In Praise of Oubliance

It was some 20 years ago, through a combination of reading Alasdair MacIntyre and William Cavanaugh, that I came to realize how much the structures of modernity are hidden from us, how much the liberalism of modern nation-states disguises itself as a neutral mechanism for the pursuit of competing visions of the good life--if, indeed, there even is such a thing as a good life, on which liberalism purports to take no position, though of course it does. Liberalism created, or certainly made more acute and problematic, the categories of "secular" and "sacred" and in so doing pretended to the former state while also privatizing and attempting to control the latter. Thus the ringing declaration of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason: "Once, there was no 'secular'."

In light of Milbank, Cavanaugh, and MacIntyre, it became obvious to me that the idea of "religion" is also a modern construct designed, in part, to try to domesticate and control transcendence, and also to disguise the theological claims made by "secularists." Cavanaugh's article "A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: the Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State" was pivotal here in pulling the mask off and showing that the post-Reformation "religious" conflicts that devastated parts of Europe were, in fact, much more properly considered as the bloody birth of the nation-state. He would develop this argument in much greater detail in his extremely valuable 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. 

I mention all this to sketch the context for considering a new book by Andrea Frisch, Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh, 2015), 208pp.

About this book we are told:

This study argues that the political and legislative process of forgetting internal differences, undertaken in France after the civil wars of the sixteenth century, leads to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and the matter of history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation and generally associated with an increasingly modern sensibility, will nonetheless prove useful to the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism.

By juxtaposing representations of the French civil war past as they appear (and frequently overlap) in historiography and tragedy from 1550-1630, Andrea Frisch tracks changes in the ways in which history and tragedy sought to 'move' readers throughout the period of the wars and in their wake. The book shows that a shift from a politically (and martially) active reading of the past to a primarily affective one follows the imperative, so clear and urgent at the turn of the seventeenth century, to put an end to violent conflict. The emotions that neoclassical tragedy and absolutist historiography sought to elicit were intended above all to be shared, and thus a medium via which political and religious differences could be downplayed or forgotten. The book aims to illuminate some of the ways in which the experience of the wars of religion, as registered in tragedy and historiography, contributed to a restructuring of the ever-vital relationship between emotion and politics, and thereby to historicize the very concept of 'esmouvoir'.

The book begins by asking what difference the Edict of Nantes made to French historiography and history more generally--what, that is, was different after the edict called for the deliberate "forgetting" of the events that had taken place up to the start of Henri IV's reign: depuis le commencement du mois de mars mil cinq cens quatre vingtz cinq jusques à nostre avenement à la couronne. Thus the edict begins what Frisch calls a politics and a policy of oubliance, calling for a deliberate forgetting of the previous Catholic-Protestant conflict, which is to be regarded as estaincte et assoupie, comme de chose non advenue.

The author notes that the effect of a policy of oubliance was "overwhelmingly negative" on French theatre, literature, and other areas. She notes, further, that there were differences in how oubliance was understood theologically by Catholics and Calvinists.

From here much of her book becomes very narrowly focused on the effects of this policy in French theatre and literature. But to my mind there is room to consider the utility of something like a new edict of Nantes today in such seemingly intractable conflicts of Eastern Christian historical memory as the Union of Brest and the Pseudo-Sobor of Lviv of 1946, about which more another time.

Nationalism in Greece and Beyond

I have long been fascinated by the role of nationalism in shaping, and often (but not always) in perverting Christianity, especially in the East. It has, of course, become a rather commonplace lament in the East for more than a century that too much of Orthodoxy is too bound up with ethnophyletism. Though that problem in places is perhaps not as pronounced as it once was, it does still continue to bedevil the Christian East in more ways than one. A recent book looks at the politics of nationalism in an Hellenic context:  Rachel Tsang and Eric Taylor Woods, eds.,The Cultural Politics of Nationalism and Nation-Building: Ritual and Performance in the Forging of Nations (Routledge, 2013), 216pp.

About this book we are told:

Rituals and performances are a key theme in the study of nations and nationalism. With the aim of stimulating further research in this area, this book explores, debates and evaluates the role of rituals and performances in the emergence, persistence and transformation of nations, nationalisms and national identity.
The chapters comprising this book investigate a diverse array of contemporary and historical phenomena relating to the symbolic life of nations, from the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan to the Louvre in France, written by an interdisciplinary cast of world-renowned and up-and-coming scholars. Each of the contributors has been encouraged to think about how his or her particular approach and methods relates to the others. This has given rise to several recurring debates and themes running through the book over how researchers ought to approach rituals and performances and how they might best be studied.
The Cultural Politics of Nationalism and Nation-Building will appeal to students and scholars of ethnicity and nationalism, sociology, political science, anthropology, cultural studies, performance studies, art history and architecture.

The publisher also helpfully provides a table of contents:

1. Ritual and performance in the study of nations and nationalism Eric Taylor Woods and Rachel Tsang PART I: APPROACHES 2. The rites of nations: elites, masses and the re-enactment of the ‘national past’ Anthony D. Smith 3. National holiday commemorations: the view from below John E. Fox 4. Time-bubbles of nationalism: dynamics of solidarity ritual in lived time Randall Collins 5. Competition as ritual and the legitimation of the liberal nation-state Jonathan Hearn PART II: APPLICATIONS 6. Ritual in the early Louvre Museum Carol Duncan 7. Inventing or reviving the Greek ideal? Forging the regeneration of the French nation in the art of Paul Cézanne after the Franco-Prussian War Athena S. Leoussi 8. The nation’s shrine": conflict and commemoration at Yasukuni, modern Japan’s shrine to the war dead John Breen 9. Collective Action and National Identity: The Rally to Restore Sanity Rachel D. Hutchins 10. Britons in Maoriland: narratives of identity during the 1901 Royal visit to New Zealand Christopher McDonald

The Politics of Iconoclasm and the Modernity of the Nation-State

A quarter-century ago now, Alasdair MacIntyre, widely recognized as the most influential moral philosopher of the last half-century, wrote that "no coherent political imagination is any longer possible for those condemned to inhabit, and to think and act in terms of the modernity of the twentieth-century nation-state." For that nation-state has been created by, and in the image of, the liberalism of the so-called Enlightenment and it has such monopolistic powers that it obviates all alternatives, leading to the "imaginative sterility of the modern state," which can only be resisted and outwitted through the creation of new local forms of community beyond the state's reach and imaginative power, a power that is such that it arouses in the hearts and minds of millions the willingness to kill themselves on its behalf, as MacIntyre puts it in a famous passage frequently quoted:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf… [I]it is like being asked to die for the telephone company ("Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats," published in 1988 and republished in 2006 in The Tasks of Philosophy: Volume 1: Selected Essays).

This is not, of course, some kind of "conservative" rant against "big government" or the "welfare state" or some kind of "liberal" rant against "militarism." MacIntyre argues that all politics is flawed today: "Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition" (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory).

These thoughts of MacIntyre, who has done more to shape my own thinking about politics and philosophy than anyone (but whose political arguments are not without problems, as this very perceptive essay carefully shows), came back to me recently as I just finished reading a compelling and fascinating new book: James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-Breaking in Christianity and Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2013), 288pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

From sixteenth-century Geneva to urban developments in Mecca today, The Politics of Iconoclasm offers a bold and original history of image-breaking and of the culture of violence and its paradoxical roots in the desire for renewal. Examining these dynamics of nationhood, technology, destruction and memory, a historical journey is described in which the temple is razed and replaced by the machine.

This is a fascinating book whose central thesis is that any outbreak of iconoclasm--whether in Calvinist Geneva, Wahhabist Afghanistan, revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, or the Balkans in the 1990s--is always the prelude to political reconfigurations and the emergence of a new state or new state actors. The theological arguments about icons and iconoclasm are in fact secondary in this book: "a study of iconoclasm must examine such acts as political statements against authority as much as theological statements against the mediation of divine beauty" (12). He goes on to note that in many cases it is difficult if not impossible to isolate one single cause of, or reason for, iconoclasm, but that it is often motivated by a tangle of theo-political reasons. In, e.g., Geneva of the sixteenth century, "beginning with the attack on Geneva's St. Pierre Cathedral in 1535," it was then, and remains today among historians, difficult to know "whether Calvinist iconoclasm had primarily religious or political motives" (14).

This mention of the cathedral of St. Pierre brought back a powerful memory for me. I was in Geneva in 1992 as a freshman undergraduate attending a meeting of the World Council of Churches, and I wandered over one afternoon to the cathedral to see it. At that time, I had never heard of "iconoclasm" and knew nothing about it in its Byzantine expressions; my ignorance of Calvinism was only slightly less--though I had heard hoary tales about Calvinists in Scotland from my Glaswegian grandmother, who thought them rather insufferable and who used to suffer their taunts at being a "crypto-papist" for belonging to the Scottish Episcopal Church (which has rarely if ever been a hotbed of "high" church practices comparable to the so-called Anglo-Catholics). I had heard, too, of how the churches of the continental Reformation, particularly in Switzerland, were usually much more spartan inside than the relatively "high" Anglican church of my upbringing with its wonderful carved rood-screen, neo-Gothic structures, stained glass windows, and frescos and mosaics covering virtually every inch of wall space. Having come from such a sensually rich parish, nothing prepared me for the shock of the cathedral in Geneva: I found it an acutely cold and barren place for reasons I could scarcely articulate then. Indeed, I have never, before or since, been in such a frigid, vacuous building, though I have been in many Protestant churches of various traditions. The Geneva cathedral felt as though there remained in her cold, lapidary walls a palpable memory of the "iconographic violence" done to them and the rest of the building.There was indeed a very strong sense of an "absent presence" so to speak. I could not wait to leave the building, and could not then, nor certainly now, understand how anyone could find such a place a warm, inviting, or remotely compelling place to worship. I know that one can worship God in a forest, in Auschwitz or the Gulag, in jail, or in much more modest surroundings than, say, the Vatican basilica or Hagia Sophia or Westminster Abbey or Chartres, but why would one want to? If, to use the familiar line from Dostoevsky, "beauty will save the world," then the house of God should be as beautiful as possible.

But let me not lapse here into sermonizing. Let me instead commend this book that insightfully traces the complex relations between Church and state--or, better, between "religion" and "politics"--in various times and places. It is an important book and deserves a place in courses not only on iconoclasm, but also political theology, and art history. If time permits, I will say more about Noyes' book in the weeks ahead as I am preparing a public lecture on iconoclasm.

On "Territory," "Canonical" and Otherwise

For many years now, even before finishing my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, I lamented the lack of serious attention being paid to the often polemical and always tendentious concept of "canonical territory" being bandied about in Eastern Europe, chiefly (and incoherently) by the Russian Orthodox Church. In a globalized world, it seems to me, the geographic imaginary behind the ancient canons must be seriously re-thought. I have long thought that what we needed was not merely an examination of the canons in light of contemporary geopolitical realities, but a deeper study of the whole notion of territory, sovereignty, and how and why, if at all, we should accept that the boundaries of the modern nation-state are necessarily coterminous with those of any so-called autocephalous church.

Set for release later this month is a book that sounds as if it will pick up at least part of this challenge: Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 512pp.

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition?

           

The Birth of Territory provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

American Idol Indeed

I have been reading William Cavanaugh for over fifteen years now. His 1995 article "'A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House': the Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State" began sketching out his thinking--and my consequent re-thinking--of the relationship between "religion" and the state in the modern West. There he began to build the case that the so-called Wars of Religion were not, in fact, about "religion" but were the bloody birth-pangs of the modern state. These are arguments he would amplify greatly in his 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, published by Oxford University Press. (This latter book is being reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in the fall.)

In the article, and then especially in the book, he has convincingly demonstrated that one of the founding myths of modernity--viz., that the state was necessarily founded in Europe (and later in North America) to keep Christians from killing one another in the aftermath of the Reformation--is rubbish. In the book he amasses evidence aplenty to support this thesis, and I will not reiterate that evidence here, instead strongly encouraging readers to buy the book and discover for themselves.

One of the many useful things about the book is that Cavanaugh does not deny that self-identified "religious" people sometimes use violence against one another, and against other non-religious actors; nor does he engage in the usual "apologetics" whereby such actions are dismissed as the unrepresentative antics of a fanatical fringe. What makes Cavanaugh's book so important is that he shows that the very creation of the categories of "religion" and "politics" or "secular" and "sacred" are tendentious attempts by the modern state to justify its existence, and especially its monopoly on violence, and to privatize "religion" while disguising the fact that the state itself makes certain transcendent metaphysical and "theological" claims. (Much of this argument is, of course, reliant upon, e.g., John Milbank and Alasdair MacIntyre.) In other words, it is impossible to speak of pure motives as though the sacred and secular were discrete and separable. The suicide bomber flying planes into buildings is doing so not only because of his understanding of a religious text ostensibly tells him to do so, but also because he has political goals in mind: to see a people, their economy, and ultimately the state itself mortally wounded and thereby ripe for conquest by another polity.

This pseudo-sacral nature of the state, with its covert theology, is the object of analysis in Cavanaugh's most recent book: Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Eerdmans, 2011), v+200pp.

This is, in parts, an extremely important book for Eastern Christians to read, though I fear most will not do so. For the modern history of Eastern Christianity, especially in Europe and especially since the end of the eighteenth century, is inseparable from various nationalistic and ethno-phyletistic movements. For too many Eastern Christians--Eastern Catholics as well as Orthodox--nationalist aspirations were kept alive during the Soviet period by and in the Churches, which in some cases functioned as surrogate "states" for those who had none in the Soviet Union. (This is true for some Western Christians who also fell under Soviet domination.)

Cavanaugh's arguments are important for both Eastern and Western Christians alike, and they are stated with the greatest cogency in the introduction and first two chapters of the book, which is really an anthology of articles disguised as a monograph. Several of the chapters fit only loosely with the book and, in my estimation, constitute something of a distraction from his very important main thesis.

Cavanaugh opens by declaring that "I don't believe that the state can be understood without theology. Carl Schmitt was right to say that all modern concepts of the state are secularized theological concepts if by 'secularized' one means 'covert'" (3). Cavanaugh will go on to note that while the "separation of church and state" can be accepted "as a liberation of the state from the wielding of coercive power, I nevertheless reject the separation of 'religion' from 'politics'" (4). It is simply impossible, Cavanaugh says, "that Christianity belongs to some special, nonempirical realm of 'religion' cordoned off from some other essentially distinct realm of human behavior called 'politics'" (4). He rejects this distinction for several reasons, not least because the relevant history shows it is false: it is a distinction we find invented in the West only in the last 400 years or so. Here a key person to read is John Bossy: Christianity in the West 1400-1700. Bossy's book is
a rollicking good historical revision of much of what we have taken for granted about Reformation and post-Reformation Christianity in the West.

Cavanaugh argues that those who think we can separate 'religion' from 'politics' end up smuggling the former back in under the disguise of the latter. This is a process he calls (borrowing Bossy's terminology) the "migration of the holy." What we once regarded as holy--viz., Christ's body in the Eucharist and the Church, understood together as Henri de Lubac showed--is no longer seen as such by more and more people today: on this, I would say, one must also read Charles Taylor's massive A Secular Age. Instead, what is increasingly regarded as holy, that for which we are willing to lay down our very lives, is precisely the modern nation-state: it, today, is regarded as holy; it, today, has become our biggest idol demanding our biggest sacrifice. How many Christians in North America are willing to kill in the name of their faith? Thankfully almost none. But how many of them are willing and ready to kill in the name of their country, and what does that startling fact tell us about Christianity today and the power--the imaginative power above all--of the modern state?

Cavanaugh's second chapter is the heart of the book. Here he argues that the nation-state is not the keeper of the common good. Making this argument requires dealing at the outset with some prominent Roman Catholic theologians who have attempted to argue that today the pursuit of the common good requires supporting the modern state. The chief person here is Charles Curran. Cavanaugh makes short work of him and spends the rest of the chapter demonstrating "the case against seeing the state as the promoter and protector of the common good" (8). He does this in significant measure by tracing the origins--philosophical, terminological, theological, sociological--of the institution of the modern state, whose roots are undoubtedly prepared "in the medieval period." Though he does not cite her, much of Cavanaugh's argument here has striking parallels to Jean Bethke Elshtain's recent Gifford Lectures:  Sovereignty: God, State, and Self,  
another very important recent contribution toward understanding the historical roots of the state's insistence on it having "sovereignty," a notion Cavanaugh briefly treats here through a discussion of Jean Bodin. This notion of the sovereign individual, and the sovereign state, are both contrary to sound Christian anthropology--a point Cavanaugh does not really develop enough.  He also does not treat the fact that the idea of sovereignty has been hugely influential in ecclesiology in the East (in its debates about "autocephaly") and in the West (in its debates, before, during, and after Vatican I, about the jurisdiction of the "sovereign pontiff," the bishop of Rome: a key person to see here is Hermann Pottmeyer; in the background, of course, is Joseph de Maistre).

While not romanticizing the modern period, nor demonizing the modern state, Cavanaugh nonetheless presents some startling ideas and facts, chief among which is that the engine that drives all state growth in every form everywhere is war: in the U.S. he says, "all but five cabinet departments and the majority of smaller federal agencies have come into being during wartime" (27, here citing Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State). We have, of course, recent evidence of this in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, now one of the largest federal bureaucracies extant. In the ongoing Congressional budget battles, nobody is talking about scaling back this department or "defense" spending. And that, Cavanaugh suggests, should not surprise us for war gives an overarching purpose or telos to the state that it otherwise deliberately if impossibly refuses to claim explicitly. (Well do I recall here my Glaswegian grandparents saying to me that the one thing they most remembered about living through World War II in Great Britain was "how united we all were." As soon as the war was over, that vanished, much to their regret--and that of many others, apparently.)

Cavanaugh notes that the nineteenth century sees the fusion of the nation with the state in the West. He has a fascinating discussion about modern nationalism as it is understood by various scholars, noting, e.g., that the very idea or "imaginary" of the nation only comes about after the idea of the state has been conceived: "nations are only impossible once states have been conceived" (34). Here he has an apt quote from the Italian patriot Massimo d'Azeglio after the creation of Italy: "We have made Italy; now we have to make Italians." This idea is crying out for critical application and empirical verification in the Christian East. I am thinking primarily of Ukraine--beyond what important work has been done already.

The problem with nationalism, and with the obeisance we give to the nation-state today, is that we make of it an idol, honoring it as we should not, and expecting of it things it cannot properly give: "the longing for true communion that Christians recognize at the heart of any truly common life is transferred onto the nation-state" (42). This is what we call idolatry. In response to this, Cavanaugh says that the "urgent task of the Church...is to demystify the nation-state and treat it like the telephone company"--that is, as the mere bureaucratic purveyor of certain goods and services, nothing more or less.

How can the Church do that? This is the burden of his next chapter: "From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space." Here Cavanaugh argues that the modern state is good at pretending to meet our "longing for unity...[and] fear that diversity will produce conflict and tear the body politic apart" (47). The modern liberal state, especially following Hobbes, claims to be in favor of diversity, to permit a variety of ends to be pursued, but it is secretly threatened by that diversity: "the nation-state needs the constant crisis of pluralism in order to enact the unum" (53). Cavanaugh does not, as he notes, have a lot of answers as to how we can outwit such a dynamic on the part of the state, but he does want--as he says earlier--to "argue for a more radical pluralism...[and] complex political space [that] would privilege local forms of community, but...would also connect them in translocal networks of connectivity" (4). He does not detail the practical outworkings of all this, but leaves it to readers to undertake the fascinating if difficult work of thinking through such practices.

One of the ways Christians can do that, he does argue (and not entirely adequately or with the length and depth I thought necessary) is through not merely the creation of more local forms of community, but also through better ecclesiology and liturgiology. It is in his sixth chapter, "The Liturgies of the Church and State" where he again cites (as he did earlier) John Zizioulas's landmark work Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Cavanaugh's chapter, however, resorts to vacuous sloganeering at points as, e.g., when he says that "we must look with a critical eye on liturgies that compete for our allegiance" (122). Here he has in mind "liturgies" of the state or other non-ecclesial organizations, but in advocating for a more critical evaluation of liturgy, I think he missed a crucial opportunity to turn a critical eye on Roman liturgy today, and how precisely it fails to do what Cavanaugh rightfully thinks good liturgy must do. In saying this, I have in mind the very important criticism of Catherine Pickstock--whose work Cavanaugh surely knows, not least because they've been published together--first articulated in a 1997 article in New Blackfriars, "A Short Essay on the Reform of the Liturgy" and expanded in her breathtaking work After Writing: On the Liturgical Cosummation of Philosophy.  In that 1997 essay, she argued that

 the Vatican II reforms of the mediaeval Roman Rite...failed to challenge those structures of the modem secular world which are wholly inimical to liturgical purpose: those structures, indeed, which perpetuate a separation of everyday life from liturgical enactment (56).

Pickstock hastens to add that her criticisms are not some kind of revanchist horror at modern liturgics. (She is, after all, Anglican and not a part of, say, the SSPX.) Rather they

issue from a belief that its revisions were simply not radical enough. A successful liturgical revision would have to involve a revolutionary re-invention of language and practice which would challenge the structures of our modern world, and only thereby restore real language and action as liturgy (56-57).

She picks this up again in her concluding paragraph, where she says that what we need is to

devise a liturgy that refused to be enculturated in our modern habits of thought and speech. Such enculturation, one would have to realise, can only be appropriate for a society that is itself, as a whole, subordinate to liturgical offering. But...our society... would have not only to register internally the need ‘to pray that there might be prayer’--by restoring a 1iturgical ‘stammer’, and oral spontaneity and ‘confusion’--but also the need to pray that we again begin to live, to speak, to associate, in a liturgical, which is to say truly human and creaturely fashion. It would have more actively to challenge us through the shock of a defamiliarizing language, to live only to worship, and to be in community only as recipients of the gift of the body of Christ (64).

Only such liturgy (which, I have argued elsewhere, can be found today in the Byzantine tradition) could remind us that the nation-state is not our true home: we have here no lasting city.

William Cavanaugh's Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church has reminded us of this crucial idea not through liturgy but through deeply challenging, and wholly welcome, argumentation, only some of which we have sampled here. I warmly recommend this book to all who are interested in these vital ideas and hope it receives the hearing it deserves.