Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 31

“Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Outraged Tweet”

Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry turns to an unlikely source as he implores us to avoid another year of online outrage – the French philosopher René Girard. He examines his work on scapegoating, which Gobry believes resonates with the way we interact online. The way to defuse our tendency toward scapegoating:

The only ancient text Girard could find that contained a denunciation, rather than an endorsement, of scapegoating, is the Bible. The Bible also has its narrative of founding murder. But while Rome’s myth states that Remus was guilty and needed to die, the Bible says that “Abel the Just” was innocent, and has its god character protect his murderer Cain from scapegoating vengeance.

The Bible also contains one of the most striking stories in all of human literature: the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. The reason why the phrase “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” has resonated so deeply in every age and culture is precisely because it strikes at the core of the scapegoat mechanism. It really didn’t matter to anyone whether the woman actually committed adultery, and the lynch mob was just as guilty, or just as innocent, as her. Once the reality of the scapegoat mechanism was exposed, the men could only realize the futility of what they were about to do.

The only way to defeat the scapegoat mechanism is to expose it. … Let he who is without sin cast the first outraged tweet.

(Image of Guercino’s “Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well,” 1641, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Poem For Sunday

“The Stags” by Kathleen Jamie:

This is the multitude, the beasts

you wanted to show me, drawing me

upstream, all morning up through wind-

scoured heather to the hillcrest.

Below us, in the next glen, is the grave

calm brotherhood, descended

out of winter, out of hunger, kneeling

like the signatories of a covenant;

their weighty, antique-polished antlers

rising above the vegetation

like masts in a harbor, or city spires.

We lie close together, and though the wind

whips away our man-and-woman smell,

every stag-face seems to look toward us, toward,

but not to us: we’re held, and hold them,

in civil regard. I suspect you’d

hoped to impress me, to lift to my sight

our shared country, lead me deeper

into what you know, but loath

to cause fear you’re already moving

quietly away, sure I’ll go with you,

as I would now, anywhere.

(From The Overhaul © 2012 by Kathleen Jamie. Used by permission of Graywolf Press. Photo by Richard Fisher)

Poseur Alert

William Giraldi, the novelist, teaches at Boston University and was given paternity leave after his wife delivered their first child. He shares how those nine months of relative leisure transformed him into a near-alcoholic:

When Pascal suggested that humanity’s strife stems from our inability to sit quietly in a room by ourselves, he neglected to specify what happens when one rolls a few barrels of alcohol in for company. I cannot say precisely why my “workload reduction” coincided with my “drinking problem,” except suddenly I had so much time. Okay, the university made me sign a document that swore I’d be incurring more than 50 percent of parental duties. But let’s be honest: even in self-consciously progressive households, it’s a rare new father who does as much baby work as a new mother. …

There came, of course, the medieval hangovers that vanquished entire days. Sleep interrupted by migraines and dehydration that felt downright malarial. Iffy decisions involving the diaperless infant on an antique couch. Puffy face and puffier physique. Aches in the liver region, nights in the living room. A first-name basis with the Visigoth at the liquor store. A propensity to click “send” without reading what I’d written. Friends just itching for an intervention. I kept waiting for a knock on the door from the university officials who had so generously granted me a workload reduction. But they never came for me.

This isn’t his first time Giraldi has written about his hard-knock life. Back in October, he lamented the way his fiction was favorably compared to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy:

If most of the McCarthy comparisons have been favorable, all of them have been facile. This is testament to the McCarthy hegemony, to how wholly he dominates an entire sector of American fiction, and to how he has usurped our understanding of a certain literary pedigree. Write a novel with a specific poetical register adequate to the task of addressing nature and redemption, one which includes the sanguinary madness of men, and McCarthy is the artist languidly at hand for every reader itching to make a connection.

But McCarthy’s prominence is such that another novelist interested in the primitive flux and flex of violence, and in that crossroad where this world grinds against the other, would have to be outright masochistic to attempt to emulate him. Neither the novelist nor the novel could ever get away with it. Every page would carry its own proof of transgression, and thus its own guarantee of detection. ‪Let’s remember, too, Walker Percy’s perfect warning to writers who attempt to channel Faulkner: “There is nothing more feckless than imitating an eccentric.”‬

Mental Health Break

Throwing Christmas trees to the lions:

On “Species Guilt”

Robert Pogue Harrison ponders humanity’s relationship with animalkind:

We like to think of ourselves as the stewards or even saviors of nature, yet the fact of the matter is, for the animal world at large, the human race represents nothing less than a natural disaster. This applies to all creatures, from those we allow to roam “wild” in designated nature preserves to those we cram together on our chicken farms; from the dancing bears of Anatolia to the bald eagles of Alaska, with their collar monitors; from the laboratory animals we test our cosmetic products’ chemicals on to the sharks whose fins leave the oceans to swim around in our nuptial soups. All creatures are under our yoke; and all, including our beloved horses, dogs, cats, and canaries, are subject to human persecution in one way or another.

From a quantitative point of view our species guilt is more aggravated today than it ever was in the past, when Plutarch or Pythagoras cried out against animal murder and the consumption of animal flesh. As the French philosopher and biologist Jean Rostand put it, “Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.” While the scale of animal death has increased exponentially, the main issue today is no longer death but the coercive reproduction and perpetuation of animal life under infernal conditions of organic exploitation. Industrialized farming today, in its manipulation of the biological processes of genesis, growth, and multiplication, forces animals like cows, calves, turkeys, pigs, ducks, and geese into artificial, barely endurable forms of existence. Far more demonic than the slaughters and animal sacrifices of the past, our relegation of these creatures to a standing reserve of consumable stock reduces their “lives” to a worldless, merely mechanical process of flesh production. In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote of the malaise of the earth: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” That creaturely groaning has gotten a lot louder of late, and if God indeed loves his creatures enough to open heaven to them, it is highly likely that, when our pets get there, they will find themselves on their own.

The View From Your Window

Hilton Head, South Carolina, 10.29 am

8-Bit Existentialism

Colin Marshall recommends the series 8-Bit Philosophy, which combines deep thinking with the aesthetics of early Nintendo:

If you’ve put in the hours playing both eight-bit video games and reading the relevant philosophical texts, you’ll surely find these videos’ Nintendonian aesthetics as impeccable as their encapsulations of Kierkegarrd, Sartre, and Camus’ positions are concise. You can find more from 8-Bit Philosophy on Youtube, including their vintage gamer-friendly renditions of Friedrich Nietzsche on time as a flat circle and what science has to do with truth. They cover other areas of philosophy, too, but something about old video games themselves — with their endless cycles of death, regeneration, and not inherently meaningful challenges — leads my mind straight into existentialism every time.

Quote For The Day

“For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one. What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this side or on the other, without being unlike herself? What but a vain shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that hand-writing nailed to the cross? What great purchase is this Christian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is, that he who eats or eats not, regards a day or regards it not, may do either to the Lord. How many other things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another?

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us. We stumble and are impatient at the least dividing of one visible congregation from another, though it be not in fundamentals; and through our forwardness to suppress, and our backwardness to recover any enthralled piece of truth out of the gripe of custom, we care not to keep truth separated from truth, which is the fiercest rent and disunion of all. We do not see that, while we still affect by all means a rigid external formality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay and stubble, forced and frozen together, which is more to the sudden degenerating of a Church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms.

Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that all in a Church is to be expected gold and silver and precious stones: it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the Angels’ ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of one mind–as who looks they should be?–this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled,” – John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England.

When Faith Is Not An Escape

In a personal essay, Laura Turner reveals the way her “anxiety frequently blossoms at the intersection of uncertainty and powerlessness,” resulting in the fear that she “can never feel at home.” How that connects to her religious faith:

The common misperception of religion as a crutch would have us believe that people are faithful because they want to escape the problems of the world and the realities of everyday life. But my faith tells me the importance of staying put. In one way it asks me to grow roots, but in another it is nothing deeper than what the words say: Stay put. Sit with the worries and fears and discomfort. Recognize it as a part of you and of the world. Recognize you can’t run from it, as much as you want to.

When I am anxious, I am filled with a powerful wanderlust that makes leaving home so tempting and makes it seem like travel will allow me to escape my churning mind. I hold the lesson of my faith in one hand and my desire to bolt in the other. I try to make sense of them. My discomfort surfaces when I have to navigate the world of adulthood for too long. Maybe I should go somewhere so utterly familiar that it does not challenge me, or else somewhere so new that it jolts me out of myself.

There’s an old hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, with these lyrics: “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” When I get tired and the inspiration to travel—to plan another trip, to look impatiently forward to what is next on the calendar, to move out of the present moment—strikes up (and partly I blame that on God for making the world such a very interesting place to explore) that lyric “prone to wander” hits me hard. I find myself thinking that maybe running away is like leaving God. Sometimes I want to run backward, back to a deeper set of roots I did not put down myself, back to my parents’ house where everything is easy and safe. And this, I think, is maybe like leaving God too.

(Video: Sufjan Stevens sings “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”)

Houellebecq’s Nightmare, Ctd

We recently noted that the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo coincided with the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Submission, which had been featured on the satirical weekly’s cover. In a recent interview with The Paris Review, Houellebecq spoke about why he believes the novel’s premise – a Muslim candidate is elected President after defeating the the far right candidate Marine Le Pen – is a thought experiment worth conducting:

Well, Marine Le Pen strikes me as a realistic candidate for 2022—even for 2017 … The Muslim party is more … That’s the heart of the matter, really. I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that, in reality, they are in a totally schizophrenic situation. Because overall Muslims aren’t interested in economic issues, their big issues are what we nowadays call societal issues. On these issues, obviously, they are very far from the left and even further from the Green Party. Just think of gay marriage and you’ll see what I mean, but the same is true across the board. And one doesn’t really see why they’d vote for the right, much less for the extreme right, which utterly rejects them. So if a Muslim wants to vote, what’s he supposed to do? The truth is, he’s in an impossible situation. He has no representation whatsoever. It would be wrong to say that this religion has no political consequences—it does. So does Catholicism, for that matter, even if the Catholics have been more or less marginalized. For those reasons, it seems to me, a Muslim party makes a lot of sense.

In a helpful review of the novel, Steven Poole asserts that its real aim is not to offer “a splenetic vision of the Muslim threat to Europe or a spineless ‘submission’ to gradual Islamic takeover”:

Some in France have already complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, but that is to miss Houellebecq’s deeply mischievous point. Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues, the novel gleefully points out, really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to “traditional” or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband – just as “Islam” means that a Muslim submits to God.

But Soumission is, arguably, not primarily about politics at all. The real target of Houellebecq’s satire – as in his previous novels – is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man, intellectual or otherwise. François himself happily submits to the new order, not for any grand philosophical or religious reasons, but because the new Saudi owners of the Sorbonne pay much better – and, more importantly, he can be polygamous. As he notes, in envious fantasy, of his charismatic new boss, who has adroitly converted already: “One 40-year-old wife for cooking, one 15-year-old wife for other things … no doubt he had one or two others of intermediate ages.”