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Larry Siedentop nominates St. Paul in his new book, Inventing the Individual. In a review, Jeremy Jennings unpacks the reasons why:

[A]t the core of both ancient thinking and ancient society was the assumption of natural inequality. Different levels of social status, Siedentop argues, reflected what were taken to be inherent differences of being. Crucially, it was this assumption of natural inequality that was to be overturned by the Pauline interpretation of the significance of the life of Christ. As Siedentop expresses it, Paul wagered on human equality and in doing so he set out a Christian understanding of community as “the free association of the wills of morally equal agents”. In essence … Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual seeks to show how this new assumption of the moral equality of humans came, over a thousand years and more, to transform the way in which we conceived of both society and government.

At its heart is the claim that the Christian assumption of moral equality in turn gave rise to a commitment to the equal liberty of all individuals. If this is true, it follows, as Siedentop states, that it was the canon lawyers and philosophers of medieval Europe and not, as has usually been assumed, the writers of the Renaissance and their rediscovery of ancient humanism who are largely responsible for our modern conception of liberty and who therefore can lay claim to having established the fundamentals of modern liberalism.

In an earlier review, Kenan Malik wasn’t quite convinced:

Siedentop usefully challenges the conventional narrative about the development of the Western intellectual tradition. But the story he tells in reframing that narrative is itself deeply problematic. Consider the issue around which Siedentop builds his whole account: the tension between the Ancient belief in natural inequality and the Christian idea of moral equality. Christianity certainly played a major role in developing notions of equality and universal visions of humanity. Yet, ideas of hierarchy and inequality remained central to the Christian tradition. “It is in the natural order of things”, Augustine preached, “that women should serve men, and children their parents, because this is just in itself, that the weaker reason should serve the stronger.” It was given by nature for the lower orders to serve the upper orders. …

Siedentop disregards, too, the distinctiveness of modern notions of equality. Christian equality was tied to religious belief; hence the long and fractious debates about whether non-Christians were equal, or even possessed souls. The crumbling of belief in a God-ordained order helped, in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, to develop a new, radical, inclusive form of egalitarianism. Having dispensed with God, there was, as the historian Jonathan Israel has put it, no “meaningful alternative” to grounding morality in a “generalised radical egalitarianism extending across all frontiers, class barriers and horizons.” The new egalitarians drew upon radical strands of Christian thought. But they transformed the very meaning of equality.

(Image of statue of St. Paul in front of St. Peters Basilica, the Vatican, via Wikimedia Commons)

Last year, David Sessions wrote an essay about his “deconversion” from Christianity, drawing on some of the ideas we aired last week about religious experience in a secular age. In particular, he noted that “something else besides just theories and arguments was driving the shift” and that, in addition to reading and thinking, he “was pulled along by massive changes in experience.” Dreher compares this to the story of Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, a lesbian academic who became an evangelical Christian (eventually marrying a man), and who admits to praying “that God would give me the willingness to obey before I understood.” Rod considers what this says about the limits of reason in our lives, especially with regard to religion:

The willingness to obey before I understood. Yes, this. Reading that line reminded me of my own slow, winding, herky-jerky path to conversion, and how I kept hitting a dead end because I wanted to understand it all before I obeyed. This doesn’t work.

I was thinking about Rosaria Champagne Butterfield’s point this morning, listening to our priest’s sermon about fasting …, and about how, when I first became Orthodox, I didn’t understand why we fasted, and fasted so strictly. But I did it because that’s what one does as an Orthodox Christian, and everybody in my church was doing it. Now I deeply get it, and as hard as it is, I’m grateful for it, because it’s exactly the medicine I need for my soul. But it took the experience of doing it for years before I really understood it.

What’s interesting about the Butterfield story of conversion in light of Sessions’s story of de-conversion is the role experience plays in both. It is epistemologically humbling, no matter what side of the belief/unbelief divide you are on.

Sessions argues that Rod takes the comparison too far:

There is a superficial similarity in the sense that Butterfield and I both had experiences that changed us before we had a full explanation or argument for what happened. What Butterfield describes … is essentially her embrace of obscurantism, a “truth” that either defies or ignores well-established scholarship—and even her own previous experience—on human sexual orientation. But the fact that experience drives intellectual transformation is not a license to abandon intellectual rigor.

For example, how does she know God has a point of view about homosexuality, or that it’s negative?

Why does she think Christianity requires her to obey it before she understands? What if Christians disagree about what that view is, or think that view is something that’s obviously misinformed? Does it make sense that a Christian God would want a convert to break up a happy family? For a former scholar, Butterfield shows remarkably little philosophical skepticism; she also seems to cast aside her training in how to review and evaluate the available evidence to determine if these views she’s been introduced to are reasonable or even widely considered to be Christian.

Millman make a distinction between Butterfield’s religious experience and the kind Sessions describes having, calling the former “the experience of divine command,” believing you won’t get very far in understanding religion “if you start from the proposition that God’s commands ought to be reasonable.” He defends this approach with an analogy:

the experience of falling in love.

Can we trust it? How should we understand it? How should we respond to it? These are not easy questions to answer. Should you marry the person for whom you experience that feeling? What if the feeling doesn’t last? What if you’re already married – should you leave your spouse for this new love? What if you never experienced that feeling with your spouse – now should you consider leaving them for this other person? Should you shun this person you’ve fallen in love with, lest the experience cause you to do something irrational or morally wrong? Or should you cultivate that feeling of blind devotion while, simultaneously, abjuring any socially or morally forbidden expression of affection? …

These aren’t easy questions to answer – unless you answer that the experience of falling in love is a bad one, to be shunned, categorically, which, it seems to me, devolves into answering that experience as such should have no bearing on our actions. Which, to my mind, is an untenable approach to life.

Dreher agrees with Millman:

This is a fundamental point. Millman explains well why you cannot understand Biblical religion if you expect everything to make perfect sense, especially (he might have added) to a 21st century Westerner. What is reasonable about God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? What is reasonable about God incarnating as a Palestinian Jew and willingly suffering torture and dying, humiliated? God cannot be contained by human reason. This is not to deny the power (and the importance) of reason, only to put it in its proper place.

I chose my profession of my own volition. I refuse to be shamed and stigmatized. I am a proud sex worker. I am #notyourrescueproject

— Belle Knox (@belle_knox) February 16, 2014

A startling percentage of Americans say yes to that question:

According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, only 29 percent of Americans think watching porn is morally acceptable. Somewhat predictably, men and women have very different opinions on the issue: Only 23 percent of women approve, while 35 percent of men think it’s okay. … White evangelicals and people over 68 are the least likely to approve of watching smut: 10 percent and 9 percent, respectively. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Millennials and people who consider themselves religiously unaffiliated approve of porn the most: 45 percent and 53 percent, respectively.

But some trends are more surprising. White Catholics are twice as likely as Hispanic Catholics to find watching porn morally acceptable—28 versus 14 percent. People with an advanced degree are somewhat less likely than college graduates to think it’s morally acceptable to watch (34 versus 40 percent). But both of those groups are significantly more likely than high-school grads to approve—only 23 percent of that group told PRRI it was okay.

For those who like your porn, a new site called SkweezMe wants to “make accessing the content that people want so easy, seamless and stress-free that pirating porn starts to look like too much work”:

The site is structured around tokens — which users buy with money or bitcoin — each of which provides 24 hours of access to anything that’s on the site, period. Unlike a lot of sites that seem to penalize people who only want to take a dip by charging significantly less for monthly subscriptions than a day pass, users can get started on SkweezMe for as little as $2.97 for three tokens — which never expire. … “If I can take 0.01 percent of people watching porn on [piracy-prone] tube sites and get them to pay a dollar a day on Skweez, then we’ve done something that’s good for everyone,” [SkweezMe co-founder Mike] Kulich said.

The industry side of this is just as straight-forward: at the end of each month, 25 percent of SkweezMe’s total generated proceeds go into a revenue sharing pool. Then, the total number of minutes viewed is divided into the rev-share’s pool figure. This determines what a Skweez minute is worth during a particular month. Producers and studios are then paid per minute, all at the same rate, for the total number of minutes their content was viewed. To illustrate, say a minute ends up being worth $1 this month. Now say that Producer A’s content was viewed for 100 total minutes, while Producers B’s was viewed for 1,642. Upon payout, Producer A will get a check for $100 and Producer B will get one for $1,642.

Basically, consumer demand drives compensation in this model, not some predetermined percentage established on the back end. This, hopes Kulich, will encourage studios to pay attention to content quality and put more power in the hands of consumers.

The above tweet is from the young woman at the center of the Duke porn outing:

Knox is a College Republican^[8] and considers herself a sex-positive feminist and libertarian. She believes her experiences are a testament to the rising costs of higher education in the United States.^[7][19]

Melissa Gira Grant, author of the forthcoming book Playing the Whore, describes the work environment at a suburban sex dungeon:

In a dungeon, a client can expect that several workers will be available on each shift, and some of these workers will want to do what he wants to and some won’t. A receptionist will take his call, or answer his e-mail and assign him to a worker based on what he’d like, the worker’s preferences and mutual availability. Some dungeons might post their workers’ specialties on a website. They might also keep them listed in a binder next to the phone, the workers each taking turns playing receptionist, matching clients to workers over their shift. After each appointment the worker would write up a short memo and file it for future reference should the client call again, so that others would know more about him. … There are shift meetings, schedules and a commission split based on seniority. Utility bills arrive, and are paid. Property taxes, too. In some cases the manager would give discreet employment references. And sometimes people were fired.

There was one group of people who did perform unwaged work in the dungeon: the many male “houseboys” who would telephone, at least once each day, to ask to come and clean. The women who worked in the dungeon knew that managing these men’s slave fantasies was itself a form of work, but when they could just turn them loose on the dishes, the worst they would have to do is check later to see if anything untoward had happened to a glass or fork. It was never meant as a commentary on the years of feminists’ arguing over the value of housework, but it still could feel deeply gratifying that the houseboys were made to understand their only reward would be the empty sink.

Hermione Hoby, considering why Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sprawling six-volume autobiography has captivated so many Anglophone writers, concludes that the maximalist approach “gives a reader the irresistible sensation of reading a life as it’s lived – reality, in real time”:

Real life, of course, is mostly boring, and in book one, the longueurs are almost comic in their banality. A teenage mission to procure beer for a New Year’s Eve party, for example, occupies about 70 pages. Throughout, innumerable quotidian tasks are rendered as meticulously and exhaustively as autopsies. Here, for example, is the making of a cup of tea: “After a while I picked up the teapot and poured. Dark brown, almost like wood, the tea rose inside the white cup. A few leaves swirled and floated up, the others lay like a black mat at the bottom. I added milk, three teaspoons of sugar, stirred, waited until the leaves had settled on the bottom, and drank. Mmm.”

Yet, as the New Yorker‘s book critic James Wood put it, “even when I was bored, I was interested.” There is something so compelling and addictive about being immersed in a life like this that it is, as one novelist put it recently, “like reading a vampire novel.” Zadie Smith is among the many writers to declare their fandom, writing at the end of last year: “A life filled with practically nothing, if you are fully present in and mindful of it, can be a beautiful struggle.”

Hoby detects a touch of envy amid the accolades – not because Knausgaard is such a talented writer, “but because he has a knack for defying every piece of received wisdom about how to write well”:

As he declared in one interview: “The critical reading of the texts always resulted in parts being deleted. So that was what I did. My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn’t write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing. Fuck quality, fuck perfection, fuck minimalism. My world isn’t minimalist; my world isn’t perfect, so why on earth should my writing be?”

Previous Dish on Knausgaard here, here, and here.

Do authors betray their loved ones with fictionalized accounts of their lives – and does the answer matter for the reader? Tim Parks explores the morally murky territory between fiction and memoir:

The question is: Can a novel that will affect the author’s closest relationships be written without any concern for the consequences? Will the story perhaps be “edited” to avoid the worst? Or is awareness of the possible reaction part of the energy feeding the book?

Italo Svevo’s Coscienza di Zeno begins with a hilarious account of Zeno’s attempts to stop smoking, always stymied by his decision to treat himself to l’ultima sigaretta, the last cigarette, usually one of the highest quality. Friends were aware this was largely autobiographical.

The novel continues with Zeno’s courting of three sisters; eventually rejected by the two prettiest, he marries the plain one. Again his wife would have been aware of elements from his own life. And now we have the story of a love affair, its various stages recounted in the most meticulous and again hilarious, all-too-convincing psychological detail. Finally, we proceed to chapters on Zeno’s business life, which much resembles Svevo’s own running of a paint company. Nevertheless the author’s wife always stated with great serenity that she was sure her husband had never betrayed her, nor was she shaken in this belief by the fact that his last words, when pulled out of a car accident were, reputedly, “Give me l’ultima sigaretta.”

So, was the introduction of the affair into the novel a kind of trial for her? She had to believe it was just made up. Or was there an agreement between them, explicit or otherwise, that whatever they knew would be kept to themselves, any truth in the matter forever denied? Did Svevo have to introduce the mistress because the shape of the novel required it? If so, wouldn’t there be a certain anxiety that his wife wouldn’t see it that way, and wouldn’t that affect the way he wrote these chapters? What I am suggesting is that in the genesis of a novel, or any work of literature, there will often be private tensions that the general reader will not be aware of playing a part in the creative decisions made. If, then, a reader becomes aware of these tensions, that awareness will inevitably alter the way the book is read.

You know him for his classic novels and searching essays, but Nikky Finney argues that poetry – which Baldwin wrote “throughout his life” – was at the heart of his self-understanding:

Baldwin wrote poetry because he felt close to this particular form and this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his imagination. From the beginning of his life to the very end, I believe Baldwin saw himself more poet than anything else: The way he cared about language. The way he believed language should work. The way he understood what his friend and mentor, the great American painter Beauford Delaney, had taught him — to look close, not just at the water but at the oil sitting there on top of the water. This reliable witnessing eye was the true value of seeing the world for what it really was and not for what someone reported, from afar, that it was.

When Baldwin took off for Switzerland in 1951, he carried recordings by Bessie Smith, and he would often fall asleep listening to them, taking her in like the sweet black poetry she sang. It must have been her Baby don’t worry, I got you voice and their shared blues that pushed him through to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain in three months, after struggling with the story for ten years. Whenever Baldwin abandoned the music of who he was and how that sound was made, he momentarily lost his way. When he lost his way, I believe it was poetry that often brought him back. I believe he wrote poetry throughout his life because poetry brought him back to the music, back to the rain. The looking close. The understanding and presence of the oil on top of the water. Compression. Precision. The metaphor. The riff and shout. The figurative. The high notes. The blues. The reds. The whites. This soaking up. That treble clef. Bass. Baldwin could access it all — and did — with poetry.

Check out Baldwin’s poetry in the volume Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. Recent Dish on Baldwin here, here, and here.

(Photo of Baldwin in 1971 via Wikimedia Commons)

Maria Konnikova searches for a fix:

The ubiquity of modern music and the resulting proliferation of earworms raise [a] question…: How do you dislodge one? In a study that [researcher Lauren] Stewart and the psychologist Victoria Williamson just published in the journal PLoS ONE, they examined thousands of survey responses to see what, if anything, was an especially effective method.

While people’s strategies for ridding themselves of unwanted aural guests fell into one of two broad categories—distraction or coping—the most successful way to remove an earworm, they found, was to deal with it head on, by intentionally listening to the song or singing it out loud, no matter how embarrassing the song.

But it may be futile to try to resist completely, if Stewart is correct about why we get earworms in the first place. In ongoing research with a team of neuroscientists at the University of Western Ontario, she says, “we’re working with the hypothesis that people are getting earworms to either match or change their current state of arousal—or a combination of the two.” She adds, “Maybe you’re feeling sluggish but need to take your child to a dance class, so it could be that an earworm pops into your hear that’s very upbeat, to help you along. Or working in reverse, can earworms act to calm you down?” It would explain why we sometimes get earworms even when we haven’t been listening to music at all, or why people who spend a great deal of time in nature often report beginning to hear every sound—wind blowing, leaves rustling, water rippling—as music, which their brain spontaneously plays over and over. Just as important, it would help explain why our brains often seem to linger on music that we don’t particularly care for.

Previous Dish on earworms here and here. Update from a reader:

For some reason I am highly susceptible to earworms. Once a melody is in my head, it will play on repeat forever. I have been known to lose sleep when an especially pernicious little melody gets its hooks into my gray matter. My wife and kids know this and have to be careful what they sing around the house and how often.

I’m not sure what it is about my brain. I am easily distracted by music and can only play certain kinds of music when I work or read. It is usually extremely minimal ambient music with little melodic or dynamic variation to grab the brain’s attention (I actually run an online label for such music). Of course the brain just loves to find patterns and a simple melody (quite appropriately called a “hook”) is something that the brain just seems to love. The good news is that I have the cure.

Jazz.

Not necessarily any jazz. It should be at least somewhat melodic and instrumental. Standards are great because they have the right combination of familiarity and novelty due to the interplay between melody and improvisation. If an earworm is crawling around in the brain, its little barbs have attached themselves to the part of the brain that wants patterns. The new melody of the jazz tune will sneak it’s way in and replace the earworm melody in the brain. Then as the song develops and improvisation takes over, the melody is basically broken apart and dissipates. Several jazz tunes in a row should work well enough to dissolve even the most pernicious melody (think Pharrell’s blissfully obnoxious “Happy”).

Try it, you’ll thank me.

Steven Soderbergh, emerging from nominal retirement, has created a mashup of the shower scenes from Hitchcock’s classic and Gus Van Sant’s 1998 shot-for-shot remake:

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Jonathan Crow explains the experiment:

For much of the piece, Soderbergh alternates between a scene from the original and one from the remake – Anne Heche, who plays Marion Crane in Van Sant’s version leaves her apartment for work and in the next scene, Janet Leigh shows up at the office. At other moments, he cuts back and forth within the scene; at one point the Marion from the remake is at a traffic light and sees her boss from the original movie. And during a few key points in the film — like the famed shower scene… — Soderbergh does something different. That sequence opens with Heche disrobing and lathering up. But when the killer starts stabbing, Soderbergh jarringly overlays the original movie over top the remake, creating a disconcerting kaleidoscopic effect.

Rachel Arons also recommends the mashup:

The project cleverly doubles down on the great psychological theme of “Psycho,” making every character appear onscreen as a “split personality.” It’s also mesmerizing to watch, like listening to Girl Talk songs or watching Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”:

the fun is in anticipating the breaks and in witnessing the fragments link up to form a larger—and, in this case, seamlessly coherent—whole. But Soderbergh’s double “Psycho” is most interesting for the perspective it brings to the much-maligned Van Sant remake. … Van Sant’s “Psycho” experiment, by replicating Hitchcock’s style frame for frame, exposes how meaning arises in films in ways that transcend mere formal structure or technique. And Soderbergh’s mashup experiment—by placing the original movie and its meticulous but inferior re-creation side by side—allows Van Sant’s experiment to come across as the fascinating failure that it was. Both force us to appreciate the singularity of Hitchcock’s original.

Watch the full mashup here.  Previous Dish on Soderbergh here, here, and here. Update from a reader:

I had just finished reading your post and decided to make a batch of cookies. I turned on the radio and started mixing. Bob Dylan started singing Motorpsycho Nightmare. I wasn’t familiar with it, so I put the spatula aside and listened. It’s about getting stranded on the road and asking the proverbial farmer and his daughter, Rita, for a place to stay. The fifth verse goes:

I was sleepin’ like a rat
When I heard something jerkin’
There stood Rita
Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins
She said, “Would you like to take a shower?
I’ll show you up to the door”
I said, “Oh, no! no!
I’ve been through this before”
I knew I had to split
But I didn’t know how
When she said
“Would you like to take that shower, now?”

Even when you’re not, you’re still spot on. Your timely post made it real.

Behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley notes “a surprising problem for military leaders in times of war: soldiers in battle find it relatively easy to shoot at someone a great distance away, but have a much more difficult time shooting an enemy standing right in front of them”:

George Orwell described his own reluctance to shoot during the Spanish Civil War. “At this moment,” he wrote, “a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards. … Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists,’ but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”

Orwell is far from alone.

Interviews with US soldiers in World War II found that only 15 to 20 percent were able to discharge their weapons at the enemy in close firefights. Even when they did shoot, soldiers found it hard to hit their human targets. In the US Civil War, muskets were capable of hitting a pie plate at 70 yards and soldiers could typically reload anywhere from four to five times per minute. Theoretically, a regiment of 200 soldiers firing at a wall of enemy soldiers 100 feet wide should be able to kill 120 on the first volley. And yet the kill rate during the Civil War was closer to one to two men per minute, with the average distance of engagement being only 30 yards. Battles raged on for hours because the men just couldn’t bring themselves to kill one another once they could see the whites of their enemy’s eyes.