Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 194

Madison’s Mysterious Malady

While noting that Lynne Cheney’s new biography, James Madison: A Life Reconsidered, is the hagiographic treatment of his life and thought you’d expect from her, Kevin R.C. Gutzman acknowledges that Cheney does convince him on one disputed point of scholarship – she “goes far toward proving that he suffered epilepsy itself,” a diagnosis previously left in vaguer terms. Gutzman also finds the illness might have played a role in the evolution of Madison’s religious life:

She has consulted leading experts, perused the relevant portions of medical texts purchased by Madison’s parents early in his life and read by Madison himself, and carefully compared the accounts of his recurrent bouts with the problem, and she leaves me persuaded. She also ingeniously relates Madison’s illness to the apparent change of heart he experienced at Princeton as a youth, when he seems to have abandoned Anglican Christianity. Faced with Western Christianity’s tradition of calling epilepsy demonic, Cheney avers, Madison rejected basic elements of Virginia’s traditional religion. Alas, there is no evidence directly on point, but her cogitations are valuable. They will need to be borne in mind by future scholars.

Cheney’s attention to her hero’s health as he climbs to the very highest offices in American government likely owes to her own life story. After all, her husband, Vice President Richard Cheney, not only served two terms as an influential vice president at the culmination of a career that found him in various other important leadership positions, but also suffers from a severe heart ailment. We do not know the private details of his suffering, but there is a special poignancy in Lynne Cheney’s sympathetic descriptions of Dolley Madison’s ministrations to James. One supposes, too, that Cheney family travails recently much in the news may have prompted the author to think about the relationship between traditional Christian descriptions of urges and afflictions as “demonic” and the evident waning, or at least metamorphosis, of whatever faith young man James Madison once had.

(Image: Portrait of Madison at age 82 via Wikimedia Commons)

All Trees Are The Tree Of Life

James Hamblin explains:

It is becoming increasingly clear that trees help people live longer, healthier, happier lives—to the tune of $6.8 billion in averted health costs annually in the U.S., according to research published this week. And we’re only beginning to understand the nature and magnitude of their tree-benevolence. In the current journal Environmental Pollution, forester Dave Nowak and colleagues found that trees prevented 850 human deaths and 670,000 cases of acute respiratory symptoms in 2010 alone. That was related to 17 tonnes of air pollution removed by trees and forests, which physically intercept particulate matter and absorb gasses through their leave.

(Photo by Flickr user Ian Sane)

A Cooler Iced Coffee

Alexis Madrigal buzzes about Blue Bottle New Orleans Iced Coffee, a brand “legendary in the Bay Area” which is now expanding east. He finds Blue Bottle “not aggressively artisan like so many Portlandia products,” but rather “a delicious, not financially ruinous luxury”:

Brewed with chicory, cut with whole milk, sweetened with cane sugar, it’s a cold coffee beverage that is at once sophisticated and unpretentious. It’s not an austere challenge to the Starbucks-trained palate like so much of high-brow coffee culture. It just tastes good in an interesting way. … This drink might let Blue Bottle challenge Starbucks, which controls the vast majority of the ready-to-drink market. It would be the latte of the 2010s….

He goes on to compare Starbucks founder Howard Schultz with Blue Bottle’s founder and CEO, James Freeman. Whereas Schultz started as primarily a salesman, says Madrigal, Freeman operates from a richer coffee philosophy:

It is impossible to read Freeman’s ode to the art of roasting coffee, included in the book he wrote with his wife Caitlin, and not believe that he cares about coffee. … “For me, no matter when I got to bed, I always felt a sense of dread when the alarm went off at 4 a.m.,” Freeman wrote of roasting. “Classic Kierkegaard, straight out of The Concept of Anxiety: animals are slaves to their instincts and hence feel no responsibility, but humans are free and therefore constantly aware of their failure to live up to their responsibilities to God—or to Coffee.”

The only thing that staves off the dread is to get up and make the coffee. … “That first decision to get up in the morning is a mirror of all the hard and lonely decisions that must be made for the rest of the roasting day.” … Freeman believes coffee makes us the people we want to be. “I am actually able to change the brain chemistry of my customers,” he has written. And his personal obsession has been perfecting the art of constructing coffee, not growing it. Making coffee is “a performance that lasts 90 seconds,” and that alters the people who experience it.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Nina Arrazello captions a wonderful little art series called Kiddie Arts:

like many children, Dutch artist Telmo Pieper drew imaginative, colorful, creative and not-always-so-anatomically correct creatures and characters when he was 4-years-old. For ‘kiddie arts’, Pieper has reincarnated the drawn works from his childhood as digital paintings, materializing them as realistic figures in intricate detail, vibrant hues and with computerized graphics. The result illustrates the quirky line scribbles as lifelike underwater animals, insects and architecture, each a bit awry in their structural and biological precision.

Love that whale.

I found myself tossing and turning all weekend from the horrible news of the last week. Today, another UN school was shelled in Gaza, killing ten, wounding many more, traumatizing countless others. These civilian deaths even in a place designated as a safe haven simply beggar belief. It is impossible to feel sympathy for either Israel or Hamas at this point. Hamas is daring Israel to kill more innocents; and Israel is eagerly obliging them. How many more children have to die to feed these zero-sum ambitions?

And it is in the wake of last week that I read Michael Oren’s piece on Zionism. As over 200 Arab children lie dead, Oren can’t contain his enthusiasm for the staggering success of the Jewish state. No reflection; no circumspection; just a long celebration until you get to this: “And there is the issue of Judea and Samaria—what most of the world calls the West Bank—an area twice used to launch wars of national destruction against Israel but which, since its capture in 1967, has proved painfully divisive.”

He means painfully divisive for Israelis. The views of the occupied do not merit any attention. And notice the reflexive victimology. This is not an area where the original inhabitants are ghettoized behind barbed wire and checkpoints, where Jim Crow exists alongside new and aggressively anti-Arab settlers, where millions of Israel’s inhabitants have no vote, and where a Russian emigré right off the plane has more rights than someone whose family has lived their for aeons. It is and always will be a existential threat that justifies permanent occupation and settlement, in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions. This victimology is why when, in a war zone, a soldier is killed, the first word we hear from the Israelis is that he may have been “kidnapped”. Kidnapped? He was killed in battle. But even if Hamas had seized him, he would be captured in battle, not kidnapped. But that would require some sort of understanding that the enemy is also human, some kind of equal. And that seems to happen less and less. What you see in Gaza is Cheneyism fully realized.

Some relief from the Dish’s weekend: a church sign for the ages; Martin Amis’ plea for agnosticism for his friend Christopher Hitchens; why we hate the dentist; the evolution of dick crit; and the collapse of Catholic religious marriages.

The most popular post of the weekend was Why Sam Harris Won’t Criticize Israel; followed by Church Sign Of the Day.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 23 more readers became subscribers this weekend – bringing us to 29,848. You can join them and get us to 30,000 subscribers here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. One writes:

Just upped my monthly to $4.20. Thanks again for all your hard work. The NYT and the Dish have been my go-to news sources for years. If you would only cut back on the Sunday god talk a bit, I would double my contribution. But that would be most un-Dish like, so keep doing what you do. It is appreciated.

See you in the morning.

We Tortured. It Was Wrong. Never Mind.

I’ve wondered for quite a while what Barack Obama thinks about torture. We now know a little more:

Even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.

I understand why it happened. I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.

But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And that’s what that report reflects. And that’s the reason why, after I took office, one of the first things I did was to ban some of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of that report.

And my hope is, is that this report reminds us once again that the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard. And when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line. And that needs to be — that needs to be understood and accepted. And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.

What to make of this?

I don’t think it’s that big a deal that he used the English language to describe what was done, in any fair-minded person’s judgment. He’s said that before now. And his general position hasn’t changed. Let me paraphrase: We tortured. It was wrong. Never mind. So he tells the most basic version of the truth – that the US government authorized and conducted war crimes – and hedges it with an important caveat: We must understand the terribly fearful circumstances in which this evil was authorized. But equally, he argues that the caveat does not excuse the crime: “the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard.”

This latter point is integral to the laws against torture – but completely guts his first point. As I noted with the UN Convention, the prohibition is absolute:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Cheney, Bush, Tenet, and Rumsfeld all knew this from the get-go. That’s why they got their supine OLC to provide specious justifications for the legally prohibited. That’s why they won’t use the word “torture,” instead inventing an Orwellian euphemism. And, of course, the president’s excuse for them – that “in the immediate aftermath of 9/11,” we did wrong things – is deeply misleading. This went on for years across every theater of combat. What about what Abu Ghraib revealed about the scope of torture in the battlefield much later on? What about 2005 when they secretly re-booted the torture program? This was a carefully orchestrated criminal conspiracy at the heart of the government by people who knew full well they were breaking the law. It cannot be legally or morally excused by any contingency. It cannot be treated as if all we require is an apology they will never provide.

Yet that’s what the president’s acts – as opposed to his words – imply. And that’s what unsettles me. It is not as if the entire country has come to the conclusion that these war crimes must never happen again. The GOP ran a pro-torture candidate in 2012; they may well run a pro-torture candidate in 2016. This evil – which destroys the truth as surely as it destroys the human soul – is still with us. And all Obama recommends for trying to prevent it happening again is a wistful aspiration: “hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.” Hopefully?

Then there’s the not-so-small matter of the rule of law.

Call me crazy but I do not believe that the executive branch can simply allow heinous crimes to go unpunished just because they were committed … by the executive branch. It seems to me, to paraphrase the president on Friday, that the rule of law “has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard.” How many times does the United States government preach about international law and Western values? On what conceivable grounds can we do so when our own government can commit torture on a grand and brutal scale for years on end – and get away with it completely?

Either the rule of law applies to the CIA or it doesn’t. And it’s now absolutely clear that it doesn’t. The agency can lie to the public; it can spy on the Senate; it can destroy the evidence of its war crimes; it can lie to its superiors about its torture techniques; it can lie about the results of those techniques. No one will ever be held to account. It is inconceivable that the United States would take this permissive position on torture with any other country or regime. Inconceivable. And so the giant and massive hypocrisy of this country on core human rights is now exposed for good and all. The Bush administration set the precedent for the authorization of torture. The Obama administration has set the precedent for its complete impunity.

America has killed the Geneva Conventions just as surely as America made them.

(Photo: a page on enhanced interrogation techniques via a FOIA request.)

A Poem For Sunday

“The Pillow” by Cyrus Cassells:

He touches her breasts, a sunburned neck, a back bent

from years in the fields.

And now she lifts to him in the moonlight

her belly, as pale

as a Nō mask—

It has been like this

for decades, the two of them

lying together on the futon:

See, their bodies have twisted

into an old branch.

From The Mud Actor © 1982 by Cyrus Cassells. Used by permission of the author. Photo by Andrea Addante

Are Religious Stories Bad For Kids?

Mark Joseph Stern warns religious parents, “All that talk of snake-inspired subterfuge, planet-cleansing floods, and apocalyptic horsemen might hamper kids’ ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality – or even to think critically”:

That’s the implication of two recent studies published in Cognitive Science in which researchers attempted to gauge perceptions of reality in religious and secular children. (The religious children were all from Christian families, from a variety of denominations.)

In one study, the researchers read realistic stories and fantasy tales to the kids. Some of the fantasy tales featured familiar biblical events – like the parting of the Red Sea – but with non-biblical characters. (In the retelling of the Red Sea story, Moses was called John.) Others featured non-biblical but clearly magical events – the parting of a mountain, for instance—as well as non-biblical characters. … Every child believed that the protagonist of the realistic stories was a real person. But when asked about the stories featuring biblically inspired or non-biblical but magical events, the children disagreed. Children raised with religion thought the protagonists of the miraculous stories were real people, and they seemed to interpret the narratives – both biblical and magical – as true accounts.

Luke Malone throws cold water on Stern’s interpretation of the studies:

[Study author Kathleen Corriveau] stresses that this needn’t be seen as strictly negative. “In no way should the findings of this study point to any sort of deficit in one group or the other,” she says. “Indeed, in some instances, the ability to suspend disbelief could be viewed as a benefit. For example, when exposed to counterintuitive phenomena—such as modern physics—a suspension of disbelief might assist in learning.”

Eliyahu Federman adds, “This study proves a benefit of religion, not a detriment, because research shows how imaginative and fictional thinking, fantasy play, aid in the cognitive development of children. Raising children with fantastical religious tales is not bad after all.” Meanwhile, Brandon Ambrosino looks at the findings in light of Justin L. Barrett’s book Born Believers, which argues that “kids are born with a tendency toward thinking that there is some sort of supernatural agent behind this order”:

Or, as he put it to me over the phone, “children have a number of natural dispositions to religious beliefs of various sorts.” And while he believes that these dispositions can “certainly be overridden by certain kinds of cultural and educational environments,” he thinks the research shows that a child’s cognitive “playing field is tilted toward religious beliefs.”

A new study out this month, however, pushes against Barrett’s conclusion. Published in the July issue of Cognitive Science, the article presents findings that seem to show that children’s beliefs in the supernatural are the result of their education. Further, argue the researchers, “exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction.” In other words, said Kathleen Corriveau, one of the study’s co-authors, the study found that childhood exposure to religious ideas may influence children’s “conception of what could actually happen.” She also told me her research suggests that Barrett’s Born Believers thesis is wrong — that children don’t possess an “innate bias” toward religious belief.

Godless Republicans Do Exist

While suggesting a few caveats to S.E. Cupp’s assertion that conservatism isn’t hostile to atheism, Allahpundit offers some reasons why she has a point:

She’s right that most conservatives welcome atheist fellow travelers. I remember telling a friend before [Hot Air] launched that I’d be writing for a righty website and him telling me that I should hide my nonbelief, but I didn’t and it’s never been a problem. The most static I catch for it is when I’ve written something extra RINO-y and a commenter grumbles that we shouldn’t expect any better from the godless. Even that’s rare; the smoking gun of RINOism that’s most often cited by my righty critics is support for gay marriage, not atheism. So yeah, certainly this is no bar to entry into the commentariat. In fact, more conservative atheists seem to be writing about their dual identities. See, e.g., Robert Tracinski in April at the Federalist making “an atheist’s case for religious liberty” or Charles Cooke back in February arguing that godlessness and conservatism aren’t incompatible after all.

I think Cupp’s right too that righty atheists on average respect religion more than their liberal counterparts do. That’s probably mainly a function of exposure:

If you’re a conservative of whatever demographic and whatever educational level and you associate mostly with other conservatives, chances are you’re going to run into and end up being friends with some devoutly religious people. I’m not so sure that’s true on the left. If you’re a highly educated, reasonably well-to-do liberal — coincidentally, the same niche that most of the left’s commentariat comes from — devoutly religious friends may be hard to come by. (Call it epistemic closure.) Just as polls on gay marriage show support for SSM rising steeply among people who have at least one acquaintance who’s come out of the closet, I suspect that knowing religious people whom you respect inevitably softens your view on the value of religion.

What Do The “Spiritual But Not Religious” Really Believe?

In her new book, Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious, Linda A. Mercadante attempts to find out. Kristin Aune runs down the essentials of “SBNRs”:

[Mercadante] explores their thoughts on transcendence, human nature, community and afterlife and finds that they don’t believe in an interventionist or personal God (if “God” exists, they think God is part of creation, not separate from it). As for human nature, they don’t see themselves as sinners needing salvation, but as “inherently good” selves needing freedom and choice so that their “purity, even divinity” can shine.

This focus on the self affects their view of community. “Many interviewees did much more than just ‘question authority’,” Mercadante says. “Instead, they relocated it within, relativized it to each person, and detached it from any particular spirituality community.” Some belonged to recovery groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, but none had a longstanding affiliation with a spiritual community. This makes it hard for them to sustain shared group beliefs or behaviour, and Mercadante thinks it impedes their ability to benefit society.

On life after death, SBNRs share ground with Hindu beliefs, reflecting what Colin Campbell calls “the Easternization of the West”. Most believe in reincarnation and “karma, endless opportunities, inevitable progress, expanding consciousness, and the very American ideal of free will and personal choice”. Their optimism is clear: reincarnations will be better, not worse, than their previous life. Actions have consequences, but only positive ones.

In a recent column on the subject, Mark Oppenheimer depicts (NYT) Mercadante as pushing back against claims that SBNR thinking leans shallow and unserious, noting that “she makes the case that spiritual people can be quite deep theologically”:

An ordained Presbyterian minister whose father was Catholic and whose mother was Jewish, Dr. Mercadante went through a spiritual but not religious period of her own — although she now attends a Mennonite church. For her project, she … found that these spiritual people also thought about death, the afterlife and other profound subjects.

For example, “they reject heaven and hell, but they do believe in an afterlife,” Dr. Mercadante said recently. “In some ways, they would fit O.K. in a progressive Christian context.” Because they dislike institutions, the spiritual but not religious also recoil from the deities such institutions are built around. “They may like Jesus, he might be their guru, he might be one of their many bodhisattvas, but Jesus as God is not on their radar screen,” Dr. Mercadante said.

While she was writing the book in 2012, Mercadante gave an interview in which she addressed the role of stereotypes involved in these discussions:

I think it does come, in part, from portrayals of conservative Christianity in the media, as some kind of hegemonic, monolithic authority. This whole thing is fraught with stereotypes. Most people don’t take the time to listen to each other, to ask questions. There are terrible misconceptions on both sides, as to what Christians are, and what SBNRs are. SBNRs see “religion” as the external structure and the dogma, whereas “spirituality” is the individual’s personal experiences of transcendence. That definition really is not an accurate portrayal of religion or of spirituality. Nevertheless, the majority of my interviewees insist that spirituality is the personal center and quest for an individual, whereas religion is something external, rule-ridden and institutional. In their thinking, religion is nothing more than a dispensable shell.

A Unified Theory Of Bob Dylan’s Weirdness

Bill Wyman hones in on Dylan’s artistic process, which shows that the singer-songwriter “doesn’t trust mediation or planning” and aims to “strip away everything that stands between Bob Dylan’s art and his audience.” He finds that this approach seems to explain both Dylan’s relentless touring and the astonishing inconsistency of his increasingly self-produced studio albums, both of which offer – for better or worse – Dylan just being Dylan. About that touring:

In Chronicles, Dylan details, with seeming frankness, the aimlessness that brought him to a slough of despond at the end of the ’80s. He may have been facing what all rock stars who survive face, which is how to grow old gracefully in a medium cruelly tied to youthfulness. He resolved to get out and play his songs—and went back on the road in 1988 with a small, seldom-changing backing ensemble, with whom he delved into his back pages, including many songs he’d never played live before.

Here’s the odd thing—26 years on, he hasn’t stopped. He’s been playing about 100 shows annually ever since, growling through a set of songs old and new with a small band. It’s an endeavor that for a good chunk of each year keeps him on a private bus and, in the U.S. at least, in relatively crummy hotel and motel rooms. … The shows at first may have been a tonic, but over time they revealed themselves to be a panacea. It must have struck Dylan: How could he look foolish if he just kept doing the same thing? If he were an artist, he would continue to create and show his art publicly. If he were a celebrity, he would appear in public. And if he were a seer, a prophet, or even a god, well, he would let folks pay and see for themselves how mortal such figures actually were.

Wyman’s conclusion about understanding Dylan:

If Bob Dylan is a question, maybe this is the answer. Given the chance, Dylan will give the audience his art, unadulterated, as he creates it, and nothing more. He believes it’s a corruption of his art to be directed by someone else’s sensibility. In its own weird way, isn’t this one sacred connection between artist and audience? It might be nicer if he did things differently. It might be more palatable, more commercially successful. (He might be somewhere by now.) This is what ties together his signal creations, his ongoing shows, and even the wretched albums of the ’80s and ’90s; what he does might be sublime and ineffable or yet also coarse and unsuccessful; it is what it is, defined by where it comes from, not what it should be. Even his remoteness is a by-product; it’s what he deserves after having given his all. Call the work art, call it crap, call it Spanish boots of Spanish leather, but in the end it’s the creation of an artist who defies us to ask for something more.

Recent Dish on Dylan here, here, and here.