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Testifying against theological imagination

The following is a tangential contribution to the conversations around topics of gender, theology, and ontology (and for those on Facebook see the conversations at The Theology Studio group).  I typically don’t have the intellectual resources to fully engage in the critique of ideas on their own terms so I offer the following as a testimony against a particular theological formation.

I am sometimes at a loss in how to respond towards people wanting ‘proof’ that their theology/theory is misguided or dangerous.  When it comes to the current conversation around the role of theology as a practice in-and-for-the-church, with its potentially self-authorizing ‘ontology’ I am coming to see that my most incisive response is one of personal testimony.  So if you have interest in this conversation (and I think it is an important one) or just want to do some online lurking then bear me out.

Continue reading “Testifying against theological imagination” →

Why should I hope in the LORD any longer?

Jeremy over at AUFS has written an important post on abuse and theodicy.  I found the piece moving on a number of levels.  First, it is rare to find such a short post packed with equal parts confession and critique.  It is both moving and forceful.  Second, it picks up an weaves a number of threads that I find myself currently tangled in.

The post is in part a reflection of Jeremy’s clinical internship in psychology.  More specifically, it is an engagement with the tragedy, pervasiveness, and damage of childhood sexual abuse.  The post then moves towards to an engagement of how theologians could possibly respond to such a reality.

For this Jeremy sets two broad poles.  There is either the ‘psychotic’ response of somehow saying this is all part of God’s plan.  Or there is a broadly ‘process-oriented’ view that conceives God as a non-coercive reality and places the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of humanity.  The first view is a clearly horrific and almost always (or ultimately) damaging articulation on a number of levels.  The second view helps avoid some of the former’s inadequacies (to put it mildly) but is pushed and viewed itself as being too ‘convenient’ and a ‘cheap way’ of avoiding the question of such a God and such a reality.

As if Jeremy’s concise post was not insightful enough the comment thread bore out a range of responses to further thicken the engagement (with some developing and some falling into the initial account).  As I mentioned above, I am writing this now because this is both a practical and intellectual question for me that is indeed pressing.  So what follows is simply an attempt at articulating what I am already doing and thinking so it might further challenged or developed.

First I will begin with my ‘practical theology’.  In the last two years I have been increasingly influenced by aspects of death-of-god theology and more recently process theology.  Academically I consider myself an expert in neither areas.  However, the result of this formation has, perhaps surprisingly, made one its greatest impacts in how I offer pastoral care.  I have become keenly sensitive in how any forms of theodicy enter my own expressions of care.  This has been helpful, and I have posted briefly about it before.  The greatest difficulty in this has been trying to respond well when people are looking to me to console them with a particular notion of God (a God that might feel good in the moment but will come back with vengeance if followed too far), or when a well-meaning visitor is also there and invokes such theologies.  I try and return the conversation to the strengths and support that I see manifest and while I am naturally a rabid ‘meaning-maker’ I refrain from doing so in that context.

But then I pray for them.  I pray.  I don’t know.  I guess I pray like I lead the congregation in prayer on Sunday.  I don’t really know what I am doing.  The intentional part is one of naming, using language to vocalize and externalize particular realities; to put them out there before us, to have to sit with them.  And then it is asking and seeking.  I don’t know, I just do this.  I hope.  But this implies a theology of course.  Just maybe there is a God who can intervene but then what does that tell me . . .  And so theology runs aground and perhaps prayer is obscene.  It definitely feels that way at times.  It can be therapeutic but would it loose its magic if I named it as such?

I think prayer can remain viable but I am hesitant to let it slip into what I consider a vacuous liberalizing of it, but why would I be hesitant?  If prayer is powerful, but perhaps not for the reasons I once thought it was, then should I not embrace and explore that differing power?  But again lingering, what if God is listening . . . but then immediately after . . . so goddammit God has been listening?!  I am hesitant and fearful about talking about God to my three year old, about praying with him.  We do give thanks (but again there is lingering here).  And I do try and invoke blessings.  To prayers that are involuntarily on my lips are God dammit and God bless ’em.

The second half of my engagement with this post was regarding the related point of my intellectual development.  I have been recently influenced by the process theology of Catherine Keller and some of the related orientation of Dan Barber (also a contributor at AUFS).  The major shift here is thinking about what it means to try and keep nothing out of play, nothing unaffected.  In this way I cannot hide an ideological/idolatrous ‘core’ that will determine in advance how I define and position people, groups, and situations around me.  So, because of my profession and confession does this model, if followed through on, end in becoming a convenient or cheap way of avoiding the question of God and suffering?  I think it depends.  It does in some ways avoid the question.  Or for me, at present, it rejects the question in most of the terms.  But this orientation has given me a renewed understanding of bearing with the chaos (as Keller, and Barber, put it).  But there is certainly no immediate payoff.  It has not made me more effective.  It does not make me more hopeful (but maybe not less hopeful either).  At present it simply helps orient me to a tradition that has power, and could be more constructively powerful.  But things are still at play with me.  I hope it does not lead me away from the church.  There is much strength in the tradition I work within.  I also support me family with it.  But I do hope I follow through on seeing and proclaiming a good news of life.

Around the time of reading Jeremy’s post I came across a little referenced passage in 2 Kings 6.  Famine was severe.  Pigeon shit had a monetary trade value.  The king of Israel hears a story of a women who was convinced by another woman to cook and eat her son and that the next day the other woman would cook her own son.  The first woman agrees and they eat her son but the next day the other woman (who suggested the plan) does not offer her son as a meal.  The king tears his clothes and runs murderously out towards the Elisha the prophet.  After all, the prophets at this time in the Bible are the ‘rain-makers’.  The king says succinctly, “This trouble is from the Lord! Why should I hope in the Lord any longer?”

Elisha here is the only theologian who can respond in this situation.  And he gives no refutation for this scenario.  He seeks to save his own life when the king approaches him.  He gives a ‘miraculous’ bounty the next day (to refute that such a miracle is not possible) but he apparently cannot resurrect the already consumed child (he did resurrect a child in 2 Kgs 4) nor does he mention him.  This strikes me as the sort of bind any theology is going to find itself in with respect to suffering.  Turning to Job he does not escape it either, but at least he does provide a resource and hope for engagement in our bondage (though the text of course includes its own problematics in all this).

I would like to have a better conclusion to all this, but it seems that is part of the problem so I will leave it at that for now.

More than meaning

Rene Girard’s basic thesis is well known; human culture arose out of the resolution of mimetic desire. By nature we desire what is desired by others, this leads to conflict and ultimately murder. Institutions and rituals arise out of this act. Girard sees the Gospel texts of the New Testament as a revolutionary exposing of this basic mechanism. However, the church has continued to offer a sacrificial reading of the Gospel which undermines its revelatory potential.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is an excellent and accessible overview of his thought. What I found interesting was his conclusion. At the end of the book Girard suggests we suffer most basically from a lack of meaning. I find this to be a bit dissonant from much of his work. Perhaps he is was still too heavily influenced by the existential angst that seemed to exist in the middle of the twentieth century but I expected him to move in a much more ‘material’ direction in his conclusion. Here are some of his parting lines,

“What is important above all is to realize that there are no recipes; there is no pharmakon anymore, not even a Marxist or a psychoanalytic one. Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured – our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
. . .
I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere ‘effect’ as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth. But I do not know how to speak about these matters. I can only approach texts and institutions, and relating them to one another seems to me to throw light in every direction.
. . .
Present-day thought is leading us in the direction of the valley of death, and it is cataloguing the bones one by one. All of us are in this valley but it is up to us to resuscitate meaning by relating all the [Judeo-Christian] texts to one another without exception, rather than stopping at just a few of them. All the issues of ‘psychological health’ seem to me to take second place to a much greater issue – that of meaning which is being lost or threatened on all sides but simply awaits the breath of the Spirit to be reborn.”

At which point Girard concludes by quoting Ezekiel 37’s vision of the valley of dry bones.

To be clear, I find this conclusion hugely attractive.  I am sucker meaning, as in meaning of life meaning, but when hearing something so well developed as with Girard I can’t help that the truth which fends off ‘madness and death’ is something other than ‘meaning’.  And here I have to default to a confessional position and introduce some notion of worship.  For all his religious language and even examination of idolatry Girard does not really address the a non-sacrificial sense of worship.  In this way I take him to be broadly in line with the death-of-God thinkers who believe we must go far enough to situate the presence and Spirit of God in and only in and only as the life-giving community.  Here again, I am deeply attracted.  But for the life of me I just don’t know who these people are that believe ‘in the power of humanity’.  I don’t see it in myself or much around me.  I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating sense but more in a I-have-been-banging-my-head-against-a-wall-for-over-a-decade-trying-to-understand-life-giving-personal-and-social-change way.  I just don’t see it to be honest.  So we offer works of worship that at our end must be purged of idolatries (here Girard, and Zizek for that matter, are right) but beyond that, hell if I know.

If you want to go the route of ‘meaning’ don’t look to Girard, the Coen brothers do it much better.

Beginning with It: Another turn in my account of reading

Like any good creation story the origin of my life as a reader holds a certain veil of mystery.  Probe too much and things have difficulty holding together but try and deny the story and there will suddenly be a glaring void in understanding how we got here.  There was something before but . . . what?  There is something before the beginning.  There always will be.  This does not make the creation story any less of a beginning.  It is a point of orientation, a framework perhaps, something we look around at, and in retrospect, have come to inhabit (even if just for a time).

When I first considered reflecting on the books that have significantly influenced not only who I am but simply how I became a reader I thought of starting in young adulthood when I started reading seriously.  However, this idea started pulling my memories back further.  I did not push my remembering.  I did not demand that it reclaim every inch of land or reconstruct every possible scenario.  I don’t remember how I actually learned to read.  Perhaps one day I will remember, but right now I don’t.  And perhaps like too many occasions my remembering will be another forced meaning held hostage by what I want.  I don’t know that I can escape that process but I would also rather not enable it further.  Rather, my remembering came  to rest quite quickly on one particular event.  It kept coming to mind, I mean It kept coming to mind.  Stephen King’s It.  I don’t know how I heard about It and I don’t know how I got my hands on It in small rural Mennonite community in grade 6 or 7.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this series I plan on simply recollecting my experiences.  I am trusting in the simple idea that what has remained impacting now is what should first be attended to.  So what follows may be flawed with factual inaccuracies.  Hell, it might not even have been It that I read . . . but that is the association I know have.

And what can I say.  I love that my mind has now and often in the past recalled, even if briefly, the bizarre memory of this work of horror/suspense as commencing something or beginning it.  I can barely keep from referencing and playing on this most simple, foundational, and entirely ambiguous point of reference.  It is entirely contextual, entirely relational.  It is the extension of the figure in definite demarcation.  It is the useless of groping at a reference to something entirely unknown but still present.  But can my first formative reading experience have already established a definitive trajectory?  Is my trajectory able to reverse-engineer all my interests back on that book?  I don’t care.  My reading began with it and is still seeking it and all the while I am creating it.

Turning circles: An account of reading

Unlike Marilynne Robinson I did not read books as a child.  Between learning to read (which I do not remember) and actually reading for enjoyment (which happened sometime around 16 years of age) I can remember reading one book.  I am sure if I forced myself, I could remember more (and dammit I just have, but I digress).  I remember reading one book and it was somewhere around grade 7.  It was a long book with a short title; Stephen King’s It.  I remember a spider.  I remember one girl with several boys (and there being ‘a scene of sexuality’).  But mostly I remember a spider, a big one, I think.  In any event I did not read much.  I remember hearing about and knowing kids that would  read books at any and every opportunity.  I did not envy them or despise them, I just didn’t care.

I was not a reader then but I am a reader now.  If I was asked to characterize one element of continuity before and after that shift I would say it was the element of exploration.  I would guess that most people consider themselves as having an exploring spirit (with varying degrees of prominence and forms).  I don’t think I am unique in having a sense of exploration only that it strikes me as what facilitated my openness to reading.  I should note that one of the books that I can identify as marking a shift towards becoming a reader is Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

And that was it.  I fell almost intuitively into stories and content that were not finished, that did not actually end.  In theology it was mysticism and not systematics.  In literature it was Doestoevsky and not Dickens.  In psychology it was the unconscious and not behaviour.  These books left me turning inward and outward, sometimes into knots, sometimes it just left of exhausted in face of the expanse.  There was a time I would have articulated this preference as judgment (clearly I have taken the high road!).  I say it now only as confession.  I have been drawn to works that explore what interests me and what interests me is the process of human experience and meaning.  And in the last almost 20 years I have simply wanted to forge ahead not worrying about data collection or classification.  I simply wanted to stay on the trail of someone or something, and the pace felt feverish at times and I was always running on a shoestring of resources.

In any event I thought that I would pause at least for a moment and align the authors and texts that have been my most valued guides or at least my most rewarding terrain.  I hope to give a simple overlay of these works with my life.  I don’t know if this will yield any insights but even in the midst of invigorating pursuits it might be prudent to gain bearings enough to ensure I am not turning circles in a forest.  Though if this is the case and my circles are expanding I could claim no better advance than through such thoroughness.

What comes will be simply an account of recollection.  I will trust that what left an impact is what was most impacting.  I could be wrong about that, but I will start from here.

A taste of mastery

I have gradually come to realize what every great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir; in short, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constitute the true living seed from which the while plant has always grown.  Actually, to explain how the strangest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really come about, it is always good (and wise) to begin by asking: what morality is it (is he – ) getting at? . . . [E]very drive craves mastery, and this leads it to try philosophizing. – Nietzsche; Beyond Good and Evil

There remains a fundamental critique in this and, I think, there are two paths that follow when this is kept in mind.  One can remain delusional as though some access to a structure of meaningful (ethical) truth will irrefutably be discovered and articulated.  The other path is to see enough in advance the rabbit trails that philosophy will all inevitably lead down.  These trails are not bad, but they are trails.  No more, no less.  This tends to place an internal contradiction within the project of philosophy as many enter into this process because of a sense of enlightenment of something more and beyond; something does indeed seem to be discovered.  But the beyond can never be what was conceived at the first.  Because for many of us the enlightenment was actually (at least in part) a taste of mastery.

I always hated studying languages in grade school.  In high school French was the only subject I almost failed.  But in Bible college I took to learning biblical languages like it was a drug.  I was drawn intuitively to this discipline.  Why?  What was the difference?  French had no trackable position in the coding of meaning in high school.  What was it that helped to position myself in high school, what did have access to?  Sports, I guess.  I was pretty good at sports.  But by the end of high school I went through a conversion period in which I experienced faith and church as a site of different coding.  In church I found peers who expressed many of the same things I found otherwise but they also talked about meaningful and intimate parts of life.  This attracted me.  I began reading the Bible, here I began to see (not for the first time of course) that the Bible functioned in a central and authorizing position in this community.  It offered itself as the source for developing the codes and values of this expression.  So in Bible college I began to learn about the production of this text and tradition.  I began to see the esoteric allure of the ancient languages of the Bible, that, when handled by someone competent and creative the Bible could be wielded with a sort of authority I had not experienced.  I not only felt nourished by the Bible but I also got a buzz from it, perhaps even became intoxicated by it.

And so I set out over the next several years spending considerable time and energy learning Greek, Hebrew, and even Aramaic.  Like in high school, I was still by no means a natural but the drive behind it was strong.  In the process of studying biblical languages I was introduced to the field of hermeneutics.  With this process I experienced the conflict of interpretations.  Two experts in biblical language and history could and did disagree.  What informed their disagreement?  It depended on their theoretical and methodological orientation.  Some perspectives sounded more persuasive than others.  How could I navigate these questions and conflicts?  So I began to explore the field of philosophical hermeneutics and with the ‘linguistic turn’ in the philosophy of the last century this led me into philosophy more properly (at least a certain strain).  The truth of the Bible was not self-evident.  I searched again for the treasure that could establish and secure my own and my community’s value.  I now find myself engulfed in philosophical and psychological theory.  I am by no means an expert but I continue to find myself attracted to what might explain and give meaning to my (our) condition.

While I concede that this is a partial account and one that leaves out the sheer enjoyment I took in all these endeavors I am finding that, in retrospect, I have come to a sort of crossroads.  I have exhausted none of the above fields of study.  I remain significantly deficient in all of them and could be considered a ‘generalist’ at best.  The crossroads rather is now being unable to appeal to these pursuits as having some fundamental position in navigating truth and value.  I still find these disciplines fruitful for such navigation but the navigation is now on a different plane.  They did not lead to the treasure.  They did not discover first things.  To continue to use these disciplines in the sense that I once, I think unconsciously, did would be manipulative at best.

But that this Nietzsche’s point, in part.  What remains is the manipulation of values that are not grounded.  So we make choices and commitments and in time we change them on the basis of . . . what?  Is it enough to accept a Nietzschian position, a position of responsibility?  I find that once drawn into and, at least partially, inhabiting this logic it becomes difficult to see another alternative.  Sure I could return to a sort of orthodox grounding and orientation to theology but to do so would be making an self-conscious commitment that I would have to take responsibility for.  All of which leads back into this same insight.  I am not saying Nietzsche’s project is the way forward but I am also not sure we cannot responsibly move forward without first passing through it.  Thoughts?

And to paraphrase Nietzsche, do you disagree, do you have another interpretation?  Well, so much the better.

“The Postsecular Turn in Feminism” – A brief summary and outline of questions

This afternoon the reading group Critical Conversation will be discussing a text by Rosi Braidotti titled, “In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism.”  In preparation I thought it might be helpful to outline the position taken in the paper and draw up a few questions.

The subtitle of the paper is really an apt description of the work of the paper.  Braidotti begins by outlining the origins of feminism as nestled within the larger Enlightenment project which critiqued and largely rejected religious dogma and clerical authority.  This was based in a larger ‘negative’ position which functioned in a primarily oppositional mode and at times seemed “to have only paradoxes to offer” (3).  This position has led to some difficulties as the critique has, at times, been shifted wholesale onto the Muslim community resulting in blatant racism.

With the ‘return of religion’ many monotheisms have been developing a conservative politics based on ‘strong foundations’ that function at a number of disjunctions (separating women from mothers / gays from humanity / sexuality from health / science from faith).

Braidotti then proceeds to ask how ‘secular’ feminism really is in its various manifestations.  Here she cites a number feminist representatives within monotheistic religions as well as more marginal ‘spiritual’ forms.  This leads to the assertion that,

All non-secularists stress the deep spiritual renewal that is carried by
and is implicit in the feminist cause, insisting that it can be of benefit to
the whole of mankind and not only to the females of the species (Russell,
1974). This humanist spiritual aspiration is ecumenical in nature and
universalist in scope. (7)

The question then becomes a matter of how to maintain a universal scope while avoiding the temptation to seize this vision and establish it for all on their terms.

In an interesting turn of phrase Braidotti then speaks of the spiritual ‘residue’ that remains at work in secularism through its expression as a negation of particular religious forms.  The postsecular problematizes this position in light of increasingly complex expressions of ethnicity and diversity that are not allowing themselves to be defined under one ‘rational’ vision.  The second feature which secularism has not accounted for is a more psychoanalytic perspective which includes vital drives and totemic structuring of psychic order and social cohesion.

The main psychoanalytic insight therefore concerns the importance of
the emotional layering of the process of subject-formation. This refers to the
affective, unconscious and visceral elements of our allegedly rational and
discursive belief system. (11)

As I near as I understand this appears to be a definition of ‘spirituality’ by Braidotti.  And it is in these elements that she finds more “residues of religious worship practice.”

From here Braidotti outlines “Vital Feminist Theories” which reflect a process rather than foundationalist or idealist ontology.  In this account “immanence expresses the residual spiritual values of great intimacy and a sense of belonging to the world as a process of perpetual becoming.”  And further, “What is postsecular about this is the faith in potential transformation of the negative and hence in the future” (13).  The position is no longer based in a negative or reactionary critique of what is destructive but attempts to explore how the creation of conditions for liberation can be achieved which allows it to address expressions (religious or otherwise) in their particularity without rejecting them under a prior ideology (anti-clericalism for instance).

What this means practically is that the conditions for political and
ethical agency are not dependent on the current state of the terrain. They
are not oppositional and thus not tied to the present by negation; instead
they are affirmative and geared to creating possible futures.
. . .
As Rich put it in her recent essays,
the political activist has to think ‘in spite of the times’ and hence ‘out of my
time’, thus creating the analytics – the conditions of possibility – of the
future. (16)

I set this paper within similar moves being made which attempt to take greater account for the mutual positioning that occurs between religion and secularism.  In this case feminism is taken seriously as a ‘third’ in its attempt to form subjectivities that will find ways of affirming “what is not contained in the present conditions.”  What are some questions, theological or otherwise, that arise from reading this piece?

What do theological anthropologies say about the ‘subject’ and subject formation?  It would seem to me that dominant practices of subject formation in the church would fall under the critique of most global monotheistic religion leveled by Braidotti.

Do we accept her characterization of religion?  Is what she is placing religion/spirituality under (as a ‘residue’ of) too nebulous to have real social and subjective traction?

How do we navigate the Western world with secularized accounts of prior religious commitments (humanism)?  And further do we need to simply learn to ‘take our place’ amidst a larger collaborative project?  Do we need to ‘become less’ so that salvation/liberation would become more?

What is the theological concept of ‘new’?  Is it actually a return to the old?

A plea for descriptive and inquisitive intervention

In my last post I was pushing towards more care in how we articulate possible notions of faithfulness tied up in practices intimately linked with having a social awareness and engagement.  So how then does one articulate and engage the world when it is of course possible to undermine any given expression?  I think part of the shift is to not ‘over-code’ a given situation.  Simply living in the ‘hood and buying 2nd-hand and organic does not itself imply goodness.  How do we describe and articulate the network of relations that are at play in our actions?  Let the theology, if there is any, emerge from the material of our life and not impose the theology on it.  So the task, in my mind, becomes more descriptive and attentive.  This is not to say neutral or objective.  But open-ended or reflexive descriptive and inquiry will allow for ongoing modification and development.  What does this mean in specific situations.  One approach is a sort of journalistic posture.

I was walking home yesterday when I saw something that stood out.  A car was stopped at an angle in the middle of an intersection.  There were no other cars around so it did not look like a crash.  Then a saw someone helping another person to their feet.  My initial response was that someone had fallen and the driver stopped to help the person up.  The person being helped up looked a little frail and perhaps had a slight disability or something (though this of course could have been the result of the incident).  The driver then hopped back into her car and drove away.  I was not prepared for how to respond to this situation.  I asked someone afterwards if the car actually hit the woman on the street.  The person said yes.  I was initially not prepared to believe this or allow for it as a possibility.

Now in what follows I want to be clear that I am not advocating for a response and posture of authority never mind superiority that leads us to believe we know what is best in a given situation.  Rather, I am advocating for a sense of responsibility and insight.  So what would a descriptive and inquisitive intervention look like?  Well, it would begin with description and follow with inquiries.

I see this woman has fallen.  How did that happen?

Perhaps this seems stupid to make explicit.  But the reality is that I am a relatively confident person who has intervened in other awkward situations in the past.  But in this instance I did not.  What was the result of my not being able to simply make an observation and ask a question?  The result was, likely, yet another of the near infinite forms of how power is abused.  The driver (I am told) hit the woman.  A car driven by a white person with visibly more wealth hit an older woman of a visible minority in a neighbourhood with a high immigrant population (I of course need to speculate because I did not directly observe or inquire).  The driver then came out and helped the woman up.  You can walk so whatever happened was not toobad.  The driver got back into the car and drove away with no visible information shared (contact information and license plate number).

The wealthy know how to defend their property at all costs.  Just think of the intense scrutiny of a vehicle after the smallest fender-bender.  They then filter this through channels of insurance to make sure maximum compensation and protection is possible.  The woman in this instance was bodily struck.  She likely had little concept of our legal system and if she did the shock may not have allowed her to process this in the moment.  So the one in power aided the more vulnerable to her feet in weakened state.  This tends to be intervention of power and privilege.  We help people to their feet but in state that is weaker than they were before.  We strike them, not intentionally of course but they just sort of get in the way, then when this happens we feel bad, help them up, and carry on in our original goal.

My hope is that a descriptive intervention would have shown the woman who was struck that she was a neighbour deserving to be loved and also that if necessary the one in power can be held accountable by community who values one another.