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Face Of The Day

Bua Noi, the only gorilla in the Pata Zoo in Bangkok, Thailand, is seen in her enclosure on September 25, 2014. Located on the 6th and 7th floors of the aging Pata Department Store, the zoo is being criticized by animal rights activists for having cramped, inadequate facilities. A recent campaign to free Bua Noi has received over 35,000 signatures and the chief of Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation has agreed to meet with activists to discuss the matter. By Taylor Weidman/Getty Images.

Do We Have A “Work Fetish”?

Patrick Spaet argues that the Western obsession with work ethic strains credulity:

Our attitudes towards work are extremely schizophrenic: we secretly aspire to sloth, while we loudly praise work. There isn’t an election poster that doesn’t promise more jobs. The call for more work is similar to the Stockholm syndrome, in which the victims of hostage-taking eventually develop a positive relationship with their captors. We constantly hear the drivel of “growth,” “competition,” and “local prosperity,” to convince us that we have to “tighten our belts,” because only that way are “secure jobs” possible–while everything else presents “no alternative.” A wage increase isn’t in the cards, because otherwise the company will go broke. We can’t tax too much, because otherwise the job generators will go abroad. All of these things have become the consensus–even among the wage slaves themselves.

This situation is all the more schizophrenic in that we take every opportunity every day to escape toil and work: who voluntarily uses a washboard, if he has a washing machine? Who copies out a text by hand, if he can use a photocopier instead? And who mentally calculates the miserable columns of figures on his tax return, if he has a calculator? We are bone idle, and yet we glorify work. The Stockholm syndrome of work fetishism has befuddled our minds. It is the paradox of the present: the religion of work has attained the status of a state religion, at exactly the point in time when work is dying. The sale of labor power will be as promising in the 21st century as the sale of stagecoaches in the 20th century.

Spaet, who published a version of this piece in the German paper Die ZEIT over the summer, goes on to remark on the considerable debate it stirred:

Some commentators pointed out that a lot of work is unpaid as well as underappreciated, like housekeeping, care work, and parenting. Yes, it’s a shame that this work, which is mostly done by women, doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It’s a vicious result of the pervasive work fetish that holds that only paid work is valuable work.

Other commentators were quite hostile: “Nobody has a right to be lazy,” they argued. “Those who don’t work are doing harm to society. They are just social parasites.”

Well, this is a prime example of the work fetish. And commentators like this one overlook the fact that most existing jobs are bullshit jobs. As Henry David Thoreau put it: “Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.”

“Everything Poisons Religion”

That’s the lesson Ferdinand Mount draws from Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, citing her claim that every major faith tradition “has tracked the political entity in which it arose; none has become a ‘world religion’ without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire and every tradition would have to develop an imperial ideology”:

The conversion of Constantine also meant the conscription of Christianity. It was not long before Augustine of Hippo was developing the convenient theory of the ‘just war’. Similarly the ahadith, the later reports of the Prophet’s sayings, confer a spiritual dimension on warfare which it doesn’t have in the Koran. Militant Sikhs today prefer to quote the martial teachings of the Tenth Guru rather than those of their founder Guru Nanak, who taught that only ‘he who regards all men as equals is religious’.

Christopher Hitchens had it the wrong way round in his subtitle to God is Not Great. It should have been, not ‘How Religion Poisons Everything’ but ‘How Everything Poisons Religion’. This is the misunderstanding which drives fanatical secularists to demand that faith be driven out of the public square and permanently banned from re-entry, like a drunk from the pub he always picks a fight in.

The demand was first heard in the 17th century from Hobbes and Locke, and it became an article of faith for the American revolutionaries. Jefferson believed that Church and State had proved ‘a loathsome combination’, and he was determined to build a ‘wall of separation’ between them. What he could not foresee was that nationalism would effortlessly take over the mantle of self-righteousness, and the apocalyptic language too. Within 60 years, the first explicitly non-sectarian republic exploded in the most modern and deadly civil war, its cause immortalised by the rhetoric of the non-religious Abraham Lincoln.

In an essay drawing from her book, Armstrong emphasizes one aspect of her argument in particular – that the modern understanding of religion as a distinctly private pursuit is not the historical norm:

Before the modern period, religion was not a separate activity, hermetically sealed off from all others; rather, it permeated all human undertakings, including economics, state-building, politics and warfare. Before 1700, it would have been impossible for people to say where, for example, “politics” ended and “religion” began. The Crusades were certainly inspired by religious passion but they were also deeply political: Pope Urban II let the knights of Christendom loose on the Muslim world to extend the power of the church eastwards and create a papal monarchy that would control Christian Europe. The Spanish inquisition was a deeply flawed attempt to secure the internal order of Spain after a divisive civil war, at a time when the nation feared an imminent attack by the Ottoman empire. Similarly, the European wars of religion and the thirty years war were certainly exacerbated by the sectarian quarrels of Protestants and Catholics, but their violence reflected the birth pangs of the modern nation-state.

Noel Malcolm, however, questions Armstrong’s reliance on this amorphous understanding of what religion really is:

Writing about ancient Persia, she declares that “a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence; it is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends”. That sounds reasonable enough, but then she makes a much bolder claim. Until about 1700, she says, people were simply unable to distinguish between religious issues and political, social or economic ones. There was no such separate thing as religion. Ergo, it is wrong to single out “religion” as something to blame.

If that were true, it would also mean that you can’t single out religion as something to excuse, or at least partly exonerate. But when she discusses medieval Christian anti-Semitism, for example, Armstrong is quick to say that not only “religious conviction” but also “social, political and economic elements” were to blame. The violence of the Spanish Inquisition, likewise, “was caused less by theological than political considerations”. What was all that about it being impossible to distinguish religious issues from non-religious ones?

Recent Dish on Armstrong’s book here.

(Photo of a bronze statue of Constantine by Gernot Keller)

The Limits Of Charity

Eric Frith finds fault with Pope Francis for not going far enough in his critiques of capitalism, arguing that his calls for generosity and deep sympathy for the poor don’t address the structural problems at work:

By invoking John Paul II’s formulation of the “option for the poor” as a call to Catholic charity, Francis obscures what should be plain. He denounces the neoliberal mythology of the autonomous and self-regulating market and the market-based commoditization of human life. But his refusal to take on the state, his insistence that charity is the only remedy for the excesses and materialism of capitalism, is in effect an acquiescence to neoliberal logic.

This does not just reflect a paucity of social theory. One does not need Marxist economics to see that encouraging the free flow of commodities while criminalizing the flow of labor will trap the poor between a rock and a hard place. One does not need to stake out a theological position on the efficient markets hypothesis to see that arming police like soldiers will lead to collateral damage. Francis prays for politicians who will take inequality seriously, but never makes reference to liberation theology’s cornerstone scriptural story: the Exodus, when with God’s help the Hebrews freed themselves from slavery.

“Charity,” St. Augustine wrote, “is no substitute for justice withheld.” If the Vatican truly wishes to engage with liberation theology, rather than eulogize it in its sunset moments, Pope Francis will have to address the power behind the markets—the police, the military, and the whole military-carceral state—as [Oscar] Romero, [Miguel] D’Escoto, and indigenous communities in Chiapas did.

Mental Health Break

Watching the Northern lights in real-time:

Quote For The Day

“I think one of the poignant things about human beings is that they’re so undefended, physically. And that there’s an absolute relationship between that defenselessness and everything that’s impressive about them. I think a lot of us would like to be turtles and porcupines, and I think that in a way one of the impulses of human beings is to defend themselves in a way that nature did not. But I think the other impulse is to just love the experience with nothing to protect oneself, and actually feeling in fact no barrier. People know about their mortality in a way that we can’t know that any animal knows. They know about Earth being a ball in space. Intelligence of the high human sort could be translated as defenselessness, because we can know many things that are very hard to bear,” – Marilynne Robinson, in an interview included in A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson.

A Short Film For Saturday

Greg Jardin’s short film Floating follows the urban adventures of a figure made entirely of balloons:

Floating once again proves our remarkable human ability to discover empathy for abstract non-humans. Known for his high-concept stop-motion music videos, Jardin, in a new passion project, displays remarkable adeptness at CG in crafting his remarkable protagonist. A bare-bones production, shot on public streets, Jardin puts in extra work in handling Edit/Sound Design and VFX in addition to writing/directing. The result is a film that looks much more lush and expensive than it probably was. … [T]he remarkable “performance” of his animated lead hits the right spots in enabling an audience to experience his crushing loneliness.

Jardin explained his inspiration in a recent interview:

I really liked the idea of crafting an emotional narrative around something that you would normally not have any real emotional connection to, in this case, balloons. When I started discussing the idea with my friend Matthew Beans, who ended up co-writing it with me, we started discussing the notion that giving the balloon person a kindred spirit and separating the two could give it more of an emotional impact that a balloon person alone for the duration of the film.

Just Browsing

Marisa Meltzer contemplates the “vicarious Tinder fantasies” of the settled-down:

“They want to save you, the married friends,” said Karen Luh, who is a lawyer in Los Angeles. She sighed audibly. “I was having dinner with a friend and talking about losers I was dating. She said, ‘You should use this thing Tinder.’ She had seen it at a baby shower. She presented it like she wished she could use it, too.” …

Perhaps, at least in part, the envy isn’t even about wishing they were single and seeing what’s on the menu out there, but about fear of being left out by new technology — or way of life. “It’s America, so people are always worried about getting old and out of touch and obsolete,” said Emily Witt, who profiled Tinder in GQ earlier this year and whose forthcoming book, Future Sex, is on women and sexuality. Married people feel like they’re “missing out on this new kind of socialization, which isn’t to say they should be jealous of us,” she said.

Or for some would-be Tinder voyeurs, maybe it’s simply a way to get their significant other a little bit jealous. One night last winter Gio Muniz and Ruth Reader were at a bar in Brooklyn, and the topic of Tinder came up. “We were talking to a friend who had just started messing around with it and telling us how someone finally figured out a hookup app for straight people,” she said. So they downloaded it on his phone and started browsing. “It lasted 22 minutes or so,” said Muniz. Then, “Ruth was like, ‘You’re gonna delete that, right?’”

Leonard Cohen On Love

Ezra Glinter looks at sex and intimacy in the work of Leonard Cohen:

Cohen’s rawness, and the honesty with which he displays his own vulnerabilities, sometimes leads him to extreme positions, granting sex a primacy that it doesn’t deserve. In his view “there is a war between the man and the woman” as well as “a war between those who say there is a war and those who say that there isn’t” (“There Is a War”). He has written, “a friendship between a man and a woman which is not based on sex is either hypocrisy or masochism.” And he has concluded, “when I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction.”

For me, that’s the voice of a less mature self, for whom deprivation is not just the mother of poetry but of exaggeration.

… Usually those emotions, even when we can admit them to ourselves or share them with our closest friends, have to be covered up in polite society. We can’t walk around constantly in the throes of our own private maelstroms. More important, maturity—and good sense—demands that we view each other as human beings who suffer from basically the same problems, not as enemies in a never-ending war of the sexes. We are the perpetrators of pain as well as its victims, we reject and are rejected, desire and are desired. But that knowledge doesn’t lessen the joy and suffering of our innermost selves. It doesn’t diminish the feelings of delight and anger that seem as though they had never been felt before. Only time diminishes them, along with experience, repetition and age.

Except, it seems, for Leonard Cohen. In his work, the bite of those feelings is still sharp. In his albums and novels, memories of love and heartbreak stay on the surface, bobbing up and down. In his poems and songs there is always, as Wordsworth put it, “The glory and the freshness of a dream.” Reading and listening to Leonard Cohen it is always, and forever, the first time.

A Story About Leaving The Dreamhouse Behind

Ophira Eisenberg survived a car accident when she was eight years old. Here she tells the poignant, bittersweet story of how her recovery gave her the perspective that comes with growing up:

Eisenberg is a comedian, writer, and a regular host of Moth storySLAMs, as well as of the NPR quiz show Ask Me Another. Previous storytelling on the Dish here.