Notes on the Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun
February 28, 2007
In preparation for a presentation, I have been reading portions of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah.. which means "Introduction". It is a theoretical introduction to the practice of history, written toward the end of the 14th century.
The beginning of the book is sharply insightful on the subject of methodology.. and he looks at a succession of historical fallacies. The first one is the idea that in the course of the exodus from Egypt there were 600,000 fighting men in the army of the Israelites. That is indeed the number you will find in your Bible. Ibn Khaldun makes mincemeat of this number:
...an army of this size cannot march or fight as a unit. The whole available territory would be too small for it. If it were in battle formation, it would extend two, three or more times beyond the field of vision... The situation at the present day testifies to the correctness of this statement. The past resembles the future more than one drop of water another. [12]
The geography is impossible and the logistics of controlling that number of people are unthinkable. Case closed. Ibn Khaldun makes his case even stronger in the next paragraph by noting the size of the largest armies fielded by the Persians in historical times. Following this historical methodology, when presented with a historical claim a person should imagine that situation in the world as it is today.. and judge accordingly whether that historical claim has any validity. If that situation is unimaginable in the present then it should be unimaginable in the past.
That sounds like an advanced way of thinking about history.. and it is. But Ibn Khaldun switches to the use of what we might term "moral facts" when considering a historical claim. He examines reports that the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid was a wine bibber. The idea is ruled absurd:
It does not in the least agree with ar-Rashid's attitude toward the fulfillment of the requirements of religion and justice... He wept when he heard their sermons. Then, there is his prayer in Mecca when he circumambulated the Ka'bah. [21]
In this way of thinking a known pious reputation is analogous to a geographical fact. A report that violates a moral fact can be discounted.. in the same way that a report of a million people wandering in the desert of the Sinai can be discounted as impossible. Underlying this respect for moral facts is a belief in the unity of human action.. what a person does in private must align with public acts. We are rightfully suspicious of this unity in the modern world, but Ibn Khaldun still has respect for this order of "facts".. as do many people still..
If one is looking for a concept that allows Ibn Khaldun to take this rational view of history, one could do worse than locating it in his view of scholarship. First, understand that there are three types of people: 1) those without any spiritual understanding, 2) those whose thinking moves in the direction of spiritual perception, 3) and those (like prophets) who are able to glimpse the divine in a moment of revelation. Where would Ibn Khaldun place himself? Surprisingly in the lowest order of people: those who are without spiritual perception.
This group of spiritually weak people are
satisfied to move downward toward the perceptions of the senses and imagination and the formation of ideas with the help of the power of memory... according to limited rules and a special order. [77]
It strikes me that plenty of thinkers have looked to kick themselves a step or two closer to spiritual perception. A mystical thinker like Ibn 'Arabi or Rumi termed themselves "knowers" of a higher knowledge. Philosophers back into the Neoplatonic tradition make a similar move. The secret of Ibn Khaldun's critical historical method lies in his willingness to be counted weak in terms of spiritual perception.. and therefore strictly limited to physical reality and logical deduction. That could be a lesson for any of us. Sometimes greatness lies in being something less than a seer..
From the Two Holy Sanctuaries:
A Rich Experience of Mecca and Medina
February 27, 2007
It is possible to divide travel writers into two distinct groups: authors who are content to report the physical stages of travel and striking events that happen along the way.. and then authors who report the interior experience of travel. We could term the works of this latter group Cognitively Rich Travel Texts (CRTT). These works transmit some of the most precious information possible: how a person living at a particular time mentally processed the world.
A new book from Amal Press entitled From the Two Holy Sanctuaries: A Hajj Journal by Gibril Fouad Haddad falls into that latter category. Take for instance the following passage describing a part of the circumambulation of the Kaaba:
Upon nearing the Yemeni corner... I waded my way closer to the Ka'ba to enable myself to touch the Yemeni corner according to the Sunna. Once I reached it, I leaned over and touched it with my right hand, then brought up my right palm to my lips to kiss it. I read in the book of our beloved Shaykh... that the Yemeni Corner, along with the Black Stone Corner, stands on the bases laid by our father Ibrahim... As I turned the corner I recited the prophet's most frequent invocation in his blessed life: "Our Lord! Give unto us in the world that which is good and in the Hereafter that which is good" (2:201)... I also remembered the Prophet's remark as I felt a delightful, refreshing breeze upon turning the Yemeni corner: "I find the rescuing wind (nafas) of the Most Beneficent coming from Yemen." [23]
Few pilgrims give us a glimpse of what was running through their minds as they complete the prescribed rituals.. and what gave meaning to their experience. Haddad shows himself to be steeped in Islamic tradition. Seemingly every step he takes is informed by this tradition. In that short paragraph he makes reference to the Sunna (established traditions), a book written by his Shaykh, a Quranic invocation, and then a traditional remark of Muhammad.
This layer or references and tradition makes for a rich internal experience (and this could apply to all travel experiences, not just that of the hajj). Many pilgrims do not experience their world in this layered rich manner, and they complete the circumambulations because that is what they are supposed to do.. and likely a guide is there telling them what to do and when. But a CRTT such as this one by Haddad gives a sense of what is possible for the pilgrim.. the extent to which actions can be made meaningful through deep knowledge of tradition.
Having described in detail the experience of Medina and Mecca, Haddad moves on to a more controversial topic: the diminishment of the pilgrims' experience by contemporary hostility to certain pilgrimage traditions. This complaint is made more powerful since we have already witnessed how richly he responds to the holy places. One can feel his exasperation at the efforts to prune back his experience:
Sadly, during our stay in the Two Holy Sanctuaries, we and the other pilgrims were bombarded with an incessant flow of disinformation promoting, for the most part, the undesirability of visiting the Prophet in Medina. This false teaching was pushed on the people, time and again, in ten-minute pep talks after prayers in neighborhood mosques, in post-maghrib hour-long talks in the Two Mosques, on the audio cassette tapes that were distributed freely, in the free handbooks written in various languages... [31]
It is traditional for pilgrims to make the journey to the city of Medina where Muhammad is buried.. This is not part of the official rituals of the hajj, but it is nevertheless standard and expected part of the hajj experience. The religious establishment of Saudi Arabia is Wahhabi.. a strict sect that has worked to purify Islam from extraneous practices. Incredibly this purifying zeal is turned on the practice of visiting the tomb of the Prophet at Medina.
It is interesting to read this thumbnail sketch of the channels of "disinformation" that are open for Wahhabi teaching: short pep talks in the mosque, hour long talks after evening prayer, audio cassettes, and free handbooks. It is a list of the kinds of informal methods of mass communication that pass under our radar screens.. literature that does not make it into any library and speeches that are not recorded or broadcast anywhere.
Arriving in Arabia the rich experience that Haddad desires is immediately challenged by this strict group. The final chapter in this short book is a defense of the practice of the visitation of the Prophet's tomb, using hadith and traditional authorities to defend his point. In conclusion Haddad writes:
Those who deny this reality are only cutting themselves off from its immense benefits. [44]
What those benefits might be are open for all to read in the first chapter of the book as Haddad describes his experience of Medina. It is rare enough to find a travel narrative that is so careful about the interior experience of travel.. but this book gains added interest in its willingness to engage in a traditional polemical defense of that experience which the author deems so valuable.. and we might learn from this that rich interior experience is something that can and should be defended.
Singing to Aurora:
The Early Origins of Music
February 25, 2007
Continuing my interest in paleolithic parenting methods, I recently started reading Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen. It has been humorous the way Emily and I keep coming up with the same conclusions about child rearing.. she from reading Dr. Sears and ideas about attachment parenting and I from books about human origins. Here is a sentence that shows what I mean:
Demand-feeding—feeding whenever the baby cries for food—is pervasive in all traditional societies and requires close contact between mother and infant all day and night; its approved absence in modern Western society is quite peculiar. [201]
Attachment parenting is a return to traditional parenting methods.. and as far as I am concerned the more paleolithic the better.
I have been fascinated by little Aurora's response to music. Here is this little wee thing, and from the first week of her life she could be calmed by music. That discovery has served me well, as there are always times when Emily needs to run to the grocery store or to the library.. and I am sitting there with a baby who inevitably starts to fuss as soon as the door shuts. Luckily I know just the thing to do.. and I can almost always get her to calm down or even fall asleep if I just sing. She seems to really like the Beach Boys.. and below I have some video of me sending her to sleep with some singing and dancing:
Other times I sing to her unaccompanied, and at those times she gets to hear all the bits of Beatles songs that I can recall.. with Hey Jude and Yesterday in heavy rotation.
But how can these melodies mean anything to Aurora? It seems obvious that the human mind is programmed to appreciate music. After all, our dog never responds to music.. he just lies there. Aurora pops out of the womb and feels music. And this is the point of departure for Mithen's book. Past theories of language and the mind have taken music to be something extra.. a spin-off from our more important communication skills. Experience with children, however, points to the fact that music is something basic and deep..
I remember years ago talking to my musician friend John Browning. He made the case that there is something mysterious about human responses to major and minor keys. There is something inside us that knows intuitively how to respond emotionally to musical modes. John's ideas go back to the Greeks.. who were similarly fascinated by our recognition and feeling for intervals of sound. After reading Mithen's book, this human connection to music seems less mystical. The following is his account of the social musical expression of early hominids:
...hominids would have begun to express their own emotions and to attempt to induce particular emotions in others, by means of vocalizations having greater acoustic variability than is found among the African apes. It is even conceivable that they utilized some of the specific pitch patterns that appear to induce particular emotions in modern humans... [136]
So there is a possible answer as to why we respond as we do to musical modes. Those modes have come down to us from a long time back. These sounds were keyed to our emotions in the course of our evolution into modern humans.
If you were to account for the origin of language and words, one way to think about its growth would be to hypothesize that humans began with a handful of signifying words.. probably important nouns. Then you can imagine the rudimentary grammar that would come into play once verbs came into use.. and from there a more and more complex grammar would take shape. Mithen (building on the earlier work of Alison Wray) believes that early language development was not at all like this. It can better be imagined as "Hmmmm".. that is, Holistic Manipulative, Multi-Modal, Musical, and Mimetic. There would be nothing symbolic or representational about this early form of communication.. no grammar. It would be entirely dependent on context and aimed at getting someone to do something.
In Mithen's view there came a time when language proper developed among homo sapiens. From that time on there was an ever greater dependence on linguistic ability.. and music branched into its own separate skill, distinct from language but retaining the ability to communicate emotions as did the earlier Hmmmm.
At certain points in human development we can still catch sight of this earlier mode of communication.. this Hmmmm. Perhaps our best view comes when we observe what we think of as baby talk.. or "infant-directed speech". This is a place where we betray that we are yet masters of Hmmmm. Baby talk is automatically adopted by people of all ages when addressing babies.. and this holds true across cultures as well. In these cases we are not communicating words and ideas.. but an emotion of love and acceptance. As we know, this baby talk can easily give way to singing.. and that is perhaps the easiest way for us to put ourselves into the mind of a Neanderthal!
Emily with Aurora
February 25, 2007
I came home one day from Lawrence and found this scene. Note that next to the sleepers are some crucial items: a burp cloth, the phone, a book, and a pad of paper for marking BMs and nursing times.
This is Emily during a visit to my office.. with baby along of course.
The Matrix of Jesus
February 24, 2007
This is a documentary peppered with American still-lifes. The scenes are of ordinary freeways and housing tracts from places in the center of our country.. the road signs that we pass.. the golden arches of McDonalds. It is a revelation to see this strange world. In between these glimpses of daily life we are ushered into the religious dramas of our freeway laden America. This at least seems to be the implication of the juxtapositions. Scratch the thin surface of the landscape and this is what you will find..
The filmmakers' idea to focus on children was a smart call. Becky Fischer, the pastor for children, explains how smart the "enemy" (in context this means Islam) is for teaching their children total commitment to their side. Then as she speaks to a room full of children she challenges them to go out and change the world.. to storm Satan's stronghold. The filmmakers evidently shared this belief in the importance of children. A series of interviews with adults might not have raised our interest.. the world is filled with believers. But to have the children front and center.. and to watch these cute-as-all-get-out kids start to pick up the message and take on these challenges.. that makes you sit up and take notice.. and worry.
I would not want to give anyone the impression that this was exactly the Christian world that I knew.. or that I was like those kids. There are some major differences in tone between this Pentecostal world and the more staid one I knew as I attended Christian schools. But Emily was constantly surprised at how much I did know of what was happening. I had to pledge allegiance to the Christian flag and to the Bible when in elementary school. I was on trips where you walk up to people cold and tell them about Jesus. I read those little evangelizing pamphlets. I watched plenty an anti-evolution video. So while the differences are important.. many things were familiar.. and in a way I could have been one of those kids
Watching the kids in Jesus Camp talk about their world.. I thought about the Matrix. At the end of the Matrix we have learned the true nature of the world.. that all those people who seem real are simulacra. In the final scene we are shown ordinary people are walking down an ordinary city street.. and yet they now look different. They are no longer people. The film had given us a mental template to cast over the world.. which made things look weird and people suddenly dispensable.
Evangelicalism is a similar mental template that governs the way the world appears. I remember my own Matrix moments coming home for Christmas break from college and walking through LAX.. all those people, all going their own ways.. I would consciously try to look at the world and see it from the perspective of eternal truth: these people were lost, wherever they were going was unimportant, the world was a façade for a deeper spiritual battle. The problem for me was that the template would always pop out of place.. and I could never quite see the world like that. It seemed so counterfactual.. these are just people making their way in life as best they can.. not sinners running from God.
The film does not exactly hold out a lot of hope for change in these kids. I watched Jesus Camp and wondered how in hell a kid could ever break out of this world. There are no hints that a percentage of these kids will lose their zeal and go AWOL from God's army. But here I am.. and AWOLer. Baby step by baby step I questioned the template. It now appears to me so obviously a template that it is hard to imagine seeing the world in that way again.. But this documentary gave me a brief chance to feel again how strong that template can be..
check out the trailer if you are curious:
Toyota!: Building Cars in the 21st Century
February 23, 2007
We are thinking about getting a new car.. which has meant for me an unaccustomed level of interest in car brands. I find myself looking at the backs of cars to see what they are. In this state of mind I could not help but be interested in the long article on Toyota that ran in the New York Times Magazine (Feb. 18, 2007). The article explains something about the history of the company and how they are poised to become the leading automaker in the world.
The article provides some insights as to how environmental concerns influence a modern corporation. Toyota is the maker of the Prius.. a nifty little car with "Hybrid Synergy Drive" enabling it to get 55 mpg. The car is an environmental favorite (and if we could afford it, it would be at the top of our to-buy list). So one might be tempted to call Toyota an environmentally friendly corporation for having the vision to develop and market this car.
As you read through the article, though, you come across the efforts to market their new big pickup.. the Tundra. Here are the five types of people that Toyota is targeting with this truck:
1) fishers and outdoorsmen; 2) home-improvement types; 3) Nascar fans; 4) motorcycle enthusiasts; and 5) country-music lovers.
Clearly a conservative group of people. I would love to see the "types" of people to whom they market the Prius.. it would undoubtedly contain "university professors" as one of their targets. This puts in perspective the nature of corporate connection with environmentalism. It is not a moral decision so much as a market decision. The Prius will have its buyers; the Tundra will have its buyers.
At the end of his article Jon Gertner raises a pointed question about the nature of the corporate response to the threat of high levels of carbon in the air. He recognizes the cumulative value of the small engineering improvements that Toyota is using to make its cars more efficient and cleaner. At the same time the trend in number of cars is heading steeply upwards.. currently there are about 3/4 of a billion cars in the world, but by 2050 we could see over 2 billion cars in the world. Needless to say, all of them will be consuming gas. Gertner points out the implications of this growth:
Accommodating those cars will entail building new roads and new factories and spending vast amounts of energy to make shipments. All those activities will create enormous emissions on their own. So even with giant strides in clean-vehicle technology, just doubling the number of vehicles could increase the overall environmental effect by a factor of three.
I find that an important point. What we are dealing with as we look to the next few decades is not simply a matter of tweaking cars so that they all perform like Priuses.. It is the need to find a solution for the continued growth of a culture that consumes energy prodigiously. We need to not just find ways to do what we do in a green fashion. We need to change the fundamental way we do things. It is as simple as that.
This is the reason for a degree of environmental pessimism. I admire California for taking the initiative to cap carbon emissions.. and to generally move in a green direction. But the sprawl of Los Angeles makes sense only if you can imagine a car. What needs to happen is a re-working of that lifestyle.. which is looked upon as nearly God-given by a large number of Californians (and Americans).
Don't get me wrong. I am all about baby-steps; I understand the pragmatic value of inching ever closer to a specific goal for emissions. But there may come a time when baby-steps are not enough.. and we need to make a break.. a life re-design. I fear that when that time comes, we will find ourselves saddled with an American landscape that was short-sightedly allowed to grow according to the dictates of profit-driven corporations.. We will find ourselves the possessors of a landscape whose primary necessity is a car and lots of cheap energy.
Borges and a Philosophy of Reading
February 22, 2007
The short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges offers a philosophy of reading. The story concerns the fictional Pierre Menard, a writer who was supposedly active in the first years of the 20th century. His grand project, as Borges explains it, was to re-write Don Quixote word for word.
That makes for an interesting thought experiment.. If you were to attempt to re-write word for word, say, a letter by Thomas Jefferson, what would you do? The obvious answer would be to cram oneself full of 17th and 18th century life.. to take up residence near Monticello and to read only the books that Jefferson read.. and in the same order. Your mind would start to move in ways that resembled those of Thomas Jefferson. Another more complicated method would be to find a way to re-write that letter as yourself—a man or woman living in the 21st century. Your work would consist of his words expressed in an ironic and archaic manner so that they express you thoughts.
That is the thought experiment.. and the story of Pierre Menard should be read not as a program, but a hypothesis. The imaginative strength of such a hypothesis is clear when the narrator remarks:
Shall I confess that I often imagine that he did complete it, and that I read the Quixote—the entire Quixote—as if Menard had conceived it? A few nights ago, as I was leafing through Chapter XXVI (never attempted by Menard), I recognized our friend's style, could almost hear his voice... [92]
Pierre Menard did not get very far on his re-write of Don Quixote, but just the idea of this project allows a reader to perceive something different in Don Quixote. It is as if you were handed the letters of Thomas Jefferson and told to read them as if Thomas Pynchon was the author.. or perhaps a Mormon. With that (false) knowledge, new things would surely leap out at you from the text. It would not be going too far to say that the experience of reading those letters would be made new.
This is exactly what Borges is applauding.. the radical re-reading of texts. We do not really need any cumbersome mechanism—like imagining the work of Pierre Menard. Simply by picking up a book a couple of centuries after its completion necessitates a new reading. The text will no longer be the letters of Thomas Jefferson, but the letters of Thomas Jefferson as read by somebody in America in 2007 with such and such intellectual commitments. The narrator of this story recounts some of the stages of Don Quixote:
The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene de luxe editions. [94]
Every book goes through this succession.. and each new reading torches the reading that it is replacing (which I think is the point being made by "The Circular Ruins").
This website is founded on the idea that historical readings of texts are possible.. and valuable. The old roads of other cultures and philosophies offer a way to escape some of the narrowness of our homogenized historical moment. In this sense we are not ready to buy into this gnostic philosophy of reading offered by Borges. We are also fascinated with the ways that texts get read and re-read as they make their way through history. Those creative new readings are just the sort of thing to excite the historian of the imagination. But there is nothing of the historian in Borges.. certainly not as he comes across in his Fictions. He would clearly prefer to live in the eternal present of the imagining mind.
Pilgrimage and Identity Commitments
February 21, 2007
In my Hajj class the other way we were talking about the definition of pilgrimage. The trick is to make the definition broad enough to accommodate experiences that are not necessarily "religious".. but which most people will want to call a pilgrimage. For example, a trip to Graceland to see where Elvis is buried.. or a trip to the site where Flight 93 went down near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
I try to explain these different sites by pointing out that all such sites are in some way connected to an identity commitment. So, for example, an American will feel a certain emotional tug when visiting a site connected to 9/11 or Gettysburg.. a Mormon will likewise feel a similar tug when visiting the birthplace of Joseph Smith.. an African American man may feel something quite similar during a visitation of the sites connected to Civil Rights. And all of these feelings or tugs could be experienced by one person.. a Black Mormon American. In other words, we have stacked levels of identity commitments, and those commitments will often be associated with places that are significant.
Religion is thus one more identity commitment. My instinct is not to view religion as different in kind from a national, ethnic, or cultural identity. The emotions felt by an extremely patriotic person at "ground zero" in New York City are likely to be quite similar to those felt by a devout Muslim when standing in front of the Kaabah. I am not interested in defining why one experience is "religious" and the other somehow different (which will forever remind me of Rudolf Otto's absurd explanation as to why religious notions of the "sacred" are somehow different than Burke's notions of the sublime).
This conception of religion as an identity commitment allows me to talk more meaningfully about an issue like religious violence. It always grates me to hear people talk as if religion per se is an inciter to war and violence.. and then inevitably comes the impossible wish: "If only we could stamp out religion" (I am thinking here of Sam Harris, my disagreement having been expressed earlier). I find this an unimaginative intellectual stance.
Because of this view I am able to talk about religious violence differently: divisions are caused by the identity commitments that split the world into "us" and "them".. religions do this, but so do all forms of nationalism.. and any other identity commitment that you can think of (tribal, ethnic). If you could magically erase religious commitments, surely some other identity commitment would arise.. and it would lead people into the same conflicts. One way out of these conflicts would be to nurture a commitment to all human beings as a global "us".. being therefore a kind of neo-Stoicism. Such a view would not erase other identity commitments (an individual would still be English or Buddhist), but it would help water down to some extent the stark divisions.
I take the danger of Islamic fundamentalism to be precisely in its willingness to max out the religious identity commitment to the exclusion of all others forms of identity. Sayyid Qutb, the fundamentalist theorist, pushes Muslims to disregard all other commitments.. especially nationality or family:
A Muslim has no country except that part of the earth where the Shari'ah of God is established and human relationships are based on the foundation of relationship with God; a Muslim has no nationality except his belief, which makes him a member of the Muslim community in Dar-ul-Islam; a Muslim has no relatives except those who share the belief in God, and thus a bond is established between him and other Believers through their relationship with God.
The starker and more overpowering the identity commitment, the greater the risk of conflict.
Coming back to pilgrimage, it is reasonable to suspect that the strength of a person's identity commitment would be connected to the emotional experience of a place. A Muslim who saw the world in the terms laid out by Qutb would at the Kaabah be facing the symbol for his or her identity. A liberal Mormon making his or her way back to the temple in Salt Lake City would feel much less affected by that experience.. seeing as how Mormonism had become a relatively weak identity commitment. But whether one is going to Graceland (where I've a reason to believe we all will be received) or the crash site for Flight 93, we are drawn by our need to physically touch one identity by which we define ourselves.
Watching Early Summer in Late Winter
February 20, 2007
Everyone who watches films must have had the experience of discovering a film backwards. That is to say, one may know the latter day versions of an earlier style.. and then slowly begin to understand the origins of that style. My most dramatic example comes from my enamorment with Magnolia (1999), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. A friend then clued me in that I should watch Short Cuts (1993) by Robert Altman.. and I moved quickly on to Nashville (1975). After watching these the shine had sure come off Magnolia. Usually my response is not quite so hostile.. I am more often grateful for the way a recent film has sign-posted me back to something interesting.
This subject is in my head from my viewing of Early Summer (1951) this past weekend. It is another film by the Japanese Director Yasujiro Ozu, treating a family in postwar Japan and the pressure to marry that comes upon the daughter in the house. The family is lovingly and carefully filmed.. small details add up to a family portrait.. and near the end of the film we witness a literal family portrait being taken. The irony is that the film is leading up to the splintering of the family when the daughter actually gets married.
Something about the little boys in Early Summer reminded my of Yi-Yi (2000) by Edward Yang. That film too is about a single family, this time in Taiwan. Three generations live together in a single apartment.. the grandmother goes into a coma and during this time we watch the members of the family come to terms with the direction of their lives. In its focus on ordinary life and a single family, Yang owes much to Ozu.. but there is nothing antiquarian in Yang's approach. His characters are set in a modern apartment. The tightly local focus that Ozu brings to his material is cast off by Yang, who situates his characters in contemporary Asia. One of the most delightful moments of Yi-Yi comes as the father goes on a business trip to Japan. We are treated to a convincing depiction of the cultural differences that divide individuals from different Asian countries.. A subject which no mainstream American film would have the patience to touch.
Yang's visual style in Yi-Yi is marked by an aesthetic sensibility. He loves the glint of light off of windows and the abstractions that arise from everyday life. He makes an obviously conscious effort to create a film with moments of beauty. This is different from the literal still-life method of Ozu in which breaks between scenes are fitted with still-lifes taken from the environment of his characters. Nevertheless Yang shows a parallel aesthetic sensibility since the scenes are there solely to please us visually. This high seriousness of intent combined with attention to aesthetic experience I would label as characteristic of Ozu's work.. and Yang is a serious student in this matter.
The connection between these two filmmakers is not the type that leads to disappointment.. nothing about watching Ozu makes Yi-Yi seem less pleasing. Strangely appreciation for Ozu will always be connected to my earlier love for Yi-Yi (which I watched twice in the theater back in 2000). So although chronologically it is Ozu influencing Yang, in my head it will always be that I have come to see Ozu through Yang. Thus our personal directions of influence often move counter to the way they must be talked about in serious film criticism.. And perhaps that is why some topics are better treated in a blog.
One Year Later, or Why I Blog
February 19, 2007
Exactly one year ago I began this blog. I just looked back on my first post and I continue to believe in the goal expressed there: to construct a blog that would not be ephemeral, but contain something of lasting value.
One thing I see clearly as time passes is the way the very structure of blogging pushes writers toward ephemeral expression. Popular blogs are almost inevitably a reflection of daily events, whether in politics or popular culture. The goal is to talk about what is happening now.. and to produce talking points that get transferred to other blogs. It is the people who talk about the most talked about things that get links.. and those links in turn establish how highly a blog is rated on a site like Technorati. The push to insert your voice into the conversation will almost always mean picking up ephemeral topics.
What attracted me to blogging was the way it liberated me from talking about somebody else's agenda. I could review old books or new books. I could stretch and develop my own point of view on the world. I could write with a more personal tone than was possible in a journalistic or academic forum. Along with this came a desire to avoid writing ephemeral blogs that would make sense to no one in five years (I mean by commenting on the political minutiae).. yes, to document the passing world around me, but also to shape this site into something permanent.. something of interest for the long haul.
Blogging happens to fit nicely into my own writing habits. For long stretches of my life I kept journals (I have a closet full of these right now). At other points in my life (notably during my time overseas in Egypt) I wrote a series of long group e-mails to friends and family. There is something inside me that wants to write.. that demands that I process my experiences through writing them down. Blogging has moved that impulse into a more public sphere.. but I don't feel like it has fundamentally changed my approach to writing.
During those years of journaling, I never devoted a great deal of thought to who would actually read what I wrote. That was not the point.. and it still isn't (although I have been delighted to hear from a number of people who read this blog!). I am content to be a spectator in the wider scheme of things.. the best position since actors in this world are generally puppets of wider forces. I will be a writing spectator.. a documenter.
I began this blog as I was winding down my grad student days.. and this one year anniversary finds me teaching in the Religious Studies department at Lawrence University. This has forced me to think about how my blogging works into my philosophy of teaching. I can think of two important ways that it connects to that philosophy.
First, it provides a way to model the intellectual life that we are striving to communicate at a liberal arts college. The goal of this education is not to deliver a great bundle of explained knowledge but to develop the mental tools for approaching the complexities of our world.. and a taste for exploring those complexities. This blog does not try to stake out "expert" territory.. but simply to model a rational and creative approach to life, places, and texts.
Second, this blog promotes a writing lifestyle. One of my fundamental beliefs concerning education is that writing is not something that can be taught with a few classes.. it comes about by writing and more writing. I hope to encourage students to take a shot at developing a similar writing lifestyle. I can't tell you how many times I have sat down to write a blog and not known exactly what I thought about a given topic.. say a movie I just watched. Only as I start to write down words can I begin to see what I'm after.. what my angle is. Writing brings clarity to thought.. and that rational clarity should be a part of a liberal arts education.
I like to imagine this blog in 10 years.. or in 30 years. This project will not be complete until this blog encompasses a sweep of time like that. I guess that is why I have a soft spot for odd imaginative projects.. It takes a lot of energy to create.. and I like to see that people can persevere and bring a private inner vision to some kind of completion.
Summer Days, Bob Dylan
February 18, 2007
When Bob Dylan began a concert from his mid-70s Rolling Thunder Revue with "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You" one could be forgiven for not taking the song literally. It is no longer the wispy country song from Nashville Skyline, but an assurance to the audience: "Tonight I'll be staying here with you!" The lines take on new significance:
Is it really any wonder
The love that a stranger might receive.
You cast your spell and I went under,
I find it so difficult to leave.
It is hard not to hear that as a tribute to his audience.. and an admission of the way that adulation can act on him like a spell.. and what else can explain his year in year out presence on the stage.. sometimes in the smallest damn towns you can imagine.
In the second album of cover songs from the 90s, World Gone Wrong, Dylan sings someone else's lines:
I tried to be loving and treat you kind,
But it seems like you never right, you got no loyal mind.
I can't be good no more, once like I did before.
I can't be good, baby,
Honey, because the world's gone wrong.
It is the first song on the album.. and it sure sounds like Dylan is making an admission to his audience. The critical point here is that the singer refuses to admit that the loss is his own fault.. a sign of his own weakness. Nope, the "world's gone wrong".. that's why he can't go on like he once did.
It was not too many years previous that Daniel Lanois was urging Dylan that we could use more songs like "Masters of War or "Girl from the North Country".. and in Chronicles Dylan recalls his response: "I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn't have anything like those songs" (195). Now go back to that line: "I can't be good no more, once like I did before..." The trick of Dylan's last decade.. from Time Out of Mind in 1997 to Modern Times in 2006.. is his ability to make a virtue out of his creative dead end.
The song that to my mind most clearly sets out this mode of working is the glorious "Summer Days". The song has become a concert staple. Whenever Emily and I make up our imaginary set list for a concert, we know that song 14, the last song of the set before the encore, will be "Summer Days". The song has a weightier presence in concert than it did originally on Love and Theft.. the doodling sinuous guitars make it a beautiful and shimmering closer. But the more I listen to it, the more it seems to take on a programmatic character.
The opening and closing stanza of this blues-form song is suggestive:
Summer days, summer nights are gone
Summer days and the summer nights are gone
I know a place where there's still somethin' going on
In the context of a concert those lines could easily be taken to mean something like: "the old days are gone.. the 60s are gone.. but right here and now we still have some sparks left from that time." The concert set list may have included songs like "The Times They Are a Changin" or "Tambourine Man".. but it all gets closed down with this song that brushes all that away.. it's fun now, but it's gone.
The song has a lot of stanzas.. too many to examine them all. But let me look at a couple of them, emphasizing in each case the way in which Dylan addresses his position as an artist and as a performer on stage.
Well I'm drivin' in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, "You're a worn out star"
My pockets are loaded and I'm spending every dime
How can you say you love someone else when you know it's me all the time?
The previous line had made reference to giving a toast to the "King".. so the mention of a Cadillac car being driven by a worn out star calls to mind Elvis.. The image of a worn out Elvis, faded creatively, is a central rock trope. Dylan gives us an image that would perhaps make us want to look away with disgust: the star giving out money left and right.. asking, begging for adulation. Then comes the line that does not quite admit defeat: "How can you say you love someone else when you know it's me all the time?" Having morphed himself into the King, Dylan then wonders whether all the new voices are not after all simply versions of himself..
The following stanza picks up a new image:
Well, the fog's so thick you can't spy the land
The fog is so thick that you can't even spy the land
What good are you anyway, if you can't stand up to some old businessman?
Those opening lines leave us with the same struggling character.. this time not begging fans to return, but lost in a fog and unable to get a firm hold on anything. Then comes one of the most self-condemning lines of Dylan's work: "What good are you anyway, if you can't stand up to some old businessman?" The line is couched as a question, but surely the drift of the song would make this a rhetorical question. No, he can't stand up to some old businessman.. and it follows that he can't be good for anything.
That old businessman could well be the one that Dylan complains about in "All Along with Watchtower": "Businessmen they drink my wine/ Plowmen dig me earth.." The young Dylan could howl back: "None of them along the line/ Knows what any of it is worth".. The older Dylan can't put his hand on anything stable.. and is hardly certain how much any of that is really worth.
My goal is not to present a complete commentary on the song, but to indicate the key theme of the song: loss over time. It is a theme you can hear everywhere in Dylan's music over the last decade.. here are some lines from "Highlands":
The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over, and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away
That could almost be the rough draft for "Summer Days"..
To my mind this is a dangerous position for Dylan creatively, as it paints him into a corner. It is a strong theme to mine, but it also ties his hands when it comes to speaking out politically.. or when a disaster overtakes a city he loves.. the Summer Days are gone.. those days when someone really could write "Masters of War" are gone. There is a creative shackling inherent there.
But we do enjoy some pretty impressive sparks! Watch this YouTube clip of Dylan performing "Summer Days". Can anyone wonder why we travel such distances to see Dylan?
Scholars in Medieval Damascus
February 17, 2007
Most of what this book (Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus 1190-1350 by Michael Chamberlain) has to say about the social world of high medieval Damascus is readily applicable to Cairo in the same period. I thought I would highlight few points which I think are suggestive for the study of the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi. But first a brief overview of his larger argument.
This book returns me to consideration of the social world of the medieval Islamic city (see this earlier review). The primary problem that Chamberlain takes up is the lack of documentary evidence concerning the nature of this social world. Instead of considering this lack an insurmountable barrier to arriving at knowledge of the social world, Chamberlain demonstrates that the lack of evidence is an important clue as to the nature of this social world. We should not come to medieval Damascus and seek to find parallel institutions.. the colleges and state bureaucracies that mark other social worlds. Instead the social world of Damascus is marked by great flux in terms of wealth and power. In this social world, Chamberlain argues, knowledge and scholarly production acquire a great deal of importance. Investment in scholars is one way that rulers gain prestige and legitimacy with their subjects; excelling in knowledge is the way that individuals gain a role in their social world. It is a unique and informal system that should not be conflated with other more familiar models.. which produced copious amounts of documentary evidence.
1. This view of the social world has direct relevance to the way that we understand the cultural landscape of a medieval city like Damascus or Cairo. The implications are sketched by Chamberlain:
Rulers of the city did not assimilate its topography to a preexisting image of power. Throughout the period, in spite of an active patronage that brought about an "architectural florescence," there were few projects on an imperial scale. Rather, households of ruling elites colonized existing space by building on open lots, by establishing household charitable foundations in palaces and houses, and by restoring the important religious buildings of the city, such as the Umayyad Mosque... Rarely did they integrate a street plan and major buildings with an image of power. [47-8]
The phrase "image of power" in the beginning and conclusion of this quotation seems to imply a centralizing idea. The high medieval Islamic city cannot be read as a whole. Its parts are not directed toward creating a single reading. The city is piecemeal.. a mosaic of individual parts. The physical structure of a city is therefore directly related to its social world.
One could go a step further and wonder whether the writing of such a piecemeal city (in a descriptive work such as the Khitat by al-Maqrizi) is in the end determined by the underlying social world. The social world forms the cultural landscape and that landscape in turn sets the way writers will textualize a city. Perhaps this could explain some of the different strategies in writing about a city.. since the descriptive literature of different cultures is so different (compare the Khitat to Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People).
2. One way to read Chamberlain's book is as a long defense of the value of biographical dictionaries. These biographical dictionaries are multi-volume sets composed mainly of biographical notices about the life and work of important scholars. These biographical dictionaries often focus on a single city.. such as Damascus (Ibn Asakir's work on Damascus ran to about 100 volumes). For Chamberlain these volumes are filled with information that is repetitive, but nevertheless tells us much about the way scholars gained prestige.. the important currency of a fluid society:
Such biographies in some respects represented the "real" history of the city as much as documents did in European cities. The a'yan of Damascus took few measures to ensure the survival of documents, save those which testified to their positions within a chain of transmission. However, they exerted themselves daily to preserve the memory of shaykhs through whom 'ilm passed... moment by moment they brandished the names, gestures, anecdotes, and tests of their shaykhs. [150]
With this note Chamberlain settles the social importance of the biographical dictionary, but he does not address the value of other historical works.. such as the Khitat by al-Maqrizi. Presumably a work such as this would have fit into the same social world.. with all its demands. But how exactly does this understanding change the way we read the Khitat or other works of topography? My instinct is to go back to the point made above and say that if the social world forms the cultural landscape, then a close description of the cultural landscape would end up talking about the social world too.
Religion and the Universal
February 15, 2007
I have been thinking lately about my newfound fascination with human origins. The topic is a logical departure from my dissertation, which was about more than just pilgrimage, but also the ways that human beings cognitively relate to place. In other words, I have always been chasing something that resembles human universals.. and this move backwards into prehistory enables me to talk with a little more precision about human beings as human beings.
Being embedded now in a Religious Studies department I also feel the need to develop a stronger point of view on the nature of religion. That seems like an obvious issue to have under my belt.. and one which will form the way I teach religion. So how could I define my current point of view on teaching religion? Here are some ideas:
- Religion should be studied as a part of human evolutionary history. It is a human development and therefore connected in some basic ways. It is not a collection of disparate views concerning the nature of God or the world. This calls for not a "world religions" approach to the subject, but a class that looks at religion as a whole.. as a human trait.
- The development of religion is associated with language and art and therefore to study it one should pay careful attention to these two evolutionary siblings. In teaching religion this should mean the introduction of at least general ideas about the way language, metaphor, and art are interconnected.
- I have read on the internet testimonials from religion instructors who present material about different religious traditions in such a way that believers from those religions could assent to the material. The goal would thus be descriptive.. and the material conform to the self-conception of believers. The notion that religion should be seen as a whole lends itself to a more contrastive approach (though not confrontational). In teaching the hajj, for example, my goal is not to get people to understand the significance that an individual Muslim finds in a certain action, but rather to place that event in a wider spectrum of human religious practices. This naturally leads to a more heretical manner of teaching.
- Teaching religion implies a fascination with human meaning creation. There are the Dawkins and Dennets of our world, but while they may be correct about the factual wrongness of belief in God, they are narrow-minded in their disinterest with respect to human cognitive creativity. Note Dawkins at the beginning of The Selfish Gene labeling all pre-1859 attempts to understand the origin of life as useless. Like I said, correct.. but missing something too. If we are going to talk about human meaning creation then we are talking about cognitive science.. and thus we are back to fundamental human traits.
- When it comes to the study of a particular religious tradition, such as Islam, my approach will be marked by attention to human social settings. For example, the topic of Islam and the city will be amenable to this approach since it emphasizes the way religion interacts with and grows out of a particular social setting. Likewise the study of patterns of religious change or the development of interpretive strategies.. both represent a chapter in the long line of human inventions of tradition.. and both have human cognition as their ultimate explanatory mechanism. What will not be an interesting topic is an explanation of the exact nature of the differences between the four major Sunni schools of law.. or the ins and outs of the debate about the "createdness" of the Quran.
People I Remember:
Bob Johanson
February 14, 2007
In the seventh grade my family moved to Redlands, California.. and my Sunday School teacher became Bob Johanson. Early in my tenure in the junior high class he walked us chapter by chapter through the Gospel of John. He would draw pictures in erasable ink on top of the white-topped table, the sweet smell of ink filling the room.
From the start
I found humorous his attempts to create a mnemonic device that would cause the contents of each chapter stick in our heads. He began with the bare number of the chapter, written on the table, and from it he would improvise some new visual cue.. numbers turning into people or things.. and then he attached a phrase that he believed would prompt us to remember that new visual cue. Mnemonic devices are supposed to be simple, but I needed a mnemonic device just to recall what his mnemonic device was for. I wish that I could recall an example.. it would not be the least interesting of my memories.
What I remember much better than his mnemonic devices were the photos he occasionally brought in from his time in Papua New Guinea. Bob Johanson had served as a pilot for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF).. and the bulk of his time had been spent flying in that complex landscape of jungles and mountains. His main job was to fly missionaries and their supplies into different villages. I recall photos of insanely short landing strips and tiny villages where the people came out to greet the new arrivals. The people in the photos wore little clothing.. and are perhaps best known for their penis gourds. But we did not laugh at anyone in the photos. These were the leaders of villages and heads of churches.. and were all people that our Sunday School teacher had actually met!
I think now about how lucky I was to have had this little primer on anthropology in the seventh grade. The habits and lifeway of a very distant people were talked about fondly. It was not just in Sunday School that this message came through.. but from as early as I can recall there were annual missionary conferences that lasted a couple of weeks. Yes, cultural information came to me with a terrible slant: these were peoples who needed to believe in Jesus and all that. But I was exposed to far more slide shows about far-flung places than is usual for a young person growing up in the US..
But back to Bob Johanson.. who may be the person I heard most often speak about his missionary experiences. He was at least six feet.. and maintained dark bushy sidebrows. He was Scandinavian by lineage, but his interests and habits were those of a young man from a small American town. I can imagine him as a character in American Graffiti.. that is, if a Hollywood movie were able to understand a character motivated by faith. There is his greaser-like slicked back hair and sidebrows.. but also the odd fact that he always wore a large silver belt buckle. One Sunday he explained to us how he always wore the buckle just to the side.. because that was the fashion when he was growing up. He also walked with a bit of a limp, and I seem to recall that this had something to do with a motorcycle accident. You can imagine a character from American Graffiti walking out of the film, spending his life in Papua New Guinea, and always maintaining a few symbolic ties to that car-crazy American past.
Bob Johanson was in Redlands because he had retired from active missionary work. He now trained pilots for MAF.. which was then using the small Redlands Airport as their training center. I never saw him fly. I knew him always as a man in our church.. sometimes leading our small congregation in a hymn, sometimes standing with his wife in the pews, but always letting his nasally voice sing out. I also remember him as a committed Arminian.. that is to say, he believed that every person in the world had a free will with which he or she could accept the Gospel message. He refused to believe in a God who decided these things for his own pleasure. During my brief dalliance with a form of Calvinism, I once expressed in a cold way my view of God's hatred for sinners.. and I recall his shock, his hurt. And I am sorry for that, for he is someone who taught me the opposite: tolerance and love for all people.
Thinking about The Old Way
February 13, 2007
An editor for Old Roads has got to be interested in a book entitled The Old Way.. so I read the book. It is an admiring account of the !Kung.. a people living according to the ancient lifeway of hunting and gathering. The book acquires an elegiac tone from the fact that this lifeway has passed away:
The hunter-gatherer life of the savannah, which began when our ancestors lost the shelter of the trees, survived until the 1970s or '80s, by which time the First People had been forced to change profoundly. And although today a few individuals may remember the Old Way and keep some of its skills, no human population lives by it anymore. [16]
You will notice the reference to the "First People". The !Kung people—according to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas—were a people living in the way that the earliest humans once did.. So whatever we learn about their lifeway is not just another example of cultural variation, but valuable in understanding who we as human beings fundamentally are. This is similar to the way that R. Dale Guthrie approaches Paleolithic human artifacts.. whatever we learn about the early people who left the earliest traces of art on cave walls can tell us something about who we are as human beings. I believed that when reading Guthrie.. with this book I am not convinced.
I kept thinking about what I have read in the past about the Paiute Indians in the arid American West. The Wikipedia article about them has this to say concerning their lifeway:
The Northern Paiute's pre-contact lifestyle was well adapted to the harsh desert environment in which they lived. Each tribe or band occupied a specific territory, generally centered on a lake or wetland that supplied fish and water-fowl. Rabbits and pronghorn were taken from surrounding areas in communal drives, which often involved neighboring bands. Individuals and families appear to have moved freely between bands. Pinyon nuts gathered in the mountains in the fall provided critical winter food. Grass seeds and roots were also important parts of their diet. The name of each band came from a characteristic food source.
That sounds a lot like the lifeway of the !Kung.. yet we would not refer to the Paiute as the "First People". Like every other traditional human culture they are the product of centuries of development and change. Study of the Paiute Indians would be a fascinating glimpse into human variation, but it would not be an approach to what we might call the universally human.
Thomas' reason for identifying the !Kung as the First People is not quite argued.. but it has to do with their position in Africa, the cradle of human evolutionary development.. with their fundamental and natural lifestyle... and with the ancient language spoken by this people (one of those click languages). The idea is that arriving with this people is like going back in time to the first human beings.. i.e. the First People:
To me, the experience of visiting this place and these people was profoundly important, as if I had voyaged into the deep past through a time machine. [6]
If you buy this idea, then everything she notes about the !Kung tells you something about who you are.. where you come from. On the other hand, if the !Kung are more like the Paiute Indians, then they are just another people group.. like us or like a tribe in Papua New Guinea.. and the book loses some of its urgency.
Clearly, I am a bit of a doubter as to the "First People" status of the !Kung. But I will admit that the picture Thomas develops of their lifestyle is consistent with that of Paleolithic people as imagined by Guthrie.. especially when it comes to the centrality of hunting in the life of the !Kung. Thomas (with the help of notes made by her mother) discusses the excitement of hunting:
...all men and boys were enthralled with hunting. "Ju/wa men talk endlessly about hunting as they sit together repairing their equipment or poisoning their arrows," wrote my mother. "They recount over and over remarkable episodes of past hunts, hear each other's news about recent hunts, and make plans. Little boys play at hunting from the time they can walk and they practice shooting throughout their childhood." [95]
That is exactly the world that Guthrie would like us to believe produced the images of large game animals on the walls of ancient rock shelters.
Thomas earned my respect by her unflinching acknowledgment that human beings are part of the animal world. That goes for modern human beings too.. only we are cut off from that world (perhaps like the dogs in her earlier work The Hidden Life of Dogs?). Her point of view comes out in many ways.. take the following brief passage:
The Bushmen of the interior, by contrast, still had their world—the world that, as an indigenous species, they had helped to form. [53]
Human beings are indigenous species in this African landscape just as the lions, antelopes, and elands. It was interesting to learn that the !Kung referred to different animals as having a territory (n!ore) like them.. seemingly allowing human and animal concepts to overlap. This strikes me as a necessary concept in the study of religion: the realization that human beings.. no matter how far separated from nature by culture.. are animals. We are an indigenous species of the earth.
The Village Green Preservation Society,
The Kinks
February 11, 2007
The Beatles began an unexpected trend when they released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1, 1967. The songs on the album are loosely connected by the idea of a fictional band. It was an ingenious concept, and the result was the release of a string of albums by other bands that mimicked this same fictional concept. I have always wanted to collect all these Sgt. Pepper's inspired albums. They range from obscurities such as the I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die album by Country Joe & the Fish:
To more high profile attempts at matching the concept of the Beatles.. such as Their Satanic Majesties Request by the Rolling Stones:
Both of the above albums were released in the latter half of 1967.. and in each the band is dressed in a fantastic get-up.
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society came out in 1968, but it employs yet again the concept of a band that is acting like they are somebody else. The album opens with the song "Village Green Preservation Society":
We are the village green preservation society
God save donald duck, vaudeville and variety
We are the desperate dan appreciation society
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
The idea was no longer novel, but the Kinks took it in a not-so-psychedelic direction.. ignoring any hint of wizards or such.. and settled instead on a rather old-fashioned English theme: they are a "preservation society" dedicated to saving various aspects of English culture that were in danger of disappearing.
The lyrics are laced with pop-culture references.. ranging from Donald Duck to strawberry jam. One might expect that a someone interested in "preserving the old ways from being abused" might be more interested in Shakespeare than Desperate Dan.. (BTW: Desperate Dan was a wild west character in the British comic The Dandy which ran until 1969). But no. The Kinks turn out to be staunch protectors of the "Old Ways" which could probably be defined as the dear England they knew growing up.
This theme sets up one of those juicy ironies that mark works like this. If you were to think of a force in the late 60s that was destroying the "old ways", it surely must be connected to the rabid cultural energy focused on rock music. But nevertheless here are the Kinks singing rock songs about preserving the old ways from being abused.. The cultural meaning of the songs was at odds with the actual message of the song. (One could almost compare the album to a website aimed at preserving old roads..)
Here are some more fun railings at the modern world:
God save little shops, china cups and virginity
We are the skyscraper condemnation affiliate
God save tudor houses, antique tables and billiards
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do
Now someone might argue that these hopes were meant ironically. The Kinks can't be serious about saving china cups or antique tables.. let alone virginity! But I think it would be a mistake to not take them seriously.. "Village Green" is not an isolated song, but one that reflects a theme that Ray Davies mines throughout his career. When we heard him in concert last March (review here) he played his song "20th Century Man", which includes the following lines:
You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me william shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I’ll take rembrandt, titian, da vinci and gainsborough,
Girl we gotta get out of here
We gotta find a solution
I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want to die here.
I enjoy a certain cheekiness in those lines. It reminds me of a dear teacher I once had who told me in all seriousness that everything after some date.. like 1885 or so.. was rubbish. I have always liked and admired people who were willing to think of themselves as out of time.. and who were in some way working to preserve the past.
So without consulting with Emily, let me just go ahead an name "Village Green Preservation Society" the official song of this website.. We understand and embrace the irony. Now check out this performance of the song from 1973:
YouTube Manifesto
February 10, 2007
The winter is too cold for major trips.. and so we are patiently awaiting the spring and summer to resume our Wisconsin videos. But this time off has not kept me from thinking a little about that possibilities inherent in a system like YouTube. I present some of my ideas in the video below..
The Ancient Imagination:
Paleolithic Art, pt. 6
February 9, 2007
In preparation for the arrival of Aurora, Emily had her phalanx of Dr. Sears books. I can see them from where I write: The Pregnancy Book, The Breastfeeding Book, The Baby Book.. and there is one more whose title I can't read. My reading in preparation for Aurora was not quite so obvious.. If I had to point to the book that has inspired me as a father, it would be The Nature of Paleolithic Art.
The chapter on the evolution of art in the Paleolithic presents an argument for the value of play. Why do human children spend so much time goofing off and doing unimportant things? I remember the hours upon hours spent playing baseball or organizing baseball cards.. and I guess if a couple of months ago I had been asked about the value of all this time, I would have said that it was a product of leisure.. and although I enjoyed every moment of those pursuits, I would not be sure that early humans could have afforded to devote so much time to play.. what with survival looming large.
Guthrie points out that human play was a necessary element in the rearing of human beings that could survive:
Versatile lifeways seem to require a mode of learning that allows individuals to build on a genetically given behavioral base. The raven's genetic program itself has to do with refinement, flexibility, and opportunism. A red poll, on the other hand, keeps closer to a strict agenda. Bent on one main pursuit, it must find and eat birch seeds that have dropped in the snow... A raven's day is not so closely defined. Most primates, likewise, have a rather open-ended day. [377]
In other words, human beings were good survivors because they were able to adapt and respond to opportunities and changes. The life skills necessary for that kind of adaptation are built through long periods of play time among the young.
How has evolution encouraged the acquisition of this practical skill of playing? It has made play enjoyable! That struck me like a flash. As Guthrie notes: "We learn and innovate best when we experience the added zest of delight, not from grim time-punch determination" (377). I won't deny that there are some "lessons" that are not fun.. like learning multiplication tables.. but even there, I remember how much better I did at that task when it was a competition. If there is any big idea that could frame our education of Aurora it would be just this: let learning be a delight.
I also took from Guthrie some ideas about the kind of environment we to build for Aurora.. an environment that would nurture maximum creativity and mental flexibility:
...creativity does not necessarily benefit from high adrenaline. Rather, perceptive breakthroughs seem to occur more often during quasi-meditative states associated with walking, relaxing, reading, and sometimes even sleeping. [390]
I remember when I was younger how long I could lay on my bed and just stare at the ceiling.. seeing shapes and figures arise out of the speckling. What a perfect use of my time! It was more beneficial than being put to work at something useful. Those moments of unstructured time are like oxygen for the mind. When it comes to raising Aurora above all I want to give her that kind of mental space.. and not constant activity. I think this also means having a home that is free from distractions and voices.. like television.
This childrearing philosophy could go by a number of names. You could call it the "Paleolithic Method".. but you could just as well call it "Romantic Childrearing". Guthrie notes how "play" was an invisible concept in the work of philosophers such as Locke, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Hume (394). But if you want a different take on childhood just turn to Romantic poetry.. say Wordsworth. When Guthrie defines creativity as "coming up with something new" he has stepped into the world of S.T. Coleridge, who fought against the notion that the mind was a data processing unit and not an imaginative creator of new ideas. Human beings are meant to be imaginative creators.. innovators.. artists. (Guthrie seems to acknowledge the rightness of Romantic conceptions when he cites a statement from Rousseau's Emile (398) with approval.)
Now we can return to Guthrie's main topic: the art left behind on cave walls by Paleolithic human beings. Here in as clear a form as possible is evidence that human beings are innate creators. This world of color and sound that surrounds us in the modern world is not some frilly invention that became possible when human beings had more time on their hands.. and fewer worries about survival.. it is the continuing result of the way evolution framed us as human beings within a lifeway that demanded powerful creativity.
Fake Jerusalems
February 8, 2007
A student in my Hajj class pointed out this site to me. It is a theme park somewhere around Orlando, Florida.. The Holy Land Experience. Note that upon buying a ticket you enter the park through an abridged replica of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and then proceed through the "Jerusalem Street Market".. undoubtedly an attempt to replicate a Middle Eastern bazaar. Then you could proceed to "Calvary's Garden Tomb" or push on to a version of the Jewish temple. Along the way you can watch worshipful performances.. Here is a YouTube commercial for the park:
My first response to this was a mixture of horror and humor. If, like me, you are given to worry that Americans grow ever more out of touch with the actual world.. then this is one outstanding piece of evidence. It represents the Main-Streetizing of a world that is messy. The humor comes when I stop moralizing and just feel like laughing at the fakeness of it all..
I also began to wonder what is really so weird about this Jerusalem set up among the green palm trees of Florida. The magnitude of fakeness at the real Jerusalem may even surpass that found in Orlando! In an always fascinating essay on the social construction of Jerusalem, Maurice Halbwachs traces the layers of meaning that have been rebuilt in Jerusalem.. concentrating on the Christian version of the city. He notes about the Crusaders:
They instituted new localizations, guided no doubt by the Gospels, but also by apocryphal writings and legends that had circulated for some time in Christian lands, and even by a kind of inspiration... The Crusaders behaved as if this land and these stones recognized them, as if they had only to stoop down in order to suddenly hear voices that had remained silent... [232]
Considering that Jerusalem was completely destroyed in 70 AD, it is amazing to encounter the confidence with which later Christians identified important sites. In a way the Jerusalem that these earlier Christians constructed was no less a fiction than the Holy Land Experience in Orlando. It is just that the earlier fictional Jerusalem was built on the correct geographical coordinates.. and therefore gained prestige.
The desire to construct a model of Jerusalem did not first leap into the mind of some Floridian businessman.. but can be traced back to the Ethiopians who constructed the holy city of Lalibela in the 12th century AD. There is a rock cut channel known as the Yordanos, and
North of the Yordanos is Debra Zeit (the Mount of Olives) and Bethany; south is Debra Tabor (Mount Tabor, the Mount of Transfiguration). The first group of churches represents Jerusalem; the second Bethlehem. In this way, a new landscape of the Holy Land was constructed in the mountains of Lasta... [Ethiopia: The Unknown Land, Stuart Munro-Hay, pg. 190]
Here again is something we could call the Holy Land Experience.. without the American theme park oddities like a wandering Jesus and musical programs. But still, it was an attempt to re-create sacred Jerusalem. So maybe I should temper my scorn.. and see the Orlando version as simply the latest fiction in a long line of others.
If al-Maqrizi Were Alive Today:
Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul
February 7, 2007
People who live with decline suffer the emotion of Hüzün.. the Turkish word for melancholy. That is the title of the central (if not the most interesting) chapter of Orhan Pamuk's book Istanbul. It is the concept that unifies the book and makes sense of the personal, civic and civilizational histories that are interwoven throughout the work. Pamuk uses the word to define the outlook not just of a poetic individual.. but a feeling shared by a group of people.
Hüzün is also the feeling that dominates the world of the "four lonely melancholic writers" that he spotlights. The descriptions of these earlier chroniclers of Istanbul are to me endlessly inspiring.. for these are the writers who took up the thankless task of describing and collecting details about a city that was clearly in decline. (I wonder if every large city somewhere has such chroniclers?) One writer, Resat Ekram Koçu, labored much of his life putting together the Istanbul Encyclopedia.. an immense project that only got to the letter G. The work itself was published fascicle by fascicle and only later bound up into actual volumes. Conventionally this man Koçu must be accounted a failure.. here is Pamuk's thoroughly melancholy account of the fate of this project:
In the years after Koçu's death, in the mid-seventies, every time I went to the Covered Bazaar I would stop at the Sahaflar Secondhand Book Market next to the Beyazit Mosque and the find the final unbound fascicles and volumes that Koçu published at his own expense in his final years, sitting among the rows of yellowed, faded, mildewed, cheap old books. These volumes, which I began to read in my grandmother's library, were by now being sold at the price of waste paper, but still the booksellers I knew said they found no takers. [169]
It is the kind of passage I love.. showing both the heroism and tragedy of eccentric projects.
I have been surprised by the thoroughness with which Pamuk takes up questions by means of reference to Western writers. At various points there are references to Arabic or Persian writers.. but the artists in which Pamuk has steeped himself are clearly Western. If you don't believe me just glance through the index of the book. This is not to say that there is nothing "Turkish" in his work, it is simply to note that the author's national or local characteristics are expressed with his gaze firmly set upon the Western literary tradition.
Reading Istanbul I keep thinking of the medieval Egyptian writer al-Maqrizi. His great topographical work known as the Khitat is infused with something very like hüzün.. as he describes with relentless detail the look and feel of Cairo in the 15th century and earlier.. and there is an unmistakable sense of loss as he describes the changes that have come over his city. Al-Maqrizi may have been motivated by a feeling that would be immediately recognizable to Pamuk, but he did not have recourse to the forms of a second literary tradition. In other words, there is no way that he could have written a book entitled Cairo that paralleled Istanbul. He was faced instead with writing about cultural loss within a literary framework generated by the Islamic/Arabic tradition.. and his answer to this problem was to amplify the topographical format of the Khitat genre.
Al-Maqrizi's situation can be seen more clearly if we imagine Pamuk in a slightly different situation. What if Pamuk had no access to Western literary forms? What if all he had to look back on were his "four lonely melancholic writers" and earlier Ottoman writers? That would have been a formidable challenge.. The break-out feel of Istanbul.. indeed what separates it from his beloved and heroic failures of local Turkish writing.. stems from his embrace of a foreign formal sensibility. This even makes the book feel somewhat contradictory in its aims.. as we encounter a writer who is steeped in a deep admiration for the past and for his world in decline, but whose work stands for a new Turkey.. not the Turkey of Ataturk, but one that can stand as an equal with the West. In the work of al-Maqrizi there is no such internal contradiction. There is only loss and change, briefly arrested by a descriptive and encyclopedic prose that manages to come as close as words can to representing a city without the use of images.
Two Films, Two Filmmakers
February 5, 2007
I have a feeling that many filmgoers would lodge a similar sounding complaint after viewing these two films: nothing really happens. That happens to be a wrong assessment.. both contain plenty of interpersonal drama and character development. But when seen from the perspective of a big American drama, both films are curiously free of large events. Comparatively these films are hardly dramas.. they are more like life studies. Both directors—the English Mike Leigh and the Japanese Yasujiro Ozu—have trained their cameras on everyday life.
The plots for both films are subtle.. not the kind of stories that I imagine would make a Hollywood mogul leap from his chair with visionary excitement. Four Days in July (1984) examines two couples in Northern Ireland over the course of four days in July. One couple is Protestant and the other is Catholic.. in both the woman is about to give birth. The film examines the daily details of these two parallel couples.. which are marked by numerous class differences. At the conclusion the Protestant and Catholic woman deliver their babies at about the same time.. and both share the same hospital room. A scene with two newborn infants is bound to be filled with some degree of hope.. but the halting conversation between the two mothers gives us a glimpse into the cultural divide about to be passed on to the next generation.
Floating Weeds (1959) is the story of a drama troop that visits a small Japanese town for what they hope will be an extended stay. It turns out that the head of the troop has a former lover in this town, and the son he had with her has now grown up into a young man. As the story progresses it becomes clear that the troop is on its last legs financially and artistically.. and will have to dissolve. The head of the troop considers settling down with his former lover and son.. but his son's relationship with a young female member of the troop complicates this plan.. and in the end he must be off again to follow up a lead for another chance acting career. "Floating Weeds" conjures up the right image: useless and unremarkable people being pushed down the river of time.
It is easy at first to think of all the ways that these two films are similar. Both relentlessly focus on everyday relationships, watching with fascination as people go about their business and interact with one another. Both films could be mistaken for documentaries.. since they labor more at re-creating a particular social world than at manipulating a social world for dramatic ends. Both filmmakers eschew fancy camera work in the telling of their stories. For Ozu that means employing his unmoving-camera.. for Leigh the use of a rather plain visual style. Nothing in their film style reaches out and grabs the viewer..
Both directors would recognize something of themselves in the films of the other.. but at times they would not quite be sure what to make of the other. Mike Leigh's plain style comes out of a commitment to portray class differences.. a commitment that also gives his films a political edge. Yasujiro Ozu is more firmly committed to aesthetic ideals.. and his films proceed like a series of still lifes.. each scene carefully composed. Ozu fills the breaks between major scenes with literal still lifes.. and opens the film with the following composition:
It is hard to imagine Leigh employing that kind of purposeful visual humor.. just as it is hard to imagine Ozu infusing his character interactions with the humorous eccentricity of the dialogue in a film by Leigh.
Both directors have made better films, but these efforts are enough to provide relief from bloated Hollywood product-films. There can be nothing more peace-giving after watching a big Hollywood "quality" film like The Departed than to sit back with two films such as these and feel real documented life washing over one.
Aurora on Sunday
February 4, 2007
I realize that the video will steal the show.. but for good measure here are a few cute pictures:
Old Roads by Way of Max Weber
February 4, 2007
At the close of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber makes a curious point about the limitations of his work:
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great re-birth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." [124]
In the very next paragraph Weber backs off these statements about the future, noting that it brings him to the sort of judgments with which "this purely historical discussion need not be burdened". It is as if this brief glance to the future has taken him outside the bounds of scholarship, and he must beat a retreat.
As Weber makes this retreat I feel like shouting: keep going! As Emily and I talk about a vision for our scholarship, one of the points we come back to is the idea that scholarship can bring about change.. it can do something more than describe what has happened. The whole point of Old Roads is that through studying the past.. whether that means the actions of 17th century Quaker women or the culture of a medieval city like Cairo.. we can arrive at new cultural models. It is a conscious push for one outcome that Weber ponders: "...there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals..."
A second more negative future is also envisioned. The capitalism of the latter days will produce "specialists without spirit" and "sensualists without heart". The specialists without heart may well be a description of the academy as Weber saw it developing. At first it seems ironic that Weber would lodge this complaint since his ideas are so central to academic identities today.. but from the "author's introduction" (a later essay tacked onto the Protestant Ethic) it becomes clear that Weber did not necessarily see himself as a specialist:
The Sinologist, the Indologist, the Semitist, or the Egyptologist, will of course find no facts unknown to him. We only hope that he will find nothing definitely wrong in points that are essential. How far it has been possible to come as near this ideal as a non-specialist is able to do, the author cannot know. [xl]
From this point of view Weber is a generalist connecting the facts unearthed by specialists. If I return to my own earlier blog about the divisions of academic study, we could identify him as a "synthesizer". It is possible even that he would be surprised to learn that he is best known as a founder of an entirely new specialization..
I am left wondering who a "sensualist without heart" might be. I imagine it is a person who lives for the pleasure of the senses but is unable to connect these things to a vital center that gives emotional unity. Perhaps that should be another area of focus for Old Roads.. to locate a center.. a way of processing this passing and beautiful world. To which Weber might reply: "whoever wants a sermon should go to a conventicle" (xli). Ah, but there again.. he has too small a view of scholarship.
Chicago, Sufjan Stevens
February 3, 2007
Sufjan Stevens is the artist who has made me mostly forget about Beck. I like the generic complexity in Beck's albums.. but I can be annoyed at his self-consciously hip poses: "Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1985". Sufjan maxes out on quirkiness.. but does so with obvious goodwill and openheartedness.. and none of the hipster pose. There is also the added benefit that Sufjan has a gift for lyrics and memorable melodies.
A song that showcases his musical talent is the song "Chicago" which was first released on Illinois, but then took on a new centrality with its three appearances on Avalanche, an album composed of outtakes from Illinois. It is a song that makes me think of my trip across the country with Mike when I was seventeen or eighteen. Sufjan is describing a different trip.. but something like our spirit pervades his song.
I fell in love again
(All things go. All things go.)
Drove to Chicago
(All things know. All things know.)
We sold our clothes to the state.
(I don't mind. I don't mind.)
I made a lot of mistakes
(In my mind. In my mind.)
The first line appears to set the motive for a trip to Chicago: "I fell in love again". Hearing the song for the first time one might think that he is referring to his love for a person. But in the next stanza the idea is clarified with a more reflective line: "I was in love with a place (In my mind. In my mind.)" So here at the outset we get an expression of place-love. It is an emotion which we might expect from an artist who has embarked (at least rhetorically) on the project of recording a topical album for all 50 states.
I am not sure what it means to sell your clothes to the state. I tried to look up the phrase online and got nothing useful. It could mean that Sufjan ended up selling some of his clothes to get by.. pointing to a trip that somehow went awry. This seems to be the admission that immediately follows: "I made a lot of mistakes.."
And I drove to New York
In a van with my friend.
We slept in parking lots.
(I don't mind. I don't mind.)
I was in love with a place.
(In my mind. In my mind.)
I made a lot of mistakes
(In my mind. In my mind.)
Here I have a hard time commenting on Sufjan's lines, as I get caught up in my own memories. New York was the goal of our trip across the country, only we did not travel by van, but by Greyhound bus.. with numerous short stops along the way. We did not sleep in parking lots but in Salvation Army shelters and open fields where we could pitch a tent.. or in the homes of people we met along the way. I remember shopping for refried beans and tortillas so that we could make inexpensive burritos.. and I recall that Mike always insisted on onions. And we did not mind either. That is kind of the glory of the whole experience.. we did not mind anything.. not the food, not the places where we slept, not the people who sat next to us on the bus. We were in love with a place.. not a particular city, but a land that seemed to expand forever in front of us.
You came to take us.
(All things go. All things go.)
To re-create us.
(All things grow. All things grow.)
We had our mind set.
(All things know. All things know.)
You had to find it.
(All things go. All things go.)
The third stanza takes the song in a spiritual direction. The "you" must refer to God.. who is the only person looking to "re-create us". As so often with Sufjan, the religious implications of his songs are slightly suppressed in the lyrics.. making it hard to pigeonhole him. But if you know the lingo, the direction of the lyrics is clear enough.
The particulars of Sufjan's trip are vague, but he has told us that mistakes were made and hardships borne. Now we glimpse some of the redemption that is possible.. re-creation and growth. The line "We had our mind set" is another one that is hard to interpret.. but plugging the line into the Christian framework we could venture that this is a negative admission.. and something inside had to be shattered.
The final lines I find beautiful:
If I was crying in the van with my friend
It was for freedom from myself
and from the land
I made a lot of mistakes.
I made a lot of mistakes.
I made a lot of mistakes.
We are back in the van with the friend.. We have already gotten the hint of a theological overview for this experience.. whose key words are re-creation and growth. Now Sufjan gives us the briefest glimpse of a breakdown.. but a breakdown which also leads to strength: "freedom from myself and from the land". That last phrase in particular is odd, since it is exactly love of the land that set him out on the trip.. and that same love animates his albums. The cartoon picture of him in the liner notes for Avalanche portray him singing "This land is your land".. connecting his ideals to Woody Guthrie's vision of America. But this central song from Avalanche declares freedom from that land!
Those lines seem paradoxical and I can't quite get my mind around them. Perhaps the song represents a young man who identified himself too closely with the land.. and whose optimism, whose unbounded assumptions about the goodness of the rest of the world, is punctured by a betrayal of some kind. He has to beat a hasty retreat. Maybe to write about this expansive land one must also feel a separation from it.. a distance. If that is the case then Sufjan is describing in elusive language the beginning of his calling.. the emergence of a self who can comment on the world around him, and not just experience it.
And then come the lines that haunt everyone: "I made a lot of mistakes.. I made a lot of mistakes.." In the context of the song those mistakes are what open up the sense of separation from a the land.. which finally allows for Sufjan to sing about this land.
The Mystical Argument: Reading Rumi
February 2, 2007
2007 marks the 800th anniversary of the birth of Rumi.. and various events are planned to celebrate his life and work. I recently finished the new translation by Jawid Mojaddedi of Book 1 of the Masnavi, published as a paperback in the Oxford World's Classics series. Of course Rumi has a high profile and his work can actually be found in various editions.. but I have always been a little nervous about the New Age packaging that his poetry tends to receive.. being suspicious that what was left out by spiritual-minded editors might be what I found most interesting.
The website set up for the 800th anniversary cites some lines from Rumi that sound as welcoming as can be imagined:
Come, come again, whoever you are, come! Heathen, fire worshipper or idolatrous, come! Come even if you broke your penitence a hundred times, Ours is the portal of hope, come as you are.
When I visited the burial shrine of Rumi in Konya, Turkey I remember reading those lines at the entrance. They stood out because I had seen nothing like them in the religious centers I visited in the Middle East. They beckoned me to enter like no mosque in Cairo.
The temptation, I think, is to read these lines and understand Rumi as a liberal.. someone who could understand the secular mindset. But that would be to mistake an expansive religiosity for a later secular viewpoint. Reading through Rumi made this misreading even more clear.. as Rumi launches multiple attacks against skeptical approaches to mystical experience.
A thousand men who just obey what's told
Were filled with doubt when one new thought took hold,
Their skills in logic, proofs, and imitation
Are based upon their false imagination.
That wretched Satan throws doubt in each mind,
In order to trip up the ones who're blind. [131-2]
I was surprised how often he returned to this point about how intellectual tools can be misleading. A little later he likens intellectual doubts to an itch that should not be scratched.. "Abstain from thoughts though they tempt and harass" (179).
There was clearly a class of people attacking reports of mystical experience. These were the "philosophers".. and we get a taste of what their line of criticism could be from the poetry of Rumi:
[Philosophers]
Saying, 'These men must be moved by emotions
To have such fantasies and foolish notions.' [201]
So the problem for the mystic becomes how to combat this charge of emotionalism.. the idea that somehow they are being caught up in fantasy. The response is to set mystical knowledge outside the bounds of human reason, and along with that comes a tendency to belittle reason.
How this kind of thinking works appears clearly in the short autobiographical work by al-Ghazali, translated under the title Al-Ghazali's Path to Sufism. Having reviewed the failings of different paths to true knowledge, he defends Sufi ideas about the experience of God. Beyond the stage of intellect, there is a higher level of understanding. A person (think philosopher) who is able to only operate with the intellect will be blind to the further level of understanding. A philosopher trying to understand mysticism will be like a blind man trying to understand colors.. it won't be happening.
I have problems with this line of thinking because with one move a person has a) removed their own beliefs from criticism, and b) belittled the ideas of the philosophers by asserting that they are blind to reality. This is not so much an argument as a rhetorical inoculation from rational thought.
Rumi follows this same rhetorical path, as can be seen from the following quotation:
Your every feeling, fancy, sense, and care
Is like the children's wooden horse, beware!
Knowledge of mystics was the steed they rode,
Knowledge of sensual men an extra load.
Heart knowledge helps you when it fills you there,
But other knowledge is a cross to bear...
So don't bear knowledge for your own sake, friend,
And you'll find inner knowledge in the end... [211]
The knowledge of the world that comes from our senses is to be mistrusted.. while the knowledge of mystics has descended from some better source. One wants this "heart knowledge". The result of this kind of thinking is convenient enough: rationalists can not lodge any real critiques.. they can be instantly brushed off.. their arguments treated like postcards from the blind.
This path of thought is common in all mysticisms.. I think right now of Jonathan Edwards and his defense of the religious affections by means of a sixth sense whereby spiritual things can be perceived. It is perhaps the most thoroughly negative contribution of mysticism to religious discourse.. pushing religion away from rational and empirical examination. We should be skeptical of any path of thought that insulates itself from intellectual criticism.. and instead of praising mystics for their tolerance, we should be holding some of their ideas to the fire. As we have noted, mystics are often able to welcome heathen and fire worshipper.. but pity the poor skeptic.
