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By Nathan Bierma


Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

November 2003

This Week:

KEEPING THE FAITH

War journalist Ernie Pyle's claim that there are no atheists in foxholes may be an overstatement, as atheists hasten to point out. Converted atheists may indeed be outnumbered in the bleak misery of battle, as some venture, by those who "have entered battle devout believers but ended up coming away without any faith all." But the adage identifies a presumption of most believers and agnostics: that God and religion are the default beliefs of human beings, prone to "kick in" at moments that jeopardize denial of the transcendent. The burden of proof, in other words, regardless of the Enlightenment, is on the shoulders of atheists to show that they really are "above" religion.

The emergence of the curious term "bright" to describe an atheist, naturalist, and/or humanist, shows how hard this is to pull off, as Cullen Murphy suggests in this month's Atlantic Monthly. Murphy notes that "brights" chose their name as an upbeat alternative to the prevalent self-description "godless Americans," although he points out that the number of pejorative names for believers rivals that of nonbelievers, including zealot and dogmatist. (And besides, doesn't "bright" make believers out to be dim bulbs? Was C.S. Lewis in the dark?)

The revealing test, the always tongue-in-cheek Murphy says, will be "the degree to which the brightness crusade itself begins to take on religious overtones." Religion has fasting; secular culture now has luxury fasting spas. Religion has saints and martyrs; secularism canonizes Einstein, Darwin, and Orwell. Religion has relics; secularism has celebrity memorabilia on eBay. Religion has predestination; secularism has "the alcoholism gene, the laziness gene, the schizophrenia gene."

The brights also have the most damning religious trademark of all: schisms. The American Atheist Association takes issue with the word "bright." Others disagree whether "bright" is an adjective or noun. The internecine spats may make Judge Snyder's pronouncement on a classic Simpsons episode unnecessary: "As for science versus religion, I'm issuing a restraining order. Science should stay 500 yards from religion at all times."

Murphy doesn't mention that many "bright" Web sites are running an evangelical playbook: "Shine the bright light! Spread the Word!" implores BrightRights.org. Still, he says, "It is only a matter of time before brightness takes on some of the trappings of a religion." All that's missing is an official brightness hymn, and Monty Python fans will not be disappointed by his suggestion. Full story

Related:

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

NAIROBI—The maiden issue of Kenya's first literary magazine carries a smoldering tale of a taboo romance between two Kenyans. … Deeper inside the stylish journal, which arrived in bookstores [last] month, is a parody of the city's corrupt and potbellied mayor and an "Editor's Rant" column that asks if the government values intellectual and artistic pursuits. Kenyans say the energetic and provocative 291-page quarterly called Kwani? —which means So? in Sheng, a slang mix of English, Swahili and several tribal languages—is an exciting sign of new freedom for writers. Booksellers used to be terrified to sell anything more contentious then East African coffee-table volumes on wildlife or the commissioned and glowing biography of the autocratic former president, Daniel arap Moi. Moi stepped down last December [in] the first change of power ever witnessed by more than half of this young country's population. In the euphoria, people declared the birth of a new Kenya. Full story

SANFORD, Maine—In a town where the hulls of dormant factories match the rusted hues of [autumn] leaves, Felix Goodrich sees salvation in the toss of the dice and the spinning dials of one-armed bandits. But Goodrich—a manufacturing worker laid off in May, who jokes his name should be "Goodpoor"—does not want to gamble in the giant new casino that is the subject of a divisive referendum in this state. He wants to help build it. "I just want to work. I just want to see this town boom again." Sanford, an inland industrial community of more than 20,000, about 90 miles north of Boston, struggling with an unemployment rate among the highest in the state, voted by a slim majority to consider a casino proposal from two local Indian tribes and a Las Vegas developer. Throughout New England, the expansion of legalized gambling has been [contested] since a pair of casinos were built in the early 1990s on reservations in Connecticut. Full story

CITY SCENE: WASHINGTON, D.C.

As I stood between the U.S. Capitol and Supreme Court on a recent muggy November day, I realized I had a silly thought in my head. I was looking at the wide expanses of marble steps ascending to both buildings and presuming that you could just walk right up and go inside. Just use the front door. The entrances were built to be inviting, I think, embodying the ideal that these are the people's places. I still remember the poster on the door of my civics classroom, bearing the famous quote of Alexander Hamilton: "Here, sir, the people govern." In fact, you won't get halfway up the steps before you are diverted by a security guard to an unceremonious side door and the metal detectors that await. In the case of the Capitol, you now have to wait in a tent that leads to a trailer that opens to a barricaded walkway that funnels you to a nondescript door, behind which lie … more metal detectors. I'm not complaining; this being my first visit to D.C. after September 11, 2001, I was frightened to see airplanes using the corridor over the Tidal Basin just before landing at Washington National, seemingly scraping the roof of the Jefferson Memorial. And I'm not the first to observe that D.C., lined with forbidding block-long government buildings, has a distinctly anti-populist feel. Even I was drawn to peer down into the House gallery and ask myself whenever someone new took the floor: is that somebody? I read once that Plato calculated the ideal number of citizens in a democracy to be something like 5,000. With as many people we have, we need a representative democracy, and with that looms the prospect of aristocracy.

WEEKLY DIGEST

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  • Speaking of democracy, the problem with trying to bring it to Iraq is that it's a mismatch; you can't implant Western ideals of tolerance and openness in a part of the world where such ideals are alien. Or so goes one line of thinking about the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. But in an indispensable essay on the global roots of democracy, a cover story last month in The New Republic, former Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen exposes the fiction that democracy was hatched in Greece and raised in Western Europe. That narrative is too limited, Sen says. "Government by discussion" and "public reasoning" may have had precedence in non-Greek cultures before the heyday of Athens, and did not immediately build momentum in Europe after that. And what about 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar, who arranged dialogues in India among people of different faiths while the inquisitions were ongoing in Europe? "It is also important to note that nearly every attempt at early printing in China, Korea, and Japan was undertaken by Buddhist technologists, with an interest in expanding communication," Sen writes. He quotes Tocqueville, who arrived in America and said that the democratic ideal is "the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history." Article preview - reprinted here
  • You've seen The Serenity Prayer on T-shirts and coffee mugs, or in the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous. God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other, the prayer reads in its original form. Elisabeth Sifton has spotted Serenity Prayer memorabilia as far away as South Africa. But despite its mass marketing, the prayer is not, as B&C contributing editor Lauren Winner points out in Newsday, "a cute bromide." It was perhaps the best known work by Sifton's father, Reinhold Neibuhr, one of the 20th-century's premier theologians. In an interview with National Public Radio, Sifton, senior vice-president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux publishing, and author of a book on the history of the prayer, talks about her father's decision to hand the prayer over to Hallmark. She also discusses what Publishers Weekly calls Niebuhr's "Christian realism, which asserts that every human effort is tainted with sin or the inevitable human failure to be perfect." Audio interview (fifth item)
  • The problem with therapy isn't just that some people are too dependent on it or the number of therapists who charge way too much. The problem is that therapy popularizes and promotes emotional turmoil and feelings of helplessness, says Frank Furedi in a new book called Therapy Culture, reviewed in the British online magazine Spiked. According to the review, Furedi downplays the argument that our self-help culture is the natural result of the decline of community and civic ties, and says that therapy only makes things worse by breeding mistrust of people close to you. "Friends are better than therapists," Spiked says. Full story What the review does not say is that Furedi seems to be playing the opportunistic contrarian, seizing on one extreme in our culture and going too far toward the other. Why would he disagree that a therapeutic culture is no more misguided and self-centered that its predecessor, which idealized "rugged individualism"?
  • For the first time in 65 years, the U.S. nickel is getting a face-lift. Not on its face, but on its back, where icons commemorating the Louisiana Purchase and the expedition of Lewis and Clark will temporarily replace Monticello. With the U.S. Mint changing our change, what about the ongoing debate over scrapping the penny? More than $10 billion in pocket change is sitting in storage in Americans' coffee cans and piggy banks, much of it in pennies, and copper mining takes its toll on the environment. To illustrate the inefficiency of our current change system, says Discover magazine, one mathematician calculated that eliminating the penny would cut the number of coins used in the average transaction from 4.7 to under three. For the fun of it, he also speculated that an 18-cent piece would most reduce the number of coins that change hands. Full story What the story doesn't say is what society's increasing use of the credit card bodes for the future of the Mint.
Related:Ten reasons to keep the penny, from Pennies.org

• Miscellaneous: U.S. military funds Shakespeare productions for overseas troops—Widow of McDonalds founder leaves record donation to National Public Radio—Should the Univ. of Cal. still manage Los Alamos?—Bionic limbs a miracle for some, too costly for others—Machines to replace people-populated pits on trading floors?

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.

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