Seven Storey Mountain

I am currently reading Thomas Merton's brilliant Seven Storey Mountain. You should read it, but in the meantime read these quotes:

"When I think of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field, about a hundred yards away from the clump of sumachs where we have built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kind of a leather jacket, standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move.

And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing: and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case.

Many times it was like that. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. Perhaps the inner motive is that the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carrry on our own lives. And we refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation."

The Darko Principle

I've had this theory percolating in my head for a while, and it's starting to become fully shaped. It's something that I call the Darko Principle. The Darko Principle refers, of course, to Darko Milicic and the debacle that was the 2003 NBA draft. In that draft, LeBron James was universally acknowledged to be the best player, so the Cavaliers took him first. After LeBron, things got fuzzy. The second overall pick belonged to the Detroit Pistons, and they had a bevy of options for improving their already stellar team. There was a host of can't-miss former college standouts, including Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony, but there was one player who was a wild card: Darko Milicic. Darko played professional basketball in Europe, and scouts praised his "upside." Because he played in Europe, it was hard to gauge his talent, but scouts were in agreement that with a few years of development, Darko would develop into an excellent player.

So the Pistons took Darko. And now, a few years later, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony have developed into perennial all-stars, while Darko is still sitting on the bench (and not even the Pistons' bench anymore). So what gives? Why would anyone pick a guy who should develop into a great player when there are great players strewn everywhere? My attempts to explain this kind of madness are where the Darko Principle gets it genesis. The Principle goes as follows:

People prefer potential to skill, fantasy to reality, and mystery to clarity.

A corollary to the Darko Principle is the Dwayne Wade Corollary: When people make decisions based on the Darko Principle, they tend to make bad decisions. This logically follows, because decisions based on murky, vague, and hopeful data tend to come out pretty bad, especially when compared to decisions made on concrete, straightforward data. The applications of these two theories to sports are obvious, but I argue that we operate on the Darko Principle in our everyday life, and it always come out bad.

In economics, dating, psychology, or pretty much anything else, we see people exercising the Darko Principle every day. You see it in the way people naturally prefer stocks to bonds; they'd rather possibly make tons of money than definitely make some money. And I'd rather buy a CD from some artist I've never heard of rather than Thom Yorke, even though I know that everything that Thom Yorke has ever made has been terrific. We want new, different, unknown.

So the trick is spotting ourselves doing Darko thinking and reminding ourselves of the Wade Corollary. For inspiration refer to the following excerpt from the movie High Fidelity. Go and do likewise.

-That other girl, or other women, whatever, I was thinking that they're just fantasies, you know, and they always seem really great because there are never any problems, and if there are they're cute problems like we bought each other the same Christmas present or she wants to go see a movie I've already seen, you know? And then I come home and you and I have real problems and you don't want to see the movie I wanna see, period. There's no lingerie...

-I have lingerie!

-Yes you do. You have great lingerie but you also have cotton underwear that's been washed a thousand times and its hanging on the thing and ... and they have it too just I don't have to see it because it's not the fantasy ... do you understand? I'm tired of the fantasy because it doesn't really exist and there are never really any surprises and it never really...

-Delivers?

-Delivers. Right. And I'm tired of it and I'm tired of everything else for that matter but I don't ever get tired of you.

Darko just doesn't deliver.

Gender roles

The German word for the Enlightenment is the Aufklarung, which roughly translated means the "clearing up." It means that during the Enlightenment the West performed a sort of spring cleaning on its ideas. I believe that we are now experiencing a second Aufklarung, but it is a social one, and, like the last Aufklarung, this one has a tendency to dismantle ideas recklessly, with the ravenous need to destroy of a mother cleaning out her son's closet.

One particular area that has been uprooted has been the area of gender. The movement happened so fast that many of us missed it. When I go to my father's hometown of Live Oak, Florida, to visit, I see a world of women told to be submissive, who often are full-time moms, while the husband provides for the family financially. At family gatherings, the women cook, clean, and dish gossip, while the men watch sports and grill meat. Areas of responsibility are clear: the woman manages the house, while the man manages the yard. When I was in this environment, the clarity of these spheres felt confining and freeing at the same time. I feel liberated because I understand what is expected of me: the yard must be kept up, money must be provided, and sports must be watched. If I can meet these simple conditions, I will meet the approval of my peers. The same impulses are enormously confining as well. There is an expectation of masculinity that is deeply troubling. Men cannot be nurturing or caring, they cannot play with the children or talk about relationships, and women cannot have a career or speak of serious things.

But then I return to my world, where women and men are hardly distinguishable, except physically. It's a more complicated, messier way to live, but it's not always worse.

Independence Day

Today is the day, I suppose, where we think about the long sequence of events, both providential and auspicious, that went into the establishment of this American democracy. From the Boston tea party (which seems, in retrospect, more like a frat-boy prank) to the oft-overlooked Louisiana Purchase, this country is assembled from a million swirling currents, and they all run together now. The recipe is somewhat irrational: combine the Enlightenment, a small group of Founding Fathers with hearts of steel and minds built like British dreadnaughts, an economy teetering on the backs of slaves, add a dash of heavy-handed English government, and churn until revolution foments.

And it does us well today to remember the mixture of fortune and steely effort that brought us here. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was the son of a candle-maker, a low-born tradesman, yet he conquered the worlds of printing and science, and he charmed the French in a way no American has done since. This is significant because he talked the cash-strapped French into giving the colonies enormous loans of money and troops. He could conduct himself with ease in the rural setting of the colonies, or in high society London, or in Enlightenment France.

That was his greatest gift: his hell-bent confidence. Benjamin Franklin--and the other Founding Fathers--believed that they belonged. There was a place at the table for this ragtag bunch of gentlemen. They didn't merely stand opposed to England, they stood opposed to the idea of England, its sense of aristocratic pietas that demanded that rank and class mattered. The American experience said that men were not their titles, or their lands; they had a right to make their way in life.

And 364 days a year, we blow hot air about American exceptionalism and the greatness of our democracy, and it turns into little more than political posturing. But maybe just this one day we'll sing songs and wave flags, and that'll be ok.

Silence before the cross

When Christ was taken in by his captors, he faced a series of sham courts, complete with false witnesses and trumped-up charges. There he stood, a holy God, a battered man, being accused. And then he did the one act that we would never expect or accept. He got up in front of those vile men, and he said nothing.

In many ways, this act was the first shot fired for the gospel. It was an act that recalled everything Jesus did and foretold everything that Jesus would do. It was the first shot across the bow of death and sin. But I want to ignore it.

If there's anything that I want, it's something to say when the world accuses me. "You've wasted your life," they would say. And I would want to produce a resume, replete with acts of holiness and humility. "You're unloving and prideful," they'd say, and I would produce a wife of character and love, who respected me for who I was. "You're lazy and a waste of potential," they'd say, and I would point to my achievements.

But Christ's silence portends the end of all that. His silence says that God loves us, in a way we don't understand. It says that he loves us not because of what we've done, but because of who we are. Christ's silence means that we have nothing to say before the world anymore. The charges against us are made by a world with no authority.

And that's the hardest part: we have to learn to be silent before the world. That all our ambitions are doomed attempts to gain the respect of a world dying away. Paul said that everything that he'd ever done was all loss before Christ. Loss! That means all of his education, his accomplishments, his hopes, his dreams. Paul was a well-schooled aristocrat toiling away at a series of meager jobs, travelling from city to city, never able to settle down. One early account of Paul describes him this way: "a man little of stature, thin-haired upon the head, crooked in the legs, of good state of body, with eyebrows joining, and nose somewhat hooked, full of grace."
He was a man who was short, fat, bald, with a unibrow, empty of himself, but full of the grace of Christ.