A splendidly set and provisioned table can be lovely and satisfying, especially when you’re hungry and there is a great cook at work.
But there is also a simple table, before anything has been laid on it, before the bowls and platters have been brought from the kitchen. Or the same table after it has been cleared.
Which is why we might appreciate those religious movements that set a simple table, or try to clear one that has been cluttered, even if the clutter seems beneficial.
Table clearing is a phenomenon among many traditions. Jesus proposed something like it, as did the Baal Shem Tov. Some Christian sects are grounded in it, such as the Shakers. That sort of table clearing is also an essence of Zen. The value of various complex Buddhist movements may not be denied, but in the beginning the Buddha himself tried all that was being offered, and ended up just sitting.
Sit at whichever table suits you, and eat whatever you like from it. But maybe consider the elegant simplicity of the table before it is set, or after it is cleared.
This time of year, the male cicadas emerge to call out to potential mates. They are loud. Loud. So loud that the droning outside can be heard inside. The females may find this appealing. Others may not.
Early in the morning I go out to listen to the birds. Lately the birds are singing with the loud cicada drone almost overwhelming the sound. Imagine going to an orchestra concert and having the person in the next seat talking incessantly on the phone through the entire performance.
Yet the birds keep singing. I keep listening. The cicadas will stop at some time. The birds will still be singing and will keep singing. I will keep listening.
These are some of the oldest stories. People are exiled and journey to an unknown land. People arrive exiled into an unknown land. People are subject to catastrophe, natural or human, that fundamentally changes the land they live in, making it an unknown land. A flood inundates the earth and only a few remain to float and start again. A civilization flees across the desert to start again. The Bible includes the earliest of many stories, especially science fiction, of strangers in strange lands—even when that strange land is their once-familiar home.
There have been a few of these stories in modern times. Weapons, first atomic, then hydrogen, transformed this into a world that might disappear in an instant. A disease infected the world. A technology, artificial intelligence, seems capable of, to use the cliché, changing everything. This is now another strange land.
Our history of dealing as strangers in a strange land, starting with the Bible, is mixed. Early concerns about nuclear weapons—“Ban the bomb” rallies—gave way to dangerous proliferation. The covid pandemic led to welcome emergency scientific vaccine breakthroughs, but also to millions of unnecessary deaths, as some number of people stubbornly refused to believe it was as bad as science said, or bad at all. Arriving in the strange lands of nuclear annihilation or covid, some wanted—still want—to go back to the way things were. They just wanted to go home to a familiar land. We don’t know how we will do in the strange land of AI, though some current indicators are not promising.
In the words of Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter in The Wheel:
The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down You can’t let go and you can’t hold on You can’t go back and you can’t stand still If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will
The Buddha said to Todd and Buzz The route is wide and useful Now a bit neglected All things die Even highways Lend me your Vette Then walk down the road To the Blue Swallow Motel Sleep if you must But be sure To wake up
This year is the centennial of Route 66. Whether that is more or less significant than the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is something to consider. We can speculate about which of the freewheeling founders would have reveled in rolling across the continent they could only dream of in a vehicle they could only dream of.
Route 66 is a once great American highway passed over by the Interstates, but not surpassed. Some motels and other businesses catering to travelers are gone. The Blue Swallow Motel remains, and is not mere nostalgia. It is a place that allows the past to be present, not because the past is better but because it is different.
Todd and Buzz are also past, heroes of the 1960s TV show Route 66, in which they drove around the country in their Corvette, having dramatic American adventures.
The Buddha is the Buddha, never in Tucumcari, never drove a Corvette, though the route is the way.
“Pope Leo, his papal predecessors and his contemporary brethren are calling for returning to Christian roots, with one simple concept: War is fundamentally antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
I am adding a short opinion piece in the New York Times, It’s Time to Put This Catholic Teaching to Rest, by James Grimaldi, former executive editor of The National Catholic Reporter. The teaching referred to is just war theory. Excerpt follows:
It isn’t every day that a pope calls for an overhaul of a more than 1,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church, but that’s exactly what Pope Leo XIV did last month. In his inaugural encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was mainly an exploration of how to protect human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, Leo devoted a brief but critical passage to just war theory.
In a break with a foundational principle of Catholic thought on conflict, Leo called the theory “outdated” and made it clear that the teaching has been twisted to justify wars for decades, most recently the war in Iran. It is about time for the change.
Just war theory holds that wars must meet strict conditions: They should be in self-defense, and only if alternatives have been exhausted; the use of force should be proportional; there should be a likelihood of success and the threat should be imminent. Since World War II at least, several popes have criticized world leaders for using the theory as a fig leaf.
While Leo did not cite any specific war in the encyclical, he clearly had President Trump’s war on Iran in mind. On June 6, in remarks en route to Madrid for a visit, he was asked if a “just war” was being waged in Iran. The pontiff replied: “I believe this has already been made very clear: In Iran, the criteria for a just war are not present.” Leo wasn’t done. “The theory of the just war dates back to centuries when it was impossible to imagine the weapons and the destructive capacity available to humanity today,” he added….
In casting doubt on the usefulness of just war teaching in the modern era, Leo’s encyclical preserved “the right to self-defense in the strictest sense.” Instead of suggesting a new framework for justifying war, Leo all but rules out war’s legitimacy. “Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness,” Leo wrote. “The use of force, violence and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.”
Overhauling just war teaching will be among the top issues to be discussed on Friday and Saturday at a consistory, or meeting of the pope’s cardinals, at the Vatican, according to Vatican News, the Holy See’s official outlet. The cardinals should not pull their punches. The moment urgently calls for new guidance, not just discussion. In reformulating the church’s view of war, the stakes for Catholicism, the United States and the world are high, and the Vatican needs to get this right. The universal church, with millenniums of moral reasoning and clergy on the ground in virtually every conflict zone, is uniquely situated to articulate a new intellectual framework on just war theory — especially as A.I. increasingly automates decisions on the battlefield.
The answer is deceptively simple. Leo, his papal predecessors and his contemporary brethren are calling for returning to Christian roots, with one simple concept: War is fundamentally antithetical to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Democratic Party is now loudly concerned that insurgent progressives running under the Democratic Socialist banner are hurting the party. As if the party isn’t hurting itself just fine.
Where to begin? Two years ago, instead of intervening, telling Biden he shouldn’t/couldn’t run for the nomination, holding a real nominating contest, and selecting a strong and charismatic candidate to defeat Trump…we know what happened. And then, as Trump set out on a mission to demolish democracy—and the White House East Wing—the Democratic Party tried to figure out what it was and how to respond. One-and-a-half years later, it is still dithering, trying to decide. When newer and younger leaders emerged, with ideas the party found too bold and risky, the party could not suppress them fast enough.
Leading to two things. One, Democrats, that is the remaining people still willing to be included in that group, are disaffected beyond disappointment, and are showing their lack of enthusiasm in a way the party understands, as donor support is cratering. Two, those newer and younger leaders are catching fire, no matter how much the party tries to put that fire out.
America desperately needs an effective opposition party in this existential crisis. The Democratic Party, as now established, is not it.
Did German citizens tell jokes about Hitler during the Third Reich? Actual jokes like this:
Hitler and Göring are standing on top of the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on the Berliners’ faces. Göring says, “Why don’t you jump?”
Were these people punished? Did the jokes have any effect?
Contrary to a common myth, targeting Hitler using quips and jokes didn’t undermine the regime. Political jokes were not a form of resistance. They were a release valve for pent-up popular anger. People told jokes in their neighborhood bars or on the street because they coveted a moment of liberation in which they could let off a bit of steam. That was ultimately in the interests of the Nazi leadership. Consequently, the Führer and his henchmen rarely cracked down on joke-tellers and if they did, the punishments were mild – mostly resulting in a small fine. In the last phase of the war when the regime felt threatened by “dissenters,” though, this changed. A handful of death sentences were handed down to joke-tellers, though the true reason for this was rarely their actual “crime.” The jokes were taken as a pretext to remove blacklisted individuals – people the Nazis feared or detested because of who they were rather than because of what they had done. Among others, these included Jews, left-wing artists, and Catholic priests. As I show in my book, a staunch party member could walk free after telling a joke, whereas a known “dissenter” was executed for exactly the same quip.
We can’t deny the significance of laughing and humor during the hardest times, personal and social. Jokes, like other subversive art, have a way of digging deep and even encouraging change. There is the example of the king’s fool, who was allowed to say things that others feared to say. But make no mistake, when the king was unhappy, not even the fool was protected from retribution and punishment.
Philosophy is embedded in all that we do, believe, and is done to us. It often goes unrecognized and unattended. Among other places, it appears in our religious traditions, though we receive the philosophies of God, the founders and the wise people as givens which we follow and practice. The same goes for calls to patriotism, nationalism and war.
There are those whose lives and careers are devoted, in whole or in part, to philosophy. Some are in the academy, some are outside. If philosophy is important, and it is, it should be front and center. If media reports regularly included philosophical notes or discussions with philosophers, events and issues could go far and deep beyond “He said, he said, this country attacked, this country fought back, these children were killed, the killing is unfortunate but excusable.” Like that.
Philosophers don’t come more forward, or out at all, for many reasons. Some philosophers, brilliant and insightful as they are, are not easily comprehensible to ordinary people—including other philosophers. This lack of communicative clarity keeps media from regularly including philosophers in their interviews and round-tables. When issues are hot and controversial, as they are now, it is risky for philosophers to offer any insights, especially when the very higher ed institutions they work for are under investigation and assault.
Nevertheless, we need to dig deeper into war and the death of democracy, or the dozens of other issues we face, beyond black and white, good guys and bad guys. Philosophers can do that, as they have always done, when they are given a platform and can make themselves understood.
Between the rational and the irrational is the place that so many traditions point us to, though not all who follow want to go. It is not in the middle, in the sense of being halfway in between, or to applying each one half the time. It is the entire space, with the wholly rational and irrational merely on the outside borders, a thin outline.
This does not sit well with many, who want to have it one way or another. Extreme rationalists frequently work hard to make ordered sense from evidence, rejecting the rest, and particularly vexed by those apparently too lazy or heedless to see how essential the rational way is. Extreme irrationalists may be driven by visions that may be delusions, or by personal preferences, and may indeed avoid the rational because it is hard work or because it may not suit their needs.
This plays out on a bigger social scale. With increasing frequency, the irreligious base their perspective on a loosely rationalist view, not only because there is no evidence of and for the religious, but because the religious seem to discard or ignore the rational in a disordered and possibly self serving way.
No one is right or wrong here, in the sense of winning an ultimately unwinnable argument. Instead consider the field where all things grow, neither rational nor irrational. The place, if we listen to the best of the traditions, where we are born and where we die.
The post below is from April 2017. That unnamed new CEO had only been in his new job for three months. Was he fired? He lost the job for a while, but astonishingly got his job back. Still has it.
He thought the job would be easier.
We are praying. Constantly.
Imagine that you hired a new CEO for your very, very big company (annual budget: $3.8 trillion). The job he takes is universally considered the most difficult job in the world.
Imagine that not all the shareholders approved him. In fact, the shareholders were very, very divided on his being hired.
Imagine that in his early days, he demonstrated some serious gaps in his knowledge and ability to do the job.
Then imagine the new CEO is interviewed and says this:
“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
Bob Schwartz 