Andrew Sullivan

When Edgar Allan Poe Looked Beyond The Stars

Eliza Strickland revisits his long prose-poem about the origins and fate of the universe, Eureka, which includes “a spookily intuitive description of the Big Bang theory more than 70 years before astrophysicists came up with the idea”:

Scientists who have read Eureka in the decades since have justly called attention to errors in other parts of Poe’s cosmology, and many consider his Big Bang notion to be nothing more than a lucky guess. But a few give Poe credit for a creative leap that contemporaneous astronomers were unable to make. Alberto Cappi is an Italian astronomer who studies galactic clusters and the structure of the universe, and who has taken an interest in Eureka. “It’s surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe, because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility,” Cappi wrote in an email. “No astronomer in Poe’s day could imagine a non-static universe.”

Perhaps the astronomers of Poe’s day didn’t have his motivation. Eureka goes on to propose that all the scattered and blown-apart atoms of the universe are now rushing together again, compelled by their “appetite for oneness.” In the due course of ages, he says, the “bright stars will become blended,” and all matter will merge in a final embrace. Poe, the bereft widower, seems to take comfort in this promise of reunification, perhaps dreaming of being reunified with his love. Many of today’s cosmologists predict a quite different fate for us all: an ever-continuing expansion, with all matter spread out in an increasingly diffuse and featureless Universe. The macabre Poe, rather than the romantic one, might have found that conclusion appropriate.

(Photo by John Lemieux)

The Greatest Known Unknown

In the midst of an interview discussing how we argue about God, Keith DeRose asserts that “neither theists nor atheists know whether God exists”:

It was about God, wasn’t it, that Kant famously wrote “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”? Whatever it does or doesn’t do for faith, my denial of knowledge here makes room for reasonable views on both sides of the question of whether God exists.

I don’t think the arguments for either theism or atheism lead to knowledge of their conclusions. But there are arguments on both sides from premises that someone might reasonably judge to be plausible. If you find it quite probable that God does not exist, I think it’s perfectly possible that you are reasonable to think as you do. But this doesn’t mean that someone who thinks it is likely that God does exist can’t likewise be reasonable in holding that position.

To know that God does (or doesn’t) exist, you have to show that there are no arguments for atheism (or for theism) that a reasonable person could find plausible. But to support that claim you would have to have better critiques of all those arguments than I’ve ever seen. In my view, it’s more likely those who claim to know whether God exists — whether theists or atheists — are just blowing smoke.

Who Are Your Favorite Heretics?

Richard J. Mouw suggests that believers should all have a few because “it can be healthy for Christians who love ideas to be challenged regularly by perspectives that we can disagree with in productive ways.” One of his? The famed British philosopher Bertrand Russell, author of Why I Am Not a Christian:

For a while, especially when I was first learning the ropes in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell was one of my special favorite heretics. In his technical philosophical work in epistemology and logic, he changed his mind a lot, and showed no embarrassment about doing so. I admired that in him. But what I enjoyed even more were his popular writings, especially about religious matters.

Russell was boldly anti-religious. He saw no room for any substantive religious ideas in formulating an ethical perspective, or in investing oneself in social-political causes. But there were moments in his writings when he expressed a sense that to abandon religion is to lose something important—even if he was not clear exactly about what the loss amounted to. One of my favorite Russell passages in this regard occurs in the context of some autobiographical reflections. As a gift for him on his twelfth birthday, he recounted, his grandmother gave him a Bible, which he still possessed. In the flyleaf she had written a couple of her favorite biblical texts: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil,” and “Be strong, and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be Thou dismayed. For the Lord Thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” Then Russell makes this remarkable confession: “These texts have profoundly influenced my life, and still seemed to retain some meaning after I had ceased to believe in God.”

I find something admirable in that confession. It expresses a sense of loss, along with a corresponding sense of moral loneliness. Being one’s own autonomous moral legislator can be a lonely experience.

A Poem For Sunday

“The Day Lady Died” by Frank O’Hara:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6^th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfield Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the John door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

– 1959

“A Wildly Popular, Semi-Secretly Christian Rock Band”

That’s how Joshua Rothman pegs U2 in an essay exploring the faith behind their music:

In some ways, this seems obvious: a song on one recent album was called “Yahweh,” and where else would the streets have no name? But even critics and fans who say that they know about U2’s Christianity often underestimate how important it is to the band’s music, and to the U2 phenomenon. The result has been a divide that’s unusual in pop culture. While secular listeners tend to think of U2’s religiosity as preachy window dressing, religious listeners see faith as central to the band’s identity. To some people, Bono’s lyrics are treacly platitudes, verging on nonsense; to others, they’re thoughtful, searching, and profound meditations on faith.

Christianity Today regularly covers U2, not just as another Christian rock band but as one of special significance. In 2004, the magazine ran an article about Bono’s “thin ecclesiology”—his unwillingness to affiliate himself with a church—that sparked a debate about the health of organized religion. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, addressed the issue of Bono’s belief in a fascinating 2008 lecture about the place of organized faith in secular society. “Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog” is one of several books exploring the theological ideas in Bono’s lyrics. Churches around the world have held “U2charists”—full services at which traditional church music is replaced with songs by U2. A few years ago, an Episcopal priest I know helped organize one at a church in New Jersey; the service, which featured a huge sound system, stage lighting, cocktails, and a bonfire, raised around forty thousand dollars for an orphanage in Cameroon.

Meanwhile, Nathan Hart looks at religion’s place in their just-released Songs of Innocence:

The power of Songs of Innocence is found within its sacramental atmosphere. There are holy moments throughout. With very personal and vulnerable lyrics, Bono has (probably temporarily) laid down his political megaphone. It feels less like a prophetic diatribe and more like a prayer of confession. For example, even in thinking about the very political “troubles” in Ireland on the closing track, he sings,

You think it’s easier to put your finger on the trouble,
when the trouble is you
And you think it’s easier to know your own tricks
Well, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do

Bono points his wagging finger away from the issue and onto himself. In other words, he’s saying, sin is not just something that has infected the big bad world out there, it is also the thing that has infected the self in here. I can’t recall any other U2 lyric that peers so honestly into the farthest corners of Bono’s own heart. Sure, he has been honest about his lustfulness and the origins of his messiah complex. But by vulnerably associating his own sinfulness with the very thing that he normally prophesies against, he offers us a lyrical sacramentology—a holy moment inviting divine redemption. Redemption comes in the same song, which later depicts a thrown lifeline, a rope, “something I could hold on to.” Then, redeemed, he can sing, “God now you can see me. I’m naked and I’m not afraid. My body’s sacred and I’m not ashamed.”

Faces Of The Day

For his book The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride, Sébastien Lifshitz collected portraits of gay relationships he found at yard sales and flea markets:

Lifshitz, who also made a documentary film on this subject, raises an important point when he reminds us that all of these photos are pre-digital era: “Because to obtain these images, they had to have gone to a small neighborhood photo lab to develop the film and then go back to pick up the prints. They, therefore, had to run the risk of exposing themselves socially. The need to keep a memory of their love was certainly stronger than the disapproval of some business or any concerns about what others might say.”

Lifshitz spoke about the collection in an interview earlier this year:

Who are the individuals featured in these photos?

I don’t know these people — they are anonymous to me. I can’t really even say that each person photographed into the book is gay, except when it’s obvious. What I like is that there are different levels of reading these photos — I would say three levels to be exact. The first one is the pictures of obviously gay single people or couples, the second is the pictures of people which can be seen as “undefined” (we’re not sure) and the third level is the ones that are obviously not gay but playing with a gay attitude (cross-dresser, some “garçonnes,” etc.). I love the ambiguity and diversity of these pictures. These photographs ask questions. I didn’t caption the photos because I don’t know quite anything about each of them (no name, no location mentioned most of the time). I wanted to expose them like the way I found them: without any information, like mysterious pictures.

The Buddhist As Novelist

Discussing her new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki connects her Buddhism to her writing, noting in particular the way her “sense of self is a more shifting (shifty?) and pluralistic entity” than is typical:

A Tale for the Time Being plays very overtly with this notion of self or selves, which in Buddhism is called no-self, or anatman. Buddhism teaches that because everything is impermanent, there is no fixed self that remains unchanged in time. And Buddhism also teaches that there is not an independent self, that can exist separate from others. Thich Nhat Hanh calls this interbeing. So what we experience as the self is more like a collection of fluid, interpenetrating, interdependencies that change and flow through time. The title, time being, refers to just this, and the novel, with its two narrators Ruth and Nao, is a kind of overt performance of these Buddhist propositions of interbeing and time being.

I think in my previous work, too, the choice of narrative voice, or voices, is related to my pluralistic sense of self. This was true even before I knew much about Buddhism. I’ve never been able to write from a single point of view, or even stick to a single grammatical person. All my novels contain multiple narrators, some of whom speak directly, using the first-person pronoun “I,” and others less directly, using third- and sometimes even second-person pronouns. The use of these pronominal shifts and multiple POVs destabilizes the sense of there being a singular “author” running the show, in charge of the fictional world, and I like that ambiguity. In the past, I’ve tried to write in an omniscient voice, but the characters refuse to cooperate.

Mental Health Break

The magic of acrobats:

Does Terrorism Have Its Roots In Religion?

CJ Werleman fisks Sam Harris over his recent post emphasizing the connection between Islamic doctrine and jihadist violence, noting that “maturing counter-terrorism analysis has brought new information to light.” He uses the example of Anwar al-Awlaki to show the limits of Harris’ approach:

Harris’ contention that terrorists are motivated more by the writings of the Koran, rather than by economic, political, social, and military oppression, is based on feeling rather than fact. Harris is unable to explain the transformation of U.S.-born terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki’s views in the decades before his death, because there is no evidence to suggest that a religious awakening led to his adoption of a radically different theology. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, al-Awlaki told journalists: “There is no way that the people who did this could be Muslim, and if they claim to be Muslim, then they have perverted their religion.” Explaining the concept of Jihad, he said, “If there is an invading force from outside, then we would, too, struggle to defend ourselves, and that is where armed combat occurs. So actually, fighting is only part of a jihad, and it’s considered to be a defensive force in order to protect the religion.”

The U.S. government had determined al-Awlaki to be a moderate, and he even spoke at a lunch event at the Pentagon. By 2010, however, he had become increasingly disillusioned with U.S. foreign policy…. Al-Awlaki’s radicalization is consistent with the historical pattern of political activists adopting a belief in terrorism when political action fails to bring about change. “From the French anarchists who began bombing campaigns after the defeat of the Paris Commune, to the Algerian FLN struggling to end French colonialism, to the Weather Underground’s declaration of a state of war following state representation of student campaigns against the Vietnam war,” terrorism is nearly always rooted in political and economic oppression says NYU adjunct professor Arun Kundani.

Christopher Massie, however, points to others who think more like Harris:

[T]here are journalists and scholars who present compelling cases that ISIS’s actions are at least partly grounded in the teachings of Islam. In a September 1 story in The New Republic, Graeme Wood traced [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s appointment of himself as caliph, as well as the group’s “taste for beheadings, stonings, crucifixions, slavery, and dhimmitude, the practice of taxing those who refuse to convert to Islam,” to its “almost pedantic adherence to its own interpretation of Islamic law.” In an interview, Wood said that while he considers the political factors behind the group’s ascent “at least as important,” it is clear that “their beliefs are central to their self-conception” and are therefore vital to grasping the differences between ISIS and other jihadist groups. He observed that journalists who do not understand the way ISIS thinks “are missing a part of the story.”

David Cook, an associate professor at Rice University who studies Islam, is more emphatic: “To say that ISIS doesn’t have anything to do with Islam is just the statement of an ignoramus or an apologist. There is support for the things that ISIS does inside the Koran. There’s support for things like beheading and different exemplary punishments that you can easily find.”

Harris’ new book Waking Up is our latest Book Club selection, introduced here. Buy it here and join the discussion at bookclub@andrewsullivan.com.

The Things They Carried

Thom Atkinson photographed the battle kits of British soldiers over the course of 1,000 years:

The series, appropriately titled Soldiers’ Inventories, starts with the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and chronicles the gear soldiers carried into 12 other battles, from the battle of Waterloo to the war in Afghanistan. “Britain spends a lot of its time fighting people,” says Atkinson.

Each photograph is like a wartime version of Things Organised Neatly. Of course, the kits include things designed to kill people in ever more efficient ways. But they provide a glimpse into what the boredom and monotony of war, with things like playing cards, checkerboards, and iPads. To gather the objects, Atkinson visited living history communities, whose members collect such things for for reenactments. He would spend hours organizing the gear just so, beginning with bigger pieces like a musket or a jacket and filling in the holes with smaller objects. “It’s a lot like Tetris,” he says.

The above kit was fit for a knight during the siege of Jerusalem in 1244. See more of Atkinson’s work here.