Andrew Shanks on Gillian Rose (or, Why Everybody Thinks Rowan Williams Is Wrong About Gay People)

Gillian Rose was a secular Jewish philosopher who was baptised into the Anglican Church on her deathbed. A lot of her work was on Hegel, and like Hegel she is incredibly difficult to read and understand. So, as a preface to actually reading her work, I've been reading Andrew Shanks' book Against Innocence, which is about her work, particularly her ideas about ethics. Rose was also a good friend of Rowan Williams, who was very influenced by her thought, and in the book's foreword Giles Fraser points out that the book as a whole is constantly hinting at the connections between Rose's work and Williams' task in trying to hold together the Anglican Communion.

Shanks starts out by pointing out that Rose was dyslexic: reading was never easy for her, and she seems to have sought out difficult thinkers like Adorno and Hegel to study. She was also caught between secularism, Judaism and Christianity for most of her life, and her thought reflects this too: she is difficult to read, doesn't quite fit in with a lot of other contemporary philosophy, and is drawn to complicated tensions and ideas which open up conversations between those three positions.

Shanks' basic argument is that a key element to Rose's thought is the rejection of innocence. We all want to feel innocent; we all want to feel like we are in the right (and therefore that others are in the wrong). But the world is more complicated than that, and the only way to keep our hands clean is to disengage from the world. What Rose wants is an ethics of engagement with 'the broken middle': the messy, complex, compromising reality of the world. If we really want to engage ethically, politically, socially, we have to be prepared to compromise, to sacrifice our innocence and our desire to be right.

One of the things that happened in the 20th century was that philosophers were so traumatised by the terrible things that came out of Enlightenment rationalism (e.g. the Holocaust) and the Marxist dream of liberation (Stalin, Mao) that they became too afraid to offer political alternatives: what if it all went wrong again? Rose isn't satisfied by this: we can't just stop engaging with the world. But she argues that the problem with a lot of the utopian political movements of the 20th century such as Marxism or 'Orientalism' (all the different movements concerned with resisting Western cultural imperialism the civil rights movement, various national liberation movements etc.) rely on the solidarity of people who think that they are right and other people are in wrong; they are innocent and other people are guilty. What Rose wants instead is the 'solidarity of the shaken', communities bound together not by their shared innocence but by their shared acknowledgement of guilt. This, Shanks suggests, is why she eventually became a Christian.

If we want to occupy the 'broken middle', we can't do this by brushing over differences and disagreements, by pretending that they're not there or that they don't matter. Philosophy, for Rose, is all about recognising and identifying conflicts which are ignored or overlooked. But what we then need to do is to refuse to identify the different positions as 'guilty' or 'innocent'. To live in the middle is to experience the impossibility of reconciling different positions, to refuse to take sides and so to look guilty to everyone, to satisfy no one, to be torn apart. This, says Rose, is where the sacred is. In particular, the broken middle tries to mediate between 'the ethical', the collective tradition and culture of a particular community and 'self-expressive nonconformity': individuals who refuse to be bound by tradition or culture. For Rose, the two thinkers who are best at practising this philosophical mediation in the broken middle are Kierkegaard and Hegel.

The key virtue of the broken middle is anxiety. Anxiety comes from allowing ourselves to be unsettled by the way that 'self-expressive nonconformists' challenge our ideas and assumptions, bringing uncertainty and insecurity. But you can't properly experience this anxiety unless you are also bound up with the life of a particular community: it's easy to challenge everything you believe in if you have a group of friends who all think exactly the same as you. But to challenge everything whilst also remaining committed to a community of people who have very different and deeply held ideas is another thing altogether. Rose is very critical of people who maintain their innocence by refusing to belong to an institution. Let's take an example that I think Shanks is hinting at: it is easy to be a conservative Anglican who thinks that it's wrong to be gay. It's also easy to leave the Anglican church and be a liberal Christian who thinks it's ok to be gay. But to live in the broken middle is to commit to the Church as an institution made up of people who deeply believe that it's wrong to be gay, and also people who deeply believe that gay people should be treated the same as straight people, and to refuse to take sides, to open yourself up to the compelling arguments from both sides, and to be torn apart by that tension. Hmm, which Archbishop might be a good example of that?

Shanks' Rose is basically arguing for liberal pluralism at its best: not the multiculturalism that pretends we're all fine and agree and can get along, but the pluralism which recognises that different groups and individuals have fundamentally incompatible ideas about the way the world is, and tries to hold them together anyway. Churches can model this sort of approach, but not if they force everyone to agree or keep splintering off into sects where everyone agrees with everyone else, and not if the basis of their community is that they are right and everyone else is wrong.

In Defence of Luther

I've talked about Luther before; I'm not his biggest fan. So it seems fair, for a change, to say something in his defence. The doctrine of salvation by faith alone isn't without its issues, but Christos Yannaras points out that Luther's obsession with it wasn't just theological, but was also deeply political. The medieval Roman Catholic Church argued that we could get at the truth about God through rational arguments which proved that God existed and that God was a certain sort of being. But the only people who got to study the logic and philosophy that let you understand those proofs, or offer their own proofs of God, were the people (and, let's be honest, the men) whom the Church educated. That was a double win for the Church. On the one hand, you could argue that anyone who disagreed with the Church wasn't only wrong but was culpable for their wrongness because they should have known better (you don't need to read the Bible to know that God exists, it's just obvious to anyone who can reason), so it's ok to kill them or take their land or go on a crusade against them because they're not just wrong, they're deliberately wrong. But it also meant that the Church, as the institution which controlled and owned those proofs of God's existence, got to claim the same absolute and obvious authority for themselves.

Luther's obsessive focus on faith alone as the means of salvation, then, wasn't just about the problems with thinking you can logically prove the existence of God, it was also about power. No institution could get between people and God and claim to control the truth about God, because everyone could and should know God for themselves, directly. That's why the earliest translators of the Bible were treated so harshly: if everyone gets to read the Bible, then the priests don't get to control that knowledge about God.

In that sense, it's fitting that fundamentalist Christianity in the US overlaps so much with the sort of far-right politics that wants to do away with the government. No one else gets to tell us what the Bible says: we read it for ourselves. No one else gets power over me. But actually, what happens in most fundamentalist churches is just that power is better hidden. You can't not interpret the Bible, but you can appropriate its authority for yourself by pretending (or believing) that you interpretation is just 'what the Bible says'. It's harder to argue with someone who's just telling you what the Bible says than it is to argue with someone else's interpretation of the Bible. Truth is simply objective, obvious, accessible to everyone: it always comes to us through people, through institutions. The question of how we know the truth about God is never just a question about how we know the truth about God, it's always also a question about who in the Church gets to have power over other people.

The Catholic attitude to sex isn't Catholic enough

Žižek's comments on the Catholic church's attitude to contraception seem particularly appropriate in the light of recent debates in the US. He says that the reason that the Catholic church objects to contraception is that sex just isn't properly human, isn't what it's meant to be, unless it involves at least the possibility of reproduction. Never mind that official teaching somehow thinks it's ok to use the rhythm method (where you only have sex when you think the woman's not ovulating) or if you know full well that either the man or the woman is infertile. Žižek highlights a more fundamental issue. His question is this: isn't it precisely when we have sex for reasons that have nothing to do with making babies that we're most human? Isn't it animals who have sex primarily to reproduce and humans who have sex because they see sex as intrinsically worth having whether there are babies or not?

Traditional Christian theology holds that God didn't need to create; Robert Farrar Capon says that this means that all creation is fundamentally pointless. It is an end in itself. It exists for joy. Every year when the grapes ferment and turn into wine, it's not that God says 'Aw man, that time of year already? I suppose I'd better get brewing...' No, every year, God looks at the grapes ripening on the vines, and says 'That was nice. Do it again.' Wouldn't it be more coherent – no, more Catholic – to take a similar approach to sex? Every [insert frequency according to taste], a woman looks at her husband and thinks 'That was nice. Let's do it again.'

Why The Artist Can't Speak

*This blog post contains spoilers!*

The Artist is, as I'm sure you've heard, a charming film; and it's certainly not the most philosophically complicated piece of cinema ever. But there is one thing that's not immediately clear in the film itself: why is it that George Valentin won't speak? It's not that, as in Singing in the Rain, his speaking voice is dreadful; and it's not like Sunset Boulevard where Norma Desmond's dying career seems like something that happened very much against her will. George Valentin is offered roles in the talkies, but he refuses, and it's never really clear why. Half way through the film, as his marriage is falling apart at the same time as his career, his wife confronts him, and says 'Why won't you talk?' It's a clever play on words: he won't talk to her about why he won't talk in the movies. And here's my theory: he won't talk to his wife for the same reason he won't talk in a film, because The Artist is actually a film about changing gender roles, with the shift from silent films to talkies a metaphor for a shift from a world where Men are Men and rule the world to a world where women are in charge and men are emasculated [Note: I don't actually agree with this version of the history of gender politics in the 20th century].

First of all, notice what happens when we shift from silent films to talkies: first, we shift from films headlined by George Valentin to films headlined by Peppy Miller. The specifically gendered nature of that shift just isn't there in films like Singing in the Rain or Sunset Boulevard. And the genre of films shifts too: all of Valentin's films are action films where he does the manly thing and rescues the damsel in distress, with plenty of swashbuckling along the way. Peppy Miller's films, by contrast, are all romantic comedies, that classic women's genre. In one of them, a man proposes to her and she looks shocked as well as pleased, only to wink at the camera over his shoulder - look, she caught him! Those crafty women with their emotional manipulation.

The exception to this rule is Valentin's last silent film, which ends as our hero sinks into the quicksand. The damsel tries to save him, but he won't accept her help: and this, of course, is exactly what happens to Valentin himself. Valentin has already saved Peppy twice: first when she clumsily and publicly embarrasses herself and he saves her by making a joke of the situation; secondly when he intervenes to stop her being fired from her role as an extra in his film. But George Valentin simply will not allow himself to be saved by Peppy: she rescues him after he nearly dies in a fire, offers to save his career, and buys up the things he is forced to sell when his money runs out. It's this last one which nearly proves the final straw for George: when he stumbles on the room with all his old furniture in he is so horrified that he runs off and tries to kill himself again: better suicide than salvation by a woman! Peppy has to come and save him again, and the least satisfying thing about the movie's end is that it's never really clear why all of a sudden he is prepared to accept her help, which has been so unacceptable up till now. They find, at last, a happy compromise between the two genres of film which lets them both be stars: tap dancing! And then the camera pulls away, and you see why the film's thesis about the end of male dominance is so terribly flawed: the studio crew are (still) all men.

Lacan on the Gospels

What is recounted by the four texts described as evangelical not so much because they are good news as good announcers for their sort of news... They write in such a way that there is not a single fact that cannot be contested in them ... but that these texts are nonetheless what go right to the heart of truth, the truth as such, up to and including the fact that I state that one can only half-say it ... In this style of things, you cannot say better than the Gospels. One cannot say the truth any better. That is why they are Gospels.

From Lacan's seminar Encore, as quoted by Cormac Gallagher.

Nature isn't natural

People who care about environmental issues often talk in terms of harmony and balance, as though there's a basic stability in nature which bad, unnatural humans are messing with. If we weren't here, then the great circle of life would go on circling, ecosystems would carry on self-regulating, and everything would be ok. The problem is, argues Žižek, that nature isn't really like that. The universe as a whole runs on catastrophes: things stabilise for a while and then bang! the universe starts; bang! an asteroid crashed into Earth and the dinosaurs die; bang! an ice age. Even the ordinary run of things is far from harmonious if you're one of the seals that a polar bear needs to eat to take its place in the great circle of life. This doesn't mean that dramatic climate change isn't bad - it's pretty terrible if you think that human life and civilisation is worth preserving - or even that there's nothing we can do to stop it; what it does mean is that we need to stop pretending that living peaceably with the world around us is somehow natural.

The Praxis of a Prophet; Or, Why Jesus probably did have a beard and carry a big stick

That's what prophets do, right? Although my great great great grandfather, a German Lutheran pastor, once wrote a theological treatise about beards and concluded that they were bad, not least because if you got the communion wine after lots of bearded people their dirty moustaches had made it taste sour. Did I tell that story already? It's really my only good theological ancestor story, so I wheel it out pretty regularly.

Anyway, chapter 5 of Jesus and the Victory of God. Wright points out the things that 'most everyone agrees on, whatever they think of Jesus: he was born about 4 BC, grew in the Galilean town of Nazareth, speaking Aramaic, some Hebrew, and probably at least a smattering of Greek. Around AD 28 he went public, and his work was originally connected with that of John the Baptist. He told everyone to repent, and announced the kingdom of Israel's god, telling a lot of parables along the way. He travelled round Galilean villages announcing his message and performing miracles like healings and exorcisms (obviously not everyone agrees they were miracles, but y'know, some stuff happened involving sick people), and ate dinner with all sorts of people. He had some followers, including 12 special disciples, and the things he said and did, especially one thing he did in the Temple, annoyed at least some other Jewish groups, particularly the high priests and their posse. Partly because of this, he got handed over to the Romans and crucified, which was what usually happened to insurrectionists (Pete Rollins, take note). But what does all this tell us about what Jesus was up to?

First-century Palestine was heaving at the cringes with a raggedy bunch of various types of prophet. Some prophets were powerful and educated, some hung around with weird sects, some had no friends, and some had huge gangs of followers. Some announced salvation; some announced impending doom. Some tried to lead uprisings against the Romans; others told people to get the hell out while they still could. Some were basically terrorists (and remember that a terrorist is basically just a violent person without any official power rather than a violent person with an army to command); others weren't violent at all.

John the baptist was one of many prophets. He was well-known in the late '20s, warning Israel of impending judgement, and getting into trouble for being a bit more political than King Herod felt comforable with. But he also baptised people for the forgiveness of sins, which implied that they didn't need the temple to have their sins forgiven; so the Temple authorities weren't fans either. Jesus clearly saw John as an important figure at the beginning of his own ministry. Jesus himself was like John the Baptist, only more so: announcing a prophetic message, inaugurating a renewal movement, and annoying the temple hierarchy.

At least at the start of his ministry, Jesus travelled around Galilean villages, avoiding the bigger towns and cities. He explained what he was doing in terms of the reconstitution of Israel. And since he went to lots of different villages, he probably said similar things in each of them; if he told a parable once, he probably told it several times, which Wright thinks goes some way to explain the variation between the different gospel accounts. The parables he told set out his agenda for Israel: what the convenant people should be doing at this point in their history. Jesus used parables because if he'd explicitly said what his parables implied, he would have gotten himself killed even earlier than he did. Jesus also warned of impending judgement that was coming on Israel if they didn't repent, threatening disaster and, specifically, the desctruction of the Temple. This isn't just ooby-dooby prediction, as if Jesus were a fortune teller: it didn't take a genius to see that if the people of Israel kept stepping on the Romans' toes, eventually there would be reprisals. Jesus also healed people, and his healings didn't just make people better, they also made unclean people clean, welcoming them back to full membership in God's people. And the nature miracles seem to hint at the idea that if Israel was restored, then the whole of creation would be restored along with her.