Month: September 2012

A time-lapsed tour of the Pacific Northwest:

Robert Dean Lurie provides a fascinating look at Jack Kerouac's Roman Catholic faith and surprising, if idiosyncratic, conservative politics. Beneath Kerouac's experimental style and turbulent life, Lurie argues, were "the deeper themes of loneliness and the yearning for God" – which Kerouac claimed lurked in all his writing:

“The Catholic Church is a weird church,” Jack later wrote to his friend and muse Neal Cassady. “Much mysticism is sown broadspread from its ritual mysteries till it extends into the very lives of its constituents and parishoners.” It is impossible to overstate the influence of Catholicism on all of Kerouac’s work, save perhaps those books written during his Buddhist period in the mid-to-late 1950s. The influence is so obvious and so pervasive, in fact, that Kerouac became justifiably incensed when Ted Berrigan of the Paris Review asked during a 1968 interview, “How come you never write about Jesus?” Kerouac’s reply: “I’ve never written about Jesus? … You’re an insane phony … All I write about is Jesus.”

Berrigan ought to have known better. But casual readers can be forgiven for failing to grasp the religiosity in Kerouac’s writing. After all, his version of Christianity esteemed visions and personal experience over doctrine and dogma. He felt a special affinity for such offbeat souls as St. Francis of Assissi, St. Therese of Liseux (“The Little Flower”), and Thomas Merton, all of whom to some extent de-emphasized legalism in favor of a direct union with God. Beyond the confines of the Catholic Church, the influence of the painter and ecstatic poet William Blake loomed just as large and perhaps fueled Kerouac’s disregard for what he perceived to be restrictive sexual mores.

Recent Dish coverage of Kerouac's religious vision here.

This spring the Virginia Quarterly Review ran an essay on the state of poetry, "Has Poetry Changed?" It provoked this blistering response from William Childress, who laments the dominance of free verse poetry in America, reserving particular contempt for the Beats and "Allen Ginsberg’s nihilistic free verse oral diarrhea":

Beat poetry went far toward making ordinary Americans see poets as drug-crazed society-wreckers who wrote only for themselves. By definition, that makes them elitists.

I researched a large stack of Beat poetry magazines from the 1970s and 1980s for this post, ranging from Doug Blazek’s Olé Anthology to Kumquat 3 and E.V. Griffith’s highly touted Hearse (“A Vehicle for Conveying the Dead”). Not only were 95 percent of the poems free verse, many of them hewed to a core of societal destruction that in another era would sound like fascism. It was an argument for too much freedom encouraging anarchy. Vitriol was plentiful, but ways to improve things were not.

While encouraging more respect for formal verse, Childress sees the dominance of free verse as paralleling the disorder of contemporary society – and points to well-written poetry as a form of resistance to this:

A blind person can see that American society is in turmoil, with a fractured government and enormous debt. Both political parties are to blame—but shouldn’t poets be trying to change things instead of writing chaos-poetry or “woe is me” diaries? Who will read poetry when they can’t find a common bond in a poet’s writing? Who likes ruptured grammar, twisted syntax and what my grandpa called flapdoodle? There’s at least a partial consensus that free verse these days consists of a lot of bad writing. I forget who said, “Poets should learn to write before they try to write poetry.”  Many of today’s poets don’t seem to realize that all writing is connected.

Over at Big Think, Hitch's Mortality is the book of the month. Peter Lawler homes in on this end-of-life fragment from the text:

Always prided myself on my reasoning faculty and my stoic materialism.  I don't have a body, I am a body.  Yet consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true, or if an exception would be made in my case.  Feeling husky and tired and tour?  See the doctor when it's over!

Lawler argues that Hitch's admirable stoicism can't really be supported by his materialism, as the above passage intimates – and that his courageous, freedom-affirming life betrays him on this point:

The stoic, from the Roman beginning, always claimed that a rational being had a kind of self-sufficiency—an inner fortress—that kept him from being governed by forces beyond his control.  If I am a body, then I really am not free and am not responsible for myself. 

And so Hitchens did not live as if he were a body.  

He did not, God love him, live in fearful attentiveness to every conceivable risk factor that might extinguish his biological being.  He smoked and drank heavily, and he ignored his body to enjoy life.  From the point of view of the health-and-safety puritans around these days, he was pretty much a madman.

Hitchens admits he lived as if he would be an exception to the general rule that our intellectual freedom is dependent on bodily health.  But we might say that his relative indifference to the body was one cause of his undeniable intellectual greatness, his courageous advocacy on behalf of human liberty everywhere.  That indifference might be understood to be in the service of the truth, which is that a life without biological death couldn't possibly be one lived in personal freedom.  Living well, after all, isn't all about living just a bit longer.

Paula Findlen reviews Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation. The book traces the origins of what Gregory calls the "Kingdom of Whatever" – "a society indelibly shaped by religious pluralism and scientific naturalism" – to the fervor of the Protestant Reformation:

In imitation of Luther, William Tyndale boldly translated the New Testament into English in 1525; James I required no fewer than forty-seven experts arguing over every line to create the King James Bible in 1611. Behind these modern Bibles lay a world of uncertainty about biblical texts in ancient languages. In 1707, the Anglican theologian John Mill identified more than 30,000 variations in different versions of the New Testament—in Greek and Latin. No wonder Jefferson read a library of Bibles with scissors in hand! Yet could such rational exercises really shore up belief and dispel doubt? In the absence of a strongly Catholic tradition, with its accumulation of centuries of learned doctrine, authority and institutions offering the path to good answers to life’s questions, faith for many Protestants became increasingly grounded in a personal experience of God.

Thus, Gregory argues, the immediate unintended consequence of the Reformation was a religious smorgasbord, a seemingly endless feast of faiths, leading to the creation of modern nations that eventually accommodated every possible permutation of belief that didn’t violate their civil laws. As J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur observed in his Letters From an American Farmer (1782), his adopted homeland was “a strange religious medley,” and he concluded that all this co-habitation and intermarriage would breed “religious indifference.” Crèvecoeur was correct in thinking that Americans would grow accustomed to living with people of other faiths, and that familiarity would dull the nature of these distinctions for many, but he was wrong to conclude that tolerance would necessarily lead to complacency or a complete melding of beliefs. Many Americans are as likely to change religion as to buy a new car, let alone move to a new house, but the vast majority still believe. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 92 percent of Americans—6 percent less than in a 1967 poll—reported a belief in God.

Alain de Botton peddles an "ethical advertising agency":

From his pitch earlier this year:

What I'm proposing is a new kind of Ethical Advertising Agency, which would every year run a campaign promoting six key virtues, as chosen by an online poll. Six very high profile poster sites would be chosen around the country, generating a wave of discussion and interest. Behind each chosen virtue, people would be directed to a host of organisations, private, charitable and governmental, which in some ways help to foster this virtue. The Ethical Advertising Agency would perform a trick which has eluded advertising in capitalism so far: to unite the best of advertisers' energy and artistry with the highest moral ambitions.

Susan Jacoby examines the gender imbalance among active non-believers. One reason for it:

The first and most obvious reason is that women, in the United States and every other country, are more religious and more devout in the practice of their religion than men. Public opinion polls show that this disparity affects every income, educational, and racial group—although it is much narrower among the highly educated than among the uneducated and the young than the old. African-American women, regardless of their level of education, are the most religious demographic in this country. This fact alone tells us that education is not the decisive factor, because although black women as a group are better educated than black men, black men are less religious. Space doesn’t permit a lengthy analysis of why women are more religious than men, so I’ll simply say that the greater religiosity of women means that both secular humanism and atheism are tougher sells to women.

She also ponders the historical causes:

Looking back further historically, it is just a fact that a great many founders of twentieth-century secular organizations, like the Center for Inquiry or the American Humanist Association, came from either a philosophy or science background—and these two areas of academia were particularly inhospitable to women before the 1980s. I should also point out that the few women who were engaged in science and philosophy had to work twice as hard as their male counterparts to maintain themselves professionally. They didn’t have the time to become involved in a marginalized secular movement. The energies of many of the smartest and most energetic women of my generation instead went into the feminist movement, which directly affected our everyday lives for the better. Personally, I’ve been an atheist since I was fifteen, but I simply saw this as something I was—not as something in which I wanted to invest my energies as a writer.

"[T]he concept of the status viatoris is one of the basic concepts of every Christian rule of life. To be a ‘viator’ means ‘one on the way.’ The status viatoris is, then, the ‘condition or state of being on the way’…It would be difficult to conceive of another statement that penetrates as deeply into the innermost core of creaturely existence as does the statement that man finds himself, even until the moment of his death, in the status viatoris, in the state of being on the way… Both—despair and the certainty of possession—are in conflict with the truth of reality. The only answer that corresponds to man’s actual existential situation is hope. The virtue of hope is preeminently the virtue of status viatoris; it is the proper virtue of the ‘not yet.’ In the virtue of hope more than in any other, man understands and affirms that he is a creature, that he has been created by God," - Josef Pieper.

Via Wesley Hill.

(Photo by Flickr user timsamoff)

Brian Jay Stanley meditates on the all-too-human desire for others' approval:

At every stage of life, we desire to be noticed and affirmed by others. Infants are born craving affection as much as milk. Children playing do not require the active involvement of nearby adults, but if you try to leave they demand that you watch them play. Adolescents, in their perpetual anxiety to be popular, do not so much look at others through their own eyes as look constantly at themselves through others’ eyes. Those who are dying worry about being remembered after death, though when dead, how can they care if they’re forgotten? As adults, our successes give us little pleasure unless sweetened by others’ admiration. 

He concludes:

Instead of pointlessly cursing the sun to go around me, my chance of contentment is learning to orbit, being the world’s audience instead of demanding the world be mine.