Month: December 2011

A reader recommends this clip from 2002, and it does feel fresh. Begin with the apparently drunk fundamentalist caller about a minute in, if you haven't had enough of this mawkish nostalgia.

Perhaps one of the very best – from last year.

Marcia Pally believes so:

The cavalier militarism and the justification of torture during the Bush years, along with the strident in-group-ism of the last four decades, prodded many evangelicals to re-examine themselves and their actions. George W. Bush may have fractured the Christian coalition that elected him.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald rejects the label:

I, like many of my peers, find it loathsome to have to qualify my Christian faith by constantly informing inquirers that I am not like "those" evangelicals. When I identify as Episcopal or Anglican, there's a lot less explaining necessary.

The Sunday press has its fill of Hitchness. My own tribute, alas, is pay-walled at the Sunday Times. Simon Schama has the best single passage:

Hitch lived for the word. It could as easily be said that English in all its muscular, jubilantly performative splendor lives on for such as him to make hay, make enemies, and make waves with.

Ross grapples with how old-fashioned Hitch was, in literature and argument, and how that befuddled and yet also beguiled the contemporary right. But I wonder if he's right about this:

In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

But it wasn't Aubade he turned to in the final days. It is that other blessed poem of Larkin's, The Whitsun Weddings. Ian McEwan explains:

I set the poem up and read it, and when I reached that celebrated end, "A sense of falling, like an arrow shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain," Christopher murmured from his bed, "That's so dark, so horribly dark."

I disagreed, and not out of any wish to lighten his mood. Surely, the train journey comes to an end, the recently married couples are dispatched towards their separate fates. He wouldn't have it, and a week later, when I was back in London, we were still exchanging emails on the subject.

One of his began: "Dearest Ian, Well, indeed – no rain, no gain – but it still depends on how much anthropomorphising Larkin is doing with his unconscious … I'd provisionally surmise that 'somewhere becoming rain' is unpromising."

Listen to Larkin's own speaking of the poem. It remains ambiguous at the end. But there is within it both light and dark:

there swelled/ a sense of falling, like an arrow shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

It swells, it falls, it precipitates. Out of sight. But somewhere.

Stephen Talbott examines how we talk about organisms:

If a single problem has vexed biologists for the past couple of hundred years, surely it concerns the relation between biology and physics. Many have struggled to show that biology is, in one sense or another, no more than an elaboration of physics, while others have yearned to identify a “something more” that, as a matter of fundamental principle, differentiates a tiger — or an amoeba — from a stone.

… [W]hatever their belief in these matters, biologists today — and molecular biologists in particular — routinely and unavoidably describe the organism in terms that go far beyond the language of physics and chemistry. Words like “stimulus,” “response,” “signal,” “adapt,” “inherit,” and “communicate,” in their biological sense, would never be applied to the strictly physical and chemical processes in a corpse or other inanimate object.

Liel Leibovitz finds Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List indicative of "much that is wrong with American-Jewish life":

In choosing Schindler’s story, and in representing it as a collection of kinetic symbols swirling in succession on-screen, Spielberg turned an infinitely complex reality into something even worse than kitsch: a spectacle. It’s of little wonder that one of Seinfeld’s funniest plots involved Jerry making out with a woman in a screening of Schindler’s List; a similar joke involving Shoah would have come off as intolerably insensitive, but necking as Neeson and Fiennes duke it out is hilarious because it concedes, however implicitly, that Schindler’s List is just a flick, overrated and overblown, best viewed while heavily petting.

Keith Boyea uses Nietzsche to tackle the question:

Nietzsche felt that man desired meaning but that religion could no longer meet his need for it.  This gave a certain type of person the opportunity to create his own meaning; to become the ubermensch.  Now this is can certainly lead down some dark, undemocratic paths.  But what I’ve taken out of this is that the responsibility for my own meaning lies with me.  It is both terrifying and liberating.  That’s a lot of responsibility–if I’m unhappy with my life, my life’s work, or my station, I have only myself to blame.  But conversely, it is freeing.  I can do anything I want–what I accomplish is only limited by me.   An instructor of mine told me that this feeling is not one of picking off a menu, but rather writing the menu yourself.   Liberating responsibility indeed.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

Kurt Gray, Liane Young, and Adam Waytz argue [pdf] that our belief that other people have minds is at the heart of our morality:

In 1945, Pablo Picasso distilled the essence of a bull.  In a series of fifteen drawings, he took the full complexity of the animal and reduced it to a dozen lines (Figure 1).  Although this final sketch does not capture the idiosyncrasies of every particular animal, it remains a compelling representation – a template – of the broader concept.  If we attempted to distill the essence of morality, what would result?  The full set of ―immoral acts is undeniably complex, and includes murder, cheating, theft, incest, disobedience, and disrespect, to name only a few.  Despite this diversity, we suggest that the human mind acts as Picasso did, abstracting out the key elements from various moral transgressions to create a cognitive template.   These key elements are intention and pain (i.e., intentional harm) and that the essence of moral judgment is the perception of two complementary minds – a dyad of an intentional moral agent and an suffering moral patient.  

(Image via Gray at Experimental Philosophy.)

Justin E.H. Smith contemplates marriage as work:

One might suppose rather that love and work—or at least a distinctly modern, capitalist conception of work—are two sides of the same coin: both emerge together at the same moment in history, and both carry with them the ungrounded belief that each of us has our destiny in our own hands, that our happiness is entirely a consequence of our life choices, and our misery a surefire sign that we are doing something wrong. In this connection the contemporary use of "passion" serves as a revealing misnomer. For how many can recall that, originally, from classical antiquity through Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul, to undergo a passion was to suffer an affliction over which one had no control?

To undergo a passion was to be on the receiving end of an action, to be a patient rather than an agent, and in this respect the idea of choosing to live a life of passion, to "follow one’s passion," could have made no sense. But in the modern world, in both work and love, this is precisely what we are expected to do: to treat the things that happen to us, that cannot but happen to us, as a result of the way our society is structured, as if they were the result of our own sundry projects of self-creation.

The rebranding of couples as "partners" is the sad culmination of the modern transformation of couples into work-love units. 

(Image by Banksy in Liverpool via Hypedot)