I found this a thought-provoking lecture series ranging from nuance and details to big picture concepts. Once a Benedictine Monk, lecturer Johnson wasI found this a thought-provoking lecture series ranging from nuance and details to big picture concepts. Once a Benedictine Monk, lecturer Johnson was also a professor at Yale Divinity School, Indiana U, and Emory. He addresses a long list of modern controversies about Paul’s writings, placing them in the context of Paul’s time and place. As an agnostic, I found his treatment fair and reasoned. While I still wonder just how radical Paul was—and who walks thousands of miles to spread a message if not more than a little passionate—for me, Johnson’s treatment disarmed some of the political correctness that so often opposes Paul. Like, he was patriarchal. No… Really? A 50 A.D. Jewish man?
The recent discovery of “ancient rhetorical writing,” which Paul seems to have employed, was an intriguing twist. Such writing assumes a character, almost like modern-day acting, and writes from that character’s perspective, language usage, etc. This makes any determination of what kind of man Paul was a little dicey, but, if true, also clarifies some of what Paul said and how he said it. Given Paul dominates 14 of 27 New Testament books, he’s a perspective to reckon with in that arena.
With my interest in individualism vs. communitarianism, I found Paul’s emphasis on and mediation of those true communities of ancient times to be fascinating. Paul, says Johnson, was no theologian, but a moral teacher. He’s much more interested in community survival and cohesion than philosophical purity. He also had to deal with real-world consequences of an explicitly pluralistic faith and all the conflicting opinions that come out of such a thing. The egalitarian beliefs vs. social realities of free/slave, man/woman, Jew/gentile during an era when Hellenism and Judaism had crashed head-on with parts and people laying all over the place was quite the juggling act for Paul. How can half the people schooled in rational thought be expected to follow someone who adheres to supernatural faith all the way to his execution, and how can the other half who expects a Moses-like war general as messiah be expected to embrace a man convicted and crucified? Paul offers a Lao Tsu-like paradox (“If you want to be full, let yourself be empty. If you want to have everything , give everything up”), when Paul responds with the acquisition of spiritual power gained through a kind of human weakness that Jesus displayed, and a kind of faith that offers wisdom of another sort.
While Johnson argues Paul did not invent Christianity, as often asserted, Paul certainly expanded and elaborated it with new ideas. Would it have gained the following it did without him? Who can say? Very informative series....more
Epicurus (341 B.C. – 271 B.C.) was the founder of Epicureanism, commonly taken as hedonism by, among others, Bishop John of Salisbury (1115-1180). ThiEpicurus (341 B.C. – 271 B.C.) was the founder of Epicureanism, commonly taken as hedonism by, among others, Bishop John of Salisbury (1115-1180). This compilation of what’s left of Epicurus shows this conclusion could not be further from the truth. After a fine but far too short introduction, we find Epicurus sounding more like a Buddhist in his temperance toward earthly pleasures and desire, especially materialism and effete wealth, which was already a malady by the time of ancient Greece. “I have anticipated you, Fortune,” writes Epicurus, “and have barred your means of entry. Neither to you nor to any other circumstance shall we hand ourselves over as captives.”
While Epicurus wrote 300 books, none exist. Only a few letters, fragments, and what others said about him. As one of the great schools in Athens, Epicurus sought freedom from worry, fear, and angst through the pursuit of natural philosophy (eventually this became science) to dispel religious superstitions, while the opposite approach to enhance fear of Yahweh was taking place next door in Israel. And yet, like Israel, Epicurus wanted people to understand their mortal place in life. A life of quiet simplicity and self-sufficiency, Epicurus believed, allowed for a proper focus on worthy priorities. Very much Richard Gregg (1885–1974) and his Value of Voluntary Simiplicity.
A substantial portion of this book is made up of letters to students regarding the possible cause of things: wind, earthquakes, cyclones, rainbows, comets, the Moon’s halo. It might be this or that, or maybe… yet again, it might be XYZ. This can go on and on. For moderns, especially those in the sciences, this can try one’s patience. But what is notable, not once is the cause supernatural—echoes of Thales’ rudiment of science. With no concept of experimentation for another 1900 years, it’s all speculation rooted in imagination, sometimes wild.
In the Letter to Menoeceus, Principle Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings (ancient Greek writings discovered in the Vatican in 1888), the text ascends with the core Epicurean philosophy. Questions of death, morality, prudence, and—sounding like David Hume 2000 years later (or modern American politics)—the “rabble,” unable to comprehend, or entirely unconcerned with philosophy or truth. In these sections, many of Epicurus’ conclusions will ring true today. Too bad so much was lost, and for what’s there, there’s no index. ...more
I was required to read this book before adopting a Greyhound. Having had dogs and cats all my life, I was a tiny bit annoyed by the obligation. And, oI was required to read this book before adopting a Greyhound. Having had dogs and cats all my life, I was a tiny bit annoyed by the obligation. And, once again, was reminded of how much I don’t know. Despite the calm and affectionate personalities these dogs are known for, there’s so much about them that differs from other dogs. Turns out, this book is required reading for potential adopters for good reason. From matters of curious interest—who knew Egypt worshiped them with statues we can pet today? (risking Louvre security), to critical drug sensitivities not shared by other dogs. I was frequently astonished, and saddened by how sometimes cruel the racing industry has been to these sweetest of companions. A quick, smooth read, with everything from Greyhound anatomy to a section for Vets on Grey-specific treatments, drugs, and doses. While not my cup of history / philosophy / science / religion / mythology tea, in the Grey-world, it’s a thorough treatment, and a valuable reference over the life of your pup. ...more
This book asks one of the most fascinating questions, “Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious?” Nobody knows. So, like answerThis book asks one of the most fascinating questions, “Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious?” Nobody knows. So, like answers to what is time, matter, or light, some of the answers are just as fun to ponder. Freaky realities are offered from neuroscience that put the source and operation of consciousness in question, but in many cases, only for those with injury, disease, or malfunction. Like a broken machine made to operate, of course, it acts odd. But central to the author’s message is that consciousness is a universal illusion. The author makes much use of things like “binding.” Light reflected off an object—like a tennis ball hitting a racket—and the sound from it hitting impinge on our senses at different times. Waiting for the last stimulus, our brain “binds” them together in time, providing the illusion of simultaneity.
But the speed of light is about 1-foot per nanosecond. Sound travels at about 1-foot per millisecond, while nerve signals run about three times slower than sound. That optic signal first to reach our eyes will reach our brains about two milliseconds before the sound hits our ears, which arrives at our brain about a millisecond after that—a three-millisecond separation. Does it matter? I’ve toiled with lasers that produce femtosecond pulses. To these circuits, 3-milliseconds feels like an eternity. One femtosecond is to a single second as 1-second is to 32 million years. But to the world humans live in, a few millisecond separation is the same as simultaneous. What illusion?
More doubt is cast on free will, “consciousness being the last to know.” We flinch at some startling noise before we recognize it. It’s asserted that “we” are our consciousness. That other thing, the subconscious or autopilot or whatever, is something not “me.” Says who?
The book ends courageously with ponderings of the hot-potato notion that consciousness (not self) may be a fundamental aspect of the universe like charge and matter, called panpsychism. Kooky as it sounds, the author does a reasonable job of considering it. Though the author’s a little miffed that physicists take seriously ten quantum dimensions, but not panpsychism. The reason being that quantum dimensions fall out of mathematical analysis, not mere speculation alone. Just because both are analogously whacky doesn’t mean both have equal validity.
While there are interesting morsels to ponder, and the author poo-poos complexity theory (which seems to be the most likely answer), for me, the book was more a pleasant muse than a revelation....more
This series hits Campbell’s big topics. The functions of myth; hunter myths vs. planter myths with their respective sacrifice and resurrection that goThis series hits Campbell’s big topics. The functions of myth; hunter myths vs. planter myths with their respective sacrifice and resurrection that got mixed with migrations; differences between East and West; the group and the individual; the West’s absorption of Levantine Near-East myths, and particularly the latter’s emphasis on literal/historical/separateness from the mystery that otherwise the East identifies each of us as being a part of. Campbell notes this view causes all sorts of problems we still battle today when myth in accord with “science” of its day gets frozen out of science in later eras. Hence, orbital mechanics denies the sun stood still for Joshua; biology denies Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale. According to Campbell, by the Levantine interpretation, myths get stuck in their time, losing touch with modern understandings or forcing moderns to double down on what looks to modernity like superstition. It’s the problem of today’s Creationists: unable to add new quotes to the fixed and inerrant word of God as some Far East traditions do; unable to reinterpret old stories in ways to accommodate modern science; Creationists must attempt to undermine proven science, cultivating enough doubt among the uninformed to maintain a flock of “saved” followers.
Campbell reveals this Levantine step-change in perspective does not emerge from the ancient Hebrews. They inherit it from the Sumerians long before and their god Enlil. Enlil is a god that supersedes the millennia’s long tradition of the goddess. Enlil usurps the laws of nature and makes his own. Enlil is no longer an agent of the cycles of existence but a god of free will to enact punishment on what he determines as guilty humans. An attitudinal change occurs from one of acceptance to obeisance. But the command to obey wears thin further west of the Levant in Europe where progressing individualism emphasizes virtue and honor, scorning obedience.
The West is a mishmash of these views, which Campbell represents by the Biblical Job at one end and Greek Prometheus at the other. Job, so devout, asks God how God can be so cruel. God’s answer, in short: Because I am great. When Prometheus is urged to “Tell Zeus you’re sorry for helping to civilize man.” Prometheus—staked to a stone where each morning an eagle eats his nightly-restored liver—says, “I care less for Zeus than nothing. I stand by my choice and the values it represents. Let Zeus do as he wishes.” Is the Western ideal the devout servant of God, or the heroic individual who brings bounty to his race? And once again, we find a merging, this time in Jesus.
A terrific series. A kind of Grand Central Station from which tracks of further study get started. ...more
Though occasionally tedious, what I found most striking about Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel is how its lines seem taken from today’s news. Authoritarian Though occasionally tedious, what I found most striking about Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel is how its lines seem taken from today’s news. Authoritarian despotism, it turns out, is a simple recipe. A recipe easily cooked up for repetitive servings to remarkably gullible people, of which, apparently, no era has a shortage. It’s also the same cast of leading characters: the Weak Man impersonating a Strong Man, corrupt enablers, and impersonators of piety.
The Trump imitator 85-years before Trump is Buzz Windrip. Windrip seeks the Oval Office with the same bombast, bluster, and thin-skinned 5-year old bullying to cover for his inferiorities and financial scams. Others “could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences,” writes Sinclair. “[Windrip] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of the traveling salesman for church furniture...”
Our want-to-play-army adolescents also get coverage, complete with a parallel to Justice/FBI investigations. “The militiamen considered him their general and their god, and when the state attorney general [indicted Windrip] for having grafted tax money, the militia rose to Senator Buzz Windrip’s orders as though they were his private army, occupying the legislative chambers and all the state offices…with machine guns.” Remember Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio, 2020?
Delightfully, authoritarians from the 1930s are disparaged. “Huey Long and Father Coughlin [Rush Limbaugh] seemed to speak more directly… to the poor, the dispossessed, the frustrated, the angry. Neither the Louisiana Kingfish nor the populist radio priest freighted their remedies for the country’s ills with feasible ideas or coherent programs. Solutions were too important to burden with details and troublesome facts.” Likewise, with “their deceptive use of the past to corrupt the present... [Where] college professors, newspapermen, and notorious authors are secretly promulgating seditious attacks.” A “fascistic regime of suppression, terror, and totalitarianism—all draped in red, white, and blue bunting.”
Interestingly, Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times but never received it. The first two were scotched by a board of overseers—the Columbia University trustees—who said his books failed to “present a wholesome atmosphere of American life.” The third prize Sinclair rejected because of actions taken on the first two. He did, however, win the Nobel for literature. Take that, trustees....more
This lecture series is a delightful roam through the multitude of attempts humans made at ordering themselves after the agricultural revolution producThis lecture series is a delightful roam through the multitude of attempts humans made at ordering themselves after the agricultural revolution produced far too many of us. Civilizations struggle to hold themselves together as they hurl themselves apart. And boy, do they. As Professor Dise tells the story with his excellent radio-voice, it all depended on what guy was in charge, how long he lived, and what guys ran the show next door. Institutions beyond paying tribute, slavery, and genocide seem rare. Ordering all those many humans was left mostly to chance, just as Alexander Hamilton suggested. But moral governance can be seen as a glimmer commencing with the first extant law codes of Sumerian king Ur-Nammu, ca. 2100 B.C., three centuries after the non-surviving Code of Urukagina (referenced by others) in Urukagina’s combat with corruption, and three centuries before Hammurabi’s code, parts of which find their way into the Ten Commandments.
One thing, in particular, stood out for me from this 2009 series. In referencing the Greek’s impression of the “good old days” when “men were men” and the heroes of Homer did their part to Make Greece Great Again, Dise hits upon something eternal. “It was the values of these warrior heroes that destabilized civilization. Heroic cultural values are characterized by immature and insecure masculinity. A masculinity that must always be proven and re-proven. A masculinity that is [thin-skinned] to insult and criticism, that’s easily affected and only with difficulty soothed. A masculinity whose emotions are poorly controlled, prone to fits of rage, characterized by an inability to see beyond one’s ego. An obsession with personal honor that produces a hypersensitivity to insults and results in frequent outbursts of violence. In other words, these are not values of the hero, but the values of a bar-brawling red neck. They glorify violence, hunting, fighting, and warfare, and they’re contemptuous of the ways of peace. Diplomacy and negotiation are disdained as effeminate; raiding is preferred to trading. Heroic values make good epic poetry, but they make bad government. A society that does not evolve beyond heroic values is a society that is doomed because they are the values that produce instability rather than stability that a healthy society requires… However flattered the values of heroic culture may be to the heroes themselves, they’re values that shatter the security of the world around them. Values that point toward doom unless they’re replaced with something more adult.”
Given America’s current state of self-inflicted upheaval and decline with the label of “strong man” applied to weak men, this sounds like some kind of universal law....more
This is an audio series taken from a more extensive video series for which there are transcripts in book form by the same name. Apparently, there was This is an audio series taken from a more extensive video series for which there are transcripts in book form by the same name. Apparently, there was no transfer from cassette to CD, though DVDs of the full video series is available in the name of Joseph Campbell: Mythos – The Complete Series, according to the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Finding this 5-tape boxed-set and an old SONY Walkman (remember those?) in an old pile of junk was like some kind of sign. And what a delight to hear Campbell’s voice again 33 years after we lost it.
Campbell sweeps through human origins, introductory psychology, and the ancient’s respect for life on earth as equivalent to our own rather than separate, with the mythological motifs that resulted. The step-change in human existence with agriculture and the rise of city-states, then empires bring with them a change in mythology to suit. Comparisons between Near East with the Far East and Native American myth couldn’t be more revealing. The Near East heritage of the Hebrew Old Testament emphasizes stern punishment, vengeful wrath, and human obedience. According to Campbell, Yahweh is “it,” the ultimate fact, thus to be worshipped. Whereas Fast Eastern myths point to something else, “transparent to transcendence,” he says. That is, of the mystery of being alive and having to die. The direction from Yahweh is one of purpose, to conquer the earth and subdue its animals. For the Native American’s this same world is one of meaning. A sense of belonging with all life is reflected by Chief Seattle’s 1855 speech, where “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle. Every sandy shore. Every meadow… Perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers.” Having lost that view to conquest, it’s no wonder we’ll need three planet earths by 2050....more
I heard this book was a great pick-me-up for Americans in times like ours when there’s not much to laugh about. Given it’s a British publication, I hoI heard this book was a great pick-me-up for Americans in times like ours when there’s not much to laugh about. Given it’s a British publication, I hoped to enjoy their classic wit and irony, but the author turns out to be American.
Occasionally it delivered. Usually, I found it accurate but not amusing. It begins with, “Americans are like children: noisy, curious, unable to keep a secret, not given to subtlety, and prone to misbehave. Once one accepts the American’s basically adolescent nature, the rest of their culture falls into place.” It seemed a valid baseline.
“Permanent commitments are what Americans fear the most. This is a nation whose most fundamental social relationship is the casual acquaintance,” writes the author. While I completely agree with this and feel some gratitude for the revelation, I can’t say I found it funny. More like something tragic but so pervasive it’s not recognized as idiosyncratic. Kudos to the author as such observations typically come from outsiders.
Published in 2000, this book was at times prescient. “Having God on your side in a fight is good. Having the United States is better. To an American, they’re the same thing. Once the battle is over and negotiations begin, however, Americans change from warriors to wimps. As humorist Will Rogers put it, ‘America never lost a war and never won a conference in our lives… we could single-handily lick any nation in the world. But we can’t confer with Costa Rica and come home with our shirt on.’” Written before 2003 Iraq.
“Being Number One is very important to Americans. It’s definitely not how you play the game that matters. It isn’t’ even really whether you win or lose. It’s whether you look like you win…” “The dark side of American cheerfulness is the undercurrent of insecurity and depression that drives much of the country’s commerce and nearly all of its psychiatry. Underneath their grins, Americans are deeply fearful, pessimistic and unhappy… American’s see conspiracy behind every event…” And this before Trump.
Accurate, but had I expected a sober assessment, I’d not have been disappointed. ...more
The late Georgetown and Oxford professor Daniel N. Robinson (1937-2018) gives us the gift of a story well told; enthusiastic, superbly informed, and aThe late Georgetown and Oxford professor Daniel N. Robinson (1937-2018) gives us the gift of a story well told; enthusiastic, superbly informed, and a talent for transporting the listener back to America’s Founding era. And it wasn’t always pretty, or brilliant, or sometimes even sensible for what he makes clear was a moment “graced by the most philosophically inclined generation in U.S. history.” With little formal schooling but from a highly self-schooled population, America’s Founders created the Declaration, Articles, and Constitution. Though Jefferson noted many of the ideas on offer since Aristotle, unique in the annals of political history was that never before had a government been brought into existence by a document providing rational arguments for its creation “for the reasoned judgment of the world.” It’s not hard to see parallels between mythological creation of the world from “the Word thy God” and creation of a new nation in the words of founding affirmations that seem almost mythical with hindsight. From a group of practical scholars, inventors, merchant patriots, and scientists (now vilified by half of America), these men created “arguably the most refined and effective political document contrived by human imagination,” says Robinson.
They were communitarians, not “rugged individualists”—a model that became America’s defining character on the frontier. Almost universally religious men, they read Scripture with the light of reason—only then considered authoritative. Never would they dream of literalism so popular today. Even Jefferson and Thomas Paine were informed by Christian perspectives of responsibility to other citizens.
But they and their times were far from idyllic, says Robinson. There were bitter battles over what George Mason called the “petty tyrants” of Southern slaveholders. James Madison blasted slavery in his 42nd Federalist, yet surrendered for Southern cooperation until 1808, which only accelerated the trade before its deadline. Paine labeled Southerners “desperate wretches” willing to “steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain… [as the] height of outrage against Humanity and Justice… practiced by pretended Christians.”
Nor was it a straight line. State constitutions served as trial grounds for the finale. The intermediate Articles allowed the Federal government to declare war but levy no taxes to pay for it. Congress depended on State donations that never came. Alexander Hamilton even wanted the executive branch to be a king with power so great he could not possibly want more. (Imagine Trump under that arrangement.)
Perhaps Robinson’s best lecture was his last concerning the Founding’s split personality: Burke and Paine. “Paine is your neighbor. Burke is your conscience,” says Robinson. Burke looks to history and tradition, Paine to immediate concerns and science. “If nature had wanted a monarchy,” said Paine, “why would we so often get an ass for a lion?” Burke’s ancient wisdom supporting people with invisible hands meets Paine with, “[Burke] pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird.” For me, Paine seemed to win the short race but loses the long haul as the defeat of tradition takes its toll. This is an exceptional series I’ll visit again. ...more
In Daniel Webster’s 1826 eulogy for John Adams, he declared the young American republic was distinguished by “an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry,In Daniel Webster’s 1826 eulogy for John Adams, he declared the young American republic was distinguished by “an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge…such has been before altogether unknown and unheard of.” By 2005, Bill Moyers noted, “One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal.” How, asks author Susan Jacoby, did America become possessed by anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and aggressive ignorance?
Her first cause: religious fundamentalism at odds with the nation’s heritage of Enlightenment reason as the “most enduring and powerful strand of American anti-intellectualism,” writes Jacoby. And part of the American experience since Puritans first disembarked from their Atlantic voyage, while another branch of Christianity balanced belief with higher learning. For fundamentalists, then as now, “the very irrationality of their faith was seen as proof of emotional and spiritual superiority.” To be clear, “Supernaturalist fundamentalism is by definition anti-rational because it cannot be challenged by any countervailing evidence in the natural world.” (For apolitical believers, perhaps “non-rational” would be more accurate than “anti-rational.”) Once checked by Enlightenment thinking, fundamentalism accelerated with the Second Great Awakening after the Revolution early in the 1800s as a response to Enlightenment restraint, “freethought,” and social change. “It is the greatest irony,” says Jacoby, “that the American experiment in complete religious liberty led large numbers of Americans to embrace anti-rational, anti-intellectual forms of faith. [While] in Europe prevailing unions between church and state made some form of rationalism… the most common response for those who lost faith in religion or government.” In America, a kind of “mindless religious tolerance” is misunderstood to mean respect not only for one’s personal beliefs but a respect for the beliefs themselves, placing “observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy…” Today, any belief, no matter how wild, is garnered “free choice.”
These intellectual fissures lay latent but then expanded in the first half of the 1800s, acquiring a new dimension in the latter half. The power of science produced a desire to meld a science-sounding cachet to emotionally satisfying dogmas. Social Darwinism was the first—the birth of pseudoscience, today called junk science, now appropriated by the Right-wing as a dismissive label for real science. Social Darwinism, which sounded like science, mixed with the very non-scientific social “sciences” to produce justification for mass inequality of the Gilded Age. (That social studies in the humanities are still called social “sciences” causes many to think they really are science.) This combination of scientific notions with social studies spun off eugenics, Nazism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, anti-vaxers, and QAnon, to name a very few among our now burgeoning conspiracy theory industry. When scrutinized by science, pseudoscience collapses. Ironically this leads Americans to dismiss real science because they can’t tell one from the other. As when “facilitated communication” with autistic children or “recovered memories” of sex abuse “victims” were found to be academic graft; when nutrition fads changed claims about vitamin C as a cure for cancer; or when demographers forewarned the end of the world in Paul Ehrlich’s 1971 The Population Bomb. None of these are physical sciences like the physics, chemistry, and biology comprising climate science. But the American response is, “See? The experts don’t know anything.” It’s not the experts.
Jacoby explores “junk thought” since the sixties with “acceptance of theories in which undue weight is ascribed to the passionate, emotional conviction of believers.” She even gets a dig in on my (not) favorite feminist theorist, UCLA’s Sandra Harding, for whom Newton’s Principia is a “rape manual.” When debunked by the hard sciences, says Jacoby, pseudoscience promoters are forced to fall back on cranks who “claim that dissent is being suppressed by a conspiracy of elites controlling the universities. [While] in the social sciences [where Harding resides], there is no shortage of credentialed ‘experts’ to endorse any position, however, untethered from common sense and scholarly evidence.”
While Jacoby’s sixties liberalism occasionally comes through as smugness, this is a fine, occasionally slow survey of American irrationalism. This and Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland go far in unraveling what went wrong in America and how it did....more
I found this book captivating and frustrating. Almost every page quotes some authority, while often, no origin or source is given. The reader is left I found this book captivating and frustrating. Almost every page quotes some authority, while often, no origin or source is given. The reader is left to wonder who, where, when the reference came from, or if Kurt Anderson—also a novelist—invented the line to suit his needs. Can I quote these unsourced quotes in my own writing? No. Can I read the books from which these quotes were pulled? No. Yet, Anderson’s book purports to be about how America became a post-truth, anti-rational, anti-intellectual nation of liars married to conspiracy theory kookery and unreason. So, support that argument.
One other demerit before the applause—but this is reader dependent: I do not believe Anderson proved his point, though he comes close. While there is clearly something wrong with Americans, “almost” certainly more wrong than most other Western civilizations (for now), what Anderson reveals was one civilization’s lifelong example of credulity, magical thinking, and superstition. In other words, a great case for human credulity, magical thinking, and superstition. Humans are strange, and Anderson proves that with the American example, but other civilizations also have and have had their own charlatan kook-leaders and nonsense.
The first irritation noted above made me want to dismiss this book with a negative review, but in the end, I couldn’t. It was far too entertaining, thought-provoking, and packed with amazing historical connections and ironies that I could validate. Like well-known crazies related to well-known giants of science, industry, or governance, and vice versa. Even minor, gossipy footnotes made me chuckle, like the stentorian ex-FOX “NEWS” talker, Scientologist, and current Trump Jr. heartthrob, Greta Van Susteren, absorbing her skills from father Urban, Senator Joseph Red-Scare McCarthy’s best man, and campaign manager.
For Anderson, America’s mix of frontier individualism with extreme religion, Buffalo Bill show business (dramatized lies), advertising, self-promotion, politics, money-making, and a love for the fruits of science without understanding it as anything different from magic, all steeped and simmered for a few centuries then ran through the anything-goes 1960s and Internet Age to give us the America of today, “where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
This and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason go far in unraveling what went wrong in America and how it did....more
Wow… Reagan Conservative Charlie Sykes takes a blowtorch to his old tribe (and mine). Sykes leaves no defector uncharred, revealing how Reagan’s conseWow… Reagan Conservative Charlie Sykes takes a blowtorch to his old tribe (and mine). Sykes leaves no defector uncharred, revealing how Reagan’s conservative GOP was executed by populist insurgents then replaced with Trump’s GOPP (Grand Old Putin Party), beginning with Trump's collusion (not conspiracy) with Putin as shown in the Muller Report and validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Sykes chronicles how Trump's followers sold their souls, trading morality, principles, and ethics for the corruption of political power at any cost. While they still carry the labels “Republican,” “conservative,” and “Christian,” they’re nothing of the sort. A characteristic of social movements, maintaining the old labels to pull along ignorant masses who assume it’s a stronger version of the same old thing. Occasionally, GOPP sentinels offer quasi-intellectual arguments, pseudo-religious defense, or counts of Supreme Court Justices to cover their betrayal. Magnificently unconvincing; instead, we find this new creation has discovered how easy, thrilling, and powerful it is to lie, with no lightning strikes from Heaven—proud members of the Liars Party and loud about it.
As Montesquieu wrote, democracies cultivate virtue, monarchies cultivate honor, tyrannies cultivate fear. As Bob Woodward detailed in his own book, FEAR, and Sykes reports here (self-validated outside his text), we see the GOPP’s goal is just that. From hit squads of character assassinators, conspiracy theorists, and apocalypse-pushers from Right-wing talk radio or FOX NEWS to their Storm Troopers, the Alt-Right, with its coordinated stalking and death threats of anyone who violates the new orthodoxy. To blaspheme Our Dear Leader, his minions, the Klan, or neo-Nazis (whom our forefathers fought the likes of in WWII) is a disgrace not to be permitted. Since this book was written, we can add QAnon to the GOPP list of favorites. And consent, implicit or explicit, by Trump, Tucker Carlson and others on the propaganda dial, of Right-wing murders in Kenosha, WS, soon to be elsewhere.
From a people who once said Bill Clinton’s character was paramount, their 92% support of an adulterer, draft dodger, and record fined Russian-mafia-money launderer, Sykes shows us the Liar’s Party is, in reality, a cult, 60-million strong (approximately 35% of Germany’s 52M were Nazis in 1940). While suspicious of exaggerations, is this cancer not a lethal threat to the nation? Can this be overstated or unduly dramatized? There’s so much here I’m forced to write a Goodreads blog about it before the November 2020 election. Let’s call it Charley’s Exposé: How America’s Right-Wing Became What it Most Despised....more
This is an enjoyable, informative “Big History” approach to earth science beginning with the Big Bang, running through the evolution of life on earth This is an enjoyable, informative “Big History” approach to earth science beginning with the Big Bang, running through the evolution of life on earth and fall of the dinosaurs to the emergence of human consciousness. Consciousness may have arisen 33,000 years ago when gauged by the emergence of art in cave paintings, or perhaps 70,000 years ago if newer finds prove to be art, not something practical. If burial and its mythic accouterments are the measure, then consciousness may have ascended even before the burial practices of Neanderthal (100,000 B.P.) with Heidelbergensis instead, a mind boggling 500,000 years ago! Yikes… One wonders if we’ll discover consciousness to originate not in the Homo line, but in mammals, or perhaps earlier on the evolutionary tree.
The interactions of various geologic and biologic systems and their outcomes, especially as global warming and cooling, make for remarkable subplots. Who knew the rise of land-based plants could—through accelerated rock weathering—cool the earth by pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere? Or that after 60M years as a plate-tectonic orphan, South America’s reconnection with its other half of North America at the Panama isthmus would trigger our current ice age (we’re in an interglacial pause)? With ocean currents changed, disconnection of the Atlantic from the Pacific, and Saharan trade winds accelerating Atlantic evaporation to elevate Atlantic salinity, the salt-heavy Gulf Stream sank with its heat before reaching the North Pole, allowing ice to form there 2.6Mya. Opossum, porcupine, and armadillo survived to move north while most of the S. American fauna vanished to hardier invader species. Most notably, humans to come—who seem to drive all species into extinction—except what they farm.
How earth scientists know what they know is a worthy through-line and killer inoculant against anti-science Creationists on the Right, their mirror twin of Postmodernists on the Left, and manmade global warming deniers of the Liars Cult. From the multitude of radioactive dating methods (carbon, argon, potassium...) to the variety of heavy/light isotopes trapped in sea floors, ice cores, bones, teeth, and shells (O16, O18, C14, C13, C12…) which can reveal everything from prehistoric air and water temperature, rainfall rates, whether a buried/preserved/ambered/fossilized lifeform lived on land or in the sea, was warm or cold blooded, and what the climate was like when they were alive. Knowledge is power against ignorance and politics. This is good place to start....more
Examining records, letters, and biographies from contemporary sources, to long after Hypatia’s murder, this author threads an amazing detective story,Examining records, letters, and biographies from contemporary sources, to long after Hypatia’s murder, this author threads an amazing detective story, still cautionary 1600 years later. She begins with literary legends old and new, to examine the times and political pressures of each. From Edward Gibbon’s use of Hypatia against the Christians he blames for the fall of Rome, to modern feminists using Hypatia as a victim of sexism. Tested against historical data on events, politics, and society of a newly Christian Alexandria, Egypt, which replaces Athens as the intellectual center, we get a fairly good picture of Hypatia, her life and death. Acclaimed for her beauty, a polymath’s grasp of philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, with massive political influence through friendships on both sides of the pagan / Christian divide, this celibate woman was an ascetic, dedicated to truth, knowledge, and her students. For Hypatia and her circle, knowledge acquisition was like a mystical experience, ideas were salvation. This exclusive group also made the common man feel small—a woman after all, who knows more than they do, lauded throughout the Empire.
Civil disorder arrives with a State / Church power struggle between semi-Christian prefect Orestes and the new corruptly-installed bishop Cyril. At one point bishop Cyril seeks a truce, asking Orestes to accept the freshly minted New Testament warm off the Nicene Creed scribal presses (recall many writings had circulated before this, claiming Christian legitimacy). Orestes tells Cyril to stick it. Orestes doesn’t need Cyril as Orestes has political clout with Hypatia and her lofty connections behind him (all the dudes want to know the hot smart chick). Naturally, bishop Cyril calls in the monks—500 of them, usually used to beat pagans—as Orestes nabs one, tortures and kills him. So Cyril turns to fake news and conspiracy theories to gin up the under-educated want-to-play-army mob with their long clubs and knives. “Hotheaded, prone to manipulation and provocation,” writes the author. Like Alex Jones’ claim that Hillary Clinton chopped up children at her pedophile pizza shop, leading Edgar Welch to fire rifle rounds into its floor to “free those children” from the basement that didn’t exist, so too the Alexandrian-city-street-intellects gobble up Cyril’s claims about Hypatia. Eliminating the most influential person in the city would give him a better shot at Orestes. Hypatia is cast as an “elitist,” “a witch,” “a black magic sorcerer,” “a messenger of hell…casting satanic spells” employing that freaky mathematics with all its weird symbols, “devoted to astrolabes and [sinful] music.”
Some details of how the Christians murder Hypatia is uncertain. After they stripped her naked, then cut her to pieces, she was either still alive or not when they threw her into the flames, followed by a cover-up. Once again, I was struck by how this story from the 415 A.D. Roman Empire would be quite comfortable in today’s news. Hypatia’s murder could happen on any street in America today, for the exact same reasons, by precisely the same kinds of people.
Mary Trump’s book is most potent when she sticks to the analysis of Donald’s psychological deformities. His mental comorbidities connected to their ouMary Trump’s book is most potent when she sticks to the analysis of Donald’s psychological deformities. His mental comorbidities connected to their outward expression was fascinating to read for the first quarter or third of the book. As she notes, being surrounded by sycophantic yes-men in the Oval Office, Senate, and half the House is little different than his many failed businesses, in all cases effectively coddled and “institutionalized.” We find all of Donald’s many flops in business and government are reported as great successes by Donald out of fear—fear that acknowledging any negative reality shows weakness and opens him to criticism which his broken ego cannot sustain. (A condition inflicted by his father.) No different than those other “strong men” who showed their true weakness by having to deflect the world as it is, surrounding themselves with followers who would tell the naked king he really does have clothes on.
Mary reports that about 3% of the human population is sociopathic. No wonder Trump, Putin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could find so many minions. That sociopaths can be made, not just born, surprised me a little. And Donald is clearly that product of his father who, however, was also sociopathic, and so may have been the grandfather, implying a genetic affinity. All three were also draft dodgers, with daddy Fred skirting WWII, and grandpa forced by the German government to leave the country for dodging WWI. Tax fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering are also found to be a family tradition, which persists in Donald’s spawn.
Though salacious and validated my countless other sources (e.g., Marryanne’s recently released recordings excoriating her brother for his fiascoes), I began to lose some interest in the middle third of the book, which was an account of the many depravities of this hyper-dysfunctional family. Like Donald’s attempt to change his father’s will and rip off the entire clan for himself or Fred’s negligent homicide inflicted on his eldest son Freddie. However, Mary hit her stride again near the end with a return to psychological analysis of Donald’s twisted gray matter. And in the darkness of that tiny cranium, a wild twist it must be. Perhaps Donald’s neediness can be convinced he’ll remain in the limelight if only he donates his brain to science for probing its many perversions.
These Penguin Classics are remarkable for their extraordinary introductions and preservation of great minds. Following Cicero’s Nature of the Gods forThese Penguin Classics are remarkable for their extraordinary introductions and preservation of great minds. Following Cicero’s Nature of the Gods format of deliberation between three antagonists, what is religion, God, and Man are the theme. Hume’s Dialogues show that most arguments for and against religion haven’t changed a bit in the 250 years since he wrote it. Though Hume’s options were so frightening at the time that friend and economist, Adam Smith, refused to publish it after Hume died (1711-1776), but Hume’s nephew did. Hume seemed indifferent to his pending death that religion mollifies, somehow comforted by rationale without supernatural promises. When the Christian, James Boswell, visited Hume 7 weeks before Hume’s death, he was staggered by Hume’s ease: “I was like a man in sudden danger, eagerly seeking his defensive arms,” writes Boswell. “I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith. I told him that I believed the Christian religion as I believed history. Said he: ‘You do not believe is as you believe the Revolution.’”
Hume (as Philo) and his fictional comrades in the debate did make a few excellent points I’d not considered. For those I knew, they occasionally articulated those with such penetration I wrote them down to commit more firmly to memory. However, this was done in modern English without the countless old English caveats, qualifications, and etiquette of polite conversation that clutter almost every line, making the read of Hume’s characters a workout.
Represented by Philo, Hume doesn’t appear to have an ax to grind with religion so much as with what he terms “the vulgar” who are under-educated, dogmatic, quick to believe, and dangerous. “It is absurd to believe the deity has human passions, and one of the lowest, a restless appetite for applause [i.e. worship].” Hume may well have written this yesterday about some Americans when he has Philo say, “the highest zeal in religion and the deepest hypocrisy, so far from being inconsistent, are commonly united in the same individual.” While admitting belief is human nature, and every definition of God, argument for faith, or trust in paradise is offered with candor, they’re eventually crucified on the cross of Philo’s reason. Not for atheism, for which Philo has no affection, but for agnosticism. The only people “entitled to His compassion are philosophical skeptics who form a natural diffidence in regard to such extraordinary subjects.” A book delightful for its ideas, not its prose....more
Aside from persistently bloated sentences, the first half of Voegelin’s text, posing as critical analysis, is mere apologetics with nothing about scieAside from persistently bloated sentences, the first half of Voegelin’s text, posing as critical analysis, is mere apologetics with nothing about science, and vanishingly little about its method or use of that method in his argument. The basis from which he makes his judgement against other views comes with no support or justification. For example, “Man’s fulfillment is brought about by grace in death,” “the world… is created by God,” and Germany’s “higher criticism” of the Gospels “concluded a preoccupation with the history of heresy.”
Oh… OK.
And the moon, which is really the eye of Horus, goes through phases because Horus does battle in the underworld each time he sets beneath the horizon, swelling his eye shut, then healing open once a month. Claiming makes it so.
Books like this are “sung to the choir” who don’t need convincing, and garners an enthusiastic one star. But Voegelin rescued some level of interest with the second half of his book. He makes honest admission that faith hangs by a thread as “Man is given nothing tangible.” With the success of Christianity, its weaknesses became apparent as people “became susceptible to ideas that could give them a greater degree of certainty than faith.” And he does a decent job of exposing weaknesses in his target systems of thought offered by Marx, Hobbes, and Hegel. Much of this today we would call aspects of tribalism, academic dishonesty, or postmodernist spin (also called lying), not gnosticism as Voegelin does. Though he can be cut some slack for generalizing the term “gnosticism” to include any social movement or philosophy because the wider set of gnostic texts we have today were only discovered in jars near Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945 not long before this book was written. Some of them are kooky, some are brilliant. But one take-away is not, per Voegelin, that they denied the world as it is and lied about it to make their vision happen as Marx did, but that the Gnostics urged a change in perspective, not an impossible change in the world. Voegelin had 2nd century bishops Ireneus and Tertullian’s attacks on the Gnostics as heretics instead. That came after the church canon was selected from available writings and the losing texts had to be expunged for political needs, justifying the selections made as the Gospel....more
This selection from many radio conversations between Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and interviewer Michael Toms (1940-2013) started out with a bang. HavThis selection from many radio conversations between Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and interviewer Michael Toms (1940-2013) started out with a bang. Having been away from Campbell’s work for so long it reminded me again of those ideas which so inspired me. Like his urging to “follow your bliss,” that vision one has for their life that is theirs alone, often derided by others. It was just this urging that gave me hope during those times when each and every day was another lesson in submission. When the hard charging life of achievement can be both satisfying and sterilizing, as Campbell says here, “The first function of mythology is to awaken and maintain in the individual a sense of wonder and participation in the mystery on this finally inscrutable universe.” And as an artist and/or intellect might be trapped in the grind of the common man’s paper chase or the acid bath of a caustic relationship, Campbell recalls T. S. Elliot’s poem The Waste Land. But the mythic adventure of Campbell’s famous “hero journey” noted here serves as a cue and a template; the metaphorical death of one life and birth of another.
Then, most surprising to come from Toms, the book took a jarring turn for me when he steered away from the universal psychological insights of mythology into those New Age chestnuts of Atlantis; that the Maya came from Atlantis and went to Egypt; and that a once great civilization, perhaps more advanced than modernity, somehow vanished without a trace. Campbell seemed irritated with this, admonishing Toms with the facts of archeology, the earth science of ocean currents and geology, and the sad reality that zero evidence for such things exists. Toms also insufficiently advises the reader that almost everything Campbell says is metaphor. Not knowing this can make Campbell sound as New Age as the topics Toms seemed to hope Campbell would validate (unless Toms did that precisely to dismiss them).
The book returned to Campbell’s encyclopedic knowledge and connections within it, ending with a too-short crescendo on Campbell’s life. An invitation to read A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell. Mostly a good book....more
This short, highly imaginative novel by Cal Tech physicist Alan Lightman only pretends to be a work of fiction. In fact, it’s a penetrating look at thThis short, highly imaginative novel by Cal Tech physicist Alan Lightman only pretends to be a work of fiction. In fact, it’s a penetrating look at the human experience through a series of Einstein’s dreams, each just a few pages. As Einstein’s subconscious works out the concept of time for his Special Theory of Relativity, each dream is a different take on time, which is actually a different perspective on life. Instead of presenting a philosophy, a sermon, or conclusions of analysis on how we ought to live, Lightman’s method takes no position on what’s right or wrong. As Joseph Campbell shows myths can tell the truth because they’re not “true,” so too, Lightman’s book is “just a fiction.” The ways of living found in each dream about people in Einstein’s little Swiss town may oppose other dream world views, contradict them, compliment or reinforce them, just like the nature and trajectory of individual human existence. Multiple times as I read this at a fireside campsite alone in a national forest I felt like Lightman pulled those tiny passing moments of joy, sorrow, regret, promise, thrill, shame and loss from my own life. Lightman shows there’s room for compassion for we creatures who pretend to be in control when the end is the same for everybody. Just the kind of book to consult whenever alone at another campsite in the wilderness....more
Alley wrote an excellent Scientific American article in terms of information and engaging writing style (“Abrupt Climate Change,” November 2004, availAlley wrote an excellent Scientific American article in terms of information and engaging writing style (“Abrupt Climate Change,” November 2004, available online). His “Time Machine,” though occasionally informative, reads like a slow school overview: “Many clever people are studying things in ice and learning many things.” OK… Maybe this was his intent, though nowhere are we forewarned. He’s best when reporting his personal adventures in the ice-core-data-recovery field he’s part of. This book is not about much-quoted GRIP data (Greenland Ice Core Project) cataloging 123,000 years of earth’s atmospheric history in that region (I thought it was), and some 2 million-year-old plants to boot. But it does reveal findings of previous drilling, good for 110 millennia, and the Vostok ice core, extending back about 450,000 years.
Alley shows that nature and man are not without their ironies. While politicians, corporations, and talk show hosts paint their rosy picture of longer summers on the beach (ignoring these beaches may be underwater) or flourishing plant life in CO2-rich atmospheres (ignoring they may be fried in heat and dryness), as it turns out, ice ages are triggered by warming. Standby. Exciting times are coming. We’ll keep rolling the dice, but at least Alley is trying to sound the alarm. Unfortunately, as the world’s biggest offender, America heard much of this in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 10s. While we try to change the world by collecting litter on Earth Day, those in power aren’t listening.
What’s interesting here is that Alley’s ice cores read like pages in a book, one year’s ice layer piled atop another, which trap gases, dust, and aerosols in each. According to Alley, the good news is, compared to previous interglacial warming periods, we humans have been remarkably lucky during the Holocene these last 12,000 years (since the invention of agriculture), with a relatively stable climate, except for a few hiccups. The bad news is plural. Contrary to political orthodoxy, measurable, repeatable data shows we have among the highest concentrations of CO2 in the recorded histories. The thermohaline circulation—the ocean’s equator-to-pole hot/cold exchange system—is a smoking gun in massive change, which according to NOAA data, is shutting down via ice melt freshening. And the biggest news of all: ice cores show dramatic, even catastrophic climate shift, as Alley writes, “in less time than it takes it get a college degree.” Oops. Nature has a threshold. Once tripped, it’s a long ride back—about a hundred thousand years. Buckle up....more
With delightful insight this book provides a grasp of not only the Maya but the common human condition and response to our short existence seen in allWith delightful insight this book provides a grasp of not only the Maya but the common human condition and response to our short existence seen in all mythic documents. Conforming to Joseph Campbell’s prescription, the Popol Vuh intends the same goal as any other, clothed in local dress.
While ancestors of the Maya stretch back to the Olmecs who were in full swing by 1200 B.C. (about the time ancient Hebrews claim to have organized) the Popol Vuh did not appear until significant Mayan city-states were in decline around 900 A.D. By 1200 the kingdoms of Mayapan and Quiche were on the rise. Apparently the Quiche (living on the Pacific coast of Guatemala) retrieved its Popol Vuh from the Atlantic coast. Despite book burnings by the Spanish and their indoctrination, much like native American eradication, their creations could not be erased completely—ditto Dead Sea Scrolls, Gnostic Gospels, etc. Four copies of the Popol Vuh survived and the alphabetic version was, like the Rosetta Stone, translated with columns of Quiche side-by-side with Spanish.
The Popol Vuh begins with the creation of things. The gods make humans, but not very good ones, so these become the animals we see. Like the experience of Noah and his antecedent, Upnapishtim several thousand years earlier in Gilgamesh, the Popol Vuh also has a flood myth, and again like others the flood is the fault of humans angering the gods. Interestingly the Popol Vuh, like ancient Egypt, place souls of the departed as stars in the sky: “sparks of light in the darkness.” Likewise, the natural mythopoetic human mind has a reason for every occurrence in our world, expressed as causes for the way the world is simply by claiming it. E.g. the moon goes dark because it is an eye of god that swells shut each month due to battles in the underworld after it sets each night. A fun read for comparing myths so much the same across time, place and cultures. Another example of those human universals....more
Fagan adds a new dimension to the failure of civilizations outside value reversals and psychological self-destruction posed by Brooks Adams, Spengler,Fagan adds a new dimension to the failure of civilizations outside value reversals and psychological self-destruction posed by Brooks Adams, Spengler, or de Tocqueville. Data from a variety of sources, not available until recently, correlates with history the impacts of climate on civilization. Fagan opens with a curious personal experience—his small sailboat on treacherous Spanish waters, passed by cargo-laden hulks seemingly oblivious to nature’s furry. This introduction becomes a useful analogy for the “scale of our vulnerability.” As we complicate society and “tame” nature, we also massively increase the calamity of nature’s accumulating response. The Sumerian city of Ur becomes our first tour, and what a tour it is. Fagan hits his stride, crystallizing his point when Sumerians are his centerpiece. Conceived around 6000 BCE as a collection of villages already employing canals for irrigation, the region suffered a monsoon shift driving Sumerians to increase organization through innovation. Hence, invention of the city by 3100 BCE. Volcanic induced climate shift eventually ran the Sumerian ship aground, as similar shifts did for others, not only starving the populous but dissolving faith in their gods, kings, and way of life. But, Fagan writes, “The intricate equation between urban population, readily accessible food supplies and the economic, political and social flexibility sufficient to roll with the climatic punches has been irrevocably altered… If Ur was a small trading ship, industrial civilization is a supertanker.” And supertankers split in half now and then.
The ability to simply return to farming or hunter-gathering is now lost given that so many of us occupy the landscape, competing with everyone else under the same conditions. If some of us once comforted ourselves with notions of shinning up the hunting rifle, returning to nature in our tent during such a calamity, forget it. When societies, stretched to the limit, falter under climate change, stress in the psyche comes to the fore in ways never imagined, even (or especially) in abrasive group-oriented societies like ours. Tribal suspicions lay waiting for such opportunities.
Fagan notes the same human response by cultures separated by thousands of years, different continents, “meaning and value” systems. “In both the Old World and the New,” he writes, “human societies reacted to climate traumas with social and political changes that are startling in their similarities.” Universal human truths, after all. (Take that, postmodernists.)
“But if we’ve become a supertanker among human societies, it’s an oddly inattentive one,” writes Fagan. “Only a tiny fraction of people on board are engaged with tending the engines. The rest are buying and selling goods among themselves, and entertaining each other. Those on the bridge have no charts or weather forecasts and cannot even agree that they are needed; indeed, the most powerful among us subscribe to a theory that says storms don’t exist. And no one dares to whisper in the helmsman’s ear that he might consider turning the wheel.” So ends a well written, at times spellbinding account of our past and warning to our present, ignored at our peril. ...more
Berger is brilliant, funny and wise. His writing is insightful, flows with ease, and engages the reader with mini-revelations. Though he writes only tBerger is brilliant, funny and wise. His writing is insightful, flows with ease, and engages the reader with mini-revelations. Though he writes only the first chapter, a few others are equally enthralling, especially those on Pope John Paul II’s philosophy, and that concerning Islam. Unfortunately a few others belong only to sociologists—speculation and esoteric social theories, where social theorists debate whether their world is made all of one thing or all of another. In the John Paul chapter we find the Pope soundly defeating postmodern silliness in its rejection of universality. The chapter on Islam teaches much, perhaps most of us never knew, and provides reasoned, balanced direction toward Islamic change for the better, though some of that is a bit idyllic when it comes to the fundamentalist branch (or any fundamentalist).
Berger’s premise is this: to assume we are living in a secular world is wrong. The world today “is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more than ever.” Though modernity has secularizing effects it has provoked powerful movements of counter-secularization. Which hearkens back to the Brooks Adams 1896 classic, “The Law Of Civilization And Decay.” In it, Adams notes with no one left to defeat, ideas from around the Empire flooded Rome causing a near universal dis-ease among its population. Their response? Extreme religious eagerness, the sprouting of new mystery religions of which Christianity was but one of many. Berger’s point is made that our upsurge today is primarily among conservative, traditionalist, orthodox movements of Islam, and in the Christian world among Pentecostals and other Evangelicals at the expense of Catholicism and mainline Protestantism like Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Methodists.
Why has modernity had this affect? Berger is clear, because modernity has removed all the old certainties while most people find it impossible to live with uncertainty. Any movement that “promises to provide or renew certainty has a ready market.” Those “dripping with supernaturalism,” he writes, “have widely succeeded.”
Berger claims that the secular crowd, while thin on the ground in numbers, wield excess influence on the media and universities, of which he is a member at Boston U. Without mention of educational differences between secular and non, Berger clarifies a chasm between them, “The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends the restricted space of empirical existence in this world, has been a perennial feature of humanity,” he writes. “It would require something close to a mutation of the species to extinguish this impulse for good… The critique of secularity common to all resurgent movements is that human existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable condition.” That is, like it or not, religion, mysticism, and mythology have been and will remain part of humanity. Finding a path to balance in the face of warring zealotry—which was of such concern to the Founders—is a subject of concern in this fine book.
There are those of merit who endorse this book, such as the Dalai Lama, and those not so meritorious: e.g. reincarnated Shirley MacLaine, and Uri GellThere are those of merit who endorse this book, such as the Dalai Lama, and those not so meritorious: e.g. reincarnated Shirley MacLaine, and Uri Geller, famous for his failed “powers” to make spoons melt between his fingers on the Johnny Carson show (when his rigged spoons had been replaced with those straight from the kitchen). Deepak uses a number of “seven-level” descriptions applying to a wide variety of things, from seven stages of God, to seven characteristics of the brain, to seven kinds of satisfaction. Finding satisfaction in life somehow “proves” the existence of God, though it’s not clear how. His propensity for claims from blue sky without support is relentless. His comparison of the human brain to God reads like a horoscope. One could make whatever comparison they might want between brain and God, and it would have fit nicely here. Say, the brain of sleep and that of awareness is akin to the God of knowing and the God who allows free will. (Huh?) His God is a popularly pleasant one as he does not include a wrathful, jealous or horrific God, nor a God of plague and pestilence.
Since his first big seller (“Quantum Healing,” also a farce for which criticism from physicists forced him to denounce his own assertions), Deepak has learned nothing more of quantum mechanics. He confuses the probabilistic nature of the micro quantum domain with the macro world to service his “evidence” for God as the power that could pull off such tricks as blinking the universe in and out of existence in a virtual world. He misrepresents quantum mechanics as having revealed everything from telepathy and clairvoyance to split personalities. His book brims with buzzwords from the vocabulary of physics, such as “space time continuum.” Notice no physicists endorsed his book.
Deepak makes use of the then-current fad in angels by noting a story of a blind priest who, about to collide with two bicyclists, is saved by an angel. We are told despite the fact such events continue to be cataloged, we still doubt them. Is this surprising? Volumes of ghost encounters, alien abductions, crop circles, and claims that Trump has a brain cell are “cataloged.” Do we believe those too?
Deepak continues to prey on the scientifically illiterate and religiously eager. If you want a serious coverage of this interesting topic, see John Polkinghorne, an Oxford physicist and Anglican Priest, or the likes of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit Priest, and biologist. If you want to contribute to Deepak’s Southern California mansion, buy his books....more
George Mason University world historian Peter Sterns highlights shifts in the framework of human experience over time. He notes key changes in belief George Mason University world historian Peter Sterns highlights shifts in the framework of human experience over time. He notes key changes in belief systems with different accommodations to change and continuity of local identities with rising influence from other civilizations in a shrinking world. Reassuring was his remark that we’ll study history here, not political dogmas regarding history, Right or Left.
A sampling of gems include: the agricultural revolution involved more work, increasing work expectations. (Feel like you spend too much time at the office?) Inequality increased with each step from hunter-gatherer to ag (especially between men and women due to higher birth rates) to civilization as a form of order-keeping; animal husbandry invited disease; the world environment met its most significant human impact—farming (after hunting so many game animals into extinction). Gender inequality was more pronounced, not less, with wealth because wealth allowed it, while all among the poor scrambled for survival. Sterns brackets the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC) from about 1200 B.C. to 800 B.C. when Jasper’s Axial Age commences, but utters not a word about Jasper or any connection between the LBAC and Axial, like, were people so desperate to find a way out they invented our world religions? Ancient India used the caste system to control large numbers of people; the Mediterranean used slavery (different from Atlantic slavery); China used obedience to “rule of the wise.” Despite Rome’s aqueducts, slavery reduced labor-saving innovation found in non-slave civilizations. Greco-Rome adopted polytheism of invading Indo-Europeans and used them as literary models of ethics and its violation, which Sterns claims, developed into abstract thought, philosophy, and science. With the Axial Age, all classical systems aim at ethical systems of right behavior, underwritten by religion, Confusion group obligations, or individual Greco-Roman virtue. All drifted away from polytheism, magic, and divinity of rulers (until Trump), toward greater tolerance (until Trump). The West emphasized youth and vigor; the East old age wisdom and ancestors. Han China and the Roman Empire serve as interesting comparisons between the rule of bureaucracy vs. law. With neither able to provide spiritual sustenance emerged the similar religions of Buddhism and Christianity, which crossed borders without the usual military conquest. By the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the key to truth was seen to lie in science, not faith, and religion as a cultural engine appeared spent, meeting absolutism as a counter-response. With 1700s birth of consumerism, the theft of things wanted, not needed, appears. While the U.K. reached 50% urbanization in 1850, the world didn’t get there until 2006. Public health, as a worldwide program by 1900, was more responsible for overpopulation than any other factor. An informative course.
African-American Steele notes how “proper” talk about race has become so formulaic and rehearsed as to become incapable oInformative perspective, but…
African-American Steele notes how “proper” talk about race has become so formulaic and rehearsed as to become incapable of resolving real problems. Steele’s view comes from the standpoint of a minority who experienced real discrimination and witnessed the imitation angst he saw whites get away with by pretending the “way they’re supposed to.” Like “diversity” training in our corporations and government branches, we all know what we’re “supposed to say,” how we‘re “supposed to act,” with the result being that farcical role playing simply kills time and another charge number to waste when something of merit could have been accomplished instead. Steele holds the position that “racial victimization is not the real problem.” He writes, “It’s a formula that binds the victim to their victimization by linking their power to status as a victim… Since the social victim has been oppressed by society they come to feel their individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by their own initiative. To admit this fully would cause us to lose that innocence derived from our victimization. We are in the odd and self-defeating position in which taking responsibility for bettering ourselves feels like a surrender to white-power.” Steele expands and elaborates in myriad ways through his style as a storyteller and by that method makes for a fast paced read. He also wrote this in 1998, long before the now common videotaped homicides of those like Eric Garner strangled by police on Staten Island, NY after been stopped for selling cigarettes without a tax stamp, Walter Scott shot in the back in Charleston, South Carolina for running from a traffic stop, and Ahmaud Arbery shot while jogging by two white men (Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael) just driving around town with their guns in Brunswick, Georgia. One wonders how many murders have gone unaccounted before everyone had a video camera in their pocket, and how Steele views that aspect of American life. ...more
A cultural mutilation of boys is underway (or was when this book was written), psychologically molesting them as young as three, perpetrated by radicaA cultural mutilation of boys is underway (or was when this book was written), psychologically molesting them as young as three, perpetrated by radical feminists, sanctioned by academic and government largesse. Sommers’ book chronicles America’s federally funded crusade against young males with data, references, names, and institutions.
Sommers opens with data refuting the “girl’s crisis” given birth by Harvard’s Carol Gilligan and promoted by the AAUW (American Association of University Women) in 1990 based on a survey funded by AAUW of 3000 children. The media jumped to action without considering critiques, conferences multiplied, academics weighed in, and soon Congress was passing laws to guard our girls against scholastic underperformance. Through some miracle of mental acrobatics, this made boys responsible for the damage. As legal injury multiplied, careful reexaminations of statically superior numbers (70,000, 99,000, and 100,000 children from 40 states) showed the opposite was true, boys were most at risk, underperforming in schools, ignored by teachers, and feeling rejected by the system. The AAUW buried it, including their own data supporting these same results from a later study. Instead, they conference-coached teachers and gender activists: “There will always be [those] who will insist the Holocaust didn’t happen,” they responded. And of all the laughs, “...revisionists so distort facts [that their] take on history loses all semblance of reality.” By this time, the U.S. Department Of Education had become the strong-arm and money stream for the AAUW and its team—NOW, the Ms. Foundation, WEEA (Women’s Educational Equity Act, unfunded in 2010), the Wesley Center, and NCSEE (National Coalition For Sex Equity In Education). Legislation rode the wave until school boards lived under the terror of costly lawsuits laying claim to ready abuses of Title IX and the ludicrous notion that small boys are sexual “proto-predators” to be subjugated. Like Sommer’s now-infamous story of Jonathan Prevette, who in 1996 kissed a female classmate, then was punished for sexual harassment. He was six years old. Or the boy who performed the ultimate outrage of hugging a girl. His parents were told his punishment was due to the fact “He’s a toucher,” at age three. In 1997 a Glebe Elementary nine-year-old was cuffed, fingerprinted, and charged with aggravated sexual battery for rubbing against a girl when he reached for an apple in the lunch line. While the DOEd approached $100M funneled to the AAUW for more nonsense, the teacher’s guide “Quit It!” and over 300 different pamphlets, books and working papers on gender equity by the hundreds of thousands crisscrossed the continent, hunting for those dangerous boys one day to be “males, socialized to destructive masculine ideals.”
Here’s an example of how laws get changed by a legislature as ignorant of science and simple math as Katherine Hanson and her WEEA (funded by DOEd) when she listed: “Every year nearly 4 million women are beaten to death [in the U.S.]; Violence is the leading cause of death among women; The leading cause of injury among women is being beaten by a man at home; There was a 59% increase in rapes between 1990 and 1991.” 59%? In one country, in one year? Try some simple arithmetic here. Over 365 days, Hanson’s first claim requires 11,000 women beaten to death per day in the U.S.. Wouldn’t somebody notice? In ~30 years, there’d be no female population. Not even the Taliban could commit such crimes. While the FBI showed 3631 women were murdered in the same year—tragic, but short of 4 million by a multiplicative factor of 1100. The leading cause of death among women was and is heart disease (370,000 in that year), followed by cancer (250,000). Hanson is right about one thing, rapes did increase, but by 4%, just shy of 59. Perhaps she’s biased by Ms. Magazine’s study claiming 25% of all college girls as rape victims (even though they didn’t know it), or Linda Ledray (“Recovering From Rape”), who tells us that even undress-you-looks and cat-calls are rapes. Such is the fodder to this day at Ms. Magazine’s website and others, where telling the truth is somehow “insensitive to the victim” (and a threat to the money tree).
What’s happening to boys is played out at our universities under the guise of speech codes (see “The Shadow University”), and Women’s Studies where girls are scared senseless of males, then learn to despise them as threats (see “Feminism And Domination”), all the while as boys retreat from campus. As the PBS News Hour’s Clarence Page said in his essay (March/2005) while noting the failure of young men in school, at jobs, and relationships as young women excel, “The problem with we men is we’re not women.” The problem with Page and his bigots is that we are not allowing boys to be men, as they are ignored, vilified, and grow up ingesting sit-coms and TV commercials that portray males as animals, vulgar and aimless fools with a woman in the background to save them from their monstrosities. The war against boys will give us just what we’re getting, disaffected males laden with rage for reasons they can’t even articulate. Sommers’ book compiles the obvious into a critical mass....more
Loading...
