The sea of faith: the ebb and flow of religion

The New Neo Posted on by

Starting in the mid-1800s, the Welsh Presbyterian Church was active in proselytizing, sending missionaries around the world. One of the places those missionaries went was Mizoram, an area of northeast India.

They were wildly successful there with a tribe called the Mizos, according to this article that appeared in the Telegraph of March, 2006. In response to the ministrations of the Welsh missionaries, the Mizos converted to Christianity in vast numbers:

The missions, at the height of the Christian revival in Wales, were phenomenally successful, with more than 80 per cent of the population [of Mizoram] becoming Christian.

The Mizos are believed to be ethnically Mongoloid and are hilltribe people divided into a number of tribes. Recently some of them have started identifying themselves as one of the lost tribes of Israel, but the incidence of Christianity is still very high.

The ties to the Presbyterian Church of Wales, which Mizos refer to as the “Mother Church”, are also very strong.

But the tide has turned, and the Mizos are now worried about the state of Christianity–in Wales. And they’ve decided to do something about it. They’re sending missionaries back to the land of the Mother Church to see if the Mizos can do unto others what was done to them:

The Rev Zosang Colney, of the Diocese of Mizoram, said that the churches in Wales seemed to be “declining physically and spiritually”.

“Many church buildings have been closed down,” he added. “The Mizos, therefore, have a burden to do something for their Mother Church in Wales.”

I’ve read about the decline of religion in Europe; the consensus is that it’s a widespread phenomenon (although some may differ), and certainly not limited to Wales. The British poet Philip Larkin wrote about the waning of religious observance and the emptiness of churches way back in 1955, in his well-known poem “Church Going” (the title can be seen as a pun).

In this excerpt from the beginning of the poem, the speaker finds himself stopping–he’s not sure exactly why–at a church during a pause in his bicycling excursion:

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into…

What, indeed? Museums, relics? Or, as with Wales and the Mizos, will the fruit of some seeds put forth long ago return to complete the cycle and cause a revival of faith at their place of origin?

Larkin isn’t sure what churches will be used for in the future. But towards the end of the poem he (or the speaker) acknowledges within himself a deep yearning for the “seriousness” they represent, a yearning he suspects will never go out of style:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Matthew Arnold, a very different poet from Larkin, wrote much earlier (1867) of the same phenomenon: the generalized loss of religious faith in Europe. Here is a stanza appearing near the close of his poem “Dover Beach:”

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

In the poem, Arnold laments the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith’s retreat, leaving the beaches empty and denuded (“shingles” refers to pebbled shores). But he offers a suggestion for dealing with a world bereft of faith and its comforting certitudes–the lovers in his poem must cling to one another in the face of the chaos that surrounds them:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

“Dover Beach” was another of those poems I was assigned to study back in high school. I didn’t really understand it then and yet it moved me and I remembered it. Somehow I was under the impression that it was a later poem than it actually is; if I’d had to guess, I’d have placed it around the time of World War I. And even as an adult, I continue to be amazed at the modernity of the sentiments it expresses; it almost seems as though Arnold could see into the future.

Arnold himself, it turns out, stopped writing poetry rather early in life (“Dover Beach” was one of his last poems) and turned to literary criticism and religious writings. The crisis he had wrestled with in the poem was one he tackled in his prose, too; in later life Arnold became a religious reformer, a founder of Anglican “modernism.”

With the long slow decline of religious belief in Europe, who would have thought that the twenty-first century would feature a revival of the phenomenon of religious war? But this time the strife is no longer between Christians and other Christians, or between Christians and Jews; it is between Islam and Islam. A fundamentalist militant political Islam is at war with a reformist and modernizing strain (and if you don’t think there is such a struggle, please read this), and the former is also at war with the West.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the fundamentalist militant strain of Islam is handily winning out over the moderates in parts of the Moslem world, causing the clash of civilizations that leads to “Islam’s bloody borders.” It seems that, for the last few decades, the sea of faith of Islam has reversed any “withdrawing roar,” and is currently crashing back towards the beach with the force of a tsunami.

The perfect war, the perfect peace

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Sanity has written here about our current desire for a perfect, error-free war. No, not our desire; our demand.

It often does seem as though the prosecution of this war is being held to an impossible standard, quite unlike any before in history. In some ways this is related to the progress we’ve made in technology; we’ve effectively reduced civilian casualties as compared to the bluntly massive killing instruments of WWII and even Vietnam, which caused a huge number of civilian deaths whether that was the aim or not.

The “smart bomb” saw its debut during the 1991 Gulf War, and bombs have only gotten smarter since. Now they’re really, really smart; in some cases, they can actually vaporize a single person and leave those not too far away from him/her (but it’s usually a “him”) unharmed.

But the smart bombs of that Gulf War also gave us the vision of a future in which wars would be surgical and relatively “clean”–at least, as far as civilian casualties go, and even (or perhaps especially) for casualties in our armed forces–as compared to previous wars of the 20th century.

It’s interesting that, as our desire and our ability to minimize civilian casualties increases, the enemy has become more and more wedded to exactly the opposite tactic: the deliberate murder, with malice aforethought, of civilians. And this is contemplated and executed not as unavoidable “collateral damage” in the pursuit of other targets, but as a purposeful strategy to strike terror into the heart of what they perceive to be our softened and excessively tender Western sensibilities. They realize that that is a very good way to reach us, perhaps the most economical and parsimonious of all.

What a paradox: our own desire to wage war that is more humane, and our incredible advances in war technology, have resulted in an enemy strategy aimed to counterbalance our advantages with exactly the opposite modus operandi. And in the meantime, our military planners are criticized for conducting a war that has any casualties at all, one which features the usual errors attendant in any war.

This demand for an unreasonable standard–the near-perfect execution of an inherently imperfect endeavor, war–seems to me to be linked to a similar desire for perfection in our everyday lives. It’s easier than ever (although never quite easy) to leave a marriage if it doesn’t fulfill our every need. We expect perfect health and extreme longevity as our birthright. And we try to arrange it so that our children never know want or fear (or that horror of horrors, a blow to their sacred self-esteem).

This is all part of an understandable impulse to better our lives. But alas; perfection is unattainable, in war or in peace. And its pursuit, although a worthy goal, can lead to unexpected consequences: a war that may end up bloodier than the one it aims to prevent, for example; or a child lacking the emotional strength to face the ordinary disappointments of life.

It’s a conundrum. We don’t want to go back to the days of more generalized suffering, when unhappy couples were yoked together, when people died in droves of diseases that are now easily prevented or cured, and when there were massive civilian bombings in wartime. But the law of unintended consequences sometimes seems determined to extract its full measure of payment nevertheless.

Another suicide blast, another heroic security guard

The New Neo Posted on by

The Hamas government claims that today’s suicide attack that killed nine innocents and wounded sixty in Tel Aviv is a “legitimate response to Israeli aggression.”

One thing you can say for Hamas: they’re clear about where they stand.

The linked Jerusalem Post article provides details of the attack, indicating that the bomber was prevented from killing more people by an alert security guard who detained him at the entrance to the restaurant, forcing him to detonate himself outside–rather than inside, where the force of any concussion is always magnified.

The article doesn’t mention it, but it’s virtually certain that that guard was one of the victims. But he was also a hero; no doubt about that.

And take a look, when you go to the article, at the photo of the suicide bomber. He is said to have been twenty-one years old, but to me he looks almost like a child. But that’s no longer any sort of surprise, nor would it be a surprise if he actually were the age he looks, fourteen or fifteen.

(Go here for a previous post of mine about the heroism of Israeli security guards, and who they are.)

Waiting for AB (After Bush)

The New Neo Posted on by

President Bush is hardly unique in having his detractors. But their ferocity and lung power has been impressive at a time when the whole world is watching–and waiting.

Everyone knows Bush is not popular. And anyone who knows anything about the way Presidential elections work in the US knows that Bush could not possibly be re-elected even if he were popular; the Constitution does not allow it, post-FDR. That’s a given.

But it’s also common knowledge that it’s not just the man himself, but many of Bush’s foreign policies that appear to have lost the support of the majority of the American people–for example, most Americans now think the Iraq endeavor wasn’t the right thing to do.

Americans are seen as losing heart for what is perceived to be Bush’s war and Bush’s foreign agenda. Some of what’s driving the opposition is honest dissent, some of it is politics as usual, some of it is intense personal hatred for Bush himself, some of it originates in leftist and/or pacifist beliefs that any war America launches against a third world country is by definition evil and must be opposed, and some of it is–well, you get the idea.

There used to be a tradition in this country that in wartime an administration should not be criticized too heavily; or, at least, should be given the benefit of the doubt. For better or for worse, that tradition died during Vietnam. Sometimes I think it has been replaced by its opposite: it’s in wartime that an opponent must be criticized most vigorously.

Whether this is because a significant segment of Americans today sees the US as invincible, and that criticism therefore cannot really threaten it; or whether it’s because so many see America as always being in the wrong; or whether it’s because nowadays war itself is so often seen as almost automatically wrong–or some combination of the above–well, let’s just say the phenomenon exists, and it represents a sea-change.

But the repercussions could be immense, and might amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy because there is a certain perception abroad in the world that goes like this: just wait. Wait till After Bush. If you can just wait it out till he’s become a lame duck, and then until his term expires, you’ll be home free.

My best guess is that the “insurgents” think it, the Iranians think it, Russia thinks it and China thinks it and the North Koreans think it. If we were perceived as weak prior to 9-11, now we are perceived as weakened and worn out. And that perception can only give the enemy strength.

On April 16 in the Telegraph, in an article entitled “The Frightening Truth About Why Iran Wants a Bomb,” Amir Taheri (the former editor of Iran’s largest daily newspaper, who now lives in Europe) was quite explicit about his take on Iran’s plans, AB:

Ahmadinejad boasts that the [legendary Twelfth] Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a “clash of civilisations” in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the “infidel” West, led by the United States, and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that, in military jargon, sounds like a low intensity, asymmetrical war…

According to [Ahmadinejad’s] analysis, spelled out in commentaries by Ahmadinejad’s strategic guru, Hassan Abassi, known as the “Dr Kissinger of Islam”, President George W Bush is an aberration, an exception to a rule under which all American presidents since Truman, when faced with serious setbacks abroad, have “run away”. Iran’s current strategy, therefore, is to wait Bush out. And that, by “divine coincidence”, corresponds to the time Iran needs to develop its nuclear arsenal, thus matching the only advantage that the infidel enjoys…

The Iranian plan is simple: playing the diplomatic game for another two years until Bush becomes a “lame-duck”, unable to take military action against the mullahs, while continuing to develop nuclear weapons.

Thus do not be surprised if, by the end of the 12 days still left of the United Nations’ Security Council “deadline”, Ahmadinejad announces a “temporary suspension” of uranium enrichment as a “confidence building measure”. Also, don’t be surprised if some time in June he agrees to ask the Majlis (the Islamic parliament) to consider signing the additional protocols of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Such manoeuvres would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director, Muhammad El-Baradei, and Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to congratulate Iran for its “positive gestures” and denounce talk of sanctions, let alone military action. The confidence building measures would never amount to anything, but their announcement would be enough to prevent the G8 summit, hosted by Russia in July, from moving against Iran.

While waiting Bush out, the Islamic Republic is intent on doing all it can to consolidate its gains in the region. Regime changes in Kabul and Baghdad have altered the status quo in the Middle East. While Bush is determined to create a Middle East that is democratic and pro-Western, Ahmadinejad is equally determined that the region should remain Islamic but pro-Iranian. Iran is now the strongest presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, after the US. It has turned Syria and Lebanon into its outer defences, which means that, for the first time since the 7th century, Iran is militarily present on the coast of the Mediterranean. In a massive political jamboree in Teheran last week, Ahmadinejad also assumed control of the “Jerusalem Cause”, which includes annihilating Israel “in one storm”, while launching a take-over bid for the cash-starved Hamas government in the West Bank and Gaza.

Ahmadinejad has also reactivated Iran’s network of Shia organisations in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen, while resuming contact with Sunni fundamentalist groups in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco. From childhood, Shia boys are told to cultivate two qualities. The first is entezar, the capacity patiently to wait for the Imam to return. The second is taajil, the actions needed to hasten the return. For the Imam’s return will coincide with an apocalyptic battle between the forces of evil and righteousness, with evil ultimately routed. If the infidel loses its nuclear advantage, it could be worn down in a long, low-intensity war at the end of which surrender to Islam would appear the least bad of options. And that could be a signal for the Imam to reappear.

Perhaps you think this nightmare vision of Taheri’s is fearmongering twaddle. Perhaps that’s the most reassuring thing to think. Perhaps you’re even right; who knows?

But to me, what Taheri writes seems extremely consistent with what Ahmadinejad has been saying and doing, and it makes more sense to me than other theories I’ve read. I tend to take at face value the words of a world leader who appears to be genuinely filled with equal parts grandiosity and hatred, who seems to believe that he is part of a pre-ordained holy war to eliminate the Great and Little Satans, and who has announced his intention to go nuclear (ah right, yes, for peaceful purposes–which not even the Europeans believe at this point).

Therefore I tend to believe that Ahmadinejad means exactly what he says when he makes statements such as the following:

[Ahmadinejad] called Israel a “permanent threat” to the Middle East that will “soon” be liberated….

“Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation,” Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. “The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”

The land of Palestine, he said, referring to the British mandated territory that includes all of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, “will be freed soon.”

He did not say how this would be achieved, but insisted to the audience of at least 900 people: “Believe that Palestine will be freed soon.”

It will be interesting to see whether Taheri’s predictions come true, whether Iran will give the appearance of cooperation–and, if so, whether Europe and the UN will swallow the bait. And then it will be interesting to see what happens, AB (don’t we live in “interesting” times?)

Opponents of Bush face a conundrum. Clearly, no one should support a President or a policy blindly, just for the sake of showing unity. But those whose vision only goes so far as to see themselves playing on the small stage of American politics, where actions have no serious consequences and it’s all a game of “gotcha,” need to stop and think what the stakes actually are.

I’m certainly not asking that everyone support Bush and his policies. But I am asking that opponents act in such a way as to not deliver the message that all the enemy has to do is wait Bush out. So far, the opposition has failed to communicate the sort of resolve that would say loud and clear to Iran, for example, that the fight will go on even after President Bush becomes ex-President Bush.

And that lack of communication of the requisite resolve, I’m afraid, is a dangerous message to give. I sincerely hope it’s not a fatal one.

Happy Easter!!

The New Neo Posted on by

Happy Easter to all my celebratory Christian readers, and to all those who just enjoy the holiday as well!

One year when my son was little, I spent the week prior to Easter blowing out eggs and dying them. Now that he’s grown and away, the eggs are packed away in boxes and stored in parts unknown. If I could get my hands on them I’d photograph them for you, because even all these years later they are beautiful, with dyes both subtle and unsubtle, interesting etched patterns and rainbow effects–definitely one of my finest crafts hours (to tell the truth, I didn’t have so many fine crafts hours, although there was also a gingerbread house we made that was stored in the attic and alas, eaten by small creatures–and not human ones, at that.)

Blown-out eggs are well worth the trouble, and why? Because they last. And nothing eats them. You only have to do them once, and you’re all set. They are a bit fragile, but not so very.

So here’s my Easter present to you (not that you couldn’t find it yourself): the instructions for blowing eggs:

First, you’ll need to make a tiny pin hole on each end of the egg. A pin works well, or a wooden kitchen skewer or even the tip of a sharp knife. Gently work the tip of the pin/skewer/knife in a circular motion until a tiny hole appears. Repeat on the other side. Then insert the pin or skewer (the knife will be too big here) far enough into the egg to break the yolk. Use your mouth [blow] to expel the contents of the egg.

And here is a more complex–but perhaps better–way, for those obsessive-compulsives among us.

These aren’t mine, but they’ll have to do as substitute:

Critical thinking is—critical

The New Neo Posted on by

Much of what I write on this blog refers back to history, with the goal of trying to make connections between then and now. Many times after I’ve written a post of that sort (or any sort, actually), I read a comment that seems especially obtuse, and I’m torn between the thought that the commenter’s failure to understand what I’ve said (forget agreeing with it; we’re talking about simple understanding here) represents a problem with critical thinking, and the notion that the commenter actually has a difficulty with reading comprehension.

Then again, it could be both. Or perhaps neither; maybe its just impatience and laziness coupled with hubris: a tendency to barely skim a post or article, think one has understood it, and then proceed to respond and try to refute it without even trying to comprehend the arguments being presented in the first place.

Or, then again, maybe the commenter is just a troll, and the “incomprehension” is feigned, strategic, and purposeful. Trolls get off on provoking all the other commenters (and the blogger, too, if possible) to dance and jump around and to generally wear themselves out in an effort to explain and to answer and to defend. So maybe the commenter has understood all too well what was said, and is just having fun stirring the pot and watching the steam rise as the stew bubbles fast and furiously.

But let’s be kind, and assume for the moment that there really is some sort of comprehension problem, at least for many. Which reminds me that I’ve often thought by far the most important task of education is the teaching of critical thinking. With this skill mastered, students would be set for life, able to assimilate and evaluate new information reliably and to use good judgment in making decisions (including those all-important voting decisions, not to mention composing blog posts and blog comments).

But without the ability to think critically, it really doesn’t matter how many facts a person has at his/her fingertips, because the information will be useless as a guide to writing, or to action–or to life itself.

Santayana’s old adage, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” often feels all too true (and, I might mention, even those who do remember are often dragged right along with them into that repetition, tragic Cassandras shouting vainly into the wind). But is the failure to “remember” the past a literal one? Are people condemned to repeat history because they don’t learn the facts–the dates, the battles, the famous movers and shakers? That’s certainly part of it, in many cases.

But it may be more crucial that, even armed with facts, people often seem to lack the ability to put them into context, to evaluate them and the spin different sides give to them, to extract meaning and guide future action by applying them to the present day. And, after all, why else learn history, if not to help us act in the present and the future?

Again, I’m not talking merely about those who disagree with me. I can recognize that there are logical, well-thought-out arguments on the other side, those that don’t misrepresent what opponents are saying in the first place. I may not agree with the premises or the conclusions, but I can follow the reasoning. It’s distortions and sophistry and failures of logic that bother me the most.

A major part–maybe the major part–of critical thinking is learning to recognize logical fallacies in argument. Why is this not ordinarily taught in school and considered a required subject, as important–if not more so–as history or English, or even reading?

I don’t know about you, but I certainly was never even introduced to the topic, despite having received a fairly decent public school education in the honors classes of a New York City high school, and attendance at several major well-known and highly respected universities as both an undergraduate and then a graduate student.

So, what’s going on here? Critical thinking seems to be considered mostly the realm of logic studies, which are easily avoided at most universities (see this list of colleges that presently require some sort of critical thinking courses of their students; note that although the University of California system appears to require one such course of all students, in actuality the category is defined so broadly as to be virtually useless).

Some are trying hard to remedy the situation, even at a pre-college level; here’s the website of a group called “The National Center for Teaching Thinking” based in Boston, for example. But, quite obviously, we have an awfully long way to go.

So I’ve got another series contemplated: my plan is to every now and then take one logical fallacy and write about it. First up on the agenda (although not today): the strawman fallacy.

We’ll see how far I get with this; I’m learning some of it as I go along, myself. And my tendency towards Blogger Attention Deficit Disorder (BADD, or ideaphoria; I’ve got ideas for about two hundred different unwritten posts churning around right now, with short notes on most of them) has been known to get in my way.

But I’m trying to do my bit–although, of course, the vast majority of my readers are already critical thinkers, right?

[ADDENDUM: Okay, okay, this is getting a little weird. I wrote most of this post yesterday, was busy earlier today, and just now as I went to post it I happened to check over at Dr. Sanity’s, and found this, which I had not seen before.

I guess it was an idea whose time had come, especially for psychobloggers.}

In celebration of freedom: Passover and beyond

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the holiday season, and one of those rare years when Passover and Easter come close together, as they did during the original Easter. So I get a twofer when I wish my readers “Happy Holidays!”

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder (as I did last night), I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars such as that in Iraq only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it; and what we’re observing there now is the hard, long, and dangerous task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects. History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have–the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a lot of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined (appropriately enough for the approaching Easter holiday) a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).

Is freedom a “basic need, then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:

How important is freedom? We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover, and Happy Easter! And that’s no non sequitor.

How many does it take to tango?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was just a tiny child, there was a popular song called “It Takes Two to Tango.”

A family story—perhaps apocryphal, perhaps true—is that when I was just a toddler, my parents took me to see the ice show at Madison Square Garden. A couple started skating to the tune. Picture the hushed auditorium, the spotlight on the dazzling pair, and then the exclamation of a mesmerized young girl (me) shouting out in awe above the music, “Gee, it really does take two to tango!”

I went on to become a dancer and dance teacher myself, but of the ballet variety. Social dancing? I grew up in the age of every man (and woman) for himself: get out there, stand in the general vicinity of your partner (or not, as the case may be), and do whatever comes to mind. But do it essentially alone.

Ah yes, there was “slow” dancing, where people touched. But that wasn’t really dancing; it was a sort of shuffle-shuffle-hold-hold, an opportunity to press bodies together to a musical background. Nothing wrong with that, actually, and very easy to learn. And “fast” dancing was improvisational—no routines necessary—as well as individualistic. It didn’t matter what one’s partner was doing, except in some vague and general sense; no need to follow or lead.

As best I can recall, this non-touch dancing started with the Twist (although the Stroll preceded it, that was technically a line dance), going on to the Watusi and the Jerk and the—well, take a look here.

But there was a parallel track of ballroom dancing of the traditional type, that never stopped and is still going strong today. My parents were spectacular ballroom dancers, the sort who, when they got on the dance floor, would actually cause others to step back and watch and then applaud. They took lessons, they had routines, they danced a lot, and they enjoyed every minute of it.

I enjoyed watching them, as well. It seemed effortless to look at, but I knew better. I knew better because, every now and then at a wedding or other occasion where there was a dance band, my father would ask me to dance.

I still remember the feeling of dread that would enter the pit of my stomach. Somehow, he always seemed to choose a fox trot, a dance about which I knew virtually nothing, rather than one I had at least a passing familiarity with, like the cha-cha or the merengue (the dance, that is, not the dessert—and yes, I checked the spelling). He would lead, and I was supposed to follow—to somehow intuit, like a mindreader, what was going to happen next. The more self-conscious and worried I became, the more I would freeze. The more I would freeze, the harder it became to follow. The harder it became to follow, the more I would try, the more I would freeze—well, you get the picture, and it’s not a pretty one.

Fast-forward to now. Because of an old back injury—and well, just being old—my ballet days are most definitely over. And my ballroom dancing days never began. But I was at a party about a month ago speaking to a couple I know, and they said they were having a lot of fun taking tango lessons.

Tango. The tango! Maybe, just maybe, I could do that. After all, I used to be a dancer, right? And I certainly look Latin. How hard could it be? And then I did some research and discovered that there’s actually a little ballroom dance place in my town, and they have group beginner classes for an extremely nominal fee.

Well, folks, I found out just how hard it could be. Very hard. Very very hard. Makes the foxtrot with my father look like a walk in the park; a cakewalk. I had no idea. I had no idea! (Did I say that I HAD NO IDEA?)

Because in case you, just like me, had watched Al Pacino dance a fabulous and sexy tango in “Scent of a Woman” and thought, “That looks like a lot of fun”:

(and yes, isn’t her back awfully bony? We wouldn’t want bony backs like that, would we, ladies? We’re glad our backs are—are—unbony, right? Right?) I’m here to tell you that yes, it does look like a lot of fun. It probably is a lot of fun, once you can do it. But I’m finding that hard to imagine, now that I’ve tried it.

Picture, instead, a dance in which there are about a thousand possible steps and combinations of steps (see this). The steps are not easy to do; they are actually fiendishly difficult to learn (at least for me). It’s not so much the steps themselves as it is the weight shifting and the stance and the feel of it all (I think a ballet background may actually be counterproductive—at least, I’ll use that as part of my excuse).

And these steps never come in any order or pattern; it’s all improvised by the man, or “leader.” The woman—the “follower”—must somehow read his body, or his mind, or both, and do what’s required. The man must know exactly what he’s going to do and telegraph it unequivocally, with no hesitation, or the woman will become confused—if she isn’t already, like me.

I’d never really thought much about it before, but ballet dancers are very into control and predictability in the dance form. Ordinarily, every movement is prescribed and choreographed; the dancer knows where even his/her fingers are supposed to be, and it’s all rehearsed over and over again. Of course, within that form, there’s a strange sort of freedom—the dance itself is so large, the movements so glorious, that the feeling is of flight and soaring and lyric oneness with the music. But it’s achieved through a strict control.

Not so the tango. At my introductory lesson, the other beginners were not nearly as beginnerish as me. The tango seems to attract the young (that is, people in their twenties) and the getting-on-in-years (that is, those older than I am). All of them tried to be polite when paired up with the most inexperienced novice there—moi. But I could see something in their eyes (and when you dance tango, you can really see their eyes, up close and personal) that said “Get me outta here; this lady hasn’t a clue what she’s doing.”

I managed not to step on any toes, including my own. And I may indeed go back for more. They say tango is not only difficult, it’s addictive:

Students–even if they are experienced dancers–discuss how hard it is to survive their first attempts at the complex steps. Emil Waldteufel, the chef-owner of Emil’s restaurant in Santa Rosa, has studied all kinds of dance in his life, including tap dancing in the hoofer style. He has even performed onstage. “The first few lessons, I found tango difficult. I was blurting out ‘I’m sorry’ all the time, but I’ve progressed well. Sometimes a breath of the music will come over me while I’m working and I’ll happily execute a little step…

Paul, a 58-year-old vineyard mechanic…describes tango as “a dance for overachievers. It draws intelligent people because it’s not easy to learn. But it still has soul. Tango has a way of making you yearn for it.”

We’ll see.

[ADDENDUM: And now that I’ve mastered—not the tango, but the art of YouTube embedding—here is that legendary tango scene from “Scent of a Woman.” Enjoy:

And here’s something more to chew on—a description of how Pacino learned the tango for the movie (scroll down a bit and start where it says, “‘The Man Who Taught Pacino to Tango’ by Susan Brenna”). Here’s an excerpt:

For two months Pellicoro and Fotinos worked with “Al” in those quiet afternoons before the after-work dance class rush hour. They’d tango for 20 minutes. They they’d take a 15-minute cappuccino break. “I like breaks,” Pacino would say. “I’m big on breaks.”…

They taught him basic principles of tango and how to stand and move like a dancer. Pellicoro and Fotinos would dance, and they he would stand and imitate Pellicoro’s commanding Ramon Navarro attitude. “He was really a natural but he wanted to be perfect,” said Pellicoro.]

Calling all horticulturalists

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been seeing these everywhere–bushes that feature branches with startlingly bright red bark, almost as though they’ve been dipped in paint (even brighter than in the photo). I’ve never noticed them before, although I can be fairly certain they’re not a new phenomenon.

So, what are they? Any bush experts here, of the botanical variety?

The Cuban missile crisis vs. Iran: making an opponent blink

The New Neo Posted on by

This blog isn’t really becoming an “all Iran, all the time” zone. But at the moment, the conundrum we face over Iran is particularly pressing, involving some very basic ethical and tactical questions that interest me. So, here we go again–

The situation reminds me (in several different ways) of an image I recall from the end of the movie “On the Beach” (stuff of nightmares), a banner reading:

There is still time, brothers.

Yes, there is still time. But how much time we have left is not at all certain, although it’s fairly clear that all of those speculating on that question do not know the answer.

In today’s Washington Post, David Ignatius has written this column on the subject of Iran (via Austin Bay, whose analysis of the Ignatious column appears here). Ignatius’s piece illustrates the strange propensity of many writers to make assumptions that they believe are obviously valid–no need to argue the points; enough to merely to state them as though they are tautologies. But are they?

For example, Ignatius writes the following:

The administration insists that it wants diplomacy to do the preemption, even as its military planners are studying how to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomacy should fail. Iran, meanwhile, is pursuing its own version of preemption, announcing yesterday that it has begun enriching uranium — a crucial first step toward making a bomb. Neither side wants war — who in his right mind would? — but both frame choices in ways that make war increasingly likely.

There are two things I notice right away about that paragraph. The first is the tendency of Ignatious to “frame” the situation in terms of symmetry: both sides are thought to be doing what they are doing in order to effect “preemption.” But the assumption on the part of Ignatius that preemption is Iran’s goal–rather than a first strike on, for example, Israel–is mere speculation, although he bases his argument on it.

But the even more serious speculation in which Ignatius engages is in the last sentence of that paragraph: Neither side wants war–who in his right mind would?

The unfounded assumption in that sentence probably leapt out at any sentient reader. Ignatious’s wishful thinking–that Iran’s leaders do not want war, because they must be in their right minds–is understandable, but only as wishful thinking, rather than being based on the evidence (not that Ignatious presents any evidence). After all, who among us in his/her right mind would want to believe that the leaders of a large country developing a nuclear strike capacity and in league with global terrorists are not in their right minds?

But, understandable though this wish is–just like Neville Chamberlain’s similar hope that Hitler was a gentleman with whom he could do diplomatic business–taking it on faith and believing it is a dangerous idea that could (to use Ignatius’s very own words) “frame choices in ways that make war increasingly likely,” as a similar notion arguably did in Hitler’s day.

After all, even Seymour Hersh’s article (which Ignatius has obviously read, since he quotes it in his very next paragraph) indicated that many consider the Iranian leaders to be “nutcases–one hundred percent totally certified nuts.” But Ignatius manages to write an entire piece ignoring that elephant in the room by simply dismissing it without discussion in one quick sentence–“who in his right mind,” indeed!

Ignatius briefly compares the current Iranian situation to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He writes that Kennedy came up with what he calls a “creative” solution to that one [emphasis mine]:

[Kennedy] issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that. Disaster was avoided because Khrushchev believed Kennedy was willing to risk war — but wanted to avoid it.

I would suggest to Ignatius that, although that is true as far as it goes, he is missing the point. Disaster was avoided for a combination of reasons, and the one he states would not have mattered in the least had not there been an answering echo on the part of Khrushchev who, likewise, was willing to risk war but wanted to avoid it.

And that’s not “wanted to avoid it” in the sense of “would have vaguely preferred not to.” It means very deeply wished to avoid it, because Khrushchev was a rational actor and believed nuclear war between the superpowers would wreak havoc on the world, as well as his own country and people.

Khrushchev was many things, but he was not a sadistic butcher like his predecessor, Stalin. He believed the Soviet system would triumph, but he wanted the Soviet people to actually survive long enough to do so. He was a practical man, focused quite clearly on this world rather than rewards in the next, and as such, he was indeed a rational actor in the political sense. That meant that he was, in a very real way, a “partner for peace”–or, at least, a partner for cold war rather than hot.

And that was the real reason Khrushchev blinked when confronted with Kennedy’s “creative” solutions.

I’ve written elsewhere that I believe the best course of action right now vis a vis Iran would be to work for regime change though clandestine operations within that country. I also believe we need to have a plan in place to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities if need be. I have no idea whether we still have the time, the resources, the expertise, and the will to succeed in either of those endeavors. But I do know that, so far, there has been no evidence that the current Iranian administration qualifies as a rational actor with self-protective instincts towards its own people, and that would preclude us from relying on a particular subset of possible solutions (creative or otherwise) that assume that the Iranian leaders are indeed in their right minds.

The need to protect one’s own people in this world–rather than to secure them a place in the world to come–seems to be a prerequisite for traditional deterrence to work. After all, blinking is a self-protective function.

[ADDENDUM: Shrinkwrapped weighs in on the state of mind of the Iranian leaders. And Shrinkwrapped, unlike David Ignatius, is in the business of being able to predict future violent behavior.]

[ADDENDUM II: Unless some important news breaks on the Iran front, I plan to take at least a short break from posts about Iran, starting tomorrow. Promise.]

[ADDENDUM III: Vital Perspectives sums it up rather nicely, I think: …the pundits tend to fall back on the old models of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Yet Iran is not the Soviet Union and represents a threat on a completely different level. Simply put, the world has never seen an Islamic extremist terrorist state armed with nuclear weapons.]

Move along; no terror connection here

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Stephen F. Hayes in the Weekly Standard discusses the links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and worldwide Islamicist terrorism revealed in some of the recently declassified Iraqi documents:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime’s domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam’s older son, Uday, ordered preparations for “special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].” Preparations for “Blessed July,” a regime-directed wave of “martyrdom” operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

Why has this news been such a relative non-event in the MSM? (And, is that a rhetorical question?) These documents have been slowly showing, in small dribs and dabs, a clear connection between Saddam’s regime and terrorism (the earlier part of the article is all about Saddam’s support for Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group in the Philippines).

Why is all of this considered so very ho-hum? Would it interrupt the preferred narrative? Is it too much to ask that the MSM should bring us news even if the information would challenge prior assumptions many in the MSM have been trying to promote? (And, once again, are these questions rhetorical?)