When I was a teenager, away at boarding school, the food was (to be candid) pretty gross. There was lots of it but what it gained in quantity it hardly lost in quality, because it had none of the latter in the first place. I am not quite sure what was the most revolting. The porridge was awful, but not exactly disgusting. The sausages were gross, but if you like oozing fat – lots of it – well you were in luck. I do remember when, instead of regular beef we were served heart. Now that really was a low.
However there was one day of the year when all was forgiven. Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. England does not have Mardi Gras like they do in New Orleans – I think we would all have found that rather vulgar and (to be honest) Roman Catholic. But there are traditions associated with that day and above all pancakes have a starring role.
Fifty years ago, when I started my life as a philosopher, one rigid distinction that we were taught was the difference between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification.” A scientist might come up with an idea in the daftest manner – the favorite was Kerkulé discovering the circular nature of the benzene ring by seeing in the flickering flames of a fire a snake swallowing its tail – but the proof of the pudding lay in whether the evidence supported it. We philosophers needed to know nothing about the former and everything about the latter. The feeling was that history of science, which deals with discovery, is basically gossip.
Then in 1962 – 50 years ago this year – along came Thomas Kuhn and his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He drove a horse and four through the distinction, arguing that unless you know something of how and why a…
Early yesterday, I had the privilege of interviewing High Priest Freddy Graham, brother of the Reverend Franklin Graham, ostracized son of the Reverend Billy Graham, and CEO of the Priest Freddy Graham Pagan Association. (To watch our interview in video format, go here.)
Priest Freddy started the interview off with the bold claim that he suspected President Obama might not be a true Pagan. “We Pagans are pretty darn good at sussing out whether people are true Pagans or not,” he told me, adding, “Mr. Obama has said he’s a Pagan, so I just have to assume that he is. All I know is, I’m a pretty good goat-entrails reader, and the gods have been darn clear in telling me that Mr. Obama’s faith is questionable. I can’t really tell if he’s one of us or not. I mean, you have to ask every person, and I’m just not willing to say for sure that President Obama is indeed of the Pagan …
Fully two-thirds of my students are writing screenplays. I bet yours are, too. (Really, just ask for a show of hands. If two-thirds of them don’t have their hands up, it’s because those who are writing screenplays at that moment haven’t yet heard your question.)
Yet the only thing they know about movie history is that The Lion King is really cool and that Pacino’s Scarface contains the line, “Say ‘hello’ to my little friend.”
And even the ones who are not currently writing screenplays consider themselves film buffs although–since “buff” is not a word a lot of them use except when discussing the male physique–they often just say, “I really, really like films. I know quite a bit about them, actually.”
What that means, as it turns out, is that they all saw Star Wars, The Little Mermaid, Babe, The Notebook, Titanic and Pretty Woman, but pretty much nothing …
The pharmaceutical industry gets a bad rap. To listen to the critics you’d think pharmaceutical companies are in the same sleazy category as oil, finance and tobacco companies. But pharmaceutical companies invent life-saving medications, not to mention countless other psychoactive products that many of us enjoy on a recreational basis. Pharmaceutical companies get blamed for fraud, kickbacks, and research deaths, but they never get the credit for oxycontin.
That is why I was thrilled to see that GlaxoSmithKline is sponsoring the prize for the British Medical Journal‘s annual Research Paper of the Year. Sure, the pharma-bashers will whine like infants at the BMJ’s decision to brand a medical research prize with the name of multinational drug company, just as…
Above is an interview I conducted for the Faith Complex series with Mr. Chaim Levin. Entitled “Davven the Gay Away?” (A Jewish play on the phrase “pray the gay away” heard in some Christian circles) the episode calls attention to Mr. Levin’s struggles to maintain a gay and Orthodox Jewish identity.
Resnick, who was acquainted with Levin personally (though did not mention him by name in the original article), accused him of self-indulgence. Resnick wondered:
By and large, though, unmarried heterosexual Orthodox Jews suffer in solitude. But do those Jews complain? Do Catholic priests, the overwhelming majority of whom remain celibate their…
I was quoted in the Washington Post yesterday as observing that “theological disputation [on the presidential campaign trail] is a loser.” I was referring to the rhetoric of candidate Rick Santorum, whose surge among GOP voters has been accompanied by a surge in vinegary faith-based oratory.
A comment Santorum made this weekend has made the rounds, and if you are addicted to Sunday morning news shows or CNN you now know it by heart. In a discussion about Obama’s environmentalist policies, Santorum lamented: “It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.”
Santorum spent Sunday walking that one back, sort of. Yet as the Washington Post article mentioned above demonstrated, the former senator is not unacquainted with the dark arts of faith-based disparagement.
Anathematizing is how I refer to this type of negative…
It’s hard to be piercingly heterodox when heterodoxy is the culture’s orthodoxy—heterodoxy of a certain sort, anyway. Heterodoxy is not inherently instructive, accurate, or interesting. It’s pure reaction. If you tell a small child to be quiet and he yammers more loudly, his rebellion is a form of bondage. It’s hopelessly tethered to what it rejects. It’s wholly predictable and adds no value. It’s provocation whose point is to provoke, but not for any particular reason other than provocation itself. It’s reverse-the-sign heterodoxy—change the plus sign to minus, or vice versa. If conventional opinion condemns al-Qaeda and you defend them because the imperialists attack them, you’re a useless idiot. Much of the worst thinking of the last century has been of this form.
Bill Maher has on occasion made trenchant objections to orthodoxies of the moment, and last fall did herald…
Trained never to forget the all
-importance of control, his face
remembers always to suppress
each unintended syllable
and can’t. Hence the expressionless
expression he maintains, a dead
-pan scowl where umbrage shadows rage.
He hurts. It is his privilege,
or was: the ones who mocked or stared
grew into people of good will
who, patient, notice nothing as
the hard words flare and sting his eyes.
The Prayer Rope Knot
Each time the monk who learned this knot
had tied his own, a devil came
& loosened it. Eventually
the monk, just as the devil hoped,
got pissed; he couldn’t pray at all.
That night his angel wakened him
& taught him how to interweave
double strands into a web
of 7 crosses. Pulled tight,
they closed into this perfect knot
whereby the devil’s silently
upbraided, and the heart sings whole.
The phrase has become a watchword in liberal thinking in the last year, from President Obama’s speeches to Todd Gitlin’s entry this week at Brainstorm. It stands as the colloquial encapsulation of a capitalist survival-of-the-fittest system that runs on greed and heartlessness. The opposite is, precisely, state policies that help the unfortunate and disadvantaged.
But “you’re on your own” isn’t necessarily a statement of cruelty. Given a little background in American classics, we can open it to the opposite interpretation. In this version, which comes out of classical liberalism (which is closer to today’s libertarian conservatism than to today’s liberalism), to be on your own is to be freed from social and biological ties of fate, as well as state restrictions. It isn’t an abandonment of people, but rather an empowerment of them. People are not forever defined by class or…
There has long been a lot of hysteria among US elites about children born “out of wedlock.” Every since the 1965 Moynihan Report’s claim that black families were failing because of the pathology of single motherhood, policy makers and pundits, not to mention more than a few sociologists, have been running around screaming the sky is falling. “Illegitimate” children are the problem, not poverty, lack of access to anything like universal education, health care, not to mention those crazy European things like state-subsidized childcare.
All of this was a way of displacing the structural poverty of many black Americans onto the “lax morals” of the black mother. Which worked pretty well since nearly all of these pundits, policy-makers, and sociologists were white and it was far easier to explain black poverty as a them problem than actually acknowledge just how much structural racism remains…
What? You didn’t know the profound connection between Russian samovars and female orgasm? You’ll just have to read on ...
Last post, I described why female orgasm is considered an evolutionary mystery. Here, we’ll look at some suggested solutions to this mystery … none of which, unfortunately, seems very promising.
The redoubtable Desmond Morris, whose fertile imagination gave us the “buttocks mimic” hypothesis for the evolution of breasts, once unburdened himself of yet another howler, proposing that orgasm is natural selection’s way of keeping a woman horizontal after sex, which in turn supposedly makes fertilization more likely.
This “knock-down” hypothesis has problems. For one, despite substantial efforts, it has never been demonstrated that postcoital positions influence …
A dear college friend died yesterday while serving as a correspondent in Syria, reporting on the rebellion against the Syrian president. He was 43. The world knows Anthony as a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for International Reporting, whose stories painted a broader picture of the beauty and terror in war-torn countries in the Middle East. He reported on war and conflicts in lands that now hold vital interest for the world. Through Anthony’s reporting, we came to learn about the struggles of people—an on-the-ground view. His work involved risk and danger. He was successful, because he was a decent man; success in that line of work can only occur if trust is built, especially among people increasingly wary about journalists. It is reported that he died of an asthma attack—the second he suffered that week.
Anthony was one of my closest college friends. We attended…
Those were impressive accomplishments, for sure. But let me say that no one, but no one, can demonize, Talibanize, or Stalinize Secularism like Rick Santorum. On occasion he has done so, I would admit, with a fair degree of intellectual seriousness, as in this 2010 speech. Though for the most part his pronouncements on the subject amount to rank and preposterous name-calling.
Back in 2003 he lamented: “I want to remind people of the societies that have been secular in nature. Starting with the French Revolution, moving onto the fascists, and the Nazis and the communists and…
Hi there! I thought I’d introduce myself. You probably weren’t expecting me–so few do–and yet since I’ve been so often on your tongue in “Brainstorm” these past few days, I thought I’d just pop in.
I’m not a mystery once you get to know me–and I certainly hope you will.
Why am I here? I like a good time. When I know people are relaxing, having intimate conversations, really enjoying themselves both cheerfully and intensely, you’ll find that I’m drawn to the moment.
I don’t need a big party, a lot of decorations, too much to drink, or a whole lot of fuss; I don’t need a red carpet, so to speak, because I carry my own with me, all rolled up and tucked into place. I don’t need a big limo, either, or a Hummer. If I need to, I can walk and get to where I’m…
Like Laurie Fendrich, I have been obsessing a bit about the Catholic bishops and their stand against birth control. Since I have thought quite a bit about this stuff, I would like to chip in. I should say that I look upon Laurie as the moral conscience of Brainstorm, and what I have to say is intended as complementary and not as contradictory.
The bishops are arguing in the context of the Catholic doctrine of natural law, something that goes back to Aquinas who in turn, as always, was hugely indebted to Aristotle. I see natural law theory as an attempt to answer the Euthyphro Problem, something expressed in the Platonic dialogue of that name. The question is asked “Why should we be good?” and the answer is given “Because it is the Will of God.” To which, another question is asked. “If doing the good is doing the Will of God, does this mean that God could simply make up…
The guilt is overwhelming. Here we have Laurie Essig getting all depressed about Valentine’s Day. Laurie Fendrich is beating up the Catholic bishops for their views on birth control, and expectedly getting a host of critics who are probably bishops writing under noms-de-plume. And dear old David Barash is working himself up into a tizzy about the female orgasm. Face up to it David. You are never going to have one, so you might as well get over it now. Why don’t you offer your services to the bishops? They could use a bit of biology that post-dates Thomas Aquinas.
And me! I am sitting on my behind in an apartment in Paris, eating breakfast – a chunk of freshly baked bread, slathered in butter and with lots of jam. (What is it about French fathers and…
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to testify at a U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee hearing on innovations in higher education affordability. You can watch the video here. It was an interesting morning marred by a long discussion of an essentially bogus idea: that college keeps getting more expensive because of onerous federal regulations.
Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) was the first to raise this notion, and she returned to it several times. She said it was an opportunity for bipartisan agreement on the committee given that Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) had cited it frequently during past debates. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the federal government imposes various regulatory burdens on colleges, and that colleges have to spend money to comply with these regulations, leaving them with no choice but to pass the costs on to students in the form …
Driving to work yesterday, I was feeling that Valentine’s Day depression that is wont to come upon me on February 14. It’s not just the cliche storyline of boy meets girl, boy buys girl stuff, boy and girl eat dinner, and so it is that love becomes incorporated into the market that gets me down. It is the sinking sense that there is no way to ever escape this story.
So it was that I drove by the church with the billboard that said “Jesus is God’s Valentine to You” and smirked with the ironic distance of my truly analytical feminist brain. But that smirk was quickly wiped off my face as I listened in on a local radio station’s Valentine’s Day special: a real live wedding. Of course it was incredibly predetermined in its presentation—the young high-school friends who were meant to be together but went their separate ways, reunited on Facebook, now marrying live on the radio. Of course…
PHOTO AT CBSNEWS.COM--CLICK TO GO TO CBS NEWS PAGE. New York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin celebrates his game-winning 3-pointer in the final seconds of an NBA basketball game against the Toronto Raptors in Toronto on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012. The Knicks won 90-87. (AP Photo/Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)
You’re right, I don’t know much about basketball. Even so, I’m caught up in “Linsanity”—infatuation with the story of Jeremy Lin, the super-great Knicks point guard who’s the first Chinese American to make it big in the NBA. He’s helped (understatement) the Knicks by winning the last six games in a row, making for the longest running streak in their season.
It’d be hard for me not to be part of Linsanity. First, this is happening in New York, the city where people come to make it, but most often fail….
directs the program in history and philosophy of science at
Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and
Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.
is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.
Follow Brainstorm through your favorite RSS reader.