It's one thing to read about the recession in the media, but it's entirely more real when you see it with your eyes.

This is an empty freight train, parked on an unused spur not far from my house. The cars extend for over a mile. These are cars not engaged in commerce. They're not going to and from the harbors and freight terminals. They're not carrying goods, because nobody is buying them.

The first time I saw it, and understood what it was, I felt like I had just seen a ghost.

My question: Are you seeing the recession? What does it look like?

A society in which the quality of education or health care one receives depends on one’s ability to pay is not a society worth protecting.

One of my favorite public intellectuals, and one with a razor-sharp sword, has just begun a blog, and his second entry—a riff on Slumdog Millionaire—is a reminder of Vinoth Ramachandra’s unique intelligence: well-read, well-aware, well-articulated, and unapologetically Asian Christian.

Ramachandra, who I've had the privilege to meet in the buildup to his landmark address at Urbana 2000, is a Sri Lankan leader in the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, is IFES Secretary for Dialogue and Social Engagement.

Here he looks at the dominant theme of this year’s Academy Award winning Best Picture (previously reviewed here): growing wealth discrepancy in India.

The Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire movingly depicts the casual brutality that haunts the lives of the urban poor. India’s social elites regard the latter as a national embarrassment, while depending on them for their daily chores, building their houses and keeping their work spaces clean.

…

Two million university and college graduates emerge every year from a country in which two out of three women are illiterate. The obvious question that arises is: what will these graduates do for these women and other forgotten poor? The answer, as in most other nations, is: not much.

But it’s not just an Indian problem, Ramachandra continues: many countries have similar situations. And Christians can’t be callous about the problem: "Gross social inequality," he says, "is an affront to the God of justice."

Of course we can argue about how to get there, but preserving a system that generates such inequality is, Ramachandra says, not a valid consideration.

A society in which the quality of education or health care one receives depends on one’s ability to pay is not a society worth protecting. In this regard, the US and UK are little different from India and far worse than continental Europe.

I suppose that is logically true, but impossible to work out with simple policy changes. Because the society that created neo-liberal economics is, for instance, but one branch of the same society that also generated the modern ecology movement. And where one stops and the other begins are hard to tell.

Any ideas out there? I’d love to hear if any changes are afoot in leading business schools, etc.

Judith Levine manages to mock just about everyone in her nevertheless great article on Salon.com, The Case Against Thrift. Levine, who a few years ago wrote Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, has found herself a minor celebrity among folks newly (re-)converted to thrift.

Pointing out that while several world civilizations contain ascetic and self-denial elements, thrift—which she defines as temperance, prudence and self-denial (I would rather think thrift the economic practice of peace, patience, and self-control)—is a Christian virtue.

And that is a bad thing, according to Levine. While primitive cultures produce bounty for the purpose of having a harvest-season party, we live for our IRAs. "They" enjoy themselves today, while we deprive ourselves for the moral indulgence of it.

But she's not done: American culture may grow as secular as it wishes, we still retain what she calls our primeval “puritan gene.”

We tend to get all legalistic about our thrift, no matter what our religion is. After all, aren’t carbon offsets as voluntary sin tax? Looking at her own retirement fund, she notes:

For decades I've dutifully put money into my IRA. This year, like everyone else, I lost half of it. Did thrift reward me? I cannot say it gave me much spiritually, unless you count a sense of security. And that turns out to have been false.

So I have reflected on what else I might have done with that money. I could have spent six months in Paris drinking wine and perfecting my French, financed a small movie, or bought oceanfront property in Nova Scotia. What effects would I have reaped from my profligacy? Knowledge, adventure, pleasure: riches perhaps exceeding those of a fully funded retirement account.

Turning to the Bible, she then concludes:

You can’t take it with you. That's what St. Paul told Timothy before warning him that the love of money was the root of all evil: "For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out." What lesson does the recession teach? Live now. Be merry. For tomorrow we -- or the stock market bull -- may die.

Here’s where Levine is wrong: the binary of parsimony and indulgence is false. The opposite of dour thrift—of re-using your dental floss and tut-tutting over people going to first-run movies—is not luxuriousness: both are individualistic and materialistic.

No, the opposite of joyless trift is generous thrift.

The trick is love, as it always is. Thrift without love quickly becomes legalism, inhospitality, joylessness and judgmentalism. But thrift informed by, or driven by love makes sacrifice possible, makes community possible.

Levine calls thrift the “new abstinence.” Thrift gone narcissistic, perhaps. But thrift covered in love: that’s when you refuse to waste because your money belongs to the whole community—it’s not really your money at all. It’s called stewardship: taking care of something on behalf of someone else.

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the Salman Rushdie affair, which though formally over, is still alive, both for the condemned man himself, and for the European intellectual culture he represents.

Thierry Chervel of signandsight.com has written a retrospective in a German newspaper, now available in English.

The main problem, says Chervel, is that

In the confrontation with Islamism, the Left has abandoned its principles. In the past it stood for cutting the ties to convention and tradition, but in the case of Islam it reinstates them in the name of multiculturalism. It is proud to have fought for women's rights, but in Islam it tolerates head scarves, arranged marriages, and wife-beating. It once stood for equal rights, now it preaches a right to difference – and thus different rights. It proclaims freedom of speech, but when it comes to Islam it coughs in embarrassment. It once supported gay rights, but now keeps silent about Islam's taboo on homosexuality.

Set aside, for a moment, the highly debatable notion that free speech and equal rights are the exclusive domain of the Left (big L, which Chervel means those of the 1968 generation). What he's saying is significant: that the West no longer stands for anything, human rights included, aside from multiculturalism.

To review, for those too young to remember 1989:

Bombay-born Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight’s Children, published a novel called The Satanic Verses, which he knew would be considered offensive against Islam.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the Iranian Revolution (the same revolution depicted in the movie Persepolis), issued a fatwa, a judgment, against Rushdie, condemning him to death.

I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses—which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur'an - and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death.

Riots and book burnings ensued, not only in Iran, but in liberal Europe as well—largely by angered Muslim residents of those countries.

The secular West may have won the struggle, Chervel argues, but only in the short run. Yes, Rushdie survived. Yes, his book became a bestseller and is today widely available. And yes, the fatwa was put in the back shed after Khomeini’s death.

But, Chervel continues, today the West’s attitude toward Islam is marked by a multiculturalist spirit of taboo. That is, in the name of respect we submit to censorship—in advance of any real controversy.

“We” (left-leaning, secular cosmopolitan types) need only look at our great success in taming Christianity to realize the importance of pushing the envelope with Islam:

Playing with the symbols, discourse and constraints of Christianity has long been taken for granted in Western culture. But playing with the symbols of Islam has been out of bounds since the fatwa, ostensibly out of "respect."

What do you think?

It seems to me that Chervel has drawn a bizarre conclusion from the Rushdie affair: that blasphemy is a duty of enlightenment, and that self-restriction out of respect necessarily constitutes submission. In fact, we restrain ourselves all the time, even when we’re entirely among those who share our culture.

It is a rhetorical trick to suggest there is no alternative between, on the one hand, embracing religion-cloaked anti-female violence, and on the other, celebrating the humiliation of that same religion. It's a false choice Chervel--and others like him--present to us.

There is a muscular civility, modeled for us by Martin Luther King and his followers, that can combine unwavering and principled judgement with kindness.

Blasphemy may be a noble calling to the transatlantic cultural élites, but it is not at all clear to me that the blasphemous life is the liberated life. In fact, to develop an idea I first heard from Slavoj Žižek: as with the senseless violence of countless urban riots, in which the property of friends and neighbors is destroyed, or with the pitiful tantrums of a two-year old, intentional offence, far from creating space for freedom, can actually be an expression of impotence and fear.

In the end, it seems to me, if Khomeini has won it is because he stands for something, while neither the multiculturalists, too timid to risk, and the Enlightenment vanguard, paranoid of restraint, stand for much of anything—they fail to define a world worth living for.

But: surely we don’t have to embrace death sentences for blasphemers. What is a better way?

[photo credit: sxc.hu member sumeja]

Monasticism is all the rage these days, at least within over-educated Evangelical circles, and I can’t help but contrast this fascination with another parallel trend: that of Evangelical disavowals of “religion”.

The two trends are incompatible, of course, because ascetic communities are nothing if not religious, on the one hand, and on the other: I’ve yet to find an “irreligious” Evangelicalism that has a healthy biblical read on the communion of the saints.

And while I’m generally distrustful of Christians withdrawing from society, monasticism has its place, if it is able to properly function as a specialist organ of the church. See, for example, the scholastic monks who, during the dark ages, painstakingly preserved and reproduced scripture. 

Anyway, I enjoyed Into Great Silence, a documentary about the Carthusian monks of Alpine France. These folks are as severe as anyone in the Christian world, and yet: more successfully communal and even multi-ethnic than most churches.

Lent is upon us, which means Carnival/Mardi Gras/Fasching/Fasnacht, depending on your country. And Christian debates about participation.

Here is a scene from the Fasnacht festival in Basel, Switzerland. Apparently a pre-Christan pagan festival, designed to chase away demons of winter, merged with the Christian celepration of Lent to make this strange festival.

When I lived there, I knew Christians who shunned Fasnacht, just as I've met people who don't celebrate Christmas because of its commercialism.

My question: How have you thought about your participation in such festivals?

[photo credit: sxc.hu member erestor04]

I remember when Ceaucescu fell.

I was in high school and quite attentive to the collapse of communist Eastern Europe. First Poland, over the summer, then several others in early autumn, before the highlight, East Germany—marked by dancing on the wall.

I was safely away in Switzerland, listening to it all on my short wave radio. The cold war’s end didn’t change my life. I was only a few hundred kilometers from history, though.

That’s the story of the delightful Romanian movie 12:08 East of Bucharest. Set on the anniversary of the dictator’s flight from his palace, but in a provincial city somewhere East of Bucharest, it is a funny day-in-the-life story of a small-town TV manager struggling to imagine a role for his city during the revolution.

It all revolves around one question: were we out protesting before 12:08, the moment when Ceausescu fled? Or did we merely celebrate in the streets, now that the danger was passed?

It’s a great question, and delivered in such dead-pan fashion—this is a really funny movie.

Here’s the trailer. I could only find the Romanian trailer and one subtitled in Spanish, so this’ll have to do:

America’s most infamous teen mother gave an interview the other day, about, well, teen motherhood. Bristol Palin (Sarah Palin’s daughter) basically said she’d made mistakes and others ought to avoid those mistakes, but:

But I think abstinence is like...I don't know how to put it, like...the main...Everyone should be abstinent, but it's not realistic at all.

I believe this is what she's saying: Even if abstinence works in practice, nobody's putting it to practice: people aren’t being abstinent.

So what’s the answer? I’m inclined to agree with her; I am a member of a very solid church where probably more children are born outside of marriage than not. This is not for lack of teaching, support, and so on. Abstinence works, if and only if it is actually practiced.

So … under what circumstances would it be realistic? What would that look like?

The Atlantic has a front-cover article out now going for controversy: The End of White America.

Mostly a survey of how white Americans are feeling about their own race, it’s a timely summary of the incremental cultural changes underway in recent years. As Barack Obama’s election has drawn all the attention from our conversations of ethnicity, here’s a reminder of something else going on.

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University … , has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: “They don’t care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’ They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture … They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don’t have a culture that’s cool or oppositional.”

What do you think? I bet Wray is dead on for how people feel, at least at a low level: it might not be on their minds every day, but I don’t know very many white person who would be comfortable answering the question, “is there anything positive about being white?”

[photo credit: Bavarian immigrant at Ellis Island, 1905, from New York Public Library at Flickr]

Me-Ville? David Zimmerman is deadly serious in his new book on individualism, Deliver Us from Me-Ville. Yet he knows, as the best storytellers always do, that well-placed humor can add to the weight of the topic.

Why Me-Ville? It’s a bit corny of a joke, but, as Zimmerman points out repeatedly in this 360° portrait of Number One, individualism is nothing short of Evil itself. He means it, and has successfully convinced me: individualism is more than an annoying trait. It is a foretaste of hell.

And that’s why we need to be delivered from it: we can’t escape it. We need help.

This is a smart book, full of that quirky mix of ancient letters and pop culture that Zimmerman’s regular readers have come to expect. Be prepared to be impressed. But not with the author’s smarts: Zimmerman is not showy. He manages to write well while keep readers thinking about the problem at hand. 

Eternally deepening individualism is the direction we’re headed. That’s why Deliver Us from Me-Ville spends so much time on Jesus. Not Jesus the theological concept (as in Jesus just alright with me) but Jesus the person, the prophet—Jesus, the creator god who stood outside our sorry system and, rather than throwing in a life preserver, jumped into the flood as a flesh-and-blood human.

Our only hope for deliverance from Me-Ville is love, and the only love that can knock us out of the downward spiral from individualism to narcissism to solipsism to hell—our only hope is a love from outside the system.

How do you repent of individualism? By singing Just As I Am? Even our Christian language is faulty here. How do you grow in knowledge of Christ? Through “Loud Time,” Zimmerman suggests. There’s a cult of personal Bible study (“quiet time”) in the church, when we ought to spend more time listening to God together.

Escaping from Me-Ville is a long-term effort, one we’ll work on throughout our natural lives. When life happens, it’ll always be tempting to retreat into self-absorption. But following Jesus into a deeper love will be worth it in the long run. Zimmerman:

The farther Jesus leads us from Me-Ville to the place he has prepared for us, the less sensible it is to go back, and the less fulfilling each visit will be. (…) When you notice Jesus, especially where you weren’t expecting to see him, you notice that what he’s doing and saying are a lot more interesting, a lot more creative than what you’re doing and saying. (p.148)

True to his message, Zimmerman has added a group discussion guide to the end of the book, and inserts several practical “Escape Routes” throughout. If you’re not a book reader, try this one.