Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 390

Out Of The Shadow Of Darwin

The above short film offers a charming animated account of the life of Alfred Russell Wallace, the under-credited scientist who developed a theory of evolution through natural selection independently of Darwin:

 ‘The Animated Life of A.R. Wallace’ tells his story with stunning use of paper art and puppetry. The combination of the compelling story, vivid colors and the crafting techniques make this film a standout. You will be delighted with the immaculate attention to detail (tiny paper tables with tiny letters, paintings on the wall, the type of wall paper), a clear and confident narration by Dr. George Beccaloni of the Natural History Museum of London, and a great story that deserves to be told.

Traffic Analysis

The travel writer Colin Thubron elaborates on his claim that “[t]he choice to travel on foot is a transforming one”:

Many people have remarked on the curious relationship between walking and thinking. The rhythm of the body seems to free the mind, just as the rhythm of a mother’s walk (it is imagined) puts at rest her babe-in-arms. Solvitur ambulando, declared the ancients: “it is solved by walking”. Wordsworth wrote many of his poems on the move, as did John Clare. Nietzsche claimed to have made all his philosophical discoveries while walking, and Kierkegaard wrote that “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.”

Emma Duncan, however, prefers to travel by bike, calling cycling “a great equaliser”:

Other types of traveller can, if they spend enough, set themselves apart from their fellows. Train-lovers can take the Orient Express; drivers splash out on slick sports cars; a private jet allows air travellers to avoid the hell of the airport terminal. But cyclists are all on a level; all have to meet each other’s eyes. Even the priciest bike cannot make cycling glamorous. However much a cyclist spends, he will still look faintly ridiculous—crouched over the handlebars, pedalling furiously, weaving round obstacles, determined to get somewhere, rather as man travels through life.

(Photo by Flickr user KJGarbutt)

Looking Back At A Self-Help Legacy

Ann Friedman reviews Stephen Watts’s Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America, which investigates the man who gave us How to Win Friends and Influence People, the perennial bestseller first published in 1936. Carnegie’s main strategy for getting ahead? He argued that once you realized “people are mainly self-interested … by playing to those interests with unwavering enthusiasm, success [is] a given”:

Instead of judging people for what they want, Carnegie suggested, we should try to understand their cravings and cater to them. This line of thought, perhaps, explains such modern capitalist horrors as the Doritos Locos Tacos at Taco Bell—but it was clearly in harmony with the emergence of a mass consumer economy. In the early twentieth century, “a new ethos emerged that was preoccupied with personality development, personal happiness, interpersonal relations, and self-fulfillment,” Watts writes, describing it as “a form of individualism less concerned with religious salvation or overt economic profit than with emotional well-being.” Whereas Carnegie’s bootstrappy, individualist sensibility could be seen as libertarian, he was in fact decidedly apolitical—almost in the manner of a “Hey, I’m just doing me” Silicon Valley bro who can’t see the larger implications of his worldview.

Reviewing Watts’s book in November, Maureen Corrigan elaborated on the cultural shifts Carnegie’s work heralded:

Carnegie’s emphasis on projecting a sunny personality was part of a larger shift away from a Victorian concern with character and self-denial to a modern fascination with advertising, consumerism and self-promotion. Carnegie’s teaching promised to pay off in self-fulfillment and fat wallets. … Watts shows how particularly attuned Carnegie was to the psychological needs of Americans beaten down by the Great Depression, who needed to hear that positive thinking would garner positive results. It’s easy, of course, for we contemporary readers to dismiss Carnegie’s teaching as mere boosterism and Babbittry, but his self-help legacy has endured well beyond his own death in 1955, and flourishes in our own age.

The Economist released a new video interview with Watts here.

A Poem For Sunday

“Solitude” by Alexander Pope (1688-1744):

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air

In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire;

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcern’dly find

Hours, days, and years, slide soft away

In health of body, peace of mind,

Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease

Together mixt, sweet recreation,

And innocence, which most does please

With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

Thus unlamented let me die;

Steal from the world, and not a stone

Tell where I lie.

(Michael Dahl’s portrait of Pope, 1727, via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s A Jerk?

Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, offers a “semi-technical definition”:

[S]omeone who fails to appropriately respect the individual perspectives of the people around him, treating them as tools or objects to be manipulated, or idiots to be dealt with, rather than as moral and epistemic peers with a variety of potentially valuable perspectives.

Perhaps the jerk’s greatest moral failing? A lack of mercy:

Mercy is, I think, near the heart of practical, lived morality. Virtually everything everyone does falls short of perfection. Her turn of phrase is less than perfect, she arrives a bit late, her clothes are tacky, her gesture irritable, her choice somewhat selfish, her coffee less than frugal, her melody trite — one can create quite a list! Practical mercy involves letting these quibbles pass forgiven or even better entirely unnoticed, even if a complaint, were it made, would be just. The jerk appreciates neither the other’s difficulties in attaining all the perfections he himself (imagines he) has nor the possibility that some portion of what he regards as flawed is in fact blameless. Hard moralizing principle comes naturally to the jerk, while it is alien to the jerk’s opposite, the sweetheart. The jerk will sometimes give mercy, but if he does, he does so unequally — the flaws and foibles that are forgiven are exactly the ones the jerk recognizes in himself or has other special reasons to be willing to forgive.

Bigotry In Britain

Dan Shewan finds the 2006 film This Is England, which depicts young skinheads in the early ’80s, an especially resonant portrayal of racism in his home country:

The bleak, fractured Britain depicted in Shane Meadows’ 2006 film This Is England is not unlike the one in which I grew up. We moved around a lot when I was young, but eventually settled in a depressing coastal town not entirely dissimilar to the one in which Shaun, the movie’s protagonist, lives. Meadows’ semi-autobiographical film reveals to us a glimpse of a Britain divided by racism — a nation where intolerance masquerades as pride, and one in which young minds are molded by fear. Growing up in a working class town, racial slurs such as “Paki” and “wog” were inextricably interwoven into the vernacular of the public schoolyards in which I played. Some children used them cruelly. Others simply didn’t know any better.

Although racism in Britain can be traced back to the slave trade, the legacy of hatred portrayed in This Is England is enduring.

A recent survey by market research firm OnePoll revealed that one in three Britons admitted to making racist remarks on a regular basis, or engaging in conversations that could be considered racist. More than one in ten people confessed to having been called a racist by someone close to them. Lastly, around forty percent of Britons polled had prefaced a comment with the classic refrain of “I’m not racist, but…” at some point or another. Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that many of the two thousand adults surveyed by OnePoll claimed their feelings of racial prejudice had been passed down to them by older members of their family. In terms of demographics, individuals over the age of fifty-five were found to be the least racially tolerant, but young people aged between eighteen and twenty-four were close behind.

There’s a huge amount of tolerance in Britain, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for an absence of intolerance. And in this, as in many other things, London is not the same as England. Still, I’m shocked by the data on the youngest generation. It suggests a deep lack of real integration beyond the prosperous metropolis.

What If Christians “Won” The Culture War?

James Chastek, a Catholic writer, fears what it might look like:

Christians occasionally daydream about winning the culture over for Christ. But this would mean that belief in Christ would be policed and encouraged in the same way that our current cultural beliefs are: by manipulation of the levers of power to control spoils, intimidate dissent, and coin new taboo words and thoughtcrimes that can immediately condemn without argument and persuade without reason. Any teacher is impressed by the degree to which cultural doctrines are thoroughly and universally believed and flawlessly applied in all particular situations; and they are not merely mouthed by children who, though really skeptical of what they are saying, mouth the words anyway. They really believe all that stuff – they even see it as self-evident.  Is that how I want someone to believe in Christ? Would I feel better if I could just silence dissent with a taboo word or the confidence that the thoughtcriminal would lose his job?

Dreher extends the thought experiment to more than just Christians, adding that “you don’t have to be any sort of religious believer to be a self-righteous prick”:

A useful thing for all of us to think about, no matter where we are in the culture war: What would victory look like? How would we treat the defeated? Would we impose a Versailles-style peace, thus setting the stage for a terrible backlash and resumption of the war? And, what would victory — the achievement of cultural hegemony and commanding power over the defeated — do to us? Would we become that which we hate?

As I write this, I’m thinking about a secular liberal I used to know. We weren’t friends, but we moved in the same circles. He was a smart guy and a paragon of crusading righteousness. You couldn’t joke with him about anything; he was always looking for signs of deviation. He was the sort of person who, if ever he gained power, would be ruthless with his enemies. This sort of person recurs through history, in all guises…

[H]e really was, and is, someone to be feared. People like that always are. They tend to be effective culture warriors, because they are tireless and uncompromising. Their moral ardor is not compromised by a sense of tragedy, of their own fallibility, of basic humanity, or even something as trivial as a sense of humor. I’ve been around people on the conservative side of the culture war who are like that; in those instances, I would rather be having a drink at a gay bar. I’m serious about that.

Mental Health Break

Flamingoes with extra flair:

A Life Lived Via Laptop

Joe Berkowitz introduces the short film seen above, Noah, which premiered this week at the Toronto Film Festival:

The 17-minute, mildly NSFW Noah is unlike anything you’ve seen before in a movie–only because it is exactly like what many of us see on our computers all the time. Created by Canadian film students Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg, the film begins when our high school senior protagonist types in the password that opens up his laptop, and the narrative takes place entirely on his computer screen.

From the desktop photo of a young couple posing for the camera, we learn that Noah has a girlfriend. Their relationship serves as the centerpiece of this cautionary tale about digital culture. Through Noah’s perspective, we see the way the couple communicates, either in Facebook chat or Skype, with him flitting through any number of other online activities at the same time, while approximating being present for their conversation. Things really get interesting, however, when our protagonist hacks into his girlfriend’s Facebook account. The rest of the film deals with the fallout from this act.

Johnson And Johnson

A man with two penises has uploaded some NSFW pictures on Reddit, where he also answered reader questions. Despite doubts, it appears to be real:

Diphallia, also known as penile duplication, may seem like it belongs in a science fiction novel, but health care professionals are well aware of this condition. Affecting one out of every five and a half million boys in the United States, diphallia is a rare medical condition with around 100 confirmed reports since Johannes Jacob Wecker discovered it back in 1609.

Experts are unsure of what causes diphallia, but speculate it occurs after the 23rd day of gestation following an injury, chemical stress, or a gene malfunction. Unfortunately, men born with this condition tend to die at an earlier age due to infections and renal failure. Although both penises are able to function on their own, men with diphallia are usually sterile due to congenital defects. These men are also at a higher risk of developing spina bifida, a condition that results in malformation of the vertebrae designed to protect the spinal cord.

Caroline Bankoff rounds up “universal lessons” from the anonymous poster’s Ask Me Anything thread:

People are slightly more accepting of differences than you’d expect: In response to a question about how women react to seeing two penises on one guy, DoubleDickDude wrote, “It varies from girl to girl. Some have been like WOW. some have been like THATS FAKE! some have freaked out like, called me names. Most are pretty curious, but i dont have casual sex anymore, i stopped a few years back. Didnt like the empty feeling inside after a 1 night stand. did a lot of those in my late teens. A LOT of them. but for the most part, girls were nervous and some changed their mind at the last minute. dudes NEVER change their mind, they always want it even if they’re freaked out a little. lol”