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Here’s a great little essay in defense of beards. I’ve made its core argument before, of course. But it’s worth making again:

The mystery of beards altogether is that it’s the growers of them who are questioned as to their motives. Given that a beard will happen of its own accord, shouldn’t it be those who interfere in the process that we ought to be interrogating? Not why do you grow, but why do you shave? I grow because I can’t bear the fag of shaving. Now you explain yourself. We will very quickly, I suspect, find vanity at the root of clean-shavenness, or if not vanity neurosis. All that work for what? To look like David Beckham who reputedly shaves every other inch of his person as well? And having shaved himself to resemble a muscular baby, gets someone else to draw on him with a needle. Tell me that’s not sick.

Esau, you will remember, was a hairy man. You will also remember that it was his brother Jacob, a smooth man, who soft-talked his way into Esau’s inheritance. The smooth do that. For all their hard-scraped air of transparent affability, it is they, not the bearded, who have something to hide.

Amen. Don Draper anyone? Richard Nixon – who fought against debilitating five o’clock shadow much of his life? You betcha. But Howard Jacobson also offers an affirmative beards-are-good argument as well:

It was said of me by my enemies when I first taught at a university that I grew a beard because D H Lawrence had one. Nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t like Lawrence’s beard. It was too sexuo-spiritual for my taste. There was too much intent and pedantry about it, and finished too far from his chin. You can always tell an erotic disciple-seeker’s beard: it doesn’t know when to stop. Had I wanted to model my beard on any novelist’s it would have been Joseph Conrad’s  – a melancholy, well-traveled, utterly unillusioned seaman’s beard. Or the one Henry James sported for a while –  the beard of a man who thought he hadn’t lived enough but was prepared to die trying. A beard should be accepting of human limitations, skeptical but sympathetic, and a little sad.

The beard is … Oakeshottian!

And scene.

(Photo: US actor George Clooney smiles as he arrives for the German Media Award in Baden-Baden, southern Germany, on February 26, 2013. Clooney is awarded for his humanitarian commitment. By Thomas KienzleAFP/Getty Images.)

Mark Oppenheimer complicates the discussion, arguing that being religious dampens creativity only if it “makes you less fun or irreverent”:

[T]he strictures of religion can paradoxically make you fruitful, but not if they are so strict or rigorous—so orthodox—that you become a pill. Not if you can’t take a joke, about your religion or about anything else. Not if you become so uptight that you can’t abide profanity, heresy, or apostasy.

If your religion prohibits you from using profane words, it might make you more creative, because you have to find fresher and better ways to say what you are trying to say, rather than falling back on hackneyed profanities. But if your religion has so straitjacketed your thought that you can’t even think profane thoughts, then of course it has made you less creative. One might almost say that a huge part of creativity involves lusting in your heart, then finding ways to make art of that lust; but if some brand of orthodox religiosity has worked you over too well, and you can’t even admit your heart-lust to yourself, then as an artist you are probably screwed.

Julia Shaw praises Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God, especially the book’s rejection of “traditional narratives about secularization” that “see world-historical events or broad intellectual movements as silver bullets killing God.” Instead, Eberstadt connects the decline of the family to our loss of faith:

Family life is not an outcome of belief but a conduit to religious faith. Eberstadt compares learning religion to learning a language. She argues that “trying to believe without a community of believers is like trying to work out a language for oneself.” Eberstadt’s theory explains the communal way in which individuals “think and behave about things religious—not one by one and all on their own, but rather mediated through the elemental connections of husband, wife, child, aunt, great-grandfather and the rest.”

Her theory is unique. Most secularization narratives ignore the family’s role in religious formation or see familial decline as a result of secularization: people stopped believing in God and then they stopped having families. But Eberstadt turns this simple, direct relationship on its head.

Jordan Hylden isn’t so sure, arguing that Eberstadt’s focus on our domestic arrangements offers too narrow an explanation for such sweeping changes:

[T]he church all too often allied itself with fading political regimes, discrediting it in the eyes of many. The First World War’s senseless violence shattered for a generation the old Christendom synthesis of church and state, and Europe’s churches have never been the same. The church held on in America, since the war did not shatter us like it did the Europeans, and because our churches were not in any case allied so tightly with the state. But the 1960s began to change that, as the civil rights movement and Vietnam began to topple the confidence of many in the American Establishment, and insofar as the “mainline” churches were viewed as part of the status quo. The American social imagination split in two, and ever since then has been characterized by culture wars, with most of religion on the conservative side.

By not telling this story, Eberstadt has left out the lion’s share of “how the West really lost God.” No doubt, her “family factor” played its part, and she is at her most convincing when she shows how family decline was part of a broader trend toward modern individualism. She never claims that family decline is solely responsible, but she claims far too much for it. It is an odd story of Western secularization that leaves to one side most of what Western culture has thought and imagined in its common life about God.

Jen Polleck Michel hesitates at George Saunders’s recent appeal to kindness:

When he fleshes out his vision of human kindness, he seizes on an example from the parent-child relationship: “If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit… YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE.” We are selfish, Saunders says, to want for ourselves. We should abandon desire in favor of love.

This is a fond and familiar heresy: that desire is to be blamed for all moral ills. In his book, The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton compares the Buddhist and Christian solutions to the treachery of desire. Buddha proposed we get rid of desire altogether. He considered it a contagion. But Chesterton defended desire, arguing that the gospel did not obligate us to give up on our desires, but rather, to judge their nature: “I do not see, for instance, why the disappointment of desire should not apply as much to the most benevolent desires as to the most selfish ones.”

In a similar vein, C.S. Lewis takes issue with the idea of unselfishness, in The Weight of Glory:

I submit that this notion [of unselfishness] has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is not part of the Christian faith . . . The negative ideal of unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.

For the greater part of my Christian life, I have failed to understand what Chesterton and Lewis are saying and what the Bible so clearly defends: desire is not evil. A thousand times and more I have hung myself on the accusation of selfishness, living with the burden of be kind, advice that would subtly seek to obligate me to the whole of humanity and will to find me guilty whenever I cannot appease their demands.

Recently, the State Department announced the creation of a new Office for Religious Engagement, which will focus on reaching out to “faith-based organizations and religious institutions around the world to strengthen U.S. development and diplomacy and advance America’s interests and values.” Linda Woodhead casts a skeptical glance at that last phrase, hoping it doesn’t imply that there’s “only one possible model of religious freedom” based on U.S.-style separation of church and state. She holds up Europe as a counter-example:

Europe’s historical entanglement with religion is deep and ancient. In fact, the very idea of “Europe” is a product of Christianity’s attempt to bring unity to this region under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, the rise of European nation states in the early modern period is bound up with the contemporaneous creation of national churches. In other words, in the form in which we know them today European states and churches birthed one another. Only in combination did they have the economic, bureaucratic, and cultural capacity to create unified territorial polities.

The result of this symbiotic relation is that it’s impossible for European countries to make religion purely private without engaging in some of the merciless coercion exercised by those communist countries which attempted—with only partial success—to achieve such an end. Imagine the actual costs and consequences of withdrawing state-support from Christian educational foundations given that in many countries they include a significant proportion of primary and secondary schools as well as universities and colleges—even in France, the EU country with the nearest to a state-church separation.

She suggests “going with the grain of existing arrangements” in the countries we work with to avoid doing more harm than good:

Socio-religious ecologies are just that. They are highly complex systems with path-dependent possibilities which have been laid down over centuries (many more centuries in most parts of the world than in the U.S.). When you look beyond the surface, what appears to be unfreedom on a crude index often turns out to work very differently in context and practice. Rash interventions almost always have unintended, often irreversible, consequences.

Gang of Four performs “To Hell With Poverty” on UK TV in 1981:

Dave Allen of Gang of Four believes that the set of challenges today’s musicians face is the “same as it ever was except for the Internet part”:

At music conferences over the years, I have heard the refrain that musicians should be able to make a middle-class income and should be provided with health insurance. But really? I mean, so should migrant workers toiling in Oregon’s fruit farms. When one starts out, as did I with Gang of Four, the last thing on your mind is getting a decent salary or enough to pay the rent. That comes later, when you enter the “business of making music for sale.” I feel like music has come full circle—it was always hard to make a dime, income very rarely came from record sales, and touring was the holy grail. So now, with the level playing field called the Internet, there is an added dimension to the possibility of making a buck, by using the platforms to extend awareness of your music, to sell directly to fans, to make fans aware of your gigs, etc, etc.

In short: own your own copyrights. Work hard. Play shows. Engage your fans via the Internet. Same as it ever was except for the Internet part.

Now, Rick Moody has called me a closet libertarian because of my attitude as outlined above, but I don’t see any other way. The positive viable future … is now upon us and it looks like the atomization through music-streaming services, a cultural shift by young people to renting, not owning, their music, and demanding access to it easily and cheaply, if not free. Yet, still, there are plenty of people out there who fully support music and musicians and who will happily pay to see them perform, buy their T-shirts, their downloads. But I sense that this is the “tactile generation” that doesn’t see the Internet as a replacement for books or vinyl records. As Sol Lewitt put it: “Every generation renews itself in its own way; there’s always a reaction against whatever is standard.” And Rishad Tobaccowala said: “The future does not fit in the containers of the past.”

Recent Dish on the music industry here, here, and here.

Joshua Rothman reviews Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s Stay, Illusion!, a new book about Hamlet that considers the play through the lens of “love and its internal contradictions”:

All humans need too much. That might not be such a bad thing: at least it is a flaw that we share. But Hamlet, according to Critchley and Jamieson, is too ashamed to share. He rejects not just love—and Ophelia—but all of the passions. That’s a mistake. “To be or not to be—is that the question?” the authors ask. “Perhaps not… . Love is an admission of the power of powerlessness that cuts through the binary opposition of being and not being.” The stability and solidity of love might be a kind of illusion, but it’s a mutual one. Its mutuality makes it sustaining.

Is this what “Hamlet” is really about?

Maybe, maybe not. This way of reading the play has one huge advantage: it makes sense of Hamlet’s enraged breakup with Ophelia. Inevitably, it leaves other themes— including the meaning of vengeance, the need for law, the nature of inheritance, the inexorability of death—to the side. One of the difficulties in literary criticism is rhetorical: in order to fully lay out your ideas, you often have to claim that they are satisfying explanations in themselves, when you know that they represent just one of many equal, and perhaps simultaneously true, alternatives.

The ideas in “Stay, Illusion!” can’t explain the whole play, but what ideas can? Jamieson and Critchley illuminate “Hamlet.” They highlight its ghostliness and expand our sense of its eroticism. They suggest that the play has a lot to tell us about the value of illusion in our own lives, and they justify our sense that the tragedy in “Hamlet” isn’t really about the pile of bodies left on stage. Instead, it inheres in Hamlet’s disillusion. Even as we reject it, it’s a feeling we can understand.

A new volume of George Orwell’s letters brings the legendary writer down to Earth:

If Peter Davison’s refulgent new volume, George Orwell: A Life in Letters, isn’t altogether de-sanctifying, it is certainly humanizing, a reminder that Orwell the Saint and Seer was also a lowly man named Eric Blair, a man whose fingernails were dirt-crammed from gardening, whose bank account was perennially bereft, and whose health was forever threatened by the tuberculosis that would eventually claim him. It’s always necessary to remember that our heroes are human—Orwell, above all others, would have insisted on that. He witnessed and reported on what blood-wet havoc stems from our maniacal making of heroes, from our masochistic need to be herded and lead. This is the real warning of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the danger comes not from our suppressors but from our ovine willingness to be suppressed.

Jason Diamond agrees that the letters have a humanizing effect, praising Orwell’s often dark sense of humor:

For all the worrying Orwell did about the future, he still had a sense of humor about what might come: “It is just as well to get all this cleared up, what with the atomic bombs etc.” he writes in a letter dated November 2, 1945 — a little over three months after the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also had some humorous things to say about literature; in one of his letters to Henry Miller, he explains what he liked about Miller’s controversial book, Tropic of Cancer: “the fact that you dealt with facts well known to everybody but never mentioned it in print ( eg. when the chap is supposed to be making love to the woman but is dying for a piss all the while[.]“

Below is an excerpt from a 1944 letter in which Orwell speaks of his hopes and fears for the British people in the face of totalitarianism:

Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

Previous Dish on Orwell here, here, and here.