Archives for September 2018

On Listening to the Designer

September 27, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

When my wife and I were shopping for our first house, the inspector pointed out a tree on the property. “The branches are rubbing against the roof,” he said, “and that’ll shorten the life of your shingles. Further, the roots will eventually undermine your foundation. If you buy the house, you should cut it down.”

Well, we bought the house, and shortly later I bought me a chainsaw. A very manly one.

It came with a fairly hefty manual, which, you’ll be surprised to know, I read.

Lots of things to remember with a chainsaw. For starters, it has a two-stroke engine, so you have to mix oil with the gas, at a very specific ratio (32:1, to be precise). Second, there’s a compartment there where you need to put a different oil, with low viscosity, for the bar and chain sprocket, to keep things moving along.

And then there’s a section in the manual about kickback. Apparently there are ways you can manipulate the chainsaw that will increase the likelihood that it will come back at you, and you’ll be essentially kissing the business end of the thing, which I’m told can lead to negative patient outcomes.

So I read all that.

Now here’s the thing.

I’m an American. I have my rights. One of the most precious is the right to property, which some political philosophers (Locke, no?) tell us underlies all the other rights. When I plunked my money down on that orange counter, that chainsaw became mine, and I have a right to do whatever I want to with it.

If I don’t want to put oil in the gas, I don’t have to. If I don’t want to use special oil in that other compartment, I don’t have to. And if I want to manipulate that growling beast in ways the manual discourages, I can do that.

It’s my chainsaw. I have my rights.

But I think you’d agree that I’d be an idiot to exercise those rights. I’ll shorten the life of the tool and consequently end up spending more money than I need to, to keep myself in chainsaws. And even more significantly, I could shorten the life of the operator—and even mar this strikingly handsome face.

That would be a loss for everybody.

When the engineer tells you how he designed the machine, you’d better listen to him. Only a fool cares more about his rights.

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

When the designer of your mind and body tells you what the specs are, you’re nuts to cast off those constraints.

As just one example, our culture has set out to redefine sex and sexuality, as to its purposes, its significance, its definition, its safe and appropriate uses.

You can do that if you want to. Really, you can.

You can deny its interpersonal significance and make it a lonely, solo experience.
You can deny its safety limits and embrace random and exhausting and faceless promiscuity.
You can deny its marital limits and take your partner(s) places they’d rather not go, but won’t necessarily deny you.
You can create children with no means or plan to give them a meaningful life.

Yes, you can.

And when you’ve done that, you’ll have what we have in our culture—

The poverty of single-parent homes
Life-changing—and sometimes life-taking—diseases
An increasing sense of frustration, unfulfillment, and discontent
Fundamental distrust between men and women, each viewing the other as the exploiter, and everyone confused and worried about what’s OK and what isn’t, all the rules unspoken, and every encounter presaging danger of future betrayal
And sex without joy.

You know, the designer made it fun on purpose.

He gave it to us as a splendid and magnificent gift.

But we’re using it in ways that not only minimize its effectiveness and usefulness, and deprive us of much of its joy, but may well end up killing us before it’s all over.

I can hear my skeptical friends now—“You know, you’re assuming there’s a designer.”

Without going into all the reasons I think that’s a well-based assumption, let me just observe that our culture is assuming there isn’t a designer.

How’s that workin’ out?

Read the manual. Respect the design specs. Use it well.

Don’t be an idiot.

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash

On Sexual Assault, Due Process, and Supreme Court Confirmations

September 24, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

There’s no sense in my jumping into the Kavanaugh battle with a personal opinion; there are bazillions of those already, and I have no experience that gives me any special insight into legal issues.

But I do find something waaay back in the writings of Moses that may give us a little something to think about.

The legal difficulty of sexual assault is that it typically doesn’t happen in the city square, with lots of witnesses. The nature of sex as a private function means that abuses of the sexual function, like its legitimate uses, tend to happen in private. And in private, there are just two witnesses. If the sex is abusive, then the two witnesses are the perpetrator and the victim.

He said, she said.

That’s how it almost always is.

In biblical times it was the same way, of course. I note that in those days, unlike today, rape was a capital offense. I’ve heard it argued that today it shouldn’t get the death penalty because if the rapist knows that, he’ll just go ahead and kill the victim, since that would eliminate a witness without increasing his penalty. I recognize the logic, but I still would prefer to see the death penalty for rape, particularly in a day when DNA testing can make the identity of the perpetrator absolutely certain.

But back to my point. In biblical times, rape got the death penalty. But here’s the thing: elsewhere the biblical law restricted the death penalty to cases where you had at least two or three witnesses (Num 35.30; Dt 17.6).

Contradiction, no? Rape gets the death penalty, but there are never enough witnesses to actually get it carried out. The woman loses, every time.

Patriarchy.

Ah, not so fast.

There’s a special provision for allegations of sexual assault. In the midst of some broad-ranging regulations in Deuteronomy 22 (help an animal stuck in a ditch [4]; don’t kill a bird sitting on a clutch of eggs [6]; build your house so that visitors are safe [8]), there’s a point about sexual assault.

²³“If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, ²⁴then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.

²⁵“But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. ²⁶But you shall do nothing to the young woman; she has committed no offense punishable by death. For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor, ²⁷because he met her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.

Interesting.

If the attack happens near other possible witnesses, then we assume that in a nonconsensual encounter the woman would protest in ways that those nearby would hear. If she says later that it was rape, then she is judged to be lying since she didn’t scream during the assault.

Women lie sometimes too. Even about things as serious as rape. We have to take that into account.

But if the event occurs away from possible witnesses, the woman gets the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did call for help, and there was nobody to hear her.

Now, a woman having a consensual sexual encounter in the woods might lie too. She could decide later that it was a mistake, and she could decide to get the poor guy in beaucoup trouble. That could happen.

But here, she gets the benefit of the doubt. As the only witness. In a charge that bears the death penalty.

It’s not a perfect world. God knows that. And he indicates that he expects us to do the best we can in these difficult decisions. We need to remember that women lie just as certainly as men do, for all kinds of reasons. And we also need to remember that sometimes we need to give a woman in a difficult spot the benefit of the doubt.

When do we do which? That’s a really tough call; as someone who served on a jury for a case of child sexual assault, I know exactly how difficult it is.

But if you support Kavanaugh simply because you’re a Republican, or you oppose him simply because you’re a Democrat, then you’re in no position to be heard in such a critical decision.

Which, I guess, disqualifies pretty much everybody this time around.

Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash

Fables Again, Differently

September 20, 2018 by Dan Olinger 4 Comments

A week ago I posted about possible lessons from Aesop for weather forecasters. This time I’d like to broach the subject again in a very different context.

In my university’s chapel program today, my colleague Eric Newton briefly referred (about 16:30 minutes in) to my experience of having my faith rescued through the study of OT genealogies. Since others may find the story helpful, I share it here.

In seminary I had to study a lot of theology, including aberrant theologies. Those included the first major theological innovation of the 20^th century, neo-orthodoxy, tied to the thinking of Karl Barth. Barth’s system and writings are complex, but the feature that got my attention was his “two-story” hermeneutic. There are two kinds of history, he said. There’s the stuff that really happened, which he called by the German term Historie. That’s the first story of the house, where we live. But there’s an upstairs too, with another kind of history, Geschichte. That’s the stuff that we believe. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that our belief helps us make sense of a confusing world and, more importantly, it energizes an existential experience with God, which is the whole point of being. There’s no staircase in the house; we can reach the second story only by an existential leap of faith.

Neo-orthodox thinkers make this kind of thinking clearer to the average guy by calling the Scripture’s early history “fable.” They don’t intend the term to be an insult; in their minds, it’s a great compliment. Fables are delightful and artful literary works, and they play an important role in our education and broader culture. For example, Aesop told a story about a boy who cried “Wolf!” It teaches us that we shouldn’t lie. That’s important.

Now. In what country did this boy live? In what century?

Ah, my friend, by asking these questions, you’re indicating that you completely miss the point. It doesn’t matter where or when he lived—in fact, it doesn’t matter if he lived at all. The point is the lesson, and historicity is irrelevant. Just learn from the story. Recognize the literary technique, and don’t be such a knuckle-dragging literalist.

Well. That concept hit me pretty hard. What if Barth’s right? What if we’re completely missing the author’s intent? (Authorial intent is a really big deal in biblical interpretation, right?) What if none of it’s true? And then, what’s the point of Jesus being the Second Adam to solve the problem of human sin (Rom 5), if there was no First Adam to originate the sin in the first place?

Maybe it’s all just stories.

At that point in my thinking I made a really foolish mistake. Being too proud to ask any of my teachers—or fellow students—for help, I determined to push through this on my own. That was foolish for a couple of reasons—first, because human beings aren’t designed to suffer alone, and second, because, as I later realized, I was surrounded by people who could have given me the answer without my having to spend weeks in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

But, foolishly, I spent some time as a doctoral student at BJU wondering whether there’s even a God, and whether there’s light at the end of this dark valley.

Well, there is light. God is gracious; he knows and loves and cares for his children, and as he always has, he overlooked my foolishness and treated me with grace instead of giving me what I deserved.

I was seeking the answer to the question of authorial intent: did the narrators of early biblical history intend for me to read their accounts as fable, or as Historie? Is there evidence in their literature that would answer that question?

Yes, there is. One day it hit me like a brick. It’s the genealogies.

You see, when you tell the story of the boy who cried “Wolf!” you don’t tell how he grew up and had a son, and then a grandson, and then a great-grandson, and how his 200-greats grandson is the mayor of Cleveland. It’s fable; you leave it in the world of fiction.

That’s not what the authors did. They tied those very early people to the people of their generation. And later authors recognized that and extended the genealogical record through 4000 (or so) years of history to the central figure of history, Jesus Christ himself.

Barth was creative, but he failed to analyze the literature carefully. He missed clear evidence of the obvious answer to the most basic question—what did the author intend to say?

Postscript

Paul tells Timothy that all Scripture is profitable (2Tim 3.16). All of it. Even the boring parts. Even the parts you tell new believers to skip.

Don’t do that. It’s all profitable. It’s there for a purpose. Recognize, embrace, and live in the light of that purpose. My 200-greats grandfather, Adam, would tell you the same thing.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Sublime to Ridiculous

September 17, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

God is great, and he is good.

He created all things in the span of six days, and the Scripture describes the origin of all the stars in all the galaxies in all the galaxy clusters in all the universe with just three words (two in Hebrew): “and the stars” (Gen 1.16). And the speed with which he made it all implies no hurry or lack of attention to detail; he made the earth perfect as a residence—a sanctuary—for us humans, with all of our needs—oxygen, water, food, light, heat—freely and abundantly provided (Gen 1.29).

He made us in his image (Gen 1.27) and sought out our companionship in the cool of the day (Gen 3.8). And despite our faithlessness to him and our rejection of his commands (Gen 3), he set out on a long plan to woo us back to himself, as the one whom his soul loves.

Why so long?

For at least a couple of reasons, I think.

First, because his long, unflagging pursuit of us assures us of his love. He’s serious about this. He’s not going away. This is true love of the purest and most devoted kind.

And second, because he gives us time. We are stubborn—he knows that (Ps 103.14)—and we need to be shown that we will not be satisfied with anything or anyone but him. So he lengthens our leash, and he lets us sniff all the sidewalks to our heart’s content. He patiently endures the jealousy his own heart feels toward us, watching us seek satiation in everything else there is. He lets us exhaust ourselves in our foolishness. He’s a patient lover.

And when we’ve come to the end of our orgy, to the end of ourselves, wrecked and ruined and unattractive and repulsive (Ezek 16), then he draws us to himself, graciously, tenderly, and whispers to us of love. And we ought to believe him. His patience tells us of his love; his revelation of himself tells us (Rom 2.4); and most especially, his giving of himself in brutalizing, deadly sacrifice—for our filthiness, not his—tells us beyond any doubt (Rom 5.8).

But even as believers—forgiven, welcomed, indwelt, gifted, guided, protected, loved—we find ourselves faithless. We doubt his promises—or worse, forget them—and fear the place he’s called us to serve. Like toddlers in the checkout line, we find ourselves distracted by bright colors and sugary treats, and we seek our fulfillment in light and worthless things. We go through the motions of marriage to him, but our heart is elsewhere. We’re glad for his grace—don’t you feel bad for all those (other) people going to hell?—but we pursue our own joys and our own ends. We’ve hired other people, you see, to serve him “full-time,” to take the gospel to the ends of the earth as he has commanded us.

And we fear. Oh, do we fear. Will I lose my health? Will the wrong guy get elected? Will the market crash? Will laws be broken?

What if it does? What if they are? Is our God asleep? Is he in the men’s room (1Ki 18.27)? After millennia of pursuing us, is he going to abandon us now?

This isn’t the first time the kings of the earth have raged against God’s anointed (Ps 2). It isn’t abnormal that God’s people are not the powerful of the earth (1Co 1). His plan for us, apparently, is very different from our plan for ourselves. Once again.

I sought the Lord, and he answered me

and delivered me from all my fears (Ps 34.4).

So then.

PSA: I’ve seen all those memes. You know, those fearful and snide and unoriginal and hostile and divisive ones about Colin Kaepernick and Cory Booker and Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein and whatever else. So you can stop posting them now, OK? Maybe you could post about–oh, I don’t know–the things I’ve mentioned above. Thanks.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

On Weather and Fables

September 13, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

As I post this, Hurricane Florence is bearing down on the Carolinas, predicted to make landfall today and to reach here in the SC Upstate over the weekend. For days we’ve been hearing about how bad this storm is, with dire warnings to run for your life if you’re on the coast—and this one, they say, will have surprisingly destructive force far inland, even here above the fall line.

I believe them. But a lot of people don’t. They’re staying put. And the local first responders are collecting the names of their next of kin so they can notify them after the fools are dead.

Why don’t people listen to such grave warnings?

Well, some people are just foolish. That’s part of human nature. But I think these days there’s more involved.

In recent years journalism has become almost entirely ratings driven. Every story has to be hyped. Local news desks give you a teaser at 8 pm so you’ll tune in at 11—and when you do, the story turns out to be not as big a deal as the teaser implied. In fact, the teaser is more like a National Enquirer headline than actual journalism. And the national desks do it as well. For some time now, Fox News’s Bret Baier has been introducing his evening broadcast—“Special Report”—with an “ALERT” logo—to imply that there’s breaking news, when usually there isn’t.

Everything’s a Big Deal. Go for the adrenaline. Capture the eyeballs. Every day.

And the weather folks are doing it too. Local and national weatherpeople, even the agencies that feed them information—the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, and so on. Every storm is the Storm of the Century, or the Snowpocalypse, or some other frightening neologism.

And they start saying these things 5 or 6 days out, before they can have any sort of reading of the storm with any scientific basis. At that point they can’t predict the path—but it MIGHT hit a population center!—or the intensity or the size of the storm. But they can get several days of good ratings by fearmongering.

Why do they do this? I’m sure they would say that they’re doing a public service by giving the population plenty of time to prepare for any eventuality. And they do, and for that I’m grateful.

But I think it’s demonstrable that there are other reasons as well. For the news outlets, they want the ratings, the eyeballs, because that drives the ad fees, and that means money in their pockets. For the agencies, they want the exposure, because that usually turns into stable future funding. There’s a strong element of self-interest in this.

Which is fine—capitalism and all that—except that there’s a downside.

As Aesop noted all those centuries ago, when the boy cries “Wolf!” repeatedly, eventually people stop believing him—even when he’s telling the truth.

Now, lots of people in Charleston remember Hugo, and lots of people in New Orleans remember Camille and Katrina, and they’re wise enough to get ready and get out. We’ve seen the interstates looking like parking lots the last couple of days, and I had a visitor in my class this morning who’s been evacuated from his school down on the coast.

But other people in hurricane-prone areas have heard repeated frenetic warnings about literally every storm with a snowball’s chance of reaching any point of the North American coastline. And in many cases those storms were described superlatively—this is a rare and even unique threat. And in most of those cases, the warnings haven’t panned out—usually because the hype started before there was any scientific basis for it.

When you’ve seen that happen a few times, you’re tempted to start downplaying the warnings. Significant numbers of people who live on the coast, and who can remember the last 20 years, are going to board up their windows, buy some batteries and bottled water, and settle in to watch the storm through their beach-facing picture windows.

And eventually, some of them are going to die—probably in great quantities, during the same genuinely powerful storm.

And whose fault is that? Might there be blame for more people than just the ones who died?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

On My Father’s 100th Birthday

September 10, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Today would have been my father’s 100^th birthday. He lived only (?!) to the age of 90, but he had a really interesting life—railroad conductor, printer, pilot, kinda travel agent, small business owner. He was never boring. Scary maybe, but never boring.

The thing that I find really remarkable about his life is the amount of change he saw.

He was born on the frontier. His father, after the murder of his own father, headed west from Missouri looking for opportunity. Eventually he homesteaded—that Homestead Act was a real boon to upward mobility—just below the Continental Divide outside Salmon, Idaho, on land that no one had ever tamed before, and he and his wife and 11 children worked like oxen to make a living for themselves.

And here’s the thing. They lived, in 1918, pretty much the same way people lived in Abraham’s day. They built their own houses by hand, carried water in from the creek, fended off the darkness with oil lamps, powered their farming with animals, and did their excretory business in a hole in the ground. Oh, eventually they got electricity, and my grandfather even bought a car before it was all over, but when Dad was born, the routine of daily life hadn’t changed much for 4000 years.

Dad’s mother died when he was 7, and his father when he was 13, and from then on he was raised relatively haphazardly by a series of older siblings as they were able. Graduated from high school a year or two late, eventually served his country in World War II—as part of the greatest generation—and came home to work with his hands to scrape together a thousand bucks or two every year to feed the wife and three kids. Leave it to Beaver, indeed.

Not well educated, but a constant reader, he created a fully organic subsistence farm, before hardly anybody was even talking about such things, on a mere two acres of land in (really) Greenacres, Washington, then piled the whole family into a Rambler station wagon and a ’54 Nash to move clear across the country for a white-collar job. (No, my name’s not Joad.)

After they finally got the kids out of the house, he and Mom retired to southern New Mexico, where within a few short years Mom died and he was left pretty much alone with his tool-sharpening shop. After he’d spent 25 years there, an ER doctor called me from New Mexico and said, “You need to come get your Dad.”

And for the last 6 years of his life, as his well-used but well-worn mind slowly ebbed, I cared for him as he needed it, but left him his independence as much as I thought was safe.

And one evening the two of us sat together at my computer, fired up Google Earth, and went back to Salmon. He guided me up the Salmon River to Baker, where he went to school (yep, on horseback, in the snow) and then north up Sandy Creek to the old homestead. It was right here, on the west side, he said. And I dropped the perspective as low as I could, and we stood on the old land and looked up Sandy Creek to the Divide, where he’d hiked over into Montana one time when he was a teen and got upset with somebody.

In one lifetime, he went from the days of Abraham to Web-based virtual reality on a laptop. In one lifetime, his life changed in pretty much all the ways that the world has changed since it began.

What a time to be alive.

Dad didn’t make it to 100—here, anyway—and I’m confident that he wouldn’t have wanted to. But what a life he had, and what lives he has left behind. Sons and daughters who have all known success, all in remarkably different ways. Two grandsons who are Service Academy graduates, and two granddaughters with great abilities and extensive experiences around the world.

And life, for him, goes on, in a way that I don’t have the experience to describe.

Hallelujah.

Photo by Ember + Ivory on Unsplash

On Asking about Ethnicity

September 6, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

In his column at National Review last week, Jim Geraghty thought out loud about a New York Times book review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind. (Did you follow all that?) Appiah raises concerns about the way introductions work. Pretty much everybody, on meeting somebody else, asks questions about him—where are you from? where do you work? Appiah suggests that this tendency to want to categorize people might often imply a sort of racism or at least stereotyping.

Geraghty thinks that identity politics might be contributing to that. Immigrants. Wall Streeters. NRA members. Police officers. We react instinctively to certain groups, positively or negatively, depending on where we are on the political or cultural spectrum. He observes that this kind of thinking contradicts the very idea of America as a place where anybody can become anything with enough hard work and perhaps a little luck (or providence). Upward mobility. No feudalism. All that.

I think Geraghty is right, and based on his description of Appiah’s book—which I haven’t read—I suspect that the latter is right on that point too. I’ve found myself making assumptions about someone I’m meeting, based on his occupation or his appearance or some other information he offers about himself. We shouldn’t do that. People are individuals, not merely members of a class.

My ethnicity is German—as is obvious from my last name. But I’d think anybody who gave me a Nazi salute was just plain weird. I was born in Washington State, but I’m not a liberal Democrat. (In fact the area of the state where I was born is rock-ribbed conservative Republican, largely for reasons of physical geography—which, while interesting, is completely off our topic.) I spent my teen years in Boston, but I don’t park my car in Harvard Yard, and frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it from people who think they’re being original and clever. I live in the South, but I’m not an advocate of the Lost Cause. I don’t like being stereotyped, and Jesus tells me that in that case I shouldn’t stereotype others.

But just a minute here. If we shouldn’t stereotype the person we’re meeting, then observers of the conversation shouldn’t stereotype the person asking the questions, either.

Sure, sometimes people ask those questions in order to put the stranger into a box—to stereotype him. But not everybody does.

On a good day, when I ask a person what he does, it’s not to prejudge him—it’s to find a point of contact, to further deepen the relationship—which so far is pretty shallow.

You’re a pilot? I love that! My Dad was a private pilot, and I got to do a lot of flying when I was a kid. There’s nothing like the top side of a cloud.
You’re a waiter in a restaurant? I did that for a year. Hardest work I ever did. Good for you. Are people tipping better these days than they used to?

And that goes for geography too.

You’re from Boston? What part? Ah, Revere. Love the North Shore. Ever get up to Gloucester and Rockport? Boy, I miss the fish!

Here’s the sad part. Because of a lot of past sins, Americans are really, really sensitive about race—or as I prefer to say, ethnicity. You can’t talk about it without feeling like you’re stepping on eggshells, and if you talk about it much, people tend to wonder what you’re up to.

But I find ethnicity just as interesting as occupation or birthplace. If I’m meeting a black person, and I detect what sounds like one of many African accents, I really, really want to ask where he’s from. And sometimes I do. If I were to meet Dr. Appiah—Geraghty mentioned that he’s Ghanaian—I’d be all over that.

Where in Ghana? Accra? I love that city! What do you think of Papaye Chicken in Osu? Do you ever get up north, to the rural areas? What about the Upper West? What wonderful people! The most patient man I ever met was a Ghanaian pastor in the Upper West. And that Volta Dam is a remarkable achievement, isn’t it?

Now, as it happens, Dr. Appiah is of Ghanaian descent, but he was born in London, so he might surprise me by saying, “I’ve never actually been to Ghana.” And that’s fine. We can talk about London instead.

Sure, the person is more than these things. But he is these things, and what else he is, is molded, or perhaps reflected, by these things and many others. What’s wrong with wanting to know him as well as you can?

Let’s take this a little further. I’m intrigued by all the variations in skin color that human genes can produce. I know someone whose mother is Puerto Rican and whose father is Italian. I know someone else whose mother is Spanish and whose father is British. And another whose mother is Mexican and whose father is a New Zealander.

All of this is really cool. Unusual mixtures of genes and cultures and accents and perspectives. I want to interrogate such people about all of that.

Maybe someday we’ll be able to do that without people getting all nervous.

I really hope so.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

On Funerals for Politicians

September 3, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

This past Saturday was the funeral for John McCain, a long-time US senator and, many years ago, a long-time prisoner of war in Vietnam. In our hotly divided political climate, even his funeral became big news and a source of political contention.

I’m not going to weigh in on the politics of it all. There’s no lack of voices doing that, and the question of whether his funeral was too political or not is none of my business and frankly none of yours either. On the matter of what’s done at his funeral, I think the decision is the family’s to make, and the family’s alone. But the controversy does bring to mind some implications that go far beyond the politics of any moment, implications that we ought to consider—“we” being not just those with an interest in the American political process, but anyone with an interest in any political process.

Most news outlets have noted the tributes given to McCain by political friend and foe alike. Perhaps the best example is a line from former President Obama, who said, “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast and insult, in phony controversies and manufactured outrage. … We never doubted the other man’s sincerity or the other man’s patriotism, or that when all was said and done, we were on the same team.”

Responses to Mr. Obama’s words, and to others like them, have typically been driven by political motives. Those on the political left have celebrated the fact that the former president, who ran against and defeated McCain in a presidential election, could speak so respectfully and generously of him. Those who voted against Obama in that election, however, accuse him, and all the other political liberals who are now lauding McCain’s “maverick spirit” and “honor” and “principles,” of being hypocrites, especially given the vitriolic language heaped on McCain by those same opponents and their campaign supporters in that election.

What interests me in all this is not Mr. Obama’s words or any of the other recent commendations. What interests me is what those words tell us about the earlier political campaign. All those excoriations, all those dire warnings during the campaign about how dangerous McCain was, or how hateful or personally flawed he was, were actually meaningless; by their own present words, McCain’s political foes actually respected him and saw him as virtuous—on the same team, as Mr. Obama put it. But they reviled him back then, because politics, you know. Have to win the election. Say whatever it takes.

And let’s not pretend that only the political left does that. Those on the right are just as inclined—aren’t they?—to say things that aren’t true just to get their guy elected, or to get votes for this or that piece of legislation.

John McCain died of cancer, a particular type of cancer—glioblastoma—that crouches in my mind as well. It killed my brother, and it killed my pastor, the man whose signature is on the paperwork that forms the legal basis for the decades of life my wife and I have shared. A friend of mine, a neurosurgeon, once told me that glioblastoma is a just a nasty piece of work, and he said he hopes he’s seen the last of it he’ll ever see. It’s the worst.

But I’m not sure it is. There’s another cancer, one that infests our national brain and is killing our ability to govern ourselves as surely as glioblastoma killed John McCain. With the size of our federal government, and consequently the power at stake in every national election, the desperation to win leads us to savage ourselves with lies, to say whatever it takes to get our way. And our leaders acknowledge that, whenever they say that this or that vitriolic conflict is “just politics.”

How healthy, how healthful, can a system be that is based on lies?

It’s a mark of strength when we can speak respectfully of the dead, with whom we disagreed in life. But it’s a mark of great sickness when in doing so we put the lie to how we lived.

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash