Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 301

Do They Still Call It “Geopolitics” In Space?

Joan Johnson-Freese expects that NASA cutting ties with Russia will prove counterproductive:

Space has a long history of serving as a surrogate for demonstrating U.S. displeasure about foreign or domestic policy actions in other countries. Though examples date back to the Cold War, the most recent case relates to China. China has been banned for years from participating in the [International Space Station (ISS)] because select members of the U.S. Congress consider it inappropriate to work with a communist government. In addition, NASA has been legislatively banned from having bilateral relations with China since 2011.

While ostensibly that ban relates to concerns about technology transfer, the underlying reason has as much or more to do with Chinese restrictions on religious freedom.

But China has neither changed its type of government nor its policies on religious freedom based on exclusion from the ISS or its relative isolation from meeting with NASA officials, nor is it likely to. In fact, China has pushed ahead with its own robotic lunar program and human space-flight program, and it works with many other countries, including Russia, in space.

Also, as Katie Zezima explains, the US space program now depends on Russia too much to cut ties completely:

Yes, NASA will stop certain contact with Russia. Russian officials won’t be able to visit the United States, and many meetings and teleconferences will be cancelled. (Wait ’til next year, boreal forest research conferences). But a number of large ties will remain intact, despite the White House directive. Cutting them just isn’t possible when, for example, the United States is wholly dependent on Russia to ferry astronauts to and from space. And, naturally, there is a U.S. astronaut in space right now who will eventually need to hitch a ride home.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

At the start of Holy Week – a miracle in the form of a spinal cord implant, letting the paralyzed feel again. A reflection – Auden, of course – on God as Father. A visit to the monks at Athos over a bottle of ouzo. And a pertinent question: why does Mary have such perfect toenails?

A wedding at the end of a life – and a smile breaking into tears. A love affair – between two people who look like twins. An obscene version of “Let It Go” – “Fuck It All!” – just in time for finals. And the stories that inspired Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel.

Plus: Butt Sex! Ya can’t beat it.

The most popular post of the weekend was “Why Aren’t Gay Men On The Pill?” Runner-up: “Where The Hard Left Says No.“

My favorite quote of the day is from Mike Kinsley:

“Native advertising” is the delightful but bewildering euphemism for advertising that looks like editorial content. Its main effect is to make editorial content look like advertising.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Cherry blossoms bloom near the Tidal Basin April 9, 2014 in Washington, DC. Peak bloom for the cherry blossoms is predicted to be around April 11-13. By Drew Angerer/Getty Images.)

A Crusader For Change

Miriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavez paints the labor leader as “a media-savvy pragmatist not averse to dealmaking”:

Yet unlike the hard-headed Anglos who ran the industrial unions, he saw himself more as a spiritual guide than a labour leader. He despaired of the tendency among poor workers he helped to desire colour televisions and golf clubs as they grew richer. He distrusted colleagues who sought pay rises, and rejected them for himself; sacrifice, he urged, must be the mark of the movement. He embarked on regular fasts, both to draw attention to the cause and, in trying times, to strengthen his own fortitude. Gandhi, rather than King, was the role model.

Peter Dreier considers Chavez’s legacy, particularly with regard to the United Farm Workers union:

The UFW served as an incubator of movements. It trained thousands of organizers and activists — boycott volunteers as well as paid staff. Many became key activists and leaders in the labor, immigrant rights, feminist, antiwar, consumer, and environmental movements. There is no progressive movement in the country today that has not been influenced by people whose activism began with the UFW.

Another legacy is the nationwide upsurge of cultural pride and political action by Latinos, most of whom were not farmworkers, that was inspired by Chavez and the UFW. The fruits of Latino activism can be seen in the growing voting power of Latinos in American politics, the thousand of Latino and Latina elected officials at all levels of government, and the growing immigrant rights movement, especially among young people.

But Liza Featherstone is less happy about the effects of Chavez’s work:

[A]s labor writer (and former UFW staffer) Michael Yates has suggested, the most important question should be: Is life for farmworkers in California any better today than it was before Cesar Chavez and the UFW came along? The answer to that, sadly, is no. As Chavez himself acknowledged, during the waning years of the UFW’s power, farmworkers’ children were 25% more likely than other American kids to die at birth. Their parents’ life expectancy was two-thirds that of the rest of the population. Laws protecting their union organizing rights were not enforced. Some drank water from irrigation pipes and lived under trees.

Citing the new documentary Cesar’s Last Fast as well as Pawel’s book, Nathan Heller explores Chavez’s 1988 fast in protest of farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides:

By the thirtieth day of the fast, Chavez had lost thirty pounds. He had renal problems and muscle wasting. His doctors urged him to break his fast. When he wouldn’t, Dolores Huerta and the Reverend Jesse Jackson devised an endgame. Chavez’s friends would pass the fast along: they’d each do three days or so, and the sacrifice would continue. Chavez agreed, and on the thirty-sixth day, a Sunday, he appeared at Mass. He was carried, limp, between the shoulders of his sons. Jackson and Martin Sheen were there, along with the family of Bobby Kennedy. Ethel Kennedy broke off a morsel of blessed bread, and Chavez finally ate. His mother sat beside his nearly lifeless body, weeping and stroking his face.

Did Chavez have a Christ complex? The question looms behind Pawel’s biography and [Richard Ray] Perez and [Lorena] Parlee’s film. “How did Cesar become such a powerful, brilliant organizer and leader?” the Reverend Chris Hartmire, of the National Migrant Ministry, asks in the documentary. “I think it was fundamentally his Catholic upbringing and his mother’s teachings.” Chavez’s eagerness to take on moral responsibility through physical sacrifice, to lead an expanding moral movement, to be both humble and irreplaceably authoritative has its roots in the founding tropes of the Church. These affinities strengthened his project, as Hartmire suggests; they also slowly eroded it. Through the hard postwar years, farmworkers needed a political and cultural leader. Chavez’s faith helped make his ethical and organizational ambitions clear. But he also aspired to be a spiritual leader, and his efforts there had less stirring effects. Workers, in the end, already had a holy figure they could trust.

Listen to an interview with Pawel here.

(Video: Trailer for Cesar’s Last Fast)

De Man As Con Man

Robert Alter insists that Paul de Man was a “total fraud,” praising Evelyn Barish’s biography of the once-central figure in American literary studies. For example, he managed to join the faculty of Bard College with absolutely no qualifications:

How does a new immigrant without credentials get appointed at an American college? De Man produced a fictitious curriculum vitae in which he claimed to hold the “equivalent of your Master’s degree.” He also said he had been an editor at Editions de Minuit in Paris, a prestigious publishing house with which he had had no contact, and that his grandfather was a “founder of the University of Ghent.” Later, in his Harvard years, he would embellish this fictitious autobiography further: the collaborator did not hesitate to represent himself as a man who had fought in the Belgian army and then joined the Resistance, and he claimed several times, both in conversation and in writing, that he was the illegitimate son, not the nephew, of [prominent Belgian collaborator] Henri de Man. This ostensibly odd attribution of paternity worked in two ways for him: he could claim to be the son of one of the leading figures in Belgian politics during the 1930s and into the war; and after his supposed father became Belgium’s Quisling, he could say he was the target of undeserved hostility, which eventually drove him to 
leave the country.

Alter attempts to reconcile de Man’s work with his personal life:

Was there any continuity between his early entanglements in crimes and lies and the literary theory that made him famous?

Barish, like others before her, proposes a link between his negation of history and his career of deception, between his denial of the continuity of the self and his suppression of his own past (he even forgot his native Flemish!), between his insistence that the written or spoken word never tells anything about the intention of its originator and his assumption of a new identity. This is certainly plausible, but I would also like to suggest a different kind of continuity between de Man’s mode of operation as a literary theorist and his mode of operation as a con man. It has to do with his style. In his writing, abstruseness, bristling abstraction, and a disorienting use of terms make his essays often difficult to penetrate. This was part of the key to his success: to his American admirers, with their cultural inferiority complex, it seemed that if things were difficult to grasp, something profound was being said.

A Subversive Songster

In a lengthy retrospective, Ben Smith and Anita Badejo explore Tom Lehrer’s brief career, larger-than-life legacy, and resolute resistance to stardom:

Lehrer had been a sensation in the late 1950s, the era’s musical nerd god: a wryly confident Harvard-educated math prodigy who turned his bone-dry wit to satirical musical comedy. His sound looked further back, to Broadway of the ‘20s and ‘30s — a man and a piano, crisp and clever — but his lyrics were funny and sharp to the point of drawing blood, and sometimes appalling. One famous ditty celebrates an afternoon spent “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” Another cheerful number, “So Long Mom,” dwells on the details of nuclear holocaust. “I Got It from Agnes” is an extended joke about sexually transmitted disease. …

[W]hile his work was widely enjoyed at the time, it was also something of a scandal — the clever songs about math and language were for everyone, but Lehrer’s clear-eyed contemplation of nuclear apocalypse was straightforwardly disturbing. And amid the clever songs about math and language, and confrontational politics, a distinct lack of prudishness:

There’s BDSM, promiscuity, gay Boy Scouts. “If you’re out behind the woodshed doing what you’d like to do, just be sure that your companion is a Boy Scout too,” Lehrer advised in “Be Prepared.” … Lehrer’s father, whose New York circle included figures like the lyricist Irving Caesar, had connected him with every prominent record producer in town. But though he drew their interest, he had too much edge. “They were all afraid of the sick humor,” [Lehrer's friend David] Robinson said.

Smith goes on to suggest that Lehrer’s “sick comedy was, in retrospect, a sign of artistic life in a conformist era”:

“Done right, social criticism set to a catchy tune always makes politics easier to digest,” said Lizz Winstead, creator of The Daily Show and a women’s rights activist. “You add a layer of humor and you can break down two barriers: One, singing a song over and over leads to repetition of a message, and two, humor creates likability. The more polarizing the issue, no matter what you say, you will have people who do not think you should use humor. He went for the jugular when it was desperately needed [yet] was always hilarious and poignant.”

(Video: Lehrer performs “The Vatican Rag” in 1967)

How The Sacred Is Sensuous

Jenna Weissman Joselit praises S. Brent Plate’s A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects as an “erudite and lyrical account of the role of objects in religious expression”:

In its insistence on seeing religion as a material phenomenon, the book goes global, making room within its pages for Eastern as well as Western traditions. In less supple hands, this perspective could fall flat, subjecting its author to charges of superficiality. What saves the text from that unfortunate fate is Plate’s control of his material, the firm and steady way in which he builds his case, guiding the reader through quicksilver transitions from one part of the world to another. …

[W]e learn that drums are a “vital source of sonic sacrality” for some, the voice of the devil for others; that bread not only “connects with creation itself,” but that “Christianity would not exist without [it],” and that the “sacred geometry” of two crossed lines can be found among the symbols of ancient China, within Navajo weavings as well as high up in the cathedral nave. Plate’s interpretations, his reading of material culture, are often downright revelatory. I, for one, was surprised to discover that The Old Testament was unusually sensitive to the power of smell. “Not all people through history,” he observes in connection with the ancient Israelites, “have delighted in smoke and scents the way the God of the Torah did.” Although I pride myself on my familiarity with the Torah, I had never thought about its multiple references to frankincense and myrrh in quite this way.

In a blog post offering “a history of religion in 11 objects” last month, Plate contemplated the human need for material things:

Humans are needy. We need things: keepsakes, stuff, tokens, tchotchkes, knickknacks, bits and pieces, junk and treasure. We carry special objects in our pockets and purses, or place them on shelves and desks in our homes and offices. As profane and ordinary as the objects may be, they can also be extraordinary. Some things even become objects of transcendence.

Devout people of faith, across religious traditions, often denigrate material goods, suggesting the really real is beyond what can be seen, felt, and heard. Yet a closer look at religious histories reveals a heart-felt, enduring love for things. Objects large and small, valuable and worthless are there from the beginning of traditions, creating memories and meanings for the devotees who pray and worship, love and share, make pilgrimage and make music.

(Photo of monk lighting incense by Flickr user Wonderlane)

The Devil’s Music In Dhaka

Marco Ferrarese investigates how heavy metal performers in Bangladesh navigate the religious tensions posed by their music:

The Muslim concept of Satan (Shaytan in the Koran) is a little different than in Christianity, but playing the devil’s music in a Muslim country is still complicated. [Guitarist for the metal band Jahiliyyah Asif] Adnan, however, says his music and his faith are compatible. “I’m a Muslim and I follow the rules of my religion,” Adnan says. “But that doesn’t stop me from living with a passion for metal, and keep an open mind. Don’t you think that metal is universal by now?” Adnan says Bengali black metallers do not reject the Koran. Rather they use it as a basis upon which to develop their passion for extreme metal, giving it a unique sonic dimension powerfully rooted in Islam. …

Perhaps the best example of a local touch to Bengali metal comes from Severe Dementia and their curious concept album Epitaph of Plassey, which retraces the 1757 defeat of the last independent Nawab of Bengal at the hands of the British East India Company. Hasan Shahriar of Abominable Carnivore, another death/black metal band, also doesn’t see a conflict between Islam and metal. “I grew up listening to my brother’s records, and my mother pushed me even further by buying me a guitar. She asked me to commit, and to do well in what I believed in, according to the will of Allah.

(Hat tip: The Browser)

Medical Miracle Of The Day

Liat Clark reports that four paralyzed people have “voluntarily and independently moved their legs” for the first time since their injuries, thanks to an experimental spinal implant:

Each of the four men received an epidural implant that delivers currents that mimic signals from the brain. They work in a similar way to myoelectric prostheses, which are grafted on to remaining nerves in the muscles and stimulate these to control movement. In these cases, those wearing the prosthetic can actually move the artificial limb voluntarily, just by thinking about it, because those salvaged nerves are still receiving information from the brain. In this latest study, the candidates could voluntarily move their limbs immediately. This has led to knock-on improvements in their health, from an increase in muscle mass to a reduction in fatigue and stabilizing of blood pressure levels. …

Each recovered and managed to make use of the system so rapidly, it’s speculated that more parts of the nervous system remained intact than previously thought. Not only this, but as the four candidates continued through their training, they needed lower and lower electrical frequencies to instigate movement – the neural pathways were improving and building off of that stimulus to create better routes. They are retraining the spinal cord to think differently.

Sam Maddox offers an account of how it played out for one man:

Kent had the stimulator implanted. A few days later they turned it on. No one expected it to do anything. Researchers were only looking for a baseline measurement to compare Kent’s function later, after several weeks of intense Locomotor Training (guided weight supported stepping on a treadmill). Kent tells the story: “The first time they turned the stim on I felt a charge in my back. I was told to try pull my left leg back, something I had tried without success many times before. So I called it out loud, ‘left leg up.’ This time it worked! My leg pulled back toward me. I was in shock; my mom was in the room and was in tears. Words can’t describe the feeling – it was an overwhelming happiness.”

Mental Health Break

Frank Ocean’s Coldplay cover takes a nostalgic tour of ’50s America:

Beyond Our Wildest Hypotheses

Barbara Ehrenreich – a trained biologist who, in her latest book, reveals her own brushes with mystical experiences – argues (NYT) that scientists should take such matters seriously:

If mystical experiences represent some sort of an encounter, as they have commonly been described, is it possible to find out what they are encounters with? Science could continue to dismiss mystical experiences as mental phenomena, internal to ourselves, but the merest chance that they may represent some sort of contact or encounter justifies investigation. We need more data and more subjective accounts. But we also need a neuroscience bold enough to go beyond the observation that we are “wired” for transcendent experience; the real challenge is to figure out what happens when those wires connect. Is science ready to take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences?

Fortunately, science itself has been changing. It was simply overwhelmed by the empirical evidence, starting with quantum mechanics and the realization that even the most austere vacuum is a happening place, bursting with possibility and giving birth to bits of something, even if they’re only fleeting particles of matter and antimatter. Without invoking anything supernatural, we may be ready to acknowledge that we are not, after all, alone in the universe. There is no evidence for a God or gods, least of all caring ones, but our mystical experiences give us tantalizing glimpses of other forms of consciousness, which may be beings of some kind, ordinarily invisible to us and our instruments. Or it could be that the universe is itself pulsing with a kind of life, and capable of bursting into something that looks to us momentarily like the flame.

Robert McLuhan responds:

It’s always heartening to see someone with a scientific education talking sense about these things.

Most scientists think they absolutely should discard anomalous results. But then we remember that it requires an actual experience to make this shift. If it had been someone else’s experience Ehrenreich would doubtless be using exactly the same reductionist terms as other atheists and scientists. It wouldn’t be an experience at all – just something that a person says who hasn’t had a proper scientific education and doesn’t know any better.

In the end, though, Ehrenreich’s expanded thinking is not just a response to her own experience, it’s also limited by it. It permits her to make a tentative step outside the confines of reductionist science, which to her is daring enough. But it doesn’t stop her being dismissive of the idea of a ‘caring’ God.

This is surprising in a way. I assume she’s read the literature of mystical experience, in which case she will have read of many, many cases of people who had a sudden revelation every bit as powerful as hers, but who, unlike her, felt swept up in the loving embrace of a God of love, that permeated every cell of their being, and convinced them for the rest of their days that love is the real stuff of the universe. Why does she think that the meaning she derives from her experience is valid, when the meaning that others have derived from theirs – clearly in the same class as hers – is not?

Meanwhile, Ross doubts (NYT) the numinous would benefit from more scientific scrutiny:

The trouble is that in its current state, cognitive science has a great deal of difficulty explaining “what happens” when “those wires connect” for non-numinous experience, which is why mysterian views of consciousness remain so potent even among thinkers whose fundamental commitments are atheistic and materialistic. (I’m going to link to the Internet’s sharpest far-left scold for a good recent polemic on this front.) That is to say, even in contexts where it’s very easy to identify the physical correlative to a given mental state, and to get the kind of basic repeatability that the scientific method requires – show someone an apple, ask them to describe it; tell them to bite into it, ask them to describe the taste; etc. – there is no kind of scientific or philosophical agreement on what is actually happening to produce the conscious experience of the color “red,” the conscious experience of the crisp McIntosh taste, etc. So if we can’t say how this ”normal” conscious experience works, even when we can easily identify the physical stimulii that produce it, it seems exponentially harder to scientifically investigate the invisible, maybe-they-exist and maybe-they-don’t stimulii – be they divine, alien, or panpsychic – that Ehrenreich hypothesizes might produce more exotic forms of conscious experience.