Month: October 2010

Zadie Smith loans money to an old friend, Christine, who disappears and then reappears. It teaches Smith a bigger lesson:

Until this episode, I’d thought of myself as a working-class girl who’d happened upon money, my essential character unchanged. But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it. George Sand: “Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.” Well, it needn’t, but it does the way I do it.

I continued passively-aggressively texting in the middle-class tradition—to the wrong number, it turned out. … The first check came quickly but sat in a pile of unopened mail because these days I hire someone to do that. Then Christine did me one more charity: she forgave me.

Sam Harris and Mark Oppenheimer are sparring over the question at The Economist. Here's Mark:

[R]eligion responds to a deep, satisfying human need for ritual. Throughout human history (and certainly among my three young daughters, who are the nearest evidence at hand), people have liked occasion, routine, ceremony. We like regular, predictable occasions to come together, offer thanksgiving, celebrate common history and experience, and affirm our ties of community.

Such rituals do not have to be religious, of course: there are civic rituals, which in America include Independence Day (and its fireworks), Thanksgiving (and its meal) and Memorial Day (often with a picnic or barbecue). But many of the best, most enduring rituals are religious: Christmas, Easter, Sukkot, Passover, Iftar, etc. And it is worth noting that even supposedly secular rituals tend to accrue quasi-religious elements to lend them meaning: prayers, invocations, discussions of a people's "destiny". In other words, it is hard to keep such rituals purely secular, although I am sure it can be done.

By the way, the best religious ritual of all is the Sabbath, and it so happens that religious people are much better at keeping a day of rest than secular people who make periodic resolutions to keep a "secular Sabbath" or just to "slow down". It seems to be a particularly, if not uniquely, religious good.

"The Litany Of Disparagement" by Dick Allen appeared in The Atlantic in January of 1997:

I drove, but I didn't turn.
I spoke, but I didn't learn.
I warmed, but I didn't burn.
Pray for me now and then.

Cards held too close to my chest,
I loved the roads running west,
Old shoes and a leather vest.
Pray for me now and then.

I never reached my floodmark.
The dog is a distant bark.
The tunnel whirls in the dark.
Pray for me now and then.

The nurse bends low over me.
With hands and skeleton key,
She opens Death's mystery.
Pray for me now and then.

Pray, for the willows must shake.
Ripples must die in the lake.
I am the life I forsake.
Pray for me now and then.

(Image from Flickr user Bonnie Woodson)

Morgan Meis marvels at a recently revealed secret:

He turned the steering wheel the wrong direction. That is the latest revelation about what happened to the greatest ocean liner of all time, Titanic. This fact, claims Louise Patten, granddaughter of Titanic's Second Officer Charles Lightoller, was kept a secret until now.

According to Louise Patten, there was some confusion in those days about what "hard a-starboard" actually meant. The new steam ships had mechanized steering systems that meant you had to turn the wheel the opposite way for starboard as you did on the old sail ships. With the iceberg looming out in the dark night, the helmsman turned the wheel the wrong way. Later, after Titanic did, in fact, strike the iceberg, the people in charge (Bruce Ismay, the director of the White Star Line that owned Titanic, leading the way), decided to push forward at full speed anyway, hastening the demise of the ship.

Charles Lightoller survived that night with the iceberg and was the only man left alive who'd heard those conversations. Fearful about his own career and the fate of the entire White Star Line, Lightoller kept his mouth shut, telling the secret only to his wife. She, in turn, passed it down to her granddaughter Louise Patten, who reveals it now.

That's Titanic for you.

Molly Worthen profiles Albert Mohler for Christianity Today:

After nearly 20 years at the helm of Southern Seminary, Mohler has put the finishing touches on what supporters call the "conservative resurgence" and critics bemoan as the "fundamentalist takeover": the radical shift of SBC leadership from the moderate, even mainline-inclined theology of the 1970s to today's firm grounding in biblical inerrancy, a complementarian view of gender roles, and, more often than not, conservative politics.

Before Mohler's appointment, Southern faculty celebrated higher biblical criticism and embraced evolutionary theory. Now the school is a bulwark of conservative Reformed theology and creationism.

The campus of lush trees and neocolonial architecture is the staging ground for a struggle against a mainstream culture that Mohler believes is sliding into moral chaos—and against "postmodern Christians," the enemy within.

That ideology was on display in a post this week on the suicide of Tyler Clementi:

As Christians, we just have to wonder. Was there no believer to befriend Tyler and, without loving his homosexuality, love him? The homosexual community insists that to love someone is to love their sexual orientation. We know this to be a lie. But no one who loves me should love nor rationalize my sin. The church must be the people who speak honestly about sin because we have first learned by God’s grace to speak honestly of our own.

Julian Sanchez wrestles with the question. Better than watching the Sunday talk shows.

J.M. Bernstein applies Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807) to the economic collapse on Wall Street:

[W]hat Hegel’s probing account means to show is that the defender of holier-than-thou virtue and the self-interested Wall Street banker are making the same error from opposing points of view.bsp; Each supposes he has a true understanding of what naturally moves individuals to action.

The knight of virtue thinks we are intrinsically good and that acting in the nasty, individualist, market world requires the sacrifice of natural goodness; the banker believes that only raw self-interest, the profit motive, ever leads to successful actions.

Both are wrong because, finally, it is not motives but actions that matter, and how those actions hang together to make a practical world. … What market regulations should prohibit are practices in which profit-taking can routinely occur without wealth creation; wealth creation is the world-interest that makes bankers’ self-interest possible.  Arguments that market discipline, the discipline of self-interest, should allow Wall Street to remain self-regulating only reveal that Wall Street, as Hegel would say, “simply does not know what it is doing.”

David Crossland reports that an unprecendented 7 million liters of beer were consumed at this year's Oktoberfest, which might explain this:

One hearing aid was … found, as were a leather whip, a live rabbit, a tuba, a ship in a bottle, 1,450 items of clothing, 770 identity cards, 420 wallets, 366 keys, 330 bags and 320 pairs of glasses, 90 cameras and 90 items of jewellery and watches.

A total of 37 children were also lost.

Heather Wax summarizes two studies that look at LSM or "language style matching" in happy couples. The studies explore when "the way we talk—the grammatical structure of our sentences—naturally starts to mirror how the other person speaks":

[T]hey looked at transcripts of speed-dates and found that 33.3 percent of pairs who had an LSM above the median wanted to see each other again, compared with only 9.1 percent of pairs with an LSM at or below the median. Then they looked at instant messages that couples sent and found that 76.7 percent of couples with an LSM higher than the median were still dating three months later, compared with 53.5 percent of those who had an LSM at or below the median. Sure enough, they say, "an unobtrusive measure of nonconscious verbal matching uniquely predicted mutual romantic interest and relationship stability."

Noam Shpancer writes about the masturbation gap between men and women:

In my human sexuality class recently, I asked students to come up with all the known slang terms for male masturbation. They quickly listed at least a dozen. Then I asked them to come up with slang to describe female masturbation. None came instantly to mind. After much effort, they came up with ‘flicking the bean' and ‘Jill off.' That was it.

Language describes reality, and also shapes it. What you don't have words for you do not own or understand. This observation is supported by the data. According to the research, over 95% of males have masturbated to orgasm by age 20, compared to around 60% of women (with some studies suggesting an even larger gap).

(Image from Life Magazine's archive of one man bands)