Paula Marantz Cohen attempts to understand George Eliot’s desire for Christian morality without a Christian deity:
Eliot … was an enormously pious young girl. In Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the young heroine, Maggie Tulliver (an autobiographical portrait of its author at that age) is obsessed with God. Maggie reads Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, a book that greatly influenced the young Eliot. But in 1853, her knowledge of German led her to another book, Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which she went on to translate. Feuerbach argued that God is not external to us but a projection of our best qualities as human beings. The Devil is the projection of our worst. This way of thinking came to inform Eliot’s view of God, and influenced her understanding of art and the task of the artist.
Last year, in an essay exploring Eliot’s attitude toward religion, Rohan Maitzen drew a parallel between Eliot and Marilynne Robinson:
“It seems to me,” the novelist Marilynne Robinson has said, “that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.”
Like Eliot, Robinson asserts continuities between belief and unbelief, but she does so by identifying as religious what Eliot saw as intrinsically human feelings. Call them “religious” if you like, Eliot might have said. “I have no longer any antagonism,” she wrote in her letters,
towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies.
Against those “argumentative tendencies” that seem to define the cultures of atheism and religion alike today, Eliot offers us novels like Silas Marner, novels that express her own faith that with sufficient understanding and attention to what is apart from themselves, people can be their own salvation.
Christianity did not initially reject suicide…. In fact, Jesus’ death was understood by many as voluntary. In the Book of John, Jesus says: “No man taketh [my life] from me, but I lay it down of myself.” Then came the martyrs. Some did not want to die, but many did. “I am yearning for death with all the passion of a lover,” wrote Ignatius of Antioch. … The rage for martyrdom went on for centuries. …
The defense of suicide was taken up most forcefully by David Hume in Britain and Baron d’Holbach in France. In their writings, neither man dwelled on the horror that a suicide can bring to family and friends, nor did they consider that suicides, if saved, might get over their misery, averting a tragic error. Hume poked fun at the church, arguing that if death were entirely the purview of God it would be a sin to avoid a stone that falls toward our head. D’Holbach pitied those forced by their belief in God to endure sadness rather than end their lives at will. Both Hume and d’Holbach considered suicide a valid escape from misery.
Hecht continues, “That view, now a defining stance of secular culture, is a mistake and needs rethinking”:
No matter how much of a burden a person thinks he is, it is nothing compared to the burden of his suicide. People do wrenching damage to their communities when they kill themselves. Studies have shown that when parents of children under 18 kill themselves, their children are three times more likely to kill themselves than children who make it to 18 with both parents alive. When one person in a community kills him or herself, the suicide rate in that community spikes. Sometimes it is called “suicidal clusters,” sometimes “suicidal contagion,” sometimes “social scripting,” but the sociology, epidemiology, and psychology literature clearly shows that if you kill yourself it is likely that others will follow you into the grave.
Suicide contagion has been most exhaustively studied in high schools and colleges. It seems that the first suicide normalizes suicide for those who follow; victims give each other the idea that suicide is an acceptable way to deal with problems.
Previous Dish on suicide here, here, and here. The Dish thread “Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing” is here.
Paul Reitter explores how a Jewish perspective might have informed Bambi: A Life in the Woods, the 1923 novel by Austrian writer Felix Salten that was adapted into a Disney movie in 1942:
Writing about a Bambi spin-off in 1930, [Karl] Kraus claimed to detect the sound of Jewish dialect—or “jüdeln”—in the speech of Salten’s hares. Salten was a hunter (a humane one, he always insisted), and, as it happened, he had just published a piece about his love of hunting. Kraus joked that Salten’s hares had adopted a Yiddishy tone of voice in order to blend in with a special type of enemy—the Jewish hunter. The hares were “perhaps using mimicry as a defense against persecution.” When Salten died in 1945, an American critic found a more straightforward connection between the plight of some animal characters and that of the Jews. In his obituary for Salten, the critic, having noted Salten’s “Zionist sentiments,” maintained that the fox in Bambi not only comes across as the rapacious “Hitler of the forest,” but also has a mentality of hatred and rage that bears similarities with Goebbels’ anti-Semitism.
It was not until a decade ago, however, that an actual reading of the “Zionist overtones” in Bambi was proposed.
In an essay published in 2003, Iris Bruce argues broadly that the novel evokes the “experience of exclusion and discrimination.” But she also pays close attention to its language. Salten’s suggestive phrase for butterflies is “wandering flowers,” and Bambi describes them elsewhere as “beautiful losers” who have to keep moving, “because the best spots have already been taken.” Bruce stresses, as well, that the culture of the deer develops around the fact of their victimization: They tell their children tales that “are always full of horror and misery.”
Likening Bambi to Kafka’s talking-ape story “A Report to an Academy,” Bruce claims that Salten’s work, too, is a critique of assimilation. One of the deer uses the loaded verb verfolgen to ask whether humans and deer might get along: “Will they ever stop persecuting us?” When another deer answers that “reconciliation” with humans will eventually come about, Old Nettla, a third deer with vastly more experience of the world, will have none of it. Indeed, her response foreshadows a line from Salten’s Zionist book Neue Menschen auf alter Erde (loosely translated, new people on ancient ground), which expresses impatience with the enduring “dream of full integration.” Old Nettla seethes that humans, “have given us no peace and have murdered us for as long as we’ve existed.”
Reflecting on the way a number of evangelical heavyweights havepraised Pope Francis, the Catholic commentator Raymond Arroyo explains the reasons behind the ecumenical admiration:
One is the great warmth, affection and magnetism of this man—Francis—and his willingness to allow the gospel to shape his ministry in a very profound and visual way. Additionally, the pressures of the culture we find ourselves in has, in a way, forced Catholics and Protestants together in a new way, where they realize that what divides them is far less than what unites them. … And when you hear a Pope stand up and talk about mercy, and forgiveness, and the broken hearts we all endure, and the need to push gossip aside and how destructive that can be in our lives, he’s getting down to the very granule level of faith that I think is appealing to the evangelical and Protestant mind.
The thing that has always impressed me about my evangelical friends—my in-laws are evangelicals, by the way—is their deep concern for the people in the pews next to them. And their willingness to go out of their own comfort zones to help those in their own community. And if the mainline churches and Catholicism have a problem, it’s that at times we can get very isolated. And though we check the boxes, we’re going to mass, we’re living our lives and we’re trying to be good people, extending that into our everyday lives can be a problem. Francis is calling people to allow that message to go deeper and to have personal reverberations in their own lives. I think that’s what they’re finding most appealing.
It’s also a very simple message. It’s a very blunt gospel, in some ways, which startles some people in the Catholic church. They go, “Wait a minute. What happened to the high theology? Where’s the graduate level exegesis here?” Francis isn’t that. I would argue that he’s boiling down the last two papacies with their the great messages and the intellectual heights that were scaled into a digestible message that the masses can absorb. And when I say “masses” I mean 99% of the people in the pews, whether they be Catholic or evangelical.
Bill Keller, an erstwhile Catholic, recently reiterated the case against priestly celibacy (NYT):
The arguments for lifting the requirement that priests forswear sex and marriage are not new, but they have become more urgent. Mandatory celibacy has driven away many good priests and prospects at a time when parishes in Europe and the United States are closing for lack of clergy. It deprives priests of experience that would make them more competent to counsel the families they minister. Celibacy — by breeding a culture of sexual exceptionalism and denial — surely played some role in the church’s shameful record of pedophilia and cover-up.
“Lots of people don’t see [celibacy] as some extraordinary act of witness,” said Thomas Groome, who heads the department of religious education and pastoral ministry at Boston College. “They see it as just a peculiar lifestyle, and one not to be trusted.” Groome was a priest for 17 years but left to be a husband and father. “The loneliness of it, I think, can drive people crazy,” he told me. “I’ve known hundreds of priests in my life,” from student days in an Irish seminary through the priesthood and decades as a theologian. “I don’t know too many diocesan priests, maybe three or four, who have lived a rich, life-giving, celibate lifestyle.”
James Martin, a Jesuit priest, read the piece with exasperation, noting that the article is “based largely on the opinions of two priests who left the priesthood and a sister who left her order, and [Keller’s] own speculation about what the celibate life must be like”:
Maybe it would have been helpful to look at some actual data.
Sure, there is some loneliness in the priesthood–and there are problems in married life too. But the picture that Mr. Keller paints is ridiculous. In the latest survey on priests from the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate in 2009, 95 percent report they would “definitely or probably choose priesthood again,” up from 79 percent in 1970. Wow. Must be pretty lonely.
And as for celibacy “surely” leading to pedophilia and cover-ups, that overlooks the fact that most sexual abuse happens in families, many cases are found in schools and sometimes even in macho places like the Penn State football program. The reasons for the sexual abuse crisis in the church are complex. As they are in families and in schools. But no one says that (a) marriage, (b) teaching or (c) football leads to abuse. Celibacy must be the main culprit in the church, say pundits, because it’s so “weird.”
Previous Dish on the subject here, here, and here.
Your post quoting Francis’s wish for a “bruised, hurting and dirty” Church suddenly sparked a match in my head – the face of the Whiskey Priest, the protagonist from one of my favourite novels, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. And all at once I put my finger on what it is that makes Francis so exciting – he is Greene’s pope. The priest of that novel is drunken, adulterous and self-destructive, weak and self-pitying. He is a “hollow man”, filthy and unshaven. But he is the greatest priest in all fiction because his is the church of the street, the church that will take you however awful or fallen or destitute you are. The church needs to hurt and fail too, if it is to properly care for a fallen people.
“It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful,” reflects the priest. “It needed a God to die for the half-hearted and corrupt”. Even as an atheist teenager I remember being struck by this radically beautiful idea. I came to see two Catholic Churches in my head: the untouchable hypocritical Ratzingers caught up in that perfect web of procedure, and the repugnant filthy whisky priests seeing pity in all humanity. That Francis sees the ideal of the Church to be poor tells me he’s on the right track.
We will never get a whiskey Pope, I suppose, which is a shame.But something tells me Greene would have liked the idea of a hurting church and a Pope who washes the feet of convicts.
Group pictures flatter individual faces more than solo shots, recent research suggests. Cindi May describes a study that “shows that individual faces appear more attractive when presented in a group than when presented alone — a perceptually driven phenomenon known as the cheerleader effect“:
Consider the Laker girls or Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. To many, these women are beautiful and sexy. However, their perceived beauty is in part a visual illusion, created by the fact that cheerleaders appear as a group rather than solo operators. Any one cheerleader seems far more attractive when she is with her team than when she is alone. …
[Researchers Drew] Walker and [Edward] Vul posit that the cheerleader effect arises from the interplay of three different visuo-cognitive processes.
First, whenever we view a set of objects like an array of dots or a group of faces, our visual system automatically computes general information about the entire set, including average size of group members, their average location, and even the average emotional expression on faces. Thus although the group contains many individual items, we naturally perceive those items as a set, and form our impressions on the basis of the collective whole.
In addition, the impression that we have of the group as a whole influences our perception of any one individual item. We tend to view individual members as being more like the group than they actually are. Thus when we see a face in a crowd, we tend to perceive that face as similar to the average of all the faces in that crowd. As it turns out, we find average faces very attractive. Composite faces, which are generated by averaging individual faces together, are rated as significantly more attractive than the individual faces used to create them. According to Walker and Vul, if presenting a face in a group causes us to perceive that face as more similar to the average, we are likely to find that face more attractive.
(Image of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders via Flickr user USAG-Humphreys)
Maria Konnikova considers why, “in the current media environment, a list is perfectly designed for our brain”:
Lists … appeal to our general tendency to categorize things—in fact, it’s hard for us not to categorize something the moment we see it—since they chunk information into short, distinct components. This type of organization facilitates both immediate understanding and later recall, as the neuroscientist Walter Kintsch pointed out back in 1968. Because we can process information more easily when it’s in a list than when it’s clustered and undifferentiated, like in standard paragraphs, a list feels more intuitive. In other words, lists simply feel better.
But the list’s deepest appeal, and the source of its staying power, goes beyond the fact that it feels good.
In 2011, the psychologists Claude Messner and Michaela Wänke investigated what, if anything, could alleviate the so-called “paradox of choice”—the phenomenon that the more information and options we have, the worse we feel. They concluded that we feel better when the amount of conscious work we have to do in order to process something is reduced; the faster we decide on something, whether it’s what we’re going to eat or what we’re going to read, the happier we become. Within the context of a Web page or Facebook stream, with their many choices, a list is the easy pick, in part because it promises a definite ending: we think we know what we’re in for, and the certainty is both alluring and reassuring. The more we know about something—including precisely how much time it will consume—the greater the chance we will commit to it.
The process is self-reinforcing: we recall with pleasure that we were able to complete the task (of reading the article) instead of leaving it undone and that satisfaction, in turn, makes us more likely to click on lists again—even ones we hate-read. The social psychologist Robert Zajonc, who made his name studying the connection between emotion and cognition, argued that the positive feeling of completion in and of itself is enough to inform future decisions. Preferences, goes his famous coinage, need no inferences.
Previous Dish on the allure of the list here, here, and here.
Focusing on the Discovery Channel’s new series Naked and Afraid – which chronicles the experience of “one man and one woman [who] are stranded nude in hostile wilderness without food or water for 21 days” – Joan Marcus examines how she is both drawn in and repulsed by the genre:
Over the years I’ve watched everything from the 2004 makeover show The Swan, in which normal-looking women undergo radical plastic surgery and then compete in a freakish beauty pageant, to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, that grotesque excuse to mock the taste level and dietary habits of the working poor in rural Georgia. I teach a college pop culture seminar, and I like to write about pop culture, which gives me a handy excuse to indulge in reality dreck ad infinitum.
Shows are always upping the ante — increasing the shock factor, finding new ways to traffic in the risqué, the humiliating, the dangerous and disgusting. The more morally questionable a show is, the more likely I am to tune in on the excuse that anything this excessive has to be examined. I do like to think about how, in affording us the pleasure of judging real people in stressful and potentially humiliating situations, these shows palliate us — situating us comfortably in our own realities, reaffirming our cultural norms and making us more satisfied with our own lot in life. But of course my interest is not just intellectual. I’m as rabid a consumer as anyone, and shows like Naked and Afraid that push the boundaries of ethics and decency are on some primal level just a really, really good time.
Obviously I’m not alone here.
4.15 million viewers tuned in for the series premier of Naked and Afraid. The finale was the number one original cable show among women and men ages 25-54; a new two-hour special episode is set to air on December 8. The success of the first season isn’t surprising considering the provocative premise: a man and a woman who have never met, forced to partner up for survival and companionship without one stitch of clothing other than what they can find or make. They have to sleep in close quarters, in makeshift shelters, perhaps huddled together for warmth. They are survivalists, so most likely superior physical specimens who should make for pleasant TV viewing as they bathe in streams and lagoons, haul wood and tend fire and thrust handmade spears into the vitals of wild animals.
But Naked and Afraid turns out not to be particularly sexy. Those of us who tuned in for the nudity probably stuck around for something more troubling: The experience of seeing people at their most vulnerable under constant risk of bodily harm. It’s cringe-worthy, all that unprotected human flesh exposed to every threat imaginable, from sand flies and leeches to caimans and pit vipers.
“We’re just warm, pink, soft bodies,” Billy Berger complains in episode six as he slogs crotch-deep through the Louisiana bayou. “Everything … wants to take a bite of us.” Pinkness does appear to be a distinct disadvantage on this show. In episode three, filmed on a sun-scorched scrap of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Jonathan Klay burns brick red and spends days lying in the sand and moaning. His partner Alison Teal fairs better, suffering only debilitating menstrual cramps and the standard starvation and dehydration routine. I feel for Teal — two days of crippling dysmenorrhea would have me out of the game for sure — but all in all she does well in the Maldives compared to cast members in other episodes. E.J. Snyder steps on an acacia thorn in Tanzania and gets a gruesome infection in the sole of his foot — we see a stomach-churning close-up of the medics slitting the wound and draining the suppuration while he screams his head off. Laura is covered head to toe in sand fly bites, her entire body miserably swollen. Billy and Ky get trench foot. Kim falls deathly ill from bad turtle meat. Puma drinks contaminated water and is carted away on a stretcher. It’s like a live action version of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, so macabre it’s hard to believe all of this is really being served up as entertainment.
Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Edward P. Jones describes his fascination with reality TV and lurid Internet news stories:
INTERVIEWER: You’ve said that TV was a kind of company for you.
JONES: People pooh-pooh it, but on the court shows there’s something wonderful at times, and also awful. There was one episode, I remember, on Judge Judy. This handsome mother and her teenage daughter were suing another woman over two cell phones. They had seen them on eBay and what the woman ultimately sent them was a page showing two cell phones. The woman’s defense was that that’s what they were looking at, that’s what they got. The utter gall of people in life!
Other things I like to watch are true-crime shows—Dateline, 48 Hours. I’m fascinated by the awful, awful things that human beings do to each other. Just the other day, on Huffington Post—AOL is the page that my computer opens up to—a father took his six-week-old infant, because the child was crying, and he put her in the freezer. Luckily, she was saved.
I have been trying to help a friend of mine with her novel over the past few years, and what I noticed, and told her, is that she was failing to show the awfulness of human beings. I’m just fascinated by that father. Because I’ve never done a thing like that, could never conceive of doing that. To see people do these things—I don’t know, I feel blessed.
Though disabled gamers may still be cut off from traditional gaming systems to some degree, a growing number of developers are using the built-in accessibility features of mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad—voiceover, assistive touch, and guided access—to create games for physically disabled and visually impaired players that don’t require the specialized hardware that living-room gaming consoles often do.
BlindSide is one of those games. It’s a survival horror setup, about an assistant professor named Case who wakes up next to his girlfriend, Dawn, in their apartment, after what initially appears to be a power outage. But Case, Dawn, and everyone else have actually inexplicably become blind. At the same time, scary-sounding monsters roam the city. Because Case is new to the feeling of being blind, one of the objectives of the game is to teach players to navigate the environment using audio cues, both from Case, who yells when he bumps into things—“The door is to my left, the kitchen is to my right”—and subtler hints, like the way sound travels in a particular environment. For example, if you’re facing an open window, you hear traffic noise in both speakers, but if you turn to the right, you only hear the noises in the left speaker. Other sounds—a dripping faucet or a noisy TV—also help you get around. …
[A] large part of BlindSide’s success seems tied to the fact that it doesn’t feel like a game that’s been designed for disabled players. A game with no visual stimulus can be just as engrossing for players who can see as for those who cannot, it seems.
The Dish 