Morgan Meis marvels at the recent critical success of Zibaldone, the lengthy diary of the 19th-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, considering that the book’s “central thesis … is that life is miserable and there is nothing to be done about it”:
The seduction of Zibaldone is in reading the words of a man who hasn’t flinched from the hardest thoughts. Reading Zibaldone is like getting permission to go into a room that is usually locked. It is a chance to let the dark thoughts speak. It is a chance to look at the desolation without brushing it away. It is a chance to sit and soak in the melancholy. Right now, at this moment in history, soaking in the melancholy seems the right thing to do. We are surrounded, after all, by a civilization that seeks pleasure and distraction with a shrillness that makes Imperial Rome look reserved. The current mainstream discussion of human happiness and infinite progress is so coarse that it has been more or less abandoned to the technocrats. Reflective persons have nowhere to turn. And then a volume like Zibaldone turns up. Leopardi, in his infinite gloom, takes on the guise of a savior. This is what it must have been like to stumble across a volume of Pascal’s Pensées in the late 17th century. It is like plunging into a very cold, very fresh mountain stream after days of walking in the hot sun.
Laura Pearson recommends the revamped Cosmos TV series, which premieres tonight with Neil deGrasse Tyson stepping in for Carl Sagan:
Popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts this time around, but the plot of the 13-part series remains largely out of this world, exploring the farthest reaches of the knowable universe and the origins of life on Earth. Spoiler alert for anyone who missed Sagan’s groundbreaking Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the instructive 1977 film strip Powers of Ten, or every science class ever: The universe is old. Mind-blowingly old and vast. To explore it is to better understand ourselves.
That’s why watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is a matter of necessity, and what distinguishes it from what’s usually on TV—Hell’s Kitchen or Kitchen Nightmares or Hotel Hell or My Cat From Hell or whatever. Whereas the vast nebulae of reality shows entice viewers with the notion that ordinary people (and cats) can access instant fame, Cosmos shows reality as it applies to everyone, famous or not.
Matt Zoller Seitz sees plenty to admire about the new version:
The show deploys blockbuster-quality visual effects, triumphant orchestral music by Alan Silvestri (who scored Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, which is based on Sagan’s novel), and cartoon interludes rendered in the handmade style of a graphic novel to make the Big Bang, the rise of Copernican astronomy, and the basic principles of evolution seem as Hollywood-magnificent as the latest Marvel opus. But its greatest special effect is the laid-back charisma of its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Affable, plainspoken, and charming without seeming full of himself, Tyson might have seemed like Sagan’s obvious successor even if the master hadn’t mentored him as a teen (a tale movingly recounted in the first episode’s final moments). He lacks Sagan’s Vulcan-like vibe but compensates with a self-deprecating average-guyness that often morphs, delightfully, into Danny Ocean cool. (It’s hard to imagine Sagan getting away with donning shades to watch the Big Bang, as Tyson does here.)
Willa Paskin describes a segment about the 16th century monk Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for holding heretical scientific beliefs, and pushes back on Seitz’s suggestion that the new Cosmos is anti-faith:
Writing in New York magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz interpreted this segment of Cosmos as “painting organized religion as an irrelevant and intellectually discredited means of understanding factual reality” and as part of the show’s larger “pushback against faith’s encroachments on the intellectual terrain of science.” (This is particularly in contrast to the sort of echt-spirituality and new-ageism that hovered around the original Cosmos. Sagan himself was agnostic.) Organized religion certainly comes in for it, but I think this segment is up to something more gentle than declaring war on blinkered anti-science evangelists. Cosmos is offering viewers a way to reconcile science and faith: Don’t let your god be too small.
In an interview, Tyson discusses how to think about the new show:
If you only think of “Cosmos” as a science documentary, then the natural obvious question would be, “Well, it’s been 35 years. What has changed?” However, “Cosmos” wasn’t only that, and it wasn’t even mostly that. “Cosmos” is mostly “Why does science matter to you? Why should you care about science? Why should society care about what scientists say? How can you empower your own destiny by becoming scientifically literate?” …
So yeah, since then, we’ve discovered nearly 1,000 planets orbiting other stars, and Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons has an ocean underneath it. There are other experiments that have gotten us closer to understanding the Big Bang. And, of course, the politics are different. Back then, we were steeped in a Cold War and using weapons that were imagined by scientists and used to hold the world hostage.
So, the climate was different than it is now, but there are other prevailing concerns that we have: What is our effect on the environment? Will we be good shepherds of this Earth as we go forward? Do we know enough to be good shepherds of this Earth? Do we understand the risk of asteroids that could render us extinct? These are broad questions, and “Cosmos” takes some element of science and shows you why it is way more relevant to your life than you ever previously imagined.
Another interview with Tyson is here. Previous Dish on the new Cosmoshere.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex recreates the philosopher’s dialogues for contemporary times. David Auerbach reviews the book:
“Plato at the 92nd Street Y” pits him against the Chua-ish “Warrior Mother” Sophie Zee, discussing Republic’s hypothetical “city of pigs” and testing out in the Myers-Briggs typology as an INTJ (just like yours truly); “Plato on Cable News” has him exchanging blows with a bloviating Bill O’Reilly clone named Roy McCoy. And yes, here is Plato at the Googleplex, debating an engineer over the possibility of crowdsourcing ethics, as well as wryly comparing its communal environment to the training of young philosopher-kings in the Republic. (I used to work for Google, and believe me, we had it way better than Plato’s ascetic Guardians.)
By alternating between these new “Platonic dialogues” and a serious chronicle of Plato’s life and philosophy, Goldstein makes a plea for the continuing importance of philosophy as Plato (427–347 B.C.) conceived it, and for the enduring relevance of Plato’s contributions.
[T]here’s something moving, if also faintly depressing, about reading Plato inserted into 21st-century Western culture.
It brings to light the gap between what might have been and what is – and what we appear to be moving toward. Consider, for instance, Plato’s musing, “I do not think that rulers should be able to own substantive private property, for substantive property will immediately make them citizens of the city of the rich, with its own special interests to protect.” It doesn’t take much imagination to deduce what Plato would have to say about PACs.
[Q] How do you think Plato would respond to the cultural dominance of television and cinema?
[A] He’d be very alarmed. You can’t help but think immediately of his allegory of the cave in The Republic: The lowest form of consciousness is that of prisoners in the dark staring at images. He would be quite in despair. He would think that we were enchanted by the lowest form of thinking. To think is to be active; passivity is the death of the mind.
But he wouldn’t oppose all of contemporary culture. Just this past week I started tweeting as Plato; I guess I’m not ready to stop impersonating him. And this kind of thing, the dialogue that happens on blogs and social media, I think he would be into it. I think he’d be intrigued by that aspect of popular culture: the verbal and the written exchanges.
A passage from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Naval Treaty” – in which Sherlock Holmes spots a rose in an interviewee’s apartment and waxes theological – prompts John Horgan to wonder if the detective believed in God:
“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from flowers.”
Holmes is alluding to what I call the problem of beauty. As I have explained previously, the problem of evil prevents me from believing in God, or at least an all-powerful God who gives a damn about us. But the problem of beauty keeps me from being an adamant atheist. If reality results from sheer coincidence, why is it often so heartbreakingly lovely? As the great physicist Steven Weinberg, an atheist if ever there was one, once wrote, sometimes nature “seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.”
My guess is that the hyper-empirical Holmes, if pressed, would say that he is an agnostic, because there is insufficient evidence for either belief or disbelief in a Creator. (Holmes is more rational than his own creator, Conan Doyle, who after the death of his wife and other loved ones consoled himself by believing in ghosts.)
Previous Dish on Doyle and Sherlock Holmes here, here, and here. The recent Dish thread on the varieties of atheism is here.
Roger Scruton frowns on “scientism,” which he describes as involving “the use of scientific forms and categories in order to give the appearance of science to unscientific ways of thinking.” The arts and humanities, he insists, lie beyond the reach of the empirical:
Art critics have a discipline, and it is one that involves reasoning and judgment. It is not a science, and what it describes forms no part of the physical world, which does not contain Olympia or anything else you see in Manet’s painting. Yet someone who thought that art criticism is therefore deficient and ought to be replaced by the study of pigments would surely be missing the point. There are forms of human understanding that can be neither reduced to science nor enhanced by it.
Here is where the neurothugs step in, to declare that, of course, the science of pixels won’t explain pictures, since pictures are in the eye of the beholder. But there is also such a thing as the fMRI of the beholder, and this does contain the secret of the image in the frame. Since understanding a picture is a matter of seeing it in a certain way — in such a way as to grasp its visual aspect, and the meaning which that aspect has for beings like us — then we should be examining the neural pathways involved in seeing aspects, and the connections that link those pathways to judgments of meaning.
But what, exactly, would such a study show?
Suppose we have achieved a perfect decipherment of the pathways involved in seeing an aspect and in stabilizing it in the mind of the observer. This is not a judgment of criticism, and while it might enable us to predict that the normal observer will, on confronting Titian’s picture, see a naked woman lying on a couch and looking at him, it will say nothing in answer to the critic who says: Yes, but that is not all that there is, and indeed you must see that this woman is not naked at all, but rather unclothed, that her body, as Anne Hollander shows so convincingly in Seeing Through Clothes, has the texture and the movement of the clothes she has removed, and that those eyes do not look at you but look through you, dreaming of someone you are not.
Critics don’t tell us how we do, with normal equipment, see things, but how we ought to see them, and their account of the meaning of a picture is also a recommendation, which we obey by making a free choice of our own. Neuroscience, then, remains only a science: it cannot rise to the level of intentional understanding, where meaning is created through our own voluntary acts. Hence we should not be surprised at the dreariness of neuroaesthetics, and its inability to cast light on the nature or meaning of works of art.
What does it mean to be called to the religious life? Even the most articulate of these women cannot find the precise words to explain how she came to understand her vocation. The youngest nun says, “I’m sure anyone who falls in love, they look back and say, ‘Oh, remember how we met? Or he showed his love?’ It’s the same, how God has shown his personal love.”
But how does one fall in love? These women are no more capable of explaining their love of the holy than we are of understanding the reasons two human beings are attracted to each other, and yet they try. One sister compares it to God “playing hide-and-seek,” drawing her to the religious life, but leaving her unsure of where to go. Like any love, there is struggle, not only with which of the various religious orders to join but how to live once there; it is not desperation which brings these women to the cloister but desire.
While I had hoped to find greater insight into this order of cloistered nuns’ monastic practices, ceremonies, and sources of personal inspiration as they have so much to overcome …, Reese does do an excellent job of presenting the nuns as individuals. They are not fetishized or turned into fringe caricatures with clichéd beliefs. Even when she has a chance to poke a hole in their convictions with contradicting opinions held by fellow nuns, she does not dispel their faith. Instead she withholds judgment, allowing room for the flexibility of their personal beliefs. Each nun gets the chance to express herself as she continues to explore and understand herself in her journey inwards and towards God. “Several nuns volunteered, in the course of the oral history interviews, that outsiders label their life as a form of escapism. They took pains to point out that religious life is not a rejection of the world or its inhabitants; the enclosure is, in a sense, a form of embracing humanity, a calling to, not a running from.”
Giles Fraser thinks “the best theologians are musicians”:
Christianity is always better sung than said. To the extent that all religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, the musicians penetrate further than most. When Mendelssohn takes the words of Psalm 55 and transforms them into the almost unbearably moving Hear My Prayer [above], he is not offering up some theological argument that can be batted about, agreed with, disagreed with. It’s not propositional. It’s a cry from the depths of his being. Longing, joy, hope, hopelessness, the call for justice – all these get expressed by religious music in ways that religious words can only partially capture.
As the voices of the choir bounce around the pillars of the cathedral, they carry with them the various petitions and often inchoate yearnings of those gathered in the pews: a death, a broken love affair, a new child, a desire for the world to be a different place. Tallis, Bach, Handel, Mozart, even contemporary musicians like the recently deceased John Tavener, they have the capacity take our patchy, confused and half-worked-through feelings and translate them aesthetically into something approaching coherence and worthy of wonder.
Will Willimon riffs on a conversation he once had with a woman who told him, “I’m so glad next week is Ash Wednesday”:
Glad for Ash Wednesday? I pressed for more. She responded, “You don’t know me that well, but I was the victim of sexual abuse by a relative when I was a young teenager. Spent years in therapy trying to get over it. Pop-spirituality and feel-good religion were just no help to me. That’s why I’m glad that we are coming to that time of the year when the church makes us put all the injustice, sin, blood and guilt on the altar and forces us to look at it and let God deal with it.”
Rejoice. It’s Lent. This is when the poor, old, bumbling church courageously reminds us of the joy of letting go of our illusions about ourselves. We offer our lives not to a God with high standards of conduct, but to a God who loves us as we are and forgives the worst in us.
My favorite theologian, Karl Barth, said that “only Christians sin.” He meant that only Christians know the joy of a God who forgives and thus can be frank about their sin. There is a sense in which awareness of God’s grace comes before, and not after, true and honest repentance. The person who doesn’t know a gracious God can never be truly honest about sin.
On Ash Wednesday this past week, Nadia Bolz Weber argued that people who find the first day of Lent depressing “totally don’t get it”:
[I]t’s a refreshing thing we and Christians all over the world do [on Ash Wednesday]. We gather to remind each other of the truth. To remind each other of our mortality. We tell each other the inescapable truth that we are dust and to dust we shall return. It’s downright audacious that amidst our societal anxiety about impermanence we just blurt out the truth as if it’s not offensive. But the thing about blurting out this kind of truth about ourselves … is that after you do it … you can finally exhale. It’s like the moment when you stop having to spiritually hold your stomach in.
Calling himself “a bastard” and “complete shit,” Giles Fraser admits he takes comfort in reckoning with himself during Lent:
[T]he language of sin and death – both, in Christian theology, the gift of Adam and thus a constituent part of the human condition – are, I think, much more compassionate ways of looking at human beings than the alternative doctrines of continual self-improvement.
This is counter-intuitive, I know. To use the language of sin sounds all terribly judgmental. But as the wonderful novelist Marilynne Robinson puts it in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought: “The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms that standards all of us fail to attain.”
Meanwhile, Alice Robb recommends that observers resist broadcasting their abstention intentions:
What are the effects of sharing your goals on Twitter? It’s often assumed that the social pressure of announcing your intentions will compel to you follow through, but recent research suggests that it might actually backfire—and not just by irritating your friends and followers.
For a 2010 paper in the journal Psychological Science, a team of psychologists led by New York University’s Peter Gollwitzer looked at how students’ behavior changed when they shared their goals with the psychologists or with their peers. For the first experiment, Gollwitzer and his team recruited 49 students training to be psychologists. They were told they were participating in a study on the motivation of first-year psychology students, and were asked to write down two goals relating to their coursework. Some expressed an intention to take reading assignments more seriously, for instance, or to get to grips with statistics. For half the students—those assigned to the “social reality” condition—the psychologist conducting the experiment read the students’ intentions back to them. Members grouped into the “no-social reality condition,” on the other hand, were told that the page on which they recorded their intentions was included by mistake and would be thrown away. One week later, the students were brought back to the lab and asked to list the days on which they’d acted in accordance with their stated goals. On average, the “no-social reality” group kept their resolutions on more days than the “social-reality” group.
The Dish 
