Dark Shadows

I don't usually post literary essays, even when they impact directly on politics or culture, but Rob Henderson's discussion of Dostoevsky's The Possessed (also known as Demons or The Devils was intriguing enough to go forward. 

When these children of affluent liberals come of age, they do not follow their parents into comfortable moderation. Instead, their kids, now in their twenties and early thirties, become enamored with socialism, atheism, and nihilism.

What had been building beneath the surface of Devils erupts in Part 3. Over the course of a few days, everything falls apart. Fires spread across the town. People are beaten, robbed, and executed. Others are coerced into false confessions. The tone shifts from satire to something closer to horror.

At the center of it all is Pyotr, the organizer of the local radical cell who has been pulling the strings from the beginning. As the chaos peaks, he flees the consequences, leaving behind a broken group and a town in ruins.

Decades ago, a very liberal psychologist said to me "We have a generation that proclaims nihilism" - he meant Boomers - "but were mostly raised in churches, even said the lord's Prayer every day in school. This new generation was raised with nihilism. They really mean it."  Neither generalisation was quite true, but it's a good first pass.

The One Bias Underlying the Others

Steve Stewart-Williams at N3 called it "One Bias to Rule them All" and links to Toward Parsimony in Bias Research. 

...the current article seeks to bring a set of biases together by suggesting that they might actually share the same “recipe.” Specifically, we suggest that they are based on prior beliefs plus belief-consistent information processing. Put differently, we raise the question of whether a finite number of different biases—at the process level—represent variants of “confirmation bias,” or peoples’ tendency to process information in a way that is consistent with their prior beliefs.  

It sounds plausible. We give up our ideas slowly, likely for good reason. James once mildly pointed out to me that we can't do a complete examen on all our beliefs every day. We would have no time left over for dinner.

Followup to the Post on Aging

 I tried this strategy on the missus. 

 She's just rescued a dog I don't much like.  I can't explain it.

Ventilator Patients Died?

 Do we know this to be true? Heartbreaking.

2014 Links

Halfway through 2014 already. With the internal links also being interesting, perhaps I should have divided this into two parts.

 

Revisiting the Bicameral Mind and the followup months later about  Circular Time.  Pastor Dave Denis suggested that Helical Time was a better description than Circular Time, and I think that is astute. Seasonal time is also a good descriptor. Linear Vs Circular Time is one of my most-visited posts of all time, if you like following that concept.

Social Justice.  Upon further review, I think my original call on this, and the internal links, are peak AVI. If I rewrote it now I would likely ruin it.

Changes In Prejudice. 

Needles Thoughts about anti-vaxx sentiment, long before Covid.

The Way NH Used to Be.  I so wish I could remember what those latter images were.

A Dog Called Kitty 

Removing the Means of Suicide  I later learned that the numbers were way too high, but the phenomenon still solid.

 

Right in the Mouth

It was thirty years ago that I first caught an glimpse of my grandfather in the mirror, and have seen each of them from different angles a fair bit over the last decade. Neither was unsightly, but also, neither were particularly attractive men. My aging seems to be accelerating the last 3-4 years. I have always thought age had a certain respectability that is nice, and I believe I am less bothered by the reality of aging than the average man.

But the next guy who tells me you're only as young as you feel is getting it right across the mouth. 

Sistine Chapel Exhibition

Tracy and I went to the exhibition in Cambridge of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes. Definitely recommended if it comes near you. Close-ups, many life-sized, all in context and described. Portrayals and techniques used for the first time are highlighted. There was a lengthy video to go with the text and audio about The Last Judgement, pointing out features one would not have immediately noticed.

 I included this view to give size context. 

March Madness

 ...has come a long way.

 

Sumer Is Icumen In

The descriptions in this song sounds more like Spring than Summer, and in fact they are. People thought more in terms of two seasons, summer and winter in the 1200s. They would make the distinction for Spring and Autumn if the occasion called for it, but not reliably.  Those of you who do genealogy or otherwise work with colonial American documents can see that persisting into the 1700s. A new year began on the first day of Spring, even in official records in many places. You will see your ancestress Elizabeth born in 1718-19 and wonder "Didn't they know?  Didn't anyone keep track?" If the month was June it was in 1718.  If it was February, it was in 1719. Old habits die hard. 

This is a nice version I had not heard before. I like that it contains the translation - and the correct one, not the bowdlerized version.

 

The Mystery That Makes Us

 AJ Swoboda, The Low-Level Theologian, starts his essay about Scripture and mystery, paradox, and seeming contradiction with an anecdote about GK Chesterton, appropriately enough. The Mystery That Makes Us,  reminds us that we are not to come to the scriptures in any arrogance, demanding immediate clarity, but in humility, trusting that God has spoken to us in the best way possible, and it is up to us to adapt if we do not understand.

To genuinely engage with the story of the Bible, it is critical that we learn to work backwards from what seems reasonable. Too often, we are prone to believe that the biblical text is credible only if we have come to understand or agree with it. What we have to learn to do is come at it differently. We must come assuming it is true. We must first accept it as it is—as truth and reality—and then work backwards from there. Reading Scripture correctly requires us to reverse-engineer our understanding of reality to what is revealed in Scripture. We don’t start by assuming our experience of reality is true and that the Bible must fit into that; rather, we begin with the assumption that everything in Scripture is true and trustworthy, and we learn to adjust our view of the world around it. 

There are twinned errors which complicate this.  One is to remain literalist and insist the earth must be square because the Bible says it has four corners.  The other is to make everything Bible so metaphorical, believing that to be spiritual, that it no longer has any definite meaning. The Swedenborgs and many New Age Christians are sometimes lovely people, but a faith that relies entirely on mysticism can quickly go awry. 

Such As... 

Holding The Center

The Evangelical Covenant Church strives to have unity in essentials and freedom in debatable matters.  Easier said than done, obviously as there is debate even about what matters are essential. Currently, the American Church and the American churches ae increasingly split along political lines. Paul Stewart writes in the denominational newsletter about the need to remain in discussion with each other even in disagreement in Holding the Center. I would go further. Remaining in discussion - how we get to an answer with other Christians - is likely more important than the answer itself. One can push that too far, abandoning standards for the sake of pretend niceness, but divisions that look clear in one generation become more mixed in the next. The central questions of the Covenant founding were "Where is it written?" and "How goes your walk?" I think those remain solid.

 From our beginnings, the Covenant has resisted making every secondary conviction into a boundary marker of belonging. That instinct came from the pietist belief that the Christian life is deeper than intellectual alignment and that unity in Christ can survive real disagreement. These are not incidental features of Covenant life. They reveal the shape of a people who have often chosen the harder, slower, more human work of staying together over the easier satisfactions of ideological clarity.

Ryan Burge's Graphs About Religion, which we have discussed here including recently, mentions more often than the denominations themselves do that the clergy, especially at seminary and headquarters level, are more politically liberal than the laity. This is true in the ECC as well, and it does have effect.  When there are books for discussion that circulate in denominational programs, they are much more likely to be from a liberal POV as a default, even if the discussions are real. 

I have heard angry and unfair things from both liberals and conservatives in my congregation, and this is ongoing. But we hold the center at the moment, and you can see bumperstickers of many types in the parking lot, both on Sundays and during weekly programs. 

To Improve The World

We are reading Kaplan's Revenge of Geography, which quotes Hans J Morgenthau's 1948 Politics Among Nations with reference to Thucydides 2,400 year-old The Peloponnesian War.  

The world "is the result of forces inherent in human nature." And human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear (phobos), self-interest (kerdos). and honor (doxa). "To improve the world," writes Morgenthau, "one must work with these forces, not against them." Thus, realism accepts the human material at hand, however imperfect that material may be. "It appeals to historical precedent rather than abstract principle and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of the absolute good."

I don't want to pretend to be wiser than Morgenthau - actually I do want to pretend that but have an immediate caution that this is likely ridiculous - but I don't think that is quite what is happening. We do take those forces into account, but each of us allows any one of them to blind us to the other two.  We focus on the bent sense of honor in Moslem countries, or their fear or self-interest, but never it seems, on all three at once. As we likely need a three-legged stool of motives to convince ourselves to do something, leaving out one of the motives above opens up a slot for us to zip in one of those absolutes and pretend it is not a cat in a dog family among the others. Honor has elements of desire for not only praise, but justice. Self-interest is nearly always loyalty to a larger group, and thus includes selflessness. Fear includes caution, planning, counting the cost. Thucydides' motives are the abstracts, applied at a discount among fallen mankind.

The abstracts reflect the sun too well, not too poorly, and we cannot bear to look at them directly.  Certainly not three at once, without tarnishing them back into something manageable. Yet the New Testament does instruct us to look at them directly, using the language of searing brightness at every turn.