October 2011

If You Wake Up Feeling No Pain, You Know You’re Dead

By in moralizing

Anupam Kant Verma:


Pain has often been privileged over other sensations. It has been represented as a somewhat enviable experience, has had something of a heroic career in spiritual literature. Yet in truth, pain is no more and no less profound than any other sensation. Pain offers the same potential for learning as any other experience. In that sense one can simply say that pain…just…is.


I never thought of myself as being particularly tough, but it seemed by ordinary standards that I had a high tolerance for pain. I played an entire season of high school soccer with what I thought was just a nagging pain in my knee; it turned out to be a stress fracture at the top of my tibia. Tape it up and jog it off, champ. My tattoo artist marveled to me that I sat there and read a book while she worked on a seven-plus hour design on my arm; most people couldn’t relax enough to concentrate on anything else, she said. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, and I had to read several paragraphs over a few times before really taking them in, but hey, you know, mind over matter and all that.

But as I said before, I developed rheumatoid arthritis in my late twenties, and due to my belonging to the twenty percent of people who don’t show a positive rheumatoid factor on a blood test, it went untreated as such for three and a half years. By the time an MRI on my hands convinced my doctors to start giving me drugs for it, I was one sad-sack, broken-down, sorry-ass sunnamabitch. I was in constant chronic pain, sometimes acute, oftentimes just like the hum of an appliance in the background. I couldn’t sit for more than ten or fifteen minutes without my lower back and knees screaming in protest when I got back up. I couldn’t stand for an equal amount of time without an equal response. I couldn’t sleep in many positions for long without waking up and having to gingerly shift myself, and the uneven sleep patterns made me feel even more beaten down and worn out. If I took pills to sleep more deeply, I paid for it upon awakening by hardly being able to move. The muscles in my right arm are still slightly smaller and weaker than those in my left because a tendon in my rotator cuff was getting pinched in between two bones, causing me to shift my shoulder forward to relieve the pressure and keep my arm close to my side, trying to only move it from the elbow down if needed. I wore shoes almost all the time because I couldn’t stand to walk barefoot, and I had to wear the same pair for a few years because I couldn’t stand the discomfort of trying to break a new pair in.

I didn’t think about it much at the time, but there was always a sort of back-of-the-mind awareness that one day, I might just have to kill myself rather than go on like this indefinitely. Nothing dramatic, nothing emotional, just an acknowledgement of the brute facts of my existence. I was increasingly unable to let my mind wander beyond the constant attention to my aches and pains. No one seemed to know what was wrong with me. Some of them even whispered behind my back that I was malingering for who knew what reason. Why go on like this?

I guess I was young and healthy enough that medication fortunately brought me back almost completely to normal. But there was no epiphany once I reached that point. No grand, life affirming lesson. Just a crystal-clear awareness of the utter senseless futility of ever trying to be tough. The world will always win. No matter how much you can personally endure, no matter how much farther you can push yourself, there will always be someone else who can tolerate worse for longer. Unless you want to take it to the logical conclusion like those stupid Buddhist monks who set themselves aflame while remaining motionless, you’re going to have to turn back at some point and stop chasing after the chimera of redemption, affirmation, accomplishment being found in pain. There’s nothing morally or spiritually purifying about it. It just is. Avoid it if you can. I’ve had friends who put themselves through unnecessary pain and suffering for reasons like that, from BDSM practitioners to MMA fighters who refuse to take aspirin for broken bones, and it just makes me sad for them.

The Passion and the Price

By in foolosophy, music

Aaron Gilbreath:

Kids, mortgages, careers — somehow all the crap we’d once dismissed as the bleak concerns of geezers had caught up with us. Well, not with me. I might not have had enough disposable income to fund many trips like this, but I hadn’t committed myself to kids or mortgages, either. I was single, self-employed, only rented apartments, and lived off taco cart tacos and ham sandwiches. Such concessions guaranteed that my time was mine to fill. I could stay up until 2 a.m. reading if I wanted to, or hike in the mountains on a whim, with no fear of abandoning or disappointing anyone else. I had no one to account for but myself. I was also at that age where you started to wonder if the life you’d fashioned in youth had lost its charm.

…Counter to the usual progression of things, the older I got, the deeper my musical appreciations grew. I got into blues in my late-20s, got into late-’50s/early-’60s hard bop jazz soon after. I went through a classical music period in which I listened to Handel’s Water Music and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos so frequently that a friend asked if I was going to start wearing white shirts with ruffles. Recently I’d seen 1950s jazz legends perform in New York, and octogenarian bluesmen tear through fierce sets in nondescript bars, men who used canes and had suffered strokes and still smoked. Although my tastes kept expanding, music had always been one of my central preoccupations.

…Unlike regular life, live music was never dull or predictable. It also elevated my existence without committing me to the sort of job required to finance the 18-year-plus task of parenting. I felt self-absorbed thinking this, even immature. So many of my friends who had kids constantly extolled parenting’s virtues: “You can’t imagine how much joy kids bring you,” they’d say, “that you could love another human being so deeply.” Baby’s first steps, baby’s first day of school, the quiet moments at home alone when they looked up at you and said, I love you, Dad — “It’s so rewarding. I would throw myself in front of a car for that kid.” I believed them, yet these were the same people who admitted: “I’m always tired.” “I’m buried in chores.” “I have no time to myself.” “I worry I’m doing it all wrong; sometimes I can’t breathe.” “I’m stuck at my job at least until she starts middle school.” “I wish I could just jump in the car and drive to the beach and talk to no one.” At night they drank too much wine to cope, or smoked occasional cigarettes even though they’d officially quit.

…Through the thin veil of our public deceptions, I could see the truth: like me, he was trying to disguise the consumptive intensity of his musical attachments, trying to look like less of a freak and avoid being typecast as the old guy who refused to “grow up.” And despite the differences in our clothing and the gray of his hair, there was no denying what he was: not only a kindred spirit, but precisely the person I might one day be if I kept living the way I was living.

I still couldn’t tell if that was a bad thing or not.

…Maybe it wasn’t parenting that bothered me so much as the mundane. Too much of life was just so earthly. If you broke down the activities that composed our daily existence, it didn’t amount to much: Which size garbage bag should I get? What’s the difference between spearmint and wintermint? Did the cashier actually give me my 10 percent discount? Always scrub the counter so food particles don’t stick. I needed something transcendent to counteract the blandness, even if it only lasted a few minutes. Which was the problem: It only lasted a few minutes. Then it was back to Is fluoride healthier than fluoride-free? Back to this.

It’s kinda strange; I’ve done all the “responsible adult” things that could be reasonably expected of me — held a steady job, had long-term relationships, owned a house, even raised a stepkid — but I’ve always felt in the world of my peers rather than of it, largely because music and books have always remained the centerpiece of my life. I prefer my music studio-packaged instead of live, but yeah, I get what he’s saying. I hardly ever talk about music anymore, because most people I know are stuck on repeat with the music of their late teens and early twenties if they even care about it at all. One friend, in the course of venting a bit about midlife crisis issues, asked how I stayed sane. Music, I said. Keeping music as my focus was what kept my entire sense of self from ossifying; it was the invigorating current that kept me from feeling like a stagnant lake. It’s all the transcendence I need.

And while I’m sure they do love their kids, I have to smirk a bit at how utterly boring most of them become as parents, boring in the sense of having no interesting thoughts about anything anymore. I don’t know how I managed to be born deaf to the siren song of the genetic imperative to pass on my DNA, but I sure am grateful for it.

Never Met A Wise Man; If So, It’s a Woman

By in gender, history, moralizing

The Chronicle on Emma Goldman:

Although Mikhail Bakunin, that fiercest of Russian anarchists, was one of her heroes, his famous definition of the revolutionary as a man who “has no interests of his own, no feelings, no habits, no longings, not even a name, only a single interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution” was as abhorrent to Goldman as corporate capitalism. If revolutionaries gave up sex and art while they were making the revolution, she said, they would become devoid of joy. Without joy, human beings cease being human. Should the men and women who subscribed to Bakunin’s credo prevail, the world would be even more heartless after the revolution than it had been before.
The conviction that revolution and the life of the senses dare not be mutually exclusive made Goldman eloquent in defense of causes—sexual freedom, birth control, marriage reform—that a majority of her fellow anarchists derided as trivializing the cause. Comrades repeatedly took her to task for, as many of them said, interpreting anarchism as a movement for individual self-expression rather than a revolution of the collective.

Luxemburg’s letters from prison are, in fact, so resolutely cheerful and gentle that they can become cloying. There is a solemn whimsy in her devotion to animals, for instance, that puts the contemporary reader helplessly in mind of Disney cartoons: “Recently I sang the Countess’ aria from Figaro, about six [titmice] were perched there on a bush in front of the window and listened without moving all the way to the end; it was a very funny sight to see.” Yet coming from “Red Rosa,” this kind of thing struck the first readers of her letters with the force of a revelation. Here was a revolutionary who loved flowers and birds, and Hugo Wolf’s Lieder, and the poems of Goethe. This Luxemburg offers the strongest possible contrast with Lenin, who famously said, “I can’t listen to music too often . . . it makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you must not stroke anyone’s head: you might get your hand bitten off. You have to strike them on the head, without any mercy.”

I just thought it was interesting to happen across two articles drawing that same contrast between two different pairs of male and female revolutionaries (and interesting to imagine how we today would react to someone from, say, OWS voicing similar sentiments to those of Bakunin and Lenin). Of course, even the more “sensible” ones sound hopelessly utopian now, though I must say that Goldman’s On Anarchism, which I got years ago at a library book sale for a dollar, struck me as much more relevant than many of the writings of her contemporaries.

Comma Chameleon, You Come and Go

By in language, writing

Henry Hitchings:

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness.

…One manifestation of this is the advance of the dash. It imitates the jagged urgency of conversation, in which we change direction sharply and with punch. Dashes became common only in the 18th century. Their appeal is visual, their shape dramatic. That’s what a modern, talky style of writing seems to demand.

By contrast, use of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that’s also a connector—but it’s a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.

More surprising is the eclipse of the hyphen. Traditionally, it has been used to link two halves of a compound noun and has suggested that a new coinage is on probation. But now the noun is split (fig leaf, hobby horse) or rendered without a hyphen (crybaby, bumblebee). It may be that the hyphen’s last outpost will be in emoticons, where it plays a leading role.

Hmm. I am indeed a fan of the dash; I see it as a linguistic pause button, allowing a brief aside, saving the lengthier ones for enclosure within parentheses. I also would rather dehyphenate most words; something about the hyphen always strikes me as annoyingly retro, like when people used to write “to-day”. But as you can see from the previous two sentences, I find the semicolon very useful and fail to understand why it should have come to be synonymous with snobbery and esoteric rules.

An English professor friend of mine occasionally passes along egregious examples of the kind of writing her students submit; it’s fun to read them out loud, verbatim, in keeping with the lack of punctuation. I usually manage to stay sanguine about the “kids these days”, figuring that the glass has always been half-empty when it comes to basic literacy. The easiest way to become a good speller and good writer is to read, read, and read some more, and most people don’t like to do it. So it goes. But I have to admit that I’m currently ready to issue death sentences to all those people who refuse to ever capitalize anything, even when submitting information for an official form. The Internet has become the recessive gene pool of Cormac McCarthy and E.E. Cummings, it seems.

The Box Is There for a Reason

By in art, music

Tony Harrison: When are you gonna start thinking outside the box?
Saboo: The box is there for a reason; to keep ball-men like you inside it.

— The Mighty Boosh

Chuck Klosterman:

As a rule, we’re always supposed to applaud the collapse of the record industry. We are supposed to feel good about the democratization of music and the limitless palette upon which artists can now operate. But that collapse is why Lulu exists. If we still lived in the radio prison of 1992, do you think Metallica would purposefully release an album that no one wants? No way. Cliff Burnstein from Q Prime Management would listen to their various ideas, stroke his white beard, and deliver the following 45-second pep talk: “OK, great. Love these concepts. Your allusion to Basquiat’s middle period was very apt, Lars. Incisive! But here’s our situation. If you guys spend two months writing superfast Diamond Head songs about nuclear winter and shape-shifting, we can earn $752 million in 18 months, plus merchandizing. That’s option A. The alternative is that you can make a ponderous, quasi-ironic art record about ‘the lexicon of hate’ that will outrage the Village Voice and mildly impress Laurie Anderson. Your call.”

…For much of my life, I lived under the myth that record labels were inherently evil. I was ceaselessly reminded that corporate forces stopped artists from doing what they truly desired; they pushed musicians toward predictable four-minute radio singles and frowned upon innovation, and they avariciously tried to turn art into a soulless commodity that MTV could sell to the lowest common denominator. And that did happen, sometimes. But some artists need that, or they end up making albums like this.

Ahhahaha. I haven’t paid attention to Metallica for fifteen years, so I don’t really care what they’ve done this time in their quest for utter shamelessness. But as far as the general principle goes, I blame the Romantics. I blame them for this incoherent muddling of creativity with chaos, the belief that uninhibited expression is a close relative or necessary precondition of genius, all of which manifests itself in everything from insufferably pretentious portrait-of-the-artist tossers to the knee-jerk opposition to ADHD drugs for children. Sometimes the tension between the untrammeled vision of the artist and the crass demands of the public or the market is what combusts into greatness.

The Thing’s Hollow—It Goes on Forever—and—Oh My God—It’s Full of Air!

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies

I speak, of course, of Mary Elizabeth Williams’s head.

But has a guy who once made a bit out of peeing himself at the MTV Awards truly had “an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th century novelist and essayist best known as Mark Twain”? Is the guy who rocked a jazz flute solo in “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” really “a fearless observer of society” with an “uncompromising perspective of social injustice and personal folly”? You betcha.

Yes, she’s talking about Will Ferrell. A very silly woman, to borrow Jane Austen’s phrase. I wish I could bring this to the attention of my old 11th-grade English teacher (who was not shy about sharing his opinion that Twain was the greatest American writer ever) just to watch him sputter in apoplectic indignation.

Momma Says Stupid Is as Stupid Does

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies

Well, we can go on for a while about whether Steve Jobs was a “smart” man or a “stupid” man for spending so much time dicking around with alternative medicine in the first year after his cancer diagnosis, how people we would generally describe as “smart” can still do “stupid” things in particular, or whether it even makes sense to use broad adjectives like “smart” and “stupid” in an all-or-nothing manner when talking about the sum total of a person’s identity, but surely we can all agree that this is a stupid essay, all told. I would excerpt parts of it, but it’s so wild and scattershot that you really have to just read it all.

CliffsNotes version: if you’ve never been faced with a life-threatening illness you have NO RIGHT to judge what anyone else does when faced with a hard choice about treatment and anyway you’re probably a Republican who hates poor people and wants to outlaw abortion too and Jobs was a Zen Buddhist which is a hell of a lot better than being a Bible-thumper, yeah I know I was just ranting about being judgmental but pfft that was like so many paragraphs ago so whatevs, anyway Zen is what made him great just like rasta made Bob Marley great so we have to accept the good with the bad, Q to tha E to tha muthafuckin’ D – non-sequitur? what non-sequitur? – and if you still say Jobs acted stupidly in postponing treatment, well then you’re a CATHOLIC too, and you think God has dominion over your life, dont’cha? Huh? Huh? Dont’cha? Catholicsezwhat HA GOTCHA, NOW, LIKE I WAS SAYING, just cuz Jobs himself came to feel that he had made a stupid mistake doesn’t mean anything cuz he was large he contained multitudes and now let’s take this baby offroad cuz I’m going to rant about Facebook and private parts and itchy noses and how just cuz Jobs was one of the most famous people in the world and a cult hero to unbelieveably annoying fanboys and fangirls and the subject of a new biography that everyone is wanking about DOESN’T MEAN that we have any right to invade his postmortem privacy by having an opinion on how he handled his illness and GAAAH here we go now I’m really gonna blast off Sarah Palin OWS pot-smoking witchfinder looking under the bed for hippies to punch Big Pharma ack glurg huff puff wheeze gaaaahhhhhh…

Damn, dude. Maybe try some, uh, kava or something. I hear that helps mellow you out.

Soundbite and Fury

By in ohferfucksake, socmed

Nathan Jurgenson:

Chomsky, a politically progressive linguist, should know better than to dismiss new forms of language-production that he does not understand as “shallow.” This argument, whether voiced by him or others, risks reducing those who primarily communicate in this way as an “other,” one who is less fully human and capable. This was Foucault’s point: Any claim to knowledge is always a claim to power. We might ask Chomsky today, when digital communications are disqualified as less deep, who benefits?

Oh, get the fuck off of it. None of us have any problem dismissing gossip as a more shallow form of conversation than intellectual discussions; no one who isn’t still entranced by their shiny new techie toys should have any problem making the distinction here. It’s telling that Jurgenson rambles through his essay, making ominous implications about the cognitive imperialism of first-world intellectuals, without ever addressing content and nuance, two of the most important criteria we use for judging depth in communication. Yes, yes, yes, it’s possible to make good points in 140 characters or less. Yes, yes, yes, it’s a great thing that more people, especially poorer people, are able to access the web through smartphones. None of which addresses, let alone changes, the fact that many important ideas need to be developed at length to be worthwhile, an unlikelihood if not an impossibility in the hyperactive, rapid-fire stimulation atmosphere of Twitter.

Going Forward In Reverse

By in history, mythology, religion, waiting for the barbarians

Kenan Malik:

Christianity may have forged a distinct ethical tradition, but its key ideas, like those of most religions, were borrowed from the cultures out of which it developed. Early Christianity was a fusion of the Ancient Greek thought and Judaism. Few of what are often thought of as uniquely Christian ideas are in fact so. Take, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most influential of all Christian ethical discourses. The moral landscape that Jesus sketched out in the sermon was already familiar. The Golden Rule – ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ – has a long history, an idea hinted at in Babylonian and Egyptian religious codes, before fully flowering in Greek and Judaic writing (having independently already appeared in Confucianism too). The insistence on virtue as a good in itself, the resolve to turn the other cheek, the call to treat strangers as brothers, the claim that correct belief is at least as important as virtuous action – all were important themes in the Greek Stoic tradition

…If the story of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution has been rewritten in the interests of creating a mythical ‘Christian Europe’, so too has the story of the relationship between reason and faith in the Enlightenment. What are now often called ‘Western values’ – democracy, equality, toleration, freedom of speech, etc – are the products largely of the Enlightenment and of the post-Enlightenment world. Such values are, of course, not ‘Western’ in any essential sense but are universal; they are Western only through an accident of geography and history.

…To challenge the myths and misconceptions about the Christian tradition is not to deny the distinctive character of that tradition (or traditions), nor its importance in incubating what we now call ‘Western’ thought. But the Christian tradition, and Christian Europe, is far more a chimera than a pure-bred beast. The history of Christianity, its relationship to other ethical traditions, and the relationship between Christian values and those of modern, liberal, secular society is far more complex than the trite ‘Western civilization is collapsing’ arguments acknowledge. The irony is that the defenders of Christendom are riffing on the same politics of identity as Islamists, multiculturalists and many of the other ists that such defenders so loathe.

We can’t seem to help it; we’re born storytellers. But I still laugh at how pervasive it is, this need to believe in some sort of golden age when things were so much clearer, better, happier or healthier. Myths of purity and simplicity are evergreen themes, but humans have always been conflicted and confused, and it’s only the increasing distance of time that allows us to think that history was ever so neat, tidy and linear.

Poking at the Giant Eyes of Ancient Gods (Slight Return)

By in jests japes jokes jollies, language, waiting for the barbarians

Rick Perry is literally trying to steal Herman Cain’s thunder

Whoa. Herman Cain literally has thunder? Well, you know, traditionally, the thunder gods were the head of the pantheon, so I’m surprised Cain isn’t the nominee already. But more to the point: we all know what happened to Prometheus for stealing enough of a spark from Zeus’s lightning to bring fire to humankind. Given what we know already of Perry’s, ah, problematic racial issues, is it wise of him to be provoking a thunder-having black man? What would the punishment be for a Texas Republican? Would he be chained to that infamous rock for eternity and forced to read every scientific paper ever published on climate change while being sodomized by an endless line of gay atheists? Or, given his fondness for capital punishment, perhaps Cain would electrocute him with lightning bolts several times a day before bringing him back to life? Or will he be covered in cheese and tomato sauce (plus two toppings) and left to the wild animals?

Or — maybe I should have asked this to begin with — is it even possible to literally steal something metaphorical?

You Will Know Them by Their Froot Loops

By in augean stables, jesus tie-dyed for your sins, ohferfucksake, religion, science

Robert Bellah:

Religion provides answers to such questions as “How shall I live?” and “What is the meaning of the universe?” that science has no capacity to answer. But because answers to such questions are incapable of empirical testing by scientific methodology, how can we evaluate the answers that various religions give? As I have said above, the truth of religious beliefs can be seen in the lives of people who live by those truths. And if we see remarkable individuals in other traditions than our own we can accept that they have some kind of truth even if it is not completely the same as ours.

I don’t feel like batting this one around like a cat mercilessly tormenting a small rodent. Let’s just get right down to elucidating what he’s saying here.

How do we know if religious beliefs are worthy? By looking at the actions of people who claim to be inspired by them.

Whoa, hey, hold up, you say. Most of us have seen religiously inspired actions that run the full gamut of human psychology, from selfless generosity to utter depravity. How can we tell which one of these wildly varying types truly represent the “truth” of a religion?

By only accepting as evidence the actions that we describe as remarkable (leaving aside that “remarkable” is a pretty value-neutral word from where I sit).

But, you may interrupt once again (awfully rude of you, you know), take Christianity. It’s been widely accepted in biblical scholarship since Albert Schweitzer that Jesus was just another apocalyptic cultist whose central concern was what he believed to be the imminent end of the world and the day of judgement to follow, a self-styled Jewish prophet who didn’t seem all that concerned with the worth of Gentiles. Why do we favor the insipid platitudes of the Sermon on the Mount as examples of Christianity’s “truth” rather than the numerous other examples where judgement, condemnation, and retribution are shown to be integral to its worldview?

Because they comport with the values that we have come to cherish by way of rational secularism.

So… religion provides us with “truths” that science can’t, and the way we know this is by judging those supposed truths in the light of rational consideration from as objective a perspective as we can attain, which, not coincidentally, happens to be a key component of a scientific outlook? Isn’t this just an incredibly convoluted way of projecting your own capacity for making critical distinctions onto an arbitrarily-chosen external authority to avoid having to accept full responsibility for your own life? Isn’t this an example of, pun intended, bad faith, ba-dum-bum-tssh?

*Crickets.*

How Now Clown Cow

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, spiritual-not-religious

Claire Fox:

We have come to interpret the very opposite of what Mill meant, that tolerance means that we should be respectful of all opinions. When we say our society has got to be tolerant, it becomes a relative thing – almost therapeutic mush that we are not allowed to offend anybody. This kind of tolerance leads to a situation where we refuse to challenge or test out arguments in the public sphere.

That is what is so ironic about the contemporary understanding of tolerance. It effectively says you must bite your lip and tolerate all views. This was not at all what Mill meant. Furedi takes on how tolerance has become degraded. He says tolerance has to be robust, interventionist and judgmental. You should tolerate all views, but that does not mean silently sitting by and agreeing with them.

I remember once reading a perspective criticizing tolerance from the left, because it wasn’t accepting enough. To that author, “tolerating” something still implied some sort of respectful disagreement or – gasp! – disdain for it. Only all-encompassing love and complete acceptance will do, comrade! You will be assimilated! (I don’t recall what the plan was for dealing with dissenters.)

But anyway. I was in a local bookstore the other day, and noticed this book on display by the register. “Hey!” I said. “I know that woman!” Her two sons were school friends of mine; I’d been out to their farm many times. Very nice woman, very nice family. I have not a cross word to say about any of them.

The book, now… uh, it’s a book about her, um, spiritual relationship with a cow. As I flipped through the first several pages, I realized that she was not using her cow as a literary device, a symbol of some sort of homespun, earthy wisdom. She’s not being figurative or taking poetic license here. She really claims that her cow communicated with her through some sort of telepathy, that she “heard” the cow’s thoughts in her own head as clearly as if she had spoken them. It’s sorta like Conversations with God, but as if God had teats and stood around looking dopey while chewing his cud.

Now, as I said, this is a perfectly sweet woman, and I always appreciated her kindness to animals, which she taught well to her kids. But there’s just no comfortable way to get around the fact that thoughts do not take the form of complete, linear sentences, scrolling across a screen in the brain like a news ticker, and they do not magically transfer through the ether in that state from one brain to another. Leaving aside, of course, that from what we know, cows do not have anything like the kind of cerebral activity that we do.

And so when this sort of thing comes up in personal conversation, it just hangs there like a rank odor that you realize, with a growing horror, is emitting from your acquaintance, and you shift uncomfortably, inching toward the exit, all the while hoping for a brief moment of self-awareness to dawn and allow them to excuse themselves gracefully.

I have this experience more times than I care to count. And it may surprise you to know that I invariably err on the side of politeness. Actually, one of the main reasons I enjoy writing pseudonymously on the Internet is because most of the people I know are, quite frankly, slightly nuts like that, and it would pain me to have to be the one to take a rational hammer to their metaphysical china. This is where I can speak the truth as I see it, letting the abstract ideas speak for themselves, independent of the personality behind them. Maybe not the people I know, but perhaps some stranger with similar beliefs will read what I write and be jarred into a different perspective. So I bite my lip in personal life, despite agreeing with Fox that mushy tolerance is not a value worth championing. Thus does sentimentality make hypocrites of us all.

Credo Quia Absurdum

By in atheism, augean stables, ohferfucksake, religion

David Berreby:

But, as Scott Atran has pointed out, the whole point of religious faith is that it is contrary to what we know by material means—that is why it’s faith. In other words, it is because it’s impossible for the sun to stand still that people value their belief that God made the sun stand still for Joshua.
As Atran puts it, “religious thought is insensitive to the kind of simple-minded disconfirmation through demonstrations of incoherence that [Sam] Harris and others propose.” So when you come along and say science shows the Sun can’t stand still, you’re failing utterly to speak to the reason people believe in the miracle.
Of course, if you point out that the reason people believe in miracles is either ignorance or a narcissistic need to believe in magic, that the universe itself is favorably disposed toward them and regularly intervenes on their personal behalf for the most petty reasons, and you suggest that this is not merely a false security but an unhelpful mindset that they might do well to leave behind, you’re accused of being rude and condescending. You’re not allowed to make a case against religious belief with science, you’re not allowed to make it with logic and rationality, and you’re not allowed to make it with psychology. It’s almost like certain apologists want atheists to just shut up and go away altogether. Oh, wait…

A Happy Anarchy Is All I Really Crave

By in extraordinary popular delusions, waiting for the barbarians

Dan Berrett:

But Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

…The defining aspect of Occupy Wall Street, its emphasis on direct action and leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, is most clearly embodied by its General Assembly, in which participants in the protest make group decisions both large and small, like adopting principles of solidarity and deciding how best to stay warm at night.

This intensive and egalitarian process is important both procedurally and substantively, Mr. Graeber says. “One of the things that revolutionaries have learned over the course of the 20th century is that the idea of the ends justifying the means is deeply problematic,” he says. “You can’t create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can’t establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same.”

When 2,000 people make a decision jointly, it is an example of direct action, or direct democracy, Mr. Graeber says. “It makes you feel different to go to a meeting where your opinions are really respected.” Or, as an editorial in the protest’s house publication, Occupied Wall Street Journal, put it, “This occupation is first about participation.”

…The idea that intellectual ferment is coming from the streets rather than academe is evidence that anarchism is witnessing something of a resurgence of interest among both activists and academics, says Nathan J. Jun, assistant professor of philosophy at Midwestern State University, in Texas, and author of the forthcoming Anarchism and Political Modernity.

While some students in the movement might be passingly familiar with anarchist studies, Mr. Jun says, they have probably not read much of the scholarship. It is much more likely that anarchism itself has had the greater influence on Occupy Wall Street because, he says, many activists there “regard anarchy as an ideal to be realized.”

Oh, dear. An ideal to be realized? Okay, there are those who would smile and shrug at the collapse of the nation-state, and at least they’re a little more intellectually consistent and clear on the concept. But if you think a modern industrial state is going to be run along the same lines as a hippie commune or an Amish community, or that life in a decentralized, consensus-based community of a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people is necessarily going to be any less oppressive to individualist sensibilities, well…

More than anything else, I think about Isaiah Berlin’s concept of value pluralism in cases like this: maybe, just maybe, some of the values you consider “good” are inherently in conflict with one another and cannot all converge on the same point in time. Maybe you can’t have equality, peace, contentment, justice, individualism, consumer goods, etc. all at the same time. Maybe, despite the fact that a bomb in Haymarket Square, Nestor Makhno leading the Anarchist Black Army during the Russian Civil War, Leon Czolgosz assassinating William McKinley, Alexander Berkman shooting Henry Clay Frick (add your own favorite example here) have all failed to light the way to utopia, and have often even been counterproductive to the revolutionary cause, maybe the 1% aren’t going to loosen their deathgrip on their purse strings until they get some genuine fear struck into them. Maybe the idea that all problems can be resolved rationally by sitting down peacefully and talking them out is an ideological delusion. I’m just saying.

Oh, I Have Slipped the Epistemological Bonds of Earth

By in atheism, philosophy, religion

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse:

Consider an analogy. In freethinker and atheist circles, a version of the Xenophanes correlation is often invoked to capture the contingency of religious belief. The following is exemplary.

Freethinker: If you were born in the United States of America, you are most likely to become a Christian. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you are likely to become a Muslim. If you had been born in Norway in the viking ages, you would have believed in Thor and Odin. If you were born in Athens around 500 BC, you’d worship Zeus and Athena.

The correlation here is, roughly, that the surrounding cultural milieu determines how one conceives of the divine. We may call this the sociological theory of religion. As the dominant religion of the culture varies with time and geography, the conceptions of the divine held by individuals will also vary. So far, this is only a descriptive point, but it is often deployed as a criticism of religion. The presumption seems to be that one’s conception of the divine should not be determined by simple contingencies. And so the more one’s theology is the product of time and chance, the less confident one should be that it is correct. The determining factors are sociological and historical, not rational.

However, once we make this observation about our images of the divine, we can subject the whole of our theology to the same criticism. It’s not just conceiving god with a long beard that’s in trouble; conceiving of god as rational, loving, and good may be projections as well.

Interestingly, the question of existence never arises for Xenophanes. In fact, in other fragments, Xenophanes offers positive conceptions of the greatest of the gods. But once we see the critical trajectory of Xenophanes’ challenges, we are compelled to ask the question: Isn’t god’s existence, too, a projection, the product of mere contingency?

Obviously, the analogy is only meant to cast doubt on the monotheistic conception of one true God for all people at all time. But pace their concluding question, this sentence is what I found most interesting: “It’s not just conceiving god with a long beard that’s in trouble; conceiving of god as rational, loving, and good may be projections as well.” David Hume and other philosophical heavyweights have questioned whether there’s any reason to suppose that God must necessarily be the ne plus ultra of benevolence and rational intelligence; there’s nothing new about that.

The reasoning underlying the analogy, though, is based on the assumption that rationality is the best way to know the objective truth about things, to whatever extent we can. It’s the only way to make sure you’re not allowing your emotional reactions, limited experience and confirmation bias to color your perceptions. Is that true? You often hear religious apologists argue that there are other “truths” that science doesn’t have the vocabulary to address, but they seem to feel that those truths are still capable of being rationally understood. Do they ever offer an alternative way of knowing that doesn’t depend on rationality?

(I kid, of course. Even epistemological anarchy has been done before. Nothing new under the sun, alas!)

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