Category: History

Ancient Conceptual Code-Switching

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I’ve been reading Hesiod as part of background research for a new book project I’m working on, tentatively titled Talos. In Talos, vulcanologists enter a strange artifact that floats to the surface of a lava dyke during a catastrophic eruption of Santorini. Inside is some kind of antique computing machine that operates using a strange fluid. The device is capable of manipulating people and time, in fact, and is used by the protagonists to harass one another, to explore history, and to change the future of the planet itself. And then it is gone again.

Hesiod represents some of the earliest works of the archaic period of ancient Greece. His Theogony is the early catalog of the Greek myths of Olympians and Titans. His Works and Days is perhaps the earliest discussion of Pandora, and it is not what most people know from Laura Croft and common parlance. In the Pandora myth, she is created by the “lame god” and blacksmith Hephaestus as a mechanism for avenging the release of the knowledge of fire to humankind by Prometheus. Why was fire a bad idea? Well, if humankind learned the ways of the gods they would just hang out and play video games, it seems:

The gods had hidden away the true means of livelihood for humankind, and they still keep it that way. If it were otherwise, it would be easy for you to do in just one day all the work you need to do, and have enough to last you a year, idle though you would be.

Perhaps we would have done a lot of sailing on the wine-dark seas. So people need punishing for the sympathetic crimes of Prometheus.… Read the rest

Kalam the Incorrigible as a Moral Good

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I’ve previously complained that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is drivel, but a recent video reminded me that intellectual sophistication can arise from confronting drivel, because it helps expose more people to the tenuous, changing, and incomplete journey of modern science and philosophical interpretation/translation. I knew I was largely in alignment with modern science when I wrote that particular post (and others), but the video, considering the figures involved, provides additional compelling insights to push the viewer into thinking more carefully about the challenges and limits of our collective understanding of who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be here now.

I highly recommend it:

And what I think is most worth emphasizing and that may not be understood by laypeople and religious supplicants, or may not be internalized as deeply as it should be, includes:

  1. Our everyday experience and intuitions about similarly-sized matter are simply not applicable to quantum and relativistic scales, or to the implications of cosmological theories. “Causality” is one of those concepts. We see this in everything from the simple case of radioactive decay to contra-causal quantum experiments, and ultimately in the question of causation as applied to the universe itself.
  2. Science operates by applying metaphors, finding the limitations of those metaphors, filtering by empirical results, and then using the refined science as a new metaphor. Most of those metaphors are incompatible with everyday experience. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so vexingly difficult to understand.
  3. Many philosophical worries about logical inconsistency are abstractly derived from everyday reasoning and may not apply to modern understandings of causality, space, and time.
  4. Humility about what we don’t know and effort to unravel it remains the best approach to our mysterious selves and the world.
… Read the rest

Intellectual Capital, Religion, Audiofools, and Irrational Poynting Vectors

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Twin New York-associated articles of note today. First, we have the New York Times with Ilana Horwitz of Tulane University on the topic of how religion helps working-class young people—especially boys—to better achieve after high school. This is part of the ongoing saga of better understanding the sagging social support network (“social capital”) that has been suggested to explain high rates of despair, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, and even white supremacist ideation and Trumpism among working-class Americans. What is particularly interesting to me is that the same religious enhancement of educational attainment doesn’t apply to the children of college-educated professionals and the author notes that strong religious belief systems—especially among young women—may interfere with future decision-making by directing them towards traditional female careers and roles.

Meanwhile, Cornel West has a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker where he repeatedly decries Harvard for becoming a spiritual wasteland of sorts, dedicated to the education of a professional-managerial class that lacks some elemental soul needed to translate ideas into public intellectual and social engagement:

That’s not just brother Trump, even though he’s a neo-Fascist one. He’s on the continuum with so much of the professional-managerial class in terms of their lack of accountability to working people and poor people. Once you have that kind of spiritual decay and moral decrepitude, man, then it’s just gangsterization on steroids, man. That’s where America’s headed.

So it seems many of the religious working-class college achievers are just working towards some kind of soulless professionalism. Without converting their intellectual achievements into activism, and by just focusing on jobs and further achievement, they are content to let the backslide towards authoritarianism continue apace. West sees a neoliberal hypocrisy at every turn, as well, and almost as toxic as the fascist urge.… Read the rest

The Art of War

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I was moved today by images and video of Ukrainian citizens taking up arms against Russian aggression. I contrasted those images with a drier, intellectualized stream of essays and opinion pieces from WaPo, NY Times, CNN, BBC, Atlantic, and others. I now know the history and conflicted consequences of NATO expansion, as well as how it was blocked in Georgia and now Ukraine by corrupted roadmaps for implementation. I expanded my understanding of Taiwan and colonial states’ self-determination after World War II. I read up on how Javelin missile systems work. I dipped into Honoré de Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” because, well, it was waiting for me. I bought Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and watched half of it because Sally Kellerman died recently. It was all war, security, brutality, hopelessness, idealizations and global order, plus a layer cake of 19th-century Parisian capitalist critique wrapped up in interminable verbiage to resemble a short story (I stumbled along in French, truly, as well. It didn’t make it better.)

What was left to do?

Music, clearly. There must be perfect pieces and composers for this moment. First, we start with Ukraine itself, and Lysenko. Qobuz gives us Solmia Soroka and Arthur Greene’s Mykola Lysenko: Complete Music for Violin and Piano. Lysenko was an ethnomusicologist who specialized in Ukrainian folk music and represents the Romantic trends of his time, doing for Ukrainian fiddling what Brahms did for Hungary (cultural appropriation much?) or Dvořák and Smetana for Czech sensibilities.

But what of war, invasion, and resistance? We can start with Sibelius’s Finlandia because a day with Sibelius is always an epic adventure, and winter ups the ante. Finlandia served as an artistic attack on Russian censorship and russification, performed using alternative titles and lyrics.… Read the rest

The Evolution of Theological Commitments

Mark Davis1 Comment

My wife studies pagan mythology, among other pursuits, and she recently undertook some of the Norse background in a far deeper way than my own shallow assemblage of role-playing references, fictional mentions, and Marvel movies. She happened to mention the other day that Christian chroniclers like Snorri Sturluson likely adapted the pre-existing mythos in order to achieve a syncretic outcome. Loki was demonized to create a dualist conflict. Ragnarök may have been created out of whole, fresh cloth in order to extinguish the pantheon and make way for the new religion.

John McKinnell studies the narratives that the Norse proselytizers used to achieve the conversion of the pagans, as well as the influence and outcomes of those people. There is a theological problem for them in terms of explaining the existence of the pagan deities that is largely solved by simply describing them as devils or as personifications of natural phenomena. They transmogrify from real to a netherworld nestled somewhere between mythic, poetic, and literal evils.

I had nearly simultaneously joined the Bart Ehrman Blog because of a post that got repeated in one of his podcasts I happened to catch. The post is from a guest contributor who uses scholarship from Mark Smith and others to detail a model of the transformation into monotheism from earlier Canaanite pantheons. In this model, during the Second Temple Period, the success of the god Marduk’s people over Yahweh’s tribes requires a theological reinterpretation in order to explain Yahweh’s defeat. How can YHWH be the greatest god under such circumstances? The answer is easy, though. Marduk is just a puppet of YHWH and the literal military victory is a divine punishment. YHWH remains supreme.… Read the rest

Gimmicky Nonfictional Fictional Futures

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Salman Rushdie’s new collection of essays, The Language of Truth, begins with an ecstatic celebration of the magical tales of old worlds—wonder tales as he would have it. As the foremost magical realist of the East in the West, Rushdie has thrived on collecting his own dreams against the literary trends of the times (realism/formalism/transgressivism/whateverism). Sage advice from a master: “Don’t write what you know unless it is really interesting” or just dream better dreams. Having myself drifted away from reading fiction in recent years (a known trend in the publishing industry) and towards more and more detailed nonfiction, from the mind-control capabilities of cat shit to the mathematical learning algorithms embedded in the universe, I am certainly guilty of exactly what Rushdie rails against (a damned philistine of sorts), though I am equally skeptical of the Knausgård-style auto-fiction that is recently idealized as a contemporary answer to the vexing question of what new literary hell we deserve.

Still, magical realism or Rushdie-an wonder tales are essentially gimmicks for conveying sometimes lofty (say the shaping of thinking by modernity in Gabriel García Márquez or the effects of colonialism in Rushdie’s own works; Devapriya Roy suggests all “global novels,” which is code for New York/American, are idealizations of liberalism that work towards world peace in some suffused sensibility), but also often trivial observations about ancient human traditions. Calling this a cornerstone of truth begs a deeper question about what truths are being exposed. Is it this universality of the desire for power or the vanity of men and women? Is it the threat imposed by female eroticism to the stability of society? Rushdie likes to think these are answered by these olden forms but a most modern mind begs for explanations of a different sort when trying to map them to our most modern experience of society.… Read the rest

Consequentia Roquentia

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I just invented a new Voltairian muse for consideration. Dr. Roquentia, after Sartre’s lead in Nausea, is the opposite of Dr. Pangloss, convinced that we are in a state of perpetual, inevitable decline. Dr. R. is unmoved by evidence to the contrary concerning improvements in society because he can always sense unease and emptiness in this change.

I thought of the good doctor not while reading the boorish WSJ hit piece on Jill Biden for being labeled “Dr.” because she has only a PhD rather than an MD. It’s an acceptable editorial convention, but hardly one that should be irritating enough to belittle the owner of the title. Dr. R. would lose the honorific, too, being merely an advanced student of the jeremiad in his own narcissistic pursuit of identity.

No, instead I thought of this new caricature while reading National Review to catch up on what is troubling one corner of the conservative mind here as Our Glorious Leader tries to subvert democracy. There are always unwritten assumptions in NR opinion pieces, as if the righteous world lurks just out of reach in the shadows. In this one, there is a quick slap for “intersectional” scholarship, or perhaps just how it might influence public discourse or policy. More centrally, though, the background zeitgeist is the assumption that it is a moral good for children to be raised to be religious like their parents, and that American society is diminished by the reduction in religiosity in America of late. Dr R, sensing a comfortable decline into misery, laments perhaps a bit too ironically given that the recovery from religionless nihilism was central to Nausea.

The author, Cameron Hildritch, might be surprised to learn that there is an alternative and less ideological way of regarding secularized education.… Read the rest

Autonomous Ethical Reasoning

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I got my first run in today after two months off. It was refreshing in that I was finally moving beyond the pain, but it also gave me that runner’s high oxygenation that lifts my spirit and fuels my thoughts. My wife and I decided a change of lockdown venue was in order so we relocated to New Mexico (after completing and checking our ballots in Arizona, I will note). My run took me up into the local mountain range and around an iconic rock formation. A coyote was sniffing around the trail until I spooked him. Some things are constant across the West, including the numinous sense of peace and calm that overtook me while I recovered under some trees and watched a few fanned-out contrails slowly drift in the high winds.

The fragility of American democracy keeps coming up in the run-up to tomorrow’s elections. Hostility, disinformation, legal actions, disruption, and general uncertainty have overtaken what was once a fairly simple process (Florida in 2000 notwithstanding).

Richard Just wrote a long-form piece in The Washington Post Magazine titled How Religion Can Help Put Our Democracy Back Together, though the title is shockingly more certain than the actual article that rebuilding is possible. Here are some of the ideas that Just circulates:

  1. If we were all a bit more attuned to the great mysteries that religions promote we would be more humble in our political engagement.
  2. Perhaps our shift away from religious involvement means that we instead idolatrously attach to political leaders.
  3. We have become obsessed with politics and lost the sense of inner peace that religions can provide.
  4. Religious communities are trust building, unlike other kinds of community involvement.
… Read the rest

Measuring Belief and Quackery

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While reviewing reporting on the RNC this afternoon, I found myself curious about the protocols at news organizations with respect to their editorial boards. For instance, does the Washington Post editorial board require that claimed facts within all opinion pieces are not clearly disputed? Does the New York Times? I suspect yes, which is what we see in the lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin against the New York Times concerning the suggestion that Palin’s campaign was relevant to the shooting of Gabby Giffords. There was at least a debate that rose to the level of the Opinion Editor, if not the board.

I was investigating this because I am curious how WaPo handles Trumpy columnists like Mark Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt, who are mostly cheerleaders without baggage for the current president, with only occasional whataboutisms and other distracting suggestions about Biden’s candidacy. They don’t defend lies and cons. They just cheer. Meanwhile, the board itself came down hard on the repeated falsehoods of Pamela Bondi and the ongoing slaughter of truth in the service of the Trump 2020 campaign.

The mainstream press represents Trump and cronies as conmen and women, manipulative, self-serving, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, ineffectual, morally questionable, and out-and-out liars. And the press uses facts to do so. Yet Trump maintains a remarkable following despite this evidence, with many quizzical onlookers at a loss as to the psychology of Trump’s followers.

In this modern example, there are many, many resources that can be used to fact check and form opinions. Yet people choose to rely on only a few and discount others as being biased.

I was recently reading some fairly detailed Bayesian analysis by philosophers concerning Hume’s argument against miracles.… Read the rest

Innocents in Intellectual History

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In 1999, I lived in a modest, rented townhouse in Redmond, Washington with my wife and a year-old baby. I had just quit my academic R&D position in a fit of pique over issues of contracts and conscience, and had uprooted our lives to go to Microsoft to be a program manager while still harboring an academic’s independent streak. I had hair down to nearly my waist that I tied back in a ponytail after it dried a bit on my way to work. I had a coordinating goatee, too. On dark, overcast days I would sometimes reach back to reposition my hair tie and the cinched area would still be mildly damp into the afternoon.

In Seattle that year, the World Trade Organization came to meet and with it violent protests over, well, what was it over? Some of it had to do with the notion of globalization of the economy. Some of it had to do with a hope for labor empowerment. Some of the participants were just anarchists, it seemed. I had a run-in one morning with a door guard-type who thought I had tailgated her through a security door at Microsoft. We had been warned in a corporate-wide email about security concerns were the protests to come out to the suburbs. I dutifully backed out, pulled the door shut, and ran my access card to open the door. Curiously, even after that, she decided not to ride the elevator up with me, a look of uncertainty and fear in her eyes.

And then there were the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 that felt similar to those Seattle actions of more than a decade before.

Kurt Andersen, author of the memorable Fantasyland, has a new book and a new Atlantic essay, College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots, that continues his theme of capturing intellectual history as a series of consistent trends that are easily observable and digested.… Read the rest