Month: August 2013

by Matt Sitman

Michael Lemonick profiles the work of archaeology professor James Adovasio, whose excavations of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in western Pennsylvania helped upend our ideas about the peopling of North America:

A young archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh, he intended to use Meadowcroft to train students. But what he found here helped demolish his colleagues’ long-held ideas about the timing of humans’ first steps in the New World. Since the nineteen-thirties, the conventional wisdom had held that humans crossed over into North America from Siberia around thirteen thousand years ago, then spread over the next five hundred years through North and South America—wiping out mammoths, mastodons, and other large mammals as they went. This hypothesis became known as the “blitzkrieg model” of species extinction.

But Adovasio, now a professor at Mercyhurst University, in Erie, Pennsylvania, discovered evidence that humans had camped at Meadowcroft, under a protective rock overhang, sixteen thousand years ago—a few thousand years before the Siberian crossing.

Adovasio at least partly blames old-fashioned prejudices for the persistence of the theory he rejects:

In part, he attributes the longstanding acceptance of this implausible story to the fact that, until relatively recently, most archaeologists were men. “I mean, who but a male would think that the ancestors of modern Native Americans sprinted to South America and killed everything in their path?”

If the first immigrants did arrive much earlier, the ice-free corridor through the glaciers wouldn’t have been available. But there’s an alternate route: they could have travelled down the coast in boats. “The colonization of Australia occurred even earlier,” Adovasio said. “It’s, in my opinion, simple racism that we never recognized before that the earliest populations in the Americas were capable of building boats.”

Here’s a great little essay in defense of beards. I’ve made its core argument before, of course. But it’s worth making again:

The mystery of beards altogether is that it’s the growers of them who are questioned as to their motives. Given that a beard will happen of its own accord, shouldn’t it be those who interfere in the process that we ought to be interrogating? Not why do you grow, but why do you shave? I grow because I can’t bear the fag of shaving. Now you explain yourself. We will very quickly, I suspect, find vanity at the root of clean-shavenness, or if not vanity neurosis. All that work for what? To look like David Beckham who reputedly shaves every other inch of his person as well? And having shaved himself to resemble a muscular baby, gets someone else to draw on him with a needle. Tell me that’s not sick.

Esau, you will remember, was a hairy man. You will also remember that it was his brother Jacob, a smooth man, who soft-talked his way into Esau’s inheritance. The smooth do that. For all their hard-scraped air of transparent affability, it is they, not the bearded, who have something to hide.

Amen. Don Draper anyone? Richard Nixon – who fought against debilitating five o’clock shadow much of his life? You betcha. But Howard Jacobson also offers an affirmative beards-are-good argument as well:

It was said of me by my enemies when I first taught at a university that I grew a beard because D H Lawrence had one. Nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t like Lawrence’s beard. It was too sexuo-spiritual for my taste. There was too much intent and pedantry about it, and finished too far from his chin. You can always tell an erotic disciple-seeker’s beard: it doesn’t know when to stop. Had I wanted to model my beard on any novelist’s it would have been Joseph Conrad’s  – a melancholy, well-traveled, utterly unillusioned seaman’s beard. Or the one Henry James sported for a while –  the beard of a man who thought he hadn’t lived enough but was prepared to die trying. A beard should be accepting of human limitations, skeptical but sympathetic, and a little sad.

The beard is … Oakeshottian!

And scene.

(Photo: US actor George Clooney smiles as he arrives for the German Media Award in Baden-Baden, southern Germany, on February 26, 2013. Clooney is awarded for his humanitarian commitment. By Thomas KienzleAFP/Getty Images.)

Mark Oppenheimer complicates the discussion, arguing that being religious dampens creativity only if it “makes you less fun or irreverent”:

[T]he strictures of religion can paradoxically make you fruitful, but not if they are so strict or rigorous—so orthodox—that you become a pill. Not if you can’t take a joke, about your religion or about anything else. Not if you become so uptight that you can’t abide profanity, heresy, or apostasy.

If your religion prohibits you from using profane words, it might make you more creative, because you have to find fresher and better ways to say what you are trying to say, rather than falling back on hackneyed profanities. But if your religion has so straitjacketed your thought that you can’t even think profane thoughts, then of course it has made you less creative. One might almost say that a huge part of creativity involves lusting in your heart, then finding ways to make art of that lust; but if some brand of orthodox religiosity has worked you over too well, and you can’t even admit your heart-lust to yourself, then as an artist you are probably screwed.

Julia Shaw praises Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God, especially the book’s rejection of “traditional narratives about secularization” that “see world-historical events or broad intellectual movements as silver bullets killing God.” Instead, Eberstadt connects the decline of the family to our loss of faith:

Family life is not an outcome of belief but a conduit to religious faith. Eberstadt compares learning religion to learning a language. She argues that “trying to believe without a community of believers is like trying to work out a language for oneself.” Eberstadt’s theory explains the communal way in which individuals “think and behave about things religious—not one by one and all on their own, but rather mediated through the elemental connections of husband, wife, child, aunt, great-grandfather and the rest.”

Her theory is unique. Most secularization narratives ignore the family’s role in religious formation or see familial decline as a result of secularization: people stopped believing in God and then they stopped having families. But Eberstadt turns this simple, direct relationship on its head.

Jordan Hylden isn’t so sure, arguing that Eberstadt’s focus on our domestic arrangements offers too narrow an explanation for such sweeping changes:

[T]he church all too often allied itself with fading political regimes, discrediting it in the eyes of many. The First World War’s senseless violence shattered for a generation the old Christendom synthesis of church and state, and Europe’s churches have never been the same. The church held on in America, since the war did not shatter us like it did the Europeans, and because our churches were not in any case allied so tightly with the state. But the 1960s began to change that, as the civil rights movement and Vietnam began to topple the confidence of many in the American Establishment, and insofar as the “mainline” churches were viewed as part of the status quo. The American social imagination split in two, and ever since then has been characterized by culture wars, with most of religion on the conservative side.

By not telling this story, Eberstadt has left out the lion’s share of “how the West really lost God.” No doubt, her “family factor” played its part, and she is at her most convincing when she shows how family decline was part of a broader trend toward modern individualism. She never claims that family decline is solely responsible, but she claims far too much for it. It is an odd story of Western secularization that leaves to one side most of what Western culture has thought and imagined in its common life about God.