For a variety of reasons I ended up watching a “debate” between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza one night on C-SPAN2 on the subject of the relative merits of religion, particularly Christianity vs. atheism. You can figure out who was on what side. I use the term “debate” for lack of a better one, but really, I can’t think of two worse representatives of the respective positions. Hitchens was soused, and D’Souza made his typical nuanced-on-the-surface-but-blindingly-simplistic-beneath arguments. The audience showed about the same level of sophistication as that of the Jerry Springer Show—slightly less as some in Springer’s crowd watch with a good dose of irony, and at this little circus all seemed committed.
This is too bad, as a genuine debate about the roles of religion and science in how we view the world is still a compelling one. Instead of tackling the issues with the kind of reflection they deserve, both Hitchens and D’Souza fell back on the same moribund arguments that have sullied these waters for as long as anyone can recall: Hitchens contended there was no scientific proof of the existence of God, so there isn’t one; D’Souza countered that science is too internally conflicted and has too little evidence to prove its own theories, and that therefore there is only one alternative, that being a traditionalist view of creation. D’Souza’s explanation is a leap of faith that he posits as pure science, and Hitchens’s is just bad science since the lack of something does not obviate its existence. If Hitchens were being honest, he would have to say that science is agnostic on the matter of God, but that the lack of positive proof would tend to indicate there isn’t one. If D’Souza were being honest, he would have to say that the limitations inherent in science force him to appeal to faith and that his traditionalist view makes the most sense for him.
If we were all being honest about this, we would say that the complexity of things like DNA might seem miraculous to us in comparison to everyday experience, but, given the nature of our physical laws, they are not beyond the realm of possibility. If we were all being honest, we’d say that these same laws that give rise to DNA, in some sense, create us, though obviously not in the same way that insists on a Big, White, Bearded Man in the Sky.
D’Souza, naturally, clung to the idea of God as a font for morality enforced by the promise of eternal salvation or damnation. Hitchens contended that the moral sense is innate, a product of evolution, corrupted by our flawed societies and the religions they espouse. D’Souza pointed out the mass murders of Stalin, Hilter, and Mao as being “secular” and “atheistic” in origin; Hitchens countered with the Crusades and feudalism, and that there never would have been a Stalin or a Hitler without the bad behavior of the religiously backed reigns of the kings and the czars.
This back-and-forth does not seem to make sense when you consider that the justification for mass murder always comes from what is most readily at hand—faith, tradition, racial purity, ideological uniformity—but that it always comes down to power, taking it and keeping it. And while our capacity for morality may very well be innate, individual expressions of it are certainly not, and that furthermore, they vary from culture to culture and era to era. Morality is more like language: by our natures we can always acquire it, but which form of it we do acquire is determined neither by God nor by genetics.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Moral relativism makes morality no more real; it merely acknowledges the complexity, ambiguity, and instability of the human condition. Likewise, it’s just fine to say that certain positions on the existence or lack of a divine being is not, maybe even cannot be, a scientific one. Science must be limited in its scope to pursue its methodology, and the more comfortable we are with that, the better off we’ll be when it inevitably reverses itself. Faith will always require a certain amount of unprovability, and the more comfortable we are with that, the more rested out spirits will be.
What really bothers me about the positions of both D’Souza and Hitchens is that they are both fundamentalist: both require a level of certainty entirely unjustified by our limited epistemology.
by Special Correspondent TS DeHaviland
We hear a lot about the “wisdom of the market” these days, especially from neo-con free-market zealots posing as savvy 30-something hipsters. But with oil at $126 a barrel on nothing more than speculation, we see further evidence that the market is not wise at all: it is short-sighted and flighty, idiotic, bullheaded, and daft. $126 a barrel oil simply ignores current supply and demand, with relatively high production and declining demand in the US of A. It rose this high first on what journalists called “jitters,” as if the traders had had too much caffeine. Actually, they were acting like spooked cattle in response to the distant thunder of the Bush administration’s threats of war with Iran from a few months back. (Could it be this is part of the president’s and vice-president’s retirement plan? But that would be too cynical a postulation.) The market responds to pressure with the same lack of rationality and bandwagon mentality that leads to the mediocrity that is American Idol.
By this point, of course, it’s buoyed up by that speculation: there’s money to be made in them thar irrational behavior, and so traders bid the price up higher hoping to dump it at just the right time. This is from the same generation of traders who seem to have learned nothing from the housing bubble and the tech bubble and biotech before that. Some of them may even be old enough to recall the collapse of savings-and-loans in the ’80s. Thus their behavior is even less that irrational: it’s bordering on criminal since their actions lead directly to the suffering of millions, in this case millions who can’t afford food anymore because it costs too much to grow and transport.
Beyond this, the mere fact that we’re still trading in oil in the first place is a good indication of the lack of market wisdom, as we’ve known for 30 years that there’s simply no future in oil since it’s a finite resource and we’ll run out of it sooner or later. Granted, there’s plenty to be made in the meantime, but you can make a short-term bundle by liquidating all your household goods and living in a cardboard box too, and I don’t see many traders doing that. A wise market would have acknowledged the inherent risk in investing in alternatives a long time ago, but would have plunged ahead anyway because the alternative is riding out a dwindling resource until there’s no market upon which to trade at all.
Jillian is a talented individual. She can exist in any time period and geography, be it Ancient Rome, the Spanish invasion of South America, Victorian Era England, American Colonialism, or present day. She has the added abilities of communicating with the past and changing genders. For a couple of years I’ve been writing poems about Jillian, letting her swing freely from the treetops as she rehearsed the role of Juliet in a high school play, trekked across the wilderness to farm the unsettled plains, wrote imprudently steamy letters while servants starched her linen. But now it’s time for this monkey to evolve already.
Immortality would be icky. An Everywoman–booooring. Specificity is needed here, like a “Jillian memeplex” that is replicating its cultural inheritance across both time and continents in order to comment with consistency on whichever cultural environment it encounters. Can Jillian be Jillian without being Jillian at the same time? I think memes are the answer here, but what do my po-mo’s think?
Yet again my students prove they cannot listen—that simply hearing is beyond them. They must be distracted because otherwise they might actually start thinking about something in the world around them, or, worse yet, they might start thinking about something in the past or something in the world that is not immediately around them, maybe something from a cubicle or from a rat-infested Mumbai slum. They might accidentally think about some massive machine slowly leaking fluid onto a factory floor. They might realize there’s a price somebody else pays for their comfort or that others unknown pay for their suffering. Aside from the children of the very rich, the children of America’s middle class are the most privileged beings on the face of the earth. They—which is to say “we,” as I was one too–do not suffer in the sense that others do, from famine or war or the violence and paranoia of political oppression. Yet any one of them will moan of a terrible life, of privation from all that’s holy and cool, of a series of arbitrary parental usurpations of rights and entitlements. He’ll also tell you that the poor just don’t work hard enough, that the wealthy have all earned what they have, that the smart are far from cool. They’ll tell you that they’re all going to be basketball stars and captains of industry, rappers and designer clothing moguls, actors and celebrities-without-portfolio, that the future is boundless and full of glory on the court, the screen, and the stage.
The American adolescent is a creation of marketing. No one is more sure of who she is than the American adolescent, and one of the things she’s sure of is that she’s “finding herself,” that this is a “difficult” and an “awkward” age. He knows this because he’s been told it. She knows what she is supposed to listen to on her iPod, indeed that she should be listening to it on an iPod. Jazz is off-limits, classical is for commercials when an air of sophistication is meant to be portrayed. Everything is better with a hip-hop beat. These are a people sure that carpenter pants are out for now and that ripped jeans are back in. They know precisely what’s bad or ugly or old skool and precisely what’s hawt and new; though they may very well disagree on the particulars, that does not change the precision of their opinions.
The American adolescent wears his neediness like an American Eagle t-shirt that she changes from day-to-day. She wears it as a badge of her hurt and her vulnerability which she’s sure of because that is part of what’s packaged as adolescence. Margaret Meade may have been the first to recognize adolescence as a Western concept, but now we must wrangle with it as a product of marketing. Adolescence is an exploitation of the indulged offspring of the middle class, whose buying power itself is a projection of the status of their parents. The best training they’ll ever get in being consumers happens here, and as such it is a de facto right of passage. Here is learned that there is no distinction between their best interests and their “style,” that individual style is a definition of self, and, because of this, that there is no distinction between political liberty and consumer choice. This pattern is maintained long into, if not throughout, adulthood, with style and image-creation largely supplanting personality. Image is a boon to marketers, since it must be continually updated, continually groomed for the next life stage.
And so Americans don’t develop much until they are in their 20s, and may not develop at all, or may never develop past their glory days of being marketed-to at 16 or 17 or so. This is not here, as it may be in some societies, a detriment. It may even be an asset. The current president of the United States was elected precisely for his adolescent brashness, bullheadedness, and peevishness, all of which we find endearing.
The irony is that many Americans who view themselves as most grown-up are the ones who encourage and promote perpetual adolescence: America’s conservatives. Conservatism in America is associated with fanatical militantism, intolerance, black-and-white thinking, an absolute hatred of ambiguity, and an unswerving faith in marketing and in the private sector generally. It also worships power, and so American conservatives encourage in their children behavior that would be seen as outré in most civilized societies: bullying, schoolyard vigilantism, unwarranted aggression of the field of play. Indeed, American football can be seen as perhaps the condensation of the American conservative ethic; it is hierarchical but also anarchical, violent, competitive for its own sake, and reliant on a purely externalized set of purposes and goals. It is no surprise that many notable American conservatives are football fanatics, from Patton to Nixon to Condoleeza Rice. This is something they share with many male American adolescents.
The confluence of politics and marketing creates perpetual consumers, perpetual adolescents, and a group of people absolutely certain of what they’re about, as their values-as-lifestyle-choice are reinforced at very turn. That we would blunder into Iraq the way we did, and that this particular president would do it, should not surprise us at all.
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