In Lehmann's Terms

Hitchens on Stalin

Though I bought it the day it came out, I didn’t get around to reading Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great until a recent weekend jaunt up to the old familial homestead in Jersey. As I expected it to be, it is a far superior tome to either Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Right off the bat, Hitchens clearly outclasses either in eloquence, leaving it not much of a fair fight on that score. But the book also outperformed its predecessors in ways I did not expect.

For one thing, though I am probably closer to Harris’ conservatism than Hitchens’ socialism, I found far fewer objectionable polemic tangents in the latter’s work. Particularly in The End of Faith, Harris is apt to go off the deep end when he moves into the subject of the War on Terror, going so far as to essentially condone torture, so long as it is a Muslim fundamentalist on the receiving end of the scabbard.

And while Dawkins is obviously a more esteemed scientific mind than Hitchens, I actually found Hitchens’ forays into philosophy of science questions far more satisfying, and much less condescendingly smug. This is remarkable in that there are few public figures MORE famously smug than Hitchens, but it seems the difference-maker is that Hitchens retains a sense of humor, both about the world and about himself, that the good professor utterly lacks.

Sitting down recently for a 20-minute chat with Hoover’s Peter Robinson on the Uncommon Knowledge program, Hitchens offers around the 15-minute mark a brief recap of what I think was one of the best sections of his book, tackling the difficult question of the evil done in the name of nominally “godless” communism, particularly by Josef Stalin. As Hitch puts it:

Until 1917, millions of Russians had been told for…hundreds of years that the czar is the head of the church – which he was, the Russian Orthodox Church. That the leader of the country should be something a little more than human. Not a god, but a little more. He’s not divine, but a holy father.

If you’re Josef Stalin, you shouldn’t be in the dictatorship business if you don’t know how to exploit an inheritance like that: millions of credulous, servile people.

And what does he do? Lysenko’s biology – miracles, we can have three harvests a year if we believe in Lysenko’s biology. Inquisition, heresy hunt, orthodoxy. Everything comes from the top and must be thanked for, and groveled for. A complete replication of the preceding theocracy.

For your argument to have…any force at all, you’d have to point to a society that adopted the teachings of Lucretius, Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Albert Einstein…and then fell into famine, dictatorship, torture and genocide. And you won’t, I think, be able to point to such. 

It is an important point, and one that free thinkers do not make often enough. The fact of some deity’s existence is ultimately less important a question than the societal framework in which that question is permitted to be answered. Logic, reason, the scientific method, free inquiry, pluralism -- organized religions have, in all times and in all places, sought to suppress these things. That they are not the only institutions to engage in such suppression is not a credit to religion, particularly not when those other institutions inevitably get away with it by mimicking religion’s installation of an autocratic god-figure…in this case, Stalin himself.

Heretics at the Book Store

If the New York Times bestseller list is even half the gauge of the public zeitgeist that it so often is assumed to be, then this morning's edition suggests it's an awfully good time for secularists in America. A startling 20% of the Hardcover Non-Fiction Top 25 are tomes that, even where not explicitly atheist, at the very least cast a piercingly skeptical eye on modern religious institutions.

At #7 is Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali native and recently-elected Dutch Minister of Parliament's tale of escaping the horrors of Islamic fundamentalism. In it, she writes: "I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values."

At #12, of course, is The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.  It has become fashionable among atheists to engage in a certain amount of Dawkins-bashing, which I attribute largely to the contrarian streak to which those of our ilk are so exceedingly prone. I'd be first to say this is far from Dawkins' best work. It's not even his best work on theology. (The Blind Watchmaker holds that title.)  But that misses the point of the book, which is to inject these "memes" into popular culture and get the conversation going. By that measure, it's been a remarkable success.

Just behind Dawkins, at #13, is Chris Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I'm actually currently in the middle of this one, and must admit to some disappointment, coming off Hedges' classic War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. While it makes for a nice catalogue of some of the more frightening elements of the U.S Christian (small "c") coalition, if the very title of your book is going to flagrantly violate Godwin's law, you really need to make a stronger case that you're describing actual fascism, and not just religiously-based right-wing nuttery.

Clocking in at #21 is one I have not yet read, but am very much looking forward to: God: The Failed Hypothesis by physicist Victor Stenger, whose skepticism is trained even on his fellow physicists that engage in the long-standing parlor game of "fine-tuning" cosmological constants in search of the Universal Theory. Stenger's been at these topics for quite some time, and the clarity with which he can relate terribly esoteric concepts has always impressed me. (For a sample, check out this ten-year-old essay on the then-burgeoning "intelligent design" movement, written for Creation/Evolution.) Plus, I'm always a little biased toward fellow Jersey boys, in this case one who shares my dad's alma mater (the defunct Newark College of Engineering, which goes these days by the title N.J. Tech)

Hanging on at #24 is Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, which I actually enjoyed rather more than Dawkins' book.  Where Dawkins can get muddled, Harris is a master of clarity. Where Dawkins has an unfortunate tendency toward abrasive smarminess and self-satisfaction (and more than the occasional strawman) Harris remains even-handed throughout. These also are the strengths that propelled him to knock-outs blows of Dennis Prager (admittedly, not much of a challenge) and Andrew Sullivan in a pair of recent on-line debates.

And the fun doesn't stop there. Possiby coming soon to a best-seller list near you, there is the just-published English translation of French philosopher Michel Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto; next week will mark the publication of Taner Edis' An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam; in May, we'll be treated to Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, and I, for one, am relieved to see Hitch pass through his neocon phase and return to the kinds of topics for which his acerbic wit is most apt; and at some point in 2008, Julia Sweeney is set to release My Beautiful Loss of Faith Story: A Memoir, the long-awaited sequel to 1997's God Said, "Ha!"

What, did Jello Biafra take the year off?

Nominees for the 48th Annual Grammy Awards were announced earlier today.  And though it's been ages since it first dawned on me just how craptacular you have to be to earn a Grammy nomination, each year, the Recording Academy manages to find a new nadir two or three leagues below rock bottom.

This year's symbol of how far we've come? Compare and contrast: Back in the Eighties, when Toni Basil put out a cheerleader chant in the guise of a rock single, she was considered a one-off novelty act. When Gwen Stefani does it in 2005, it's a "Record of the Year" contender. Slouching toward Gomorrah, indeed.

But perhaps the most amusing list of nominees can be found among those vying for Best Leftist Spoken Word Album, who will all no doubt be able to get the trash-talking started early when they see each other at next week's MoveOn.org Holiday Party.

• The Adventures Of Guy Noir
        Garrison Keillor
        [HighBridge Company]
  
  
• The Al Franken Show Party Album
        Al Franken
        [Artemis Records]
  
  
• Chronicles - Volume One
        Sean Penn
        [Simon & Schuster Audio]
  
  
• Dreams From My Father
        Sen. Barack Obama
        [Random House Audio]
  
  
• When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?
        George Carlin
        [Hyperion Audiobooks]

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate

Dante Alighieri informs us that those who commit sins of fraud are confined in the afterlife to Malebolge, the 8th Circle of Hell. Though I've heard the place has gentrified somewhat over the milennia -- a bit of a spill-over effect from those sky-high rents in Purgatorio -- it's still hardly the kind of nabe you'd want to park the Escalade for any extended period of time.

Flatterers are perpetually immersed in rivers of shit. Lotharios are lashed by horned demons. Thieves are chased by snakes whose bites cause them to spontaneously combust, or otherwise turn into snakes themselves.

Corrupt politicians are thrown into a river of boiling tar, kept at bay from trying to claw out of the pitch by demons with grappling hooks and barbs. Corrupt priests are turned upside down in baptismal fountains, and the soles of their feet are doused in oil and continuously ablaze. “Sowers of discord” are made to march as the walking disfigured: decapitated, cut in half or completely disemboweled.

Fortune-tellers have their heads twisted completely in reverse, and must walk backward around the circle for eternity. Alchemists are sticken with rashes, leprosy and consumption. Fraudulent advisors – shyster lawyers, self-help authors, pump-and-dump scheming boiler room brokers, Oprah – are turned into flaming faggots, in the original sense of the term.

Ya know, just sort of picture Newark, but without the bakeries on Ferry St.

Anyway, I'm here to report that there is, in fact, one pit of the 8th Circle that seems to have escaped notice of the medieval Italian poet and Virgil, his pagan guide through the afterlife. It's the place where terminally lazy Web addicts who feign at being upstanding members of the working financial press go to receive their punishment. 

Here, your intrepid correspondent is made to sit through panel after panel of insurance regulators, state politicians, and lobbyists discussing such soul-crushingly boring topics as collateralization requirements for foreign reinsurers; the criteria under which domestic deference does or does not hold in multi-state market conduct reviews; and how appropriate it is to apply the internal controls attestation standards laid out in Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to audits of non-public mutuals and/or closely held stock companies.

He is then made to return to his hotel room, order crappy room service, spend the evening transcribing and forming halfway readable stories out of this muck, before getting a couple hours of sleep and dragging his jet-lagged ass out of bed to begin the process anew the next day. 

Ahh, but the pièce de résistance...he is made to do all of this while awaiting him just outside the walls of his hotel -- but forever out of his reach -- are miles and miles of beaches, kissed by the Southern California sun, and populated with a startlingly disproportionate tally of the world's most beautiful women, all wearing next to nothing. They mock him and his laptop.

Camus famously thought Sisyphus to embody the absurd hero, who finds meaning in his work no matter how pointless it is.

I disagree. Sisyphus was a whiner. So you had to roll a big rock up a hill, over and over again. Big deal. Fuckin' pussy.

Oh, yeah, so....ummm, I'm back. What'd I miss?

Spam-ku

If ole Bill Burroughs were still around, I like to think the cut-and-paste master would share my latest fascination -- constructing haikus entirely from the computer-generated subject lines of spam e-mails I receive (most of them quite pornographic).

A few recent entries to the log book:
 

    Latina shemale
Busty redhead ladyboy
    cute teens in black stocks

    come get a free quote
URGENT & CONFIDENTIAL   
    Printer Cartridges

    blonde babe with dildo
have alot of viagara?!?
    Free Shipping Offer

    Big News Kuira
have listen of pekinese
    THOUSANDS OF NEW SITES!!!

The Dalrymple Meme

A recurrent meme running through recent posts of several of my fellow AnCaps (shonk comments here, mock does the same here and here) suggests that we've all independently taken to reading Ted Dalrymple at about the same time. Perhaps there's something in the water.

I should mention that I've been following Dalrymple -- a retired British physician who has made a named for himself on this side of the Pond mostly on the strength of his contributions to the Manhattan Institute's City Journal -- for a number of years now, and at first, I did not think  kindly of him at all. My impression has improved over time, but there remain a number of habits in his writings -- which consist largely of anecdotal accounts of the failures of multi-culturalism and the welfare state, culled from his experiences working with Britain's underclass -- that never fail to irk me.

A gifted writer with an innate ear for evocative prose, Dalrymple's essays nonetheless tend to follow a pre-ordained formula. In part one, he offers a character sketch, or a number of related character sketches, about welfare-class patients, their numerous self-destructive habits, and their steadfast refusal to accept any sort of personal responsibility for the ails that have befallen them. In part two, he generalizes these stories as indicative of broader trends in society at-large, although usually without any supporting data. In part three, he offers his univeral diagnosis of the problem -- pervasive liberal permissiveness, albeit stated in a strawman form that few liberals would recognize as their own actual beliefs -- but tends to offer little in the way of prescriptions for treating it.

Invariably, Dalrymple sees trouble arising from the breakdown of customs that have generally served Western society well, and on this point, I'm broadly sympathetic, although his particularly British priggishness leads him to focus on a number of developments -- openly homosexual relationships, the popularity of tatoos among the middle class, the permeation of street slang into common language -- that don't tend to trouble me nearly so much as they do him. At other times, he hints that the solution lies in government sanction of various sorts of deviant behavior, though he leaves the details of such sanctions quite vague. If he were pressed to expound on the matter, I doubt his policy prescriptions would look much like any I would endorse.

Nonetheless, at times, he can be absolutely brilliant, and he's perhaps never been better than in his analysis of features of Islam that remain fundamentally incompatible with Western ethos, a subject on which he has been asked to comment frequently in the days since the 7/7 London transit bombings. In a recent panel discussion for Front Page, Dalrymple offers a critique of what could be called the "culinary model of multi-culturalism":

The London bombings may have caused at long last people to examine their fatuous multiculturalist pieties, which I believe are fundamentally derived from the restaurant model: today we eat Hungarian, tomorrow Mexican, the day after Lebanese, and so forth. Clearly, this is possible and very enjoyable, but there are more important and deeper things in life than a variety of cuisines.

Perhaps people will begin to see that some values are simply not compatible with others, and will now be prepared to stand up for those that we believe in. Certainly I hope people will start to examine the abominable abuse of women that, if not universal, is very widespread in the Moslem population, and that is a large part - I believe - of the attraction of Islam to increasingly and essentially secularised men. (Interestingly, a recent article in Le Monde about French converts to Islam gave the statistic that 83 per cent were men -and I suspect that the 17 per cent of women were in response to love affairs, though I don't know this to be the case. This is eloquent testimony.)

In Britain, if we had the courage to defend Moslem women, I think Islam would lose a lot of it residual attraction. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister's wife went into court shortly before the last election to defend a Moslem schoolgirl's right to wear 'traditional' costume - not traditional in Luton, by the way - I suspect to obtain the Moslem vote for her husband, and probably knowing, and certainly with the duty to know, the often abominable social meaning of this costume.

Let us hope the recent events have taught the Prime Minister the folly - no, the sheer wickedness - of this.

I think Shonk hits the nail squarely:

I was saying to my brother just the other day that it is possible to have a successful multiethnic and even multicultural society, but what cannot work is a multi-ethical society. Clearly everyone is not going to agree on all moral values, but there has to be one basic ethical standard in society. Without that the conflicts will be interminable and insuperable, and perhaps worse than that the tacit sanctioning of moral wrongs.

ADDENDUM: My eyes are due for a check-up. The Selling Waves posts were from Curt, not (Original Flavor) Shonk.