Author: Andrew Sullivan

Speaking to graduates of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, David Byrne dumped a big bucket of cold water on their career prospects. Rachel Aron, who was there, summarizes:

In a slide-show presentation on the auditorium’s projection screen, Byrne showed a series of graphs, based on information compiled by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), illustrating that if you chose a career in the arts you are, basically, screwed. A pie chart, based on 2011 data, showed that only three per cent of film and theatre grads, and five per cent of writing and visual-arts grads, end up working in their areas of concentration (forty-three percent work in the arts but outside of their specialties; forty-one per cent work outside of the arts altogether). A subsequent bar graph showed that, according to those stats, fourteen writing and fourteen Columbia visual-arts graduates will go on to careers in their fields, and eight theatre and eight film grads will go on to careers in theirs. “That’s the end of the charts,” Byrne said, after sharing another, which showed the median salaries of people working in the arts (between thirty-five and forty-five thousand dollars across all four sectors). “I’m glad you’re laughing.”

Colin Marshall tries to find the silver lining:

[F]irsthand reports from the ceremony don’t describe a too terribly shaken Columbia graduating class, and even Byrne took pains to emphasize, or at least emphatically imply, that truly worthwhile careers — such as, I would say, his own — lay outside, or in between, or at the intersection of, definable fields. And why would you want to work in the same field you studied, anyway? To paraphrase something Byrne’s friend and collaborator Brian Eno said about technology, once a whole major has built up around a pursuit, it’s probably not the most interesting thing to be doing anymore.

Meanwhile, in a commencement address at McGill University, the philosopher Judith Butler offered a more hopeful appraisal for those studying the humanities, focusing on the non-financial aspects of such an education:

The humanities allow us to learn to read carefully, with appreciation and a critical eye; to find ourselves, unexpectedly, in the middle of the ancient texts we read, but also to find ways of living, thinking, acting, and reflecting that belong to times and spaces we have never known. The humanities give us a chance to read across languages and cultural differences in order to understand the vast range of perspectives in and on this world. How else can we imagine living together without this ability to see beyond where we are, to find ourselves linked with others we have never directly known, and to understand that, in some abiding and urgent sense, we share a world?

She continued:

You will need all of those skills to move forward, affirming this earth, our ethical obligations to live among those who are invariably different from ourselves, to demand recognition for our histories and our struggles at the same time that we lend that to others, to live our passions without causing harm to others, and to know the difference between raw prejudice and distortion, and sound critical judgment. The first step towards nonviolence, which is surely an absolute obligation we all bear, is to begin to think critically, and to ask others to do the same.

Related Dish coverage of Joss Whedon’s commencement address here.

Reviewing Curtis White’s new book, The Science Delusion, Mark O’Connell summarizes the non-religious case for a more expansive understanding of truth:

White is a nonbeliever, but like a lot of nonbelievers—me included—he’s frustrated with the so-called New Atheism’s refusal to engage with anything but the narrowest and most reductive understanding of religious experience, and its insistence on the scientific method as the only legitimate approach to truth. He starts out here by taking some well-aimed swipes at the Dawkins-Hitchens-Dennett Axis of Reason, but the book’s interest isn’t so much in the New Atheism per se as in the broader ideology of which it is the militant wing: scientism. Science often looks like the only show in town when it comes to considering things like the nature of consciousness and the meaning of human existence, and White is convinced that the demotion of the humanities—of poetic, philosophical, and spiritual approaches to truth—is a demotion of humanity itself. He’s aggravated, in particular, by the mechanistic model of personhood advanced by neuroscience, whereby consciousness is seen as something that can be “mapped,” explained in terms of “wiring” and “connections,” as though the mind were actually (as opposed to just metaphorically) a kind of computer. And so he’s arguing for a return to the spirit of Romanticism, to an intellectual culture that looks to poets and philosophers and artists, rather than scientists, for insight into what used to be called “the human condition.”

Jerry Coyne unloads on O’Connell:

Aren’t these anti-New Atheism pieces getting tiresome? They have three characteristics: 1. The author is an atheist or agnostic; 2. The author takes New Atheists to task for presenting a caricature of religion and not engaging with religion’s “best” arguments (i.e., academic obscurantism that uses big words), and 3. They call out New Atheists for the horrible crime of scientism.

The response goes on to call out the “nuanced” understandings of religion that New Atheists supposedly fail to engage:

Sometimes I wonder if people like O’Connell have really read the purveyors of obscurantist religious bullpucky: people like Karen Armstrong, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, or even Tanya Luhrmann.  Their “nonreductive understanding” is either an attempt to evade spelling out what they really believe, or a wordy justification for garden-variety religion.  And O’Connell also neglects that fact that most religious people aren’t theologians, do not read theology, and have a pretty straightforward (and “reductive,” whatever that means) set of beliefs. Jesus existed, was divine, and was crucified to save us from sin; Mohamed was the prophet and his words are not metaphorical; Joseph Smith revealed the visit of Jesus to North America and you can baptize your ancestors post mortem; you can get “clear” by investing thousands of dollars in analysis with the e-meter, and so on. I venture to say that at least 90% of the world’s religious believers fall into the class that Dawkins criticizes.  Why on earth do critics like O’Connell always equate “religion” with “theology”?

Meanwhile, Pat Finn takes the debate in a different direction, emphasizing White’s re-appropriation of Romanticism as an alternate way forward:

Between the scientific rationalism of the neuroscientists and their allies in the New Atheist camp and the religious dogmatism of, among others, the Christian right, White advocates for a third mode of conceptualizing reality that he traces to Romanticism, which swept through Western Europe in the 19th century. What White sees as central to Romanticism is a commitment to the interminable re-imagining of society, and he considers its legacy to be intimately bound up with the various counterculture movements that sprung up in the second half of the 20th century, when millions of people throughout the Western world expressed dissatisfaction with their culture and tried to change it. To protest requires an act of imagination or will, the type that the scientific worldview tends to de-emphasize or even outright deny with its vision of man as an elaborate piece of machinery. This isn’t a new idea. As White points out, Isaiah Berlin made a similar argument in the 1960s when he said that “[s]cience is submission, science is being guided by the nature of things.” Many other secular thinkers throughout the past two centuries have expressed a similar form of dissatisfaction with the constraints science threatens to impose on human potential, both individually and collectively. To leap beyond the given – to see the world not as a collection of bare facts but as material to be transformed – is, for White, the essence of a progressive political culture. Scientism threatens to extinguish this belief in possibility and freedom that has always been at the heart of progressive cultural and political movements.

George Zarkadakis visited a monastery on Mount Athos, known as the “Christian Tibet,” to experience hesychasm – the “mental prayer” of Eastern Orthodox tradition:

In the early 14th century, a Greek theologian named Gregory Palamas produced a synthesis of Orthodox philosophy that has defined the theology of the Eastern church ever since. He founded the contemporary tradition of hesychasm, which focuses on achieving experiential knowledge of God. Palamas believed that human beings could never understand the essence of God by employing reason alone. But humans could experience God’s actions (or ‘manifestations’ as he called them), through a retreat into inner prayer. While the Catholic tradition of mental prayer allows the faithful to use icons as aids and regards apparitions as signs from God, Orthodox mental prayer focuses on mental stillness and abstraction, deliberately keeping the mind free of images or thoughts.

Palamas claimed that such prayer gradually builds an increasingly close relationship with God. One of the common themes in late Byzantine iconography is a ladder, representing hesychastic prayer, which connects the earth to the heavens.

Though no longer sharing the “central beliefs” of the faith, Zarkadakis found himself moved to wonder:

I climbed the steps to the highest spot on the wall, and looked out towards the sea. The sky was steadily lightening and a cool breeze carried the rejuvenating scent of salt towards me. Thyme, pine, jasmine and laurel emanated from the monastery’s garden. My face was warmed by the first rays of the sun. I knew that the light that kissed my face came from a star — a great ball of fire fuelled by thermonuclear reactions. That the laurels, the thyme, the bees and the chanting monks were the results of millions of years of biological evolution that had probably begun with a humble bacterium. That I smelled, saw and listened because of electrochemical signals that passed between neurons. That my limbic system was on overdrive.

But despite my knowledge, a sense of mystery remained. Why was the sun so magnificent? Why was the sea so dear? Why did I feel a sense of profound meaning in everything? Perhaps my epiphany owed to nothing more than a second night of sleep deprivation. Nevertheless, I had arrived at a state of mind, possibly not dissimilar to that of the praying monks, where logic failed and gazing at beauty was all that mattered. If that was true then perhaps to know God was simply to look at a rising star, and feel inexplicably moved.

(Photo of the Iviron Monastery, where Zarkadakis stayed, by Leon Hart)