Relocating To Elfland

The New York Times thinks contemporary pop culture may be narcissistic.

Now there’s some insight for you. News to pay for.

In my last post, I noted in passing the MSNBC interview between Martin Bashir and Rob Bell. Here is a quite interesting follow-up in which Bashir comments at length on that interview.

Here’s another great article from David Bentley Hart, this time on the recent free speech ruling by the Supreme Court. To whet appetites all around: “when personal liberties become absolute, they also become simply another form of tyranny.” I have a short treatise brewing on this subject, but I doubt it’s appropriate material for a blog.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s wrong with my generation. Recently I discovered a most unlikely ally in Mark Ames, who wrote an online piece bitterly decrying Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity.” The root of Ames’s bitterness is summarized in this paragraph:

“I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all – looking stupid. That’s why they’ve turned Stewart into a demigod, because he knows how to make the other guys look really stupid, and if you’re on the same team as Stewart, you’re on the safe side of the mockery, rather than dangerously vulnerable to mockery.”

Bells went off when I read this. The constant difficulty one faces when dealing with the “post-everythings” of my generation is that they mock (in ways ranging from skilled to imbecilic) all things concerning which they are “post,” but it’s well-nigh impossible to pin them down on what they stand for, because they stand for something only so long as it’s something concerning which the in-crowd of mockers is not yet laughingly “post.” We’re a generation defined by ridicule, but we’re impotent to present anything constructive, because as soon as something is constructed, someone starts laughing at it, and we’re petrified of identification with anything the scoffer-elites are laughing at. We’re neutered by our own fear; there is no other word for it. We’re cowards who can’t withstand the faintest breeze of mockery. Which is crippling, for the simple reason that nothing today – absolutely nothing – is beyond the reach of pillorying. Tell me one serious thing Jon Stewart can’t make look foolish. I defy you. I mean, the guy is freaking good at it.

It so happened that around the time I read Ames’s post, I also read this from Psalm 69:

“For zeal for Your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me. When I wept and humbled my soul with fasting, it became my reproach. When I made sackcloth my clothing, I became a byword to them. I am the talk of those who sit in the gate, and the drunkards make songs about me.”

Let us be clear. Jon Stewart & Co. would laugh at Jesus, if He were walking around today. They would laugh at Abraham if he were alive, and Moses, and David, and the prophets and apostles. They laugh, and will continue to laugh, at every believer whose heart is poured out in this psalm. They laugh because they don’t believe in anything enough to stand for it. That kind of belief, after all, requires courage. It requires conviction bloody but unbowed. It requires iron in the soul. It requires sacrifice. It requires one to embrace looking like a fool; it requires one to accept misunderstanding, rolling eyes, mockery, and scorn. It requires everything one despairs to find among post-everythings.

My hat is off to Ames. He and I wouldn’t agree on much politically, I suspect; but we could raise a glass together to all those who have understood, even in this generation, that “to move the world you must have a place to stand.”

A parting shot at Wright’s article (yes, I’m still thinking about it):

I’m pretty sure gays should have Islamophobia (something about sharia law), and I’m pretty sure a lot of Muslims have Homophobia (something about sharia law). So either we need to get the Muslims over sharia, or we need to get gays over their gayness, and it’s pretty clear where Wright would come down on this one. There just ain’t a “benign context” big enough to fit sharia.

I don’t know why I keep dignifying Robert Wright’s work with responses. I guess my reasoning is that, if he’s popular enough to get published in the Times, there must be some people out there who actually think his driveling qualifies as analysis, and my heart goes out to them.

Wright’s latest gush of twaddle, provocatively (if somewhat unoriginally) titled “Islamophobia and Homophobia,” asserts that we need to get over our phobia about Muslims, just as we have gotten over our phobia about gays, because if we don’t we are going to keep alienating Muslims, and alienating Muslims raises the risk of homegrown terrorism. Which, Allah help us, “could carry America into the abyss.” [Collective gasp.]

We have a constructive resource, however, in the progress we’ve made overcoming homophobia: “maybe the underlying dynamic is transplantable to the realm of inter-ethnic prejudice.”

Which, by the by, leaves me standing in uffish thought, for I can’t make head or tail of how concern about Muslims (adherents to a particular religion) equates to inter-ethnic prejudice (prejudice against those of a certain race). But be that as it may . . . .

When we explore the roots of our progress against homophobia, we discover that we’ve been able to “build bonds across social divides” just insofar as we’ve been delivered from “the power of intolerant scripture” and begun simply “getting to know people.” This getting-to-know-you thing is so potent – it has such power to move us to accept people, and in accepting them, to accept everything about them (gayness, Islamic beliefs, Christian fundamentalism [oops, strike that], or what have you) – that it can actually change the way we read our “intolerant scripture.” It helps us go back and read with fresh eyes: “if this broader tolerance requires ignoring or reinterpreting certain scriptures, so be it; the meaning of scripture is shaped by social relations.”

Well, hold on now. Let’s all settle down and breathe deeply before asking the question: “Could getting to know Muslims have the healing effect that knowing gay people has had?” The good news, says Wright, “is that bridging does seem to work across religious divides.” [Praise be!] It’s all a matter, he avers, “of bringing people into contact with the ‘other’ in a benign context. And it’s a matter of doing it fast, before the vicious circle takes hold, spawning appreciable homegrown terrorism and making fear of Muslims less irrational.”

‘kay. There you have it. Utopia on the other side of a group hug.

Yes, first question, there in the back. “Has this guy ever talked to a homegrown terrorist?” Don’t know; it seems unlikely. Next question. “Does he seriously think homegrown terrorists regard us as the enemy because they weren’t treated nicely on the playground?” Any other questions?

I have a few, actually. Does Wright realize that his group hug requires religious adherents to give up everything he regards as offensive before they get to be included in the hug? I assume, for instance, that no matter how much Wright gets to know a Christian fundamentalist or an Islamic militant – be the context never so benign – the warm fuzzies won’t permit him to accept such a person’s defining beliefs. It would be different, of course, if their defining thing were gayness.

Which leads to the question that vexes me every time I read Wright: Does he have any idea how boorish he sounds when he sneers at people who don’t happen to hold his insipid philosophical views? There are people in the cosmos – mirabile dictu – who don’t think they are competent to decide for themselves what is good or evil, and then to impose their gaseous emissions on the rest of humankind. They actually believe in the universal moral rule of a transcendent God, and regard departures from His truth and will, by anyone include themselves, as wickedness. (Not all, I might add, are prepared to blow up buildings over it.) One can say they’re all fools – dangerous ones, at that – who should be excluded from group hugs, but one should offer a more substantive reason than, “Well, those just aren’t people I can accept.” Otherwise, we have simply replaced the “power of intolerant scripture” with the tyranny of the benign.

I’m no economist, but the column by Paul Krugman in the Times today may be the most extraordinarily inane piece of analysis I have ever read. He seems sincerely to believe that yet-more-excessive government spending (?!) will actually stimulate the economy, whereupon (and not before) it will become safe for the government to start saving money. The best I could gather about the details of his theory is that the government can create jobs by spending, and put money back in people’s pockets by cutting healthcare costs. Very well, let us hypothesize that this succeeds. There is no mention of the fact that jobs created by government money must also be sustained by government money, so how does this help us ever get around to government saving? No mention, either, of the fact that, while reducing healthcare costs might perhaps put some money back in the consumer’s pocket, the whole point of economic stimulus is to get that money back out of the pocket and into the market, with the result that in a few years our consumer is broke again and – mirabile dictu – eager for a government bailout. We have created an economy premised on overspending, and now people like Krugman seriously think overspending by the government will stimulate consumers to overspend and the fruit will be a flourishing economy. Dare I say: blowing up a balloon-rabbit bigger and bigger never makes it a real rabbit. What’s missing in our economy is real value – hard assets instead of paper promises. We go on spending money we don’t have so we can possess things we don’t own, our government goes on spending money it doesn’t have so we can spend money we don’t have so we can possess things we don’t own – an admirable balloon, or it was before it started sagging. Thanks to Krugman for reminding Uncle Sam to puff again, with feeling.

Reading the latest development in the health care debate made me wonder if the establishment is really trying to lose, come November. I can’t confirm  whether this is an oft-used procedure, as Pelosi claims, but it may rank as the political gaffe of the decade to pull it out right now, on this issue. Way to reassure the voting public.

A recent ABC article reporting on the work of Satoshi Kanazawa has me a tad worked up. The reason, you will shortly discover, is that I am evolutionarily challenged and (understandably) defensive about it.

Bottom line, says Kanazawa, smart people tend to become liberals and atheists (rejecting religious values); and smart men tend to value relational fidelity (adopting family values), while this isn’t necessarily true for smart women (who have always had strong family values, and still do).

Dimwits like me, by contrast, tend to remain stuck in religious values; the males among us also remain “mildly polygamous,” while our females continue to value fidelity as they always have, and as their brighter female counterparts still do.

The data supporting all this is pretty thin, when you get right down to it. About 20,000 kids are interviewed in their teens, and again in their 20s, and lo! the smart ones have become more liberal, more atheistic, and . . . well, things are a bit fuzzier in their family values, because the smart guys are starting to value faithfulness, while the smart girls aren’t appreciably different from the dumb ones – they all want relationships that last. Hmmmm. . . . “The participants were all in their twenties, and ‘the findings from them [says Kanazawa] may or may not generalize to all Americans across generations.” You think??? I wonder what IQ it took to figure that one out.

Something else I don’t get (nota bene: I am not one of the bright ones): all of this is supposedly thrilling in view of evolution. Bright people, i.e., the evolutionarily advanced ones, have this cool capacity for things “evolutionarily novel.” For example, it’s so weird that smart kids eventually become liberals – they actually start to care about other people – because ordinarily in evolution it’s survival of the fitter. Those who remain stuck in uncaring conservatism, now, they make sense; they are evolutionarily predictable.

But (if I may) doesn’t this really change the rules in evolution? I mean, the whole idea of natural selection assumes certain adaptational patterns, most notably that features which make for higher survival and reproduction will gradually prevail over those that don’t. (I didn’t make this up; I got it from Jerry Coyne, who should know.) So is it really evidence of being “smarter” or “better” or “more advanced” that one takes care of other people at great cost to oneself? Couldn’t this be construed as evolutionary regress, or at best an anomaly (read: weird)?

Never mind, though. What really kills me about Kanazawa’s findings is that they are so atrociously sexist (perhaps that needn’t trouble him, being a man of science and all). “Higher intelligence,” we are told, “had no effect on the women’s [family] values.” So what happened here? How come the smart girls don’t have the capacity for evolutionary novelty in their family values? How come they haven’t been able to get beyond predictably faithful to “mildly polygamous,” while their male counterparts are moving from “mildly polygamous” to faithful? If girls are so evolutionarily predictable on this point, doesn’t that mean they are less evolutionarily advanced than the guys? (It can’t be an IQ problem, because we know they are smarter than the dumb girls.) But . . . bear with me here . . . wouldn’t that sort of undermine the whole point of Kanazawa’s findings? Wouldn’t that mean that evolutionary novelty and predictability have precisely nothing to do with one’s IQ?

I’m not bright enough to figure out if I should be insulted by this research. I am definitely bright enough to figure out how insulted I would be if I were a bright girl.

Whodathunk the ghost of Cornelius Van Til would ever haunt the New York Times Opinionator? Check this out from Stanley Fish, reviewing Steven Smith’s soon-to-be-released Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (which appears to be a must-read). A teaser from Fish: 

“While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.” 

I was equally taken with Fish’s brief mention of “a form of intellectual/political apartheid known as the private/public distinction.” It reminded me what a mess dualism has made in the history of Western philosophy and theology. Think about it: 

In philosophy, the duality of idea and form, which we owe to the classical Greeks. We’re still trying to find a way to put these back together, especially post-Kant. 

In anthropology, the duality of soul (mind) and body. In the field of medicine alone, one wonders how different things might look if these were ever brought back into fruitful connection. Let us not even speak of the field of education. 

In social theory, the duality of religious (church) and secular (state, society). The one cares for all things “spiritual” (worship, and the fate of the soul); the other for all things social, tangible, and embodied (says Fish, “the business of everyday life – commerce, science, medicine, law, agriculture, education, foreign policy, etc.). The arrangement sits awkwardly, one must admit, with the biblical metaphors of salt, light, and leaven; but there are Christians who seem to believe God is happy with it.

Penetrating all of this, the eschatological duality of heaven (eternity) and earth (time). What doth earth matter? Of what value is the historical? We’re holding out for a harp, a cloud, and a crown. I could do without the cloud, myself, but my sanctification has proceeded only so far.