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Does ‘divine hiddenness’ belong to theists or to atheists?

Theistic literature is full of references and allusions to a self-concealing deity. The psalm writer whose poems are included in the Hebrew Bible regularly calls out, in alternating notes of perplexity, impatience and despair, to a God whose felt presence apparently seemed frustratingly inconstant. But he or she still assumed that God was there.

Something similar is true in the rest of the Bible, and indeed across most of western religious history. Take the notion of a ‘dark night of the soul’ associated with Saint John of the Cross. The medieval Spanish mystic was talking about the mysterious ways of operating of a divine reality in relation to human beings who seek God. Apparently he was not in doubt at all about whether such a being belonged to reality in the first place.

But recently things have changed. A few years ago the world discovered the distress of Mother Teresa of Calcutta over her own long and apparently unremitting ‘dark night.’ In some quarters this particular dark night is discussed in hushed tones because it appears to have included doubts about the very existence of God. Mother Teresa has many compatriots among those who quite explicitly are former believers, for whom the hiddenness of God’s presence has turned into what we might call the hiddenness of God’s existence.

Having reached this idea, we can see that – even though some linguistic stretching is required – it invites application to many more than just those who, like Mother Teresa, were led into doubt or disbelief by an inconstant or absent sense of God’s presence. Today many live their whole lives without God. In my first real job, at an employment center, I sat across from a pleasant young man who reminded me of evangelical Christians I knew. It turned out he had never given God a thought. The topic simply had never come up. And modern science helps us see the vast spans, prior to the advent of western religions and dozens of times longer than their histories, in which humans were quite innocent of belief in the God of those religions.

All of this is background to an interesting recent development not in theology but in analytical philosophy, which has discovered the hiddenness of God’s existence and fashioned from it a new challenge to the existence of God. Theists of course take God’s hiddenness literally. And because many theists have responded to the argument, it is often called the argument from divine hiddenness – though when I first developed the argument in 1993 I did not call it that. As a sort of linguistic compromise, I am today inclined to call it ‘the hiddenness argument’. How did we get this twist in the tale?

“Dante’s Inferno” © Regina Couper. Image used with permission.

In part it’s tied in with the growing secularity to which I’ve alluded. Because of this twentieth and twenty-first century phenomenon, even theologians are today willing to admit that much doubt and disbelief about God is honest, reflecting good character rather than bad. And, as noted, a sort of ‘nonresistant nonbelief’ can be observed across long periods of human life that are at a disadvantage when it comes to receiving recognition because they pre-date ‘civilization.’ Also important is the fact that we have become more sensitive to how truly loving people are open to a meaningful conscious relationship with those whom they love, and less willing to assume that fathers – remember God the Father? – are often forgivably distant from their children.

Stir all these facts together, add the insight that you can’t have a meaningful conscious relationship with someone you don’t believe to exist, and what you have is a simple new argument for atheism, easily summarized: a perfect personal being (which God must be) would be perfectly loving toward all such creatures as ourselves, and so would be open to the relevant sort of relationship with us, and therefore would never allow the sort of nonbelief – completely nonresistant nonbelief – that flourishes on the planet.

With this reasoning, atheism – understood not as seeking the demolition of religion but as stroking out one item on a list of ways religion could be right – has claimed a large tract of hiddenness territory as its own, and has a powerful new argument to add to the problem of evil. (The hiddenness argument doesn’t depend on there being something bad as the argument from evil does.)

So we have the question: in 2015, to whom does ‘divine hiddenness’ belong? To theists or to atheists?

You might want to go with the second option, since if the atheistic hiddenness argument, focused on God’s existence, can’t be answered, there’s little point in speculating about why God might allow those other sorts of hiddenness I alluded to earlier – the hiddenness of God’s nature or of God’s presence or of God’s plan for the world.

But the issue is complicated by the fact that theists have in the past couple of decades been very busy trying to answer the atheistic hiddenness argument: a long line of replies followed the original statement of that argument into the literature. They keep coming. And very recently, analytical philosophers who belong to a movement called ‘analytical theology’ have sought to direct attention back to theology’s own broader take on hiddenness issues, and to the ways in which believing theists experience the hiddenness of God.

This last could be seen as an attempt on the part of theistic philosophers to reclaim the hiddenness discussion for theology. It could also be that theologians are hoping to generate some new and more convincing replies to the atheistic hiddenness argument. Unless that argument can be made to go away, the distraction of in-group conversations may prove ultimately unsatisfying. Indeed, the possibility of hiddenness in the context of a relationship with God, on which theistic philosophers have been focusing, may be more of a problem than a help, since it suggests that the hiddenness of God’s existence isn’t needed for the various good states of affairs under discussion. It would only be a distraction for God!

That is my view. But the hiddenness problem hasn’t been only mine for a long time now. At the present juncture, one might say that ‘divine hiddenness’ does not fully belong to either theists or atheists. Given how things started out, with the problem firmly in the hands of theists, that’s already an interesting realization. And it will be fascinating to see how the discussion continues to unfold. (Contributions from people new to the discussion are just out, or around the corner.) What ‘divine hiddenness’ will finally reveal no one knows.

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Preparing for ASA 2015

This year’s American Sociological Association Annual Meeting takes place in Chicago, and our Sociology team is gearing up. The 110th Annual Meeting will bring together over 6,000 sociologists nationwide for four days of lectures, sessions, and networking with some of the top figures in the field. This year’s theme is “Sexualities in the Social World,” but each section will be exploring many of today’s most difficult questions.

How can you discover some of the best new scholarship in the field? The ASA Awards Ceremony & Presidential Address Plenary is a great opportunity to find out. Several of our authors will receive awards at the meeting this year including Mara Loveman, author of National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America (2015 Best Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Global and Transnational Sociology; 2015 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section Political Sociology Section; 2015 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities); Fatma Muge Gocek, author of Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (2015 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book, Sociology of Culture Section, American Sociological Association); Christine B.N. Chin, author of Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City (2015 Political Economy of the World System Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association); and Alison Brysk, author of Speaking Rights to Power: Constructing Political Will.

What’s trending the the field in general, and in various sub-disciplines? The conference section schedule has a variety of programs on various work, and several publishers will be displaying their newest publications. For example, the ASA’s Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change teamed with Oxford in the recent publication, Climate Change and Society. New textbooks also offer insight into the needs of the next generation of researchers, such as The Process of Social Research by Jeff Dixon, Royce Singleton and Bruce Straits; Exploring Inequality by Jenny Stuber; Exploring Masculinities by CJ Pascoe and Tristan Bridges; and Race and Racisms: Brief Edition by Tanya Golash-Boza.

Have questions for us? We’ll be at booth 409/411/413 in the exhibit hall with our latest books, journals, and online resources in sociology. Don’t forget to follow @OUPAcademic on Twitter using #ASA15.

Finally, the most important questions. Cubs or Sox? Lou Malnati’s or Giordano’s? We’ve put together a map of things to do, see, and eat in your spare time, so take off that conference badge and put down that poster—it’s time to explore the Windy City!

We look forward to seeing you all in Chicago!

Image Credit: “Chicago Skyline” by Fernando Garcia. CC BY NC 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Neuroscience, Botticelli, and marizpan: Darra Goldstein on sugar and sweets

When trying to gauge someone’s personality, a few well-phrased questions are sometimes all it takes to light the fire of passions within someone. We had the pleasure of speaking with Darra Goldstein, Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, and asked her a number of questions that reveal what “bakes her cake.” She reveals her fascination for neuroscience and animal biology; why we should care whether the marzipan we get from the store is “real” or not; and what types of chocolate she prefers. To get a sense of who Darra Goldstein is, unless you have the opportunity to meet her in person, we suggest watching through the following videos.

How do humans, cats, and cockroaches taste sweetness?

Darra Goldstien on Botticelli’s depiction of a wedding feast

Darra Goldstein on why she loves marzipan

Lightning round questions with Darra Goldstein: getting to know the Editor-in-Chief

Headline image: Photo by Jakub Kapusnak via FoodiesFeed.

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Water and conflict

The four-year drought in California, which is causing severe water shortages and related problems, is receiving increasingly more attention. It is affecting everyone, causing people to adjust their lifestyles and causing small business owners and entire industries to rethink their use–and misuse–of water.

Meanwhile, the longstanding water shortages that are threatening the survival of people in several Middle Eastern and North African countries–and may ultimately threaten the survival of these countries–is receiving scant attention in the news media here in the United States.

There is much less freshwater in the world than one might think. Almost 98 percent of water is either salt water or polluted water. Almost two-thirds of the rest is frozen in glaciers and polar ice. Of all water throughout the world, less than 0.01 percent is available for human use. Freshwater is increasingly more scarce in many regions of the world–about one billion people do not have access to safe freshwater.

Water shortages in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere are often compounded by climate change, with increasing temperatures and more frequent and more severe droughts, continued rapid population growth, and inadequate political and technical capabilities to address the problem. In addition, much of the available freshwater in the water-stressed Middle East and North Africa region comes from river systems that are shared by two or more countries, such as the Nile, on which Egypt and ten other countries heavily rely.

In that region, which is already plagued by widespread armed conflict, water shortages could lead to more frequent and more intractable armed conflict, as a review of data from the past half-century suggests. The number of conflicts over water, between countries and within countries, has increased during this period from 0.37 to 4.61 annually– with about three-fourths of these conflicts being violent or in the context of violence.

Water shortages have also contributed to armed conflict within countries. For example, the roots of the civil war in Syria can be traced to drought conditions, which forced many farmers to abandon their farms and migrate to cities, where their opposition to the Assad government was met with violence.

Not only in severely water-stressed countries, but also here in the United States, water shortages present complex challenges. Yet they also represent opportunities for cooperation among countries and within countries. Much can be done to prevent water-related conflicts, including increasing the availability of water, improving the efficiency of water use, and resolving water conflicts before they “boil over.”

Availability of water and efficiency of water use can be increased by reducing unnecessary uses of water, leaks in water distribution systems, and industrial and sewage contamination of water. It can also be increased by improving methods of desalinization and expanding usage of “greywater”–wastewater from sinks, showers, and bathtubs, which can be recycled for irrigation, flushing of toilets, and other uses.

Conflicts over water can be resolved by national and local laws and regulations, as well as international treaties; by mediation and arbitration; and by proactive cooperation among countries or among states (or groups) within countries. Such cooperation can not only address water shortages, but also improve food security and increase economic, social, and environmental stability.

Public health is what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy. Access to safe freshwater is essential for public health–and for sustainable peace between and within countries.

Image Credit: “Drought in Cordoba” by Tuomas Puukko. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Studying botany in college

Many of us involved in teaching botany feel a sense of urgency in our profession. Botany departments, botany majors, and botany curricula have gradually disappeared from most colleges and universities in the United States, and I suspect in many other parts of the world as well. Too many students are graduating with little or no understanding of the unique ways in which plants meet the challenges of survival and reproduction in the Earth’s diverse ecosystems. Biology faculty who don’t have training or experience with plants are often ill-prepared to relate to or take advantage of the unique contributions plants might make to their own teaching and research.

So if we have only a semester, or worse only a week or two, to teach the fundamentals of plant life, and to pass on the exhilaration we feel in the face of their diverse adaptations, how do we do it? If our non-botanical colleagues have been assigned to teach introductory botany, how do we help them understand the basics and develop some enthusiasm for the subject matter?

Some teachers prefer an ecological approach, emphasizing the pivotal and diverse roles of plants in the ecosystem. Others prefer an approach emphasizing applications to human technology, agriculture, nutrition or medicine. All of these approaches are useful in developing interest, but may end up being too superficial with respect to fundamental structure and function. Traditional botany texts tend to be dry and encyclopedic. Non-majors texts may be more appropriate for most of today’s audience, but they still tend to avoid a side of biology that I call the “why” questions.

One must have the “what” before the “why,” but it is the latter that gives some context or meaning to the former. The “what” is the factual material one finds in a textbook. The “why” is the explanation of the “what.” For example, textbooks typically contain a little section on the differences between monocots and dicots (or now monocots and eudicots, awkwardly ignoring magnolids, waterlilies and other basal angiosperms). We are told that dicots typically have net-veined leaves, vascular bundles arranged in a ring in the stem, and secondary (woody) growth, while monocots typically have parallel-veined leaves, vascular bundles scattered within the stem, and no secondary growth. That is the “what,” at least in a simplistic sense, but there is typically no “why” to follow it.

A moss colony, such as this Isopterygium, is both photosynthetic and gamete-producing. It holds water within its spongy matrix, which sustains the life of the vegetative colony and also provides a watery pathway for sperm cells in search of eggs. Because of this mode of reproduction, mosses must remain small and close to the ground. The sporangium and its stalk constitute the sporophyte generation, a separate individual resulting from the fertilization of the egg. Spores will germinate to establish new genetically mixed moss colonies. Photo by Frederick B. Essig

Monocots are the newer invention in plant architecture, having developed their unique structures and way of growth as they split from ancient dicots. Why do they have parallel veins? Why do they not have secondary growth? How do they interact differently with the world than dicots? How did their innovative structures come about? (Hint: it has to do with ancestral monocots going “underground.”)

“Why,” in scientific terms therefore, has to do with the process of adaptation. It’s the story of origins, of plants facing environmental challenges, and finding innovative ways to cope. This is what makes botany interesting. It is also a way to make sense of some fundamental features of plants that may be dismissed as obscure and unimportant, but which are loaded with both meaning and utility.

For example, let’s take everyone’s favorite: life cycles. Students already sophisticated enough to know that sperm and egg in animals are produced through the special kind of nuclear division called meiosis are truly puzzled by why that does not happen in plants. Others are surprised that plants produce sperm and egg at all. In the evolutionary story of sexual reproduction in plants, we find that the algae that gave rise to land plants did produce sperm and egg directly, as do the most ancient of land plants: mosses and liverworts. In both cases, however, the joining of sperm and egg does not result in a new plant, but rather the production of spores.

The production of spores in green algae mostly occurs within a single cell, but in land plants, a special multicellular body, technically a separate plant called a sporophyte, develops for that purpose. That plants alternate between gamete-producing plants and spore-producing plants is the “what” of plant reproduction. Students might memorize dozens of life cycle diagrams, but won’t know “why” such things exist, or why they have to bother with such tedia until the adaptive story is told.

That story has primarily to do with the fact that plants cannot move around to find mates, and that if they simply released sperm cells to go off and find an egg on their own, it would lead at best to severe inbreeding. Such a strategy works well enough in some marine invertebrates, like sea stars, where currents can help disperse the sperm cells, but on land, these tiny, fragile cells just don’t get very far. Spores do the traveling for plants, taking the place of mate selection in mobile animals. Genetic diversity in plants depends on spores from different genetic backgrounds landing close to one another, so that when they develop into gamete-producing plants, suitable mates will be next to one another.

Spores are launched best from an elevated vantage point, and so sporophytes tend to stretch upward as much as possible. Sporophytes became larger and larger in most land plants, and in fact the trees, herbs, and grasses we see today are actually the sporophyte generation of the plant life cycle. The egg- and sperm-producing “plants” (gametophytes) – the equivalent of the algal or moss colonies, are hidden within the embryonic seeds and pollen grains of these more advanced plants. Yes, it’s complicated, but if the story unfolds from the perspective of how and why this system evolved, it does make sense.

Feature Image: The sword-shaped leaves of cat tails, have parallel veins because new tissues are added at their bases, pushing them upward from their underground stem systems, lengthening each vein as the leaf lengthens. The evolution of this specialized architecture in early monocots also explains the suppression of woody tissues in favor of clonal spreading. Photo by Frederick B. Essig.

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Commemorating Sri Aurobindo’s anniversary, the birth of a nation, and a new world

The fifteenth of August commemorates Sri Aurobindo’s birthday, and the birth of independent India, a historical landmark where he played a significant role. Aurobindo, the founder of Purna, or Integral Yoga, is a renowned and controversial poet, educationist, and literary critic, a politician, sociologist, and mystic whose evolutionary worldview represents a breakthrough in history. Nevertheless, what is the relevance of Aurobindo nowadays? Is there any need to create an act of remembrance? The Indian Revolution considered him one of the fathers of the country, and centers of education and yoga were founded worldwide on the integral paradigm he outlined, but is that really enough?

In the academic arena, Aurobindo steadily calls the attention of scholars in different fields of knowledge. The key for this interest lies on the pertinence and relevance of his thought. The interdisciplinarity and cross-cultural outlook of his writings inspire today varied research in the fields of psychology, philosophy, spirituality, religion, and cultural anthropology. Even more, his suggestive philosophical proposals of intertwined ontological and social structures, contrasted occasionally with Teilhard de Chardin or Hegel, encourage new applied studies in leadership, integrative and community mental health, poetry, literature, and education.

Aurobindo outlines the evolution towards a new society, the social paradigm of the gnostic being. The human being is a being in transition, a living laboratory with complex stages of growth. His theory underpins the need for progress at a global level, and an increased awareness of the coexistence of diversity and oneness. To propitiate the development of this paradigm, the tools are yoga and education–the means to enhance a complex, inclusive, and synthetic thought, not detached from people and social reality. Aurobindo encourages the social and psychological aspects of education and highlights the process of integration of body and emotions, mind and spirit, to hasten the evolutionary process and the collective welfare of society. The key for advancement is an awareness-enhancing environment of self-learning, praised by UNESCO, and the evolution of consciousness as the ultimate revolution.

Sri Aurobindo. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The present religious, political, and economic crisis meets a solution in Aurobindo’s belief on the human capacity to discover complementarity underlying apparent contradictions. A binary worldview without nuances leads to a breakdown of dialogue, and a revival of conflicts that curtail the expression of identities. His sociological works, The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, provide clues for a deeper understanding of multiculturalism, and the conflicts arising out of the creation of international political institutions. One of the keys he proposes is inclusivism, the creation of a confederation of nations that enhances plurality within world unity. In times of extremisms and reductionisms, his Integral Yoga provides a transformational synthesis. All life is yoga, any activity may be developed as a way to be yourself, transform yourself, and transcend yourself–powerful mantras that go beyond the determinism of any particular religion, pointing towards a universal religion for humanity.

Aurobindo is a controversial figure that raises both admiration and criticism. His applied integrative synthesis of the material and spiritual realities of social and individual structures provokes adherence and rejection. He doesn’t seem to fit either traditional Eastern or Western evolutionary theories. What calls our attention is the resilience of his thought, despite probing and critical scrutiny. How can we explain his acknowledged contribution to knowledge and his simultaneous criticism? His mystical empiricism explains why his philosophical work resists the passing of time, while some of his social and international proposals, unthinkable at the time, seem to have a place in contemporary political affairs. Presently, the world is linked through global institutions, though they lack the spiritual, subjective connotations Aurobindo aimed for the development of the human being. His writings pose a reflection on the place of spirituality in education in a multicultural secular society, a place among twentieth century educational innovators, such as Paulus Geheeb, Rabindranath Tagore, Rudolf Steiner, or Innayat Khan. His political engagement with the framing of the Indian nation is still revised in comparative studies that claim why Gandhi is praised, and Aurobindo, at times, erased.

The first Indian leader to call for complete Independence from colonial rule was also a propounder of Indian spiritual values, and their role in a world union respectful of cultural individualities. His pluralistic, evolutionary nationalism transcends current Hindutva appropriations. Transpersonal psychology is recurring to his structure of consciousness, related to the core of Ken Wilber’s proposals and his spectrum of consciousness. A major exponent of Indian English literature, and the creator of Savitri, the longest poem in English, he epitomizes the representation of consciousness, tradition and modernity, a precursor of Mulk Raj Anand, Nissim Ezekiel, and Anita Desai, among others. Culturally speaking, he anticipates Homi Bhabha’s perspective of his multiple levels of hybridity. His translations of the Vedas and Upanishads approach Indian tradition to the contemporary reader, offering a view of religion that transcends superstition and ritual practices, a timely contribution to todays’s fanaticism and misinterpretation of ancient spiritual proposals.

Sri Aurobindo offers a profound reading of the human being. His works draw on Eastern and Western sources, and present an integral synthetic vision of reality–an invitation to travel a collective journey not restricted by geographical frontiers. His vision waits to be awaken in the layers of our consciousness, while his words inspire “The call that wakes the leap of human mind” (Savitri, Book I, Canto I, The Symbol Dawn).

Image credit: “Sri Aurobindo Ashram Rewa” by Siddharth807. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Introducing psychoanalysis

In the podcasts below, Daniel Pick, author of Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction, introduces psychoanalysis, discusses its role within history and culture and tells us how psychoanalysis is used today.

Daniel Pick begins his brief history of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, the “father of psychoanalysis”, and goes on to describe how psychoanalysis has developed since the late nineteenth century. His final podcast covers what psychoanalysis looks like today and what people should expect from psychoanalysts.

What do you think makes a good psychoanalyst in the twenty-first century?

Featured image credit: ‘Bubbles, streams, and waves’, by Wolfgang Wildner. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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Florence Nightingale’s syphilis that wasn’t

Nursing lore has long maintained that the mysterious illness that sent Florence Nightingale to bed for 30 years after her return from the Crimea was syphilis. At least that’s what many nursing students were told in the 1960s, when my wife was working on her BSN. Syphilis, however, would be difficult to reconcile with the fact that Nightingale was likely celibate her entire life and had not a single sign or symptom typical of that venereal infection.

Even so, Nightingale’s was a decidedly strange illness, one that has stubbornly defied diagnosis since her death on this day 95 years ago. In all likelihood, its seed was sown in 1854, when in her mid-30s, she traveled to Skutari (Uskudar), Turkey to care for British soldiers fighting the Russians in what came to be known as the Crimean War. With a mere 38 nurses, she supervised the care of an all but endless stream of troops wracked by frostbite, gangrene, dysentery, and other diseases crammed into 4 miles of beds not 18 inches apart. Her own quarters were cramped and infested with rodents and vermin. During January and February of her first winter, she saw 3,000 of her patients die, while working 20 hours a day, caring for the severest cases herself. In May of the following year, she developed a near-fatal illness (most likely brucellosis). Although urged to return to England to recuperate, she remained with the Army for 21 months until the last soldier had left for home.

Image Credit: “Florence Nightingale.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

When she finally returned to England, she appeared hardened and aged by illness and exhaustion. She complained of intermittent fever, loss of appetite, fatigue, insomnia, irritability, depression, sciatica, shortness of breath, and palpitations. For nearly three decades, these complaints kept her confined to her room, scarcely ever out of bed. Finally, in her 60s, her symptoms began to dissipate, and the cold, obsessed, and tyrannical workaholic Nightingale had been as an invalid gradually transformed into a gentle matron capable of something close to normal relationships with friends and family. She died non compos mentis at age 90 of “old age and heart failure.”

Since Nightingale’s death, biographers, historians, nurses, and physicians have debated the cause of her strange illness, with some convinced that it had an organic basis and others convinced that her symptoms were the product of a neurosis. It has been suggested that she suffered from “dilation of the heart and neurasthenia;” a “strategic illness” with no physical basis; self-pity manifested as “Victorian melodrama;” and “repressed self-loathing” for her arrogance and ignorance in failing to recognize that the unsanitary condition of her wards was the reason why her army perished. In all likelihood, Nightingale had not one, but four different disorders, all at least loosely inter-related—bipolar personality disorder, Crimean fever (brucellosis), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and terminal, senile dementia (Alzheimer’s disease).

With regard to PTSD, there is no record of Nightingale ever having spoken or written of flashbacks or recurrent dreams of her Crimean experience. However she had no one with similar experiences or problems in whom she might have confided such thoughts or dreams. She never spoke of her wartime experiences after returning to England. Nor did she ever again personally minister to the sick or wounded, perhaps to avoid situations or activities likely to arouse traumatic Crimean memories. Like many of today’s PTSD sufferers, she isolated herself from social interactions, in her case by punishing herself for almost 30 years with what amounted to virtual self-imposed imprisonment.

Like all wars before and since, Nightingale’s was a hell steeped in the blackness of death, leaving no delight clean and pure, and torturing the minds of those involved long after the fighting ended.

Image Credit: “London – Crimean War Memorial” by Magnus Halsnes. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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The mystery of Meryl Streep

In Ricki and the Flash, now in theaters, Meryl Streep plays an aging rocker, managing in her fourth decade atop the star pile to once again give us a character unlike any she has played before. Raymond Durgnat attests that, “the stars are a reflection in which the public studies and adjusts its own image of itself…. The social history of a nation can be written in terms of its film stars.” So what does Streep’s capricious, unpredictable style reflect?

Although it may now be difficult to imagine, Streep’s predilection for altering herself from role to role caused anxiety early on in her career. While Molly Haskell, for example, welcomed her ability to give unprecedented dimension to characters outside traditional bounds of sympathy, she worried that audiences did not have access to the real Streep. “The aura of the old stars radiated out of a sense of self, a core identity projected into every role,” she wrote; “[h]owever varied the performances of Bette Davis, say, or Katharine Hepburn, or Margaret Sullavan, we always felt we were in the presence of something knowable, familiar, constant,” whereas “Streep, chameleon-like, undercuts this response…. Instead of merging with her roles, [she] metamorphoses, changing herself completely, tying up all the loose ends so that she is perfectly hidden.” Pauline Kael openly disdained Streep for similar reasons. When Silkwood was released in 1983, she complained that, “[p]art of being a good movie actress is in knowing what you come across as … [Streep] has been giving us artificial creations. She doesn’t seem to know how to draw on herself, she hasn’t yet released an innate personality on the screen.”

Haskell’s chameleon metaphor has stuck to Streep. Chameleons hide in plain sight, their exteriors mutable, visible and invisible at the same time. Why have critics wanted to think of Streep as camouflaging herself, or, rather, why does it matter that “Meryl Streep,” unlike “Humphrey Bogart” or “Katharine Hepburn,” lacks a clear referent? I know of no better place to look for an answer than Postcards from the Edge, a film that considers Streep’s effect on the stardom game, and one, not coincidentally, directed by Mike Nichols, with whom she has worked more than any other director. Streep has repeatedly cited Nichols as her most influential director, though theirs was not the muse/Svengali relationship one often hears about between actresses and male directors. By this time, the two had collaborated on Silkwood and Heartburn (and he prepared The French Lieutenant’s Woman before departing due to a scheduling conflict). They would later make Angels in America together, and were planning an adaptation of the hit play Master Class when Nichols died.

Adapted from Carrie Fisher’s rehab-to-riches novel/memoir, Postcards follows Suzanne (Streep), a recovering drug addict struggling with her acting career and her relationship with her mother, the aging — and alcoholic — Hollywood musical star Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine). Suzanne’s story can only resolve when she figures out how to separate from her mother and to be the actress she wants to be, aspirations that she must learn coincide. She triumphs in the end, winning a role as a country singer — a woman not at all similar to the other roles we have seen her play, or to Suzanne herself. The film marks this transformative performance as successful, opposing it to Doris’s old-fashioned stardom, which promises to display the essence of the performer. Rather than modeling the old injunction to be true to oneself, Streep/Suzanne fashion a more modern idea of being as becoming. Streep teaches us that potentiality and contradiction are not at odds with a workable notion of personal identity — and may even be necessary to it. They need not be excluded from realist performance, or from the individualities that become stars. Postcards argues for Streep’s mode, for versatility, for flux over stasis. Sundering actor from character creates distance between them, inspiring a desire to plumb the depths of these figures before us, and to ponder their relation.

While there were certainly actors before Streep who refused to disclose themselves or solidify into a type (say, Greta Garbo or Charles Laughton), it is testament to her influence that we now commonly applaud actors for departing from their previous expressions of ways of being. But Streep is not just important within cinema history. As the nation’s culture wars essentialized and politicized stable identities — that is, hypostasized kinds of experience as non-fungible commodities predicated upon certain types of bodies — she cracked open the epistemological identity of actor and character, of star and type, in America’s most prominent medium for thinking about personhood. In this way, Streep’s stardom indicates a public willing to think capaciously about personal identity, to ask difficult questions about individualism, selfhood and otherhood, the relation of self to self, and about the dangers of making becoming into a brand. Is it any surprise that she remains as relevant, as necessary, as ever?

Featured image: Meryl Streep in Ricki and The Flash. (c) Sony Pictures via rickiandtheflashmovie.com.

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Complexities of causation

Imagine the thrill of discovering a new species of frog in a remote part of the Amazon. Scientists are motivated by the opportunity to make new discoveries like this, but also by a desire to understand how things work. It’s one thing to describe the communities of microorganisms in our guts, but quite another to learn what causes these communities to change and how these changes influence health. A big part of science, with important practical implications, is understanding how things work, i.e., causation.

Sometimes it’s simple to understand causation. Do you read murder mysteries? One part of solving the crime is figuring out how the victim died; if there’s a smoking gun, the detective can be pretty sure of the cause of death. Scientists occasionally have definitive evidence to test an hypothesis about a cause-effect relationship. Often, however, they don’t have such a smoking gun, and have to rely instead on multiple lines of individually inconclusive evidence.

Several factors contribute to complexity in causation. Behaviors of animals are influenced by internal physiological processes and external environmental factors as well as the evolutionary history of the lineage to which the animals belong. Causes may be necessary but not sufficient, or sufficient but not necessary, or “Insufficient but Necessary parts of a condition which is itself Unnecessary but Sufficient” (INUS conditions, Mackie 1965). Doing science is challenging because of these complexities in understanding causation, but there is a more fundamental source of complexity that is challenging for everyone trying to understand results of research.

Kintigh Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant in Somerset, New York. Burning coal is one example of an anthropogenic cause of global warming. Photo by Matthew D. Wilson, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

Humans often fail to recognize that events can have multiple interacting causes and instead attribute events to single, specific causes. Two examples in the news lately illustrate these features of human thinking, one involving climate change and another involving vaccination against common diseases. Many factors influence our changing climate: volcanic activity, changes in solar radiation, and other natural factors as well as human activities that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Climatologists account for both natural and anthropogenic factors in modeling global temperature change since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; only models that include both types of factors are consistent with the observed pattern of temperature change since 1860. Yet climate contrarians seem to believe that the cause of climate change must be either natural factors or human influences, not both. Since we know that volcanic activity and changes in solar radiation influence climate, they argue, we must ignore human influences. In fact, effects of both natural and anthropogenic factors on global average temperature are obvious before 1950, but virtually all change in temperature since 1950 can be attributed to human activity. If anything, recent history supports the opposite of the claim of climate contrarians.

Large-scale vaccination programs have greatly reduced the incidence of diseases such as measles and whooping cough in developed countries. Some individuals in any population can’t be vaccinated because they are too young, too old, or have compromised immune systems, so the success of vaccination programs depends on vaccinating a large enough percentage of the whole population that the disease won’t spread to those who can’t tolerate the vaccine. This is herd immunity, and the necessary fraction that must be vaccinated depends on the basic reproduction rate of the organism causing the disease. Since measles and whooping cough are easily spread, they have high reproduction rates, and more than 90% of people must be vaccinated to prevent epidemics. There have been several outbreaks of whooping cough in the United States in recent years, coincident with two factors: (1) a decline in vaccination due partly to an active and energetic anti-vaccination movement and (2) replacement of the traditional vaccine using killed pertussis cells (DTP, which includes vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus as well as whooping cough, also known as pertussis) with an acellular preparation that has fewer side effects but isn’t as effective as the traditional vaccine (DTaP). Members of the anti-vaccination movement reject the importance of herd immunity and argue that the sole cause of recent outbreaks of whooping cough is reduced effectiveness of the current acellular vaccine. In fact, this cause is synergistic with the recent decline in vaccination. Herd immunity is even more important now that physicians use a less effective vaccine against whooping cough. Since some people will have been vaccinated with DTaP long enough ago that their protection against whooping cough has lapsed, an even larger percentage of the population needs to be vaccinated to prevent spread of the disease.

You may think that you are too sophisticated to assume that events have single, specific causes as illustrated by these simple examples. If so, I urge you to read T. C. Chamberlin’s classic 1890 paper “The method of multiple working hypotheses.” Chamberlin summarizes the risk of narrow-mindedness for practicing scientists thinking about causation as follows: “The moment one has offered an original explanation for a phenomenon which seems satisfactory, that moment affection for his intellectual child springs into existence; and . . . his intellectual offspring . . . grows more and more dear to him.”

Feature Image: Eruption of Kanaga Volcano on Adak Island, Alaska. Volcanic eruptions are one example of a non-anthropogenic cause of global warming. Photo by  E. Klett, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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