Month: October 2014

“To the Reader: The Language of the Cloud” by Chase Twichell:

Come with me to a private room.
I have a secret to show you.
Sometimes I like to stand outside it

with a stranger because I haven’t
come at it from that vantage in so long—

see? There I am beside him, still joined,
still kissing. Isn’t it dreamlike,
the way the bed drifts in its dishevelment?

Bereft of their clothes, two humans
lie entangled in its cloud.

Their bodies are saying the after-grace,
still dreaming in the language of the cloud.
Look at them, neither two nor one.

I want them to tell me what they know
before the amnesia takes them.

(From Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been © 1998, 2010 by Chase Twichell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Suzanne LaGasa)

It’s long been a simmering intelllectual rift within the philosophy of conservatism – between the rigid disciples of Leo Strauss and the wayward offspring of Michael Oakeshott. My own choice of Oakeshott for my dissertation was one of the first moments when my “conservatism” was greeted with intense skepticism by the neocons I knew. The chill was palpable. He wasn’t interested in fostering the morals of others, which was, to many neocons, the only real purpose of religion at all. So it’s no surprise that in introducing a collection of essays, On Jews and Judaism, written by her late husband Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb connects his attachment to religion to his brand of neoconservatism – and not to the bohemian Englishman’s conservatism:

Religion, he held, is not just for the good of society; it is good for the individual, and not just for the sake of leading an ethical life but for the sake of a meaningful and soulful life. … His neo-orthodoxy is firmly Jewish, rooted in history and community, in an ancient faith and an enduring people. And so, too, his neoconservatism is firmly rooted in Judaism. In an essay on Michael Oakeshott written many years later, Kristol recalled the day in 1956 when, as an editor of Encounter in London, he found on his desk an unsolicited manuscript by Oakeshott entitled “On Being Conservative.” It was a great coup for the magazine to receive, over the transom, an essay by that eminent philosopher. Kristol read it “with great pleasure and appreciation”—and then politely rejected it. It was, he later explained (although not to Oakeshott at the time), “irredeemably secular, as I—being a Jewish conservative—am not.” Oakeshott’s “conservative disposition,” to enjoy and esteem the present rather than what was in the past or might be in the future, left little room for any religion, still less for Judaism:

Judaism especially, being a more this-worldly religion than Christianity, moves us to sanctify the present in our daily lives—but always reminding us that we are capable of doing so only through God’s grace to our distant forefathers. Similarly, it is incumbent upon us to link our children and grandchildren to this “great chain of being,” however suitable or unsuitable their present might be to our conservative disposition. And, of course, the whole purpose of sanctifying the present is to prepare humanity for a redemptive future.

Kristol’s inability to appreciate the deeper religious teaching of Oakeshott was not surprising. Few did for most of his life  – my own dissertation was the first to insist upon it, and has been supplanted by Elizabeth Corey’s elegant work on Oakeshott’s understanding of religion and aesthetics, and even more by the recently published Notebooks, where religion is an obsessive interest. The idea that Oakeshott is “irredeemably secular” is almost laughable once one has read these.

If I were to point to one core difference between Oakeshott’s understanding of faith and the neocons’, it would not simply be the difference between Judaism and Christianity, but more that the neocons see religion primarily as a political and social tool, rather than as an insight into a present eternity. And it is neoconservatism’s use of religion that makes them in fact, the irredeemably secular ones. And, to the extent that some, like Allan Bloom, were actually atheists, cynics.

John Gray pans Richard Dawkins’ memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, which takes us beyond Dawkins’ polemics on behalf of science to reveal a bit of the man himself. One point Gray makes? The famed New Atheist is nothing like his hero Charles Darwin:

No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist and the latter-day evangelist for atheism. Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. If science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world. The Victorians are often mocked for their supposed certainties, when in fact many of them (Darwin not least) were beset by anxieties and uncertainties. Dawkins, by contrast, seems never to doubt for a moment the capacity of the human mind—his own, at any rate—to resolve questions that previous generations have found insoluble.

Dawkins may not be Victorian, but the figure who emerges from An Appetite for Wonder is in many ways decidedly old-fashioned. Before Dawkins’s own story begins, the reader is given a detailed account of the Dawkins family tree—perhaps a natural prelude for one involved so passionately with genes, but slightly eccentric in a twenty-first-century memoir. Dawkins’s description of growing up in British colonial Africa, going on to boarding school and then to Oxford, has a similarly archaic flavor and could easily have been written before World War II. The style in which he recounts his early years has a labored jocularity of a sort one associates with some of the stuffier products of that era, who—dimly aware that they lacked any sense of humor—were determined to show they appreciated the lighter side of life.

In a review of Mandy Aftel’s new book Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent, Emily Gould reveals her affinity for perfume. The book, she suggests, “makes a person wearing perfume feel connected to every human in every era who has ever done so”:

A spritz of L’Artisan Parfumeur: Passage d’Enfer in the morning not only becomes a way of “decorating the day,” as perfume critic Tania Sanchez memorably wrote, it also gives you the sense that you have something in common with the ancient Egyptians, who packed frankincense inside the corpses they embalmed. Jars of unguents taken from these tombs, according to Aftel, have retained their fragrance. If you can still smell, three thousand years later, what Egyptians wanted to smell like in the afterlife, that’s a kind of afterlife in and of itself. Aftel also points to biblical descriptions of the uses of incense and the specific instructions for compounding it given to Moses by God. It’s easy to forget, as you light a stick of incense to mitigate the smell of a litter box, a bong, or a neighbor’s cooking, that smoke rising toward the skies once was used to communicate messages to heaven.

(Photo of incense and candles at Yangon’s ancient Shwedagon Pagoda by William)

Jon Fortenbury examines why leaving a religion can be a detriment to your health, touching on findings from psychologist Darrel Ray:

Ray has been a psychologist for more than 30 years and founded Recovering From Religion, an organization that connects nonbelievers with therapists and each other. According to Ray, it generally takes depressed deconverts two to three years for their health to bounce back. A few years after leaving their religion, they tend to reestablish a social community and rid themselves of guilt they may have felt over premarital sex, depression over losing God, and anxiety about death and hell.

Ray, author of The God Virus and Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality, said not all of his clients recover within the typical three years, though. Getting over a fear of death after believing in an afterlife for so long takes some of them five years or longer. And about five percent of his clients can take even more time to stop fearing hell. Ray often compares learning about hell to learning a language.

“When you were five years old and learning English, you never stopped to ask your parents why you weren’t learning German,” said Ray, who uses cognitive behavioral therapy to decatastrophize the concept of hell for clients. “You just learn it. The same is often true of religion. When you’re taught about hell and eternal damnation at ages four through seven, these strong concepts are not going to easily leave you. Just like it’s hard to unlearn English, it’s hard to unlearn the concept of hell.”

At Guernica, Meara Sharma interviews Anthony Pinn, a scholar of African-American religion, about the role mega-churches play in the American black community:

Guernica: I think for many people, there’s something off-putting, or just unsettling, about a pastor like Creflo Dollar, who has a private jet, a Rolls Royce, and multiple million-dollar homes. There’s a dissonance between that kind of lavish lifestyle and being a spiritual figure.

Anthony Pinn: For believers, it would only be off-putting if Creflo Dollar said, Look, this stuff is only available to people like me. I’m special. You can’t get this. But to the extent that he provides this invitation—you live by my teachings, and you can have what I have—then it’s appealing.

It really depends upon how one views churches. If one views the black church as being primarily about the business of spiritual renewal, emotional, psychological, spiritual well-being, then it’s offensive. But, to the extent that folks recognize black churches as businesses, why shouldn’t they see their CEO have what the CEO of Pepsi has? The parishioners don’t see a contradiction between the church as an economic enterprise and a place for spiritual renewal. One leads to another. They flow together.

Guernica: So what happens when it doesn’t seem to be working for the parishioners? When they’re not getting more prosperous, even though they’re abiding by the teachings?

Anthony Pinn: This is the genius of the system. It’s not working because you’re not doing it right. There’s no flaw in the system! No flaw in the teachings! There’s a flaw in your practice of the teachings. How can the minister say this? Because the minister is still doing well! The minister is still driving that Rolls Royce, wearing ten-thousand-dollar suits, so clearly the teachings work! You are not practicing them properly.

And Jesus wept.