The American Conservative

That, my dears, is a vasilopita, or, St. Basil’s Cake. Today, on the Old Calendar, is the Feast of St. Basil. Inside the cake is baked a coin, in honor of a tradition that says St. Basil wanted to distribute money to the poor, but to allow them to retain their dignity. So he baked gold coins into cakes he distributed to them. Today, people put a single coin into the batter. The the tradition is that the first slice is for Jesus Christ, the second for his Holy Mother, and the third for St. Basil. And then on you go, through each member of the family. Whoever gets the piece with the coin in it is said to be blessed throughout the year.

St. Basil got the coin in our house tonight, but Nora (see right) got that piece. She holds the coin in her hand. This was the first year we had such a cake. It was completely delicious.

Over the weekend I had an exchange of e-mails with a friend who mentioned Stanford University anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s well-reviewed book from last year about the prayer culture of the Vineyard Fellowship. I blogged about it here. Luhrmann studied the Vineyard for years, and concluded that when people pray in the way Vineyard does, they are conditioning their minds. She’s not saying whether or not God really exists, or really talks to people, but rather points out that to practice prayerfulness in the way that the Vineyard people do (and people from other religious traditions) is a form of training that really does change the way one experiences spirituality. Luhrmann explains it better in this Fresh Air interview. 

Over 20 years ago, Luhrmann wrote her thesis on the psychology of UK witchcraft practitioners, who turned out not to be a bunch of marginal misfits, but middle-class, educated people — including a disproportionate number of computer industry people. In a New York Times review of the book that came out of that experience, Philip Zaleski wrote:

How, Ms. Luhrmann ponders in her most penetrating meditation, do such tenets take hold? What leads a businessman to abandon conventional beliefs, strip naked and implore the goddess Hecate for a better secretary? Most magicians, it seems, really do believe that magic works. She found that as the fledgling magician develops proficiency, he or she begins to see new patterns and accept new assumptions – as does a specialist in any field. The magician, like anyone else, tends to remember the successful rituals and forget the flops. Events others ascribe to chance become proof of a ritual’s effectiveness; if the magician performs a ritual involving water and next day sees someone crying, the tears validate the ritual. Magicians see causality where others see coincidence.

The pull of any new ideology can be intense. Even Ms. Luhrmann, the dispassionate observer, found herself seduced. Beginning her fieldwork as a skeptical scientist, she began to think in magical terms. Her fantasy life deepened, as did her dreams, which exploded with mythological imagery. While she refuses to endorse magical power, she describes herself as ”hooked.” After rituals, she feels ”vital and electric.” She is ”astonished” by the ”pertinence” of tarot cards. If she finally rejects a magical view of the world, it is in large measure because ”I stood to lose credibility and career by adherence.”

Ms. Luhrmann concludes that people are too ”fuzzy” to live by rational ideology. Rather, they stumble upon new ways of living and then compose an ideology to justify their actions. She calls this process ”interpretive drift” – a disturbing proposition, especially since the transformation is often ”accidental, unintended,” even ”unacknowledged.” We are, as it were, bewitched by life, and our ideas follow suit. This, in turn, thrusts upon us a formidable challenge that T. R. Luhrmann’s book implicitly poses – a rigorous examination of the tenets of our own faith, ideas, dearest intellectual castles, to find out just where the foundations lie.

I found especially interesting the Luhrmann quote in which she says she rejected a “magical view” of the world not because she found it untrue, but because she stood to lose social and professional status by accepting it.

The reason I bring all this up at all is because my friend, an academically-oriented researcher who is interested in these questions of spirituality and practice, wrote to say she was troubled in one respect by Luhrmann’s When God Speaks, the one about the prayer lives of Evangelicals. I haven’t read the book, by the way. My friend said it was an incredibly well done book, and a profound accomplishment, but it left her with the sense that Luhrmann, while far more accepting of the validity of these experiences than most, still leaves herself an “out” — a way of distancing herself from the possibility that these experiences of the supernatural are exactly what people claim them to be, and not merely a function of subjective imagination.

In her book about witchcraft, Luhrmann says that after immersing herself within an English witchcraft community, she once saw six Druids standing outside her London window. Here she is elsewhere describing what happened, and the context in which it happened. She begins by talking about how, when she was studying the London witchcraft group and participating in its life and rituals, she underwent a form of mental conditioning, doing guided meditations and other spiritual-mental exercises. Luhrmann writes:

What startled me, as a young ethnographer, was that this training worked. At least, it seemed to shift something in the way I used my senses and my internal sensory awareness. After about a year of this kind of training, spending thirty minutes a day in an inner world structured in part by external instructions, my mental imagery did seem to become clearer. I thought that my images had sharper borders, greater solidity and more endurance. They had more detail. I felt that my senses were more alive, more alert. I began to feel that my states of concentration were deeper and more sharply different from those of my everyday experience. One morning, I woke early after an evening in which I had read a book by a magician. The book was about Arthurian Britain and the early Celtic isles. Reading late into the night, I had allowed myself to get deeply involved with the story, reading not the way I read a textbook but the way I read books like The Secret Garden as a child. I gave way to the story and allowed it to grip my feelings and to fill my mind. As I woke that next morning I saw six druids standing against the window, above the stirring London street below my window. I saw them and they beckoned to me.

I stared for a moment of stunned astonishment, and then I shot up out of bed. Before I could capture the moment again, they were gone. Had they been there in the flesh? I thought not. But my memory of the experience is still very clear. I do not remember that I had imagined them, or that I had wanted to see them, or that I had pretended to see them. I remember that I saw them as clearly and distinctly and as external to me as I saw the notebook in which I recorded the moment, my sentences underlined and marked by exclamation points. I remember it so clearly because it was so singular. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

But other people in the magical world had experiences like that. They practiced the exercises and read the books and participated in the rituals and then, out of the blue, they had seen something. They saw the Goddess, or a flash of light, or a shining vision of another world. They saw these as things in the world, not phantoms in the mind, although because the image vanished almost immediately, they knew that what they had seen was not ordinary. They said that their mental imagery had become sharper. They thought that their inner sense had become more alive.

That’s what the training does. It shifts attention from the external to the internal, and blurs the line we draw between the mind and the world. And, as I have argued in my scholarship and teaching, this shift alters the lines we draw. The mind bleeds into the world. Not predictably, and not on demand, and for some more than others, but when it happens, the senses experience what is not materially present.

I’ve read neither her book about witchcraft, nor When God Talks Back, her book about the Vineyard church, though I certainly want to read the latter, and soon (if it were available on Kindle, I would have bought it today). My friend has read the Vineyard book, and, to repeat, says that in the end, Luhrmann falls back on her secular materialist convictions to a degree that strikes my friend, Luhrmann’s sympathetic reader, as not entirely honest, or at least not entirely persuasive.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s Glenn Hinson, in the appendix to his 2000 ethnography Fire In My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel, argues that ethnographers discount the validity of subjective experience in the groups they study. He says that whatever they tell themselves they’re trying to do, ethnographers approach their subject with a bias that frames the experiences reported by their subjects as illusory, as products of their own culture constructing and imposing meaning.

If I’m reading him accurately — and his prose is fairly academic — Hinson says that there are three ways to look at a “testimony” of an individual experience: 1) what actually happened; 2) what the person who experienced it believes happened; and 3) what the person hearing the testimony believes happened. There’s no way to be sure about the first in the list, of course, and Hinson believes (and I think this is inarguable) that the person who witnesses an event can only approximate what happened. That experience is mediated through the witness’s own finitude; he will interpret his experience in large part based on how it resonates with what he knows, or thinks he knows, already. But that doesn’t mean something objectively real didn’t happen to him – that is, this doesn’t mean he had a hallucination.

Similarly, the person who hears the testimony brings his own biases to the hearing — and this is what concerns Hinson in the appendix to his book. He praises ethnographers for trying to overcome their own observational biases by living with the people they’re studying. But:

…the experience-based extrapolations of ethnography tend to break down when recounted experience draws the ethnographer toward the supernatural. Shared experience is fine, it seems, until that sharing challenges the ethnographer’s reality. Then it’s time to step away, to affirm the relativity of belief, to invoke the “explanatory” mechanisms of psychology and cultural pattern. Suddenly reports of experience that in other areas of life are accepted at face value lose their credibility; suddenly they no longer reference the real, or at least not a “real” that isn’t sharply circumscribed by the consciousness-shaping forces of culture. It’s as if the very association with belief somehow taints told experience, drawing it out of the realm of the objective and authentic and into that of the subjective and imaginary. Supernatural experience is thus consigned to a reality apart, a realm where the “real” is defined only within the narrow parameters of belief. “That’s what they believe,” most ethnographers seem to say, “and thus it’s real for them.”  What remains unsaid — but certainly not misunderstood — is the concluding codicil “but not for us, for we can see beyond the boundaries of their belief.” Thus slips away any guise of ethnographic objectivity, only to be replaced by implicit claims to a fuller knowledge and a more real reality. Accounts of supernatural experience, in turn, get treated as artifacts of belief, interesting for the light they shed on culture, but meaningless as testaments to authentic encounter.

Hinson goes on to say that some ethnographers who themselves have supernatural experiences while doing fieldwork get back to the familiar territory of “a shared (and disbelieving) worldview,” causes them to believe that they had been deceived by their own minds. Hinson writes, “In essence, most experiencing ethnographers, like Ebenezer Scrooge in his encounter with the ghost of Marley, attribute supernatural experience to that ‘undigested bit of beef,’ never considering that on this one occasion their minds might not be playing tricks with them.”

It sounds like this might have been what happened with Luhrmann and the witches, though if the Times review from 1989 is correct, she recognized that she stepped back from that experience, and the witches’ worldview, because it would cost her too much professionally to accept it. That, to put it mildly, is hardly a case against the witches, any more than it’s a case against an academic becoming, say, a Pentecostal Christian, though I imagine an academic today would find it more costly to their professional standing to become a Pentecostal than a Wiccan.

Anyway, there are a couple of questions in all this that interest me. First is the matter of how we can know what’s real. If we are marked by finitude and fallibility, how can we know whether what we saw is real, a half-truth, or a hallucination? How can we know whether someone who claims to have witnessed something supernatural can be believed? How can we be really sure that the only acceptable explanation is a materialist one? If we do so, aren’t we loading the analytical dice? For that matter, a believing Jew hearing an African-American preacher talk about a vision of Jesus Christ is going to interpret that testimony differently from a believing Catholic … just as that African-American preacher is likely to interpret a vision of St. Francis of Assisi different from an Italian Catholic. How can we know whose vision is true, and whose interpretation is trustworthy?

One of my longtime readers, Franklin Evans, is a practicing Pagan. He shared with me a series of supernatural experiences he once had. I, an Orthodox Christian, believe these things happened to him — that they really did happen, not that they were imagined. Franklin and I have different interpretations of the meaning. We could both be wrong … but we can’t both be right, except in that we agree that something external to Franklin’s consciousness happened. You meet Franklin, and you know instantly that this guy is on the level. He’s not the kind of person who strikes one as fanciful or lightly grounded. I think you would have a hard time denying that something extremely unusual and significant happened to him, unless you had a strong bias against admitting anything supernatural as a possibility.

But how do you know? I think it’s impossible to have an interpretation without a prior commitment, or set of commitments. I know what mine are, and I believe them to be true, not just “true for me.” Yet I can’t prove them. When I posted the other day about cultural relativism, and the value of considering the perspective of the Other, I did not mean that by opening oneself to the Other’s perspective, that one must necessarily affirm it. One can examine the Other’s point of view, and decide that the Other has it all wrong. There is value, though, in the exercise, honestly done. I don’t expect a convinced materialist to become a Christian because he has seriously thought about how the world looks through my eyes, but with luck he will have come to see my conclusions as reasonable, if ultimately wrong.

The second question is a more complicated one. Luhrmann wrote in her 1989 book on witchcraft, and in her 2012 book about the Vineyard’s Pentecostal-ish prayers, that they both “work” insofar as “working” means they attune the mind to alternative realities. I hesitate to say much about that because I don’t want to misstate Luhrmann’s view, not having read her books, only about them. Nevertheless, it seems to me that one objection could be that these mental techniques don’t open the mind, but rather obscure it.

Still, I think it is important to consider that the normative modern Western mindset may be deficient in important ways. I mean, maybe we really cannot see things that are actually there, because we have accepted a priori that they cannot be there. The anthropologist Wade Davis has written that Tibetan Buddhists consider their tradition to be a science of mind. Their prayer and meditation is not simply a therapeutic or a devotional practice, but offers objective insights into reality and human personality, or so they claim. I have read very similar claims by Orthodox Christian monks from Mount Athos. The Orthodox tradition says that in order to experience greater union with God, one has to pray, and to purify one’s nous — the soul’s perceptive faculties. They are not surprised when an unbeliever, or a Christian who doesn’t pray much, fails to understand what they’re talking about, or to take it with the seriousness it deserves. Of course you don’t get it, they would say. Pray and fast, pray and fast, and the doors of perception may be opened to you.

I say all these things in the spirit of opening a discussion. Let’s go.

Hot on the heels of the Julie Burchill kerfuffle, one of you readers just tipped me off to even more about that vicious debate from within the cultural left. Verily, this is a Same Planet, Different Worlds situation if ever there was one. It is a to-do over what is called the Cotton Ceiling. What is the Cotton Ceiling? Glad you asked:

The Cotton Ceiling refers to discrimination against transsexual people at lesbian sex parties. It is called such because transsexual women are required to keep their underwear on while the rest of the lesbians have fun. Essentially, it renders the transsexual people in attendance as “asexual” and is another form of cissexist bullshit that transsexual people have to endure.

I, for one, had no idea that transsexual people had to suffer such unspeakable ostracism at lesbian sex parties. My goodness, and I thought I had problems. Here is an unintentionally hilarious e-mail exchange between a trans person and a lesbian over the Cotton Ceiling. Excerpts:

To: [redacted trans]
Subject: Re: What’s the cotton ceiling?
Thanks. Do you really think lesbians are transphobic for not wanting to have sex with a trans woman who is male-bodied?

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 1:57 PM, [redacted trans] wrote:
Trans women are not male-bodied. There is nothing male about our bodies.

I think that everyone has the right to decide who they want to have sex with, how they want to have that sex, and when they want to have that sex, or to not have sex at all. Consent is incredibly important, and no one should ever feel pressured to have sex of any kind with anybody.

However, I also think that people’s desires are often influenced by (and even dictated by) an intersectionality of cultural messages which include transphobia, transmisogyny, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and xenophobia, among many other factors. This is a topic that many within the feminist movements and womanist movements have discussed in terms of racism, shade-ism, classim, and ableism, and is also being discussed now in reference to transphobia and transmisogyny. I believe that many cis queer women do not see queer trans women as viable sexual partners in large part due to the cultural messages that exist, both within queer culture and mainstream/straight culture, that tell us that trans women’s bodies are inherently undesirable except as a fetish for cis straight men. I also think that it is rooted in the belief that trans women are not women, which is transphobic and transmisogynist.

More:

From: [redacted lesbian]
Sent: March-12-12 1:59 PM
To: [redacted trans]
Subject: Re: What’s the cotton ceiling?
Thanks. So, just to make sure I understand this, a trans woman with a penis, and who has no desire to have a sex change, is not male bodied – correct?

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 2:02 PM, [redacted trans] wrote:
There is nothing inherently male about a woman’s body, unless she identified things about it as male herself. So, no, I do not consider trans women with penises to be male-bodied, unless that is how they identify.

From: [redacted lesbian]
Sent: March-12-12 2:04 PM
To: [redacted trans]
Subject: Re: What’s the cotton ceiling?

This is seriously problematic for lesbians. What you are saying is lesbians – who desire sex with females – are somehow bigoted for that desire, no? That’s exactly what nontrans males say to us.

Anyway, take care, [redacted lesbian]

I can understand the lesbian’s confusion, can’t you? Well, Angry Trans Person can’t, not one bit. ATP really takes off on the lesbian, insisting that yes, as a matter of fact lesbians who don’t want to have sex with a penis-possessing transperson claiming to be a woman really are bigots. The sex you are, he/she says, is the sex you choose to present yourself as — and to deny it is to show what a hater you are.

This is why, according to Angry Transperson, lesbians who want transgender “women” with penises to keep their panties on at orgies are the Worst People In The World.

Whee! The Cotton Ceiling. Who knew? The things you learn on this blog.

UPDATE: Let me clarify something. Yes, I think this is really funny, this “cotton ceiling” issue, but I also think there’s a serious aspect to it, and it’s this: At what point does reality defy our will and imagination? Is the world ultimately nominalist? When does, say, biology negate psychology? If my uncle claims to be Napoleon, that does not make him Napoleon; is that analogous to a man with male genitalia claiming that he’s really and truly a woman, not simply a facsimile of a woman?

Are words magical? Can they reshape reality? If so, are there limits to their power?

Fearless. Gorgeous. Italian. Quite possibly the sexiest woman on the planet. Watch that clip and marvel. Why is this woman not a secret agent?

(H/T: James Fallows).

Isn’t that charming? That’s a map of Paris done by the English artist and graphic designer Alice Tait. I had completely forgotten that my publisher engaged her to do the endpapers for The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming. She’s working on a map, or maps, of Starhill and the places where Ruthie lived, and that she loved. She’s going to include images, too. I love Alice’s work, and can hardly wait to see what she comes up with for Little Way. Follow the link to her blog to check out her portfolio. I am certain that Ruthie would have loved it, and I hope that she can see how much her life will be honored by Alice’s part in telling her story.

The conservative UK commentator Tim Stanley takes notice of a vicious slapfight between a loud faction of British feminists and transsexuals (whose side Stanley takes, interestingly enough). It’s amusing watching sexual revolutionaries devour themselves, especially when everyone involved is British, which means they are vastly superior to us Yanks when it comes to deploying sophisticated verbal firepower against each other. Stanley writes:

Burchill seems to think that transsexuals (or “bed wetters in bad wigs”) are engaged in a global conspiracy against “the minority of women of working-class origin to make it in what used to be called Fleet Street”, as if Rupert Murdoch spends his weekends in drag working out ways to destroy women with regional accents. And so the article is full of non-sequiturs about single parenthood and council houses. It’s a classic example of the identity politics revolution consuming itself. Liberalism has created different political classes of minorities who compete with each other for title of the most oppressed – and this invariably creates new forms of fascism as one group asserts itself over the other.

Do make a point of reading Julie Burchill’s screed. Whether you think she’s the Worst Person In The World, or has something of a point here, I think we can all agree that the woman knows how to go after her enemies in an extremely entertaining way. Somewhere, Christopher Hitchens and Evelyn Waugh must be looking down on that Burchill daisy-cutter and chortling with cruel English delight.

Not long ago, in the Mall Killers thread, we had an intense discussion of race, crime, and culture. It started with a reflection on the fact that a rampaging flashmob of black teenagers terrorized customers at the Mall Of Louisiana, and required it to be locked down and evacuated. Some of the mob continued down the street and caused mayhem at another mall. One of the questions we discusses was whether or not the statistics on violent crime in Baton Rouge justify being afraid of and avoiding young black males.

Yesterday the Baton Rouge Advocate published a lengthy analysis of the 2012 murder stats in the city. Take a look at this PDF of one of the inside pages. Last year, 83 people died by homicide in Baton Rouge. Of that number, 87 percent were black, and 87 percent were male. Two-thirds had been in trouble with the law before, and one-third had been in trouble with the law for drugs. The median age of victims: 26.

Of the perpetrators, the median age was 22. Get this: 96 percent of them were black, and 90 percent were male. Almost two-thirds had previous arrests. One out of four had a drug record.

Most of the murders took place in the poorest parts of the city.

What can we learn from these statistics? That murder in Baton Rouge is almost entirely about young black men from the poor part of town killing other young black men from the poor part of town. It’s mostly a matter of thugs killing thugs.

If you are an ordinary Baton Rouge citizen with common sense, you want to get away from poor black people — especially if you are black, and have children you hope to save. That’s what these statistics say. If I’m wrong, show me how I’m wrong. Hey, you could move out here to the country if you like. Half the people around here are black, the other half are white. There’s no small amount of poverty, but we don’t have much violent crime to speak of.

After that thread, I received an e-mail from a friend in Baton Rouge. She is white, Republican, and active in community affairs. She wrote (below the jump):

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Cheesy, creamy, toasty gratin dauphinoise for a winter’s day in New England. Look at it up close below the jump. Look at it!. It’s the black pepper that really tantalizes Your Working Boy. I’ll give you one guess as to who the chef and photographer is.

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I’ve come to be friends with Stephanie Lemoine because of my late sister Ruthie. Stephanie was one of Ruthie’s “chemo buddies,” by which I mean they were  cancer sufferers who met and became close in the Baton Rouge General’s chemotherapy room. Stephanie went into remission; Ruthie, of course, didn’t make it. I’ve gotten to know Stephanie since I returned to south Louisiana, and she’s a key part of The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming.

Stephanie’s cancer returned, and she’s been having a very, very hard time of it. The last time I visited her, she told me that she began noticing that during her lowest times, sometimes after she had been praying with particular intensity — especially asking for her late friend Ruthie’s prayers — a cardinal would appear outside her window. She had come to see it as a sign of Ruthie’s faithful presence at her side as she was on this painful and difficult journey through the land of cancer.

Today we went to Sunday dinner at my mother’s house. She told me that Stephanie is about to go back to M.D. Anderson in Houston for another round of grueling cancer treatment. She — my mother, I mean — was sitting out on her front porch late last night, in the dark, praying for Stephanie, when she heard a loud rustling noise in the bush next to the porch. She shined her flashlight to see what was making the noise, and there she saw a cardinal.

Cardinals are diurnal birds. You never see them at night, and when you see them in the daytime, they are quiet, unfussy birds. But there was one in the bush next to my mother, making noise as she prayed for Stephanie. My mother took it as a sign of Ruthie’s presence for and with her faithful friend, and it gladdened her heart. It gladdened Stephanie’s heart too. And mine. I believe it.

Please pray for Stephanie Lemoine, if you pray.

Welcome to The Citadel, a planned fortified community in which future far-right residents will live behind a wall, in poured-concrete dwellings, and manufacture guns for a living while waiting for the collapse of civilization. Excerpts from The Citadel’s website:

The Citadel is evolving as a planned community where residents are bound together by:

• Patriotism
• Pride in American Exceptionalism
• Our proud history of Liberty as defined by our Founding Fathers, and
• Physical preparedness to survive and prevail in the face of natural catastrophes — such as Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina — or man-made catastrophes such as a power grid failure or economic collapse.

The Citadel is not your typical planned community where the developer’s objective is selling cookie-cutter homes at the highest possible profit-margin.

The Citadel is not profit-driven. The Citadel is Liberty-driven: specifically Thomas Jefferson’s Rightful Liberty.

Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.

DESCRIPTION: The Citadel Community will house between 3,500 and 7,000 patriotic American families who agree that being prepared for the emergencies of life and being proficient with the American icon of Liberty — the Rifle — are prudent measures. There will be no HOA. There will be no recycling police and no local ordinance enforcers from City Hall.

But there will be ordinance enforcers of some sort. There will have to be; no community can do without them. Given the ideological orientation and militancy of this walled city, these ordinance enforcers are likely to be — how to put this? — unsubtle.

For the record, the city fathers know that you’re thinking they’re just a bunch of racists or anti-government militants who want to make a Last Stand against the gummint. They want you to know that they don’t care what your race is; as long as you share their ideology, you are welcome. And, they want you to know too that they are not preparing to withstand a military or governmental assault. So there’s that.

You know, if the organizing principle here weren’t right-wing militancy, and if the town weren’t planning to support itself via gun manufacture, I would be supportive of this venture as an experiment in building intentional and resilient community. It sounds, though, like a place where angry Tea Partiers are planning to hole up building guns and watching Hannity, and waiting for the end of the world. I don’t think this will end well for them, but I could be wrong.

A better example may be the lay community that I hear is developing around Clear Creek, a traditional Benedictine monastery in eastern Oklahoma. Five years ago, Slate wrote: