OurFuture.org Blogs: Robert Jensen

Hollywood rape: Why Polanski is getting a free ride

Robert Jensen — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:29:52 -0700

Special commentary by Gail Dines

Roman Polanski did not “have sex” with a thirteen year old. He raped a thirteen year old anally and vaginally after drugging her. This doesn’t seem to bother much of the media who keep saying “had sex with,” nor does it bother Hollywood who continued to have close ties with Polanski after the rape, even giving his film “The Pianist” an Academy Award for best picture. Now, to cap it off, some stars, including Woody Allen, have signed a letter calling for his release. What does it take to hold a celebrity male accountable for his actions? Obviously, raping a child is not enough of a transgression, nor is physical assault on a woman. Jack Nicholson in 1996 was accused of severely beating a prostitute he had just had sex with. This was front page in the British newspapers but hardly got a mention in the American press. A year later Nicholson won the Academy Award for best actor.

There are most likely multiple reasons why Polanski is being given such soft treatment by the press and his Hollywood buddies, but I would bet that some of this has to do with how our society sexualizes girls. In an increasingly sexualized culture, we see girls, often preteens, dressing and acting like miniature women. Padded bras, thongs, low cut jeans, midriff revealing tops and high heeled shoes are now available for young girls.

Lest we think that this is cute, in a recent interview I did with incarcerated child molesters in a Connecticut prison, some of them told me that they had to avoid going to the mall because the sight of the pre-adolescent girls aroused them. One explained to me that their clothes “give off sexual signals that the kids are unaware of.” One particularly eloquent child rapist explained that he really didn’t have to work hard to prepare his stepdaughter for rape because “the culture did a lot of the grooming for me.” By this he meant that all the sexual messages of the culture had sparked a precocious interest in sex in his 10 year old victim, and he used her questions about sex as a way to introduce her to child porn.

Child porn is still illegal in this country and I suspect the average man surfing porn sites is not actively looking for images of children being raped. But there is now a subgenre of porn that has exploded over the last few years. Called pseudo-child porn because it uses women who are 18 or over, the goal of the porn is to make her look much younger. With titles like Fuck the Babysitter, Daddy’s Whore, First Time with Daddy and Cute Teens Fucked Hard, the user doesn’t need much imagination to know what he is getting. The women in these movies look very different from the usual women who populate porn. In place of big breasted, curvy women with oiled bodies, these women are typically small breasted, thin and surrounded by markers of childhood such as stuffed animals, cartoon-themed bed sheets, Disney posters on the wall and, of course, lollipops, lots of them, that she seductively sucks.

These images add to the general sexualization of children in pop culture. One of the pioneers of this was Calvin Klein, who in the early 1980s, used the then fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields in ads for his jeans with the famous tagline "Do you wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." In the mid-1990s Klein ratcheted up the imagery by using mostly underage teenagers in poses that looked so much like actual child pornography that the Justice Department started to investigate him for possible violation of the law. Klein escaped prosecution, only to come back a few years later with ads for his childrens underwear line that featured prepubescent boys and girls wearing only underwear. This time Klein was forced to pull his ads almost overnight due to public outcry. Around the same time, a seventeen-year-old Britney Spears released a debut single called “Baby, One More Time” which became an instant international success. In the accompanying video, Spears is dressed in school uniform with a knotted shirt that reveals a bare midriff, socks and braided hair as she writhes around asking her ex-boyfriend to “Hit me baby one more time.” Spears later went on to employ Gregory Dark to direct her videos, a long-time porn director whose films include The Devil in Miss Jones, New Wave Hookers and Let me Tell Ya ‘Bout Black Chicks.

Miley Cyrus, the Disney girl wonder, is routinely sexualized. In her videos she has been shown pole dancing and simulating anal sex. Last year Cyrus caused a stir when pictures of her wrapped in a bed sheet and wearing a bed-head hairdo, graced the pages of Vanity Fair. Why such a fuss? One reason could be that photographer Annie Leibovitz, by copying the visual codes of porn, made stark the degree to which we are now living in a culture that packages girls as sexualized commodities. This does not bode well for girls as many of them, according to an American Psychological Association report, are internalizing these messages and come to see themselves, not as active desiring sexual subjects, but as passive desired sexual objects.

The men I interviewed in the Connecticut prison picked up on these cultural messages, and ended up committing the same crime as Polanski, but they are not famous film directors so they went to prison. They were just your average guys who got bored with porn and needed a shot in the arm to keep them aroused. While some started with the pseudo-child porn sites, all ended up with real child porn and then went on to rape a child. Not one of these admitted to raping a child, they all rather “had sex” with her. Polasnki has also avoided taking responsibility for his actions and now the media are complicit in redefining what it means to rape a child. While perpetrators and the media talk about men having sex with children, their victims will live with the rape for the rest of their lives. Why is the media not telling their stories?

Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, and a founding member of Stop Porn Culture. Her new book, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality, will be published by Beacon in July 2010.

Is Obama a socialist? The degradation of politics and the ecosystem

Robert Jensen — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:23:36 -0700

[This is an expanded version of a talk given to the University Democrats student group at the University of Texas at Austin, September 23, 2009.]

For months, leftists have been pointing out the absurdity of the claim that Barack Obama is a socialist. But no matter how laughable, the claim keeps popping up, most recently in the form of the Republican Party chairman’s warning of “a socialist power grab” by Democrats.

Within the past year, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina has called Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” Conservative economist Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University has acknowledged that Obama isn’t really a socialist, but warns that the “socialism lite” of such politicians “is as specious as is classic socialism.”

Silly as all this may be, it does provide an opportunity to continue talking about the promise and the limits of socialism in a moment when the economic and ecological crises are so serious. So, let’s start with the basics.

As with any complex political idea, socialism means different things to different people. But there are core concepts in socialist politics that are easy to identify, including (1) worker control over the nature and conditions of their work; (2) collective ownership of the major capital assets of the society, the means of production; and (3) an egalitarian distribution of the wealth of a society.

Obama has never argued for such principles, and in fact consistently argues against them, as do virtually all politicians who are visible in mainstream U.S. politics. This is hardly surprising, given the degree to which our society is dominated by corporations, the primary institution through which capitalism operates.

Obama is not only not a socialist, he’s not even a particularly progressive capitalist. He is part of the neo-liberal camp that has undermined the limited social-democratic character of the New Deal consensus, which dominated in the United States up until the so-called “Reagan revolution.” While Obama’s stimulus plan was Keynesian in nature, there is nothing in administration policy to suggest he is planning to move to the left in any significant way. The crisis in the financial system provided such an opportunity, but Obama didn’t take it and instead continued the transfer of wealth to banks and other financial institutions begun by Bush. Looking at his economic advisers, this is hardly surprising. Naming neo-liberal Wall Street boys such as Timothy Geithner as secretary of the treasury and Lawrence Summers as director of the National Economic Council was a clear signal to corporate America that the Democrats would support the existing distribution of power and wealth. And that’s where his loyalty has remained.

In short: Obama and some Democrats have argued for a slight expansion of the social safety net, which is generally a good thing in a society with such dramatic wealth inequality and such a depraved disregard for vulnerable people. But that’s not socialism. It’s not even socialism lite. It’s capitalism -- heavy, full throttle, and heading for the cliff.

In reaction to the issues of the day, a socialist would fight to nationalize the banks, create a national health system, and end imperialist occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the right wing can accuse Obama of being a socialist when he does none of those things is one indication of how impoverished and dramatically skewed to the right our politics has become. In most of the civilized world, discussions of policies based in socialist principles are part of the political discourse, while here they are bracketed out of any serious debate. In a recent conversation with an Indonesian journalist, I did my best to explain all this, but she remained perplexed. How can people take seriously the claim that he’s socialist, and why does applying that label to a policy brand it irrelevant? I shrugged. “Welcome to the United States,” I said, “a country that doesn’t know much about the world or its own history.”

Let’s take a moment to remember. Socialist and other radical critiques of capitalism are very much a part of U.S. history. In the last half of the 19th century, workers in this country organized against expanding corporate power and argued for worker control of factories. These ideas were not planted by “outside agitators”; immigrants at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries contributed to radical thought and organizing, but U.S. movements grew organically in U.S. soil.

Business leaders saw this as a threat and responded with private and state violence. The Red Scare of the 19-teens and ‘20s tried to wipe out these movements, with considerable success. But radical movements rose again during the Great Depression, eventually winning the right to organize. In the boom times after WWII, management was willing to buy off labor (for a short time, it turned out) with a larger slice of the pie in a rapidly expanding economy, and in the midst of Cold War hysteria the radical elements of the mainstream labor movement were purged. But radical ideas remain, nurtured by small groups and individuals around the country.

One of the reasons that “socialist” can be used as a slur in the United States is because that history is rarely taught. If people never hear about socialist traditions in our history, it’s easy to believe that somehow socialism is incompatible with the U.S. political and social system. Add to this the classic tactic of presenting “false alternatives” -- if the Soviet Union was the epitome of a socialist state and the only other option is capitalism, then capitalism is preferable to the totalitarianism of socialism -- and it is easy to see how people might wonder if Obama is a Red to be Scared of.

This long-running campaign to eliminate critiques and/or critics of capitalism -- using occasional violence and relentless propaganda -- has always been a threat to basic human values and democracy. The promotion of greed and crass self-interest as the defining characteristics of human life deforms all of us and our society. The concentration of wealth in capitalism undermines the democratic features of the society. Socialist principles provide a starting place to craft a different world, based on solidarity and an egalitarian distribution of wealth.

But capitalism is not only inhuman and anti-democratic; it’s also unsustainable, and if we don’t come to terms with that one, not much else matters. Capitalism is an economic system based on the concept of unlimited growth, yet we live on a finite planet. Capitalism is, quite literally, crazy.

But on this question it’s not fair to focus only on capitalism. Industrial systems -- whether operating within capitalism, fascism, or communism -- are unsustainable. The problem is not just the particular organization of an economy but any economic model based on high-energy technology, endless extraction, and the generation of massive amounts of toxic waste. Extractive economies ignore the health of the underlying ecosystem, and a socialist industrial system would pose the same threat. The possibility of a decent future, of any future at all, requires that we renounce that model.

This reminds us that one of capitalism’s few legitimate claims -- that it is the most productive economic system in human history in terms of output -- is hardly a positive. The levels of production in capitalism, especially in the contemporary mass consumption era, are especially unsustainable. We are caught in a death spiral, in which growth is needed to pull out of a recession/depression, but such growth only brings us closer to the edge of the cliff, or sinks the ship faster, or speeds the unraveling of the fabric of life. Pick your metaphor, but the trajectory is clear. The only question is the timing and the nature of the collapse. No amount of propaganda can erase this logic: Unsustainable systems can’t be sustained.

To demand that we continue on this path is to embrace a kind of collective death wish. So, while I endorse socialist principles, I don’t call myself a socialist, to mark a break with the politics associated with industrial model that shapes our world. I am a radical feminist anti-capitalist who opposes white supremacy and imperialism, with a central commitment to creating a sustainable human presence on the planet. I don’t know any single term to describe those of us with such politics.

I do know that the Republican Party is not interested in this kind of politics, and neither is the Democratic Party. Both are part of a dying politics in a dying culture that, if not radically changed, will result in a dead planet, at least in terms of a human presence.

So, socialism alone isn’t the answer. In addition to telling the truth about the failures of capitalism we have to recognize the failures of the industrial model underlying traditional notions of socialism. We have to take seriously the deep patriarchal roots of all this and the tenacity of white supremacy. We have to condemn imperialism, whether the older colonial style or the contemporary American version, as immoral and criminal. We have to face the chilling facts about the degree to which humans have degraded the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain our own lives.

I’m not waiting for Obama or any other politician to speak about these things. I am, instead, working in local groups -- connected in national and international networks -- to create alternatives. There is no guarantee of success, but it is the work that I believe matters most. And it is joyful work when done in collaboration with others who share this spirit. But to get there, we have to find the strength to break from the dominant culture, which is difficult. On that question, I’d like to conclude by quoting Scripture. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:

“Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” [Matt. 7:12-14]

I end with Scripture not because I think everyone should look to my particular brand of radical, non-orthodox Christianity for inspiration, but because I think the task before us demands more than new policies. To face this moment in history requires a courage that, for me, is bolstered by tapping into the deepest wisdom in our collective history, including that found in various religious traditions. We have to ask ourselves what it means to be human in this moment, a question that is deeply political and at the same time beyond politics.

At the core of these traditions is the call for humility about the limits of human knowledge and a passionate commitment to justice, both central to finding within ourselves the strength to pass through that narrow gate.

My advice to any of you who want to be part of a decent future: Find that strength wherever you find it, and step up to the narrow gate.

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Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

Can journalism schools be relevant in a world on the brink?

Robert Jensen — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:05:43 -0700

Journalism schools have much in common with the mainstream news media they traditionally serve. As the business model for conventional corporate journalism collapses and digital technologies reshape the media landscape, journalism schools struggle with parallel problems around curricula and personnel.

As I begin my third decade of teaching journalism, I hear more and more students doubting the relevance of journalism schools -- for good reasons. The best of our students are worried not just about whether they can find a job after graduation but also whether those jobs will allow them to contribute to shaping a decent future for a world on the brink.

Can journalism and journalism education be relevant as it becomes increasing clear that the political, economic, and social systems that structure our world are failing us on all counts? Do these institutions have the capacity to see past the problems of falling ad revenues and outdated curricula, and struggle to understand the crises of our age? Can journalists and journalism educators find the courage to grapple with these challenges?

The question isn’t whether journalism and education are important in a democratic society but whether the institutions in which those two endeavors traditionally have been carried out can adapt -- not only to the specific changes in that industry, but to that world in crisis.

My answer is a tentative “yes, but” -- only if both enterprises jettison the illusions of neutrality that have hampered their ability to monitor the centers of power for citizens and model real critical thinking for students.

Journalism’s business problems provide an opportunity for journalism education to remake itself, which should start with a declaration of independence from the mainstream media and a renunciation of the corporate media’s allegiances to the existing power structure. Our only hope is in getting radical, going to the root of the problems.

Toward that end, I proposed a new mission statement to my faculty colleagues in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. I argued that by stating bluntly the nature of the crises we face in today’s world and breaking with our longstanding subordination to the industry, we could offer an exciting alternative to students who don’t want to repeat the failures of our generation.

It quickly became clear that while some colleagues agreed with some aspects of the statement below, only a handful would endorse it as a mission statement. Some disagreed with my assessment of the crises we face, while others thought it politically ill-advised to criticize the industry and corporate power so directly. But nothing in that discussion dissuaded me from my conclusion that if journalism education is to be relevant in the coming decades, we must change course dramatically.

So, I offer this mission statement to a broader audience as one starting point for debate about the future of journalism schools, which must be connected to a discussion about the fundamental distribution of wealth and power in the larger world. Journalism alone can’t turn around a dying culture, of course, but it can be part of the process by which a more just and sustainable alternative emerges.

Journalism for Justice/Storytelling for Sustainability: News Media Education for a New Future

Schools of journalism must recognize that our work goes forward in a society facing multiple crises -- political and cultural, economic and ecological. These crises are not the product of temporary downturns but evidence of a permanent decline if the existing systems and structures of power continue on their present trajectory.

These failing systems produce too little equality within the human family and too much devastation in the larger ecosystem. We face a world that is profoundly unjust in the distribution of wealth and power, and fundamentally unsustainable in our use of the ecological resources of the planet. The task of journalism is to deepen our understanding of these challenges and communicate that understanding to the public to foster the meaningful dialogue necessary for real democracy.

The best traditions of journalism are based in resistance to the illegitimate structures of authority at the heart of our problems. From Thomas Paine to Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells and Ida Tarbell, the most revered journalists have had the courage to take a stand for ordinary people and against arrogant concentrations of power. But today, commercial journalism is constrained by diversionary and deceptive claims to neutrality, leaving journalists trapped in a corporate-defined and -directed subservience to the status quo. Increasingly we live with a journalism that rarely speaks truth to power and routinely echoes the platitudes of the powerful. Even when journalists raise critical questions, too often it is within the parameters set by the wealthy and their political allies.

In a world in which an increasingly predatory global corporate economy leaves half the population living on less than $2.50 a day, can we ignore the call for justice? In a world in which all indicators of the health of the ecosystem that makes our lives possible are in dramatic decline, can we ignore the cry of the living world? Mass media have a moral responsibility to produce journalism for justice and storytelling for sustainability.

As the journalism industry faces a broken business model and struggles for solutions, there are great opportunities to reshape journalism to serve people and the planet, following the traditions of the spirited independent journalists of the past and present. The curriculum for this should not only offer training for a job but also inspire a collective search for the values and ideas that can animate a just and sustainable society. We invite you to join us in this exciting time for journalism. By remembering the inspirational lessons of our past and facing honestly the problems of the present, we help make possible a new future in which justice and sustainability define not just our dreams but our lives.

A note to critics: Some might argue that this mission statement threatens to “politicize the classroom.” This kind of complaint is based on the naïve notion that a curriculum in the humanities and social sciences can be magically constructed outside of, and unaffected by, the distribution of wealth and power in the larger society. The choices that go into all teaching -- from the identification of relevant problems, to the selection of appropriate materials, to the analyses offered in lectures -- are based on claims about the nature of a good life and a good society. The important questions are whether instructors are open with students about how those choices are made and can justify those choices on intellectual grounds. In other words, there is a politics to all teaching, but good teaching is more than the assertion of one’s politics.

When a department constructs a curriculum that supports the existing distribution of wealth and power, challenges rarely arise. Perhaps the most politicized departments on any college campus are in the business school, where the highly ideological assertions of corporate capitalism are rarely challenged and the curriculum is built on that ideology. In a healthy educational institution with real academic freedom, we should encourage a diversity of approaches to complex questions. This mission statement identifies problems and suggests we consider the systemic and structural roots of those problems without asserting simplistic solutions. Such an approach honors the best traditions in journalism and scholarship, offering a path for struggling with difficult questions rather than dictating simplistic answers.

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False gods of state, corporation: Becky Garrison interviews Robert Jensen

Robert Jensen — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:10:37 -0700

A Conversation with Robert Jensen
by Becky Garrison

Robert Jensen is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism and author of the personal memoir All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, a compelling memoir that highlights the religious debate currently raging in the United States. I had the chance to contact Dr. Jensen to discuss some of the themes he raised in his book.

What prompted you to write All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice?

After many years of working in secular left/feminist political movements, during which I had always avoided religion, I met a radical minister in Austin, Jim Rigby, and started talking with him about progressive approaches to Christianity and religion. The more we talked, and the more we organized political events at the church, the more I started thinking about religion in new ways. I realized that my distaste for a religion had led me to ignore approaches to theology that would resonate with me. Those experiences led me to write the book, on the assumption that others are searching in similar ways.

How did your interest in politics motivate you to join St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church?

My initial interest was primarily political, part of a more general search for spaces in which people could come together to think about radical politics in a world structured by such profound inequality. I found St. Andrew’s hospitable to that project, but I also realized that it was more than a place to organize political events.

When people call you a “Christian” how do you respond?

A lot of people want to know whether I’m a “real” Christian or not. By that, they want to know whether I hold supernatural beliefs (believing in the idea that God is an actual being, entity, or force; and believing that the resurrection of Christ was an actual historical event). Since I don’t hold supernatural beliefs, and I approach Christianity as a belief system that makes use of myth, symbolism, and poetry, there’s sometimes a lively discussion about whether I should call myself a Christian. For me, the point is not so much to answer the question as to start a discussion about what people believe and the consequences of belief for action in the world.

What draws you to keep coming back to church?

St. Andrew’s remains a place where I work politically, but it’s also become much more. The text and tradition are a rich source of wisdom, and I find church to be a place where I learn a lot, from Rev. Rigby and from other members of the congregation. Instead of a place where I come only to influence others, it’s a place I come to be educated. I also find it a comforting space, both in the ways I am part of a community and I can be alone. For me, church is both a place to connect to others and to find solitude.

In your book All My Bones Shake, you stated “These are end times, of a sort. I am not talking about rapture and tribulation, but about rupture and triangulation.” Can you elaborate what you meant by this statement?

I think more and more people recognize that we live in an unsustainable system in ecological terms. We can’t continue to draw down the ecological capital of the planet indefinitely -- we have created a rupture with the larger living world. That’s not an apocalyptic vision, a claim about the rapture, but a recognition of reality. To make sense of it we have to triangulate, to ponder the problems from many perspectives, rather than sink into a narrow interpretation of one tradition. If religion is to be of value in helping us deal with these multiple crises, we have to overcome the fear-driven interpretations so common in conservative/fundamentalist Christianity. But I think we should recognize that we live in a crazy system, and a fear of what’s ahead is real and reasonable.

Can you unpack what you mean by the statement, “[O]ur only hope is that there is no God, and more than ever we need to serve the One True Gods?”

As a tribal species, we humans are rooted in community, a relatively small group. That’s most of our history as a species. At the same time we now recognize ourselves as one human family on the planet. To me, those are our “gods” in a sense -- the commitment to people we love up close, and the commitment to universal values that apply to every single person on the planet. Yet in this world, we are pushed to declare loyalty to the nation and the corporation, which in these terms are false gods. We have to develop a theology and politics that allow us to reject the false gods and nurture our commitment to those one true Gods.

How do you feel Christians can be a prophetic voice in the public sphere?

In my understanding, the call to speak in the prophetic voice is the call to critical self-reflection and honesty. We have an obligation to look critically at ourselves and the systems in which we live, and then speak honestly, even when there are risks. To do that, we need not speak with arrogance or in narrow sectarian terms. We can speak of the universal values that animate all moral and theological systems and hold ourselves and our society accountable.

This interview first appeared on Sojourners, http://blog.sojo.net/2009/08/05/interview-with-robert-jensen/
Becky Garrison is featured in the documentaries “The Ordinary Radicals” and “Nailin’ it to the Church.”

Teachable Moments Require Willing Learners

Robert Jensen — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:01:06 -0700

Honoring President Obama’s request that the controversy involving a black Harvard University professor and a white Cambridge police officer become “a teachable moment,” here’s my contribution to an old lesson that we white people tend to be slow to learn.

In lectures about the United States’ system of white supremacy and the privileges that white people have in that system, I have sometimes told a story about being stopped by police in Austin, TX.

I was driving home in a dilapidated old Volkswagen Beetle on a busy street, late at night after a long day at work. I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, feeling rather cranky and looking rather raggedy. Eager to get home, I saw the yellow light and gunned it. Next I saw the flashing red lights of a police car.

I turned off onto a dark side street and dug in my wallet for my license. Just as the officer got to my car, I was opening the glove compartment to get the vehicle registration when out popped a small knife I keep for emergencies. I looked at the knife, looked at the white officer, and wondered what he would say.

“Sir, would you mind if I held that knife while we talked?” he asked politely. I handed him the knife and my documents, and he walked back to his car. When he returned he handed me those documents, along with a ticket, and my knife, without comment. “Please drive safely,” he said. And safely I drove home.

When I told that story to illustrate white privilege, I asked people of color in the room what they imagined might have happened to them in such a situation. The black and Latino men, especially, laughed. “Do you mean before or after I’m on the ground with a gun at my head?” one of them said.

My point was not that every cop is out to harass or brutalize every person of color, but that people of color could never be sure a routine traffic stop would play out routinely. I could be reasonably sure that, barring unusual circumstances, such a stop would be uneventful. Even when the knife popped out, I didn’t feel at risk.

I was feeling proud of myself for making this point to the mainly white audience, when I saw a hand go up. I called on the young black man, assuming he would endorse my analysis.

“You really don’t get it, do you?” he said. “You think your privilege started when the cop came up to the car and saw you were white. Has it ever occurred to you that when you turned onto a dark side street you were taking your privilege for granted?”

My first response was to explain: I had been on a busy street and turned to avoid blocking traffic. I was trying to be considerate of other drivers, I said.

“I know why you did it. My point is that I would never turn onto an unlit street with a cop behind me,” the young man said. “I would have pulled over and blocked traffic. I’m not going to take myself out of public view with a cop.”

My next response was to feel appropriately foolish for my unwarranted self-righteousness, and then to be grateful to the man for using that teachable moment.

He wasn’t suggesting that I be ashamed of myself, only that I recognize the burden he carries in the world that I don’t. The story was one more example of the privilege that comes with being a member of the dominant group in an unjust hierarchical system. It’s the same lesson men should learn about the sexual violence women face. Heterosexuals should learn it about the condemnation that lesbians and gays endure. The wealthy should learn it about the insecurity that poor and working people cope with. U.S. citizens should learn it about the fear of arbitrary authority that haunts immigrants no matter what their status.

I still tell that story when I lecture, now emphasizing that the man’s comments had reminded me no one with privilege ever fully “gets it.” It doesn’t mean we whites -- or men, or heterosexuals, or the well off, or citizens -- are consigned to perpetual stupidity, but rather that we should never think we have it all figured out.

In this allegedly “post-racial” era, these teachable moments are an important reminder that white supremacy is woven deeply into the fabric of this country. A system as perverse and pervasive as white racism -- in all its forms, conscious and unconscious, brutal and subtle, personal and institutional -- will not end simply because we appoint black professors or elect a black president.

In this moment, we white folks should ask ourselves, after so many teachable moments, why we still have so much to learn.

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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 2009). He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

Conflicting visions of romantic love

Robert Jensen — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:01:38 -0700

a review of A Vindication of Love Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century
by Cristina Nehring

Cristina Nehring's title marks the problem with her attempt to vindicate love and reclaim romance: Love needs no vindication, and we shouldn't be eager to reclaim the vision of romance she offers - dark and dramatic, tortured and tragic, always a heroic individual endeavor. If humans are to survive and thrive in the 21st century, we will need a very different vision of love from Nehring's.

Many, myself included, would agree with Nehring's central point: There is something shallow and unfulfilling about the readily available, commodified sex so common in contemporary U.S. society, and something equally empty about the passionless paint-by-numbers relationships in which so many find themselves trapped.

The problem comes in her celebration of romance as constant, tumultuous, emotional struggle and tedious existential angst. Her prescription - to intensify the erotic charge in romance and sex by celebrating and intensifying the domination/subordination dynamic - is rooted in a misdiagnosis of the malady. Our warped sexual ethic derives directly from that dynamic, and we can't save ourselves by deepening our attachment to patriarchy.

Perhaps the term patriarchy - the unequal share of power society accords to men and male concerns - may seem old-fashioned. It's less commonly used than it once was to describe U.S. society, yet it remains useful: Men and male concerns still dominate the private and public spheres, and men's violence enforces that domination in a rape culture. The very idea of domination can become "natural": It can become accepted that society always will be hierarchical and that the best we can do is smooth off the rough edges and find our place.

Instead of eroticizing inequality, as Nehring suggests, there is no reason we can't eroticize equality. Feminist movements have long argued for a cultural shift toward a sexuality based on an egalitarian spirit, which doesn't rob us of passion but opens up new space for a different idea of passion.

Nehring regards feminism not as a social movement dedicated to the liberation that comes with the end of hierarchy and real equality, but rather as an impediment that mutes rather than enhances our emotional lives. She observes, correctly, that a woman's reputation as a thinker can be tainted by "an erotically charged biography" in a way a man's typically is not, but suggests that feminism, with its "antiromantic bias," must share the blame along with patriarchy.

But let's imagine a more radical feminism, one that rejects hierarchy and commits itself to real community - couldn't that make possible a more meaningful kind of love? Nehring wants none of that political struggle; she insists on setting herself up as a heroic figure beyond politics who wants to lead us to a transcendental love and romance.

Although she draws most of her examples from literature, at the heart of Nehring's book is a failure of imagination. After describing power discrepancies as having a "magnetic force," as if they come from nature rather than human choices, she asserts that adult erotic relationships "thrive on inequalities of almost every ilk." That is true enough in a patriarchal society, but such inequality is neither natural nor desirable. Nehring can't seem to imagine life outside patriarchy's hierarchy: "It is precisely equality that destroys our libidos, equality that bores men and women alike," she writes. Trapped within such an ultimate victory of patriarchy, our imaginations atrophy and our choices narrow.

Nehring tries to package this capitulation as "transgression," but it feels like empty macho posturing. "Real transgression takes guts," she tells us, sounding like one of the guys in the locker room. This transgression transgresses nothing and, in fact, keeps us trapped. When the trap springs, the results are often brutal. Nehring offers us violent metaphors - "When we fall in love, we hand our partner a loaded gun" - but we should remember that the violence in relationships is often not metaphor but reality, with women most commonly the target.

On the book's last page, Nehring reveals that she bears "the bodily scars of a loss or two in love," including being "hospitalized by love." No details are offered, and she is under no obligation to provide them. But throughout this book, Nehring's own words contradict her thesis and hint that we should strive for something beyond her notion of love-as-heroic-quest. If such love is always tragic, maybe it's time to reconstruct love and romance rooted in different values.

I suggest an alternative title: A Vindication of Love Grounded in Equality and Community: Reclaiming Life. Not as snappy, but it highlights key ideas that would help us sort out our emotional and erotic connection to others. Love is more than the meshing of bodies in sex. Love is more than the acceptance of conventional relationships. But striving for something more doesn't have to mean glorifying domination and subordination, or accepting the brutality that flows from them.

There's a sadness at the core of this book that tells us much about the ultimate emptiness of romance as Nehring envisions it. What we need is a new conception of love: we need to rethink the community within which love happens. What would love-as-the-eroticizing-of-equality look like in a society that was defined not by hierarchy but by justice? We may not know that from experience, but we can try to imagine it.

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This review appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 19, 2009. http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/51022227.html

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The limits of faith and knowledge, Part I: God as mystery

Robert Jensen — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:00:22 -0700

After years of avoiding organized religion, I surprised my friends when I joined a church in 2005. Though St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX, is known as a progressive congregation with a radical minister, those friends were curious: Did I now believe in God? That depends, of course, on what one means by “God.”

A quick definition: God is a name we give to the mystery of the world that is beyond our capacity to understand, reminding us that the energy of the universe is ordered by forces humans cannot fully comprehend.

This approach to the concept of God not only rejects a naïve and illusory biblical literalism but also challenges the conception of God that many moderate Christians hold. The key is whether we refer to God as a mystery or simply as mystery, and the difference between those two formulations is crucial. The first implies that God is an entity, force, or being with some shape, but that his/her/its contours are beyond our capacity to fully comprehend and chart. The thing that God is, is a mystery to us, but God is something, some kind of thing that, if we had the capacity, we could describe. The second formulation suggests that God is simply the name we give to that which is beyond our capacity to understand. God is not a mystery but rather another name for mystery -- for the vast, unexplainable mystery of the world around as we swirl among billions of stars, as well as the mystery inside as billions of cells interact to create us.

If God is not a mystery but rather is another name for mystery, then the command to love God can be understood as simply another way of saying that we must strive to love the mystery around us and in us, rather than to be afraid of all that we cannot understand. We certainly encounter that mystery, bumping up against it daily. I can strive to deepen my sense of that mystery, and I can have reverence for it. I can have a deep love for the wonder that such mystery produces, whether the mystery centers on me, the nature of my relationship to other people, or the nature of my relationship to the world.

With this conception of God we are not striving to love what we cannot know, but coming to terms with the fact that we will never know and embracing our place in the world. To seek to always love God means, from this view, to seek always to accept our place in a Creation that will always be mystery, no matter how much science teaches us about specific parts of that Creation around us and in us, through physics and biology. To love God is not a command to stop seeking knowledge, but rather a reminder to have a sense of the limits of our knowledge and embrace that which is beyond knowledge. Nothing in this view demands that we reject science, but instead reminds us to be aware not only of what science illuminates but what is beyond its reach.

In the world before modern science, it’s not hard to understand why people attributed certain things to an idea of God as an entity, or force, or being. Such a concept could be used to explain why the rain fell, the lightning lit up the sky, and the thunder shook the ground beneath us. A God that could intervene in human affairs could be used to explain why people suffered in some instances and prospered in others. That we now have other ways -- natural science, philosophy, history, the social sciences -- to guide our understanding does not mean we need to scrap those stories our ancestors told. Instead, we can reframe those stories to find other levels of wisdom in them. The poet Muriel Rukeyser reminds us of the importance of this when she writes, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” [Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness,” in The Speed of Darkness (New York: Random House, 1968), stanza 9, lines 3-4.]

Even with the advances in science, in a deep sense the universe remains mystery to us, and we understand that mystery through stories. God is a term for mystery explored in story. To make such a shift in our understanding of God is not to lose faith, but to understand the dynamic nature of faith. If God is the name for what we cannot know, our love for God is an expression of our knowledge of our limits and of our commitment to living in the world within those limits. Our love for God reminds us of the need for humility. In this sense, God is a way of reminding ourselves that while we are a clever species, this cleverness has not only improved our lives but gotten us into considerable trouble.

[to be continued in Part II, “Humility in the garden.”]

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This essay is excerpted from Robert Jensen’s new book, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, published by Soft Skull Press.
For more information, go to http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=978-1-59376-234-6

Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, TX. He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

The limits of faith and knowledge, Part II: Humility in the garden

Robert Jensen — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:59:33 -0700

[See Part I, “God as mystery.”]

We humans appear to be the only life form on the planet that fusses about truth. As far as we can know, oak trees and wolves don’t spend much time considering whether the understanding of the world that guides their actions is true; it appears that oak trees and wolves go about their business in the world without reflection upon the nature of truth. We humans may at times wish we were a bit more like oak trees and wolves; this quality we call consciousness is, as that cliché goes, a blessing and a curse.

This struggle for truth is at least in part rooted in the fact that when we modern humans with the big brain look out on the world, we see incredible complexity that dwarfs our ability to catalog and analyze. The world we see is chaotic, especially in the modern era when we can see (or, at least, see a representation of) so much of the world through mass media and have a direct experience of (or, at least, brush up against) so much of the world because of relatively rapid transit. But the cleverness we humans have developed to control many aspects of our environment is a bit of a trap; it leads us to believe we can understand the world, but then the world inevitably proves too complex for our understanding. It’s as if we are the victims of a cosmic bait-and-switch scam -- we know just enough to seem to be able to control the world, and then the world reminds us of our limits. We build nuclear power plants and then wonder what to do with the deadly waste. We dig for coal and drill for oil, then scratch our heads as the planet heats up.

Wes Jackson, a planet geneticist who left conventional academic life to co-found The Land Institute to pursue projects about sustainable agriculture and sustainable culture, suggests that we would be wise to recognize this human condition -- our basic ignorance. His point is that whatever our technical and scientific prowess, we are -- and always will be -- far more ignorant than knowledgeable, and therefore it would be sensible for us to adopt “an ignorance-based worldview” that could help us understand these limits. [See Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson, eds., The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008).]

Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should revel in the ways humans can act stupidly, but rather we should be spurred to recognize that we have an obligation to act as intelligently as possible, keeping in mind not only what we know but how much we don’t know. Such humility is implicit not only in the dominant faith systems today, but also in traditional and indigenous systems. Humility is also ¬the key lesson that we should take from the Enlightenment and modern science -- a contentious claim, perhaps, given the way in which modern science tends to overreach. The crucial Enlightenment insight, however, is not that humans can understand everything in the universe through reason, but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be satisfied with knowing only what we can know. That is, we can be content in making it up as we go along, cautiously, aware that we often will be wrong. That is the real lesson of the scientific revolution, and one of the tragedies of the modern world is that too few have learned that lesson. The conception of God-as-mystery is a healthy corrective to human arrogance, providing theological support for the ignorance-based worldview that Jackson prescribes.

We should remember that this lesson also is at the heart of the Christian creation story. Following Jackson’s analysis, we might consider reading Adam and Eve’s banishment in chapters two and three of Genesis as a warning that hubris is our tragic flaw. In the garden, God told them they could eat freely of every tree but the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This need not be understood as a command that people must stay stupid, but only that we resist the temptation to believe we are godlike and can manipulate the complexity of the world. Human arrogance of that type is epitomized by a boast made in 2000 by Richard Dawkins, one of the “new atheists.” As a scientist, he certainly understands the contingent nature of scientific inquiry, yet he made the claim that “our brains … are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.” [Richard Dawkins, “An Open Letter to Prince Charles,” May 21, 2000. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/prince/prince_index.html] Such a statement is a reminder that human egos are typically larger than brains, which highlights the dramatic need for humility.

Nothing in this view argues for giving up on the idea of truth or humans’ capacity to know the many things that we can trust that we know. It is not a plea to abandon science and seek answers purely on non-rational grounds, but rather a reminder that we should understand our limits. Nor does this view demand that we give up our struggle to know the mystery that is beyond our rational capacity. It is not a plea to abandon spirituality and confine ourselves only to what can be safely known through science, but rather a reminder not to create answers simply because we want answers.

As we sort through this, we also must never forget our moral obligation: We are limited, but our limits don’t relieve us of our duty to act in the world in ways we can defend as ethical, as consistent with human flourishing in harmony with the non-human world. Our intellectual and spiritual limits don’t mean that the suffering of others is irrelevant because we can’t be sure how to alleviate it. Nor does it mean that we can turn our backs on the obligation to live in harmony with the rest of the planet, even if it appears that we have intervened in the ecological health of the planet in a fashion that may have gone beyond the point of no return.

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The Color of the Race Problem Is White

Robert Jensen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:31:32 -0700

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aH-WSqanyQ
and
https://blogs.communication.utexas.edu/Podcasts/2009-05-13/race_lecture-...

“The Color of the Race Problem Is White”
a lecture by Professor Robert Jensen, University of Texas at Austin
author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege
recorded March 30, 2009
(lecture, 28 minutes; discussion, 24 minutes)

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois suggested that the question white people so often want to ask black people is, “How does it feel to be a problem?” This program turns the tables and recognizes some simple facts: Race problems have their roots in a system of white supremacy. White people invented white supremacy. Therefore, the color of the race problem is white. White people are the problem. White people have to ask ourselves: How does it feel to be a problem?

Following the ideas in his book The Heart of Whiteness, Jensen argues that -- even decades after the significant achievements of the civil-rights movement and with an African-American president -- it is still appropriate to describe the United States as a white-supremacist society, in terms of how we think and how we live. Through an analysis of contemporary racial ideology, Jensen presents a framework for critiquing the naturalizing of power and privilege in other arenas of our lives (gender, class, nationality, and ecology). How have we come to accept so easily systems of domination and subordination? How did we become resigned to hierarchy? How can we challenge the unjust and unsustainable nature of the systems in which we live?

---------------

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002). Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Information about the film and an extended interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff are online at http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html.

Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

What does it mean to be a human being? Balancing theological and political

Robert Jensen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:54:10 -0700

My first venture into political activism was in the feminist movement to end men’s violence against women and men’s use of women in the sexual-exploitation industries (stripping, pornography, prostitution), grounded in a critique of the underlying conception of what it means to be a man that most of us have been socialized to accept: masculinity as a quest for control and domination, routinely leading to aggression and violence. Our understanding of what it means to be male has to change, and to drive home that point, I often offer this challenge to my brothers: “You can be a man, or you can be a human being.”

The point was not that we men should alter our bodies but that we couldn’t retain a loyalty to masculinity and still live fully human lives. I later adapted that question for talks on racism, United States foreign policy, and economics. We can be white people, or we can be human beings. We can be Americans, or we can be human beings. We can be affluent, or we can be human beings.

The common claim is simple: to embrace being a man in the conventional sense is to accept the oppression of women in patriarchy; to embrace being a white person in a racist society is to accept the oppression of non-white people; to embrace being American in a world dominated by our hyper-violent nation-state is to accept profound injustice in the world; and to embrace being affluent in a world structured by a predatory corporate capitalism is to accept the deprivation that billions around the world endure.

Underneath those claims is a structural analysis of the roots of an unjust and unsustainable system, and the recognition that for all its affluence and military power, the United States is in many ways a society in collapse -- politically, economically, culturally and most important, ecologically. We live in an increasingly callous culture that exploits sexuality and glorifies violence, often with racist images and themes; embedded in a house-of-cards economy built on orgiastic consumption, deepening personal and collective debt, and an artificially inflated dollar; at the end of an imperial era that is grinding to a potentially disastrous demise. And looming over all those crises are the consequences of ignoring for too long the unraveling ecological fabric that makes life possible.

This framework no doubt would seem radical, even crazy, to many. It is radical, in the foundational sense of the term: going to the root, trying to understand the nature of things. In this new century, we need radical analyses more than ever. That’s not crazy, but is in fact the only sane response to a world facing such crises. Radical is realistic, and realistic is sane.

When we dare to be radical, we confront the reality that, at both the personal and planetary levels, we are surrounded by systems based on a domination/subordination dynamic, which we have to challenge at all levels. It’s important to be clear about these particular systems -- race, gender and sexuality, capitalism, and empire -- all of which must be examined in the context of the coming ecological collapse.

A focus on the first two, race and gender, is often dismissed as mere “identity politics,” and there certainly is a way in which a shallow “diversity talk” can derail radical politics. But there is no way to talk about progressive social change in this country and the wider world if we don’t confront the pathologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, both of which are woven deeply into the fabric of U.S. society. Such terms may seem old-fashioned, but we live in a world of enduring racialized disparities in wealth and well-being, rooted not in the inadequacy of people of color but in white dominance, and a world in which women still face the social limitations and physical threats that come from male dominance.

These ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy are linked to the systems of capitalism and empire, rooted in the glorification of a hyper-competitive, violent masculinity and a belief in the inherent superiority of the United States and Europe. Capitalism creates a world defined by greed and attempts to reduce us to crass maximizers of self-interest -- not exactly a recipe for living a decent life consistent with our principles of equality and the dignity of all people. Empire allows the extraction of the wealth of the many to enrich an ever smaller number of people, not exactly a morally defensible model.

These systems leave half of the people on the planet to live on less than $2.50 a day (World Bank, “World Development Report 2008,” www.worldbank.org/wdr2008). More than 3 billion people struggle for food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care on less than what one of us in the developed world might spend on a fancy cup of coffee. The people living at that level of poverty are disproportionately non-white and female. They live mostly in a Third World that has suffered, and continues to suffer, from military and/or economic domination by the First World, especially today by the United States. Radical politics says not only that this state of affairs is unjust, but that the systems and structures of power that give rise to it are fundamentally unjust and must be changed.

And then there is the question of sustainability. Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live -- groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity -- and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. And, of course, there is the undeniable trajectory of climate breakdown.

That’s not a pretty picture, and it’s crucial we realize that there are no technological fixes that will rescue us. We have to go to the root and acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves. Here, just as in human relationships, we either abandon the domination/subordination dynamic or we don’t survive.

A radically realistic assessment of the nature of contemporary systems and institutions is necessary if we are to make progress toward real justice and real sustainability. It is realistic, though not pleasant to recognize, that when we draw our sense of self from the privilege and power that comes with being in a dominant position within unjust and immoral hierarchical systems -- patriarchy, white supremacy, U.S. imperial domination, and capitalism -- we sacrifice some deeper sense of our humanity. We can’t accept those privileges and that power without losing a part of ourselves, the part that gives real meaning to our lives, the part with which we yearn to connect to others.

We can be men/white/American/affluent, or we can be human beings.

That challenge leaves one obvious question unasked and unanswered: What does it mean to be a human being? Given all that we know and don’t know in the modern world, what does a claim to be human really mean at this moment in history? What qualities are we most focused on when we say we are human, when we talk about our humanity? We appeal to each other’s humanity all the time, but with surprisingly little discussion of what it means in the modern context.

As I worked on political issues connected to these systems of oppression, I found that the political traditions in which I was rooted gave me the tools I needed to analyze and resist those systems. Radical feminism, anti-racist theory and practice, traditional anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements, and the best thinking in ecology -- all were more than adequate for providing an understanding of how these systems work and for putting together a holistic analysis of a profoundly unjust and immoral modern world. Those political traditions could take me a long way, but increasingly I had a sense they could not take me all the way home. I had difficulty fashioning an answer to that nagging question: What does it mean to be human?

So it was then, somewhat reluctantly, that I turned to theology and eventually joined a congregation. My motivation wasn’t a sudden surge of interest in the origins of the universe or a concern about what awaited me after death; my focus remains on the question of how to live fully and responsibly in the here and now. The same questions that had led me to radical politics nudged me to expand the scope of my inquiry. I had no interest in succumbing to New Age-style self-indulgence, nor did I intend to give up politics to pursue theology. My goal has been to deepen my politics through theology and open up to new ways of thinking about myself as well. Whatever I had thought of religious institutions in the past -- I had never cared much for them -- increasingly it seemed self-defeating to avoid engagement with religion, which is so clearly a powerful force for so many. Theology and organized religion are not, of course, the only routes to explore these questions, but there is no reason to reject the wisdom that theology might offer.

Our first step is not to pretend to answer questions but to pose questions clearly, in ways that would allow people of different views at least to start from some common ground. If I were to condense all this into one question, it would look like this:

Which practices, systems, and fundamental conceptions of what it means to be human,
are consistent with a sustainable human presence on the earth, respectful of other life,
in societies that provide the necessary resources for all people to live a decent life,
within a culture that fosters individual flourishing alongside a meaningful sense of collective identity,
helping us to take seriously our obligations to ourselves, each other, and to the non-human world?

Embedded in that one question are, of course, many complex questions that people have pondered for centuries without clear resolution. Completely new insights are unlikely to emerge here; maybe there are no truly original insights to be had by anyone. But if we want to take politics and theology seriously, we can’t pretend not to understand these questions, and we can’t evade our responsibility to struggle to understand and then to act on that understanding.

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This essay is excerpted from Robert Jensen’s new book, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, from Soft Skull Press.
For more information, go to http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=978-1-59376-234-6