Action, Passion, Faith, and History

While I drove from student teaching to Echo Park en route to Downtown where I pick up my wife from work, I thought through a thread that connects Wendell Berry to Niebuhr and them to contemporary social science.  The thread is fragility.

An advertiser wrote on a description for a new collection of Berry’s essays that Berry writes about “fragmentation” and the search for health through wholeness.  I think Berry would agree with the description if each word be read and understood in all their potential depth.  The problem he writes: fragmentation, pieces, bits, the piecemeal, and the overestimation of humanity’s role and power.  The solution: health through acknowledging mystery, ignorance, fragility, and dependence.

Niebuhr would agree, if he’d let me play puppet master with his ideas for a short while.  Niebuhr writes that modern history is the story of people living beyond their means.  My metaphor to describe living beyond our means is that we are all really stuck on a wheel that turns us round and carries us forward.  If we move to act to far beyond our proper place, it is as though we reach out beyond the wheel.  Reaching too far lets the turning human only grab a tuft of the turf on which he or she roles, only slowing down the forward motion.  Tucking in for the ride, however, lets the mystery of existence carry, or spin, the human forward.  I don’t know where the urge for creativity lies in this metaphor, but at the very least the urge must be restrained to fit the metaphor and acknowledge mystery.  Otherwise, the urge would flare out of control, taking over the creation rather than thriving with it.

Taking further liberties with Niebuhr’s ideas in Faith and History, I think an inactive passion is an appropriate human posture in history.  I use the word passion because I discovered that Christ’s passion wasn’t merely a modern emotion sort of passion but fully absorbing his surroundings.  I add inactive because passion has been turned into a word for a burning fire under a boiler that makes steam in order to power our endeavors, physical and otherwise.  Like the industrial steam power, our contemporary passion acts quickly and destructively to accomplish narrow and immediate goals.

And now the social science connection: social science started in an industrial passion and is moving toward an inactive passion.  The new passion is more inactive as we realize the futility of “pure” science.  I call it inactive because less than pure science (or more than pure, for that matter) calls for methods that hold polar and binary thinking in tensions of twos and threes. For example, lab science becomes observation in both the lab and the field; theory must be enacted and dynamic.

I come to the conclusion that a “fruitful tension” for today, in our struggle to continue forward while within proper limits, should be a practice of living as best I can (practicing life, or praxis) followed by dissecting bits of that same life.  I think Robert has shown that labeling things goes a long way to a fruitful fragmentation.  Going further than labeling, one might take out bits of life for a few days at a time in order to find their proper place and limits.  Or one might isolate bits in order to see their connections.  For example: I isolated 1.5 hours of my day by driving to Echo park instead of driving straight home to West Hollywood before picking up my wife from Downtown.  I took these same 1.5 hours that I usually spend at home.  Today, by fragmenting my life, I see what’s missing: I cannot make supper at home, clean our home, or use the Internet to continue my job search.  I can, however, take time to sit in a coffee shop, CHANGO, and write my thoughts on paper, and read.

Other people call this fragmentation their time for reflective thought or creative thought or prayer or holy scripture reading.  I want to expand this idea of reflection and thought time to the idea that a time away from one’s own commonplace slices life just so.  So that the whole is divided and put back together, with the fruit of knowing how the pieces work best together.  I suppose I’ve turned on Berry’s words, or at least those of the advertiser, advocating for a new sort of fragmentation.  I hope I don’t forget to put myself back together, and I hope I still know how to cook when I get home.

After typing this short essay/blog, I noticed Robert’s thoughts on specialization and habits comment on the day-to-day as well, especially constructing habits in order that the mind can fly around, unconcerned about the practical.  I suppose I disagree with Wittgenstein, in that case.