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Monday, March 28, 2016
God Is a Question, Not an Answer
By William Irwin March 26, 2016 2:30 pm, New York Times
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Near end of Albert Camus’s existentialist novel “The Stranger,” Meursault,
the protagonist, is visited by a priest who offers him comfort in the face of his
impending execution. Meursault, who has not cared about anything up to this
point, wants none of it. He is an atheist in a foxhole. He certainly has not been
a strident atheist, but he claims to have no time for the priest and his talk of
God. For him, God is not the answer.
Some 70 years later, Kamel Daoud, in his 2013 novel “The Meursault
Investigation,” picks up the thread of Camus’s story. In one scene late in the
that novel, an imam hounds Harun, the brother of the unnamed Arab who was
killed in “The Stranger.” In response, Harun gives a litany of his own
impieties, culminating in the declaration that “God is a question, not an
answer.” Harun’s declaration resonates with me as a teacher and student of
philosophy. The question is permanent; answers are temporary. I live in the
question.
Any honest atheist must admit that he has his doubts, that occasionally he
thinks he might be wrong, that there could be a God after all — if not the God
of the Judeo-Christian tradition, then a God of some kind. Nathaniel
Hawthorne said of Herman Melville, “He can neither believe, nor be
comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to
do one or the other.” Dwelling in a state of doubt, uncertainty and openness
about the existence of God marks an honest approach to the question.
There is no easy answer. Indeed, the question may be fundamentally
unanswerable. Still, there are potentially unpleasant consequences that can
arise from decisions or conclusions, and one must take responsibility for them.
Anyone who does not occasionally worry that he may be a fraud almost
certainly is. Nor does the worry absolve one from the charge; one may still be a
fraud, just one who rightly worries about it on occasion. Likewise, anyone who
does not occasionally worry that she is wrong about the existence or
nonexistence of God most likely has a fraudulent belief. Worry can make the
belief or unbelief genuine, but it cannot make it correct.
People who claim certainty about God worry me, both those who believe
and those who don’t believe. They do not really listen to the other side of
conversations, and they are too ready to impose their views on others. It is
impossible to be certain about God.
Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say to God if it turned out
there was one and he met him at judgment. Russell’s reply: “You gave us
insufficient evidence.” Even believers can appreciate Russell’s response. God
does not make it easy. God, if he exists, is “deus absconditus,” the hidden God.
He does not show himself unambiguously to all people, and people disagree
about his existence. We should all feel and express humility in the face of the
question even if we think the odds are tilted heavily in favor of a particular
answer. Indeed, the open-minded search for truth can unite believers and
nonbelievers.
In a previous essay in The Stone, Gary Gutting re-conceived Pascal’s
wager. Rather than consider it as a bet on whether God exists, which has
tremendous consequences on one side and relatively trivial consequences on
the other, we should consider it as a bet on whether to embrace a “doubt of
indifference” or a “doubt of desire.” A doubt of indifference is simply a matter
of not caring, and it has no clear benefits. By contrast, a doubt of desire
approaches the question with the hope that a higher power could be found that
would provide greater meaning and value to human existence. As Gutting sees
it, the choice is obvious.
Of course, nonbelievers will object that there are various secular
alternatives for finding meaning and value in life. Additionally, there is an
assumption built into Pascal’s wager that we are talking about the God of the
Judeo-Christian tradition. Nonbelievers may see no reason to favor that
particular deity. So Gutting’s “doubt of desire” needs to be more explicitly
conceived as an openness to the question in which the nonbeliever explores
what various religious traditions have to offer. The nonbeliever might embrace
the ethical teachings of Christianity, the yogic practices of Hinduism, the
meditative techniques of Zen Buddhism, or any of the vast array of teachings
and practices that the world’s religions have to offer. Such embrace may lead
the nonbeliever to belief in God, or it may not.
This proposal should be taken in the other direction as well: There should
be no dogmatic belief. The believer should concede that she does not know
with certainty that God exists. There is no faith without doubt. The Trappist
monk Thomas Merton wrote that faith “is a decision, a judgment that is fully
and deliberately taken in the light of a truth that cannot be proven — it is not
merely the acceptance of a decision that has been made by somebody else.”
Indeed, belief without doubt would not be required by an all-loving God,
and it should not be worn as a badge of honor. As nonbelievers should have a
doubt of desire, so, too believers should have a faith inflected by doubt. Such
doubt can enliven belief by putting it at risk and compelling it to renew itself,
taking it from the mundane to the transcendent, as when a Christian takes the
leap of faith to believe in the resurrection.
We can all exist along a continuum of doubt. Some of us will approach
religious certainty at one extreme and others will approach atheistic certainty
at the other extreme. Many of us will slide back and forth over time.
What is important is the common ground of the question, not an answer.
Surely, we can respect anyone who approaches the question honestly and with
an open mind. Ecumenical and interfaith religious dialogue has increased
substantially in our age. We can and should expand that dialogue to include
atheists and agnostics, to recognize our common humanity and to stop seeing
one another as enemy combatants in a spiritual or intellectual war. Rather
than seeking the security of an answer, perhaps we should collectively
celebrate the uncertainty of the question.
This is not to say that we should cease attempts to convince others of our
views. Far from it. We should try to unsettle others as we remain open to being
unsettled ourselves. In a spirit of tolerance and intellectual humility, we
should see ourselves as partners in a continuing conversation, addressing an
enduring question.
William Irwin is a professor of philosophy at King’s College, the author
of “The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism Without Consumerism” and
the general editor of the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series.
The Neanderthals, the Denisovans and Us
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MARCH 28, 2016, New York Times
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It’s been nearly 160 years since we Homo sapiens, or “wise people,” first got an
inkling through Charles Darwin and the discovery of Neanderthal remains that
we are just another evolving species on this planet. In recent years, the pace of
new discoveries — made possible by advances in a broad array of disciplines,
including biotechnology, genetics and paleontology — has increased.
In 2010, scientists found that our ancestors not only crossed paths with
other hominids on a similar evolutionary track, but mated with them. They
discovered that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals because many
people, mostly outside of Africa, carry DNA that matches material from the
Neanderthals, our heavybrowed evolutionary relatives.
Now a new study of global genomes, published this month in the journal
Science, reports that our ancestors also crossed paths and interbred with
another distinct hominid species known as the Denisovans.
Like all the previous studies, the latest one raises at least as many
questions as it answers. It found, for example, high levels of Denisovan
ancestry in Oceania, thousands of miles from the Siberian cave where the
species was discovered less than a decade ago. Does that mean the Denisovans
wandered far and wide, or that they crossed paths somewhere else with
modern humans who later settled in Melanesia?
Another tantalizing discovery was that some regions of Neanderthal and
Denisovan DNA became more common in modern humans as generations
passed, suggesting that it proved useful for survival, perhaps by supplying
genes that bolstered immunity. But Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA was
totally absent from four regions of the modern human genome, suggesting that
there were areas in which our ancestors found better and unique evolutionary
solutions.
As discoveries and scientific methods multiply, we will become more
familiar with our distant ancestors of all kinds and species. What is already
evident is that our ancestry cannot be defined by a tidy genealogical tree, but is
an ever-evolving, mysterious and wonderfully diverse tangle of roots and
branches.
Wolff: Trump as the Great White Hope -- Note for a lecture, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"
Michael Wolff, USA TODAY 8:45 a.m. EDT March 28, 2016
Trump image from article
A significant part of modern journalism focuses on minorities who in the past might otherwise have seemed invisible to traditional media.
The New York Times is aggressively on top of the transgender story, likely to the surprise of many of its longtime readers. The issue of economic opportunities for African Americans stretches all the way, according to a recent breathless BuzzFeed story, to the fact that they may not be getting their fair share of jobs in the growing marijuana industry. Another dull Oscar year became a big story about multicultural diversity. The evils of sexism are as large in media as the evils of communism once were. This is otherwise known as identity politics — a chronicle of the rising power and continued grievances of various social subdivisions.
And yet the media seems largely to have missed what may be the most important development in identity politics, radically pushing the national mood and agenda: white rage. Indeed, the nation’s Donald Trump shock might not have been so great if white plight had been better documented.
True, this is often called the white backlash story — quite a media chestnut. But that’s not a story so much about conditions in poor and lower-middle-class white communities as about the resentment of people in these communities toward other groups. The condition is the resentment.
There’s a broad business news category that deals with the collapse of the manufacturing sector and, occasionally, the setbacks of trade unionism and, more recently, a sudden awareness of the effects of trade imbalances — all having a disproportionate effect on older white people without college educations. But there is to these stories largely a sense not of inequity but of the inevitable. Globalism is globalism, and not all demographics are equal. Some are a write-off.
The Times, not long ago, seeming to grasp at the larger story here, devoted considerable attention to drug issues in this demo. White people are the new heroin addicts. The "proscription" drug epidemic is now one of the leading killers in the demo. And if the drugs don’t get you, you’ll kill yourself anyway — with spiking suicide rates in the new white ghettos. This is, it’s hard to miss (or perhaps easy to miss), very similar to the stories that used to be written when the once overwhelmingly white media tried to cover the black community. From outside looking in, what you saw were crime, drugs and single mothers.
You might regard older white people as the new black people — in an economically hopeless situation, with broken families, and ever-escalating drug dependence, handicapped by deep cultural prejudice (and a negative media portrayal), and largely funneled into depressed communities, ghettos by any other name.
Part of the problem here is that older poor and lower-middle-class white people don’t have a separate identity designation. Once, there was the working class, or the white rural poor, and for a while there were the evangelicals, but now it's an identity largely formed just by lack of education. They are merely part of the larger dominant white culture — the failures in it.
Another specific media problem is that, for a host of complicated reasons, this group largely ended up in the right-wing camp (as Reagan Democrats or part of the politically homeless catchall called populism) rather than the left-wing camp, which fosters modern identity designations and allocates media coverage. (Fox News understood this and developed its counter-programming strategy accordingly.)
Then too, there is the issue of how exactly to cover this story. A particular holy grail of the media is that you need natives of an identity group to understand and write about that group. Everybody’s bearing witness. Gays about gays. Hispanics about Hispanics. Even Millennials about Millennials. The Times has a frequent transgender op-ed columnist, Jennifer Finney Boylan, for a trans point of view. Vanity Fair used a gender ambivalent writer, Buzz Bissinger, to profile Caitlyn Jenner.
White people, however, can’t write about other white people just because they are white. And even if they could, what would they bring to the story? People in the identity politics business, even as they become respected journalists, endeavor to hold on to their identities — and have pride in them. The nature of white upward mobility, however, is that you become the opposite of the downwardly mobile. White people — strivers vs. Trump’s hard-bitten base — are divided. It’s an identity gap. To maintain a sympathy with an older white underclass might even appear to be a kind of racism. (Curiously, before the rise of identity media, there was robust coverage of and identification with the white lower class — they were newspaper readers!)
Has this very invisibility and lack of representation, this virtual blackout, this, at best, merciless condescension in the media, helped fuel Donald Trump’s rise? This demo would hardly be the first not to see itself or its concerns reflected in the media — and to have realized that to gain any cultural consideration, it must make itself impossible to ignore.
Is this Trump’s attraction? He is someone who can talk back to the media — who can take control of the media. Identity politics needs a showman. The Donald as a sort of white rapper. He would seem like an awfully unlikely hope. But every identity group must have its own unique promoter. And often you don’t choose him, he chooses you. And you embrace.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
Saturday, March 26, 2016
American "polarization": billionaire (buzzword of the electoral season)?
As I ponder why the USA is currently politically divided, I think I have a too-easy, "capsule" answer (a propos, see the video).
***image from
Some people, the least economically fortunate, admire billionaires (Trump supporters), while others, more economically fortunate, hate/mistrust billionaires (Sanders supporters).
Such is, far too simply put, the ironic "polarization/fracture" in the current USA electoral climate.
As for Hillary, I can only think of the joke: What did the two lawyers call their daughter? Sue.
Obama’s Visit to Cuba Spells the End of a Grotesque Amusement Park
Tom Zoellner, zocalopublicsquare.org
The Island’s Opening Will Deny American White-Collar Subversives Their Once Forbidden Fruit
image from article
As every librarian or pornographer knows, one of the most reliable ways to excite interest in a creative work is to ban it. When the authorities clamp down and announce “you can’t have this,” a juvenile corner of the imagination demands access, figuring there must be something delicious in that locked box to justify all the fuss.
Cuba has long been such a titillating nogo zone for American travelers. Never mind that hordes of Canadians and Europeans have been going to Cuba for decades, for Americans the Caribbean island nation has been off-limits since the Kennedy presidency. If you didn’t have relatives there, going to Cuba has thus
amounted to making a statement, either of cool defiance or serious purpose, since only certain types of visitors could obtain a license from the U.S. government to go. (Technically, the license is to spend U.S. currency there.)
Even better, going to Cuba has been risqué without being all that risky. Nobody is going to hurt you like they might in Yemen or Nigeria. Street crime is virtually nonexistent and your biggest danger was from the guy at osé Martí Airport who might stamp your U.S. passport right off the flight from Cancun and leave you
vulnerable to a hefty fine for “trading with the enemy” when you get back home.
President Obama’s trip to Havana this week marks the end for this status-conferring ritual—and winsome party story—available to white-collar subversives who relish the forbidden fruit. After all, what’s trailblazing and salacious about following in the footsteps of a trade delegation that included members of Congress, and CEOs from companies like Marriott looking to make deals?
This is where I get to boast that I went to Cuba last summer as part of the last wave of American travelers to jump over the knee-high barriers to see the island before it gets re-colonized by U.S. corporate interests. But here’s a confession you won’t hear from everyone who peeked into the locked box: What I saw there was deeply sad. If Cuba occupied a special place in the imagination of the American thrill-seeker, it is a place that deserves to die.
Cuba in the late-embargo period resembled a giant work of fiction. The jet that took me there from Miami (I went on a scholastic visa) was operated by a charter company but painted with the livery of American Airlines. The notes I traded my dollars for were Cuban convertible pesos—the CUCs or “kooks” used by foreigners and the rich—a luxury currency pegged to the U.S. dollar. Communist iconography was limited to statues and a few obligatory billboards complaining about the blockade. Nobody I met under the age of 60 expressed any zeal, let alone fondness, for the ongoing “revolution.” The entire country felt like a plantation run for the personal benefit of the Castro family.
A curious fact about Cuba: Literacy is among the highest in the world, at 99.7 percent. But there is almost nothing around to read, not even approved dogma. Bookstores are rare in Havana and almost nonexistent everywhere else. The only newspaper, Granma, is distinguished by its thinness and its utter lack of
anything interesting to say. Virtually nobody sits on park benches reading, as if the activity were shameful. And of course there are no electronic tablets. There is barely any Internet.
The working fleet of Harry Trumanera Detroit cars remains on display, and the food is just as scarce and crappy as the guidebooks warn, but even more prevalent is the double-mindedness required of any individual to get along in a repressive society. Cubans behaved one way in public and another behind
closed doors. “We live a lie here,” one woman told me in a city on the southern coast. “Nobody believes in the rhetoric. But we have to go along with it.” The bifurcation of the mind is a long-term national illness.
The most common complaint (quietly) expressed throughout Cuba is the lack of any reward whatsoever for imagination or hard work. You may labor for years on a project and still be forced to accept a monthly wage of $15 per month, with bare nutritional staples. Education, housing, and health care are virtually free, but with a lifetime guarantee of no hope for advancement or distinction. Being Cuban with an imagination is a particular kind of torture. Labor is truly alienated here, though not in the way Karl Marx intended.
The names of Raúl or Fidel Castro are rarely spoken aloud; a common gesture when referring to the government is to stroke an unseen beard. In the absence of a successful revolution, the people found personal release in sex—“the only thing Fidel couldn’t nationalize,” goes the old joke—and turned infidelity
and speed-flirtation into national games. Tourists wielding dollars need not look far to find a desperate prostitution trade, both of the conventional variety and of the unspoken expectation of a morning “gift.”
Old Havana is undeniably charming but only because it is poor and somewhat hopeless, full of spontaneous scenes that look like a Gershwin opera unfolding under the balconies of 18th-century Spanish townhouses, their fading parlors lit with harsh shadeless lamps.
Walking through the city at night under arcades splashed with shades of ebony and maroon and seeing dozens of alleys and passageways stemming from a single block, each leading to new bad rooms, is to see a real-life 1959 film noir improbably preserved less than 90 miles from the Florida Keys. But Cuba exists in this state of functioning ruin because of the selfishness of its leadership, the autism of its official politics, and the complicity of shortsighted U.S. diplomacy. If you’re a tourist, the place is a grotesque amusement park, with the theme of a totalitarian state.
An entire generation of Cubans have been forced to squander their life’s possibilities under an oppressive system hostile to progress or personal initiative. The exodus to Florida stood as a lesson in cold Darwinism, for it seems likely that America took in many of the most daring personalities who were willing to risk their all.
Memories of a blockaded Cuba will linger before they fade entirely, before Cuba becomes like a Costa Rica of open borders and consumerist values. While the crowds of ordinary American visitors should be aware they are treading into a special place in its twilight days, their journey should also come with a mindfulness of just how contorted and artificial the mid-20th-century Cuban distinctiveness was, and what a high price in human potential was paid for it.
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