Berkeley’s Idealism and Modern Violence

The philosopher George Berkeley made the logical but counterintuitive argument that things don’t exist outside of our perception. To be unperceived is to not exist. The idea that things are impermanent is disturbing; does half the world cease when I turn around? For Berkeley, ideas create reality, and what is forgotten ceases to exist.

Our world of mass media is proving Berkeley to be correct. Things take on a life of their own once they enter the screen and the public consciousness. Life really does imitate art, as when the Klu Klux Klan’s robes changed in design after Birth of a Nation to reflect the movie’s Klan costumes.

Alan Moore’s From Hell depicts the 1880s as an anticipation of the 20th century in its brutality and media frenzy. “Jack the Ripper” was just a name coined by the newspapers of the day to sell more newspapers, but then it became the canonical name for these series of murders. Ideas are what control reality, as when the psychic Mr. Lees confesses to making up his visions, but in the end they ironically became true: "I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part." In this fascinating interview, Moore discussing how permeable the imaginative world is, and what happens when fictional things start to happen in the non-fictional world.

Church and school shootings are connected to these ideas of brutality and media frenzies. This type of violence didn’t exist decades ago, but in a world of 24-hour television news and the internet they are now disturbingly regular. The concern is, the more attention we give to these events by naming the shooters and memorializing the events, the more attractive such violent acts are. If you are lonely and marginalized, the media attention showered on these acts creates further possibilities. Terrorist acts have been encouraged by the internet and modern media because they are, in part, public relations and recruiting events.

What would it mean to imagine a world without violence, especially against the innocent? This is a harder act of imagination. It’s much easier to tell stories of hell, like in Dante’s Inferno, or of violence, like in CSI. The work of a Fred Rogers is a much more vague work. It is real work that is inspiring, but somehow it resists the human imagination. Violence is always easier to imagine than non-violence.

Simone Weil reflects on this truth in her great statement that “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

Avoiding Context Switching

Cal Newport continues to hound us that the human mind is not multi-threaded. We are no good at switching contexts or multi-tasking, even if recent computing technology is good at these things.

The modern world has encouraged such multi-tasking. Telegraphs, telephones, texting, mobile are all devices that may demand we switch contexts. Perhaps early forms of the technology still had mono-tasking employees, such as the telegraph operator or the secretary who answered the phone. Their sole job was to deal with the inputs and outputs. At some point, though, secretaries were to type as they dealt with the phone, and then the phone just rang directly to the person whose job was doing other things besides answering the phone. Pretty soon we were forced to jump between various tracks, and interruptions could demand our attention.

Part of the problem with these interruptions is that they are without faces. As Newport argues in Digital Minimalism, we are built for complex interactions like facial expression, body posture, vocal tone, and so on. It’s harder to turn someone down face to face, and it’s harder to interrupt someone face to face. But technology enables a fast interruption: can you do this? Can you respond to this person? We hate to interrupt someone who is busy, but if I can’t see that you’re busy then it doesn’t feel like an interruption anymore.

Some apps are self-interrupting. To write an email you have to open the email app and see your inbox. To send a text you end up seeing your other texts and the one you forgot to respond to yesterday.

Some apps are more distraction free. Newport likes Workflowy because it presents you with a blank canvas for a to-do list. Drafts starts with a blank sheet. These apps are more like a blank piece of paper; they are inviting and non-distracting. Instead of seeing the last thing you did, or something you didn’t finish, you are invited to put in that space whatever was on your mind in the first place. (It’s a bit like Monty Python’s “Novel Writing” sketch where Thomas Hardy writes his new novel in front of an adoring crowd.)

Perhaps as technology grows smarter and more context aware it will get better at not interrupting us. If I want to check my to-do list then I want to see everything; if I want to add something to that same list while I’m reading, writing, or whatever, then I don’t want to see my whole list and get sidetracked and hijacked. If I’m on the phone then I don’t want a text message to pop up (unless it says BUILDING ON FIRE EVACUATE NOW, or something to that effect). Computers are great as external brains, but not as external distraction devices.

Hagar and Sarah

Hagar’s story is relatively brief in Genesis chapters 16, 17, and 21. As Sarah’s servant, she was given to Abraham so that the family could have a child. But her pregnancy meant new jealousies within the family unit, and so the pregnant Hagar fled.

While in exile an angel told her to return to Abraham and Sarah because her son was destined to be a father of a great people. She called God “you are the one who sees me.” Hagar returned to Abraham’s household, and she gave birth to Ishmael, which means “God hears.” God heard her in the wilderness and will hear her and Ishmael again. If Sarah laughed, Hagar cried, and God heard both.

God’s covenant with Abraham meant that his descendants will be a great nation, through Sarah’s birth of a son named Isaac. This covenant is marked through the practice of circumcision, which Abraham did immediately to all the males of his household, including himself and his 13 year old son Ishmael. Ishmael was circumcised before Isaac was even born.

With the birth of Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac and an intensified rivalry, Sarah exiles Hagar and Ishmael. Desperate in the desert, she and the boy sob in despair. God hears their cry, and God reveals water and renews the promise that Ishmael will be a father to a great nation. Ishmael’s 12 sons become tribal leaders and, according to tradition, the Arabic people.

Traditions outside of Genesis add other details. Ancient rabbis suggested that Hagar was an Egyptian princess, as does Islamic tradition. Rabbis also suggested that after the death of Sarah, Abraham’s later wife Keturah was actually Hagar. (This makes for a moving love story.) For Islam, Ishmael is an equal to Jacob. Both are promised children, patriarchs, and sources of monotheism. Ishmael, as the father of the Arabic peoples, is the ancestor of Muhammad. Abraham and Ishmael together built the Qabah in Mecca. Ishmael is buried in the Great Mosque at Mecca, where Malcolm X found peace and the end of his great racial bitterness when he fully embraced traditional Islam.

In Galatians 4, Paul uses Hagar in a symbolic way; she is an apocalyptic or esoteric archetype of being under the law. The later tradition will follow this path and see Hagar as a source of rebellion, sin, and sinful human kingdoms. Hagar is an outsider in Christianity, because she was Sarah’s human attempt fix her problem rather than trust in God.

The Genesis account is more enigmatic. Archetypes are not that simple, and neither is the reality of human living. It’s easy to make a system, harder to live in the reality. The promises to Hagar and Ishmael remain, as does his mark of the covenant. God sees, hears, and cares for Hagar and Ishmael. Their experience reflects the Jewish experience of covenant, blessing, slavery, and emancipation. Like Israel, Hagar and Ishmael find God in the desert in the midst of struggle with slavery and freedom. Hagar is a parallel and archetype of Israel itself.[^1] She is not an archetype for works-righteousness or human sin, as if sin could be cast off so quickly and ably, and the elect could exile the unredeemed.

Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, are different, yet both are loved by God and blood relations. Israel cannot live without the Ishmaelites that surround them. Sometimes there is rivalry and violence, other times there is peace, trade, and marriage. The differences have the possibility of co-existence and belonging, because difference doesn’t necessarily entail violence, and otherness doesn’t have to lead to alienation. Israel’s destiny is not that different from other peoples and nations.[^2]

God sees and hears all. And in the end, Ishmael and Isaac bury Abraham together, the father they both loved, and who loved them both.

[^1]:Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), p. 233.

[^2]: Fryer-Kensky, p. 236.

New Podcast: Theology Is Annoying

Theology and teaching and a bit of pop culture, with Dr. Leah Robinson and Dr. Kevin Taylor. (Logo photo credit: Kristina Kashtanova from Unsplash.)

My colleague Dr. Leah Robinson and I have started a new podcast: Theology Is Annoying. It is on many of the major podcast platforms, and coming soon to Apple Podcasts. Until then, check out the link here.