Jan Gossaert: Portrait of a Merchant c. 1530. But is he loved? (see the discussion after the poem)**
PLACES, LOVED ONES
No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;
To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it's not your fault
Should the town turn dreary,
The girl a dolt.
Yet, having missed them, you're
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.
~ Philip Larkin (1954)
I think Kurt Vonnegut put it more concisely: “You finally come to understand that you love whoever is there to be loved.”
(I'm quoting this from memory, so there may be a word off here and there, and I know I remembered the gist of it: You don’t waste your life waiting for The One, but love whoever is available to be loved.)
And the same goes for some ideal place where you completely “belong.” Now, if you have a dream about living in New York, by all means at least visit — you’ll find the visit interesting, but it will also give you enough taste of the city to make you know if this is your kind of place. Some cities you have to spend some time in before you get a feel for them — but when it comes to New York, you’ll know right away.
Another problem with cities, however, is something that Larkin alludes to: they change. Los Angeles used to be enchanting — I'm not kidding. Santa Monica was my special favorite, but Beverly Hills was great to drive through, or Sunset Blvd from downtown all the way to the ocean — I just loved that ride. Hollywood was tacky, but interesting. Now Los Angeles has become a hopeless traffic jungle, practically unlivable — and I watched it become less and less livable.
People change too, but because we change as well, and because a long-term relationship is such a great journey and adventure, I would not try to discourage anyone from a serious commitment (except when two people are so poorly matched that everyone can see it from a mile except for the besotted pair — usually that’s not a problem if marriage is delayed until somewhat older age, when you presumably “found yourself”).
Or not “besotted.” Not long ago I had an opportunity to witness the tension between a rich older man and his much younger, beautiful wife — I’d say she was at least 25 years younger. It was a classic gold-digger marriage, except that in those we tend to think of the woman as completely cold-hearted and calculating, while the man may be genuinely in love and wanting to spoil his young darling with pretty jewelry, fancy cars, and so on. Here there was only hostility in the spectacularly elegant mansion, reminding me, again, that it’s better to be utterly poor and in love than rich and loveless.
Look again at Gossaert’s portrait of the merchant. Wonderful cheekbones! He’s prosperous. But is he loved? Thinking again about the couple I recently visited: he was putting her down while she was milking him for money, making him buy her more jewelry (she was already bejeweled). She’d break into Spanish now and then — “And she’s been here already ten years!” he exclaimed. She broke down and started crying — very quietly, which somehow made it all the more heart-rending. And I wonder — can you call yourself a success unless you are loved?
(Or at least receiving nourishing affection and emotional support from several sources, e.g. good friends? Or loving your work, with positive human contact coming to you now and then from those who appreciate your work? (Ideally, all of the above, but life is about dealing with the real, not the ideal.)
Fine, you say. But how does that fit with Vonnegut’s idea that you love whoever is there to be loved? If for whatever reason (e.g. a strong belief that a child needs a two-parent home) you decide to stay in an unsatisfying marriage, you can consider this idea: love is not a feeling; it’s a behavior. It’s how lovingly you act toward your partner. It’s how you wish for what is best for him or her rather than following your own agenda, thinking only of what you want.
Frankly, I'm guessing here. My model is what happened after I realized that depression was not a feeling, but a behavior — and a behavior can be changed. I did change my behavior, and my life changed dramatically. I realize that this becomes more tricky when it’s not just you and what you do, but also another person, complex and unpredictable, their soul a proverbial dark forest. But you can also try something unexpected: instead of cursing him or her, you can bless the person.
**
“EMOTIONAL HUNGER IS NOT LOVE. It is a strong emotional need caused by deprivation in childhood.
People who are emotionally hungry act compulsively in relation to others in much the same manner as an addict. Their exaggerated attention and involvement have an ongoing negative impact on the person they think they love.” ~ Robert Firestone (paraphrased)
Oriana:
I don’t think I ever met anyone who had zero emotional hunger, some degree of abuse of childhood. But experience has taught me that if you meet someone who had a truly horrible childhood, run for your life — if that person has not had therapy in some form, which need not be conventional. Otherwise, sooner or later you’ll be on the receiving end of displaced rage.
If you did experience abuse, if you recognize that emotional hunger in you, are you doomed to behave like an addict? This is where the idea (never mind whether it’s 100% accurate) of love as a behavior rather than a feeling can be very useful — because a behavior can be changed. We can learn to perform small acts of kindness — be it just a smile or a supportive comment. Or just that light of attention and gratitude in your eyes. Your very presence.
“You always have something to give” may be a platitude, but it’s one of the wisest platitudes I know. It’s there with “That too shall pass”; “You are suffering because you WANT something from that person”; and the blessing “May the best outcome manifest itself.”
I'm tempted to add the recently learned: “Seek to be useful rather than happy.” In contrast to the sixties motto: “Don’t just do something; sit there,” I am a strong advocate of doing something, particularly something useful and/or beautiful (though to me beauty IS useful; it nourishes the soul).
HOLDEN CAULFIELD: CHRIST-LIKE REBEL OR JUST A SELF-CENTERED WHINER?
~ The text for Holden’s behavior is his insistence on absolute primitive Christianity: “Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. . . . I think any one of the Disciples would’ve sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.” ~
~ Holden isn’t unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees that people are phonies because he is unhappy. What makes his view of other people so cutting and his disappointment so unappeasable is the same thing that makes Hamlet’s feelings so cutting and unappeasable: his grief. Holden is meant, it’s true, to be a kind of intuitive moral genius. (So, presumably, is Hamlet.) But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it. ~
Harold Bloom: ~ Holden is seventeen in the novel, but appears not to have matured beyond thirteen, his age when Allie died. Where Holden’s distrust of adult language originates, Salinger cannot quite tell us, but the distrust is both noble and self-destructive. . . Faulkner remarked that Holden’s dilemma was his inability to find and accept an authentic mentor, a teacher or guide who could arouse his trust. The dilemma, being spiritual, hurts many among us, and is profoundly American. Holden speaks for our skepticism, and for our need. That is a large burden for so fragile a literary character, and will turn out eventually to be either aesthetic salvation for The Catcher in the Rye, or a prime cause for its dwindling down to the status of a period piece. ~
William Faulkner: ~ To me, his tragedy was not that he was, as he perhaps thought, not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity. His tragedy was that when he attempted to enter the human race, there was no human race there. ~
~ His younger brother whom he has idolized for his innocence — the way he now does his sister Phoebe — has died. And he ruminates on this – on going to his grave and being caught in a downpour and thinking of leaving his brother there underground in this terrible day. And later, he himself is walking along the street in New York. And it should be festive. It’s around Christmastime. The shoppers are out. And he is broken into a sweat. Every time he steps off the curb, he thinks I’m going to go down and down forever. No one will ever see me again. This kind of calls up that image of his brother in his grave. And he starts praying to his brother — Allie, don’t let me disappear. Don’t let me disappear. There’s such terror there. The humor that has sustained so much of this novel begins to unravel at the end and you’re left with this naked soul in pain and in conflict. Finally, you see not with the world but with himself. ~
~ Holden talks like a teenager, and this makes it natural to assume that he thinks like a teenager as well. But like all the wise boys and girls in Salinger’s fiction—like Esmé and Teddy and the many brilliant Glasses—Holden thinks like an adult. No teen-ager (and very few grownups, for that matter) sees through other human beings as quickly, as clearly, or as unforgivingly as he does. Holden is a demon of verbal incision. . . .
”You had to feel sort of sorry for her, in a way.” The secret to Holden’s authority as a narrator is that he never lets anything stand by itself. He always tells you what to think. He has everyone pegged. That’s why he’s so funny. But The New Yorker’s editors were right: Holden isn’t an ordinary teenager—he’s a prodigy. He seems (and this is why his character can be so addictive) to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life. ~
https://lithub.com/holden-caulfield-egotistical-whiner-or-melancholy-boy-genius/
Oriana:
“Holden isn’t unhappy because he sees that people are phonies; he sees that people are phonies because he is unhappy.” ~ Louis Menand, in “Holden Caulfield at Fifty.” For me that speaks so loud that I don’t need anything else.
But I also like the insight that there is a religious angle to the book, and that Caulfield can be seen as a Christ-like figure — at least now and then. The text for Holden’s behavior is his insistence on absolute primitive Christianity: “Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. . . . I think any one of the Disciples would’ve sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I’ll bet anything Jesus didn’t do it.” ~ Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, in The Fiction of J. D. Salinger
WHY TRUMP SUPPORTERS DON’T SEE HIM AS CORRUPT
~ “In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
Fox’s decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen’s guilty plea illustrates Stanley’s point. In the eyes of many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences.
The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms.
Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense. Since 2014, Trump has employed the phrase rule of law nine times in tweets. Seven of them refer to illegal immigration.
Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”
Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/what-trumps-supporters-think-of-corruption/568147/
Oriana:
After reading this article online, several people have commented “Now I understand!” It’s a different meaning of corruption that is crucial here: not legal corruption, not laundering of the Russian mafia money — much less hush money paid to porn stars — but “corruption” of the traditional hierarchies of white supremacy and male supremacy. For a long time I too was at a loss as to what conservatives were trying to “conserve.” In a word, it’s is their privilege.
Mary:
I also found the Atlantic article on why Trump’s supporters do not see him as corrupt to be very enlightening. They are not worried about his racism, misogyny, fascistic tendencies, love of dictators, lack of intelligence, boorishness, narcissism, etc. They are worried about threats to their own privilege, and loss of the “traditional order” where equality, freedom, diversity, inclusiveness and equal rights for all are not only not valued, they are seen as evil, threatening, and to be avoided, thwarted and suppressed at any cost.
The two most important things about this are first, that what the liberal, democratic, humanistic mind sees as ethical, good and desirable, as just and necessary changes, the defenders of the Traditional see as evil, even demonic. Women, minorities, immigrants struggling for freedom and equality are actually the enemy — “uppity” folks who have “forgotten their place.” If you hear the voice of the slaveholder here, you are not mistaken. The fear is that these uppity folks will upend the order of the world, and unseat the “rightful” owners.
The second is that in defending their privilege (to wealth and power and undisputed ownership), nothing, truly nothing, is out of bounds. Those who are threats deserve what they get, up to and including torture and death. So we have people shot, beaten, lynched, burned, bombed. Children taken from parents and put in cages. Parents taken from children and deported. All fueled by hatred and rage . . . deep and seemingly limitless. And completely unembarrassed.
Again I feel we must remember we’ve seen this all before, and there’s nothing, Nothing that makes it impossible for this to go to the same monstrous conclusion.
On that dark note, sorry. I am not really a complete pessimist — but sometimes it’s hard to see past the mess to a better time.
Oriana:
Yes, you are so right to remind us that “we’ve seen all this before.” There are photographs of lynching mobs — and in them none of the participants seem anything but self-satisfied. They are not hiding their faces. I suddenly feel just a grain of appreciation for the KKK for at least hiding their faces.
Ford Madox Brown: The Last of England, 1855. Remember when T asked, "Why can't we have more immigrants from places like Norway?"**
~ “In the wake of Nikita Khrushchev's "secret" report to the 20th Party Congress, in February of 1956 — one denouncing and effectively desanctifying Stalin, three years after the latter's death, as a mass-murderer of innocent people, rather than the greatest and wisest human being ever to walk the earth — there was registered across the country a rash of suicides among the mid- to high-ranking Party members, unable to reconcile themselves to the reality of their having wasted their lives worshiping a false idol and veritable antichrist of Marxist-Leninist theory, the wicked perverter and debaucher of the beautiful pan-human idea of the deathless future Kingdom of Communism.” ~ M. Iossel
Oriana:
There was also a wave of suicides in Germany after Hitler’s death in 1945 — and I don’t mean just those high-ranking Nazis who feared reprisal for their war crimes. Some “ordinary Nazis” simply could not bear the reality of defeat and the collapse of the Utopia to which they dedicated their lives. Some killed their families and then themselves.
*
Stalin and Lenin in the Red Square Mausoleum. Stalin’s body was later removed. *
TELEOLOGICAL THINKING: THE COGNITIVE ERROR BEHIND CREATIONISM AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES
~ “Teleological thinking involves ascribing intentions and purposes to features of the world that may not have any consciousness or desires at all. One example Dieguez gave is the thought that the sun rises to provide us light — when in reality the sun appears to rise in the sky because of the Earth's rotation in the solar system.
These patterns of thought are "part of children’s earliest intuitions about the world," the authors, led by Pascal Wagner-Egger, note in the paper.
"This type of thinking is anathema to scientific reasoning, and especially to evolutionary theory, and was famously mocked by Voltaire, whose character Pangloss believed that 'noses were made to wear spectacles.'" said Dieguez. "Yet it is very resilient in human cognition, and we show that it is linked not only to creationism, but also to conspiracism.”
One way to detect teleological thinking in individuals if to find that they subscribe to views such as, "Nothing happens by accident" or "Everything happens for a reason” [“reason” in the sense of “purpose”]. The researchers found that these types of views correspond closely with a propensity to believe conspiracy theories.
But this kind of thinking also bears a striking resemblance to creationism — the view that Darwinian evolution by natural selection didn't occur and that life on Earth was specifically designed (by God, it is usually assumed) with the diversity of species that we see today.
It's worth noting that this view itself may carry with it the corresponding belief that evolutionary views are themselves the result of a conspiracy to deceive the public about the origins of life.
In a series of surveys, Dieguez and other researchers found that teleological thinking, conspiracy theories, and creationism were correlated — albeit sometimes only "modestly" — with one another.
"By drawing attention to the analogy between creationism and conspiracism, we hope to highlight one of the major flaws of conspiracy theories and therefore help people detect it, namely that they rely on teleological reasoning by ascribing a final cause and overriding purpose to world events," Dieguez says. "We think the message that conspiracism is a type of creationism that deals with the social world can help clarify some of the most baffling features of our so-called 'post-truth era.’"
Understanding how these beliefs propagate and why they are so compelling to people — even when, as in the case of Q Anon, they are so obviously nonsense — is critically important to find a way to prevent their spread. The researchers hope their work can help educators and communicators better refute and undermine false theories and beliefs.” ~
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/scientists-identify-key-cognitive-error-could-explain-why-people-believe
A reader's comment: If you believe in souls, heaven, gods or god, ghosts, astrology, Q, psychics, creationism, etc. you are still thinking like a child.
Oriana:
Teleological thinking is explored in depth in Jesse Bering’s brilliant book, The Belief Instinct. The book also presents findings on other cognitive errors underlying religion. Humans are averse to randomness and apparent lack of meaning. They are story tellers, and seek a coherent narrative.
Reasoning in terms of purpose is especially prevalent among young children, Bering showed. “Mountains exist so that animals can climb to higher places.” Rocks? “So that animals have something to scratch their backs against.” For children, things exist for some purpose rather than because of this or that cause (not that we’d expect a child — or an uneducated adult, for that matter — to know about volcanoes or tectonic upthrust).
Evolution, too, is a narrative — but we must not forget that there is no overriding purpose underlying it (or at least we have found no evidence of such purpose), and that devolution can take place too. As Jeremy Sherman said: “We didn’t fall from grace. We are rising from slime.” But even that rise is not without setbacks and unintended consequences. Downright errors and inefficiencies argue against “intelligent design.”
Amborella trichopoda — the earliest known flowering plant“Moralizing is way more prevalent than morality. Rationalizing is way more prevalent than rationality.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
*
HOW SLAVERY INSPIRED “SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT”
~ “In 1911 a congressional special committee convened to investigate the impact of new business practices on the lives of workers. Of particular interest to the committee was something called scientific management, a technique that sought to measure and improve worker productivity. The system’s most vocal proponent, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor, had just published his magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s work would become an inspirational touchstone for the management profession. Indeed, his influence continues today. Articles profiling management pioneers often begin with him, lauding his efforts to apply precise metrics to even basic processes.
However, when Taylor and others were called to testify in 1911, the tone was far from inspirational. And scientific management’s critics gestured to a very different point of reference—slavery. An experienced iron worker from the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts told the committee that scientific management felt to him “as if it is getting down to slavery.” Managers, he said, exerted extreme control, “following you when you are at your job . . . and with a stop watch stand over you while you bend down to pick up a few rods. . . . This is too much for a man to stand.” The head of a machinists’ union argued that the system had “reduced the men to virtual slavery, low wages,” and that it had “engendered such an air of suspicion among the men that each man regards every other man as a possible traitor or spy.” At the close of the hearings, though the committee took little action, it agreed that elements of the system acted “the same as a slave driver’s whip on the negro, as it keeps him in a constant state of agitation.”
One associate of Taylor’s, Scudder Klyce, argued that scientific management was simply a system of “Cooperation or democracy,” but Klyce’s definition of democracy was decidedly undemocratic: he describes it as a system that “consists of the able person’s taking the lead in giving ‘orders’ in the cases where he is of superior ability, and the others’ submitting: it is the relationship of master and slave, regardless of how otherwise it may be named.” From the manager’s perspective, control was the essential characteristic of scientific management. The relations of control could change over time: “At any time a lathe hand may be able to show the superintendent a better way.” But from the perspective of workers, fleeting reversals offered little benefit. When they showed the superintendent a better way, they gave up their own power. They rendered themselves replaceable.
The most striking parallel between slavery and scientific management can be found in the “task idea,” which Taylor described as “the most prominent single element in modern scientific management.” The task system is closely identified with Henry Laurence Gantt, who is well known today for the Gantt chart, a scheduling tool, which still bears his name. During the heyday of scientific management, Gantt developed a “task and bonus system,” which paired a flat task and a time wage with bonuses for overwork. Workers would be paid a base wage plus an additional piece rate for production above a certain minimum. By combining an achievable (rather than a maximal) task with bonuses, workers would enjoy the security of a minimum payment but also be encouraged to strive beyond it.
Yet while they introduced some novel details, neither Gantt nor Taylor created the task system. It has a much longer history and was one of the principal methods of organizing labor under slavery. Under the task system, an enslaved person would be assigned a set “task” or quota that he or she was expected to complete by the end of the day; this was in contrast to the gang system, where enslaved people labored under constant supervision for a set period of time. In some cases, slavers who used the task system even gave monetary bonuses for achievement above set targets. They “dangled the carrot” in a way that resembles not just Gantt’s methods but those of the gig economy today. Indeed, except for the base payment and the critically important ability for workers to quit, Gantt’s new system was in nearly every respect the same as the system used by some slaveholders, a fact that Gantt made no attempt to hide. Rather, he acknowledged that the word “task” was “disliked by many men” because of its connection to slavery, and he regarded this negative connotation as its “principal disadvantage.”
Gantt’s father, Virgil Gantt, owned more than sixty men, women, and children. As Gantt wrote, “The term ‘task master’ is an old one in our language; it symbolizes the time, now happily passing away, when men were compelled to work, not for their own interests, but for those of some one else.” Gantt’s goal was not to abolish this old system but to adapt it to modern needs.
In a sense, scientific management replicated slavery’s extractive techniques while jettisoning the institution itself. Gantt’s rhetoric was not necessarily of distance but of progress; he purportedly liked to say that “scientific management marked a great step forward from slave labor.” James Mapes Dodge, a Philadelphia manufacturer and early supporter of Taylor, explained in 1913 that “we cannot tell who first liberated the germ idea of Scientific Management, as it was born to the world in the first cry of anguish that escaped the lips of the lashed slave.” Dodge’s reference was metaphorical, to a vague and distant past where slavery prevailed, not to the slave South. But he understood that “the present generation” had inherited “from the past the relationship of master and slave” and saw it as the job of scientific management to move beyond it.
In 1911, during the many months of congressional hearings on scientific management, Taylor attempted to distance his system from that of slavery by describing it as a school for workers who did not know how to work: this “is not nigger driving; this is kindness; this is teaching; this is doing what I would like mighty well to have done to me if I were a boy trying to learn how to do something. This is not a case of cracking a whip over a man and saying, ‘Damn you, get there.’”
Half a century after Phillips, Keith Aufhauser again described the extent to which the theory and practice of the slaveholders conformed to Taylor’s system of scientific management. During a decade of heated debate over the nature of southern slavery, Aufhauser argued that there were deep parallels not just between planters’ tools and those advocated by scientific managers, but also about the power relations they reflected.
He wrote, “As far as discipline at the workplace goes, . . . the master-slave relationship is quite similar to the capitalist-wage-laborer relationship in scientifically managed enterprises.” Two decades after Aufhauser, historian Mark Smith would again describe aspects of plantation management that looked strikingly like scientific management. Smith focused on the role of time discipline on the plantation, pointing to the widespread use of clocks to assess how much labor the enslaved could perform.
When Harvard Business Review marked its ninetieth anniversary in 2012, Taylor made it into all three featured essays, offering an inspirational point of reference for the ability of managers to transform the broader economy. The business history of plantation slavery offers a very different point of reference—a cautionary tale that warns us what profit-seeking can look like when everything, including lives, is up for sale. The heritage of U.S. business includes both stories of innovation and those of extreme violence. Often the two are deeply intertwined. This was true in specific ways for scientific management, and it was undeniable for plantation slavery. Reckoning with these uncomfortable histories can help us to see the deep connections between capitalism and control and, perhaps, even to find a more humane way forward.” ~
http://bostonreview.net/race/caitlin-c-rosenthal-how-slavery-inspired-modern-business-management
Oriana:
Taylorism, as “scientific management” also came to be known, was deeply admired by Stalin. “Work pioneers,” those who exceeded the production quotas, were celebrated as Soviet heroes and given various rewards and privileges.
**
Quicksand-bagging: relentless accusations that sink the opponent no matter how they respond, e.g. “You’re being defensive.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
An excellent observation. It reminded me that one way to counterattack is to shift the focus of attention on your attacker. Go off-topic. For instance, you can suddenly say, “Where did you get that shirt?” Or, as I learned from Father Kidney, you can also exclaim, “God bless you!” and move on in some manner.
Yet another behavior that’s been suggested in this situation is broken-record agreeing with whatever is being said, with little prefaces like “That’s a brilliant insight.”
**
PANTHEISM AND POLITICAL RADICALISM
~ “Materialists such as Spinoza and Diderot argued that if matter itself was dynamic there was no need to posit a transcendence beyond its borders. The radical Enlightenment took its cue from the pantheistic determinism of Spinoza, probably the most reviled philosopher of eighteenth-century Europe. If Nature and Spirit were one, there was no need to imagine an all-powerful will lording it over the material world. Pantheism [in the era of the Enlightenment] was linked arms with political radicalism.” ~ Terry Templeton, “Culture and the Death of God”
Oriana:
One reason Spinoza is so dear is that he didn't hold a double standard promoted by certain Enlightenment writers: philosophy for the elite, and the “consoling lies” of religion for the uneducated masses. Spinoza didn't believe in dispensing consoling or noble lies to anyone. The task of the philosopher was to educate; Spinoza held all human beings to be educable.
The odd thing is that today we still have people arguing that atheism or agnosticism or a metaphoric understanding of religion is fine for you and me, but what about Joe Six-Pack? Doesn’t he need traditional religion? Isn’t he going to fall apart if we tell him that he won’t see his dog in heaven, or watch Sunday football there? (I suspect he’d rather watch football than be reunited with a long line of ancestors, most of whom probably speak a different language anyway.)
My view is that Joe is not that fragile, and his private view may very well be that religion is fairy tales, just as he suspected when first told of Eve being made from Adam’s rib or about Jonah and the Whale.
But let’s forget about Joe for a while, whether psychologically fragile or not, requiring a blissful afterlife or adjusted to the thought that life is only temporary. It’s not every day that one comes across the statement, “If Nature and Spirit were one, there was no need to imagine an all-powerful will lording it over the material world.” If there is no need for a king of kings, the ruler of the universe, then perhaps there is no need for earthly kings either? After millennia of kingship, this is all shockingly new thinking, we must admit . . .
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
~ Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 2
THE “ABOMINABLE MYSTERY” OF FLOWERS
~ “It was, Charles Darwin wrote in 1879, "an abominable mystery". Elsewhere he described it as "a most perplexing phenomenon". Twenty years after the publication of his seminal work The Origin of Species, there were still aspects of evolution that bothered the father of evolutionary biology. Chief among these was the flower problem.
The roughly 350,000 known species of flowering plants make up about 90% of all living plant species. Without them, we would have none of our major crops including those used to feed livestock, and one of the most important carbon sinks that mop up our carbon dioxide emissions would be missing. How and where did they originate? And, perhaps more importantly, why did they become so spectacularly successful?
Darwin was painfully aware that there were apparent exceptions to his slow and steady rule [of how evolution works]. The angiosperms were a particular source of frustration. Angiosperms simply didn't exist for most of Earth's history. Early forests were populated by bizarre primitive tree-like plants closely related to the club mosses and horsetails that are a very minor part of today's plant communities. Later a group called the gymnosperms – plants with unenclosed seeds such as the conifers – took over. And then came the angiosperms.
Darwin did suggest a solution, however. Angiosperms, he said, may have evolved gradually in a remote region of the world as yet unexplored by scientists. By the middle of the Cretaceous, something caused them to spill out of their homeland and rapidly spread across the world. This, reasoned Darwin, would give the misleading impression to researchers working in Europe and North America that a wide variety of flowering plant species had all evolved at the same time. Aware of the lack of evidence to back up his theory, Darwin described it as “wretchedly poor”.
In fact, his speculation has since proved to be partly correct. Angiosperms that predate the middle Cretaceous specimens by tens of millions of years have begun to turn up in rocks from China. But Darwin didn't get the details entirely right because very rare early angiosperms have been found in Europe and the US too.Palaeobotanists may not yet agree on precisely where and when flowering plants first evolved, but their appearance in the fossil record much earlier than was previously known means they are no longer a problem for Darwin's theory of gradual evolution. Other debates about them, especially concerning their spectacular diversity, remain active, however.
Clues to the ultimate origins of flowering plants are to be found on New Caledonia, a small island about 1,600 kilometers east of Australia. Here, around the time that Darwin was agonizing over his angiosperm problem, botanists discovered a plant called Amborella. Careful study over the last century has shown it to be the sole survivor of one of the very earliest branches of the angiosperm evolutionary tree. This means its relationship to all living flowers is bit like that of the duck-billed platypus to all living mammals: it might look unassuming, but Amborella can tell us more than even the most elaborate orchid about how the angiosperms first evolved.
Today's plant scientists understandably have a better handle on the origins of flowering plants than Darwin did, but they are still struggling to explain the group's diversity, and why despite this it has failed to become dominant in some parts of the world.” ~
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141017-how-flowers-conquered-the-world
Mary Delany (1700-1788), a botanical collage. Delany began producing her astonishingly accurate and beautiful cutouts at the age of 72, after becoming a widow. *
WHAT? THERE WAS NO RELEASE OF BARABBAS?
“The story of Barabbas the criminal, whom Pilate offers to kill instead of Jesus, is predicated on the supposed Jewish custom of releasing a prisoner at Passover . . . BUT THERE WAS NO SUCH JEWISH CUSTOM. In fact, it flies in the face of deeply held Jewish (and, for that matter, Roman) beliefs about justice.” ~ Joel M. Hoffman, The Bible’s Cutting Room Floor
“The custom of releasing prisoners in Jerusalem at Passover is known as the Paschal Pardon, but this custom (whether at Passover or any other time) is not recorded in any historical document other than the gospels, leading some scholars to question its historicity.” ~ Wiki
A further puzzling detail: the meaning of the name “Barabbas”
“Barabbas' name appears as bar-Abbas in the Greek texts of the gospels. It is derived ultimately from the Aramaic בר-אבא, Bar-abbâ, "son of the father". Some ancient manuscripts of Matthew 27:16–17 have the full name of Barabbas as "Jesus Barabbas" and this was probably the name as originally written in the text. Early church father Origen was troubled by the fact that his copies of the gospels gave Barabbas' name as "Jesus Barabbas" and declared that since it was impossible he could have had such a holy name, "Jesus" must have been added to Barabbas' name by a heretic. It is possible that later scribes, copying the passage, removed the name "Jesus" from "Jesus Barabbas" to avoid dishonor to the name of Jesus the Messiah.” ~ Wiki
*
THE SMALLER LIES WERE A BIGGER SHOCK
After realizing that the Judeo-Christian god, like all the other gods, had been invented by humans and did not exist outside of the believers’ minds, I had no trouble seeing it all as mythology — both the stories of the Old Testament and events like the Virgin Birth and Resurrection. It was only natural to conclude the virgin birth was absurd, the resurrection never happened, and Jesus is never coming back.
Likewise, it was terribly unlikely that a Jew would tell anyone to drink his blood, given the huge taboo . . . so the Last Supper with its symbolic cannibalism never happened. Nor did Jesus die for anyone's sins like a sacrificial animal. That was just disgusting, and blatantly archaic.
When it comes to those big inventions, my attitude was soon, “How could I have ever believed this nonsense?” And I have to remind myself that it’s easy to brainwash a child, with her immature brain. You just repeat certain things, no matter how impossible they sound.
The shock was the small things. Scholars like Bart Ehrman publicized the historical findings that there was no census requiring anyone to go to the town of one’s birth (a bizarre idea; that’s not how census is done), no slaughter of the innocents, no flight into Egypt, no reading of a non-actual (conflated) passage of scripture at the synagogue in Nazareth (there was no synagogue in Nazareth, which wasn’t a functional town in the first century). Nazareth may have been a Greek mistranslation of Nazarene, which referred to men so consecrated to piety that they were not allowed to cut their hair. Oddly enough, it’s those relatively minor confabulations that shocked me at first — not the “big stuff.”
No resurrection, no second coming — that was easy. But — the slaughter of the innocents never happened? — I was in a state of shock for hours. What a web of lies had to be invented.
Bart Ehrman also made sense of the apocalyptic preaching, gradually de-emphasized in the later gospels — there were many apocalyptic preachers during that era. Ehrman assumes that there was a historical Jesus and he was one of those end-of-the-world nuts. (If there was a historical Jesus, he meant the end days literally, clouds of glory and all. Later I was able to see this metaphorically, as applying to the last decades of a human life — there just isn’t time for a lot of things that may have been fine in youth.)
At my bedside, a tincture of passion flower
to add to the wine,
but not in case of passion.
The greatest seduction is sleep,
that velvet drowning
in innocence again,
the only Eden left of childhood.
~ Oriana, Passionflower
Mary Delany, Passiflora laurifolia
No comments:
Post a Comment