zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — where motive is a multiple choice question, all (or several) of the above may be decent responses, but i’m checking “dunno” ]
.

The waters haven’t settled yet, and we don’t have a clear picture as to the shooter’s motive or motives, yet.

One recent suggestion is that Mercer left a “manifesto” (somehow, that’s what these things get called) in which he claimed “I am going to die friendless, girlfriendless, and a virgin.” That’s reminiscent of Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer from May 2014.

But he appears to have studied several mass killers, and maybe (with an assist from news, social media & 4chan guesswork) left “clues” pointing in enough directions to keep us all talking about him..

Nazi

jihadist

satanist

atheist

racist

friendless, girlfriendless, and a virgin

conservative republican

spiritual

IRA

BlackLivesMatter

and so on..

Please note, these links were hastily gathered to make my overall point, and better ones may well be available — the amount of coverage and speculation is vast.

**

FWIW, Bob Shea and RA Wilson pillaged the many conspiracy theories sent to Playboy’s legal department and amalgamated them all, however mutually incoherent, to form the Illuminatus Trilogy. Wilson later wrote that his basic assumption was:

Suppose all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists.

**

Guns? Mental illness? No comment at this time.

This is the second in a series of posts regarding Socrates and his modern legacy that began with a discussion of the books and authors involved – The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone and Socrates: A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson . We are also getting some direction from a foremost academic authority on Socrates and Plato, the late Gregory Vlastos in the form of  his last book,  Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. 

The greatest divergence between Johnson and Stone is on the matter of Socrates and religion. This is is some importance because one of the charges leveled at Socrates by his accusers Anytus and Meletus was not believing in “the gods of city”and introducing new ones.

The sincerity of this specific charge is an interesting question. As both authors indicated, the century of pre-Socratic philosophers in Athens laid the cornerstone of empirical and rational thought about nature that were the forerunners of both materialism as well as science in the form of natural philosophy. This coincided with the rise of Athens to greatness and empire and a possible change in Athenian civic culture, not so much a secularization but an emphasis on humanism over mysticism in political affairs. This point Johnson was at pains to emphasize as the core nature of “the cultural revolution” wrought by “the Periclean regime” , where Protogoras was prominent sophist. Stone regards the transition to one where religion was “demoted…reduced to venerable fables and metaphorical personifications of natural forces and abstract ideas” which renders the religious question at Socrates’ trial a “distraction”.  The primitive awe in which the Greek gods were held during archaic times, gave way to a more ritualistic and cultural reverence in the classical period, or so this line of argument goes.

I am not certain this interpretation is correct to that exaggerated degree. It strikes me far more likely as a representation of the beliefs of  educated elite Athenians at the time than those of the middle classes or the thetes, or of Greeks from other cities. Pagan folk religion probably retained the same influence over public and private life in Athens as Christianity does in America in our own times. That is to say there were likely differences in religiosity between the aristocratic elite and the masses in democratic Athens and between political factions (democratic, moderate and extreme oligarchic).

Some contrasting examples: Nicias, whose political reputation with the Assembly was anchored in trust of his admirable piety, brought final disaster upon the Sicilian Expedition and himself with his obstinate, superstitious, deference to religious signs and soothsayers when the path of escape still remained open. Xenophon, in delicately rebuffing calls to accept rulership over the 10,000 in The Anabasis of Cyrus used pious arguments with the soldiers that he himself probably viewed with some degree of cynicism because they were an effective excuse to pass the leadership to a Spartan. Speaking of the Spartans, they were known in this time as “the craftsmen of war” not because of battle art but because of their zealous adherence to military religious ceremonials and divination of sacrificial animals to discern the will of the gods.

That does not sound much like a people for whom Zeus and Apollo were merely enjoyable campfire fables for children, figures of comic sport in the theater or convenient metaphors for chance or the weather.

Stone argued that Athenian religion had been “demoted” but did so for purposes of rebutting the claim of Socrates that decades of comic poets lampooning him in their plays (like The Clouds, by Aristophanes) had prejudiced the jury against him. Stone was also writing  The Trial of Socrates after the time when standards of  “traditional morality” had been challenged culturally and theologically during the sixties and seventies and were rejected by a significant part of the Baby Boom generation:

….As for not believing in gods, the Athenians were accustomed to hearing the gods treated disrespectfully in both the comic and the tragic theater. For two centuries before Socrates, the philosophers had been laying the foundations of natural science and metaphysical inquiry. Their gigantic pioneering in free thought still awes us as we pore over the fragments of these so-called pre-Socratics. Almost all the basic concepts of science and philosophy may be found there in embryo. They first spoke of evolution and conceived the atom. In the process the gods were not so much dethroned as demoted and bypassed. They were reduced to venerable fables or metaphorical personifications of natural forces and abstract ideas.

These philosophers were rationalists and rarely bothered with what we call “theology”. The very term was unknown to them. Indeed it does not appear in Greek until the century after Socrates. The word theologia – talk about gods – turns up for the first time in the Republic when Plato is explaining what the poets in utopia will not be allowed to say about the divine powers. In his ideal society a Socrates would have indeed been punishable for deviating from the state-sanctioned theologia, but not in Athens.

….Polytheism was, by it’s pluralistic nature, roomy and tolerant, open to new gods and new views of old ones. It’s mythology personified by natural forces and could be adapted easily, by allegory, to metaphysical concepts. These were the old gods in a new guise, and commanded a similar but fresh reverence.

Atheism was little known and difficult for a pagan to grasp because he saw divinity all about him, not just on Olympus but in the hearth and boundary stone, which were also divinities though of a humbler sort…..

….It was the political, not the philosophical or theological views which finally got Socrates into trouble. The discussion of religious views diverts attention from the real issues. 

Stone develops this theme further in his explanation of how Socrates might have won acquittal, had the old philosopher not been determined to antagonize his jury:

The indictment’s two counts are equally vague. No specific acts against the city are alleged. The complaints are against the teaching and beliefs of Socrates. Neither in the indictment – nor at the trial – was there any mention of any overt act of sacrilege or disrespect to the city’s gods or any overt attempt or conspiracy against it’s democratic institutions. Socrates was prosecuted for what he said, not for anything he did.

In other words, the charges against Socrates were of a very different character than the ones which had been made during the Expedition to Syracuse against the close associate and student of  Socrates, the ambitious demagogue Alcibiades. The latter had been charged with sacrilege, specifically defaming and vandalizing the Eleusinian Mysteries, forcing his recall as joint strategos over the expedition and summoning him back to Athens for trial. This ill-fated and poorly timed indictment may or may not have been false, but it had certainly been politically motivated and was the catalyst for the subsequent treason of Alcibiades and the military disaster in Sicily, both so damaging to Athens. That charge, unlike the one against Socrates however, was based upon real acts that had taken place, whether Alcibiades had been the culprit or not.

….on the impiety charge, Socrates is as vague as the indictment. He never discusses the accusation that he did not respect or believe in – the Greek verb used, nomizein, has both meanings – the gods of the city. Instead, he traps the the rather dim-witted Meletus into accusing him of Atheism, a charge he easily refutes. But there was no law against atheism in ancient Athens either before or after the trial. Indeed, the only place we find such a law proposed is in Plato’s Laws. In this respect, Plato was the exception to the tolerance that paganism showed to diverse cults and philosophic speculation about the gods.

….it was monotheism that brought religious intolerance into the world. When the Jews and Christians denied divinity to any god but their own, they were attacked as atheos or “godless”. This explains how – to borrow Novalis’s characterization of Spinoza – a “God-intoxicated” Jew and Christian like St. Paul could be called an “atheist” by pious and indignant pagans.” 

We will see later that Johnson takes a normatively very different, but logically complementary view to Stone on “Socratic monotheism”, who concludes:

By trapping Meletus into calling him an atheist, Socrates evaded the actual charge in the indictment. It did not accuse him of disbelief in Zeus and the Olympian divinities, or in gods generally. It charged disbelief in ‘the gods of the city”.

This was in the ancient Greek sense, a political crime, a crime against the gods of the Athenian polis. This is a crucial point often overlooked.

In Athens, Democracy was itself deified and personified, at least to the extent of having it’s own ritual priest in the annual theater of Dionysus – and what was old Socrates in the view of Stone but the teacher of antidemocratic and antipolitical doctrines in a city where the Democracy had been overthrown by the Thirty?

End Part II.

[ by Charles Cameron — pros and cons of an important piece by Scott Atran — who among us can comprehend religion? ]
.

.
Scott Atran, the anthropologist who gave us the book Talking to the Enemy, has got it right (as to importance) but wrong (as to procedure) in his latest, significant piece on Foreign Policy, God and the Ivory Tower: What we don’t understand about religion just might kill us.

First, the importance of the issue he’s discussing – understanding religions (emphatically plural, IMO):

Religion molds a nation in which it thrives, sometimes producing solidarity and sacred causes so powerful that citizens are willing to kill or die for a common good (as when Judea’s Jews around the time of Christ persisted in rebellion unto political annihilation in the face of the Roman Empire’s overwhelmingly military might). But religion can also hinder a society’s ability to work out differences with others, especially if those others don’t understand what religion is all about. That’s the mess we find ourselves in today, not only among different groups of Americans in the so-called culture wars, but between secular and Judeo-Christian America and many Muslim countries.

Time and again, countries go to war without understanding the transcendent drives and dreams of adversaries who see a very different world. Yet we needn’t fly blindly into the storm.

Atran is exactly right: we needn’t fly blindly into the storm — but to avoid flying blindly we need to understand those “drives and dreams of adversaries who see a very different world” — and to avoid flying into the storm at all we may (all of us, friends and foes alike) need to understand our own “transcendent drives and dreams” better than we do at present.

The question is, who can help us do that?

That’s what I mean by the procedure — the path that should be taken to achieve that kind of understanding. And note: there are different kinds of understanding — theoretical, imaginative, visceral… dispassionate, empathetic, impassioned…

**

Atran’s answer is science:

Science can help us understand religion and the sacred just as it can help us understand the genome or the structure of the universe. This, in turn, can make policy better informed.

There’s only one problem there. I can believe that scientists of extraordinary breadth and insight – Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Gell-Mann, Feynman probably – and social scientists — Bateson certainly, Victor Turner, Atran perhaps – my lists are not exhaustive – could make useful suggestions for scientific approaches to the field of religion.

But scientists in general? As Atran notes:

If you look at the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Britain’s Royal Society, well over 90 percent of members are non-religious. That may help explain why some of the bestselling books by scientists about religion aren’t about the science of religion as much as the reasons that it’s no longer necessary to believe.

Non-believers may “get” what’s dangerous about religions, but they almost certainly won’t “get” what’s marvelous and inspiring about them.

And believers are no better – they may get what’s great about their own tradition, but still see nothing but perdition in the traditions of others…

So to get a decent set of insights worth experimenting with — or modeling, for that matter — requires a blend of subtle thinkers to include some social anthropologists, some scholars of comparative religion, some sociologists with fine-tuned statistical skills, some depth psychologists… believers, skeptics, atheists and agnostics… with a whole wild variety of plumages, specialties and interests.

Yes, and some poets, historians, some hard scientists. Yes.

**

How easy is it to get things wrong?

In his paper Reframing Sacred Values [link is to .pdf] written with Robert Axelrod — the political scientist whose contest for winning strategies for the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game put “tit for tat” and agent based modeling on the map in his books The Evolution of Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation — Atran speaks of “Rational versus Devoted Actors“.

The distinction is a significant one. And the paper itself is important because, as Atran and Axelrod suggest:

Counterintuitively, understanding an opponent’s sacred values, we believe, offers surprising opportunities for breakthroughs to peace. Because of the emotional unwillingness of those in conflict situations to negotiate sacred values, conventional wisdom suggests that negotiators should either leave sacred values for last in political negotiations or should try to bypass them with sufficient material incentives. Our empirical findings and historical analysis suggest that conventional wisdom is wrong. In fact, offering to provide material benefits in exchange for giving up a sacred value actually makes settlement more difficult because people see the offering as an insult rather than a compromise. But we also found that making symbolic concessions of no apparent material benefit might open the way to resolving seemingly irresolvable conflicts.

But who is to say which actors are “devoted”?

The most devoted may be the one who stands in most need of redemption, the one who has sinned the most, not the one who has been the most pious. Let me put that another way: the most devoted may be the drunken reveler rather than the regular church- or mosque-goer.

**

Consider:

Inigo was a courtier, a conquistador, a musketeer. The commandments were of course unquestionable in theory, but practice was entirely another matter. Church was for times of danger or for celebration of victory, and he never prayed so hard to our Lady as before a duel. In his last years when he had no need to be boastful, he was quoted by his secretary- biographer: “Though he was attached to the faith, he lived no way in conformity with it and did not avoid sin. Rather, he was much addicted to gambling and dissolute in his dealings with women, contentious and keen about using his sword.”

Inigo found plenty of trouble…

A scientist might not think such a person a reliable example of religious fervor. An antagonist of religion might think it illustrates the flaws of religion perfectly.

The passage in question comes from a life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.

Religion is a subtle matter. We may think it a matter of belief, but it may be a matter of behavior – orthopraxy vs orthodoxy is the distinction the folks in religious studies make — or of visionary experience.

It may “take one to know one” – as Thomas Merton, the Catholic contemplative understood the Buddhist contemplatives he met. But then he was open to the possibility that others might have intuitions not dissimilar to those he himself had had. “I’m deeply impregnated with Sufism,” he once wrote — Sufism being the mystical strand in Islam. Indeed, I received a letter from him myself while still a student at Oxford, in which he wrote of his life in the Abbey of Gethsemani, “here you get beaten for being a dervish. I am bruised for this all day long.”

**

But again, one can be blinded by one’s own faith to the merits of the faiths of others. And this is also a subtle business.

Retired US Gen. Jerry Boykin, for instance, said in April last year (link is to YouTube video):

Sharia law is a very serious threat in America. We are being invaded by a group of people who see it as their absolute imperative to establish a legal system in America which will in fact destroy our Constitution to be replaced by this thing called Sharia law.

One wonders what Boykin might make of the late California Presbyterian teacher, RJ Rushdoony — a figure, I’m guessing, far to the General’s right?

As is widely known, the New Testament contains a “Great Commission” which Christ gave to his apostles after his Resurrection:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” — Matthew 28:18-20.

Rushdoony, in his master work The Institutes of Biblical Law, makes it clear that in his views, this constitutes a divine mandate to bring Biblical law into effect in all nations: “The fulfillment of that covenant is their great commission: to subdue all things and all nations to Christ and His law-word” (Institutes, p. 14) and this is to be achieved in terms of a single world order, “The goal is the developed Kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, a world order under God’s law” (Institutes, p. 357).

Sadly, the church no longer recognizes the full implications of the Great Commission, and has fallen into a heresy that is political in nature: “The church today has fallen prey to the heresy of democracy” (Institutes, p. 747). In truth, the laws of a democratic society will need to be replaced by the laws of God as set forth in the Old Testament: “While all Scripture is God’s law word, the heart of that law is the law of Moses” (Institutes, p. 675).

Here’s where it gets trickier, though:

Slavery, too, will need to be reinstituted: “The (Biblical) Law here is humane and also unsentimental. It recognizes that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so. It both requires that they be dealt with in a godly manner and also that the slave recognizes his position and accepts it with grace” (Institutes, p. 251).

**

This thing called “religion” is difficult to pin down. It has extremes that appear unconscionable even to many who claim devotion to the same scriptures as do the extremists. It features violence, peace, apocalypse as destruction and apocalypse as fresh creation.

Atran is an anthropologist – he surely knows this.

The study of religion involves walking through a minefield — in the gardens of Paradise…

[ by Charles Cameron — Facebook diplomacy between Israeli and Iranian individuals, atheist proselytizing in the US, popular media uses in a “monitory” world ]
.

I have long been intrigued by some of the unofficial ways in which we communicate with one another — some of you may recall an earlier post of mine on a spate of religious arguments carried out on “duelling buses“, while another more recent post noted some of the stencilled graffiti and at times quite sophisticated artwork featured on the walls around Tahrir Square during the demonstrations there…

1.

In much the same spirit, I’d like to offer here for your consideration four thumbnails of images recently posted on Facebook by individual citizens in Israel and Iran, in response to a posting (above) by two Israeli graphic artists, Ronnie Edri and Michal Tamir, which seems to have triggered quite a response in both countries.

The two Israeli posters appear to have posted images of individuals, perhaps themselves. The Iranian posters, interestingly, used images of Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the “Iranian Schindler” (upper image), with a caption that reads in part:

Abdol Hossain Sardari, a junior Iranian diplomat, found himself almost by accident in charge of Iran’s mission in Paris in 1940 and went on to help up to 2,000 Iranian Jews flee France…

and an image of the tomb of Esther and Mordecai — the tomb in Hamadan, Iran, of the same Jewish heroine recently celebrated at Purim, and pointedly referenced by Netanyahu in his gift of a Megillah to Obama — and a popular site of pilgrimage for Iran’s present day Jewish population.

Apparently there has been quite an exchange of these graphics, although some have been on the more caustic side, expressing what I can only call .. strangelove…

2.

My other graphic examples are of a pair of billboards recently put up by American Atheists:

As we might expect, these were to be displayed (respectively) in or near Jewish (above) and Muslim (below) communities — the Jewish-oriented billboard in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York, and the Islamic-oriented billboard in Paterson, New Jersey.

According to the MSNBC report where I first ran across these billboards a couple of weeks ago, a Williamsburg rabbi said the sign in his district was “a disgrace. .. The name of God is very holy to us and to the whole world” — while the American Atheists’ president David Silverman reported he had not received “any blowback” from the Muslim Community in Patterson.

One imagines that some in each community would have had hurt feelings, while some in each community clearly had the good sense to show tolerance.

3.

These images tie in, I believe, with John Keane‘s notion of “monitory democracy” [link is to .pdf] that our blog-friend David Ronfeldt discussed in his post today… with our discussions here [1, 2] of the wicked complexity of many of the problems that face us… and also perhaps of the Slaughter doctrine [1, 2, 3]of the responsibility to protect…