I just published a new issue of my newsletter:

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Dan Gillmor and Doc are blogging from Open Source Conference where Larry Lessig and Richard Stallman have given keynotes:

Ask a venture capitalist how much he’s willing to invest in new technology Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti won’t sign off on. The answer is zero, says Lessig.

We’re watching our freedom evaporating.

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Jeff Chapman points out an article and discussion at Geek.com about the Cyber Security Enhancement Act that passed the House of Reps on July 17 on a vote of 385-3, the lopsided majority just about ensuring that it was a vote based on expediency backed by ignorance. According to the article:

Before the Patriot Act passed, law enforcement needed probable cause and had to go through slow legal channels to get ISP information. After the passing of the Patriot Act, law enforcement could get ISP information more quickly if agents believed that it could be used to stop a dangerous situation. Now, under CSEA, law enforcement or any government entity (not specifically law enforcement agencies) can get subscriber information if agents/representatives of that group think it relates to a threat to national security

So any government agency could tap the Net without probable cause. No possibility of abuse there, eh? Why’d we need that stupid ol’ Constitution anyway when we can trust all those government agencies not to abuse their powers?

There’s more at Geek.com and at slashdot.

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David Isenberg’s new SMARTLetter has his must-read analysis of the “utter crisis” in telecommunications, as FCC Chair Michael “Son of” Powell calls it. Isenberg puts it in perspective. For example:

Let’s not call the current overcapacity situation a “bandwidth glut.” Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. The scarcity folks — the telephone companies (and others) whose business is based on the fact that communications capacity is scarce, therefore expensive — are controlling this “glut” dialog. Nobody talks about a glut of clean air or a glut of traffic-jam-free roads. No — to an end user it is great to have a lot of cheap >network capacity.

and

Everybody believes that fiber to the home is the end game of the Communications Revolution. It is not expensive, about US$600 to $3000 per home with today’s technology (and less in the future, and less with economies of massive scale). But just as Qwest’s 1997 transcontinental fiber build-out fatally maimed domestic long-distance (including Qwest itself), fiber to the home would kill the Incumbent Local Exchange Companies.

Therefore, fiber to the home is not coming until the Incumbent Local Exchange Companies become considerably weaker.

and

ATM and SONET are not the only technologies that are becoming obsolete even as they’re being deployed. There’s DSL and MMDS and 3G and WAP and a whole lot more. Technology marches on. And it is not as if Telecom executives made the wrong decisions — mostly they made the best decisions they could at the time.

The debt movie is playing at the Global Crossing theatre and the WorldCom playhouse — but soon it will be playing at a telephone company near you. Verizon and SBC and BellSouth will not be immune …

and

So if you hear that somebody is going to “enhance” the Internet — to make it more efficient, to Pay the Musicians, to Protect the Children, to thwart hackers, to enhance Homeland Security, to find Osama, or whatever — this is almost certainly propaganda from the powerful businesses that are threatened by the Internet. Remember that the Internet became the success it is today — and the threat that it is to existing telcos — because it is a Stupid Network, an end-to-end network.

This is the most coherent, understandable explanation I’ve read of what’s goin’ on technologically and economically.

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For a shorter, lighter-hearted expression of the Hermeneutical Dilemma, read Marek‘s digital rendition of Hamlet.

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AKMA has responded to my response to his thread on “differential hermeneutics.” (He’s also responded to email from Tom M.)

On the key question of whether there’s something special about Scripture, we’re not yet in agreement. And we may never be, thus providing an example of Differential Hermeneutics in Action. AKMA, and post-Modernism in general, wants to untie reading (= interpreting) from the meanings “behind” a text. In particular, the “right” interpretation is not the one that reconstitutes in the reader the author’s original intention. There are lots of good reasons for recognizing this rupture between what we understand and what the author meant, and when it comes to scriptural interpretation the reasons include the terrifying result of believing that you have the right interpretation; armed with a belief that I know what God meant, I may feel justified in wreaking destruction on those who disagree.

And yet, if there is such a thing as revelation (and I am required here to note that I don’t think that there is), doesn’t it have to mean that God is telling us something in a way that we can understand? And if revelation tells us something that we can understand, then isn’t it telling us what God thinks and feels — God’s intentions? I don’t see how you can exclude the possibility of understanding what God had in mind and still think there’s revelation. [1]

So, here I am about to engage in the hermeneutic act of trying to figure out what AKMA has in mind. I think AKMA thinks that if we say that a hermeneutics of revelation tries to get at what’s in God’s mind, it has to be an “integral hermeneutics” that assumes only one interpretation is right, thus leading to intolerance. But that doesn’t necessarily follow. Suppose we say that revelation expresses God’s meaning in a way that humans can understand but God’s meaning surpasses our simple understanding and overwhelms languagw. So, we are forced to engage our understanding together, through discussion and disagreement. Further, to speak in a way that humans can understand means to speak in way that can be reappropriated by each generation with its differences in culture and language; that’s why scripture has survived the ages.

Why do I insist on this to AKMA? Because we share ethical/political aims. We want to be inclusive, not intolerant. We want a way of sincerely embracing people who also trying to understand God from widely divergent starting points. We don’t want to slap people down and shut them up simply because they understand God differently. AKMA writes:

We’ll rely on people we trust, we’ll look back on what the ancients have taught us, we’ll try to help one another along, and we’ll try humbly to accept correction when people whom we respect suggest that we’ve got something important wrong.

What this doesn’t allow us is a stick with which to beat the annoying people who persist in promulgating erroneous interpretations; we can’t say, “That’s just not what it means!” (not in an absolute way). In response to mistaken interpretations, a differential hermeneutic would advise that we make as plain and persuasive a case for our interpretation as we possibly can, and let willful or foolish interpreters do their best.

If that’s all DH did, then every tolerant person would agree to it. But DH says more than this. (It has to, for otherwise DH is nothing but tolerance.) It says that we cannot read the author’s intentions:

Differential hermeneuts will, however, allow that different people will imagine [my emphasis] different authors, and there’ll be no way to pin a really real intention to a really real author and make from that a really final interpretation.

Granting the impossibility of knowing the real, final interpretation of the author’s intentions especially when it comes to God, there’s got to be more to interpreting than imagining, especially when it comes to scripture. If revelation is God speaking in a way that we can hear (and, by the way, can not hear or mis-hear), then there has to be more than what I as the reader bring to the party. That does not mean that there is a unitary meaning or a meaning that we foolish mortals can be confident enough is right that we can stop listening to others.

Earlier, AKMA explains the result that’s driving his line of thought, I believe:

I’m not reluctant to ascribe authorship of Scripture (in some sense) to God, but I refuse to exclude people who disagree with me on this from my account of hermeneutics.

… <big snip>

…”the Bible” already constitutes an interpretive decision that includes some people and excludes others; ascribing its authorship to God narrows the body of agreeable interpreters even further. And (as a differential hermeneutician) … I have to account for those people’s interpretations, too.

But I think AKMA doesn’t have to exclude non-believers from his account of hermeneutics; he just has to exclude them from people he thinks are capable of understanding what revelation says. How can you believe that revelation is God talking to us in a way that we can understand — which to me simply means believing in revelation — without excluding atheists from the body of “agreeable interpreters”? When I say that scripture was written by barbaric humans (stone the witches, kill the homosexuals) and has less revelatory power these days than Updike’s Rabbit series, AKMA ought to stop paying attention to what I say God meant by the book of Job [2]. You may still want to listen to me when I discourse about the history of Canaan or about Paul’s word usage patterns, but I have announced that I am not engaged in trying to hear what God is saying through scripture. You can still “account” for my interpretation — DH explains why people have different interpretations and gives us a way to try to find value in them. You just won’t count it for much. You will, however, keep in mind that all interpretation is situational and fallible, so you won’t tie me to a stake and gather bundles of wood to show me the error of my thinking.

Let me sum up (sorry for the length). AKMA writes:

I just don’t believe texts have “meaning” in any way that escapes our attributing meaning to them.

“Attribute” puts the bulk of the burden of interpreting on the reader; “imagine” puts all of the burden there. If we take “attribute” to mean “involves us” or “depends on us but not just on us,” then we get what I think is a clearer picture. Every act of understanding is situated in a specific person, language, culture, and history. But if understanding revelation consists of nothing but me throwing meaning at a text, then there is nothing left of revelation. It is indistinguishable from me reading the words formed in my bowl of alphabet soup. If, on the other hand, revelation is God speaking to us in a way that we can understand, it doesn’t mean that there is a unitary meaning and that those who don’t get it are simply wrong. The advantage of differential hermeneutics is that we can say that the differences among those who are trying to hear the word of God engender the conversation that is the way to hear what God is trying to say.

So let me do my own rephrasing of AKMA’s differential hermeneutics as I would apply it to scriptural interpretation: The way we humans can try to hear the word of God is by talking with one another. We aren’t arguing about who does a better job of inventing meanings for a text that is incapable of speaking for its author. We’re arguing about words written by God to speak to us — a voice we can hear, a voice that is there, although we can only hear it together and can only understand it imperfectly. Our conversation is aimed at hearing God’s intentions more clearly. If hearing His intentions is impossible, then revelation doesn’t speak and our conversation is mere chatter.

Two notes:

1. What I think is true of interpreting revelation I actually think is true of all acts of interpretation. I don’t think we are as cut off from the author’s intentions as AKMA seems to believe.

2. Perhaps we should leave room for atheist scriptural interpreters who preface every remark with, “Now, if there were a God, we can see in this passage that He would have meant…” and then proceed to explicate God’s word without believing it’s God’s. I’m sure there are examples of such. These people are worth reading. But they are only worth reading if the text they’re explicating is worth explicating, and it only has accidental and incidental value if the text isn’t God speaking in a way that we can understand.

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Mark Feldman points us to a collection of children’s art maintained by PaPa iNk, a non-profit he heads. Some beauty, not just cuteness.

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Gary Nexcerpt Stock passes along a fasinating article by Christopher Caldwell in the NY Press about the sweetheart deals that made W a rich man. But the most tantalizing bit is at the end where Caldwell speculates about what the WS Journal last week called “interesting Saudi connections on the finance side” with regard to who bought who bought W’s Harken shares. Caldwell suggests “the ex-president’s ne’er-do-well son appears to have been used by the Harken board as ‘Arab bait’.”

This story is only going to get bigger.

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AKMA continues his deeply important blogging about what he calls “integral” vs. “differential” hermeneutics. (It begins here, goes here with a response to Tom Matrullo, continues here with a response to my email, and goes here.)

I hesitate to try to characterize briefly the difference between the two hermeneutics, but I’m gonna anyway. Hermeneutics, usually explained as the study of interpretation, is actually the study of how we make sense of things, where “things” includes texts and the world. Integral hermeneutics thinks that to understand X is to see the simple, unambiguous, single meaning behind X; it is fundamentalism and literalism applied beyond the realm of scripture. Differential hermeneutics not only notices that there are many ways of understanding X but thinks that the best way to proceed is to pay attention to the differences among those interpretations. AKMA sides with the differentialists. (AKMA, if I got this wrong, set me straight!)

When AKMA first blogged about this, on July 10, it took me a while to muster a response, which I sent to him privately. I like his distinction and I also side with the differentialists. I wrote to AKMA with two aims. First, I wanted to know what he thought about what DH (differential hermeneutics) means for revelation. Is revelation a special type of truth-giving? If so, what does that do hermeneutics? Second, I suggested that AKMA still gave the sense (or was I merely projecting it?) that DH implies a failure: Too bad we can’t get at a unitary meaning, so we’ll have to settle for DH. Judaism, on the other hand, has taken DH for the past couple of thousand years anyway as quite positive. Judaism’s interpretations – that is, the Rabbi’s interpretations – are grounded by a text that’s taken to be revealed but not susceptible to a fundamenalist, literal reading; by a tradition that preserves the losing arguments; by a tradition of how to conduct an argument; and by an embedding of interpretation into practice since the resolution of arguments over interpretation determine how daily life will be conducted.

AKMA responded to my comments with his customary brilliance and gracefulness. Here’s one salient passage:

Differential hermeneutics, however, can locate revelation not in the text by itself, such that we’re left to assay the content of an unambiguous revelation that we can’t get at. Instead, differential hermeneutics can locate revelation in the shared practice of interpreting the Bible under the social, liturgical, communal, ethical conditions of participating in life under the Law, or under the Cross.

I’m not entirely comfortable with that, although I think there may be no practical difference in our positions. (As if I’m entitled to have a position in this conversation! Got to have standing before you can have a position.) I’m in the odd position of saying that I don’t think AKMA is giving enough weight to the scriptural text. His view of DH finds all of interpretation’s value in the play of differing interpretations and none in the meaning behind the text or the text itself. (Am I getting you wrong, AKMA?) So, we interpret revealed scripture and a restaurant menu differently because people encounter them “under different conditions, with a different stake in what they’re interpreting, and different goals in taking on the interpretation…” Notice that the difference is not that one text was written by God and the other by a person working in a restaurant.

But isn’t something crucial and real lost if you can’t acknowledge that difference? And if you’ll momentarily grant an atheistic Jew the standing to ask this: Why does AKMA seemingly shy away from saying scripture is special because it’s revealed? Is he worried that this puts us back into the game of thinking that there is a single, integral meaning behind the text, which in turn means that only one position is right and that we are justified in being intolerant of those who get the meaning wrong?

But you can believe that scripture is special without becoming an integral hermeneuticist. Suppose, for example, one were to believe that:

1. God is the author of scripture.
2. Scripture in some way stands for God’s beliefs and intentions.
3. The meaning of scripture overwhelms our mortal understanding.
4. Human understanding is always situated in a time, culture, community of practice, and language. Human understanding is only possible within such a situation.
5. Scripture is designed to maintain its meaning through multiple human situations, as human history unfolds.
6. Scripture needs a differential hermeneutics — a tradition of argument and discussion and the “proactive” preservation of differences.

Then you would be able to maintain that revelation reveals God’s truth without resorting to the simplistic integral hermeneutics that has led our species down such dark alleys. And, I believe, that that position sketches the Jewish stance towards scripture, although my belief here is strictly second-hand.

I very much like AKMA’s comments in his most recent blog about “performative criteria” — i.e., “testing truth-claims by living them out.” A right interpretation isn’t one that corresponds to the concealed meaning but one that enables you to live well. This is in response to Happy Tutor‘s blogging about post-Modernism as a way of avoiding responsibility. The Happy Toot writes:

Postmodernism is to be resisted not because it is false, nor because it can be refuted (you can’t refute an ideology), but because the moral type it produces is detestable.

My initial complain about post-Modernism agrees with this. POMO produces academics who use it destructively to position themselves as the smartest person in the room, showing why everyone else is still stuck in “the old metaphysics.” But POMO also captures a great truth, one that is liberating and is increasingly required for humans to continue inhabiting the planet. AKMA is a fearless partisan of the liberating force of POMO, and bless him for it.

What’s missing, I believe, is a sense of the joy of being situated. Yes, we are “stuck” in a culture and a history and that inevitably colors our view of the world. And, yes, there is no escaping being situated to achieve a superior view, free of cultural bias and prejudice, that can identify the One Truth. But if we stop there, we are left with the POMO the Tutor abhors. The other side of this coin, however, is that being situated is a joy and would be a blessing if there were a God. Further, within a situation we have ways of discussing and conversing that give some views more standing than others. (That’s why DH is important.) Further further, if there were revelation, it would provide a basic text that orients the conversation. Further further further, as Toot points out, practice and practicalities drive the important conversations, whether it’s soldiers arguing over tactics or Jews arguing over whether telephone wires count as demarcating a bounded community (i.e., whether they count as an erev). POMO untied from situation — and from the life of practice that constitutes a situation — does indeed suffer from the tyrannical relativism both the Tutor and AKMA abhor.

By the way, AKMA is using BlogAmp, a plugin to WinAmp that automatically generates a bloggable list of the tunes you’ve been playing in WinAmp. (I’d consider using it but I don’t use WinAmp.)

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David Farnham is keeping a blog about his service in Afghanistan. He writes: “One of these days I’ll get back to my life as a web architect, but for now I’m trying to get online and post whenever I can. Have a look.” In fact, yesterday’s post reads:

This is the last post I will be able to make for several weeks. After a month of waiting for a mission I have been assigned to a team and will be in-country for awhile. Despite the constraints and requirements, we are managing to do some good work down there and I look forward to playing a part. The danger is real, but I am confident in my abilities and encouraged by the ineptitude that has been displayed by our enemy so far.

At David’s home page (which is no longer up to date) you can read about his participation in the Army’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) School.

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