Notes on Meaning of the City: Cain

I’m reading through Jacques Ellul’s Meaning of the City for the second time. The first time through it was powerful stuff, but almost overwhelming. I came away with the basic point, namely that, with the exception of the New Jerusalem, the Bible consistently uses the city to represent man’s effort to live without God. But the details of Ellul’s case are myriad, and well worth pondering individually, so I thought it would be good to go through the book again and make careful note of the ones that catch my attention.

What follows are only notes, and fragmentary ones. I’m not yet up to summarizing Ellul’s case in any useful way. But I hope some readers will find them helpful, or at least intriguing.

When Cain murders Abel, he receives this curse from God: When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.

“Until now, only God’s protection has enabled life to go on, and this protection is seen in a certain stability, a certain familiarity, between man and nature. Cain has shattered this serenity. He has introduced insecurity, the taste for blood, for vengeance. And the condemnation pronounced by God is only the inevitable result of Cain’s act. Cain has broken the relationship between man and the world, and so he will necessarily be a fugitive and a wanderer. He will no longer have natural protection …”

Cain said to the LORD, "My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."

My observation: Cain is right about the basics of his fate, but he assumes far too much, e.g. that God has driven him away, that His face will be hidden, that God will no longer protect him.

Then the LORD said to him, "Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.

“God is standing before a man who is in open revolt and who in the normal course of events will cease believing in God. What chance is there that such a man will take God’s word seriously? Can receives a sign of God’s protection, but of what import is that sign? He would prefer a more obvious security, such as the one he destroyed by his crime—family security, a relationship with animals and things, a familiarity with men and places.”

My observation: This last sentence of Ellul’s is a good example of how he achieves depth in reading scripture. The implication—that Cain has through his act no longer has the security of family, or a relationship with animals and things, or a familiarity with men and places, is too much to draw from this passage. But it is possible to draw it from a complete survey of how scripture portrays the city—the survey he proceeds with in the book—and the implication is quite consistent with this particular passage, and in fact resonates with the reader’s own experience—city dwellers are observably prone to all these qualities. [See also last two paragraphs on page 8.]

Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

Cain is in fact under God’s protection, but Cain is not willing to believe this; the protection is God’s promise, which is useless to a man without faith. Instead, he chooses to leave the presence of the Lord.

“Cain has no way of knowing that the mark (which he cannot see) will suffice to protect him, even in the depth of his sin, from his disobedience, from his separation from God. And now Cain will spend his life trying to find security, struggling against hostile forces, dominating men and nature, taking guarantees that are within his reach, guarantees that appear to him to be genuine but which in fact protect him from nothing.”

Cain is thus the father of those who choose to live as if they are independent of God.

“The land of Nod is a literal translation of the Hebrew ‘the land of wandering’ (but why make into a proper name what is not?). … The seed of all man’s questings is to be found in Cain’s life in the land of wandering, always searching for a place where his need for security might be satisfied. But the only place he finds is that very country characterized by being uninhabitable.”

Opening of St. Augustine’s Confessions: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee, O Lord.”

“It was after he had gone far from God’s presence that Cain began his life in the land of wandering. How can we not associate the two notions when the text does so? It is God’s absence which is the never-ending sting planted in his heart.”

“And now he tries something else, something that will disturb his situation and make it even worse. Cain is completely dissatisfied with the security granted to him by God, and so he searches out his own security. However, this search is no different from his first desire for God’s presence, and his security can only be found in God. It is only when he believes in God that he will be able to believe that the mark placed on him (and in fact on every one of us?) is an effectual guarantee, because it is an integral part of God’s word (his pledge). But of course Cain does not understand it the way God does. And as for his security, he will find another way to procure it. And another way to satisfy his desire for eternity. He will try to take care of his own needs in these areas. He is about to take the wrong road, where every step leads further from God. But is it possible to be further from God than Cain? No, the road does not really lead further from God, it leads to the mirages of man’s heart because it leads to temporary satisfactions of the thirst for eternity and rest.”

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.

“The first builder of a city thinks of his action as a response to his situation, an effort to satisfy his deepest desires. He will satisfy his desire for eternity by producing children. He will satisfy his desire for security by creating a place belonging to him, a city. The direct relationship between the two acts is revealed in the identity of name given to the city and the child.”

“Cain has built a city. For God’s Eden he substitutes his own, for the goal given to his life by God, he substitutes a goal chosen by himself—just as he substituted his own security for God’s. Such is the act by which Cain takes his destiny on his own shoulders, refusing the hand of God in his life.”

The name Enoch means “initiation” or “inauguration.” The city Enoch is thus Cain’s substitute for God’s creation; Cain cannot create, but he can begin again.

“There was a solution for [Cain’s] situation, but the solution was in God’s hands, and that is what he could absolutely not tolerate. He wants to find alone the remedy for a situation he created, but which he cannot himself repair because it is a situation dependent on God’s grace. And cain accumulates remedies, each one a new disobedience, each one a new offense. Each remedy which seems to be a response to a need in Cain’s situation, in fact sinks him even deeper in woe, into a situation ever more inextricable.”

“Cain takes possession of the world and uses it as he wishes. Cain creates the art of craftsmanship. He carves stones and thereby makes them impure, unfit for use in an altar for God. It is man’s high-handed piracy of creation that makes creation incapable of giving glory to God. Cain bends all of creation to his will. He knows full well that by God’s order he has received dominion over creation, and he assumes control. He forces creation to follow his destiny, his destiny of slavery and sin, and his revolt to escape from it. From this taking possession, from this revolution, the city is born.”

“Before going on, we must lay to rest a possible misunderstanding. City versus country. We are in no way putting the city on trial, or making an apology for the country. Our only intention is to discover what the Bible reveals concerning the city. Nothing else.”

“All of man’s history is not limited to the history of the city and its progress. But they have nevertheless intermingled, and neither can be understood alone. The two realities are realities for God, and only in Him can we know exactly what they are. But the problem becomes serious when the city kills the country, when Cain kills Abel. When that happens, man and history are so thrown out of kilter that nothing can modify the new situation. But—and here is what is important—it can be no other way. Cain could not stop being himself. From the beginning he had to kill Abel. The city, so mediocre, so puerile with its scanty population still rustic in nature—the city was, from the day of its creation, incapable, because of the motives behind its construction, of any other destiny than that of killing the country, where God put man to enable him to live his life as best he could.”

Next up: Nimrod.

What makes us think we’ve finally gotten it right?

I’ve just finished reading most of Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, by Frances and Joseph Gies; about one-third of the book was devoted to life among the nobility, and so I skipped past those chapters. But the rest is very good, especially because it takes the time to set the stage by describing the marriage and family patterns among the groups that fed into medieval society, mainly Greeks and Romans and Germans and Christians.

It turns out that those pre-medieval patterns of marriage were very much different from what we see as normal today, and that many of the important shifts came during the Middle Ages, usually in response to shifting economic circumstances. For example, the decision to marry became more of a private and individual matter because the parties involved could afford it—as peace and prosperity increased, the need to use marriage as a tool for extending the family decreased. Similarly, family life turned inward because prosperity allowed for more independence from the community.

What disturbs me about the historical understanding of marriage that I’ve gotten from the Gies and from Stephanie Coontz is the same thing that always disturbs me when I study social patterns in history: why has there been so much variation over the years in what were seen as Christian standards? With marriage, for example, the church as an institution only began to intrude toward the end of the first millennium, and it was nearly three hundred years from the time that the church asserted a role in marrying people to the time when that role was accepted among the people.

In this book I found that many things we see today as biblical standards for a marriage were in fact cut from whole cloth one thousand years after the canon of scripture was closed, usually by some church thinker who waited hundreds of years for the church to be able to partially impose only some of his conclusions about what scripture dictated. And each time I have to wonder: if this fellow was right, then why did God see fit to let His people wander for a thousand years in ignorance before finally using this fellow to enlighten them?

Anyway, next time you read or hear some Christian teacher who lays out what he claims is a biblical pattern for marriage or the family, I encourage you to not simply accept the pattern at face value but to spend some time looking at patterns that have actually existed in history. Most Christians in most of history have followed different standards than the ones we are being exhorted to embrace today, and we ought to at least think about why that might be so.

Ticket sales in a down economy

Mish Shedlock’s readers often supply him with solid and detailed anecdotal evidence about what is going on out in the real world. Here’s an email he received from one:

I don’t care what the media says, the economy is getting worse and I can see it in ticket sales and even questions about tickets.

Last February, most of my ticket sales were requesting "Best available" and big concerts sold out within days or weeks, typically a month or more before the concert. Concerts sold out from the front (highest ticket price) to the back.
By mid summer, I began to notice that the buying was changing. Concerts sold from the front and from the back but the middle seats were selling last. I have only voices to gauge age but it seems to me that the 40-55 crowd had begun to disappear.

By early fall, the cheap seats were selling out first. This pattern started first in Chicago, spread throughout the midwest, then over to the Carolinas, south to Florida and across to Arizona.

Since December, the most often question that I get is "If I buy at the venue, do I have to pay the service charge?"

Ticket agents charge a ticket fee of 10-15% on each ticket and a year ago I never had a single complaint or a question about the ticket fee.

If you are buying 6 tickets with a $12 fee each, I can see it making better sense to spend an hour and go to the venue, but if you are buying 2 tickets and having to drive for a hour, park and stand in line, is it really worth it?
Throughout all this, the college crowd consistently bought without complaint. That has changed since Christmas. Now, the college kids are trying to beat the $6-8 ticket fees.

Concert sales in the Northeast and California almost always sold out, but now California is beginning to soften, especially with the younger crowd. The deterioration has been slow, but constant for a year and I don’t see any signs of improvement.

Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly did a show at Westbury in January. So did Bill Maher. Westbury is on Long Island and the theatre is small, perhaps 3000 seats. It is theatre in the round and sometimes they run it as half round.
The Beck/O’reilly show started out 1/2 round and sold out in minutes. People called for hours wanting tickets. Then Westbury decided to go full round the next day and the rest sold out within an hour. People called for weeks wanting tickets.

On the other hand, the Bill Maher show only sold about 70% of the 1/2 round at Westbury. The show sold so poorly that they closed the back seats and moved people forward to make it look better.

I sell Westbury all the time. Most of the people that call me are older, retired, and almost all have American Express cards and AOL e-mail addresses.

I would have thought that the results would have been that Bill Maher would have sold out and the Beck/O’Reilly concert not sold out. I was just amazed.

New weblog, sort of

At the encouragement of a musician friend, I have created a new weblog and copied over all the music-related posts that I’ve made in the past eight years, both here and on the Simpler Living website. Although I won’t delete those posts from their original locations, I think that all future posts about music will be made only there.

Looking over those nearly 500 posts, I realize that they constitute an as-it-happens account of two musicians trying to establish themselves as performers, an unusual resource that might be valuable to others who are banging around on the lower rungs of the music business. I think it is good to separate them from the others, so as not to burden readers who are interested only in that part of our adventure, and those who are not interested at all.

If you are interested, please keep up with the latest news by checking the Ridgewood Chronicles, or subscribing to its RSS feed.

Talent contest: Prairie Home Companion

I’m at liberty now to say that the talent contest mentioned in this earlier post is the annual Prairie Home Companion competition. This year their theme is “Battle of the Bands,” where the aim of the music is to get people up and dancing. Here’s a link to the contest guidelines.

And, again, here’s the recording that we will be submitting. We’re pretty pleased with it.

Knowing where to tap

I love jokes that encapsulate an important bit of knowledge. My family is all too aware of this, since it means that I bore them repeatedly by making a point with some anecdote they’ve heard many times before. But they’re kind enough to put up with it.

This morning I was reminded that a given task requires not only doing it but being prepared to do it, and sometimes the time and effort needed to prepare vastly outweighs the time needed to execute. I have a joke for that, of course. But curious to see if someone on the internet had told the same joke better, I poked around and stumbled on some variations that not only were pretty good, but got to their destination differently.

Here’s one that has a punchline close to the joke that I tell.

I’ve worked with a fabulous voiceover actor. I watched him go into the booth and nail a commercial in five minutes. When the client balked at his fee saying, "But it only took you five minutes." My friend replied, "No, it took me 20 years. You only saw the last five minutes."

But the joke I tell involves a tourist who encounters someone in a park doing sketches. Here’s one that covers that angle, with a slightly different punchline.

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him. “It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

Here’s one I hadn’t heard, that gets at the same point differently.

A famous French hatmaker is sitting in a cafe when a woman approaches and begs him to make her a hat. He assents and takes some pins and some felt out of his satchel. With a whirl of hands he creates a magnificient chapeau.

The woman is charmed. The hatmaker says, "That will be 5,000 francs."

The woman is aghast. "Five thousand, francs!? But it only took you a few moments."

The man then takes the hat, removes all the pins, smooths out the felt and returns it to her saying, "The materials are free."

Here’s one that is better known but makes roughly the same point and brings out the difference between preparation and execution.

A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!"

So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap…………………….. $ 9,998.00

In this same vein, I am old enough to remember cameras that used disposable flash bulbs. When those were first introduced, there was a significant amount of resistance to them because the cost of the bulb was far higher than the bit of film that it exposed. It took some time to make people understand that what was important was whether it was worth the cost of both the film and the bulb to have the picture, i.e. no bulb, no picture.

Talent contest entry

With the help of our friend Kevin Amburgey on mandolin, Chris and I recorded a song that we hope to submit for a talent contest which is billed as a Battle of the Bands, where a “band” has at least three members and the music is designed to get people up and dancing.

It’s a bit outside our normal kind of performing, but we had a few songs we thought would make good dance tunes, and after running through them with Kevin we settled on this one. We recorded it this afternoon in one take, in Kevin’s living room.

Does it make you want to dance?

Testifying through our actions

Here are two striking examples of how patterns of living can be clear and direct testimonies:

In 1562 a certain Caspar Zacher of Waiblingen in Wurttemberg was accused of being an Anabaptist, but the court record reports that since he was an envious man who could not get along with others, and who often started quarrels, as well as being guilty of swearing and cursing and carrying a weapon, he was not considered to be an Anabaptist.

On the other hand in 1570 a certain Hans Jager of Vohringen in Wurttemberg was brought before the court on suspicion of being an Anabaptist primarily because he did not curse but lived an irreproachable life.

No golden ages

I’m skimming through Stephanie Coontz’s book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. I never intended to read the whole thing, because I mostly wanted to know how marriage was among pre-modern Christians, and Coontz is much more comprehensive, providing a broad anthropological survey in the beginning, and spending the last half covering the transformation of marriage that has occured over the past two hundred years. But even skimming through the parts that didn’t interest me has taught me several things.

Coontz emphasizes that although romantic love has always existed, before 1800 or so it was unusual, and had nothing at all to do with people’s reasons for marrying. Up until then people married for economic reasons, broadly conceived; some scholars have argued that the best way to describe marriage universally is as a process of acquiring in-laws, i.e. joining families together. Falling in love was not essential; it was something that happened after the wedding, if at all. People married primarily to create a sustainable family economy; individuals were unable to do the work needed to survive without the help of a spouse and children.

Various historical forces combined to prepare the ground for a shift to modern day love-centered marriage. The Protestant Reformation promoted the family over the community as a source of fulfillment, sometimes to the point of idolatry. The rise of wage labor turned couples from equal partners in labor to breadwinner and homekeeper, with the labor of homekeeping being severely devalued (since no one paid for it). Increasing affluence led to a declining birth rate, since the extra hands were no longer needed. All this set the stage for the Victorian shift to the nuclear family as a “haven in a heartless world,” with husband as the brains and brawn and wife as the heart.

Coontz’s most interesting point is that this shift was actually a radical transformation, from a pattern that had stood the test of time since the beginning to one that was completely untried—and that the new pattern does not work. One aspect of the change she highlights is that originally marriage was of a limited duration; late marriage and early death led to an average length of fifteen years. Today a marriage has the potential to last fifty years or more. Combine this tripling in length with the removal of most of the old pressures to stay married—social disapproval, economic need, family ties—and the addition of one novel reason to be married—romantic love—and perhaps it isn’t surprising that the modern version of marriage is unable to endure.

What struck me as I read the book is how much the pattern of marriage has responded to whatever social and economic forces were present at a given time in a given place. Coontz’s anthropological survey shows that, beyond the core purpose of extending the family for economic reasons, marriage has taken on many different forms—yet each one makes sense in context. And her historical survey of European marriage from Roman times up to today demonstrates that things we take for granted as bedrock (e.g. church and civil involvement, grounds for divorce) are in fact recent innovations, just some of many things on the list that have come and gone as historical circumstances changed.

This seems to me to be completely at odds with the eternally popular pastime of divining a biblical standard for marriage. I don’t deny that the Bible has things to say about marriage, but I do think that most people aren’t satisfied with how little it has to say about that blessed estate, and so many things are added to the biblical standard which sound good and healthy and pious, but are in fact biblically indifferent and often of dubious earthly value.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to add to the biblical standard—as long as we recognize that those things are not themselves mandated by God. Having an established, tested pattern for marriage saves individuals from having to reinvent the institution for themselves. But those parts of the pattern which are not divinely dictated need to be tested, and re-tested as historical circumstances change. And Christians need the freedom to deviate from them as they see fit. Likewise, we need to ponder the inability or unwillingness of individual Christians to adhere to those parts of the pattern, seeking to understand if it might be the pattern that falls short.

The pitfall here is what might be called golden age thinking. We like to think that for any given aspect of life there is a golden age, perhaps somewhere in the past or perhaps yet to come, where everyone adhered to a particular standard and life was good as a result. But when we start poking around to find out whether there ever was such a golden age, or whether adherence to the standard ever brought us any closer to such an age, the answer is generally no, not really—but the reason is not that the standard failed us, but that we failed to live up to the standard. When the mechanism of the free market is criticized, the defense is not to point to a time where the free market was successful, or to show that society benefits to the extent that a free market exists, but instead that we’ve never really had a free market, and if only ….

Similarly with biblical marriage. Different teachers have drawn very different pictures of what a truly biblical marriage looks like, each one exhorting their flocks to adhere to the standards they have divined from scripture. Two patterns are especially popular. One draws from the ancient Jewish pattern of marriage—but not comprehensively, of course, because modern-day life is so different that much of the pattern is impossible to recreate (e.g. betrothals that are as binding as a marriage). Another draws heavily from the Victorian pattern—but, again, not comprehensively, because much of the pattern is connected closely to the deep flaws in Victorian culture (e.g. promiscuity of husbands, lack of passion in wives).

So I think it’s fair to say that anyone promoting a biblical pattern of marriage today is promoting something that has never been tried, much less proven successful. And there’s no problem with that—to the extent that the pattern being promoted adheres strictly to scripture. But in those areas where the pattern goes beyond scripture, we need to recognize that these may be valid ways to live, but it is equally valid—imperative, I’d say—to question them, and to look for historical evidence which may tell us whether those ways will bless us or curse us. And, again, we need to accept that Christians are allowed to differ in their approaches to these areas.

My main concern about golden age thinking is that we tend to use it as a substitute for wisdom—the standard is the given, and any failure to be blessed by it is not a problem with the standard but with our inability to live up to it. This leaves us totally unequipped to say anything wise to someone who doesn’t accept some part of our standard, since we really have no idea how the rules fit together or why they were formulated as they were in the first place. A shame, because Christians are exactly the people who should be able to bring wisdom to bear in any and all circumstances, whether or not they deviate from our own pattern of living.

The burden of defined benefit pension plans

So many different elements of the modern economy are on the brink of failing that it is worth pondering which one might end up dealing a fatal blow. Mish Shedlock has long maintained that the next major shock will be a quick tumble into insolvency by city, county, and state governments, and that one of the primary causes will be the untenable pension plans that civil servants have managed to obtain for themselves over the past fifty years.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has just announced that his state is on the edge of bankruptcy, and that the main culprit is the state’s pension system. He gave two examples that illustrate how much more the government is required to pay out to pensioners than it takes in from them:

One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits — a total of $3.8m on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?

Whether or not it is fair, the important point is that it is impossible. For whatever reason, the government made rash promises to its employees that it now finds itself unable to keep. Unfortunately, unless the ones promised the pensions agree to renegotiate, the only way a city, county, or state government can escape their legal obligation to pay them is to declare bankruptcy.