Tariq Ramadan, Swing Dancing, and the Village People

I had an eventful weekend, with highlights including swing dancing Friday night with a live band, distributing Valentine's Day gifts with my parish's confirmandi to the elderly at American Village, a nearby nursing home (they're affectionately know as "the Village People"), braving the cold for a couple runs, and plenty of relaxing. The nursing home visit was really quite good, and I'm thinking about offering to distribute ashes to the residents next Wednesday, because some were asking about that. They really enjoyed the visit.

I officially finished my course of "Beginners" Latin study, so I'm moving on to working my way through Caesar's De bello gallico. In the course of my study, I discovered that I really enjoy learning foreign languages, which has apparently become a hobby of mine. I'm thinking about returning to Knoxville next summer for a part time job that would leave me time to take a course in Spanish or German at UT. German would help me in grad school, but I've found I mostly know languages that other people I meet don't know. I often meet Spanish- or Italian-speakers from Europe or Central/South America, but I speak neither of those languages. To be more hospitable to the folks I meet in the states, I'd really like to learn one of those languages, even though neither would help me much in my future studies. After learning Latin, a more practical language might be a good step.

Finally, I've started reading Tariq Ramadan's Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (another great find in a used bookstore). For those who don't know, Tariq was received a faculty appointment at Notre Dame, only to be denied a Visa to the US after a lot of dilatory tactics at the Department of State. Reading his book, I'm very disappointed he couldn't be part of life at Notre Dame, because his goals resonate well with Notre Dame's. Both are attempting to articulate a method of expressing the fullness of their respective faiths in an often antagonistic culture. Surprisingly, I have found that the two people I'm most reminded of in reading Tariq are Professor MacIntyre (in his remarks on "Islam, Modernity, and Us") and Pope Benedict (in his insistence on reason). Tariq outlines, among the basic principles of Islam, that God is transcendent and creator; that his dominion, and that of his Revelation, is universal in scope; that all creation is "Islamic," that is, submissive to God's will, and thus a source of Revelation; and that human beings are incomplete and thus yearn for completion and fulfillment in God alone. Of course, though each of these themes have their counterparts in Christianity, there are substantial differences, also in the anthropologies and philosophies of Islam and Christianity, but Tariq's account of Islam is thoroughly reasonable. Naturally, he misunderstands Christianity in many of the ways I would expect him to, but so has Benedict "brusquely" treated Islam here or there. Let me offer one excerpt from Western Muslims:

A living faith makes it possible for the intellect to accept signs beyond simple elements of nature, and active reason makes it possible for faith to understand and also to acquire more self-understanding, and in that way to draw closer to the divine: "Of all the servants, those who know are those who are open to the intimate awareness of God." Blaise Pascal had an apt expression: "The heart has reasons that reason does not know," thus differentiating the two realms of faith and reason (even though this formula has often been--wrongly--reduced to an opposition between the emotional and the rational). From an Islamic point of view, the relationship between the heart (where the first longing, the first breath toward faith takes place) and the intellect (which responds to the call of this breath and takes up the quest) might rather be expressed this way: the heart has reasons that reason will recognize. Apart from the expression, the difference is profound.

I am eager to see Tariq's practical insights about Muslim life in Western Society, which he intends to expound in the second half of the book, after outlining the fundamental principles of Islam in the first. And I'm still kind of upset with the State Department.

The Dawkins Delusion

Blood Diamond

Saturday night, I saw a very intense, but very well done, movie: Blood Diamond.

If you can handle so much gore (really, you're not supposed to be able to handle it), Blood Diamond conveys powerful themes. It effectively juxtaposes western comfort and abstraction with the hell on which it often depends. The opening scene, for example, flashes between a rebel raid on a Sierra Leon village and a three-piece-suit UN meeting on curbing the flow of conflict diamonds. The western response was farcically disproportionate to reality.

Basically, the movie was about exploitation: of civilians, of the land, of the poor. Often, movies about social justice issues turn out too Michael-Moore-esque, a fate that Blood Diamond avoids. It is not about blaming everyone in particular, or simply conveying a political message; rather, it examines the sordid reality we all inhabit, whether knowingly or unwittingly. In the course of the film, two of the three protagonist discovered how he or she exploited the agony of others; they lived off of hell, either by fueling it or sensationalizing it (through journalism). This they discovered not on a geopolitical level alone, but through their personal interactions with those around them. The third protagonist, one of the damned condemned to hell by forces beyond his control, shone as a ray of hope and redemption. The personal microcosm that made the movie so engaging resonated with my conviction that, when dealing with social justice issues, we must examine our own activity according to the principles with which we critique society: am I looking out for the weakest among us? do I welcome the marginalized among my neighbors? do I encourage others to freely and creatively use their gifts?

Final thought: the movie made me return to an excellent book I read over the summer: War, Evil, and the End of History by Bernard-Henri Levy. This was quite a find in a used bookstore a year ago. Henri-Levy, a French professor of philosophy, parachuted into some of the darkest conflict zones in the world (Angola, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Columbia). There, he interviewed suicide bombers, child soldiers, derelict civilians, and drug lords (it's from his book that I borrow the language of "hell" and "the damned" that I use above; they refer to a place or persons which have lost all meaning, all continuity with the past, all presence today, and all hope for the future). Henri-Levy's mission, as he discovered it in writing his book, was to give voice to those ghosts, not in general (westerners are fond of generalities, which are more comfortable and manageable than personalities), but in particular. In this way, he could give the people he met a small purpose and meaning in life, because someone else would listen to them. By having an audience, they discover their story. His "adventures," as he called them, also shook him out of the comfortable theories of the West by literally dropping him into a world where every neat philosophy he had ever taught went up in smoke. "Evil," in these conflict zones, is not an archaic religious idea, or an event overcome by democracy and human rights, or a matter of perspective; nor are passion and commitment always good, nor are the conquered always victims; evil is not an idea at all, but a reality, or, better yet, a non-reality, for it obliterates reality. It infects those with power, crushes those indifferent to it or powerless before it, enlists the naive, and negates everyone. Without warning, it destroys cities, towns, and families, leaving living ghosts to wander amid the rubble of their lives that will never be rebuilt. Without facing this "reality," we cannot understand redemption or envision its surprising possibility. I am thankful that a movie like Blood Diamond can put us, even for only two hours, in a world where our assumptions and values are sorely put to the test.

Minding Other People's Business

Why Do Good? Brain Study Offers Clues - Forbes.com

I came across this very interesting article in Forbes the other day. It reports a recent study on the neurophysiology of "altruism." The researchers designed an experiment to see what regions of the brain increased in activity in altruistic people, as opposed to selfish people, upon seeing something good happen to someone else. They hypothesized that the "warm and fuzzy" department would increase activity, that is, the region associated with pleasure and reward. This would support the belief I've often heard that all love and service is really self-serving; I help other people because it feels good, or because it gives me something to be proud about.

Surprisingly, the study found that it is not the reward system, but the system that responds to meaningful stimuli in the environment, which is active, for example, when I see something threatening to me. Under the constraints of the experiment, this region was much more active in those who exhibited unselfish than in those who were selfish.

What motivates people to do good, the study suggests, is not self-satisfaction, but a deep, even primal solidarity by which I identify with a neighbor, realizing that "that could have been me." I haven't read the full study, only the report in Forbes, but it leaves me with some new questions. Here are a couple.

What I would study if I were a neurologist:
1) What trains or cultivates the region of the brain in question so that one responds to situations others face? Personal tragedy? Service work?

2) "Altruism" (there must be a more profound word they could have used!) often moves us to make costly sacrifices. How do ascetic practices, such as fasting, affect this region of the brain?

3) How much depends on genetics? How much on the way a child is raised?

Anyway, I was pretty pleased to see that a new scientific study is challenging the widespread assumptions of rational choice theory. Perhaps it will turn out that humans are even biologically a bit deeper than modern economics suggests.