Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 39

Survival Of The Kindest?

A superb video explores the evolutionary origins of kindness and sympathy:

Convincing Creationists Of Climate Change, Ctd

In an interview with Guernica, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and Evangelical, discusses why attempts to reconcile faith and science can’t always take the long view:

Here’s the thing: if you can frame climate change as an alternate religion, or as one more of those issues where the pointy-headed liberal atheist scientists are trying to discredit the Bible, then you’ve already got a ton of people on your side who are concerned about heresy, other religions, or teaching evolution in schools. Some people—very well-meaning people in the [scientific] community whom I genuinely respect—have said to me, “Well, let’s just focus on getting people on board with the science. We have to reach out to churches and schools and help people understand science, and we have to build rapport between scientists and people of faith. Then once we get that understanding and rapport built, then everyone will be on board with climate change.”

I’m involved in some of these efforts myself, and I believe they are important. But I’ll tell you, we don’t have a hundred years to fix climate change. We don’t have a hundred years to wait until we’ve built all these bridges and rapport and scientific understanding and so on and so forth. We have to fix climate change with the people we have right now, and to a large extent with the perspectives we have right now as well.

She adds:

My faith is an enormous motivator for me to engage … because climate change is not just an issue that affects the entire planet, it is one that disproportionately affects those who do not have the resources to cope with this change—those whom we are explicitly told as Christians to care for. We are called to help, to make people healthy, to love. When I look around, the biggest way in which we are failing to care for those in need is through ignoring climate change and acting like it doesn’t exist. As a Christian, I believe that is something the church needs to know.

On a related note, William Saletan profiles Jeff Hardin, chairman of the University of Wisconsin’s zoology department and an Evangelical who claims that “God authored the emergence of life and humankind but that evolution explains how this process unfolded.” When he tries to convince his co-religionists to be less skeptical of science, one thing he emphasizes is humility:

“Truth and absolute certitude are not the same,” says Hardin. The proper Christian attitude is that truth resides in Jesus. The believer’s job is to follow Jesus, not to assume that the believer knows the route. Hardin cites the Apostle Paul’s counsel that God “works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” One way God works in people is through science. They learn that their initial conclusions from scripture—computing the age of humanity, for example, from the number of generations recounted since Adam—are clumsy and naive. To allow God to work in them, Christians must remain, in Hardin’s words, “epistemically open.”

Christians who believe that the world was created in six days, or that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, think they’re reading the Bible literally. But in reality, they’re projecting modern notions of time and narration onto their ancestors. Hardin shares their aspiration to be faithful to the Bible, but he argues that to achieve this, one must approach the text the way one approaches science: with empirical rigor. Scripture is a real thing. It was written and preached for a lay audience in a historical context. Those people weren’t scientists or journalists. So it makes no sense to treat the text as a tight chronology, nailing down timelines or the process of speciation. Instead, evolutionary creationists advocate what Hardin calls “literary-cultural analysis”—asking, in layman’s terms, what each passage was meant to convey to an ancient Hebrew.

Previous Dish on climate change and faith here.

Woven Wonders

In a review of the Met’s exhibition Grand Design, Anthony Grafton extols the virtues of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, the tapesty artist whom “everyone who was anyone in the sixteenth-century art world liked.” He particularly praises Coecke’s depictions of the Apostle Paul:

When Coecke depicted the martyrdom of Saint Paul, he made the setting modern—starting with the castle that bulks large in the background. The artist wanted above all to show the violence that confronted the first Christians and the combination of sorrow, fear, and understanding with which they met. To achieve such effects, he subjected his work to endless revision. For The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, we have both his petit [patron, a small pattern] and his grand patron [the image, or cartoon, that tapestry weavers followed]. Comparing them, we see that his great fluency and facility were accompanied by an equally distinctive and powerful drive for revision and improvement. A young, innocent-looking Roman soldier appears in the sketch, pulling a woman by the wrist. In the cartoon he has turned into an older, battered man who has experienced and inflicted much—and he keeps that character in the final tapestry.

Grafton continues:

Coecke was an artisan—a painter without, so far as we know, an extensive formal education. He collaborated, as artisans did, and played second chair when a monarch placed someone else in the first. And he had what Albrecht Dürer thought the artist’s and artisan’s principal gift, the docta manus (learned hand), with its tacit skills at which words could only hint. But he also looked and read as widely as any scholar. Coecke wrote a neat, scholar-like cursive hand. He read Latin more accurately than the otherwise exemplary authors of the exhibition catalog, who make a hash out of too many of his brief, clear Latin captions, and other languages as well. In fact, he produced his own partial translations of the ancient architectural work of Vitruvius and the modern one of Serlio. … Men like Coecke contained multitudes—Italian as well as northern ones—and it will take an equally capacious mind to do them justice.

The exhibition is open through January 11th.

(Image: The Martrydom of Paul by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, circa 1535, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Way Time Heals

Hilary Mantel revisits C.S. Lewis’s classic meditation on the death of his wife, A Grief Observed, noticing the way it refuses to elide the complexities of loss:

Mechanical efficacy is attributed to the passage of time, but those in mourning know how time doubles and deceives. And though, in Britain, self-restraint is said to have vanished with Princess Diana, sometimes it seems the world still expects the bereaved person to “move on” briskly, and meanwhile behave in a way that does not embarrass the rest of us. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of her husband’s death, she writes of our dread of self-pity: Lewis too experienced this. We would rather be harsh to ourselves, harsher than a stranger would be, than be accused of “wallowing”, of “dwelling on it”.

But where else can the bereft person dwell, except in his grief? He is like a vagrant, carrying with him the package of tribulation that is all he owns. As Lewis says, “So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.” It is hard to spot signs of recovery, hard to evaluate them. Lewis asks: “Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?” The first acute agony cannot last, but the sufferer dreads what will replace it. For Lewis, a lightening of the heart produces, paradoxically, a more vivid impression of his dead wife than he could conjure when he was in a pit of despair. Recovery can seem like a betrayal. Passionately, you desire a way back to the lost object, but the only possible road, the road to life, leads away.

A Short Film For Saturday

Bernardo Britto’s film Yearbook imagines the end of the world:

As is usually best when depicting world-shattering events, Britto’s film is insular, the script a narrated monologue (by Britto himself) detailing a single character’s evolving process of cataloguing the history of humanity. It’s a remarkable premise, and Britto thoughtfully explores it within the film’s short 5 minute runtime. The real twist? When the hard drive runs out of space. …

Britto’s dry delivery of the narration, and the character’s placid demeanor combine to undersell the strong emotional effect of the film however. When dealing with such a weighty topic there isn’t a need to cue the violins, the thoughtful carrying out of inquiry will arrive at a pretty devastating place. When our lonely cataloguer reaches his epiphany, we recognize where he’s ended up. We feel for him, we feel for ourselves, we feel for everyone we’ve ever loved.

In an interview back in August, Britto spoke about what inspired the work:

The film poses the question, what if you were tasked with condensing the whole of human history into a single hard drive. What inspired this idea?

The idea came from the obvious realization that everything will be forgotten eventually. And, with that in the front of my mind, it became really hard for me to create something new. The only thing that made sense was for me to make a movie about that feeling and confront it head on. I think the hard drive thing specifically was something left over in brain from the bit in Keanu Reeve’s really great documentary Side By Side where they talk about film preservation. I pretty much just ripped off Keanu for that one.

As part of the narrative concept, you were forced to select your own take on the most important people in history. How did you decide who would be spoken about and who would actively be written off?

It’s actually not my own take; I tried to make it so it was the character’s own take. So it’s very male-centric and also from a pretty American point of view. Initially there were a few more film people and Walt Disney and stuff and I had to sort of step back and think, “Who would this guy think is important?” So the only black people he writes about are the two most obvious Civil Rights leaders. And the only women are Jane Fonda–whom he seems to remember more forBarbarella than for her political activism–and Joan of Arc and Marie Curie–but only because of how they died. And then I snuck a few people in that I just personally think are interesting historical figures like Eugene Debs, Ninoy Aquino, and Tiradentes.

Sexting Just Got Easier

Flirtmoji is a new “visual language designed to empower people of all sexualities to communicate their desires, concerns, and of course, flirtations”:

The often NSFW icons include anatomically accurate genitalia, whips, chains, fuzzy handcuffs, and even some sexually-suggestive fruit. There are also special, specific collections like BDSMS, Snow Bunny (holiday appropriate), and Safe Sext.

Katy McCarthy, one of the creators of Flirtmoji, discussed the project in an interview in November:

Some of these, like the vulva in particular, are really detailed and surprisingly anatomically correct. Did you have to think about ways to also make them sexy?

Well that’s the meat of the project. That’s where some of the most heated debate came out. To pass our test, the drawings have to be sex-positive. Anyone has to be able to look at them and not feel offended. There’s definitely a ton that didn’t make the cut.

But some people will probably find these offensive anyway.

Well sex-positive and offensive… there’s definitely a judgment call on that. There are people who will be very deeply offended — people who are offended by certain sexualities — but we’re not worried about those people. I mean, get your shit together. People are having sex, and it looks like this. And yes, part of being inclusive is that it’s all sexy. Even if it’s not my thing, necessarily, I wanted the Flirtmoji to be sexy because it’s someone else’s thing and it’s sexy to them.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

In April. 1985, what was eventually to become a hugely popular anthology, Lifelines: Letters from Famous People About Their Favourite Poem, was launched at Wesley College in Dublin as the first in a series of stapled pamphlets to raise funds “in aid of the Developing World.” Together those pamphlets comprised the first of three popular anthologies, each introduced by a famous Irish poet. For Christmas, a friend gave me the omnibus volume put together in 2006, a selection made from those heralded books.

In his introduction to the first, Seamus Heaney wrote, “This anthology was a magnificent idea from the start… a book in which poems re-enter the world refreshed rather than jaded by their long confinement inside people’s heads, a book that is surprisingly various and compulsively readable.”

The actress Judi Dench chose Edward Thomas’s poem “Adlestrop,” writing, “I love it because of its essential Englishness and because it reminds me of the time of steam trains and that special hiss that announced their arrivals and departures.”

“Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas (1878-1917):

Yes, I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

(Photo of Edward Thomas in 1905, via Wikimedia Commons)

The View From Your Window

Leucadia, California, 5.15 pm

Talking Dirty

Jonathon Green, who has compiled 1,750 slang terms for sex, ponders how the tally got so high:

[W]hen a piece of slang escapes into the wider world, it leaves a gap that must be filled. So while the slang of the 16th century has mainly vanished, its descendants march on. We lose wap and get bumbaste, lose that and get trounce, lose that and get strum. And on it goes, until we have 1,750 terms for sex.

You might expect this lineage to die off. In an era of surveillance and social media, of confessionalism and dwindling taboos, why bother generating secret new words for old preoccupations? And yet take a look at the latest batch of slang I’ve compiled. Multicultural London English, as academics call it, blends elements of American rap, British grime music, Jamaican patois, and London Cockney. A vocabulary that cuts across class and color to an unprecedented extent, it’s definitely new. Or is it? Some examples: gash (women), shotting(drug-dealing), wonga (money), merk (murder), lash (intercourse). Here we go again.

Mental Health Break

Dancing with light: