The Dish – Page 355

The Soul Of John Updike

In a review of Adam Begley’s Updike, William Deresiewicz finds that writer’s short story, “Pigeon Feathers,” offers telling insight into his religious beliefs. In the story, the character David is asked by his mother to kill the pigeons roosting in their barn, which gives him “the sensation of a creator.” How Deresiewicz describes what happens next:

It is when he’s burying these creatures that he has his epiphany. He has never seen a bird up close before. “Across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him.” Now he knows “that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let  David live forever.”

The story is a credo at once theological and artistic.

David finds God by emulating him. He creates. That he creates by killing— the story’s brazen moral scandal—only draws him nearer to his model, for He does the same, as Piet in Couples understands. The more important point lies in the way in which he kills: carefully, cleverly, with a patience both of seeing and of skill. It takes no wit to recognize a third, implied creator, intermediate between the other two. The boy creates the birds; the artist creates the boy; the deity creates them all. “Controlled rapture” is a precise description of the state in which the patterns of Updike’s own work, here and elsewhere, have been so evidently crafted. The joy hangs level  everywhere around us.

This is the argument from design, and it is also an argument for design. Updike believed in art as imitation, a tracing of the wonders God has put in pigeons and in Davids. “Pigeon Feathers” tells us that people do not matter, not even to themselves, unless they have immortal souls. Elsewhere Updike makes a corollary statement about fiction. Without souls, he asks, “are mundane lives worth writing about?” Art becomes a form of affirmation. Updike didn’t want a better world, he only wanted this one, forever. He may not have thought that everything was holy—he wasn’t pious or sentimental—but he thought that it was beautiful, to use the language of art, and he certainly thought, to use the language of Genesis, that it was good. And men and women (their sins  included)—they were very good.

Recent Dish on Updike’s faith here.

(Photo by Partha S. Sahana)

The Ideology Of ISIS

Kevin McDonald argues that its origins are not at all medieval, but rather modern, and indeed, even Western:

It needs to be said very clearly: contemporary jihadism is not a return to the past. It is a modern, anti-traditional ideology with a very significant debt to western political history and culture. When he made his speech in July at Mosul’s Great Mosque declaring the creation of an Islamic state with himself as its caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi quoted at length from the Indian/Pakistani thinker Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami party in 1941 and originator of the contemporary term Islamic state. Maududi’s Islamic state is profoundly shaped by western ideas and concepts. He takes a belief shared between Islam and other religious traditions, namely that God alone is the ultimate judge of a person, and transforms this – reframing God’s possession of judgment into possession of, and ultimately monopoly of, “sovereignty”. Maududi also draws upon understandings of the natural world governed by laws that are expressions of the power of God – ideas at the heart of the 17th-century scientific revolution.

Ella Lipin focuses on its allusions to Islamic eschatology and how ISIS uses the promise of an apocalyptic battle as a recruiting tool:

In July, ISIS released the first two issues of Dabiq, its digital magazine, revealingly named after a Syrian town believed to be the site of the future climactic battle, to be fought between Muslims and Romans, that will lead to Judgment Day.

The use of Dabiq draws from hadith, revered accounts of the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings or practices. The relevant passage states that the end of days won’t come until the battle at Dabiq. After the battle, the triumphant Muslims will go on to conquer the Western world (symbolized by Constantinople). ISIS reprinted this hadith in full in the first issue of its new publication. Herein lies ISIS’s propaganda strategy: employ Islamic apocalyptic tradition – with the West as the modern day Romans – to mobilize followers. Both the organization and its new recruits understand this script, made all the more relevant and compelling by the recent debate about U.S. airstrikes in Syria. …

This interpretation of events is not limited to Sunni extremists; a large number of Muslims believe these events may be imminent. A 2011-2012 Pew survey found that a high percentage of Muslims in the Middle East believe they would witness events leading to the Day of Judgment. In Iraq, where ISIS has recently expanded, 72 percent of respondents expect to experience the coming of the Mahdi, a messianic redeemer who will restore the political and religious purity of Islam. While the figures were lower in other Muslim countries—Tunisia (67 percent), Lebanon (56 percent), Morocco (51 percent), the Palestinian Territories (46 percent), Jordan (41 percent), and Egypt (40 percent)—the apocalyptic tradition clearly resonates deeply throughout the region.

Last week, Laurie A. Brand looked into how ISIS is trying to promote its ideology by rewriting the school curriculum in the areas it controls:

The term “Syrian Arab Republic” is to be removed completely and replaced with “the Islamic State,” and the Syrian national anthem is to be discarded or suppressed. There is to be no teaching of the concepts of national patriotism (wataniyyah) or Arab nationalism (qawmiyyah); rather, students are to be taught that they belong to Islam and its people, to strict monotheism and its adherents, and that the land of the Muslim is the land in which God’s path (shar’ Allah) governs. The words “homeland” (watan), “his homeland,” “my homeland,” or “Syria” are to be replaced wherever they are found with the phrases “the Islamic state,” “his Islamic state,” “land of the Muslims” or the “Sham (or other the Islamic State-governed) Province.” The teacher is instructed to replace any gaps in Arabic language and grammar instructional materials that may result from the suppression of these terms with examples that do not conflict with sharia or the Islamic State. In addition, all pictures that violate sharia are to be removed, as are any examples in mathematics that involve usury, interest, democracy or elections. Finally, in the science curriculum anything that is associated with Darwin’s theory or evolution is to be removed and all creation is to be attributed to God.

Meanwhile, Michael Koplow cautions against conflating the defeat of ISIS with the defeat of the ideas it espouses:

ISIS’s ideology is a revolutionary one seeking to overturn the status quo and to constantly expand, which makes it particularly susceptible to living on beyond the elimination of its primary advocate. Much like Voldemort’s life force after he attempts to kill Harry Potter as a baby, ISIS’s ideology will not die just because its host body is decimated. It will lurk around until another group seizes upon it and resurrects it, and much like ISIS seems to be even worse than al-Qaida, whatever replaces ISIS is likely to be more radical still. The problem with Obama’s speech yesterday was that it set an expectation that cannot be fulfilled. Yes, ISIS itself may be driven from the scene, but the overall problem is not one that is going to go away following airstrikes or even ground forces.

The Carpaccio Dog

In an essay exploring how Vittore Carpaccio portrayed animal life, Jan Morris turns her eye to “the Carpaccio dog”:

Vittore has been called pantheistic. I am quite sure he revered Nature, anyway, or he could not have painted the birds and beasts as he did. He seems to have loved them in the way Montaigne loved his cat—as equals, unpatronizingly, clear-eyed, never gushingly. Consider the little dog in his celebrated painting concerning Saints Jerome and Augustine, one of the most famous dogs in all art—the Carpaccio Dog, in fact. Nearly everyone wonders what kind of dog he is. Ruskin, in 1851, thought he was exactly like his white Spitz Wisie (which he described, during a nadir in that animal’s career, as being a “poor little speechless, luckless, wistfully gazing doggie”). Pompeo Molmenti (1907) considered him “a lively little spaniel.” Terisio Pignatti (1958) believed him to be a Maltese puppy, and called his coat “fluffy.” So did Kenneth Clark (1977) in his book Animals and Man. I myself though (2014) prefer to think of him as a dog of no particular breed, a tough urchin mongrel, cocky, feisty, and fun, rescued from the street perhaps by one saint or another, and cherished by multitudes down the centuries. To me he is simply the Carpaccio Dog. Doggie indeed! Fluffy my foot! …

In a preliminary sketch for his picture about Jerome and Augustine, the Carpaccio Dog was not a dog at all, but what seems to be a cat, a crouching, weasely thing with a collar around its neck. Having failed so abysmally in this exercise, Carpaccio gave up, turned the animal into a dog and, so far as I know, never tried to paint a small feline again.

(Image: The Vision of St. Augustine, 1502, by Carpaccio via Wikimedia Commons)

Quote For The Day

“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’ clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools,” – William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

(Photo of Faulkner’s Underwood Universal Portable typewriter by Gary Bridgman)

Mental Health Break

Playing with fire never looked so beautiful:

Seeing The Glass As Half-Empty

As a species, we’re prone to it:

Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path. The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.

Hundreds of scientific studies from around the world confirm our negativity bias: while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer. Socially, we invest more in avoiding a bad reputation than in building a good one. Emotionally, we go to greater lengths to avoid a bad mood than to experience a good one. Pessimists tend to assess their health more accurately than optimists. In our era of political correctness, negative remarks stand out and seem more authentic. People – even babies as young as six months old – are quick to spot an angry face in a crowd, but slower to pick out a happy one; in fact, no matter how many smiles we see in that crowd, we will always spot the angry face first.

Face Of The Day

Sage Sohier captured the expressions of people being treated for facial paralysis:

Sage Sohier spent three years at a facial nerve clinic, photographing people in the beginning stages of treatment of facial paralysis for her series “About Face.” The portraits of men, women, and children of all ages and ethnicities with varied causes and visible extents of paralysis are striking. Looking directly into the camera, directly at the viewer, the patients smile.

Sohier adds:

Most people I photograph are acutely aware of their imperfections and try to minimize them. Some have confided in me that, in their attempt to look more normal, they strive for impassivity and repress their smiles. They worry that this effort is altering who they are emotionally and affecting how other people respond to them.

See more of her work here.

War Stories

During World War II, book publishers began to mass-produce cheap copies of their most valuable hardcovers, selling them to the army for pennies. Yoni Appelbaum looks back at which titles made a particular impression on GIs:

No book generated more passion among its readers than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a gritty coming-of-age novel. On a Pacific island, a lucky soldier given a new copy “howled with joy,” but knew he’d have to sleep on top of it if he hoped to hang onto it long enough to finish it. A 20-year-old Marine “went through hell” in two years of combat, but wrote from his stateside hospital bed that the book had made him feel human again. It might, he conceded, be “unusual for a supposedly battle-hardened marine to do such an effeminate thing as weep over a piece of fiction,” but he was now making his way through the book for the third time. In France, the colonel commanding an anti-aircraft battalion being shelled by German artillery found one of his soldiers reading the book between explosions. “He started to read us a portion … and we laughed like hell between bursts. It sure was funny.” The tough West Pointer later found a copy of his own, and was tempted to pull it out and read it while wounded and pinned down by enemy fire. “It was that interesting,” he recalled, in a letter to the publisher.

Appelbaum goes on to describe how the publishers’ wartime gamble helped the industry flourish after troops came home:

Suddenly, anyone who wanted to could fill a shelf with books. Paperbacks lost their stigma. The Armed Services Editions succeeded in “conditioning the younger generation to be perfectly at home with books in paper covers.” The new technology, initially feared and scorned, proved to be the industry’s salvation. Many readers first hooked with paperbacks later purchased hardcovers, fueling sales and providing the old-line publishing industry with a vastly larger market for its wares.

Talk Yiddish To Me

Tanya Basu asks what the future holds for the Ashkenazi language:

Joseph Berger, a religion reporter for The New York Times, explores [the future of Yiddish] in his book, The Pious Ones: The World of Hasidim and Their Battles with America, published Tuesday. In it, Berger recounts meeting Rabbi Hertz Frankel, the principal of a Satmar girl’s school in Brooklyn, home to the largest concentration of Yiddish speakers in America, along with a large population of Orthodox Jews. Frankel comments on how secular Judaism has contributed to the death of Yiddish and a simultaneous loss of traditional Jewish identity:

The secular community is dead, dead, dead. There’s no Yiddish press, no Yiddish theater [not quite accurate since there is one still-vibrant group, the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene]. Dead, dead, dead. There were hundreds of Sholem Aleichem schools, Peretz schools. Where are they? How many Yiddish books are being published? The secular people dominated everything and now they’ve lost. Hasidim are pushing everyone to be more religious, more Jewish.

Rabbi Frankel’s bemoaning of the potential extinction of Yiddish illuminates a greater issue: The language has become synonymous with Orthodox Judaism and has lost its meaning within the secular parts of the faith. It’s a dying language among mainstream Jewish Americans but a thriving one among the Hasidim, who speak the language almost exclusively.

We Have Nothing To Learn From Ants

E.O. Wilson spells out why we shouldn’t look to the insects for moral guidance:

[A] question I hear a lot is, “What can we learn of moral value from the ants?” Here … I will answer definitively: nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are pitiful creatures with wings, huge eyes, small brains and genitalia that make up a large portion of their rear body segment. They have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season. They are built to be robot flying sexual missiles. Upon mating or doing their best to mate, they are programmed to die within hours, usually as victims of predators.

Wilson goes on to explain why it’s “a bit of a stretch” to refer to human societies as “superorganisms”:

It is true that we form societies dependent on cooperation, labor specialization and frequent acts of altruism. But where social insects are ruled almost entirely by instinct, we base labor division on transmission of culture. Also, unlike social insects, we are too selfish to behave like cells in an organism. Human beings seek their own destiny. They will always revolt against slavery, and refuse to be treated like worker ants.