The Essential Art of Inquiry

By Harry T. Cook

10/18/13

Answers we have aplenty, usually proffered before the questions have been thought through and adequately formulated. They tend to be easy answers that have frequently led us down blind alleys, up dead-end roads and now and again into disasters that we were ill-equipped to recognize as such until it was too late.

An obvious example: The building and use of atomic weapons. Who knows how much of our national treasure was invested in the bombs that altered hundreds of thousands of lives -- some permanently -- in Hiroshima and Nagasaki along with their cityscapes and culture? The bombs were presented as the answer to a very shortsighted question: "What's the quickest way to end the war?"

After four long years, it was an understandable question but superficial. The consequence of its too-easy answer is writ today in Iran's determination to have deployable nuclear weapons and in the global angst about what should be done -- and how -- to neutralize the country's trigger-happy Revolutionary Guard and at what cost.

Yet another example: what my friend Frank Joyce calls the massive disorganization of work. Says Joyce: "Millions are unemployed while other millions are working two or three jobs or insane amounts of overtime. What's up with that?" His comment and question lead us to another even more difficult question: Who says capitalism as we attempt to understand it is the so-called "best economic practice in the world"? Or as Joyce puts it: "If this is the golden age of capital global domination, why is wealth and income inequality rising so rapidly?"

The fact is that clear-headed, objective (as opposed to subjective and therefore loaded) questions about economic justice are seldom asked outside of academe, if there. Are the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to be considered odious just because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its political apparatchiks have declared it so over time, or is it important revisit the idea of worker ownership of the means of production?

Individual entrepreneurs now design, produce, sell and distribute via computer, making big money. They do it all in their pajamas. Mass production with its unavoidable waste of raw materials and human resources may soon be a thing of the past.

Taking the discussion in a different direction: The one-time mayor of what's left of Detroit recently was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for committing a long list of larcenies from the public till. He may be well over 70 years of age when the prison gates open outward to him. He will be joining in incarceration more than two million fellow Americans -- an astonishing percentage of which share at least once characteristic with the ex-mayor: skin color.

This raises a question that needs to be thoroughly plumbed: What does it mean that our country's jails and prisons are home to 2.3 million people, almost 50% of whom are black, the African-American population being less than 14% of the nation's total population?

The easy -- and incorrect -- answer is that blacks commit more crimes than whites. So maybe the original question was off-target. Might the question or questions be: What is it about America that creates such a disproportionate racial makeup in our prison population, and why do we think incarceration, which overburdens many a state treasury, is an appropriate or effective counter to crime? Is there a chance that economic disparity and the reprehensible neglect of our urban primary and secondary educational systems might have something to do with the massive numbers of imprisoned African-American males? If so, what is to be done?

Another question that produces another facile answer is: How can we make America independent of foreign oil? The deceptively easy answer is: "Drill, baby, drill. Approve the Keystone pipeline. Mine more coal." The more helpful question is: What kinds of energy sources can be developed that will not eventually bring about ruinous climate change?

Among the most helpful areas of continued inquiry is science in its many aspects. How about we give heed to what scientists are saying, among many things, about the consequences of overuse of fossil fuels? Scientists have issued alarming forecasts about weather for the next half-century that could see in some areas the coolest days being hotter than today's hottest days. Really.

Were we to ask a more carefully reasoned version of the original question, we might see that the current bar to curbing and one day ending our dependence on fossil fuels from anywhere is traceable in great part to the grip the oil lobby has around the throats of election-eager politicians . . .

. . . which raises this question: How can the nation's voters at all levels from township boards to city councils to county commissions to state legislatures and on up to Washington, D.C., recruit, nominate and elect people to office who are not and will not be in thrall to private interests that seldom operate for the benefit of the public? Possible answers to explore lie in the area of nonpartisan panels for legislative and congressional redistricting with an effective end to party-minded gerrymandering.

But beyond that, in an era when elections are dominated by big money and engineered by often anonymous forces, how can citizens in every place be both excited and equipped to vote at every opportunity as participants in democracy, ignoring the blandishments of ad hominem television ads? The idea is to make election outcomes work for the common good, not for narrow, malevolent interests.

Effective inquiries into the issues dealt with above require that questions be thought through and skillfully formulated. A priori pronouncements of certitude are best eschewed by a people serious about governance or any other vital function. Declarations of "revealed truths" such as those too frequently made by political and religious authorities -- often for their own benefit -- have no place in the practice of the art and science of democracy. Such pronouncements uncritically accepted may yield quick and easy answers, but they are almost always wrong -- sometimes tragically so.

What a Friend They Had in Jesus: The Theological Visions of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Hymn Writers

Have you ever found yourself humming a favorite childhood hymn, only to realize you could no longer embrace its message? Harry Cook explores how hymns reflect the religious beliefs of their times. He revisits the texts of popular hymns, posing such questions as: How true are they to the biblical texts that seem to have inspired them? What aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century piety have persisted into the twenty-first century through the singing of those hymns? And, how does one manage the conflict between the emotional appeal and the theological content of such hymns?

Available at:

Polebridge Press

Amazon.com

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What reviewers said:

"Important and heart-warming ... Cook's keen insights into the most familiar of old-time gospel hymns ... help you do theology like a grownup."
--Robin Meyers, author of Saving Jesus from the Church

"A compelling look at centuries of Christian theology and practice, at how particular hymns have shaped American faith and religious thought."
--Richard Webster, Director of Music and Organist at Trinity Church, Boston

"A call to integrity in worship ... This exciting, penetrating and provocative study explores the theology we sing, which re-enforces the dated and pre-modern theology from which the Christian faith seeks to escape."
--John Shelby Spong, author of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World

Readers Write

Essay 10/18/13: A Sebastopol Minority

Brian McHugh, Silver City, NM:

That got me thinking. One would have to write a book to begin to answer the fundamental question you raise. Anyway, what came to mind as I pondered yours Sebastopol woman was this: so many people in America have, for mysterious reasons, colluded in their own repression and they are profoundly embarrassed to admit it, if indeed their ill-education even permits them to understand and to articulate their predicament. In my view, they are the victims of that strangely warped Christianity that has plagued America since the beginning. This is a Christianity that has taught a very low doctrine of the human person. It has infantilized human beings, and taught them to subject themselves to an all-powerful external God. In modern America, the place, or perhaps the personification, of this God has been taken by the powerful and political wealthy, in whom Americans see those whom God has blessed, both with wealth and authority. Buy some osmosis, they feel that they should identify with these people, even though these people, like a God, essentially despise them. So, like all people who have been abused, they pass that abuse on to anyone else they can, in order to feel better. For Caucasian Americans, who are used to being on top, that means those who are not like them, particularly if they are Hispanic or gay and, in many cases, women. They are, of course, fueled by enormous depths of fear and of anger. As you said, the Sebastopol Woman, following the teachings that she should surrender all her personal power to other external authorities, be it God or rich and powerful politicians, has a deeply debased sense of her own humanity and cannot see that this is because she has embraced a false god. Americans have been taught to believe in this false God. For a long time, it was subliminal, but in the last several decades it has become blatant, seen in the flowering of right-wing religious extremists. I guess the best that can be said is that at least it is in the open -- but people who have been infected with this over centuries are blinded from seeing their position.

Julian Newman, M.D., Denver, CO:

I could not agree more with your thoughtful look at the current political scene. I might also not have thought to return the quarter after hearing the lady's views.

Edmund Karner, Sterling Heights, MI:

Your cashier probably isn't a dyed-in-the-wool social conservative, given the surroundings. Much more likely a libertarian type -- perhaps a Randian objectivist. There are no archaic conceptions of natural law at play here (or, as some would put it, patriarchal assertion of right over female bodies) nor even simple traditionalism of the kind Christopher Lasch found so appealing in his True and Only Heaven. This is a different ideology, socially liberal, but pushing out the Christian compassion that was at the heart of the liberal cause. It preaches that all taxation is theft and that an ethics that isn't built upon self-interest is wrong -- that altruism itself is unethical. And that is where false consciousness and cultural hegemony show themselves. This, truly, is mastery of men's mind. The wealth of the rich is evidence of their virtue. It would be morally wrong to share those rewards, so the rich are right not to do so. It would be wrong to tax them to better the condition of other men. It's irrelevant if it can be shown that taxation or altruism could result in a better life for all of us -- rich and poor -- because the undertaking is morally wrong. I sympathize with and pity social conservatives. They believe in their positions deeply -- few, but some, on grounds that could in some conceptions be considered rational -- and they have enjoyed little, but defeat over the past thirty years despite their continual political exploitation. But I fear libertarian Randians because they truly possess a false consciousness - they've bought in to an ideology just as sure as any early 20th century Bolshevik.

Betty Withers, Utica, NY:

Your cashier person in California is a worrisome sign. I wish you would have asked her what she thought about the government shutting down. I think I know what her answer would be.

K.L. George, Bexley, OH:

What a cautionary tale, that grocery store person in California. It does not bode well for a country already in trouble. Maybe Sepastopol is not as liberal as all that.

Jack Lessenberry, Huntington Woods, MI:

I had a student once who had to drop out because she couldn't pay the tuition and never finished. She wasn't too bright and the only job she could get was cleaning bathrooms at McDonald's. Yet she was dead set against raising taxes, because "I intend to be a millionaire some day, and I don't want the government taking all my money."

Fred Fenton, Concord, CA:

I read about your experience in Sebastapol the day after meeting my first Birther. It was at a luncheon for a "Y" water aerobics class to which my wife and I belong. This gentleman, well-dressed and amiable, explained to someone sitting across from him that Obama should not even be President because he was not born in this country. The man to whom he was speaking referenced the President's birth certificate, to which the Birther replied the long delay in making it public was because the document had to be forged. In your essay, you raise the important question regarding why people think this way. Thomas Frank's argument in What's the Matter With Kansas, which you cite, is that right-wing forces harp on emotional issues like abortion to rile people up and confuse their thinking. That is undoubtedly true. Ed Bacon, rector of All Saints, Pasadena, sees a deeper, all-pervasive reason. Ed writes, "It has never been more painfully clear that the toxin of bigotry fuels everything, from the just-ended government shutdown in Washington, to the prison industrial complex, to voter suppression laws to the resistance to just immigration reform." I submit that bigotry, or prejudice toward other people because of fear or distrust, can only be overcome by a massive educational effort in the home and school by responsible adults who are themselves largely free of prejudice and motivated to do their part to achieve the Beloved Community of which Dr. King spoke and for which he gave his life.

Robert Halsey, Bibra Lake, West Australia:

I am an Australian who takes an active interest in what happens in the U.S. of A.I am neither Democrat nor Republican by persuasion. Each has good programs to serve the country. I earnestly believe that the underprivileged and poor in the U.S. have a right to all that Obamacare offers. But can you afford to give the poor what they deserve when you look at the huge debt you face? And it can only get worse. Your military and homeland budgets and massive financial scandals are bleeding the country white! And yet you dare not cut back a lot without becoming very vulnerable. You seem to be between a rock and a hard thing. And God isn't going to help! No point looking up at him. But don't look down on the poor and disadvantages. Where can you look for an answer? No one really knows, though thousands really do care. I wish you guys the very best for success.

David Carlin, Newport, RI:

Frank's book assumes that a vote for the "socialist" Democratic Party will be in the best economic interests of low-income people. A faulty assumption. Look at Detroit (and certain other big cities with lots of low-income people). The voters of Detroit consistently voted for the Democrats, and the city collapsed. Your clerk of Sebastopol is not being economically served by either party, and in the meantime the prosperous liberals of her home town no doubt look down on her as being rather a primitive. Who can be surprised that she dislikes the Democrats, the party of her snooty neighbors? And who can be surprised that she votes Republican, for at least the GOP, though it doesn't do much for her economic interests, pretends to care for her cultural interests. Your clerk is Tea Party material. And people like you are stunned to find that such people exist. Until you met her you apparently thought the USA was made up of very rich white people (bad), poor blacks and Hispanics (good), and benevolent-affluent liberals (good). Surprise, surprise! It's also made up of whites from the lower-middle classes, and these people increasingly feel -- and correctly feel -- that they are getting the shaft.

Frances McGregor, Berkeley, CA:

What a story! You wandered into a strange place, met this woman and assumed, being from Sebastopol, she would be a liberal. Sebastopol also has its redneck types, and it sounds to me like she listens to them. That you engaged with her at all is a compliment to your willingness to listen. You seem to feel sorry for her. I certainly do.

What do you think?

I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at revharrytcook@aol.com.

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