Did you know that 365 -- the number of days in a year -- is equal to 10 times 10, plus 11 times 11, plus 12 times 12? Or that the sum of any successive odd numbers always equals a square number -- as in 1 + 3 = 4 (2 squared), while 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 (3 squared), and 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16 (4 squared)? Those are just the start of a remarkable number of magical patterns, coincidences and constants in mathematics. No wonder philosophers and mathematicians have been arguing for centuries over whether math is a system that humans invented or a cosmic -- possibly divine -- order that we simply discovered. That's the fundamental question Mario Livio probes in his engrossing book Is God a Mathematician? Livio, an astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, explains the invention-vs.-discovery debate largely through the work and personalities of great figures in math history, from Pythagoras and Plato to Isaac Newton, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. At times, Livio's theorems, proofs and conundrums may be challenging for readers who struggled through algebra, but he makes most of this material not only comprehensible but downright intriguing. Often, he gives a relatively complex explanation of a mathematical problem or insight, then follows it with a "simply put" distillation. An extended section on knot theory is, well, pretty knotty. But it ultimately sheds light on the workings of the DNA double helix, and Livio illustrates the theory with a concrete example: Two teams taking different approaches to the notoriously difficult problem of how many knots could be formed with a specific number of crossings -- in this case, 16 or fewer -- came up with the same answer: 1,701,936. The author's enthusiasm is infectious. But it also leads him to refer again and again to his subjects as "famous" and "great" and to their work as "monumental" and "miraculous." He has a weakness as well for extended quotes from these men (and they are all men) that slow the narrative without adding much. There are exceptions, including the tale of how Albert Einstein and mathematician Oskar Morgenstern tried to guide Kurt Gödel, a fellow mathematician and exile from Nazi Germany, through the U.S. immigration process. A deep-thinking and intense man, Gödel threw himself into preparing for his citizenship test, including an extremely close reading of the U.S. Constitution. In his rigorously logical analysis, he found constitutional weaknesses that he thought could allow for the rise of a fascist dictatorship in America. His colleagues told him to keep that reading to himself, but he blurted it out during his naturalization exam. He was allowed to stay anyway. The interplay of mini-biography and the march of mathematical knowledge serves the author well. It does not, however, ultimately help him to answer the big question, Is God a mathematician? On one side of the debate are all those remarkable constants that crop up, the makings of the ideal yet hidden world posited by Plato. In addition, there's what the physicist Eugene Wigner, in a seminal 1960 essay, called the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematical theorems: the astounding ability of math to predict unimagined results. Wigner was picking up on ideas explored earlier by Einstein, and Einstein's general theory of relativity remains one of the best examples: His predictions about how gravity can cause ripples in space-time was recently corroborated by measuring radio waves from a distant set of compact, high-energy stars called double pulsars, using technology unknown in Einstein's day. Doesn't all this indicate that the mathematical structure of the world is out there waiting to be discovered? On the other hand, math cannot explain many situations, and chaos theory suggests that it may never be possible to predict the weather or the stock market with accuracy. Recent research has pointed to basic mathematical constructs in the human brain, suggesting that we impose numbers and forms on the world, not vice versa. In addition, mathematics is less stable than it appears to us in grade school. At the higher reaches of the field, there is constant ferment and debate. If the "truths" discovered through mathematics are always changing, doesn't that indicate they are a product of human study and manipulation, rather than something fixed and eternal? As explained by Livio, the history of mathematics is partly a struggle between these points of view: that math is how God (or nature) organizes the world, or it is simply a human tool to understand that world. Livio comes down in the middle, contending that math may well be both invented and discovered. He points, for instance, to the eternal truth contained in the geometry formulated by Euclid 2,400 years ago. By the 19th century, however, iconoclasts had posited and established a whole new world of non-Euclidian geometry. Livio writes about the symmetries of the universe: the immutable, if incompletely understood, laws of math and physics that make a hydrogen atom, for instance, behave in the same way on Earth as it acts 10 billion light years away. Another sign of universal structure, as teased apart with the help of math? No, Livio writes, it is more likely a sign that "to some extent, scientists have selected what problems to work on based on those problems being amenable to a mathematical treatment." The author acknowledges that some readers will find his inconclusive conclusion to be unsatisfying. I didn't. Sometimes the adventure, the intellectual ride, is more important than the final destination.
Marc Kaufman, a science reporter for The Washington Post, is writing a book about astrobiology.
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
28.2.09
Morrissey & Philip Larkin
Morrissey, the former lead singer of the British alternative-rock band The Smiths, is one of the most beguiling and misunderstood pop singers of the last quarter-century; his ninth solo album, Years of Refusal, has just hit stores. A little over a year ago, he let slip the following in an interview with the New Musical Express:
Britain’s a terribly negative place. And it hammers people down and it pulls you back and it prevents you. Also, with the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England and you have no idea where you are. . . . If you walk through Knightsbridge you’ll hear every accent apart from an English accent.
That was more than enough to incite a row in the British press, though Morrissey claimed that his remarks were taken out of context. His silly and ineffectual countermeasures—threatening to sue the magazine and fulminating against its shoddy music coverage—precipitated equally silly and ineffectual paroxysms of outrage from his critics, who have chided him for his mild flirtations with xenophobia. But they miss the point and fail to understand what impels Morrissey’s politically incorrect sensibility. The fey elegist of alienation and every type of ambiguity is actually a conservative Anglo nostalgic, a species sometimes known as a Little Englander.
The term connotes a backward-looking nationalism, most acutely felt in Morrissey’s parents’ generation—the one that came of age during the Depression, World War II, and the subsequent age of austerity. Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and David Edgar’s play Destiny stand as the literary registers of this epoch, and Morrissey absorbed them secondhand, filtered through a sieve of pop culture he consumed madly in his youth. His favorite soap opera was Coronation Street, which dealt with all the peculiarities of an England struggling to find a role in the world after auctioning off its empire to the superpower across the sea. Most of the teenaged Morrissey’s other interests, barring glam and punk, were oddly retrospective. He loved 1960s girl groups and golden-age cinema stars. He also harbored a Victorian-style obsession with the brute criminality of his native Manchester: an early Smiths track, “Suffer Little Children,” dealt with the Moors murders that ravaged Lancashire during the singer’s boyhood. Even the Smiths’ phonebook-pervasive name served as an ironic commentary on drab postwar conditions.
Morrissey’s muses were the disaffected adolescents from those “ugly new houses” in the North, though he started out as a parody of the petty-bourgeois curmudgeon, complete with onstage accessories: the outsize pompadour and the National Health Service specs that later became signatures belonged to a decade he’d seen recycled on the small screen. The Pope of Mope’s musical tastes were similarly hidebound. Declaring “all reggae is vile,” and defaming Band-Aid’s charitable efforts for African famine relief as more a torment to England’s ears than a boon to Ethiopia’s bellies—these were some ways to be branded a chauvinist.
However, there was little cause for controversy in Morrissey’s racially tinged tracks, most of which were laid down during his solo career. “Bengali in Platforms” begs: “Don’t hate me / Just because I’m the one to tell you / That life is hard enough when you belong here,” a sentiment Zadie Smith and Monica Ali would no doubt second. The singer did himself no favor by draping himself in the Union Jack as he performed “National Front Disco” at a Madstock concert, but as a kitsch gesture, this wasn’t even on nodding terms with David Bowie’s onstage sieg-heils, and the song was, as many forget, a satire on homegrown fascism.
Morrissey’s self-touted lefty politics and his loathing of Margaret Thatcher don’t quite militate against his sentimental or tongue-in-cheek identifications with the England of homburg hats and Angry Young Men. In “Irish Blood, English Heart,” he professes to be standing by the flag “not feeling shameful, racist, or partial,” but he’ll have none of the options on offer from New Labour. He reviled Tony Blair, comparing him at one point to Osama bin Laden, and his quiet but crude anti-Americanism (as in “America Is Not the World”) also finds a home on the British right, which has never done an honest day’s work until it has castigated the Yanks for failing to live up to their liberal principles. Even Morrissey’s outspoken distaste for monarchy has not widened the gulf between himself and the establishment. The current Tory leader David Cameron used to mount the hustings with a peculiar Smiths song playing in the background: “The Queen Is Dead.”
Is it any wonder that the bard of failure and thwarted ambition should also be a monument to repression? Gibber on though the fans may about Morrissey’s “asexuality,” however, his most shocking songs are the ones that traffic in heteroerotic imagery. More characteristic is the solo album Bona Drag, a tribute to the gay London vernacular of the 1960s, featuring songs such as “Piccadilly Palare,” which is about English rent boys, and “Hairdresser on Fire,” which is not about Paul Mitchell’s being in good hands with Allstate. Indeed, Morrissey has paid everlasting homage to the wit and camp subversiveness of Oscar Wilde; the chart-topping single “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” sounds like something Gore Vidal would mutter at a Manhattan salon.
But when it comes to true lyrical kinship, it’s not really Wilde who’s on Morrissey’s side—it’s Philip Larkin. “Larkin was not an inescapable presence in America, as he was in England,” noted Martin Amis on the occasion of the poet’s death in 1985, “and to some extent you can see America’s point.” The “bald, bespectacled and bicycle-clipped” provincial, who once told an interviewer that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth, was also a dour loner, keenly attuned to the “ironic romance of exclusion, or inversion,” as Amis put it. That this made him England’s finest postwar poet was itself something of an English in-joke.
Larkin had a terrific sense of humor about the absurdities of modern life, which of course included himself: “one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys,” as he self-diagnosed in one poem. “Life is first boredom, then fear,” he wrote in another. He tried his hardest to make good on this lugubrious proposition, sometimes to the befuddlement of his fellow scribbling pessimists associated with the “Movement” of 1950s British poetry (particularly his soul mate, Kingsley Amis). His themes were conventional—longing, unrequited love—but also eccentric. Larkin had his own “Suffer Little Children” in the poem “Deceptions,” which concerned a horrific rape he’d read about in a Victorian book of journalism. His morose nature made him the Homer of the ambulance, the nursing home, and the cemetery, and his muses were the “palsied old step-takers,” the “waxed-fleshed out-patients.” A bachelor to the grave, he hymned the mundane horrors of family life (“He married a girl to stop her getting away / Now she’s there all day”) and a country of vanishing charms and landscapes where the accents were already becoming different.
Before he became a celebrated poet, Larkin found a job as a university librarian, which he kept for the rest of his days. Heaven knows he was miserable then: “Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?” True, he “adored” Thatcher, but he wrote poems at odds with the values she promulgated, such as commercialism and speculation (he’d have appreciated the Smiths’ recording-industry lampoon, “Paint a Vulgar Picture”). Like Morrissey, he was smart enough to recognize that his feelings made him an awkward anachronism, even as a child (which he claimed he never was). Consider “Naturally the Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses,” which rather sounds like the title of a Morrissey b-side:
That day when Queen and Minister And Band of Guards and all Still act their solemn-sinister Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall
It used to make me throw up, These mawkish nursery games: O when will England grow up?
Larkin had nothing worthwhile to say about America, which he never visited but once described as two coasts interrupted by “a desert full of bigots.” This was an odd complaint coming from a man whose correspondence was full of boyo humor and racist doggerel that make Morrissey’s New Musical Express kerfuffle look like a case study in multiculturalism. Larkin, too, made clever use of repression. Sexual intercourse, he once said, was like “getting somebody else to blow your nose for you,” and it only “began,” famously, “between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” Though there were half a dozen affairs with women—three of them simultaneous—there were also missed connections with men, judging by his correspondence and a dream diary he kept. He devoted serious time to the composition of lesbian pornography, written under the nom de smut Brunette Coleman.
There’s a famous photograph of Larkin that I’ve long thought would have done nicely for a Smiths or Morrissey album cover. It shows the poet sitting primly with his ankles crossed on a large sign that reads ENGLAND. According to his biographer, Andrew Motion, “immediately before posing he had urinated copiously behind the word.”
Michael Weiss is an editor at Nextbook and a frequent contributor to Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The New Criterion.
Britain’s a terribly negative place. And it hammers people down and it pulls you back and it prevents you. Also, with the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because although I don’t have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears. If you travel to Germany, it’s still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England and you have no idea where you are. . . . If you walk through Knightsbridge you’ll hear every accent apart from an English accent.
That was more than enough to incite a row in the British press, though Morrissey claimed that his remarks were taken out of context. His silly and ineffectual countermeasures—threatening to sue the magazine and fulminating against its shoddy music coverage—precipitated equally silly and ineffectual paroxysms of outrage from his critics, who have chided him for his mild flirtations with xenophobia. But they miss the point and fail to understand what impels Morrissey’s politically incorrect sensibility. The fey elegist of alienation and every type of ambiguity is actually a conservative Anglo nostalgic, a species sometimes known as a Little Englander.
The term connotes a backward-looking nationalism, most acutely felt in Morrissey’s parents’ generation—the one that came of age during the Depression, World War II, and the subsequent age of austerity. Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and David Edgar’s play Destiny stand as the literary registers of this epoch, and Morrissey absorbed them secondhand, filtered through a sieve of pop culture he consumed madly in his youth. His favorite soap opera was Coronation Street, which dealt with all the peculiarities of an England struggling to find a role in the world after auctioning off its empire to the superpower across the sea. Most of the teenaged Morrissey’s other interests, barring glam and punk, were oddly retrospective. He loved 1960s girl groups and golden-age cinema stars. He also harbored a Victorian-style obsession with the brute criminality of his native Manchester: an early Smiths track, “Suffer Little Children,” dealt with the Moors murders that ravaged Lancashire during the singer’s boyhood. Even the Smiths’ phonebook-pervasive name served as an ironic commentary on drab postwar conditions.
Morrissey’s muses were the disaffected adolescents from those “ugly new houses” in the North, though he started out as a parody of the petty-bourgeois curmudgeon, complete with onstage accessories: the outsize pompadour and the National Health Service specs that later became signatures belonged to a decade he’d seen recycled on the small screen. The Pope of Mope’s musical tastes were similarly hidebound. Declaring “all reggae is vile,” and defaming Band-Aid’s charitable efforts for African famine relief as more a torment to England’s ears than a boon to Ethiopia’s bellies—these were some ways to be branded a chauvinist.
However, there was little cause for controversy in Morrissey’s racially tinged tracks, most of which were laid down during his solo career. “Bengali in Platforms” begs: “Don’t hate me / Just because I’m the one to tell you / That life is hard enough when you belong here,” a sentiment Zadie Smith and Monica Ali would no doubt second. The singer did himself no favor by draping himself in the Union Jack as he performed “National Front Disco” at a Madstock concert, but as a kitsch gesture, this wasn’t even on nodding terms with David Bowie’s onstage sieg-heils, and the song was, as many forget, a satire on homegrown fascism.
Morrissey’s self-touted lefty politics and his loathing of Margaret Thatcher don’t quite militate against his sentimental or tongue-in-cheek identifications with the England of homburg hats and Angry Young Men. In “Irish Blood, English Heart,” he professes to be standing by the flag “not feeling shameful, racist, or partial,” but he’ll have none of the options on offer from New Labour. He reviled Tony Blair, comparing him at one point to Osama bin Laden, and his quiet but crude anti-Americanism (as in “America Is Not the World”) also finds a home on the British right, which has never done an honest day’s work until it has castigated the Yanks for failing to live up to their liberal principles. Even Morrissey’s outspoken distaste for monarchy has not widened the gulf between himself and the establishment. The current Tory leader David Cameron used to mount the hustings with a peculiar Smiths song playing in the background: “The Queen Is Dead.”
Is it any wonder that the bard of failure and thwarted ambition should also be a monument to repression? Gibber on though the fans may about Morrissey’s “asexuality,” however, his most shocking songs are the ones that traffic in heteroerotic imagery. More characteristic is the solo album Bona Drag, a tribute to the gay London vernacular of the 1960s, featuring songs such as “Piccadilly Palare,” which is about English rent boys, and “Hairdresser on Fire,” which is not about Paul Mitchell’s being in good hands with Allstate. Indeed, Morrissey has paid everlasting homage to the wit and camp subversiveness of Oscar Wilde; the chart-topping single “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” sounds like something Gore Vidal would mutter at a Manhattan salon.
But when it comes to true lyrical kinship, it’s not really Wilde who’s on Morrissey’s side—it’s Philip Larkin. “Larkin was not an inescapable presence in America, as he was in England,” noted Martin Amis on the occasion of the poet’s death in 1985, “and to some extent you can see America’s point.” The “bald, bespectacled and bicycle-clipped” provincial, who once told an interviewer that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth, was also a dour loner, keenly attuned to the “ironic romance of exclusion, or inversion,” as Amis put it. That this made him England’s finest postwar poet was itself something of an English in-joke.
Larkin had a terrific sense of humor about the absurdities of modern life, which of course included himself: “one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys,” as he self-diagnosed in one poem. “Life is first boredom, then fear,” he wrote in another. He tried his hardest to make good on this lugubrious proposition, sometimes to the befuddlement of his fellow scribbling pessimists associated with the “Movement” of 1950s British poetry (particularly his soul mate, Kingsley Amis). His themes were conventional—longing, unrequited love—but also eccentric. Larkin had his own “Suffer Little Children” in the poem “Deceptions,” which concerned a horrific rape he’d read about in a Victorian book of journalism. His morose nature made him the Homer of the ambulance, the nursing home, and the cemetery, and his muses were the “palsied old step-takers,” the “waxed-fleshed out-patients.” A bachelor to the grave, he hymned the mundane horrors of family life (“He married a girl to stop her getting away / Now she’s there all day”) and a country of vanishing charms and landscapes where the accents were already becoming different.
Before he became a celebrated poet, Larkin found a job as a university librarian, which he kept for the rest of his days. Heaven knows he was miserable then: “Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?” True, he “adored” Thatcher, but he wrote poems at odds with the values she promulgated, such as commercialism and speculation (he’d have appreciated the Smiths’ recording-industry lampoon, “Paint a Vulgar Picture”). Like Morrissey, he was smart enough to recognize that his feelings made him an awkward anachronism, even as a child (which he claimed he never was). Consider “Naturally the Foundation Will Bear Your Expenses,” which rather sounds like the title of a Morrissey b-side:
That day when Queen and Minister And Band of Guards and all Still act their solemn-sinister Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall
It used to make me throw up, These mawkish nursery games: O when will England grow up?
Larkin had nothing worthwhile to say about America, which he never visited but once described as two coasts interrupted by “a desert full of bigots.” This was an odd complaint coming from a man whose correspondence was full of boyo humor and racist doggerel that make Morrissey’s New Musical Express kerfuffle look like a case study in multiculturalism. Larkin, too, made clever use of repression. Sexual intercourse, he once said, was like “getting somebody else to blow your nose for you,” and it only “began,” famously, “between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” Though there were half a dozen affairs with women—three of them simultaneous—there were also missed connections with men, judging by his correspondence and a dream diary he kept. He devoted serious time to the composition of lesbian pornography, written under the nom de smut Brunette Coleman.
There’s a famous photograph of Larkin that I’ve long thought would have done nicely for a Smiths or Morrissey album cover. It shows the poet sitting primly with his ankles crossed on a large sign that reads ENGLAND. According to his biographer, Andrew Motion, “immediately before posing he had urinated copiously behind the word.”
Michael Weiss is an editor at Nextbook and a frequent contributor to Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The New Criterion.
Wired for Books
http://wiredforbooks.org/
For many years, most of the best writers of the English language found their way to Don Swaim's CBS Radio studio in New York. The one-on-one interviews typically lasted 30 to 45 minutes and then had to be edited down to a two minute radio show. Wired for Books is proud to make these important oral documents publicly available for the first time in their entirety. Listen to the voices of many of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
For many years, most of the best writers of the English language found their way to Don Swaim's CBS Radio studio in New York. The one-on-one interviews typically lasted 30 to 45 minutes and then had to be edited down to a two minute radio show. Wired for Books is proud to make these important oral documents publicly available for the first time in their entirety. Listen to the voices of many of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
27.2.09
Status Anxiety
From the Speccie:
I caught a burglar last week. I was standing in my kitchen at 11 o’clock on Saturday morning when a young man suddenly appeared at the bottom of the garden. At first, I didn’t realise he was a burglar. I strolled outside in a spirit of genuine curiosity. What was he doing?
‘I was playing football and I kicked the ball over the fence,’ he said. ‘I thought it had gone in your garden, but it must have gone in the next-door one.’ At first, I believed him. He was young enough to be playing football — mid-to-late twenties — and he apologised for having climbed over my back fence. I showed him out through the front gate and it was only when he didn’t knock on the door of my neighbours that I realised he must be lying. Instead, he simply walked off down the street.
I rushed back inside to get my camera, hoping to take a photograph of him, but by the time I got outside again he’d vanished. I didn’t bother reporting it to the police until two days later, by which time a house four doors down had been burgled. I managed to track down the investigating officer and gave him a detailed description of the man I’d seen in my garden. He confirmed that the ‘lost football’ routine was a well-known ruse and that the man had probably been casing the joint. He said he might send round some officers with some images of burglars for me to look at, but he never did.
My wife Caroline was remarkably blasé about all this until we met a couple of our neighbours at a dinner party, who’d been subjected to a four-hour ordeal by three crack addicts. It was the middle of the night and the first the husband knew about his home being broken into was when one of the intruders sat on his chest and placed a pillow over his head. He warned him that if he tried to remove it, he’d cut his throat. His wife, too, was made to hold a pillow over her head while the three men searched for valuables. When they couldn’t find anything, they threatened to cut off one of the husband’s fingers. He persuaded them to take his wallet instead and gave them the pin number of his cashpoint card. One of the men stayed with them while the other two went to the nearest bank.
‘The most frightening moment was when they called from the cashpoint machine and told the man they’d left behind that I’d given them the wrong number,’ he said. ‘He threatened to cut off one of my wife’s nipples unless I gave them the right one — but I’d given them the right one. It turned out they were trying to get money out with my B&Q loyalty card. They were unbelievably stupid, but that made them all the more dangerous.’
In the end, the men managed to extract £400 from the husband’s bank account and then left. The wife said her greatest fear was that her one-year-old baby would wake up. ‘If he had started crying, God knows what might have happened,’ she said. ‘But for the first time in his life he slept through the night. Afterwards I thought, “There is a God.”’
Caroline has become quite paranoid since hearing about this, particularly as the chances of all four of our children sleeping through the night are vanishing to zero. I suggested applying for a shotgun licence and then keeping the weapon in a locked cabinet in our bedroom, but Caroline pointed out this wouldn’t have helped our neighbours. More likely, the crack addicts would have got hold of the gun and shot someone. In any event, shooting a burglar can easily result in a manslaughter conviction — and if you don’t kill him, he can sue you. Prudence dictates that keeping a gun in a house in town is never a good idea.
Our best bet is to strengthen our security — a trellis on the back fence, anti-burglar paint on the sidewalls, double-glazing on all the windows — and hope for the best. I have taken to sleeping with my grandfather’s cavalry sword under the bed. It’s a fearsome-looking thing and he once saw off a gang of burglars merely by brandishing it at them. I hope I’d have the courage to do the same, but I’m far from confident. We live in testing times.
I caught a burglar last week. I was standing in my kitchen at 11 o’clock on Saturday morning when a young man suddenly appeared at the bottom of the garden. At first, I didn’t realise he was a burglar. I strolled outside in a spirit of genuine curiosity. What was he doing?
‘I was playing football and I kicked the ball over the fence,’ he said. ‘I thought it had gone in your garden, but it must have gone in the next-door one.’ At first, I believed him. He was young enough to be playing football — mid-to-late twenties — and he apologised for having climbed over my back fence. I showed him out through the front gate and it was only when he didn’t knock on the door of my neighbours that I realised he must be lying. Instead, he simply walked off down the street.
I rushed back inside to get my camera, hoping to take a photograph of him, but by the time I got outside again he’d vanished. I didn’t bother reporting it to the police until two days later, by which time a house four doors down had been burgled. I managed to track down the investigating officer and gave him a detailed description of the man I’d seen in my garden. He confirmed that the ‘lost football’ routine was a well-known ruse and that the man had probably been casing the joint. He said he might send round some officers with some images of burglars for me to look at, but he never did.
My wife Caroline was remarkably blasé about all this until we met a couple of our neighbours at a dinner party, who’d been subjected to a four-hour ordeal by three crack addicts. It was the middle of the night and the first the husband knew about his home being broken into was when one of the intruders sat on his chest and placed a pillow over his head. He warned him that if he tried to remove it, he’d cut his throat. His wife, too, was made to hold a pillow over her head while the three men searched for valuables. When they couldn’t find anything, they threatened to cut off one of the husband’s fingers. He persuaded them to take his wallet instead and gave them the pin number of his cashpoint card. One of the men stayed with them while the other two went to the nearest bank.
‘The most frightening moment was when they called from the cashpoint machine and told the man they’d left behind that I’d given them the wrong number,’ he said. ‘He threatened to cut off one of my wife’s nipples unless I gave them the right one — but I’d given them the right one. It turned out they were trying to get money out with my B&Q loyalty card. They were unbelievably stupid, but that made them all the more dangerous.’
In the end, the men managed to extract £400 from the husband’s bank account and then left. The wife said her greatest fear was that her one-year-old baby would wake up. ‘If he had started crying, God knows what might have happened,’ she said. ‘But for the first time in his life he slept through the night. Afterwards I thought, “There is a God.”’
Caroline has become quite paranoid since hearing about this, particularly as the chances of all four of our children sleeping through the night are vanishing to zero. I suggested applying for a shotgun licence and then keeping the weapon in a locked cabinet in our bedroom, but Caroline pointed out this wouldn’t have helped our neighbours. More likely, the crack addicts would have got hold of the gun and shot someone. In any event, shooting a burglar can easily result in a manslaughter conviction — and if you don’t kill him, he can sue you. Prudence dictates that keeping a gun in a house in town is never a good idea.
Our best bet is to strengthen our security — a trellis on the back fence, anti-burglar paint on the sidewalls, double-glazing on all the windows — and hope for the best. I have taken to sleeping with my grandfather’s cavalry sword under the bed. It’s a fearsome-looking thing and he once saw off a gang of burglars merely by brandishing it at them. I hope I’d have the courage to do the same, but I’m far from confident. We live in testing times.
26.2.09
Zeitgeist & the New Testament
The Greatest Story Ever Garbled
by Tim Callahan
Perhaps the worst aspect of “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” Part I of Peter Joseph’s Internet film, Zeitgeist, is that some of what it asserts is true. Unfortunately, this material is liberally — and sloppily — mixed with material that is only partially true and much that is plainly and simply bogus. Joseph’s main argument is that Jesus never existed and is in fact a mythical character based on earlier sun gods. He sees all the motifs and characters of the New Testament as coded astrological or solar references. The argument that Jesus was a mythical construct has been made before — for example by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in their 1999 book, The Jesus Mysteries, though Freke and Gandy made their argument with a far greater level of scholarship. In reducing Jesus to a sun god, Joseph ignores — as Freke and Gandy did before him — the powerful current of messianic apocalypticism prevalent in first century Judea. The fact that there were references back to earlier dying and rising gods in the Christ myth can lend an air of spurious scholarship to Zeitgeist, as long as one ignores the equally important messianic myth and the fact that there is a viable basis for an actual historical Jesus. Joseph totally ignores the messianic/apocalyptic aspects of the New Testament writings and erroneously asserts that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus. I will return to this issue later. For now, let us consider Joseph’s solar deity argument.
The Solar Cross & Sloppy Solar Symbolism
The first assertion made in Zeitgeist is that the cross is a solar symbol and not a representation of the instrument of Jesus’ execution. That’s true enough, as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. What Jesus was crucified on probably looked more like a capital “T,” the crossbeam to which Jesus’ wrists were nailed being hoisted to rest atop an already anchored upright post. It was then probably secured in place by a spike. The Christian cross probably represents a melding of this “T” shape with the solar cross as a bit of religious syncretism. This can be seen if one considers that many Christian crosses are shown enclosed by or intersecting a circle, as in the Celtic cross. The cross is also a symbol of the four cardinal directions and the four winds. However, the solar associations of the cross, while adding solar connotations to the Christ myth, do not militate against it also being a symbol of the Crucifixion.
Joseph next asserts that the gods Horus, Krishna, Mithra and Attys all paralleled Jesus. Again, there is some truth to this, but Joseph mingles so much falsehood with whatever truths he reveals as to give ample ammunition to evangelical Christians who might want to shoot holes in his thesis. First of all, he says that the Egyptian god Horus was adored by three kings, had twelve disciples and was crucified. He says much the same thing about Mithra, as well as noting that Krishna was born on December 25. Almost none of this is true.
When it comes to Egyptian sources of the Christ myth, Joseph seems to have conflated Horus with his father, Osiris. The Osiris/Horus myth, in much simplified terms, goes as follows: Set, the evil brother of the good Osiris, murders that god and cuts his body into 14 pieces. Isis, the wife of Osiris collects and reassembles the pieces, having to substitute a wooden phallus for that part of the dead god’s anatomy. She copulates with the dead god in the form of a bird, conceives Horus and gives birth to him in secret, raising him on an island in the Nile amidst the reeds. She also raises Osiris from the dead, although this very physical resurrection is in the underworld. When Horus comes of age he does battle with his uncle Set. Set tears out the eye of Horus, while Horus rips off Set’s genitals. Eventually, peace is made between the two, both are healed, and they divide the rule of the year by seasons of life and death.
The physical resurrection of Osiris, even though it is in the underworld, is a significant precursor to Jesus as a dying and rising god, as is the physical resurrection of Dionysus, after he is killed, dismembered and partially eaten by the Titans. Surprisingly, Joseph fails to mention this bit of classical mythology. Horus being born and nursed in the rushes of an island in the Nile is an important parallel to the infant Moses being found among the rushes. However, beyond the resurrection of Osiris, the main parallels between the Egyptian myth and the New Testament are iconic. Isis with the dead body of Osiris prefigures the imagery of the Pieta. More importantly, Christians co-opted the imagery of Isis and the infant Horus in the form of the Madonna and child. I have absolutely no idea where Joseph got the notion that Horus had 12 disciples or that he was ever crucified.
As to the god who is born on December 25 — this was not Krishna, but Mithra in his solar aspect as Sol Invictus (Latin for “Unconquered Sun”). The reason Mithra/Sol Invictus was born on December 25 was that in the Roman calendar of that day, that was the Winter Solstice, the 24-hour period having the fewest number of daylight hours. From that date the days get longer and the nights get shorter until the Summer Solstice. Owing to imperfections in the Roman or Julian calendar, the solstice gradually shifted to December 21, until corrections were made resulting in our present Gregorian calendar. Christianity seems to have deliberately co-opted the birthday of Mithra as a way of occupying a rival’s holiday, rather than this being the result of Jesus being a solar savior.
Joseph’s confusion continues when he tries to tie Isis into the Annunciation narrative of Luke. He says that an Annunciation scene from Luxor shows Isis being told by angelic beings she will bear Horus. Actually, the panels from Luxor depict the mother of Hatshepsut being told she will bear the divine child. Next, the god Amon-Ra consorts with Hatshepsut’s mother. Then the divine child (Hatshepsut) is adored by gods and mortals. This is probably the source of Luke’s Nativity. Mary is told by the angel Gabriel she will bear the divine child. The Holy Spirit overshadows her. Then angels and mortals (shepherds) adore Jesus. However, it has nothing to do with Isis. It was part of the standard Egyptian royal myth that each Pharaoh was engendered by Amon Ra, taking his father’s mortal form to have sexual relations with the Pharaoh’s mother. The reason Hatshepsut (ruled 1498–1483 BCE) had to emphasize her divine origins is that, as a female, she was assumed to have ordinary mortal origins. So there probably is an Egyptian origin to the Lucan Nativity, but it has nothing to do with Isis, Osiris or Horus.
Three Kings & Other Astrological Nonsense
Zeitgeist continues to find not only solar but astrological sources for the Christ myth. The star followed by the wise men is Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major, which lines up with three bright stars on Orion’s belt. These stars are often called the “three kings,” hence the three kings following the star in the Nativity story. Mary is a virgin because she represents the constellation Virgo, which is also referred to as the “House of Bread,” or, in Hebrew beth-lehem, or the town of Bethlehem, The death of Jesus by crucifixion represents the sun being in the Southern Cross, a constellation that in antiquity was visible from the Mediterranean. Thus, the sun was, at its lowest point in the sky (when it “died”) “crucified,” in that it was ensnared in the Southern Cross. Jesus rose from the dead at Easter because it was then, at the Vernal Equinox, that the sun conquered darkness. Jesus had 12 disciples because they represent the 12 signs of the Zodiac. His crown of thorns at the Crucifixion represents the rays of the sun emanating from his head.
This story, like most of Part I of Zeitgeist, is a pastiche of factoid, fiction and ingenious invention. It also betrays a certain naïveté on the part of Peter Joseph in regard to his knowledge of the Bible. This is obvious when he sees in the “Three Kings” of Orion’s belt pointing at Sirius, the source of the magi following the star in the Nativity story of Matthew. At this point, let me ask readers a question: Without looking at a Bible, tell me how many wise men or kings followed the star to Bethlehem. Most likely you answered “Three.” After all, we’ve all heard and sung the popular Christmas carol “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” So weren’t there three kings? Let’s look at the Bible, specifically at Matthew 2:1,2:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him.”
Two things are readily apparent from this passage. First, those who saw the star are wise men, not kings. In the original Greek of the New Testament, what is translated as “wise men” is magi, that is, Zoroastrian holy men. The Greek word magos is the source of our words mage, magic and magician. Second, Matthew nowhere says how many magi came to Jerusalem. So where did we ever get the idea there were three of them? Also, if they were actually following a star, it would have led them directly to Bethlehem. The star doesn’t actually lead the magi until they have been told by Herod’s scribes to go to Bethlehem. Only then does the following happen (Mt. 2:9–11):
When they had heard the king they went on their way, and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then, opening their treasures they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
This is odd. One wonders why the star didn’t just lead the magi to Bethlehem right off. This has led many to speculate that the “star” wasn’t an actual star, but perhaps a conjunction of astrologically significant planets in one constellation or another. It would be tedious to go into them here. Suffice it to say that Joseph’s “three kings” in the belt of Orion bear no relation to the actual myth in Matthew’s account of the Nativity. The only reason conventions of art and caroling gave us three wise men (not kings) is that the magi give Jesus three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It is in these three gifts, along with the eastern origin of the magi, that we see the key to the actual myth in Matthew’s Nativity, which is political. Throughout the Mathean Nativity account, the gospel’s author takes great pains to find fulfilled prophecies showing Jesus to be the messiah of the Davidic line of kings. He is born in Bethlehem because that was David’s home town, and Jesus must be born there to fulfill the prophecy in Micah 5:2, which the chief priests and scribes quote to Herod when the magi ask where the baby is that is born to be king of the Jews (Mt. 2:5, 6):
They [the priests and scribes] told him [Herod], “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is written by the prophet:
‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah; for from you will come a ruler who will govern my people Israel’”
So Bethlehem’s mythic associations have to do with Davidic kingship, not astrology. The three gifts also reflect Davidic kingship, since the Queen of Sheba gave King Solomon rich and kingly gifts (1 Kings 10:10). These included a great quantity of gold and, by implication, since Sheba, or Saba was located in modern Yemen, at the southern end of the Red Sea, frankincense and myrrh. Sheba, or Saba, in Yemen is at the southern end, the point of origin of an ancient caravan route that stretched from Yemen to Damascus called the “Incense Route,” since what was traded from the southern end of the Red Sea were two forms of incense, frankincense and myrrh. Thus, the infant Jesus received from the magi the same gifts given to Solomon by the Queen of Sheba.
Other astrological fantasies in Zeitgeist regarding the Christ myth are that Mary is a virgin because she personifies the constellation Virgo, that the Crucifixion represents the sun in the constellation of the Southern Cross, that Easter is related to the sun’s triumph over darkness at or shortly following the Vernal Equinox, that Jesus’ 12 disciples represent the signs of the Zodiac, and that his crown of thorns represents solar rays emanating from his head. The astrological associations of all of these elements are tenuous at best. Certainly, the virgin birth and the elevation of the Virgin Mary in the Gospel of Luke reflects pagan influences on the Christ myth, which can be seen in the Lucan Nativity and which sharply contrast to the messianic/Davidic kingship motifs of Matthew. As previously noted. Luke’s Nativity seems to be based on Egyptian panels from Luxor dating to the 18th dynasty and the reign of Queen Hatshepsut. So Mary could relate to the constellation Virgo, but also took on the iconography of Isis
As to the sighting of Easter near the time of the Vernal Equinox, we must remember that the Passion is staged during Passover. There is a complex layering here that is lost if we simply relegate Easter to a celebration of the Vernal Equinox.
The Christ myth relates not only to previous dying and rising gods, like Osiris and Dionysus, but as well to Jewish messianic, apocalyptic and historical myths. Thus, situating Easter in the Passover season probably relates more to messianic myth than to the sun. Passover itself was probably originally a festival of first fruits, that is, a seasonal, agricultural festival relating to rebirth. However, Jewish seasonal festivals relating to a cyclic view of time were recast in messianic, apocalyptic terms as historical and related to a linear concept of time. In the case of Jewish belief, I believe it’s safe to say that the linear, historical view effectively eclipsed the original seasonal festival. Since the Christian Passion and Resurrection narratives reintroduce a dying and rising god meme into the holiday, the layering of Easter becomes far more complex. Easter blends apocalyptic messianism, emphasizing Christ’s death and resurrection as the critical turning point in God’s war with Satan, and portraying Jesus as the culmination of Israel’s hopes and dreams, with the dying and rising god motif, and the promise to Christians that they, too, would transcend death. It must also be remembered that the cult of Isis and Osiris, which spread through the Roman Empire about a century before the time of Jesus, was not entirely the same as the millennia old Egyptian fertility cult it had originally been. Rather, it was, in all probability, Hellenized and showed some of the refinements of Greek philosophy. This was, likewise, probably the case with the much younger cult of Dionysus, another dying and rising god.
Jesus having 12 disciples also relates more to Jewish messianism than to astrology. The 12 disciples relate to the 12 tribes of Israel, which, though they no longer existed as political entities, were important genealogically to the extent that Paul could confidently claim to be of the tribe of Benjamin (Romans 11:1). Actually, there were 13 tribes, 12 plus the priestly tribe of Levites. Each tribe originally supported the Levitical priesthood and maintained the central shrine for one month a year. The division of the tribes worshipping Yahweh into 12 divisions may well reflect influences of what was originally a lunar cult, but such influences had been subsumed by the apocalyptic, messianic monotheism of post-exilic Judaism well before the time of Christ. Had the 12 disciples represented the signs of the Zodiac, as Joseph asserts, then we would expect to find the disciples individually given specific zodiacal characteristics in the canonical gospels. Instead, most of the disciples are little more than names and lack any character whatsoever.
Jesus’ crown of thorns, along with most of the specific details of the Passion — his being clothed in a purple robe and given a reed as a scepter, the mocking and scourging by the Roman troops, even his being put to death — were probably elements of the Zagmuku Festival, which the Jews brought back with them from Babylon after their captivity there (587–538 BCE). Elements of this festival are to be found in the entirely fictional Book of Esther and the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim. This, by the way, is not to say that Jesus’ crucifixion was not a real, historical event, merely that its details were heavily fictionalized in the process of dramatization and storytelling.
It is the historiscity of Jesus that will tell us whether the Crucifixion was real or merely symbolic of the sun descending into the constellation of the Southern Cross. I will deal with that subject later.
The End of the Age
Zeitgeist continues its assertion of the astrological basis of Christianity and even of the Jewish Scriptures with the assertion that both Moses and Jesus based their words and actions on a belief in astrological ages of roughly 2,000 plus years dominated by a specific sign of the Zodiac. According to this scheme the Age of Taurus (the Bull) was ending or had ended when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and was being superceded by the Age of Aries (the Ram). This age was, in turn, superceded by the Age of Pisces, in which we live, but which is now winding down. It will soon be followed by the Age of Aquarius, hence the song by the same name from the musical Hair. Moses, Peter Joseph says, condemned worshipping the golden bull calf because it was a throwback to an earlier age. The blowing of the shofar, specifically a ram’s horn, and other symbols indicate that Judaism came, initially, out of the Age of Aries. Since Christianity came into being at the beginning of the Age of Pisces, fish symbolism is particularly common in the New Testament. Thus Jesus tells the fishermen he recruits (Mark 1:17), “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Thus he feeds the multitude with loaves and fishes, and thus the fish is a Christian symbol. There are also, according to Joseph, references in the Christian Scriptures to the coming Aquarian Age. Jesus tells his disciples to follow a man bearing a jar of water (i.e. Aquarius, the water bearer) in Luke 22:10:
He said to them, “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house which he enters, and tell the householder, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?’”
Finally, Jesus tells his disciples (Mt. 28:20) referring to the Age of Pisces and its transition into the Age of Aquarius, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
So, was the fish imagery in the New Testament a reference to the Age of Pisces? When Jesus spoke of the “end of the age,” was he referring to the transition from the Piscean to Aquarian age some 2,000 plus years into the future? The answer to all these questions is, “No.”
Consider the antagonism against bull imagery implicit in Moses condemning the people’s worship of the golden calf. This Yahwistic prejudice seems to have evaporated by that time of the building of Solomon’s Temple, as can be seen in this description of the “molten sea,” a huge vessel containing water that was one of the principle furnishings of the Temple (1 Kings 7:25): “It stood upon twelve oxen, three facing nth, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east; the sea was set upon them, and all their hinder parts were inward.” Oxen also decorate the panels of ten stands made of bronze, along with lions and cherubim (1 Kings. 7:28). Yet, for all the rich imagery of the interior of Solomon’s Temple, it is utterly devoid of any image of rams. Thus, we must assume that the story of the golden calf in Exodus refers, as it would seem, to idolatry.
Fish certainly are common images in the New Testament. Yet so are olive trees, fig trees, sheaves of grain, and, particularly, sheep and lambs. In fact, lambs and lost sheep probably figure more prominently in the New Testament than do fish. Does this mean that Jesus actually wanted to turn the clock back to the previous Age of Aries? Joseph would probably counter such an objection by pointing to the Christian fish symbol. Doesn’t this point to Christianity as the faith of the Piscean Age? The Christian fish symbol has been interpreted as referring back to the “fishers of men” phrase from Mark 1:17 and has also been seen as a vaginal symbol lying on its side. However, it appears most likely that the Greek word for fish, ichthys, was an acronym for (in Greek) Iasos Christos Theos Yios Soter, or “Jesus Christ, son of God, savior.”
The assertion in Zeitgeist that when Jesus tells his disciples in Mt. 28:20 he will be with them until the end of the age, he is referring to a time roughly 2,000 years into the future is absurd considering the apocalyptic outlook of early Christianity. Consider what Jesus has to say in Mark 8: 38–9:1:
“For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly I ay to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.”
Despite the efforts of Christian apologists to rationalize this as something other than a prediction of the end of the world in Jesus’ own generation, there is little else to which it could refer. The parallel verses in Matthew even throw in the Last Judgment (Mt. 16: 27, 28):
For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not tastes death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.
Though there are no parallel verses to this in the Gospel of John, it also proclaims the imminent end of the world (John. 5: 28, 29):
Do not marvel at this, for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his [Jesus’] voice and come forth, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.
Paul also proclaimed the end of the world in his generation in this passage from 1 Thessalonians (1 Thess. 4: 15-17):
For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we, who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep [i.e. died]. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.
These are but a few of the apocalyptic references salted throughout the New Testament. However, lest anyone doubt that early Christians believed the world would end in their generation, consider what John of Patmos says at the opening of Revelation, that vivid and detailed description of the end of days (Rev. 1:1, 2, emphasis added):
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.
“What must soon take place’” cannot refer to the end of the Piscean Age some 2,000 years into the future any more than it can refer to a series of events triggered by Russia invading Israel in 1988.
History vs. Myth
Again mixing facts with sloppy assumptions, Part I of Zeitgeist concludes with an assault on the historicity of Jesus, claming that, outside the New Testament, there is no indication that Jesus ever existed. Joseph correctly points out that the biblical flood myth has its origins in material antedating the earliest sources of the Hebrew Scriptures. He specifically cites the Epic of Gilgamesh. However, he could just as well have cited the Sumerian flood hero Zuisudra, whose account greatly antedates the flood account in Gilgamesh.
Was there a real Jesus? While the historical evidence is meager, it does exist. In his Antiquities of the Jews, book 20, chapter 9, item 1, referring to the execution of James, Josephus refers to him as the brother of “Jesus, who was called the Christ.” It is quite plain that Josephus didn’t see Jesus as the Christ (Christos, the Greek word meaning “anointed”), he merely recorded that James’ brother was the Jesus who had been called or was alleged to be the Christ.
Beyond this scrap, valuable though it is, we can imply the existence of a historical Jesus from the criteria of embarrassment and difficulty. The criterion of embarrassment says that people do not make up embarrassing details about someone they wish to revere. So, if they say such things about the person, they are probably true. Now let’s apply this to what the Roman historian Tacitus had to say about Jesus early in the second century. Concerning rumors that had spread that Nero had deliberately set fire to the city of Rome, Tacitus says (The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 1, Chapter 15):
To suppress this rumor, Nero fabricated scapegoats — and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capitol.
That Tacitus is obviously a hostile witness makes it much more likely that he accepted Jesus as a real person. Had he reason to suspect he was nothing more than a fabrication, Tacitus would certainly have said so. That author’s claim that Jesus had been executed by Pontius Pilate could only have come from one of two possible sources: Either Tacitus knew this to be true from extant imperial records or he was repeating what Christians themselves had said of Jesus. Were Jesus a mythical character they had invented, they certainly wouldn’t have gone out of their way to invent his being a criminal who had been executed.
In like manner, people do not go out of their way to invent difficulties for a character they have invented. It is clear from the Nativity narratives of the gospels of Matthew and Luke that they were faced with having to explain why Jesus grew up in Galilee if he was born in Bethlehem. Both gospels had to invent rather convoluted means to get Jesus born in Bethlehem in accordance with the messianic prophecy in Micah 5:2, then get him moved to Nazareth. Clearly they were stuck with a real person known to have come from Galilee, when he should have come from Bethlehem. Had they been making Jesus up out of whole cloth, they would simply have said he came from Bethlehem: end of story, no complications. So the evidence for Jesus as a real, historical personage, though meager, is solid.
A Roman Plot?
Considering that Part II of Zeitgeist asserts that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a conspiracy on the part of the powers that be, and that Part III is an attack on the Federal Reserve Board and income tax as unconstitutional plots devised by hidden powers bent on reducing all of us to poverty, one might wonder why Peter Joseph even bothered to open his film with an attack on Jesus and Christianity. Summing up at the end of Part I, Joseph asserts that Christianity was, in fact, developed by the Romans as a means of social control. He cites the Council of Nicaea in 325 as the beginning of this social control. So this is the connection between Part I and the rest of the film: Everything you’ve ever believed to be true is all a pack of lies foisted on you by the secret manipulators who really run things. They faked the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon to manipulate us into a war. They are undermining our financial and other freedoms through manipulation of our money and — guess what?! — they’ve been at it since the creation of Christianity, back in the time of the Roman Empire!
Zeitgeist is The Da Vinci Code on steroids.
by Tim Callahan
Perhaps the worst aspect of “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” Part I of Peter Joseph’s Internet film, Zeitgeist, is that some of what it asserts is true. Unfortunately, this material is liberally — and sloppily — mixed with material that is only partially true and much that is plainly and simply bogus. Joseph’s main argument is that Jesus never existed and is in fact a mythical character based on earlier sun gods. He sees all the motifs and characters of the New Testament as coded astrological or solar references. The argument that Jesus was a mythical construct has been made before — for example by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in their 1999 book, The Jesus Mysteries, though Freke and Gandy made their argument with a far greater level of scholarship. In reducing Jesus to a sun god, Joseph ignores — as Freke and Gandy did before him — the powerful current of messianic apocalypticism prevalent in first century Judea. The fact that there were references back to earlier dying and rising gods in the Christ myth can lend an air of spurious scholarship to Zeitgeist, as long as one ignores the equally important messianic myth and the fact that there is a viable basis for an actual historical Jesus. Joseph totally ignores the messianic/apocalyptic aspects of the New Testament writings and erroneously asserts that there is no evidence for a historical Jesus. I will return to this issue later. For now, let us consider Joseph’s solar deity argument.
The Solar Cross & Sloppy Solar Symbolism
The first assertion made in Zeitgeist is that the cross is a solar symbol and not a representation of the instrument of Jesus’ execution. That’s true enough, as far as it goes, which isn’t very far. What Jesus was crucified on probably looked more like a capital “T,” the crossbeam to which Jesus’ wrists were nailed being hoisted to rest atop an already anchored upright post. It was then probably secured in place by a spike. The Christian cross probably represents a melding of this “T” shape with the solar cross as a bit of religious syncretism. This can be seen if one considers that many Christian crosses are shown enclosed by or intersecting a circle, as in the Celtic cross. The cross is also a symbol of the four cardinal directions and the four winds. However, the solar associations of the cross, while adding solar connotations to the Christ myth, do not militate against it also being a symbol of the Crucifixion.
Joseph next asserts that the gods Horus, Krishna, Mithra and Attys all paralleled Jesus. Again, there is some truth to this, but Joseph mingles so much falsehood with whatever truths he reveals as to give ample ammunition to evangelical Christians who might want to shoot holes in his thesis. First of all, he says that the Egyptian god Horus was adored by three kings, had twelve disciples and was crucified. He says much the same thing about Mithra, as well as noting that Krishna was born on December 25. Almost none of this is true.
When it comes to Egyptian sources of the Christ myth, Joseph seems to have conflated Horus with his father, Osiris. The Osiris/Horus myth, in much simplified terms, goes as follows: Set, the evil brother of the good Osiris, murders that god and cuts his body into 14 pieces. Isis, the wife of Osiris collects and reassembles the pieces, having to substitute a wooden phallus for that part of the dead god’s anatomy. She copulates with the dead god in the form of a bird, conceives Horus and gives birth to him in secret, raising him on an island in the Nile amidst the reeds. She also raises Osiris from the dead, although this very physical resurrection is in the underworld. When Horus comes of age he does battle with his uncle Set. Set tears out the eye of Horus, while Horus rips off Set’s genitals. Eventually, peace is made between the two, both are healed, and they divide the rule of the year by seasons of life and death.
The physical resurrection of Osiris, even though it is in the underworld, is a significant precursor to Jesus as a dying and rising god, as is the physical resurrection of Dionysus, after he is killed, dismembered and partially eaten by the Titans. Surprisingly, Joseph fails to mention this bit of classical mythology. Horus being born and nursed in the rushes of an island in the Nile is an important parallel to the infant Moses being found among the rushes. However, beyond the resurrection of Osiris, the main parallels between the Egyptian myth and the New Testament are iconic. Isis with the dead body of Osiris prefigures the imagery of the Pieta. More importantly, Christians co-opted the imagery of Isis and the infant Horus in the form of the Madonna and child. I have absolutely no idea where Joseph got the notion that Horus had 12 disciples or that he was ever crucified.
As to the god who is born on December 25 — this was not Krishna, but Mithra in his solar aspect as Sol Invictus (Latin for “Unconquered Sun”). The reason Mithra/Sol Invictus was born on December 25 was that in the Roman calendar of that day, that was the Winter Solstice, the 24-hour period having the fewest number of daylight hours. From that date the days get longer and the nights get shorter until the Summer Solstice. Owing to imperfections in the Roman or Julian calendar, the solstice gradually shifted to December 21, until corrections were made resulting in our present Gregorian calendar. Christianity seems to have deliberately co-opted the birthday of Mithra as a way of occupying a rival’s holiday, rather than this being the result of Jesus being a solar savior.
Joseph’s confusion continues when he tries to tie Isis into the Annunciation narrative of Luke. He says that an Annunciation scene from Luxor shows Isis being told by angelic beings she will bear Horus. Actually, the panels from Luxor depict the mother of Hatshepsut being told she will bear the divine child. Next, the god Amon-Ra consorts with Hatshepsut’s mother. Then the divine child (Hatshepsut) is adored by gods and mortals. This is probably the source of Luke’s Nativity. Mary is told by the angel Gabriel she will bear the divine child. The Holy Spirit overshadows her. Then angels and mortals (shepherds) adore Jesus. However, it has nothing to do with Isis. It was part of the standard Egyptian royal myth that each Pharaoh was engendered by Amon Ra, taking his father’s mortal form to have sexual relations with the Pharaoh’s mother. The reason Hatshepsut (ruled 1498–1483 BCE) had to emphasize her divine origins is that, as a female, she was assumed to have ordinary mortal origins. So there probably is an Egyptian origin to the Lucan Nativity, but it has nothing to do with Isis, Osiris or Horus.
Three Kings & Other Astrological Nonsense
Zeitgeist continues to find not only solar but astrological sources for the Christ myth. The star followed by the wise men is Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major, which lines up with three bright stars on Orion’s belt. These stars are often called the “three kings,” hence the three kings following the star in the Nativity story. Mary is a virgin because she represents the constellation Virgo, which is also referred to as the “House of Bread,” or, in Hebrew beth-lehem, or the town of Bethlehem, The death of Jesus by crucifixion represents the sun being in the Southern Cross, a constellation that in antiquity was visible from the Mediterranean. Thus, the sun was, at its lowest point in the sky (when it “died”) “crucified,” in that it was ensnared in the Southern Cross. Jesus rose from the dead at Easter because it was then, at the Vernal Equinox, that the sun conquered darkness. Jesus had 12 disciples because they represent the 12 signs of the Zodiac. His crown of thorns at the Crucifixion represents the rays of the sun emanating from his head.
This story, like most of Part I of Zeitgeist, is a pastiche of factoid, fiction and ingenious invention. It also betrays a certain naïveté on the part of Peter Joseph in regard to his knowledge of the Bible. This is obvious when he sees in the “Three Kings” of Orion’s belt pointing at Sirius, the source of the magi following the star in the Nativity story of Matthew. At this point, let me ask readers a question: Without looking at a Bible, tell me how many wise men or kings followed the star to Bethlehem. Most likely you answered “Three.” After all, we’ve all heard and sung the popular Christmas carol “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” So weren’t there three kings? Let’s look at the Bible, specifically at Matthew 2:1,2:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him.”
Two things are readily apparent from this passage. First, those who saw the star are wise men, not kings. In the original Greek of the New Testament, what is translated as “wise men” is magi, that is, Zoroastrian holy men. The Greek word magos is the source of our words mage, magic and magician. Second, Matthew nowhere says how many magi came to Jerusalem. So where did we ever get the idea there were three of them? Also, if they were actually following a star, it would have led them directly to Bethlehem. The star doesn’t actually lead the magi until they have been told by Herod’s scribes to go to Bethlehem. Only then does the following happen (Mt. 2:9–11):
When they had heard the king they went on their way, and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then, opening their treasures they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
This is odd. One wonders why the star didn’t just lead the magi to Bethlehem right off. This has led many to speculate that the “star” wasn’t an actual star, but perhaps a conjunction of astrologically significant planets in one constellation or another. It would be tedious to go into them here. Suffice it to say that Joseph’s “three kings” in the belt of Orion bear no relation to the actual myth in Matthew’s account of the Nativity. The only reason conventions of art and caroling gave us three wise men (not kings) is that the magi give Jesus three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh.
It is in these three gifts, along with the eastern origin of the magi, that we see the key to the actual myth in Matthew’s Nativity, which is political. Throughout the Mathean Nativity account, the gospel’s author takes great pains to find fulfilled prophecies showing Jesus to be the messiah of the Davidic line of kings. He is born in Bethlehem because that was David’s home town, and Jesus must be born there to fulfill the prophecy in Micah 5:2, which the chief priests and scribes quote to Herod when the magi ask where the baby is that is born to be king of the Jews (Mt. 2:5, 6):
They [the priests and scribes] told him [Herod], “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is written by the prophet:
‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah; for from you will come a ruler who will govern my people Israel’”
So Bethlehem’s mythic associations have to do with Davidic kingship, not astrology. The three gifts also reflect Davidic kingship, since the Queen of Sheba gave King Solomon rich and kingly gifts (1 Kings 10:10). These included a great quantity of gold and, by implication, since Sheba, or Saba was located in modern Yemen, at the southern end of the Red Sea, frankincense and myrrh. Sheba, or Saba, in Yemen is at the southern end, the point of origin of an ancient caravan route that stretched from Yemen to Damascus called the “Incense Route,” since what was traded from the southern end of the Red Sea were two forms of incense, frankincense and myrrh. Thus, the infant Jesus received from the magi the same gifts given to Solomon by the Queen of Sheba.
Other astrological fantasies in Zeitgeist regarding the Christ myth are that Mary is a virgin because she personifies the constellation Virgo, that the Crucifixion represents the sun in the constellation of the Southern Cross, that Easter is related to the sun’s triumph over darkness at or shortly following the Vernal Equinox, that Jesus’ 12 disciples represent the signs of the Zodiac, and that his crown of thorns represents solar rays emanating from his head. The astrological associations of all of these elements are tenuous at best. Certainly, the virgin birth and the elevation of the Virgin Mary in the Gospel of Luke reflects pagan influences on the Christ myth, which can be seen in the Lucan Nativity and which sharply contrast to the messianic/Davidic kingship motifs of Matthew. As previously noted. Luke’s Nativity seems to be based on Egyptian panels from Luxor dating to the 18th dynasty and the reign of Queen Hatshepsut. So Mary could relate to the constellation Virgo, but also took on the iconography of Isis
As to the sighting of Easter near the time of the Vernal Equinox, we must remember that the Passion is staged during Passover. There is a complex layering here that is lost if we simply relegate Easter to a celebration of the Vernal Equinox.
The Christ myth relates not only to previous dying and rising gods, like Osiris and Dionysus, but as well to Jewish messianic, apocalyptic and historical myths. Thus, situating Easter in the Passover season probably relates more to messianic myth than to the sun. Passover itself was probably originally a festival of first fruits, that is, a seasonal, agricultural festival relating to rebirth. However, Jewish seasonal festivals relating to a cyclic view of time were recast in messianic, apocalyptic terms as historical and related to a linear concept of time. In the case of Jewish belief, I believe it’s safe to say that the linear, historical view effectively eclipsed the original seasonal festival. Since the Christian Passion and Resurrection narratives reintroduce a dying and rising god meme into the holiday, the layering of Easter becomes far more complex. Easter blends apocalyptic messianism, emphasizing Christ’s death and resurrection as the critical turning point in God’s war with Satan, and portraying Jesus as the culmination of Israel’s hopes and dreams, with the dying and rising god motif, and the promise to Christians that they, too, would transcend death. It must also be remembered that the cult of Isis and Osiris, which spread through the Roman Empire about a century before the time of Jesus, was not entirely the same as the millennia old Egyptian fertility cult it had originally been. Rather, it was, in all probability, Hellenized and showed some of the refinements of Greek philosophy. This was, likewise, probably the case with the much younger cult of Dionysus, another dying and rising god.
Jesus having 12 disciples also relates more to Jewish messianism than to astrology. The 12 disciples relate to the 12 tribes of Israel, which, though they no longer existed as political entities, were important genealogically to the extent that Paul could confidently claim to be of the tribe of Benjamin (Romans 11:1). Actually, there were 13 tribes, 12 plus the priestly tribe of Levites. Each tribe originally supported the Levitical priesthood and maintained the central shrine for one month a year. The division of the tribes worshipping Yahweh into 12 divisions may well reflect influences of what was originally a lunar cult, but such influences had been subsumed by the apocalyptic, messianic monotheism of post-exilic Judaism well before the time of Christ. Had the 12 disciples represented the signs of the Zodiac, as Joseph asserts, then we would expect to find the disciples individually given specific zodiacal characteristics in the canonical gospels. Instead, most of the disciples are little more than names and lack any character whatsoever.
Jesus’ crown of thorns, along with most of the specific details of the Passion — his being clothed in a purple robe and given a reed as a scepter, the mocking and scourging by the Roman troops, even his being put to death — were probably elements of the Zagmuku Festival, which the Jews brought back with them from Babylon after their captivity there (587–538 BCE). Elements of this festival are to be found in the entirely fictional Book of Esther and the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim. This, by the way, is not to say that Jesus’ crucifixion was not a real, historical event, merely that its details were heavily fictionalized in the process of dramatization and storytelling.
It is the historiscity of Jesus that will tell us whether the Crucifixion was real or merely symbolic of the sun descending into the constellation of the Southern Cross. I will deal with that subject later.
The End of the Age
Zeitgeist continues its assertion of the astrological basis of Christianity and even of the Jewish Scriptures with the assertion that both Moses and Jesus based their words and actions on a belief in astrological ages of roughly 2,000 plus years dominated by a specific sign of the Zodiac. According to this scheme the Age of Taurus (the Bull) was ending or had ended when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and was being superceded by the Age of Aries (the Ram). This age was, in turn, superceded by the Age of Pisces, in which we live, but which is now winding down. It will soon be followed by the Age of Aquarius, hence the song by the same name from the musical Hair. Moses, Peter Joseph says, condemned worshipping the golden bull calf because it was a throwback to an earlier age. The blowing of the shofar, specifically a ram’s horn, and other symbols indicate that Judaism came, initially, out of the Age of Aries. Since Christianity came into being at the beginning of the Age of Pisces, fish symbolism is particularly common in the New Testament. Thus Jesus tells the fishermen he recruits (Mark 1:17), “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Thus he feeds the multitude with loaves and fishes, and thus the fish is a Christian symbol. There are also, according to Joseph, references in the Christian Scriptures to the coming Aquarian Age. Jesus tells his disciples to follow a man bearing a jar of water (i.e. Aquarius, the water bearer) in Luke 22:10:
He said to them, “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him into the house which he enters, and tell the householder, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?’”
Finally, Jesus tells his disciples (Mt. 28:20) referring to the Age of Pisces and its transition into the Age of Aquarius, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
So, was the fish imagery in the New Testament a reference to the Age of Pisces? When Jesus spoke of the “end of the age,” was he referring to the transition from the Piscean to Aquarian age some 2,000 plus years into the future? The answer to all these questions is, “No.”
Consider the antagonism against bull imagery implicit in Moses condemning the people’s worship of the golden calf. This Yahwistic prejudice seems to have evaporated by that time of the building of Solomon’s Temple, as can be seen in this description of the “molten sea,” a huge vessel containing water that was one of the principle furnishings of the Temple (1 Kings 7:25): “It stood upon twelve oxen, three facing nth, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east; the sea was set upon them, and all their hinder parts were inward.” Oxen also decorate the panels of ten stands made of bronze, along with lions and cherubim (1 Kings. 7:28). Yet, for all the rich imagery of the interior of Solomon’s Temple, it is utterly devoid of any image of rams. Thus, we must assume that the story of the golden calf in Exodus refers, as it would seem, to idolatry.
Fish certainly are common images in the New Testament. Yet so are olive trees, fig trees, sheaves of grain, and, particularly, sheep and lambs. In fact, lambs and lost sheep probably figure more prominently in the New Testament than do fish. Does this mean that Jesus actually wanted to turn the clock back to the previous Age of Aries? Joseph would probably counter such an objection by pointing to the Christian fish symbol. Doesn’t this point to Christianity as the faith of the Piscean Age? The Christian fish symbol has been interpreted as referring back to the “fishers of men” phrase from Mark 1:17 and has also been seen as a vaginal symbol lying on its side. However, it appears most likely that the Greek word for fish, ichthys, was an acronym for (in Greek) Iasos Christos Theos Yios Soter, or “Jesus Christ, son of God, savior.”
The assertion in Zeitgeist that when Jesus tells his disciples in Mt. 28:20 he will be with them until the end of the age, he is referring to a time roughly 2,000 years into the future is absurd considering the apocalyptic outlook of early Christianity. Consider what Jesus has to say in Mark 8: 38–9:1:
“For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly I ay to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.”
Despite the efforts of Christian apologists to rationalize this as something other than a prediction of the end of the world in Jesus’ own generation, there is little else to which it could refer. The parallel verses in Matthew even throw in the Last Judgment (Mt. 16: 27, 28):
For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not tastes death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.
Though there are no parallel verses to this in the Gospel of John, it also proclaims the imminent end of the world (John. 5: 28, 29):
Do not marvel at this, for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his [Jesus’] voice and come forth, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.
Paul also proclaimed the end of the world in his generation in this passage from 1 Thessalonians (1 Thess. 4: 15-17):
For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we, who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep [i.e. died]. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.
These are but a few of the apocalyptic references salted throughout the New Testament. However, lest anyone doubt that early Christians believed the world would end in their generation, consider what John of Patmos says at the opening of Revelation, that vivid and detailed description of the end of days (Rev. 1:1, 2, emphasis added):
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.
“What must soon take place’” cannot refer to the end of the Piscean Age some 2,000 years into the future any more than it can refer to a series of events triggered by Russia invading Israel in 1988.
History vs. Myth
Again mixing facts with sloppy assumptions, Part I of Zeitgeist concludes with an assault on the historicity of Jesus, claming that, outside the New Testament, there is no indication that Jesus ever existed. Joseph correctly points out that the biblical flood myth has its origins in material antedating the earliest sources of the Hebrew Scriptures. He specifically cites the Epic of Gilgamesh. However, he could just as well have cited the Sumerian flood hero Zuisudra, whose account greatly antedates the flood account in Gilgamesh.
Was there a real Jesus? While the historical evidence is meager, it does exist. In his Antiquities of the Jews, book 20, chapter 9, item 1, referring to the execution of James, Josephus refers to him as the brother of “Jesus, who was called the Christ.” It is quite plain that Josephus didn’t see Jesus as the Christ (Christos, the Greek word meaning “anointed”), he merely recorded that James’ brother was the Jesus who had been called or was alleged to be the Christ.
Beyond this scrap, valuable though it is, we can imply the existence of a historical Jesus from the criteria of embarrassment and difficulty. The criterion of embarrassment says that people do not make up embarrassing details about someone they wish to revere. So, if they say such things about the person, they are probably true. Now let’s apply this to what the Roman historian Tacitus had to say about Jesus early in the second century. Concerning rumors that had spread that Nero had deliberately set fire to the city of Rome, Tacitus says (The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 1, Chapter 15):
To suppress this rumor, Nero fabricated scapegoats — and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome. All degraded and shameful practices collect and flourish in the capitol.
That Tacitus is obviously a hostile witness makes it much more likely that he accepted Jesus as a real person. Had he reason to suspect he was nothing more than a fabrication, Tacitus would certainly have said so. That author’s claim that Jesus had been executed by Pontius Pilate could only have come from one of two possible sources: Either Tacitus knew this to be true from extant imperial records or he was repeating what Christians themselves had said of Jesus. Were Jesus a mythical character they had invented, they certainly wouldn’t have gone out of their way to invent his being a criminal who had been executed.
In like manner, people do not go out of their way to invent difficulties for a character they have invented. It is clear from the Nativity narratives of the gospels of Matthew and Luke that they were faced with having to explain why Jesus grew up in Galilee if he was born in Bethlehem. Both gospels had to invent rather convoluted means to get Jesus born in Bethlehem in accordance with the messianic prophecy in Micah 5:2, then get him moved to Nazareth. Clearly they were stuck with a real person known to have come from Galilee, when he should have come from Bethlehem. Had they been making Jesus up out of whole cloth, they would simply have said he came from Bethlehem: end of story, no complications. So the evidence for Jesus as a real, historical personage, though meager, is solid.
A Roman Plot?
Considering that Part II of Zeitgeist asserts that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a conspiracy on the part of the powers that be, and that Part III is an attack on the Federal Reserve Board and income tax as unconstitutional plots devised by hidden powers bent on reducing all of us to poverty, one might wonder why Peter Joseph even bothered to open his film with an attack on Jesus and Christianity. Summing up at the end of Part I, Joseph asserts that Christianity was, in fact, developed by the Romans as a means of social control. He cites the Council of Nicaea in 325 as the beginning of this social control. So this is the connection between Part I and the rest of the film: Everything you’ve ever believed to be true is all a pack of lies foisted on you by the secret manipulators who really run things. They faked the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon to manipulate us into a war. They are undermining our financial and other freedoms through manipulation of our money and — guess what?! — they’ve been at it since the creation of Christianity, back in the time of the Roman Empire!
Zeitgeist is The Da Vinci Code on steroids.
25.2.09
Some thoughts for Ash Wednesday
RELIGIOUS FAITH today is one option among others. Many people—call them secularists—live without any transcendent source of value. Some, but not all, are militant atheists. A millennium ago, this would have been unimaginable. Everyone believed in God and oriented their lives in reference to that belief. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious-secular divide came into being. He concludes that modern Western secularism has its roots in Christian theology and that secularism and Christianity reveal a common ancestry in their shared commitment to human rights—a commitment that does not follow from atheism as such.Taylor is Catholic, and he is clearly trying to make the case for theisms like his own. Taylor’s history refutes what he calls the “subtraction view” of the movement toward secularism, according to which the decline of religious belief is simply the result of the falling away of superstition and the growth of knowledge. Rather, modern secularism is a religious worldview, with its own narrative of testing and redemption, and shares the vulnerabilities of such views. The news that secularists also live in glass houses has implications for ongoing stone-throwing operations.In the primitive world of nature rituals and tribal deities, there was no clear distinction between the immanent and the transcendent. The sense of cosmic order pervaded everything; there were no clear boundaries between self and non-self, personal agency and impersonal force. Possession by demons was a real and terrifying possibility. In such circumstances, unbelief was unthinkable.Around the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the great world faiths appeared. Confucius, Lao-tse, Siddhartha Gautama, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, and Plato brought new visions of universal ethics and individual salvation. A world that had been unified was now divided between the disordered lower realm and the higher aspirations toward which individuals were to strive.A Secular Age focuses on the evolution of the Christian world. From the beginning, Taylor argues, there was a tension in Christianity between salvation for all, promised by a transcendent God, and the pagan practices and habits of mind that persisted among the laity. This kind of tension, between the life of religious ascetics and the inevitably less perfect lives of ordinary people, is present in all civilizations organized around post-pagan religions, but Latin Christendom is distinguished by “the deep and growing dissatisfaction with it.”The movement that culminated in the Protestant Reformation began in the Middle Ages. There were repeated efforts by the church, first to reform its own practices and later to restrain as idolatrous the veneration of saints’ relics, magic, miracle-mongering, and dancing around the maypole. The Reformation radicalized this move by abolishing this tension and inaugurating the “priesthood of all believers.” Ordinary life—work, play, sex—began to take on sacred meaning. The Christian virtues were no longer those of ascetic monks; an ethos of personal responsibility and self-discipline became available to everyone.This attempt to bring Christ into a world that had become desacralized inspired a new focus on the world. Human beings now had to inhabit the world, writes Taylor, “as agents of instrumental reason, working the system effectively in order to bring about God’s purposes; because it is through these purposes, and not through signs, that God reveals himself in his world.”This disengaged stance toward a disenchanted world became the moral basis of the new scientific method. Technological control of the world became yet another way of doing God’s work, benefiting the human race in accordance with his plan. The highest goal was understood to be “a certain kind of human flourishing, in a context of mutuality, pursuing each his/her happiness on the basis of assured life and liberty, in a society of mutual benefit.”The “this-worldly ethos” eventually made it possible to cut loose from religiosity altogether. Once “God’s goals for us shrink to the single end of our encompassing this order of mutual benefit he has designed for us,” it is easy for God to drop out of the picture completely. The goal of order becomes simply a matter of human flourishing, and the power to pursue that goal is a purely human capacity, not something we receive from God.Thus a reforming movement in Christianity was in time transformed into militant secularism. In this new vision, Christianity is a danger to the goods of the modern moral order; it risks fanaticism and estrangement from our own nature. Religion is suspect because it posits transcendent goals and is alien to human fulfillment; it is, in fact, the enemy of human fulfillment. Moreover, the problem of theodicy becomes more acute in a world in which the purposes of the world are understood to center around human flourishing: “The idea of blaming God gets a clearer sense and becomes much more salient in the modern era where people begin to think they know just what God was purposing in creating the world, and can check the results against the intention.”But the secular worldview has its own discontents, manifest in repeated waves of Romantic protest. It can create a sense “that something central is missing, some great purpose, some élan, some fulfillment, without which life has lost its point”; it has no good account of its own commitment to universal benevolence, which it cannot disentangle fully from its roots in Christian agape. Taylor writes,
That I am left with human concerns doesn’t tell me to take universal human welfare as my goal; nor does it tell me that freedom is important, or fulfillment, or equality. Just being confined to human goods could just as well find expression in my concerning myself exclusively with my own material welfare, or that of my family and immediate milieu.The claim that universal benevolence is just part of human nature is not especially plausible. It also isn’t consistent with “our sense that there is something higher, nobler, more fully human about universal sympathy.” A secular worldview has notorious problems dealing with the facts of suffering and evil. Secular language finds it difficult to articulate the force of ethical demands or for that matter the power of artistic experience.Secularism and religious belief are each animated, for many of their adherents, by pictures of the world in which the other position is simply unimaginable. “What pushes us one way or the other,” writes Taylor, “is what we might describe as our over-all take on human life, and its cosmic and (if any) spiritual surroundings.” It is possible to feel some of the force of each opposing position—to stand “in that open space where you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief”—but this is relatively uncommon.What is more common is to occupy some specific intermediate point between the polar positions. For the past few centuries, there has been a growing proliferation of views that do this, first among the elite and then later generalized to the whole society. Whatever position is held depends on its resonance for the individual. The reforming emphasis on free faith inevitably decentralizes; it is contradictory to seek “a Church tightly held together by a strong hierarchical authority, which will nevertheless be filled with practitioners of heartfelt devotion.”TAYLOR IS right that secularism is missing something important. There is a gap in the narrative. But this is not a comparative disadvantage for secularism, because the precise area of weakness—a normative commitment to human rights that can’t be accounted for—is equally present in traditional religious worldviews.In a religious worldview, one can say that what grounds one’s commitment to treating people decently is that the will of God makes everyone sacred. But then what grounds one’s belief in God? We have moved from one shaky foundation to another; there is no gain in confidence.Taylor is right that “going one way or another requires what is often called a ‘leap of faith.’” Secularism has the advantage of parsimony in its leaps. In its most common modern form, it relies on a humanitarian impulse that has no articulable foundation. But this intellectual weakness isn’t any more troubling than any of religion’s. In fact, it is probably less so, because it doesn’t require belief in improbable events in historical time—golden plates borne by the Angel Moroni, a messiah resurrected from the dead. Religious people are divided about the importance of such claims. Taylor, for example, thinks that propositional beliefs, such as the existence of God, are not essential to religiosity, but are derivative from one’s broader sense of what is important in life.Taylor has noted that a central element of ordinary moral reasoning is “strong evaluation”: the “discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged.”It is doubtless true that for many people strong evaluation is inseparable from religion. On the other hand, there are secularists for whom the rejection of what they regard as religion’s superstitions and fanaticisms is as much a matter of strong evaluation as their commitment to human rights (a term I’ll use to represent not just the right to be free from torture and indefinite detention without trial, but more generally the claim to decent treatment for all human beings). Their commitment to human rights lacks any further grounding. It certainly doesn’t follow from their secularism. As Friedrich Nietzsche showed, the rejection of religion can easily be accompanied by the rejection of human rights.What secularists are committed to might be called “Naked Strong Evaluation”: the idea, unsupported by any particular metaphysical claims, that the commitment to decent treatment for all human beings is a mandatory criterion for judging our desires and actions. Does the nakedness of this commitment weaken it? Not necessarily.Here I can offer some pertinent introspection. I’m a specimen of what Taylor is studying, a modern secularist with a deep commitment to human rights. Since it’s my worldview that he’s anatomizing, I can offer some data as an anthropological informant.I’m not prepared to argue, as Richard Rorty does, that there is no transcendent basis for my commitment to human rights and that it is a purely contingent historical formation. Rorty is mighty sure of himself. I just don’t know. So there is what appears to be a permanent gap in my belief system. If I were a religious person, I guess I’d be entitled to call it a Mystery. This gap doesn’t trouble me. All belief systems have Mysteries. My agnosticism is in many ways the functional equivalent of atheism: I don’t rely on a belief in God to justify my human rights commitments. I don’t think I have to. Naked Strong Evaluation works for me.THE QUESTION about the relation between religion and human rights is chronically confused because it is really four different questions:(1) Epistemic: How do we know that there are human rights? Taylor is right that the secularist commitment to human rights is curiously ungrounded and that religious revelation is one answer. It would be implausible, however, to suggest that it is the only answer. Knowledge of God’s existence has no more secure epistemic foundation than Naked Strong Evaluation. On the contrary, it raises new problems: How do we know, for example, that the bush that Moses saw was burning and not consumed?(2) Justificatory: In a materialist universe, how can there be any compelling warrant for moral statements? The question’s implication is that moral obligations can’t be justified in a godless universe. (Taylor doesn’t claim this, but others have.) This also is problematic. In order for this argument to be persuasive, it would have to be shown how God helps—how warranted moral claims can be dependent on God’s existence. There are ancient and unresolved difficulties about whether morality is a divine command or whether it is also a constraint on God, whether evil deeds would become good if God did them, and so forth. If God is subject to moral judgments, then God can’t be the source of all moral judgments. Naked Strong Evaluation doesn’t have these problems. There certainly is something mysterious about strong evaluation in a materialistic universe. The Transcendent Something toward which all this points is, however, obscure.(3) Sociological/psychological: Can human beings sustain their allegiance to human rights if they don’t believe in God? It is sometimes suggested that the answer to this question must be no. But this claim is obviously silly. Taylor certainly isn’t saying this; one of his primary data, needing explanation, is the existence of secularists like me who are firmly committed to human rights.In a 2004 essay, “A Place for Transcendence?”, Taylor raises an interesting psychological question about secularism and human rights. It is true that “no previous civilization has accepted the obligation to help human beings, wherever and against all, as our contemporaries have.” But the whole operation depends on maudlin emotional appeals: “Spectacular events, affecting images, keep the money rolling in, but there are often more pressing needs elsewhere, and we have to either re-allocate the public’s contributions elsewhere without telling them or inflect the priorities of action in order to follow public emotion.” The morality of compassion appears to exceed our emotional capabilities; “what we are missing is a love for the human being as he/she is, with all its imperfections, weaknesses, idiocy, ugliness.” Taylor thinks that only Christian agape or Buddhist mahakaruna can fill this gap. But this is pure speculation. People manage, through varying methods and with varying degrees of success, to accomplish this psychological trick within themselves.(4) Historical: Did the idea of human rights, at least in the West, emerge from Christian doctrine? The answer to this is yes, as Taylor has shown more thoroughly than anyone before him. Some people (not Taylor) have taken 4 to be evidence of 1 or 2. This is a jejune error in logic. Our knowledge of the truth may be–often is–rooted in previous errors. Modern astronomy is rooted in astrology, but astrology is not a good epistemic path to knowledge of astronomy, nor do the data of astronomy need a justificatory basis in astrology.LATE IN this book, Taylor makes a Kantian argument: “Does not a great deal of our political activity take as its goal, if only as an idea of reason, a world order in which peoples live together in equality and justice? Does not a great deal of our efforts at healing take as a goal the wholeness of the person? How easily can we set these goals aside?” Kant thought that morality required, at a minimum, the belief that God and a future life are possible. The highest human good had to be a real possibility in order for a person intelligibly to take it as a practical end. Both secular and religious people seem to share a similar sustaining hope, a vision of a world in which our benevolent aspirations can be realized.The Kantian nature of Taylor’s argument for religion is apparent in a debate that he has been having over the past twenty years with fellow philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In a 1988 review of her book The Fragility of Goodness, Taylor pressed Nussbaum for a clearer articulation of her own evaluation of the aspiration to transcend ordinary human life—an aspiration that she explores in ancient Greek thought. Nussbaum responded to Taylor in a later essay, “Transcending Humanity,” arguing that we should “reject as incoherent . . . the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constitutive conditions of our humanity, and to seek for a life that is really the life of another sort of being—as if it were a higher and better life for us.” If one aspires to “a more compassionate, subtler, more responsive, more richly human world” than the one we now inhabit, then “there is a great deal of room for transcendence of our ordinary humanity—transcendence, we might say, of an internal and human sort.” The extra-human transcendence that Taylor has in mind has its dangers. “If one thinks that the really important thing is to get over to a different sort of life altogether, then this may well make one work less hard on this one.”In A Secular Age, Taylor observes that Nussbaum is making the familiar secularist objection to religion: it pulls us away from the benevolent project that should be our real preoccupation; it keeps us from taking human desire and neediness seriously. Taylor responds that the move toward transcendence is always internal in its basis, so the distinction between internal and external transcendences can’t do the work that Nussbaum intends. Human aspirations don’t all fit together; they are in tension with one another. Ethical demands and erotic love are both felt internally, but both may seem to be external from the standpoint of the other, each threatening to marginalize an important part of our lives. The same is true with the admiration for military heroism and the desire for perpetual peace. We don’t want to renounce either, but it is not possible, in this world, to have both. Taylor thinks that the “this-worldly” humanitarian concern that Nussbaum advocates points beyond itself toward the transcendent.TAYLOR ENDORSES what Jonathan Lear calls (in a book with that title) “radical hope”—a hope that is, as Lear puts it, “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” In a review of Lear’s book, Taylor is uncertain whether radical hope “can be sustained without some kind of formulated faith in something, whether religious or secular—faith in God, or in History, or in our own resources, or in human resilience.” Any formulation, however, will be inadequate to that toward which it points. It is part of our nature that “we long for things that we do not yet fully understand.”For many people, this hope takes a religious form, and probably could only take a religious form. Consider a crucial episode in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. During the Montgomery bus boycott, a series of death threats, some of them directed at his family, had left him demoralized. “I was ready to give up,” he recalled. Sitting in the kitchen, unable to sleep after a threatening phone call, he began to think of how he could pass the leadership of the desegregation movement on to someone else. He began to pray out loud and, as King recalled, “it seemed to me at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” King’s new courage resulted from direct, felt connection with Christ—“I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me.”—and he persisted in his civil rights advocacy. It made him into the closest thing to a secular saint that twentieth-century America produced. It also got him killed.I’m confident that King was not a fool or a sucker. I can’t tell you why I think that. And so I’m in a poor position to attack the hopes—hopes that to me (in most of my moods) are deeply implausible—that supported him in his confidence. Perhaps he could have arrived in the same place on the basis of Naked Strong Evaluation. Some have. But to do that, he would have had to change in so many ways that it is hard to imagine what he would have looked like. Martin Luther Kings don’t turn up that often, so I’m not inclined to tinker with the ones we have.Wherever you situate yourself in this landscape, your view of the moral universe won’t—and can’t be—a neat, closed system with all the loose ends tidied up. Recognizing this can inoculate us against two related errors: One is to think that we have all the answers. The other, perhaps even more malign, is to be too confident of what the other fellow’s beliefs entail: that his or her “belief in God produces fanaticism” or “atheism leads to immorality.”Naked Strong Evaluation is very difficult, perhaps even unimaginable, for many people who can be reliable allies in the cause of human rights. On the other hand, quite a lot of people seem to be able to pull it off. We’re all stumbling around in the dark, grabbing as much of the elephant as we can. It is unseemly to mock one another’s shortsightedness. Taylor’s book does a wonderful job of elucidating the predicament that is, at the deepest level, what unites us.
Andrew Koppelman is the co-author (with Tobias Barrington Wolff) of A Right to Discriminate? How the Case of Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale Warped the Law of Free Association, forthcoming from Yale University Press.
That I am left with human concerns doesn’t tell me to take universal human welfare as my goal; nor does it tell me that freedom is important, or fulfillment, or equality. Just being confined to human goods could just as well find expression in my concerning myself exclusively with my own material welfare, or that of my family and immediate milieu.The claim that universal benevolence is just part of human nature is not especially plausible. It also isn’t consistent with “our sense that there is something higher, nobler, more fully human about universal sympathy.” A secular worldview has notorious problems dealing with the facts of suffering and evil. Secular language finds it difficult to articulate the force of ethical demands or for that matter the power of artistic experience.Secularism and religious belief are each animated, for many of their adherents, by pictures of the world in which the other position is simply unimaginable. “What pushes us one way or the other,” writes Taylor, “is what we might describe as our over-all take on human life, and its cosmic and (if any) spiritual surroundings.” It is possible to feel some of the force of each opposing position—to stand “in that open space where you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief”—but this is relatively uncommon.What is more common is to occupy some specific intermediate point between the polar positions. For the past few centuries, there has been a growing proliferation of views that do this, first among the elite and then later generalized to the whole society. Whatever position is held depends on its resonance for the individual. The reforming emphasis on free faith inevitably decentralizes; it is contradictory to seek “a Church tightly held together by a strong hierarchical authority, which will nevertheless be filled with practitioners of heartfelt devotion.”TAYLOR IS right that secularism is missing something important. There is a gap in the narrative. But this is not a comparative disadvantage for secularism, because the precise area of weakness—a normative commitment to human rights that can’t be accounted for—is equally present in traditional religious worldviews.In a religious worldview, one can say that what grounds one’s commitment to treating people decently is that the will of God makes everyone sacred. But then what grounds one’s belief in God? We have moved from one shaky foundation to another; there is no gain in confidence.Taylor is right that “going one way or another requires what is often called a ‘leap of faith.’” Secularism has the advantage of parsimony in its leaps. In its most common modern form, it relies on a humanitarian impulse that has no articulable foundation. But this intellectual weakness isn’t any more troubling than any of religion’s. In fact, it is probably less so, because it doesn’t require belief in improbable events in historical time—golden plates borne by the Angel Moroni, a messiah resurrected from the dead. Religious people are divided about the importance of such claims. Taylor, for example, thinks that propositional beliefs, such as the existence of God, are not essential to religiosity, but are derivative from one’s broader sense of what is important in life.Taylor has noted that a central element of ordinary moral reasoning is “strong evaluation”: the “discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged.”It is doubtless true that for many people strong evaluation is inseparable from religion. On the other hand, there are secularists for whom the rejection of what they regard as religion’s superstitions and fanaticisms is as much a matter of strong evaluation as their commitment to human rights (a term I’ll use to represent not just the right to be free from torture and indefinite detention without trial, but more generally the claim to decent treatment for all human beings). Their commitment to human rights lacks any further grounding. It certainly doesn’t follow from their secularism. As Friedrich Nietzsche showed, the rejection of religion can easily be accompanied by the rejection of human rights.What secularists are committed to might be called “Naked Strong Evaluation”: the idea, unsupported by any particular metaphysical claims, that the commitment to decent treatment for all human beings is a mandatory criterion for judging our desires and actions. Does the nakedness of this commitment weaken it? Not necessarily.Here I can offer some pertinent introspection. I’m a specimen of what Taylor is studying, a modern secularist with a deep commitment to human rights. Since it’s my worldview that he’s anatomizing, I can offer some data as an anthropological informant.I’m not prepared to argue, as Richard Rorty does, that there is no transcendent basis for my commitment to human rights and that it is a purely contingent historical formation. Rorty is mighty sure of himself. I just don’t know. So there is what appears to be a permanent gap in my belief system. If I were a religious person, I guess I’d be entitled to call it a Mystery. This gap doesn’t trouble me. All belief systems have Mysteries. My agnosticism is in many ways the functional equivalent of atheism: I don’t rely on a belief in God to justify my human rights commitments. I don’t think I have to. Naked Strong Evaluation works for me.THE QUESTION about the relation between religion and human rights is chronically confused because it is really four different questions:(1) Epistemic: How do we know that there are human rights? Taylor is right that the secularist commitment to human rights is curiously ungrounded and that religious revelation is one answer. It would be implausible, however, to suggest that it is the only answer. Knowledge of God’s existence has no more secure epistemic foundation than Naked Strong Evaluation. On the contrary, it raises new problems: How do we know, for example, that the bush that Moses saw was burning and not consumed?(2) Justificatory: In a materialist universe, how can there be any compelling warrant for moral statements? The question’s implication is that moral obligations can’t be justified in a godless universe. (Taylor doesn’t claim this, but others have.) This also is problematic. In order for this argument to be persuasive, it would have to be shown how God helps—how warranted moral claims can be dependent on God’s existence. There are ancient and unresolved difficulties about whether morality is a divine command or whether it is also a constraint on God, whether evil deeds would become good if God did them, and so forth. If God is subject to moral judgments, then God can’t be the source of all moral judgments. Naked Strong Evaluation doesn’t have these problems. There certainly is something mysterious about strong evaluation in a materialistic universe. The Transcendent Something toward which all this points is, however, obscure.(3) Sociological/psychological: Can human beings sustain their allegiance to human rights if they don’t believe in God? It is sometimes suggested that the answer to this question must be no. But this claim is obviously silly. Taylor certainly isn’t saying this; one of his primary data, needing explanation, is the existence of secularists like me who are firmly committed to human rights.In a 2004 essay, “A Place for Transcendence?”, Taylor raises an interesting psychological question about secularism and human rights. It is true that “no previous civilization has accepted the obligation to help human beings, wherever and against all, as our contemporaries have.” But the whole operation depends on maudlin emotional appeals: “Spectacular events, affecting images, keep the money rolling in, but there are often more pressing needs elsewhere, and we have to either re-allocate the public’s contributions elsewhere without telling them or inflect the priorities of action in order to follow public emotion.” The morality of compassion appears to exceed our emotional capabilities; “what we are missing is a love for the human being as he/she is, with all its imperfections, weaknesses, idiocy, ugliness.” Taylor thinks that only Christian agape or Buddhist mahakaruna can fill this gap. But this is pure speculation. People manage, through varying methods and with varying degrees of success, to accomplish this psychological trick within themselves.(4) Historical: Did the idea of human rights, at least in the West, emerge from Christian doctrine? The answer to this is yes, as Taylor has shown more thoroughly than anyone before him. Some people (not Taylor) have taken 4 to be evidence of 1 or 2. This is a jejune error in logic. Our knowledge of the truth may be–often is–rooted in previous errors. Modern astronomy is rooted in astrology, but astrology is not a good epistemic path to knowledge of astronomy, nor do the data of astronomy need a justificatory basis in astrology.LATE IN this book, Taylor makes a Kantian argument: “Does not a great deal of our political activity take as its goal, if only as an idea of reason, a world order in which peoples live together in equality and justice? Does not a great deal of our efforts at healing take as a goal the wholeness of the person? How easily can we set these goals aside?” Kant thought that morality required, at a minimum, the belief that God and a future life are possible. The highest human good had to be a real possibility in order for a person intelligibly to take it as a practical end. Both secular and religious people seem to share a similar sustaining hope, a vision of a world in which our benevolent aspirations can be realized.The Kantian nature of Taylor’s argument for religion is apparent in a debate that he has been having over the past twenty years with fellow philosopher Martha Nussbaum. In a 1988 review of her book The Fragility of Goodness, Taylor pressed Nussbaum for a clearer articulation of her own evaluation of the aspiration to transcend ordinary human life—an aspiration that she explores in ancient Greek thought. Nussbaum responded to Taylor in a later essay, “Transcending Humanity,” arguing that we should “reject as incoherent . . . the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constitutive conditions of our humanity, and to seek for a life that is really the life of another sort of being—as if it were a higher and better life for us.” If one aspires to “a more compassionate, subtler, more responsive, more richly human world” than the one we now inhabit, then “there is a great deal of room for transcendence of our ordinary humanity—transcendence, we might say, of an internal and human sort.” The extra-human transcendence that Taylor has in mind has its dangers. “If one thinks that the really important thing is to get over to a different sort of life altogether, then this may well make one work less hard on this one.”In A Secular Age, Taylor observes that Nussbaum is making the familiar secularist objection to religion: it pulls us away from the benevolent project that should be our real preoccupation; it keeps us from taking human desire and neediness seriously. Taylor responds that the move toward transcendence is always internal in its basis, so the distinction between internal and external transcendences can’t do the work that Nussbaum intends. Human aspirations don’t all fit together; they are in tension with one another. Ethical demands and erotic love are both felt internally, but both may seem to be external from the standpoint of the other, each threatening to marginalize an important part of our lives. The same is true with the admiration for military heroism and the desire for perpetual peace. We don’t want to renounce either, but it is not possible, in this world, to have both. Taylor thinks that the “this-worldly” humanitarian concern that Nussbaum advocates points beyond itself toward the transcendent.TAYLOR ENDORSES what Jonathan Lear calls (in a book with that title) “radical hope”—a hope that is, as Lear puts it, “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” In a review of Lear’s book, Taylor is uncertain whether radical hope “can be sustained without some kind of formulated faith in something, whether religious or secular—faith in God, or in History, or in our own resources, or in human resilience.” Any formulation, however, will be inadequate to that toward which it points. It is part of our nature that “we long for things that we do not yet fully understand.”For many people, this hope takes a religious form, and probably could only take a religious form. Consider a crucial episode in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. During the Montgomery bus boycott, a series of death threats, some of them directed at his family, had left him demoralized. “I was ready to give up,” he recalled. Sitting in the kitchen, unable to sleep after a threatening phone call, he began to think of how he could pass the leadership of the desegregation movement on to someone else. He began to pray out loud and, as King recalled, “it seemed to me at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” King’s new courage resulted from direct, felt connection with Christ—“I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me.”—and he persisted in his civil rights advocacy. It made him into the closest thing to a secular saint that twentieth-century America produced. It also got him killed.I’m confident that King was not a fool or a sucker. I can’t tell you why I think that. And so I’m in a poor position to attack the hopes—hopes that to me (in most of my moods) are deeply implausible—that supported him in his confidence. Perhaps he could have arrived in the same place on the basis of Naked Strong Evaluation. Some have. But to do that, he would have had to change in so many ways that it is hard to imagine what he would have looked like. Martin Luther Kings don’t turn up that often, so I’m not inclined to tinker with the ones we have.Wherever you situate yourself in this landscape, your view of the moral universe won’t—and can’t be—a neat, closed system with all the loose ends tidied up. Recognizing this can inoculate us against two related errors: One is to think that we have all the answers. The other, perhaps even more malign, is to be too confident of what the other fellow’s beliefs entail: that his or her “belief in God produces fanaticism” or “atheism leads to immorality.”Naked Strong Evaluation is very difficult, perhaps even unimaginable, for many people who can be reliable allies in the cause of human rights. On the other hand, quite a lot of people seem to be able to pull it off. We’re all stumbling around in the dark, grabbing as much of the elephant as we can. It is unseemly to mock one another’s shortsightedness. Taylor’s book does a wonderful job of elucidating the predicament that is, at the deepest level, what unites us.
Andrew Koppelman is the co-author (with Tobias Barrington Wolff) of A Right to Discriminate? How the Case of Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale Warped the Law of Free Association, forthcoming from Yale University Press.
23.2.09
Alcohol
Standing behind a bar for much of my early adulthood, I wasn’t a big reader. My literary inclinations were limited to the New York Post’s sports section and the Daily Racing Form when a friend handed me a Raymond Chandler novel. “Go ahead,” he said. “It won’t kill you.” I read just the one, put it down, and really didn’t give it much thought. Their words were seductive, but so was the sound of ice clinking in a glass.
But this is how addictions begin, subtly and then suddenly. Soon I found myself devouring every hard-boiled word of Chandler’s. And then I read them again. I started talking in similes and metaphors. One day I told a dear friend that he had a face like a collapsed lung. I couldn’t help myself. A progression took hold. Chandler led me to Hammett and from Hammett I staggered to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald led me to Hemingway.Sure, what drew me to these writers were their words: some terse and declarative, others colorful and descriptive. But the attraction also held something far more sinister: the subtle sound of ice clinking in a glass, the muted laughter of an inside joke told a few tables away, the seductive swirl of cigarette smoke climbing to the barroom ceiling. I couldn’t get enough.
Throughout my early 30s, my reading addiction began to conspire against me. I found myself working behind the bar at Elaine’s and there I came face-to-face with my demon.For almost 50 years Elaine Kaufman has attracted writers to her restaurant as though she were giving away royalty checks. And though not all of them turned me on, there were a few who, when they walked through the door, had me jonesing like a street junkie. Late one night Hunter S. Thompson sat by himself at a back table lighting shots of Bacardi 151 rum with his Zippo and firing them down the hatch. I don’t remember how many flaming shots he drank — but I do remember the last one. Something had gone horribly wrong with his technique. When I looked back at him he was on fire. Only the quick thinking of Carlo the waiter, who snatched a nearby tablecloth and used it to smother the blue flames, saved Dr. Thompson from escalating into a three-alarm blaze.
If you were there that night at Elaine’s, no doubt you would have seen a drunk, crazy man who had set his own hands on fire. But what I saw was a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and a pint of raw ether.
The day after the Thompson immolation, I read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in my studio apartment, the door locked, the phone turned off, the shades drawn. I found myself wandering the streets for more. Thompson led me to Jack Kerouac and Kerouac to Charles Bukowski. Eventually it was the plays of Eugene O’Neill. My bookshelf began to sag under the weight of drunken writers.
I knew things were bad when I started buying the biographies of the writers I craved: Truman Capote, Fitzgerald and Chandler. From these texts, I learned that Chandler would sober up when he wrote. He would retreat to his cabin in the California hills and white-knuckle his words onto the page, every one of them bringing him closer to his next drink. I knew that Capote often drank martinis while writing “In Cold Blood.” I read Scott Fitzgerald’s letters from France begging his editor, Maxwell Perkins, for money to pay bar tabs and buy cigarettes.
It was all so intoxicating. Capote once said that he drank because “it’s the only time I can stand it.” His reasoning probably sounded convoluted to most, but seemed perfectly logical to me. When your addiction begins to swallow you the only way to endure the pain is to swallow back. I got to the point where I read my favorite writers because I couldn’t stand it.
The reality of my favorite writers’ lives, at least the ends of their lives, wasn’t romantic at all. Hemingway and, later, Hunter chose the coward’s way out; Chandler tried his hardest to join them. He went into the shower one day with a loaded pistol and pulled the trigger twice. Only by the grace of God — and the fact that he was schnockered to the eyeballs — did he miss both times. Most of the rest of my bookshelf had drunk themselves into early dirt naps.
All seemed hopeless. That night I lay on my couch clutching an old, stained copy of “The Long Goodbye” to my breast and cried myself to sleep.
The next morning, I awoke, emotionally weakened and physically drained, and made my way to a nearby Barnes & Noble. There a salesperson named Daniel gently led me to the memoir section. At first I recoiled. No, I cried, anything but this! I needed a whiskey-soaked fiction bad. But Daniel handed me Pete Hamill’s “A Drinking Life.” I read it slowly, doubting every page. But then something miraculous happened before I was halfway through: I liked it. I liked it a lot.
This new reading life wasn’t easy. The urge to slip back to my old ways was strong. I took it one book at a time. Hamill led the way to Mary Karr’s “Cherry,” then “Home Before Dark,” Susan Cheever’s memoir of life with her father, John Cheever. Soon I had a whole new bookshelf given over to writers who wrote just like my beloved boozers but did so in the past tense.
I haven’t felt the need to pick up a Chandler or Hammett for five years now, and my reading horizons have opened considerably. I still enjoy a good boozy memoir every now and then — J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar” is one that comes to mind — but I’ve discovered that there are libraries filled with writers who never needed liquor as a muse.
Still, it’s not like Hammett, Chandler and the rest don’t call to me. They do. They exist deep in my soul, having their bourbons and hammering away at their typewriters. I keep them safely down there by helping others addicted to drunken writers. They’re easy to spot. They gather in front of the Strand scouring the $1 racks, they have rings around their eyes from all night reading sessions, they talk in similes. The other day one of them told me I had a head like a bucket of mud.
But this is how addictions begin, subtly and then suddenly. Soon I found myself devouring every hard-boiled word of Chandler’s. And then I read them again. I started talking in similes and metaphors. One day I told a dear friend that he had a face like a collapsed lung. I couldn’t help myself. A progression took hold. Chandler led me to Hammett and from Hammett I staggered to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald led me to Hemingway.Sure, what drew me to these writers were their words: some terse and declarative, others colorful and descriptive. But the attraction also held something far more sinister: the subtle sound of ice clinking in a glass, the muted laughter of an inside joke told a few tables away, the seductive swirl of cigarette smoke climbing to the barroom ceiling. I couldn’t get enough.
Throughout my early 30s, my reading addiction began to conspire against me. I found myself working behind the bar at Elaine’s and there I came face-to-face with my demon.For almost 50 years Elaine Kaufman has attracted writers to her restaurant as though she were giving away royalty checks. And though not all of them turned me on, there were a few who, when they walked through the door, had me jonesing like a street junkie. Late one night Hunter S. Thompson sat by himself at a back table lighting shots of Bacardi 151 rum with his Zippo and firing them down the hatch. I don’t remember how many flaming shots he drank — but I do remember the last one. Something had gone horribly wrong with his technique. When I looked back at him he was on fire. Only the quick thinking of Carlo the waiter, who snatched a nearby tablecloth and used it to smother the blue flames, saved Dr. Thompson from escalating into a three-alarm blaze.
If you were there that night at Elaine’s, no doubt you would have seen a drunk, crazy man who had set his own hands on fire. But what I saw was a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and a pint of raw ether.
The day after the Thompson immolation, I read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in my studio apartment, the door locked, the phone turned off, the shades drawn. I found myself wandering the streets for more. Thompson led me to Jack Kerouac and Kerouac to Charles Bukowski. Eventually it was the plays of Eugene O’Neill. My bookshelf began to sag under the weight of drunken writers.
I knew things were bad when I started buying the biographies of the writers I craved: Truman Capote, Fitzgerald and Chandler. From these texts, I learned that Chandler would sober up when he wrote. He would retreat to his cabin in the California hills and white-knuckle his words onto the page, every one of them bringing him closer to his next drink. I knew that Capote often drank martinis while writing “In Cold Blood.” I read Scott Fitzgerald’s letters from France begging his editor, Maxwell Perkins, for money to pay bar tabs and buy cigarettes.
It was all so intoxicating. Capote once said that he drank because “it’s the only time I can stand it.” His reasoning probably sounded convoluted to most, but seemed perfectly logical to me. When your addiction begins to swallow you the only way to endure the pain is to swallow back. I got to the point where I read my favorite writers because I couldn’t stand it.
The reality of my favorite writers’ lives, at least the ends of their lives, wasn’t romantic at all. Hemingway and, later, Hunter chose the coward’s way out; Chandler tried his hardest to join them. He went into the shower one day with a loaded pistol and pulled the trigger twice. Only by the grace of God — and the fact that he was schnockered to the eyeballs — did he miss both times. Most of the rest of my bookshelf had drunk themselves into early dirt naps.
All seemed hopeless. That night I lay on my couch clutching an old, stained copy of “The Long Goodbye” to my breast and cried myself to sleep.
The next morning, I awoke, emotionally weakened and physically drained, and made my way to a nearby Barnes & Noble. There a salesperson named Daniel gently led me to the memoir section. At first I recoiled. No, I cried, anything but this! I needed a whiskey-soaked fiction bad. But Daniel handed me Pete Hamill’s “A Drinking Life.” I read it slowly, doubting every page. But then something miraculous happened before I was halfway through: I liked it. I liked it a lot.
This new reading life wasn’t easy. The urge to slip back to my old ways was strong. I took it one book at a time. Hamill led the way to Mary Karr’s “Cherry,” then “Home Before Dark,” Susan Cheever’s memoir of life with her father, John Cheever. Soon I had a whole new bookshelf given over to writers who wrote just like my beloved boozers but did so in the past tense.
I haven’t felt the need to pick up a Chandler or Hammett for five years now, and my reading horizons have opened considerably. I still enjoy a good boozy memoir every now and then — J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar” is one that comes to mind — but I’ve discovered that there are libraries filled with writers who never needed liquor as a muse.
Still, it’s not like Hammett, Chandler and the rest don’t call to me. They do. They exist deep in my soul, having their bourbons and hammering away at their typewriters. I keep them safely down there by helping others addicted to drunken writers. They’re easy to spot. They gather in front of the Strand scouring the $1 racks, they have rings around their eyes from all night reading sessions, they talk in similes. The other day one of them told me I had a head like a bucket of mud.
22.2.09
Renaldo Kuhner
His Secret World, Opening to Tourists
The filmmaker Brett Ingram remembers the first time he saw Renaldo Kuhler. Mr. Ingram was riding a bus here in 1994 when a tall man with a white beard and ponytail boarded. The man greeted the driver in a loud, affable growl with a hint of a German accent. Mr. Ingram was struck by his outfit: snug shorts, high white socks, a handmade bolo tie, a military-looking jacket and a railroad cap.
“I thought, ‘Now there’s an interesting character,’ ” Mr. Ingram recalled recently.
Two years later Mr. Ingram took a job in the media department of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. Touring the staff rooms on his first day, he was surprised to be introduced to the odd man he had seen on the bus. Mr. Kuhler had been a scientific illustrator at the museum since 1969, drawing hundreds of gorgeously detailed portraits of snakes and spiders, bats and shrews, for display, and as illustrations in natural history books.
But it was Mr. Kuhler’s private work, revealed a little at a time as the two became friends, that intrigued Mr. Ingram. From cartons stacked around his desk Mr. Kuhler shyly pulled pen-and-ink drawings and watercolors of fantastic-looking cities peopled by men and women in Victorian-looking dress, cartoonishly rendered yet startlingly vibrant. There were also dozens of notebooks filled with a strange language rendered in ornate script.
Mr. Ingram said he gradually realized he was seeing fragments of an astonishing imaginary universe, epic in scope and minutely observed. Mr. Kuhler called it Rocaterrania, an homage to Rockland County in New York, where he grew up, and had been secretly, obsessively creating it for 50 years. “The level of detail was staggering,” Mr. Ingram said. “There were hundreds of characters. It conveyed the emotional energy of someone who had spent years and years literally in his own world.”
The secret world of Renaldo Kuhler is about to go public. “Rocaterrania,” a feature-length documentary that Mr. Ingram began shooting in 1997, will have its premiere on Feb. 28 at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, Calif. And in October Rocaterrania will have its first museum exhibition, part of a yearlong group show at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
“Renaldo’s extremely talented,” Roger Manley, the show’s curator, said. “He’s very much in the mold of somebody like Henry Darger,” the Chicago janitor who over a half-century created his own private world, which wasn’t discovered until his death in 1973.
At 77 Mr. Kuhler is something of a local legend in Raleigh for his eccentric dress and manner. On an evening in late January he sipped a glass of vodka in the 42nd Street Oyster Bar here under a framed photograph identifying him as a “Famous Customer.” Warmly greeted by the staff and patrons, he introduced denizens by playful nicknames. (Mr. Ingram is addressed as Spike.)He flirted gallantly with the women, telling them, “You have beautiful teeth” or “You are a horse’s ears,” high praise in his personal code.
In Mr. Ingram’s film Mr. Kuhler describes how fantasy and reality intertwined in his life. Rocaterrania “directly tells the story of my life and my struggle to become what I am today,” he said. “I am Rocaterrania.”
Born in 1931 and named Ronald by his parents, Otto and Simonne, Mr. Kuhler grew up in Blauvelt, N.Y. Otto Kuhler, a German immigrant, was a prominent designer of streamlined locomotives in the 1930s and ’40s and a landscape painter. Simonne was Belgian. “They were introverted and very critical,” Mr. Kuhler said, sipping his vodka. “Very few people were good enough for them.”
Himself a gifted painter, Otto Kuhler did little to encourage his son’s talent, Mr. Kuhler said: “I mostly taught myself.”
His parents sent him away to boarding school. “Those were miserable years,” he said. He was desperately shy and starved for affection, a chronic bed-wetter teased by other students. His only escape was the occasional trip to visit his father’s industrial design offices on Liberty Street in Manhattan, where he loved to ride the Sixth Avenue El.
In 1948, when he was 17, he moved with his parents to a remote ranch in Colorado. For an already isolated teenager it felt like extreme exile. He refused to become the cowboy his parents wanted him to be, he said, though he loved horses for their quiet gentleness (which is why “horse’s ears” is a compliment).
He retreated into his imagination and began to create the private refuge that became Rocaterrania, a tiny sovereign nation in New York State along the Canadian border. He gave it a detailed history of tyrannical despots at least partly inspired by his parents, and populist uprisings reflecting his own struggles for autonomy. He developed its language, Rocaterranski, and designed its alphabet. It has its own small version of Paris, Ciudad Eldorado, with its own eclectic style of architecture, and its own fashions, which inspired Mr. Kuhler’s outfits.
For years the citizens of Rocaterrania were his only friends. In the mid-1950s he attended the University of Colorado, majoring in history. He said he stood out as a skinny loner who smoked a pipe and wore three-piece suits with bowler hats on a campus where others preferred letter sweaters and crew cuts. “Everyone conformed,” he growled. “But I refused. Better to be a minute entity than a nonentity.”
On a mantel in his apartment is a small portrait of a pretty young blond woman painted in enamels and house paint. She is Jeanette Lingart, another product of his imagination, whom he envisioned moving from Rocaterrania to be his college sweetheart in Colorado. Later he imagined her returning to Rocaterrania and opening a nightclub, the Oasis, inspired by the Casino in Central Park.
He never had a real girlfriend in college and has never married. As in the work of Darger, another loner, a certain sexual ambiguity is evident in Rocaterrania. Its inhabitants include a race of “neutants,” including Peekle, an anatomically robust boy-girl with a jutting “Nixon nose.”
In 1963 he legally changed his name from Ronald Otto Louis Kuhler to the more musical Renaldo Gillet (pronounced gee-LAY) Kuhler. After moving to Raleigh, where he said he arrived as “a lost stranger” at 37, he continued to cultivate the quirky, garrulous public persona that seems a shy man’s interface with the outside world.
Still, he kept Rocaterrania almost entirely to himself until meeting Mr. Ingram. “It was none of their business,” Mr. Kuhler said. “They wouldn’t have understood. Something about Spike told me he’d be tolerant and not think it odd.”
A North Carolina native, Mr. Ingram, 42, teaches film at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His first feature film, “Monster Road,” a portrait of the idiosyncratic Claymation artist Bruce Bickford, won the best-documentary award at several 2004 film festivals. A 2007 Guggenheim fellowship helped him finance the completion of “Rocaterrania.”
Mr. Kuhler was asked if, after hiding his secret world for so long, he was prepared to become more than a famous customer at his favorite watering hole.
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “I always wanted to stand out. I’m a glory hunter.”
The filmmaker Brett Ingram remembers the first time he saw Renaldo Kuhler. Mr. Ingram was riding a bus here in 1994 when a tall man with a white beard and ponytail boarded. The man greeted the driver in a loud, affable growl with a hint of a German accent. Mr. Ingram was struck by his outfit: snug shorts, high white socks, a handmade bolo tie, a military-looking jacket and a railroad cap.
“I thought, ‘Now there’s an interesting character,’ ” Mr. Ingram recalled recently.
Two years later Mr. Ingram took a job in the media department of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. Touring the staff rooms on his first day, he was surprised to be introduced to the odd man he had seen on the bus. Mr. Kuhler had been a scientific illustrator at the museum since 1969, drawing hundreds of gorgeously detailed portraits of snakes and spiders, bats and shrews, for display, and as illustrations in natural history books.
But it was Mr. Kuhler’s private work, revealed a little at a time as the two became friends, that intrigued Mr. Ingram. From cartons stacked around his desk Mr. Kuhler shyly pulled pen-and-ink drawings and watercolors of fantastic-looking cities peopled by men and women in Victorian-looking dress, cartoonishly rendered yet startlingly vibrant. There were also dozens of notebooks filled with a strange language rendered in ornate script.
Mr. Ingram said he gradually realized he was seeing fragments of an astonishing imaginary universe, epic in scope and minutely observed. Mr. Kuhler called it Rocaterrania, an homage to Rockland County in New York, where he grew up, and had been secretly, obsessively creating it for 50 years. “The level of detail was staggering,” Mr. Ingram said. “There were hundreds of characters. It conveyed the emotional energy of someone who had spent years and years literally in his own world.”
The secret world of Renaldo Kuhler is about to go public. “Rocaterrania,” a feature-length documentary that Mr. Ingram began shooting in 1997, will have its premiere on Feb. 28 at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, Calif. And in October Rocaterrania will have its first museum exhibition, part of a yearlong group show at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
“Renaldo’s extremely talented,” Roger Manley, the show’s curator, said. “He’s very much in the mold of somebody like Henry Darger,” the Chicago janitor who over a half-century created his own private world, which wasn’t discovered until his death in 1973.
At 77 Mr. Kuhler is something of a local legend in Raleigh for his eccentric dress and manner. On an evening in late January he sipped a glass of vodka in the 42nd Street Oyster Bar here under a framed photograph identifying him as a “Famous Customer.” Warmly greeted by the staff and patrons, he introduced denizens by playful nicknames. (Mr. Ingram is addressed as Spike.)He flirted gallantly with the women, telling them, “You have beautiful teeth” or “You are a horse’s ears,” high praise in his personal code.
In Mr. Ingram’s film Mr. Kuhler describes how fantasy and reality intertwined in his life. Rocaterrania “directly tells the story of my life and my struggle to become what I am today,” he said. “I am Rocaterrania.”
Born in 1931 and named Ronald by his parents, Otto and Simonne, Mr. Kuhler grew up in Blauvelt, N.Y. Otto Kuhler, a German immigrant, was a prominent designer of streamlined locomotives in the 1930s and ’40s and a landscape painter. Simonne was Belgian. “They were introverted and very critical,” Mr. Kuhler said, sipping his vodka. “Very few people were good enough for them.”
Himself a gifted painter, Otto Kuhler did little to encourage his son’s talent, Mr. Kuhler said: “I mostly taught myself.”
His parents sent him away to boarding school. “Those were miserable years,” he said. He was desperately shy and starved for affection, a chronic bed-wetter teased by other students. His only escape was the occasional trip to visit his father’s industrial design offices on Liberty Street in Manhattan, where he loved to ride the Sixth Avenue El.
In 1948, when he was 17, he moved with his parents to a remote ranch in Colorado. For an already isolated teenager it felt like extreme exile. He refused to become the cowboy his parents wanted him to be, he said, though he loved horses for their quiet gentleness (which is why “horse’s ears” is a compliment).
He retreated into his imagination and began to create the private refuge that became Rocaterrania, a tiny sovereign nation in New York State along the Canadian border. He gave it a detailed history of tyrannical despots at least partly inspired by his parents, and populist uprisings reflecting his own struggles for autonomy. He developed its language, Rocaterranski, and designed its alphabet. It has its own small version of Paris, Ciudad Eldorado, with its own eclectic style of architecture, and its own fashions, which inspired Mr. Kuhler’s outfits.
For years the citizens of Rocaterrania were his only friends. In the mid-1950s he attended the University of Colorado, majoring in history. He said he stood out as a skinny loner who smoked a pipe and wore three-piece suits with bowler hats on a campus where others preferred letter sweaters and crew cuts. “Everyone conformed,” he growled. “But I refused. Better to be a minute entity than a nonentity.”
On a mantel in his apartment is a small portrait of a pretty young blond woman painted in enamels and house paint. She is Jeanette Lingart, another product of his imagination, whom he envisioned moving from Rocaterrania to be his college sweetheart in Colorado. Later he imagined her returning to Rocaterrania and opening a nightclub, the Oasis, inspired by the Casino in Central Park.
He never had a real girlfriend in college and has never married. As in the work of Darger, another loner, a certain sexual ambiguity is evident in Rocaterrania. Its inhabitants include a race of “neutants,” including Peekle, an anatomically robust boy-girl with a jutting “Nixon nose.”
In 1963 he legally changed his name from Ronald Otto Louis Kuhler to the more musical Renaldo Gillet (pronounced gee-LAY) Kuhler. After moving to Raleigh, where he said he arrived as “a lost stranger” at 37, he continued to cultivate the quirky, garrulous public persona that seems a shy man’s interface with the outside world.
Still, he kept Rocaterrania almost entirely to himself until meeting Mr. Ingram. “It was none of their business,” Mr. Kuhler said. “They wouldn’t have understood. Something about Spike told me he’d be tolerant and not think it odd.”
A North Carolina native, Mr. Ingram, 42, teaches film at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His first feature film, “Monster Road,” a portrait of the idiosyncratic Claymation artist Bruce Bickford, won the best-documentary award at several 2004 film festivals. A 2007 Guggenheim fellowship helped him finance the completion of “Rocaterrania.”
Mr. Kuhler was asked if, after hiding his secret world for so long, he was prepared to become more than a famous customer at his favorite watering hole.
“Oh yeah,” he replied. “I always wanted to stand out. I’m a glory hunter.”
Banks
The Real Reason Bank Stocks Are Tanking
by William D. Cohan
Henny Ray Abrams / AP PhotoAs late as Friday, even as their stocks tanked, America’s banking leaders were still in denial. No wonder they have no credibility.
So why are our largest money-center banks—you know, the ones that are supposed to be the survivors of the financial crisis, like JPMorganChase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—in the process of a further, and possibly fatal, meltdown? Last week alone, Citigroup’s stock fell by one-third, JPMorgan’s fell 13 percent, and the shares of Bank of America and Wells Fargo each fell by 25 percent.
With apologies to economist Nouriel Roubini, the “Dr. Doom” of the financial crisis, the reason for the continuing collapse in the financial sector is not that the prospect of nationalization looms large for these money-center banks, although if that were to happen, shareholders would be wiped out in much the same fashion as those of AIG. Rather, the reason for the downward spiral is that, incredibly, some 20 months into the crisis, credibility is still the most acute problem facing the banks. We still don’t know the extent of the toxicity of the assets on their books and, in many cases but not all, we no longer trust the people who run these institutions to tell us the truth about the danger lurking therein. Until the trust in these institutions is restored, and soon, there can be no equity or franchise value, regardless of whether the government or the existing shareholders owns the equity.
It shameful that Bank of America chairman and CEO Ken Lewis has no capacity to admit that his decision to buy both Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch was beyond irresponsible.
And frankly, at the moment, why should we trust these erstwhile leaders? Some of these are the very men—would that a few women were in charge!—who got us into this mess in the first place. Not only should many of them been dismissed months ago, but they also seem unable to ’fess up to their collective roles in the disaster.
A sampling of the myths still being perpetrated by these Wall Street executives reveals the extent of the ongoing problem. From Dick Fuld, the longtime CEO of Lehman Brothers, during his congressional testimony from last October: “I wake up every single night thinking, ‘What could I have done differently?…What could I have said? What should I have done?’…I made those decisions with the information that I had. Having said all that, I can look right at you and say this is a pain that will stay with me for the rest of my life...”
And then in January, from one of Fuld’s several apologists, Harvey Miller, the partner at law firm Weil, Gotshal, which represents the Lehman carcass: “Lehman was a victim of a financial tsunami that was beyond its control.”
Miller wrote in a January 5 letter in response to a court motion made by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli: “…[T]he Comptroller is oblivious to the critical facts that caused the financial meltdown that engulfed Lehman and, generally, the financial markets, including inter alia, the failure of the government authorities to appropriately regulate and oversee financial markets and the deficiencies of the rating agencies….[T]he Chairman of the Federal Reserve System and the United States Treasury Department, as well as others, failed to foresee the oncoming financial tsunami, as did most of the economists and the financial analysts.”
So Fuld, by his own admission and that of his high-priced attorney, simply bears no responsibility for what happened? Please.
But wait, there’s more, much more. Alan Schwartz, CEO of Bear Stearns at the end, was similarly at a loss to explain what he or his firm could have done differently to prevent its fate when he testified before Congress last April: “I can guarantee you it’s a subject I’ve thought about a lot…saying [to myself], ‘If I’d have known exactly the forces that were coming, what actions could we have taken beforehand to have avoided this situation?’ And I just simply have not been able to come up with anything, even with the benefit of hindsight, that would have made a difference to the situation that we faced.”
Robert Rubin, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, former secretary of the treasury, and the former power behind the throne at Citigroup, told an enthralled audience at the 92nd Street Y a few weeks back that there was a confluence of the most extraordinary events that caused the problems, from high oil prices to high housing prices to unscrupulous mortgage lenders and less than vigilant rating agencies.
“You put that all together and then add one more item to that—which is global interconnectivity, that it is to say all of this very quickly spread around the world, so the problems developed here, they broke and they occurred elsewhere—all of that started to have more effect on the real economy, and it all came together in what some people have referred to as a perfect storm,” said Rubin. “And maybe the term is trite, but I think the idea, which is that a kind of a coming together that was a low probability event that then gave rise to a set of conditions as the most extreme since the 1930s is I think sort of what happened. Not sort of—that is what happened.”
During his nine years at Citigroup, Rubin was paid around $115 million. But he could not admit in a public forum to any personal responsibility for what happened or to the role Citigroup played in it. This is shameful.
It also shameful that Ken Lewis, chairman and CEO of Bank of America, has no capacity to admit that his decision to buy both Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch was beyond irresponsible. These two deals, for which Bank of America badly overpaid, have put his company and his various stakeholders—employees, shareholders, and debt holders—on the brink of financial disaster. Lewis is blind to it. On Friday, he lamely defended these deals, claiming that business was picking up at both firms and that their wisdom would soon be apparent.
“I met with a group of about a hundred of our top leaders to discuss what’s going on in the businesses and listen to their thoughts and concerns,” he wrote in a memo to all employees. “We talked about the great challenges we’re all facing in the marketplace. But we also talked about how encouraging it is to work with such strong teammates, to have the trust and support of our customers and clients, and to have the position in our markets that we do. As we concluded the meeting, I told them that we have a clear challenge in front of us: to prove the cynics and the critics wrong. I know we can do that—in fact, I think we’re doing it now, in the work each of you is doing every day, and the business results you’re putting up on the board.” Pure pabulum.
Until Wall Street CEOs admit that their blind ambition and ravenous greed resulted in decision after decision, year after year that put their firms, and now our financial system and way of life, at perilous risk, there can be no healing, no redemption, and no recovery. The sooner we squeeze the life out of the pathetic myths that Wall Street continues to perpetrate as if we were all idiots, and the sooner we face the truth of what happened and why, the sooner we will be able to put this dreadful chapter in our history behind us. Let’s get on with it already.
William D. Cohan, a former senior-level M&A banker on Wall Street, is the author of The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co. Cohan's House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, will be published by Doubleday in 2009. He also writes for Fortune, ArtNews, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post.
by William D. Cohan
Henny Ray Abrams / AP PhotoAs late as Friday, even as their stocks tanked, America’s banking leaders were still in denial. No wonder they have no credibility.
So why are our largest money-center banks—you know, the ones that are supposed to be the survivors of the financial crisis, like JPMorganChase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—in the process of a further, and possibly fatal, meltdown? Last week alone, Citigroup’s stock fell by one-third, JPMorgan’s fell 13 percent, and the shares of Bank of America and Wells Fargo each fell by 25 percent.
With apologies to economist Nouriel Roubini, the “Dr. Doom” of the financial crisis, the reason for the continuing collapse in the financial sector is not that the prospect of nationalization looms large for these money-center banks, although if that were to happen, shareholders would be wiped out in much the same fashion as those of AIG. Rather, the reason for the downward spiral is that, incredibly, some 20 months into the crisis, credibility is still the most acute problem facing the banks. We still don’t know the extent of the toxicity of the assets on their books and, in many cases but not all, we no longer trust the people who run these institutions to tell us the truth about the danger lurking therein. Until the trust in these institutions is restored, and soon, there can be no equity or franchise value, regardless of whether the government or the existing shareholders owns the equity.
It shameful that Bank of America chairman and CEO Ken Lewis has no capacity to admit that his decision to buy both Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch was beyond irresponsible.
And frankly, at the moment, why should we trust these erstwhile leaders? Some of these are the very men—would that a few women were in charge!—who got us into this mess in the first place. Not only should many of them been dismissed months ago, but they also seem unable to ’fess up to their collective roles in the disaster.
A sampling of the myths still being perpetrated by these Wall Street executives reveals the extent of the ongoing problem. From Dick Fuld, the longtime CEO of Lehman Brothers, during his congressional testimony from last October: “I wake up every single night thinking, ‘What could I have done differently?…What could I have said? What should I have done?’…I made those decisions with the information that I had. Having said all that, I can look right at you and say this is a pain that will stay with me for the rest of my life...”
And then in January, from one of Fuld’s several apologists, Harvey Miller, the partner at law firm Weil, Gotshal, which represents the Lehman carcass: “Lehman was a victim of a financial tsunami that was beyond its control.”
Miller wrote in a January 5 letter in response to a court motion made by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli: “…[T]he Comptroller is oblivious to the critical facts that caused the financial meltdown that engulfed Lehman and, generally, the financial markets, including inter alia, the failure of the government authorities to appropriately regulate and oversee financial markets and the deficiencies of the rating agencies….[T]he Chairman of the Federal Reserve System and the United States Treasury Department, as well as others, failed to foresee the oncoming financial tsunami, as did most of the economists and the financial analysts.”
So Fuld, by his own admission and that of his high-priced attorney, simply bears no responsibility for what happened? Please.
But wait, there’s more, much more. Alan Schwartz, CEO of Bear Stearns at the end, was similarly at a loss to explain what he or his firm could have done differently to prevent its fate when he testified before Congress last April: “I can guarantee you it’s a subject I’ve thought about a lot…saying [to myself], ‘If I’d have known exactly the forces that were coming, what actions could we have taken beforehand to have avoided this situation?’ And I just simply have not been able to come up with anything, even with the benefit of hindsight, that would have made a difference to the situation that we faced.”
Robert Rubin, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, former secretary of the treasury, and the former power behind the throne at Citigroup, told an enthralled audience at the 92nd Street Y a few weeks back that there was a confluence of the most extraordinary events that caused the problems, from high oil prices to high housing prices to unscrupulous mortgage lenders and less than vigilant rating agencies.
“You put that all together and then add one more item to that—which is global interconnectivity, that it is to say all of this very quickly spread around the world, so the problems developed here, they broke and they occurred elsewhere—all of that started to have more effect on the real economy, and it all came together in what some people have referred to as a perfect storm,” said Rubin. “And maybe the term is trite, but I think the idea, which is that a kind of a coming together that was a low probability event that then gave rise to a set of conditions as the most extreme since the 1930s is I think sort of what happened. Not sort of—that is what happened.”
During his nine years at Citigroup, Rubin was paid around $115 million. But he could not admit in a public forum to any personal responsibility for what happened or to the role Citigroup played in it. This is shameful.
It also shameful that Ken Lewis, chairman and CEO of Bank of America, has no capacity to admit that his decision to buy both Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch was beyond irresponsible. These two deals, for which Bank of America badly overpaid, have put his company and his various stakeholders—employees, shareholders, and debt holders—on the brink of financial disaster. Lewis is blind to it. On Friday, he lamely defended these deals, claiming that business was picking up at both firms and that their wisdom would soon be apparent.
“I met with a group of about a hundred of our top leaders to discuss what’s going on in the businesses and listen to their thoughts and concerns,” he wrote in a memo to all employees. “We talked about the great challenges we’re all facing in the marketplace. But we also talked about how encouraging it is to work with such strong teammates, to have the trust and support of our customers and clients, and to have the position in our markets that we do. As we concluded the meeting, I told them that we have a clear challenge in front of us: to prove the cynics and the critics wrong. I know we can do that—in fact, I think we’re doing it now, in the work each of you is doing every day, and the business results you’re putting up on the board.” Pure pabulum.
Until Wall Street CEOs admit that their blind ambition and ravenous greed resulted in decision after decision, year after year that put their firms, and now our financial system and way of life, at perilous risk, there can be no healing, no redemption, and no recovery. The sooner we squeeze the life out of the pathetic myths that Wall Street continues to perpetrate as if we were all idiots, and the sooner we face the truth of what happened and why, the sooner we will be able to put this dreadful chapter in our history behind us. Let’s get on with it already.
William D. Cohan, a former senior-level M&A banker on Wall Street, is the author of The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co. Cohan's House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, will be published by Doubleday in 2009. He also writes for Fortune, ArtNews, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post.
21.2.09
A.O. Scott on the Oscars
You may not care about the Oscars, but the Oscars definitely don’t care about you.
The producers and broadcasters of the Academy Awards ceremony want us all to watch, of course, and they fret about the decline in ratings. There has already been ritualistic worrying about the low box-office returns collected by some of the best picture nominees this year. While “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” have done pretty well, the combined grosses of the other three would barely reach the bellybutton of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Has the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lost touch — or broken faith — with the moviegoing public?
The question makes sense only if you believe that any such faith existed in the first place, or that the moviegoing public is something more than a mathematical abstraction. But hand-wringing about the state of the audience has become such a staple of Oscar-season discourse that its peculiar double-edged logic deserves some unpacking.
There is a fake-populist version, favored by hard-nosed business columnists and trade paper wiseguys, which condemns the elitism of the academy. All those heavy-duty, deep-dish, politically correct dramas! Don’t those academicians understand that the people want “Friday the 13th” and “The Dark Knight,” Harry Potter and Pixar?
The response is simply to turn the accusation on its head, to answer fake populism with ersatz high-mindedness and lament the coarsening of popular taste. All these wonderful, serious films, and so few discerning customers paying money to see them! Offered an exquisite delicacy like “The Reader,” Americans flock to, um, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Apparently you’d rather watch an overweight shopping center guard chase bad guys than watch an illiterate concentration camp guard have sex with a teenager. What is wrong with you people?
Underlying both the sighs of the art lovers and the grumblings of the democrats is a shared fantasy, a cloudy, rose-tinted memory of the days when good movies were popular and popular movies were good, and the Academy Awards floated serenely in the cultural mainstream. Remember “The Godfather”? A heck of a picture, that one — a blockbuster and a critical favorite, the film of the year and one for the ages. Those were the days.
Actually, though, there have been only about three or four such days in the eight-decade history of the Oscars — serendipitous moments when mass taste, artistic distinction and a majority of academy votes magically fell into alignment. And it can happen again. But most of the time it doesn’t. The best picture winner and its satellite laureates are filed away in the cabinets of cultural curiosities, while the parallel histories of cinematic accomplishment and fan behavior go on to write themselves.
In other words, the Oscars have always been trivial, and are best appreciated when they are allowed to be. They have over the years provided an annual sideshow, where the stars dress up, the host cracks awkward jokes and the viewing population feasts for a few hours on the inimitable combination of vulgarity and high-mindedness that defines the image of Hollywood.
And to the extent that this year’s Oscars will uphold this tradition, supplying a dash of sentimentality, sweet (those “Slumdog Millionaire” kids) or bitter (Heath Ledger), a spoonful of suspense (Mickey Rourke or Sean Penn?) and perhaps even a surprise (Melissa Leo!), they may exceed the low expectations that surround them. But the problem — the reason for those low expectations — is that in the past decade these awards have transformed themselves from a harmless, annoying, sometimes enjoyable sideshow into the main event. Less through the ambitions of the academy itself than through a combination of entertainment-media overkill and film industry anxiety, the Oscars have taken on a cultural and economic importance that they can’t possibly sustain and were never meant to have in the first place.
As studio profits have increasingly come from globally marketed, hugely expensive (and often pretty good) franchise movies, the less tangible but still vital reward of prestige has been passed down to a different class of movie. The “A” pictures of an earlier era (sweeping social dramas like “The Best Years of Our Lives” or bittersweet comedies like “The Apartment”) have been reborn as the middle-sized, serious movies that dominate this newspaper’s Friday arts section from October to Christmas. These tend to be literary adaptations (“Brokeback Mountain” and “Atonement”) or biographies of admirable figures of 20th-century history (“Capote” and “Ray”).
Sometimes one of the two or three remaining movie stars will be involved, but more often the casts are composed of actors whose reputations have been secured by previous awards and nominations. Similarly, the directors have usually achieved a level of name recognition that allows them to be referred to, in a shorthand whose theoretical origins are all but forgotten, as auteurs.
What unites these movies is Quality — not as a designation of merit, but rather as a brand. Whether or not particular films qualify as successful works of art, the most important thing is that they be marketed successfully as art films, not in the old sense of being difficult or esoteric but in the tautological new sense of being the kind of movie that might qualify for an award.
And the kind of movie that does best is one that manages to blend art-house or “indie” cachet with old-fashioned populist appeal, combining a degree of originality with reliable and recognizable genre elements. That formula, which worked last year for “No Country for Old Men” — a western and a heist movie as well as a prestigious literary adaptation — has been wielded with particular success by Fox Searchlight, distributor of “Slumdog Millionaire.”
For four of the last five years Searchlight has had a best picture nominee that manages to be both a scrappy little underdog and a specimen of an established mainstream breed. “Sideways” was a buddies-on-the-road comedy. “Little Miss Sunshine” was a family-on-the-road comedy. “Juno” was a teenage romantic comedy. And “Slumdog” is a twofer: a coming-of-age comedy and a fast-paced crime drama.
These are likable movies, and it’s hard to begrudge them their success. But why should an industry award be the measure or the spur of that success? More to the point, why should the inability of other movies to occupy the narrow middle ground of Oscar-worthiness be taken as failure?
Each week, as the fall weather grows colder, a new batch arrives, first in New York and Los Angeles (sometimes by way of Cannes or Toronto) and then in other cities, and every movie is greeted with the same question: Will it get any nominations? The early answer will depend on reviews and on initial grosses; if those auguries look promising, more money will be spent trying to generate momentum, to spin news coverage and to solicit the favor of the voters.
To what end? The phrase “Oscar campaign” has entered the lexicon, but it’s an odd kind of campaign, involving an office with neither symbolic nor actual power and a public that is constitutionally barred from voting. But perhaps the metaphor is military rather than political, since what is required is for one movie — or five of them, in the early phases — to wound, exhaust and ultimately kill the others.
The losers in this cultural blood sport are ambitious, idiosyncratic films that never get a fair chance at an audience, and filmgoers whose attention is distracted by endless, empty chatter about the state of the contest.
Or maybe not distracted. It seems just as likely that the vast, multifarious, unpredictable public is tuning out the Oscar noise and going to see, for example, Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” which has made more money so far than any of his academy-honored efforts. Or maybe they’re fanning out in search of DVDs of the interesting movies the academy overlooked, or taking comfort in the kind of entertainment the academy never seems to recognize. It may be that the more movies matter, the less the Oscars do. And vice versa.
The producers and broadcasters of the Academy Awards ceremony want us all to watch, of course, and they fret about the decline in ratings. There has already been ritualistic worrying about the low box-office returns collected by some of the best picture nominees this year. While “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” have done pretty well, the combined grosses of the other three would barely reach the bellybutton of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Has the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lost touch — or broken faith — with the moviegoing public?
The question makes sense only if you believe that any such faith existed in the first place, or that the moviegoing public is something more than a mathematical abstraction. But hand-wringing about the state of the audience has become such a staple of Oscar-season discourse that its peculiar double-edged logic deserves some unpacking.
There is a fake-populist version, favored by hard-nosed business columnists and trade paper wiseguys, which condemns the elitism of the academy. All those heavy-duty, deep-dish, politically correct dramas! Don’t those academicians understand that the people want “Friday the 13th” and “The Dark Knight,” Harry Potter and Pixar?
The response is simply to turn the accusation on its head, to answer fake populism with ersatz high-mindedness and lament the coarsening of popular taste. All these wonderful, serious films, and so few discerning customers paying money to see them! Offered an exquisite delicacy like “The Reader,” Americans flock to, um, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Apparently you’d rather watch an overweight shopping center guard chase bad guys than watch an illiterate concentration camp guard have sex with a teenager. What is wrong with you people?
Underlying both the sighs of the art lovers and the grumblings of the democrats is a shared fantasy, a cloudy, rose-tinted memory of the days when good movies were popular and popular movies were good, and the Academy Awards floated serenely in the cultural mainstream. Remember “The Godfather”? A heck of a picture, that one — a blockbuster and a critical favorite, the film of the year and one for the ages. Those were the days.
Actually, though, there have been only about three or four such days in the eight-decade history of the Oscars — serendipitous moments when mass taste, artistic distinction and a majority of academy votes magically fell into alignment. And it can happen again. But most of the time it doesn’t. The best picture winner and its satellite laureates are filed away in the cabinets of cultural curiosities, while the parallel histories of cinematic accomplishment and fan behavior go on to write themselves.
In other words, the Oscars have always been trivial, and are best appreciated when they are allowed to be. They have over the years provided an annual sideshow, where the stars dress up, the host cracks awkward jokes and the viewing population feasts for a few hours on the inimitable combination of vulgarity and high-mindedness that defines the image of Hollywood.
And to the extent that this year’s Oscars will uphold this tradition, supplying a dash of sentimentality, sweet (those “Slumdog Millionaire” kids) or bitter (Heath Ledger), a spoonful of suspense (Mickey Rourke or Sean Penn?) and perhaps even a surprise (Melissa Leo!), they may exceed the low expectations that surround them. But the problem — the reason for those low expectations — is that in the past decade these awards have transformed themselves from a harmless, annoying, sometimes enjoyable sideshow into the main event. Less through the ambitions of the academy itself than through a combination of entertainment-media overkill and film industry anxiety, the Oscars have taken on a cultural and economic importance that they can’t possibly sustain and were never meant to have in the first place.
As studio profits have increasingly come from globally marketed, hugely expensive (and often pretty good) franchise movies, the less tangible but still vital reward of prestige has been passed down to a different class of movie. The “A” pictures of an earlier era (sweeping social dramas like “The Best Years of Our Lives” or bittersweet comedies like “The Apartment”) have been reborn as the middle-sized, serious movies that dominate this newspaper’s Friday arts section from October to Christmas. These tend to be literary adaptations (“Brokeback Mountain” and “Atonement”) or biographies of admirable figures of 20th-century history (“Capote” and “Ray”).
Sometimes one of the two or three remaining movie stars will be involved, but more often the casts are composed of actors whose reputations have been secured by previous awards and nominations. Similarly, the directors have usually achieved a level of name recognition that allows them to be referred to, in a shorthand whose theoretical origins are all but forgotten, as auteurs.
What unites these movies is Quality — not as a designation of merit, but rather as a brand. Whether or not particular films qualify as successful works of art, the most important thing is that they be marketed successfully as art films, not in the old sense of being difficult or esoteric but in the tautological new sense of being the kind of movie that might qualify for an award.
And the kind of movie that does best is one that manages to blend art-house or “indie” cachet with old-fashioned populist appeal, combining a degree of originality with reliable and recognizable genre elements. That formula, which worked last year for “No Country for Old Men” — a western and a heist movie as well as a prestigious literary adaptation — has been wielded with particular success by Fox Searchlight, distributor of “Slumdog Millionaire.”
For four of the last five years Searchlight has had a best picture nominee that manages to be both a scrappy little underdog and a specimen of an established mainstream breed. “Sideways” was a buddies-on-the-road comedy. “Little Miss Sunshine” was a family-on-the-road comedy. “Juno” was a teenage romantic comedy. And “Slumdog” is a twofer: a coming-of-age comedy and a fast-paced crime drama.
These are likable movies, and it’s hard to begrudge them their success. But why should an industry award be the measure or the spur of that success? More to the point, why should the inability of other movies to occupy the narrow middle ground of Oscar-worthiness be taken as failure?
Each week, as the fall weather grows colder, a new batch arrives, first in New York and Los Angeles (sometimes by way of Cannes or Toronto) and then in other cities, and every movie is greeted with the same question: Will it get any nominations? The early answer will depend on reviews and on initial grosses; if those auguries look promising, more money will be spent trying to generate momentum, to spin news coverage and to solicit the favor of the voters.
To what end? The phrase “Oscar campaign” has entered the lexicon, but it’s an odd kind of campaign, involving an office with neither symbolic nor actual power and a public that is constitutionally barred from voting. But perhaps the metaphor is military rather than political, since what is required is for one movie — or five of them, in the early phases — to wound, exhaust and ultimately kill the others.
The losers in this cultural blood sport are ambitious, idiosyncratic films that never get a fair chance at an audience, and filmgoers whose attention is distracted by endless, empty chatter about the state of the contest.
Or maybe not distracted. It seems just as likely that the vast, multifarious, unpredictable public is tuning out the Oscar noise and going to see, for example, Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” which has made more money so far than any of his academy-honored efforts. Or maybe they’re fanning out in search of DVDs of the interesting movies the academy overlooked, or taking comfort in the kind of entertainment the academy never seems to recognize. It may be that the more movies matter, the less the Oscars do. And vice versa.
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