Joe and Bob

from chapter four . . .
God made room for other wills. A parable can unpack the spatial metaphor of “making room”: If Joe is in a room (or a universe) by himself and then Bob enters, Joe has lost some of his freedom, simply because there is less of the room for him to occupy. This still holds even if Joe has invited Bob in. If Bob sits down and then Joe wants to sit in the same chair, then he will have to live without fulfillment of that desire or find a way of displacing Bob. The problem did not exist until Bob entered the room. Before then, Joe had complete freedom of the will with regard to which chair to occupy. He was in the happy condition of one playing musical chairs solitaire. The addition of another will, Bob’s, complicates Joe’s world. And if Nancy comes in after Bob, then Joe’s sovereignty over the chairs in the room is in even greater trouble.
____If Joe is God, then what he has done is to create Bob and Nancy. And that is amazing. “It is only the heathen gods who envy man. The true God, who is unconditionally the Lord, allows him [humankind] to be the thing for which He created him. He is far too highly exalted to take it amiss or to prevent it. . . . There can be no doubt that with an autonomous reality God does give to man and to all His creatures the freedom of individual action” (quoting K. Barth).

from chapter six . . .
Remember Joe and Bob two chapters back? They illustrated what happens when there is more than one will in the universe. Now think again about Joe’s situation once Bob has entered the room and sat down. Joe is for the moment not God but one of us. He has two ways of getting Bob out of the favored chair.
____One is persuasion. Joe can use any of a number of arguments relating to rules (“I got here first”), Bob’s self interest (“With your short legs, that chair over there would be more comfortable, and it’s closer to the TV”), or prior treaties (“Remember, I reserved chair-choice to myself when I let you in”). His arguments can be truthful or not, relevant or not, honest or dishonest, and delivered with respect or not (though he might do well at least to fake respect, as a rhetorical strategy). The objective is the same. He wants to sit in the comfier chair (or he enjoys bossing Bob around chair-wise).
____Or Joe can resort to violence. His violence can be of the sort used in the children’s game of musical chairs or of a greater degree with more permanent and messy results. Again, the objective is all the same, and it is the same objective as he would have if he attempted persuasion. And if we thought of other means that stand on the line between persuasion and violence (say, threats of violence), gaining the objective would be the criterion for success, and the objective would still be the same.
____Or Joe might throw a noisy tantrum, hoping that someone will hear from the next room and intervene on his behalf. Regardless of the sincerity or falsehood of the tantrum (another possible rhetorical strategy), the objective remains the same.
____And he might back up his argument or fisticuffs with prejudice, particularly if he wants other people in other rooms to think he might be righteous, or at least right, in his conflict with Bob — or if he wants to convince himself of that, since it is more enjoyable to be righteously selfish than just plain selfish. That desire to justify oneself is just as human as all this conflict over chairs. At any rate, Joe might disqualify Bob by pseudo-scientifically proving that people whose names begin with B are incapable of understanding correctly what is involved in sitting in chairs. That would be every bit as sensible as arguments American racists have made. And because Bob is, as a “B” person, so stupid, Joe is not addressing this as an argument to Bob himself. Perhaps Joe believes what he says. That would make it easier, but it is not necessary (claiming to believe his own arguments might be yet another rhetorical strategy). His objective remains the same.
____If Bob is just as determined to maintain possession of the chair as Joe is to regain control of it, then Bob will respond similarly. He would not need to do so if Joe did not oppose him, but now his doing so demonstrates something that is a constant in human wars: we become like our enemies. Bob may not use the same tactic: he may resort to violence in response to Joe’s attempt at persuasion. But then Joe, given that excuse, is likely to become a partner in demonstrating that principle that we become like our enemies, meeting Bob’s violence with violence.
____But, backing up to the beginning of the story, if Joe, who may now be God, wants Bob’s agreement, then the situation changes. God may use violence, but at every point in the Old Testament, what he wants is Israel’s agreement. He wants Israel’s will to match his, which is another way of saying that he wants effective covenant with Israel. Covenant is made effective through faithfulness, through love. God wants to persuade Israel, to woo Israel. God is not like Joe because for God the goal dictates the means of getting to the goal.
____God thus messes up the rules of conflict. The distinction between goal (the chair) and means (persuasion or coercion) that a human Joe enjoys falls apart when he or Bob or Susie or Albert is dealing with God because God knows when we are lying and when we are speaking truth but without truth as our goal. No fooling God.
____But with each other, that is a different story. Among humans there is hardly ever a reason to slow down the power games. We find it easier to overlook them, which is like overlooking the rhinoceros standing on my left eyebrow. The games are so pervasive, constant, and subtle that we forget that they are happening, that they, in fact, nearly define what we are. The hidden games of one-upmanship in friendly social conversation are as fierce in their way as any murderous inter-family feud, any saber-rattling among nations, or any playground bragging.
____The more a person is aware of his or her own thinking and of the distance between psyche and presentation, then the more he or she is aware, therefore, of all this gaming and how it rules each of us. If I thus say that an it (the game) rules me, I confess that the image of God, the one given dominion over other animate creatures, has become the slave to something not even worthy of a personal pronoun — and I am also thereby well on the way to acknowledging the apparent difference and even warfare between two things that share the name “myself.” I begin to speak, then, as the confused “I” in Romans 7:7-25.

from chapter ten . . .
Think back again to Joe, Bob, and the chairs. According to Emmanuel Levinas, Joe need not think of Bob’s entry as a threat or a diminishment of himself, even if it entails him changing his position to make room for this other. Joe might, rather, understand this encounter with the other as a privilege. Bob’s entry alters things for Joe, no doubt, but it thus creates an opportunity, bringing the possibility that Joe becomes more by the encounter. More what? More human, because being human is something one does with others, not in isolation. That is not a statement of fuzzy-warm ethics but a simple fact of what we are. The isolated human is abnormal, perhaps less than human, whether isolation is chosen or imposed.
____But Joe also becomes more wise when Bob walks in. Levinas speaks of philosophy as the “wisdom of love” rather than the “love of wisdom.” Truth is not found apart from relationship. Knowledge comes only after the encounter with the other. So ethics is “first philosophy.”