December 2024

Death Is Unanswered

By in atheism, religion, the geist of the zeit

Peter Savodnik:

But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

There is something inevitable about this reassessment, Jonathan Haidt, the prominent New York University psychologist and best-selling author, told me. (Haidt’s books include The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.) “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution,” he said. He was alluding to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote extensively on the nature of faith.

“We evolved in a long period of group versus group conflict and violence, and we evolved a capacity to make a sacred circle and then bind ourselves to others in a way that creates a strong community,” Haidt told me.

When Savodnik contacted me a while back, he said he was writing an article about prominent secular intellectuals turning toward religion, and he wanted to know if I, an important philosopher and public intellectual, had any thoughts about it. I replied:

He sighed, and asked if I’d mind elaborating. Well, I said, no offense, but journalists are no better than marketing executives, and as such, I don’t take their proclamations seriously, whether the hot new thing is religion or those Stanley tumblers that people were fighting over in the aisles of Target. The media exists to create ephemeral narratives in a desperate attempt to stave off an unguarded moment of crushing self-awareness, and this one will soon be replaced by the next. Life will continue on much as it has. I don’t think there will be any significant return to that old-time religion, but if Crawford, Ferguson, and Hirsi Ali are satisfied with their new Christian outlook on life, good for them. As for me, I don’t feel like I’m lacking meaning, I still don’t believe in deities or immortal souls, and even if I calculate in utilitarian fashion that church attendance is a better thing for society overall than social justice activism, I think it would be a patronizing insult to go through the motions myself as a “faitheist.” As always, whatever the current enthusiasm, I just ask to be left out of it.

I see my remarks didn’t make the published article.

That’s All He Can Stands, He Can’t Stands No More

By in jests japes jokes jollies, music

“This is why Trump won! I mean, this is our culture now!”

Ben Shapiro? Hugh Hewitt? No, this was a friend of mine, a guy in his fifties who has a weekly late-night radio show on a local station, where he plays punk, alternative, post-punk, and weird music in general. To the extent that he’s political, it’s a typical Gen-X sort of liberalism, formed in the days when “alternative music” actually meant being a non-lucrative subculture in opposition to the mainstream. For many of my fellow Gen-Xers, their worldview was solidified by the early 1990s: Republicans as the racist, sexist Tartuffes, and Democrats as the easy-going, open-minded cool people who aren’t religiously opposed to having fun. So what could have inspired this Psalm 22ish lament?

Well, as I said, he’s a DJ, he plays in a band, and he’s constantly listening to all sorts of music. With the end of the year approaching, it’s almost time for his “Best of 2024” episode, his favorite of the year. This year, for some reason, he thought he’d listen to some of the year’s mainstream hits and see if his punk-rock snobbery had led him to miss any gems. It was then that the streaming algorithm produced Ice Spice’s “Think U The Shit” (Fart),” with its poetic refrain:

Think you the shit, bitch?
You not even the fart (Grrah)
I be goin’ hard (Grrah)
I’m breakin’ they hearts, like
Bitches be quick, but I’m quicker (Like)
Bitches be thick, but I’m thicker (Like)
She could be rich, but I’m richer (Damn)

“I love hip-hop! I consider myself a scholar! But this…” he sputtered. This is a guy who quit a ska band because he thought a couple of the other members were racist, as evidenced by the fact that they booed the mention of Barack Obama’s name from the stage at one show. I laughed and laughed, partially at the sub-moronic drivel coming from the bluetooth speaker, but mostly at his surprise. I feel like I’ve heard plenty of comparable garbage. Why was this the bridge too far?

The Hidden

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

I suppose the question boils down to whether you think that everything in life should be out in the open or whether some things should be concealed. I favour the second view, but I think I am now in the minority. It is not merely that, like everyone else (I assume) there are things about me that I would wish no one else to know: I think there are things about everyone I care for that I would not wish to know. The art is in knowing where to draw the line.

The hidden is, in part, what makes life interesting. To say that someone is an open book is also to imply that they are shallow. There are many things that should be skirted over or even brushed under the carpet.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Nothing But Wickedness: The Delusions of Our Culture

• While talking to a college kid we have working for us during his winter break, I offhandedly mentioned my wish for a widespread ethos of “digital modesty,” in which people refrain from oversharing. I thought this was a banal remark, but he seemed quite struck by it. Has no one else ever offered him that perspective before? It just serves as a reminder of the quotation misattributed to André Gide: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

• While listening to Christmas music, I was reminded of a coworker from my days in the newspaper business, a guy from the island of Truk, in Micronesia. I worked with this guy almost every day from 1993-2011; in particular, this song called to mind one Christmas morning when we were two of the few people who still had to come in to work rather than take a day off. He was everyone’s ideal employee: hardworking and always cheerful, but he was somewhat quiet, owing partially to his basic command of English. We only had a few real conversations over those couple of decades. The last time I talked to him was in the summer of 2013, when we discussed him doing some side-work for me. Upon Googling him last weekend, I found that he died of cancer almost a decade ago, in February 2015. He was only 46. Did I ever really know him? Did I need to?

• At present we regard it as a matter of propriety not to be anxious either to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything. “Is it true that the good God is everywhere present? ” asked a little girl of her mother: “I think that is indecent”: a hint to philosophers! One should have more reverence for the shame-facedness with which nature has concealed herself behind enigmas and motley uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not showing her reasons? Perhaps her name is Baubo, to speak in Greek?… Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: for that purpose it is necessary to keep bravely to the surface, the fold and the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in forms, tones, and words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial – from profundity!

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Obiter Scripta, no. 130

By in books, obiter scripta

From an early age he sunbathed naked on Welsh hillsides (when there was sun), which did not endear him to the preachers of the local chapels. He believed himself to be a druid, wrote in an archaic Welsh all his own, and wore red trousers, a green tunic, and a complete fox skin on his head. He grew a long white beard and refused to wear socks. He was a vegetarian, claiming that to eat the flesh of animals was to take on their characteristics (exactly what a vegetarian cousin of mine claimed a century later), and was an anti-vaccinationist. He was in favour of free love and fathered a child at the age of 87.

He was the father of British cremation, believing burial to be unhygenic and wasteful. In 1884 he tried to cremate his 5 month old son (called Jesus Christ Price) but was arrested in the attempt. A howling mob attacked his home for his blasphemy, but at his trial—Dr. Price always defended himself—he was acquitted by the judge, James Fitzjames Stephen, author of the classic riposte to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and uncle of Virginia Woolf. Henceforth cremation was permissible under UK law. The howling mob changed its mind too. Around 20,000 people attended Dr. Price’s own cremation, nine years later.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Nothing But Wickedness: The Delusions of Our Culture

This potent little capsule biography reminds me of a similar one by Bill Bryson. Again, it seems to me that a full biography would be disappointing in comparison. On the one hand, it’s sobering to imagine one’s own life summarized, however deftly, in a couple short paragraphs. On the other hand, we can only hope for a Dalrymple or Bryson to memorialize us in such a charming way. Nudity seems to be a common theme with these eccentrics. I guess I need to start going around naked more often if I’m going to be worthy of an amusing eulogy.

Obiter Scripta, no. 129

By in books, obiter scripta

Let him who has two pairs of trousers turn one of them into cash and purchase this book.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

I have never gone trouserless in order to buy a book, but I have known the pleasure of using credit card points to that purpose. Groceries, business supplies, and other mundane necessities, through some abstract alchemy, become a new hardcover on my nightstand.