Creative Emptiness

Thought for the day from the introduction to Alan Watts’ classic The Wisdom of Insecurity (p. 10):

In [my former books] I was concerned to vindicate certain principles of religion, philosophy, and metaphysic by reinterpreting them. This was, I think, like putting legs on a snake—unnecessary and confusing, because only doubtful truths need defense. This book, however, is in the spirit of the Chinese sage Lao-tzu, that master of the law of reversed effect, who declared that those who justify themselves do not convince, and that to know the truth one must get rid of knowledge, and that nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness—from which men shrink.

Lao-tzu was the author of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational "scripture" of Taoism. Taoism is the most compelling of eastern philosophies to me. Contemporary therapies like CBT draw on its principles, as does Watts in this book, both of which basically argue that anxiety and insecurity are, paradoxically, "the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves" from suffering and death (p. 9). In other words, embrace change as the only certainty in life. Live life mindfully and openly, but with no fixed expectations. Despair is nothing more than a fear of and resistance to change.

There, now you don't need to read the book. (A terrible summary, actually.)

But in fact, I liked this quote for other reasons, which I will not entirely explain. But it echoes my own experience of the conflict between theology and spirituality, religious discourse versus religious experience. Religious apologetics and sermonizing fill me with boredom or even mild melancholy, and theology may be intellectually engaging, but rarely anything more. To invoke an old saw, discoursing on religion is like dancing about architecture. To reduce it to words empties it of meaning, since it is irreducibly experiential. It can be evoked by the arts, including words-as-art, but words-as-description aspire to fixed definitions, which are limiting and grossly inadequate.

So, how exactly did I become a scholar of religion by vocation? Scholars can be mystics, too.

Doubting Ditchkins

There are two new books out that take on, in different ways, the New Atheism of (especially) Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whom one author calls collectively "Ditchkins." These two bestselling authors have provoked a very strong response, but I have come across little that really breaks new ground. But these two new titles look very good. I've read other books by their authors and they are both very bright lights.

David Bentley Hart is an Orthodox theologian who authored an excellent piece of contempory theodicy in The Doors of the Sea, among other works. His new anti-atheism book is Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (brief reviews here and on Amazon). Rather than rehashing old Aquininan arguments for the existence of God, he examines how Christ and Christianity have created our contempory "humane" view of humanity itself. He is not a easy author, and this recycles his previous work to a large extent, but this looks to be an accessible entry into Hart's thought.

Even more interesting to me is the new book by Terry Eagleton, a British scholar and cultural and literary critic who must be the world's most articulate Marxist. His takedown of postmodernism in After Theory was tremendous, coming as it did from a PoMo fellow-traveller. I won't survey his new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, since Stanley Fish does it thoroughly, but it is a very unexpected defense of religion from someone who is not (in any obvious way) religious.  Fish speculates on why he wrote this book, and concludes: "He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels."

The Unthinkable

This is a shoutout to a great post on Mr. Fweem's Blog and an article by Clay Shirky titled, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable." What an incredible bit of writing.

Shirky talks about epochal change in one branch of publishing, newspapers, but much of this applies to all print publication. The institute that employs me is, in part, an academic publisher. Academic publishing lives in a strange bubble to begin with, but we are even further removed from reality by the fact that our publishing is non-profit (only partly by design). But even we are increasingly asking the question, does it really make sense in the Internet Age to spend diminishing resources putting ink on dead trees? It's not just the cost. If your goal is the widest possible distribution of information, then printing is limiting. And in fact, we put almost all (soon to be all all) of our print publication on our free website anyway. So, why not go direct to web?

The main reason for us is that print publication is still academically legitimating. Scholars in most fields still distrust the internet, as if the expense of print publication somehow is a guarantee of academic quality. Rank advancement committees generally discount web-only publications. This thinking will have to change, and in fact, university administrations may be the force that changes it. They want to own the intellectual property their institutions produce instead of ceding it to publishers. But that is another topic.

Another reason for print vs. web publication is to restrict unauthorized reproduction. But online distribution of print texts, mostly unauthorized, continues to increase. I won't get into that, but in addition, two words to ponder: Google Books. We are just years, but not decades, away from having most print books available to everyone on web, for a modest fee or free. More and more titles will be published primarily as ebooks, and secondarily as print titles, mostly via print on demand. But don't get me going on the death of books.

The Shirky article also has some poignant thoughts on the nature of information revolutions like we are experiencing. Speaking of Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press, he describes the massive upheaval it caused, especially for civic and ecclesiastical hierarchies:

The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust? . . .

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

Religions and ideologies are experiencing this in a major way, to their benefit (new movements) or detriment (established groups). I found it interesting that Pres. Thomas S. Monson's closing remarks at the recent LDS General Conference focused on the internet. Obviously pornography is the leading concern, but working for a Mormon apologetics organization, I know something of just how challenging the internet is for the church in terms of information and message control.

It is no surprise that Elder M. Russell Ballard, who is heavily involved in the church's proselyting and public communications, has encouraged faithful LDS blogging. That was something of a volte-face but also a recognition that, on the internet, volume is more powerful and persuasive than authorized credentials. It's the means for a million little converations, not the vehicle for one authoritative declaration. But there is still a tendency to treat the internet as a source of information and media rather than the source. This perpective is slowly changing, of necessity. But most of us will really only apprehend the magnitude of this revolution in retrospect.

To Write Is Good, To Edit Divine

My job includes several substantial editorial assignments. I know what it's like to sweat under deadlines and how easily typos happen. In fact, I can't even look at a book we've published after it comes back from the press. I'm too afraid of what mistakes I might find.

One title we published (not one of mine) was a work of Islamic philosophy called the Decisive Treatise. The cover designer got confused and set the title on the spine as, Decisive Treaty. The editor caught it in the first round of proofs and corrected it, but when later design adjustments were made, the designer accidentally used his original file. So, yes, the spine was printed as, Decisive Treaty. Ugh.

So I winced in sympathy upon hearing of a small but catastrophic typo in yesterday's Daily Universe, our campus newspaper, whereby a photo of LDS apostles at the recent general conference was captioned, "Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates." When discovered, the university rushed to pull the 15,000 copies of the paper out of circulation, replacing it with a corrected print run later in the day. Here are the gory details.

The Macho Evangelical

I've said before, I'm not much into posting on religion, because that's work, not leisure. But it looks like I'll be making some exceptions. This NYT article on Pastor Mark Driscoll of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle was very interesting, less for the somewhat racy bits (reader warning) than for the profile of evangelical neo-Calvinism that it profiles. Many protestants, both liberal and conservative, have been increasingly uncomfortable with Calvinist predestination. Many evangelicals today might describe themselves as "four-point Calvinists" (Google it), rejecting limited atonement to some degree or other. Others question the doctrine of election altogether. There has always been pushback against this "weak" Calvinism from some quarters, but I find this example especially interesting because it is not egghead theology, but commonman spirituality.

Scientists Discover that Religion Is Good for You

I don't often post on religion since that's my employment. This blog is for leisure. But this article is nothing too heavy, just generally interesting. For some of us, it's probably just a, "Tell me something I didn't know."

This NYT article reports that two scientists at the University of Miami "have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control." It continues:

Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier. These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn’t account for all the benefits. . .

Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

Nonreligious folks can try to replicate the forms and practices of religion to derive similar benefits, but I expect further research will show, as is indicated here, that these virtues derive much more from belief than practice.