While reading Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for World Dominance I was also re-reading Margaret Atwood's fascinating little big book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.The second read is proving invaluable because the subtlety and depth of her ideas need more than one reading to appreciate them. Besides promoting thinking, Payback would seem to also promote curious fushigis. (Click on link to see definition.)
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| Noam Chomsky |
I've transcribed the relevant bits from the interview here:
@19:47minutesOkay, so while this isn't quite antinomian, it has the same flavour. (And, of course, I do find it an interesting logical slip that the congressman who expressed that belief has failed to include specifically whether or not God was referring just to His own actions with regards to a cataclysmic flood, or those of men as well.)
NC: ... Take a look at the new Congress, for example. Just about every new congressional representative that came in last November is a climate denier. In fact the congress has already moved to ban funding for the most mild environmental efforts, and furthermore, unfortunately many of these people are true believers. The head of one of the congressional sub-committees, new Republican, explained that global warming can't be a problem because God promised Noah that there wouldn't be another flood. Others are supported —
JP: But why do you care about stupid people?
NC: Stupid people?! These people have power. And they're carrying out actions! They're carrying out the actions which are defunding possible efforts to do something about these crimes. Furthermore they're backed by major concentrations of power. The major business lobbies for example, have announced that they're funding big propaganda campaigns to convince people that this doesn't matter. These are serious issues. Incidentally if you want to look at stupid people we find them all over the place. For example we happen to be right in the middle of a huge financial crisis. People have noticed. You can trace that back. A lot of it comes from a fanatic religious belief in what's called the efficient market hypothesis. It's pure fanaticism. Dominated the economics profession. Dominated the federal reserve. The one consequence was that when an eight trillion dollar housing bubble developed totally unrelated to any fundamentals; completely off the hundred year history of housing prices, the profession — the feds the central bank — say it wasn't necessary to pay attention because of efficient markets. Is that very different from God promised Noah?
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| Atwood Photo fushigi |
So, here is Margaret Atwood discussing the soul being pawned in the sense that the soul, like a pawned item, is redeemable from 'original sin.' And her discussion moves to those who do not need to redeem their souls because they belong to a special cadre, the antinomians, who are neither tainted by original sin nor can create sin regardless any action or inaction they may or may not take.
The debt load of sin you've inherited from Adam — "Original Sin" as it's known — which has been added to through your own probably not very original sins — can never be repaid by you, because the sum total is too large. So unless someone steps forward on your behalf your soul will become (a) extinct or (b) a slave of the Devil in Hell, to be disposed of in some unpleasant way. Various of these ways are described by Dante, where Hell is ruled over by a really horrible version of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado,And that is the first of the odd little fushigis this book has brought me while reading it and Chomsky.
ingeniously bent on making the punishment fit the crime. If that's too medieval for you, a shorter rendition can be had in the sermon on Hell incorporated into James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
During their lifetimes, all souls not in a state of grace or actually sold to the Devil fully and finally are believed to be in an intermediate condition; in peril, but not fully damned as yet. Christ is thought to have redeemed all souls, in theory at least, by having acted as a cosmic Sin Eater — he took everyone else's sins upon himself at the Crucifixion, where, with Geshtinanna-like selflessness, he offered himself up as the substitute human sacrifice to end all substitute human sacrifices — thereby redeeming the huge Original Sin debt. But individuals must also participate in this drama: in effect, you must redeem yourself by allowing yourself to be redeemed.
Thus all the souls of the living can be thought of as residing in a pawnshop of the soul, neither entirely slaves nor entirely free. Time is running out. Will you be redeemed before the clock strikes midnight and the Grim Reaper arrives — or, worse. Old Nick in his red suit, ready to pop you into his infernal collecting sack? Hang by your fingertips! It's never over till it's over!
This is what gives the Christian life its dramatic tension: you never know. You never know, that is, unless you're a believer in the Antinomian Heresy. If you are, you're so certain of your own salvation that even the most despicable things you do are right, because it's you doing them. Here's a summation of this position, taken from a 2005 article in the London Telegraph in which the author, Sam Leith, suggests that Tony Blair, the ex-prime minister of England, was in the grip of this heresy:Roughly put, antinomianism — and this will have to be roughly put, since I make no claim to be a theologian — is the idea that justification by faith liberates you from the need to do good works. Righteousness overrides the law— which was, arguably, the PM's position on Iraq.Since politicians, at least in the English-speaking West, are showing an increasing tendency to drag religion into politics, it would seem fair for the electorate to be able to question them on their own theological views. "Do you believe that you personally are irrevocably saved, that any graft, fraud, lying, torturing, or other criminal activities you may engage in are fully justified because you're one of the Elect and can do no wrong, that to the pure such as yourself all things are pure, and that the vast majority of those you say you wish to represent as their political leader are vile and worthless and predestined to fry in hell, so why should you give a damn about them?" would seem to be an appropriate lead-off at question time(68-70).
It can be seen, in some way, as the squaring of a tricky theological circle: the Calvinist idea that the Elect have been singled out for salvation as part of the divine scheme long before any of them were twinkles in the twinkles in their ancestors' eyes. If justification by faith, rather than by works, is the high road to heaven, the logical extreme of the position is that works don't matter at all.
Divine grace, over which we'have no control, brings about faith. Faith brings about salvation. Ergo, if you're not touched by grace, there's nothing much you can do about it except look forward to an immensely long retirement having your toes warmed by the devil in the pitchfork hotel.
If, on the other hand, you are one of the Elect, whoop de doo: Jesus wants you for a sunbeam and no amount of bad behaviour is going to prevent him seeing you right. This is a pretty crazy view to take, most of us would agree, and historically it has tended to be discouraged by both civic and religious authorities for rather obvious reasons. But there it is ('Blair Believes He Can Do No Wrong: Just Ask the Antinomians" Telegraph.co.uk 2 March 2008.)
The second one is similarly amusing, but perhaps a bit more so because it connects to my last blog on Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival. And what makes it additionally amusing, at least to me, is that it brings an example of the curious nature of the unconscious. I read Payback last year, and so its contents have at least passed from my consciousness and into my unconscious. So, you can take this with some salt. In my Hegemony or Survival review I wrote:
I ask myself whether or not the expanding bankruptcy of what were once viable public school systems is an accident due to incompetency and delusion, or part of the concomitantly expanding corporate and wealthy tax 'breaks' that have been successfully enriching the wealthy and, with the delusion of Wal-mart wealth, impoverishing everyone else? I am siding on the planned side, because under-funding public schools would help impoverish the poor and enrich the people who run the country by contributing to one of the biggest growth industries in the USA — the expanding prison system.So, after writing that, without any conscious memory of having read the following, I wind up re-reading:
..."paying your debt to society" didn't often mean a fine. Instead it meant an execution or a jail term. Let's ponder this in the light of everything we've said about the debtor and the creditor as joined-at-the-hip twins balanced on the two sides of a scale, with equilibrium arriving when all debts are paid. If the person being executed or jailed is the debtor who's thought to owe something to somebody, and if that creditor is society, in what way does society benefit from the execution or the incarceration? It certainly doesn't profit financially, since it costs a bundle to put people on trial and then lock them up, or cut off their heads, or disembowel them, or burn them at the stake, or electrify them so that smoke comes out of their ears, and so forth. So there must be some other kind of payment intended.So, is that a fushigi or simply an example of the unconscious expressing itself in a curious way? I think it is both because even though what I wrote in my review is a paraphrase of Atwood's comments, how does that explain the timing of my writing it within a day or so of my 'accidently' re-reading? And it is possible that many fushigis are in fact creative expressions of the unconscious, especially the collective unconscious.
If we were still operating on a strict Mosaic eye-for- an-eye repayment scheme, there would be some sense to the execution part—that is, if the individual being executed had murdered someone. One dead body would result in another dead body, thus balancing the scales. But doing time in jail isn't an obvious equivalent of anything—that's why the jail-time verdicts for any given crime vary so widely from era to era and from place to place — and the material benefit to society is not only zero, it's considerably less than zero, because it's not the jailed criminal who's actually paying for anything, it's the taxpayer. And the two commonly heard justifications for locking people up ~ as a deterrent to other would-be crime committers, and as a way of accomplishing the moral improvement of the locked-up person—don't appear to work out very well in money terms. Education is a better and cheaper deterrent, community service a better and cheaper moral improver.
Alas, the kind of payment actually meant by "paying for your crimes" really amounts to vengeance. So the debit side — the crime itself, and the ruination it may have caused to others — and the credit side — the self-righteous gloating, the feeling that the scum-bucket is getting a well-deserved comeuppance — can't really be translated into cash equivalents at all. Similarly, some debts can never be money debts: they're debts of honour. With these, it's felt that other forms of payment must be exacted, and these other forms most often have to do with the infliction of nasty blunt- or sharp-implement procedures on other people's bodies. "Hamlet, remember," says the ghost of Hamlet's father, but he doesn't mean that Hamlet should go to Claudius and say, "So, you murdered my dad, that'll be a thousand ducats."
He means that the accounts will not be balanced until Claudius is dead, not of old age but of revenge at the hand of Hamlet (124-5 my emphasis).
Hamlet, remember me. I.v.
And there is one more flavour to add to this strange brew.
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| David E. Kelly |
In light of my re-reading this section of Payback this isn't a fushigi, but it sure is a curious example of how themes or ideas being explored in life oftentimes overlap in odd, or even metaphorical ways. And by the way, I am thoroughly enjoying 'Harry's Law' and would like it to make it, so please give it a try. The episodes are mostly available on line — I think.
Photo fushigi addendum. As I was cobbling this thing together, I stumbled into just one last fushigi.
Just before finishing up I decided that I wanted to patch in an image of Atwood, so I did a Google 'search and grab'. It turns out that there are a lot to choose from — 467,000 in .09 seconds, according to Google. So many choices, so little time. But I got lucky, and saw on the first page an image that looked like her talking, which fit perfectly with what I wanted to do. It is the the one you see above. However, in order to copy the image I needed to connect to its link, which turns out to be a on-line edition of a British newspaper's story about Margaret Atwood being shortlisted for Canada's national business book award for, yup, Payback. Now that is truly strange, in no small part because I had no idea that such an award existed, let alone that Atwood had been shortlisted for it or that Naomi Klein won it in 2001 for No-Logo.
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