Month: January 2015

“You ask yourself the question every time you open a newspaper or switch on the TV or walk the streets… You know the question. It reads: Just what the hell is going on around here?

The world looks worse every day. Is it worse, or does it just look it? The world gets older. The world has seen and done it all. Boy, is it beat. It’s suicidal…the world has done too many things too many times with too many people, done it this way, that way, with him, with him. The world has been to so many parties, been in so many fights, lost its keys, had its handbag stolen, drunk too much. It all adds up. A tab is presented. Our ironic destiny. Look at the modern infamies, the twentieth-century sins. Some are strange, some banal, but they all offend the eye, covered in their newborn vernix. Gratuitous or recreational crimes of violence, the ever-less-tacit totalitarianism of money (money—what is this shit anyway?), the pornographic proliferation, the nuclear collapse of the family (with the breeders all going critical, and now the children running too), the sappings and distortions of a mediated reality, the sexual abuse of the very old and the very young (of the weak, the weak): what is the hidden denominator here, and what could explain it all?

To paraphrase Bujak, as I understood him. We live in a shameful shadowland. Quietly, our idea of human life has changed, thinned out. We can’t help but think less of it now. The human race has declassed itself. It does not live anymore; it just survives, like an animal. We endure the suicide’s shame, the shame of the murderer, the shame of the victim. Death is all we have in common. And what does that do to life?” – Martin Amis, “Bujak and the Strong Force, or God’s Dice” in Einstein’s Monsters.

(Hat tip: John Benjamin)

Christopher Occhicone photographed the residents of Tent City in Lakewood, New Jersey:

Tent City … has been home to up to 100 residents for the past 7 years. Local residents have been calling for the closure of the camp since it began. The town succeeded in forcing out most of the residents by August 2014. Some were offered one year of rent-free housing in neighboring towns. Others were given $3,000 in cash to agree to leave town. The remainder were unable to accept either offer because of outstanding arrest warrants.

The aim of my work was to provide an honest look at life inside the camp and thus better inform policy (being decided outside the camp). I wanted to make a document that can be used as a reference for people wanting to address the issue of homelessness.

The project was screened at Visa Pour L’image. See more of Occhicone’s work here.

Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry turns to an unlikely source as he implores us to avoid another year of online outrage – the French philosopher René Girard. He examines his work on scapegoating, which Gobry believes resonates with the way we interact online. The way to defuse our tendency toward scapegoating:

The only ancient text Girard could find that contained a denunciation, rather than an endorsement, of scapegoating, is the Bible. The Bible also has its narrative of founding murder. But while Rome’s myth states that Remus was guilty and needed to die, the Bible says that “Abel the Just” was innocent, and has its god character protect his murderer Cain from scapegoating vengeance.

The Bible also contains one of the most striking stories in all of human literature: the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. The reason why the phrase “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” has resonated so deeply in every age and culture is precisely because it strikes at the core of the scapegoat mechanism. It really didn’t matter to anyone whether the woman actually committed adultery, and the lynch mob was just as guilty, or just as innocent, as her. Once the reality of the scapegoat mechanism was exposed, the men could only realize the futility of what they were about to do.

The only way to defeat the scapegoat mechanism is to expose it. … Let he who is without sin cast the first outraged tweet.

(Image of Guercino’s “Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well,” 1641, via Wikimedia Commons)

Throwing Christmas trees to the lions:

Robert Pogue Harrison ponders humanity’s relationship with animalkind:

We like to think of ourselves as the stewards or even saviors of nature, yet the fact of the matter is, for the animal world at large, the human race represents nothing less than a natural disaster. This applies to all creatures, from those we allow to roam “wild” in designated nature preserves to those we cram together on our chicken farms; from the dancing bears of Anatolia to the bald eagles of Alaska, with their collar monitors; from the laboratory animals we test our cosmetic products’ chemicals on to the sharks whose fins leave the oceans to swim around in our nuptial soups. All creatures are under our yoke; and all, including our beloved horses, dogs, cats, and canaries, are subject to human persecution in one way or another.

From a quantitative point of view our species guilt is more aggravated today than it ever was in the past, when Plutarch or Pythagoras cried out against animal murder and the consumption of animal flesh. As the French philosopher and biologist Jean Rostand put it, “Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.” While the scale of animal death has increased exponentially, the main issue today is no longer death but the coercive reproduction and perpetuation of animal life under infernal conditions of organic exploitation. Industrialized farming today, in its manipulation of the biological processes of genesis, growth, and multiplication, forces animals like cows, calves, turkeys, pigs, ducks, and geese into artificial, barely endurable forms of existence. Far more demonic than the slaughters and animal sacrifices of the past, our relegation of these creatures to a standing reserve of consumable stock reduces their “lives” to a worldless, merely mechanical process of flesh production. In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote of the malaise of the earth: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” That creaturely groaning has gotten a lot louder of late, and if God indeed loves his creatures enough to open heaven to them, it is highly likely that, when our pets get there, they will find themselves on their own.

Hilton Head, South Carolina, 10.29 am

Amy Westervelt talked to professor Frederic Luskin, who has spent ten years leading forgiveness classes at Stanford, about the importance of pardoning everyday transgressions:

‘Even the stuff that forgiveness was supposed to be good for – stuff like murders … it’s so rare,’ he told me. ‘More important is can you forgive your brother-in-law for being annoying? Can you forgive traffic? Those things happen every day. Big things? They happen once in a lifetime, maybe twice. It’s a waste of forgiveness. That’s my perspective. But forgiveness is really important for smoothing over the normal, interpersonal things that rub everyone the wrong way.’

Part of what makes the word – and practice – tough for people, in Luskin’s view, is that it requires a degree of selflessness. ‘For me to say, “Even though you were a shithead, it’s not my problem; it’s your problem, and I’m not going to stay mad at you, because that’s you, not me,” that’s a huge renunciation of self,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know whether it’s our [Western] culture or a human thing, but it’s hard.’

Plus it requires acknowledgement of our fundamental human vulnerability, without getting angry or bitter about it. ‘A lot of times people start with this idea that “I shouldn’t have been harmed”,’ Luskin said. ‘Why not? We live on a planet where harm happens all the time, where children are murdered and horrible things happen; to think that you should escape that is a mammoth overstatement of your own importance and a lack of sensitivity to everyone else on the planet.’