I read Holy Resilience and my method for writing this review
of it is to copy the preview of
it and reply to it, like to a long email.
My "replies" are set off with --
--
In 2018, I wrote a book called Patience. It's a sort of strange
book, most of which I can't remember right now. I've tried to re-read my
old books in the last few years, but I haven't gotten around to reading that
one. But I am aware of one part of it that opened up a big new area in my
thinking.
Someone I knew back in the middle of the 2010s was a secular Jew around
my age who was a history student. He pointed me to a book by Yosef
Yerushalmi called Zakhor which claimed that "history was the faith
of fallen Jews". What impressed me was a claim that Yerushalmi
was using as background for his argument, which is I would guess not
original to him, that the Hebrew Bible was the "cultural memory" of the
Jews, and not history.
It struck me that the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament was something
"remembered from" a position. Even as a non-scholar, it really looked to
me like a lot of the Old Testament was written down in captivity.
That's when the history books (1 Samuel through 2 Kings / 2 Chronicles)
leave off. My naive theory is that a lot of the content of the Old
Testament was oral tradition, and the editors or canonizers of the Old
Testament chose which oral tradition to preserve and trust. The Old
Testament could be historically accurate, but it's more like the past
of the people in captivity, which makes them who they are, and only
secondarily history in a secular sense (what literally happened in time).
I don't think this takes away from the possibility that they are inspired.
Maybe God wanted his people to remember their past a certain way. Maybe
the events of the Old Testament literally happened in a kind of spiritual
world, which is somehow in parallel with our own and which we have lived
and will live again in our own secular way.
I thought that the Jews ended up being admirable because they were
losers when they wrote down the Old Testament. They were losers who
survived.
--Carr's book basically doesn't support my theory. Yes, they were
losers who survived, but he tends to make it sound like they didn't choose
to remember things the way they did from a sense of loss, of having nothing
more to lose, but rather, they chose to remember things the way they did
to help them survive emotionally. But, one of the
ways of emotional survival was to make sense of things through self-blame
-- there was a reason for what they went through, which was their own
sins. This is a known trauma mechanism. That caused them to see the
negative in their own past, which then got somewhere into their identity.--
--A Jew steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures would probably have the sense
that the people of Israel were "mixed" people: chosen, but sometimes
morally exemplary and sometimes the opposite of morally exemplary, who
fell short of a holy God. There is a sense of being aware of spiritual
danger in that stance and also a version of humility. I guess my
perspective now is that the initial psychological mechanism was (or could
have been) some kind of self-blame, and that may have come up over the
years when things went really bad for the Jews, but that there is a
"mellowing" effect that time and tradition has on a text which gives the
text a life of its own. (Like cooking raw ingredients until they make
a soup.) And once it "mellowed" (or "ripened" or "aged") the text was
able to speak as though it had been edited, composed, and/or canonized, by
people who "had nothing left to lose" and "just wanted to speak
the truth".--
--Maybe the distinction between "having nothing left to lose
and speaking the truth" and "self-blaming" is that "self-blaming" could
be a semi-conscious or unconscious way to take control of a situation
and to save yourself, but "having nothing left to lose", I could say
by definition, is about letting go of control of a situation and not
trying to save yourself.--
--However, one thing which I didn't determine in the one reading I
did of the book, is exactly how epistemically trustworthy Carr is.
I'm not sure that there couldn't be other valid stories about the
origin of the Bible, and, supposing I could list them all, I don't
know how much credence I would apportion to Carr's views.
I often wished he would qualify some of his statements in keeping with
the conjectural nature of what he was saying, and also, I would have
liked to have seen quantified credences for those statements. I would
have had a better sense that there was something possibly more to believe
than what Carr was defending if I saw that, and I suspect that Carr
does not believe that his view is conclusively certain and thus does
believe that there is a wider epistemic world, and so it would be a
way to have his text reflect his actual worldview to indicate its
insufficiency. I would have also liked to have seen more endnotes
or discussion in the text proving some of his cases, or referring
to other sources that did.--
--But, I'm not extremely interested in history, but rather in
philosophy and present and future religion. So, I am glad to face
the distinction between "self-blame" and "having nothing left to lose"
occasioned by his book ("philosophy") and then I continue to think
that God may use "having nothing left to lose"-based "loser thinking"
in the present and future of religion, given that good "loser thinking" can
be good for people and society. I think that Scripture is validated
not by the process of composition, but by how it speaks to people
once it has taken its form, mellowed culturally, entered the world
of ahistorical or extramundanely historical truth (as opposed to,
say, random things people were saying about recent events) and become
established and trusted by communities and individuals.--
At the time, and still to this day, I don't feel a strong
sense of identification with a people group. Some people are very
nationalistic -- some in ways that seem good, others in ways that seem
bad (like the Nazis). Nationalism is a great way to start wars; motivate
genocide and ethnic cleansing; suppress, shame, or dehumanize people;
or waste time getting and feeling angry. Nationalism (as I used it in my
book) doesn't have to just be about nation-states, but could operate at
different levels -- it operates at the level of the individual with his
or her own personal nation, as well as in the family or friend group, and
in the church or workplace, and in various identities (races, sexes/genders,
and sexual orientations as identities rather than as accidental physical
facts, political or religious affiliations, fandoms), all of them
nationalisms. The love that we have for ourselves and others is often
(or usually?) nationalism. So every affiliation that draws persons into
distinct people groups (one meaning of "political"), we could call
nationalism. So that "nationalism" (which can include nation-state level
nationalism) can make people brothers and sisters of each other,
emotionally bonded, can give them spiritual nourishment, can give them
a sense of being a person, can motivate whatever it is that causes people
to help each other.
I don't think that that "good nationalism" is a good god, in fact, I
think it is a tempting idol. But, "bad nationalism" is an obviously
bad god that can also be an idol. And good nationalism, like all really
good temptations, is a good thing in itself. Perhaps we need good
nationalism (of a sort that is really good and non-tempting) so that
bad nationalism or bad anationalism doesn't cause us to get desperate
for good-nationalism-of-whatever-sort, leading us to idolize good
nationalism.
So there are two questions: can we split good nationalism from bad
nationalism, and how? And, can we make nationalism an inherently
God-worshiping thing instead of a very good thing which turns us away
from God? I don't know the answer to the second question right off
the top of my head right now, but I have a suggestion for the first,
based in the sort of notable moment of insight or inspiration I had
when I wrote Patience.
Being ignorant of most of Jewish history, I saw the Jews as being
the people group who wrote and remembered the Old Testament. So what
kind of people wrote and remembered the Old Testament? Losers. So I
thought, if I'm going to be part of a people group, part of a chain of
cultural memory, if I'm going to adopt an identity as a person who belongs
to other people based on their collective self-concept and "past", and in
this way become a "thick" person who connected with people, what group
should I choose? The Jews (the people who wrote and remembered
the Old Testament) have claim to being the people of God's word. They
certainly have a "past" (the Old Testament itself), which I could adopt.
But, notably, they are also the losers of history, dispossessed, looking
back on how they messed up, how they fell away from God, how they mistreated
each other. I thought that if I intentionally identified with this, even
strongly, I would not fall into the temptations of bad nationalism.
At that point I thought that if I was ever going to join a people
group, for real, on the level of "rootedness", it should be to the
Jews who wrote down and remembered the Old Testament, or people who
could be considered sufficiently like them, although not necessarily to
the Jews in general.
Recently, I heard on this episode of the Israel Bible Podcast
an introduction to David M. Carr's Holy Resilience which
claims that the Bible (both Old and New Testament) came out of
response to trauma, and that that origin enables it to speak to people
in difficult times. This is why it has staying power over time,
where more triumphalistic texts have failed. (At least, that's
what I remember from the episode -- I may have misinterpreted or
misremembered it.) If that is Carr's argument, it's akin to what
I believe, but also maybe strangely askew to it. It sounds like
maybe Carr will have the people of the Bible be winners after all,
the winners who use non-triumphalism about their failed "battles"
to help them win the longer-term "war" of survival. Survival is
good, and "pays the rent" for the truth, but survival itself isn't
the point -- it's a very good thing and therefore a very compelling
temptation to idolatry.
I expect Carr to have interesting arguments, some of which may
support my own point of view. I'm also perhaps expecting that he
could say things which flesh out his point of view in a way that
makes my own less attractive to me. (Sometimes seeing your
reflection in a mirror does that.) So, I've bought a copy of
the book, and intend to start reading it soon.
(I read the preface and it somewhat makes me think that Carr will
not be in favor of triumphalism, but will also not be arguing for
exactly what I would argue for.)
--Overall, I think Carr's point of view was of humanism, survival
in a secular ("first-deathly") way, self-care, healing. My point of
view is more of ... not anti-humanism, but a humanism which must
depend on loyalty to God, survival in a supernatural way (avoiding
the "second death"), being true and moral. So his point of view
is all about how trauma makes people not triumphalistic and then
they go on to be successful in the world. Assyria, Babylon, and
Rome (who had triumphalistic narratives) are gone and largely
forgotten (Rome less so, but still relatively forgotten), but
Judaism and Christianity have survived to this day, much longer,
and Carr thinks it's because of their ability to get through tough
times with adaptations caused by trauma's mark on their text.
Ironically, he does point out that Christians ended up persecuting
Jews once Christians became dominant. But Christians got some
of their cultural power, allowing them to be strong enough to
persecute, from their ability to die without shame
by calling Jesus' death on the cross good (by having that response
to the trauma of seeing their leader killed). So the Christians
ended up using the power of trauma for basically evil ends. So
is trauma that yields power a good thing? It's only as good
(in effect) as the use of the power.--
--But I would like to be in favor of trauma which produces
holiness and truth, or perhaps instead of trauma (which we might
define as being something that produces "kneejerk" reactions
(for instance, of self-blame)), that adverse effects, exilic conditions,
breakdowns of groups or individuals, or whatever other stresses
occur should cause us to "lose" rather than develop the complexes
of textbook traumatization. Maybe the kinds of things that
break us generally do traumatize us and it's only as we heal
and look back at the mellowed trauma that we can see a glimpse
of loserhood and go on to choose to enter into that identity.--
--Or, we can willingly leave our "throne room next to
God in heaven where we are victors and live comfortable lives" and
instead identify, without being forced to, with the losers of
history. That we prefer or inhabit a "throne room" does not mean
we are not insecure, nor that we do not suffer and struggle.
But we are still trying to hold onto victory as a value and onto our
own victorious status, such as it is, as though it will save
us.--
--(Lives of suffering and struggle can still be comfortable
on some levels.)--
--One thing I should mention by way of warning is that I don't
know if "loserhood" as I describe it is something that works in real
life -- I feel like it is somewhat "untested" and I don't feel the
strongest intuitive and emotional connection with it, it doesn't feel
completely comfortable. It may work. It does feel right in cases of
zero-sum or "insufficiently positive-sum" competition.--
