The One True Blog

Spoing!

2012-01-29T10:07:00.005-05:00

When the revolutionaries of France began building their new order, they knew it would have to include religion. Even the atheists among them saw that the people needed comforting rituals and sanctioned celebrations to usher them through life. The Christian God, however, had been sent to the guillotine; an alternative was required. Their answer was the Cult of Reason.

Just like old-style religion, the Cult had centres of worship, virtue-stiffening sermons and a calendar of festivities. These climaxed with the Fête de la Raison of November 1793, for which churches across France were renamed “Temples of Reason”. The altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame was replaced with a model mountain, atop which a mini Greek temple stood dedicated “To Philosophy”. Beside it burnt the Torch of Truth and the lengthy proceedings culminated with the appearance of an attractive women dressed in red, white and blue embodying the Goddess of Reason.

...After all, stealing the best ideas of other faiths is itself a venerable religious tradition. The great creeds have never been afraid to appropriate rituals, saints or myths from earlier belief systems – even Christmas and Easter, Christianity’s two most important festivals, are revamped versions of older rites. Secular society too should therefore be unembarrassed about adopting what is best from the believers. It is time for a new Cult of Reason.

I'm going to ignore the low-hanging fruit about how well that worked out for the Jacobins and instead reach higher up the tree for the suggestion that obedience to authority, ritual repetition of empty slogans and deference to symbols learned by rote, and, last but certainly not least, the very idea of a "cult" itself are all anathema to what most people who use the term reason in opposition to religion understand it to represent. Good thing I don't have an irony meter.

Ritual de lo Habitual

2012-01-29T08:19:00.006-05:00

Will Doig:

These crowdsourcing tools have transformed the way we experience cities, often for the better — they help us streamline our lives and avoid wasting time with subpar businesses. It’s now easier than ever to avoid bad meals and dingy hotel rooms...But for all Yelp’s virtues, pre-screening every experience can inhibit us, too. These days, many of us wouldn’t think of trying a new hairstylist or hotel without first checking others’ impressions online.

...“The efficiency that the Web has brought has downsides,” says Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture. “On balance, it works against happy accidents.” Tenner calls this counter-serendipity: when preconceived notions prevent lucky flukes. For instance, a poorly rated restaurant on Yelp might have a few die-hard fans — outliers who, for whatever reason, love the place. Their reviews might even be posted. But many of us go with the general consensus, writing off anywhere with a three-star ranking or less. “Is it possible that a place you really would have liked doesn’t have many positive comments, but you would have been one of the few positive ones?” asks Tenner.

Even if the ranking doesn’t deter us, by the time we do go to the club or the restaurant, we’ve sometimes seen so much of the place online that we’ve basically pre-experienced it. Having online access to so many venues might make us more adventurous in one sense, prompting us to try things we never would have tried or even have known about. But in another sense, it becomes a less-adventurous adventure, certified for us by hundreds of others who’ve already checked it out, assured us we’ll like it, testified to its quality, cleanliness and safety.

Ian Leslie:

Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.

...We have our paths, our bookmarks and our feeds, and we stick closely to them. We no longer “surf” the information superhighway, as it has become too vast to cruise without a map. And as it has evolved, it has become better and better at ensuring we need never stray from our virtual triangles.

...Cohen worries that even as the volume of media has grown exponentially, “our propensity to explore it is diminishing”. Driven by the needs of advertisers keen to hit ever more tightly delineated targets, today’s internet plies us with “relevant” information and screens out the rest. Two different people will receive subtly different results from Google, adjusted for what Google knows about their interests. Newspaper websites are starting to make stories more prominent to you if your friends have liked them on Facebook. We spend our online lives inside what the writer Eli Pariser calls “the filter bubble”.

To escape it, we can leave our screens and walk outside. But some of our most serendipitous spaces are under threat from the internet. Wander into a bookshop in search of something to read: the book jackets shimmer on the table, the spines flirt with you from the shelves. You can pick them up and allow their pages to caress your hands. You may not find the book you wanted, but you will walk out with three you didn’t. Amazon will have your book too, but its recommendation engine doesn’t even come close to delivering the same stimuli. Similarly, a librarian isn’t as efficient as a search engine, his memory isn’t nearly as capacious, but he may still be better at making suggestions to a reader in search of—well, something.

So, to sum up: the Internet and social media change the scale and efficiency of our lives as consumers, and as with absogoddamnlutely everything in life, there are advantages and disadvantages to this, but with topical references to shiny new technogadgetry, we're going to pretend this is somehow interesting and informative. If only we could work in the ubiquitous "brain scans show that...", we could have this year's version of The Shallows.

All of this romanticization of pre-Internet life does some serious question-begging as to how adventurous we really were back then, and the paranoia of influence here is just laughable. Maybe I just have an indomitable will of titanium steel -- okay, yes, yes I do -- but I'm capable of reading dozens of opinions while only considering the information I find relevant and dismissing the rest. If I read about a restaurant online, it's only to get a basic idea of their prices and selection, and to make sure there aren't, say, repeated complaints of rodents and insects showing up in the food. When I read about an album on iTunes, the repeated generic assertions that it rocks, kicks major ass and rules yr world don't even register in my awareness. And though I sho nuff love me some brick-and-mortar bookstores, I have found countless books through Amazon's recommendations that I would have never known existed otherwise, having never seen them on the shelf during their limited print run. In short, both signal and noise have increased exponentially thanks to the Internet. Plus ça change.

And honestly, whose friends and bookmarks mirror them so perfectly that they never get exposed to anything new during the course of a day online? I daresay you've gotta be one dull sunnamabitch if that's the case. Even the sites I absolutely love visiting are mostly filled with topics and links I don't actually have any interest in reading about in depth. A lot of it is passed over at a glance and quickly forgotten, but some of it comes bubbling back up at the most unexpected times thanks to some random trigger, sending me on a vague, fumbling search to try to find the newly relevant source again. Is that not serendipity? It happens to me a lot more on the Internet than it ever did in meatspace, I'll tell you that much.

You Can Do It Your Own Way If It's Done Just How I Say

2012-01-28T22:45:00.004-05:00

Tauriq Moosa:

To silence free speech is not simply removing an expression that upsets you: it is shutting down the only means we have to convey to another person what we think. If we cannot tell others what we think, then we are being told what to think. If we are dictated to, then we have lost an important – if not the most important – aspect of freedom: the ability to engage fully with an idea.

If the idea is wrong, then that can be shown, through argument and engagement – in other words, it can be destroyed through the very same mechanism that brings it into existence: free speech and engagement. If all that you can do to oppose an idea or view is to restrict others knowing it, then it is a sign of your own viewpoint’s weakness, not that of your target. If your argument is better than the one proposed, I for one would want to know what it is: you are doing the world a disservice if all you do is cut an idea off by the root, rather than indicate why it is, in fact, a weed. You are denying knowledge that is, perhaps, needed. You do yourself and everyone a favour by indicating the stupidity or ineptitude of a view. But you help no one by merely censoring the view.

I agree totally, but the older I get, the more I despair of most people ever setting aside their righteous outrage and world-saving urges. Everyone has internalized the understanding that "censorship" is a terrible thing, but they justify the boycott/quarantine approach to eradicating bothersome opinions by saying that only heavy-handed government interference can truly be considered censorship. I got sick of the whole charade around the time that the progressive political blogosphere launched a pathetic, ineffective boycott of Whole Foods because the CEO offended their tribal sense of faux-hippie identity by publishing an op-ed in the WSJ in opposition to Obama's health care plan.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: being offended is not such a terrible thing, and can even be a useful stimulus if you just take a deep breath and relax your sense of self-importance.

With Us In Spirit

2012-01-28T21:37:00.004-05:00

Huh. If Christopher Hitchens is going to be there, a violent rethinking of basic principles will be in order. Why, I'd go so far as to say his presence might just invalidate the entire event. I hope there will be a Q&A session...

So Then It Is His Children Who Go Out Into the World, Seeking the Church that He Forgot

2012-01-27T19:22:00.004-05:00

Oh, Alain:

"My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins," says Alain de Botton. "The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves and we're not joining that nonsense." In his new book, Religion for Atheists, he recalls his father reducing his sister Miel to tears by "trying to dislodge her modestly held notion that a reclusive god might dwell somewhere in the universe. She was eight at the time." It's one of few passages in his unremittingly mellifluous and genteel oeuvre that sticks out with something like anger.

...But asking about De Botton's father is irresistible because Religion for Atheists is, he readily concedes, an oedipal book. "I'm rebelling," he says. "I'm trying to find my way back to the babies that have been thrown out with the bathwater." He's elsewhere described his father as "a cruel tyrant as a domestic figure, hugely overbearing".

Suddenly the whole business with him wanting to build an atheist temple makes much more sense. And yet, I agree with him that there is a yawning chasm between philosophy for the highly educated and self-help platitudes for the masses, and that it wouldn't be a terrible thing for someone to try and make the fruits of high culture more accessible to the average person. I would suggest that those old religious structures and customs he wants to reappropriate are haunted and likely to possess and warp the rational intentions of those who inhabit them, but what do I know. A lot of people I know joined a religion precisely because they wanted to salve their existential aches by belonging to a group, and a church happened to be the most available and welcoming one. Maybe there are some people who need something like that as an intermediate step.

But anyway, I find this interesting for a couple reasons. I've long suspected, protests about ad hominem fallacies notwithstanding, that much philosophy actually reduces to psychology. The logical consistency of de Botton's propositions could be quite firm, but they still wouldn't resonate with someone who doesn't share the emotional need for an authority figure to provide them with unambiguous answers. Secondly, as the above anecdote demonstrates, unintended consequences seem to constantly interject themselves into our best-laid, logical, progressive plans.

Rinse, Repeat

2012-01-26T17:31:00.004-05:00

John Cook:

Mormons, of course, are known for their habit of posthumously converting dead souls. They also believe that families are reunited in eternity after death. So the incentive for Ann Romney to convert Edward Davies in death so that they may one day frolic together in the interplanetary afterlife was presumably fairly powerful. Did she posthumously baptize him, despite his belief while he lived that such a baptism and the beliefs that undergird it are pure "hogwash"? I have asked both the Romney camp and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints in the past; both declined to say.

Stories like this remind me of stories like this, and as always, I am strangely amused and cheered by further evidence that our species is congenitally insane.

Anyway, my grandfather had an interest in genealogy, and he told me that while our Amish ancestors stayed in Pennsylvania, another branch of the family tree extended west and became Mormons. Perhaps someone out in Utah is keeping tabs on me and the rest of the clan for just such a purpose, but if so, I'm afraid it's too late. I was actually baptized Methodist, but I read in a collection of folktales about witchcraft about a girl who cheerfully confessed to the charges against her, claiming that she renounced her baptism by putting one hand on her crown, the other on the soles of her feet, and giving everything in between her two hands to the Devil. So that's what I did as well. Good luck haggling over my soul with him.

Hic Sunt Dracones

2012-01-26T15:55:00.004-05:00

The Greeks, in a way of life in which great perils and upheavals were always present, sought in knowledge and reflection a kind of security and ultimate refuge. We, in an incomparably more secure condition, have transferred this perilousness into knowledge and reflection, and calm ourselves down with our way of life.

- Nietzsche

Winifred Gallagher:

The history of curiosity testifies to society’s strong influence in determining whether neophilia is a virtue or a vice. Even the philosophical Greeks and Romans were wary of inquiring too deeply into the way things are. Christianity only intensified this wariness...Like individual rights, the concept of curiosity as a laudable urge is an innovation from the Age of Reason.

The wild beasts that lurk in the shadows of life in the developed world have morphed and become insubstantial; we've banished lions, wolves and dragons, only to fall prey to depression, angst and ennui as our passion for exploration became more interiorized.

Lose Your Illusion

2012-01-26T08:42:00.003-05:00

Why couldn't the world that concerns us – be a fiction? And if somebody asked, "But to a fiction, surely there belongs an author?" – couldn't one answer simply: why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?

- Nietzsche

Sam McNerney:

That the unified self is largely an illusion is not necessarily a bad thing. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Dennett suggests that it is a convenient fiction. I think he’s right. With it we are able to maintain stories and narratives that help us make sense of the world and our place in it. This is a popular conviction nowadays. As prominent evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker explains in one of his bestsellers, “each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce.” In fact, without the illusion of selfhood we all might suffer the same fate as Phineas Cage who was, as anyone who has taken an introductory to psychology course might remember, “no longer Cage” after a tragic railroad accident turned his ventromedial prefrontal cortex into a jumbled stew of disconnected neurons.

However, according to the British philosopher Julian Baggini in a recent TED lecture the illusion of the self might not be an illusion. The question Baggini asks is if a person should think of himself as a thing that has a bunch of different experiences or as a collection of experiences. This is an important distinction. Baggini explains that, “the fact that we are a very complex collection of things does not mean we are not real.” He invites the audience to consider the metaphor of a waterfall. In many ways a waterfall is like the illusion of the self: is it not permanent, it is always changing and it is different at every single instance. But this doesn’t mean that a waterfall is an illusion or that it is not real. What it means is that we have to understand it as a history, as having certain things that are the same and as a process.

Ah, but the self is an illusion. The key is to distinguish between an illusion and an error.

Arrows of Longing

2012-01-24T08:21:00.004-05:00

From David C. Smith's The Transcendental Saunterer:

Thoreau's walking experience reveals not only the tensions in his own life between the pull of nature and the pull of society, it also demonstrates his inability to fully resolve the conflicts he experienced between his desire for solitude and his yearning for meaningful human companionship.

It's the taken-for-granted normative implication that gets me: why must we assume that conflicts can and should be resolved? What if the friction between opposing drives is the source of a creative spark in one's personality? To borrow a Nietzschean metaphor, what if the tension in one's personality is the tension of the taut bowstring which enables arrows to fly farther? Or what if we prefer the stimulating differences of Isaiah Berlin's value pluralism to the entropy of conflict resolution?

Fresh Roses By Any Other Brand Would Not Smell as Sweet

2012-01-23T11:04:00.003-05:00

If it weren't for the cigarette smoke, I would totally enjoy hanging out with this dude and having an olfactory discussion. It's not often that people genuinely surprise me by defying easy classification and stereotyping, but it's always cheering when it happens.

Got Nothing to Lose But Bitterness and Patterns

2012-01-23T08:43:00.004-05:00

Phil Oliver:

People often demur, when asked if they consider themselves atheists, on the grounds that it sounds too confident and cocky to say they don’t believe in a transcendent/supernatural creator God… even if they really don’t. But why should it seem any more cocky to say “I don’t believe X” than to say “I do,” when it’s already been conceded all around that nobody-but-nobody knows for sure? If we’re really flinging open the closet doors and inviting everyone into the fresh air and honest sunshine of truthfulness, it should not. No double-standards need apply.

And what's so terrible about being confident anyway? What's so terrible about possibly being wrong? I maintain that it makes no sense to be wary to the point of paranoia over metaphysical commitment unless one is still laboring under the cultural inheritance that teaches that pride is a deadly sin and God is a vindictive, jealous God who will settle all scores and avenge even the most trivial slights. You clucking hens who are so quick to condemn atheists for cockiness, is that where you're coming from? Have you even thought about it? Shame on you either way.

The inability to change one's mind when presented with new evidence is a deficiency, yes, but making a fetish out of a stubborn refusal to take a stand one way or the other is no less so. I don't know which is more pitiful, the cowardly inability to shake off the fear of offending a celestial petty tyrant, or the incredibly self-absorbed delusion that our individual personalities are actually significant in the grander scheme. "What do we matter? Our whole lives are experiments, let us also want to be them!"

People of the Potboiler

2012-01-23T07:41:00.004-05:00

Rachel Aviv:

In The Church of Scientology, one of only a handful of academic treatments of the subject, Hugh Urban is less interested in the experiences of Scientologists than in the legal processes and semantic twists through which a set of beliefs becomes a religion. A professor of religious studies at Ohio State, Urban is interested in secrecy in religion, and in this book he chronicles the way Hubbard reacted to legal and political challenges to his authority by attempting (largely successfully) to conceal his theories from the public. Had he stuck with his original conception of Dianetics, his practices could have been investigated and judged according to scientific standards. A religion, on the other hand, can turn self-help platitudes into a scarce and privileged resource; criticism can be dismissed as intolerance, or persecution.

I was in a synagogue last weekend for a book sale, and listened with great amusement as a couple of Jewish volunteers, pitching their voices so as to be heard by anyone within earshot, used a copy of Dianetics as an opportunity to scorn Scientology as an "invented" religion.

Spread your arms wide. Breathe deeply. Feel the irony in all its glorious weight, like a heavy mist that slowly penetrates and saturates your clothing.

This I Act As If I Believe

2012-01-22T12:27:00.003-05:00

Eric Schwitzgebel:

The best way to conceptualize “belief”, I think, is that to believe something is to steer one’s way through the world as though it were true. And although reaching explicit judgments about things is an important part of steering one’s way through the world, much else is even more important. Suppose, for example, that you are disposed to say, in all sincerity, that all the races are intellectually equal. You will argue for this claim against all comers and really feel that you believe it in your heart of hearts. It doesn’t follow that you really do steer your way through the world as your egalitarian utterances would suggest. You might really be incredibly biased. You might really always treat people of a certain race as though they were stupid. In that case, I don’t think we should say that you really, fully believe in the intellectual equality of the races. Instead, I think, you’re in a mixed-up condition in which it’s neither quite right to say that you believe the races are intellectually equal nor quite right to say that you fail to believe that. I call this an “in-between” state of believing. It’s in-between but it’s not at all like being uncertain. You might still feel unshakeably certain.

I think such in-between states are very common for the attitudes we regard as most central to our lives. Do you really believe that God exists? Do you really believe that family is more important than work? Let’s not look just at what you sincerely say to yourself and others but at how you act and how you react. Let’s look at your spontaneous valuations of things. Often, the match between sincere words and in-the-world reactivity is poor. And I doubt we have very good self-knowledge about any of this.

It might help repair our ignorance about such matters if we had good knowledge of our stream of experience. If I knew, for example, that I was frequently having angry thoughts about my children, or if I knew that I felt a kind of emotional soaring at the prospect of a new project at work and an emotional crash at the prospect of having to come home early to have lunch with the family – that might provide an important set of clues. But we don’t know such things about ourselves, and in fact we regularly fool ourselves in such matters to protect our self-conception.

One of the more wearying tropes I've encountered over the years while reading blogs is the bizarre obsession with what some outrageous public figure says and whether they really "believe" it in their heart of hearts, or whether they're just putting on a cynical show for the money and power. As if it's that straightforward. Half of the things we profess to believe are things we've accepted provisionally while attempting to talk ourselves the rest of the way past our doubts. The drive to obtain objective truth for its own sake has to compete against the drive to cultivate and defend our sense of self as well as the drive to feel secure and adequate within one's social group, just to name a few. "Belief" is a deceptively simple term that often encompasses knowledge, hope, and fear, all at once, in an unstable mixture.

Lucubratio (XI)

2012-01-22T04:06:00.001-05:00

I've always done some of my best thinking deep in the still of the night. And on that note, I recently came across an arresting passage from Thoreau's essay Night and Moonlight:

"As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural prey of the intellect."

Freud Where Prohibited

2012-01-21T10:09:00.004-05:00

John Gray is another thinker whose output I generally appreciate, but, uh, what?

Yet several generations of intellectuals were in no doubt that he was a thinker of major importance. It is only recently that his ideas have been widely disparaged and dismissed. Initially rejected because of the central importance they gave to sexuality in the formation of personality, Freud’s ideas are rejected today because they imply that the human animal is ineradicably flawed. It is not Freud’s insistence on sexuality that is the source of scandal, but the claim that humans are afflicted by a destructive impulse.

...Freud’s thought is a vital corrective to the scientific triumphalism that is making so much noise at the present time. But more than any other feature of his thinking, it is his acceptance of the flawed nature of human beings that is offensive today. Freud’s unforgivable sin was in locating the source of human disorder within human beings themselves. The painful conflicts in which humans have been entangled throughout their history and pre-history do not come only from oppression, poverty, inequality or lack of education. They originate in permanent flaws of the human animal. Of course Freud was not the first Enlightenment thinker to accept this fact. So did Thomas Hobbes. Like Hobbes, Freud belongs in a tradition of Enlightenment thinking that aims to understand rather than to edify. Both aimed to reduce needless conflict; but neither of them imagined that the sources of such conflict could be eliminated by any increase in human knowledge. Even more than Hobbes, Freud was clear that destructive conflict goes with being human. This, in the final analysis, is why Freud is so unpopular today.

I'm afraid Gray is waggling his Freud puppet on his fingertip here, as partially evidenced by the fact that he doesn't provide any examples of Freud's thought coming in for fresh disparagement as an object of scandal. I daresay you could substitute Gray's name for Freud's in most of the excerpt above and get much closer to the heart of it, which might even be a modified version of what somebody once classified as "projection". Granted, I don't follow developments in the field very closely, which is to say at all, but as far as I'm aware, most people's objections to Freud begin and end with the fact that his "scientific" theories were extracted from deep within his colon. Yes, I used an anal metaphor to dismiss Freudianism. Let the psychoanalysts stagger under the weight of the immense ironic density, bwa ha.

Artsy Impartsy

2012-01-21T09:02:00.002-05:00

Alain de Botton, to whom I normally feel kindly disposed, continues his unfortunate quest for a secularized form of religion with a plea for art museums to become bastions of moral instruction, with curators apparently assuming the role of priests:

The problem is that modern museums of art fail to tell people directly why art matters, because modernist aesthetics (in which curators are trained) is so deeply suspicious of any hint of an instrumental approach to culture. To have an answer anyone could grasp as to the question of why art matters is too quickly viewed as "reductive". We have too easily swallowed the modernist idea that art that aims to change or help or console its audience must by definition be "bad art" – Soviet art is routinely trotted out here as an example – and that only art that wants nothing of us can be good. Hence the all-too-frequent question with which we leave the modern museum of art: what did that mean?

...Try to imagine what would happen if modern secular museums took the example of churches more seriously. What if they too decided that art had a specific purpose – to make us a bit more sane, or a little bit wiser and kinder – and tried to use the art in their possession to prompt us to be so? Perhaps art shouldn't be "for art's sake", one of the most misunderstood, unambitious and sterile of all aesthetic slogans: why couldn't art be, as it was in religious eras, more explicitly for something?

Modern art museums typically lead us into galleries set out under headings such as "the 19th century" and "the Northern Italian School", which reflect the academic traditions in which their curators have been educated. A more fertile indexing system might group together artworks from across genres and eras according to our inner needs. A walk through a museum of art should amount to a structured encounter with a few of the things that are easiest for us to forget and most essential and life-enhancing to remember.

There are numerous problems here, the most obvious being: Alain, buddy, the death of God does not weigh heavily upon me. I do not have a God-shaped hole in my life that requires filling. My "inner needs" are--

When people try to benefit someone in distress, the intellectual frivolity with which those moved by pity assume the role of fate is for the most part outrageous; one simply knows nothing of the whole inner sequence and intricacies that are distress for me or for you. The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by "distress", the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed – all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites.

Ahem! Chill out, I've got this! Sorry, Nietzsche was eavesdropping. He had heard enough, and couldn't resist interrupting. But, uh, yeah, he's right.

Anyway, de Botton seems to be using "modernist" problematically, when he really appears to mean "elitist". I can sympathize, though I think he carelessly suggests cryptic pretension is best countered by exhortatory preaching. I too want to see artists - poets and musicians, not just painters - illuminate more of the personal intellectual and emotional context surrounding their work, not because I need to be told what to think and how to feel, but so that I can feel like I'm having a conversation with a distinct point of view. I already know what I think; that's the most easy and boring thing in the world. Tell me what you think, what made you express it in that way. Surprise me with a different perspective.

All the World's an Action Flick

2012-01-18T12:27:00.005-05:00

I issued an official position paper on Mark Wahlberg's nonexistent acting skills some time ago, and proceeded to do my best to forget he even existed. But in the course of my web browsing last week, I saw a blurb for this review from Dana Stevens; its gushing reference to Marky Mark's masculinity made me choke back a laugh/cough before doing my best to scrub that memory from existence as well.

I won’t try to make the case, as Adam Sternbergh half-jokingly did on the Times’ 6th Floor blog early this week, that Wahlberg has been cheated of his due as the greatest actor of his generation. Though there’s no question he’s been wonderful in movies as diverse as Three Kings, Boogie Nights, The Fighter, and I Heart Huckabees, Wahlberg is no accent-mastering shape-shifter, no saturnine Leo Di Caprio or whimsical Johnny Depp: What you see is what you get. But this true-to-his-word decency, this simplicity, is precisely what you cast Wahlberg for. I had plenty of time to consider the actor’s appeal during the unspooling of the otherwise nondescript Contraband, and here’s what I came up with: Mark Wahlberg is attractive because he seems genuinely, effortlessly masculine rather than anxiously, compensatorily macho. You believe he could singlehandedly spearhead an international smuggling scheme while also believing he’s a sweet, vulnerable family man hopelessly in love with his wife.

Oh, you do, do you? Well, apparently, he believes it himself, if nothing else:

On being scheduled to be on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11:

 “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’”

I like to imagine the scene as a story of three faces: the interviewer struggling mightily to maintain a poker face as he/she dutifully records the soundbite that will launch a million page hits, the publicist with eyes frantically bugging out, grimacing, and making an abrupt throat-slashing gesture, and, of course, the utterly vacant, expressionless gaze of Wahlberg himself, his beady eyes staring off into the distance as he softly hums a stirring film score to accompany his not-at-all anxious or overcompensating fantasy.

Nuclear Reprocessing

2012-01-16T20:24:00.003-05:00

Katherine Newman:

In poorer households, these accordion families have always been there. There’s nothing new there, because lower-income people have had to pool their incomes for generations, because to keep the household afloat you had to have everybody working and everybody contributing – and by the way, that was true for many middle-class households before the Second World War.

So this period of time which we come to see as normal – of young people leaving home; and spending time on their own before they marry; and their parents having an empty nest – that’s a phenomenon of the post-Second World War period of great affluence. It created a huge boom in wages, and burgeoning opportunities in the white-collar world. We’re not there anymore and we might not be again. We think of it as normal – and I think this is an important point – because the generations that experienced that “normal” are so huge. They dominate the social scene. They’re the baby-boom generation. That was their normal, but it wasn’t normal before them and it may not be after them.

A number of college grads not having a really clear, defined career path are often returning home to “figure out what to do next.” Is this a privilege of class or reflective of a deeper social or cultural value?

Class has something to do with it, but there is something else going on. When I [used to] talk to my grandparents, they never thought that work was something that gave you meaning – it was just the way you put the roof over your head. But suddenly in the boomer generation, you have a very different way of thinking about work: It’s to be valuable, meaningful, honorable, enjoyable, a source of identity. That has now become a kind of standard for the way we think work should be. We have accepted the notion that our children ought to have jobs that are meaningful, not just a job that puts a roof over your head.

She took the words right outta my mouth, she did. It's like Emerson said -- "...a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another." No shame here, though; I'm just glad to hear someone else saying it.

I wonder, though, if her book addresses one of the most far-reaching consequences of this likely return to prewar standards of living; namely, the loss of the ne plus ultra of Internet insults, the scarlet L of loserdom: accusations of dwelling in the basement of one's parents.

When Someone Smiles at Me, All I See Is a Chimpanzee Begging for Its Life

2012-01-14T12:45:00.004-05:00

Miller-McCune:

Has life treated you unfairly? Do you have a nagging suspicion that other people, are, on balance, happier than you are? You might want to get off of Facebook.

A newly published study suggests the phenomenally popular social networking site may be skewing the way users perceive their lives. It finds those carefully selected photos of cheerful, contented people cumulatively convey a self-esteem-shattering message: Our lives are fantastic! What’s wrong with you?

Just a few months ago, they were reporting from the other side of those pearly whites:

College freshmen whose Facebook profile pictures featured intense smiles were more likely to feel satisfied with their lives 3½ years later.

You can learn all sorts of information by perusing a person’s Facebook page. But newly published research suggests you can ascertain a key fact about that individual – how satisfied they are with their life – without reading a word. Just check out their profile picture, and gauge the intensity of their smile.

The lesson here is clear. No matter how banal or useless the subject, there are evidently people out there who will throw bundles of money at you to publish a study on it as long as you connect it to social media in some perfunctory way. Help me brainstorm here; there's gotta be a way we can get in on this before the shininess wears off.

Dependent Arising

2012-01-11T11:42:00.003-05:00

To explore the whole sphere of the modern soul, to have sat in its every nook – my ambition, my torture, and my happiness.

How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together, or, in your case, remain small together.

- Nietzsche

Ashis Nandy:

There survives another concept of happiness, more nuanced and yet, at the same time, more down-to-earth. It affirms that healthy, robust, authentic happiness – “authentic” in the sense existential psychoanalysis deploys the term – must have a place for unhappiness. Aoki talks about the sadness of unrealised hope and the struggle to acquire a language in which to talk about happiness. In such instances, the presence of the unpleasant does not necessarily mean the diminution of happiness. It becomes part of a happy life that oscillates between the pleasant and the unpleasant, achievement and failure, being and becoming, work and play. In such a life, work becomes vocation and leisure need not be reinvented as the antithesis of work. Vocation includes leisure, exactly as a pleasurable pastime may comprise some amount of work. The idea of perfect happiness is consigned either to the domain of the momentary or the transient or to the mythic or the legendary. It cannot be achieved in life, but may be realised in exceptional moments.

Happiness as an elliptical orbit, perhaps?

Well, Less Is Not Necessarily More, Lucrezia, I Am Judged

2012-01-11T09:36:00.005-05:00

Pico Iyer:

"Your sentences are so long," said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn't quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn't want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn't have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I'm using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment.

...Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the "gaps," as Annie Dillard calls them — that don't show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).

...Many a reader will have no time for this; William Gass or Sir Thomas Browne may seem long-winded, the equivalent of driving from L.A. to San Francisco by way of Death Valley, Tijuana and the Sierras. And a highly skilled writer, a Hemingway or James Salter, can get plenty of shading and suggestion into even the shortest and straightest of sentences. But too often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude. The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity's greatest adornment).

...There'll always be a place for the short sentence, and no one could thrill more than I to the eerie incantations of DeLillo, building up menace with each reiterated note, or the compressed wisdom of a Wilde; it's the elegant conciseness of their phrases that allow us to carry around the ideas of an Emerson (or Lao Tzu) as if they were commandments or proverbs of universal application.

But we've got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise to you that I try to use my writing as the same kind of protest. I don't mean that I go out of my way to write long, snaking sentences filled with baroque vocabulary, just that I have no interest in making myself more accessible to the feeble-minded who use phrases like "tl;dr" and read everything on a smartphone screen. Luxuriating in language is one of the great joys in my life, and I feel sorry for anyone incapable of ever slowing down enough to appreciate the musicality of an artfully constructed phrase.

I'll again quote Nietzsche on why it's sometimes necessary to raise our language above the colloquial and bare-bones:

When one writes a book and thus steps into the public light, that is always a significant act deserving of a certain solemnity, so that one has to put aside everyday language. You have a good example in Catholicism, toward which, as you perhaps know, I am not exactly friendly, but this does not prevent me from recognizing the great worldly wisdom with which Rome has been conducting its business over the ages. Why does Rome still have the Mass read in Latin? To give the solemn act, veiled in mystery, a special solemnity even externally. But that must not be at the expense of clarity or intelligibility. If thoughts were thereby hidden, if the real meaning became hard to understand, that would of course be false, that would no longer be solemn, that would be foolish.

Protestant simplicity for the transfer of essential information, Catholic grandeur for the playful spirit of creativity. Wouldn't that be a good balance? Unfortunately, it feels like too many people are possessed with the spirit of Martin Luther when it comes to language these days, seeing the devil of artifice behind every unfamiliar word and an obfuscating fog in every wisp of incense smoke.

Neither Do Men Light a Candle and Put It Under a Bushel

2012-01-10T20:38:00.003-05:00

David William:

If I walked into someone’s house and saw a collection of their trophies on a shelf, I’d laugh. Shiny metal statues, a parody of the sports and activities they represent. Fortunately, I haven’t really seen that often. But I began to notice the equivalent that bookshelves have to the trophy case. Both are meant for public display, whether we admit it or not. Oh, please admire the depth of my quest for knowledge. If you still disagree, then keep your books boxed up or make a bookshelf closet. Yeah, it’s nicer to have them on display.

I’m absolutely guilty of this. There is a charm and mystique (and respect!) that comes with a well put together bookshelf. It’s no surprise that one of my favorite tumblr blogs is Bookshelf Porn. Books are a trophy of sorts. They are dated, dusty, often unmoved, and represent what we want to see and remember of ourselves. Yeah, I know. You just looooove to hold a book, smell the scent of the pages, the degradation of lignin… yeah yeah yeah we get it. I do too.

Man, I love my bookcases. I love the way they look, just as furniture alone, especially the matching pair of handmade ones I got from a relative. And honestly, the only person who has ever given my bookshelves more than a passing glance is my mom, so if I were arranging them in the hope of attracting awestruck compliments, I would have long ago fallen into despair and fed the books to the woodstove.

I'm sure there are people who buy books just as ego baubles, but one thing I'm proud of is that I only buy books I intend to read. If nothing else, I don't have money to throw away on stage props for a nonexistent audience! But, yuh know, being fake doesn't just mean striving for undeserved attention and praise. False modesty - like hiding a passion of yours away - is just as much a case of pretending to be someone you're not.

If There Were Gods, How Could I Endure Not to Be a God?

2012-01-10T18:25:00.003-05:00

Laurie Anderson:

The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority... Part of it is the pure fun of making things and thinking about things, and, like I said about Buddhism, being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do—and I have a god complex.

BLVR: A godplex.

LA: Yeah, a godplex! I’m thrilled by the fact that I made something out of nothing. There it is! It wasn’t there before: there it is—I made it! That’s pretty powerful, and that’s the power that Buddhists give to every single person. There is no one judging you; you are the Buddha. And that’s a frightening thought and a liberating thought, that you are the ultimate authority.

Sigh. A little learning is a dangerous thing, indeed. Buddhism, existentialism, solipsism, narcissism, what's the diff.

To the Manner Born

2012-01-10T13:13:00.004-05:00

David Hadju:

Recently reading Harper’s, I came across an advertisement for a mail-order audio course entitled Life Lessons of the Great Books. Over 36 lectures, it promises to teach “how great books...provide you with insights on how to conduct yourself in times of trouble, how to handle the joys and frustrations of love, how to appreciate the simple moments in life, and so much more.”

Great idea, I thought! In fact, I’ve decided to start my own line of courses, mining the works of all forms of literature for lessons that can be directly applied to solve everyday problems.

Biting sarcasm ensues.

I've never read a self-help book, but I'm open to the idea that the style can be done intelligently, without necessarily sacrificing nuance to lowest-common-denominator expedience. I can't help but note, though, that the literary cognoscenti seem to have a much harsher view:

The idea of reading Jane Austen to learn lessons about life is totally repugnant to me. Equally repugnant are memoirs about lessons learned from reading her. I read Jane Austen for pleasure, for the instant delight of, say, the opening of Persuasion: “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one…”

The poised irony of this character sketch, the rhythm of the sentence with its paradoxical tone – Jane Austen’s style – makes me laugh out loud. Vladimir Nabokov, in his 1950s Cornell lecture on Mansfield Park (published in Lectures on Literature, 1980) ends by reflecting upon Jane Austen’s style, and particularly what he calls “the epigrammatic intonation, a certain terse rhythm in the witty expression of a slightly paradoxical thought. The tone of voice is terse and tender, dry and yet musical, pithy but limpid and light.”

That style is what gives endless pleasure to readers of her novels, not the “life lessons” touted by Brownstein and Deresiewicz. Austen’s style is what is lacking in film or TV adaptations of her novels, however faithful they are to the dialogue and the plot. So in the 2008 BBC version of Persuasion, Sir Walter is portrayed as a vain snob, just as Jane Austen declares him to be, but not as foolishly comic, which her irony renders him. Underpinning the style is her command of language, the acuity of her observations, her finely nuanced moral sensibility and her natural wit.

All six of her novels are about love and marriage among the county gentry. To find “lessons” in them is to lose sight of them as comedies of manners, in which bad behaviour keeps breaking out.

Gulp. If I were a braver man, one that didn't fear having his head removed in a snarling flash of teeth, I might meekly raise my hand at this point and venture a query: Couldn't the reader possibly do... both? Is it really an either/or dichotomy? Might it not even be conceivable that readers who initially approach The Great Works with the base aim of pilfering some self-centered lessons might find themselves captivated by the exposure to a different perspective and sticking around for genuine learning? (I've suggested as much before.) Kitson says without elaborating that she reads for "pleasure", which I take to mean pleasure in the artistry, but why is that inherently superior to the more mundane pleasure of self-improvement? What about those of us who fail to be impressed overmuch by Austen's rhythm and tone even after having it called to our attention? Are we possessed of a ghastly deficiency, or have we simply frittered away the evenings in dissolute tomfoolery when we should have been attending to Nabokov's Cornell lecture?

Sometimes I suspect that this is all just a lingering inheritance from the good old days of aristocracy, and the real affront here is the artlessness of naked ambition, the gauche grasping after personal advancement, the sweat that accompanies striving. You're supposed to act as if you were born knowing this sort of thing, you peon. Now get back to sweeping my chimney.

Which also reminds me of something from Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason:

Middlebrow culture, which began in organized fashion with the early nineteenth century lyceum movement – when no one thought of culture in terms of “brows” – and extended through the fat years of the Book-of-the-Month Club in the 1950s and early 1960s, was at heart a culture of aspiration. Its aim was not so much to vanquish the culture of the gutter, although that was part of the idea, as to offer a portal to something more elevated.

[…] We did indeed, as (Virginia) Woolf observed disgustedly, have “pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters” on our walls; my mother’s taste ran to Van Gogh, Renoir, and Degas, I can still see the Degas ballerinas who adorned my bedroom walls, and it would not surprise me if that early exposure to middlebrow reproductions had something to do with a passion for art that did not emerge until my mid-twenties.

[…] The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself. Many uneducated lowbrows, particularly immigrants, cherished middlebrow values: the millions of sets of encyclopedias sold door to door from the twenties through the fifties were often purchased on the installment plan by parents who had never owned a book but were willing to sacrifice to provide their children with information about the world that had been absent from their own upbringing. Remnants of earnest middlebrow striving survive today among various immigrant groups, but the larger edifice of middlebrow culture, which once encompassed Americans of many social classes as well as ethnic and racial backgrounds, has collapsed. The disintegration and denigration of the middlebrow are closely linked to the political and class polarization that distinguishes the current wave of anti-intellectualism from the popular suspicion of highbrows and eggheads that has always, to a greater or lesser degree, been a part of the American psyche. What has been lost is an alternative to mass popular culture, imbibed unconsciously and effortlessly through the audio and video portals that surround us all. What has been lost is the culture of effort.

[…] I look back on the middlebrow with affection, gratitude and regret rather than condescension not because the Book-of-the-Month club brought works of genius into my life but because the monthly pronouncements of its reviewers were one of the many sources that encouraged me to seek a wider world. In our current infotainment culture, in which every consumer’s opinion is supposed to be as good as any critic’s, it is absurd to imagine that a large commercial entity would attempt to use an objective concept of greatness as a selling point for anything. That people should aspire to read and think about great books, or even aspire to being thought of as the sort of person who reads great books, is not a bad thing for a society.

You Know Nothing of the Crunch

2012-01-09T10:28:00.002-05:00

Julian Baggini:

When it comes to the crunch, it seems that very few genuinely embrace, or are prepared to admit they embrace, a form of religion that doesn't make supernatural claims. This finding was backed up by two surveys I conducted, which while far from authoritative strongly suggest that churchgoers do, indeed, hold traditional beliefs about such things as Christ's resurrection and the need to worship God. (Oddly, many people have claimed I was surprised by these results, when, as I explained in a reply, I have never expressed any amazement at all.)

So where does this leave me and does it constitute progress? The more procedural points merely clear the way for progress, so at best they represent a kind of proto-progress. It is a kind of negative progress to discard, set aside or reduce in importance aspects of the debate that are red herrings or have become too central. On the positive side, I think the real movement has come from grappling with the question of how important literal belief is to religion.

I'm fine with the idea of religion staying locked in a cyclical battle with disbelief for eons. What I'd like to do away with is this fetishization of linear "progress" in human psychology, this Hegelian faith that every thesis and antithesis can be synthesized, this tiresome pose of being the hero with enough balance and level-headedness to lead us safely between Scylla and Charybdis.

I Think That I Will Grow an Elfin Beard

2012-01-08T20:57:00.003-05:00

Christopher Howse:

It is true that the park becomes another world after dark, but historically it is just the place for a hermit.

When St James’s Park was being re-arranged in the first half of the 18th century, William Kent, who designed the pepper-pot topped Horse Guards, also ran up for Queen Caroline a hermitage called Merlin’s Cave. This rum cross between a grass-roofed African hut and a gothic ruin was installed in the gardens of Richmond Lodge. The Queen then appointed Stephen Duck, “The Thresher Poet”, as her ornamental hermit.

Ornamental hermits were quite the thing in the Age of Reason. No grotto was complete without one.

This is the bright side of the 1% accumulating so much of the nation's wealth -- a niche like this opens up for people like me.

With Our Tongue Will We Prevail

2012-01-07T14:50:00.003-05:00

While I'm on the subject, I should note that, as always, even unobjectionable ideas can easily be taken to absurd, facepalming lengths:

What if we transformed the meaning of occupy yet again? Specifically, what if we thought of Occupy Language as more than the language of the Occupy movement, and began to think about it as a movement in and of itself? What kinds of issues would Occupy Language address? What would taking language back from its self-appointed “masters” look like? We might start by looking at these questions from the perspective of race and discrimination, and answer with how to foster fairness and equality in that realm.

Occupy Language might draw inspiration from both the way that the Occupy movement has reshaped definitions of “occupy,” which teaches us that we give words meaning and that discourses are not immutable, and from the way indigenous movements have contested its use, which teaches us to be ever-mindful about how language both empowers and oppresses, unifies and isolates.

For starters, Occupy Language might first look inward. In a recent interview, Julian Padilla of the People of Color Working Group pushed the Occupy movement to examine its linguistic choices:

To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to “‘decolonise Wall Street”’ to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it’s all about who and how and why. When white colonizers occupy land, they don’t just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.

This linguistic change can remind Americans that a majority of the 99 percent has benefited from the occupation of native territories.

Yeahhhh—Did You Get That Memo?

2012-01-05T20:07:00.003-05:00

A year and a half ago, I issued a call for greater accuracy in our invective, greater precision in our obloquy. Strangely, my words have apparently fallen on deaf ears (or blind eyes, I suppose).

I mean, really -- would you entrust your penis to Donald Trump's mouth? Calumny requires verisimilitude for maximum effect!

Cashing Satan's Checks With My Dick In My Hand

2012-01-04T10:13:00.004-05:00

Well, fuck. If it's the coveted Vile Scribbler endorsement you want, I've been using Google Chrome for a couple years now (mainly because I got tired of having to update Firefox every ten minutes), and I'm saying that for free. Of course, if someone would like to send me some backpay as a result, I certainly won't object. Nudge nudge wink wink.

Let Our Brilliance Make Them Look Dark

2012-01-03T08:58:00.003-05:00

Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others! We rarely change an individual, and if we should succeed for once, something may also have been accomplished, unnoticed: we may have been changed by him. Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is yet to come balances and outweighs his influence. Let us not contend in a direct fight – and that is what all reproaching, punishing, and attempts to improve others amount to. Let us rather raise ourselves that much higher. Let us color our own example ever more brilliantly. Let our brilliance make them look dark. No, let us not become darker ourselves on their account, like all those who punish others and feel dissatisfied. Let us sooner step aside. Let us look away.

- Nietzsche

I always thought that was one of the most beautiful things he ever wrote, and so at odds with the crude stereotype of his philosophy. I was reminded of it while reading this passage from American Nietzsche:

Bourne worried, however, that Nietzsche needed rescuing from his friends more than from his enemies, and he turned to Mencken's Nietzsche-derived critique of American Puritanism as a case in point. Bourne argued that Mencken exemplified the tendency among anti-Puritan "crusaders" to resort to the very morality-based essentialism they set out to destroy. "One wishes Mr. Mencken had spent more time in understanding the depth and subtleties of Nietzsche," Bourne wrote, "and less on shuddering at Puritanism as a literary force." Had Mencken done so, Bourne argued he might have understood that the "attack must be, as Nietzsche made it, on that moralism rather than on its symptoms." According to Bourne, the value of Nietzsche's analysis of the priestly zealotry of Christian slave morality was that it enabled the critic not to ferret out the zealotry of others but to recognize it within one's self. Nietzsche didn't respond to finger-wagging with more of the same, nor did he advocate a simple inversion of slave morality for master morality. Rather, he employed genealogy to demonstrate the relativity of all moral values.

That relentless moralizing sneer certainly is one of the more tiring things about reading Mencken; see also George Bernard Shaw. I mean, look: even in an age of widespread literacy and easy access to education opportunities, most people are not intellectually inclined. It's just how it is. But the familiar pose of the disappointed idealist really is the mirror image of the judgmental, provincial busybody. In both cases, there's an unquestioned assumption that there is an ideal type of personality and lifestyle that all people should aspire to. One of the most valuable concepts I first encountered in Nietzsche was that we should check our proselytizing instinct at the door and think about what a great thing it is that other people are different from us, since it gives us that much more room to develop our own distinctive lives, using them for contrast and relief.

Shadow Puppets

2012-01-02T11:33:00.007-05:00

Jonathan Sacks:

Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterise modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask.

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes. Second, technology: technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say. As for the liberal democratic state, it gives us the maximum freedom to live as we choose, but the minimum direction as to how we should choose. The market gives us choices but it does not tell us what constitutes the wise or the good or the beautiful choices. Therefore, as long as we ask those questions, we will always find ourselves turning to religion.

... Individuals may live good lives without religion — the moral sense is part of what makes us human — but a society never can, and morality is quintessentially a social phenomenon. It is that set of principles, practices and ideals that bind us together in a collective enterprise. The market and the state may be driven by the pursuit of interests but societies are framed by something larger and more expansive, by a shared vision of the common good. Absent this and societies begin to fragment. People start thinking of morality as a matter of personal choice. The sense of being bound together — the root meaning of "religion" — in a larger enterprise starts to atrophy and social cohesion is lost. The West was made by what is nowadays called the Judeo-Christian heritage which gave it its unique configuration of values and virtues. Lose that and we will lose Western civilisation as we have known it for the better part of two millennia.

Damn, that's pathetic. Sacks sounds like a terrible ventriloquist reduced to tearfully pleading with his audience to stay in their seats and please refrain from pointing out how often his lips move.

If we've reached a level of awareness wherein we can openly discuss God's existence in such mercenary, calculating terms, then surely we can take that next tiny step and agree that the values that we generally call "Judeo-Christian" are worth preserving even if the presumed author of them has turned out to be a pseudonym without even an actual being behind it. Would Shakespeare's plays be any less profound in their effects if it turned out that they had indeed been produced by hundreds of monkeys on hundreds of typewriters over hundreds of years? Meaning is a relationship, one that we are constantly updating and recreating, not a solid object with a fixed place of residence.

Saturday Shuffle

2011-12-31T18:23:00.003-05:00

Let's end the year in song, shall we?

Fever Ray -- Concrete Walls
The Wildhearts -- The Revolution Will Be Televised
Silversun Pickups -- Melatonin
Vive la Fête -- Jaloux
The Knife -- Got 2 Let U
SONOIO -- Heartbeat
Planningtorock -- I Wanna Bite Ya
Alice in Videoland -- Something New
Cansei de Ser Sexy -- Believe Achieve
MNDR -- Caligula
Meat Beat Manifesto -- Guns N Lovers
London Quireboys -- 7 o'clock
Corrosion of Conformity -- Buried
The Black Keys -- When the Lights Go Out
Siouxsie and the Banshees -- Peekaboo
Zeromancer -- Clone Your Lover
Suicidal Tendencies -- Tap Into the Power
Brad -- We
Danzig -- Dominion
Joachim Witt -- Die Flucht

Creatio Ex Nihilo

2011-12-31T17:57:00.003-05:00

George Steiner:

What is the mystery that triggers creation? I wrote Grammars of Creation to understand it. But at the end of my life, I still don’t understand.

But would understanding mean that you miss out on the art?

In a sense, I am happy that I don’t understand. Imagine a world where neuro-chemistry could explain Mozart... It is conceivable, and I find it frightening.

Mozart can be "explained" in terms of musical theory, vibrating strings, displaced air molecules, and the structure of the inner ear as it is; would it really make a difference to add neurochemical jargon into the mix? Or more importantly, would it make the total experience of Mozart's music any less enthralling to have a conscious inkling of how all these different systems interact to produce it? And how does it follow that art must magically come unbidden from a vacuum in order to have any power at all?

We Have Burned Our Tongues While We Burned Your Ears

2011-12-31T11:00:00.002-05:00

Holly Brubach:

Reading “Crampton Hodnet,” a Barbara Pym novel set in North Oxford, Epstein gets the sense that “gossip traditionally has worked best in a small, one might even say tight, community.” I can’t help wondering how many citizens of small communities whose destinies are not in Barbara Pym’s benevolent hands would agree.

In any case, we all live in a small town now. Epstein acknowledges the power to libel and “wreck lives” made so widely available by the Internet. But he cites no more than a handful of online gossip’s casualties, in examples ranging in gravity from Malcolm Gladwell’s reputation (after his inclusion in a database of bad tippers) to a Rutgers student’s suicide (after video of his encounter with another male student was streamed online). Nor does Epstein seem particularly interested in gossip’s relationship to power, though he suggests it may have a role in revolutions. What for him constitutes a kind of spectator sport has been (and still is) for the disenfranchised a means of reconnaissance, a way of acquiring information crucial to their status and survival. It’s not for nothing that the two groups most notorious for trafficking in gossip have been women and gay men. Epstein quotes Leo Lerman, who said he kept a gossip-filled journal “because I am always interested in the disparity between the surface and what goes on underneath.”

Well, I suppose. Pascal Boyer wrote in Religion Explained about what he called "strategic information" -- essentially, knowing what other people are doing and saying when they might not want you to know it. He suggests that deities and other lesser spirits are extrapolations from that concept -- we humans are always limited in our access to strategic information, but wouldn't it stand to reason that there could be some who have unlimited access? As circumstantial evidence, he notes that "gods" always seem to be primarily interested in who's sleeping with whom, who's telling lies, who's stealing, and any of the myriad other behavioral concerns so typical of small communities, rather than in more abstract knowledge ("Does God know what every insect in the world is doing at this very moment? Does he know the contents of every refrigerator in the world?") Interesting theory.

Anyway, I just feel like acknowledging here how grateful I am to the age of digital anonymity for allowing the freedom to choose your relationships to a much larger degree. I can't help but think that people who romanticize small-town life must either be incredibly straitlaced and boring, or they've never actually lived in one.

Dance, Baby, Dance Like the World Is Ending

2011-12-31T09:26:00.002-05:00

Daniel Baird:

The difficulty with prophecies — whether based on passages from the Bible or ancient calendars, on solid climate science and economics or the visions of the Mongolian shamans Lawrence E. Joseph visited while researching his books — is that they are almost invariably wrong. Human beings are remarkably bad at predicting even relatively short-term, simple occurrences, such as the weather on Monday or the price of gold on Friday, much less something as vast and complex as the future of humanity. Many important events of the recent past came as a surprise to most people: World War I, the stock market crash of 1929, the Cold War, the computer age, the economic meltdown of 2008, the Arab Awakening, even the Occupy Wall Street movement. Part of the problem, as Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out in the eighteenth century, is that we are equipped with a concept of “cause” that constitutes little more than an association of things or events in the past — and projecting the patterns of the past onto the future is perilous. We read books of narrative history and biography and get the impression that what made things happen, what shaped the story, was always sharply defined and clear, when in fact it wasn’t and more likely still isn’t. The real problem with the future is that it doesn’t yet exist, and the forces that bring it into existence are too complicated, too subtle and volatile and fractal, for us to know in advance — or ever.

And yet we continue to try. Why? Because we need to have a sense that we control our fates, even if all that means is that we know our fates. And because we need to believe we are part of a story with a larger meaning, that vice is rewarded with punishment, that redemption is possible, that history is not random and empty, that a higher power (whether Isaiah’s wrathful God or simply the natural world) exacts the final judgment.

I've got the book Longing For The End in the stack of books waiting to be read, as it happens. Guess I better hurry up and get it done before next December if I want to at least die in the comforting embrace of wisdom!

I think the second paragraph sums it up pretty well, but I would also add in a dash of Nietzsche: "However, the fact that generally the ascetic ideal has meant so much to human beings is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui [horror of a vacuum]. It requires a goal—and it prefers to will nothingness than not to will."

Cuckoo for Foucault

2011-12-30T08:16:00.003-05:00

Jerome Roos:

I first encountered the work of Michel Foucault in college. Intrigued but confused, I decided to look for videos of the intellectual giant explaining his theories in a way that might be more intelligible than his obscurantist writings. To my excitement, I encountered a fascinating debate between Foucault and Chomsky aired on Dutch television in 1971. The exchange between the figureheads of the European and American Left, respectively, was a true clash of titans. By the end of it, however, I had lost most of my short-lived obsession with Foucault and had sided instead with the radical linguist Chomsky.

Later, while doing graduate studies in Paris, I was taken aback by the extent to which intellectuals are still revered in French culture, as if they were some kind of postmodern priests. Thinking back of Foucault, it struck me how ironic it was that the founding father of discourse analysis should be praised for speaking a discursive dialect that no sane person could believably claim to fully understand. What is the point of criticizing the reproduction of power through academic institutions if you willfully reproduce that same very power through your own unintelligible language?

Given the fact that Foucauldian discourse analysis is meant to reveal the obscured power relations undergirding social interactions in everyday life, there must have been an exclusionary purpose to Foucault’s flamboyant style of writing and speaking. In my own discourse analysis of Foucault, his was a desperate attempt to turn commonsensical statements about the role of language into seemingly profound truths backed by the culturally-respected veil of social theory — common sense dressed up in the hot air of ‘philosophy’.

Or, as Chomsky himself would later go on to say:

Quite regularly, “my eyes glaze over” when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don’t understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish.

I remember a cashier at Barnes & Noble ringing up a book by Nietzsche for me and enthusiastically asking if I liked Foucault too. "No, I tried reading him, but it just seemed... I dunno... pointless." I knew Foucault considered himself in intellectual debt to Nietzsche, and I really wanted to find something of value there, but my youthful gut response still holds true for me. People I respect like Brian Leiter seem to think highly of him, but I just couldn't find any there there.

Better Read Than Dead (III)

2011-12-29T16:20:00.004-05:00

Oh, no, I haven't finished all the ones from the last picture I took. These are just the ones I've added to the list since then.

I did finish Spook last night, though. It was well written and laugh-out-loud funny at times, but it ended up on that annoying note of supercilious evenhandedness so typical of people who write about religion and science as if reconciling them is the most important thing. Like this:

"I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things can—including the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter rising—but not all. I believe in the possibility of something more—rather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums). It's not much, but it's more than I believed a year ago... Perhaps I should believe in a hereafter, in a consciousness that zips through the air like a Simpsons rerun, simply because it's more appealing—more fun and more hopeful—than not believing. The debunkers are probably right, but they're no fun to visit a graveyard with. What the hell. I believe in ghosts."

Not to mention that she approvingly cites "Maria's shoe", of all things, as being the closest thing to a "dazzle shot"; i.e., a case that would be extremely difficult to refute.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others (II)

2011-12-29T16:05:00.004-05:00

Wasn't I just writing this morning about intellectual inconsistency? As before, bumper stickers give you all the proof you need that people don't always patiently follow their thoughts to a logical conclusion. I saw these on a car in town today:

• Peacemonger

• Dictionary definition of liberal (image)

• The Earth Does Not Belong to Us, We Belong to the Earth

• John Galt Is Coming

Freudwin

2011-12-29T13:20:00.003-05:00

When I first read the Jesse Bering column that Chris Clarke parodied the hell out of, it took me a few minutes to decide whether it was for real. I mean, I vaguely recall having read some dumb stuff from him before, and I guess I knew in the abstract that there were people who come off like a fundamentalist combination of Freud and Darwin, but I couldn't say I'd ever encountered one in the wild. Maybe he was being at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek?

Anyway, yeah, if there were any doubts, they're gone now.

Faith Is Believing What You Know Ain't So

2011-12-29T10:51:00.002-05:00

Robert Butler:

Three years ago, Dr Rowan Williams wrote a book about the 19th-century Russian novelist, in part, he says as a reaction to the attacks on Christianity by Richard Dawkins and others. The Archbishop felt that when he spoke to atheists about faith they seem to be talking about something very different to him. In their eyes, faith was seen as "a rather second-rate theory to explain why the world is the way it is or a second-rate psychological crutch for people who can't bear the weight of reality".

Dostoevsky wrote that if you tried to get a group of people to agree that two plus two equals four, they were almost bound to say "why not five?" There was something stubborn and perverse in the human imagination that wanted to go beyond the obvious. Dr Williams says, "I turn to Dostoevsky and think, well that sounds more like what I think faith is than what Richard Dawkins thinks faith is."

Eighteen minutes in, Dr Williams sums up the connection between fiction and faith:

Fiction helps you to understand that whatever the principles, whatever the sort of standing rules and perspectives on the moral and the spiritual life, human beings are every bit as unpredictable as Dostoevsky sets out, that they resist rational cataloguing and categorisation, and they often resist reasonable solutions. And you don't begin to understand humanity unless you understand that thread of wildness that's in it all.

Most people I know believe blatantly contradictory things. There's nothing wrong with that, of course; none of us are aiming to fit our lives perfectly under a system of rational organization. But most people don't have the self-assuredness to stand proudly in the intellectual nude with Walt Whitman and let their non-sequiturs dangle in the breeze. They'll still feel a sense of embarrassment if you point out those contradictions and will attempt to resolve them, something that probably wouldn't happen if they were simply being creative or rebellious. Methinks the archbishop is refusing to distinguish the exuberance of imagination from the shame of incoherence.

Plus Ça Change

2011-12-27T07:33:00.002-05:00

But ask yourself: Is it preferable for ten people in a group of 1,000 to die violent deaths or for ten million in a group of one billion? For Pinker, the two scenarios are exactly the same, since in both, an individual person has a 99 percent chance of dying peacefully. Yet in making a moral estimate about the two outcomes, one might also consider the extinction of more individual lives, one after another, and the grief of more families of mourners, one after another.

Today's higher populations also pose a deeper methodological problem. Pinker plays down the technical ability of modern societies to support greater numbers of human lives. If carrying capacity increases faster than mass murder, this looks like moral improvement on the charts, but it might mean only that fertilizers and antibiotics are outpacing machine guns and machetes -- for now.

There is also a more fundamental way in which the book is unscientific. Pinker presents the entirety of human history in the form of a natural experiment. But he contaminates the experiment by arranging the evidence to fit his personal view about the proper destiny of the invdividual: first, to be tamed by the state, then, to civilize himself in opposition to the state. The state appears in Pinker's history only when it confines itself to the limited role that he believes is proper, and enlightenment figures as the rebellion of intelligent individuals against the state's attempt to exceed its assigned role.

There's much, much more in what I suspect is the definitive takedown of Steven Pinker's latest book by Bloodlands author Timothy Snyder.

The Tongue That's Bitten Through

2011-12-26T16:58:00.002-05:00

Phil Oliver:

But the real problem is not an absence of good will in search of demonstrable objectivity, by conscientious religionists, humanists, naturalists, theists, and atheists. They can search all they want without finding that.

No, the real problem is a failure of empathy and an appreciation for the subjectivity of those who experience the world differently. It’s James’s perennial blindness in human beings who insist on treating the spectrum of belief and nonbelief as a catalogue of others’ errors… except, of course, for one’s own privileged experiences and inerrant beliefs.

Spirituality. The word itself heralds a creeping rhetorical fog that permeates everything it touches, doesn't it? I mean, what exactly does one have to do to display empathy and appreciation? Isn't it a fool's game to allow other people to sit in judgment of whether you're being demonstratively warm and openminded enough? How quietly must one sit, how long must one listen, and how carefully does one have to couch objections in the softest language possible before they're allowed to simply say, "I'm sorry, but there's no reason to think that's true," with the nonnegotiable implication being that we should all care about what's true?

There are many, many areas of human experience where I'm thrilled to discover people who think and feel differently than me because of the chance to broaden my own horizons, art being perhaps the most obvious. And even when it comes to the big questions, I still understand the natural human tendency to want to fit experience into a self-flattering narrative, to find external meaning and purpose to their lives. But it doesn't mean I want to coo soothingly and nod along as they tell me about the divine message behind a happenstance occurrence, or their conviction that cows communicate psychically if you know how to listen. People who are insecure about believing silly shit are always going to think anything less than wholehearted assent is being unfair.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

2011-12-25T05:18:00.003-05:00

Due to the financial and temporal constraints of this topsy-turvy year, I wasn't able to track down as much new music as I would have liked. However, there were some notable releases that made my world a better place, so let me offer paeans to Audysseus, the god of songwriting:

• Awolnation, Megalithic Symphony

I had heard the song "Sail" on the radio and meant to check them out, but forgot about it for a while, until my friend Sandi mentioned them and reminded me. Thanks, Sandi! Glad you said something, because this was one of my two favorite records of the year, and I went ahead and put it first on the list due to the novelty factor giving it a slight edge. Musically, it veers hyperactively from rock/metal to dance to aggressive electronica, but Aaron Bruno puts so much heart into his singing that it becomes a unique beast, something greater than the sum of its parts, if that makes any sense.

Favorite songs: Pretty much all of them. Seriously, there's three short instrumental tracks that don't really need to be there, but that's just quibbling.

• Ladytron, Gravity the Seducer

My co-favorite record of the year. They don't tinker much with what they've been doing all along, they just keep getting better and better at it.

Favorite songs: White Elephant, Mirage, White Gold, Ambulances, Transparent Days, 90 Degrees

• Rob Crow, He Thinks He's People

The record that aurally defined my autumn. I had to furtively look for time alone so that I could listen to songs like "Tranked" on extended repeat without sending other people screaming out into traffic just to make it all stop.

Favorite songs: Tranked, Locking Seth Putnam In Hot Topic, Sophistructure, So Way, Hangnailed, I'd Like To Be There

• 16Volt, Beating Dead Horses

I would love to hear Eric Powell branch out from industrial metal, because he has such a knack for catchy melodies and interesting arrangements even within those somewhat tight confines, so much so that the more straightforward metal riffs and paint-by-numbers depressed lyrical themes sound flat and uninspired sometime, almost like he just put them in there out of habit or to meet expectations. Again, though, I'm quibbling. The dude just keeps on churning out great records.

Favorite songs: The Wasteland That Is Me, Fight Or Flight, Burn, Breathing Water, Ghost, Dissembler, Somewhere New

• Maximum Balloon, Maximum Balloon

Technically, this came out last year, but I only discovered it in January, so I'm counting it. A sorta-side-project of Dave Sitek from TV On the Radio with various vocalists contributing. Speaking of which...

Favorite songs: Groove Me, Young Love, Communion

• TV On the Radio, Nine Types of Light

It took me forever just to get past the first three songs on this disc long enough to listen to the rest of it.

Favorite songs: Second Song, Keep Your Heart, You, Killer Crane

• Elbow, Build a Rocket, Boys

The mournful post-Radiohead Brits haven't let winning the Mercury prize cheer them up, and that's a good thing. Keep moping, boys.

Favorite songs: The Birds, The Night Will Always Win, High Ideals, With Love

• Kasabian, Velociraptor

These Brits are neither mournful nor in any way resembling Radiohead. They've never recaptured the magic of their debut, but I still like them.

Favorite songs: Neon Noon, Re-Wired, I Hear Voices, Velociraptor, Days Are Forgotten, Man Of Simple Pleasures

• The Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part 2

Licensed to Ill was the first record (cassette, actually; remember those?) that I got as my own, the first music that my parents didn't already have or even want to know about, back when I was thirteen. So the Beasties have always had a special place in my heart. This wasn't even anywhere close to my favorite disc of theirs (that would be Hello Nasty), but hey, it's still the Beastie Boys. It's going on the list, goddamnit.

Favorite songs: Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament, Tadlock's Glasses

When I Want Your Opinion, I'll Give It to You

2011-12-24T19:39:00.003-05:00

Tim Padgett:

Yes, Christians believe that Jesus' nativity was a virgin birth and that he rose from the dead on Easter. But if you were to show most Christians incontrovertible scientific proof that those miracles didn't occur, they would shrug — because their faith means more to them than that. Because in the end, what they have faith in is the redemptive power of the story. In Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, an agnostic says to his Catholic friend, "You can't seriously believe it all ... I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."

"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."

"But you can't believe things simply because they're a lovely idea."

"But I do. That's how I believe."

I'm willing to bet it's how most believers believe. Before Hitchens died at 62 from esophageal cancer, he made a point of declaring he was certain no heaven awaited him. But that swipe at the faithful always misses the point. Most of us don't believe in God because we think it's a ticket to heaven. Rather, our belief in God — our belief in the living ideal of ourselves, which is something even atheists ponder — instills in us a faith that in the end, light always defeats darkness (which is how people get through the wars and natural disasters I cover).

I don't see a need to dwell on the many ludicrous points contained here, because honestly, I'm just in a hurry to to take that bet before he changes his mind. My life savings are on the table whenever you're ready, Tim. "Most" believers, yes? Before we shake on it, you might want to take a moment and consider that not everyone is an educated, cosmopolitan, sophisticated fellow like yourself, and you might be unpleasantly surprised at how many of the great unwashed take their "stories" completely seriously.

It's atheists who are arrogant, though, remember. And yet you see this so often from the sophisticated believers, this blithe, serene self-assurance that the author or speaker has been appointed to represent everyone else's thoughts and feelings. I tried last night to start reading a book I picked up at a library sale last month, Poetry As Spiritual Practice, by Robert McDowell. This was in the introduction:

All human beings—Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, animist or atheist—seek spirituality in their daily lives whether they know it or not. We seek truths greater than ourselves, our individual beings.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise to you that I already gave up on the book. No, really, he just gets worse from there. Please, take my word on it.

It's not just that "spirituality", that endlessly elastic word that manages to be simultaneously ubiquitous and meaningless, is defined here as "anything other than strict solipsism", apparently; it's the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, heart-stopping way he refuses to allow the possibility of anyone truly disagreeing with him. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. I would consciously acknowledge the irony of being lectured on "truths greater than ourselves" by someone who repeatedly throughout the book makes it clear that other people only exist as screens, canvases and receptacles for him to project his thoughts and feelings into and upon, but I'm afraid that the sheer ironic density of it would act as a black hole and tear a hole in the fabric of space/time.

Seriously, though, I may be at least slightly misanthropic, standoffish and elitist, but I at least avoid treating other people as if they need me to tell them what they really think. Which do you prefer, honest rudeness or smarmy patronizing?

When Out On the Lawn There Arose Such a Clatter

2011-12-24T17:13:00.002-05:00

My friend Arthur passes along a bit of subversive holiday cheer that he wrote years ago:

CLAUS COMPOUND RAIDED, SANTA ARRESTED FOR ANIMAL ABUSE

December 24, 2011 -- Santa Claus was arrested today on charges of animal abuse after police and FBI agents raided his reindeer ranch outside of Anamoose, North Dakota and found Donner and Blitzen passed out in a pool of their own vomit.

Guided by loud snoring sounds, law enforcement officers had little trouble locating the prostrate pair of oversized ungulates inside a corral stinking of urine and littered with empty Schnapps bottles.

An FBI source said authorities were acting on a tip from a disgruntled elf. “Some pissed-off midget dropped a dime on the old fart, for sure,” said the agent.

A neighbor of the well-known children’s idol and Consumer Age mega-icon, speaking on condition of anonymity, admitted that he frequently caught glimpses of celebrity reindeer Rudolf on the grounds of the fenced compound, sometimes grazing unsteadily, sometimes guzzling avidly at a large bowl.

“That red nose should have tipped me off that ‘the Antlered One’ had a major league drinking problem,” said the neighbor. “No way you get a neon schnoz like that unless you’ve been hitting the happy sauce big time. The pressure of stardom, it was obviously getting to him, and Santa, that enabling a-hole, he was always leading the poor dumb critter to that industrial-sized punch bowl, you know, sort of egg-nogging him on. I wanted to call an animal control officer or something, but this Santa guy, yeah, he’s real jolly and stuff when he’s sober, but Christ, what a mean drunk! When the Clausmeister’s liquored up, watch out, dude, he’ll pull that stick of his bag and beat the living bejeezus out of you before you can say, Ho-ho-holy crap! Try to run away and he’ll bonk you upside the head with big-ass chunk of coal. Got an arm like Johnny Unitas, that fat bastard. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and he’s a total asshole!”

Reporters caught sight of the obese, mystically ubiquitous shopping mall shill as he was being led away by police, clad only in stained long-johns, his white beard dyed a distinct shade of yellow, apparently by nicotine stains. With bags under his eyes, a puffy face, and cheeks several hues redder than rosy, he bore little resemblance to the kindly nocturnal visitant sometimes caught on camera eating cookies and drinking a glass of milk with a sheepish grin in affluent households across the country. “I got your badge numbers,” he was heard to shout in what seemed to be an advanced state of inebriation as he struggled with the arresting officers. “Don’t worry, you fucking pigs, I’ll be keeping a list and checking it twice. You like presents? Boom! Ka-Pow! A bunker-buster straight down the chimney, how’s that for a stocking stuffer, blue boy?”

Several elves were also taken into custody on suspicion of being illegal aliens. It appears that many of Mr. Claus’ underpaid and overworked assembly line workers were smuggled here from the Land of Oz. Two of these cuddly sociopaths have been the subjects of a year-long Munchkin-hunt. Police say the pair are wanted on charges of pixie-dust trafficking.

Mrs. Claus, who has been separated from her husband since 1996, declined to comment on the incident when contacted at her home in Boca Raton, Florida.

Mr. Claus’s attorneys have told reporters that they will be issuing a statement tomorrow. A hearing is scheduled for some time next week.

Let's Do It Like They Do On the Discovery Channel

2011-12-24T08:48:00.002-05:00

Chris Clarke makes me laff. Also, I'm embarrassed that I never thought to use "humanitarian" as a dietary descriptor before.

This, Then, Is the Mark of the Man, the Beard

2011-12-22T19:35:00.003-05:00

In the spirit of the season, I can forgive Shmuley Boteach his religious beliefs in order to come together in agreement on the issues that really matter:

A full beard is a sign of the robust mountain man... Second, a bearded man is an honest man by choice and not by circumstance... The bearded man knows he can avoid liability for any untruths. He can hide behind his muttonchops, and no one would be the wiser. But he chooses to have his words mimic his heart. His beard lends him conviction. Third, a beard is also the sign of patience and commitment in a man... Fourth, a beard represents confidence and individuality. A man who grows a beard is a man who is sure of himself. A man who grows a beard is not afraid to stand alone. He does not let himself be swayed by the opinions of his wife ("Oh, no honey, not a beard!") or of American pop culture. A bearded man knows what he wants and sets out to get it... So, in a moment of half-seriousness, let me say that it seems that so many trail-blazing individuals throughout history have born beards. From literary giants like Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, and Walt Whitman, to business visionaries like Andrew Carnegie to the entirety of the Impressionistic Art movement... Of course only bearded men can be artists. They have to fashion that facial hair every morning into something presentable, a challenge and a pleasure that the devilish clean-shaven man will never know... And my final point: a bearded man has the perfect paradoxical relationship between raw instinct and careful cultivation... And only a man with a beard can combine the bohemian and the bourgeoisie in a manner that we can read upon his face. Literally.

Surrounded By the Sounds of Saxophones

2011-12-22T07:20:00.007-05:00

Tim de Lisle:

If there was a contest to find the most derided instrument in rock music today, the saxophone would be a prime contender. After ruling the airwaves in the Eighties, it was chased out in the Nineties by grunge, and these days it often feels as if the only person still playing the sax in public is Lisa Simpson... Roxy Music were the first great rock band in which a woodwind player was a central member (Andy Mackay, on sax and oboe; there has still, arguably, been only one more: Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, featuring the late lamented Clarence Clemons).

At times like this, I wish I knew how to spell that stunned sound of disbelief that cartoon characters make when they shake their heads rapidly. Uh, Tim? Meet Dana Colley, the invalidation of your entire thesis. Even if you don't count Twinemen and Bourbon Princess as major bands, Morphine alone - before, during, and after the heyday of grunge - did more to display the creative potential and importance of the saxophone in rock music than all of the superfluous '80s soft-rock hits put together.

Sit Back and Look For the Warnings; The Future's Bright and Alarming

2011-12-22T05:18:00.000-05:00

The Economist:

But turn again to those living 100 or 500 years ago. How would they have viewed civilisation today? Think of all the animals, languages, and societies that have since gone extinct. Modern lives might seem like a vision of hell. The coastal, urban corridor along which I live now is horribly changed from its condition a century ago. Those of us who live along it spend the vast majority of our time indoors and only rarely glimpse anything that could honestly be called nature. The food we eat is highly processed and often unidentifiable as one plant or animal versus another. Many of us rarely see many of our close friends and family, and communicate with them only through the tinny interfaces of our electronic devices. "Some life!", a resident of the past might conclude. Yet how many of us would switch places with those who lived centuries ago? A century from now, much more of the world will likely have been despoiled. Humans might live in underground bunkers eating lab-grown meat. But who's to say they won't prefer their lot to ours?

That excerpt's not really the main point of the article. I just thought it was interesting in and of itself.

Blood Is On the Table, The Mouths Are Choking

2011-12-22T05:04:00.002-05:00

Here we go again. "If you really care about animals, you'd eat them." Is this topic what the kids like to call "trending"? Someone must have sent out a memo.

I see two direct conclusions to the contrarian logic here which are nonetheless surprisingly absent. One, the most overall balanced lifestyle for humans is hunting/gathering. Good luck with selling that. Two, the most overall balanced state for the planet itself would require a few billion less humans on it. But I suppose only a Malthusian fascist or whatever would point that out.

There Are Known Knowns; There Are Things We Know We Know

2011-12-20T18:55:00.000-05:00

In lieu of a pertinent thought of my own
Two links - within rhyme! - on what's rationally known.

We Are Trees For Yielding a Sweet Death

2011-12-20T10:24:00.000-05:00

Dying is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none
within us.

- Rilke

Alberto Manguel:

The Cranach painting led Stan and me into a discussion on whether we would like to extend the time of our lives, if such a thing were possible. I said that the foreseeable end did not frighten or worry me; on the contrary, I liked the idea of living with a conclusion in mind, and compared an immortal life to an endless book which, however charming, would end up seeming tiresome. Stan, however, argued that living on, perhaps forever (provided he were free of sickness and infirmities), would be an excellent thing. Life, he said, was so enjoyable that he never wanted it to end.

When we had that conversation, I was not yet fifty; this year, I turned sixty-three, and I am more convinced than ever that an endless life is not worth living. Not that I think I have many decades to go. Of course, it is difficult to be certain without holding the entire volume in my hands, but I’m fairly sure that I’m on one of the last chapters. So much has occurred, so many characters have come and gone, so many places have been visited, that I don’t suppose the story can continue for many more pages without petering out into an incoherent and incontinent babble.

...As Petrarch understood it, the intimate conviction of readers is that there are no individually authored books: there is only one text, infinite and fragmented, through which we leaf with no concern for continuity or anachronism or bureaucratic property claims. Since I first started reading, I know that I think in quotations and that I write with what others have written, and that I can have no other ambition than to reshuffle and rearrange. I find great satisfaction in that. And, unlike Stan, I’m convinced that no satisfaction can be truly everlasting.

Constant Entertainment For Our Restless Minds, Constant Stimulation For Epic Appetites

2011-12-18T15:50:00.001-05:00

Maria Russo:

I guess you can’t fault Andersen for wanting culture to be an adventure – though he also seems to think that means providing him with endless stimulation. But what is really lost if the shock of the radically new doesn’t show up every 10 years to give him pleasure and make it easy to differentiate decades? Notably absent from the essay is an acknowledgement that all the rad stylistic innovation that ended sometime in the early 1990s had to be paid for with borrowed money. Andersen is a child of the Great American Financial Expansion that crashed and burned in 2008, groaning under the weight of the millions of spacious, elegant homes now inhabited by Boomers, and the pressure of the post-9/11 Boomer wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and drip drip drip of the barrage of needless medical tests performed every time a Boomer has a headache. Of course the party’s over. The money has all dried up.

Technology is definitely making lifestyle — and the expense associated with acquiring it — less relevant. (Which is fortunate for those of us who can no longer afford much of one, anyway.) Much of what Andersen prizes from the allegedly more innovative American past is just display. But when your life — public and private, working and leisurely — revolves around a MacBook and an iPhone, and constant, disembodied exchanges of information in placeless cyber realms… well, you don’t need to overturn the Aeron chair, do you? Nor do you need to fixate on the status-symbolism of where you live. Best of all, you don’t need to worry about what you buy and what it says about you, because you may buy very little.

Andersen believes we’re stopped innovating culturally because it’s just all become too, too much. Sheltering ourselves has become our collective defense against meltdown in the searing heat of technological advance. “[T]hese stagnant last couple of decades may be a secular rather than cyclical trend, the beginning of American civilization’s new chronic condition, a permanent loss of appetite for innovation and the shockingly new,” he writes.

Or maybe external change isn’t what we’re all about anymore.

I had been mentally chewing on Andersen's essay since I first saw it, wondering how to phrase exactly what bothered me about it, but I can't really improve on that. I would also throw in what Josh Rothman said about it: the rapid rate of cultural change that Andersen takes as the natural order of things is actually a very recent aberration.

Lucubratio (X)

2011-12-18T01:12:00.006-05:00

I'm guessing this is supposed to be some devastating satire of atheism, a reductio ad absurdum, but all it makes me think of is the kind of kid who would complain to his mom that he shouldn't have to clean his room because it's just going to get dirty again.

No, Dylan Thomas, No

2011-12-16T18:54:00.000-05:00

PZ:

As atheists, I think none of us can find solace in the cliches or numbness in the delusion of an afterlife. Instead, embrace the fierce strong emotions of anger and sorrow, feel the pain, rage against the darkness, fight back against our mortal enemy Death, and live exuberantly while we can. Confront mortality clear-eyed and pugnacious, uncompromising and aggressive.

My, such hostility! It's practically a parody of a tragic poet, what with all that sturm und drang. Well, I'll leave the professor to his fist-shaking at the heavens and stroll over here to converse more casually with you all.

You know the old saw about how living well is the best revenge, I'm sure. I think the basic principle applies here, too. All you can do is live. Live exuberantly, if you wish. Or with your passions on a slow simmer. Either way, just enjoy yourself and don't worry overmuch about death; it'll arrive at its own sweet pace. Confront it, fight it, rage at it, whatever. It don't make death no nevermind.

And what's the point of maintaining this antagonistic relationship with it anyway? Would you seriously want to live forever? Do you honestly believe disease can or should be entirely eradicated? Death is the necessary coda that keeps existence from sprawling out into endless, atonal meaninglessness. Its nature is such that it's never dignified or convenient for you and I personally, but as a general rule, we couldn't do without it. Wise men at their end know dark is right.

I Am Superman and I Know What's Happening

2011-12-14T12:10:00.002-05:00

Michael Holroyd:

I enjoyed bringing out Shaw's humour, his hidden generosity and outstanding deficiency in mechanical matters – such as controlling his typewriter, his bicycle and his cars – all of which humanised the public figure who had come to exist in many people's imagination as a remote Superman. It was impossible not to warm to someone who replied to an actress claiming that since she had the most beautiful body and he the most brilliant mind they should produce a child of genius: "But what if the child inherits my body – and your brain?"

Yes, that's certainly witty. But, as John Gray once put it:

Throughout his life, the great playwright argued in favor of mass extermination as an alternative to imprisonment. It was better to kill the socially useless, he urged, than to waste public money locking them up. This was not just a Shavian jest. At a party in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday held in Moscow during his visit to the USSR in August 1930, Shaw told his half-famished audience that when they learnt he was going to Russia his friends had loaded him up with tinned food; but - he joked - he threw it all out the window in Poland before he reached the Soviet frontier. Shaw taunted his audience in full knowledge of their circumstances. He knew the Soviet famines were artificial. But he turned a jovial eye on their victims from the considered conviction that mass extermination was justified if it advanced the cause of progress.

Speaking of which, his criteria for determining the socially useless sounds indistinguishable from that of my teabagger relatives:

You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

Lysenkoism. Anti-vaccination. He had the intellectual's unfortunate tendency to follow a trail of convoluted abstract thinking to absurd conclusions that would have been apparent to the straightforward common sense of the simpletons he derided so much, as well as the inclination toward becoming a True Believer according to Eric Hoffer's taxonomy: a zealot by nature jumping from cause to cause, never letting failure or embarrassment temper his enthusiasm for the sort of moral crusading that his attention to Nietzsche should have helped him see as a lingering inheritance of Christianity (along with his fervent wish for teleological redemption to come in some glorious future); instead, he superficially rebelled by insisting on treating Christmas as just another workday, which, of course, was the official position of the actual Puritans, thus bringing us around full circle in a neat illustration of John Calvin's malignant influence. O irony!

Make no mistake, I'd like to read the biography. The most interesting people do tend to contain multitudes. But even when I agree with him, as on vegetarianism, he strikes me as a tiresome prig with a thorny stick wedged in his nether regions. Fascinating to know, perhaps, but exceedingly difficult to "warm to".

We Got a Kinder, Gentler Machine Gun Hand

2011-12-12T14:47:00.002-05:00

Shannon Gilreath:

But having gotten to where we are—to a place at which the law no longer bars Gays’ entry into the armed services, the question of whether Gays should serve stands out in bold relief. This is, at bottom, a question of priorities. The modern “gay rights” movement, at least since the 1970s when the Gay Activists Alliance split from the Gay Liberation Front, has been governed by a politics that values only that which is paradigmatically straight and, accordingly, has striven mightily to get Gays into the two institutions through which most of the world’s violence is accomplished—the state sanctioned home and the military—without much critical analysis of how participation in these institutions actually affects Gay people.

Yup. I recently read an interview with David Graeber where he said that the only plausible scenario where a genuine revolution can occur is when the forces of order refuse to shoot. A preliminary to that would be for more people to refuse to join the forces of order and pick up a gun in the first place.

Things Which Are Not Seen

2011-12-12T10:12:00.002-05:00

Sabrina Golonka:

While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of "the mind" and the modern view of cognition. But, how universal is this conception? How do speakers of other languages think about the psychological aspect of personhood?

In Korean, the concept "maum" replaces the concept "mind". "Maum" has no English counterpart, but is sometimes translated as "heart". Apparently, "maum" is the "seat of emotions, motivation, and "goodness" in a human being" (Wierzbicka, 2005; p. 271). Intellect and cognitive functions are captured by the Korean "meli" (head). But, "maum" is clearly the counterpart to "mind" in terms of the psychological part of the person. For example, there are tons of Korean books about "maum" and body in the same way that there are English texts on "mind" and body.

The Japanese have yet another concept for the invisible part of the person - "kokoro"."Kokoro" is a "seat of emotion, and also, a source of culturally valued attention to, and empathy with, other people" (Wierzbicka, 2005; p. 272). To illustrate the contrast between "kokoro" and "mind", Wierzbicka gives the following example: A Japanese television programme proclaims, "The 21st century should be the age of kokoro. Let's make a point of meeting with other people" (Hasada, 2000: 110). If an English speaker declared the 21st century to be "the age of the mind" then "meeting with other people" probably would not be a priority - thinking and knowing would be. In contrast to the Korean "maum", "kokoro" is not associated with will and motivation ("hara" meaning belly serves this purpose in Japanese). But, "hara" is not associated with the psychological component of the body, the way "kokoro" is. In other words, "maum" is all about motivation and "kokoro" is all about feelings and "mind" is all about thinking.

Interestingly, Russia, which kind of sits between East and West uses "dusa" as the counterpart to the psychological part of the person. "Dusa" is often translated as "soul", but also sometimes as "heart" or "mind." "Dusa" is associated with feelings, morality, and spirituality. The "dusa" is responsible for the ability to connect with other people. This meaning seems to lie somewhat more with the Eastern conception than with the highly cognitive concept of "mind." In a larger sense, the fact that there seems to be a universal belief that people consist of visible and invisible aspects explains much of the appeal of cognitive psychology over behaviourism.

You Don't Want the Truth

2011-12-12T07:09:00.003-05:00

A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight, after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power. Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and we confront the first attempt to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question, that is the experiment.

- Nietzsche

Eric Weiner:

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us? The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones. Apparently, a growing number of Americans are running from organized religion, but by no means running from God. On average 93 percent of those surveyed say they believe in God or a higher power; this holds true for most Nones — just 7 percent of whom describe themselves as atheists, according to a survey by Trinity College.

Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism. We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

It's like a cat managing to always land on its feet. You just have to marvel at how fatuous twits, upon being dropped into a crucible of doubt, reflection, and despair, will always manage to make everything about them, to convince themselves that their every banality is profound, and that whatever holds true for them during this particular snapshot of their life must be synonymous with timeless verities. Maybe it just needs to be pitched to him on the sort of mushy self-help level that appeals to so many like him: dude, you seem to have some serious issues with commitment and decisiveness.

I like the Nietzsche excerpt because it's such a sharp riposte to the typical apologists who claim that the sugar-coated errors and self-centered illusions of religion are necessary to preserve people's ability to function at all. The impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.

Mythunderstanding

2011-12-09T20:41:00.005-05:00

Sigh:

"These Native Americans [in the south-west] believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits, too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature."

While the account tries to show respect, Loewen argues that it reduces the believers to simple-minded caricatures. Their beliefs are presented as childish make-believe. A similarly literal version of Christianity would offend believers:

"These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world... They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating their [god's] son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died."

Loewen points out that textbooks never describe Christianity this way. The reason is not hard to find: believers would immediately recognise that such literalism fails to convey either the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction of sharing in the beliefs and practices of a religious community. Rather than reducing their faith to a listing of the bizarre and the irrational, researchers need to pay as much respectful and sympathetic attention to the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of the underdogs of the world as they do to those of the orthodox elites and the powerfully established.

You know what? I'm just going to let the brilliance of these two Jesus and Mo cartoons speak for me here.

Playing to the Groundlings

2011-12-09T18:35:00.003-05:00

Despite my best efforts, I have yet to drive off my most dedicated readers, my longtime blog-companions. So at this festive time of year, I feel I should probably reward their stubbornness and masochism with stuff that they might actually enjoy reading and commenting on, as opposed to my usual hobbyhorses.

So for Noel, here's an article on the usefulness of hallucinogens in treating various mental illnesses. For research purposes only. Not that he would know anything about that himself, persistent, scandalous rumors to the contrary.

For Brian, here's an article about how cyclists are a bunch of rich elitist snobs who should all be steamrolled.

And for Shanna, here's something about some plucky Canadian musicians taking the Billboard charts by storm. Canada has its own rock bands? Aww, that's so adorable!

Discuss, pontificate, fight, do as the spirit moves you.

Where the Fleshless Abide

2011-12-09T18:05:00.004-05:00

Ed Yong:

The goggles I wore displayed the view from a camera pointing at my back. Ehrsson tapped my chest with one plastic rod while using a second one to synchronously prod at the camera. I saw and felt my chest being prodded at the same time as I saw a picture of myself from behind. Within ten seconds, I felt as if I was being pulled out of my real body and was floating several feet behind it.

A year after removing his subjects from their own bodies, Ehrsson learned how to trick them into acquiring new ones. This time, the volunteers' goggles showed them the view from a camera on the head of a mannequin looking at its own plastic torso. Simultaneously poking the arm or stomach of the mannequin and the volunteer a few times was enough to convince the subjects that they were the dummy. They could even stare at their old bodies from their new ones and shake hands with their old self, all without breaking the spell. “It really is very intense and incredibly fast,” says Mark Hallett, a neurologist from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who experienced it first hand.

In his latest trick, published in May, Ehrsson convinced people that they had jumped into a tiny Barbie doll. When he prodded the doll's legs, the volunteers thought they were being prodded by giant objects. And when Ehrsson tested the illusion on himself and a colleague touched his cheek, he says, he looked up and “felt as if I was back in my childhood and looking at my mother”.

...He also occasionally gets angry letters from people who have had out-of-body experiences themselves. “They believe that their souls have left their bodies, and they feel threatened that a similar experience can be induced in a lab,” says Ehrsson. He offers a diplomatic response, saying that he has “no way of disproving their ideas”. Metzinger is more forthright. “Henrik's work speaks to the idea that there is no such thing as a soul or a self that's independent of the brain,” he says.

Hee hee. It's like Schopenhauer said -- if forced to choose between a personal deity and personal immortality, people would turn atheist in a heartbeat. Who cares about arguing over God's nonexistence? It's far easier to disprove the idea of an immaterial soul, and far more devastating to traditional religious conceptual frameworks. Even most theodicy has to rely on some invocation of God's mysterious ways, which aren't readily apparent to the untrained eye. Few believers would be willing to allow an average life on Earth, bounded by the physical events of birth and death, to stand as proud affirmation of the inherent worth of existence.

"Was That—Life?" I Shall Say to Death. "Very Well, Once More!"

2011-12-08T08:39:00.008-05:00

Vanity Fair:

Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive.

Or, as George Carlin said, much more succinctly:

Here’s more middlebrow bullshit philosophy. “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” I’ve got something more realistic: “That which does not kill me may sever my spinal cord, crush my rib cage, cave in my skull and leave me helpless and paralyzed, soaking in a puddle of my own waste.” Put that in your T-shirt, touchy feely New Age asshole!

Yeah, it's a bit of a shame that of all the things Nietzsche wrote, this should be possibly the bite-sized quotation that's become part of the collective consciousness. He wrote much more profound stuff, really! But I think Hitchens is right in saying that all he really meant by it was to attempt to affirm the few periods of pain-free existence he had as he aged, in keeping with his thoughts on the eternal recurrence and all that. And the romantic in me can sympathize with the proud, defiant gesture of it. Like the eternal recurrence, treat it as a thought experiment rather than a factual statement, a brave attempt to hold on to all that gives your life meaning even when facing unbearable suffering, and I think it sounds a lot less facile.

...adding, this is just fucking stupid. Of course it's not "true". Is logical positivism suddenly back in vogue? What simpleton ever took the phrase literally in the first place? And what is this "atheist list" of maxims from which it must be scratched? We have our own official list of U.S.D.A. certified godless aphorisms now? Is it a list of sayings by atheists, for atheists, or both? What are the penalties for quoting unapproved sources?

Black Flowers Blossom

2011-12-07T09:02:00.002-05:00

Ingrid Norton:

Pinker recognizes World Wars I and II as big problems for his thesis that modernity lessens violence. Though far from the only mass atrocities in human history, these conflicts entail some of the most densely violent years in the annals of bloodshed. Pinker asserts that despite this, the détente that occurred afterwards was more durable: The “enduring moral trend of the [20th] century was a violence-averse humanism that originated in the Enlightenment, became overshadowed by counter-Enlightenment ideologies wedded to agents of growing destructive power, and regained momentum in the wake of World War II.”

Confirmation bias much? Yeah, I have to agree with what others have said about this book: it's more than a little specious to pretend that "the Enlightenment" only encompasses those strains of thought that happen to appeal to us today. As Isaiah Berlin stressed repeatedly, a large number of Enlightenment thinkers accepted that Newton's accomplishments in physics could be duplicated in ethics, that "true" answers to normative questions could be obtained through rational inquiry, and that if one persisted in clinging to worldviews which had been discredited scientifically, they were not simply mistaken but possibly perverse, and perhaps a liberal application of force was needed to make them see the error of their ways, or at least clear their outdated detritus off of the shining path of progress.

Some thinkers who epitomized the sort of Enlightenment ideals that Pinker values, like Voltaire and Fontenelle, hewed to an "original sin" conception of humanity as hopelessly corrupt and weak, needing strong, enlightened guidance from elites. Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Maoists followed suit. Even Nazism wasn't quite the "counter-Enlightenment" movement that Pinker seems to imply. Opposed to ideas of toleration and personal freedom, yes; but they shared a belief with many progressives of the age in eugenics in particular, or more broadly, in the application of science to purify humanity in order to achieve its glorious future destiny. There really isn't a neat dividing line between the Enlightenment, the Romantics, progressives, and reactionaries, and no reason to think that one will ever appear.

People Talkin' About Us, They Got Nothin' Else to Do

2011-12-05T20:13:00.002-05:00

Issac Chotiner:

Epstein finds these stories irresistible, as he phrases it, “A man or woman without any interest in gossip may be impressive in his or her restraint, but also wanting in curiosity, uninterested in the variousness of human nature, dead to the wildly abundant oddity of life, and thereby, in some central way, deficient.”

Deficient, huh? Well, this is where I just like to invoke the vague autism-spectrum thing to explain my failure to evince interest in the salacious details of other people's peccadilloes. But in fairness, when I read that, it occurred to me that perhaps this also applies to my lack of interest in reading fiction. Seriously, I'm the most fiction-deficient person you know. I hardly have any novels on my shelves, except for escapist Forgotten Realms fantasy stuff. I'm intensely interested in issues and ideas, especially in philosophy and history and psychology, but not so much in particular individual characters. Interesting.

But yeah, gossip per se doesn't hold any attraction for me. It was strange over Thanksgiving, not having seen my family much for several months, to notice how jarring it felt to hear my mom and brother indulging in petty, somewhat mean-spirited gossip about people we knew. I didn't realize how little I missed being around it. My brother told me something about a former co-worker of ours, who he claimed was having some sort of trouble in his twenty-year relationship. I found myself both embarrassed and irritated at even having to listen to it. And that makes me wonder about the accuracy of Epstein's description -- doesn't it take a more nuanced, experienced understanding of human nature to hear a rumor like that and immediately think, yeah, well, maybe his wife is cheating on him, and he's always seemed like a super-swell guy, but what the hell do I know about what their relationship has been like for almost two decades? There's always more to the story than what you first hear. People change and grow apart, interpreting the same situations differently until one day they suddenly realize that a hairline crack in their shared experience has widened into a unbridgeable chasm. It doesn't always lend itself well to the gossipy tendency to paint a heroes-and-villains kind of story.

The thing I associate most with gossip isn't being titillated by dirty little secrets; after all, a lot of gossip is benign, just a way to fill the air with words and create some sort of common bond. It's what most people would think of as the mindset of a small town, where everybody knows everybody else, and more importantly, seems to take it for granted that they have a right to be in everyone else's business. My family is very small and I only have two living relatives outside of the area; we've never been very tight-knit. But my ex had a larger extended family, and it was always expected that you would put in regular appearances, especially at holidays, and there was something unsavory about you if you didn't. I could never get over my instinctive revulsion at the presumption, the expectation that I was obliged to keep everyone informed about what I was doing, and again, the embarrassment at having to hear about whatshisname's gambling problem and so-and-so's mental illness.

I wish we had an acceptable social category that encompassed the feeling of "You're a pleasant enough person, but we're only associating through external circumstance, we really don't have anything in common, and we should just be adults and accept that we don't want to spend any time around each other without anyone feeling insulted." Maybe the Germans or the Japanese have a word for that.

Tattoos With Meaning, American Spirit Lights

2011-12-04T13:36:00.007-05:00

Tim Donnelly:

Midtown is not exactly a hotbed of tattoo activity at any time of day, let alone at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, but that turned out to be the saving grace that prevented me from becoming a hypocrite. As I accidentally discovered online a few days later, getting a tattoo can be about as vegan as having a rib-eye sewn to your arm. The ink and processes at your average shop contain a veritable buffet of animal detritus: charred bones of dead animals in the ink, fat from once-living things in the glycerin that serves as a carrying agent, enzymes taken from caged sheep that go into making the care products.

..."I've never found anything that works as well," said Karr, who dabbles in ink-making himself. "It sucks that you can't live your life completely vegan. Where do you draw the line? It's really difficult to remove all the elements from your life."

In times of ethical crisis like this I turn to my friend J.P. Piteo, a coworker and compendium of cruelty-free esoterica. In addition to being the longest tenured vegan in my quiver (13 years), she's tattooed from ear to ankle. She didn't learn about the ink issue until five years after her first tattoo and well into her vegan career.

"In the moment you are permanently decorating yourself with a tattoo, you can also choose how you make an impact on the environment," she told me. "And we all know how pollution works and how it's largely irreversible, just like your new tattoo. That's supposed to be a part of what veganism is about, that big picture."

It's funny how those who are most likely to espouse platitudes about everything being connected, all being one in the circle of life, never seem to firmly grasp just how true that really is, and how devastating it is to our egocentric experience of the world.

Aiming to minimize needless suffering is a great thing, of course. Doing your best to be aware and compassionate is a commendable thing. But you see it in descriptors like "hypocritical" -- this is where veganism as an ideology is just one more ego bath, taking overweening pride in abstractions like consistency and rationality, nowhere near as radical as its proponents like to style themselves.

It's simply impossible to remove yourself from samsara so that you are not contributing a single molecule in thought or deed to perpetuating suffering. I don't care who told you otherwise; Buddha, Jesus, whoever, they were flat-out lying through their yellow teeth. It's a delusion to insist on seeing suffering as an unfortunate side effect that can be prevented with enough diligent maintenance like a homeowner keeping the cedar siding from getting warped and mildewed, rather than a fundamental attribute of life. Even the purest vegan body is going to replenish the soil which will nourish the plants which will be eaten by the herbivores who will fall prey to the carnivores who will feed the worms and insects who will be snapped up by the birds and lizards and on and on as it's always gone, as it always will even once we are gone (thanks to Shanna for the recommendation; that is indeed a fascinating book), until the Sun vaporizes the Earth and all of this sound and fury turns back into basic atoms scattered across endless space. And that's the crux of it -- veganism as an ideology is just one more way of desperately trying to convince ourselves that we ultimately matter, that we're special, that through our self-centered willpower, we can save and be saved.

You Cannot Trust a Single Thing I Say

2011-12-04T10:40:00.003-05:00

Raw Story:

Religious people distrust the world’s estimated 500 million atheists as much as rapists, a study found Friday in the wake of a poll that said less than half of Americans would vote for an atheist president.

“Where there are religious majorities — that is, in most of the world — atheists are among the least trusted people,” said lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

...“While atheists may see their disbelief as a private matter on a metaphysical issue, believers may consider atheists’ absence of belief as a public threat to cooperation and honesty.”

Not to tie the faith-minded up in logical Gordian knots, but who would a believer consider more trustworthy, then: an atheist who tells you so up front, or one who publicly makes a minimal gesture toward piety while privately rolling their eyes at what they need to do to appease the simpletons? Doesn't matter, I suppose; they're both equally flammable.

Still Waters Run Deep

2011-12-04T08:42:00.002-05:00

Nigel Featherstone:

Part of the allure of reading is finding fictional worlds more interesting than the predictable day-to-day of real life. But books haven’t simply offered escape. They have given me depth, they have given me perspective, the sense that my days and nights have expanded, opened out.

...The fact is that at the age of forty-three years and twenty-eight days I have a room that can rightly, justifiably be called a library. It’s a physical thing as much as a brain and heart thing; it’s a space, a place, a room all of my own, in every possible way. It is without question my favorite room in the house, the most important room, as archaic as that sounds, as archaic as it probably is, but I really don’t care. My library is my anchor, it’s my look-out, it’s my lighthouse.

I was just talking with a friend about our respective literary nerdisms; mine history, hers fantasy/sci-fi. I said that I didn't want to live my own life, I just want to spend it reading about everything else that's ever happened. But I don't mean it as a disparaging comment on the quality of my everyday life. I just cheerfully accept that I'm an ordinary, nondescript schmo with no good stories to tell, and it's more fascinating to read the greatest stories of humankind's adventures during our brief time at the pinnacle of existence. And yes, I, too, would like to have an entire room I could justifiably call a library, rather than a dozen or so mismatched bookcases scattered throughout the house. Someday...

This Is the Autumn, It Will Break Your Heart

2011-11-30T12:15:00.003-05:00

Matthew Gallaway:

These days when I go out in the garden, I’m reminded of how, as a kid, I used to feel at the end of August, when the start of school loomed and you could already hear the gates to freedom and laziness clanking shut. As an adult, it’s a dread of winter tempered by the last of the color; the brightness is all the more striking for being found in a web of leafless, grey vines and branches. There's a certainty that what remains is about to end.

...Then there are the conifers, which, for staying green all year round, must be considered the optimists of the garden (or perhaps the insomniacs). They actually look forward to the snow, which is why we must regard these trees with equal parts admiration and skepticism—they're not the kind of someones you'd necessarily want to start a business with. And finally it’s important to acknowledge the moss, which as it slowly creeps over the brick reminds us that all paths lead to the same end.

I've really come to appreciate November in particular among the triptych of my favorite months of the year. October gets all the attention due the standard-bearer of all things beautiful about autumn, and December, well, you know how that goes. But there's the middle child, November, overlooked and underappreciated by its more flamboyant siblings. Cold enough to be pleasant, not quite cold enough yet to make your bones ache. Smack dab in the middle of the holiday season, allowing enough time to have savored some while still anticipating others. And honestly, some years it seems that the leaves don't reach their peak display until the beginning of November anyway.

On the horticultural side of things, I've never felt saddened by bare branches and dead leaves. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of walking for hours during the Christmas break among the vast-to-my-young-mind expanse of conifers behind my house (many of which have been replaced by more and more houses in the last couple decades, to my chagrin every time I go back to visit my parents). I have several ringing my yard here, and I hope to plant more in the spring.

The last day of November already? I'm a bit sad, I have to say.

This Is Not an Ad

2011-11-30T09:18:00.003-05:00

When I was seven years old, I desperately wanted a pair of Zips shoes because I was always one of the smaller, younger kids in my grade, and not especially fleet of foot. I remember one of my classmates scornfully proclaiming that "Zips don't really make you run fast!" But trusting as I was, I still wanted to believe in the promise held out by those commercials, so I finally got a pair. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that my wise-beyond-his-years Doubting Thomas friend (or, rather, Doubting Hank, since that was his name) was correct; I still came in second in an important relay race on Field Day at the end of that school year. Well, I may have had to settle for a red ribbon instead of a blue one on that sad day in May, but the lesson of armoring oneself with jaded skepticism toward people who want to sell you something has stuck with me all along.

So I dunno; I thought it was common knowledge (Adbusters has been going on about this kind of thing for as long as I remember) that advertising is all postmodern/ironic/de-signified/ultrameta nowadays. We all like to fancy ourselves savvy consumers, too worldly to be taken in by simple appeals to insecurities and impulses. Advertising had to morph in such a way as to let the consumer in behind the curtain. No, of course our product won't make you sexier or more popular or fill in that gaping hole in your psyche, but we're admitting that to you up front, so you know we're good guys. It's just another product among many, but we've got a sense of humor. We're all postracial, postsexual, whatever. We're just messing with these old cultural stereotypes from a detached distance, which we know you'll appreciate, because you have that same kind of rarefied, discerning awareness that we do. It's all just a big put-on, all of it. You know it, we know it. You want some cool stuff which is by no means the sum total of your unique personality, we want your money. Aboveboard, straightforward, no hard feelings. A'ight. Dap.

But, yuh know, go ahead and buy our stuff.

Also, this. I have a feeling that it's not so much any strong sort of moral conviction that ignites the outrage here, just the artless, transparently inauthentic way that Patagonia went about trying to appear above such base motivations. For the sort of New York hipsters who write for Gawker, the cardinal virtue is taking frivolous amusement in sneering at other people's dickishness while never appearing to be a dick yourself. We fake it so real we are beyond fake.

The Fitful Dozing of Reason

2011-11-29T21:47:00.004-05:00

Alan Ryan:

OWS, as it has come to be known, by contrast gives the impression of being constituted by entirely rational people, mostly young but afforced during daylight hours by writers, academics, curious bystanders and members of the Class of '68 eager to show solidarity with their grandchildren.

They do seem awfully rational at that, the utopians among them, at least. I often find that to be the case -- some people seem so earnestly convinced that deep down, we all want the same things, and with just enough effort and sitting down to to talk things out, we'll get there. It's like such a quaint little pocket of Enlightenment rationality, right here in the midst of all the bizarre incoherence that people continually prove themselves capable of. Speaking of which:

I once had a landlord who was an arch Republican with signed pictures of various Republican figures (George W. Bush, Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan) on his walls. He was also an avid dowser, past-life regresser, and astral projector. He cured the neighbor’s apple tree of a worm infestation, found people’s lost objects over the phone, and attempted to heal my terror of snakes through a visualization technique that involved repetition and tapping on my sternum (the last one didn’t work and can’t speak to the second, but there weren’t worms in the apples when I lived there). He was an aficionado of conspiracy theories, a veritable archivist. I have never had so much fun talking to anyone with whom I disagreed so much. He was a truly marvelous person. But every time I try to describe the man to someone, the story is met with wonderment that a person could be both a conservative and a new age mage. Some sort of inauthenticity is implied in the discomfort. Yet why should it be so? What is our anxiety about dissonance? What is the landlord out of tune with but our own conceptions of harmony?

She goes on to sing the praises of seeming contradictions and the wonderful new possibilities they represent, but in this particular instance, I don't see much to wonder about. My mom is the same way, and my brother, to a much lesser extent. Rabidly conservative politics and completely loopy new age beliefs manage to spoon each other in a loving embrace in her mind. To me, the common thread between them is an extreme self-centeredness, which may not be one of the qualities immediately associated with the image of Age of Aquarius-types, but believe me, it's there in abundance. From their preoccupation with extending and customizing both their physical lifespan and the supposed afterlife to follow to their unshakable belief that the entire world exists as the backdrop to their own personal spiritual journey, New Agers have been some of the most narcissistic people I've ever met.

If You Wish to Strive for Peace of Soul and Happiness, Then Believe; If You Wish to Be a Disciple of Truth, Then Inquire

2011-11-28T19:19:00.005-05:00

John Horgan:

Some Western Buddhists have argued that principles such as reincarnation, anatta, and enlightenment are not essential to Buddhism. In Buddhism Without Beliefs and The Faith To Doubt, the British teacher Stephen Batchelor eloquently describes his practice as a method for confronting—rather than transcending—the often painful mystery of life. But Batchelor seems to have arrived at what he calls an "agnostic" perspective in spite of his Buddhist training—not because of it. When I asked him why he didn't just call himself an agnostic, Batchelor shrugged and said he sometimes wondered himself.

All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science's disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.

Yeah, the article is almost nine years old, but it's new to me. And since I was just going on about the same topic, I had to excerpt it.

But the Politics Were Too Convenient

2011-11-26T10:32:00.003-05:00

Nathalie Rothschild:

On Black Friday, the true colors of the Occupy Wall Street movement really shone through. Premised on the idea that it speaks on behalf of 99 percent of Americans, the Occupy movement is in fact deeply contemptuous of the masses. In no way was this made clearer than through the alignment of the Buy Nothing Day campaign and the Occupy movement.

...But of course Occupy Wall Street never spoke for 99 percent of Americans. This was always a fantasy figure that lent itself well to sloganeering and to presenting a black-and-white view of the world, according to which the powerless masses struggling to get by are on one side, and the fat cat CEOs and reckless bankers are on the other. In this Star Wars-like narrative, the Occupiers serve as the heroes who will purportedly save the masses from their downfall by enlightening them and campaigning on their behalf.

The message that the Occupiers want to send through their anti-consumption campaign is that Americans have been brainwashed by corporations, that they have been induced to blind over-consumption and unthinking acceptance of the messages put out by 'the 1%'. This is the Occupier's Burden, a kind of re-vamped version of the civilising mission described by Rudyard Kipling: to 'de-program' Americans and, in the meantime, render them voiceless and clueless so that the apparently enlightened Occupiers can justify stepping in to define their interests for them and to speak on their behalf.

The message of Buy Nothing Day follows in this vein. Initiated by Adbusters, every anti-consumption hipster's must-have mag, the campaign is essentially promulgation for mass austerity -- a point well-made on the American Situation blog -- and it is an elaborate way of telling people they are stupid, irresponsible, greedy and shallow.

I'm not sure if she's more upset by the anti-consumption message or the masked elitism, but she does apparently write for Spiked, so maybe she just has to be contrary the way most people have to breathe.

Anyway. The idea that there can ever be a perfectly horizontal social movement, appearing everywhere at once from nowhere in particular, is indeed a silly one. It's impossible to get even a tribe or a village to move as one without some type of coercion being involved; it's a pure pipe dream to think that a nation of 310 million could possibly be run through General Assemblies and consensus and mic checks. Anyone with the sort of grand vision and charismatic personality to set themselves up as revolutionary leaders should probably be tranquilized and confined before they freedom and liberty the shit out of you for your own good.

But there's nothing hypocritical about pointing out that within American society itself, the overwhelming majority have indeed been getting brutally fucked over and made to pay for the privilege by the unrestrained greed of the ultra-rich, while within the global community, Westerners in general and Americans in particular have been benefiting from the misery of a few billion other people in order to fill their empty, grasping lives with shit they don't need, financed by money they don't have.

Frankly, a lot of this kind of tired gotcha-style accusation could be buried if people would finally stop acting as if the very concept of elitism is radioactive, but I guess that's a whole 'nother topic.

All the Little Birds on Jaybird Street Love to Hear the Robin Go Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

2011-11-26T09:14:00.004-05:00

Bill Gurley:

Twitter suffers from two key misperceptions that need to be resolved before the business can reach its true potential. The first misperception is that Twitter is simply another social network, like Facebook. People commonly think of Twitter as a variant of Facebook. The press frequently positions the two together as “leaders in social networking.” This pairing erroneously implies that the two services are used for the exact same thing, even though the two platforms are very different. Facebook is a few-to-few communication network designed for sharing information and life events with friends. Twitter, on the other hand, is a one-to-many information broadcast network. The only way magic happens on Facebook is through reciprocity: I friend you and you friend me back – then information flows. But on Twitter, I can get something out of following Shaquile O’Neil who has no social obligation to follow me back.

...In many ways, Twitter is much more of a competitor to other “discovery tools” and “information sources” than it is to Facebook. Facebook is unquestionably the number one resource for “sharing with the people in your life.” From this perspective, Facebook competes (extremely well) with email, instant messengers, and certainly other symmetric social networks like MySpace. Twitter, on the other hand, competes most directly with other tools that help you find important links, news, and information. It is in this broad, non-friend based crowd-sourcing and speed of discovery where Twitter truly shines.

Some who understand this point have suggested that Twitter is merely a “Better RSS reader.” While this analogy is directionally more accurate than the Facebook comparison, it greatly underestimates the power and value of Twitter. RSS feeds are simply computerized information “routers” that require complex setup, initialization, and maintenance. Twitter has three breakthroughs that make it dramatically more powerful than simple RSS. First and foremost, your personalized Twitter feed is human-curated by a potential universe of millions of curators. When you “check Twitter” you are looking at the specific articles and links purposefully chosen by people you have chosen to follow. That is powerful leverage. Second, it is easily extensible. Due primarily to the concept of “retweeting,” the simple act of using Twitter exposes you to new and interesting sources to follow. It evolves into a richer and more customized offering over time. You discover new people as well as new information.

Okay, I can get that. Three things, though. One, it greatly amuses me that anyone would choose Shaquile O'Neal as the prime example of someone from whom you can "get something" by following his random fun-sized thoughts. Two, I'm no Luddite, but all this jabbering about information, irrespective of quality and content as long as it's fasterfasterfaster, makes me want to go re-read Theodore Roszak's The Cult of Information. And three, I'm so old, I remember when people used to have these things called "blogs" or even "websites" where they could post news and essays of their own as well as link to other people's. If most tweets of value are just links back to more substantial fare, why not eliminate the middleman? I mean, I have a long list of blogs and sites I check every day, and that gives me all the food for thought I need, really. I just trust that anything worth my attention will eventually get caught up in that net without me having to go frantically searching for it the second it appears.

The Theatrical Declaration of the Death of Things Is Dead

2011-11-26T08:29:00.005-05:00

What's the Latest Development?

As an innovative messaging system, email is dead. And for anyone whose job feels taken over by their inbox, this won't come as bad news. Social media programers are already looking past email toward a communication media that better suits the demands of business and casual interaction. While email served as a good point-to-point too, social media has shown us the advantage of flow tools such as wikis, micro-blogging and internal social networks.

What's the Big Idea?

Email is growing, to be sure. "Technology market researchers Radicati see the number of email accounts worldwide growing from 3.1bn in 2011 to nearly 4.1bn by 2015." But its influence in our communication is set to decline, say business professionals and social media gurus. Dave Coplin, head of Microsoft's Envisoneers team, says: "I think that email is dead when it comes to social media in the same way that snail mail was dead when it came to email."

That's a post from the editors of Big Think in its entirety. The title was "Email Is Dead. What's Next?" Now, you may have noticed that little aside at the beginning of the second paragraph noting the startlingly life-like growth projections of email over the next few years. Lazarus, eat your heart out! But yes; perhaps you were puzzled by this. Perhaps, as I did, you raised a questioning finger in the air and said "Um." Well, the editors provide a link telling you to read more at BBC News. So I did. Here's a smattering of what I found (to be fair, they may have been too busy monitoring their Facebook and Twitter feeds to notice that Coplin had a lot more to say on the topic than the little bit they excised to suggest ambivalent support of their grandiose, trendchasing conclusions):

One man with more reason than most to have an opinion on the matter is email specialist Mimecast's chief scientist Nathaniel Borenstein, co-creator of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol. This is the internet standard that lays down how messages are formatted. It lets your email contain different characters, have attachments, and contain other types of files, among other things. Mr Borenstein says it is used more than a trillion times a day.

"Email is still growing," he says. "There's no real sign that social is making a major dent in it. For the most part I think they fill different functions, but that they connect with each other. I think they're symbiotic. I'm reluctant to cast them into opposition."

...Not everyone is as sunny as Mr Borenstein when it comes to the future of email, however. Lee Bryant is co-founder of Headshift, the world's biggest social business consultancy. He believes email's dominance over business communications is coming to an end.

...Nevertheless he says he doesn't see email going away anytime soon.

"You narrow down email primarily to what it was designed for, which is one-to-one communications."

...Head of Microsoft's Envisoneers team and self-confessed "social media luvvie", Dave Coplin, is not impressed.

"I think that email is dead when it comes to social media in the same way that snail mail was dead when it came to email. Time and again, it's always the same thing. Enter the bright shiny new technology stage right, therefore old boring technology must exit stage left. Of course it never happens that way."

"The functionality offered by email is in many ways not well represented by social media. The asynchronous nature is really important, the ability to attach things, the ability to have a secure conversation, all of those things are crucial."

But however shiny the future may be, email is in rude health in the present, according to Mr Coplin.

"The key thing for me is to dispel the myth that a lot of social media luvvies would have you believe, that email is dead. To me it's shiny penny syndrome."

I especially like how Big Think's tagline reads: "A forum where top experts explore the big ideas and core skills defining the 21st century." I guess core skills like contextual understanding and reading comprehension are just sooo 20th century.

A Snot, a Sot, a Trot

2011-11-25T18:24:00.004-05:00

Reading this interview with Terry Eagleton made me think of this recent article kicking the everloving shit out of his Marxist apologia. But it also reminded me of a recent email exchange I had with my friend Arthur, where I had occasion to share with him Matt Taibbi's famous description of Eagleton as "physically resembling a giant runny nose". That in turn inspired a bit of deliciously mean-spirited verse from Arthur, which I am now sharing with you:

‘A runny nose in person and a snot

In prose?’ You must mean Eagleton. A sot,

A Trot with three cribs snagged by playing prole,

He loves sweet dogma in his Catholic soul.

Capitalism is a mortal sin

On which to trade in Theory and cash in

In fact—highest ideals make deals with merest

Point-scoring twaddle of a sharp careerist.

The words of academic politicians

Repeat the same text in revised editions,

But books that trend so well when newly minted

May not wear well enough to be reprinted.

The Question Is Which Is to Be Master—That's All

2011-11-25T09:35:00.005-05:00

The first half of my book, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized is devoted to the question of whether Buddhism is science friendly. The current Dalai Lama is personally very interested in science. He says that the belief in rebirth would have to go if science proved it impossible. The trouble is however, the standard of proof and disproof he recommends makes it impossible to prove or disprove the existence of anything. All the empirical evidence in the world can’t disprove the claim that I am a reincarnation and that I will have a rebirth nor can it prove that you are reading these words. There is truth and there is proof. Only mathematics trades in proof and disproof. Proof to one side, the 14th Dalai Lama is very interested in and enthusiastic about establishing neuroscientifically that Buddhist practices, and in particular meditation, can make one happy. I examine the question of whether happiness is something in the head that can be assessed by MRI. Before that though, I need to address the question of whether Buddhism promises happiness. If so, what kind? My answer to this is that there is no good evidence that Buddhists are happier than anyone else. The second half of the book takes up the question of what Buddhism would look like if one subtracted the hocus pocus about karma and rebirth. Can there be such a thing this is “Buddhism Naturalized”? My answer to this is that Buddhism can be naturalized, and that what is left is a deep, credible philosophy for our time.

Whether Buddhism contains a philosophy that really could be attractive to 21st century secular humanists means that it would require at a minimum, that Buddhist theory was consistent with science and thus broadly naturalistic, and so beliefs in karma, rebirth and nirvana would have to go. Can there be Buddhism without these beliefs?

There can be meaningful existence without those beliefs, but I, for one, would not want to wade into the tar pit of argumentation over who rightly gets to claim the Buddhist label for themselves, any more than I wanted to over what constitutes zazen. I agree that the thing he's referring to, the crucible of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics he names "Buddhism naturalized" is a fine guide to living and one that deserves to have attention called to it, but I'm not the least bit interested in the bitter fights over copyright and branding that are sure to follow. In the tug of war over language, I offer no resistance. You can have whatever words you want. I'll stick with the experience, which I don't really need to talk about anyway.

My Life Did and Does Smack Sweet

2011-11-25T08:53:00.004-05:00

Owen Flanagan:

Does Buddhism promise happiness, and if so, what kind? Presumably it is not the familiar “happy-happy-joy-joy kick your heels” kind of happiness, not the Hugh Hefner kind of happiness, and it is not the ephemeral happiness that comes from winning the lottery. Instead, some say that Buddhism offers no kind of happiness, but it offers an end to suffering, which is very different. You have a headache. I give you aspirin. You are not suffering. But are you happy?

There is much hype in recent years about the good effects of Buddhist meditation on health, well-being, and happiness. This, plus the fact that in Buddhism there is no creator God, makes Buddhism especially attractive to liberal post-Abrahamic folk who think of themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” But is happiness important? Were Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, or Martin Luther King Jr. happy? It seems an odd question. They each lived great lives. They mattered. Aristotle said that happiness is not the most important thing, but meaning, purpose and fulfillment are. A malevolent person could be happy, but the meaning and significance of his life are worthless and evil. According to Aristotle, one cannot tell whether an individual flourished or lived in a fulfilled and fulfilling way, until after he is dead and gone, one sees how the grandchildren turn out. This means that flourishing, purpose and meaning are not completely subjective, not located solely in the head, and thus not to be seen there on brain scans. It became clear to me that although American culture hypes happiness, it is generally of a shallow type and that no great spiritual tradition ever promises anything like that sort of happiness.

I maintain that it makes more sense to think of happiness as a point around which we travel in an elliptical orbit, sometimes closer than others, but never a point to be occupied, possessed. The harmony and symmetry of the orbit are the sublime parts.

I sit here this morning, amply fed and sufficiently warm. I'm enjoying the look of frost on the ground outside my window and the sound of choral Christmas music on the stereo. I'm fretful over whether or not my financial goals for this week will be met, and if not, what that will bode for the next couple months. I'm eagerly anticipating the next batch of library sales, both as a salve for those financial worries as well as the pure joy of the hunt for new books. I'm wistful and slightly melancholic as I recall that today marks two years since my closest canine companion died from cancer, and I spent a few minutes in sober contemplation as I held the bag of his ashes and relived that day. I have an indescribable mix of thoughts and feelings left over from yesterday after visiting my childhood home, encountering the usual spurs to reminiscence, and listening to my parents talk about health and aging, which prompted a slightly more vivid awareness of mortality, both theirs and mine. I'm excited to be able to spend the day at home cleaning and decorating and even playing video games if I want. I'm fearing for Liverpool's chances against Manchester City on Sunday, but glad to be able to sit and watch soccer games this weekend. And I'm contented by the steady, comforting presence of my girlfriend.

In other words, a typical day. What does it even mean to try to sum it all up by saying yes or no to the question of happiness? I'm alive, that's good enough.

A White Picket Fence In the Void

2011-11-23T17:02:00.004-05:00

Adam Kirsch:

Why does this kind of complacency about the Nietzschean challenge, the certainty that one can have one’s nihilism and eat it, feel so quintessentially American? One reason, American Nietzsche clarifies, is that Americans have been adept at taking from Nietzsche only those ideas that reinforce their own beliefs or political goals.

...In America, the readers most receptive to the idea of the Übermensch turn out to be the most lumpen of Untermenschen: the deluded, frustrated and envious—exactly the kind of people Nietzsche would have denounced as the herd. Thoughtful and educated Americans, on the other hand, usually managed to make Nietzsche the servant of their own purposes, no matter how different those purposes may have been from his own.

...Depending on how you look at it, there is something either pathetic or reassuring about America’s ability to learn from Nietzsche without becoming Nietzschean—or, in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s words, to create a “philosophy that never abandons… humanistic promises.”

...The prospect that tomorrow may not bring pleasure and power, but in Nietzsche’s words “profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished” is—even in these days of recession and uncertainty—a notion as remote from American thought as from American experience.

On the one hand, I remind you again that Nietzsche himself famously said that one repays a teacher badly if one remains only a student, so the concept of an army of "Nietzschean" disciples may very well have made him throw up his hands in disgust in a Life of Brian moment. And as should be common knowledge by now, he disagreed fundamentally with the very notion of an internally consistent philosophy that contained absolute truths, saying, "I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." He was more of a poet and an intellectual provocateur than a philosopher in the scholarly sense, so it makes sense that he would serve as a fertile source from whom all sorts of new perspectives might grow, rather than a top-down arbiter of truth. There's nothing necessarily wrong with making use of him for our own ends. Being a perennial spur to Dionysian creativity might very well be the way he would have been happiest to be remembered.

On the other hand, it's true that there is a typically Myrrhkin trait of wanting to turn every fucking thing into a "teachable moment" in a slightly narcissistic quest for endless self-improvement, and in that sense, it's true that many of them are being superficial and dishonest in refusing to seriously consider his affront to their buoyant progressive optimism.

Eisegesis

2011-11-21T12:37:00.003-05:00

Jessa Crispin:

...I had a hard time finding any sympathy for Teofilo Ruiz while reading The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization. Ruiz follows Frazer’s model pretty well, offering up a historical document with a helping of his own personal problems on the side. The book ostensibly explores how men and women throughout time have dealt with the immense weight of living in a world with incredible suffering and pain — through religious belief, through art and aesthetics, through decadence and hedonism. Like Frazer, he tracks particular behaviors to find their universality. For example, some of the citizenry responded to the Black Death that killed half the population around them by imagining they were being punished by God and tried to make amends. Others decided to eat, drink and screw until the end came for them. And then others wrote a collection of tales about a society trying to function amid the backdrop of plague and terror and called it the Decameron.

If Ruiz is writing about humans’ avoidance behavior, looking for all the ways we manage not to take responsibility for the state of the world, he is doing so with a significant amount of judgment. The word “avoidance” does not have a positive connotation, nor does “removal” or “ahistorical,” other words he uses instead of “coping strategy.” For Ruiz, there is something shameful about these methods of distracting ourselves from what he sees as the “meaninglessness” of existence. The religious are particularly scorned, as Ruiz believes they use the promise of an afterlife to check out from the here and now. He somehow forgets that throughout history, Christianity was the one reason not to check out.

...Frazer held the religious as superior over the magical. Magic was superstitious, but religion was a higher state. Ruiz takes that further — religion is an emotional crutch, an "attempt to step out of historical processes, to escape the crushing reality of everyday expectations," and pure rational atheism is not only a more honest belief system, but also a more ethical way to go through life.

...Agnosticism is at least an open, fluid, humane state of being. Pessimism, rigid disbelief, and a view of life as essentially meaningless is its own avoidance behavior. Frazer wrote that there is no true religious belief without action. Religion is (supposed to be) about engagement, not hiding or twisting away from life. Believing that we're all fucked no matter what, as Ruiz appears to think, is a way of avoiding reality, or at the very least, of refusing to be a part of the rehabilitation process.

It might be churlish of me to point out that Crispin has already shown herself to be highly defensive over this topic and therefore sure is one to talk about authors letting their prejudices spill into the story they're telling, but I'll do it anyway, because I am an ornery li'l cuss, after all.

Not having read Ruiz's book (though it is on my wish list, hint hint), I can't say whether he is indeed being unfair. I will say that Crispin is overreaching in trying to define religion according to her sensibilities, in suggesting that clearly seeing the fiction of inherent, universal meaning is just another form of avoidance, and in implying that only a progressive, teleological view of human nature and history allows one to act compassionately and morally. Some of us just do the right thing for its own sake, tautologies be damned, even if human history is cyclical, even if the earth will one day be swallowed up by the sun and render this all moot. But arriving at that point does indeed mean letting go of comforting old fables.

Better Read Than Dead (II)

2011-11-21T11:00:00.005-05:00

This is my current stack of unread books, a few of which have been hanging around for a year or so, other books constantly butting in front of them in line, but many of these only joined the fold in the last couple months as I traversed hill and dale, mountain and valley, metropolis and hamlet in search of books to buy and sell. Those are the ones that I took a shine to and kept for myself. Best of all, I hardly had to spend a farthing or a ha'penny on them; some of them were at most a couple dollars, some of them were free, free as a bird on the wind.

Feel free to critique, speculate, pontificate, enthuse, query, or offer your own list in response (and you can click the pic to embiggen it).

Dry Bones

2011-11-19T08:00:00.004-05:00

Brian Leiter:

Why does Nietzsche write in such an unusual, more aphoristic style?

The explanation really comes in the first chapter of the book where Nietzsche tells us that the great philosophers are basically fakers when they tell you that they arrived at their views because there were good rational arguments in support of them. That’s nonsense, says Nietzsche. Great philosophers, he thinks, are driven by a particular moral or ethical vision. Their philosophy is really a post-hoc rationalisation for the values they want to promote. And then he says that the values they want to promote are to be explained psychologically, in terms of the type of person that that philosopher is.

The relevance of this is that if this were your view of the rational argumentation of philosophers, it would be quite bizarre to write a traditional book of philosophy giving a set of arguments in support of your view. Because in Nietzsche’s view consciousness and reasoning are fairly superficial aspects of human beings. What really gets us to change our views about things are the non-rational, emotional, affective aspects of our psyche. One of the reasons he writes aphoristically and so provocatively – and this, of course, is why he’s the teenager’s favourite philosopher – is connected to his view of the human psyche. He has to arouse the passions and feelings and emotions of his readers if he’s actually going to transform their views. There’d be no point in giving them a systematic set of arguments like in Spinoza’s Ethics – in fact he ridicules the ‘geometric form’ of Spinoza’s Ethics in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil.

The longer I live, the more convinced I am of the truth of this idea. It's not impossible for rational arguments to persuade someone to change a course of action, of course, but even I, as far-seeing and judicious as I am, can struggle to present such a change to myself in a way that doesn't make me feel diminished or threatened by it. How much more difficult, then, for ordinary mortals to face up to the crushing awareness that they are wrong, wrong, wrong!

This also reminded me of a passage from Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter:

As Newton developed his thinking, his new physics grew ever more hospitable to his vision of an omnipresent, omnipotent, all-knowing, and above all, an active deity, fully present in the material cosmos of space and time. He explicitly offered the Principia as testimony to the existence and glory of all-creating divinity: "When I wrote my treatise upon our System, I had an eye on such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity," he wrote to Richard Bentley, an ambitious young clergyman preparing the first of the series of lectures Robert Boyle had endowed in defense of Christian religion. "Nothing can rejoice me more," Newton added, than that his work would prove "useful for that purpose."

...Newton's God existed everywhere, "substantially"—really, materially there, able to impinge on matter instantly, through all of space and time. The observed fact of cosmic order, combined with Newton's demonstration that human mathematical reason could penetrate that order, implied (necessarily, to Newton) the existence of that perfect being from whom both order and intelligence derived. Newton's natural philosophy was thus, as he told Bentley, explicitly an inquiry into what could be discovered through the properties of nature about the divine source of all material existence.

Newton was convinced. Nonetheless, some uncharitable louts remained unpersuaded, disdainful. Leibniz, for one, ridiculed the notion of a divine sensorium and what he saw as Newton's flight to an occult explanation for gravity. What was wanted, what Newton sought, was an eyewitness demonstration of divine action in nature. Hence, alchemy. Alchemy seemed to offer a way for him to rescue his God from the threat of irrelevance—salvation through the ancient alchemical idea of a vital agent or spirit.

...He knew that all the theorizing, all the theological argument, all the indirect evidence from the perfect design of the solar system could not match the value of one actual, material demonstration of the divine spirit transforming one metal into another in the here and now. If Newton could discover the method God used to produce gold from base mixtures, then he would know—and not just believe— that the King of Kings would indeed remain triumphant, forever and ever.

Moreover, Kant, one of Nietzsche's favorite targets, was startled into the thinking that would result in his Critique of Pure Reason by David Hume's radical skepticism, thinking that was explicitly enlisted to "beat back reason to make room for faith." It didn't honestly work, of course; the fact that so many people took, and continue to take, seriously Kant's idea of a noumenal realm existing outside our apprehension or comprehension (which can somehow magically still be asserted to exist at all) simply speaks to the yearning so many have felt these last few centuries to keep finding a way to believe in the personal God of monotheism -- a God, it greatly amuses me to point out, who was apparently done away with by the rigorous search for pure, objective truth engendered by monotheism to begin with.

Lucubratio (IX)

2011-11-18T02:49:00.001-05:00

Point/counterpoint, with Adam Nicolson:

Here is the miracle of the King James Bible in action. Words from a doubly alien culture, not an original text but a translation of ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, made centuries ago and thousands of miles away, arrive in a dusty corner of the New World and sound as they were meant to—majestic but intimate, the voice of the universe somehow heard in the innermost part of the ear.

You don't have to be a Christian to hear the power of those words—simple in vocabulary, cosmic in scale, stately in their rhythms, deeply emotional in their impact. Most of us might think we have forgotten its words, but the King James Bible has sewn itself into the fabric of the language. If a child is ever the apple of her parents' eye or an idea seems as old as the hills, if we are at death's door or at our wits' end, if we have gone through a baptism of fire or are about to bite the dust, if it seems at times that the blind are leading the blind or we are casting pearls before swine, if you are either buttering someone up or casting the first stone, the King James Bible, whether we know it or not, is speaking through us. The haves and have-nots, heads on plates, thieves in the night, scum of the earth, best until last, sackcloth and ashes, streets paved in gold, and the skin of one's teeth: All of them have been transmitted to us by the translators who did their magnificent work 400 years ago.

And Jonathan Rée:

Christian belief suffered a serious setback in the first half of the 19th century, when critics like Ludwig Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss suggested that the Bible was a story-book like any other – a multi-authored compilation of fact, fiction, folktale and fantasy, a fabrication on a par with the Iliad, the Aeneid or the Niebelungenlied. In theory the Christians could have turned the challenge back on their assailants: they could have accepted that their holy books were works of myth-making, while affirming that they told the greatest stories in the world. In practice however the case was not so easy to make. You cannot spin much depth of character or narrative suspense from the conviction that Jesus saves and that all manner of things will be well.

If a character born with every perfection is a poor premise for a story, then a God who is almighty, omniscient and eternal is even worse. You can make a case that monotheism was a historical precondition for the rise of modern science, since the idea that the universe is created and controlled by a totally intelligent supreme leader implies a rational order behind the rough and tumble of everyday experience. But if monotheism is a gift for science, it is likely to be poison for the art of narrative. Genesis got off to a bad start, narratologically speaking, with God creating one good thing after another and seeing that each of them was good: the device has the makings of a bedtime soporific rather than a page-turner. God, it would seem, is the death of narrative, and narrative the death of God.

The Cool World Need a Savior, Baby, Maybe It Could Be You

2011-11-17T15:21:00.003-05:00

Frank DeBoer:

This, then, is the role of the resentment machine: to amplify meaningless differences and assign to them vast importance for the quality of individuals. For those who are writing the most prominent parts of the internet—the bloggers, the trendsetters, the über-Tweeters, the tastemakers, the linkers, the creators of memes and online norms—online life is taking the place of the creation of the self, and doing so poorly.

This all sounds quite critical, I’m sure, but ultimately, this is a critique I include myself in. For this to approach real criticism I would have to offer an alternative to those trapped in the idea of the consumer as self. I haven’t got one. Our system has relentlessly denied the role of any human practice that cannot be monetized. The capitalist apparatus has worked tirelessly to commercialize everything, to reduce every aspect of human life to currency exchange. In such a context, there is little hope for the survival of the fully realized self.

All well and good, the parts about petty differences in aesthetic taste being magnified into such a huge distinction in Internet culture. But I suggest to you that the idea of the "fully realized self" being equally available to all is also a product of our consumer culture, as well as the luxury of sitting around worrying about authenticity and originality in the first place. It's a fine thing to cultivate the wiredrawn aspects of our personalities and intellects, of course. But do we have to go as far back as a few centuries to consider the existence of small-town villagers and peasants, or can we stop at our grandparents' generation in order to realize that for many people, life was about growing up in the same area as the rest of your extended family, doing the same kind of work that they did, never traveling more than a few day's journey in any direction, and settling down to raise a family and grow old without ever pondering whether there was anything else to it?

Most of the artists and thinkers who cultivated such well-rounded lives were aristocrats themselves or depended on them as patrons; for the rest of us, money has always played a major role in defining (or, should I say, limiting) our horizons, our relationships, and our potential. The system has denied the role of any human practice that cannot be monetized? Well, why are you looking to the system for validation?

No Recess

2011-11-17T11:58:00.002-05:00

Jonathan Lethem:

Many readers also come to literature with a longing to get beyond the pettiness of the world. There’s a dream that you can finally escape small-p politics, competition, envy — all the things that are evoked by the label “high school.”

You would think that the more I rose into this status called “major,” the more privileges I appeared to enjoy, the more free I would feel, the more I would have left “high school” behind. I would have graduated. In fact, in many ways it was the opposite.

When I was a marginal, dark horse operator, I felt very out of “high school.” I could talk about all the different things I was excited about, talk about out-of-print writers and my love of vernacular cultural things — pop music, science fiction, Hollywood film. I could do high/low at once and no one was patrolling that. That, to me, felt like graduation.

But after taking on more importance in my publisher’s view and some critical frameworks, I felt handed a script that was a lot more like “high school.” There were things it wasn’t cool to say. There were people you weren’t supposed to mention anymore. When I got to be one of the cool kids, all I was supposed to do was answer questions about the cool kids and act like there were no other kids around.

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of making a living through music. Even then, I was aware that actually admitting to a desire to be a rock star was verboten if you wanted respect, but that was essentially what I wanted. Not so much the fame, but the money and the ego nourishment of having a huge audience enjoying my artistic creations? Hell yeah.

It didn't take long before I realized that I was visualizing a fantasy life; essentially, a complete revamping of my personality that would somehow magically occur once I reached a certain level of success. I began to realize more and more that I would still be the same person dealing with the same petty hassles of daily life, and it was obvious that many of the people who had achieved that kind of success were still unhappy. And I finally admitted that my personality simply wasn't the kind that would thrive under the bright lights of stardom in any event.

I still like to write and record music. I still like the idea of other people being as moved by it as I am by the music of my favorite artists. And if I somehow stumbled across the opportunity to make a mint from a one-hit wonder, I'd go ahead and grab it before disappearing back into my cave. But I'm free to enjoy myself recording on my computer at my pace, my leisure, with no outside pressure of any kind. That's really the kind of contentment I originally thought I'd find through success. And it's the same reason I enjoy the kind of writing I do. Honestly, I don't think an awful lot of my writing ability. I'm sure it'll never be anything other than a moot point, but even if I had the chance to make regular money from my writing, I wouldn't do it. I already know when things are good enough.

I'll Try Being Nicer If You Try Being Smarter

2011-11-17T11:08:00.004-05:00

Julian Baggini:

So there are three factors at work with how we believe: the clarity and comprehensiveness of the belief; the conviction we currently have of its truth, and our willingness to contemplate its potential falsity. And it's the third factor that is most important when it comes to identifying what constitutes militant or aggressive belief. People are often accused of being aggressive if they criticise opponents directly and strongly. But it seems to me there is no virtue in itself in being either intellectually pugnacious or accommodating. What matters is not how strong and clear own our views are, nor how vigorously we defend them, but how much we really engage with our critics. It's about taking seriously the best case for the opponent being right and the strongest case that you might be wrong. What is really objectionable is not conviction and clarity, but the abuse, mockery and refusal to acknowledge any weakness that signals a lack of openness to the possibility of being wrong, and sadly, this is all too common.

That's why the fluffy brigade can be as guilty as engaging in pointless argument as their supposedly more aggressive peers. It may appear respectful and polite not to challenge your opponent at all, but in reality, all that means is a refusal to engage with the deep differences between you. As Frank Furedi puts it in his latest book, "instead of serving as a way of responding to differences in views, tolerance has become a way of not taking them seriously."

I readily admit that I can be irritable, impatient and generally prickly in close quarters. That can carry over into my attitude toward metaphysical beliefs. It's not that I'm unwilling to contemplate the possibility of something like the traditional concepts of God and the soul being true, it's just that I have been around the block a few times, I have spent a lot of time following painstakingly pedantic debates and arguments about those topics, and I feel it's a safe bet that you're not going to be the one to finally advance the same old "proofs" that have been around since the Scholastics. I did my homework, and I don't feel like starting from square one each new day. I apologize for any bruising to your self-esteem, but your feelings, whether agreeable toward the possibility of a happy afterlife or disagreeable toward me for being crotchety, do not constitute an argument.

The Beast Inside of Me Is Gonna Getcha, Getcha, Yeah

2011-11-16T20:32:00.003-05:00

Tom Jacobs:

So why are atheists “among the least liked people … in most of the world,” in the words of a research team led by University of British Columbia psychologist Will Gervais? In a newly published paper, he and his colleagues provide evidence supporting a plausible explanation. Atheists, they argue, are widely viewed as people you cannot trust.

“People use cues of religiosity as a signal for trustworthiness,” the researchers write in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Given that “trustworthiness is the most valued trait in other people,” this mental equation engenders a decidedly negative attitude toward nonbelievers.

Oh, izzat so? Well, good. I didn't want to borrow your money or babysit your fucking kids anyway. Seriously, whatever. More fuel for the flames of my smug sense of superiority, that's all.

Let me remind you, though, as I've noted before, that we facially behaired people are also seen as untrustworthy. When you combine beardedness and godlessness in one perilous package such as myself, well, as Nietzsche said, I am no man, I am dynamite.

Be afraid.

Faaaame

2011-11-15T18:40:00.003-05:00

While haunting libraries in Charlottesville these last few days, I have made some discoveries. Would you like to hear what they are? Of course you would; you've probably been beside yourselves waiting for my next missive, you poor dears.

My philosophy professor wrote a book. Apparently, she wrote another one before this that was a bestseller. I had always meant to give her a call one day and tell her that the shiftless ne'er-do-well student in the back of her class has never lost a passion for philosophy that she instilled in him, but now I don't know. Maybe she has people for that sort of thing, people who handle pedestrian tasks like answering phones for her now.

This author used to live on my street growing up. His son and daughter went to school with me through middle and high school. I thought he was a doctor, didn't know he had written several books.

Thinking of him reminded me that Rita Mae Brown lived a couple houses down from him, at the end of our road. I never met her, but her black Great Dane named India used to wander down to my house all the time and accompany me on walks through the woods.

Anyway. Just thought I'd share.

Another Song, Another Mile

2011-11-13T21:57:00.002-05:00

Brad Warner:

But I did tell them that sitting in chairs was not zazen. Zazen is a physical practice. To sit in a chair and call it zazen is incorrect. It's not that sitting on a chair will lead you to Satan and cause your eternal soul to burn forever in Hell. It's not evil. It's just not zazen.

...So this weekend in Antwerp and next weekend in Manchester, England I will be allowing people to sit in chairs if they insist upon it. I'll be glad to have their participation. I won't be mean to them or shout at them or tell them they're doing something wrong. I don't bite. I always allow people to do what they want as long as it doesn't disrupt others. People sitting on chairs will be welcome to be with us and share in the experience in their own way. But they won't be doing zazen. Not a big deal. It just isn't zazen if you sit on a chair, unless there really honestly is no other way you can do it. That's all.

It's funny to me that people are so lacking in self-confidence, so unsure of their own experience, that they feel threatened by something like that. I just shrug and say okay, I guess I'm not doing zazen, then. I'm just meditating. The label isn't important.

And as it happens, I found a book for a dollar at a library sale today that talks about my favorite style of meditating: doing it on the road. From the jacket copy:

You may well ask, what is Zen driving? The Japanese word Zen literally means meditation, and meditation means being fully aware, fully in touch with your surroundings. When you are in a meditative state, you are in your natural self, your Buddha self—and you can do it while driving.

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout. Electronic music works best for me, but I can get absorbed in just about any kind of rhythm or melody. Having just returned from a whirlwind five-state jaunt, I got to spend a lot of time over hundreds of miles letting my mind sort itself out accompanied by a soundtrack. If that's doing meditation wrong, baby, I don't ever wanna be right.

That Journey a-Have Its Way, and Have Me Wanderin' All My Days

2011-11-11T09:28:00.003-05:00

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

I might return to this later, but for now, I'll just present this buffet for thought by Elisabeth Camp:

Wordsworth is thus presented to a reader of The Prelude as a blessed soul, gifted with a high calling and the imaginative powers to achieve it. To a mainstream analytic philosopher, though, Wordsworth’s faith in his fortunate fate is likely to look like a bad case of wishful thinking and metaphysical confusion. He is lucky only in the sense that he has succeeded in deluding himself into a self-aggrandizing lie. It may well be right, as Wordsworth claims, that we ‘spread the sentiment of Being’ over the earth, by imbuing the objects and events around us with a moral life. Hume makes much the same point, in much the same terms, claiming that the faculty of taste “has a productive faculty, and [by] gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation.” It might even be true that Nature participates in or guides this ‘spreading’ or ‘staining’ in the sense that there is some general evolutionary advantage to projecting moral and aesthetic properties onto nature. But it is most certainly not the case that Nature designates individual people for particular tasks, like being a Poet, and then manipulates their surrounding circumstances—conjuring an advancing storm, say, or orchestrating their discovery of a little boat on a lake—to mold those individuals into agents capable of performing their allotted tasks.

A natural way to respond to the accusation that The Prelude manifests nothing so much as self-serving delusion is to point out that the accusation depends on treating The Prelude in a flat-footedly literal manner, one which ignores the various ways in which Wordsworth the author signals that he is creating a character—the hero of an epic poem—in the service of a larger project of promoting a secular, naturalized, neo-Humean conception of imagination, beauty and morality. This response is fair enough as a matter of literary analysis. Indeed, it allows us to identify another source of The Prelude’s rhetorical power: its appropriation and adaptation of heroic tropes from earlier epics like the Odyssey, Aeneid, Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost. However, precisely because this response takes The Prelude’s ‘literary’ status so seriously, it also renders The Prelude problematic as a model for a narrative conception of self-identity. Many people in the past have believed, and many today continue to believe, in a powerful, purposive Agent who selects a particular destiny for each person and guides us toward its fulfillment. However, such a view is not seriously supportable by contemporary intellectual standards. Even proponents of Intelligent Design do not claim that specific, substantive self-identities are ontologically given or objectively determined; and Intelligent Design is itself at best a highly marginal view in serious academic discussions. Further, naturalistic teleological conceptions of evolution as a mechanism for explaining apparently adaptive properties of entire species have come under sustained attack over the last thirty years. More fundamentally, however, many philosophers—especially, analytic philosophers—argue that a clear-headed examination of the metaphysical facts reveals that there is no self in the substantive sense required to determine a distinctive ‘bent’ or ‘office’ for any particular individual.

...One might wonder why autobiographical narratives need to take as specific a form as that of anything resembling a ‘quest’. Some theorists, like Jerome Bruner and perhaps Kenneth Burke, appear to simply assume that all narratives are inherently structured in terms of agents pursuing goals through obstacles; but this is clearly too restrictive, insofar as it rules out many narrative histories, such as those concerning families and nations. However, I think we can justify something very close to this restriction within the context of an individual’s biography. If a person’s life is to be explained in narrative terms, then it must be governed by an overarching, forward-looking explanatory trajectory; and if that explanation is to be plausible and compelling, then it must have some significant causal basis. But further, if this explanatory-causal role is not to be filled by an external agent who manipulates the biography’s focal subject, as in Augustine’s Confessions or Wordsworth’s Prelude, then it must be occupied by the subject herself. That is, the subject must be an agent who imposes an explanatory unity on her unfolding life by striving to achieve some goal. Otherwise, we are left either with no unifying, sense-making ‘rationale’ for the narrative at all, or else with a ‘rationale’ that is presented as merely epiphenomenal: as emerging mysteriously from out of a miasma of blind contingency.

...Similarly, some people—what Galen Strawson calls “Episodics” —move through life without any special commitment to long-term, identity-defining goals at all. Instead, these people savor each moment, and meet each temporary challenge and opportunity as it comes. (As examples of Episodics, Strawsoncites himself, along with such luminaries as Montaigne, Stendhal, Woolf, Borges, Murdoch, and Bob Dylan.) In neither case do we want to conclude that these people cannot have selves, or that their selves must be deeply fractured, simply because there is no narratively compelling connection among the disparate episodes or strands of their lives.

A second class of narratively problematic selves does live a strongly goal-oriented life, but in a way that produces spectacularly boring narratives. These people have as their overarching goal simply to be a certain kind of person: to achieve a particular personality trait, like serenity, for instance, or a certain professional status, like being the town doctor. When things go as planned, they achieve that crucial, self-defining quality quite early, and simply manifest it in a consistent, ongoing way from then on. The stereotypical pater familias, farmer, or town doctor coasts through life indefinitely, savoring the pleasures and confronting the challenges of each day and season, but without any particular expectation or hope of substantial change. Asked to tell the story of their lives, they’d say there wasn’t much to tell, or proudly offer a one-line characterization. Much like Episodics, they accumulate many anecdotes—variations on an unchanging theme—in lieu of a compelling developmental narrative. I take it that this is an utterly familiar, even paradigmatic type of selfhood. But because the narrative conception focuses so strongly on becoming at the expense of mere being, it is forced to disvalue these selves.

Across the Youniverse

2011-11-10T15:29:00.004-05:00

Josh Rothman:

[C]hemicals organize[d] themselves into complex patterns requiring the coordination of trillions of molecules. And they did this with no instructions. No human organized them. Nor did they have a genetic blueprint that guided their actions. Their own intrinsic self-organizing dynamics directed these complex interactions.... The deep truth about matter, which neither Descartes nor Newton realized, is that, over the course of four billion years, molten rocks transformed themselves into monarch butterflies, blue herons, and the exalted music of Mozart.

This scientific story, the authors argue, should make us rethink our own relationship to the environment, and call into question our tendency to see the non-living world as inanimate. In fact, physics shows us that the non-living world is incredibly dynamic, surprising, and creative -- it's just that the creativity happens over very long scales of time. It's an important fact, they write, that the universe is itself 'set up' for creativity. The universe, they argue, isn't anarchic, meaningless, absurd, or pointless; it's creative in its essence. This should make a difference in the way we think about the meaning of our own lives: By being creative and creating novelty, we're participating in a universe-sized process.

As Bakunin said, the urge to destroy is also a creative urge. What I mean by invoking that in this context is that molten rocks also transformed themselves into lethal viruses, genocidal tyrants and nuclear weapons, and thus we're still left with the age-old question of how to live meaningfully in a world frequently indifferent or hostile to individuals, and that question isn't resolved by simply trying to make the focus of one's identity the universe itself. It's true that we really are all one in an important way, but we can't live day-to-day on that level of awareness. No one is comforted in a meaningful way by the fact that our atoms, which may once have been part of a comet or an underwater volcano, will also one day be part of other living organisms, and perhaps return to being stardust countless years hence. It's sublime to contemplate, sure; but sublime is not the same thing as beautiful, you know.

Girl, I Oughta Warn Yuh, My Reputation's Unkind

2011-11-09T20:16:00.003-05:00

Adam Lee:

Looking at the religious aspects of many intergroup conflicts, at the violence carried out by zealots in the name of religion, some people conclude that the world would be safer "religion-free." They may even try living this way themselves. But too often they only practice a form of self-delusion. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the human spirit. As C.S. Lewis said, the opposite of a belief in God is not a belief in nothing; it is a belief in anything. Sweep the demon of religion out the door and, like the story in the Gospels, you may only succeed in making room for an evil spirit worse than the first — this one accompanied by seven friends (Luke 11:24-26; Matt. 12:43-45). Zealous atheism can perform this role of demonic pseudoreligion.

This language could have come straight out of a Christian gospel tract: saying that atheists are in the grip of self-delusion, that we're worse than the violent zealots we condemn, or that we're practicing a "demonic pseudoreligion". And, lest I overlook it, this passage clearly implies that it's necessary to believe in God to be a UU - or even just to be a good person. I expect this kind of hostile, sneering denunciation from Bible-thumping fundamentalists, but to hear it from the mouth of a Unitarian Universalist minister was an awful shock.

I don't really care what the official UU stance is on atheism; as a doctrinaire grouchomarxist, I likewise declare that I wouldn't want to belong to any group that would have me as a member. No, my eye was caught by the other excerpt. With all due disrespect to C.S. Lewis, he's so full of shit, I'm surprised he wasn't covered in flies when he wrote that.

I was recently called a nihilist in all innocence; no insult intended. It's just one of those things we take for granted -- you don't believe in God, so you must believe in nothing, right? Well, no. Now, bear with me here. I'm not splitting hairs to be difficult; this is just a fine but very important distinction. A nihilist is someone who is still desperate to believe in something, anything. Nihilists take the concept of nothingness and reify it, raise it to the level of Absolute Truth where their God used to reside. They still want to believe in the sort of one-size-fits-all universal truth common to Platonic philosophy and Christianity, but if they can't believe anymore in some kind of eternal meaning, they'll settle for believing that nothing ever means anything. The enveloping, inescapable rule of Nothingness becomes the blanket they cover up with to keep out any existential drafts. It's what allows them the security of being able to shrug off responsibility and say "I was just following orders." The poor melodramatic fellow we had such fun laughing at last month is a nihilist; he's just frantically trying to cover up the sour stink of his fear with some Jesus-scented air freshener, and probably not even fooling himself. Nihilism is quite literally the shadow of God.

I feel that it's quite apparent to anyone who looks carefully that there is no inherent meaning in anything. There are no souls, no absolutes, no guarantees. Meaning is something we create out of the contingent pieces of our shared existences, themselves contingent, and it is always an unfinished work. The absence of belief in inherent meaning is not a positive affirmation of the substance of meaninglessness. So how, then, as my interlocutor asked, does the non-nihilist person live in the absence of such active belief? Well, as Suzuki Roshi said, you do it every day.

She Used to Be a Painted Bird, Yeah

2011-11-06T18:50:00.002-05:00

Chris Opfer:

Buffy Martin Tarbox was 22 when she got her first tattoo. It was a 4-by-3-inch, black and red circle above a cross — the symbol for women—on her arm. Less than a month later, she added a second tattoo: a black Celtic knot on her other arm. But when Martin Tarbox reached her mid-30s, she decided it was time for the ink to go. “When I got the tattoos, like most people, I was young,” she says. “Believe me, I regret it. I’m a professional woman now.”

Roughly a third of Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 have at least one tattoo, according to a 2008 Harris Poll. So do a quarter of 30- to 39-year-olds. Like many trends, celebrities are helping to drive the desire to get inked — roughly 70 percent of NBA basketball players are tatted up, according to Andrew Gottlieb’s In the Paint: Tattoos of the NBA and the Stories Behind Them, as are a slew of entertainers from Lil Wayne to Lady Gaga.

But tattoo remorse is leading many of the painted masses to rethink their ink and opt for increasingly available laser removal procedures. They are fueling a burgeoning business: specialty removal shops, like California’s Dr. Tattoff, Chicago’s Hindsight Tattoo Removal, and Zap A Tat in Virginia, are thriving.

Huh. Me, if I were worried about my professional status, I'd get the name "Buffy Tarbox" scrubbed off of my birth certificate long before I'd worry about removing two piddly tattoos from my arms, but it takes all kinds, I suppose.

I remember back in freshman comp, when a guy sitting at my table saw me showing off my first two tattoos to a couple of my friends. "You're going to change, you know," he said, as he suggested that I would regret it one day. Well, as one of that quarter-of-Americans demographic cited above, I can say here and now that I REGRET NOTHING. So, uh, there you go; fuck you, random know-it-all blond guy from English class. Hope you're enjoying your "natural" male pattern baldness and paunchy gut!

Ten Men Love What I Hate

2011-11-06T13:45:00.004-05:00

Marc Hogan:

Critical reception of Coldplay has been thawing a bit, too. (Beloved Swedish pop singer Robyn’s killer cover of “Mylo Xyloto’s” initially panned lead single, “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall,” hasn’t hurt much, either.) Just in time, too. “Mylo Xyloto” could easily go down as Coldplay’s best album. It’s definitely where they best balance their obvious desire for artistic respect with their undeniable ability to write songs that throngs of people want to chant along.

...It’s not that Coldplay have given up on competing for artistic cachet. Quite the opposite, given how obsessively Martin focuses in the New York Times piece on what Bruce Springsteen and U2 did at similar points in their careers. They’re just integrating their influences less obtrusively now.

Daniel Nester:

The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor.

And why embarrassing? Because the Doors reflect a conflict many of us have with artists we think we have outgrown. For those with a youthful bent, sustained naïveté, or a poetical inclination, the combination of the Doors’ music and Jim Morrison’s lyrics can be transformative.

...While I’m not terribly interested in the interminable debate over whether rock lyrics qualify as “real” poetry, it turns out one can’t avoid it entirely when we speak of Jim Morrison, Gateway Poet, as a serious writer. It is mostly a losing proposition, I know. It is absurd. And yet I’m not willing to completely disregard what the eighth-grade me found so moving.

...Just how seriously Jim Morrison can be taken as a poet depends on whom you ask, but there’s no question that he regarded himself as the real deal. Starting with No One Here Gets Out Alive and each subsequent biography, Morrison is portrayed as carrying Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry books in his pocket or quoting from Nietzsche, all by way of suggesting the singer should be taken seriously as a poet, without many other reasons why.

Music snobbery - or art snobbery in general - is one of those topics, like religion and politics, that it's best to avoid in polite company, because there's just no reasoning with people over their sense of identity. But anyway, it's a shame when popular art forms get caught up in painful self-consciousness and a desire to be taken seriously. The worst thing you can do is let the cool kids know you desperately want to hang out with them; once they know they have that power over you, they'll never let you stop squirming.

Catching up with a friend once, I asked her what she'd been listening to lately. She didn't answer at first, and when I persisted, she named a few bands (while mentioning that one of them had gotten "too commercial", and then asked in a surprisingly defensive tone whether I was disappointed in her for her pedestrian taste. I guess she assumed that because music was such an all-consuming passion for me, I must disdain anyone who didn't match my obsession or, uh, knowledge. Of course, there are plenty of songs and artists I can't stand, but there's always a surreptitious grin in it for me; it's just something fun to joust about. There are plenty of people who probably get something from those artists, and good for them.

I'm actually listening to the new Coldplay right now. I consider myself a fan; their first two albums are particular favorites, and the others all have at least a few good songs on them. Shrug, I dunno -- I don't need them to be anything other than what they are. There are enough serious artists out there that I don't begrudge anyone who just wants to write catchy tunes or those who enjoy them. Cheering someone up with a pretty melody is just as noble an endeavor as shocking the bourgeoisie, I reckon.

Art, for me, is a relationship in flux rather than an essential property of a person or thing. The motivations of the artist, the skill of their craft, and the headspace in which it reaches the listener are all part of its character. Profound thoughts can develop while daydreaming along to ear candy. Pretentious artists can be misled by the puritanical obsession with ascetic standards, the idea that anything enjoyable or easy to understand must be insipid and bad for your character. The most valuable thing about art to me is the way it enables new perspectives, and I've lived long enough to know that those can come from some very unlikely sources.

Our Interest's On the Dangerous Edge of Things

2011-11-06T12:11:00.002-05:00

Why, I believe I was just talking about this concept:

And truths to be pursued: Emerson and Nietzsche, ultimately, share Plato’s vision that philosophic inquiry is a heroic enterprise: the bold seeker is on a quest for truths undetectable by slaves to conformity, truths they know will be superseded. “How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare,” Nietzsche tells us, is the ultimate “measure of value.”

First things first: I MUST OWN THIS BOOK. You all may now commence fighting over which one of you will purchase it for me.

Secondly: Neech himself said one repays a teacher badly if one remains only a student, and here is one of the points at which I feel his concern to be a bit antiquated, where his truth has been superseded -- as a cultural ideal, the heroic search for capital-T truth is destined to end at the same blank wall in the same existential cul-de-sac; it's just something each person goes through in their own way at their own pace. The only Truth is that there is no Truth, to get all koan-ish about it. Logic is an ouroboros. Words become acidic, dissolve themselves, and you tumble through the resulting hole in the dictionary, finally liberated from the futile effort of trying to jam-pack existence into concepts and linguistic boxes. Then you just live day to day, taking pleasure from contingent experiences.

Ah, But a Man's Reach Should Exceed His Grasp

2011-11-06T11:05:00.003-05:00

Tim Minchin:

I, on the other hand, don't tend to walk around with glowing atheist belt buckles. I've been atheist since I became aware of the term, but my material is not all about religion – not by a long shot – and when I do address the topic it is to point out where religiosity meets discrimination. Many comics write about what makes them angry, or, at least, what they observe in the world that is at odds with how they feel it ought to be. This is the case when Seinfeld talks about muffins or McIntyre talks about Argos (brilliantly, I hasten to add). I just happen to be less preoccupied by parking spots and soup nazis, and more by homophobes and creationists.

Most people don't know I'm atheist, though I do confess to a fair collection of kitschy t-shirts advertising the fact in one way or another (though I tend to save those for times when I don't plan to meet up with anyone I know). But here on the Internet, where I have yet to meet one more godless than myself, I like to part company with my more conciliatory brethren, who are happy with benign mistakes as long as they lead to beneficial results, and take it a little further: it's easy to condemn religion for its ill effects; it's a little more sporting to me to criticize it for being rooted in irrational soil to begin with. I'm glad that some people manage to be religious while embodying it in a way of life that coexists easily with mine, but I'd be happier if they took a more direct route to that understanding.

Granted, pure rationality is neither attainable nor desirable. And I honestly don't have any desire to convert as many people as possible to my way of thinking. But I think as a general rule that you should still endeavor to see as clearly as possible, even at the cost of personal discomfort, and I like the idea of serving as a prod, a stimulus, an irritant, a gadfly to perhaps push other people in that direction.

By the way, it's funny, that Browning quotation -- when I heard it, I took it as a suggestion that heaven is actually unattainable, simply a projection. I don't know what he meant by it, though.

The Apparition Among the Stacks

2011-11-06T10:12:00.003-05:00

I've been traveling a lot these last few days, and yesterday I found myself in Alexandria, a suburb of D.C., at a library sale. As I was browsing the shelves downstairs, an elderly man in the grey work clothes of a janitor glanced over at me as he made his way to the elevator and suggested I check out the books upstairs too. I assured him I'd be up there momentarily, and when I did make my way up the stairs, I found it to be a veritable treasure-trove of great books, many of which I hadn't seen for sale at any other libraries. Quite a few copies were signed by their authors. Rock-bottom prices. Why, it was sort of like a dragon's hoard, if dragons collected books instead of gold.

But I had only been up there for ten minutes or so when the woman at the desk said that they were closing the upstairs section now! We had been given erroneous information, and the sale was ending four hours earlier than we thought! Aaahhh! Quick! Mad scramble! There's too much good stuff in here that I haven't seen yet! But just as my panic level began to rise, into the room stepped the grey-clad janitor again.

"It's okay, you can leave it open. I'll close things up when I leave. I've got nowhere to be," he said to her. And so he settled down into a chair and allowed us to keep browsing. "You sure I'm not inconveniencing you?" I asked. "No, no, it's fine. I've got nowhere to be," he repeated. "You look like you're going to spend some money," as he nodded toward the several canvas bags full I was dragging behind me, "and I'm not going to stop you." And so we made small talk for the next 45 minutes as I had the room to myself, my girlfriend taking care of the outer area.

He told me he was a retired government worker who volunteered at the library because it allowed him time to browse through all the fiction that no one else was interested in. He claimed to have read every biography of Benjamin Franklin, having grown up in the first town in America named after him, where knowledge of the great man was drilled into you as a kid in school. He'd been around used books all his life, a friend of his owning a store that he spent a lot of time at. He said that when he retired, he thought he'd open up a store of his own, but he soon found it to be too much work. So it was the life of a library volunteer for him now. We talked about living the simple life, trying to avoid the rat race, the joy of finding rare and unknown (to us) books, and how much we wished finger cancer upon those stupid bastards who insist on writing inside of books and ruining their value. Finally, we added up all the books and I wrote him a check. My girlfriend came in with four more a minute later, and I got out my checkbook again, but he stopped me with a shake of his head. "Nah, don't worry about it," he said with a dismissive look. "You two alone have spent half as much as everyone else today combined. In fact," he added, "you're probably parked in the big lot, aren't you? Tell you what; put all your bags in that blue bin out there and I'll meet you down at the loading entrance." We loaded up the bags into one of those containers on wheels that they use at the post office, and headed out to the van.

After situating them in the backseat and shutting the door, we chatted with him a bit more as he took a smoke break, told him where we were headed next, talked about the merits and drawbacks of different libraries, sales, and locations, and he wished us luck as we promised him we'd be back regularly, exchanged names and handshakes, and thanked him profusely for all his generosity.

So we called the library back this morning to confirm what days and times their sale would be next taking place, and mentioned what a great help Mr. Higgenbottom had been to us yesterday. "Mr. Higgenbottom?" the lady said with a puzzled tone. "Mr. Higgenbottom... why, he passed away thirty-two years ago, reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin at his desk in the office upstairs! Are you sure that was his name?"

"Uh... no, I'm sorry, I must have misheard. Thanks anyway; see you next month."

Okay, not really. I'm just kidding about that part. Or am I??

It's a Small, Small World

2011-11-01T09:39:00.005-04:00

I was at a library sale outside of D.C. last week, and picked up one book that looked interesting, though it had a low sales rank and no resale value, so I decided to keep it for myself. I started reading it last night, and noticed that the author's bio mentioned him living in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. A few dozen pages in, he mentioned having been the proprietor of a bookstore in Charlottesville. Glancing at his picture again, the wheels started turning in my head, shaking off the cobwebs. The tone of this book sounds familiar... a bookstore owner... hey, wait, what was that guy's name again...? Tom...? So, a quick Google search later confirmed my vague suspicion; this was the guy who used to run my favorite used bookstore downtown. I traded in many a book for credit in his store, though the only real conversation I recall having with him was over the issue of Leonard Peltier's conviction (he felt Peltier was guilty, railroaded or not; I wasn't so sure). I never knew he wrote books himself, though. What a cool coincidence.

A few days later, I was in the southern part of the state and found another book with a wry take on the whole self-help genre. And once again, the author turned out to be from Charlottesville. I've never met her, though.

I had no idea I had grown up in the crucible of the rebellion against mushy, feel-good, self-help platitudes. Why, I take a little pride in knowing that now.

Enemies Closer

2011-11-01T08:45:00.004-04:00

Richard Coles:

I wouldn’t argue that Dawkins and Hitchens are crypto-believers, far from it, but it interests me that religion continues to hold a fascination for them, even if it is an appalled fascination. That tells you something about religion’s persistence, endurance. When I read Hitchens’s God Is Not Great – which I found good in parts – I liked his passion, but there is something so angry and disappointed in that literature, and you think, ‘Why do you care so much?’, and then I think it must be because of the way followers of Jesus Christ fail so lamentably to follow what Jesus preached.

Well, I suppose if there's nothing else in the philosophical pantry, we can always reheat some Freud. Perhaps Dawkins and Hitchens are like little boys shooting spitballs at a girl to show how much of a crush they have on her.

Look, I'm not sure it really needs any explication as to why people should have an interest in the Big Questions, or in those those who claim to have the final answer, and if I may get all Nietzschean about it for a moment, it's equally natural to be concerned about a belief system which has had great power for thousands of years, especially if one considers oneself to be an ideological enemy of it. And continuing in that vein, I'll add that outright disbelief is still enough of a novelty in our culture to provide an iconoclastic opportunity for distinguishing oneself. Oh, sure, I'll admit it: there's a bit of an egotistical thrill upon feeling as if you've seen through a venerable deception that has gulled so many important and powerful people.

If You Wake Up Feeling No Pain, You Know You're Dead

2011-10-31T09:21:00.003-04:00

Anupam Kant Verma:

Pain has often been privileged over other sensations. It has been represented as a somewhat enviable experience, has had something of a heroic career in spiritual literature. Yet in truth, pain is no more and no less profound than any other sensation. Pain offers the same potential for learning as any other experience. In that sense one can simply say that pain...just...is.

I never thought of myself as being particularly tough, but it seemed by ordinary standards that I had a high tolerance for pain. I played an entire season of high school soccer with what I thought was just a nagging pain in my knee; it turned out to be a stress fracture at the top of my tibia. Tape it up and jog it off, champ. My tattoo artist marveled to me that I sat there and read a book while she worked on a seven-plus hour design on my arm; most people couldn't relax enough to concentrate on anything else, she said. It wasn't exactly pleasant, and I had to read several paragraphs over a few times before really taking them in, but hey, you know, mind over matter and all that.

But as I said before, I developed rheumatoid arthritis in my late twenties, and due to my belonging to the twenty percent of people who don't show a positive rheumatoid factor on a blood test, it went untreated as such for three and a half years. By the time an MRI on my hands convinced my doctors to start giving me drugs for it, I was one sad-sack, broken-down, sorry-ass sunnamabitch. I was in constant chronic pain, sometimes acute, oftentimes just like the hum of an appliance in the background. I couldn't sit for more than ten or fifteen minutes without my lower back and knees screaming in protest when I got back up. I couldn't stand for an equal amount of time without an equal response. I couldn't sleep in many positions for long without waking up and having to gingerly shift myself, and the uneven sleep patterns made me feel even more beaten down and worn out. If I took pills to sleep more deeply, I paid for it upon awakening by hardly being able to move. The muscles in my right arm are still slightly smaller and weaker than those in my left because a tendon in my rotator cuff was getting pinched in between two bones, causing me to shift my shoulder forward to relieve the pressure and keep my arm close to my side, trying to only move it from the elbow down if needed. I wore shoes almost all the time because I couldn't stand to walk barefoot, and I had to wear the same pair for a few years because I couldn't stand the discomfort of trying to break a new pair in.

I didn't think about it much at the time, but there was always a sort of back-of-the-mind awareness that one day, I might just have to kill myself rather than go on like this indefinitely. Nothing dramatic, nothing emotional, just an acknowledgement of the brute facts of my existence. I was increasingly unable to let my mind wander beyond the constant attention to my aches and pains. No one seemed to know what was wrong with me. Some of them even whispered behind my back that I was malingering for who knew what reason. Why go on like this?

I guess I was young and healthy enough that medication fortunately brought me back almost completely to normal. But there was no epiphany once I reached that point. No grand, life affirming lesson. Just a crystal-clear awareness of the utter senseless futility of ever trying to be tough. The world will always win. No matter how much you can personally endure, no matter how much farther you can push yourself, there will always be someone else who can tolerate worse for longer. Unless you want to take it to the logical conclusion like those stupid Buddhist monks who set themselves aflame while remaining motionless, you're going to have to turn back at some point and stop chasing after the chimera of redemption, affirmation, accomplishment being found in pain. There's nothing morally or spiritually purifying about it. It just is. Avoid it if you can. I've had friends who put themselves through unnecessary pain and suffering for reasons like that, from BDSM practitioners to MMA fighters who refuse to take aspirin for broken bones, and it just makes me sad for them.