Year: 2013

Tania Lombrozo suggests that the “relevant contrast might not be between science and religion but between beliefs that promise an orderly universe—one in which individual humans or some external forces, be they natural or divine, impose structure and corral uncertainty—and those that do not”:

Perhaps it is no surprise that religious beliefs have tended to fit the more psychologically attractive profile. Religion isn’t tethered to empirical facts the way scientific theories are; it is free to shift, to fit the contours of the human mind. When it comes to science, however, the empirical world offers hard constraints. We can hope for scientific theories that offer an orderly and predictable view of the natural world, but we can’t enforce them.

What we can do is rethink the way evolutionary ideas are presented, and work to improve people’s understanding of the ways in which natural selection is—and is not—a random and unpredictable process. While humanity may be an evolutionary accident in some sense, our place in the tree of life can be characterized in highly systematic ways that highlight the exquisite dynamics of evolutionary change. There are patterns in the natural world, and grasping them can be revelatory.

Ben Myers explores the importance of biography in shaping the spiritual lives of early Christians. He argues that it “was Christianity’s immense investment in the idea of incarnation – the belief that God has entered the world in human flesh – that made exemplary lives so important for the Christian moral imagination”:

Nothing is more illustrative of the whole Christian attitude toward life than the preponderance of biography in the early centuries of the faith. The first Christian biographies, like the Passion of Perpetua (circa 203 CE), commended the heroic death of martyrs as exemplars for others. …

In the fourth century, once Christians could not be martyred anymore, biographers turned their attention to a new kind of exemplary life: the person who cultivates self-martyrdom through acts of heroic asceticism. The first and greatest biography of this kind was Athanasius’s Life of Antony, written in Egypt around 356 CE. By now the moral dimensions of biography had been expanded to include all manner of details about the saint’s daily life – diet, dress, moods, habits of speech and so forth – culminating in a meticulously detailed account of his death. Though Antony’s own death is admittedly not the death of a martyr, it is nonetheless performed by Antony as something “worthy of imitation.”

(The Torment of St. Anthony, the earliest known painting by Michelangelo, 1487-88, via Wikimedia Commons)

Beatrice Marovich reflects on Barbara King’s recent book, How Animals Grieve, claiming that “love is so ubiquitous and natural that we can’t really avoid it” – that words like grief and love apply to more than just human emotions:

When we hear a story about deep social bonds between birds, what do we name that social bond? When we see intense forms of social devotion between dogs captured on video, what do we name it? King is constantly on guard against the charge of anthropomorphism—that she’s violating species boundaries by finding something so human as love, or grief, in animal life. “Anthropomorhic excess”, she acknowledges, can very likely “cause us to miss crucial distinctions.” It could make us humanize all of animal life. For this reason, she’s careful to specify that the physical experience of grieving in cat life looks (like all cat behavior) notably distinct from the experience of grief in dog life, which is inevitably different from goat grief.

The 17^th century English philosopher Anne Conway argued that the differences between humans and other creatures were “finite” differences—differences of degree and intensity. There is no infinite difference between creatures that makes another’s form of life wholly and eternally incomprehensible. Whoever can’t see that something sort of like “justice” functions in the animal world, Conway argued, “must be called completely blind.” I’m with Conway. In a sense, then, I’m also with King. Whoever can’t see that something sort of like love, or something sort of like grief, functions in dog life must be blind.

Gene Demby explores the question:

Neal Lester, who teaches a course at Arizona State University about the word’s history, says it spread into wider usage during Reconstruction through the early 20th century, when it dotted children’s rhymes and even the names of consumer products. But, he says, “there are ways that the radioactive part was always there.” … Lester makes a common argument: If the word can still be used as a vile epithet, it can’t be considered neutral or harmless in any context.

The black-people-use-it-all-the-time-so-why-can’t-I argument is a popular rejoinder; Dr. Laura Schlessinger made the argument after she was chided for using it on her radio show. But these arguments rest on the idea that the word mutated only recently into its “friend/brother” iteration. But [linguist John] McWhorter says that the reappropriative usage — that is, among blacks to other blacks as a term of endearment — is hardly new, and predates hip-hop by quite a bit. “We’re romanticizing the way the N-word was used in the past,” he says. “You can see 100 years ago that people were using the N-word in the same affectionate way. You can see it in Zora Neale Hurston’s [writing] and not just once.”

In other words, the racially pejorative usage of nigger and the in-group usage of nigger have long existed side by side; the word and our racial dynamics are messy enough for it to simultaneously represent different, disparate ideas.

An answer to Demby’s question:

“Like other strong slurs, the N-word inherits its toxicity from the larger culture,” [professor Geoffrey] Nunberg says. “So long as there are virulent forms of racism around, they’ll continue to infect the word. It will be weakened only when those attitudes are attenuated, in the same way that social acceptance of Irish-Americans has softened the contempt that was implicit in ‘mick’ in the 19th century.”

He pauses a second. “That could take a while,” Nunberg says.

Mary Gaitskill thinks Nabokov’s “madcap orgy of Thanatos” nevertheless speaks to lovers:

Love itself is not selfish, devouring or cruel, but in human beings it suffers a terrible coexistence with those qualities; really, with any other vile thing you might think of. These oppositions sometimes coexist so closely and complexly that the lovers cannot tell them apart. This is not only true of sexual love, but also of the love between parents and children, siblings, and even friends. In most people this contradiction will never take the florid form it takes in Humbert Humbert. But such impossible, infernal combinations are there in all of us, and we know it. That Lolita renders this human condition at such an extreme, so truthfully, and yes, as von Rezzori says, convincingly, is the book’s most shocking quality. It is why it will never be forgotten.

(Photo by Alessandro Bovini)

Tara Culp-Ressler praises DrinkSavvy, a company developing cups and straws that change color in the presence of “date rape” drugs Rohypnol, ketamine, and GHB:

[Company founder Mike] Abramson’s product is in contrast to some deeply-ingrained societal attitudes about sexual assault — most notably, the idea that it’s women’s responsibility to avoid “dangerous situations” like going out to bars and drinking too much alcohol — that foster a victim-blaming rape culture. When victims come forward about being raped, whether or not they were drinking alcohol at the time of their assault often comes under scrutiny. Sexual assault prevention programs often suggest that women should just be more careful by going out in groups, making sure they don’t leave their drink unattended, and refusing to accept drinks from strangers.

Refreshingly, a cup that detects date rape drugs removes this dynamic. Rather that expecting women to bear the burden of assuming their decisions will provoke a sexual crime against them, DrinkSavvy simply gives them the power to avoid ingesting sedatives without their consent — no matter who gave them the drink and how long they may have taken their eyes off of it.

Recent Dish on rape here, here, and here.

(Photo by DrinkSavvy)

A.O. Scott coined the term last year during a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire:

Nowadays everyone must love (or at least pretend to love) pleasures that were supposedly once disdained or taken for granted: dive bars, street food, trashy films. But knowing, sophisticated attempts to replicate those things often traffic in their own kind of snobbery, confusing condescension with authenticity. Movies like ‘The American,’ ‘Drive’ and now ‘Haywire’ offer strained pulp, neither as dumb as we want them to be nor as smart as they think they are and not, in the end, all that much fun.

Scott expands on the definition:

Let me be clear that I’m not talking about what we used to call, back in the ’90s, “irony,” though a better term might have been “insincerity.” There was a time when just about anything — dumb commercial entertainment, ugly clothes, the weird dishes your grandmother used to serve — could be appreciated and appropriated in quotation marks. Strained pulp is not quite that — its celebration of the formerly marginal and disreputable is serious and sincere. The condescension is not overt but is latent in the desire to correct and improve the recipes retrieved from the past, to finish vernacular artifacts with a highbrow glaze. We’re going to make ’em — movies, cocktails, regional dishes, zombie novels, garage-rock anthems — just the way they used to, but a little bit better. This strikes me as a form of snobbery. But then again, maybe I’m the snob.