Is Obama "too intelligent" to be President?

In an op-ed in Thursday's New York Times, Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins chided Obama for quoting from JFK's inaugural address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” They argued that Kennedy was made to eat these words after his "self-destructive" Vienna summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, and that the lesson Obama should learn from this is that "sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate."

There is a germ of truth in this. Kennedy agreed to the Vienna summit against the advice of his more diplomatically experienced advisers, including his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. The summit wasn't preceded by the usual intense meetings of lower-level officials who would work out all of the details concerning the issues to be discussed, so that the summit itself would be a well-rehearsed kabuki. Instead, Kennedy, Harvard educated and one generation removed from South Boston rough-and-tumble, went, as the current White House occupant might put it, mano a mano with Khrushchev, a gut fighter of peasant stock who rose to premiership in the wake of Stalin's death by dint of sheer ruthlessness (although Khrushchev, in his so-called "secret speech" to the Communist Party Politburo in 1956, denounced Stalin's excesses and his "cult of personality").

After the meeting, as Thrall and Wilkins recount, Khrushchev remarked that Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.” How was it that the Soviet leader could corroborate intelligence with weakness, and why should intelligence be considered a disadvantage in summit meetings? Here's Thrall and Wilkins on Khrushchev's approach to Kennedy:

...Khrushchev lectured him on the hypocrisy of American foreign policy, cautioned America against supporting “old, moribund, reactionary regimes” and asserted that the United States, which had valiantly risen against the British, now stood “against other peoples following its suit.” Khrushchev used the opportunity of a face-to-face meeting to warn Kennedy that his country could not be intimidated and that it was “very unwise” for the United States to surround the Soviet Union with military bases.

What I think Khrushchev meant was that Kennedy was intelligent enough to realize that there was some truth in what he had said. The U.S was, indeed, supporting reactionary governments (Franco's in Spain, Salazar's in Portugal, and Ngo Dinh Diem's--whose assassination Kennedy may later have approved, if not ordered--in South Vietnam, to name a few) on the theory that they were bulwarks against communism. Of course, Khrushchev did not live to see the Soviet Union's own old, moribund, reactionary regime collapse. In any event, what Kennedy may have been intelligent enough to sense was that neither superpower had a monopoly on truth.

Thrall and Wilkins would have us believe that JFK's performance at the 1961 Vienna summit was an unmitigated disaster. But here is the assessment of Jack F. Matlock, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987-1991, as set forth in his letter to the editor of the Times responding to Thrall and Wilkins's column:

In what sense did Khrushchev triumph — even temporarily?

The issue over Berlin was Khrushchev’s threat to deny Western access rights to West Berlin, by military force if necessary. After building the wall between East and West Berlin, he abandoned his pressure on the access routes, and the viability of West Berlin (Kennedy’s prime objective) was assured.

As for “fear to negotiate,” why should the stronger party ever fear negotiation? Ronald Reagan did not, when he sought out our Soviet adversaries.

Refusing to talk and refusing to negotiate are dead-end streets, as the Soviet leaders before Mikhail S. Gorbachev never learned. And that’s why they lost.

And, on the subject of summit meetings, we have this more recent cautionary example.

Quote of the day.

Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes.

--David Brooks, "The Alpha Geeks", New York Times, May 23, 2008.

In the same column, Brooks writes:

[E]ven as “Revenge of the Nerds” was gracing the nation’s movie screens, a different version of nerd-dom was percolating through popular culture. Elvis Costello and The Talking Heads’s David Byrne popularized a cool geek style that’s led to Moby, Weezer, Vampire Weekend and even self-styled “nerdcore” rock and geeksta rappers.

Soon, I'll be doing a post about a band made up of NYU faculty memebers. Can't get much geekier than that. Meanwhile, I've got to check out this "geeksta rap." Anybody have any suggestions?

La plus ça change, ...

...la plus c’est la même chose. (A tip o' the hat to Instaputz.)

Feh!

In my last Mets post, I wrote: "Just don't backslide."

Being the Mets, of course they did.

Update: The humiliation is complete.

So, just what is art, anyway?

In Little Murders (1971), directed by Alan Arkin, with screenplay by Jules Feiffer, Elliott Gould (seen at left, in stained white suit) played Alfred Chamberlain, a successful but disillusioned commercial photographer who took to wandering the sidewalks of New York shooting photos of what, in those pre-pooper-scooper law days, could all too easily be found there. He explained this unusual avocation by saying that he'd received several awards for work he'd done--photographs of consumer products that were used in advertising--that he considered artistically without merit, and that this made him conclude that he might as well be taking pictures of shit. Eventually, his excremental photos won plaudits as well. When Patsy, later to be his bride, first visited his apartment and saw his photos on the wall said she thought they were lovely, and added, "and they're all ...?" He nodded affirmatively.

Feiffer may have been inspired to create this scene, and indeed the whole episode of Alfred's scatomania, by an actual show presented at the Gallery Gertrude Stein in 1964. The artists Sam Goodman and Boris Lurie, who, along with Stanley Fisher, led the NO!art movement of the early 1960s, conceived a "NO! Sculpture" exhibition in which the sculptures were simulated feces, produced by extruding wet plaster from plastic "guts". The critic Thomas Neumann, writing for Art News, characterized this as "the direct, unsublimated expression of instinct".* Brian O'Doherty, a New York Times art critic, had this reaction:

These aggregations of colonic calligraphy contain many formal excellences for anyone whose purist education forces him to perceive them.

But the subject matter puts the joke on those who do find formal values in it. Those who do not are forced to deny the legitimacy of values that by now have been inculcated into several college generations--thus pointing up the current effeteness of the formal idea.**

Update: For a contemporary version, by Paul McCarthy, of the Goodman/Lurie project, see here.

So, is shit art? Here I will venture a bold statement: shit, per se, is not art. Why not? Again, I'll be bold. Art must be intentional. It must be the product of a conscious decision to make something of artistic value. Shelley and his Skylark to the contrary notwithstanding, I don't believe in "unpremeditated art". I'll leave aside for now the question, "What is artistic value?", thereby sidestepping the formalism versus whatever (postmodernism, emotionalism, "meaning") brouhaha, in which O'Doherty took the anti-formalist side. The point I want to stress is that a thing that was not created with a conscious intention to make art, be it dogshit or an orchid, is not art.

By including the qualifier per se, though, I've left open the possibility that both Alfred's photographs and Goodman and Lurie's fecal simulacrae may be considered art. Does the act of photographing or making a replica of something that is not in itself art, and displaying it, make it art? Does tagging it with spray paint (see my colleague Miss Heather's blog, newyorkshitty.com) do the trick? To take the question further, is it art simply to abstract an object from its usual environment, perhaps adding a bit of graffiti, and to show it in a gallery, as in the instance of Marcel Duchamp's urinal? In each of these, there is an element of intentionality.

Is intentionality a sufficient, as well as a necessary, condition? It's tempting to say so. Intentionality provides what we lawyers like to call a "bright line" test. Nevertheless, if we say that anything meeting the criterion "created intentionally as a work of art" must be considered art, we're letting in some hard cases. I'm thinking here of the controversy, as reported by my Brooklyn Heights Blog colleague Homer Fink with his post about the sculptor Tom Otterness, prompted by the installation of his "Large Covered Wagon" on a patch of greensward in DUMBO, just north of the eastern approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.

It isn't Otterness's whimsical sculpture that makes this a hard case, but something he did some 31 years ago, when he was a 25 year old trying to make it as an artist in the East Village. Homer quoted Gary Indiana, reviewing a retrospective of East Village art from the 1970s in New York Magazine, as follows:

I’m repulsed by this show’s inclusion of Tom Otterness, a sculptor of limitless nonentity despite his demonstrated skill at conning public-art commissions and taste-impaired collectors into making him rich. Mr. Otterness, once upon a time, adopted a dog and then shot it to death for the fun of recording his infantile, sadistic depravity on film. I’d like the New Museum’s visitors to keep that in mind while looking at this creep’s work. Mr. Otterness isn’t one of those special exceptions deserving the adage “Lousy person, terrific artist.” Lousy both.***

Otterness has since apologized for this cruel act several times, one of which was to neighbor blog McBrooklyn.

If shooting dogshit can be art, is shooting a dog, and committing its demise to film for the purpose of showing it as an artwork, art? It meets the intentionality test. Still, there's something in me that rebels against applying the word "art" to the result of an act of cruelty. "Art" is a word of approval. "That's a work of art!" is another way of saying "That's great!" Of course, not all art is great. Still, even less worthy art can be "nice"; I call it kitsch and consider it a guilty pleasure. For what it's worth, I put Otterness's sculpture in this category.

Here, though, I run smack-dab into what I sidestepped earlier: the vexed issue of what art is supposed to be. The various positions that art critics and academics take on this issue, I believe, fall into three general categories. For some, the answer might be: art should evoke a purely aesthetic response; it should challenge or expand our ability to appreciate form, color or texture. Others might argue that art should be a means for the artist to communicate her or his inner emotional state to the viewer. Still others might say that art should awaken the viewer to contradictions within the prevailing social-economic-political order.

While it is hard to see how "Shot Dog Film" could be considered art on a formal or aesthetic basis (I haven't seen the film, but I can't imagine how watching a dog be shot and die could expand my aesthetic awareness), it could be said to communicate Otterness's emotional state at the time it was done; indeed, Otterness indicates as much in his apology. It could also be argued that it serves as a critique of consumerist society and the attitude of disposability that it engenders. So, to deny "Shot Dog Film" the status of art, I must adopt a purely formalist position.

This I decline to do. My view is that all three of the positions described above concerning what art should be--formalist, emotive and critical, if you will--are valid. There may be other criteria, as well, that deserve consideration. Consequently, I am thrown back onto the intentionality test, which means I must renounce any attempt to ascribe a normative dimension to the word "art". There is good art, there is bad art, there is even evil art. In deciding what is good, bad or indifferent, we may resort to the categories of decision previously described, or to others that also relate to art-as-art. In deciding what is evil, however, we must be guided by something that transcends considerations of what is or isn't, or what's better or worse (from a purely artistic perspective), art; that is, our consciences.

Though I've given my answer to the question posed in the caption, I want to finish with a look at what goes into the making of art, in which we see that even trash can be a source of inspiration. This we can do by taking a hike with Thomas Nozkowski:

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*Neumann is quoted in Simon Taylor, "The NO!art Movement in New York, 1960-1964 (Final Draft, 7/21/95)", pp.15-16. (This text was available on line when I wrote this post; unfortunately, it is not now.)

**Brian O'Doherty, "Season's End: Groups at Castelli and Auslander--Plus a Shock at Stein's", The New York Times, May 31, 1964. This review also mentions a presumably then little-known artist, Christo, of whom O'Doherty noted that his "pet trick is a good, if quickly expendable, one--wrapped packages prompting curiosity." This was, recall, 1964. The "quickly expendable" trick proved to have considerable staying power.

***Gary Indiana, "One Brief, Scuzzy Moment: Memories of the East Village Art Scene", New York Magazine, December 6, 2004 (see text here).

Leon Kass wants you to drop that ice cream cone, NOW!

As a member, and former chairman, of the President's Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass has played an important role in determining the Bush administration's policy on matters such as funding of stem cell research, assisted suicide, and so forth.

Less well known than his views on these weighty matters are Dr. Kass's opinions concerning more mundane stuff. In his article "The Stupidity of Dignity," in the current New Republic, Steven Pinker serves up this juicy Kass quote:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America, but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive...Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays a lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ...Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to the mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ...This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

I just don't get it, Doc: "catlike" equals undignified? I guess you've never been owned by a cat.

Update: thanks to Eric of Classical Values, I now have the complete Kass quote, without ellipses, here. To be fair, Dr. Kass does admit:

I fear I may by this [ice cream] remark lose the sympathy of many reader[s], people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs.

He then goes into a diatribe against uncovered yawning, which is one with which I heartily agree. But failing to stifle or cover a yawn yields no pleasure. Dr. Kass would have us believe that the only reason for licking an ice cream cone or eating anything "in public" is "enslavement to the belly." Not so. On a balmy day, it is quite rational, even when not driven by the press of business, to choose the al fresco frankfurter (or suitable vegan alternative) over the confines of table. As for the ice cream cone, I think it really does taste better than with dish and spoon.

(Thanks to Just Your Average Joggler for the perfect image.)

Chicken soup for the Mets fan's soul.

Two decisive wins over the Yanks, the latest featuring the so far wildly inconsistent Oliver Perez over the redoubtable Chien-Ming Wang by the score of 11-4, makes up for a lot of earlier disappointment.

Just don't backslide.

Will this mean the Mets secure the default front-page-of-the-Times-sports-section position, at least until their record slips to worse than the Yanks'? I'm not counting on it.

Music for one apartment and six drummers.

Do try this at home.

Can it get any worse than this?

The Mets have lost three of four to the worst team in their division, and in the final game of the series were unable to score a run against an unheralded starter who went seven innings and a bullpen that, coupled with some magnificent fielding, kept the Amazins off the board. Inability to capitalize on scoring opportunities seems to be this team's bugbear, as it has been in so many seasons past. Joe Martini, in his comment on my last Mets post, puts it thus: Eleven hits and two friggin' runs???!!!

Tim Marchman likens this weekend's Mets/Yanks series (which, given the predicted weather, is unlikely to start tonight, thereby giving both teams a bit of rest) to "a pair of bums fighting over a ham sandwich in an alley." Of the Mets, he notes: "The team...basically consists of players having All-Star-class seasons and bantha fodder." This last reference sent me scurrying to Google, where I learned that I'm not sufficiently into Star Wars geekdom.

Wedding scene from Little Murders

This probably is as comprehensive a summary of what y'all in God-fearing Red State America think about us anomic coastal elites as has ever been put on film.

I found this while doing research for a big post that will be coming soon, with the working title, "So, just what is art, anyway?" (Never let it be said that S-AB shies from the Big Questions.) I know you're all waiting eagerly. Meanwhile, enjoy Donald Sutherland in what has to be his best small role so far.

Oh. My. God.

I need this like I need another Republican administration.

That, and having Lastings Milledge support the "curse of the ex-Met" theory.

(OK, maybe it could be worse. I could be a White Sox fan, having to deal with Dollgate. Kevin Hench is my kind of sportswriter: one who can start a story with a quote from Virginia Wolff, compare her to Randy Wolf, then note that Mrs. Dalloway would bat fifth in the current Chisox lineup.)

Update: Figueroa's trash talk doesn't jinx the Mets tonight as Maine pitches a good six innings, Wagner gets another save while preserving his zip-uh-de-doo-dah ERA, and Church illuminates the scoreboard with four ribbies. Milledge, meanwhile, is held hitless.

Strange are the ways of Google

My Sitemeter tells me that the fifteen thousandth visit to S-AB was from New Delhi, and came to the blog via a Google search for "play boomer 10 ben mania". For whatever reason, Google directed the visitor to this post, which must have seemed perplexing, to say the least.

Joe Martini was visitor number 14.999. I'm glad to see Joe reposting his screed on ethanol madness, which is an issue on which we agree. I'll also take this opportunity to thank Joe for his thoughtful comment on my Paul Simon post. I wish I had been able to attend the Simon/Philip Glass discussion.

Cicely Nichols, 1937-2008

I can't remember when I first met her, except that it was some time in the late 1970s. I'm sure of where, though; the bar of the Lion's Head, a place that served mostly unmarried (in our instances, previously married) Villagers with a literary bent, as a sort of living room away from home. We may have been introduced by one of the many Head regulars we knew in common; just as likely, we may simply have found ourselves occupying adjacent stools and fallen into conversation.

Whatever was said that night, it was sufficient to establish a common desire to continue the conversation on other evenings. She was nine years my senior, and had been in the Village long enough to tell me about things that happened there when I was a college freshman in Florida thinking romantic thoughts about escaping to that fabled urban patch occupied by the likes of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. I was thrilled to hear that she had worked for Grove Press, the avant garde house that published Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, as well as works by Beckett, Ferlenghetti, Fanon, LeRoi Jones and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. More surprising was that she had led a strike against Grove and its publisher, Barney Rosset, demanding better conditions for editorial employees. Because of the strike, she had to take on freelance work, which in turn led her to become one of the founders of the Editorial Freelancers Association. At the top of the home page of the EFA website, you will find a link to a tribute to Cicely and her work in establishing and determining the character of that organization.

As the years passed, we became confidantes. She endured many a night of my maunderings about failed and longed-for romances, and I listened to such troubles as she had in the same department, hers being of a more sane and mature nature. Although I hadn't thought of it this way until now, she came to occupy a space in my psychic organizational chart, previously unfilled, marked "older sister". The night when I first brought the woman who is now my wife to meet my friends at the Head, Cicely said, with a sly smile at me, "This woman looks like trouble." She was right, of course. The "trouble" has lasted eighteen years (almost seventeen of them as spouses), and produced a daughter about to enter high school.

Marriage, work responsibilities and fatherhood combined to limit my time at the Lion's Head, and consequently my socializing with Cicely; later, illness limited her time at the Head even more. Still, she would find the strength, with some help from her daughters and friends, to put on magnificent combination Christmas and birthday (hers was December 27) parties. I last saw her this past December, during what may have been her last period of remission, bright and smiling and cut-the-crap smart as ever. That's how I'll remember her.

iPod Log 3 -- Xenophilia Edition

My iPod music library includes songs in eleven languages other than English.* The other morning, the iPod went on a xenophiliac binge, playing six foreign language songs in succession. These were:

E Inu Tatou E, the Kingston Trio. First, the bad stuff. These were white frat boys who named their group for the capital of Jamaica because they wanted to cash in on a craze for African-Caribbean calypso music. They affected fake Mexican accents on some of their songs; for example, "Coplas", "En el Agua" and, most famously, "Tijuana Jail" ("SEE-nyor come WEETH me, 'cause I want YOOOO!"). "Coplas Revisited", from their album College Concert, recorded live at UCLA in December, 1961, includes a line that I didn't understand for several years after first hearing it:

Show me a cowboy who rides sidesaddle,
And I'll show you a gay ranchero.

I guess that proves the old saw about California being a cultural bellwether. The good is that the Trio were all talented musicians who, over the course of a decade or so, and with one personnel change (John Stewart replacing Dave Guard in 1961), committed a lot of music to vinyl, much of which was quite good and some of which was superb. Folk purists derided them as inauthentic, middle-class, button-down shirt wearing squares. In truth, they were sometimes guilty of putting a bourgeois gloss on their material. I can't imagine a real working sailors' chantey including lines like "The ragged heavens open up / We sound the jubilation," as they put into their version of "Haul Away, Joe". Their eclecticism was remarkable: among the styles of music they interpreted and were influenced by were the aforementioned calypso, Hawaiian (Bob Shane was born and raised on the Big Island, and Dave Guard spent several years in a prep school in Honolulu), Appalachian and Celtic, Spanish and Mexican, African and blues. They have been credited with creating and nurturing a taste in American audiences for what is now called "world music". To top it all off, from my point of view, I learned from the Wikipedia article linked above that they even had a Mets connection. They learned what became their most-requested song, "Scotch and Soda", a blues-tinged lounge number, from Tom Seaver's parents, when one of them was dating Seaver's sister. "E Inu Tatou E" is an example of their Hawaiian repertoire. I couldn't find a translation of the lyrics, which are credited to George Archer. Some lyrics sources give it the subtitle "Drinking Song", and, on the Live at Newport album, Guard introduces the song and translates the title as "Let's Get Drunk".

Ebben, Ne Andro Lontana, East Village Opera Company. I've mentioned this group and this aria in an earlier iPod log. The aria is from Alfredo Catalini's seldom staged La Wally. At the first EVOC concert I attended, AnnMarie Milazzo introduced her nail-you-to-the-wall rendition by saying, "When you have to marry someone you don't want to, you get really, really mad."

El Preso Numero Nueve, Joan Baez. You also get really, really mad if you're a hard-working hombre who comes home to find his wife in the arms of un amigo desleal--mad enough to commit double murder, then tell the padre, just before you face the firing squad, that you have no fear, and will follow their footsteps through eternity. This is from Joan's auspicious first album, which, to the occasional dismay of my roommate, who called her "the screaming bitch", I listened to on many late evenings during my freshman year at USF.

Elama, Yasser Habeeb. I got this hypnotic, Indian-influenced song off Putumayo's Sahara Lounge. According to the album's notes, Habeeb is a Dubai native who started as a recording engineer and producer, then approached EMI with "Elama" ("Until When"), which became a hit throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. The notes give this translation of the lyrics:

Until when will this agony last? / Until when do I have to tolerate this torture when I have not harmed anyone? / The more you make me suffer, the more I am attracted to you / You keep hurting me, but I never complain / Just treat me fairly for once.

You can play a sample here.

Schlittenfahrt, Marlene Dietrich. If you've ever longed to hear the Blue Angel sing "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" from Oklahoma in German translation, this is it.

Usku Dara, Eartha Kitt. When I was about seven, and we were living in rural Hertfordshire, England, one afternoon my mother and I were listening to BBC radio when the disc jockey said, "And now, here's some Turkish music." What followed was a tune so hooky that it remained caught in my memory until some thirty or so years later when Mike McGovern, a New York Daily News writer who later became known as Kinky Friedman's sidekick in the Kinkster's detective novels, invited several of us who had closed down the Lion's Head to come to his place for a nightcap. He poured us each some whiskey, then put an Eartha Kitt album on his turntable. After a couple of cuts, I was amazed to hear the same exotic tune that had so captivated me as a child. Judge it for yourself (including the two deliciously non sequitur spoken English translations) here:



I'll close with a strong recommendation of another musically-oriented blog, Struts and Frets, by DJStan. His most recent post, on the late New York street musician and Whitmanesque genius Moondog, reminds me of a gaping hole in my music collection: I still don't have The Band's Moondog Matinee.

Erratum: Thanks to DJStan for pointing out an error. In listing the languages represented in my iPod library, I had assumed that "Kol Rina", by the Klezmer Conservatory Band, was sung in Hebrew. In fact, it's in Yiddish, and I've corrected the list accordingly.
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*These are: Arabic, French, Gaelic, German, Hawaiian, Italian, Malagasy, Spanish, Turkish, Yiddish and Zulu. (Breton and Czech are soon to be added.)

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Dear IOZ,

Quel horreur! I cannot bear the thought of another day without your bracing negativity.

Ever thine,
Sexually backward patriarch.

Update: O frabjous day! The real IOZ is back.

Nine unearned runs?

I hoped that the ghost of the 1962 Mets had departed this vicinity when the Polo Grounds stadium was demolished. Sadly, no. The current version of the team seems compelled periodically to re-enact the follies of their predecessors of 46 years ago.

Breslin's book about the 1962 Mets is a joy to read. Where is Joan Whitney Payson now that we need her, again?

Update: Tim Marchman says they suck, acknowledges that it's largely the players' fault, but calls for the manager's head. Meanwhile, Marchman dubs this year's edition of the Cubs "a true winner." Could there be a hot time in the Old Town come October? With my Tampa homeboy Sweet Lou at the helm, and given my long-standing love of underdogs, that might be a result I could live with. OOF-WAH!

FIAT Topolino

Cutest car ever? At least tough competition for the bug-eye Sprite. Brought to you by those wonderful folks at Fix It Again Tony. This one was caught parked on Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, on the Ides of March.

Update: If the trend in oil prices continues, the car of the near future may look much like this little "mouse".

Ben Stein is a jackass.

And to think, I used to like the guy. Thanks to Archaeopteryx and Pharyngula for setting me straight.

Addendum: I don't agree with everything the commentator has to say on this clip. His response to Stein's silly assertion that "Darwinism" (i.e. natural selection) implies "social Darwinism" (i.e. the belief that altruism in social arrangements is counterproductive because it goes against the grain of "survival of the fittest"), and Stein's equally silly extension of that concept to include Nazi racism, is off target. In particular, the commentator's analogy between Nazi ideology and the notion of the covenant between God and the Jews is not only wrongheaded but offensive. He should instead have pointed out that evolutionary theory supports the notion that altruistic behavior can be beneficial not only for species but for individual survival.

Also, the commentator's apparent belief that economic globalization provides proof against war is wishful thinking. World War I is the most recent and perhaps strongest historical counterexample to the notion that extensive trading relationships between nations prevent them from going to war. Nevertheless, I think it is valid to say that, all other things being equal (which, admittedly, they seldom are), nations that trade with each other are less likely to fight each other than those that don't. In particular, I think that a nation like China that depends greatly on export markets is unlikely to risk military confrontations with its customers.

Update: Read about the dishonest content of Stein's movie Expelled, as well as the lengths to which its makers went to suppress intelligent criticism of it (ironic in light of their assertion that there is a scientific conspiracy to suppress criticism of evolution) here. (Again, a tip of the hat to Archaeopteryx.)

A treat for TS and Blue Texan.

My friends Ross and Kathryn Petras produce a desk calendar called The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said. On this year's calendar, the quote for April 26 is by one of my friends' at Instaputz favorite putzen, Jonah Goldberg, from a speech he made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

The Great Plains used to be a giant forest. The Indians burnt it to the ground to hunt buffalo.

R&K helpfully add this caption: "...[W]e hear they're also responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer."

Fouad is out of jail.

A friend who is traveling in the Middle East e-mailed me this item from Arab News, in which the wife of Saudi blogger Fouad Al-Farhan is quoted as saying he has been released from prison. I double-checked and found confirmation of this on Ahmed Al-Omran's blog Saudi Jeans. It's a great relief to know that Mr. Al-Farhan has been allowed to return to his wife and two young children.

But is he now truly free? The Arab News piece quotes Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Ahmed as saying

The issue (of Al-Farhan) was not that important as it represented the mistake committed by a person on himself. A man who commits a mistake should bear its result.

This cryptic (and evidently awkwardly translated) statement gives us no clue as to the nature of Al-Farhan's alleged "mistake". Moreover, the article also quotes "an official statement" as saying he "was detained on Dec. 10 for violating the Kingdom’s regulations,... but no charges were pressed against him." Again, there is no indication of what regulations he is said to have violated. Perhaps more importantly, he was held in prison for 137 days without being charged with any crime. (Yes, I know that my own government is not immune to criticism in this respect.) One can only wonder what chilling effect the prospect of being once again torn from his family and held indefinitely without charges for some unspecified "violation" will have on his writing.

Nevertheless, this is an occasion to celebrate. Thanks to Mark Crawford and all others who joined me in signing letters asking for Mr. Al-Farhan's release. I like to think that we at least hastened the course of justice.

Paul Simon, "American Tunes", at BAM.

Saturday night, my wife and I had the privilege (thanks to a neighbor who had two tickets she couldn't use) of attending Paul Simon's "American Tunes" concert (part of the "Love in Hard Times--The Music of Paul Simon" series) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

My credentials as a Simon fan are pretty solid. In 1965, I plucked a copy of Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Simon and Garfunkel's first album, from the "Folk" bin of the record department of the University of South Florida bookstore. I knew nothing about them, but the cover looked intriguing and I was a folk fanatic. Someone told me he thought they were from Miami, which would have given them a Florida connection, to boot. (Wrong.) I took the vinyl album to my dorm room, played it, and experienced the opposite of buyer's remorse. During winter break, I was playing it on my parents' stereo when a neighbor, a devout Catholic lady, came in just in time to hear them harmonize on the Christmas spiritual "Go Tell It on the Mountain (that Jesus Christ is Born)." She smiled brightly and asked me who was singing. "Simon and Garfunkel", I answered. Her aspect immediately went from beatific to baleful, and she snapped, "So what does Simon Garfunkel know about Jesus Christ?" I weakly replied that I believed they shared a common ethnic heritage.

My S&G fandom continued through my college days, although to an extent eclipsed by my devotion to Dylan, who appealed to my wild-and-woolly Hermetic, as opposed to my snotty-intellectual Apollonian, side. My third year of law school, in the throes of hopeless love, I would sometimes annoy my dorm floormates by attempting "Bridge Over Troubled Water" during my morning shower. "Kodachrome" provided part of the soundtrack of a joyous summer excursion to the West Coast following my discharge from Army active duty. When I hear it today, I can envision myself driving south on California Highway One, waves splashing rocks below to my right, the trees and hills of Big Sur to my left. Paul welcomed me back to New York with "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard". And so on.

Despite all this, I'd never seen Simon and Garfunkel, or Simon alone, in live performance. I wasn't sure what to expect of this concert, which featured several other singers and groups--only two of which, the Roches and Olu Dara, I'd ever heard before--as well as Simon and his band. The Roches opened with the concert's title song, "American Tune", followed by "Another Galaxy". I've liked the Roches without being a great fan, and their performance of these two songs confirmed my estimation--excellent musicians, but a bit too cutesy. Then they finished their set with a "Cecilia" that rocked the rafters, and set me and my estimation back on our heels.

I had expected the format to be all of the supporting musicians up first, in turn, with Simon out for the last set, perhaps culminating in a final song in which everyone would be on stage, singing in turns. I even imagined the last song as being "America". But, no. The Roches exited, and there was Simon, chugging into "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover."

Few, if any, musicians will perform their old standards exactly as recorded, for understandable reasons having to do both with their own sanity and, in most instances, a laudable desire to expand their audiences' horizons. Sometimes, however, this is done in such an aggressive way that it seems to express contempt for the audience, as if the musician is thinking, "I know you want to listen to this old crap instead of the exciting new stuff I'm doing, so, here it is, with stresses on all the wrong notes and way slow (or fast) rhythm. Eat shit and die!" I'm a great fan of the Byrds, and will collect just about anything of theirs. The only "live" album in their mainstream Columbia collection is one disc of (Untitled), on which they did several oldies (including the oldie-est of them all, "Mr. Tambourine Man") in ways that reflected influences on the band (principally from country music) since the time the songs were recorded, but still treated the songs, and the audience's expectations, with respect. About a year ago, I picked up a recording of a concert the Byrds did at Winterland, in San Francisco, in which the songs were done in such an assertively awful style that I could only guess at the band's motivation. Perhaps it was as I speculated above--simple boredom with their material. Maybe it was the Angeleno Byrds' contempt for Bay Area pretensions. Whatever it was, I donated the CD to the Grace Church Fair and prayed that nobody I like wasted a buck on it.

The point of this digression is to get something off my chest, and to lead into my observation that Paul Simon does it right. In this concert, he sang his oldies in ways that allowed the audience to discover unsuspected nuances in favorite songs without alienating them. Sometimes it was by doing a pre-Graceland song in a way that incorporates African pop influences, as he did in "Fifty Ways"; in others it was just by bringing out some aspect of the song that hadn't previously been stressed, as in his blues tinted performance of "Mrs. Robinson".

A Brooklyn band, Grizzly Bear, opened with an idiosyncratic but compelling version of "Graceland", then followed with "Mother and Child Reunion". The latter was originally done on Paul Simon with a bouncy reggae rhythm that seemed at odds with the song's somber lyrics. Grizzly Bear turned it into a slow, chant-like piece that was very affecting. This is a band worth watching. According to the program, they will be opening for Radiohead on a forthcoming tour.

Olu Dara and his band followed with "Slip Slidin' Away" and "Still Crazy After All These Years", both done in his unique jazz-blues-dance band style. His vocals and cornet solos were superb. I saw Dara once before, some years ago, when he provided musical accompaniment and counterpoint to a reading by the late August Wilson from his works, at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights.

Josh Groban was the only one to seriously disappoint me. The program quoted New York Times critic Stephen Holden:

His intonation is nearly perfect. He always sings directly on the note... He respects the melodic line of a song and brings to everything he sings an intrinsic sense of balance and proportion.

I mostly agree with Holden. Groban has a gorgeous voice. I'd love to hear him sing Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge, or something by Cole Porter. But on two of the songs in this performance, "America" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water", in my estimation he misjudged the material. "America" needs to start in an understated way, then build to a grand climax. Groban gave it the full-bore treatment from start to finish. On "Bridge", by contrast, he stayed too much in control at the end, failing to finish with the wild abandon that the song demands.

Amos Lee did competent versions of "Peace Like a River" and "Nobody", accompanied by multi-instrumentalist and Paul Simon band member Mark Stewart on cello, holding it like a guitar and playing it pizzicato on the latter song.

The real eye-opener of the concert for me was Gillian Welch, who, with her partner, David Rawlings, sent things to a whole new level with "Gone at Last", done in a style that combined elements of Bill Monroe, Tom Petty and Lucinda Williams, along with some original juice, to produce a sound that had many in the audience clapping and hooting along with the music. Welch then said Paul had asked her if there was a particular song she wanted to sing, and she told him there was one that she would cry if she couldn't do. I guessed "Duncan", and she proved me right, producing spine-tingling harmony with Rawlings on my favorite Simon song. After that, Simon joined Welch and Rawlings onstage to do "Boxer."

Simon's final set was all I could hope for. He reached way back for "Sounds of Silence", making it seem as pertinent now as it was in the 1960s, and leaped ahead to 2006's powerful "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" For his encore, I expected something upbeat, perhaps "Baby Driver", but he closed on a sweetly wistful note with "The Only Living Boy in New York".

Perfect baseball night.

Mets beat Phils, Red Sox won, Yanks lost (to the O's, no less). And, this morning, I find that the Mets have accomplished one of my goals for them: with their fourth straight win, while the Bronx Bullies flounder, they've supplanted the Yanks on page one of the Times sports section.

Update: Of course, the Mets have sucked mightily since I posted this, just before leaving for a short visit with my mom in Tampa. Driving past Tropicana Field, I wistfully thought of becoming a Rays fan. True underdogs starting to show some class, I reasoned, not perpetual (at least since 1986) underachievers. After all, I spent my middle and high school and university years in Tampa. Nevertheless, switching loyalties would be a violation of one of Bill Simmons's rules (of which I was unaware until August made his comment on this post, below), to wit:

Once you choose a team, you're stuck with that team for the rest of your life ... unless one of the following conditions applies:

Your team moves to another city.

You grew up in a city that didn't field a team for a specific sport - so you picked a random team - and then either a.) your city landed a team, or b.) you moved to a city that fielded a team for that specific sport.

(There are other exceptions that are irrelevant here. One of them is if the owner of your team has proved to be irredeemably loathsome. Of Fred Wilpon, I can only turn an oft-used New York-ism on its head: what's there to loathe?) As I've explained before, I first chose the Brooklyn Dodgers. When they went to L.A., they lost my loyalty (in accordance with Simmons's first exception), but it did not shift to another team. Instead, I simply lost interest in baseball. When I moved to Tampa, which then had no team (it was then, in pre-Steinbrenner days, the spring training camp for Cincinnati, so there was some local loyalty to the Reds) I didn't choose a random team, I just remained indifferent. Then I moved to New York and, in accordance with Simmons's rule, I picked the Mets as the logical successors to the Dodgers. But the Mets aren't moving (except into a new stadium next year), so I don't get the benefit of that Simmons exception, even though my old home town now has a team (which it didn't at the time I picked the Mets). Besides, my antipathy to the designated hitter rule makes it difficult for me to have any American League team as my primary loyalty. Finally, being a Rays fan would bring me into direct conflict with my wife's Red Sox fealty. So, I'll continue to suffer with the Mets and root for the Rays only when they play the Yanks.

Best description so far of the presidential campaign.

Gail Collins in today's New York Times:

You were all excited about this election and now you feel like someone who got all dressed up for a great event and wound up at a B-list party with a cash bar.

Addendum: This, regarding the recent Clinton/Obama debate, from Dawn Coyote on WikiFray:

Obama manages to be much more gracious, but really, this is like watching two people competing for the job of Head of Brain Surgery by being required to perform an interpretive dance while the other shoots spitballs at them.

Say it ain't so, Mo!

Maureen Dowd's column in today's New York Times starts off in full Peggy Noonan-esque cry: I was raised by decent, hard-working, churchgoing folks, and I'm no way bitter. Thus does she preface a departure from her usual occupation of Clinton-bashing (though she includes a remark about how "Hillary fights like a cornered raccoon") to take a roundhouse swing at Obama for his now notorious guns-religion-bitterness remark at a fund-raiser in San Francisco. She then attempts what amounts to a sort of Cliff's Notes encapsulation of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:

The elitism that Americans dislike is not about family money or connections — J.F.K. and W. never would have been elected without them. ... What turns off voters is the detached egghead quality that they tend to equate with a wimpiness, wordiness and a lack of action — the same quality that got the professorial and superior Adlai Stevenson mocked by critics as Adelaide. The new attack line for Obama rivals is that he’s gone from J.F.K. to Dukakis. (Just as Dukakis chatted about Belgian endive, Obama chatted about Whole Foods arugula in Iowa.)

Well, sheesh, I guess I can give up any notions I ever had of running for office (now about as realistic, anyway, as trying to become a rock star).

What's really rich, though, is Dowd's claim that San Francisco is "elitism's epicenter." Any fool who's read Frank McCourt's Tis knows it's Brooklyn Heights.

Titanic--nature's triumph or human failure?

The sinking of the Titanic has always been presented as a morality tale, one in which human hubris ("unsinkable") was humbled by the power of nature. However, according to William J. Broad's story in today's New York Times, two scientists who have examined both physical evidence from the ship's wreckage and the archives of her builder, the famous Harland & Wolff, of Belfast, have concluded that nature may not have had to win the contest, or at least not with as catastrophic consequences.

According to the researchers, rivets recovered from the wreck show an unusual amount of slag mixed with the iron from which they were forged. Moreover, minutes of H&W's Board of Directors meetings at the time Titanic was under construction document discussion of the difficulties in procuring sufficient rivets, which may have led H&W to rely on substandard suppliers, as well as problems in finding skilled riveters to hire, which could have led to faulty workmanship. Present and past officials of H&W have disputed these conclusions, one of them calling them "a waffle." Also, James Alexander Carlisle, grandson of an H&W riveter who worked on Titanic, has vigorously disputed the faulty rivet theory on the website of the Belfast Titanic Society.

If the researchers' theory is correct, Titanic is not so much a morality tale about technological hubris, but one about loyalty to an institution (H&W, at the time, was trying to complete on schedule what had to be the largest shipbuilding project in history: the construction of Titanic and her sisters Britannic and Olympic) trumping considerations of prudence and due regard for human life.

Goodbye, Lonesome Picker.

Sometimes, bad news seems to hide from me, taking its sweet time to reveal itself. So it was with the death, in January, of John Stewart. I finally got the news yesterday morning, paging through the New York Times "Week in Review" section, and seeing a teaser for an on-line only op-ed piece by Roseanne Cash.

I first knew of Stewart as the replacement for Dave Guard in the Kingston Trio (more about them in a soon to come--I promise!--post). Guard was an intelligent musician with an adventurous spirit that led to his break with the Trio when he thought their act was getting too formulaic, but Stewart brought a warmth and passion, as well as his own kind of intelligence, to the group. His voice was also an improvement over Guard's. I was a huge Trio fan through my high school and college years, and two of my favorite albums of theirs, #16 and Sunny Side, are from the Stewart period.

He left the Trio in the late 1960s to go solo, working as both a songwriter and performer. Perhaps his best known song, "Daydream Believer", was recorded by the Monkees, in my opinion one of the most underrated bands, and TV shows, of the '60s, and released in 1968. The following year, his album California Bloodlines, consisting entirely of his songs, was released. I fell in love with that album when I first heard it, in the summer of 1970, while visiting a friend in Greenwich Village. Along with contemporaneous work by Gram Parsons, Stewart, in this album, helped to lay the foundation for what has come to be called "alt/country" or "Americana" music, and today is exemplified by bands like Wilco and Son Volt, and singers like Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Tom Russell and Lucinda Williams.

Here are a pair of video clips from Stewart's career. The first is an audio of one of my favorites from California Bloodlines, "You Can't Look Back", accompanied by a series of reproductions of album covers and photos:



This one was made less than a year before his death, in a cafe in Pawling, New York, where he performed "Mother Country". This version, I venture, tops the one he recorded 38 years before on California Bloodlines:

So long, John, and thanks for so much.

Update: There's a splendid memorial site for John, with some YouTube clips, here.

Ouch!

Gail Collins, in her column titled The Revenge of Lacey Davenport, in Saturday's New York Times, wrote:

Long, long ago, Mick Jagger used to say that he couldn’t picture singing rock ’n’ roll when he was 40. His message, obviously, was not that the Stones planned to retire, but that Mick planned on remaining in his 30s forever. That which we cannot change, we ignore.

"Lacey Davenport" is a Doonesbury character thought to be based on the late Millicent Fenwick, who was elected to Congress from New Jersey at the age of 64, which at the time (1974), Ms. Collins observes, was considered "a geriatric triumph." She then adds: "These days, of course, as the first baby boomers are pushing 64, it’s regarded as part of the prime of life."

Well, of course it is. We boomers are a cohort of Jean Brodies, all in our prime:
Which, I suppose, is why, when I see a guitar store window, I pause and look longingly at those sleek Fender Strats and Teles, those gorgeous Gibson Les Pauls; why I'm distracted at the dry cleaner's by a poster offering guitar lessons. To quote the Beach Boys, It's not too late... .

Update: Ted Burke suggests (see comments) blues harp as a perhaps more attainable alternative to guitar heroism. Actually, I have an exemplar in that regard: one of my wife's friends' father, a septuagenarian living in the suburbs of Buffalo, who took up harp late in life and now bids fair to be the Sonny Boy Williamson of the Niagara Frontier.

Bonus: Hear and see Ted play blues in G here.

A tale of two stadia.

Anyone who's known me, or read this blog, for any length of time knows this if nothing: I love the Mets; I hate the Yankees. I've loathed the Bronx Bullies since I was in fourth grade, in an elementary school in the panhandle of Florida, when all of my  classmates were cheering for them and I, advocate that I was for the lowly and despised, knew the joy of seeing the underdog Brooklyn Dodgers defeat them in the World Series. I became a Mets fan in 1985 when a friend took me to a game at Shea, after a long baseball latency period precipitated by the Dodgers' move to L.A. During the course of that game, in which the Mets beat the Cards thanks to a dinger off what, that year, was called Howard Johnson's "unlikely bat", my friend, a Brooklyn native, said, "What you've got to remember is that the Mets are really the Brooklyn Dodgers continued by other means." That was enough to re-ignite the flame.

Nevertheless, as both teams play their final seasons in their long-time home venues, it's Yankee Stadium that I mourn, not Shea. To be sure, I've spent more time at Shea, and experienced more vivid emotion (mostly, I'm afraid, of the negative variety, but some moments of surpassing joy) there than in the older stadium in the Bronx. But, as most Mets fans will readily allow, Shea (photo at left above) is a charmless place. It's a product of the most dismal era of American architecture, the early 1960s, which produced such monstrosities as the Cadman Plaza apartment complex that looms over the northeastern flank of my beloved Brooklyn Heights. Painting Shea's walls blue only seemed to make matters worse.

Yankee Stadium (photo at right above), while graceful compared with Shea, has grown somewhat ungainly with recent revisions and additions. Its original facade, in a streamlined neoclassical style, is pleasing but unspectacular. What makes it special for me is its continued existence as a token of an era before my living memory. Shea was completed when I was a university student. Yankee Stadium, completed 23 years before I was born, was always the "House that Ruth Built". Babe Ruth, who died when I was two, was simply the most famous, and most charismatic, baseball player of all time. Most of his career was as a Yankee, and that's how he's remembered, but he came to fame with the Red Sox and made his last living appearance in a baseball uniform as a coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers. More than just a superb player, the Babe was a rare character. Herewith two of my favorite Ruth non-baseball anecdotes:

1. The Babe was invited by a New York society matron to be the guest of honor at a dinner party. Ruth's publicist subjected him to a Henry Higgins-like crash course in proper speech and manners. Like Eliza Doolittle, the Babe's first venture into high society rated an "excellent" for form but with a cautionary note for content. When the hostess passed a serving dish to him, he smiled sweetly and said, "No thank you, Ma'am. I never eat asparagus; it makes my urine smell."

2. A few months after Pearl Harbor, the Babe was to be interviewed live on a network radio show. At that time, it was imperative to relate everything to winning the war, so the host told Ruth that his first question would be, "Babe, how do you think sports can contribute to the war effort?" He had helpfully prepared an answer for Ruth to give: "Well, Bob [or whatever his name was], as the Duke of Wellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." They practiced this a number of times, until the Babe seemed to have it safely in memory. But when they went live, and the question was asked, Ruth said, "Well, Bob, as Duke Ellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton." After the show, the host said something like, "Gee, Babe, I thought you had that down pat. Why did you change it?" Ruth said, "Well, you see, I never met this guy Wellington, but Ellington, I know him. And I've never been to Eton, but I married my first wife in Elkton, Maryland, and I'll never forget that place as long as I live."

If there's an event associated with Shea that might make it worthy of preservation, it would have to be this (Note especially John Lennon during the last song, "I'm Down", on which he plays keyboard. I can't recall a moving image of a person, other than as an actor in a drama, in such an unalloyed state of Dionysiac fury; though McCartney, surprisingly, gives him a run for the money.)

The Beatles - I'm Down Live At Shea Stadium - Aug 15th, 1965 from Isaac on Vimeo.

Faith

The opposite of faith isn't doubt; it's certainty.
-- Anne Lamott

Having come to the Easter season (I began writing this on the evening of Easter Sunday; it's now two weeks and one day later, but still within the liturgical Easter), it seems appropriate to review my Ash Wednesday post, and reflect on what's transpired since. In that post, I wrote:

As I've noted recently, I have great difficulty with the notion of "faith" as it is commonly understood in a Christian context; that is, as a willingness to suspend skepticism with regard to propositions that are not amenable to empirical testing.

This drew a response from Marcia Tremmel, wife of my old high school and college friend Allan, and herself a deacon of the Episcopal Church:

I'm not sure that's my idea of faith. I am not at all sure that God expects us to suspend our skepticism or to walk away from such empirical testing as our current levels of science and knowledge permit. Those levels move almost daily - just look at the physics we grasp now compared to 50 years ago. The Letter to the Hebrews defines faith as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of that which we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1) It doesn't say a thing about maintaining a blind and stubborn certainty about things our empirical observations have proved otherwise. To me, being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see, is remembering that I (and you and all of us) are created in God's image, redeemed by the death of His Son, and sustained by the gift of the Holy Spirit. That, to me, is way bigger than any empirical testing done or not done, or that might become possible tomorrow or next week, so why not do that empirical observation? God's big enough to handle it.

The first syllable of 'remembering' is stressed because I'm thinking of the way my Vicar says the words of institution in the Great Thanksgiving - "do this in remembrance of me." He's stresses that syllable because he's trying to get across that we are not thinking about something that happened a long time ago, but bringing it into the present moment--into our lives today--anamnesis--right now. I catch it because I'm standing next to him at the Altar; the rest of the congregation I'm sure doesn't notice.

I remembered what Marcia had written to me during our Easter Sunday mass, when our Rector made the point about the resurrection not being some historical event, but something that is present for us and in us now. I still have trouble with the notion of a physical resurrection; indeed, I have a serious problem with the notion of "miracles" in general, and nothing that C.S. Lewis wrote on the subject seems convincing to me. (Update: I linked to Tattersall's article because his objections to Lewis's arguments in Miracles seemed pretty much in accord with mine, if better thought out. Now that I've had the opportunity to skim Darek Barefoot's response to Tattersall, I see that I'll need to revisit this issue in another post.) Nevertheless, the notion of "resurrection" as the remembrance of Jesus' teachings by his disciples, and by the heirs of those disciples down to the present and into the future, does not run afoul of that objection. Others might cavil that this provides the basis for only a denatured form of Christianity, but more about that in a later post.

It was what Marcia wrote about the definition of "faith," however, that particularly caught my attention. When I read it, I realized that I had used a meaning that was at variance with something I had read many years ago. That was Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith. I got it from my bookcase and quickly found my definition skewered at the beginning of Chapter Two, "What Faith is Not." Under the heading, "The intellectualistic distortion of the meaning of faith," Tillich writes:

The most ordinary misinterpretation of faith is to consider it an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence. Something more or less probable or improbable is affirmed in spite of the insufficiency of its theoretical substantiation.

Tillich then distinguishes between faith and belief, the latter being based either on "evidence sufficient to make the event probable" or trust in some authority who has answers; that is, who has evaluated the evidence in a way I regard as trustworthy; much as I might trust the late Richard Feynman on the topic of quantum physics, or Jancis Robinson on what wine to have with roast duck. Such trust, however, is not the same thing as faith, because trust is conditional--if some other authority I respect publishes something that contradicts or modifies what Feynman wrote about quantum physics, I may decide to believe the new theory; if Ms. Robinson recommends a wine that I don't like, well, de gustibus non disputandum est--while faith is unconditional.

So, just what is this unconditional faith? According to Tillich, it is not knowledge.

Faith does not affirm or deny what belongs to the prescientific or scientific knowledge of our world, whether we know it by direct experience or through the experience of others. The knowledge of our world (including ourselves as part of the world) is a matter of inquiry by ourselves or by those in whom we trust. It is not a matter of faith.

In this respect, Tillich anticipated the late Stephen Jay Gould's argument for "nonoverlapping magisteria" or "NOMA"; that is, that the magisteria (teachings) of science and religion, as properly understood, cannot be in conflict because they address different spheres of human experience. As Gould put it:

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the arch cliches, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.*

But this still doesn't answer the question: What is faith? Faith, for Tillich, means "the state of being ultimately concerned." What would it mean for Gould? My quick-and-dirty research has failed to uncover anything Gould wrote addressing that question. Gould proclaimed himself an agnostic, but not hostile to religion:

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball).

(Now there's a man who had his priorities in good order.) Gould went on to write:

As a moral position (and therefore not as a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality), I prefer the "cold bath" theory that nature can be truly "cruel" and "indifferent"—in the utterly inappropriate terms of our ethical discourse—because nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming (we are, after all, interlopers of the latest geological microsecond), and doesn't give a damn about us (speaking metaphorically). I regard such a position as liberating, not depressing, because we then become free to conduct moral discourse—and nothing could be more important—in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality.

I think that this passage indicates that Gould's "ultimate concern" (note the words "nothing could be more important") is the freedom of humans to determine the moral framework governing their lives through rational "discourse" rather than through revelation. While to many this seems the opposite of "faith," to Tillich it exemplifies a particular type of faith, specifically, a "humanistic" faith of the "moral" or "progressive-utopian" type. Of such a faith, Tillich writes:

The faith of the fighters for enlightenment since the eighteenth century is a humanist faith of the moral type. They fought for freedom from sacramentally consecrated bondage and for justice for every human being. ... It was faith, and not rational calculation, although they believed in the superior power of a reason united with justice and truth. ... As for every faith, the utopian form of the humanist faith is a state of ultimate concern.

Because it is "ultimate concern," it is faith; for Tillich, the only way to be without faith is to have no ultimate concern.

What is "ultimate concern"? According to Tillich, it is defined in Deuteronomy 6:5, the so-called "Great Commandment": "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." (N.R.S.V.)

This is what ultimate concern means and from these words the term "ultimate concern" is derived. They state unambiguously the character of genuine faith, the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern.

Yet it is obvious that it possible to have faith, even "genuine" faith in the sense of the demand for total surrender, in something other than the "Lord your God." At the beginning of Dynamics, Tillich gives two examples. The first, making reference no doubt to Nazi ideology but with application to jingoism anywhere, is a totalistic nationalism, and the second is "the ultimate concern with 'success' and with social standing and economic power."

It is the god of many people in the highly competitive Western culture and it does what every ultimate concern must do: it demands unconditional surrender to its laws even if the price is the sacrifice of genuine human relations, personal conviction, and creative eros. Its threat is social and economic defeat, and its promise--indefinite as all such promises--the fulfillment of one's being. ...When fulfilled, the promise of this faith proves to be empty.

Later, Tillich makes a similar, if somewhat qualified, assertion concerning humanistic or secular faith.

It is faith, but it hides the dimension of the ultimate which it presupposes. Its weakness or danger is that it may become empty. History has shown this weakness and final emptiness of all merely secular cultures. It has turned them back again and again to the religious forms of faith from which they came.

At this point, I confess to being a bit perplexed. I don't think Tillich is arguing here for the elimination or erosion of the separation of church and state. Rather, he seems to me to have asserted that a culture that is not informed by religious faith, even perhaps a plurality of faiths, has a fatal weakness. However, I wish he had given examples of "merely secular cultures" that had "turned...back...to the religious forms of faith from which they came." Perhaps some readers can help.

A more fundamental difficulty for me is defining the nature of that "ultimate" which, according to Tillich, is the proper--as opposed to idolatrous, like those discussed above--object of ultimate concern. According to the Great Commandment it is "the Lord your God." Here is where Tillich made a clever move:

The fundamental symbol of our ultimate concern is God. It is always present in any act of faith, even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God.

Well, OK. Tillich has already posited ultimate concerns--nationalism, success, humanism--that are not "God" as understood in religious terms. Suppose I were to say, as I believe Gould would have, that my ultimate concern is with human freedom to establish a moral order based on reason, and not on divine command. Would I be denying God in the name of God? To cut to the chase, what Tillich seemed to be saying is that whatever is our ultimate concern is, for us, God, and that, consequently, no one can be an atheist, or even agnostic, no matter what that ultimate concern may be. It all seems to me a bit, dare I say, tautological.

So where do I end up on all this? It would be easy if I could just state, "My ultimate concern is X." At my age, it should be a question I could readily answer. Not long ago, I would have given the same answer to that question that I hypothesized Gould's giving: that it is the freedom to determine the moral order through reason alone. I would have said that despite regularly attending church services. If pressed as to the sincerity of my religiosity, I would have given a flip answer (as I actually once did) like, "I'm just an ontological reductionist who gets off on good liturgy."

Today, I'm not so sure. The mere fact that I can "get off" on liturgy points to something: Tillich might have said it was an indication of a "sacramental" form of faith. I've sometimes been accused, with good reason, of wanting to have things both ways. Tillich's radical separation of faith from the empirical and Gould's NOMA give me some comfort in this respect. I like to say that my position is one of epistemological modesty. By this I mean that I retain a healthy skepticism about claims that are not readily testable, but also keep in mind, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."** There's a fine line between this kind of open-mindedness and credulousness, but I try to stay on the right side of it. At least, I hope that Archaeopteryx will concede that I still have functioning neurons.

Lastly, I must address the apparent conflict between the epigram at the start of this post from Anne Lamott, which I got courtesy of our Rector, Steve Muncie, and the words from Paul's letter to the Hebrews (11:1) quoted by Marcia. I like Ms. Lamott's statement that the opposite of faith is certainty because it seems in accord with my position of epistemological modesty. Yet Paul wrote of faith as being "certain of that which we do not see." On reading this, I was tempted to interpret it as meaning "certain that there are things that we do not see." This would mean a certainty of there being uncertainty, certainly in agreement with the modest position. Unfortunately, I don't have access to, or knowledge of, the original Greek, so I couldn't attempt my own exegesis. I looked to see how the verse was rendered in my Cambridge Study Bible (New Revised Standard Version), and found it was

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

The Cambridge scholars helpfully appended to this and the succeeding two verses*** this note:

The explanation of faith given here conforms in style to definitions in Greek philosophical writings, and the crucial terms, conviction and assurance, carry philosophical meaning as to how ultimate reality can be known. But the writer has made a crucial addition: faith is oriented toward the future and is grounded in the hope of fulfillment of God's purpose. The assurance is that the heavenly realities, which humans have not yet seen, will be revealed to God's faithful people, just as the ancestors looked forward to this reality. God's word, which was the instrument for shaping the creation...and the ages of history (worlds), is here seen as disclosing an eternal world which exists in the heavens but is not visible to humans.

(Emphasis in original; citations omitted.) Perhaps the crucial point here is that the certainty in question is "oriented toward the future" and "grounded in hope." This can be contrasted to the "certainty" of Biblical literalism, or fundamentalism, which is oriented towards the past (and which, I suspect, is the "certainty" that Ms. Lamott had in mind). (Biblical literalism is also, for Tillich, a form of idolatrous faith; a point I mean to take up in a later post.)

Over to you, Marcia (and anyone else who wants to chime in).

Update: Thanks to Archaeopteryx for linking to this post both on his blog and on the Faith-Based Fray, where it's already generated lots of discussion.
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*Gould recognized that, while the magisteria of science and religion do not overlap, there are important issues that implicate both:

Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both [magisteria] for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult. To cite just two broad questions involving both evolutionary facts and moral arguments: Since evolution made us the only earthly creatures with advanced consciousness, what responsibilities are so entailed for our relations with other species? What do our genealogical ties with other organisms imply about the meaning of human life?

**Hamlet, I, v.

***These are

2. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.
3. By faith, we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

Hebrews 11:2-3 (N.R.S.V.). The second clause of verse three may be a restatement of Democritus' atomic theory.

An important (ahem!) announcement.

I will be interviewed live tomorrow (Thursday, April 3) from 5:30 to 6:00 P.M. EDT on Sirius Satellite Radio, Indie Talk Channel 110, the "Blog Bunker" show.

For those of you who don't have Sirius receivers or haven't already signed up for Sirius Online, you can get a free three day trial of Sirius Online by going here.

Update: Things went so fast that I didn't get a chance to put in a plug for the other blog on which I participate, Brooklyn Heights Blog. Please give it a look, especially if you live in or near the Heights, are thinking of living in the Heights, used to live here and miss it, or were a big fan of the Patty Duke Show.