Month: September 2012

In an interview about his new book, Reinventing Bach, which "mixes biography, history, travelogue, and personal reflection to tell the story of the great composer," Paul Elie describes how the Internet changed the biographer's task:

I think the presence of the web can liberating for nonfiction writers. In the age prior to ours, there was a certain kind of biographer who felt a professional obligation to work stuff into the book, because if it weren’t in the book there would be no access to it. You wound up with multi-volume biographies of middling people, books that are a combination of a life story and a scholarly resource. I don’t want my book to be a resource. I want it to be a work of art in its own right …

San Francisco, California, 12 pm

The historian Walter McDougall, author of Promised Land, Crusader State, and a critic of foreign policy hubris, reflects on how his views have marginalized him among conservatives. It all began after his speech, “The Crusader State in the 21st Century,” which likened contemporary American interventionists to Medieval popes:

Both could make geopolitical arguments on their behalf: the Crusades, after all, were a long-delayed counteroffensive against Arab jihads. But both promoted forms of “assertive multilateralism” on behalf of “regime change” in hopes of solidifying and sanctifying their home fronts while forcibly exporting their civilization. But pious intentions did not prevent the crusading knights from wreaking death, destruction, and havoc at ruinous cost, including collateral massacres of non-combatant Muslims, Jews, and Greek Orthodox Christians. Worse still, the Crusades became a self-perpetuating, transnational, political-economic system justified by “the revolutionary idea that Christendom had an intrinsic right to extend its sovereignty over all who did not recognize the rule of the Roman Church.”

With high irony I suggested the audience substitute America for Church and Democracy for Christianity to imagine how our modern crusaders could spawn perpetual war for perpetual peace—like Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984—and exhaust their own countries in the process. Much of the audience gave my talk a standing ovation, but an angry minority did not. Some were devout Catholics who took offense that I would liken Urban II to the sleazy Clinton! The rest appeared to be earnest young Straussians in whose neoconservative Weltanschauung my Burkean conservatism was heresy.

There is something just deliciously appropriate that a candidate who has consistently and outrageously run a campaign on the notion that his opponent is really a European rather than an American, a foreigner rather than a native son … has a tax return that describes the USA as a “foreign country.” It’s worth savoring.

In a moving letter to his son Nicholas, the poet Ted Hughes reflects on the “vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside” – and what it means to live:

Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was.

But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line—unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive—even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember.

And this verse pops immediately to mind:

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

(Hat tip: The New Yorker. Photo by Flickr user Zdenko Zivkovic)

Honey:

In a recent paper, Alyssa Crittenden, an anthropologist and behavioral ecologist, at the University of Nevada, points out that wild honey is one of nature’s most energy-rich foods. It is 80 to 95 percent sugar and, if left unprocessed, contains both protein and fat from bits of bee larvae. As a rule, hunter-gatherers struggle to find calories: a scoop of honey supplies a huge hit.

In her ethnographic research on honey consumption, Crittenden discovered that human hunters have long targeted bee hives. The artists who painted Altamira cave in what is now Spain some 25,000 years ago, for example, left depictions of bees,  honeycombs, and—most amazing of all,  in my opinion—honey collection ladders.

Colin Schultz add that if "it’s true that honey is one of the pillars that brought us so far as a species, that lends extra gravity to the recent epidemic ravaging honeybee populations known as colony collapse disorder."

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood and has written recently about football here, here, here, here and here. Previous videos of TNC here, here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

In an incisive essay on Alain de Botton and Simon Critchley's recent books that, from a secular perspective, seek to reclaim the structure of religion for meaning-starved moderns, David Sessions argues that the liberal project is faltering:

The rise of radical political religion in the U.S., most recently in the forms of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, is not, as almost any mainstream pundit would put it, a dying gasp before the final triumph of liberalism. Rather, it is re-awakening of the theological desire that was always latent in liberal democracy, resting beneath its supposedly secular principles. As Jacques Derrida argued, Western politics have an auto-immune disorder: they are structured to pretend that their notions of reason, right, and sovereignty are detached from a deeply theological heritage. When pressed by war and economic dysfunction, liberal ideas prove as compatible with zealotry and domination as any others. Citizens see the structure behind the façade and lose faith in the myth of the state as a dispassionate, egalitarian arbiter of conflict. Once theological passions can no longer be sublimated in material affluence and the fiction of representative democracy, it is little surprise to see them break out in movements that are, on both the left and the right, explicitly hostile to the liberal state.

 

The philosopher Thomas Nagel recently published a dense, searching review of Alvin Plantinga's new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, which argues for the compatibility of religious faith and science. Nagel ends his essay by admitting Plantinga has pointed to something essential:

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

Jerry Coyne seizes on that paragraph to scold Nagel:

Nagel has fallen for the God-of-the-gap trap. The credible solution is to do more work to find out how the structure of the mind produces consciousness, and how natural selection might have acted to promote that feature. Does Nagel think that science has used all its resources on this problem, and failed? Does he not know how relatively primitive neurobiology is right now? Nagel has just thrown up his hands and said, “You people haven’t explained it, therefore perhaps Plantinga is right.”  Or there might be “another alternative.” Curious that Nagel doesn’t propose what that alternative might be.

Sean Carrol broadens the debate, attacking Plantinga's understanding of faith:

Even if your faith is extremely strong in some particular proposition, e.g. that God loves you, it’s important to recognize that there’s a chance you are mistaken. That should be an important part of any respectable road to knowledge. So you are faced with (at least) two alternative ideas: first, that God exists and really does love you and has put that belief into your mind via the road of faith, and second, that God doesn’t exist and that you have just made a mistake.

The problem is that you haven’t given yourself any way to legitimately decide between these two alternatives. Once you say that you have faith, and that it comes directly from God, there is no self-correction mechanism. You can justify essentially any belief at all by claiming that God gave it to you directly, despite any logical or evidence-based arguments to the contrary. This isn’t just nit-picking; it’s precisely what you see in many religious believers. An evidence-based person might reason, “I am becoming skeptical that there exists an all-powerful and all-loving deity, given how much random suffering exists in the world.” But a faith-based person can always think, “I have faith that God exists, so when I see suffering, I need to think of a reason why God would let it happen.”

Elizabeth Drescher laments the lack of preaching from Christian pulpits that instructs congregants in the ways of non-violence – which she puts at the heart of the Gospels:

Atonement theologies that highlight God’s solidarity through Jesus with those who suffer eschew the structures and vocabularies of domination and violence that Jesus encountered in his life and that brought about his death. An enlightened, nonviolent version of classic moral influence theories, theologies of radical Christian solidarity argue that God became human as Jesus to make known, as only a divinity choosing to be present in human form could, the tragic vulgarity of the systematized human impulse to domination, exploitation, and violence.

Against this backdrop, Jesus’s teachings about the “Kingdom of God” available “on earth as it is in heaven” and his resurrection are much more than slick marketing brought home with a jaw-dropping divine parlor trick. They are powerful critiques of the social striving, accumulation of material wealth, religious self-righteousness, and the often violent means used to enforce elite status that corrupt human cultures. The lowly birth, bottom-up ministry, criminal execution, and miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ are, likewise, for Christians proclamations that salvation is not a passive, ringside, spectator sport viewed from a mystical kingdom in the sky. Christians are called by faith in the here and now to be “all in” with regard to justice, compassion, and nonviolence—though the response to this call has been rare enough that those who have attempted to make it a way of life came to be called “saints” in a specialized way that St. Paul surely never intended.

Or, as the British Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton famously put it, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”