pope francis

I'm not Catholic. I'm not even culturally Catholic really, although the fact that some of my formative years were spent in New Orleans, and my formal education in religious studies began there, is non-trivial. I was raised Congregationalist, which is about as far from Catholicism as you can get in the mainline Protestant denominations -- far from revering the Blessed Virgin Mary, Congregationalists don't even believe the virgin birth happened.

So that's my background. Now let's talk about the dumbass things I have seen people say in response to Pope Francis's visit to the United States.

Chronic migraines have me exasperated with a lot of the stupidity in my field of view; my tone reflects this.

1: Why does everyone care about the pope so much? I'm not even Catholic. Who cares what he says?

Well, you live in the fucking world, chuckles. Open the window and let the air in.

Francis is the spiritual leader to over 1 billion people, about 15% of the world. The Dalai Lama, in comparison, represents 20 million people at the outside. While the Catholic Church is not the political force it once was -- and ever having been that force is a subject of valid criticism -- the Catholic population is both widespread throughout the world and heavily concentrated in some areas, such that Catholic beliefs have significant political influence.

One of the things I will rail against over and over again in this blog is declining religious literacy. Declining religious engagement is a more complicated topic, and one in which I am a hypocrite -- I am not a churchgoer myself and can't fathom becoming one -- but it is definitely implicated in the decline of religious literacy. Religion is a key element of human culture, a key impulse in human nature, and may have been since before biologically modern humans even fucking existed. It doesn't go away just because science overtakes supernaturalism, nor is there reasonable basis to claim that religion depends on or extends supernaturalism.

That's another area for another time too, really, but the point is: the spiritual leader to a seventh of the world is someone whose views influence a great many people, and the views of a great many people are the musculature that bend the shape of the moment of that world that you get to experience, and what the fuck is wrong with you, you stomatous wet turd, that you think you can recuse yourself from caring about what happens in that moment?

If the President of France started making multiple speeches condemning, I don't know, Islamophobia and economic inequality, I would be interested and glad because these are utterances that can improve the world, and while I don't live in the part of the world that would be affected, because I am a living breathing human, I care about the lives lived in other parts of the world.

Francis is an especially newsworthy pope because of the ways he differs from recent predecessors. Though he is absolutely liberal in a Catholic framework, there's no denying that liberalism. Vatican II aside -- and most of its promises and intentions were never followed through, despite its reputation -- the general trend of American religion for the last five or eleven decades has been increasing conservatism and increasing alliance with political conservatism. The evangelicals succeeded in creating a political alliance with Catholics over abortion, which redirected Catholic political efforts traditionally spent on advocating for the poor, the sick, prisoners, and immigrants. (I'm not saying Catholics would not have wasted their time on the pro-life movement without evangelical involvement, don't worry.) Evangelical Protestantism has overtaken mainline Protestantism. In a handful of centuries we have shifted from a country in which church folk spent their time caring for the poor and pressuring the government to provide social services to one in which church folk are mobilized by -- let's call them what they are -- fuckstick evildoers to stop the poor from getting medicine.

So it is a good sign that there is a Pope who echoes the concerns of the Social Gospel, a Pope whose social and political priorities are aligned with what we like to think Catholicism has traditionally been associated with. This is a man with vast resources and vast influence. You have to be a dunce not to give a shit what he thinks.

That brings me to...

2) Fuck this Pope, he hasn't done anything about the sex abuse cover-up, abortion, or female priests.

Those issues are very important to me. There are a host of other concerns people have brought up in criticizing Francis, and I agree with many of those as well, but these seem to be the big ones -- the continued failure to do anything about the Church's orchestrated cover-up of rampant child sexual abuse, the Church's ongoing opposition to abortion, and the way it has dragged its feet on the inevitability of ordaining women as priests. (We are several decades into a severe shortage of priests, and the functional health of the Catholic Church depends on addressing it.)

However.

I voted for Barack Obama twice, in 2008 and 2012. My 2008 vote was predicated on several key issues, apart from being a vote against McCain/Palin: universal healthcare, serious finance reform, serious reform of higher education (including but not limited to the student debt crisis), the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and the de-escalation of our involvement in / instigation of foreign wars. In 2012 I knew I was only going to get one of those things, and voted to re-elect him anyway.

Yes, of course Obama has been a disappointment to progressives -- ironically, obviously, given how much idiot conservatives paint him as a socialist, when he has sadly turned out to be a centrist on most issues. Only some of this can be ascribed to Republican obstructionism. Some areas where he has failed to act pose disastrous consequences if they are not handled by his successor, and other areas simply reflect badly on us as a people.

So too with Francis. Neither Catholic nor non-Catholic voted for him, but that doesn't mean he doesn't represent an alternative to other possible Popes, and just as Obama's race signalled an end to a long-present barrier to entry, so does Francis's Argentinian nationality, which makes him the first Pope from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere. Given the cultural differences in Catholic concerns throughout the world, this is not a minor thing.

While Francis has not abandoned many of the conservative positions of previous modern popes, he has not placed special emphasis on them either. He fails to give us the answer we want when talking about ordaining women, homosexuality, or birth control, but they're not part of his platform, as it were, either. (Abortion is another matter; his pro-life commitment is clear.) Meanwhile, he has advocated for the poor, condemned wealth inequality and the institutions that keep it in place, reaffirmed the Catholic opposition to the death penalty, reaffirmed evolution's compatibility with Catholic belief, and become the most prominent speaker on the necessity of addressing climate change.

He's a radical, as far as the far right is concerned.

As with Obama, he faces structural issues. I'm not saying that I believe he wishes he could be more progressive than he is. I'm not convinced that's true. But the Catholic Church by its nature moves slowly. Part of the decline of religious literacy -- or one of the factors contributing to it, maybe -- is that people have trouble perceiving in context the behavior of slow-moving institutions. Something as large and as old as the Church cannot pivot as quickly as we did from conservative Bush to centrist Obama any more than an elephant can do cartwheels. Change has to be understood in context and with an eye on the timeline. That's not always a great thing, though it has undoubtedly saved our asses a number of times in the past.

At his first consistory, Francis appointed 18 new cardinals, 16 of whom are young enough to vote in a papal conclave and who will likely be involved in voting for his successor. More than half of those 16 are from Third World countries, reflecting Francis's commitment to inequality and poverty issues. There are pretty good odds that whatever Francis doesn't get done will be followed up by the next pope.

evolution again

Suppose I show you this tree, right.

Suppose I show you this tree that grows watches.

I'm not going to show you a tree that just has a lot of watches hanging off it or fastened around the branches or anything. That's no big deal. You could hang watches off any tree.

Suppose I show you this tree and we sit there for a while, couple of sandwiches, maybe a little whiskey, and we keep an eye on things. We see the little buds form, these solid gold leaves. Every once in a while we pry one open and we can see tiny little gears growing inside. Springs sprouting and coiling up. Those gears shift and grow and converge in a gear train. After a period of time, although we saw each piece growing in turn, somehow we're still startled to see a complete balance oscillation system. Hey look at this, the escapement is growing. Holy shit, now it's a whole fucking watch. When we sat down for lunch, it was just this little bud.

That's a pretty cool tree.

A couple hundred years ago, archdeacon William Paley used a metaphor to "prove the existence of God," which has since been adopted by Creationists:

"In crossing a heath suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But supposing I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there."

GET IT? A rock is just a rock, it's no big deal, but if you trip over a watch you trip over evidence of a watchmaker. The watch by its nature implies the existence of a watchmaker.

Except there's this tree, right.

Because Paley was writing before Darwin, before molecular biology, before paleontology, before DNA. He correctly identified one of the mysteries of biology -- how did all this shit get here? But his solution comes up wanting given what we know now. To be fair to Paley -- because it's not his fault what people do when quoting him -- it's very unlikely he would make the same argument today.

There's this tree, and you can watch the watch, man, you can see the watch forming now. It's not some crazy complicated object you tripped over crossing a heath, some magical watch from the ether. Our science got better. We have more data now and better tools for looking at the world. We've figured out germs and meteors, and the moon turns out to be this big dusty rock that we can fly to. We don't cling to our pre-scientific understandings of astronomy or medicine, and there's no value in clinging to Paley's inability to explain a watch.

Rejecting evolution requires freezing your scientific knowledge in the 18th century. Ignorance is the kindest word for it. If you believe in a God who's responsible for the universe's existence, how on earth do you justify remaining intentionally blind to the way that universe works? Especially when it comes to something as awesome and impressive as evolution -- the miraculous workings of which surely count to God's credit, if you really do believe in God.

Am I questioning the legitimacy and sincerity of the faith of people who can only believe in God by dismissing science, people who are so certain that scientific understanding threatens faith and belief in God?

Little bit.

The problem isn't just the Creationists, it's the fact that even religious people who accept the truth of evolution -- and really, Americans in general regardless of their ism -- tend to shy away from any specifics about evolution. I don't think I could get an overview of the modern synthesis out of many of the the graduate-degree-holding people I know, at least the non-biologists. I'm not certain how many of the people I know could even recall the term "modern synthesis" without prompting. And I know a lot of smart, smart people. This is not about not being smart. This is about avoiding certain streets without good reason.

Evolution is the biography of life. It's literally our heritage, and certainly as important to understanding the story of ourselves as the shot heard round the world and Joseph's technicolor dreamcoat. Deliberate ignorance is never an acceptable thing to make sacred, but ignorance about this, about the functioning of the world and life itself? Fuck that.

Meanwhile, it turns out that insects are evolving into watches, so hang that from your fob and wind it.

the new atheism

I've already mentioned the New Atheism, so as with some of these other early posts, best to have a "defining our terms" post.

I don't -- I wish it didn't need to be said, but it does -- have a problem with atheism. I have more common ground with some of the atheists I know than with most of the Christians I know. The writers and movement that have come to be called the New Atheism are another matter. The big names here are Richard Dawkins, previously best known for introducing the idea of the meme and favoring the gene-centered model of evolution over others; cognitive scientist and philosopher of science Daniel Dennett; and English-American journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Subjectively, one of the differences between the New Atheism and the atheism of Bertrand Russell, for instance, is that the New Atheism lacks a certain ... intellectual rigor.

They don't do their research, is what I'm saying. Dawkins especially has been taken to task for showing little to no familiarity with religious studies, with the history of any particular religion, or with non-Western religions. New Atheists like to dismiss this sort of criticism -- "if we don't believe in any of it, what's the point in studying any of it?" -- but it's exactly the sort of thing that becomes relevant when they start going off about "all the wars religion has started." And it's not just religious content that the New Atheists show little to no familiarity with, but the social sciences in general. Furthermore, there's a clear difference between simply being unaware of the details, and purposefully supporting the conservative Christian agenda by painting fundamentalism and literalism as the purest forms of religion, while coincidentally being the easiest targets.

Objectively, a clear difference between New Atheism and earlier generations is the aggression, anger, and evangelizing associated with the New Atheists. It's pretty fair to paint this as a reaction to the rise in aggression on the part of conservative Christian elements, but New Atheism has also piggybacked on Islamophobia, both before and after 9/11, xenophobia in general, and white Anglo-Americans' hostility towards the cultural markers of others.

The average person is not impacted by New Atheism very much, not in ways we see without speeding up the film -- I think it's a further symptom of, more than a contributing cause to, the tendency of American religion in the last century to grow increasingly conservative as liberals participate less and less rather than fighting back. But certainly it presents nuisances in my work -- religious literacy is so low already, and the New Atheists certainly contribute to worsening it, and have made it virtually impossible to find decent discussions of religion among strangers.

When considering the attitudes and actions of religious people, if we are at all moral and human, we see Goofus, who insists that his path is the only possible true one and that everyone else will burn in hell (or dismisses all other paths as those of ignorant foreigners, or rubs his hands together because he loves being one of the chosen few on the one true path and can't wait till we all die so everyone else will see how wrong they are), differently than we see Gallant, who is as devoted to his path as Goofus is but judges others by their actions and behavior rather than whether their beliefs accord with his own (and may show a healthy interest in other peoples' beliefs, understanding that truly held devotion is not threatened by exposure to different ideas). There is no reason for approaches to atheism to be considered any differently than approaches to religion.

Twenty years ago and maybe even only ten or fifteen, the dumbest positions on religion that I'd overhear were, 90% of the time or more, from moderately to extremely conservative Christians. The dumb moderates were usually the sheltered types who wound up in classes on religion or ancient history and were shocked that history books didn't reassure them that the religion they were raised with was the best, truest, or original. The dumb conservatives espoused a theology a few decades old that they were sure originated the minute Adam woke up.

These days I'm as likely to see "religion started all the wars! religion killed all the peoples!" comments as the first two types. Some of this, of course, is because any framework, any model of the world, will find adherents who can't quite grasp things in granular detail and revert to broad sweeping statements. Some of those raised in arch-conservative households find it easy to adopt the New Atheist rhetoric instead, because ultimately they agree on so much -- their understanding of religion is still fundamentally the same -- and it's easier to go from "Yes it is!" to "No it isn't!" than from either to "actually, the situation is more nuanced than that." But that's basically my point: that the New Atheism as a movement consists exactly of that dumbing-down and simplification, an atheism limited to primary colors and broad gestures, and one that has made itself appealing to internet trolls in just the same ways that Christian fundamentalism did.

it was evening all afternoon

Robin Williams has been dead for one year and three weeks. I was so SOMETHINGOROTHER, angry frustrated sad, when the autopsy three months later revealed Lewy body dementia -- a sign that his Parkinson's had progressed, a boulder in the stream of conversation that suddenly created two tributaries:

he was suffering from a terrible disease so of course he had good reason to die;

and maybe he wasn't in his right mind when he did it.

I've been what I've sometimes called "easily capable of being in touch with suicidal feelings" for most of my life, and when addressing them have usually either been glib enough that hey it can't really be a big deal, right, or used roundabout locutions that put some distance between MRMORTONTHESUBJECTOFTHESENTENCE (YT, yours truly, me me me meeeee) and just what exactly the predicate says he does.

It's Suicide Prevention Month. It's always some kind of month. There's always some coffee can on the counter, slit in the plastic lid, paper taped to the side, some reason for you not to pocket your change. I get it. I know.

What can I even say about Robin Williams? I loved Mork and Mindy before I was old enough to understand why. I loved little things like his vest and his red space suit and Exidor. (It's still a terrific show.) He was a huge part of everything that I understood or experienced about comedy growing up. There's a whole style of comedy, a whole flavor of presence, that no one else can touch without my comparing them to Robin Williams. And yes, there was Dead Poets Society, and yes he was great in Louie, and yes he had some startlingly good dramatic roles like One Hour Photo, but all of that pales next to his comedy for me. Not because it wasn't great but because Robin Williams being funny is ballet performed on the thin rim of the universe.

Why would I want to kill myself? I could tell you specifics about childhood traumas and how men who were abused as children often don't start dealing with that abuse until their 30s or 40s, carrying around a lot of PTSD baggage in the meantime. I could offer concise but empty answers like "a reasonable release from an unreasonable burden of trauma" or "mental illness/depression." The problem is that we tend to ask motive questions, "why would you do, why do you want" questions, in a certain way and expecting certain kinds of answers, and "why would you kill yourself?" is not the same kind of question as "why do you want to work at Viridian Dynamics?" or "why did you major in art?"

Robin Williams in The Fisher King is a revelation. Perry (RW) and Jack (Jeff Bridges) have both been shattered by the same traumatic event, a gunman egged on by Jack opening fire in a restaurant and killing a bunch of people, including Perry's wife. Jack has descended into self-loathing while denying any culpability or examining what kind of persona he was projecting for that gunman to be the kind of audience he attracted. Perry has retreated into delusions which simultaneously shield him from dealing with his loss and punish him for attempting to move on. It might be Terry Gilliam's best movie. It's almost certainly Robin's best performance, one of the few that can draw equally from his manic humor and his dramatic chops -- moreso, even, than Good Morning Vietnam.

In terms of signal to noise, here's the best thing I can say about suicide and me: I don't call myself a survivor of abuse because until it turns out that I've died of something other than suicide, how can I say for sure that the trauma never got the better of me?

There are certainly warning signs that may indicate someone needs help, but depression doesn't always look the way you think it looks, especially from the outside. And someone who's okay today might not be okay tomorrow. Nothing need happen overnight for that to be true.

Do I want to die?

I don't want to die.

Do I want to experience the pain of death?

I don't want that pain.

Do I want the anxiety and fear of all the mise en place of suicide, the knife, the pills, the blankets against the garage door, the note?

Ugh no.

Would I walk through a door that unmakes me, just magically removes me from everything?

There are a lot of times that sounds attractive.

Today I'm fine, today I'm good. I wasn't going to wait to write this blog entry until I was feeling low. Today is not a problem.

For a couple weeks we almost had a conversation. For a couple weeks people thought Robin Williams might have killed himself because of depression. For a couple weeks people had to deal with that. He wasn't a young guy -- we have a narrative for famous young suicides. He was famous and well-liked and had a great family and plenty to live for.

Suicide isn't about having been a failure in other peoples' eyes.

Suicide isn't about turning the Nintendo off because you're playing badly.

It's damaging to bring those measures to the conversation about suicide. When you weigh a man's life to decide whether or not he had a good reason to end it, it's not just unfair to him, it's unfair to everyone else who has dealt with similar suicidal thoughts or actions. It's not for you to say how difficult someone else's life is, especially from that great a distance, and your willingness to do so signals to everyone else the way you're looking at them, too. You're looking at them that exact same way -- you just haven't been called upon to issue your judgment yet and tell them if their life is worth keeping.

He didn't have an obvious reason to die, so for a moment there people had to struggle with the idea that he wanted to die anyway. I don't think I saw many people struggle successfully. I saw way too much relief when the autopsy news came out.

"Oh, I get it now."

"Oh, that's how sick he was."

"That's not really suicide when you think about it, not REALLY, that's only a step down from euthanasia."

But see, all that news did was let them understand the intent of suicide: to put an end to suffering. Uncurable sickness is a kind of suffering people sympathize with, are able to understand, in a different way than depression or mental illness. There is a greater understanding that the sickness is not your own doing, for one thing. It's not something you can rub dirt on and walk off. When we privilege physical sickness that way, we reinforce the idea that mental illness is somehow ... all in your mind. Somehow something that you could actually, really, secretly, just walk off if you really wanted to.

We reinforce the stigma of mental illness.

We reinforce the stigma of trauma, abuse, victimhood.

We reinforce the preference for polite silences.

I often talk about how the stigma of admitting to having been sexually abused -- the stigma to admitting to having been traumatized by such abuse -- reinforces the silence that pervades the culture, and helps to perpetuate a society that is safe for predators, a society in which it is easier to abuse children. The same is true for our treatment of mental illness. So long as people continue to treat any of these issues -- depression and mood disorders, personality disorders, impulse control, anger, self-loathing, the processing of trauma, addiction, anything -- as something you can just get over, something you have to just "really want" to overcome, we stigmatize and punish the people who are already suffering the most.

We bond so much over our migraines, trading stories of what triggers us and whether Gatorade or Excedrin does any good, or our seasonal allergies and isn't it so much worse this year than last year, but if we talk about our emotional problems, our mental illness, our blinkless nights studying the skin of the room, we're whining -- wallowing -- making it uncomfortable --

I'm not asking you to hold everybody's hand and listen uncritically to their every little complaint about the world and everything that's happened to them. I'm not asking you to indulge self-destructive behavior in the name of supporting people or to make no distinctions between depression and whining, depression and simple sadness.

I'm asking you to think differently about mental illness and grant it as much dignity as a histamine response.

Why do people kill themselves?

Because they didn't find a better solution.

Because they didn't stop hurting.

Because it was the one thing they could do.

Because it was something they could control.

Because the thought of a tomorrow is horrifying.

Because they are the one person they have the power to lash out at.

Because a walk around the block and a little me time wasn't enough.

Because you can do everything you're told you're supposed to do, and you still feel the same way, and now what?

Because we did not help enough.

Suicide Prevention Resource Center.

National Alliance on Mental Illness.

big ideas, jelly beans

There's something equally appealing and dangerous about what I've thought of, for I guess about 25 years now, as Big Ideas. Capital B capital I. It's not a great term of art, but it's my blog here.

What I mean by Big Ideas -- cause like I said, the label is not specific, I know -- are ideas that come in the form of little explanatory narratives about, in some broad sense, human nature.

They have to be something you can express quickly, even if fully articulating the ramifications of the notion takes longer. The implications of the idea have to be non-trivial, and have to leave you feeling that you understand humanity -- or an individual human you know, or human history -- much better. There's a sensawunda sometimes, like with science fiction or religion.

They have to be essentially unprovable. A model of gravity isn't a Big Idea. Even the evolution of species isn't a Big Idea. But just about everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, for instance, is about a Big Idea. "People are motivated primarily by comfort" is a Big Idea.

Memetics, previously mentioned, is a Big Idea.

When I was a kid, futurism was all the rage. At the earliest end of my childhood you have Alvin Toffler and Hal Lindsey, for instance -- the former a writer of books like Future Shock and Third Wave that not only dwelled on the changes he believed he saw in the immediate future of post-industrial society, but popularized the idea that people and businesses who weren't prepared for the future were going to be, I don't know, forced into being janitors or some fucking thing -- the pressure to make sure your kid studies Japanese because Japan's going to be a big power or Arabic because the Middle East is a player, that style of thinking, Toffler has a lot to do with laying that particular brick; the latter (yeah, this sentence is structured all sorts of flibbety) a "the Rapture's coming, the Tribulations are gonna getcha" type writer, who helped popularize batshit 19th century eschatologies. Though without that batshit, we wouldn't have The Leftovers today, so Mr Lindsey my hat is off to you.

There's a lot of good drama owes its existence to some awful fucking notions, you know?

That's not a Big Idea.

If you weren't there, or paying attention to this especial stratum of the world wasn't your thing, I don't know if I can really get across to you how big a deal the future was. Not in the Gernsbackian Jetsons House of Tomorrow kind of way, a much more anxious kind of way. But not teen dystopias and zombie pocalypses either! Both the Toffler and Lindsey strains basically say:

Get ready for the future, be good enough for the future, or it will fucking run you over.

That's not an always idea. That's not evergreen. It just feels like it sometimes because we're still in the wake of all that. We pretty much redefined adolescence with all that shit in mind, and it'll take a while to spring back into shape. Meanwhile, some things the kids actually had to deal with that no one pointed out while they were worrying about keeping up with Japanese tech geeks: the student loan debt crisis; the ongoing reduced relative value of a college education; degree inflation; an overpopulation of young lawyers even as law school enrollment skyrockets and public universities continue to spin off law schools as guaranteed moneymakers; changes to the privacy landscape that mean drastically different consequences for both public and private behavior than their parents could have possibly foreseen and most likely still don't understand.

At the other end of my childhood you have the obsession with all things cyber, all things dot, all things com. The late 80s, early 90s, you had Omni Magazine, you had Mondo 2000, you had Wired, you had Jaron Lanier, you had virtual reality around the corner, you had that Jesus Jones video, for some reason you had Lawnmower Man, you had the just-ended Cold War and some big questions about the futures of trade, politics, international relations. Shit played out a little weird as it turns out, but in the moment, there was this obsession with the Next Big Thing (VR-goggles! grape-sized watermelons! post-Soviet capitalism!) that I don't think really died down until the Segway reveal. The internet was going to change the way we live, the way we date, the way we do business, the way we vote, it was going to make everything available to everyone, it was going to make a new generation of billionaire capitalists and fuck everybody else over, etc etc.

My childhood was bookended by different flavors of obsession with the future, is what I'm saying, periods when coming up with Big Ideas about the future was big business -- moreso than at most other points in the 20th century.

So the idea of the Big Idea has been on my radar for a long time. And a lot of them are pretty awful. They're a sugar substitute or a Jelly Belly that tastes like the fruit from the tree of knowledge but doesn't have the nutrients.

There is a Big Idea about Big Ideas, about other stuff too, which I guess goes like this: Most of the time when people are reading nonfiction, they're more invested in a compelling narrative and a satisfying feeling of understanding than they are in what they're reading being true or useful. 

Most people do not fucking love science. They fucking love science theater: they love pretty photos and sensawunda.

Self-help books are the lowest form of Big Idea, for instance, a low hanging fruit that everyone understands the awfulness of. They have simplified little models of human behavior that have more in common with a roleplaying game's character creation chapter -- and not even GURPS -- than they do with the real world or a psychology text. They're the "which member of the Monkees are you?" quiz taken way too seriously. But that's what those readers want. That's a form they can digest. It leaves them feeling that they understand something or someone better, or leaves them feeling validated, and that's ultimately what they're actually looking for. Actual true shit would challenge you and offer few easy solutions, and you'd have more work on your plate after the book than before it.

Some Big Ideas I've noticed along the road:

Stupid Big Ideas in Bad Books

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was enormously popular with college kids and engineer types for a while, and might still be for all I know. It won a Pulitzer and it's not hard to find historians who will praise it for offering an analysis of world history that refuses to entertain the idea of inherent European superiority. But Diamond is a non-historian trying to hack history by introducing a kind of environmental determinism that no one familiar with history on a more granular level can actually take seriously, unless they are an English aristocrat drinking brandy in a 19th century gentleman's club and telling stories about their last safari. Although I have argued with history profs who enjoy the fact that the book interests some kids in history -- Big Ideas bring people to the table, because there's always someone who doesn't want to do the work unless they're going to be there when we solve the fucking world -- it's not a coincidence that almost 20 years later, the book has changed nothing about the way we teach world history except that some departments now offer a course on the book itself. This is not because history departments are set in their ways -- they've gone through a hell of a lot of other changes in those two decades -- but simply because Diamond's ideas are not very good, and once you put the book down, you can't do much with them.

But people like the big explanatory narrative, and it's a form of history that doesn't require learning a lot of detail. Engineer types love it, because it's basically a history of humanity uncomplicated by the involvement of people.

Pretty much everything Malcolm Gladwell publishes, like I said, is about Big Ideas. He comes up with a cutesy explanatory narrative that sheds light on some aspect of the human condition, you read the review in the New Yorker, you go "whoaa, of course," and you either forget about it or become one of those annoying people who can never forget about it and never shuts up about it.

And none of it is very good. He takes an oversimplified narrative and peppers it with anecdotal evidence -- for which he has, no doubt, a keen eye and an adept hand -- and it never really adds up to much. But it leaves you feeling like you've learned something, the same way a jelly bean can leave you with the aftertaste of Juicy Pear.

Actually Totally Reasonable Big Ideas

Thankfully there's some real stuff out there too.

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions isn't perfect or without its critics, but I think it remains the best framework for looking at the history of scientific work and scientific progress. Kuhn popularized the idea of "paradigms," the frames of reference and sets of assumptions that necessarily shift when sufficient anomalies accumulate to challenge them, but don't give him too much shit for how the management consulting biz ran with that ball.

Hans Kung took Kuhn's ideas and analyzed the history of Christian theology through this lens. I confess I haven't come to terms with whether I agree with all of Kung's thinking yet, but it's a valuable contribution even if some of it proves to be misleading.

Jeffrey Kottler's Compleat Therapist examines surveys of patient satisfaction and therapeutic results and, finding no significant difference in the success rates of different approaches or schools of thought, determines that it is the relationship between the patient and the therapist that has the biggest influence on therapeutic success, not the therapist's beliefs about mind, personality, behavior, etc. This may sound smaller than some of the above Big Ideas, but you can actually do something with it.

[ETA 9/14: I left out two of the biggest Totally Reasonable Big Ideas, from the perspective of this former history grad student:

Robert Wiebe's organizational hypothesis, which states that the Progressive Era -- roughly the 1880s to the 1920s -- in American history is marked by the shift in focus from regional or state identity to national identity -- not only in politics, but in labor unions, professional guilds like the national bar association, nationwide standards for professions like law/medicine/engineering/teaching, nationwide educational standards. There are many many conclusions you can draw, going on from there -- how this has impacted our politics and informs our present-day life, how it impacted our foreign policy, how American identity plays with intersectionality -- but the basic hypothesis is an incredibly important way to look at American history.

And of course, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, which I wrote my first grad school paper on, as did so many other history students.]

But all in all, I'm less interested in separating out the good Big Ideas from the bad ones, and more interested in the phenomenon of Big Ideas in general -- and the related phenomenon I keep bringing up, the junk food intellectual stimulus, the illusion of learning, the feeling of getting smarter and the way that satisfies, well, most people.

It's like slacktivism, I guess, something I wish we didn't have a word for, because once the word got popular, it sort of put a bow on the whole thing and people stopped talking about why it's a problem. If changing your Facebook status or profile photo in order to "show support" for a particular cause scratches your get-up-and-do-something-about-this itch, you're going to leave it at that. If you get enough likes or praise or pats on the back for doing nothing except kind of implying that you care, you're not going to do anything to bring about actual change, because the effort-to-reward ratio doesn't scale enough to motivate you.

So too with learning shit about stuff. If a little Gladwell at your lunch hour, a little History Channel on a Saturday night, makes you feel like you know more, it can be really hard to put that feeling aside and actually eat an apple instead of a clever apple-licious jelly bean.

evolution

I'll be talking about evolution from time to time, since I have a number of biology readings in the hopper. So let's get the groundwork out of the way:

* The idea that there is an inherent conflict between evolution and religion as is ridiculous as it is hard to dissuade people from.

* Since 1950, the Catholic Church has gone from acknowledging the possibility of evolution to accepting the truth of it. That 1950 encyclical was the first official statement on the matter - there was no prior anti-evolution stance to correct. Despite its reputation among laymen thanks to Galileo, the Church has generally been reluctant to comment on scientific theories (scientific practices, especially where the human body is concerned, are another matter).

* Every mainline Protestant denomination either endorses evolution or declares that there is no conflict between evolution and its religious truths. This isn't a recent development either, although it's arguably becoming less relevant to my point, since mainline Protestants are on the decline as the evangelicals grow.

* In other words, within Christianity -- which is what most people, theists and atheists alike, MEAN when they talk about an evolution/religion conflict -- the only naysayers are found in evangelical Christianity.

* In OTHER other words, evolution is only found objectionable by an overtly anti-science branch of Christianity that's barely a century old -- younger than the theory of evolution -- and was founded in part to oppose the teaching of evolution.

* There are, certainly, individual Christians and Christian parishes who oppose evolution and do not belong to evangelical churches. This is because the evangelical viewpoint has dominated the conversation. It's also because modern Christians are, in the aggregate, fucking illiterates when it comes to knowing anything about their religion, their denomination, and the tenets of their faith. They insist they believe something because of "tradition," and refuse to learn anything about those traditions.

* It's not hard to see the compatibility between evolution and religion. Evolution is a mechanism. It's a description of how processes in the physical world work. It offers no comment on the nature or existence of God, no more than the law of gravity does. There's zero difficulty in believing in God and believing that God created a universe in which life evolves.

* It isn't a theory, in the same way that "maybe Ferris is a figment of Cameron's imagination" is a theory. It's a theory in the sense that it's a constantly adjusted model of how we think evolution works -- again, like the "theory" of gravity. There's no actual question about whether evolution is "true." It takes a willful ignorance of hundreds of years of science to pretend there is.

* Because most American Christians have allowed evangelicals to dominate the evolution conversation, those who believe in evolution nevertheless rarely embrace it as part of their religious understanding, and this is a deep shame. Evolution isn't just true, it's fucking wonderful. It's amazing.

If you believe nothing else about a God who created the universe, you should believe this:

Bettering your understanding of that universe brings you closer to God.

Delving into the intricacies of how the world works absolutely reveals the wonder of it all.

The universe is too big, too great, for there to be any possibility than learning more about it will rob it of its mysteries.

You live here. You're one of us. You should know something about it.

I can't relate to any experience of "being religious" that does not include having these things on your mind every single fucking day.

moral psych, continued

More from my moral psychology reading --

One of the oldest questions in the social sciences is where the incest taboo comes from. In almost every culture, we find a strong condemnation of sex between close relatives, and any time we find ANYthing in "almost every culture," we ask why that is. Is it biological, like the maternal bond? Is it a common reaction by disparate cultures to common environmental challenges, like the traditions of cooking meat or making clothing? Is it something else?

It's an interesting question in of itself, an interesting series of questions -- you can break it down into the two fundamental components, "why do people have an aversion to sex with their close relatives?" and "why do they condemn incest committed by others?" There are testable mechanisms of kin aversion that suggest an answer to the first question (siblings raised together but unrelated by blood share the aversion, for instance, suggesting a mechanism based on childhood coresidence).

The second question is tougher. It's easy to understand why individuals support the idea that murder's wrong -- because the more individuals who do so, the less likely they'll be murdered. But opposing third-party behavior that doesn't involve you and doesn't use your resources, there's no clear benefit there.

The chapter isn't just concerned with incest. That's the jumping-off point: this is the broader and more pertinent question, this idea of where this subset of moral sentiments -- these feelings we have about the things people do that don't impact us -- comes from. One of the suggestions is that the way human cognition and theory of mind work leads to us evaluating actions as though we were a participant, i.e. our own kin aversion leads us to condemn others' incest because on some uncontrollable level we are still reacting as though it's incest we're part of. If it's gross for us it's gross for everybody.

Have you ever been grossed out by watching somebody eating food you find disgusting, or just hearing about it on Facebook? This argument is saying that it's a similar effect (it's not saying the same mechanisms are involved; this is just an analogy).

I don't know yet if the explanation works for me, and besides, I haven't even finished the chapter, but it's interesting to look at in light of many of the social issues of the last couple years:

* The guys who don't understand what the big whoop is about Orange is the New Black, because there's no male character for them to relate to

* The religious right's obsession with other peoples' sexual behavior

* In particular, the insane response to gay marriage that has people arguing that some dude is going to marry a fucking walrus or something

* The difficulty some people have understanding why it's necessary to say Black Lives Matter, and that this isn't implied by "All Lives Matter"

I think what I'm getting at is that on the one hand we have an empathy gap that's behind a lot of culture war problems. The empathy gap is what causes somebody to see their misfortunes as bad luck and somebody else's as evidence of not trying hard enough, for instance, or prevents someone from understanding the importance of representation in media, politics, civil service, leadership, etc.

On the other hand we have this bizarre fussiness-fueled hatred where people -- sometimes the same people -- just can't stop worrying about what other consenting people are doing with each other, and the suggestion made by this moral psych reading that that reflex originates with these people imagining themselves getting gay married all over the place, gay married the hell out of. I suppose that's not surprising given how often "but it sets a bad example for the kids" comes into the conversation with these turdballoons.

That "other hand" isn't an overabundance of empathy or anything like that, but it's clearly something that draws on the same cognitive capacities, something from the same engines of humanity. (So too with the need to post a Facebook status about every tragedy in the news to somehow make it about you -- it's irritating, but the mechanisms involved still come from the same toolbox as the one that makes people run back into burning buildings to save the other kids, etc etc.)

The empathy gap is something I aim to talk a lot about. I didn't mean to bring it up before having the time and mental space to devote an entry to it.

But everything I'm talking about here is, at any rate, an interesting lens through which to look at morality. Most people don't reason about their morality much. They memorize codes and processes and dos and don'ts. They get very upset when their resulting lists are challenged or changed. Most people, in my experience, don't even think much about where they derived their morals from, and if they do, they are usually wrong.

A lot of these blog entries are just going to taper off, because I'm just jotting down thoughts I have after reading something -- often, things I think about while swimming in the morning after morning reading -- and those thoughts don't necessarily arrive neatly packaged.

jesus!

This is another "what I believe" post, except that frankly I'm weighting it a little heavier than just "that's just like my opinion, man."

One big point out of the way first: the idea that Jesus is "fictional," "a myth," etc. This is just dumb. It's natural to want to swing the pendulum in the other direction in response to the extremists' Cross-fetishism, and it's maybe not an easy thing for the layman to have a good grasp on which Biblical figures are historically suspect or not, but there is less evidence for the existence of scores of Roman emperors and Egyptian pharaohs than there is for the existence of Jesus, and no one challenges them. Early Christianity was my area of focus as a historian, and I have yet to see a compelling argument for the possibility that there was no Jesus of Nazareth. Furthermore, early Christianity makes much, much more sense with a real Jesus, one that early followers or potential converts could be expected to have encountered or heard stories about.

The bulk of the New Testament consists of letters written by post-Crucifixion convert Paul and narratives about Jesus's life -- the Gospels -- written a generation or more after his death. The best way to think of the Gospels -- both those included in the New Testament and the various extracanonical ones -- is as texts produced by various leadership-communities: small local Christian churches led by, founded by, or inspired by a particular early Christian leader. It's important to remember that no book of the New Testament was written during a time when there was a uniform Christianity -- even the process of assembling the New Testament, as one of many steps in the process of attempting to create a universal (that is, "Catholic") Christian church, was a highly politicized one. Compromises were made. Including the book of Revelation is a key example. But putting that aside, the point is that the books of the New Testament were written during a chaotic period in which there were many disparate Christianities, some of which competed with one another, others of which operated with little contact with or awareness of each other.

Keep in mind that by the time the New Testament was formalized, by the time Christianity was anything close to unified, the Christian community was already older than the United States is now. Non-historians -- in my experience, even historians who don't specialize in early Christianity -- tend to brush this off because in light of how old Christianity is now, it seems like such a short time. But a lot happens in three centuries. (I'm aware that it is more accurate to paint Western Christianity as "constantly trying to construct orthodoxy" than as having ever achieved unity and orthodoxy, but I am trying to keep this post streamlined.)

While these books, including the gospels, were written primarily for use by the communities that produced them, they're also full of what we'd now call spin. Think of the different ways to talk about American history, Constitutional law, or freedom of religion in the United States, and the ways our narratives of those topics are shaped by our politics -- especially, but not exclusively, when we are either trying to sway someone to our way of thinking or writing something for an audience that is already in our choir. These are the same forces shaping the gospels. Where they agree -- like with the many points of agreement among the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke, the three oldest gospels in the New Testament) -- it's probably in large part because there was a common narrative about Jesus that had been accepted by most of the communities.

There is significant evidence that Mark is the oldest gospel, and may have been used as a source by the authors of Matthew or Luke. Here are some things to consider about the oldest Jesus narrative:

* In Mark, there is no birth story -- no shepherds or wise men, no divine conception, no virgin birth. The first time we see Jesus is as an adult. Only Mark refers to Jesus as "the son of Mary." Only Mark calls Jesus a carpenter, gives his brothers names, and refers to his sisters. Mark's story, in other words, is about a more human and grounded Jesus who had normal human roles in addition to his work as an itinerant rabbi.

* In Mark, Jesus is never referred to as God, nor portrayed as having existed before his life on Earth.

* This is not to say that Mark is not a supernatural narrative. Far from it. All the more reason why these exclusions are significant -- this is not an attempt to tell a non-supernatural story about a supernatural figure, but a story about a figure with divinely-granted healing abilities (part of the standard "wandering religious leader" package for the time) with no claim to divine birth, much less to being God in human form.

One of the most interesting ways in which Mark accords with Matthew and Luke is how significant John the Baptist is in all three gospels. In Matthew and Luke, the supernatural birth narrative serves to downplay John the Baptist in a sense -- he is still just as present in the story, given a good deal of screen time, but his supernatural role is that of the Messiah's advance man. Mark is more clearly consistent with the idea that John the Baptist was the leader of a major religious-political movement at the fringes of Jewish society, and that after John's death, many members of that movement either joined Jesus or, in time, became members of the early post-Crucifixion Christian communities. The attempt to keep these Baptist followers within the Christian fold is one of the many, many forces that shaped early Christianity.

The story of Jesus is complicated, mysterious, and frustrating, in part because one of the things we can be surest of is that he was deliberately enigmatic in many of his pronouncements, and in part because it is difficult to be sure what he said or did, and what was attributed to him the way we attribute everything to Mark Twain now. It is clear that he was a travelling minister who intentionally, even ostentatiously, violated many of the social and religious norms of his community -- though he is sometimes lazily characterized as an ascetic due to his homelessness and dependence on donations by followers, he ate and drank enough that some onlookers considered him a drunk. He loved the marginalized and he loved to frustrate people who thought they had figured things out. He told parables, many of which are as opaque today as they must have been at the time, and even if we assume that many of the sayings credited to him were things he never said, it still seems likely that he contradicted himself often and with little concern.

His ministry was brief -- maybe three years, probably less -- and though he probably began as a follower of John the Baptist, I think he parted ways with John over a theological or political disagreement (for these two, I don't know that there was much difference between theology and politics). Eventually he was executed by crucifixion, likely for sedition.

I think any stories about Jesus that precede the start of his ministry around age 30 have symbolic meaning at best. They do contribute important frames to our understanding of Christian origins -- for one thing, the portrayal of Herod's persecution of the Jews in his province underscores the idea of Jesus as a member of an oppressed group, a would-be revolutionary leader whose work was left unfinished at his death.

All the more reason why the so-called Christians who invoke him so often while condemning gay marriage or refusing to support basic human rights are such abhorrent fuckwits.

Above all else, this needs to be understood: The "All Lives Matter" crowd are shitting on the face of Christ. The "remember, police officers get shot too, where are our protests?" people are wiping themselves with the Cross. There is little in American life today that is more scornful of Jesus's teachings, more incompatible with his message, than the political and social stances adopted by his most vocal mourners.

Catholic theologian John Dominic Crossan popularized (and I think coined?) the best phrase I've heard for summing up Jesus's message: "open commensality." Open commensality means inviting everyone to the table. That's not a metaphor. He ate and drank with prostitutes, lepers, tax collectors, and criminals, despite being a strongly religious man in a culture that for centuries had emphasized ritual cleanliness and purity -- in other words, he did something that would be very difficult for us to do, but in a time and place that made it much, much harder for him. Further, while today we might expect to be praised for outreach to the downtrodden if we could find the right spin, he constantly had to defend himself for it, and there's ample evidence that this is something his followers continued to struggle with (and which likely informed the discussion of who, exactly, can become a Christian, but that's another matter). Open commensality means you don't draw lines between yourself and other people. It's not the judgmental "tolerance" some Christians are starting to support, but a state of being filled with such compassion that you don't need to tolerate anyone because you cannot perceive in them anything to tolerate, anything you need to be judgmental about.

His strongest words of criticism were always reserved for the wealthy, the powerful, and those who presumed to condemn others.

The one thing we can be surest of where Jesus is concerned is that if you are one of these All Lives Matter types, one of these healthcare-denying, gay-marriage-opposing, "what about Straight Pride Day, what about White History Month," "why do poor people get free cell phones?", abortion-shaming types, and you have the gall to publicly align yourself with Jesus and his legacy, you have surrendered to the evil in your heart.

moral psychology, naturalism

Technically I majored in philosophy, a double major with English. Because the philosophy department was tiny, I graduated one class short of fulfilling that double major -- I had taken most of the classes the department offered, which made it more and more difficult to find a session of any of the remaining classes that didn't conflict with anything else. I'd already been accepted into a Master's program in History, so it didn't make sense to put that off for a year just to take one class, so my Bachelor's is officially only in English. I almost went back to philosophy after that program, when LSU offered me a fellowship in their PhD program, but moved to Indiana instead.

Anyway, for whatever reason I have been less diligent in keeping up with readings in philosophy than I have in history or religious studies -- maybe, unconsciously, because I didn't get that degree, and so think of myself as "less" of a philosophy student than a history one.

Any academic program leaves you with a lot of gaps, but in some disciplines, the gaps are felt more inuitively and obviously than in others -- it's pretty easy to understand, as a historian, where your gaps are, for the simple reason that you're obviously aware of the existence of the many eras and countries about which you have no familiarity. If you took a class on antiquity and a class on the Renaissance, you absorbed a little about the Middle Ages but you have a clear sense that your understanding of European history has a large gap in it. The map of philosophy is a lot less clear. I didn't even have a good sense of what "the philosophy of biology" entailed, for instance, until two degree programs later, when I happened to take a seminar on it.

I don't know that I am necessarily as concerned with my gaps in philosophy as I am in other areas, to be honest, but I am trying to shore my reading and understanding up. At the moment, the book I'm reading in the car is the first volume of a series of essay collections on moral psychology -- the intersection of philosophy (especially ethics) and psychology. The first volume begins with a discussion of the naturalism debate, perhaps the defining debate in ethics in the 20th century.

Interestingly, this was the second context in which I read about philosophical naturalism -- the proposition that there are no supernatural influences in the world -- in the span of a week, and the contexts were very different. In the first, Alvin Plantinga argues in Where the Conflict Really Lies that evolution contradicts the claims of naturalism. Plantinga is one of the most important theologians of the last century, but in attempting to counter the idiocies of the New Atheism, he goes too far -- it's this train of thought that led him to support intellectual design for a while, and when you're in the room with those guys, you really have to take a long look at your life.

The surface meaning of philosophical naturalism -- "there is no supernatural world" -- is the least interesting part of it to talk about. In ethics, the naturalism debate is concerned more specifically with the question of whether moral philosophy, normative philosophy, whatever you want to call it -- a philosophical framework that defines what is right and what is wrong -- needs to be grounded in an understanding of human behavior and the natural world, and/or whether it is possible to have a system of ethics that does not depend on the existence of God. That may sound like two questions, but your answer to one tends to dictate your answer to the other.

This may seem like a non-issue to laymen, but they would probably differ considerably on what the "obvious" answer is. The fact is that philosophers have tended to agree with Kant's insistence that an ethical framework has to postulate the existence of God. People who agree with that further tend to think that it's fine to talk about what's right and wrong without concern for how humans are built -- they're the ones who are the quickest to attack "relativism," or to paint as relativist any ethical reasoning that invokes the findings of social sciences. Philosophers and scientists alike are surprisingly uncomfortable with the idea that ethics should be informed by an understanding of human behavior and biology -- far more than you would think given the horseshit narratives we're always fed about godless science.

Now, me, I've already said that I condemn the use of the afterlife as a behavioral incentive, so it's not surprising that I find the idea that "there can be no ethics without God" abhorrent. More importantly, I don't think that belief in God requires -- or even easily leads to -- the belief that ethics can be considered only in a vacuum without reference to human realities. There are a lot of aspects of the naturalism debate that involve too much nit-picking and hair-splitting for me to be interested in, so maybe it's good I didn't take that fellowship; I am kind of a utilitarian about philosophy, I quickly lose interest in the questions whose answers have no impact on behavior. 

Though philosophers, thankfully, don't do this, the whole kerfuffle reminds me of some of the worst idiotic things that Christians say -- it's always Christians in my experience, but perhaps in countries with different religious demographics, other denominations are just as guilty: 

"If you don't believe in God, how do you know right from wrong?"

"If you don't believe in God, how does your life have any purpose?"

They're roughly the same question, at least from these dips. And it's always, always from Christians who know very little about their own religion, have thought very little about Christian ethics, and certainly don't have any real answers -- answers that have actually changed what they do in life -- to the "purpose" question. Fuckwits all. These questions are just signals that tell you what the asker is deriving from their religious identity -- a sense of superiority and security, a sense of settledness.