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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Category Archives: Essay

Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Essay, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, civilization, Daesh, France, interview, ISIL, ISIS, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihadis, Jihadism, Lawrence O'Donnell, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Paris, Paris Attacks, Podcast, religion, Sam Harris, Still Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, terror, Terrorism, The Last Word, violence

Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

__________

Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

  • The ultimate poem about the city of lights: “In Paris with You” by James Fenton
  • Meet Napoleon Bonaparte
  • A few of the best words from some indomitable Frenchmen: Jules Renard, Blaise Pascal, Edmond de Goncourt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus

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Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

09 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and Others on the Surprising Reason We Want to Stay Alive

Tags

birth, consciousness, Crime and Punishment, Epicureans, Epicurus, existence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, General Philosophy, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?, Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, Life, literature, Lucretius, Michel de Montaigne, Mortality, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Sam Harris, Saul Frampton, science, To Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die, When I Am Playing with My Cat

Dworkin-Nagel 1

Aggregated here are several attempts to address that simple question. Why do you want to stay alive?

Though they arrive there from different byways, each thinker finally rests on the same idea: the reason why we want to stay alive is, simply, to perpetuate our existence. We want to stay alive to stay alive. Sound absurd, or absurdly tautological? It’s not, at least in my view. The value we place in life has little to do with projected positive experiences — the quivering line graph that registers whether we’re ecstatic one moment, unsatisfied the next. Rather, what we want is to continue the oft-banal experience of merely existing. Read on. See if you agree.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, speaking through the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov in Part II, Chapter 6 of Crime and Punishment:

‘Where is it,’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!… How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!… And vile is he who calls him vile for that,’ he added a moment later.

In a recent interview with Jenny Attiyeh, Jim Holt, author of the existential mystery Why Does the World Exist?, reflected on the question and offered a level-headed and explicit answer:

Interviewer: Jim, in your work there are some themes that keep reappearing, notably religion and mortality… do you think that perhaps you’re getting a little bit worried about death?

Holt: Actually I think in many ways it would be a good career move for me [laughs], and it would solve almost all of my problems.

I think that life is — and I don’t know what your life is like — but mine sort of hovers around the zero point that separates pleasure from pain and happiness from misery. And every once in a while I’ll get a little spike into the happiness region, but then I’ll immediately go back down close to the zero point, or creep below that into the misery region. Yet I fluctuate around that point. And what I really cherish about life is being conscious. And to me that’s the subjective counterpart to the question ‘Why should the universe exist?’: ‘Why should consciousness exist? Why should my self exist?’

And what interests me is the way that philosophers have tried to take the sting out of death by various arguments that go back to the Epicureans. Lucretius and Epicurus himself said, ‘Well, don’t get so worried about death because your nonexistence after you die is just the mirror image of your nonexistence before you were born.’

And you didn’t worry about not existing the centuries before you were born, so why should you worry about not existing after your death?

The great Thomas Nagel rigorously deconstructed the idea in his magisterial book The View from Nowhere:

People are attracted to the possibility of long-term suspended animation or freezing, followed by the resumption of conscious life, because they can regard it from within simply as a continuation of their present life. If these techniques are ever perfected, what from outside appeared as a dormant interval of three hundred years could be experienced by the subject as nothing more than a sharp discontinuity in the character of his experiences. I do not deny, or course, that this has its own disadvantages. Family and friends may have died in the meantime; the language may have changed; the comforts of social, geographical, and cultural familiarity would be lacking. Nevertheless those inconveniences would not obliterate the basic advantage of continued, thought discontinuous, existence.

It is being alive, doing certain things, having certain experiences, that we consider good. But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or nonexistent, or unconscious, that is objectionable. This asymmetry is important. If it is good to be alive, that advantage can be attributed to a person at each point of his life. It is good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer. Death, however, is not an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust. If death is a disadvantage, it is not easy to say when a man suffers it.

If we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes.

Saul Frampton reflects on Montaigne and the question of existence for existence’s sake in his book When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me?:

Sometime towards the end of the sixteenth century, Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, reached up to the ceiling of his library and scratched off an inscription he had placed there some years before…

The inscription Montaigne erased was a line from the Roman poet Lucretius: Nec nova vivendo procuditur ulla voluptas — There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer. It was a sentiment he had previously held dear to. Like most thinkers of his time, Montaigne followed a Christian and a Stoic philosophy, where life was seen as preparation for the afterlife and the task of philosophy was to harden oneself against the vicissitudes of fortune…

But Montaigne’s erasing of the words of Lucretius from the ceiling of his library also marks an amazing reversal in Montaigne’s outlook over the course of his writing – a shift from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life.

And Montaigne’s writing overflows with life. In over a hundred essays and around half a million words he records every thought, every taste and sensation that crosses his mind. He writes essays on sleep and on sadness, on smells and friendship, on children and sex and death. And, as a final testament, he writes an essay on experience, in which he contemplates the wonder of human existence itself.

And, to close, Sam Harris nodded at the significance of life’s most mundane pleasures in a recent online Q&A:

Questioner: Is is not objectively better never to have been? What flaw is there in the nonexistent state?

Harris: It is impossible to eat pancakes there.

__________

Have more to add? Send them my way: john[at]jrbenjamin.com.

The picture is of the headiest pancake breakfast of all time: Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel shooting the breeze at the local diner.

I’ve done this sort of agreement among geniuses thing before:

  • Does the beauty of the Gospels attest to their truth?: Einstein, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Thomas Cahill, and Julian Barnes share a surprising conclusion
  • Science as child’s play: Einstein, Newton, Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson embrace the wonder of the natural world
  • The sovereign subject: Jefferson, Adams, and Charles Krauthammer agree that government is the most important subject
  • Can we just assume god exists?: Updike, C.S. Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Anthony Flew see eye to eye on whether faith can trump reason
  • We don’t march: Orwell, Steinbeck, and Einstein rage against militarism 
  • Is your life valuable? If so, why?: Ronald Dworkin, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Campbell, Michio Kaku, and Vonnegut give a counterintuitive answer

Dworkin-Nagel

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Vineyard Haven

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay

≈ Comments Off on Vineyard Haven

Tags

Beach, Essay, Havanas in Camelot, In Vineyard Haven, Seaside, Small Town, Vineyard Haven, William Styron

William Styron 324

“Mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea. It is often manifested simply in the sounds of the place — sounds unknown to forlorn inland municipalities, even West Tilbury. To the stranger, these sounds might appear distracting, but as a fussy, easily distracted person who has written three large books within earshot of these sounds, I can affirm that they do not annoy at all. Indeed, they lull the mind and soul, these vagrant noises: the blast of the ferry horn — distant, melancholy — and the gentle thrumming of the ferry itself outward bound past the breakwater; the sizzling sound of sailboat hulls as they shear the waves; the luffing of sails and the muffled boom of the yacht club’s gun; the eerie wail of the breakwater siren in dense fog; the squabble and cry of gulls. And at night to fall gently asleep to the far-off moaning of the West Chop foghorn. And deep silence save for the faint chink-chinking of halyards against a single mast somewhere in the harbor’s darkness.

Vineyard Haven. Sleep. Bliss.”

__________

The last paragraph of William Styron’s “In Vineyard Haven,” the final essay in his fantastic collection Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays.

William Styron 2

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The Problem with Nationalism

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Politics, War

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Essay, George Orwell, Nationalism, Notes on Nationalism, Patriotism

George Orwell

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. […]

Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.”

__________

From George Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism,” published in May 1945.

More prophetic words for the politics of today:

  • Joseph Conrad identifies the two main traits of terrorists (1907)
  • Schumpeter sees there’s always a reason for empires to invade (1919)
  • Brandeis writes that a government’s contempt for law is contagious (1928)
  • Raymond Chandler observes a newspaper is a business — nothing more (1953)

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Friendship as a Conservative Act

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Andrew Sullivan, Conservativism, Essay, Friends, friendship, Matthew Sitman, Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative, Philosophy

Michael Oakeshott

“Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into… The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness; the disposition engaged is conservative, not “progressive.” And what is true of friendship is not less true of other experiences – of patriotism, for example, and of conversation – each of which demands a conservative disposition as a condition of its enjoyment.”

__________

From Michael Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”.

I found this excerpt in my friend Matthew Sitman’s wonderful short tribute to his friend and colleague Andrew Sullivan, on the day that their blog TheDish, the internet’s best news and commentary hub, wraps up for good. I like all of Matthew’s writing, which I encourage you to follow as he sets off toward greener pastures, though this final paragraph about his business-friendship with Andrew really did it for me today:

I can’t help but feel joy that my friend is leaving blogging behind. His deepest interests are not political, as my own story of meeting and getting to know Andrew should indicate. The daily jousting on the web, however brilliantly he executed it, does not reveal the core of the Andrew I know. Instead, if asked to describe the man, what comes to mind is the time we talked about God hour after hour one sunny Spring day, or the eagerness with which he showed me Provincetown my first visit there. I look forward to the day, soon arriving, when reciting our favorite Philip Larkin poems supplants discussion of web traffic, and when, after going to Mass together, we can converse about Jesus without worrying over Monday morning’s blogging.

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Mark Twain on the Jews

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, History

≈ Comments Off on Mark Twain on the Jews

Tags

Anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews, Essay, history, Jews, Judaism, Mark Twain, Palestine, Philo-Semitism, racism, The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine and abstruse learning are also very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greeks and Romans followed and made a vast noise, and they were gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, and have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, survived them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jews; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

__________

Mark Twain, writing in his short essay “Concerning the Jews” (1898).

Though his essay is almost entirely philo-Semitic, Twain did include within it his view that the Jewish people, “like the Christian Quaker,” were unwilling servicemen – that they had “an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.” However, after the War Department figures showed Jewish overrepresentation in the U.S. military, Twain issued a retraction which he titled “The Jew as Soldier.”

In 1867, a mere eight decades before the state of Israel’s formal declaration, Twain traveled to Palestine and chronicled his trip in The Innocents Abroad. One particular quote sheds adequate light on his assessment of the place:

[It is a] desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… We never saw a human being on the whole route… There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.

Go on:

  • Twain’s hilarious, furious letter in which he calls the recipient, “An idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link”
  • Twain’s daily routine

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Andrew Sullivan: What I Believe

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Freedom, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

America, Andrew Sullivan, Freedom, liberty, Life, morality, Patriotism, Philosophy, political philosophy, The Pursuit of Happiness

Andrew Sullivan 345

“I believe in liberty… I believe in a system of government that places that liberty at the center of its concerns, that enforces the law solely to protect that freedom, that sides with the individual against the claims of family and tribe and church and nation, that sees innocence before guilt and dignity before stigma. I believe in the right to own property, to maintain it against the benign suffocation of a government that would tax more and more of it away. I believe in freedom of speech and of contract, the right to offend and blaspheme, as well as the right to convert and bear witness. I believe that these freedoms are connected — the freedom of the fundamentalist and the atheist, the female and the male, the black and the Asian, the gay and the straight.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

And I believe in a country that enshrines each of these three things, a country that promises nothing but the promise of being more fully human, and never guarantees its success. In that constant failure to arrive — implied at the very beginning — lies the possibility of a permanently fresh start, an old newness, a way of revitalizing ourselves and our civilization in ways few foresaw and one day many will forget. But the point is now. And the place is America.”

__________

From Andrew Sullivan’s article “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

  • Andrew answers: If you could live in one country, which would you choose?
  • Can we be optimistic about America’s future? (Krauthammer says yes)
  • Reinhold Niebuhr on the role of forgiveness in the good society

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Wallace Stegner: What I Believe

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

America, belief, Christianity, Classical Virtues, Everything Potent Is Dangeorus, Freedom, Goodness, kindness, morality, Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner

“It is terribly difficult to say honestly, without posing or faking, what one truly and fundamentally believes…

However far I have missed achieving it, I know that moderation is one of the virtues I most believe in. But I believe as well in a whole catalogue of Christian and classical virtues: in kindness and generosity, in steadfastness and courage and much else. I believe further that good depends not on things but on the use we make of things. Everything potent, from human love to atomic energy, is dangerous; it produces ill about as readily as good; it becomes good only through the control, the discipline, the wisdom with which we use it. Much of this control is social, a thing which laws and institutions and uniforms enforce, but much of it must be personal, and I do not see how we can evade the obligation to take full responsibility for what we individually do. Our reward for self-control and the acceptance of private responsibility is not necessarily money or power. Self-respect and the respect of others are quite enough. […]

Man is a great enough creature and a great enough enigma to deserve both our pride and our compassion, and engage our fullest sense of mystery. I shall certainly never do as much with my life as I want to, and I shall sometimes fail miserably to live up to my conscience, whose word I do not distrust even when I can’t obey it. But I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world’s millions, I am also born more obligated.”

__________

Excerpted from Wallace Stegner’s essay “Everything Potent Is Dangerous”.

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Is It Illegitimate for a Person to Convert during One of Life’s Darker Moments?

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Essay, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Atheism, belief, Christian Wiman, Christianity, conversion, doubt, Elijah, Faith, God, Mortify Our Wolves, religion, Suffering, The American Scholar, theism

CT ct-prj-christian-wiman06.jpg

“That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith — or what looked like faith? — rather than find it. It is the flinch from life — which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death — and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.

But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake — or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the ‘still, small voice’ that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it.”

__________

Christian Wiman, writing in his superb and rightly praised essay “Mortify Our Wolves”.

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Religion and the Ethos of the Climate Debate

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Essay

≈ Comments Off on Religion and the Ethos of the Climate Debate

Tags

Climate Change, Elegy for a Country's Seasons, Environment, Environmentalism, Faith, Global Warming, Martin Amis, religion, The New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

“Another response that would seem natural aligns a deep religious feeling with environmental concern, for those who consider the land a beauteous gift of the Lord should, surely, rationally, be among the most keen to protect it. There are a few of these knocking around, too, but again, not half as many as I would have assumed. Instead the evidence is to be ‘believed’ or ‘denied’ as if the scientific papers are so many Lutheran creeds pinned to a door. In America, a curious loophole has even been discovered in God’s creation, concerning hierarchy. It’s argued that because He placed humans above ‘things’—above animals and plants and the ocean—we can, with a clean conscience, let all those things go to hell. (In England, traditional Christian love of the land has been more easily converted into environmental consciousness, notably among the country aristocrats who own so much of it.)

But I don’t think we have made matters of science into questions of belief out of sheer stupidity. Belief usually has an emotional component; it’s desire, disguised. Of course, on the part of our leaders much of the politicization is cynical bad faith, and economically motivated, but down here on the ground, the desire for innocence is what’s driving us. For both ‘sides’ are full of guilt, full of self-disgust—what Martin Amis once called ‘species shame’—and we project it outward. This is what fuels the petty fury of our debates, even in the midst of crisis.”

__________

A small slice of the best-written essay I’ve read this year: “Elegy for a Country’s Seasons” by Zadie Smith.

I highly recommend you take the time to parse the entire essay, in which Smith looks with a critical, even gaze onto the individual human desires — for vindication, for guiltlessness — which are driving the climate change chatter. Her prose moves with some of the rhythms of one of my favorite writers, Julian Barnes, and she speaks with a clarity, consistency, and evenhandedness that so rarely seeps into discussions of this topic.

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