Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 181

Academics, Public Work, And Labor

by Freddie deBoer

Last July, I attended the Council of Writing Program Administrator’s annual conference in Normal, Illinois. While there, I watched a keynote address given by Duane Roen, a vice provost and professor at Arizona State University. Roen’s speech addressed the great need for academics and scholars to be publicly engaged, to share their work with a general audience and to endeavor to make the work we produce in our universities more accessible to the public. Roen referenced Nicholas Kristof’s famous (or notorious) column complaining that academics are too cloistered, our work too obscure to be of use to the general public. At the time, I and others complained that Kristof’s perspective was willfully narrow, failed to recognize a whole host of academics who make their work public every day, and ignored structural economic reasons for why academics can’t or won’t engage publicly. But Roen’s speech made clear that, despite these real reservations, we must continue to press ourselves to be more engaged, accessible, and open in our teaching and our research. Whether the perception that we are inaccessible and secluded from public life is fair or not, that perception must be combated through rigorous public engagement. Roen discussed academics who had, he felt, done an exemplary job of making their work available to a wider audience, and laid out the many benefits of this type of scholarly work.

Roen was the perfect figure to deliver such an argument, given his long history as a leader and mentor within the WPA world. The night before his speech, my friend Marcy and I talked with Dr. Roen at length at a gathering for graduate students, and I was struck by his warmth and approachability. This, too, is a form of public work, engaging with early-career academics and making them feel like part of the scholarly conversation. I was happy to see that Roen’s speech displayed the same friendliness and openness.

But while I felt energized by Roen’s keynote, I also felt concerned. I had noticed that all of the academics Roen listed were late career, and enjoyed the benefits of both tenure and prominence. During the Q&A, I asked Roen about the dangers of engaging publicly as a grad student or untenured academic, given that public speech tends to be political speech. Roen admitted that the question for the untenured was complicated, and advocated a cautious approach. Afterwards, several other faculty members in the audience addressed the question, and argued that grad students should not fear political engagement. Why would someone want to join a department, one asked, if that department had such little regard for intellectual and political freedom that it wouldn’t hire someone with controversial views? I felt encouraged by that support. But it’s also the case that, after I spoke, I was approached over the course of the next day by perhaps a half dozen grad students, who confided in me that they, too, feel constrained in what they can say, and fear speaking out in public about issues of controversy. They appreciated the support of the faculty in attendance, as I did, but said that with the academic job market as demoralizingly competitive as it is, they could not help but feel pressure to keep their opinions to themselves. They want to engage publicly, but the risks seem to outweigh the rewards.

These questions have taken on particular salience recently. Dr. Steven Salaita, a Palestinian-American scholar who studies indigenous history and post-colonialism, had a tenured job offer rescinded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, thanks to a series of tweets he had sent regarding Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. To make matters even worse, Salaita had already resigned his tenured position at Virginia Tech, as his appointment at Illinois had already been confirmed. Adding insult to injury, Cary Nelson, a professor in the department Salaita was to join and the former president of the AAUP faculty union, vigorously defended the school’s decision, despite being a self-identified defender of academic freedom. (In fact, Nelson has displayed such intimate knowledge with Salaita’s tweets that it is fair to ask whether he had a hand in the decision.) I wrote a letter to UIUC’s chancellor to protest, as did many others, and as Corey Robin has documented at length, a great number of academics and public figures have condemned this action. (Robin’s blog, in general, has been an indispensable resource in covering this story.) But while I hope and pray that Salaita lands on his feet in a secure tenured job, the damage to academic freedom has been done no matter what the outcome: the millions of academics observing this situation, particularly those who are in the precarious position of being untenured—the vast majority—cannot help but be less likely to speak out on matters of controversy. Those at UIUC who are responsible for this decision are culpable for this chilling effect on free political and intellectual expression.

Nelson’s performance throughout this controversy has been an embarrassment to himself and to his university. He has made it clear that his objection is not procedural but rather based largely on his personal rejection of Salaita’s politics. He has stated, for example, that “he doesn’t consider Gaza under occupation,” which is absurd, and anyway should be totally irrelevant to whether or not Salaita should have been fired. Nelson has taken the typical tack of representing Salaita as anti-Semitic, despite the fact that Salaita has said (in the self-same medium) “My stand is fundamentally one of acknowledging and countering the horror of antisemitism,” ” I believe that Jewish and Arab children are equal in the eyes of God,” “I refuse to conceptualize Israel/Palestine as Jewish-Arab acrimony. I am in solidarity with many Jews and in disagreement with many Arabs,” among other things.

What little procedural defense of Salaita’s firing Nelson was able to muster involved the notion of “collegiality.” As many have pointed out, Nelson himself has not always been a champion in this regard himself, referring to another academic in print as a vampire bat, among other outbursts. Beyond the palpable hypocrisy of Nelson’s take, there is the simply unworkable division between expression and tone. Arguments about tone are perennially utilized to forbid ideas that are controversial or disliked; there is no meaningful distinction between the two. Too often, notions of collegiality and tone become a catch-all complaint that cannot be independently verified. Would Malcolm X be able to serve in Nelson’s university? Would Eugene Debs or Jane Addams or Larry Kramer?

Someone once wrote that “claims about collegiality are being used to stifle campus debate, to punish faculty, and to silence the free exchange of opinion by the imposition of corporate-style conformity.” That man was Cary Nelson. I would like very much for Dr. Nelson to grapple with this: when smart and committed young academics tell me that they are too afraid of the potential professional consequences to speak out publicly, as they have often, it is people like Nelson who are partially responsible. His conduct has directly and deeply damaged our sense of a right to intellectual freedom.

Earlier this year, I got myself in some trouble with my fellow leftists when I asked whether we might take pause at the firing of Mozilla CEO Brandon Eich. I felt no personal sympathy for him, none at all, and I said so. Eich is a rich and powerful person, and I strongly disagree with his opposition to gay marriage rights in California. But I was disturbed at how casually my liberal friends disregarded his claims to free speech rights. “The first amendment doesn’t guarantee you the right to keep your job! It just means that the government can’t come arrest you for expressing unpopular views!” And yet consider what that attitude means. If workers have no expectation at all to the right to hold political views their employers don’t like, how do they enjoy basic democratic political rights at all? In a world in which you need a job to provide for your own material security, the notion that employers have the right to fire you for holding unpopular political views means that you have no right to hold unpopular political views. Indeed: in such a world, the only people who maintain the ability to hold unpopular political opinions are the independently wealthy. How that could be considered a liberal or progressive outcome, I have no idea, and yet those who self-identify as members of the broad left were the most aggressive in ridiculing my questions. Though they and I have little regard for Eich, the fact remains that rights must be universal if they are rights at all, and the procedural precedent set by Eich’s dismissal was, I thought, at least worth discussing.

Under labor conditions in the university system as brutal as we’ve faced, and with the cost of controversy as high as ever, how can academics and professors feel free to work through controversial and unpopular ideas, which is a necessary part of our work? Some defended the Eich firing by pointing out that, as a CEO, he had a special responsibility to be the public face of the company. Eich’s job, in this telling, was in part to be uncontroversial, and he failed in that task. Perhaps that’s true. But for us as academics, having and expressing controversial ideas is our job. A professoriate that feels that it cannot express impolite opinions is a professoriate that has no ability to cast new light on the human condition, no ability to truly grapple with the essential questions that confront the human race. Nor can they engage publicly if they are so busy teaching a huge course load as adjuncts that they have no time in which to research and teach, let along expand their work to the public sphere. My friend Anthony Galluzo, a brilliant Americanist, has written publicly about academics and research before, and I’d like to read more. But he’s been constrained, as so many other bright academics are, by his need to teach an unsustainable course load to survive. There is no way in which we can build the kind of public outreach we are asked to in a context where so many academics are so overworked and underpaid– and no way, incidentally, those academics can be the kinds of teachers they need to be.

All of this might seem like inside baseball, an obscure conversation had by members of a small, unusual industry. But the conditions that academics face are in fact not that different from those of everyone else. After all, it is not merely academics who have a responsibility to undertake public, political work, but all of us who are democratic citizens. By the most basic political philosophy of democracy, citizens are not required merely to vote and leave the debates to the politicians, but must actively engage in the messy work of self-governance. That means that they must feel free to express themselves politically without fear that their boss will fire them, leaving them unable to provide for themselves or their family. In a world where poor job quality, insufficient hours, insufficient pay, ever-expanding corporate rights and protections, sharp reductions in unionism, and the threat of automation all diminish the negotiating power of workers, controversial political engagement becomes a risk few can afford to take. Economic insecurity becomes political insecurity.

In the academic world, there is simply no alternative to reinvesting in the human resource that is the professoriate, expanding the ranks of those who enjoy the protections of tenure. It is possible, even in a context in which we are finally taking the necessary steps to rein in the increase in tuition. Because universities have been so profligate in the recent past, building dorms and gyms and dining halls beyond all sense and employing an army of administrators whose work is tangential to the academic enterprise, there is ample room to cut while still restoring the professoriate, particularly if states decide to reinvest in their public universities, which have been the envy of the world. We must make the choice as a society to privilege teaching and research over fancy buildings and expensive amenities. A commitment to hiring more tenure-track faculty from the ranks of our contingent labor and graduate students will improve undergraduate teaching, as overworked adjuncts teaching five or six classes a semester to make ends meet cannot possibly reach their peak potential as educators, through no fault of their own. It will also revitalize our research mission, and it will empower scholars to do the controversial, political work that is such an essential part of the life of the mind.

In the broader societal view, we must recognize that we have endured four decades of declining workplace conditions for millions of Americans. Flat-lined real wages, periods of high unemployment, and the general casualization and deprofessionalization of our labor force have left us not merely a less prosperous and humane society, but a less free, less democratic one as well. Our people cannot perform their role as citizens in a working world where they have no leverage and no negotiating power. To restore civic participation and public life, we must restore our unions and reinvigorate collective bargaining rights, strengthen our social safety net, and transition to a system of market socialism through a guaranteed basic income. Then, workers of all stripes, academic or otherwise, will enjoy the ability to engage politically without fear that they will go hungry if they say the wrong things. In the end, the projects to improve humanitarian outcomes, to increase personal liberty, and to revitalize deliberative democracy are one and the same.

Don’t Be A Stranger On The Train

by Dish Staff

New research suggests you’re better off chatting up fellow commuters than staying mum:

The investigation began with rail and bus commuters travelling into Chicago. Dozens of them were recruited into one of three conditions – to engage in conversation with a stranger on the train, sit in solitude, or simply behave as they usually would. Afterwards they mailed back a questionnaire in which they answered questions about the experience. Their answers were compared to the predictions made by other commuters, who instead of fulfilling one of these three conditions, imagined what kind of experience they’d have had if they’d taken part.

The returned questionnaires showed it was those commuters who were instructed to strike up conversation with a stranger who’d had the most positive experiences (sitting in solitude was the least enjoyable, with behaving as normal scoring in between). Surprisingly perhaps, chatting with a stranger didn’t come at the cost of self-reported productivity. These findings contrasted starkly with the predictions made by the commuters who imagined taking part – they thought that being asked to engage with a stranger would have been the least enjoyable of the three conditions. [Researchers Nicholas] Epley and [Juliana] Schroeder said this provides evidence of a “severe misunderstanding of the psychological consequences of social engagement”, thus providing a clue as to why, despite being social animals, we so often ignore each other.

(Photo of NYC subway via Rebecca Wilson)

Hello There

by Freddie deBoer

Hey guys, my name is Freddie deBoer, and I’m very happy to be filling in for Andrew this week.

For five years (exactly), I wrote a blog called L’Hote, which I named as a joke based on the fact that before I started blogging, I was a commenter on other people’s blogs. (L’hote, in French, means both the host and the guest.) For about a year or so now, I’ve been blogging under the title Interfaces of the Word at my professional website. I write about everything and anything, but I write a lot about education and education reform, professional writing and journalism as cultures, and artificial intelligence. I have also written for n+1, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, and a bunch of other places.

I’m an academic, from an academic family. My father was a professor and his father was a professor and his…. I’m currently a fourth year student and doctoral candidate at Purdue University, in the Rhetoric and Composition program. My academic work occupies the overlap between composition studies, applied linguistics, and education, with a focus on assessment and testing, second language learning, and program administration. If I’m pressed to name my field, I sometimes say educational linguistics, sometimes literacy education, and sometimes just composition. I’m not really caught up on labels. I care about writing, I care about language, and I care about teaching and researching both. That’s my field.

I consider myself a quantitative researcher, and a lot of my work involves corpus linguistics, computerized textual processing, and statistics. At the same time, I value qualitative, historical, and theoretical work as well. What I’ve gained from studying rhetoric and composition generally, and at Purdue’s program specifically, is freedom– immense freedom to define my own interests, my own methodologies, and my own path. I’m currently writing a dissertation on the Collegiate Learning Assessment+, a standardized test of college learning that is being adopted here at Purdue. My dissertation involves testing and assessment theory, empirical evaluation of piloting results, the history and rhetoric of the higher education assessment movement, and other issues, which suits my interdisciplinary interests very well. (I hope to write a post about the test for you guys this week.) I’m on track to graduate this coming May on a four year plan, and the academic job market is rushing up at me in the coming months.

I’m also a socialist, from a socialist family. In that, I mean that I believe in an economic system based on a societal obligation to secure basic material security for all of its people, and that this responsibility cannot be fulfilled by reforming capitalism. My personal preference is for the implementation of a system of market socialism through the vehicle of a universal basic income. What comes after that, I can’t say, but it should stem from the recognition that economic outcomes are the product of forces beyond the control of the individual, and that the market will never deliver moral outcomes unless it is forced to by society. I also reject the ideas of religion, intrinsic sexual identity, patriotism, and empire.

I have a cat, named Suavecito, and a dog, named Miles, who are both crazy in very different ways. You can see my neurotic dog and my sociopathic cat in the picture above.

I also have a reputation. Because I believe in being direct, and I like to fight, and more I believe it’s our democratic responsibility to fight. So when you think I’m wrong, write me an email, and let’s argue. I’m looking forward to it, and I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Email Of The Day

by Dish Staff

A reader writes:

I am writing to say that I will miss Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Phoebe Maltz Bovy when their guest-blogging tenure is over. I am sure there are plenty of laments thrown your way about their female- and youthful-centric topics, but I have to say that the Dish has turned into a far more interesting version of Jezebel this week.

I am by no means a libertarian, save in one area: feminism. And as such, I have agreed with pretty much everything Ms Brown has written on the matter. I was bobbing my head throughout her piece on prostitution. And I loved how Ms Bovy takes a seemingly superficial topic like fashion and spins it toward an essay on cultural appropriation.

So thank you for inviting them this week, and you can be sure that I will seek out their blogs to read more of their writing.

It’s been a joy having them on the blog this week. And Phoebe will continue her role as a Dishtern, so you may see her writing again soon. For more on the two women, check out their intros. Read all of Phoebe’s posts here and all of Elizabeth’s posts here.

(Photos: Phoebe on the left, Elizabeth on the right)

A Poem For Sunday

by Alice Quinn

“The House on the Hill” by Anne MacKay:

A house for summer with lawns and porches,

Edwardian books, adventure stories, the smell of musty closets,

thin mattress over metal springs, blankets with holes,

a cabinet of arrowheads and stones, forbidden

dumb-waiter creaking, they said it was too old,

odor of attics with discarded bureaus, portraits.

I lived with relics of children already aunts and uncles—

a doll’s house, college scrapbook on the shelf,

baseball bats and gloves forgotten in the window seat.

Nothing could change in the days of salt air filling

the garden, storm winds rattling the big windows,

Mother and Grandmother reading in small circles of light,

now ghosts whispering. The house a lost arm aching in the night.

(From Sailing the Edge © 2003 by Anne MacKay. Used by permission of the Estate of Anne MacKay, 2014. Photo by Brian Stocks)

What Can Prevent Campus Rape? Ctd

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

A reader writes:

I have been involved in student affairs at a college campus in some capacity for over twenty years. I have some, not a lot of, experience with sexual assault investigations. Police should always be notified, and it is their job to conduct investigations according to their established procedures. These types of investigations are not the purview of academic institutions. On this we agree.

However, to suggest that academic institutions have no role is mistaken. All colleges have their policies regarding sexual assault and, while the police may not have enough evidence to bring charges, they can determine that a policy has been violated and that this violation merits sanction. Just because the police may not be able to gather the necessary evidence does not mean that institution cannot address the matter for common good of the college community.

You make a persuasive case for the limited impact (if at all) of abstinence programs of many sorts. However, simply providing the instruction about how to have sex is not enough. Young people also need to learn and understand how the male and female bodies work. For males it is often easy to attain physical pleasure. For females it is often not easy. Failure to understand this important difference risks contributing negatively to the emotional dimension of sexual relationships that we too often refuse to discuss.

Another expert on the subject:

I am a college student affairs administrator and work at a private university in the US. I have worked directly for about a decade with the issues you brought up in your recent post on sexual assault on college campuses. In my current role, I serve as a “Deputy Title IX Coordinator” (a title that is becoming more frequent on campuses nationwide) where I have the responsibility of overseeing our investigations into reports of sexual assault (in addition to sexual harassment, partner violence and stalking, which all fall under the same policies and regulations) as well as the staff that are responsible for investigations and adjudicating cases, should they get to that point. As I am at a smaller, private institution, this is just one of the hats I wear as part of my position (which also include oversight of all student conduct issues and other student affairs initiatives).

There are a few points that you brought up that I’d like to respond to. Obviously, I can only speak from my own experience, but I have issues with the perceived assumption that colleges are acting in bad faith.

Speaking as a student affairs professional, those of us in this line of work are doing it precisely because we enjoy working with students. We see them at their best and at their worst, after exceptional achievements and after terrible traumas. In any sexual assault allegation, I have been tasked with investigating, adjudicating or overseeing, and my first concern has been student welfare (of all parties). And the professionals I work with conduct their duties to the best of their abilities. Incidents are not “kept quiet” for PR purposes, as we have an obligation to the parties to protect their privacy (though there are exceptions which may trigger community notification of an incident).

Also, unless the victim has requested it, universities cannot involve law enforcement outside limited exceptions. I don’t see why we’d want to change this. It’s important to keep that decision with the victim and give them the opportunity to make their own decision.

In situations I’ve been involved with, none of the students who have been dismissed/expelled for sexual assault have ever been charged with crime. This fact in no way shakes my confidence that the university did the right thing in each situation. Our campuses were safer without those students, something I say unapologetically. What I don’t understand is why people are shocked that these disparities happen. In conversations with colleagues at my current institution, they can go back almost 20 years and note that not a single sexual assault allegation a student has brought to the local police has resulted in a charge, never mind a conviction (we do not have a sworn police department on my campus and rely on the local PD when an arrest has to be made). Yet people are surprised when the university is asked to take steps, or why a victim feels more comfortable discussing these issues with a college administrator or counselor who will actually listen and provide options, as opposed to getting poor treatment at the local PD (of which I have plenty of stories).

Which leads to another area of disagreement: the belief that if something is a crime, then it should only be dealt with by law enforcement. Putting aside the assumption of law enforcement expertise in incidents of sexual violence that I do not share, colleges and universities deal with students who commit crimes all the time. Underage alcohol possession is a crime. Two roommates who get into a fistfight is a crime. Someone stealing a video game from a residence hall room is a crime. Giving alcohol to minors is a crime.

The list goes on an on, and universities have been dealing with these issues for decades and longer. What makes sexual assault different? Is it the discomfort for all involved? I know plenty of universities, especially “elite” universities, would like to get out of the sexual assault response business because it’s unpleasant, but why would a university provide all sots of services and assurances of a safe community but just stop at sexual assault? Keep in mind that this obligation to address student behavior is not a new thing, and has been supported by state and federal courts for decades. There is even a professional association for student affairs professionals who do this work, the Association for Student Conduct Administration. I’d like to direct you to an oft-cited federal court opinion from the 1960s that other courts cite as a foundation for this obligation, the General Order on Judicial Standards of Procedure and Substance in Review of Student Discipline in Tax Supported Institutions of Higher Education. It says in particular:

The discipline of students in the educational community is, in all but the cases of irrevocable expulsion, a part of the teaching process. In the case of irrevocable expulsion for misconduct, the process is not punitive or deterrent in the criminal law sense, but the process is rather the determination that the student is unqualified to continue as a member of the educational community. Even then, the disciplinary process is not the equivalent to the criminal law process of federal or state criminal law. For, while the expelled student may suffer damaging effects, sometimes irreparable, to his educational, social, and economic future, he or she may not be imprisoned, fined, disenfranchised, or subjected to probationary supervision. The attempted analogy of student discipline to criminal proceedings against adults and juveniles is not sound.

I can agree, however, that the web of regulations is becoming incredibly difficult to navigate, particularly at smaller institutions that do not have separate offices that handle diversity and equity, regulatory compliance, etc. I have become the de facto compliance officer on my campus, because I have a good knowledge of our obligations, speak about them effectively, and my pre-higher education background. While you listed many of the federal mandates universities are dealing with (Title IX, VAWA, the Clery Act, FERPA, etc.) and one that may come our way if it makes it through the legislative meat grinder (CASA), keep in mind that several states have individiually enacted their own laws (for many of the same political reasons your post assigned to the feds). At least four states that I know of have either enacted or are looking to enact their own legislation (CA, CT, NJ, and NY). This, plus proposed increased enforcement, makes our jobs much more difficult. I’ve been involved in an OCR investigation. It’s an incredibly difficult experience, and when OCR sets up shop, it makes it almost impossible to do your actual job, because of the amount of time and amount of data they demand.

Sorry for the long-winded response, but while I cannot write from the perspective of a survivor or an accused student, I can definitely write from the perspective of someone who is part of this issue, and being asked to administer it. Thank you and Andrew. As a long-time reader, this provides a good reminder to renew my subscription.

When Religion Gets Into Your System

by Dish Staff

Michael Schulson is rather amused by a recent paper in the journal Biology Direct that “suggests that the impulse behind some religious rituals could be driven by mind-altering parasites.” His quick summary of the authors’ argument:

Essentially, [researcher Alexander] Panchin et al. have noticed that some rituals spread germs. (They’ve mostly ignored the many, many cleansing rituals that seem to do the opposite). So, they ask, what if germs, looking to spread, drive people to perform rituals? This isn’t quite as outlandish as it sounds. Many germs really do alter their hosts’ behaviors in ways that help the germ spread (think of rabies, which spreads by biting, and which alters the brains of infected mammals to make them feel very, very aggressive; or consider Toxoplasmosis, a protist associated with cats, that seems to cause infected rats to feel less fear of felines).

Of course, the urge to bite your fellow mammals is, perhaps, a shade less nuanced than all the possible reasons that might motivate a person to take communion, or kiss an icon, or travel to Mecca and mingle with strangers.

He sees such a notion as part of a long history of reducing faith to a kind of mental illness, a comparison he finds wanting:

[T]hinking of religion as an illness of the mind gives an enormous amount of power to abstract ideas, and very little credit to individual people. Unlike, say, the experience of having a virus, we can usually exercise some choice over our religious lives. When we can’t exercise that choice, the constraints are as likely to be sociological as they are the result of some multi-tentacled idea that has become lodged in our brain (or in our gut). And, unlike a virus or a gene, we can take the religious practices given to us and consciously shape them, change them, deploy them in new ways, and use them for practical ends.

One feels, reading the Panchin paper and its viral ilk, not that they’ve plumbed the psychology of the religious impulse, but that, unwittingly, they’ve revealed their own total bafflement at why someone might actually want to do something spiritual. Fortunately, there’s a cure for that bafflement. It’s called interacting with human beings who are different from you.

Though not about bacteria, Patrick McNamara details his work on the neurological basis of belief, especially dopamine’s place in our spiritual lives. The origins of why he started digging into this topic:

I had a lucky break during routine office hours at the VA (Veterans Administration) Boston Healthcare System, where I regularly treat US veterans. I was doing a routine neuropsychological examination of a tall, distinguished elderly man with Parkinson’s Disease. This man was a decorated Second World War veteran and obviously intelligent. He had made his living as a consulting engineer but had slowly withdrawn from the working world as his symptoms progressed. His withdrawal was selective: he did not quit everything, his wife explained. ‘Just social parts of his work, some physical stuff and unfortunately his private religious devotions.’

When I asked what she meant by ‘devotions’ she replied that he used to pray and read his Bible all the time, but since the onset of the disease he had done so less and less. When I asked the patient himself about his religious interests, he replied that they seemed to have vanished. What was so striking was that he said he was quite unhappy about that fact. What appeared to be keeping him from his ‘devotions’ was that he found them ‘hard to fathom’. He had not stopped wanting to believe and practise his religion but simply found it more difficult to do so.

How A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever

by Dish Staff

Cody C. Delistraty offers a lovely meditation on the connection between beauty and happiness:

In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton weighs the feeling of walking into an “ugly” McDonalds in the Westminster area of London compared to the feeling of entering the “beautiful” Westminster Cathedral across the street. He says that because of the harsh lighting, the plastic furniture, and the cacophonous color scheme (all those bright yellows and reds), one tends to feel immediately “anxious” in the McDonalds.

What one feels in the Westminster Cathedral, however, is a calmness brought on by a series of architectural and artistic decisions: the muted colors (greys and bleak reds), the romantic yellow lighting that bursts out onto Victoria Street, the intricate mosaics, and the vaulted ceilings. Although the Westminster Cathedral has the same principle elements of architecture as the McDonald’s—windows, doors, floors, ceilings, and seats—the cathedral helps people to relax and reflect, where the fast food restaurant causes one to feel stressed and hurried.

It seems part of humans’ appreciation of beauty is because it is able to conjure the feelings we tend to associate with happiness: calmness, a connection to history or the divine, wealth, time for reflection and appreciation, and, perhaps surprisingly, hope.

(Photo of interior of Westminster Cathedral by Steve Cadman)

Another Round On The Political Roots Of Atheism

by Matthew Sitman

Last Sunday we featured Nick Spencer’s argument that the rise of modern atheism had less to do with the advance of science than the fallout from the entanglement of religion and politics in early modern Europe. Kenneth Sheppard pushes back with a number of qualifications and questions:

It is an oversimplification to suggest, as Spencer does, that the major scientific developments of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries were “hardly atheistic at all.” Yes, Copernicus was a priest. So was Galileo. Yet David Wootton has argued that Galileo was in fact a closet unbeliever (Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, Yale, 2010). Yes, Bacon argued that his new natural philosophy was really an aid to theology. But did all his contemporaries think likewise? Christopher Riggs has argued that Bacon’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, was an unbeliever for reasons related to the new science (The World of Christopher Marlowe, Faber and Faber, 2004). What about more challenging examples, such as Hobbes or Spinoza? Surely it would be difficult to sustain the claim that their deeply heterodox – and perhaps atheistic – views had nothing to do with recent developments in science? No, the history of science does not fully explain the history of atheism, but it is misleading to suggest that the two are unrelated.

Spencer is right to look to politics as an alternate source for an explanation of atheism’s history, but he does so in rather simplistic terms. Apparently atheism emerged in France because of its supposedly intellectual and political backwardness, was avoided in Britain because of its antipathy to absolutist and revolutionary France, and was effectively negated in America because of the separation of church and state. But this way of looking at the history of France, Britain, and America rests on taking French anticlericalism, British whiggism, and American exceptionalism at their word. What evidence does Spencer offer here, other than a series of declarative statements with fairly thin evidentiary argumentation?

Sheppard is definitely right to point out how complicated this period of history was, especially with regard to religion. In my previous life as an academic, I studied early modern political thought, which led me to explore a number of the personalities and issues he mentions, though admittedly my focus wasn’t on the history of science. But to take an example he mentions that I did study with some care, Thomas Hobbes, I’m still conflicted about where to draw the line between mere heterodoxy and a more subversive atheism, or how to determine when the appearance of piety was, well, just that – an appearance, undermined by the many subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle criticisms he leveled against traditional Christianity, or the way he reworked Christian doctrines almost beyond recognition.

And let’s say Hobbes was an atheist; it’s still worth noting that half of his masterwork, Leviathan, takes on the rhetoric of religion, discussing everything from angels to what Hell might be like. His arguments about the Bible amount to one of the first examples of the historical-critical method – and yet his political vision culminates in a “Christian commonwealth.” Transposing our categories and preoccupations onto the past is always problematic, but it seems to me that it’s especially fraught when it comes to religion in the early modern period. Hobbes is just one example of this. Sheppard mentions others, and still more examples could be multiplied.

So I’m inclined to agree with Sheppard that we should avoid oversimplification, and I’d go further and say that that’s case whether you want to argue, as Spencer seems to, that the emergence of modern science owes much to the work of believers, or, from the opposite point of view, you want to claim modern science constituted a break with our benighted religious past, our emergence from the fog of superstition and credulity. For me, the more I read about this period of history, and the more I’ve realized the complicated ways religion interacted with science, politics, and culture, the more I’ve become resistant to linear narratives from partisans of both faith and unbelief. We tend to want all good things to come from those in the past who seem to be on “our side” – but that’s just not the case.

All that said, I still would argue that Spencer does seem to be onto something when it comes to the impact of politics on the rise of atheism, Sheppard’s questions notwithstanding. The former’s argument reminds me of this passage from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:

Christianity, which has declared all men equal in the sight of God, cannot hesitate to acknowledge all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange concatenation of events, religion for the moment has become entangled with those institutions which democracy overthrows, and so it is often brought to rebuff the equality which it loves and to abuse freedom as its adversary, whereas by taking it by the hand it could sanctify its striving.

What Tocqueville realized, much like Spencer, is that when Christianity was put in the service of a political regime – here, he especially means undemocratic forms of government, whether aristocracy or monarchy, or some blend of the two – its eventual fall meant it took Christianity down, too. It became impossible to separate, practically speaking, religious faith from the oppressive and unjust regimes with which they were in bed. When throne and altar are joined, a protest against the former can’t help but implicate the latter.

Tocqueville was writing as someone who thought religion was good for democracy, and so his description is as much a warning as it a dispassionate reading of the past. He was admonishing Christians especially not to put themselves on the wrong side of the real moral, political, and scientific advances of his day. The psychological thrust of his point seems true to me: the more religion meddles in political affairs, or the more religious leaders seem obtuse and retrograde, the more it gives people reasons extraneous to the core tenets of the faith to reject it. Political trends shift without warning, leaders fall out of favor, revolutions happen – why hitch Christianity to any cause that doesn’t directly relate to the message of Jesus? Tocqueville insisted, again and again, that Christians, especially ministers, distinguish between what was and what wasn’t essential to the Gospel. If they didn’t, Christianity increasingly would lose its credibility. It’s hard to see how he’s wrong on this point. It seems axiomatic to me that the horrible behavior of far too many Christians over the last few centuries contributed to religion’s relative decline in the West.

I read Spencer, then, like Tocqueville, to have the present in mind almost as much as the past – or rather, to find in the broad patterns of the past a real lesson worth pondering. Any sweeping statement about “religion and politics” in the past can be quibbled with, as Sheppard shows. And certainly the advance of science makes unbelief possible in new ways as more and more of the world gets explained apart from the divine – I wouldn’t argue against that at all. But I wonder what emotional resonance this has, especially for those outside the confines of elite intellectual circles, compared to seeing priests cozy up to corrupt and brutal rulers in the 18th century, or, today, seeing hucksterish reverends preach nonsense about gay people or the age of the earth? Such actions go a long way toward making decent people everywhere doubt the truth of Christianity, or any religion.

When Christ Comes To Compton

by Dish Staff

Black Jesus, Aaron McGruder’s new live-action comedy show on Adult Swim set in contemporary south Los Angeles – where Jesus, played by Slink Johnson, has returned – is drawing criticism from the usual suspects. NPR’s Neda Ulaby, however, spoke with one theologian who wasn’t upset:

Yolanda Pierce of the Princeton Theological Seminary says the show raises some important theological questions. “If Jesus were to return, what would Jesus look like?” she asks. “What would Jesus do? And would we, those people who consider themselves as Christians, as I do, recognize Jesus if the historical Jesus is not the blond-haired, blue-eyed [man] of our usual stained-glass depictions?” Pierce also says that the provocative setting — a Jesus who drinks 40s, curses and smokes weed — might also reflect the reality of people who could use some ministering. “Especially people at the margins, who may be using weed or who may be drinking as a way to soften the brutality of their everyday existence,” she says. She says Jesus would preach to those whom Scripture calls “the least of these.”

Jay Parini is on the same page:

As a Christian myself, I like the idea of seeing Jesus return in various guises, skin colors, outfits and social contexts. Why not? The Jesus I know and love was something of a party animal. His first miracle was to turn water into wine at a wedding: and lots of wine was apparently drunk.

At the Last Supper, in keeping with Jewish tradition (if you regard this as a Passover feast or seder), everybody was obliged to drink four glasses of wine. In Luke 5:27-32 the Pharisees condemn Jesus and his friends for eating and drinking with “publicans and sinners.” In Matthew 11:18-19, we read that Jesus is accused of being “a drunken and a glutton, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”

On and on, the image of Jesus and his band, which includes a fair number of women — including Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna (see Luke 8:2-3) — seems one of a merry-making group, not a pious and bedraggled or depressed conclave.

Placing Black Jesus in the context of previous religious satires, Jimmy J. Aquino compares the show to another famous depiction of Jesus:

The uproar over Black Jesus is just the latest in an endless cycle of controversies ignited by Christian groups who immediately take offense at religion being satirized in comedic works and denounce those works as blasphemous. Will the outrage over the McGruder show last as long as the controversy surrounding Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which continues to this day? Life of Brian drew protests from Christians around the world in 1979 and ended up banned in Glasgow for 30 years. As recently as 2013, the 1979 religious satire was banned from being screened in Germany on Good Friday.

The accusations that Life of Brian is blasphemous against Christ make little sense because the Python troupe actually respected and admired Christ’s teachings and backed off depicting him comedically in any way; he’s played completely straight in the film by Kenneth Colley. In fact, Life of Brian isn’t even about Jesus, who appears in the film for about only 30 seconds and is always filmed from a distance. Instead, the film targets Jesus’ followers, and in keeping with the Python troupe’s disdain for authority and institutions, it points out the absurdities and failings of organized religion.