December 2011

Black Flowers Blossom

By in books, history, moralizing, the madness of crowds

Ingrid Norton:

Pinker recognizes World Wars I and II as big problems for his thesis that modernity lessens violence. Though far from the only mass atrocities in human history, these conflicts entail some of the most densely violent years in the annals of bloodshed. Pinker asserts that despite this, the détente that occurred afterwards was more durable: The “enduring moral trend of the [20th] century was a violence-averse humanism that originated in the Enlightenment, became overshadowed by counter-Enlightenment ideologies wedded to agents of growing destructive power, and regained momentum in the wake of World War II.”

Confirmation bias much? Yeah, I have to agree with what others have said about this book: it’s more than a little specious to pretend that “the Enlightenment” only encompasses those strains of thought that happen to appeal to us today. As Isaiah Berlin stressed repeatedly, a large number of Enlightenment thinkers accepted that Newton’s accomplishments in physics could be duplicated in ethics, that “true” answers to normative questions could be obtained through rational inquiry, and that if one persisted in clinging to worldviews which had been discredited scientifically, they were not simply mistaken but possibly perverse, and perhaps a liberal application of force was needed to make them see the error of their ways, or at least clear their outdated detritus off of the shining path of progress.
Some thinkers who epitomized the sort of Enlightenment ideals that Pinker values, like Voltaire and Fontenelle, hewed to an “original sin” conception of humanity as hopelessly corrupt and weak, needing strong, enlightened guidance from elites. Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Maoists followed suit. Even Nazism wasn’t quite the “counter-Enlightenment” movement that Pinker seems to imply. Opposed to ideas of toleration and personal freedom, yes; but they shared a belief with many progressives of the age in eugenics in particular, or more broadly, in the application of science to purify humanity in order to achieve its glorious future destiny. There really isn’t a neat dividing line between the Enlightenment, the Romantics, progressives, and reactionaries, and no reason to think that one will ever appear.

People Talkin’ About Us, They Got Nothin’ Else to Do

By in books

Issac Chotiner:

Epstein finds these stories irresistible, as he phrases it, “A man or woman without any interest in gossip may be impressive in his or her restraint, but also wanting in curiosity, uninterested in the variousness of human nature, dead to the wildly abundant oddity of life, and thereby, in some central way, deficient.”

Deficient, huh? Well, this is where I just like to invoke the vague autism-spectrum thing to explain my failure to evince interest in the salacious details of other people’s peccadilloes. But in fairness, when I read that, it occurred to me that perhaps this also applies to my lack of interest in reading fiction. Seriously, I’m the most fiction-deficient person you know. I hardly have any novels on my shelves, except for escapist Forgotten Realms fantasy stuff. I’m intensely interested in issues and ideas, especially in philosophy and history and psychology, but not so much in particular individual characters. Interesting.

But yeah, gossip per se doesn’t hold any attraction for me. It was strange over Thanksgiving, not having seen my family much for several months, to notice how jarring it felt to hear my mom and brother indulging in petty, somewhat mean-spirited gossip about people we knew. I didn’t realize how little I missed being around it. My brother told me something about a former co-worker of ours, who he claimed was having some sort of trouble in his twenty-year relationship. I found myself both embarrassed and irritated at even having to listen to it. And that makes me wonder about the accuracy of Epstein’s description — doesn’t it take a more nuanced, experienced understanding of human nature to hear a rumor like that and immediately think, yeah, well, maybe his wife is cheating on him, and he’s always seemed like a super-swell guy, but what the hell do I know about what their relationship has been like for almost two decades? There’s always more to the story than what you first hear. People change and grow apart, interpreting the same situations differently until one day they suddenly realize that a hairline crack in their shared experience has widened into a unbridgeable chasm. It doesn’t always lend itself well to the gossipy tendency to paint a heroes-and-villains kind of story.

The thing I associate most with gossip isn’t being titillated by dirty little secrets; after all, a lot of gossip is benign, just a way to fill the air with words and create some sort of common bond. It’s what most people would think of as the mindset of a small town, where everybody knows everybody else, and more importantly, seems to take it for granted that they have a right to be in everyone else’s business. My family is very small and I only have two living relatives outside of the area; we’ve never been very tight-knit. But my ex had a larger extended family, and it was always expected that you would put in regular appearances, especially at holidays, and there was something unsavory about you if you didn’t. I could never get over my instinctive revulsion at the presumption, the expectation that I was obliged to keep everyone informed about what I was doing, and again, the embarrassment at having to hear about whatshisname’s gambling problem and so-and-so’s mental illness.

I wish we had an acceptable social category that encompassed the feeling of “You’re a pleasant enough person, but we’re only associating through external circumstance, we really don’t have anything in common, and we should just be adults and accept that we don’t want to spend any time around each other without anyone feeling insulted.” Maybe the Germans or the Japanese have a word for that.

Tattoos with Meaning, American Spirit Lights

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, herbivory

Tim Donnelly:

Midtown is not exactly a hotbed of tattoo activity at any time of day, let alone at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, but that turned out to be the saving grace that prevented me from becoming a hypocrite. As I accidentally discovered online a few days later, getting a tattoo can be about as vegan as having a rib-eye sewn to your arm. The ink and processes at your average shop contain a veritable buffet of animal detritus: charred bones of dead animals in the ink, fat from once-living things in the glycerin that serves as a carrying agent, enzymes taken from caged sheep that go into making the care products.

…”I’ve never found anything that works as well,” said Karr, who dabbles in ink-making himself. “It sucks that you can’t live your life completely vegan. Where do you draw the line? It’s really difficult to remove all the elements from your life.”

In times of ethical crisis like this I turn to my friend J.P. Piteo, a coworker and compendium of cruelty-free esoterica. In addition to being the longest tenured vegan in my quiver (13 years), she’s tattooed from ear to ankle. She didn’t learn about the ink issue until five years after her first tattoo and well into her vegan career.

“In the moment you are permanently decorating yourself with a tattoo, you can also choose how you make an impact on the environment,” she told me. “And we all know how pollution works and how it’s largely irreversible, just like your new tattoo. That’s supposed to be a part of what veganism is about, that big picture.”

It’s funny how those who are most likely to espouse platitudes about everything being connected, all being one in the circle of life, never seem to firmly grasp just how true that really is, and how devastating it is to our egocentric experience of the world.

Aiming to minimize needless suffering is a great thing, of course. Doing your best to be aware and compassionate is a commendable thing. But you see it in descriptors like “hypocritical” — this is where veganism as an ideology is just one more ego bath, taking overweening pride in abstractions like consistency and rationality, nowhere near as radical as its proponents like to style themselves.

It’s simply impossible to remove yourself from samsara so that you are not contributing a single molecule in thought or deed to perpetuating suffering. I don’t care who told you otherwise; Buddha, Jesus, whoever, they were flat-out lying through their yellow teeth. It’s a delusion to insist on seeing suffering as an unfortunate side effect that can be prevented with enough diligent maintenance like a homeowner keeping the cedar siding from getting warped and mildewed, rather than a fundamental attribute of life. Even the purest vegan body is going to replenish the soil which will nourish the plants which will be eaten by the herbivores who will fall prey to the carnivores who will feed the worms and insects who will be snapped up by the birds and lizards and on and on as it’s always gone, as it always will even once we are gone (thanks to Shanna for the recommendation; that is indeed a fascinating book), until the Sun vaporizes the Earth and all of this sound and fury turns back into basic atoms scattered across endless space. And that’s the crux of it — veganism as an ideology is just one more way of desperately trying to convince ourselves that we ultimately matter, that we’re special, that through our self-centered willpower, we can save and be saved.

You Cannot Trust a Single Thing I Say

By in atheism, religion

Religious people distrust the world’s estimated 500 million atheists as much as rapists, a study found Friday in the wake of a poll that said less than half of Americans would vote for an atheist president.
“Where there are religious majorities — that is, in most of the world — atheists are among the least trusted people,” said lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
…“While atheists may see their disbelief as a private matter on a metaphysical issue, believers may consider atheists’ absence of belief as a public threat to cooperation and honesty.”
Not to tie the faith-minded up in logical Gordian knots, but who would a believer consider more trustworthy, then: an atheist who tells you so up front, or one who publicly makes a minimal gesture toward piety while privately rolling their eyes at what they need to do to appease the simpletons? Doesn’t matter, I suppose; they’re both equally flammable.

Still Waters Run Deep

By in books

Nigel Featherstone:

Part of the allure of reading is finding fictional worlds more interesting than the predictable day-to-day of real life. But books haven’t simply offered escape. They have given me depth, they have given me perspective, the sense that my days and nights have expanded, opened out.
…The fact is that at the age of forty-three years and twenty-eight days I have a room that can rightly, justifiably be called a library. It’s a physical thing as much as a brain and heart thing; it’s a space, a place, a room all of my own, in every possible way. It is without question my favorite room in the house, the most important room, as archaic as that sounds, as archaic as it probably is, but I really don’t care. My library is my anchor, it’s my look-out, it’s my lighthouse.
I was just talking with a friend about our respective literary nerdisms; mine history, hers fantasy/sci-fi. I said that I didn’t want to live my own life, I just want to spend it reading about everything else that’s ever happened. But I don’t mean it as a disparaging comment on the quality of my everyday life. I just cheerfully accept that I’m an ordinary, nondescript schmo with no good stories to tell, and it’s more fascinating to read the greatest stories of humankind’s adventures during our brief time at the pinnacle of existence. And yes, I, too, would like to have an entire room I could justifiably call a library, rather than a dozen or so mismatched bookcases scattered throughout the house. Someday…
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