A Cross For All America

Two years ago Los Angeles sculptor Jon Krawczyk was presented with a unique opportunity.

The image of the I-beam cross left standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center is a familiar one. In the days and weeks following 9/11 the cross became many things for many people: a symbol of hope and healing; a representation of the unyielding stance of good in the face of evil; a sign of God's presence; a meaningless coincidence. After standing for several years on a pedestal at the corner of the former Trade Center site the cross was in October 2006 moved a block away, to a place along the sidewalk next to St. Peter's Catholic Church (which itself was not only damaged when the towers fell but also played a vital role in the recovery efforts carried out in the wake of the attack). This I-beam cross would eventually be moved back to its original site, as a permanent part of the September 11th Memorial & Museum. The St. Peter's community, meanwhile, had grown attached to the cross and what it represented, and began searching for someone who could create a new cross to stand in its place. My friend Jon Krawczyk, a New Jersey native, accepted the task.

Rather than replace that I-beam cross with a replica, Jon wanted to create something completely different. After many months of designing (and redesigning), Jon had ready a model of a sculpture that, while in the basic shape of a cross, took on in abstract form the shape of a human body, comprised of several uniquely contoured pieces that came together into a single entity. The symbolism, Jon hoped, would transcend the traditional significance of the cross and make this memorial a conduit of remembrance that would embrace all Americans.

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Haboobs in Arizona

Oh serendipity! I may not be able to bear it if this is not the zenith of Islamic attempts to take over Arizona!

Those Arizonians are right to oppose the linguistification of jihadism. From the most humble zero to the highest admiral, we as Americans and English speakers must resist this assassination of our sacred language!

Perhaps we should respond with tariffs on all Arab nations? Or simply bleed them scarlet. I am so distressed that I’m frantically searching for an algorithm to make myself feel better. It may not be enough to relax on my sofa with some candy, coffee, soda, or alcohol with plenty of sugary syrup!

I may have to go full bore and partake of a fine meal with apricots and artichokes, tuna, spinach, oranges, lemons or limes; then huddle in the fetal position beneath my soft mohair and muslin sheets. I may have to surround myself with the sweet scents of camphor or jasmine, or play some guitar music, to send this Islamofacism to its just nadir. I could distract myself from the Muslim takeover by reading a magazine about the safari!

Is there any elixir or gauze that can ease my pain?

(Perhaps there is some hashish in a jar somewhere under my mattress.)

h/t Russell Saunders

Rejoinders to a New Political Dialectic

I posted some rejoinders to my original piece "A New Political Dialectic" in the comments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  I have reproduced them below:

1.  A possible litmus test for what constitutes “positivist New Atheism” is that they tend to make the argument that religion is unfalsifiable as if that is an indictment of religion.  Really, religion does not hold itself to the same standards as science (why should it?).  The two work best when kept separate.  Just like I can be a scientist who enjoys art or a scientist who enjoys nature, I can also be a scientist who enjoys religion.

Again, this doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not God exists, (which I made explicit above) and I was hoping not to get into that since it’s been hashed out billions of times and no one has made any progress.  But, since people seem to want to talk about that, from my own personal journey, I know that “Does God exist?” is a difficult question to define precisely.  I’ve settled into a sort of noncognitivist/Spinozan outlook on the divine that places me closer to both a Sufi mystic and a Nietzschean atheist than one who believes I’ve been “saved” by a personal Jesus or the group of people that make vast amounts of money antagonizing believers in personal Jesuses (Jesi?) because their beliefs are not based on the scientific method.

2.  To be honest, I’m really disappointed that comments tended towards an old-fashioned Internet atheist debate, but I fault myself for putting so much about Harris and his positivist atheism at the beginning of the piece.  Burt Likko’s comment is one here that actually engages my argument, which is that political debate should be driven by a dialectical relationship between libertarianism and socialism; I was hoping that more comments would address this contention.

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A New Political Dialectic

<cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

Jackson Lears has a riveting piece up at the Nation which soundly routs the new parapositivism taking the popular and newspaper science cultures by storm.  The piece is called "Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris".  It's a takedown of Harris couched within a takedown of the New Atheist conceptual framework couched within a takedown of a positivism which oversteps its bounds.  Freddie deBoer recently praised the piece:

I think that absolutely everyone should read this profoundly necessary evisceration of Sam Harris, the Moe of the New Atheist Three Stooges, written by Jackson Lears and published by the Nation. It may be my favorite essay published this year; it goes well beyond the usual stalking horses of New Atheism and speaks to some of the fundamental analytical and ethical issues confronting our species, particularly when it comes to progress and the limits of knowledge. Read the whole thing, seriously.

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Transcendent Indwelling

To continue my rambling series on personificationism, the way we typically discuss "God" makes no sense at all.  (Out of simple curiosity, I have chosen to ignore the obtrusive irony of committing these thoughts to words.)  For a long time, I have been averse to both Evangelical Christians like all the usual culprits and New Atheists like all the usual culprits.  It seems there is a dearth of surly, self-appointed team captains willing to speak for the radical withholding of judgment.

Perhaps at least part of my aversion to both factions is rooted in their tendency to debate the nature of a representation, which just doesn't make any sense at all.  Mr. Hand says "Romanticism is green".  Mr. Book says it is not green.  I have more antipathy towards the New Atheists because as scientists they are presumably not proceeding from first principles; this - and a history of science full of arrogant fuck-ups - compels more cooperative metacognition.  But then again, conceptualization has never been the scientist's strong suit.

A typical argument used by the New Atheists comes from Betrand Russell's teapot.  The positivist Russell parodied the claims of the religious by postulating that a teapot exists in orbit around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  One cannot disprove the existence of that teapot, therefore Russell's claim that the teapot exists is just as invalid a claim as "God exists".  At first glance, this seems like a fair attack on the existence of God; yet upon closer examination, we realize that Russell's claim involves the physical object of a "teapot", whereas "God" is a received linguistic artifact.  Russell and the New Atheists commit an egregious category error in compelling a falsifiable conception of the divine.

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The Way of the Gods - Part II

This is part two of a three-part series.  Part one can be found here.

After fighting through crowds of tourists laughing childishly at the "Takeshita Street" sign, Nigerians hawking hip-hop wear and shouting "Yo! Genki!?" at passersby, and the strangely-coiffed, various in-groups of pre-teens clustered around Harajuku Station, my be-dressed wife and a be-suited I made our way past scattered, camera-wielding foreigners and Japanese alike down the long, wide paths beginning at the quiet and stately entrance to Meiji Jingu.  Fifteen minutes later we arrived at a boring administrative building near the honden (main hall) of Japan's largest shrine.  

We entered a lobby of sorts that would have been indistinguishable from a hotel reception area but for the giant chrysanthemum seals ostentatiously displayed everywhere.  After simmering for fifteen minutes or so, we were escorted by a high shrine baba to a modern-looking, pink-carpeted room with ordinary chairs placed flush against all four walls.  Shallow, white china teacups were arranged on brown industrial folding tables set in front of these chairs; a gold-leaf folded screen lay auspiciously at the far end of the room.  At a table in front of the gilded screen sat the couple to be married, with the groom's guests trailing off to the left and the bride's guests stretching to the right.  My wife and I sat at the terminus next to the door in the exact middle of the far wall directly facing the couple.

There were about forty people in the room altogether, almost all of whom were family members, including the younger sister of the bride, who was also our friend and had recently given birth to an apparently quiet, well-behaved baby.  Of the forty allowed to attend the ceremony, there were five non-Shinto priest non-family members: my wife, me, and three other friends of the bride.  The groom, who grew up at Yasukuni Shrine, had no friends who were not also Shinto priests. 

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The Way of the Gods - Part I

It's fortuitous that Kevin wrote about love rules in Japan vis-a-vis Valentine's Day, because I attended a wedding over the weekend that I have been meaning to write about all week.  This wedding was one of if not the most profound cultural experience I have had in Japan.  I will try in vain to convey some of this profundity in the words that follow.  This post is the first of a meandering and exhaustive three-part series on the event.

Kevin used the word "neo-tradition" at the beginning of his post.  Perhaps because I am familiar with the pejorative usage of the terms "neo-liberal" and "neo-conservative", I immediately perceive the destructive power of the term "neo-tradition".  In the metaphorical parlor rooms of the blogosphere that I haunt, the term "postmodern conservative" is used to denote the conscious choice to revive lost tradition - the rational judgment that blind adherence to tradition is essentially superior to the cerebral uncertainties of fractured modernity's all-consuming void of purposelessness.  

I for one see such a dichotomy as false; tradition is necessarily a yoke - whether benevolent or malevolent - and it is for this reason that neo-traditions will ultimately be nothing but baseless human attempts at coercion.  I wrote in the comments to Kevin's post:

..."neo-tradition" embodies all the scorn I think hiding behind the word "tradition" to force unfounded and absurd obligation on other people really, really deserves...I have no problem with "neo-traditions" that everyone agrees on observing; nor do I have much of a problem with restrictive "paleo-traditions". It's obligatory neo-traditions that must be destroyed. These are like nationwide hazing.

For all the goofy neo-tradition one encounters in Japan (Don't think the U.S. is exempt from widely-observed neo-tradition.), paleo-tradition still abounds.  It is trying to understand some of this paleo-tradition and to filter it from vulgar neo-tradition that gives purpose to the expatriate intellectual mission.  For me, the most interesting, most difficult to understand, darkest (in a good way), and most quintessentially Japanese tradition is Shinto.

Shinto torii at the summit of Mt. ZaōDepending on one's definition of the word "religion", Shinto may or may not qualify.  Shinto is best described as an aggregate of received practices; it is not necessarily a belief system.  Shinto is the indigenous cultural system of Japan, and was likely practiced in some form when Jomon peoples were first cultivating chestnuts.  In the Shinto cosmos, kami (essences) exist in all things, and humans and other animals become kami after they die.  Shrines, unusual natural elements, and other designated places are interfaces to the world of the kami; shrines, artifacts, and amulets act as conduits to the spirit realm.  Shinto has been described as an optimistic system: people are good, and evil is caused by only evil kami.  Protection from evil requires diligent adherence to correct ritual, the logistics of which have been handed down as cultural treasure through the generations.  These rituals connect modern Japan to its prehistoric past, to the vague darkness which pervaded all existence before the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the light of letters that came from the continent.

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The Virtue of Virtues

Some of the 72 disciples of Confucius at Koshi-byo in Nagasaki

Sharon Begley writes in Science Journal in 2004:

The task was to practice "compassion" meditation, generating a feeling of loving kindness toward all beings.

"We tried to generate a mental state in which compassion permeates the whole mind with no other thoughts," says Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Nepal, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

Not since David Hume has virtue ethics found a place in the mainstream philosophy community, despite the fact that - more than any other moral framework - virtue ethics serves as the basic moral framework for all of the world's major religions and cultures.

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On Reciprocal Altruism

For a long time Darwinism struggled to adequately explain altruism, or, what appeared to be the giving of gifts or services with no expected return.  When the concept of reciprocal altruism was first proposed, many who believed in the goodness of humankind revolted; for how can our goodness be based in selfishness?  It was simply too glib to say that generosity evolved because of reciprocity.  But the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.  One can be truly altruistic and still get a competitive advantage because of that altruism.  For the religious, this could even be couched in the language of theology and construed as God's reward for good behavior.  

So, some questions for religious people: why oppose Darwinian explanations for human behavior?  Does studying physics or geology diminish the beauty of nature?  Does understanding how a zygote works make me love my daughter any less?  Does accepting that generosity builds community invalidate goodness itself?    

Religion as Moral Government

Not that kind of Moral Government - Image by RobLisaMeehanToday, I walked by a sign advertising a lecture on an age old question: "Does Religion Make People More Peaceful?"  Well, it sure doesn't seem like it!  Radical Islam has demonstrated conclusively that fervent religious belief doesn't always entail pro-social behavior.  That's the most recent example in a multi-denominational trend that stretches through the Crusades, Inquisition, Hindu chauvinism, Mormon persecution and Mormon murderers.  One caveat to that sad litany: for the vast majority of people religion does make it easier to live a peaceful life.  However, there exists among some of the most feverishly religious people a propensity to engage in barbarism.  Why is it that even though all religions feature prominent scriptural prohibitions on violence, the observant seem particularly capable of unspeakable acts of brutality?  Religion has proven a flawed system of moral government: usually effective, but infrequently disastrous.

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Even More on The Cove

The Cove continues to take the western world by storm.This post was inspired by the conversation on www.alllooksame.com about the merits of eating dolphins and the arguments used against this by the documentary film “The Cove”, a film which I excoriated in my review for this website.

The proprietor of www.alllooksame.com, Dyske Suematsu, suggests that the film’s argument that the Japanese must not be allowed to eat dolphin meat comes from a primarily ethnocentric worldview, and is ignorant of Japanese cultural norms.  In particular to this is the view on species of the Shinto religion/philosophy, that there is no hierarchy of species and that all life must be equally respected. 

However, I feel that there are arguments from religion (both of Japan and elsewhere), self-interest, humanism, mathematics, and postmodernism that suggest we should not eat dolphins.  This debate is of course guided in the simple fact that in the state of nature, life consumes life to survive. 

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Breakthrough or Sign of the Apocalypse?

It bothers me that science and faith are so often at war.  As a person without faith- or at least religious faith - perhaps I oversimplify the difficulty of rationalizing deeply held beliefs with another view point that is so rigid that it can be doctrinaire.  It pains me to see centuries old science dismissed as mere guesswork, but when religious views are repeatedly undermined perhaps it is natural to eventually believe that there is malicious intent.  Some days, even I wonder if perhaps the scientists aren't just sticking it to them; exhibit A, Stanford researcher have discovered a process to make sperm and eggs from embryonic stem cells- a process that works no matter what the gender of the donor is.  Christians believe life begins at conception so this is murder, though to be fair, turning an embryo into sperm and eggs which can become another embryo is pretty muddy ethically.  I suppose their answer would be that either way it thwarts God's will, but that does seem to skirt the larger questions.  How can life begin at conception if it can be restarted and become a different life?  If embryos are capable of being unwound back to their parts then how can they be a completed human life?  

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