The Dish

Ross Simonini defends Carl Sandburg’s work:

Nonsense is for everyone. It falls off the tongues of all speakers of all languages everywhere, from Hugo Ball in Switzerland to Aimé Césaire in Martinique to SpongeBob SquarePants in Bikini Bottom. True, nonsense words and sentences can’t make arguments or walk through A-ergo-B lessons, but this is part of nonsense’s reason for existence: anti-logic (“breaking the oppressor’s language,” says Césaire). It is a parody of language, a burlesque, and yet it still deeply resonates, not with specific emotions or ideas, but with the uncanniness of a life-altering dream.

“We are familiar with the frequently beneficial consequences of involuntary askesis. How many times have we heard as we have visited a parishioner in the days following a heart attack, “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me – I’ll never be the same again. It woke me up to the reality of my life, to God, to what is important.” Suddenly instead of mindlessly and compulsively pursuing an abstraction – success, or money, or happiness – the person is reduced to what is actually there, to the immediately personal – family, geography, body – and begins to live freshly in love and appreciation. The change is a direct consequence of a forced realization of human limits. Pulled out of the fantasy of a god condition and confined to the reality of the human condition, the person is surprised to be living not a diminished life but a deepened life, not a crippled life but a zestful life,” – Eugene Peterson, under The Unpredictable Plant.

A reader writes:

I read the entry "How Natural Is Masturbation, cont."  Then I noted the next title, "Waiting for Growth," followed by "The Daily Wrap."  Then, I went back to the top, and found "They Had It In Their Hands."

Hmmmmm…

From Bernie Madoff to Dick Cheney: how knowledge of the other can lead to tormenting them:

Nativism is never pretty – from the right or the left. The way in which both Jon Chait and Matt Yglesias have responded to Veronique de Rugy's rhetorical excess is beneath them.

Jonah Lehrer explains:

The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.)

Caleb Crain remembers the jolly fellows, "a certain type of American man—rowdy, boastful, hard drinking, and fond of games, brawls, and tricks—who could dependably be found in village taverns and on city streets":

Jolly fellows found themselves besieged when the nineteenth century's famous reform movements began to attack drinking, brawling, gambling, and whoring. Reform arose in the Northeast but quickly spread south and west, transforming society wholesale: The average American drank an estimated 7.1 gallons of alcohol in 1830, but only 1.8 in 1845. The alteration is sometimes credited to the religious movement known as the Second Great Awakening. But Stott quotes a Mississippi boatman's belief that "religion is generally located in the upper story" and suspects that the deeper cause was industrial capitalism, which shifted America's ethos from sympathetic interdependence to prudent individualism.

Manners became finer, diets became more sophisticated, homespun fabrics gave way to factory-made ones. Men in suits were unlikely to soil them by brawling. An early sociologist, studying the change as it hit an Indiana village in the 1860s, noted that guilt, gossip, and legal coercion joined forces. Before, "the typical man was a fighter"; afterward, he was "a champion of denial." Once credit agencies started to record men's drinking habits, jolly fellowship was doomed.

The kicker from Graeme Wood's dispatch on the Iranian holy city of Qom:

Despite their conservatism, Qom’s pilgrims seemed motivated not by passion for Ahmadinejad—I never heard anyone say his name, though the “Leader” Ali Khamenei was mentioned repeatedly over outdoor loudspeakers—but by a total denial of politics, and a preference for something much simpler. In Tehran the previous week, I’d heard many rumors about protests, violence, provocation. Here I saw no sign of disloyalty to the government (save one: on a campaign bumper sticker with a picture of Ahmadinejad next to the slogan Man of the People, someone had scraped out his eyes and cheeks). Instead, I felt the opposite of the idealistic flurries of this summer’s protests—the happy docility of a one-party state.

Or rather, surely, the indifference to politics that true faith evokes. There is such a faith in Islam, and it is obviously as different from Islamism as true Christianity is from Christianism. Because it is based on a transcendent experience of God that makes the desire to control others, rather than to love them, seem absurd.

Meghan O'Rourke delves:

In the wake of the AIDS crisis and then 9/11, the conversation about death in the United States has grown more open. Yet we still think of mourning as something to be done privately. There might not be a “right” way to grieve, but some of the work [psychologist George] Bonanno describes raises the question of whether certain norms are healthier than others. In Western countries with fewer mourning rituals, the bereaved report a higher level of somatic ailments in the year following a death.

Today, [psychoanalyst Darian] Leader points out, our only public mourning takes the form of grief at the death of celebrities and statesmen.

Some commentators in Britain sneered at the “crocodile tears” of the masses over the death of Diana. On the contrary, Leader says, this grief is the same as the old public grief in which groups got together to experience in unity their individual losses. As a saying from China’s lower Yangtze Valley (where professional mourning was once common) put it, “We use the occasions of other people’s funerals to release personal sorrows.” When we watch the televised funerals of Michael Jackson or Ted Kennedy, Leader suggests, we are engaging in a practice that goes back to soldiers in the Iliad mourning with Achilles for the fallen Patroclus. Our version is more mediated.

Still, in the Internet age, some mourners have returned grief to a social space, creating online grieving communities, establishing virtual cemeteries, commemorative pages, and chat rooms where loss can be described and shared.

(Photo by Flicker user squigglypuddle)

Dacher Keltner studies human nature:

[We can] see the great human propensity for compassion and the effects compassion can have on behavior. But can we actually cultivate compassion, or is it all determined by our genes?

Recent neuroscience studies suggest that positive emotions are less heritable—that is, less determined by our DNA—than the negative emotions. Other studies indicate that the brain structures involved in positive emotions like compassion are more "plastic"—subject to changes brought about by environmental input. So we might think about compassion as a biologically based skill or virtue, but not one that we either have or don"t have. Instead, it"s a trait that we can develop in an appropriate context.

Virtue is acquired. Love is learned. Forgiveness is a strain. This is why I believe that Jesus came to help us.