Tag: Premium

The late night conversation continues. For a recap, the whole thing is here. I should let readers know that I’d proposed to Hitch that we discuss Iraq as well as religion, but for reasons I leave to you to snicker about, we kept putting off that question later into the night. In the last installment, we were still talking about whether the message of Jesus was actually wicked – but the question of the combination of religious fundamentalism and weapons of mass destruction was at the edge of the conversation – and where it would soon turn.

A: It’s wicked to love one’s neighbor?

H: It doesn’t ask one to love one’s neighbor. That was said by Rabbi Hillel, in fact, long before. It says, “Love the neighbor as oneself.” An impossible—you see, the real wickedness of Christianity, or one of many, is it demands the impossible: To ask me to love you, Andrew, sometimes seems too easy…

A: [Laughs.]

H: But to ask me to love you as I love myself is an impossible demand, I cannot possibly, cannot conceivably do that, and it would be wrong of me if I did because I have other things I have to do. I have a wife, children, others.

A: But as an aspiration—

H: No, absolutely not, it’s a dissolution of the personality, it’s the abolition of the individual.

A: No it’s not.

H: Of course I’ll have enough self-respect to like myself more than I love you. I’ll have to do it. It’s a morally impossible demand. The demand to give up all possessions and to forget the future is not just unlivable and impossible, but would be, if it could be done, cruel and stupid.

A: Because it would abrogate responsibility.

H: It would mean there’d be no investment, no thrift, no thought about subsequent generations. There’s no saving Christianity from the charge, it seems to me, that as stated even at its strongest by its warmest believers that it’s recommendations, its precepts, are rather nonsensical or evil. Sometimes both.

A: I just find that the aspiration to treat others as one treats oneself, you know, which could be rendered in secular terms.

H: No, it doesn’t say “treat,” Andrew.

A: Love.

H: It says “love” as yourself. Rabbi Hillel comes up with the Golden Rule.

A: I’m just trying to grapple with the idea that that aspiration is evil or wicked. It strikes me as preposterous.

H: No, because it’s too strenuous, I mean to say. Because it’s impossible it means that anyone falling short of it is in a state of sin. To do to others what you want done to yourself doesn’t mean “always be nice to me,” because it would be banal, was well as tautological. It could mean you have to be very hard on someone, to use force on them, as you would hope they would to stop you committing a crime, for example, or a theft. So it’s—

A: It could be, except there’s also the doctrine of forgiveness and—

H: Forgiveness?

A: Yes, forgiveness.

H: Yeah, that doesn’t completely work for me either but…

A: (Laughs) I know, none of it’s gonna work for you, Christopher!

H: No, just as the donor, excuse me, I mean not just as the donor but as a recipient. Why should I deserve forgiveness from someone else, let alone have the power to offer it?

H: Who gives me this right? It’s a social question. It’s to be decided by law and by even utilitarianism, I suppose.

A: It can be, it may not be. It can also be a sense that—and again, I have to say things like this— in ways we do not understand…

H: You do have to say that.

A: Yeah, well, that is a premise of every religious statement, okay?

H: Then agree that you are one of those who doesn’t understand.

A: To some extent we can argue, as we are, about whether this doctrine makes sense in the way that one lives one’s life, or whether it’s inherently dangerous or inherently wicked or, indeed, inherently totalitarian. But at some level, what matters therefore is the level of certainty with which one holds certain truths. There is a fundamentalist mindset in which the perfect is always the enemy of the good and in which the human being thrashes around in guilt and condemnation and judgment. And the last thing one sees in another human being in the sway of this religion is serenity or calm or benevolence. One sees insecurity, anger and a frustration that the world as it should be is not as it is. And an attempt to close the gap, somehow, in your own life and everybody else’s.

H: Well, it doesn’t want everyone reconciled to the status quo. But the human discontent with the way things are has been a great spur to invention and innovation, usually waged against the priests and against religious dogma ever since we have records.

A: But they will also die, and you will die. And whatever achievements you have managed will no longer be available to you.

H: Well that’s a priori true. It doesn’t give an inch to religion. It doesn’t advance the case for a spiritual belief.

A: No, what religion does is ask, “what is a human being’s best response to that fact, of completely mortality of not just our lives but everything we do in our lives?”

H: Well to borrow a phrase from you, acceptance.

A: Right.

H: The first thing is to realize that that is the case, that we are born into a losing struggle, that we’re from a poorly evolved species that now understands rather better its cosmology and its DNA. To do the best we can with that, but not to deny it, or to make up stories that appear to pretend that it isn’t so.

A: No, but at some point to understand also that there may be some capacity that is not our rational capacity, but that is what one might call one’s spiritual capacity, to be in touch with what one cannot know. And to have what one cannot know be in touch with us.

H: See that sounds like white noise to me, I have to say. And you don’t normally talk white noise. Religion has the effect on you, as it has on many intelligent people, of making you appear to be dumber than you are. I have to tell you this.

A: (Laughs.)

H: Just as religion will often make people accede to immoral acts that they would never, ever consider, if they weren’t under the warrant of Heaven in some way. No decent Catholic is going to go around saying “I’d rather have AIDS than condoms;” it’s the Church that makes them, makes good people say wicked things. And you just asked me a piece of pure babble that you wouldn’t have thought of, it’s so well below your usual standard, because you feel that religion in some sense makes you have to do it. It’s like people stop writing poetry when they become poet laureate. Something about the monarchy kills the poetry. (Laughs.)

A: No, that is not—let me just protest, for a second.

H: Please, my dear chap. Do you want some coffee? I’m not sure there is any.

A: If I have any more coffee I’ll never sleep at all.

H: Well, we’ve strayed from Mesopotamia.

A: We have. Except we haven’t, in a way, because of course…I think one of the things that happens when you blog every day or you read the news every day and you’re obsessed with news stories and news cycles is you can forget that the reason we’re in Mesopotamia in the first place, the context in which any of this makes sense is a fundamentalist religious movement that attempted to kill us and does want to destroy us and everything we stand for. So in some ways we are not digressing from the war; we are talking about it, aren’t we? Isn’t this the origin of this war? It’s like talking about the fight against Soviet communism without talking about totalitarianism.

H: Well in a way that’s true. As you know, there’s a huge argument that has, I wouldn’t even call it a half-truth, but a partial truth in it that says the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime has little or, some people say, nothing to do with the quarrel with fundamentalist Islam. I would say I’d give this much to it: the decision to remove Saddam Hussein—the realization that our existence was incompatible with his regime, or international law was incompatible—was made in 1998 by the Senate in a unanimous vote, and that was a bit too late. It could’ve been made in 1991. Saddam Hussein’s regime is evil and it has broken all the laws governing genocide, weapons of mass destruction, aggression against neighboring states. But it was also, as it happens in my opinion, flirting with and helping to incubate jihadist groups and that became part of the case against it.

But I regard it as a war on two fronts with Saddam Hussein and his regime and his followers. As we’ve now seen the Ba’athists and the jihadists have fused on the battlefield, and they began doing that before his regime was overthrown and anyone who’s cared to look knows this. But I think this general quarrel with the totalitarian, one-party, one-leader state that needs to be pursued in any case. So, I agree they’re aspects of each other but they can just as happily be considered separate.

A: But the cost-benefit analysis shifts when one also understands that such a state can also sponsor entities outside of itself with access to technologies.

H: Voila.

A: I mean, one of the things, one of the more fundamental issues that you raised is this: homo sapiens at this stage of evolution. I ask myself this question in the dark of the night, “has our technological power vastly outpaced our capacity to handle it as human beings in terms of our ability of self-restraint, our understanding of toleration, et cetera?” It seems to be quite self evident it has, and its a miracle in some ways that it hasn’t led to worse…

H: Oh my God, one has—well, you and I are both simians but we can look down on some primates as inferior to ourselves and you see people, the tapes of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan testing chemical poisons on dogs and so forth. You realize, boy. Here you have the nightmare. A subhuman—

A: With superhuman powers.

H: With technology that was developed by people like Albert Einstein, who restore one’s faith in the species to which we all belong. But who did it, in an awful paradox, for humanitarian reasons so that the real sadistic primates didn’t get a hold of it first.

A: Right.

H: So, does AQ Khan suffer from these scruples? No. He invents nothing, he does no real scientific work; he’s a plagiarist, he’s a thief, and he cannot wait to spread what Einstein was hoping against hope to keep confined. This is a huge difference, yes, it’s all the difference in the world. But it doesn’t free us from the knowledge that we’re all primates, mammals.

A: Right: and as primates, mammals, as you say, we increasingly understand are subject to certain patterns of behavior that were formed over millennia and millions of years of behavior which lead to awareness of history as a constant violent struggle on some level or other. We’re certainly not progressing morally at the same pace as we’re progressing technologically, which leads one to a certain prediction of catastrophe, right? Is it not a matter of time?

H: It’s come back to me a lot, lately. I mean, when I was a kid—I’m older than you, a lot; when I was 15 or 14—a particularly objectionable and conceited primate John Kennedy considered that his own vanity in a quarrel that he’d helped to pick with another thuggish mammal, Nikita Khrushchev over Cuba, among other things, was worth risking the destruction of the human race for. And I remember the evening when we all thought it would happen. And so intense was that memory that, when it was over, I think a lot of people forget how bad it had been. We began to think, “well, maybe there were other things, and maybe deterrence will hold up and maybe there are other things we should be concerned with…” And there were, too. But it’s come back to me a lot lately, that 60s feeling of the imminence of the mushroom cloud.

A: And the 50s feeling, too. I mean, the thing that the intellectuals of their time are obsessed with is the bomb. Not just its existence, but that it was a paradigm shift, the paradigm shift to astonishing destruction.

H: Or, let’s not say the bomb as a summa of human achievement, as nuclear physics is, but the return to the age of Biblical plagues. The idea of spreading, deliberately, terrible violence, toxic…

A: Why do you think this hasn’t happened?

British Education Secretary Michael Gove proposed for a “narrative of British progress” to be taught in history courses. Giles Fraser unpacks the submerged Christian assumptions behind such thinking:

What is at work here is secularised theology, technically a form of eschatology – the belief that history is the expression of God’s purpose for humanity, that it begins with the fall and works its way towards the salvation of the human race. Here, history is always working towards some final end or purpose. Forget the fact that Gove, Marx, Fukuyama et al present their history in the neutral trappings of social science; the very idea that history contains some teleology is, as John Gray has pointed out in his recent book The Silence of Animals, a hollowed-out version of Christian theology.

Not that all religious people accept this mythology. Even [Herbert] Butterfield, who was himself profoundly Christian, refused to see history as evidence for the hand of God guiding us towards some inevitable conclusion. On the other hand, we all love a story: one with a beginning, middle and end. And to see history as simply one damn thing after another seems to rob it of that larger meaning that many want to read into it.

Deciding between these competing views of history requires us to recognise that some of our secular ideas have a hidden theological substructure. “What presents itself as the ‘secularisation’ of theological concepts will have to be understood, in the last analysis, as an adaptation of traditional theology to the intellectual climate produced by modern philosophy or science,” was how the political philosopher Leo Strauss put it.

Rachel Aviv revisits Julian Jaynes’s eccentric, controversial 1976 book on human beings’ interior lives. The basics of Jaynes’s theory:

Jaynes began inspecting the world’s earliest literature for the first signs of human consciousness. “I started off like in a detective story,” he told a reporter for the Princeton radio station. As he moved backward through the centuries, he saw that consciousness, as he had defined it, disappeared somewhere between the Odyssey and the Iliad. Odysseus is a modern hero, introspective and deceptive. In the Iliad, the writing of which scholars date some three hundred years earlier, the characters are passive and mentally inert. They have no concept of a private mental space. The word “psyche” referred only to actual substances in the body, breath, and blood, which leave the warrior’s body as soon as he dies. The gods, emerging from mists or clouds or the sea, handle the warrior’s decisions. When Achilles accuses Agamemnon of stealing his mistress, Agamemnon insists he had no agency. “Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus,” he explains. “So what could I do? Gods always have their way.”

Why modern understandings of consciousness emerged:

By roughly 1,000 B.C., earthquakes and overpopulation in the Mediterranean led to mass migrations, which caused an unprecedented degree of social upheaval, according to Jaynes’s speculation. The gods, who had provided guidance by transforming habit and intuition into speech, fell silent in the face of novel dilemmas. They retreated to the sky, where they gave ambiguous signs of their watchful presence. Humans were left alone, groping for answers. They still heard a voice, but they knew it was their own: they silently narrated their days, weighing options, imagining what others would think, making sudden pronouncements that they immediately doubted. Jaynes describes the muting of the gods as an excruciating loss from which we still have not recovered. “The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time,” he writes. “Why have the gods left us? Like friends who depart from us, they must be offended. Our misfortunes are our punishments for our offenses. We go down on our knees, begging to be forgiven.”

(Photo by Flickr user Brenda-Starr)

Theodore Dalrymple separates pessimists into two distinct groups:

Pessimists are of two types, the catastrophists, that is to say the types who look up in the starry heavens and see (metaphorically) only asteroids in the sky racing towards us to wipe us out as the dinosaurs were wiped out; and existential pessimists, that is to say those who see dissatisfaction as the permanent condition of mankind because of his inherent makeup, his contradictory desires and emotions, dissatisfaction that is perfectly compatible however with a great deal of enjoyment of life. I am a pessimist of the latter kind.

The former kind of pessimist, those who foresee inevitable universal collapse, destruction, death by epidemic, and so forth, have no sense of humor, or at least of irony. For them, the furrowed brow and the shoulder weighed down by care are signs of intellectual and moral seriousness, the sine qua non genuine concern for humanity and (God preserve us) the planet. Like catastrophe itself, they are not much fun.

The existential pessimist is light-hearted, for he knows that human life is not perfectible, and can therefore enjoy what it has to offer without any sense of guilt that he is not spending his every waking hour averting disaster or bringing perfection about. He does not deny that many diseases currently incurable will one day change their status and that this is a good thing, for taken in the round more life is better than less; but neither does he expect that, when formerly incurable diseases have become curable, human complaint and dissatisfaction will become things of the past.

Adult film star and sex educator Maggie Mayhem and her husband created the PSIgasm, a device to collect data on arousal:

[This research] was all done in the ’70s and nobody has done anything else since. It also means the only research we have on the orgasm comes from people who are able to have orgasms in a sterile lab, people with clipboards and lab coats staring at them. To me, that’s not a very round depiction of the human orgasm. …

This version has about 14 sensors. It has all the pressure gages in various places throughout the device and they’re detecting the pounds per square inch exerted by the muscles of the pelvis floor. It also picks up pretty much everything a lie detector test would get. That’s all the vital data: blood pressure, heart rate, respiration—these are all major parts of the orgasm cycle.

Her hopes for the project:

It’s research that I feel strongly we all have to do collectively, I’m hoping to make versions where people can anonymously upload their biodata. I’d like to make a collective living document that’s always evolving and everybody is participating in. We are all researching. It’s people exploring themselves.

Alex Cornell maps some ideal seating arrangements for dinner guests. Some tips:

7 Person Rectangle: It’s very easy to get screwed in this scenario. While it may appear like you can sit anywhere except the ends, this is not so. You are at risk of sitting next to the lonely end-seat, which requires you to speak soley to that person for the duration of the meal.

2 Tables of Any Size: You’re fucked. Regardless of how you time your approach, you will inevitably choose too soon. Lament as the other table’s attendance crystallizes into what is clearly the superior group. Sometimes it’s best to visit the bathroom while seats are chosen, so any seating disasters are the result of chance, and not your own miscalculation.

A large version of his map here.

Francine Prose rejects the advice of a 7th grade teacher who cautioned students, “Never end a story with, ‘It was all a dream!’”:

Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own. Jacob’s ladder of angels. Joseph saving Egypt and himself by interpreting the Pharoah’s vision of the seven fat and lean cows. The dreams in Shakespeare’s plays range as widely as our own, and the evil are often punished in their sleep before they pay for their crimes in life. Kafka never tells us what Gregor Samsa was dreaming when he awakens as a giant insect, except that the dreams were “uneasy.” Likely they were not as uneasy as the morning he wakes into.

She credits Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with the boldest use of a dream in fiction:

Tolstoy showed it was possible to give a character a dream that strikes the reader as plausible, convincing, important enough to pay attention to, without being heavy-handedly symbolic or portentous. Or boring. What’s harder to recreate on the page is anything remotely resembling the experience of actually dreaming, with all the structural and narrative complexities involved, the leaps, contradictions, and improbable elements. Maybe that was my seventh-grade teacher’s problem: She’d read too many middle-school accounts of dreams that were nothing like dreams.

Alexis Coe marvels at the tumultuous relationship Virginia Woolf had with her servant of 18 years, Nellie Boxall:

Boxall was hired as the Woolf’s live-in servant at 52 Tavistrock Square, where the writer would draft Mrs Dalloway and launch Hogarth Press. All the while, Nellie was hard at work in the background, pumping the water, lighting the lamps, making the beds, and emptying the chamber pots — more than her title of “cook” suggests, though she did that as well, serving multiple courses three times a day.

Few scholars have parsed Woolf’s diaries without commenting on her frequent, detailed, and often vitriolic accounts of Boxall. Their brand of melee was firmly mired in a cycle, each arguing her points with the tools available to them. Boxall howled and cried, and then threatened to leave, which she would not, but the threat greatly destabilized and embarrassed Woolf. For her part, Woolf recognized, if not predicted, the attraction, writing, “If I were reading this dairy…I should seize with greed upon the portrait of Nelly & make a story — perhaps make the whole story revolve around that.”

More details of their toxic dynamic:

Boxall certainly facilitated optimal writing conditions at times, and greatly hindered them at others. Her complaints were not unfathomable, given her substantial work load. Swollen ankles and a bad back might have been tolerated in relative silence if, she seemed to tell Woolf, her efforts were appreciated. “Nellie Boxall was one of the majority throughout history who had made their presence felt through surliness or tears, downright disobedience, petty acts of revenge (like spitting up on soup) or vicious talk,” wrote [Alison Light, author of Mrs. Woolf and Servants]. Nellie communicated her grievances through dramatic scenes, which Woolf found distracting and “degrading,” but nonetheless chose to obsess over them for nearly two decades.

Woolf recounted and appraised “the famous scene” at Tavistock Square in London over and over again in her diary. After a particularly bad argument, Boxall ordered Woolf out of her room, one she inhabited but technically belonged to her masters. “In her closest relationships — with Vanessa, Leonard, Nellie, Vita, and Ethel — Virginia knew she wanted mothering and protection but she also distrusted ‘the maternal passion,’” explained Light. This was not weak moment for Woolf, and she did not need to be reminded of instances in which Boxall had played the stern but kind parental figure. She could not decide if Boxall, by ordering her out of the room, had treated her like a child or a servant; in the end, it did not matter, for Woolf was resolute. This time, Boxall would go. She spent the following weeks rapt with expectation, engrossed in preparation for any possible scenario. She copied out and practiced reading aloud various replies to what she expected Boxall to say. “I am sick of the timid spiteful servant mind,” wrote Woolf, the very same woman who had railed against men’s use of ‘the female mind.’”

Jordan Weissmann points out that, if the government slashed aid to private colleges, it could “cover the tuition bill at every public college in the country”:

With the money that’s either going to private colleges, or or being paid to the public sector in a roundabout way via tax breaks, we could probably make tuition at public institutions — which educate about 76 percent of American undergrads — either free, or ridiculously cheap.

Daniel Luzer pushes back:

Any attempt to move all federal aid directly into state universities would result in a vast and angry outrage (and lobbying efforts) from America’s private universities (not to mention for-profit companies that offer higher education).

“You’re cutting off aid to poor students,” they’d complain. And they’d be right. The reality is that while Princeton or Amherst could continue to exist fairly well without federal financial aid, University of Phoenix would go bankrupt. Also destroyed under this plan would be a huge swath of small private colleges that educate many middle and working class Americans.