Month: January 2022

There are a lot of aspects about contemporary progressive concepts of justice that one could criticize, but I think the lack of the possibility of forgiveness is it’s chief failure. Notice I didn’t say “redemption”, which is, in theory, possible (though astonishingly difficult), but forgiveness.

Say some celebrity does something really bad. He gets called out. He apologizes. He gets criticized for not apologizing enough. So he apologizes more. He makes a written statement. He donates a million dollars to some foundation-against-badness. He makes the talk show rounds and declares how wrong he was. He gets replaced in all his upcoming film acting roles. His character on that hit TV show gets retconned. His book gets cancelled by the publisher. He’s kicked off his sports team. His career collapses. Heck, maybe he even spends a couple years in federal prison (e.g. Michael Vic). He’s very sorry and very publicly sorry. But is it enough? No, it’s never enough. There is no forgiveness for his doing of bad things. Even if he seems redeemed or atoned for, his accusers will continue to accuse him for the bad thing he did. It cannot be undone as there is no time travel, and so there is no end to  justice’s blade. Ever.

I was reminded of this attitude while reading a review of the new Bill Cosby documentary. The film is made by comedian W. Kamau Bell, who idolized and was deeply inspired by Cosby in his youth and who was then devastated when it came out that for all those years Cosby was at the top of family-friendly comedy, he was also serially drugging and date-raping women. Bell is as upset about this as anybody on earth.

Though I’m not black or a comedian, I share some of that same devastation personally as well. I grew up listening to Cosby’s comedy acts on cassette tape on repeat. I can recite the entire “The Chicken Heart that Ate up New York City” bit by heart, or the one about his friends racing go-carts. The Cosby Show was one of the few (and I mean very few!) shows I was allowed to watch growing up. I still remember the episode where he has a trippy bad dream after eating too much spicy food and his daughter is playing a purple saxophone. I have no idea why I remember that stuff, but it’s great. I was also upset to find out about all the horribly things did. For years I thought for sure he was one of the “good guys”. It totally sucks.

Bell, in his documentary tries to grapple with that and in the end comes to a conclusion that he must separate Cosby the man from the art he created, somehow. This is a conclusion come to by a lot of historians who study great but also terrible people. Sculptor Eric Gill comes to mind. But the reviewer at Vulture is pissed off about it.

Most frustratingly of all, in the end, after persuasively illustrating over four hours that this artist and this man are intertwined, Bell decides the best option is to keep them separated. Returning again to the question he raised about how to think about Bill Cosby now, he confesses, “I wanted to hold on to my memories of Bill Cosby before I knew about Bill Cosby. I guess I can, as long as I admit, and we all admit, that there’s just a Bill Cosby we didn’t know.” He suggests that if we can absorb the lessons taught by the good Bill Cosby, then we can create a world where bad Bill Cosbys are less likely to exist. Which: sure, maybe. But that’s a pretty pat note to end on given the complicated, knotty analysis that has preceded it.

The much harder but more honest thing to do is acknowledge that there is no division — or, as Jelani Cobb, writer and Columbia University professor, puts it, “Some people tended to see it as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I think that you could make an argument that it’s all Mr. Hyde.” If you ever admired Bill Cosby, it may hurt to hear that. But just about everything in We Need to Talk About Cosby, excluding Bell’s own conclusion, suggests that Cobb is absolutely right.
-Jen Chaney, We Need to Talk About Cosby Wrestles With a Fractured Legacy, (emphasis mine)

See what the reviewer did there? I’m not sure who this professor she quotes is, but it’s a perfect statement of contemporary social justice: There is no Dr. Jekyll. There is only Mr. Hyde. And Mr. Hyde can NEVER be forgiven. How dare you even suggest a framework where it might be possible to forgive Bill Cosby? That’s not “honest”. How dare you!?

This right here is a key contrast to the gospel. The gospel says: yes, you really did do all these terrible things. In fact, they are even more awful and sinful and evil and destructive than you can even imagine. BUT, Jesus forgives you. Yes, if you clean up your act and become a better person, that’s great, but it’s not required. In fact, there may be little you can do to can’t fix the past anyway, but you don’t need to. You can be reconciled to God and also reconciled to others through the power of his forgiveness.

Justice has a sword, but it has a flat edge as well.

I meanwhile thought of how thrilling it is when a baseball outfielder grabs the ball off the wall and throws it dead-on to home plate to catch a runner. Doesn’t happen very often. A computer with a throwing arm, of course, could do the same every single time, without fail. A simple machine can throw a baseball miles further than any human. I thought of what a composer teacher of mine told me about his first experience with electronic music. When he started working with an analog synthesizer and tape (that being what you did in the ‘70s) he was interested in creating complex rhythms beyond the capacity of human musicians. He did so. And he discovered that it didn’t sound like anything, was about as interesting as throwing a handful of gravel on a tin roof. Which is to say, it didn’t matter. “What I realized,” he told me, “was that I wanted the intensity of real musicians struggling to play complicated rhythms.”
– from Jan Swafford’s great piece on the attempt to fabricate Beethoven’s Symphony 10 using AI (emphasis mine)

I recognized this idea as something similar to what hit me about 15 years ago when I discovered the wonderful solo guitar music of Pierre Bensusan. One could listen to a wonderful Celtic band like Lunasa play a set of tunes on their pipe, whistle, fiddle, and bass. Or you could listen to Pierre play the same tune with all the harmonies stuffed onto the six strings of the guitar with just his two hands. Sometimes it seemed that despite all his skill and “harp sustain” technique, that he was just barely, barely keeping the thing glued together! It’s like, you aren’t supposed to play all those notes on a guitar and the thing was always on the edge of crashing and burning. But it didn’t, and that frantic energy in the playing made the music very exciting in a way that’s difficult to describe and virtually impossible to communicate on sheet music.

It also reminds me of a quote from Brian Eno’s autobiography about pushing music technology to it’s limits, or even over them.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
-Brain Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

This all sounds very familiar as I spent much of the last year creating a synthwave album that features synthesizer sounds recreated in such a way that the original noise of the circuits and unstable tuning of the originals is carefully recreated with software to give the sound a nostalgic or authentic sonority.

All three of these things I just mentioned are similar in that they are grappling with the human experience element in music, and how big of a role it plays, and how it can’t exactly be controlled like other aspects.

The lectionary reading yesterday was from John 8. It’s an absolutely bananas passage, but this part really stuck out to me:

Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed Him, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

They answered Him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone. How can You say, ‘You will be made free’?”

Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.

-John 8:31-36 (NKJV)

“We are Abraham’s descendants, and have never been in bondage to anyone!” the Jews listening to Jesus argue. But could this statement be more ridiculous? Only a few generations after Abraham they were literally slaves in Egypt for 400 years.  In more recent memory they were quite literally slaves in Babylon for ~70 years. And right then, as they are speaking, they are essentially non-citizens in an occupied territory of Rome. They aren’t slaves proper, but a pretty far cry from “free”. They obviously knew all that too, but insisted on the liberty talk.

I imagine people today saying, “We’re Americans! We have never been in bondage to anyone!” (bald eagle screeches overhead). And Jesus responding with “uhhhhhhh, not exactly”.

 

My friend Austin posted the above. The same day, Micah Mattix wrote this in his newsletter. I think the two go together.

Scott Beauchamp writes about the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han: “‘Every age has its signature afflictions.’ So begins Han’s The Burnout Society, his taut tract describing the psychological effects of our technological age. The signature affliction of our time isn’t viral or bacterial, he maintains. Instead, it’s neurological illnesses ‘such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD) and burnout syndrome,’ which ‘mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century.’ Today’s society ‘is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories,’ Han explains. ‘It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.’ The inhabitants of this society are instructed to be ‘entrepreneurs of themselves.’”