The Dish

Stephen Williams reviews the latest work by Bruce Ellis Benson:

The argument in this volume is that Nietzsche retained his native Pietism. He was brought up in a Pietist home and broke away from the beliefs which it housed, but he did not thereby cease to be religious or pious. He aspired to become a disciple of Dionysus, a devotee of Life, of which Dionysus is the symbol. This determination to pursue a way of life is rightly called "piety" when we observe the continuities between Nietzsche's background Pietism and his later quest. His Pietism was a way of life rather than a set of doctrines.

The form remains where the content changes. In pursuit of what changes, Nietzsche sought out a musical ask sis. Benson explores this carefully. Ask sis is a form of spiritual exercise in self-transformation. It is not identical with asceticism, which carries connotations of bodily denial. It is affirmative of bodily life as well as negative toward spiritual sickness and the enemy of decadence, also carefully explored by the author, which Nietzsche self-consciously fought in himself.

Music was a vital and central force in Nietzsche's life, but for those Greeks whom Nietzsche so loved and to whom he was so indebted, it was a far more basic force than we tend to imagine when we hear the word "music." For Nietzsche, music forms the soul; it effects a profound spiritual formation. As far as he was concerned, once he had shrugged off the baleful influence of Wagner, music assumed its proper office of fostering spiritual health and cheerfulness, which is to say, a form of life. Pietism was a heartfelt way of life.

In sum: Nietzsche sought to know, follow, pray to Dionysus, god of Life, through a musical ask sis, and, in doing so, he transplanted a form of Pietism onto the soil of Dionysus or, better, cultivated the apparently alien form of Dionysus on the soil of native Pietism. He may not have succeeded in overcoming his childhood Pietism. But it is what Nietzsche was about, even if he did not fully know it.

Graeme Wood gets caught up in the frenzy:

After and during the Saturday victory, fans set me on fire twice. They were harmless conflagrations, but they reminded me what a blessing it is, in so many ways, not to be the type who wears polyester and flammable hairspray. A man ignited a sparkler next to me, in an area packed so tight we were pressed together, chest to back. By the time he realized his folly, sparks had sizzled through my shirt and lightly scorched my skin. At Tahrir Square, which is Cairo's Times Square, fans shut the place down to traffic and began lighting aerosol cans ablaze. One burnt off the fringe of my hair.

Carl Zimmer reports:

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention – not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Heather MacDonald doesn't appreciate how the faithful connect religion to ethics:

Would someone please provide an example of

a. someone actually claiming that murder, say, (or theft) is fine at all times and places, or

b. someone claiming that murder (or theft) is fine at all times and places because there is  no God, or

c. someone claiming that murder (or theft) is fine at all times and places because there is  no God, and then being recalled to sanity by an invocation of the Sixth (or Eighth) Commandment?

I have simply never witnessed the need to reference to God to establish the validity of our laws against extortion, say.  Real-world moral disputes are more complicated:  Is health care a right?  Who should pay for it and how much should one group pay for another’s health care?  Is economic regulation theft?  Is theft admissible to stave off starvation?  We answer these questions by drawing on our innate and developed moral intuitions and our society’s legal framework.

Does anyone really believe that Denmark and Copenhagen are going to stop enforcing contract law because they have “exhausted the patrimony” of Leviticus and are uncomfortable invoking God as the source of their commercial code?

Michael Fitzgerald sorts through a number of studies on the economic effects of religion:

Among the most provocative findings have come from Robert Barro, a renowned economist at Harvard, and his wife, Rachel McCleary, a researcher at Harvard’s Taubman Center. […] The two collected data from 59 countries where a majority of the population followed one of the four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. They ran this data – which covered slices of years from 1981 to 2000, measuring things like levels of belief in God, afterlife beliefs, and worship attendance – through statistical models. Their results show a strong correlation between economic growth and certain shifts in beliefs, though only in developing countries.

Most strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.

Denver, Colorado, 7.18 am

David Benjamin:

There are no lies in Sarah's book; nor in her life, nor in her heart. Utterances that seem untrue are not lies, because Sarah believes them true. If she says one thing, then later forgets what she said and says the opposite, Sarah Palin is neither lying nor mistaken, nor forgetful, because at each moment, she believes what she has said. And a minute later, she will believe something else, if she says it. Whatever she says, if she says it, will be true. But if it's not, so what? It's words, only words.

Sooner or later, words fail everyone. This goes double for Sarah and her faithful. Sarah Palin is the voice – and the embodiment – of the inarticulate.

Douthat applauds the pro-life movement's gradual acceptance of women in the workplace:

During the ‘08 election, you’d often hear media types buzzing about how Palin was a bad mother for putting her political ambitions ahead of her family; you’d almost never hear that from pro-lifers. Some of this reflects partisan biases, obviously — but some of it reflects a real sea change in how religious conservatives view women in the workplace.

Indeed, you might say that the pro-life movement has done an impressive job of embracing, albeit slowly, the positive achievements of the feminist revolution, while remaining steadfast in its opposition to that revolution’s darker consequences. (Well, O.K., you might not say that, but I probably would.)

Matt Taibbi shares the Dish's desire to have politics be about arguments about solutions to emergent problems. He's not unaware that the culture war has helped prevent this, which is the core reason I supported Obama in 2007. But Taibbi sees Palin as a kind of anti-matter to Obama's matter. And he's dead on:

Rush [Limbaugh] is no Einstein, but the man does research. It may be fallacious and completely dishonest research, but he does it all the same. His battlefield is world politics and most of the time the relevant action is taking place in Washington. As good as he is at what he does, he still has to travel to the action; he himself isn’t the action.

Sarah Palin’s battlefield, on the other hand, is whatever is happening five feet in front of her face. She is building a political career around the little interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding her sawdust-filled head. 

And in the process she connects with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America on a plane that’s far more elemental than the mega-ditto schtick. Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).

A People reader asks Palin, "How is your daughter Bristol doing as a young mother?" She replies:

She's spectacular. She's amazing. Still doesn't get a lot of sleep because Tripp is a light sleeper through the night and Bristol's got him all the time. But she's going to college, she's working and taking care of the baby. She's got her hands full. But very, very strong, very optimistic. She teaches me good lessons through all of this, too. She keeps things in perspective. She is realizing that her good decisions today will bear fruit, perhaps years down the road, but she's seeing now that it's worth it to take the high road when it comes to the [custody] controversy with Levi [Johnston] and him doing his porn stuff [posing for Playgirl]. It's all about the baby, it's all about what he is going to grow up with, and she knows she has to pull even more weight to make sure Tripp has a good upbringing.

More unprompted attacks on the father of her grandson – "doing his porn stuff". And more inconsistency:

note how she both accuses Levi of not being a good father and also criticizes him for seeking legal custody of his son, Tripp. Again, there is no logic here and no behavior that would comport with a mother seeking the best for her family. Something else is going on here between Levi and Sarah, some game of chicken in which Palin keeps goading, placating and then attacking the father of her grandson. And the father of her grandson, a mere 19 year old, is clearly unintimidated. Why unintimidated? In his words:

I just look at her in disgust. … It's almost funny, that she's like, 46 years old, and she's battling a 19 year old, and I'm winning. And I'm telling the truth. She's lying and losing. … If you look at her face, she's got — she's really — you can tell her mind's going 100 miles an hour when Oprah asked her those Levi questions. … I've got a lot more knowledge and credibility than she gives me credit for.

It's a war of nerves right now behind this world-famous politician-celebrity and a 19 year old from Wasilla. and Levi seems the only one not even beginning to buy her constant b.s.

(Photo: Sarah Palin with child, Trig, at a book tour in Grand Rapids. Michigan. By Bill Pugliano/Getty).