You are the Smallest Thing

Every day, if we are not wary, we can be overwhelmed by the inhuman torrent of information that blasts our consciousnesses.  It's a riot-hose of data, knocking us back, making us angry and anxious as events utterly beyond our control consume our attention.

It's all at such a scale that it can seem beyond our ability to do anything.  Wars and storms, murders and corruption, our knowledge ecosystem bludgeons us into sputtering helplessness.  How can we hope to change such a vast and catastrophically borked system?  How can we bring justice to a world that is so utterly unjust, and hope to a world where every moment serves up moral horror and outrage?

We can't.  You can't.  I can't.

I can't change geopolitics, because I am so small.  I cannot change the great blind injustices of our economic systems, our our species-wide eagerness to inflict suffering on one another in the pursuit of power.  Even community tensions and family conflicts seem to at times become so complex and intractable that no amount of my effort can bring them to resolution.  The activist's mantra...that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere...becomes a recipe for despair and dysfunction.  We stress and we rage, and Lord have mercy, does it seem futile.

Where, then, can change occur?  Where can we make things better?

It occurs first and foremost at the very smallest level, meaning it's a quantum thing.

We tend to think of "quantum" as a word that shimmers with futuristic promise and cutting edge resonances.  Quantum computing!  The insights of quantum physics!  Brands slap that label on themselves if they want us to imagine they are Very Forward Thinking.  

"Oooh!  Quantum.  It must be good!"

But "quantum" just means "the smallest possible thing."  

The term replaced "atom," which Greek philosopher Democritus used to describe the invisible and indivisible particles that he believed made up the whole world.  Science once used the term "atom" to describe the atomic elements, but eventually realized that "atoms" were in fact not the smallest possible thing.  There was a "subatomic" realm, a philosophical oxymoron that would have given Democritus conniptions.  Rather than science saying, "Oops, our bad, those elements aren't actually atomic,"  we called the things smaller than atoms quanta, teeny tiny spooky indivisible units upon which all other things are somehow made.

What does that have to do with making things better?

That's you, morally speaking.  

You, in your unique personhood, are the smallest possible thing.  Your soul, your personhood, your agency?  That's the fundamental unit of analysis, the Cogito that Ergo Sums.  You have agency over you, assuming you are a sentient being, which you hopefully are.  You are the place where change happens, and where you are empowered to make change happen.  The place where hate ends.  The place where compassion begins.  Where grace reigns.

Unless it doesn't.  

All you have to do, again, is allow yourself to be changed.  Which is just super duper easy, as y'all know.

But it can be done.

Always start small.  Small is plenty hard enough.

Inside/Out and the Dis-Integrated Soul

I finally went and watched Inside/Out this weekend with my wife and my sons.

It's been one of the hits of the summer, a film that landed to essentially universal critical acclaim, and as I sat there watching, I began to wonder what might be wrong with me.

Well, honestly, I know what's wrong with me.  I'm a Presbyterian, and I think too darned much.

It wasn't that I wasn't appreciative of the creative effort, or of the talent that went into it.  It's just that, well, here's a smart movie about emotions, and what I'm feeling is basically nothing.  There was the occasional snicker at a bit of humor, but the pathos just wasn't there.

I did not particularly care about what happened, one way or another.  Oh, sure, it was conceptually interesting, and made for some great conversation amongst the family on the drive home.

But as intelligent as it was, it didn't get to me.  And that impacted my viewing experience, because if you're not deeply emotionally vested, lines like "I'll try, Bing Bong" don't quite carry the same gravitas.  I know I was supposed to be weeping, but I was desperately trying to suppress my inappropriate laughter at that point.  "I'll try, Bing Bong?"  Mon Dieu!  C'est absurde!  I'd missed the emo-bus everyone else in the theatre was riding, clearly.

Here, Pixar, which has been so good at hooking me in...sniffles at the opening of Up, brimming eyes every time I watch the conclusion of Monsters Inc...and I'm not feeling anything at all.

Honestly, I felt about as moved watching Inside/Out as I did watching Monsters University.  This surprised me, particularly given the radiantly positive reviews and the huge box office.

Why, I thought, might that be?

Reflecting on it, I think I realized it was this:  I didn't really connect to Riley.  Here, the putative protagonist, the 11 year old girl whose inner life is the stage for everything we encounter, and I'm not feeling her struggles.

Why is this?  Because she seemed to me to be, well, not really part of most of the film.

Oh, she was animated and voice-acted well enough.  But when we were "inside her head," Riley just disappeared amidst the complex whimsical machinations of her imagined inner life.  Once you got into the mind of Riley, she was no more a part of that process than Jeff Bezos is part of the process on the floor of an Amazon distribution center.

As I reflected on it, I realized that this disappearance was because as the film presented it, her emotions were not her.

She did not suffuse them.  They were not integrated into her.  They were, instead, distinct personalities.  What we saw was not "Riley's Joy."  Not "Riley's Sadness."  Instead, we saw Joy and Sadness, Anger and Disgust and Fear, cast as archetypes, and completely removed from her. An understandable choice, if you want comedy A-Listers doing the voiceovers, but it had an impact on my viewing experience.

This distance was part of her character design and realization.  Unlike every other character in the film whose inner life we encounter--the mom, the dad, other kids, her teacher, animals, you name it--Riley's personified emotions were abstracted from the core of her eleven-year-old personality.

The dad's emotions looked and acted like versions of him.  The mom's?  The same.  The cat's?  Brilliantly, hysterically so.

But for the character who provides our core narrative, her emotions were only part of her in the way that employees are part of a corporation, which meant it did not feel like she was a realized person.

It didn't seem, well, like Riley had a...cough...soul.

Which, when you conceptualize the inner workings of human beings too intently as independent processes, tends to be how things feel.

 And that, I think, is why Inside/Out just didn't quite work for my overthinking Presbyterian self.

Jesus and Vladimir's Putin's Soul

My son and I were on our way back from a music lesson, and talking about Vladimir Putin.

He'd been the most recent topic of conversation, as we talked about the remains of a Malaysian Airliner, which still smoldered in a Ukrainian field.  He was offering up his cynical explanation for those deaths, while Russian state-owned media spun out one obfuscating story after another.

"So, here's a hard question for you," my younger teen said.  "You're a pacifist, right?  Let's say you suddenly get super powers.  And you know that someone is taking actions that are going to get thousands and thousands of people killed.  Do you use your powers to kill that person, and save thousands of lives?  Or do you let them live, and let thousands of innocent people die?"

I'm not a pacifist, of course, not entirely.  But I also think that integrating violence into one's method for attaining justice is profoundly dangerous.  So we talked, and as we bantered around the question, I found myself wondering something else.  Just how does one deal--as a Christian--with those who wield power with cold eyes?

Vladimir Putin has always struck me as just such a soul.  And he has a soul, I think, despite Joe Biden's recent and entertaining statement to the contrary.  Oh, Joe.

I just can't take that route.  Assuming a person is just an automaton, or that they're somehow no longer human, that's a very dangerous call to make.  When we deny the soul of the other, we do so at the peril of our own.  So yes, he does have a soul.

It's just a very hard soul.  I cannot look at Vladimir Putin without seeing just how intelligent he is, how shrewd, how calculating.  Here, a human being who understands the dynamics of power, and understands--from history and experience--how to use power to his advantage.  That is his defining ethos.  That is who he is.

People who oppose Vladimir Putin die, or are imprisoned, or disappear.  Support him, and you'll be rewarded, or permitted to profit from that support.  Truth is immaterial, or, rather, it is known, but closely and cynically held.  If it is an impediment, it will be bent and spun to the needs of power.  He's a hard, hard man, leading a nation whose long history is filled with hard men.

But how, I find myself wondering, do you theologically approach folks like Putin?

Here, an individual whose identity--his whole self--is woven up with worldly power.  And it has worked for him.

Of what use are the teachings of Jesus to such a man?  Oh, the church and institutional religion are undoubtedly very useful, as they have always been to kings and emperors and tzars.  But the radical love of God and neighbor that is the heart of the Gospel?  What conceivable appeal can they have to him?

Though I know them to be true, I am reasonably sure that he would find that Way of being naive, weak, and childish.  Just as I find his way of being wrought of the dark hubris of coercive power, and inherently self-annihilating.

The final disposition of such a soul, of course, is not my call.

This, as my conversation with my son reminded me, is a good thing.