Well, I try really hard to avoid talking about politics, but I don't see how anyone can say nothing about this year's presidential race; especially now.

The most important thing I can say about Obama's victory, for myself, is that I realize it is deeply meaningful in profound ways, ways that many of us cannot possibly fully appreciate. Watching news coverage of people weeping, screaming, running and dancing in the streets and—I could be imaging it, but—the general excitement and pride I believe I've encountered in LA this week, is precious. I am very, very, very happy for this meaning in Obama's victory. I am grateful to be able to say that I've been a witness to it. And for those who smirk at the idea of this being the "most important" thing I can say, well, my response is that in my opinion you truly underestimate its meaning.

Other than that, during the campaigns I found myself more frustrated and saddened than ever; largely because I paid more attention to this campaign than any other, partly because I'm getting older, and partly because I pay more attention to rhetorical strategies nowadays. All of the candidates bent the truth (I'm being kind) with impunity, both potential presidents made promises they cannot possibly keep, and both said they will do things they cannot possibly do. My biggest frustration and sadness in this campaign was simply the further maturing realization that as a consumer of political propaganda, punditry and "analysis," I am assumed to be a gross moron fueled by fear, raw emotion and selfish motives. To whatever level, in actuality, that I rise above that, I have been deeply offended by the whole mess of it all. I almost, very closely, refused to vote. But as I've noted previously in this blog, I hold, in faith, to the importance of voting. So I voted. For the dude I knew was going to lose anyway. I cast a vote not for a person, nor for a party's ideology, but for my own ideology, and in a manner that would not be a part of anyone being put into the white house. My vote was one of supporting an idea while rejecting its methodologies; of supporting the process in principal while not being a part of it in effect.

And this may well mean, after all, that I am a gross moron fueled only by fear, raw emotion and selfish motives. The strange loops of being human are seemingly unavoidable.

Next week work will be taking me to LA. The week after that I'll be heading to… well, someplace else. Geez. I hate flying. I have a phobia. It terrifies me. Think "Rain Man." Anyway…

This week I've met a few well-travelled folks, people who are retired and spend their time travelling about the country building homes with Habitat for Humanity. My boss has extended me the luxury of working on a Habitat house in the day, and working my real job at night. I think I'm not wise for assuming this schedule, but I am thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying helping build the house. I get to do physical labor, I meet generous folks, I do something good for another family, and I feel like I'm living like I'm supposed to. And, you know, it's a good thing for one's humility to do something you know little about. I have no idea how many times this week I've been shown what I've done wrong. But there are some really fine, practical, hands-on educators doing this stuff. I've been working with a guy and I'll ask him, "So, how do I do this? What am I doing wrong here? How do I fix this?" He'll show me how to do it, and then have me do it myself. Then he'll say, "Do you want me to tell me you why?" and if you answer in the affirmative, he'll explain the reasoning behind the action. I am always fascinated that there's a reason behind pretty much everything, and that a zillion little things are discovered throughout history, preserved and passed down and taught, becoming common knowledge in a particular community. Anyway, I like this approach to teaching. Tell somebody how to do something. If they're happy with that, so be it. But then offer to explain why that's how it's done. If they want to know, tell them. Either way: easy, efficient, done.

One of my kids asked me why I'm doing this. So I explained, again, that everything we have, and everything we can do, has been given to us for a reason: to help other people. Hopefully, one of these days it will stick. And hopefully, one of these days I'll do a better job of living up to it myself.

Here's the interesting theoretical aspect to the experience: you've got the two poles of American socioeconomic political theory coming together in a way that works very well. The company sponsoring this house is a big-business capitalistic enterprise which just so happens to have invested one and a half million dollars into Habitat, and on this gig is pitching in big time. On the other hand, there's an element going on concerning the haves and the have-nots, about socioeconomics and about what's fair and what's not, and about people who aren't worried about getting their hands dirty and their knuckles busted. It's a really interesting mix of various ideologies coming together both in theory and in individual people. The frameworks battling it out silently and far behind the scenes are enormously complex. But, I like my version: everything we have, and everything we can do, is to help other people.

This basic understanding and agreement is part of what I'm preaching in life.

As noted previously, when I was typing my post on Plato's Dilemma, I got to the two words "be humble" and was suddenly struck by the idea of my religious faith being a metaphor for the issues surrounding Plato's Dilemma. The parallel runs something like this:

God exists. God is truth. God is knowable, but only as something unknowable; what we ultimately come to know of God is God's ultimate un-knowable-ness. So, we acknowledge that there is Truth, we acknowledge that somehow it can/should/does guide our lives, but we also acknowledge we cannot fully ascertain nor articulate it. We must address the idea of God, of relationship with God. We must decide notions of faith for ourselves. But doing so involves making claims. It involves abiding in an ideology. We cannot/should not/must not make absolute claims. We cannot say our faith is superior to another person's faith without claiming to be God ourselves, which we most certainly are not. We must not judge another. In the face of this, we form a faith of our own (as Paul said, we work our salvation "with fear and trembling") and we hold it in the utmost of humility. We know it is frail because we have worked it out. We know it is precious because God has made it so. The key comes down to holding our faith in deep, profound humility before God and other human beings.

In other words, faith involves living according to a personal ideology concerning Truth, one that we must value, therefore live by, and therefore in some way espouse for it to be a faith worth having. Yet, we cannot universally verify or validate a given faith in human terms. And, since we cannot verify or validate it, we understand that each person's humble faith is just as valid as our own. Yet from a particular point of view, to say that every faith is valid is to negate the idea of Truth, and therefore the value of faith. Plato's Dilemma.

However, after years of wrestling with this issue in terms of faiths, I have resolved it to my satisfaction with this idea of humility; with this idea that it is not the intellectual particulars of faith which make it faith. Rather, it is the heart, the spirit, the humility of the faithful which is the key. The view needs to be elaborated upon to explain well, but it is a workable solution. I like to say in metaphorical terms that we religious folks spend a lot of time arguing over what kind of clothes (causal, dress, business) we are supposed to wear in the sight of God, but God only cares about the fabric; not the style or cut of the garments. Likewise, God cares about our heart, our humility, our submission and devotion to him at a deeply personal level. I don't think God is interested in doctrine and dogma.

And so. Reading Gee's work on Plato's Dilemma, when I understood Gee's point intuitively, as if it were a long lost friend suddenly formally introduced, and when I recognized that (contrary to Gee's claim) a solution exists, and it rests in intellectual humility, I was thunderstruck by the parallel to my personal view of faith. And I had to ask myself, which is the chicken, and which is the egg? As a born existentialist, have I worked out my faith as a response to a pre-existing intuition of Plato's Dilemma, or is my intuitive grasp of Plato's Dilemma, and the solution to it that I see as perfectly natural, born of my pre-work performed in working out my faith?

An interesting question, and one that could be asked more directly by asking if my view of God, Man and faith is based largely (merely?) in my existentialist mind. At present, I would wager that both my faith, and my grasp of Plato's Dilemma, are based in my existentialist nature. Which gets back to my posts of this year regarding belief, reality, and faith. We truly believe only what are minds of capable of truly believing; we can do nothing else.

A closing point? A takeaway? I left it sitting on a doorstep in my previous post: be humble. To read, to hear, to interpret, to speak is to take a stand. Our stand may not be superior to any other. Or perhaps it may be. We may never know. This doesn't make our stand unimportant. But it does mean that we should stand humbly in a humility that recognizes it may be wrong, and in an even greater humility that recognizes it may be right.

AH HAH! So now I understand my hand-wringing and vacillation about posting my opinions on debatable matters. Now I understand in a simply-stated way what for years I've been fussing with and dancing around. Now I know that this middle ground has a name. Now I've seen it in print. In an academic work. And everybody knows that makes it official: Plato's Dilemma. Yep. Plato's Dilemma.

Literacy scholar Dr. James Paul Gee briefly describes what he terms Plato's Dilemma, and my summary of his brief description follows presently. Plato's argument against the written word was that it could not answer back to a questioning reader. A reader could not ask the text itself, "What do you mean?" and receive a newly phrased answer, as could be done in oral dialogue. Furthermore, a text could make no decision as to whom it presented itself; crudely meaning, somebody too ignorant to have any business reading it. On the other hand, if one simply presented texts with an official interpretation that was unquestionably authoritative, this was no better than the history of oral myth (which is to say, Homeric myth) which blindly guided the society of Plato's time and place. The dilemma in short is this: (1) To force an interpretation upon a text is to exercise mind control, authority, etc. over the people and dupe them as fits your needs rather than theirs, but (2) to allow every reading of a text to be considered legitimate is to at once say no reading of the text is legitimate, and therefore have no need of the text.

I realized immediately as I read Gee's presentation that this paradox plagues us on many levels. Consider that "text" is not necessarily a written sheet of paper, but can be any discourse. One can see that if we look at religion, the same point arises. If "anything goes" as far as views of Man and God, then there is not much point in talking about Man and God, for there is no Truth. On the other hand, to claim a view as "correct" or "incorrect" or more or less one or the other is to align oneself with an ideology and claim its supremacy over others. It is to privilege oneself implicitly; and who has this right, to claim to know the Truth?

And so we must do what we should not do. In my terms, this is the dilemma restated. Where does a person place her or himself vis-à-vis this situation? Is there no truth to be rightly claimed anywhere, or do we risk the arrogance to claim that we, few or one among many, possess it? Gee states there is no way out of this dilemma; to "read" a "text" is to instantly form an opinion and align with an ideology. Certainly, as Gee points out, Plato was not innocent. His solution, offered in The Republic, was that texts should be limited in distribution and always "correctly" interpreted by philosopher-kings; people like… Plato, of course. The issue comes down to how we deal with this; what do we do in facing the fact that our choice is either nihilism or privileging ourselves above others?

In two words: Be humble.

… … …

[*cough.* It just struck me that my faith-based, existentialist thinking views (uses?) religion as a giant metaphor built upon this basic problem of human existence. *cough. * ]

I haven't gotten around to watching Obama's acceptance speech yet; I'll watch it as a podcast when I have the time, as I will McCain's. But a Kingdom-sympathetic, bridge-building, space-spanning person like myself can't help but raise a thumb upward for Greg Boyd's brief comments on division, polarization, empire and Kingdom.

In this season (unfortunately, more like year) of political campaigning, this general subject seems timely. The other day one of my classmates brought up the realm of a writer's voice as related to a writer's identity. Noting right from the start that voice and identity are both subjects that a person could spend a lifetime studying and theorizing about, I'd still like to cover some points about them.

There is a tension within me that results from various concerns and forces tugging and pulling at some nebulous, ill-defined center called 'my identity.' A few of them are involved with the subject of this post. Several years back, I worried a great deal about finding my writing voice, which in my thinking concerned style and content. "Oh if I could just figure out my innate style" I would lament. I sort of got over that, realizing that a writer doesn't have to have a single style. This alleviated some issues with style, but didn't do much for identity. So then I thought of identity in terms of confession and subject matter, until I wrote the essay "Deconstruction, Truth, Meaning." It was then I admitted to myself that neither writing, nor anything else, will ever result in a full presentation of one's identity. "This I confess," is possible; "Now you know me," is not.

These are part of the tension. An additional part is the ages-old spiritual quest for contact with one's singular, "true" identity, which nominally is expressed, with no façade or fiction, in every moment of life—versus the theoretical view that we each have multiple identities. We are different, in some ways, depending upon the context of the moment. Are we talking to children, our own children, coworkers, fellow students, folks at church, etc.? On the one hand, it seems each of us should "just be me" in all of life's varied circumstances. But on the other, are we really the same? Do we, can we, should we, must we show the same self to everyone in all cases? In theory I have an ultimate true identity in God. In theory identity is merely a malleable social construct.

Reiterating, voice and identity are subjects we could spend a lifetime analyzing and theorizing about. Likewise with our social interactions. None of these are simple. But just to try to place something onto somewhat firm footing, it's pretty safe to say that nearly all of us act a bit differently depending upon social context. We say different things, and we say things differently. And this is the small point of the moment, in this post. Do we each reveal a fundamentally different identity in each case, are we revealing different voices of the same identity, both, or neither? What determines what? Can we answer this, at all?

I think we should try. When at the Abbey of Gethsemani, I talked to an aged monk who was long ago a friend of Thomas Merton. Naturally, we talked about Merton. So this monk's voice was the voice of a friend and historian. When this same monk talked to my daughter, his voice was more like that of a loving father. I would assume that his voice when speaking to his superiors in confession would be different. Yet, I tend to think that in this man's discipline and age and wisdom, all of these voices are from a singular, integrated identity. There is no contradiction; no false implications. No pretending. No self deception. On the other hand, consider a political candidate who travels from venue to venue. There is a speech in the northwest about gun-toting rednecks, perhaps. There is a speech in the south about the right to bear arms. There is a speech in the Midwest about the working man and woman struggling to make ends meet while the rich get richer. There are talks behind closed doors, about making the rich richer. And in each venue, not just the vocabulary, but the literal physical accent, inflection and cadence of speech, and the stories, change. What does this person believe? Who and what are they? What is false, pretend, real, genuine? What, if anything, do the answers tell us about identities? That the politician has many identities, or actually only one, which has nothing to do with being genuine and everything to do with wanting to be elected? This example is more personal than we might think, if we ask ourselves the same questions, only substitute "liked," "admired" or "loved" for "elected."

I am somewhat aware that there is code-switching in discourse, such as I might say, "I view this as a very positive development" to a group of professionals, and just plain "Sweeeeet!" to my pre-teen child. I can say to my younger coworkers, "Owned!" and they understand that which with an older audience requires, "Wow, the other party clearly attained the upper hand in this situation, and at your expense." This is natural in the sense that almost all of us do it every day, to some greater or lesser extent. There are people I know who don't, but they typically come across to others as boring, stuck-up, out of touch, or just plain frightening. A bit of code-switching is necessary, and is a positive aspect of discourse. To me, code-switching means I want to communicate with somebody at whatever level they communicate. And I think here is the crux of the issue. Why do I want to communicate, and what do I want to communicate? Are my motives selfish or no? Is my communication for good or ill? It is for the benefit of the other, or for me? And I can ask myself, should ask myself, if the communication is true to "who I am" regardless of the code.

And this leads me to a few concluding thoughts. When we communicate, we make statements explicitly and implicitly. We are also aware (I hope) that inferences will be made. True enough, inferences are largely the responsibility of the audience and cannot be controlled by us. But this is not entirely the case. We perceive at least the possibility of particular inferences. Sometimes we encourage them. Certain rhetorical forms depend upon them. In such cases, do we manipulate the inferences, and to what end? In all of these cases (explicit claims, implicit claims, and cajoled inferences), are we speaking from a single identity that controls our speech keeping it consistent to our "true self" no matter what the voice, no matter what the code? I have no firm conclusions. But one thing that seems promisingly useful is to remember that our actions are valuable in that they reflect our state of being. If our speech acts, properly translated from various voices and codes, are contradictory, we are not speaking from a single identity—or, our single identity is behaving dishonestly. It doesn't take a genius to realize that there are cases where we are genuinely, and for the good, being all things to all people—and cases which cross the line to where we are simply being false.

If I had to claim at present an area of research for my degree, I'd say that ostensibly it's about "Building bridges and spanning spaces." Supposedly I concern myself with internarrative spaces and the breakdown of communication between discourse communities. And, of course, magical ways of forming connections across these gaps: a little something I impressively label "memetic bridging." Yeah. Thumthin like that.

I truly do find internarrative spaces fascinating. But I have to admit that sometimes they're just plain disheartening. When you study the differences of frameworks in ardent opponents, sometimes it's simply frustrating and you just wonder why the groups can't see what each other is saying. But what's really unsettling is when you try to grasp the supporting structures of each framework in certain cases, and also examine, on each side, the critiques of the respective opponent's framework. This is not so much frustrating as it is simply mind-numbing. It becomes obvious why, in certain meetings of certain communities, the end result is that each group decides the best thing is to just do their own "thing" and leave one another alone.

I've been reading a present debate on the internet between two guys who belong to one Protestant tradition, one guy in the Bible Belt and one guy way out west. The former is, in my point of view, a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying fundamentalist, while the latter is… well, more conservative than I am but a flaming, hell-bound liberal in the eyes of the former. Same religious tradition, same Bible, and about 170 degrees off from one another. This could be considered the intriguing, even frustrating, part. But, the reading of the interpretations that each has of the other's words, and the comments of people who are reading the debates, is the mind-numbing part. Beyond the fact that everybody is writing in English, there is almost no framework which exists to support effective dialogue.

Yet both these groups fit into a big bucket the secular world hears say, "Come unto us in the name of Christ, and find the Truth."

Time for me to go sit and rock in a corner, hugging myself, trying to find a happy place.