The Two Men of Bullying

Bullying isn't what you think it is; it's not quite the movement we've been led to believe in popular media.

John Cloud of Time, in a feature article, demonstrates the myths of the bullying epoch we seem to live in:

Other numbers suggest that many students are both victims and victimizers. In a survey of 43,000 high school students completed in 2010, the Josephson Institute's Center for Youth Ethics found that 47% had "been bullied, teased or taunted" at school but " that 50% had been bullies themselves. This suggest a lot of overlap between the two groups, meaning that the world isn't cleanly divided into bullies and victims.

Cloud goes on to describe this truth in particulars.

Lowe, who has been a principal in middle schools for 25 years, has found that bullying incidents are rarely simple cases of cool kids attacking outcasts. Once she starts poking around, she says, "I can guarantee you that no one is innocent on any of this. Something has come before."

We are both victims and victimizers. Both innocent and guilty.

In similar reading on Bensonian, I'm glad sociologists and principals are picking up on what Dickens so long again did.

Reviewing Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s book Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, Michiko Kakutani writes:

In a remarkable account of a meeting [Dostoevsky] had with Charles Dickens in 1862, Dostoyevsky recalled that the British novelist told him: “All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I asked.”

Truly, our sociologists and novelists are only confirming what Saint Paul understood years ago, and even saints before him. That we are both created in the image of God and subject to the Fall. Saint Paul says it a little better than I do.

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

-Romans 7:21-2

When we realize that evil cuts straight through the heart of even ourselves, we will seek a savior.

Laudator Temporis Acti

All things are wearisome,
   more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
   nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
   what has been done will be done again;
   there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say,
   “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
   it was here before our time. 

Ecclesiastes 1:8-10

When I graduated from graduate school, I told myself that for a year I wasn't going to read anything written in the last 50 years. That put my cut off point around C.S. Lewis, whom I allowed to nourish my soul still. That's because in seminary I always had to read the newest research, the newest books on ministry innovations, and the newest commentaries. One would think after graduating seminary I would have actually read Luther or Barth. But I didn't. I read new authors who talked about Luther and Barth, but I was never required to read them. So, for a year, I read Luther (though not Barth) and Chesterton and Calvin and Agatha Christie (one of these things is not like the other one).

And even still, after several years, I grow weary of re-invention and innovation and the clamor for newness. The great American myth of newness has even infiltrated the church. For instance, music must always be newer. Music texts must always be newer. Sermons must be fresh and meaningful and entertaining. As one who works in the church, believe me when I say it's hard to compete with YouTube and television for a congregation's entertainment.

In light of my rumination of the shadow of things which are past, I found some amusing reading this past week. I'm reading Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a book put together after his death, and of which only recent history has given us a thorough and authoratitive version of it. The irony is that Bonhoeffer speaks to his friend of his relationship to his fiancee:

Unfortunately, I am not yet of one mind with Maria in the area of literature...Most likely our age difference also shows in these literary matters as well. Maria's...generation has unfortunately grown up with very bad contemporary literature, and it is much more difficult for them to connect to older literature than for us...Do you know of one book from the best literature of the last fifteen years that you think will endure? I don't. It's partly wishy-washy, partly striking various poses, partly self-pitying sentiment- but no discernment, no thought, no clarity, no substance, and almost always a base, unfree use of language. On this point I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.

This last phrase in Latin means "one who praises the ancient time." He might as well have been writing about our contemporary literature.

The reason for such judgment is that time itself is the ultimate judge. The hymnbook has mostly good hymns because time has weeded out all the bad hymns written centuries ago. The reason classic literature is so good is that no other literature has really endured from it's milieu. Time has judged that which is bad. There is a lot of bad music and books being written today, just like in any age, but we haven't had the patience to let time do it's work.

We should therefore care more about older things than various fads. It's the love of the things of the past that help us determine what in our own time is ephemeral and kitsch versus what is lasting and significant. The Arab Spring mattered. The Grammys do not. Usually what's trending on Twitter does not. After all, isn't what's trending only a matter of minutes usually?

With all this clamor for newness, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, I join the chorus of "Vanity!"

Down-Syndrome and the Moral Mess

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

Isaiah 5:20

Time Magazine has a feature article this week on the improving technology for detecting Down-Syndrome in the womb. The news isn't good.

Because of this improved technology, abortions are expected to rise, and the article already puts Down-Syndrome "pregnancy terminations" at about the 90% range. Somehow, this earlier-detection technology relieves a little more moral weight. If we can kill a child at week 7, then that's better than week 15 or 20. What a sad state of affairs. If viability makes someone a human, then I visit a lot of non-humans in hospitals these days. Woe to those who call evil good.

One doesn't have to be a hermit to understand other implications of detecting Down-Syndrome in the womb either. You have seen it in the media-as well, I have friends- that when Down-Syndrome is detected that people are considered moral monsters for having the child. "The child will suffer," they say. I've had friends who have Down-Syndrome; they aren't suffering. Our own sense of freedom might decrease, but that doesn't change the fundamental humanness of someone with Down-Syndrome. Woe to those who call good evil.

Perhaps a different moral example will clear matters up. In India and China, when gender is discovered in the womb, little girls inside their moms are routinely aborted. The quintessential question becomes, what is the fundamental difference between this and children with Down-Syndrome? What is fundamentally distinct? People could make the same argument for women in patriarchal cultures: "they will suffer." But nothing is fundamentally distinct. Reminds me of a Reagan quote something to the tune of "I can't help but notice that all those in favor of abortion have been born."

Sadly, though the Time article acknowledges the moral muddle of the technology (and we should add, it's benefits: it is helpful for parents keeping the child to walk through the emotions and plan before the child is born), the interviews conducted in the article leave the ambiguity on a morally clear situation. Even some of the parents in the article who did have the child honestly weighed "pros" and "cons" to having the child. Woe to those who call evil ambiguity.

Perhaps the moral root of this quandary will never leave us. We are selfish and we hate suffering, so if someone else will make us suffer let's end them before we have to lay eyes on them. But perhaps, just maybe, those who come after us will view this issue like American slavery is now viewed from 150 years of distance. We'll end an enormous moral problem.

Join me in this cause. It's the small issues, like Down-Syndrome early detection and resulting termination, where hearts and minds need to begin to be changed. If it can't be changed in our laws, let's begin to change it in the people around us lovingly and with respect.

Should Someone's God Really Control the Government?

As a Time magazine subscriber, I often read through gritted teeth. They are a cultural gatekeeper, perhaps still the most significant one in a culture fast losing its walls, and thus its need for gates. Even so, Time is a cultural gatekeeper and I am constantly surprised by the narrow view of the world that gets promoted by their commentary and feature pieces. Take two seemingly contradictory examples.

The first is from Kurt Anderson's closing commentary on the 9/11 commemoration. His point is that terrorism really didn't change all that much, and that's not all bad. Consider this paragraph:

Before 9/11, American prejudice against Muslims was negligible, so that is a real change. Yet given that al-Qaeda casts itself as an Islamic vanguard and its jihadists have continued trying to kill American civilians, it's surprising how relatively little anti-Muslim ugliness has been spewed. Last summer's Ground Zero — mosque controversy was sad and unnecessary, and the ongoing anti-Shari'a-law movement is nuts. But we've seen much, much worse — internments of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and of German Americans during the First.

Anderson's larger point is provocative, and I don't have much of a quibble with that. But do you notice what he did in the middle there? In a breath of a comment, he noted that anyone who opposes Shari'a law is a nut. At this point, I'm not even sure if Anderson has read Shari'a law. Does he know all of the things in there that are in direct opposition to our Bill of Rights? Things like cruel and unusual punishment, lack of due process or a speedy trial, or a lack of free speech. All of these are characteristic around the world where Shari'a law is consistently practiced. Allowing Shari'a law is not merely allowing someone to practice their religious beliefs, but an imposition on the American rule of law.



Which brings me to my second observation. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there worried about a sect of Evangelicals called Dominionists that want God and his law, from Moses, to be the law of the land (I apologize that the article is only for subscribers). First, I've grown up and lived my whole life in evangelical churches, and I know no one like this (which makes me wonder if the author of the article, Jon Meachem, even knows any evangelicals). Second, the entire "Dominionist" claim is a made-up one by certain segments of the media. No one calls him or herself a Dominionist, and only a very small, few people- that couldn't even be characterized as evangelicals- want biblical law writ large over the United States.

Do you now see the irony? Does the editorial staff at Time even realize it's egregious double-standard and bias? Shari'a law, based on actual worldwide evidence, is Islamic law written over and against and in direct opposition to the jurisprudence of the West. On the other hand, there's not really much evidence for the same phenomenon happening in Christianity in America, yet apparently that is more to be feared. And the print and television media often wonder why evangelical Christians feel a bias in their news and then rush to radio personalities? (As far as I'm concerned, a pox on all their houses. I care about truth and how it's reported, and I have little time for bias, untruth, or rabble-rousing.)

To set my own record straight, I think the U.S. Constitution and it's Bill of Rights is an appropriate statement of limited government (particularly the 1st and 9th amendments) and justice for our time and for all times. I don't think we need to change anything in fundamental governance structures, unless God descends upon the earth, righting all wrongs, and doing it Himself.

More thoughts on What We Can Learn From the Recession

Nancy Gibbs has this great article about how we can still learn from the recession. This is a good follow-up to an earlier post.

The notion that misery loves company may be less about malice than about solace: that problems shared grow smaller, that courage is contagious. Is it just a coincidence that Mississippi, which typically ranks as the most generous state in charitable giving, is also the poorest? To suffer alone is a tragedy; to struggle together is an opportunity, when we find out what we really care about.