Author: ken

On Being a Pope and a Saint

It looks like former Popes are getting preferential treatment in becoming saints.  The religious reporter for The New York Times provided some interesting statistics.  Only five popes were canonized in the entire second millennium. Most of the dead popes recognized as saints were martyrs, canonized by acclaim in the first centuries of Christianity. Pius X, who died in 1914 and was canonized in 1954, was the first pope so honored in nearly 400 years.

“Now nearly every recent pope is on the canonization track. John Paul II beatified Pius IX, the 19th-century pope who is a polarizing figure because of his belief in the power of the papacy and his views on Judaism….  John Paul did a little ticket-balancing. He simultaneously beatified the popular John XXIII, who convened the liberalizing Second Vatican Council in 1962. The canonization process for Paul VI, who followed John XXIII, is underway, and there is a campaign to beatify John Paul I, who reigned a mere 33 days before his death in 1978.”

Looking at the evidence through the lens of fair employment practice, the statistics alone make a blatant case for discrimination.  What is going on here?

The Times reporter suggests that in this age of mass communication, the pope has become the face of Catholicism.  As such has to be not only the most powerful of the bishops but the most holy.  The pope, in effect, represents the brand.  He has to be flawless.

The Rev. Richard McBrien, a theology professor at Notre Dame, offers another suggestion:  canonizations may be a defense against criticism of popes.  He observed “the church would do better to canonize more saintly lay people — parents and grandparents and regular holy folk ‘with whom the overwhelming majority of Catholics can identify.’”

“The only one of the recent batch of papal candidates for canonization who is at all credible is John XXIII,” added Father McBrien.  (See “Pope Quiz: Is Every Pontiff a Saint?”)

Both explanations are plausible and probably correct.  I would add that in an age where so many priests have been accused of molesting their charges and colluding in covering up the evidence, there may well be a strong felt need to emphasize the virtue and holiness of others in the church, to rectify the balance.  There may be bad priests and derelict bishops, so the logic of this argument goes, but at the very top the church is perfect.

If so, it has the opposite effect, however, creating a split between “regular holy folk” and the ultra holy.  As with all splits, it’s not just that the ordinary practitioners are left out, the point that troubles Father McBrien, but everyone is then presented with an unrealistic standard, an unobtainable ideal.

The article points out that there is another problem with this trend:  it neglects the real job of the pope.  The theologian Karl Rahner observed that “if a pope turns out to be a wonderful Christian, that’s ‘a happy coincidence,’ just as when the president of the chess club is also a great player. It is not necessarily relevant, however, to the health of the chess club — or the church.”

Why Do They Say What They Say?

As Bankers lined up to testify in Washington last week about the credit crisis they obviously helped create, not one of them seemed prepared to apologize.  As The New York Times put it Wednesday, “corporate chieftains worry that apologies may be red meat for shareholder lawsuits.”

But that’s not the only reason.  Sydney Finkelstein, a management professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, said his research for a recent book showed that heads of Fortune 500 companies almost never apologize for poor performance.  Robert F. Bruner, dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, added: “they simply tend to have big egos that are not used to admitting mistakes.”

“You don’t get to the top of a large and highly competitive organization by debasement and humility,” he said.  (See, “For Bankers, Saying ‘Sorry’ Has Its Perils.”)

But they had to say something.  So, as expected, we heard various versions of “mistakes were made,” vague, abstract acknowledgements that things could have been handled better.

Paul Krugman wrote that two moments stood out for him in the testimony: “One was when Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase declared that a financial crisis is something that ‘happens every five to seven years. We shouldn’t be surprised.’  In short, stuff happens, and that’s just part of life.”

Krugman went on to note:  “Mr. Dimon’s cluelessness paled beside that of Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein, who compared the financial crisis to a hurricane nobody could have predicted.”  Blankfein’s comment also upset Phil Angelides, the commission’s chairman, who acidly commented that the financial debacle was made by men and women.  They are not “acts of god.”  (See, “Bankers Without a Clue.”)

So, were the bankers just protecting their egos, while trying to persuade the commission that new regulations were not needed?  Or, could it be that the bankers really do not understand what happened?

Almost certainly what they said is the usual mix of what they want to believe themselves and what they want us to believe.   The important point is that it would be a mistake for us to look to them to illuminate what happened.

As a Times editorial put it today:  “The commission must uncover what bankers, investors, government officials and other people in positions of power, past and present, would prefer not to say — or perhaps do not know or understand — about the crash and the bailouts.”  (See, “The Show Must Not Go On.”)  They will have to look into the facts.  And we will need to maintain our skepticism about their testimony.

On Being a Light Skinned “Negro”

A black graduate student at Harvard, Omar Wasow, dared to say it on The Root, and Slate dared to pick it up:  Harry Reid “was simply being honest about how voters react to skin color.”  What’s the fuss about? (See, “Was Harry Reid Right?”)

Good question!  The subject must evoke such anxiety among us that we are rendered unable to think about it sensibly.  Indeed, just to say “Negro” in public creates a startle reaction – if not a panic — causing us immediately to blame the person who scared us.

So we had a week of apologies, demands that Reid resign, dire predictions about his career, the balance of power in the Senate, etc. etc.  The papers, the blogs, the magazines were full of it.  No doubt this was all exacerbated by party politics, as the Republicans relentlessly search for anything to use against the Democrats.

But now the fuss is gradually dissipating.  Today’s New York Times may have finally put the issue to rest by noting that Reid’s words closely echoed Obama’s himself. (See, “In Reid’s Comments, Hints of Obama’s Own Words.”)

What can we learn from this?  Despite having elected a black president, we are far from a post-racial world.  Indeed, we are all so tense about the pervasive, daily racism that is part of our social fabric – and has been from the beginning of our country — that we imagine it everywhere, even where it is insignificant and relatively benign.

At one extreme, we can think about it as the symptom of a suppressed obsession.  At another, it’s like Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  If you have been through a war, as we all have been, with racial riots, lynchings, systemic injustice, oppression, and segregation, the memories of conflict do not simply fade away.  Neither do the suspicions and hatreds they   have given rise to over the generations.

It doesn’t take much to reactivate the trauma.

Can We Do it Right?

Profiling is how the mind works:  we fit things into categories automatically and unconsciously, the more efficiently to deal with them.  And we do this even before we recognize what they are – or who.

Evolution blessed us with this capacity to help us survive.  If we had to stop and think every time we faced a danger – or saw an opportunity – we  might not have made it as a species.  Other species have the same capacity, and that helps them to contend with each other and with us.

This is the origin of prejudice, a quick and dirty way of making sense of the world.  It comes up now again as we are trying to improve airport security in the aftermath of the “underpants bomber.”  Peter Beinart, blogging on The Daily Beast, warns us against the increasing clamor to subject Muslims – or Muslim sounding – travelers to extra scrutiny:

“Religious profiling, in reality, is often racial profiling. And racial profiling is not only ugly, but counterproductive. The reasons are simple. Airport officials have finite resources. The more they concentrate those resources on a profiled subset of the population, the less scrutiny everyone else gets. And the less scrutiny everyone else gets, the greater al Qaeda’s incentive to recruit terrorists who fall into that less-scrutinized category.” (See “Profiling Will Never Work.”)

That’s a good point, but it is also true that security guards probably can’t help being influenced by their instinctive tendency to profile the danger they feel they know.  Right now we are all on guard against the threat from the Middle East.  We can’t help it.

But evolution blessed us with a second gift:  consciousness.  That allows us to reconsider our instinctive reactions, discuss them with others, and arrive at more effective and adaptive responses.  That is, we can’t erase our initial responses, but we can stop ourselves from acting on them, and we can think carefully about better ways to respond.

Moreover, the same nervous system that evolved to perceive dangers before we actually recognized them, also alerts us to other signs.  We might pick up an unusual tone of voice, a shifty manner, a stare, or even far more subtle signs that indicate that something is amiss.  Sometimes that just leaves us with an odd sensation, a “funny feeling,” but we can be trained to take such sensations more seriously and probe into their source.

The point is that there is a wealth of information that can help us to grasp what is happening in front of our eyes, even when we can’t “see” it directly.  Racial profiling is just the blunt and crude tip of the unconscious reactions we have.  We can take it at face value and risk making things more dangerous for ourselves.  Or we can be smarter about it and safer.

Or Why We Need a Consumer Protection Agency for Banking

Usually businesses want to make it easier for consumers to buy things.  But it seems that Visa, the credit card company, has made it easier for themselves to charge more for the same transaction.  That makes it harder for us – but we might never know what’s happening.

Today’s New York Times discloses that: “When you sign a debit card receipt at a large retailer, the store pays your bank an average of 75 cents for every $100 spent, more than twice as much as when you punch in a four-digit code.” Apparently this information is in the fine print, but it took the magnifying glass of a Times’ reporter for us to see.

Visa thinks it doesn’t matter to the consumer, since the merchant pays the fee.  But, of course, we all do end up paying it, eventually, as it becomes part of the cost of doing business.

We could easily be encouraged to use our PIN codes to help keep costs down.  Not having read the fine print, however, we usually don’t know about our choice.  Indeed, it turns out there are incentives to sign our names instead: “’When you use your Visa card, you have a chance to win a trip to the Olympic Winter Games,’ a new Visa commercial promises.  The commercial does not explain the rules, but the fine print on Visa’s Web site does: nearly all Visa purchases are eligible — as long as the cardholder does not enter a PIN.”  (See, “How Visa, Using Card Fees, Dominates a Market.”)

We could just treat this is plain old marketing savvy, but it is more deceptive than that – and it relies on our unconscious trust that fees are fair, reasonable, and stable. It used to be that the debit card was just a way of transferring funds directly from your bank account to a merchant.  Unlike a credit card, you were not actually borrowing money.  But that distinction is long gone.  Inch by inch, day by day, the rules were changed.

And then there are other hidden fees that a gullible or ignorant public ends up paying.  “Some merchants are infuriated by a separate, larger fee, called interchange, that Visa makes them pay each time a debit or credit card is swiped. The fees, roughly 1 to 3 percent of each purchase, are forwarded to the cardholder’s bank to cover costs and promote the issuance of more Visa cards.”

“Interchange revenue has increased to $45 billion today, from $20 billion in 2002, driven in part by the surge in debit card use.  Some merchants say there should be no interchange fees on debit purchases, because the money comes directly out of a checking account and does not include the risks and losses associated with credit cards.”  But few merchants have the resources or the clout to fight Visa about these policies – and they inevitably pass on that cost to consumers:  “the National Retail Federation says the interchange fees cost households an average of $427 in 2008.”

I think we know that something like this is going on sight-unseen.  But without knowing the specifics, we just go along – and without federal oversight it will inevitably continue.