Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 182
August 17, 2014
The Ambivalent New Atheist
Ten years ago this month, Sam Harris published The End of Faith, perhaps the first example of what would become known as the New Atheist publishing phenomenon – Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens weren’t far behind with their own polemics against religion. Looking back at what’s happened since the book’s release, Harris clarifies one way he doesn’t fit comfortably with that cohort:
I’m not a big fan of rallying around the concept of “atheism” — for reasons that I once spelled out in a talk entitled “The Problem With Atheism.” In fact, I never even used the term “atheism” in The End of Faith, simply because it never occurred to me to use it. I agree that it serves a narrow political purpose, and [can] sometimes be useful, but it comes with a host of liabilities. I prefer to talk about the conflict between faith and reason, religion and science, bad evidence vs. good evidence, etc. One very dangerous blind spot engendered by generic “atheism” is a default assumption that all religions are the equally bad and should be condemned in the same terms. This is not only foolish, it’s increasingly dangerous. Anyone who is just as concerned about the Anglican Communion as he is about ISIS, al-Qaeda, and rest of the jihadist menace needs to have his head examined.
The future of “atheism” — one in which our hopes for a truly secular and rational world are fulfilled — is one in which we keep important distinctions in focus. Above all, it is a future in which we remain free to criticize bad ideas, and are moved to criticize them in proportion to how much harm they are doing in our world.
Read a transcript of Andrew’s recent conversation with Sam Harris here.
August 16, 2014
A Dark Discovery
Jeanette Bonds calls the above NSFW short film, Good Grief, a “uniquely pleasant dark comedy about death and grieving”:
Molly receives a voice mail from her seemingly emotionally vacant father informing her that her mother has passed away. Immediately following we see Molly at her father’s house reading a ‘Grieving for Dummies’ book while her father is sleeping in a tent in his backyard. Molly tries to go into her mother’s bedroom when she sees a lock on the door, tries to enter, but fails. While on the toilet talking to her brother on the phone, as one does, she hears her father entering her mother’s locked room. She rushes out of the toilet to get into the room and her father makes every effort to prevent her from entering but she fights through. Upon entering the room Molly is surprised with a colorful display of her mother’s dildos, whips, chains, and an array of pornographic polaroids of her mother plus various men and women. …
Despite explicitly dirty pictures of naked women with their legs spread open, the film itself leaves a lot to the imagination. The toys and images we see trigger an archive of images we’ve seen (or at least some of us have seen) in movies and television. In some ways we look at the toys and think to ourselves exactly what Molly is thinking, “what on earth was she doing with all those things?”, yet in reality, we know exactly what was up.
The Rashomon Of Rock
A new documentary from Jeff Krulik, whose 1986 film Heavy Metal Parking Lot remains a cult classic, turns the camera on a concert that may never have happened:
It’s Jan. 20, 1969, the day of President Nixon’s inauguration. At a suburban Maryland gymnasium, a band starts playing to a crowd of about 50 teens. That group’s name: Led Zeppelin. This story is just too crazy to be true, right?
Maybe not. In his new documentary, Led Zeppelin Played Here, director Jeff Krulik tries to get to the bottom of this legend by talking to some musicians, writers and local fans who don’t believe the concert happened … and others who swear they saw them.
Richard Metzger digs the film:
What I loved about Krulik’s charming, low key film is that the whole mystery of this did-it-or-did-it-not occur spur of the moment Led Zeppelin show is something that he uncovered while making a film about something else entirely. The Rashomon-like onscreen narrative becomes quite intriguing as the viewer goes along with the filmmaker on his fact finding mission, Krulik serving as a dogged rock snob gumshoe on the trail of this elusive and either legendary—or apocryphal—Led Zeppelin show. In the end, we’re left to decide for ourselves if this concert actually took place or not, his Columbo with a MOJO subscription sleuthing having provided no definitive answers.
What Krulik had to say while working on the film in 2011:
I do hope to present a strong case [that] the concert happened. It’s a mystery worth solving/explaining. And I personally believe it did happen. We just live in such a proof driven/conspiracy theory/immediate info society now that people doubt these unbelievable claims unless there’s concrete example, i.e. ticket stub, photo, diary entry. Nothing has turned up yet, and will likely not turn up. This was a hastily assembled concert on an off night, a rainy, cold Monday in January ‘69, and the band was new and hoofing it, taking whatever gig they could.
Watch Krulik’s 30-minute Heavy Metal Parking Lot below:
Parenting On Pot
Brittany Driver is a legal-weed-smoking mom who uses the substance to soothe an irritated stomach. She fields some common questions about her habit:
“Does your child see you when you are stoned?”
If I’m being real here, most people see me when I’m stoned — or medicated, rather. I smoke as a natural way to settle my normally irritated tummy and to give me an appetite, which I usually just don’t have. (And it’s not a thyroid thing — I’ve checked.) I don’t smoke excessively while I’m taking care of my son. Certainly don’t infer that I’m sitting on the couch barely conscious or stoned to the point of recklessness. It is the same as taking any medication, and I always put the safety of my child first. But if I don’t smoke at all then I don’t eat. And if I don’t eat, I don’t feel well or have any energy. I know that I can’t parent that way and, luckily, I don’t have to. …
“Does it help with your parenting?”
This one is a double-edged sword.
I know marijuana helps me medically. And so when I smoke it, I shouldn’t hear a tiny voice that says, “You’re doing drugs,” “This isn’t good for your kid,” and “Go get a real job, ya hippie!” But sometimes I do. Sometimes that D.A.R.E. officer’s rhetoric in elementary school comes back to haunt me.
Because of the (unproven) stigmas drilled into my head over a lifetime, there is sometimes a feeling of guilt. It’s a guilt I know has no real legs to stand on, but even so, it pops up here and there. But I think that’s normal. A conscious parent knows that what they do affects and shapes their child. And a conscious parent is going to question their actions, hopefully often, to make sure they’re on the right path.
Does smoking a bowl help me relax and make dancing with my son a little more fun? Sure, it does. But that’s not why I’m doing it. I could have fun with my guy even if all the cannabis in the world was eradicated. (Truth, but please no.) I smoke because I need to, and my son is better off having a mommy who is stoned and eating and living life than a mommy who is wasting away. Just sayin’.
Swastika Chic
I guess we have our Zoolander Award winner! Steven Heller reports on some new efforts to reclaim the swastika as a fashion symbol:
[Sinjun] Wessin, a native of Joplin, Missouri, who attended The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, has been creating fashion since he was in high school 15 years ago, starting with a clothing line called Hybrid Imagery—a fusion of spiritual designs and streetwear with “positive messages.” Currently, he designs for a company creating graphics for t-shirts, leggings, tops, hoodies, etc. “I’ve always been fascinated with t-shirt graphics as they can be a blank canvas for unlimited creativity,” he says.
His goal in using the swastika in a lighthearted way is to tap into its ancient meaning. He hopes that his “donut swazi,” a graphic creation that is related to an Indian pastry in the shape of a swastika, inspires people to learn more about the history as a symbol of good luck and happy eternity. The donut design is an amalgam of swastikas from Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, Greek, and other global iterations.
“If the hate is taken away from the symbol by energizing its positive side, then we take away power from the people who want to use it in a hateful way,” Wessin says. “If we don’t do anything and just leave it as negative, then we still let hate win.”
Haters are, no doubt, gonna hate. But is it really so terrible if that hatred is directed at swastikas? At provoca-hipsters wearing swastika sweatshirts? That’s also Heller’s own stance: “In my own book …, Swastika, Symbol Beyond Redemption?, I challenge the view that it can or even should be entirely reclaimed.” While I have not written a book on why it’s maybe not the best idea to hit the gym in swastika leggings, I did once write a blog post about the inadvisability of swastika earrings. One does not need to have deeply investigated this issue to see why such a look is textbook hipster racism. It’s sartorial equivalent of a certain recently-mentioned Thought Catalog essay. (Super adorbs, nein?, that the release party for this swastika fashion was, according to the above YouTube video, held somewhere called “Haus of Love.”)
And before someone jumps in with the obvious: Clearly this is not a discussion of uses of swastikas/swastika-like symbols in other cultures. When I was in Japan, I didn’t become outraged upon seeing the Japanese map symbol for a temple. Clearly the question refers to parts of the world where its immediate association is with Nazism.
When it comes to reclaiming highly-charged negative words, symbols, anything, this sort of has to come from the victimized party. If Jews, along with gays, Roma, and others for whom Nazism was an extra-unpleasant interlude, decided, en masse, that the time had come, fine. If, however, this is a ‘movement’ consisting of a handful of people trying to make a few dollars off offensiveness chic, it’s a bit of a joke that this is about reclaiming anything.
Waiting Till The Wedding Night
Samantha Pugsley doesn’t recommend it. When she was 10, she took a pledge at her church to remain a virgin until marriage – a pledge she kept, and ultimately found damaging:
Ten-year-old girls want to believe in fairy tales. Take this pledge and God will love you so much and be so proud of you, they told me. If you wait to have sex until marriage, God will bring you a wonderful Christian husband and you’ll get married and live happily ever after, they said. Waiting didn’t give me a happily ever after. Instead, it controlled my identity for over a decade, landed me in therapy, and left me a stranger in my own skin. I was so completely ashamed of my body and my sexuality that it made having sex a demoralizing experience.
I don’t go to church anymore, nor am I religious. As I started to heal, I realized that I couldn’t figure out how to be both religious and sexual at the same time. I chose sex. Every single day is a battle to remember that my body belongs to me and not to the church of my childhood. I have to constantly remind myself that a pledge I took when I was only 10 doesn’t define who I am today. When I have sex with my husband, I make sure it’s because I have a sexual need and not because I feel I’m required to fulfill his desires.
Enjoy The Silence?
Separate from all of the other debates raging online is the question of whether you are, in fact, a terrible person if you’re steering clear. Or, conversely, if you’re joining in. Which is it? First, the counterpoint:
*Israel-Palestine Conflict Unexpectedly Resolved by Intense Facebook Wall Debate Between Former High School Acquaintances*—
Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) July 30, 2014
Nick Bilton is also skeptical (NYT):
Trying to discuss an even remotely contentious topic with someone on social media is a fool’s errand. Yet still we do it. My Twitter and Facebook feeds over the last month have been filled with vulgar discourse about Israel and Gaza. For example, someone posts a link saying Hamas hailed rockets upon Israel, someone else responds by accusing Israel of killing hundreds of civilians, and next thing you know it’s chaos on social media. A link quickly devolves into vicious and personal attacks.
Been there, done that. While I do scan Twitter and Facebook to see what others have linked to or are discussing (and, ahem, linking to the things I’ve written), when it comes to actually posting things myself, I’m ever more drawn to Pinterest, Instagram, and the upbeat, apolitical world of adorable pets, space-age fashion, and from-scratch yuba preparation. (No, that was not a gratuitous link to a Saveur article that, yes, happens to include a photo of a fit, shirtless man. That was just the best explanation of yuba I could find!)
But there’s also a strong case that social-media silence is itself unethical. Writes Janee Woods:
For the first couple of days, almost all of the status updates expressing anger and grief about yet another extrajudicial killing of an unarmed black boy, the news articles about the militarized police altercations with community members and the horrifying pictures of his dead body on the city concrete were posted by people of color. … And almost nothing, silence practically, by the majority of my nonactivist, nonacademic white friends – those same people who gleefully jumped on the bandwagon to dump buckets of ice over their heads to raise money for ALS and those same people who immediately wrote heartfelt messages about reaching out to loved ones suffering from depression following the suicide of the extraordinary Robin Williams, may he rest in peace. But an unarmed black teenager minding his own business walking down the street in broad daylight gets harassed and murdered by a white police officer and those same people seem to have nothing urgent to say about pervasive, systemic, deadly racism in America?
They have nothing to say?
Why? The simplest explanation is because Facebook is, well, Facebook. It’s not the New York Times or a town hall meeting or the current events class at your high school. It’s the internet playground for sharing cat videos, cheeky status updates about the joys and tribulations of living with toddlers, and humble bragging about your fabulous European vacation. Some people don’t think Facebook is the forum for serious conversations. Okay, that’s fine if you fall into that category and your wall is nothing but rainbows and happy talk about how much you love your life.
Woods goes on to discuss factors beyond social media pertaining to what she sees as white silence regarding Ferguson (worth reading), but let’s pause on her analysis of what it means to remain silent on social media. Woods is ostensibly referring to two different phenomena: First, to the people who are very much part of the conversation, but who’ve skipped a particular topic, and next, to those who have active social-media accounts but tune out. These are, however, two sides of the same coin. If someone’s weighing in, but only in uncontroversial cases (does anyone support depression or ALS?), they may be making the world a better place, but they’re not risking anything.
But! Before weighing in, there’s something to be said for knowing a little bit about what you’re talking about. Like Woods, I found that a disproportionate amount of my social-media reading material (links and commentary) on Michael Brown has come from non-white (specifically: black) Facebook friends and Twitter users, but… I’m actually fine with that. Listening-to rather than speaking-for, you know? Everyone should be upset about what’s happening, and it relates to all Americans, but when it comes to figuring out what’s going on and what to do about it, I would, all things equal, rather hear what black people have to say. I’m not sure what’s added if white people, responding principally to an “in case you missed it” social-media environment, start holding forth before… well, before doing what Woods advises later in her post: “Diversify your media.”
Is abstaining from these squabbles a noble way of focusing on more serious debate (or of leaving important problems to the experts)? Or is engaging what it means to be an informed citizen? It’s hard to avoid the sense that some of the weighing-in is see-I-care posturing. An appropriately-timed status update that hits just the right notes garners “likes”; is the warm feeling that ensues about what those “likes” say about how one’s friends stand on this key issue, or is it maybe just the teensiest bit personal? But it’s also hard to hear justifications of prolonged silence on certain issues as anything other than defensiveness.
Do you battle it out on social media? Email dish@andrewsullivan.com to let us know.
A Legal Nightmare
In a long and compelling article, Paul Campos presents the for-profit Florida Coastal School of Law as a microcosm of the problems afflicting higher education in America:
Florida Coastal is one of three law schools owned by the InfiLaw System, a corporate entity created in 2004 by Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm. InfiLaw purchased Florida Coastal in 2004, and then established Arizona Summit Law School (originally known as Phoenix School of Law) in 2005 and Charlotte School of Law in 2006.
These investments were made around the same time that a set of changes in federal loan programs for financing graduate and professional education made for-profit law schools tempting opportunities. Perhaps the most important such change was an extension, in 2006, of the Federal Direct PLUS Loan program, which allowed any graduate student admitted to an accredited program to borrow the full cost of attendance – tuition plus living expenses, less any other aid – directly from the federal government. The most striking feature of the Direct PLUS Loan program is that it limits neither the amount that a school can charge for attendance nor the amount that can be borrowed in federal loans. … This is, for a private-equity firm, a remarkably attractive arrangement: the investors get their money up front, in the form of the tuition paid for by student loans. Meanwhile, any subsequent default on those loans is somebody else’s problem – in this case, the federal government’s.
He adds, “From the perspective of graduates who can’t pay back their loans, however, this dream is very much a nightmare”:
How much debt do graduates of the three InfiLaw schools incur? The numbers are startling. According to data from the schools themselves, more than 90 percent of the 1,191 students who graduated from InfiLaw schools in 2013 carried educational debt, with a median amount, by my calculation, of approximately $204,000, when accounting for interest accrued within six months of graduation – meaning that a single year’s graduating class from these three schools was likely carrying about a quarter of a billion dollars of high-interest, non-dischargeable, taxpayer-backed debt.
And what sort of employment outcomes are these staggering debt totals producing? According to mandatory reports that the schools filed with the ABA, of those 1,191 InfiLaw graduates, 270 – nearly one-quarter – were unemployed in February of this year, nine months after graduation. And even this figure is, as a practical matter, an understatement: approximately one in eight of their putatively employed graduates were in temporary jobs created by the schools and usually funded by tuition from current students.
August 15, 2014
Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter
Last night, a close friend told me he had been reading my posts about decriminalizing sex work. “I’m sympathetic,” he said, “and I want to agree with you. But I just keep thinking, ‘what if it were my daughter?’ That’s, like, every father’s worst nightmare.”
My friend doesn’t have a daughter, to be clear. He’s also one of the most sexually liberal people I know. But while his attitude does discourage me, it doesn’t surprise me. This is the sexist culture we live in—one where a man whom I know has had sex with at least three different women in the past week can literally imagine nothing worse for his hypothetical daughter than getting paid to have sex.
Damon Linker trots out similar sentiment at The Week today. Using his apparent mind-reading powers, he asserts that no one could honestly be okay with having a child in porn:
People may say they see nothing wrong with or even admire (Miriam Weeks’) decision to become a porn actress, but it isn’t unambiguously true. And our ease of self-deception on the matter tells us something important about the superficiality of the moral libertarianism sweeping the nation.
How do I know that nearly everyone who claims moral indifference or admiration for Weeks is engaging in self-deception? Because I conducted a little thought experiment. I urge you to try it. Ask yourself how you would feel if Weeks — porn star Belle Knox — was your daughter.
I submit that virtually every honest person — those with children of their own, as well as those who merely possess a functional moral imagination — will admit to being appalled at the thought.
Linker knows that nearly everyone must feel appalled because… he thought about it and was appalled? That’s some pretty shaky logic. (By the reverse, I conducted a thought experiment and am not appalled ergo everyone wants porn star daughters!) It also preemptively dismisses disagreement—anyone who says they are not appalled is just not being honest.
Under that rubric, I’m not even sure what sense it makes to argue, but nonetheless: I would not be appalled to have Weeks as my daughter. I would be proud to have raised a young woman of intelligence, confidence, academic commitment, libertarian leanings, a strong feminist streak, and a way with words. I would worry about her doing porn—but not because of the porn itself. I would worry about the way she might be treated by people outside the industry. I would worry that she might experience sexual violence not on set, but at the hands of people who think porn stars and prostitutes don’t deserve the same bodily integrity as “good” women. And my heart would break to think of her other accomplishments being dismissed by people intent on defining a women’s worth by how many people with which she’s had sex.
I would sure as shit rather have a porn star daughter (or son) than one who thinks, as Linker does, that being in porn makes someone “low, base, and degraded.”
I think I get this viewpoint from my very Catholic, sex-negative, virgin-until-marriage mother. She taught me that we’re all created equal, that only God can judge, and everyone, everyone, is deserving of charity and respect. (The God part didn’t resonate so much with me, but you win some, you lose some.) I’m also reminded of one of my favorite quotes, from a book called Das Energi:
Don’t ever think you know what’s right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what’s right for you
There’s nothing wrong with having certain expectations for your children—most parents want to see their kids live up to their fullest potential and achieve certain markers of normative success. All else being equal, I’d rather my own hypothetical daughter choose, say, engineering over becoming a Burger King cashier or a brothel worker, because the former seems to offer more security and room for advancement. But here’s the crux of the matter: Our best laid plans mean jack.
“It’s fine that you wouldn’t want your daughter having sex for money,” I told my friend yesterday, “but say she does anyway, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Would you want her to have to stand out on the street, get in cars with totally unvetted strangers, be arrested, get a criminal record? Or would you want her to be able to work in a safe environment? And go to the police if something bad happened? And not get thrown in jail?”
Decriminalizing prostitution is a means of harm reduction.
It’s the same argument people make about marijuana: You don’t have to get high, or even approve of people getting high, to think we shouldn’t be locking people for up it. Proponents of decriminalization aren’t asking you to become pro prostitution, to encourage your kids to go into sex work, or even to abandon thinking it’s morally wrong, if that’s what you think. Plenty of people think premarital sex in general is wrong, but they probably don’t think it should be illegal. All we’re asking is for you to consider that criminalizing prostitution does more harm than good. If — gasp! horror! disgust! — your daughter did happen to become a sex worker, wouldn’t you want to make it as safe and non-ruinous for her as possible?
Thoughts? Email dish@andrewsullivan.com.
(Photo: @belle_knox/Twitter)
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