The Biggest Lies In Contemporary Discourse

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Luke Ford

* The New York Times reports June 9, 2024: “Israel’s Euphoria Over Hostage Rescue May Be Fleeting”

Is there any euphoria that isn’t fleeting?

The same Times article continued: “The audacious [hostage rescue] operation did little to resolve the many challenges facing Israel’s government.”

Did anyone claim that it would?

* Nahum Barnea wrote May 26, 2024:

The military incursion into Rafah must be stopped. Not because the International Court of Justice ordered it, but because the cost outweighs the benefit. We can debate for days the judges’ motives, their integrity and their judicial rigor, but it won’t save Israel.

I put the phrase “won’t save Israel” into Google News and got dozens of results.

Who seriously argues that any one act by Israel will save Israel? Nobody. Salvation for individuals and nations is an ongoing project. It does not descend from above. Nobody is coming to save you.

What are real moral categories vs fake moral categories? Real moral categories go back in time. Allegations of racism and imperialism are recent made-up moral categories.

Here’s a 2018 paper examining real moral categories:

A complex web of social and moral norms governs many everyday human behaviors, acting as the glue for social harmony. The existence of moral norms helps elucidate the psychological motivations underlying a wide variety of seemingly puzzling behavior, including why humans help or trust total strangers. In this review, we examine four widespread moral norms: Fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation, and consider how a single social instrument—reciprocity—underpins compliance to these norms. Using a game theoretic framework, we examine how both context and emotions moderate moral standards, and by extension, moral behavior. We additionally discuss how a mechanism of reciprocity facilitates the adherence to, and enforcement of, these moral norms through a core network of brain regions involved in processing reward. In contrast, violating this set of moral norms elicits neural activation in regions involved in resolving decision conflict and exerting cognitive control. Finally, we review how a reinforcement mechanism likely governs learning about morally normative behavior.

…if a core component of morality is that humans share a set of codes and beliefs that dampen selfish inclinations, it is important to examine what those moral strictures might be. We make the case that there are four fundamental moral norms—fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation—that play a prominent role in shaping many everyday social interactions. While there are other possible candidate norms that could be included (e.g., norms of respect, justice, harm, and so forth), these four norms are sufficiently general enough to be applicable to a wide array of moral behavior (e.g., trusting that an individual will not be harmed by others), while also having enough specificity to capture unique behavioral patterns across them. Here we argue that these norms of fairness, altruism, trust, and cooperation are all subserved by, and rooted in, a single mechanism—reciprocity—that enables people to make flexible moral decisions across a range of social contexts.

What are traditional values? Here’s a good summary:

1. Traditional values provide a sense of identity and belonging. When we embrace traditional values, we connect with our cultural roots and heritage. This helps us to understand who we are and where we come from, giving us a sense of belonging and identity. Traditional values provide a framework for our beliefs and behaviors, and they help us to make sense of the world around us.

2. Traditional values promote social cohesion. When we share common values, we are more likely to work together and support each other. Traditional values promote social cohesion by encouraging people to work together towards common goals. This helps to build stronger communities and promotes a sense of unity.

3. Traditional values promote personal responsibility. Traditional values emphasize the importance of personal responsibility and accountability. When we embrace these values, we take ownership of our actions and are more likely to make responsible decisions. This helps us to become more self-reliant and independent.

4. Traditional values provide a moral compass. Traditional values provide a moral framework that helps us to distinguish between right and wrong. They help us to make ethical decisions and guide our behavior towards what is good and just. This is particularly important in a society where moral relativism is becoming increasingly prevalent.

5. Traditional values promote stability and order. Traditional values provide a stable foundation for society, promoting order and stability. They help to maintain social norms and prevent deviant behavior. This is particularly important in a world where social norms are becoming increasingly fragmented.

6. Traditional values promote family values. Traditional values emphasize the importance of family and the role of the family unit in society. They promote strong family bonds and encourage parents to take an active role in the upbringing of their children. This helps to build stronger families and promotes family values.

7. Traditional values promote respect for authority. Traditional values emphasize the importance of respecting authority and following rules and regulations. This helps to maintain law and order and promotes a sense of discipline and respect for authority.

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Russian Decency

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

Zhenya Bruno writes for NYBooks.com:

In the investigative journalist Elena Kostyuchenko’s new book about Russia, resistance is carried out through small, discreet acts…

There was a flash of confidence in her eyes, a claim that certain lines should not be crossed. Elena Kostyuchenko gives us a term for this certainty. She calls it decency: “A decent person follows established rules,” she explains. “They obey their elders. They don’t insist on their rights.”

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No Comfort in Shakespeare’s Tragedies

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

Fintan O’Toole writes for NYBooks.com:

What we encounter, then, is nothing so comforting as imperfect men causing trouble that will be banished by their deserved deaths. It is men who embody the hurly-burly that, contrary to the predictions of the witches at the start of Macbeth, is never going to be “done.” Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and Lear are distinguished in these dramas by the illusion that they can determine events by their own actions. They have, they believe, the power to say what will happen next. But no amount of power can ever be great enough in an irrational world. The universe does not follow orders. That, as Miss Prism might have said, is what Tragedy means.

It is nice to imagine a time when these plays could be loved for their poetry alone. It would be a delight to think that their pleasure would be that they speak, as Horatio has it at the end of Hamlet, to an “unknowing world/How these things came about.” But there is not yet a world that does not know the violence of these plays or the fury with which reality responds to all attempts to force it to obey one man’s will. There is no place in history where “Be not found here” is not good advice for millions of vulnerable people. We return to the tragedies not in search of behavioral education but because the wilder the terror Shakespeare unleashes, the deeper is the pity and the greater the wonder that, even in the howling tempest, we can still hear the voices of broken individuals so amazingly articulated. They do not, when they speak, reduce the frightfulness. They allow us, rather, in those bewildering moments, to be equal to it.

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The Workings of the Spirit

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

Peter Brown writes for NYBooks.com:

A new history of Christianity traces its transformation over a thousand years from an enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to Catholic uniformity…

Peter Heather’s Christendom is a colossal book written by a colossus in the field. Aptly subtitled “The Triumph of a Religion,” it covers a millennium, from the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312 to the baptism of Grand Duke Mindaugas of Lithuania, the last pagan ruler in Europe, around 1250.

Heather resolutely rejects the romantic notion that Christianity rose to the top of late Roman society by its intrinsic merits alone, without the help of the powerful. His attitude is close to that of J.B. Bury, who argued that “it must never be forgotten that Constantine’s revolution was perhaps the most audacious act ever committed by an autocrat in disregard and defiance of the vast majority of his subjects.”

To justify this view, Heather offers a cogent analysis of the structure of Roman upper-class society and its relation to the Roman state—a relation that made elites peculiarly vulnerable to pressure from a Christian court. If pressure was exercised by Constantine and his Christian successors on the wider population, it was the gentle violence of a state that lacked the strength and organizational capacity of modern dictatorships. The late Roman state was not “a decadent Leviathan,” as many scholars from the 1930s onward deemed it to be. These scholars saw the later empire as a warning for their own society, faced with the rise of totalitarian states in Europe and with what struck some of them as the ominous expansion of government associated in America with the New Deal. As a result, they greatly exaggerated the Roman Empire’s coercive powers.

Heather points out that the late Roman state could not enforce an ideology; it was too “rickety.” But it could seduce. Its immense ambitions depended on networks of friends and clients that stretched from the court to the lower reaches of the gentry in a never-ceasing waterfall of favors asked and favors received. If one wanted to get anything done, one had to please someone. And ideally this was someone who had pleased the emperor and those around him.

Once the emperor made plain that he was an orthodox Christian and that he would shut the “divine ears” to the petitions of heretics, Jews, and pagans, the message trickled down with surprising speed. A confessional state was born.

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Leaving The Fold

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

I just renewed my subscription to NYBooks. It is such a gorgeous publication.

From NYBooks.com:

All religious autobiography hinges on a drama of escape. The convert speaks from a vantage of liberation, having been freed from the shackles of sin, looking back on the years he lived in bondage, a “prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness,” as Thomas Merton puts it in The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), his celebrated memoir about becoming a Trappist monk. The deconversion narrative relies on the same arc, but in reverse. The apostate wins her freedom by fleeing the prison of institutional religion. Each narrative is, of course, a lie. The believer, even after he has glimpsed eternity, must continue to live in the world with other fallen humans and his own wayward flesh. Anyone who has left the church finds, inevitably, that secular life has plenty of constraints and disappointments of its own. What drives the narrative impulse is that first, ecstatic taste of freedom—of having borne witness to something as formless and vast as the night sky…

In her mid-twenties she was living in Paris and writing scores for a music publisher when her father died, a trauma that hit with seismic force. Although she and her siblings had not been raised religious—neither parent was a churchgoer—her grief succeeded in convincing her that she had (so to speak) a father in heaven….

Conversion experiences are always the least convincing part of a faith narrative. It would be easy to chalk this up to secularization, our loss of faith in the reality of faith itself, but the problem, I think, is broader than that. (“And then I realized—” the poet Robert Haas once observed, is “the part of stories one never quite believes.”) Epiphanies, those watermarks of shifting internal states, consist of pure, untested potentiality. Coldstream’s passages about her contact with the divine during those early years of prayer are, fittingly, vague to the point of meaninglessness…

…few things are more disappointing to the new convert than religious laxity. But Coldstream makes little effort to put these complaints in perspective, to see them as the follies of youthful purity, or to consider why her aloofness and superiority are so alienating to the other nuns, most of whom are cradle Catholics. Recalling how she was often chided for her “convert’s enthusiasm”…

…As I read page after page of schoolyard bullying and mean-girl snubs, I could not help but long for a different storyline, one in which Coldstream fully embraces her prophetic megalomania and does what so many saints have done—disappearing into the desert, climbing to the top of some ragged mountain, calling on a complacent church to find its way back to its pioneering ideals..

Lucy is one of many nuns who over the years succumb to mental illness and are forced to leave the convent, a fact that Coldstream attributes to prolonged repression. The religious call to “self-immolation,” the tireless effort to conquer temptation and suppress one’s true feelings, is unnatural, she writes, because “the shadow side of the psyche…cannot be kept down for ever.” This is an odd about-face, given her original complaints about religious laxity. She was the one who wanted more self-immolation. But in trying to account for the growing tension she experienced—her attempts to suppress her artistic, solitary, and prophetic nature—and the array of personal dysfunction she witnessed at the convent, she ends up concluding that the problem is the unnatural discipline of monasticism itself. The ascetic life that survived two millennia of Christianity had finally, at the dawn of the third, become untenable.

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