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Xavier Marquez unpacks the political psychology referred to as the “good Tsar” bias, when leaders escape blame for the disasters and mistakes that happen under their rule – anyone or anything but the ruler is held accountable:

The “good Tsar” bias does not incline people to say that the world is just, or to rationalize injustice as somehow deserved, only to deny that those leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the nation (the Tsar, the Führer, the King, etc.) bear responsibility for bad outcomes in everyday life; that responsibility, instead, is assigned to subordinates. In this respect, the bias appears to be more closely related to what Dan Kahan and others have called “identity-protective cognition“: the closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people’s identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one’s identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure. And leaders, like Hitler, who are the focus of high-intensity rituals associated with big national occasions — plebiscitary elections, victories in war, even set-piece speeches on the occasion of good economic news — are precisely the sorts of leaders who become associated with important community symbols; indeed, in important ways, they come to symbolize the community, as long as the rituals are successful.

Dreher applies the theory to various aspects of contemporary American life:

We saw it in Catholic circles post-Boston, with the desperate attempts by some conservative Catholics to wall of John Paul II from the catastrophe. If you were reading certain Catholic blogs at the time, the rationalizations for John Paul’s inaction were legion. The Holy Father was kept in the dark by disloyal subordinates. The Holy Father was too sick to act. The Holy Father has a secret plan to deal with the scandal. Et cetera.

There is no theological reason for this strategy. Papal authority, even papal infallibility, does not depend on the capability of a pope to govern prudently. Dante, in the Commedia, exemplifies the perfectly Catholic position: loyalty to the Church and to its teachings, including the papacy, but unleashing hell on the corrupt popes. The “Good Pope bias” here was not really a theological defense — a theological defense was not strictly necessary — but a psychological one.

It doesn’t have to be focused on a person. You’ve probably heard the line, “conservatism cannot fail; it can only be failed” describing, from a liberal perspective, the way movement conservatives rationalize the failures of conservative government. For these people, corruption, bad judgment, or ineptitude on the part of elected conservative leaders doesn’t disprove conservative ideas or principles; it only means they weren’t really tried. The failed presidency of George W. Bush had nothing to do with the wrongness of conservative ideas, you see; it was because Bush wasn’t sufficiently or genuinely conservative. In this case, the Good Tsar is not a person, but an ideology.

Responding to criticism that Pope Francis hasn’t acted swiftly or decisively enough on the issue of sex abuse by Catholic priests, Garry Wills offers a theory why –  Francis realizes that “without addressing structural issues in the Vatican, meaningful action to restore trust in the priesthood and church authority cannot get far.” One issue is celibacy:

Yes, celibacy does not directly and of itself lead to sexual predation. There are many unmarried men and women who are not predators. But Catholic celibacy is not simply an unmarried state. It is a mandatory and exclusive requirement for holding all significant offices in the Church. This sets up a sexual caste system that limits vision, empathy, and honesty. It enables church rulers to be blithely at odds with the vast majority of their own people. According to a 2011 Guttmacher Institute study, 98 percent of American Catholic women of child-bearing age have had sex—and, of that 98 percent, 99 percent have used or will use some form of contraception. Yet celibate priests tell us they know what sex is really about (by their expertise in “natural law”), and in their view it absolutely precludes birth control. There is an induced infantilism in such cloistered minds, an ignorance that poses as innocence. This prevents honesty at so many levels that any trust on sexual matters begins in a crippled state, handicapping all treatment of sexual predation in the Church.

Another problem that stands in the way of true reform is clericalism:

The previous three problems [celibacy, homophobia, and patriarchy] converge on the clerical mindset that afflicts all bureaucracies, but especially sacred ones. Advancement of one’s career involves deference to those above, adherence to corporate loyalties, and a determination not to hurt the institution (demonstrated by signal loyalty). Questioning “church teaching” is subversion. This leads to support of one’s own in all ways possible—as far as one can go, for instance, in denying sin among one’s colleagues. This is the area in which Pope Francis has made some initial moves, challenging the power of the Curia (Rome’s bureaucracy).

But challenge is not change, and so long as these structural issues persist, it will be impossible to restore trust in the Vatican’s authority. No pope can change all these things all by himself, even one as winning as Francis is proving. If it is to be done at all, it must be by a joint effort of the whole People of God. Perhaps that is what Francis is waiting for. I suspect he would welcome it.

Recent Dish on the topic here.

Trent Dalton visited the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, to talk with Steve Quinto, an American businessman who believes the world is “in the second phase of certain self-destruction.” But Steve and his wife, Ruth, aren’t worried – they’ve been building their dream retreat:

Steve’s utopia … [is] an 800ha living ark that he has spent the past eight of his 79 years creating, investing his life’s fortune in the shipment of 300 tonnes of materials from around the world to the very edge of human existence. Paradise. Salvation. A new world for when the old one dies. He calls it Edenhope.

Dalton goes on to describe his tour of Edenhope, which, Steve estimates, can comfortably accomodate 23 people:

The turning track straightens to a clearing and there it is:

the dream, Edenhope, a new world among the trees, a network of wooden bridges and paths and staircases weaving through manicured garden beds and rolling orchards with fruit trees in the hundreds and a kitchen hut and 10 octagonal bungalows made of high-end red hardwood timbers. The wondrous dreamscape includes wild blue flowers and bird of paradise plants and trees so big their root ­systems form houses of their own. There’s a communal library; a warehouse filled with ­endless tools and hardware; a surgery stocked with enough medicines to last two decades.

It’s a staggering work of human endeavour. Steve brought an earthmover and a front-end loader here from Canada. He rallied workers, paid and paid for their services for eight years; organised thousands of nine-hour sailing journeys back and forth between civilisation and sanctuary, hauling floors and sacks of concrete and machinery and miscellaneous goods in preparation for the apocalypse. He walks to a patch of dirt in the centre of his village. “It started here,” he says. “It was nothing but Ruth and I in two hammocks tied to trees.”

Steve closes his eyes and breathes his home in deep through his thin chest. “This is the birth of a new species,” he says. “This is the birth of beauty. This is the birth of dreams.”

(Photo of Vanuatu by Graham Crumb)

This post on the intellectual shallowness of some New Atheists stirred a number of readers to write. One connects it to two other Sunday posts on meditation and mindfulness:

If Michael Robbins wants us to worry that the decline of organized religion implies some loss of certainty about the foundations of our ethics, we will need some data showing that religiosity correlates with ethical behavior.  Did the universal piety of the European Middle Ages really make that a more ethical time?  Today, as then, we live in a world of murderous crusaders, rapist priests, and covetous megachurches.  What’s different today is that we also have deeply ethical atheists, agnostics, and secularists who debate the fine points of moral behavior with as much rigor and passion as theologists do, and who are building great ethical revolutions such as environmentalism on the surprisingly robust foundation of a practical, secular ethics.

Much of this success rests on the self-explanatory Golden Rule.  No fear of damnation is needed to explain why it’s a good idea to treat others as you would like to be treated.  It’s a contract, and you get security and stability only if you obey it.  The obviousness of this contract also makes it a firm basis for moral innovation.  You can get 80% of the way to understanding environmentalism, for example, by seeing it as the application of the Golden Rule to more remote relationships, such as between a river polluter and fishermen far downstream, or between humans and animals, or between humans and the natural forces that sustain them.

Of course, there’s a deeper basis to secular ethics for those who seek it, and your back-to-back posts by Christopher Isherwood and Rowan Williams both refer to it.

It lies in the insight that our illusion of self or ego is the real foundation of evil.  Meditation, as Sam Harris argues in The End of Faith, can briefly relieve us of the sensation of “I.” What’s left is an emptiness (“the body as a sort of cave” as Williams puts it) out of which comes Isherwood’s certainty: “Supposed knowledge of individuality … is nothing but illusion and ignorance.”  If everything we are is relational, and there is no ego to defend, then to be good toward others arises out of the essence of what we are.  Call it the social contract, or call it a spiritual insight, or call it God, but it’s definitely not the infantilizing fear of damnation. What’s more, it’s working.

Isherwood, from the 1940s until the end of his life, was a devotee of Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy – you can read about it in his last major work, My Guru and his Disciple. And Williams is an Anglican priest, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. There may be a secular basis for the ethics both men point toward, but neither can be claimed for the atheist camp. Another reader:

The religion Robbins, Hart and their ilk describe is not the religion believed and practiced by the vast majority of the religious. Good grief, Christians are burning witches in Africa, the US is littered with creationist “museums”, and Robbins wants atheists to focus on “austere abdication of metaphysical pretensions”? When Robbins says his religious belief isn’t like belief in the Easter Bunny, I’m happy to agree. For the vast majority of the religious, it’s exactly like belief in the Easter Bunny.

The religious intelligentsia want to embrace the vast majority of Christians (who believe nothing like they do), as part of their faith, and at the same time decry atheists who focus on that vast majority as failing to engage “true” Christianity and the deep, meaningful arguments for the faith.

When Robbins writes: “Of course the dead in Christ don’t intervene with God to help you find your car keys, and of course the Bible is inconsistent and muddled (no matter what the Southern Baptists claim to believe), and of course I find it extremely unlikely that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse”, that’s when he gets to criticize atheist focus.

And this from a reader who notes that it “always is your threads on belief and atheism that prompt me to write a grumbling missive to you”:

What Robbins, and by extension you and Nick Spencer, seem to want is a Christian monopoly on “good values” – charity, humility, self-sacrifice, concern for the downtrodden; essentially liberal humanism with the theological scaffolding still attached – such that an anti-Christian (opposite of Christian) morality is by definition against all of these things and for “bad values.” Nietzsche, for all his brilliance and insight, was a fiercely anti-democratic elitist who hated weakness and had no use for social justice (Ayn Rand aped much what Nietzsche was doing, but with far less wit and humor). Presumably Robbins wishes contemporary atheists would own up to this and get down with their bad selves. In value-neutral terms, he thinks Christianity is a cat and Atheism is a dog and modern “New” atheists are dogs that eat cat food.

This is wrong for at least two reasons. First is Nietzsche’s gross misreading of social history and his own time. He castigates Christianity for glorifying weakness and poverty across millennia, without noting that Europe’s nations and their institutionalized Christianity, whatever their rhetoric of altruism, operated by the values he extols: aristocracy, patriarchy, indifference to suffering. It was the conditions created by these values and systems that birthed socialism and communism, largely atheistic movements that Nietzsche loathed.The other, related reason Robbins is wrong is his ‘no true Christian’ assumptions. The Christianity of doubt that you and he seem to both favor is a lovely little thing, but it has little truck in the popular consciousness. Mainstream Christianity, especially that which is most influential in our politics, is as it ever was in Nietzsche’s time: mouthing pieties of love and sacrifice, while in practice giving cover to a plutocratic status quo, and holding contempt for anyone that doesn’t fit its definition of humanity.

It also has evolved a proud scientific illiteracy. Atheists spend so much time knocking down what Robbins thinks are self-evidently stupid ideas like Creationism, because those are the kinds of ideas that are being most advanced by American Christianity. If modern atheists are theologically illiterate, it is only because modern Christianity is too. These aren’t strawmen being knocked down; as the top comment on that Slate review points out, 46% of Americans believe in literal creationism. No atheists are going to meet Robbins in metaphysical combat, because the battle is being waged elsewhere.

To close, if atheists were the anti-humanists of the “true” Nietzschean type, there would be far fewer fellow advocates for the purported Christian values of human rights, social justice, and egalitarianism. You certainly won’t find them in the bulk of American Christianity.

Carl Zimmer suggests that religion and science coexisted easily in many Renaissance minds. The developing science of geology, for example, was influenced by 16th- and 17th-century understandings of the divine:

You don’t have to page through old books to see just how geologically-minded people in the Renaissance had become. Their paintings show us where their eyes turned when they looked at landscapes. And remarkably often, they turned to rocks. A number of the finest painters of the Renaissance incorporated exposed layers of rocks in their pictures – the fruits of careful observation. They were looking at the intricate effects of millions of years of geological change. …

“The world is not eternal,” declared the Jesuit priest Benito Pereira in the 1570s. “From its beginning to those days no more than five thousand six hundred years have elapsed.” It turns out, however, that many philosophers didn’t follow Pereira example very closely.

They accepted that the Earth had not existed forever, but they saw it as lasting far longer than a few thousand years. Some treated Noah’s Flood as a real geological event, but merely as the most recent of many great cataclysms. And for all the vigor of the Counter-Reformation, no one was burned at the stake for such claims.

Writers in Italy and elsewhere continued to develop ideas about the history of Earth. They investigated fossils more deeply, they thought long and hard about how layers of rock formed, and they considered how volcanoes and earthquakes shaped the planet. By the 1700s, the outlines of modern geology were emerging. But the proto-geologists of the 1700s didn’t see their work as a fundamental break from the past. Instead, they saw a seamless connection reaching back centuries.

(Image: Apparition of The Virgin to St Bernard, showing rocks in the background, by Filippino Lippi, 1486, via Wikimedia Commons)

Last year, Kate Kelly, a human rights lawyer and Mormon, began a campaign to open the priesthood to female leadership. Ordain Women attracted support but also significant controversy within the community, and last month the Church excommunicated Kelly – a decision she’s appealing. Cadence Woodland, a lifelong Mormon, sees (NYT) such stifling of dissent as a sign that the Church’s “Mormon Moment” – “not just the frenzy of interest that rose (and largely faded) with Mitt Romney’s campaigns for the presidency, but a distinct period of dialogue around and within the Mormon community” – has faded. She explains she stopped attended services in December:

The church will continue to lose members like me until it realizes that messages about diversity and inclusion are hollow when excommunication and censorship are the responses to dissent. While the church invests in missionary work, especially overseas, an unwelcoming posture is likely to hinder its growth.

The true legacy of the Mormon Moment might just be that the church was given the chance that many religious institutions desperately need to stay relevant in the 21st century: the opportunity to open itself to criticism and inquiry. The church has chosen not to. And it has killed its own moment by doing so.

Citing Woodland, Hemant Mehta suggests that “Mormons aren’t alone in screwing up their golden opportunity”:

For all the power evangelical Christians, Southern Baptists, the Catholic Church, and the Mormons have today, can you imagine how much more they would have if they supported marriage equality and abortion rights a decade or two ago? Instead, their own actions have forced young people to leave the institutions, drop their religious labels, and search for more welcoming communities.

Woodland is upset about that. She shouldn’t be. She did herself a favor by leaving a Church that shows no desire to improve. If more people followed suit, maybe these institutions would finally rethink their policies.

But in an interview, Kelly explains that she hasn’t given up hope:

How has the campaign been received? Has there been much support within the Church?

We have had a huge outpouring of support from men and women in the Church. It has been amazing to watch this movement grow so quickly. There has also been negative feedback and repercussions, but the good outweighs the bad, by far.

Did excommunication come as a shock?

I was completely shocked. I have lots of faith in humanity and in justice. So, I thought there was no way they would excommunicate me. There was no way they would do something that was just so plainly wrong. …

Will you give up the Ordain Women campaign?

I will not give up speaking on behalf of female ordination. Not because I refuse to do so, but because I am not able to do so. I cannot live an inauthentic life and that is what my leaders are asking of me.

 

A recent addition to the genre, Le Week-end:

The reader who pointed to Finding Mr. Right as evidence of a Chinese appreciation for romantic comedies responds to the critic who argued that culturally specific jokes don’t translate well:

It’s not true. In Finding Mr. Right, the heroine is a fanatical fan of Sleepless in Seattle, a comedy by the notoriously verbal Nora Ephron. Shakespeare in Love by the even more linguistically-oriented Tom Stoppard was a huge underground hit in China on DVD. And North American audiences have embraced British romantic comedies such as Bend It Like Beckham without even knowing exactly what the title referred to.

This reader is exactly wrong; what we often enjoy in our filmgoing experience are familiar tropes cycled through a foreign sensibility. In fact, you could argue that’s exactly what continues to make Shakespeare so popular (in all his myriad forms) with North American audiences.

Meanwhile, Megan Gibson suggests that the romcom genre peaked 25 years ago, with the release of When Harry Met Sally:

Part of what makes the movie so great is its simplicity.

First of all, the two leads aren’t thrown together due to some ridiculous bet (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, She’s All That), nor are they dealing with any kind of magic or spell (Groundhog Day, 13 Going on 30). Harry and Sally aren’t even grappling with any class or status differences (Pretty Woman, Notting Hill). Both are white and privileged, living in New York with huge apartments and loads of disposable income and time.

Instead, the Harry and Sally are simply dealing with the age-old question of the differences between men and women. The issues that the pair – along with their two best friends, Jess and Marie, excellently played by Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher, respectively – face are pretty universal in the relationships of 20 and 30-somethings everywhere: fights over possessions when moving in with someone; needing a “transitional person,” aka a rebound, after a break-up; dealing with a partner who’s “high maintenance” – a term that the movie just happened to have coined. And, of course, the tension and awkwardness that follows having sex with a good friend. What’s even more remarkable is how relevant the movie still feels today.

Watch it again. Aside from some hairstyles and sartorial choices, the film has aged remarkably well, largely thanks to its script.

Recent Dish on the state of the romantic comedy here, here and here.

MessyNessy profiles the GIF artist Oamul, particularly praising his On the Road series:

Oamul is a talented young illustrator and animator from China who brings his hand-drawn illustrations to life in these enchanting GIFs. His subject matter ranges from things he sees, hears and experiences on his travels and in his daily life to his favourite movie scenes….

In an interview last year, Oamul talked about how he became an illustrator:

When did you first discover you liked illustration? What were your influences?

When I was a kid, I saw my sister had drawn a picture about Sailor Moon. At that time, I wanted to draw things that I enjoyed and liked, so I began to use a pen to sketch everyday.

How was your design education? Were you formally educated in design, or was it just a hobby?

After my parents discovered I was gifted at drawing, they decided to send me to formally learn art. When I went to university though, I chose Interior Design. Although interior design is very different from what I create now, it still has a big influence in my work. After I graduated, I learnt 3D animation in a computer game company. Those experiences were crucial in influencing my work today.

What do you think of Design and illustration in China? Do you think it has its own style, or do you think that it is still influenced by the West?

I think today, China’s illustration is becoming more and more diverse, all designers having their own style. But we are still learning all the time from many influences all over the world.

See more of his work here.

Recently, Jordan Ellenberg noticed that, judging by the most-frequently-highlighted passages in Kindle bestsellers, the overwhelming majority of people who buy Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century don’t make it far past the first pages. As William Falk observes, “the Kindle formula also works with fiction”:

Ellenberg’s dullness detector uncovered a curious phenomenon among readers of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year. The five most popular highlights all occur in thelast 20 pages of the 771-page novel. Is that a compliment? I suspect not. The Goldfinch is one of those self-conscious “masterpieces” that some readers and critics adore — and some, like me, find bloated and self-indulgent. To get to the end, I found myself skimming over dense chunks of pointless description and meandering subplots. … I think Tartt’s novel would benefit if it were cut by, say, 250 pages. Kindle doesn’t lie: To be read more, write less.

Meanwhile, Tom Lamont advocates abandoning boring books early on:

[O]f course you should stop reading when the fireworks aren’t there. When you aren’t impressed, lulled, entertained, lightened, depressed, remoulded, whatever you go to books for. Even if it means reshelving the thing with that telltale halt in the creases on the spine, or admitting to friends, spouses or book clubs that you’ve bunked a recommendation.

Alex Clark differs:

Believe me, I am not defending every book that gets published, nor telling people to force themselves onwards when something is clearly a) dross or b) so completely antithetical to everything they as a reader hold dear that only misery awaits. That would be ludicrous, masochistic and likely to result in a more total disenchantment with reading. … But I am saying that if you give up on a book the minute you don’t like a character, twig a plot development, see quite where the author’s going with it all, have a sudden yen for a game of Candy Crush – then you’re going to miss out. I’ve nothing against reads that are quick and dirty fun, but seriously good books are immersive experiences, demanding of time and patience. Respect them.

Previous Dish on Piketty here, and previous Dish on The Goldfinch here.

Virginia Hughes explores why autism studies have exploded in the 21st century. Considering that many more males than females are diagnosed with the disorder, she explores how gender factors into funding:

In 2009, the National Institutes of Health spent $196 million on autism, compared with $186 million on Parkinson’s disease and $22 million on Down syndrome. In her new paper, [science historian Sarah] Richardson takes a close look at hundreds of grant applications and published studies related to autism and sex differences. Many grant applications cite autism’s rising prevalence as prime motivation. But they also frequently site the sex bias and [psychologist Simon] Baron-Cohen’s theory [that autism’s “primary characteristics are just an exaggeration of typical differences between men and women, and that they’re caused by excessive exposure to male sex hormones in the womb”].

Richardson describes grant proposals investigating autism’s sex bias through the lens of genetics, epigenetics, gene-hormone interactions, brain anatomy, chemical exposures, rat brain cells, and even the nervous system of worms.

She also found 442 studies related to autism and sex differences that have been published since 1980. Of these, 86 percent came out after 2001, and 10 percent were authored by Baron-Cohen. The rest came from laboratories in a variety of fields, including endocrinology, genetics, brain imaging, and molecular biology. Since 2001, animal research on this topic has exploded.

This is all evidence, Richardson says, that autism has become a “biomedical platform” for scientists of all stripes who are looking for funding, particularly in this era of shrinking science budgets. “We show how, over time, researchers have begun to link their very basic research — even if it’s on nematodes — to frame it as a contribution to autism,” she says. “In the funding and publication structure, there’s been a real shift toward opportunistically using extreme-male-brain-type theories to gain research funding.”

Previous Dish on autism here, here, here, and here.