Month: February 2007

An interesting blast from the past.

Here’s a good essay by James Fenton in the Guardian on a great poet. A reader comments:

Always my personal favorite poet by a country mile – from my early teenage years on – and I’m not that big a poetry fan.  His early poetry (despite the one puzzling reference in this essay to his "obscurity") managed to avoid the enormous 20th century trap of what may be called Decoder Ring Poetry (see, for instance, early Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and – as I’ve most recently discovered, to my disappointment – Yeats), while also avoiding the lesser but real trap of excessive simple-mindedness. That is, it’s intelligent and complex, but by God you can nevertheless understand all of it.

Starting in the 1940s, unfortunately his poetry did slide too far toward Offensive Transparency – some of his late stuff looks like Winnie the Pooh – but to the end of his days he remained an absolutely delightful, incredibly readable reviewer and analyst. If I had to name a single book to give to any high-school student (not just the gifted ones) to get him interested in literature, I would unhesitatingly pick Auden’s 1973 anthology "Forewords And Afterwords".

Larkin has him beat, I’d say, especially on the grounds of readability. But re-reading Auden always reveals some new detail or meaning or nuance. In some of his greatest poems, he also manages to make almost philosophical arguments about the world in ways that only poetry can. My own understanding of homosexuality, for example, was altered deeply by his poem, "In Praise of Limestone." The poem was a lodestar for the second essay in "Love Undetectable," called "Virtually Abnormal."

By the way, I’m considering adding occasional short verse to the blog. Once a week, maybe just on the weekends. Any objections?

(Photo: Limestone formations along the Wujiang River are seen on November 29, 2006 in Gongtan Township of Youyang County, Chongqing Municipality, China. By China Photos/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I ended up surfing over to conservapedia.com for good laugh after I saw it posted on your blog. I came across the following sentence while reading their "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia"

"For example, even though most Americans (and probably most of the world) reject the theory of evolution, Wikipedia editors commenting on the topic are nearly 100% pro-evolution. Self-selection has a tendency to exacerbate bias in the absence of affirmative steps to limit it."

I don’t know if it strikes you or anyone else as funny that a group of conservatives has used a reasonable definition of natural selection – "a tendency to exacerbate bias through self-selection" – to refute, er, evolution.

A small joke, I guess. The bigger joke is that conservatism is now allied to creationism.

A reader writes:

In the post "Modernity and Spirituality", you and the reader both equate the term "modernity" with "freedom". But "freedom" is not the part of "modernity" that people who believe in traditional religion are worried about. (By "traditional," I mean a religion that holds to traditional understandings of miracles, the existence of a spiritual realm, God/church authority, etc.)  Modernity does not simply represent liberty, it represents the philosophical movement of Modernism coming out of the Enlightenment whereby science and reason are enthroned with authority, and religion (as if it were always opposed) is to be hidden away in the corner of a private home. Modernity is more like a worldview than a period in time. 

Karen Armstrong in The Battle for God, argues that Modernity and Fundamentalism are two sides of the same coin – Modernity uses a narrow view of science and reason to push God into a corner, and Fundamentalism uses a narrow view of God and theology to push back, with equal and opposite force. I think Armstrong is wrong about a lot of things, but this argument (which you have made as well) I find very compelling. And I think you’d agree with me that much of this battle between Modernity and its sidekick Fundamentalism is on the wrong track, and it hurts both science and religion in the process (and creates a lot of confusion for the thoughtful religious who strive to hold the two together, against the polarization of an error-filled but widespread worldview).

Many who study such movements would say that only some of the world today is in the realm of Modernism – some societies are premodern (no need to name names) while others are increasingly postmodern. There is considerable overlap.  Postmodernism as a philosophy is, like Armstrong, wrong about a lot of things, but one area where it has gained traction is this: Science and reason do not have all the answers. Narratives, myths, and many other ways of knowing and experiencing the world cannot be discounted. Therefore, your reader’s list of spiritual storefronts in LA are more a sign of Postmodernism making inroads than Modernism allowing religion to flourish.

The latter point is only true, though, if the only religions flourishing in post-modernity are "spiritual" and not "traditionally religious." Contemporary America has all of the above: traditional faith, fundamentalist faith, spiritual faith – and many over-lapping variations on the three.

A reader of my book argued that is is essentially a manifesto for post-modern conservatism. I prefer to think of it as a case for modern, secular conservatism, with profound respect for traditional and non-traditional inquiries into the divine. But – shameless plug – read it for yourself and see what you think.

A mob attacks two allegedly gay or transexual men in Jamaica, chasing them into a store. The cops seem unwilling to protect the men. One gay activist alleges he was subsequently beaten by the cops. An account of the incident from a rabidly anti-gay Jamaican blogger can be found here. A YouTube of Jamaican television’s report can be seen here. If two Jews had been attacked by an anti-Semitic mob, or two blacks attacked by a white mob with police support, I have a feeling it would become global news.

Update. A reader adds:

That’s probably true. It’s also probably true that if the attackers of these gay men had been white Christians, the story would also have become global news…

A reader writes:

The soldier’s email about Walter Reed reminds me of this quote, which Bernard Fall used as an epigraph for "Hell In A Very Small Place", his classic history of Dien Bien Phu:

"When a nation re-awakens, its finest sons are prepared to give their lives for its liberation. When empires are threatened with collapse, they are prepared to sacrifice their non-commissioned officers."

That’s Menachem Begin, in 1951.

I kid you not.

The obvious riposte:

I think it was proven that the heart does not reside in the soul with the advent of heart transplants. If you get a new heart, do you get a new soul? Are you soulless for the period of transition?

I seem to recall many recipients of heart transplants occasionally speaking of all sorts of strange and alien experiences living with someone else’s heart. But my point was perhaps too cryptically expressed. Science, it seems to me, is ill-equipped to tell us anything definitive about a concept unknown to science. Yes, neuroscience may well unpack many of the secrets of our living consciousness. But a soul is eternal. It may be dismissed as such by scientists. But they can’t disprove something not susceptible to proof. They can merely try to delegitimize those of us who take the unprovable seriously.

Hey, it’s a post-modern world, and truth isn’t always truthiness.

Chris Kelly has a movie clip package all prepared before the president walks on stage to present an award.