Month: October 2010

A brilliant, insightful assessment of how the man's "messiah complex" overwhelmed his modern pragmatism. Money quote:

In a strange sense, Blair on terrorism recalls nothing so much as the Labour Party ideologues he used to make fun of as they loudly declaimed about the nationalization of industry, unilateral disarmament and workers’ communes. They were obsessed by an ideology, contemptuous of complicating facts on the ground, fed up with a public that didn’t see the light and supremely convinced that history, ultimately, would vindicate them. What do you know. Tony Blair has turned out to be Old Labour after all.

Terry Teachout explores the resurgence of interest in autochrome, and wonders what seeing the world in black and white did to our sensibilities:

[My] thirteen-year-old nephew, has taken to turning up his nose at black-and-white movies, a form of youthful snobbery that I'd heard about but never previously encountered. Not for him the clean, crisp surreality of the monochrome image: he wants color or nothing. No doubt blood looks better when it's really red. ….

The world was simpler then, simpler and more reassuring and–yes–less honest. Much was being swept under the rug in 1960, much suffering and much folly, far too much for our collective good. And now? We get color or nothing, with more than enough blood to go around. But while I suppose I'm glad to know what I know about the world, luridly and garishly vivid though it may be, I don't think I would have wanted to know very much of it when I was young–and I'm not at all sure it's a good thing that my nephew already knows some of it.

Jackie Wang quotes The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, on the eternal debate between being out in the world and writing about the world:

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises.

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

For Sunday:

Kyle Cupp decodes the contradictory elements of many religious symbols:

[T]he Christian conception of evil as a stain or blemish that the cleansing waters of baptism remove envisions evil as a kind of thing, as something with being, and yet, in the same tradition, evil is also considered as a privation, as a lack of a good that ought to be there, as not a thing at all, as not having any being. These two conceptions of evil aren’t entirely compatible, and yet both are very much at home in the same faith tradition. …

Ultimately what we know about evil, or anything else that we use figurative language to conceptualize, cannot be made into a single, coherent, all-encompassing conception.  Its truth is not one, but many, at least in so far as we have its truth figuratively in mind.

James Ley disparages (pdf) the "undergraduate bull session" observations of Terry Eagleton's most recent book, On Evil:

Eagleton’s notion of absolute evil disappears into its own vacuity. Like his definition of God, it purchases metaphysical purity at the cost of irrelevance. As a category it is analytically useless, not simply because it ultimately describes nothing, but because it also explains nothing.

East London, England, 12 pm

Jenny Hendrix reviews Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters, a collection of Marilyn Monroe’s writings:

One of the more remarkable things “Fragments” does is give us Marilyn Monroe the way we’ve always wanted her: as someone, finally, have-able. This is both satisfying and, ultimately, disturbing. In one entry, Monroe recounts a dream in which she is being operated on by Strasberg and her analyst. When they cut her open, Monroe writes, “there is absolutely nothing there … devoid of every human living feeling thing.” This book feels a little like this sort of cutting open, only in addition to this fear of emptiness there are many other “living feeling things” inside.

Christopher Mims cites Heather Knight, founder of the world's first (non-industrial) robot census, on why the Japanese are more receptive to robots:

She posits that the difference between Japanese and American attitudes toward robots is rooted in something much older than even the idea of robots: religion.

"In Japan… they're culturally open to robots, on account of animism. They don't make a distinction between inanimate objects and humans."

Animism is a component of the Shinto faith, the religion that preceded the introduction of Buddhism to Japan and remains an influential part of the country's culture. Animism is the notion that all objects have a spirit – even man-made objects.

In the West, in contrast, creating life inevitably leads to destruction of the creator — a notion that is hardly original to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as author Rui Umezawa points out.

In order to understand fully religion's influence on the West's attitude toward robotics, we also must remember that Judeo-Christian monotheism also adheres to the doctrine that only God can give life, a popular interpretation of Genesis in which there is only God in the beginning and all living things are His creations. Exodus also decrees that idolatry is a sin. Thus, any human who breathes life into an inanimate object is assuming the role of God and thereby becoming a false idol.

(Video hat tip: Max Read)

Kenneth C. Davis sets the record straight on America's true history of religious tolerance:

In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith. 

The truth:

From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation."

(Image via Pharyngula)