Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 289

The Horny Tory

If you want to read one brief essay on the work of Michael Oakeshott, my old friend Jesse Norman offers the best short account I’ve ever read. It’s gorgeously written and betrays, with light erudition, a profound understanding of the most original political thinker of the last century. Its only flaw is a somewhat too-brief summary of something quite astounding in the exploding area of Oakeshott studies: the publication of Oakeshott’s decades of private writing, Notebooks, 1922-1986:

The present volume has been culled from a vast array of journals written by Oakeshott between 1922 and 1986. These include his own reflections, quotations and passages transcribed from other writers, as well as mini-essays and purely personal cris de coeur. They were not written for publication, and have not now been assembled into anything remotely resembling a single line of thought (how could they be? Oakeshott described them as “a Zibaldone – a written chaos”). Their editor, Luke O’Sullivan, has worked wonders to bring them to book.

The result is a treasury of apothegm, ideas and wisdom. Nearly every one of its more than 500 pages contains some pungent and arresting thought: “Citizenship is a spiritual experience, not a legal relationship.” “To lose youth, vitality, power, love, a friend – all are deaths & they are felt & suffered as deaths . . . these lesser deaths, the mortal material of our life – are the worst.” “In love is our existence made intelligible. For in love are all contraries reconciled.” And, no less in character, “In pretty girls moral qualities are not so awfully relevant.”

Olive Letwin finds that while the journals don’t offer any revelations about Oakeshott’s philosophy, they do “reveal quite a lot about the man”:

Oakeshott’s philosophical eccentricity was matched by eccentricity in many other aspects of his life. He played mah-jong with enthusiasm but refused the winds (or was it the dragons?) because he idiosyncratically conceived them to be inferior. In the same vein, he refused all honours (including the very highest) on the grounds that honours should be awarded to those who want them most. He was as shrewd as the shrewdest street-trader when it came to things like running his beloved department at the LSE; but his private life was notably quixotic. In short, much of his charm lay in his capacity for unexpected romance.

The Notebooks bring out this quality, letting us into some of the smouldering passions that lay behind the extreme delicacy of his conversational manner. There is much reflection on God, and on the history of man’s relation to the numinous in nature. In 1923, we find Oakeshott pondering (over successive days) on the ‘experience of the Red Sea in the history of the Jews’ and on the sea as the symbol of the ‘mightiness of God’. ‘The stars have lost much of their mystery — but who would dare to say that he had discovered the secret of the sea?’

I just bought the Kindle edition of the book – and recommend it to anyone with a curious and open mind who is interested in a conservative thinker far removed from the deranged ideology of the American right.

When I wrote my doctoral dissertation on his thought, Intimations Pursued, in 1989, it was only the second dissertation ever written about him. The philosophical work – in particular his bookend masterpieces, Experience And Its Modes, and On Human Conduct – is so rigorous, unique and penetrating that it sometimes obscures those moments of aphorism, wit, asides and humor that punctuate them. I learned to examine all the footnotes, if only because they took my breath away with their aphoristic, almost Nietzschean, surprise and wit. But they also hinted at a brilliant conversationalist, with a chaotic but always serendipitous life of love and loss and adventure, whose unscripted thoughts might be even more revelatory than the exquisitely composed published work.

I spent one long winter’s afternoon with him months before he died and all that wit and humor and gentleness and mischief was undimmed in his late eighties. But I always knew that for him, life was as important as thought, love far surpassing philosophy in making life worth living, and sex an endlessly fascinating series of adventures and exploits and passions and love. Yes, this was a conservative committed to eros. He was pathological about love. Jesse Norman again:

For the truth is that Oakeshott was not merely an Apollonian, but a Dionysian. He was married three times and had an extensive but often unsuccessful and rackety love life. A man of enormous charm, brilliant conversation and few pretensions, he admired and respected many women, yet had periods in which he behaved with great cruelty to those who loved and depended on him.

The Notebooks include a remarkable sequence, dating from 1928-34, named after “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by Keats, in which the thirtysomething Oakeshott veers from profound observations on love and loss to obsessional grumbling about his principal girlfriend, Céline (his diaries attest to an interest then in at least nine further women), interspersed with melodramatic screams of sexual frustration. He said of himself, “I am like the River Jordan, my course has ended in a Dead Sea.” And of his first wife, “To know is to lose.”

No wonder the theocons and the neocons regard this Don Juan of a deep thinker with such deep suspicion. But he towers above all of them – in work and in life.

(Photo of Oakeshott lecturing in 1964 via the archives of the London School of Economics)

A Double-Barreled Canonization

Today Pope Francis declares Popes John XXIII and John Paul II to be saints, the first double papal canonization in Church history. To give Dish readers added context about the event, Byliner has unlocked Bill Donahue’s The Secret World of Saints, an in-depth look at the canonization process, which John Paul II streamlined:

When he became pope in 1978, John Paul II was keenly aware that the saint-making process was malleable. A playwright in his early days, he also recognized the theater inherent in sainthood, and he saw that, by minting new saints, he could endear the Church to its growing flock in Africa, Asia, and South America. And so, in 1983, he simply changed the rules. He did away with the devil’s advocate—suddenly there was no longer an official naysayer hovering over each sainthood cause. He also reduced the number of miracles needed for sainthood. For centuries, four miracles had been required of non-martyrs. John Paul cut that number to two.

In his twenty-six-year papacy, John Paul canonized 482 people—more than had been named during the preceding five centuries. He beseeched local dioceses to recommend saintly candidates so that Catholics everywhere might feel that they live amid exemplars of holiness. He specialized in mass canonizations (among them, the 120 Martyr Saints of China, canonized in one fell swoop in 2000) and in sanctifying people of color—for instance, Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese-born slave.

Both of these popes also benefited from exceptions to the established path to sainthood, especially John Paul II, whose canonization only nine years after his death sets a modern record:

John Paul’s record sprint to sainthood started during his 2005 funeral Mass, when chants of “Santo Subito” or “Sainthood Now” erupted from the crowd. Bowing to the calls, Pope Benedict XVI waived the typical five-year waiting period before a saintly investigation can begin and allowed the process to start just weeks after his death.

The rest of the process followed the rules: John Paul was beatified in 2011 after the Vatican certified that a French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease was miraculously healed after she prayed to him. A Costa Rican woman whose inoperable brain aneurism purportedly disappeared after she prayed to John Paul was the second miracle needed for canonization. …

John XXIII was beatified in 2000 after the Vatican certified that the healing of an Italian nun suffering from a gastric hemorrhage was miraculous. Pope Francis, very much a spiritual son of John, waived the Vatican rule requiring a second miracle so that John could be canonized alongside John Paul.

When asked what these two popes were known for, Rachel Zoll explains their divergent reputations – but also notices the shrewd politics behind Pope Francis canonizing them together, which she describes as “balancing the ticket”:

One is Pope John XXIII who served from 1958 to 1963 and he’s known for his modernizing reforms of the church, bringing it out into the modern world. And the other is Pope John Paul II, who served from 1978 to 2005 when he died. And he’s known for, obviously a lot of things, but he also helped uphold orthodoxy and doctrine, and was seen in a way as putting some control around, or course corrections around, the reforms that John Paul XXIII had put in place.

There’s a left-right divide in the church and it is very wide. And by bringing these two men together for canonization at the same time, he’s saying a lot of different things. He’s saying one isn’t–there not at odds with each other, that they’re more on a continuum of how they led the church and also, that there’s room for everybody. This is a big message of his pontificate, that he wants all people of different views to be welcome in the church.

George Weigel makes a similar observation, but in the context of the Second Vatican Council, which began at John XXIII’s prompting:

Pope Francis’s bold decisions to canonize Blessed John XXIII without the normal post-beatification miracle, and to link Good Pope John’s canonization ceremony to that of Blessed John Paul II, just may help reorient Catholic thinking about modern Catholic history. For what Francis is suggesting, I think, is that John XXIII and John Paul II are the twin bookends of the Second Vatican Council—and thus should be canonized together.

Zooming out, Michael Lipka and Tim Townsend remind us that a pope becoming a saint is “a rarity in modern times”:

Roughly 30% of all popes are saints. Starting with St. Peter, traditionally regarded as the first leader of the church after Christ’s death, 52 of the first 55 popes became saints during Catholicism’s first 500 years. In the last 1,000 years, just seven popes have been made saints, including the two being canonized on Sunday.

You can purchase The Secret World of Saints as a Kindle Single here.

Mary Magdalene, Disciple?

Ann Turner rejects the claim that Mary was a prostitute and describes her – the only woman in the New Testament whose full name is used – as “a model of what a true disciple looks like”:

[A]ttempts to move Mary to the background of the Passion Narratives and to erase her as a vital and loving witness to Jesus began well before the fifth century. It began with the writer of Luke, in Acts, where Peter and Paul are given center stage as those who preach to the Gentiles, as those who witness to the risen Christ — ignoring that it is Mary Magdalene, called the Apostle to the Apostles, who first sees the risen Christ in the garden, according to both the Gospels of Matthew and John. In Luke, when Mary and two other women return breathless and excited to say they have seen the Lord, the male disciples think their words are “like nonsense” (Luke 24:11). Is the author of Acts responsible for this erasure of The Magdalene, as she sometimes is called, or is it part of a wider effort to discredit her authority and put Peter at the head of the new church?

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great tried to undermine Mary Magdalene’s reputation by connecting her story to the story of the prostitute that precedes her story in the Gospel of Luke. But this is a later misinterpretation. Luke is clear that Mary was the woman healed by Jesus when he expelled seven demons from her. And Mary responded by contributing to Jesus’ ministry and following him. Luke says she was a woman of means, like some other women who followed Jesus. They were not just followers in the passive sense — they were disciples.

(Image of The Penitent Magdalene by Guido Reni, circa 1635, via Wikimedia Commons)

Turning The Nones Toward Faith, Ctd

Damon Linker claimed last week that possibly “the most daunting obstacle to getting the nones to treat traditional religion as a viable option is the sense that it simplifies the manifest complexity of the world.” Millman quibbles:

I do think that pluralism poses a fundamental challenge to traditional religion. But it’s not the pluralism of modes of knowledge that poses a challenge, but the pluralism of identity. It’s not that traditional religion can’t “handle” natural selection, or psychopharmacology, or biblical source-criticism; it’s certainly not that it can’t explain the evil of the Holocaust. It’s that traditional religion – Abrahamic religion, anyway – demands that you identify yourself definitively as an adherent. It demands an unequivocal commitment. And contemporary young people, according to all the evidence, are very wary of making commitments like in any walk of life: in love, in work, or in terms of religious identity.

Picking up on similar themes, David Session offers advice to millennials facing this pluralistic world, claiming that “whatever earnestness and work ethic millennials may have, they face seemingly endless indistinguishable choices, and respond with defeated detachment—indecision.” What they should do:

All we have to do is start living different ways, a little at a time. Start committing to people, places, things. Say yes to your friend’s party Saturday night, and go anyway even when something better comes up. Join an organization that fights for an issue you care about, and keep going even when the meetings are long, boring, and seem pointless. Fight for someone below you, anyone: immigrants, minorities, the homeless, the incarcerated, whoever; you’ll realize you had more in common with them than you thought. Commit to a person or people; stay in the same city with them, live with them, marry them. Join a union, especially if you’re the only member under 50; if there isn’t one where you work, start one. If you can find one that hasn’t retreated into spiritual apoliticism or reactionary traditionalism, I don’t even care if you take up a religion. The point is to build human ties, add little by little to your network of solidarity, make it thicker and stronger. It won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start.

Book Club: Occam’s Razor And The Gospels

[Re-posted from earlier today. The whole Book Club thread on How Jesus Became God is here.]

A reader turns the conversation toward something I wrote:

You clearly do not believe in Occam’s Razor. You write that “Jesus was not the only first-century who was deemed to have a virgin birth, martyrdom and resurrection. In fact, these were quite common tropes in the Greek and Roman world at the time.” Next paragraph: “And in that astonishing vision of a Jesus fully alive after death, so much that had mystified his disciples in Jesus’ life and teachings suddenly became clear. This man truly was God.”

So you’re acknowledging that there were a fairly large number of Jesuses running around Judea at the time, all making similar claims.  But in the next breath you declare your certainty that the one you worship really was the Son of God (whatever that means) and the rest were phonies.

So which explanation is simpler, and infinitely more probable: (1) you are right, the universe is ruled by an immortal, all-powerful entity that shares attributes with some creatures living for an ungraspable brief period of time on one tiny planet among a countless number of other planets in an infinitely large universe, and who had a son that was identical to these isolated creatures, and decided to sacrifice his son to pay for the follies of these creatures, or (2) the Christian myths of the resurrected man/god, which had been around for a long time before your cult figure was born, for a variety of historical reasons, became centralized in this one figure?  The question answers itself.

Andrew, I’m sorry, but you have to see why most Christians must put on the blinders and believe in rote dogma. The whole mess otherwise falls apart so, so rapidly.

Another reader:

I’m always confused when I’ve read you write things like “Even through [the Gospels] obvious literal imperfections, a deeper perfection shines.”

I don’t really know if you mean that the Gospels don’t actually need to be literally true AT ALL – that it’s really just their deep metaphorical, spiritual meaning that matters – or if you still believe that in some areas they do have to refer to literal truths.

If it’s the first, then I could agree with that view of the Gospels – spiritual truth can be conveyed by all sorts of texts that are not literally true. But if it’s the second, then I wonder how Ehrman’s book doesn’t create a core doubt in you or in Christianity in general. Because it seems to me that it pushes the answer to the question of whether or not modernity and Christianity can co-exist towards “no”.

For example, Christians believe that Jesus was resurrected in the flesh. But we’ve learned that Jesus and the apostles lived in a world where virgin births were not unique to Jesus, and neither were people who were half-god and half-human. So I imagine that resurrection stories also existed outside of Jesus’ story. (And maybe that’s answered in a later part of the book than I’m currently in!)

A glance at the biblical record:

Nine individuals in scripture are clearly presented in the Bible as being raised from the dead. Of these miraculous resurrections, three occur in the Old Testament. At least three individuals were raised from the dead by Jesus. Both Peter and Paul raised a person from the dead and most importantly of all, Jesus himself was resurrected. In addition, an untold number of saints were resurrected at Jesus’ crucifixion (Matthew 27:52-53). Also, it is incredibly possible that Paul himself was resurrected after he was stoned and left for dead (Acts 14:19-20).

The reader continues:

If so, why is Jesus’ resurrection any more special than any other resurrection from a different tradition? If we believe Jesus’ story, shouldn’t we believe the others’ stories? Other people in other religions had equally strong faith. And if we don’t believe the other stories, why believe Jesus’? Couldn’t the apostles have been hallucinating, under some form of mass delusion? What makes Jesus’ story so special that you must believe it is true when others aren’t?

For me, Ehrman’s book bolsters the argument that the answer is that it’s not special. It shows that the Gospels are, as you say, messy, inaccurate, internally conflicted, human. They took from and paralleled other traditions of the time. Like many other religious stories, the story of Jesus is a universal spiritual quest filtered through the particular individual, cultural and historical conditions in which it existed. It’s not really special in the way that I think Christianity requires.  So, without that specialness, how DOES Christianity survive?

Another wants clarification:

“Does this book effectively debunk Christianity’s core claims in modernity … or does it point to a new way of understanding and believing them?” Of course the answer to your question depends on what exactly the “core claims” of Christianity are.

If the core claim is that Christ is the Son, co-equal with the Father for all eternity – or similar “high” Christological claims – I do think this book and books like it erect additional barriers to that belief, by shedding light on how they came to be formulated and exposing the gulf between them and the beliefs of the earliest Christians.  It’s very hard to believe that powerful men with very specific interests, writing hundreds of years after Jesus, would have more accurately grasped his nature then men and women closer to his own station, who had learned of him from his own disciples and others that knew him.

If the core claim of Christianity, on the other hand, is that Christ was in some sense God – for example, that Christ represented the extent to which a fully human life could be infused with the power and purpose of God – and that, furthermore, the manner in which he was God allowed him to conquer death and sin, the book does not impact this belief much one way or the other.

The challenge for every Christian is to understand how Jesus, fully human, was nonetheless God; and thereby to understand how we, fully human, can participate in God’s kingdom.  A critical, historical reading of the gospels is an aid in this effort, not an impediment.  If anything, the high Christologies of later years are the impediment, obscuring as they do the real, full extent of Jesus’ humanity, and thus relieving from us the burden of Christ’s greatest challenge to us – to live like him, and through doing so, to act out God’s kingdom in our own lives.

(Please email any responses to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com rather than the main account.)

Tumblr Of The Day

The delightful I Write For SkyMall:

This particular product comes from a severe miscommunication between SkyMall and our Chinese manufacturers, but we’re making the best of it! Because at SkyMall, we know that nothing better accompanies a declaration of love than an entirely unrelated statement of fact.

So let the loved one in your life know just how strongly and literally you feel about them by gifting them the I Love You Stone. If they ever come to doubt you, just tell them, “But it’s on that stone. Spoken out loud.”

I suggest you gift this product in an undecorated box inscribed with the word ‘GIFT’. As you hand off the present, tell your recipient, “This is a gift.” After they open it, as they tearily thank you for the warm and heartfelt gesture, hug them. And as you hold them close, cherish the moment by whispering ever so softly in their ear: “I am hugging you.”

Breaking Into The Black Market

Roy Klabin talked to “Viktor” – a marijuana distributor who makes an estimated $24,000 to $32,000 per month – about the underground drug economy:

Having a trusted third party transport the weed is the least risky way to get it into the marketplace. “Because you have somebody coming to you, on your terms, paying cash. Boom. Immediately, in one deal, all your illegal weed has just turned into cash. Farmers are eager to offload in bulk, so as buyers we entice them by offering to buy the biggest quantities. The more bulk you buy, the more leeway you have with price.” According to Viktor, it’s a buyer’s market. “There are plenty of people making weed. In California and Colorado, they got more weed than they know what to do with.”

In order to become a broker, Viktor explained, you have to get an in with a farmer—which is no small feat. “It’s easier to befriend distributors than farmers. If you’re a farmer, you’re protecting everything about yourself. Even if you were going to have a visitor, you’re going to black bag their head all the way up. You don’t want them knowing how to get there, remembering anything about where you’re at. If the wrong person finds out about your million-dollar pot farm, they’re going to come up there and kill you. There’s no witnesses, because it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Meanwhile, Matt Honan investigates the high-tech future of growing and selling pot:

Start with indoor farms, which are massively energy-intensive. Their high-pressure sodium lights, which themselves require large amounts of electricity, can send temperatures soaring. Yet marijuana plants need to stay cool and dry. Traditionally, growers have handled this dilemma by using electricity-gulping HVAC compressors. Colorado company Surna saw opportunity here. It has introduced an energy-efficient climate-control system that uses chilled water. The system pipes a circuit of cooling water through the grow and can even extract water directly from the indoor air to regulate humidity. “This plant is from Afghanistan. It wants to be on a windy hill in semi-arid conditions,” says Surna CEO Tom Bollich. “That’s one thing we can do that traditional HVAC can’t—we can give you 40 percent humidity and 75 degrees.” If Bollich’s name is familiar, it could be that you know him from his previous gig: CTO of Zynga. “I moved on from that, did several startups and moved around, and started looking into the cannabis industry,” he says. “It was the next gold rush, honestly.”

(Photo by Miguel Peixe)

Chart Of The Day

Mona Chalabi looks at childhood profanity:

A study published last year in the American Journal of Psychology collected “data about the emergence of adult like swearing in children.” … The study found that, overall, boys had a slightly larger repertoire of bad words than girls (95 compared to 80). But that repertoire varied by age. By age 3 or 4, girls were using 40 taboo words while boys were using 34; but among 7- and 8-year-olds, boys were using 45, and the number of bad words girls were using slipped down to 25.

Curiouser And Curiouser

Jonathan Crow digs up Curious Alice, a 1971 short film intended as an anti-drug PSA for 8-year-olds – a message undermined by its “trippy, Monty Pythonesque animation”:

Curious Alice [is] a visually stunning, deeply odd movie about the perils of drug abuse that makes the stuff look like a lot of fun. Created by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1971, the film shows young Alice reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in a sunny dappled meadow before nodding off. She soon finds herself plunging down the rabbit hole and in a wonderland … of drugs. The King of Hearts is hawking heroin. The Mad Hatter is tripping balls on LSD. The hookah-smoking Caterpillar is stoned out of his gourd. The Dormouse is in a barbiturate-induced stupor and the March Hare, who looks like the Trix Bunny’s ne’er-do-well brother, is a fidgeting tweaker. “You oughta have some pep pills! Uppers!” he exclaims. “Amphetamines! Speed! You feel super good.” …

The animators clearly had a blast making this movie, but their efforts didn’t exactly translate into an effective message. After the movie came out, the National Coordinating Council on Drug Education slammed the movie, calling it confusing and counterproductive.

DIY Celebrity

Joe Cosarelli explores the peculiar fame of YouTube personalities:

The rough edges of the Real Housewives, even, read as prepackaged and fake compared with the intimacy of a girl staring directly into the camera and cataloguing her latest shopping spree in more detail than you might have thought possible. Or of Jenna Marbles, a basic blonde with extra sass who tells her 13 million YouTube subscribers (more than Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, or Taylor Swift) what’s going on in her life. Many teenagers today (girls and boys) find this a lot more interesting than what’s on television—not least because by watching, clicking, and commenting, they are the ones making performers into stars.

As with modern art, the thought “I could do that too” is in many ways more compelling than “I could never do that.” And entry to this new star system is as simple as signing up for YouTube, Twitter, Vine (the six-second-looping video service owned by Twitter), Tumblr, Instagram, or, most likely, all of the above.

But just because anyone can post a video doesn’t mean that anyone can build an audience. And the system for becoming internet-famous is just as brutal—maybe more so—than Hollywood. Offline, after all, there are gatekeepers, but also a whole system of talent management: huge marketing budgets propping up a star’s brand. Online, it’s pure click-driven democracy—your worth can be measured precisely, to the fan, so almost definitionally, the people who are racking up big followings are doing something really (though often bizarrely) impressive.