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)
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.
Allow me to recommend Jim Fallows’ latest post on freedom of speech and Max Blumenthal’s grueling book about the extremist elements in contemporary Israel, Goliath. The core point is that, whatever you believe about the arguments of the book, or of its author, it remains a powerfully reported account of actual people currently living in Israel, their attitudes and beliefs. You might imagine that Blumenthal’s selection of racist, extremist elements in Israeli culture obscures a larger truth, as we noted recently. But, even then, it is still a lesser truth that should be engaged, not ignored. He marshalls facts. He talks to people directly. The idea that a book that delves into such empirical questions must somehow be repudiated or ignored is a deeply illiberal idea.
Jim argues:
[Blumenthal] has found a group of people he identifies as extremists in Israel—extreme in their belief that Arabs have no place in their society, extreme in their hostility especially to recent non-Jewish African refugees, extreme in their seeming rejection of the liberal-democratic vision of Israel’s future. He says: These people are coming, and they’re taking Israeli politics with them. As he put it in a recent interview with Salon, the book is “an unvarnished view of Israel at its most extreme.” Again, the power of his book is not that Blumenthal disagrees with these groups. Obviously he does. It comes from what he shows.
To see for yourself, just watch a few minutes of the video Blumenthal and his associates made a few months ago, about recent anti-African-immigration movements. The narration obviously disapproves of the anti-immigrant activists, but that doesn’t matter. The power of the video comes from letting these people talk, starting a minute or so in.
I don’t know how you can watch the video above without thinking of previous attempts in human history – a “cancer on our body!” – to demonize, persecute and expel marginal minorities in defense of a racially homogeneous country. Period. In a particularly glaring twist, the New York Times commissioned the video then simply refused to air it.
Now I know I can be tedious about this kind of thing, and one shouldn’t engage a book merely because some want it branded anathema. But nonfiction is at its most urgent when forcing us to confront uncomfortable reality.
You can and should criticize that reality for being untrue, or deceptive, or simply false. But not engaging it at all on empirical grounds is a sign of fear, not wisdom. That was my argument for airing “The Bell Curve” a couple of decades ago; it’s my argument for presenting Steve Jimenez’s reporting on the tragedy of Matthew Shepard on the Dish. It’s why my instinctive response to those who want a book ruled out of the discourse, is to read it as a human being or air it as an editor.
It’s staggering to me that the New York Times, for example, has not reviewed (even critically) either Goliath or The Book of Matt. Why not? Either because they are cowards or because they genuinely believe that examining arguments that undermine core factions or lobbies – gay or Jewish – is somehow offensive in itself. Neither of these is a good argument. Both sustain denial.
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.
Nearly 9 million people were mobilized to serve in Britain’s military during World War I. By the time photographer Giles Price started seeking veterans of the war in 2005, there were just 23 left. … His series, “The Old Guard,” features portraits of the last 12 veterans of the war, which broke out 100 years ago next summer. At the project’s start, Price wrote letters to each of the veterans requesting to take their photo. Thus commenced a race against time. “I was 20 minutes from taking one sitter when the home rang me to say he had passed that morning. He was 106,” Price said.
Price built a small studio in each of the homes he visited and used a studio flash to light the portraits. He shot the centenarians looking upward and ahead, in an effort to place less emphasis on their extreme age and more on the pride and dignity they retained over the years. “The gaze was one of reflection, be that the war, long life, or anything that we associate with time and memories,” Price said.
(Photo of Henry Allingham, 110, by Giles Price, whose Kickstarter project is here)
In the midst of a searching rumination on the current state of Catholic writing, Dana Gioia offers a description:
Catholic literature is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent. Catholics generally prefer to write about sinners rather than saints. (It is not only that sinners generally make more interesting protagonists. Their failings also more vividly demonstrate humanity’s fallen state.) John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, for example, presents a huge cast of characters, lost souls or reprobates all, who, pursuing their assorted vices and delusions, hilariously stumble toward grace and provisional redemption. The same dark comic vision pervades the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, and Muriel Spark. Ron Hansen’s Atticus begins with the investigation of a murder. Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is full of resentment, violence, and anger. “Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine,” she observed, and violence is “strangely capable” of returning her characters “to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace.” When Mary Karr titled her poetry collection Sinners Welcome, she could have been describing the Catholic literary tradition.
Much of Gioia’s essay grapples with the decline of Catholic art and literature from its heyday in the mid-20th century. One reason he cites for the current impoverishment? A growing obsession with politics:
What absorbs the Catholic intellectual media is politics, conducted mostly in secular terms—a dreary battle of right versus left for the soul of the American Church. If the soul of Roman Catholicism is to be found in partisan politics, then it’s probably time to shutter up the chapel. If the universal Church isn’t capacious enough to contain a breadth of political opinion, then the faith has shriveled into something unrecognizably paltry. If Catholic Christianity does not offer a vision of existence that transcends the election cycle, if our redemption is social and our resurrection economic, then it’s time to render everything up to Caesar.
Wallace Stevens remarked that “God and the imagination are one.” It is folly to turn over either to a political party, even your own. If American Catholicism has become mundane enough to be consumed by party politics, perhaps it’s because the Church has lost its imagination and creativity.
