To read an author is to read someone different from ourselves. Reading is not a means of self-affirmation, but of self-denial. Any book that is any good challenges its readers: This is so, isn’t it? Did you know this? Have you considered that? [ . . . ]

Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully attended to. True diversity in literature would be to read authors in circumstances as different from our own as possible, because we might then imagine ourselves as different than we are — not the creature of circumstances, but their master. Reading is fundamental, all right: to a person’s ethical development.

You can say the same about most great art, and it certainly need not be limited to fiction, though I grant that a fictional narrative will likely place the reader closer to the thoughts of the subject at hand. But consider great theatre and film, even music or dance in the more abstract sense, in how they can shake us from our comfort zones, force us to empathize with characters to whom we would normally never relate, those of different times, situations, and motivations.

I’ve cited it before, but it bears repeating here. I am once again reminded of the panhandler interviewed in Al Pacino’s documentary, Looking for Richard. 

We should introduce Shakespeare into the academics. You know why? Because then the kids would have feelings. We have no feelings. That’s why it’s easy for us to shoot each other. We don’t feel for each other, but if we were taught to feel, we wouldn’t be so violent. Does Shakespeare help us? He did more than help us. He instructed us. . . . If we think words are things and have no feelings in words then we say things to each other that mean nothing. But if we felt what we said, we’d say less and mean more!

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In today’s New York Times, a piece about Mitt Romney and his faith is accompanied by this image:

Which is, of course, in reference to the word Mormon, which is, of course, Mitt Romney’s religion.

But I immediately thought it was a reference to Merman, the aquatic evildoer and ally of Skeletor from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

Seriously, it’s like I’m perpetually eight years old.

Mormon and Merman. NOT THE SAME.

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…and immediately recalled a time when a bunch of us Shakespearean actor-folk were doing one of our many, many workshops we sometimes gave for companies or federal employees or what have you, and our facilitator, who whom I love dearly, was regaling the attendees with some of the wonders of Shakespeare’s language use. Wandering into a side thought about some bit about the derivation of many of our modern common-use words, she said…

“I’m fascinated by word origins. I love entomology.”

And all of us pretty much died inside right there.

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. . . I would argue that the quality of governance in the US tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently.

Except I don’t think it’s as accidental as Fukuyama implies. While there is no doubt that a bureaucracy can begin to eat itself if left unchecked, the bigger problem with governance today is that one of the two principle engines of governance, the political parties, has decided to sabotage governance for the very purpose of proving its inefficacy. It’s the old saw, which I will now badly paraphrase: the Republicans say that government is the problem, and then they get elected and prove it.

It’s one thing for government to grow a few too many tentacles which eventually need pruning. It’s another for the people at the levers of power to intentionally drive the ship of state into a series of ditches.

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What a coincidence!

In 2008, I wrote a master’s thesis on the above subject, and I recently decided to clean it up, get it all good and formatted, and publish it as an ebook…and a dirt-cheap ebook at that, at 99 cents. So today I published on Amazon’s Kindle Store my once-thesis-now-book, Under the Stained Glass Ceiling: Atheists’ Precarious Place in Modern American Politics. Here’s my description from the Amazon page:

Being atheistic defines what a person does not believe, but it may not sufficiently describe what one does. This is one of the central sticking points for atheists who hope to make their voices heard in American politics: deciding what those voices should be saying, and then, how best to say it.

For some nonbelieving Americans, the goal is simply to be left alone, free to refrain from worshiping any gods, and have religious Americans keep their supernaturalistic beliefs out of government. For others, there is a feeling that nonbelievers have been champing at the political bit for too long.

This book will explore atheists’ precarious place in American politics, both in terms of their potential for impact and the harsh realities of their station in American society. We will examine the oft-conflicting goals of the nonbelief movement and take a critical look at the dominant strategies for achieving those goals. And in the light of their failures and successes, their public image and their political potency, we will evaluate the prospects for atheism in electoral contests and for mainstream social acceptance. Feeling a renewed sense of purpose, and sensing a rare opportunity, atheist Americans are preparing to mark their territory in the political arena. As has always been the case, however, there is little consensus as to what victory looks like.

The preface covers most of the necessary context (how the content was written in 2008, but now in 2012 there’s little changed in the most important areas), but the long and the short is that I am releasing this somewhat on a whim, mainly to get the material out into the hands of those who might find it of interest. I really do think it’s quite accessible and a genuinely enjoyable read, and it seemed absurd that after so much work put into it that it should simply gather electron-dust on my hard drive. I hope to get it to the iBookstore as well, but that has proven more difficult than I expected, despite the release of iBooks Author.

So, if you have a buck to spare, perhaps you’ll give it a download and check it out. If you like it, I hope you’ll bestow some Amazon love on it in the form of a positive review. Most importantly, if you don’t like it, well, pretend you do and don’t tell me.

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"Look what I made!"

(Ooh, what a title for a blog post! I hope it’s as exciting as it sounds!)

Last night, Newt Gingrich, in all his usual bellicosity, harangued CNN’s John King for beginning the South Carolina GOP debate with a question about allegations made by Gingrich’s ex-wife, and it was such a piece of television drama that it may well serve to catapult Gingrich to a victory there tomorrow night.

Gingrich found the question (or claimed to find the question) offensively irrelevant, and I pretty much agreed. John King himself, during the post-debate punditry, continuously asserted that the question needed to be asked because “it was in the news,” implying that it was the right place to allow Gingrich a chance to weigh in on his own terms.

I call bullshit. It would be one thing if at this debate, something was posed to the candidates concerning the topic in abstract (something like “is the sexual behavior of a candidate fair game for considering whether or not that person is fit to serve” or what have you), but it was not at all the place to confront one candidate with one accusation about a private matter. This is not the Barbara Walters special, it’s a presidential debate. Gingrich was right to declare it to be the wrong venue for such a thing.

But!

To get a little meta, everyone knew what would become of such a question. Gingrich knew he’d get asked about it, and no doubt was prepared to do his “I’m being attacked by the liberal media” performance that got him so much attention in this election in the first place. John King no doubt knew that this is exactly what Gingrich would do. He probably didn’t expect to be hit so personally by Newt, with such ferocity, but he knew something of this kind was coming his way. This was theatre from both ends, CNN’s and Newt’s. It may have been only loosely scripted, but the scenario was all but planned.

And!

I like the way this was put by Andrew Sprung:

Newt’s little show of high moral dudgeon when asked at the opening gun about his ex-wife’s allegations of cruel, self-serving betrayal is getting rave reviews as performance art. And it was an astounding display of the Audacity of Hubris. In the space of a minute or two, Gingrich managed to blame or condemn questioner John King, the news media, his ex-wife and Barack Obama for his being forced to address the consequences of his serial adultery.

In other words, spare us, Newt. His hypocrisy and underhandedness on this topic is his own fault. The only media bias of which Newt is the victim is the bias for sensationalism and salaciousness. He is being attacked for being a Republican about as much as he’s being attacked for being a white guy or a Christian (which is not at all).

He is being paraded about as another character in the absurd reality show that is contemporary politics. If anything, he is a celebratory figure for his behavior, because he offers so much prurient content to what would otherwise be a dry subject. And he’s brought it all on himself by his own behavior — he who bemoans the alleged immorality of the “secular state” and he who waged a crusade against a sitting president for sexual activities comparatively banal compared to Newt’s own infidelities.

So both are true: The question was way out of line, but Newt had no business getting on even a medium-sized horse about it. He and John King made that bed together, and now he has to sleep in it, presumably with whomever he is diddling at the moment.

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John Hopwood, 52, an unemployed editor from Manchester . . . said he usually voted Democratic — he voted for Bill Richardson in the 2008 Democratic primary and then for Mr. Obama in November — but was disappointed in the administration. He said he was considering Mr. Huntsman and Mr. Gingrich but was unsure which way he would go.

In the end, he said, “I’ll probably vote Democratic and write in Hillary.”

This needs to be called what it is: stupid. If you’re really torn between left-of-center Democrats and the hardest, wing-nuttiest of the right, then you have no idea what’s going on. What could possibly be the swaying factors among this disparate array of candidates — a group of which, at the extreme ends from the Democrats to Newt-Freaking-Gingrich, have essentially nothing in common other than that they are mammals.

This is not being independent. This is being ignorant. And these are the people to which general election candidates have to cater. Jeebus help us.

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At The Loop, Matt Alexander predicts the coming demise of e-ink-based readers. His contention, which may be right, is that the rapid evolution and decreasing prices of tablets will render “electronic paper” to sub-niche status. I can believe that if what we now know of as tablets become so crisp and readable for long durations, then yes, e-ink will no longer have much of a purpose.

But here’s where I disagree. Alexander writes:

While I’d say there is much evolution to come for magazines, the e-book, above all others, is overdue for modernization. I love my Kindle Touch for what it is, but it does little to take the concept of the printed word and evolve it. The e-ink display serves its purpose well, but as the concept of the printed word evolves, so too must the technology around it.

I don’t think this is quite right, because I think if anything, the rise of the Kindle has proven that there remains a great desire in the culture and in the market for long-form reading, reading in the form of what we know of as books. And traditional books need no additional bells and whistles.

As much as some kind of “enhancement” for books is predicted by many in the tech blogosphere, I think the novel, the short story, and most nonfiction is best suited to be presented as clearly readable text, and almost nothing else.

Books, on the whole, don’t need a bevy of video easter eggs or audio atmosphere or anything like that. Linking to a dictionary or encyclopedia to look up unfamiliar terms? Great, and e-ink does it. A way to make notes and highlights? Done. Better ways to navigate indexes or to recall characters or ideas? Kindle’s “X-Ray” feature is just the first step in that. There’s almost nothing else one would even want to have added to that mix. (And I should note that Alexander himself is a huge proponent of the latest e-ink Kindle.)

This is not to say that the book or the printed word must not or need not evolve. It’s wonderful to think of what new media may arise with these emerging technologies. But they will rise alongside traditional forms. They will share, at it were, shelf space with our newly-digitized old-school books. And that’s great.

So for these reasons I think e-ink has a longer life ahead of it than Alexander gives it credit for. It may be that more “tablety” displays reach a point of convergence at which e-ink is no longer necessary, but that won’t be because of some enormous shift in what “book” means.

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"I have not yet BEGUN to crazy!"

If you’re in the spheres of my online social networks, you may have noticed that I’ve had a certain fixation on the more insane or upsetting aspects of the Ron Paul candidacy. Call it schadenfreude if you like, or malicious cherry-picking, but I’ve felt compelled to highlight things about Paul that show his more hard-right or bizarrely conspiratorial musings. (I’ve had some thoughts about him on this blog as well.)

I’ve only now realized why this is so. It’s not the same motivation I have for, say, mocking Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann – they’re more pure comedy. Well, not pure, because there’s a hefty dose of revulsion in there. But you get my point. It’s motivated instead by what I perceive to be liberals’ sympathy for Ron Paul. He seems to keep being blessed by folks all over the progressive spectrum as “the Republican who we trust.”

Why is this? Ron Paul is by no means a sympathetic character for liberals: he’s by most accounts a rock-solid, hard-line cultural conservative. Though he may not always want the federal government to legislate on behalf of cultural conservatism, he seems to have no qualms about states doing so. He’s fully committed to opposition to the cornerstone of contemporary liberalism: the welfare state. Liberals as we know them today are descended directly from the policies of the New Deal, the basis of which was government aggressively imposing itself on the economy in order to triage a collapsed economy. But any government-based program that in any way lends support to those who need a small assist is anathema to Paul’s ideology.

What liberals really seem to like about Ron Paul are his support for ending the drug war and, most importantly, his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the last election cycle, when the Iraq War was among the most salient of all issues, Paul stood out among the GOP field for opposing the party line. Democrats and liberals, frantic with their opposition to the war and to the president that birthed it, deified Paul as the sensible Republican almost solely because of his position on one particular war.

But liberals, I think, would be hard-pressed to take Paul’s larger foreign policy vision seriously, a vision that involves loopy scare theories about the UN taking over the country and other such nonsense. And none of this even takes into account those horrible newsletters, which I think should make the entire mainstream political world shudder. Whether Paul penned those screeds himself is almost immaterial, as he allowed his name to be attached to, and then profit from, their vileness.

In other words, liberals need to stop thinking of Ron Paul as the adorable old uncle who, while he holds some antiquated views, has the right idea at heart. No, sorry. With opposition to the Iraq invasion and his opposition to our absurd drug laws, Ron Paul is almost the definition of the proverbial stopped clock; he’s been right essentially twice. Ever. But his support for Christianist social conservatism, his belief that the government should leave its people to suffer merely on a haughty principle, and his batty ideas about supervillain conspiracies trump all of that.

So stop admiring him. If nothing else, liberals should be heartily relieved that Paul has no chance of becoming president.

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That’s right, Best Buy didn’t even see fit to give these Kobo, Nook, and Sony devices electricity. And these are gadgets that have batteries that last something like a month, so who knows how long they’ve been sitting here, unconscious, unusable, and, probably most importantly to their manufacturers, unappealing.

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As our societies get larger and larger, there’s no need, in fact, there’s even less of a need for any one of us to be an innovator, whereas there is a great advantage for most of us to be copiers, or followers. And so, a real worry is that our capacity for social learning, which is responsible for all of our cumulative cultural adaptation, all of the things we see around us in our everyday lives, has actually promoted a species that isn’t so good at innovation. It allows us to reflect on ourselves a little bit and say, maybe we’re not as creative and as imaginative and as innovative as we thought we were, but extraordinarily good at copying and following.

We may be, by memetic versus genetic evolution, weeding ourselves out of brilliant people. It’s already the case that only a tiny fraction of us can, say, program a computer or fix a car. Will they also become a smaller and smaller minority? I really don’t want to have to learn to do either of those things.

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In another world, I was alerted to the fact that well before he tackled Johnson all those decades ago, Caro had written a biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. I found this out thanks to John Siracusa’s use of this book as an example a biography against which all others could be judged (in the context of lambasting the Steve Jobs biography on his podcast Hypercritical).

It was only serendipitous, then, that I stumbled upon this gem, a literary magazine piece from 1999 in which Caro is interviewed by perhaps my favorite novelist, the late Kurt Vonnegut. It’s wonderful, and I thought I’d at least share a snippet to give you a taste of its overall flow:

High-level shit-shooting

VONNEGUT

Let me ask you a question, Bob. I was on a panel with Joe Heller down in Florida. We were talking about the war mostly because that’s what we wanted to talk about, but I asked him at one point if he was disappointed about what the country has become. Because I am deeply disappointed. I was a prisoner of war with the Brits and the French and listened to all their plans for after the war, wanting justice and distribution of power in the world and that sort of thing, and Heller said that he was not disappointed-that he was unsurprised that the nation had turned out this way. Are you disappointed?

CARO 

I guess, in a way, I am. I think with all our riches and wealth and the fact that  we don’t have an enemy now who can threaten us, we ought to be doing a lot more now with the dispossessed of the world and the Blacks and Hispanics in our own country. I don’t think we’re doing very much compared with what we could do.

VONNEGUT 

Well, what about your basic trade of journalism…What are you, sixty, now?

CARO 

Sixty-one.

VONNEGUT 

All right, so in the past thirty years, how has journalism done?

CARO 

Yeah, I’m very disappointed in that. Aren’t you?

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And what’s shocking to me about that is how some in Gropnik’s survey of the literature have bestowed this current honor on the television set. He writes, with an implied shake of the head:

Now television is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user.

I say that this is shocking because not only is this view somewhat risible (as indeed Gropnik find it), but that it ignores the enormous sway television still has. The implication of this neo-Luddite view is that these days television is the wholesome-yet-forgotten technology versus the Internet, which is the wicked-and-ever-present one. Yes, our attentions are more fragmented, but the TV has hardly been removed from its central location in family life. Indeed, if anything, TV is as fragmented as other “screens,” what with the avalanche of channel and on-demand selections and the fact that most families have several sets with very few watching the same set at the same time.

And this sway the TV retains is also, I think, far worse than whatever defects are engendered by the Internet. Think first of the poor quality of almost all televised content, think of the low common denominators to which it must aspire to reach maximum potential audience sizes. Then, remember that TV is passive. It is something one consumes, something that washes over the viewer, while the computer, the Internet, at least has the capability of being participatory. It isn’t always, and maybe it isn’t usually, but the potential is there. With television, one can only watch.

So earlier tirades about how TV was ruining what was good about radio and how radio was ruining what was good about books, etc., at least had a grain of truth to them, whether or not they were overblown. But today, citing the television as the superior and more culturally benign medium over the Internet is absurd. The sooner what we now know as TV is killed by the Web or Apple or whomever, the better.

“Once it is not everything, it can be merely something,” Gropnik writes, but so far, TV is still close enough to “everything” that it need not be mourned.

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I maintain significant disagreement with many religious beliefs, but I do not wish to be associated with narrow-minded, dehumanizing generalizations about religious people. I am disappointed that such positions represent atheist activism not only to the majority of our society, but to many of my fellow atheist activists as well.

I have been guilty of this myself, and like Stedman, I have no qualms about actively questioning all forms of irrational, baseless belief, but I also have in recent years come to feel less adamant about casting all forms of spiritual seeking into the same ditch as fundamentalism.

Stedman’s prime example of the ugly confusion about what it is nonbelievers ought to be doing with their energies and activism is the embarrassing and grossly wrongheaded campaign by American Atheists to remove the “World Trade Center Cross” from the 9/11 Museum, something I also noted as a wrongheaded move because it focused to stopping religion willy-nilly, rather than acknowledging the object’s place in history. I wrote then:

I don’t have to like it. The World Trade Center cross was there [in the aftermath of the attack], and the people of New York divested it with meaning, and thus it became a character in the story of the 9/11 attacks. Its placement in the museum is not an endorsement of Christianity, it’s a page in that story. Whether I like that part of the story or not.

Suing to have it removed was vindictive rather than productive or consciousness-raising. Perhaps that’s the key difference: what can we do that is improves people’s awareness and sensitivities versus waging merely a zero-sum game of conflict?

Recently, Andrew Sullivan did a video post explaining his approach to prayer, and it was about the least objectionable explanation of what prayer is or can be that I’ve ever heard. I obviously don’t subscribe to his position or believe there is any mystical force listening to one’s prayer, but if Sullivan’s version of belief and prayer were the dominant one, there’d be little need for the anti-religious movement that Stedman sites.

Food for thought as we approach December 31, at this socially-constructed-yet-somehow-poignant time of reflection.

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One’s time and capacity of attention are short, and in regards to Twitter, the fact that I have been “followed” does not necessarily mean that I owe them my subscription to their own activity. It’s more valuable to allow those into one’s feed that engender genuine interest.

There are innumerable quality blogs and web publications, but I won’t become an ill-informed dolt if I don’t keep track of every passing post from each outlet.

Think of the emails you don’t want, even if from organizations or companies you feel a passion for. Surely you don’t need reminding of your allegiance to them several times a week. It’s okay not to want any more emails from the champions of your favorite cause.

My word to live by going into 2012 is “unsubscribe.”

I don’t mean shutting one’s eyes and ears. In a media and cultural environment with an avalanche of content and interaction, I’m talking about being selective about what I spend my time and attention on.

I’m going to pare down social networks to those with whom I actually want to network socially. I’m going to whittle down my RSS reader to those posts I will actually want to regularly read. I’m going to get off email lists in general, as I never read anything that wasn’t written to me specifically. I’m going to worry less about cultivating an audience by way of pretending to have relationships I in fact do not.

I hope it leaves me more space. I hope it leaves me less stressed. I hope it leaves me a little wiser.

Of course, I hope you don’t unsubscribe from this blog. But if you do, you know, I won’t like it, but I dig.

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