Month: December 2012

Or am I missing something?

…The question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself—about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold. First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for?

Man’s refusal to make any commitment—which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering—means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his “I” ultimately for himself, without really rising above it. Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity.

Gay people stand ready for that commitment – which does indeed mean suffering at times and sacrifice for the other, and all that an unending freely chosen responsibility to another human being requires. The question is not whether we are willing or capable. We are and we have been for centuries. The question is why the Pope cannot see us as human beings.

(Photo: Joe Klamar/Getty)

Zadie Smith ruminates on the distinction between pleasure and joy, finding the latter "doesn’t fit with the everyday" and that, actually, joy "has very little real pleasure in it":

[S]ometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously. Children are the infamous example. Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation? It should be noted that an equally dangerous joy, for many people, is the dog or the cat, relationships with animals being in some sense intensified by guaranteed finitude. You hope to leave this world before your child. You are quite certain your dog will leave before you do. Joy is such a human madness.

The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do. The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.

Zach St. George reminds us that not all gun ownership is about hunting or self-defense:

[T]he cowboys at the Richmond Rod and Gun Club — whooping at good shots, ribbing each other over their costumes — hint at a more basic reason for the popularity of guns in America: They're fun. Like an old car and a Roman candle rolled into one, guns are a hobbyist's dream. They're collectable and endlessly customizable, fit for tinkerers, pyros, and sporting types alike. The objections to guns are learned, based on moral and intellectual arguments, but the physical appeal is natural, childlike in its simplicity — pull a trigger over here, and something happens over there. Pop pop pop pop pop!

Understanding the fun of guns is part of understanding why people own guns, says Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA, and author of Gun Fight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. "Gun control advocates ask, 'Why does anyone need this particular kind of gun, like an AR-15 (an assault rifle similar to the one used by the U.S. military)?" Winkler says. "The reason people like an AR-15 is because it's fun to shoot." Firing a weapon, he says, triggers the same chemicals in the brain as riding a roller coaster: endorphins and adrenaline.

Mormons Terryl and Fiona Givens recently published The God Who Weeps, meant to explain their faith to a country newly fascinated by it. In an interview, they describe a distinctive Mormon doctrine, that, in Joseph Smith's words, "God Himself was once as we are now":

It is now common for believers and theologians alike to talk in terms of a feeling, personal, compassionate God. It is easy to forget that in 1830, the Christian world almost universally embraced a creedal position still on the books of many faiths: belief in a God “without body, parts, or passions.” Smith’s description of a Heavenly Father who literally wept over the pain of his children was a startling innovation. And Mormonism developed that cardinal insight into a God-theology that collapses the infinite divide separating Creator from creature into a bond of familial resemblance. God is a being of supreme majesty and perfection and holiness-but he is not utterly beyond our comprehension, or remote from a personal if worshipful relationship.

Dancing the Gospels:

In an excerpt from his new book, Jared Diamond suggests what modern parents could learn from hunter-gatherers:

At minimum … one can say that hunter-gatherer rearing practices that seem so foreign to us aren’t disastrous, and they don’t produce societies of obvious sociopaths. Instead, they produce individuals capable of coping with big challenges and dangers while still enjoying their lives. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted ?for such a long time are worth considering seriously.

Jackson Lears is unimpressed by Diamond's latest book, which contrasts "the traditional" and "the modern":

[Diamond] seems characteristically unaware of the huge historical and anthropological literature complicating the categories of the traditional and the modern, as well as calling their utility and their empirical basis into question.

His understanding of modern societies is thin, superficial, and overgeneralized: He ignores differences created by culture and political economy, making no distinctions among neoliberal capitalism, social democracy, and the authoritarian hybrids emerging in such places as China and Singapore. All modern societies, to use his acronym, are WEIRD—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. As in his earlier books, differences in how power is shared or not shared simply escape his notice. Everything is lumped together in the wan category of “the modern.”

What Diamond has to say about the "the traditional":

From the Siriono of Bolivia, the !Kung of the Kalahari, the Iñupiat of the Arctic, and above all the many tribes of New Guinea, Diamond extracts mild and mostly incontestable lessons: We should consider following their example (he thinks) by spreading child care among a local network of providers, respecting the knowledge of elders, adopting agricultural practices designed to anticipate food shortages, learning multiple languages, and embracing a low-salt, low-sugar diet. This is hardly a controversial agenda.

Writing at Poetry magazine, Harriet Deutsch considers the ambiguities of the publication's approach to verse in times of war:

Poets have long expressed contradictory ideas about their role in wartime, and Poetry’s editorial engagement with war has reflected such clashing tendencies. In the century since the magazine’s inception, some editors have asked for war poems, while others have pointedly refrained from doing so; some writers have submitted swarms of contributions, while others have attacked the staff for according war poetry any power or purpose. The publication’s shifting attitudes toward war poetry reflect the tensions that beset poets who are called on to be “political,” as well as the changing relationship between poetry and politics in the 20th century.

Recent Dish coverage of poetry and war here.

(Image: A scan of a final draft of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen, from Wikimedia Commons)

Jeff Warren details his difficult, exhausting experiences at a meditation retreat, which spurred him to ask a Buddhist teacher to describe "the stages of contemplative development":

When he finally answered he said he had noticed 3 flavors. The first flavor, he said, is bitter — the bitterness of effort, of beginning to recognize the depth of the contraction and the alienation and the subsequent struggle to address it. If you are sincere, he said, then you are rewarded with a second flavor: a sweetness. The sweetness of surrender, of opening. A new tenderness. This is what most spiritual practitioners crave, and it is delicious when we find it.

But ultimately, even this doesn’t last. The final flavor, he said, is bittersweet. It is marked by a recognition that both effort and surrender are ways of re-tracing the basic illusion, the first that there is a self that need to get somewhere, the second that there is some “other” to surrender to. True devotion, he said, is not having faith in something or someone. It is a vehicle of questioning, and in that questioning our consolations are impossible to sustain.

Ricky Gervais argues that "there shouldn’t be a word for atheism: it shouldn’t exist, it’s ridiculous. If people didn’t keep making up supernatural deities, I wouldn’t have to deny they exist." Fellow unbeliever Norm Geras disagrees:

Gervais professes not to have any problem with the fact that others than himself believe in God or in an afterlife. OK, so he's not after stamping out religion, and that being the case, the word 'atheism' has a useful meaning. It puzzles me why atheists are sometimes shy of the word. If it's because they consider the phenomenon with which atheist belief contrasts to be a negative one, you might expect anti-racists and feminists to have a problem with the terms 'anti-racism' and 'feminism', but by and large they seem not to, though it would be better if those terms weren't needed.