Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 290

Hathos Alert

A reader writes:

I saw this video this afternoon and thought of the Dish. It’s basically a commercial for a classical music festival, B-Classic – they created a “Classical Comeback” video with a Korean dance team in skimpy costumes doing sexy moves to an excerpt from Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony.  The caption on YouTube says the video “gives classical music the same recognition as pop and rock music by combining the timeless emotion of classical music with the visual talent of a contemporary director.”

Just about made my head explode, it was so weird, but oddly hathetic as well.

A Subdued Celebration

Twenty years after the Walt Disney Company broke ground on a master-planned community of Celebration, Florida, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan describes the town as “a paradigm for how contemporary Americans view utopian projects – with a huge amount of suspicion”:

Celebration, below its twee veneer and even below its shoddy craftsmanship, is a pretty sustainable idea. It has lessons for us to learn about how to quell the worst of the sprawl eating away at our country. And it is, by most accounts, a pretty good place to live: Public spaces, walkable streets, downscaled housing, and good schools, all within a compact downtown. Even its critics have to admit that it’s better than swampy, sprawling hellscape that lies just outside of it, dripping with strip malls and sweaty drive-thrus.

So why don’t we think of it as a success? For one thing, the mere whiff of utopia sets our teeth on edge these days. After a century of high-profile failures – from Fordlandia to Helicon Home Colony – most of us can’t shake the idea that behind those neocolonial shutters lurks something sinister, whether as simple as tax evasion or as truly nightmarish as a violent cult. In other words, Celebration is not only a victim of its own marketing, but a victim of a public that perceives planned communities as deeply creepy – which is how Celebration is described again and again.

Maybe the problem with Celebration isn’t its flaws, but the weariness with which the American public perceives the simple idea of utopia these days. After centuries of struggling to engineer a perfect society, utopia’s greatest enemy might turn out to be as simple as a creeping suspicion.

(Photo of downtown Celebration by Bobak Ha’Eri)

After The Madness Fades

Toronto Star reporter Amy Dempsey shares the poignant story of a man who killed his mother during a psychotic break, and must now come to terms with what he has done:

Michael understands what it means to be not criminally responsible, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling guilt. “Sometimes I feel like if I just would have done a few things differently then maybe I could have avoided things from happening.” He averts his eyes at the mention of “things” because he doesn’t like to talk about those things. He regrets resisting medication for all those years, fighting for off-grounds privileges when he was in hospital. “What I needed more was to just get treatment. And I didn’t realize that at the time. I didn’t accept it.”

His father and his doctors counter that Michael was too sick to understand he needed treatment, let alone grasp the consequences of refusing it, but even so, Michael still thinks about what might have been. He probably always will. He doesn’t speak at all about what happened to his mother in July 2002 and his treatment team feels it would be unwise to raise it with him. If he must refer to the incident in conversation, Michael uses the review board term, “the index offense.” Even fond memories of his mother are difficult for him. He grows quiet or changes the subject when painful topics come up.

Michael accepts the realities of his life today but tries to remain optimistic about his future. He downplays the promise he showed as a young man, perhaps because the comparison between the Michael he is and the Michael he was is too painful to think about. He knows he won’t go to university, but he thinks he might try to get a job soon, possibly at the local cinema. “I still think that I can salvage something,” he says hopefully.

The View From Your Window

Waynesboro, Virginia, 3.50 pm

Even Atheists Stereotype Atheists, Ctd

A reader writes:

I think there’s a pretty fundamental flaw in Jacobs’ interpretation of the study on atheists and immorality. He says:

The findings suggest our instinctive belief that moral behavior is dependent upon God – as ethical arbiter and/or assigner of divine punishment – creates a belief system strong enough to override evidence to the contrary. It leads people many to look at non-believers and reflexively assume the worst.

I would argue that this study says nothing of the sort. Jacobs is drawing the line from atheism to immorality, where the study only shows a causal path from immorality to atheism. There is a big difference between assuming someone who is acting unethically is an atheist and saying that someone who is an atheist is less capable of acting ethically. As an illustration, imagine they repeated the same experiment with serial killers, varying gender instead. Most documented serial killers have been men. Thus, someone doing the above experiment would likely more readily assume that a serial killer was a man. This does not mean that these people think men in general are incapable of acting morally.

Another writes, “The idea that atheists are less moral than believers deeply offends me”:

I am an atheist, yet I strive to do the right thing in all aspects of my life. I do not always succeed, but I always try. And I do not try to do the right thing because I am seeking reward, or trying to avoid punishment in some afterlife, but because I believe that, in most situations, there is a right and a wrong, and that to be a moral person, one must strive to do right.

I learned in a university philosophy course about different theories of the stages of moral development, and that the highest form of morality is based on an internalization of universal principles of right and wrong. The most primitive form of morality is based on a fear of punishment. It is not necessary to believe in a higher power to achieve the highest form of morality.

When I am unsure of what is right in any situation, I don’t ask “What would Jesus do?” but rather, “What would my mother do?” My mother was one of the most moral people I have ever known, and although she believed in God, she did not always follow the Church in its pronouncements as to what was right and wrong. She followed her own conscience, even if it disagreed with the Church’s teachings. My mother was an amazingly good woman and my moral compass. I struggle without her.

Another is on the same page:

Your post about distrust of atheists brought to mind a criticism I shared with the late Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens used to rail against the notion that only believers can be moral because they believe in a god that can reward you or punish you. Hitchens would say it’s very telling when believers only do good to gain reward or avoid punishment, instead of just doing good for the sake of doing good. I share this feeling.

My wife and I are atheists, and we are raising our two children as such. We live in what’s considered Alaska’s Bible Belt (think: near Palin’s hometown), and religion is very pervasive in everyday life and governmental functions. This has a real chilling effect on how “open” about our atheism we can be. If more people knew, I am certain we would be ostracized and stereotyped as some sort of horrible people.

This is why I am of the opinion that there are lots more atheists than there appears to be. Society just hasn’t gotten to the point where people’s minds have accepted atheism as a harmless, acceptable thing, so many atheists say in the closet.

To See What Is In Front Of One’s Nose …

Some things now seem to me increasingly clear in Russia-Ukraine crisis. The deal last week has not held, because Russia has failed to live up to its agreements. The rhetoric on both sides has acquired the kind of frenetic and extreme statements that can very easily escalate into full-scale conflict. Here’s the Ukrainian acting prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk:

“The world has not yet forgotten World War II, but Russia already wants to start World War III.”

Here’s Lavrov:

“The West wants to take control of Ukraine while exclusively putting its geopolitical interests, not the interests of the Ukrainian people, at the forefront.”

The Ukrainian government is not letting up in its legitimate attempt to rid Eastern Ukraine of Russian undercover forces and pro-Russian separatists. Those separatists have just detained some European military observers. Then this:

In another ominous sign of escalating tensions, Russian fighter jets have made about a half-dozen incursions back and forth across the Ukrainian border over the past 24 hours, the Pentagon said late Friday.

The odds of an outright, imminent war between Russia and Ukraine are now, it seems to me, pretty high.

(Photo: A pro-Russian armed man in military fatigues stands guard outside the security service (SBU) regional building which was seized by pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk, on April 25, 2014. Seven members of an OSCE observer mission in Ukraine were seized by rebels today and being held in the eastern flashpoint town of Slavyansk, the interior ministry in Kiev said. By Kirill Kudryavtsev  AFP/Getty Images)

Your Friday Cry

Communicating With The Comatose

It’s an awful lot like mind-reading:

[Neuroscientists Adrian] Owen and [Steven] Laureys were trying to find a reliable way to communicate with patients in a vegetative state, including Gillian*. In July 2005, this 23-year-old had been crossing a road, chatting on her mobile phone. She was struck by two cars. … Five months later, a strange stroke of serendipity allowed Gillian to unlock her box.

The key arose from a systematic study Owen started with Laureys in 2005. They had asked healthy volunteers to imagine doing different things, such as singing songs or conjuring up the face of their mother. Then Owen had another idea.“I just had a hunch,” he says. “I asked a healthy control to imagine playing tennis. Then I asked her to imagine walking through the rooms of her house.” Imagining tennis activates part of the cortex, called the supplementary motor area, involved in the mental simulation of movements. But imagining walking around the house activates the parahippocampal gyrus in the core of the brain, the posterior parietal lobe, and the lateral premotor cortex. The two patterns of activity were as distinct as a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’. So, if people were asked to imagine tennis for ‘yes’ and walking around the house for ‘no’, they could answer questions via fMRI.

Gazing into Gillian’s ‘vegetative’ brain with the brain scanner, he asked her to imagine the same things – and saw strikingly similar activation patterns to the healthy volunteers. It was an electric moment. Owen could read her mind.

Tweet Of The Day

This is how a revolution begins. RT @8NewsNow: Cliven Bundy compared himself to Rosa Parks on Friday morning: http://t.co/2oDW8qerkp

— Sasha Issenberg (@sissenberg) April 25, 2014

Kinda brings it all together, no?

Save The Environmentalists

Will Potter warns that it’s an increasingly deadly world for them:

Between 2002 and 2013, at least 908 people were killed because of their environmental advocacy, according to “Deadly Environment,” a new report from the investigative nonprofit Global Witness. That’s an average of at least one environmentalist murdered every week, and in the last four years, the rate of the murders has doubled. In 2012, the deadliest year on record, 147 deaths were recorded, three times more than a decade earlier. “There were almost certainly more cases,” the report says, “but the nature of the problem makes information hard to find, and even harder to verify.”

In places like Myanmar, China, and parts of Central Asia, human rights monitoring is simply prohibited. In African countries like Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zimbabwe, where clashes over resources have escalated, researchers say it is impossible to track the violence without in-depth field investigations, because governments haven’t documented the killings. The most vulnerable activists are those in indigenous communities in remote, rural areas who are facing off against much more powerful business interests in industries like mining and logging. Much of the world never hears about their struggles, or their deaths. In other words, where environmental advocates are most at risk they are least visible.

Keating adds:

The most dangerous country in the world for environmentalists is Brazil, with 448 killings over the last 10 years. According to the report, “this can be attributed to Brazil’s land ownership patterns, which are among the most concentrated and unequal in the world.” The country’s rapid economic growth has frequently brought powerful business interests into conflict with small and medium-sized farms as well as indigenous groups, often with deadly consequences.

To be fair, the high totals from Brazil may also be a result of the fact that the country has a relatively robust civil society and media sector, so killings in the context of land and environmental disputes are more likely to be reported.