In conservation with Joshua Knobe of Yale, Kurt Gray of UNC-Chapel Hill explains why playing the victim is the best way for a guilty person to escape blame:
You can watch the entire video here and subscribe to The Mind Report here.
Month: March 2013
Just One Verse
While researching Reinhold Niebuhr’s papers in the Library of Congress, Justin Hawkins uncovered a fascinating exchange between the theologian and William Nichols, editor of This Week Magazine, who asked him, “If as a result of some cataclysm, it were possible to retain just one passage from the Bible – what would your choice be?” Niebuhr’s response:
The passage of the Bible which I would choose is Ephesians 4:32, “And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” I take it that the purpose is to find a passage of Scripture which will contain as much as possible of the whole message of the Bible. I have chosen this particular passage because it combines the high point of the Christian ethic, which is forgiving love, with a reference to the whole basis of the ethic, which is the historical revelation in Christ. We are asked to forgive one another. The charity of forgiveness is, however, not possible as a duty. It is only possible in terms of the knowledge that we are ourselves sinners, and that we have been forgiven. It therefore combines the Christian Gospel with the Christian ethic in succinct form.
Hawkins comments:
While this answer stands with the majority of the Christian tradition, it is also distinctively Niebuhrian in several ways. First, it recognizes the limitation on human moral performance. Niebuhr notes that mere knowledge of the moral imperative is insufficient to actually perform it. Secondly, the humble approach we must take toward our moral performance is occasioned by the reality of sin. Though Niebuhr would later mention that he regretted so frequently employing the language of sin because it entailed historical and doctrinal baggage from which he wanted to distance himself, that language is inextricably bound up with the rest of Niebuhr’s political, ethical, and theological projects.
A Poem For Sunday
“Spring Uncovered” by May Swenson:
Gone the scab of ice that kept it snug,
the lake is naked.Skins of cloud on torn blue:
sky is thin.A cruelty, the ribs of trees
ribboned by sun’s organdy.Forsythia’s yellow, delicate rags,
flip in the wind.Wind buckles the face of the lake;
it flinches under a smack of shot.Robbed of stoic frost, grass
bleeds from gaffs of the wind.Rock, ridging the lake,
unchapped of its snowcloth, quakes.But autumn fruits upon the water,
Plumage of plum, and grape, and pumpkin bills:Two mallards ride, are sunny baskets;
they bear ripe light.And a grackle, fat as burgundy,
gurgles on a limb.His bottle-glossy feathers
shrug off the wind.
(From May Swenson: Collected Poems, Library of America © 2013. Reprinted with the permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved. Photograph © 2013 Mark Seth Lender)
The Underworlds Of Literature
Brad Leithhauser contemplates various authors versions of Hell. He’s not talking about a literal Hell:
The heat I’m talking about has little to do with traditional hellfire. It’s the hell of overheated emotions. Wind is a prevailing weather condition: gusts of storming rage. Molten waves of unrequited lust break and sprawl on its rocky shores. It’s a place where rationality collapses. Nothing is predictable. You can’t count on your adversary for anything—even to act in his own self-interest. His fury may be such that he’d embrace mutual destruction before seeing you escape his wrath. It’s a hell Huck Finn knows well, embodied in the ragtag shape of his drunken father. There’s no reasoning with Huck’s old man, so suffused is he with bigotry and outraged indignation. (“But when they tell me there’s a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote… I says I’ll never vote agin.”) He’s forever subjecting Huck—and, hence, the empathizing reader—to a beating with his hickory stick (“making it warm for him”), and eventually goes after his son with a knife.
Jesus And Jazz
Marc Hopkins investigates the trend of incorporating jazz music into Christian worship services:
Elements of jazz have been in black churches since enslaved peoples transformed Christian hymns with West African rhythms. Jazz would later emerge from gospel and blues as a distinct genre. But the music developed a stigma for being worldly, played in dimly lit smoke-filled venues, and deemed inappropriate for Sunday morning. In the 1960s, jazz artists began to shift this perception with sacred compositions. Among them: pianist Mary Lou Williams with the album Black Christ of the Andes, and the bandleader Duke Ellington, who performed three “Sacred Concerts” in churches and cathedrals across the U.S. and Europe.
What’s different now is that churches of varying perspectives and racial identities have picked up on [Rev. Dr. Henry T.] Simmons’s strategy of using jazz to attract disaffected believers, and a number of pastors have embraced the notion that jazz has something to do with prayer and can enhance the worship experience.
Outgrowing Religion
Richard L. Rubenstein spent a weekend with the late Swami Muktananda at his American Ashram, where the guru gave him this advice:
You mustn’t believe in your own religion; I don’t believe in mine. Religions are like the fences that hold young saplings erect. Without the fence the sapling could fall over. When it takes firm root and becomes a tree, the fence is no longer needed. However, most people never lose their need for the fence.
The View From Your Window
Istanbul, Turkey, 9.40 am
The Philosophy That Can’t Be Lived
Pivoting off Thomas Nagel’s book against scientific materialism, Mind and Cosmos, Andrew Ferguson summarizes the core issues involved this way:
As a philosophy of everything [materialism] is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense.
A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. Say what you will about Leiter and Weisberg and the workshoppers in the Berkshires. From what I can tell, none of them is a psychopath. Not even close.
Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell’s famous insult: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Earlier Dish on Nagel here.
A Bad Review
Darryl Pinckney recalls when, as a young writer on the make, he trashed a book by James Baldwin, one of his literary heroes – and then encountered the man himself:
Just Above My Head is a sprawling saga about a black gay gospel singer and his family. I am embarrassed more than three decades later by the knowingness of that review, from the typewriter of Mr. Little Shit. I was young, Baldwin was young no longer, and therefore I had his number. I eased scorn on what I saw as his sentimental portrayal of a gay couple. Because the two men in Baldwin’s novel consider themselves married, I accused him of having them imitate heterosexual behavior. He’d given up on sexual liberation, I said. Mary McCarthy advises that a good way to get started as a writer is to publish reviews. I was going about the business of trying to become a writer, willing to do so at the expense of this tender, brave, and brilliant soul.
A few years later at a party for Baldwin after he read his blues poems at the 92nd Street Y, I, drunk, asked—yes, asked—if he’d seen that review. He graciously said no and I’m afraid I can’t pretend that I did not in a seizure of self-importance rehearse some of my arguments against his book right there, in the middle of a cocktail party for him, this adored figure. His smile was all forbearance and understanding. He had my number.
(Photo of James Baldwin in 1969 by Allan Warren, via Wikimedia Commons)
Getting Readers To Swallow Philosophy
Emma Woolerton reveals why Roman poet Lucretius presented his philosophy in the form of poetry:
Children hate the taste of medicine, even though it is, of course, good for them; so doctors often put it in a cup the rim of which is covered in honey. The child tastes the honey in the first instance, and by the time he is glugging down the medicine it’s too late. In the same way, we may find Epicureanism difficult to swallow at first, so Lucretius lures us in with some honeyed poetry, and before we know it, we’ve taken the philosophical medicine as well. It’s a picture that isn’t particularly flattering either to Epicureanism or to his readers, but it’s the rationale Lucretius states for his choice of verse.
The Dish 
