An End and a Beginning

I'm not sure if anyone is paying attention to this site, since it's been nearly a year since there's been any activity here, but Corpus Permixtum is no more. In its stead, Bryce and I (Nicolas) have erected a new blog, Circle and Tangent, which can be found here. We hope to see you there.

The Conservative Turn...How Did I Get Here?

I'm struggling to remember what it was like to read and contemplate theory. A few years ago I was reading Judith Butler, the Gender Studies maven, as I recall, the conclusions and "unpacking" of gender roles she provided made complete sense in a roundabout way. Now I can't remember why exactly. These thoughts come to me as the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, my, for the time being, intellectual and spiritual preserve, has voted on the liberal side of the sexuality debate. This is partly because the traditionalist have already left the church and have no representation to offer. I guess, as I alluded to in a prior post I was hoping for an eternal stale-mate on this question. I can only assume that my prior life as a professional student would have openly welcomed this decision, but my place and activities have changed from the days of sitting around reading theory. While I don't think I'm necessarily any smarter than those days, I don't think I'm any dumber, or less contemplative about matters either. So the question becomes, how did such a change in thinking occur?

My best approximation: Place determines one's position

The academic environment informs opinion differently than the business world. I'm not thoroughly saturated in the business world, but I didn't want to use a phrase like "real world" as the alternative to the academic environment. I don't think that I have upgraded the milieu in which I live, but I do get different answers than before. So how do we reconcile the different places that we live in and the different prespectives that we garner from our respective places? Absent a universal or public good, how do our competing conceptions of good hold any preference outside of our place?

My father teaches math on the weekends to a group of students who aim to be the first college bound people in their families. He tries to prepare them for success in that environment. Every once in a while a truly talented kid will come through the program. Several years ago one such kid was mentored into applying to Princeton and subsequently received a full ride there. His parents, who did not exist within a framework where going to Princeton is a great achievement could not understand why their kid would need to go all the way to New Jersey, far away from his entire family to go to school when UT Permian Basin was in Odessa. The kid ended up going to UTPB. He could have chosen to go Princeton and followed the narrative of luminaries like Sonia Sotomayor, but he didn't. His place configured success differently than that.

And while we do have the law, which judges narratives as corrupt or not based upon legislation, a gang member might have a fully functioning rational narrative to take someone's life, but society has judged that as an unacceptable narrative, there seems to me few other frameworks with which to judge which narratives are successful and which ones are not.

So in the case of the Episcopalians, we have rival conceptions of Christ's church, informed by differing narratives in which majority rules. This makes me uneasy, I would prefer a framework of doctrine or creeds or authority, of course only when it complies with my perspective, to help adjudicate decisions like these. Even then, such tools are not stable.

It seems all I can do is make the narrative, or the opinions that my place has informed as attractive as possible and try to win as many as possible. A few weeks ago I was comforted by a passage in Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation in which he advocates a more other peoples conception of the good are none of your business attitude: "the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside." This is all well and good, unless child molestation helps one to find God. It also does nothing to alleviate the anxiety I feel about my own positions. I would prefer to be "Right" within my own opinions, whatever that means, but subscribing to the idea that my opinions are the outcome of my place makes that hard to do.

I'll end with a witty quip by Terry Eagleton. Speaking on the adoption of Scientology and New Age Spirituality by celebrities he has this to say: "you wouldn't believe that if you only had $38.00 in the bank". I think that quote can apply to everything I wrote today.

Piety Unbroken by Laughter Spills Blood

I just recently read the graphic novel Watchmen and saw the movie. (If gratuitous violence and sex offend you, stick to the book and avoid the movie. Apart from those excesses, the movie is actually a pretty faithful adaptation.) My wife encouraged me to write a blog post on it, which I’m assuming she did because she got tired of hearing me talk about it all the time and wanted me to redirect it to someone else. So this post is in part an effort to be a more considerate spouse.

(No spoilers anticipated.)

Watchmen rules. It's probably one of my all time favorite works of fiction. It’s a super(anti)hero comic book story about what the world would look like if people in real life traipsed around in costumes taking the law into their own hands. The book has a lot to say about politics, philosophy, ethics and psychology, and Alan Moore designed each of the six main characters to represent six different ways of viewing the world. I’d like to address one issue raised by two of those characters: Rorschach and The Comedian.

Philosophically, the two characters are mirror opposites of each other. Rorschach believes in moral absolutes; the world is comprised of clear-cut distinctions between good and evil. His mask, an inkblot pattern that constantly changes shape, seems to symbolize this. Life is black and white, and while the boundaries between right and wrong continuously flow into and displace each other, blacks and whites absolutely never mix into greys. He is willing to operate as an illegal superhero, savagely torture people who have information he needs and kill evildoers in a variety of colorful ways, as long as it means achieving retributive justice in the end.

The Comedian, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in anything. As you can infer from his name, he thinks life is a joke. He is a superhero because it’s fun, he kills innocent people because he can, he sees no existential difference between the just and the unjust, and he’s a devoted crime fighter even though he thinks the efforts of superheroes are futile in effecting any real change.


What’s interesting is how similar they are when it comes to how they live. Both are merciless killers who will go greater lengths than other superheroes in violently suppressing enemies. They don’t get along well with others, but they do have considerable respect for each other. And they’re both sociopaths. This reminds me of the great lesson learned about the alliance between the Nazis and the Soviets in World War II: the extremes of two opposing ideologies end up having more in common with each other than with anyone in the middle. As Bryce is fond of pointing out, the political spectrum looks more like a horseshoe than a straight line.


I’m interested in the relationship between righteousness and laughter. To me they are like opposing forces: righteousness is very serious, heavy matter, and laughter is as light as air. Righteousness should ground laughter with meaning and laughter should teach righteousness to loosen up a bit. But one with out the other is insanity. Rorschach never laughs and The Comedian never uses “ought” language. They are both sociopaths because they each live out unmixed commitments to either righteousness or laughter.

It might seem counterintuitive, but a life of pure piety is deadly. John Caputo says in Against Ethics, “Piety unbroken by laughter spills blood. Excommunication, extermination, execution, exile, exclusion, extra ecclesia nulla salus est [There is no salvation outside the Church]: that is the outcome of pure piety and of preoccupation with saving powers.” (I will proclaim boldly, without caveat, that Against Ethics is the single most satisfying work of philosophy I have ever read.) We tend to forget that the Spanish Inquisition came out of a time of rekindled interest in Catholic spirituality and holiness, and that purifying Europe of foreign, contaminating elements flowed from the same urge to renew Christianity. It was concomitant with a golden age of Spanish spirituality (St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila). A similar kind of spiritual revival impelled the 12th century Crusaders. So Rorschach’s brutality is not a dismissible symptom of a pathological love of violence—it has its eye on justice itself.

Uninhibited laughter is no less disturbing. The Comedian’s freewheeling, carefree life of hedonistic laughter is the consummate expression of individual autonomy. No kind of external obligation hinders him—his rule of life is auto- (self) nomy (rule) in the strictest sense. Laughter is as light as air, but even the highest mountain can’t stop the wind; it’s frictionless. Balancing his point against purebred piety, Caputo says, “In certain situations free agency should be made to tremble. When agents produce patients, people who suffer, I want to let agency waver in insecurity, to let autonomy and spontaneity and creativity and freedom feel their own murderousness—instead of singing hymns to them”.

I wish there was some account of Jesus laughing in the gospels (I appreciate The Passion of the Christ, if for no other reason than that it showed Jesus making a joke). Even though laughter is not mentioned specifically, I think Jesus’ way of life embodied the right mixture of laughter and piety. He made fun of and publicly embarrassed the Pharisees for taking themselves so seriously, but he also stood in righteous silence before the sardonic laughter of the Roman guards. As for me, most days I can’t decide whether I should put on sackcloth or just laugh. Trying to live out both is a difficult balance to strike. Maybe that’s why there don’t seem to be any good Christian comedians out there.