Digest, 5/1/21: Gone to See About a Girl

the first weekly digest post

Helen Frankenthaler, The Boy, 1963, Detroit Institute of Art

Greetings from the UK. I write to you from a hotel room I share with a kind and mysterious young woman I happen to love. She has discovered Breath of the Wild and I am eating English breakfast every day. Life is good.

I am not yet posting anything that is not being sent out to email. (Because I am a reed in the wind, blowing here and there based on which opinion was voiced by the last grumpy email I read.) But regardless of whether I ever turn off emails for any given post, I still really like the idea of an end-of-week roundup where I can post various things that would not be email worthy on their own. So, here’s the first digest email, which I hope you enjoy. Subscribers, do what thou wilt in the comments. (Be polite.)

Because several people have asked: I intend to allow comments from subscribers on the large majority of posts. Occasionally I will be moved to disable them. I will do so at my whim and without explanation; this is my project. You are of course always invited to reply to a post via email.

A quick note from a recent post. To my delight, the email responses to “you are exhausted because life is pain” came in two broad types: “Dude, are you ok?” and “Dude, that was hilarious.” And both are perfectly sensible responses to that post. One of the most cherished principles I have in as a writer is belief in negative capability, the notion expressed by John Keats that there are truths that are not necessarily expressible in terms of reason and logic and which can be, at times, directly internally contradictory. I consider myself a materialist, and yet I really deeply believe that there are aspects of life and reality that are irreconcilable in our rational brains. You will likely get used to me complaining about literalism, or the insistence on viewing everything through the reductive lens of that which is true in the most simplistic and uncomplicated sense. The world is too multivariate for that, I think.

Do I believe everything I wrote in that post? I do. Very much, and quite literally. I think that we live lives of constant doubt and pain because we are the product of fickle chance in an uncaring and indifferent universe. I believe most everyone lives every day in constant fear of death, the one outcome none of us can ever avoid. Also, was that post funny? Well, I hope so! Because nothing is funnier than that which is deadly serious. Is life mundane and comic and laid back as well as tragic? Of course. That post is true and it was a joke; it was 100% sincere and it was a little bit winking, a little bit tongue-in-cheek. It’s important to me to be hybrid, to be honestly deceptive, to be both. Just like I am a chronic over-sharer even as there are basic aspects of my life that the internet knows nothing of. Call it the prima donna in me.

Now please check out this YouTube channel Jacks of No Trade by two of my best idiot friends, featuring minimal production values and a total lack of skill and knowledge balanced with unfailing enthusiasm.

This Week’s Posts

Monday, 4/26/2021 - What Became of Atheism, Part One: Wearing the Uniform

The first in a series of posts on contemporary atheism and how it came to be. This post emphasizes the problems with draining religion of actual metaphysical content and the supernatural, and takes particular issue with Jonathan Haidt and his Jews for Jesus approach to atheism, so to speak.

I had a number of disagreements with commenters and emailers about this one. (Which means it’s one vs many, for however you would like to take that fact.) Their first claim has been that the evacuation of metaphysical/literal truth claim/supernatural content from traditional religions is nothing new, that most people view religion this way, and that in fact this has always been true of religion even going back to ancient times. The vast majority of religious believers throughout history, in this telling, have been arch secularists deep down. All of this, I think, is wrong, as a matter of history and sociology. Perhaps someday I will find the time to defend that stance from evidence. I will think that perspective over carefully if I do.

But there is a related point on which I must be adamant: the constant insistence that non-Western/monotheistic religions are in fact materialist and ecumenical by nature are the product of the idiosyncratic diffusion of these traditions through Western intellects that have distorted them along the way. The notion that these religions are “more enlightened” from the perspective of 21st century progressive mores is a very common view in contemporary American intellectual life, but it is just not correct. It’s a trope, a meme, that has emerged from marketing and pop nonfiction meant to flatter W.E.I.R.D. sensibilities. The world is not divided between Eastern religions that are perfectly enlightened according to 21st century liberal sensibilities and their myopic and warlike Western counterparts.

The classic example of this is Buddhism. It is very common for Westerners to confidently claim that Buddhism is in fact “the atheist’s religion,” that is has no supernatural element, that it’s just a philosophy for life…. And I really want to stress this: for the vast majority of the world’s Buddhists, this is simply, unambiguously wrong. Yes, there are schools of Theravada Buddhism that could be considered atheist, but even within that vision there are profoundly different valences and concerns regarding the metaphysical. Meanwhile a majority of Buddhists practice a Mahayana Buddhism that tends to involve the theistic and the supernatural, what could only be considered gods, demons, angels, and the like. Though you have been confidently told otherwise at parties or on campus, for many Buddhists Nirvana is in fact an afterlife and very similar to a traditional Western conception of heaven.

Why has the impression developed that Buddhism is an atheistic tradition? Well, for one thing, pop nonfiction thrives on counterintuitivity, and “Why Buddhism Perfectly Conforms to All of Your Educated Westerner Preconceptions” is a great subtitle to leap out at you in the airport bookstore. To be clear, the flavor of Buddhism that has been filtered through the secular Jews who did so much to introduce the tradition to Western audiences is no less valid or real than others. There is no Buddhist version of the Holy See to say otherwise. But the notion that this is what Buddhism is to most Buddhist is, I say again, a distortion. If you cornered the average Vietnamese Buddhist and tried to explain to them that Buddhism makes no truth claims about the nature of the universe they would probably look at you with great confusion.

There’s no such thing as expansionistic Judaism? I invite you to hang out with some of the settlers in the occupied territories and find out. Hinduism is not evangelical? The most powerful political force in India, which will be the world’s most populous country within the next decade, is the Hindutva movement, which is a nationalist movement but also a Hindu supremacist one that many adherents view as intended specifically to spread the religion. Eastern religions aren’t aggressive or militaristic? Shinto was so key to Japanese militarism that it was ordered to be abandoned as the state religion following World War II by the American occupation. I have to say, the notion that only Christianity and Islam 1) make claims about the nature of reality that are contrary to scientific understanding of the universe, 2) seek to spread themselves to nonbelievers, and 3) can be implicated in nationalistic, militaristic, and imperialist behavior is, simply put, the product of exoticism and condescension.

But you can feel free to tell me why I’m wrong below!

I can’t tell you how often, for example, commenters on liberal blogs would preface a denunciation of Richard Dawkins by reassuring everyone that they themselves were agnostic or otherwise unaffiliated. “Of course Christianity isn’t literally true,” they would always say before excoriating arrogant atheists. What they never seemed to understand is that the “of course” was a more grievous insult to sincere Christians than Christopher Hitchens could ever come up with. What the atheists felt they needed to prove, the anti-atheists simply assumed away. They took as given that traditionally religious claims about the world were so ridiculous that they could dismiss them with a footnote. The difference is stark. Angry atheists think religion is wrong. Anti-angry atheist liberals think religion is not even wrong.

Wednesday, 4/28/2021 - Elizabeth Wurtzel, 1967-2020

My obituary for Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of the divisive depression memoir Prozac Nation and other pioneering works in the field of oversharing. Like Courtney Love, to whom she was frequently compared, Wurtzel both constantly invited legitimate criticism with her provocation and excess and was also clearly the victim of a sexist critical culture that refused to accept her work in the manner in which it was intended. For Karl Ove Knausgård, self-absorption to the point of solipsism is seen as a legitimate artistic choice; for Wurtzel, it was a sign of her fundamental unseriousness. She burned so bright, but she didn’t burn long. RIP.

Was her work pretentious and self-absorbed? Sure. But she never claimed to be otherwise. Depression makes you myopic; hurt develops its own kind of gravity, and over time everything falls in, except those people with foresight enough to see that they are approaching the event horizon and step away in time. You will not be saved by trying to maintain the requisite ironic distance from your own life, to act like some 21st century Twitter power user who deadens their experience of life with jokes and memes and cleverness. She chose to do the opposite, and being a writer, she did it with words

Thursday, 4/29/2021 - More Music For You, Volume One

Five artists for you to discover, all of them from the more experimental/nontraditional school. Shared due to multiple requests and, as the title indicates, the first in a series.

Friday, 4/30/2021 - A Portrait of Ross (Subscriber Only)

A brief meditation on a piece of art I love and why you should be willing to open yourself up to artwork that might initially seem unusual to you, or even ridiculous. This post was 90% an excuse to say “this piece of art exists,” to share with you something that was very meaningful to me when I was a much younger man. And which remains very meaningful to me today.

Ross was Gonzalez-Torres's lover, and died of AIDS. When Ross was first diagnosed, his doctor told him his ideal weight was 155 pounds. Every day, the candy is weighed and 155 pounds is placed out. Visitors to the museum or gallery where it’s being showcased are encouraged to take a piece. So it's a giving, generous work of art, but with a dark edge, for as the candy gradually diminishes it symbolizes Ross's weight loss due to AIDS. But every morning, the candy is weighed out again, restored to its previous weight, so art (unlike life) is eternal.

Song of the Week

“Song for Zula,” by Pr0files. A (radically different) cover of a lovely song by Phosphorescent and a real banger, one to put on when you come home drunk from the bar late at night and you’re not ready to go to sleep yet and you want to lie on your bed and think of old lovers whose bodies you can still smell. Also (forgive me) a certified panty-dropper.

Substack of the Week

For the first of these, it’s got to be Daniel Larison’s Eunomia. Daniel is the best foreign policy writer working today and has been for, oh, 15 years. I discovered him at the late, lamented right-leaning-but-profoundly-heterodox conservative group blog the American Scene. Daniel is a conservative (or so identified when I started reading him) and previously wrote for The American Conservative, which has prevented some lefties of little imagination from reading his work. That’s a mistake. Daniel’s foreign policy ethos is a profoundly moral one, an angry one driven by his deep scholar’s knowledge of the impossible weight of America’s complicity in death, torture, and displacement in the wider world, undertaken to secure power and treasure. Daniel is a more sincere and effective critic of empire than the vast majority of anti-imperialist lefties I know. His project is more than worth supporting financially.

Every time the recognition of the genocide is debated, we hear the same lines about the importance of not alienating our ally and how the status of the genocide shouldn’t be “politicized.” Meanwhile, the Turkish government engages in the most egregious genocide denial on the planet and penalizes anyone that speaks or writes about it honestly. The Turkish government long ago politicized the question with its insistence on denying the historical record. Our government is not obliged to go along with Turkey’s official lies. - A Long Overdue Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

Book Recommendation

Winter World, Bernd Heinrich, 2003

Definitely a “does exactly what you want it to do” classic, this deft, entertaining work of science writing explores the many strategies animals use to survive the winter. There’s a freewheeling and rambling nature here that might frustrate fans of more traditional science writing, but I find it loose and fun. It’s just page after page of facts that make you nod your head and go “Mother Nature, you gorgeous bitch.” For example, the arctic ground squirrel sets an enviable example for all of us by digging a hole and hibernating for like three quarters of the year. (Its body temperature drops to below freezing but somehow its blood doesn’t freeze.) Hibernation in general is revealed to be a profoundly diverse and complex practice, and one that presents clear tradeoffs to go with its benefits. I should note that, as several Goodreads reviews complain, Heinrich has a disquieting tendency to grab animals by the scruff to learn about them and, even more casually, to kill them, so avoid this if that sounds too unpleasant for you. Then again he’s German so I find this all very on-brand.

Comment of the Week

"And have we fallen that far, as a society, in terms of basic community"… Yes. And as a result of how far we've fallen, people find the community a religious group offers a needed and enriching part of their lives. I'm in recovery, so like the abstracted conceptions of religiosity Freddie discusses, my relationship with a higher power is abstract to the point of meaninglessness (some of the times). However, the recovery community and its literature (at its best) - committed to respect, civility, accountability, forgiveness, humility, self-reflection, self-respect, integrity - offer a "guide to living," that although not grounded in a particular religious doctrine, offer a framework by which to walk through the days and interact with other people. - David Selsby, on “What Became of Atheism”

I will, inshallah, be home early next week. Regardless, I have a few things lined up for you set to autopublish. See you soon.

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