Month: December 2013

Noting that Qatar “is estimated to have recently spent well in excess of $1 billion on Western art,” James Panero considers the implications:

On the one hand, Qatar’s art initiatives can be seen as a modernizing force, one that could liberalize the tribal attitudes of the country’s native population and pave the way for further political reform. On the other hand, contemporary art may merely serve as a cover for further repressive policies. This artifice of modernism mirrors Qatar’s other contradictory diplomatic positions. An ally to the United States and host of U.S. Central Command, Qatar nevertheless reportedly helped Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escape U.S. capture in the 1990s, may have been paying protection money to al Qaeda, and is currently arming radical Syrian rebels and offering safe haven to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

The terrible history of Iran demonstrates what can happen when a modernist culture merely overlays a repressive regime. In such circumstances, artists and organizations might profit by spreading modernity, but they are also abetting a compromised state.

(Photo of skyline in Doha, Qatar, as seen from the Museum of Islamic Art, by Mark Pegrum)

Christine Gross-Loh profiles the famed bioethicist Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save:

One reason, according to Singer, that people are so hesitant to give is they think their kindness will not matter. This tendency to think that one can’t do very much, or to dismiss all forms of aid as useless, is what researchers call “futility thinking:” What difference can one person even make? Research indicates that money makes people more individualistic and less altruistic. In other words, as societies become wealthier, their citizens become more individualistic and depend less upon one another. Self-interest becomes the norm.

But one antidote against futility thinking is to carefully research charities and organizations—something that Singer’s $100 donation experiment allowed students do. They were presented with four organizations, asked to research and discuss their merits, and vote on where the $100 should go. They applied the lessons they’d learned in the course: that not all donations are equal, and that some donations have a measurably more positive impact than the same amount donated elsewhere…. They learn that their money will always go much further overseas: that a very small amount of money for an American can be life-saving to someone who is desperately poor. In other words, they learn about the tenets of effective altruism: how to evaluate organizations for transparency and benefits, and figure out which forms of aid are the most cost-effective. This is information that tends to inspire more giving.

I’d guess we have 12-18 months until the population develops herd immunity to ‘viral’ headlines. http://t.co/x2GLKF6K8i

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) December 7, 2013

The tweet above is a small moment of hope in a sea of upworthiness.

Meanwhile, I cannot get Derek Walcott’s equation of poetry and prayer out of my mind. Nor Jay Parini’s understanding of Jesus as a sacral moment in the meeting between East and West. Alice Quinn gave us, in another sharp take on the power of poetry, the shards of Emily Dickinson’s genius – on little scraps of paper.

Four more: the Zionist reading of Bambi; the mystery of Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew, so dear to Pope Francis; the struggles of the forgotten lower-middle-class; why high IQ kids turn out to be more likely to try drugs in later life; and Daniel Mendelsohn on the critical virtues of the emails students write to explain why their paper is late.

The most popular post was Smart People Get Wasted More; followed by Meep Meep Watch.

See you in the morning.

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Aeon captions the above short film, “Unusual Choices”:

In this gentle and honest portrait, Buddhist nun Ani Chudrun explains what led her away from a life of celebrity, drugs and materialism to one of reflection, compassion and ritual. Shot at Ani’s home in a forest in Sussex, the film shows how one person can radically transform their life in the search for meaning.

In the midst of a review of Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic, Alan Jacobs relays the story of a summer he spent teaching a course called “Practical Apologetics” to a group of Christian pastors in Africa. When they spurned his advice on how to reach out to Muslims, he realized there was something missing from his suggestions – as Jacobs puts it, there was “a human dimension to this enterprise that I had failed to take into account”:

Would-be apologists cannot think only of the needs of their audience; they must think also of their own limitations. Those limitations may be intellectual: as Sir Thomas Browne wrote in the 17th century, “Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity. Many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.” They overrate their own intellectual capabilities, and embarrass not just themselves but the faith they had planned to defend.

But equally important are emotional or spiritual limitations. ‘I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist,” [C.S.] Lewis wrote in 1945, when he was at the apex of his career as defender of the faith. “No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.” The key word in that second sentence is “successfully”: the greatest spiritual danger presents itself not to the one who has manifestly failed (in Milton’s phrase) “to justify God’s ways to man,” but to the one who succeeds, or thinks he succeeds. And the greatest danger is not even pride: it is the discovery that a doctrine put into cold print, or into one’s own (fallen, fallible) mouth, loses much of its reality and power.

David Deutsch reflects on Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), which he calls “the finest television documentary series ever made”:

Bronowski saw the purpose of art as being the same as that of science: to give meaning and order to our experience by revealing hidden structure beneath the appearances. … Though he expressed it with characteristic understatement, his was a message of rebellion, a bold attempt to correct one of the great misconceptions of modern times and single-handedly to redirect the great river of intellectual history.

The misconception might—if its perniciousness were generally acknowledged—be called antihumanism: the pattern of ideas that disparages the human species, jeers at its claims to superiority over other species, or to any special entitlement, glories in its cosmic insignificance, and reinterprets its advent as nothing special and its subsequent progress as mostly illusory or fraudulent—and thus in all these senses, denies its ascent. Antihuman ideas would have seemed wicked or insane to the great majority of thinkers since the Enlightenment at least. But during Bronowski’s lifetime, many of them had become mainstream, to the extent of being taken for granted in academic and everyday discourse. So Bronowski’s rebellion is already there in his title: The Ascent of Man. He says that it refers to the “brilliant sequence of cultural peaks”—such as the invention of stone tools, agriculture, cities, and modern science—by which humans have learned how “not to accept the environment but to change it,” thereby improving our lives. And that this progress, despite continual setbacks, has been cumulative for as long as our species has existed.