Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 330
March 17, 2014
Faces Of The Day
This year St. Patrick’s Day and the Hindu festival of Holi fall on the same day, so what better way to commemorate the coincidence than two Irish-looking Dishheads in Hyderabad?
Nice Weather We’re Having
Zadie Smith contemplates the ways we talk about climate change:
Although many harsh words are said about the childlike response of the public to the coming emergency, the response doesn’t seem to me very surprising, either. It’s hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to get out of bed in the morning. What’s missing from the account is how much of our reaction is emotional. If it weren’t, the whole landscape of debate would be different. We can easily imagine, for example, a world in which the deniers were not deniers at all, but simple ruthless pragmatists, the kind of people who say: “I understand very well what’s coming, but I am not concerned with my grandchildren; I am concerned with myself, my shareholders, and the Chinese competition.” And there are indeed a few who say this, but not as many as it might be reasonable to expect.
Another response that would seem natural aligns a deep religious feeling with environmental concern, for those who consider the land a beauteous gift of the Lord should, surely, rationally, be among the most keen to protect it. There are a few of these knocking around, too, but again, not half as many as I would have assumed. Instead the evidence is to be “believed” or “denied” as if the scientific papers are so many Lutheran creeds pinned to a door. In America, a curious loophole has even been discovered in God’s creation, concerning hierarchy.
It’s argued that because He placed humans above “things”—above animals and plants and the ocean—we can, with a clean conscience, let all those things go to hell. (In England, traditional Christian love of the land has been more easily converted into environmental consciousness, notably among the country aristocrats who own so much of it.)
But I don’t think we have made matters of science into questions of belief out of sheer stupidity. Belief usually has an emotional component; it’s desire, disguised. Of course, on the part of our leaders much of the politicization is cynical bad faith, and economically motivated, but down here on the ground, the desire for innocence is what’s driving us. For both “sides” are full of guilt, full of self-disgust—what Martin Amis once called “species shame”—and we project it outward. This is what fuels the petty fury of our debates, even in the midst of crisis.
A New And Improved 538
Nate Silver introduces us to his new site:
The breadth of our coverage will be much clearer at this new version of FiveThirtyEight, which is launching Monday under the auspices of ESPN. We’ve expanded our staff from two full-time journalists to 20 and counting. Few of them will focus on politics exclusively; instead, our coverage will span five major subject areas — politics, economics, science, life and sports.
Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we’ll have interactive graphics and features. Within a couple of months we’ll launch a podcast, and we’ll be collaborating with ESPN Films and Grantland to produce original documentary films.
The site won’t be all data all the time:
We’re not planning to abandon the story form at FiveThirtyEight. In fact, sometimes our stories will highlight individual cases, anecdotes. When we provide these examples, however, we want to be sure that we’ve contextualized them in the right way. Sometimes it can be extraordinarily valuable to explore an outlier in some detail. But the premise of the story should be to explain why the outlier is an outlier, rather than indicating some broader trend. To classify these stories appropriately, we’ll have to do a lot of work in the background before we publish them.
All of this takes time. That’s why we’ve elected to sacrifice something else as opposed to accuracy or accessibility. The sacrifice is speed — we’re rarely going to be the first organization to break news or to comment on a story.
Our Failure To Treat Suicidal Thoughts
Emily Greenhouse wants more attention paid to suicide:
In the United States, suicide rates have risen, particularly among middle-aged people: between 1999 and 2010, the number of Americans between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-four who took their own lives rose by almost thirty per cent. Among young people in the U.S., suicide is the third most common cause of death; among all Americans, suicide claims more lives than car accidents, which were previously the leading cause of injury-related death. …
Alan Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology and the president of the International Association of Suicide Prevention, has said that in the developed world ninety per cent of those who attempt suicide suffer from psychological ailments. “We have effective treatments for most of these,” Berman said last year. “But the tragedy is, people die from temporary feelings of helplessness—things we can help with.” The relentless intensity of those feelings has always been difficult to convey to those who have not experienced them: William Styron, in his powerful memoir, “Darkness Visible,” lamented the insufficiency of “depression” as a label for “the veritable howling tempest in the brain.” Styron, who checked himself into the affective-illness unit at Yale-New Haven hospital, lived to write an account of his suffering, but many others lack the wherewithal, or the capacity, to seek such help.
The Dish’s tread on suicide is here.
March 16, 2014
The View From Your Window
Victoria, British Columbia, 10.36 am
Is Religious Experience Irrational? Ctd
Damon Linker continues the debate the Dish featured the past two weekends about the nature of religious experience in a secular age, arguing that “[r]eligious experience — in modernity no less than in premodern contexts — transcends intellect and reason”:
God can call at any time, at any place, overturning a lifetime of thinking and acting and living — including a lifetime of thinking and acting and living within established, settled religious traditions. The call requires and demands an act of surrender to an externally issued, absolute, unrelativizable command.
Read in the light of [philosopher Leo] Strauss’ description of primal religious experience, [David] Sessions’ insistence that the potential convert not abandon “intellectual rigor” appears to be an example of how one can foreclose the possibility of religious experience by refusing it pre-emptively. Accepting the authority of critical biblical scholarship and academic theology (among other modern intellectual pursuits) may guarantee that the authoritative call of God will never be heard, rendering genuine religious experience impossible.
Dreher nods:
How can you hear the voice of the authentic prophet if you have decided in advance that a prophet must fit certain narrow criteria to be listened to. Who wants to pay attention to a wild man of the desert who ears animal skins and eats locusts and honey? That rural carpenter of Nazareth claims to be the Messiah of Israel, but everybody knows when moshiach comes, he will be a warrior king, so pay that loon no mind. If you rule out ahead of time the possibility of theophany (God breaking into the natural world and showing Himself), you won’t see it when it happens. Linker says that we are responsible for our own disenchantment.
James K.A. Smith, author of a forthcoming book on the philosopher Charles Taylor, the figure whose work spurred much of this debate, tries to clarify the terms involved:
I think this conversation has over-identified “the secular” with the phenomenon of “disenchantment”—the sense that we live in a world unhooked from transcendence, devoid of the divine, no longer enchanted by spirits or the Spirit. If a “secular” age is a disenchanted age, then it raises the sorts of questions Linker and Sessions are asking: Can one still experience enchantment in a secular age? Indeed, if disenchantment is just synonymous with modernity, then it would seem like religious belief is precluded: To live in a secular age is a matter of growing up and refusing to believe in sprites and fairies and gods and God. Get over it. Wake up and smell the disenchantment. …
But that notion of “secularization” is precisely what Taylor is calling into question. So it’s odd to see people railing against Taylor as if his account of disenchantment rules out religious experience. Taylor has his own account of disenchantment, but disenchantment is not what he sees as the kernel of secularization. Instead, for Taylor, ours is a “secular” age because it is an age in which all of our beliefs are contestable. It is a shift, not in what we can believe (or “experience”), but in what is believable. Ours is a “secular” age, not because we’re all doomed to inhabit the world as disenchanted, but because even those who experience it as enchanted have to realize that not everyone does. Taylor never suggests that belief, conversion, and religious experience are impossible in a secular age. Instead he emphasizes that they are “fragilized”—undertaken and experienced with a sense that our neighbors don’t share our convictions.
Face Of The Day
After finding out that a friend had been sentenced to 36 years in prison, Trent Bell began to photograph inmates at Maine State Prison:
The project was to capture and print large, almost life-sized photographs of inmates from within Maine State Prison, have them write a letter to their younger selves and superimpose those handwritten letters as vignettes around the inmate. The idea behind it being to display these images in a gallery for public viewing, in hopes that it brought a much more human element to individuals we often look at only as convicts living in a cell.
Leon Watson quotes from some of the letters:
[One inmate], named Peter, starts off his letter saying: ‘It’s great to be able to talk to you, I’m 55 years old, and living in prison for the last six years. Let me tell ya kid, it’s no way to live.’
Jack told himself: ‘Much more will be expected of you from these so-called friends. However impressing them won’t be worth it because in the end it’s you sitting in a cold cell.’
In another heart-wrenching letter, a prisoner, who did not leave his name, said: ‘I want to reach out to you and hopefully help save you from becoming me.’ On a similar note, Wes said: ‘Dear Wes, I’m reaching out to you today and I pray that the words of my heart are encouraging enough to keep you from making bad choices that could change your life forever.’
More about Bell’s work here, here, and here.
(Photo by Trent Bell)
Religion With No Guarantees
In an interview, the philosopher John Caputo draws on the work of Jacques Derrida to explain what it means to approach religion through “deconstruction” – a way of thinking that “involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy,” including the distinctions between atheists, agnostics, and believers:
Maybe [the suggestion that God’s promises might not be reliable] disturbs what “most people” think religion is — assuming they are thinking about it — but maybe a lot of these people wake up in the middle of the night feeling the same disturbance, disturbed by a more religionless religion going on in the religion meant to give them comfort. Even for people who are content with the contents of the traditions they inherit, deconstruction is a life-giving force, forcing them to reinvent what has been inherited and to give it a future. But religion for Derrida is not a way to link up with saving supernatural powers; it is a mode of being-in-the-world, of being faithful to the promise of the world.
The comparison with Augustine is telling. Unlike Augustine, he does not think a thing has to last forever to be worthy of our unconditional love. Still, he says he has been asking himself all his life Augustine’s question, “What do I love when I love my God?” But where Augustine thinks that there is a supernaturally revealed answer to this question, Derrida does not. He describes himself as a man of prayer, but where Augustine thinks he knows to whom he is praying, Derrida does not. When I asked him this question once he responded, “If I knew that, I would know everything” — he would be omniscient, God!
This not-knowing does not defeat his religion or his prayer. It is constitutive of them, constituting a faith that cannot be kept safe from doubt, a hope that cannot be kept safe from despair. We live in the distance between these pairs.
For more, check out Caputo’s book on the matter, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion.
A Poem For Sunday
From “Trying to Leave Saint Paul” by Jim Moore:
Little streets of Saint Paul
that lead nowhere. One of them
ends where quiet drunks sit
in the old September grass
on top of a hill.
Street cars used to run here,
through a tunnel cut into the hill.
The sun rides so low
in the cloud-filled western sky,
it makes the empty bottles glow.
(From Invisible Strings © 2011 by Jim Moore. Used by kind permission of Graywolf Press. Photo of the St. Paul skyline by Flickr user Jeremiah)
Quote For The Day
“[I]t is not only the power and deathlessness of God that is made visible, manifest, three-dimensionsal, if you like, in Jesus’ going to his death. For us death is also inseparable from the reality of shame, powerlessness, pain, failure and loss. Jesus didn’t go only to occupy a space of death in some abstract, hygienic sense. He went to occupy the space of being the sort of human who is thrown out in order that others can survive. In other words, he went to death as a victim, the sort of person whom others gang up against. And the reason that this is important is that it catches us at our worst, as it were. The space of the victim is the kind of place none of us at all ever wants to occupy, and if we find ourselves occupying it, it is kicking and screaming. More to the point, we spend a great deal of time pointing fingers and making sure that other people get to occupy that space, not us.
Now by Jesus going into, and occupying that space, deliberately, without any attraction to it, he is not only proving that we needn’t be afraid of death, but also we needn’t be afraid of shame, disgrace, or of the fact that we have treated others to shame and disgrace. It is as if he were saying, ‘Yes, you did this to me, as you do it to each other, and here I am undergoing this, occupying the space of it happening, but I’m doing so without being embittered or resentful. In fact, I was keen to occupy this space so as to try to get across to you that I am not only utterly alive, but that I am utterly loving. There is nothing you can do, no amount of evil that you can do to each other, that will be able to stop my loving you, nothing you can do to separate yourselves from me. The moment you perceive me, just here, on the cross, occupying this space for you and detoxifying it, the moment you perceive that, then you know that I am determined to show you that I love you, and am in your midst as your forgiving victim. This is how I prove my love to you: by taking you at your very lowest and worst point and saying ‘Yes you do this to me, but I’m not concerned about that, let’s see whether we can’t learn a new way of being together,’” – James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice.
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