In Praise of Thickness
Photo by Macie Jones on Unsplash
II was first introduced, as were many of us, to “thickness” as an interpretive category by George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984). Lindbeck writes:
Meaning is more fully intratextual in semiotic systems (composed, as they entirely are, of interpretive and communicative signs, symbols, and actions) than in other forms of ruled human behavior such as carpentry or transportation systems; but among semiotic systems, intratextuality (though still in an extended sense) is greatest in natural languages, cultures and religions which (unlike mathematics, for example), are potentially all-embracing and possess the property of reflexivity (114).
This heavy jargon-loaded statement is illuminated by his further commentary:
Only by detailed “familiarity with the imaginative universe in which …acts are signs” can one diagnose or specify the meaning of these acts for adherents of a religion. What the theologian needs to explicate “is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed or knotted to one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render.” In rendering the salient features, the essential task “is not codify abstract regularities, but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them…There is, indeed, no more demanding exercise of the inventive and imaginative powers than to explore how a language, culture, or religion may be employed to give meaning to new domains of thought, reality, and action. Theological description can be a highly constructive enterprise (115).
Lindbeck has taken over the notion of “thick description” from Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973) who came to understand that cultures are complex systems of signs, so that Lindbeck could see that religions as well are constituted by complex systems of signs. As a result, they require interpretation, and allow for great freedom in the exercise of imagination. They cannot be read simplistically off the surface, but require attentiveness to complexity, obscurity, and ambiguity.
With that awareness in the background, I read Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022) by Lorraine Daston. Her exposition of “rules” concerns the way in which a society is governed that includes both thick rules and thin rules. Of thin rules Daston avers:
[They] aspire to be self-sufficient and explicit. In principle, they wear their interpretations on their sleeves; they eschew commentary and have no need of hermeneutics. Nor must they enlist discretion to distinguish among cases and adjust to particular circumstances. Their generality presupposes that the class of cases to which they apply is unambiguous, that all cases in this class are identical, and that they will remain so for all eternity. Thin rules need not be concise—computer programs can go on for pages; ditto arithmetic calculations—but they cannot be vague (93).
It is most telling to notice her judgment that such rules require neither commentary nor hermeneutics. They are fully understood a first glance and leave no room for slippage.
By contrast, Daston’s understanding of “thick rules” is that they require “discretion” both in terms of cognitive discretion in order to understand the norms and executive discretion in obedience or implementation. Thick rules, without that double discretion, are unhelpful and non-functional. Daston sees, moreover, that such thick rules are not themselves flat imperatives, but are rather models or paradigms for “patterns” of conduct, behavior, and policy.
The Bible, of course, is a collage of many rules. It is important, in the Bible as in our society, to distinguish between thick rules and thin rules. With a glance at the old distinction between “apodictic” and “casuistic” law enunciated by Albrecht Alt, it is useful to recognize that the baseline of scriptural rules, the Ten Commandments, is a set of “thick rules.” That is, they set forth quite general norms for acceptable conduct in the covenant community; but quite clearly they require much interpretive work. Thus for example, the sixth commandment on “killing” has required a delicate distinction between murder and the legitimacy of war. Or we have gone to great lengths to parse the fourth commandment on sabbath in order to determine what constitutes “work” that would violate sabbath. And we have witnessed President Clinton’s torturous parsing of the seventh commandment concerning adultery. The interpretive work on these commandments is endless in the communities said to be governed by the Decalogue. Both Jews and Christians have devoted great and continuing energy to the task. And while we may continue to quibble, there is no doubt that the Decalogue in sum intends a neighborly community of security and wellbeing amenable to holiness of God that precludes all other absolutes. As a consequence we are able to see that our variously proposed absolutes are inescapably penultimate, and our preferred certitudes are kept open and are, it turns out, much less than certain.
But of course the Bible also offers prominent examples of thin rules that voice quite specific requirements and leave nothing to imagination or interpretation. Thus, for example, the list of polluting foods in Deuteronomy 14:3-21 is unambiguous. The list neither requires nor permits interpretation or exposition. (We may however notice that in verse 21 it is as though Moses adds a qualifying thought about the disposal of such “unclean” animals, either by giving to “sojourners” or by “selling to foreigners.” The later options serve to protect the holiness of the people of God). While the intent of Isaiah 28:10-13 is not completely clear, it may be cited as an example of the way in which the community may endlessly multiply more and more rules to cover more and more cases, until the catalogue of rules seems endless and inexhaustible:
For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
Here a little, there a little…
Therefore the word of the Lord will be to them,
precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
there a little, there a little (Isaiah 29:10, 13).
The Hebrew is even more strikingly dramatic in its mesmerizing repetition:
ki zau lezau zau lzau
qau lqau qau laqau
ze’er sham ze’er sham.
The lines that sound like a ridiculing chant are reiterated in verse 13. The context suggests that this endless multiplication of rules is the work of a community that is in an anxious stance of self-destruction.
Thus we are able to see (along with many other evidences that could be cited) that Israel was capable of both thick rules and thin rules. We may hypothesize that in its times of greater anxiety or threat, Israel moved toward thinner rules that sought to eliminate ambiguity or uncertainty.
Daston judges that, starting in the seventeenth century, we can witness “the rise of more ambitious and less accommodating rules”:
More ambitious, because they aimed to regulate either in greater detail… or to broaden their jurisdiction across space and time…Less accommodating, because either more explicit…or less open to discretion… Increasingly, rules come shorn of the woolly coat of examples, exceptions, and appeals to experience that had cushioned earlier rules…against collision with unforeseen circumstances. Their tone becomes preemptory rather than expansive. In principle, these rules were expected to be obeyed to the letter; in practice, letter and spirit inevitably clashed in application to hard cases (241).
It may be that such a trajectory is reflective of the rise of science with Descartes and Bacon, and so an attempt to shape religious ethics according scientific models. Or perhaps the move reflects anxiety about the collapse of the long-trusted heliocentric universe that was contradicted by Descartes and then by Galileo. Either way, the modern era is tempted to endless refinement of rules that eliminate interpretive alternatives and that refuse the playful of freedom of interpretation.
Daston notices as well that rules require exceptions:
Rules formulated to guide practice in situations in which the unexpected is the expected, whether in running a monastery or besieging a city, build in examples and exceptions …These thick rules are prepared to deal with any and all eventualities. Rules formulated for more stable, standardized circumstances, whether applying an algorithm to a routine calculation or setting speed limits for city streets, barely mention exceptions. Such would-be thin rules flourish in the same settings that averages do: where what happened in the past is a reliable guide to what will happen in the present and future….An immense amount of infrastructure, both human and material, goes into making the world safe for thin rules. Workflows for calculations; sidewalks and broad, straight streets for city traffic; schooling and sanctions for everyone. Even under the most propitious circumstances, in which rules are so effectively drilled into schoolchildren that a slight change can provoke a national wave of protest, as in the case of orthography, rules must be constantly shored up by the editor’s red pencil and the demon spellchecker. The court to equity in English law…or the dictionary of the Acadamie francaise … both venerable institutions established to adjudicate between rules and exceptions, offer eloquent testimony to the fact that exceptions we shall always have with us (269).
Of course it is the same in scripture. Thus for example, Leviticus 27:1-8 provides a catalogue of the “worth” of human beings, depending upon age. The catalogue is complete and precise. In verse 8, however, it is recognized that exceptions must be made to the precise catalogue for those “who cannot afford the equivalent.” In such instances, the payment is to be determined by the decision of the priest who has freedom to make great allowances in particular transactions. Or in Deuteronomy 14:22-29, the rule requires regular offerings (tithes) to be taken to the place chosen by YHWH. But then in verses 24-25, an exception is made if the place of YHWH’s choosing is far away:
But if, when the Lord your God has blessed you, the distance is so great that you are unable to transport it, because the place where the Lord your God will choose to set his name is too far away from you, then you may turn it into money. With the money secure in hand, go to the place that the Lord your God will choose (vv. 24-25).
The exception reflects the realism of the rule makers.
We are able to see the same contrast of thick and thin rules in the New Testament. In the long polemic of Matthew 23:13-36 we can see the critique of a phony sacerdotal system that has endless requirements:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, and mercy and faith (Matthew 23:23).
The managers of the dominant system had devised extensive rules for tithing, (not unlike Deuteronomy 14:22-29). These were apparently rules for the “taxation” of every commodity, right down to the most minute spice. (Such specificity is perhaps nicely echoed in the intense exactitude of the US Federal tax code). That exactitude, however, had “blinded” the leadership to the large realities of covenantal faith (see Matthew 23:16). This exactitude, moreover, was a distraction that caused neglect of what really matters to a Torah-keeping community. By contrast, consider the neighborly practice of the church commended by the apostle Paul. His catalogue is “by contrast” to the self-indulgence of Galatians 5:19-21, but is also “by contrast” to religious punctiliousness:
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
This list of positive practices lacks precision but offers general categories that are to be acted out with specificity among the faithful. Paul’s conclusion, “There is no law against such things,” is a recognition that he is not articulating a “law,” but rather a model of conduct that can guide the community in a most generalized way. At the same time, we can easily recognize that this list of attitudes is readily available to live out in specific practice, even while we “negotiate” the radicality of the exposition.
In my reflection on this suggestive discussion by Daston, my thinking has gone like this:
1. Good (thick) rules leave much hard work to do. Like the Decalogue or the catalogue of Paul, matters are not specified. We must each time do the hard interpretive work of deciding how, in what way, and to what extent we will “obey” this rule. On the one hand, this means that the congregation that claims the text of scripture must be engaged in the active, knowing, critical work of moral reflection. While there was a time when such an ethic was more or less in the woodwork of our society and could be taken for granted. It is so no longer. And so the church and its pastors must be engaged in probing the ways in which the “thick rules” of our faith pertain to every sphere of our common life. On the other hand, it is inescapable that such hard serious work, interpretive work,—that will be filtered through our fears, our hopes, and our vested interests—is sure to be quarrelsome and contentious. Indeed a community that is seriously engaged in such moral reflection is sure to be a community of contestation. (To some great extent we have avoided this hard work by self-selection into homogeneous communities, on which see The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, 2009).
2. It seems clear enough that we have continued the trajectory that Daston notes in the seventeenth century to embrace thin rules. Thus in our “age of anxiety” there is a great hunger for certitude that will serve to fend off the seeming chaos. It is easy enough to observe this propensity in right-wing reductionism, perhaps its most extreme form represented by Governor DeSantis in his passion for specific rules of exclusion. Such thin rules function to banish any ambiguity and to make matters singularly clear in terms of social expectations and requirements. But of course liberals also have an inclination to reduce the thick rules of the gospel to specific requirements about inclusion and social justice, so that anyone who thinks otherwise is dismissed or disregarded. Every time there is such a reduction, either liberal or conservative, it is an attempt to control the interpretive narrative and to dominate moral discussions that are never without a dimension of ambiguity. In the end, there cannot be enough thin rules, conservative or liberal, to eliminate the need for adjudication and conversation in the community.
3. After all of our thin rules, we do not live our lives by such rules. Rather we rely on matters of relational trust. Thus even the Decalogue is introduced by reference to the emancipatory God of the Exodus. The Decalogue is simply a model for how to live well in response to that faithful emancipatory God. Thus the rules are guidelines for relationship. It is for that reason that even the most zealous rule-enforcers in the community—whether liberal or conservative—can still be moved to compassion and generosity by the needy plight of a neighbor. It is a core claim of this moral community that in the end we do not live by rules but by relationships. Thus, “the sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). It is for compelling reason that Jesus—in the manner of the rabbis—was able to see that the commandments—rule sweepingly thick or rules particularly thin—are finally about true love—love of God and love of neighbor (Mark 12:28-34). Our most treasured thick rules are about how to act out those two true loves.
We in the church might take a deep breath in order to recognize that we are a rule-trusting, rule-making, rule obeying community. But all of our trusting, making, and obeying rules are in the service of our two true loves. And when our anxieties decenter that truth in our lives, we may twitter away our energy on rules that are designed precisely to maintain our control and fend off chaos. Too much of the time, we want escape the hard, contested work of interpretation. But love requires it. Indeed interpretation is an ongoing exploration of how we live out the two loves that define our lives. Daston sees that our rules are prophetic and aspirational. Thus those who formulate rules envision:
An order that did not yet exist and perhaps never would: a fashion for unchanging simplicity and restraint in dress, a city where the houses were all neatly numbered and it was safe to cross the street; a nation united by a language spoken and spelled by all citizens in the same way. There was a utopian element in these hard-headed regulations (209).
Amid the thick rules of our faith, we are invited to a concrete yearning for the coming rule of God where the last are first, and the humbled are exalted.
