Matthieu Aikins captured the above footage in Aleppo last June, when he spent a week accompanying the Hanano Civil Defense team to sites of death and destruction. He recounts how the volunteer rescue team responded after a helicopter dropped two barrel bombs on civilian land:
A rebel shouted from the road: “There are children in that car.” Annas ran over to a little blue sedan that lay crumpled near the site of the second bomb; it looked as if it too had fallen from the sky. He started prying frantically with a crowbar at the rear door; a mother and her children were still in the back seat. The mother had been decapitated by the blast, and the children were pale and immobile. As he hefted their small bodies out, he saw why. The little boy was missing his right leg below the knee, and had bled to death. His sister had taken a fatal piece of shrapnel through her chest.
The site was close to several hospitals, and the wounded — including the driver of the sedan, the children’s father — had already been carted away. The team realized they were just recovering bodies from the wrecks. But they worked urgently; the site was wide open and exposed and the helicopter might return at any minute. It was hot and there was a sharp stench in the air, more acrid than blood. Someone yelled that a plane was coming, and the crowd broke and ran in a panicked herd. But it was a false alarm. When the last body was out, the team climbed back into the truck and headed toward the old station; the whole affair had taken 15 minutes.
K. Sabeel Rahman unpacks Nicholas Carnes’ White CollarGovernment, which documents “the dominance of upper class individuals in the composition of legislatures”:
The intuition that class skews politics is mainstream by now, but Carnes provides a novel account of the mechanics of class identity in public policy. The issue for Carnes is not income levels so much as occupational background—the ways in which policymakers have earned their living in the past. Work, in his view, is what most centrally shapes daily life, and as a result, political attitudes. Carnes shows that working-class backgrounds—having the experience of working in occupations that provide little material security and generally require less formal education—characterizes 65 percent of American families, but are vastly underrepresented in Congress. This has major repercussions for Congress’ political views and outcomes. Even when controlling for differences in party affiliation, constituencies, campaign contribution sources, and demographic factors, legislators with working-class backgrounds are systematically more liberal on economics—in both their individual voting records and political attitudes towards issues like the role of government and the importance of social safety net policies. …
In real-world terms, turning the tables would have a major impact. If Congress’s class composition reflected the country as a whole, Carnes estimates it would be more labor-friendly and less business-friendly—enough to flip approximately six major legislative policy issues per term. If we were to reweight the last few Congresses to reflect the country’s actual class composition (while retaining other partisan and geographic features), a host of corporate-friendly liability shields and tax incentives would have failed, as would the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the financial bailout.
Last weekend we flagged philosopher Roger Scruton’s new book, How to Be a Conservative. In an interview he expands on his distinctive style of conservatism:
Q: It struck me that the empirical side of your conservatism is also underpinned by what might be call a metaphysics of personhood, a conception of the nature of the human person.
RS: That’s absolutely true. I think it’s what conservatism—my kind of conservatism, at least—shares with liberalism: an attempt to found things ultimately on a vision of what the human person is. Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality… the good in the present.
Related to this is the emphasis you place on what you call the “first-person plural,” a phrase that occurs several times in the book.
Yes. Ultimately, political order does not generate itself. For that reason, social contract theories are suspended in mid-air, so to speak. All political order presupposes a pre-political order, a sense that people belong together. And then, of course, they might seek a contract that embodies their togetherness. But the togetherness has to be there.
With Oakeshott’s remarks about conservatism as a “disposition” in mind, I was very struck by something you say about the tone of voice in which this book is written. You say: “The case for conservatism does not have to be presented in elegiac accents.” What do you mean by that?
So much of modern political conservatism—and you see this in America, which has a quite articulate conservative movement compared with us—is phrased in elegiac terms. [It’s about] what we’ve lost—we’ve lost the traditional working-class family, the black family or whatever it might be. Now, all that is perfectly reasonable. But the most important question is what have we got, rather than what we’ve lost, and how do we keep it?
Dreher applies Scruton’s insights to his interest in the “Benedict Option” as a “way forward for religious conservatives in this rapidly changing social order”:
We must give up on the hope of restoring the past in this culture. It’s not that some aspects of the past shouldn’t be reclaimed, but rather that doing so, at least at a society-wide level, is not feasible at this point in time. The more we act as if it were so, the greater our losses will be once we definitively lose an unwinnable battle. This “take back America” stuff is self-deluding nostalgia, and the more conservatives believe it, the worse off they will be.
There are times when you have to fade into the forest and retrench. I’ve called this call for retrenchment the Benedict Option, because it strikes me as the most sensible strategy by which religious conservatives can engage the world as it is now and is to come. The Benedictines were ordinarily not completely cloistered; they engaged with the people in the areas where their monasteries were. But they established walls and habits that set them apart from the secular world, and gave them the means to preserve their identity over generations. This is what I’m talking about: how to preserve the core of our identity in a post-Christian culture?
Recent Dish on Dreher’s arguments for the Benedict Option here, here, and here.
“The pretensions of human cultures and civilizations are the natural consequence of a profound and ineradicable difficulty in all human spirituality. Man is mortal. That is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin. Man is a creature of time and place, whose perspectives and insights are invariably conditioned by his immediate circumstances. But man is not merely the prisoner of time and place. He touches the fringes of the eternal. He is not content to be merely American man, or Chinese man, or bourgeois man, or man of the twentieth century. He wants to be man. He is not content with his truth. He seeks the truth. His memory spans the ages in order that he may transcend his age. His restless mind seeks to comprehend the meaning of all cultures so that he may not be caught within the limitations of his own.
Thus man builds towers of the spirit from which he may survey larger horizons than those of his class, race and nation. This is a necessary human enterprise. Without it man could not come to his full estate. But it is also inevitable that these towers should be Towers of Babel, that they should pretend to reach higher than their real height; and should claim a finality which they cannot possess. The truth man finds and speaks is, for all of his efforts to transcend himself, still his truth. The ‘good’ which he discovers is, for all of his efforts to disassociate it from this own interest and interests, still his ‘good.’ The higher the tower is built to escape unnecessary limitations of the human imagination, the more certain it will be to defy necessary and inevitable limitations. Thus sin corrupts the highest as well as the lowest achievements of human life. Human pride is greatest when it is based upon solid achievements; but the achievements are never great enough to to justify its pretensions. This pride is at least one aspect of what Christian orthodoxy means by ‘original sin.’ It is not so much an inherited corruption as an inevitable taint upon the spirituality of a finite creature, always enslaved to time and place, never completely enslaved and always the illusion that the measure of his emancipation is greater than it really is,” – Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Tower of Babel,” in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History.
(Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563, via Wikimedia Commons)
Adam Frank rejects the idea that awe is the “sole province of modern religion,” instead holding that it is “something that is common to all human experience” – which makes it the ideal starting point for conversations between believers and atheists:
[I]t is in response to the experience of awe that we are set on the road to science or the road to spirituality. In that way, you can just as easily ask, “Is the awe of the religious really just scientific response?” as you can ask, “Is the awe of the atheist really a religious response?” In all cases, the significance of this “oceanic feeling,” a term Sigmund Freud popularized, is that it’s pre-scientific and pre-religious. It comes before we opt for explanations of any kind … It’s easy in these discussions to split apart into our usual camps — the atheist vs. the religious. But rather than use this universal sense of awe of as point of contention, it could become a point of where the discussion gets really interesting. I’ve argued for some time that the word “sacred” is, historically, not rooted in any particular religion but refers to exactly that eruption of awe into our everyday lives.
It’s about attention not attribution.
So what if we — atheists and religious folk alike — asked ourselves about both the similarities and differences? What if we made awe the pivot point around which a new kind of respectful discussion might begin? Of course some strident folks will not want to have this kind of dialogue. They’ll want to remain behind their parapets. But for me, that only means they’re no longer interested in the subtleties of their own positions.
Beckett Mufson introduces Jeff Frost’s mesmerizing short film Circle of Abstract Ritual:
Jeff Frost has been filming Circle of Abstract Ritual since he spontaneously decided to capture a timelapse of the Anaheim riots in 2012. Since then—with help from a very successful Kickstarter—he’s been gathering strange and surreal timelapse footage of abandoned buildings, deserted deserts, fiery hillsides, and open roads. The result is a beautifully shot, highly atmospheric glimpse into the underbelly of California, composed of 300,000 still photos. Frost’s stellar cinematography characterizes the city as a dark, mysterious place, where the seemingly familiar streets and avenues harbor a sense of foreboding—under his meticulous lens, even the white, puffy clouds seem to be harbingers of an oncoming storm.
Frost elaborates on his inspiration for the film, explaining that it “began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing”:
The destruction end of that thought began in earnest when riots broke out in my neighborhood in Anaheim, California, 2012. I immediately climbed onto my landlord’s roof without asking and began recording the unfolding events. The news agencies I contacted had no idea what to do with time lapse footage of riots, which was okay with me because I had been thinking about recontextualizing news as art for some time. After that I got the bug. I chased down wildfires, walked down storm drains on the L.A. River and found abandoned houses where I could set up elaborate optical illusion paintings. The illusion part of the paintings are not an end in themselves in my work. They’re an intimation of things we can’t physically detect; a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.
Daniel Larkin raves over Eisa Jocson‘s recent performance at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, titled “Macho Dancer,” calling it “gender-bending cognitive dissonance at its artistic best”:
Jocson learnt a specialized form of male dancing from Manila’s red light district to develop this piece. “Macho Dancing” is unlike go-go boys in New York. It is its own genre best revealed in its own terms by a quicksurf on YouTube. Like any dance form, it spans a spectrum but its core elements consist of a man dancing to music, striking several masculine poses, flaunting his physique, and proceeding to strip his clothes. Some of the Filipino macho dancers don’t stand stationary like the go-go boys in US bars. It’s can often resemble a drag show on a stage, where a man is performing a form of hyper-masculinity. …
But the performance was more than mind tricks for gender studies acolytes.
In fact, it was also just plain cool to watch and hear. The interplay of light, fog, gesture, costume, and music made for scintillating visuals that allowed this persona to shine outside the conventional boxes of gender expression. Allowing hybridized gender to be rhythmic and animated by showmanship was exciting. Although, it is tempting to link Jocson to the drag king tradition, a woman appropriating Manila’s specific style of male dancing is simply without any widely known precedent.
In an interview this summer, Jocson spoke about what she expects audiences make of her performance:
My impression is that audiences that come to see Macho Dancer all have strong opinions afterwards, each one very different from another. For example some people think its made for the male gaze, some people think its made for the female gaze, some think its about gender, some about materiality of the body, some about spirituality through the materiality of the body, some about exploitation and social context, some about making the audience feel guilty, some about exoticism, some about objectification, some would react on the position of the piece in the performing arts market, some were curious if I was really a woman or a ladyboy, some were over protective of their partners who came to watch with them, some people have expressed their fascination to the point of fondly proposing marriage… etc…
I perform a proposition. It is up to the audience where they want to take it, how to look at it, how to position themselves in the work. Distance is important to analyze one’s experience of a performance.
Joe Pinsker asks why the tradition of men paying on first dates with women persists:
A [new] survey … found that about 77 percent of people in straight relationships believe men should pay the bill on a first date. The survey, put together by the financial website NerdWallet, polled roughly 1,000 people who had been dating their partners for six months or more.
The company’s survey indicates that, in the early stages of courting, the pressure to pay falls primarily on men, but this imbalance hardly dissolves as the relationship progresses. Fifty-six percent of men foot the bill in full once they’re in an established relationship, and, even further down the line, 36 percent of men pay all of household bills, versus 14 percent of women. There’s not much in the way of historical data on the question of who pays for dates, but the findings of a 1985 poll suggest that very little has changed in the past 30 years. …
Who’s expected to pay for a date may seem trivial—some would even argue that covering the tab is a form of respecting women—but there’s reason to believe that this minor, “benevolent” form of sexism can lead to a fraught question of what the man is then owed.
Alice Robb presents new findings on why some disabled men pay for sex:
[Sociologist Kirsty] Liddiard interviewed 25 physically disabled men and women, recruited through ads on websites and in publications for people with disabilities. (The ads didn’t mention that she was studying sex work.) Of the 16 men included in the study, seven said they had at some point purchased sex from a female sex worker. (None of the women had ever paid for sex.) This is consistent with other research that suggests disabled men seek out prostitutes or “sex surrogates” at higher rates than non-disabled men.
In a 2005 survey carried out by the British magazine Disability Now, 22 percent of the 1,115 disabled male respondents admitted they had at some point paid for sex, and 37.6 percent said they’d at least considered it. (Only 1 percent of disabled women had hired a sex worker, though 16.2 percent had thought about it.) Researchers estimate that about 10 percent of all British men have ever visited a prostitute. …
[Liddiard] found that for many of the men, it was as much about demonstrating their independence as it was about the sex. For Harjit, a 23-year-old-student whose parents had moved into his university residence to care for him, making secret arrangements was as much an accomplishment as the sex itself. “From the excitable way such stories were told, it appeared that a lot of the ‘buzz’ … was as much from exercising agency, autonomy, control and independence as it was about experiencing sexual fulfilment, pleasure, and satisfaction,” wrote Liddiard.
Other men simply wanted to have an experience they believed they wouldn’t have otherwise. “I wish I could go out and meet someone, but it’s not that easy,” one man complained. “I can’t go into a nightclub and easily pull, although I have in certain circumstances, but I can’t do it easily,” said another. Mark, a 35-year-old Liddiard interviewed in person, said that his experience with a sex worker was the only time he’d ever felt “sexiness.”
The Dish 
