In the domain of religion and science, decisions, actions, attitudes, practices, and conflicts of the present moment require careful assessment for what they mean now and how they may affect the future. Conservative Protestants today, for example, offer many reasons for leaning against or actively combating the consensus of modern scientists concerning evolution. Some of those reasons concern narrowly defined issues of physical evidence or the interpretation of specific biblical passages, while others range to broader issues of theology, philosophy, ethnicity, family order, public education, or government. To offer historical explanations for the standoff, which this paper tries to do, is not the same as explaining the individual motives of those who engage such issues today. But it is a good way to see that contemporary stances represent an amalgamation of discrete attitudes, assumptions, and convictions, and that the components of this amalgamation all have a history.The purpose of this paper is to specify fifteen of these attitudes, assumptions, and convictions, to indicate when they rose to prominence, and to suggest how they relate to affect contested issues of science and religion.
All it takes is actually bothering to meet a teenager or three and you’ll see what I know to be true from meeting hundreds upon hundreds every year: they’re the same curious, sensitive, smart, compassionate, funny, questioning, brilliant people they’ve always been.
If art is a mirror, dreams are the back of the head. A work of art derives its effects from light, sound, and movement, but dreams unfurl in darkness, silence, paralysis. Like a recipe attempted in an ill-provisioned kitchen, “dreamlike” art relies on substitutions: dutch angles, forced perspective, absurdist juxtapositions, arbitrary transformations, and, as Peter Dinklage’s character points out in the film Living in Oblivion, a lamentable superabundance of dwarfs. Dreams in art either make sense, or they make no sense at all, but they never manage to do both at the same time, the way dreams do while we’re dreaming them.
it is become a custom after chapel to repair to one or other of the coffee houses (for there are divers), where hours are spent in talking, and less profitable reading of newspapers, of which swarms are continually supplied from London. And the scholars are so greedy after news (which is none of their business) that they neglect all for it, and it is become very rare for any of them to go directly to his chamber after prayers without first doing his suit at the coffee-house, which is a vast loss of time grown out of a pure novelty. For who can apply close to a subject with his head full of the din of a coffee-house?
Well, I’m basically a literary and philosophical humanist myself, not a journalist or scholar or expert of any kind, so I do personally regret that people like me don’t have and never again will have the cultural authority that the New York intellectuals had. But history has moved on, and there’s still a place, after all, for us humanists to practice the honorable activity of applying the really matchless moral resources of literature and the philosophical tradition to criticizing society and culture. Still, the work on the front lines now needs to be done by others, the investigative journalists and maverick scholars, people who can do deep reporting or work in the archives. Those are activities that classical public intellectuals—Bourne, Russell, Camus, Sartre, Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte—didn’t have the time or the temperament for. So even though I personally will never be a Glenn Greenwald or a Noam Chomsky, I’m supremely grateful to them. They’re doing what I think needs above all to be done. Cultivating and expounding the humanities will always be essential to the moral health of society. But politically speaking, the literary intellectual is now a kind of auxiliary— George Scialabba. Someday I’ll find time to explain why I don’t agree.
A young man in a small town in Patagonia or in Kansas reads an ancient Chinese poet in a book he borrowed from the library and falls in love with a poem, which he reads to himself over and over again as the summer night is falling. With each reading he brings the voice of the dead poet to life. For one unforgettable moment, he steps out of his own cramped self and enters the lives of unknown men and women, seeing the world through their eyes, feeling what they once felt and thinking what they once thought. If poetry is not the most utopian project ever devised by human beings, I don’t know what is.
There is of course a written literature that predates and underlies all these movies, which could hardly have found their form without the help of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick (not to mention the foundational assistance of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon). There is even an epic poem, Harry Martinson’s Aniara, an absurdist vision of life aboard a rocket ship permanently lost in space, that in 1958 was turned into a twelve-tone opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl. But it is in the form of movies that this mythology becomes part of the furniture of our world, to which we turn as one might to a prayer rug or a Ouija board, in an effort to make contact with the unknowable. It’s where the Romantic Sublime went to die.
Publishing books is itself a strange experience. Your relationship with a book in progress is intensely intimate while you’re writing it–it’s always on your mind. But once it goes to the publisher, you pretty much lose control of the whole process. Sometimes people make the analogy to being a parent–the book grows up, it graduates, and out into the world it goes. But your kids don’t have your name on their spine, and books aren’t autonomous actors.It may be that the book seems odd to the author because the usual process of commodity fetishism doesn’t work. Neighbors see the book sitting conspicuously near the front door, where I’ve casually left it, and are impressed; it just appeared! I buy commodities like that all the time: they appear in the store, they look cool, I buy them. But I can’t do that with the my book–I can’t square the object with the years of labor required to produce it.
Dan Cohen suggested that back when you typed your manuscript, or had someone type it, you ended up with a big pile of paper, a sort of primitive, missing-link relative of the book itself. The stack of paper was related to the book like a vestigial limb on a whale. A printed book was a vast improvement over a pile of numbered pages: you couldn’t lose it or have it blow away or fall to the foor and get out of order. The progression that went “idea — pile of pages — book” made sense. But a modern book might never leave your computer screen before it shows up in print. The transition is jarring.
The physical book – The Aporetic. Well, first of all, congratulations to Mike! And second, I resonate with some but not all of this. For me the really strange thing about writing and publishing a book is that I’ve never gotten the feeling of closure, of completion, that I always expected I would get and somehow still expect to get, even though I ought to know better now.
When are you “done” with a book? You feel done-in-a-way when you complete the first full draft, then done-in-another-way when you send it to the publisher. But that’s when a lot of important stuff is just getting started. You get editorial suggestions that you respond to, usually by making revisions; then you get a copy-edited version that you have to go over, making further changes; then you get a designed and typeset version that looks pretty much like what the final version will look like, to which you are allowed to make only very minor changes, like correcting spelling errors that got missed in earlier pass-throughs. Around this time you might get a bound galley, the version that’s going out to reviewers. Finally, the book itself arrives in the mail. And you’re done! Finally, it’s done!
Well, sort of. If you’ve written more than one book, you know that there will still be errors: factual mistakes, grammatical infelicities, and the like — but also perhaps judgments you wish you hadn’t made and would like the chance to revisit. Some writers read their books as soon as they arrive, but I’m not one of them: it takes me about five years before I can bear to look at a book I’ve written, in part because I ready to think about other things, but in part because I don’t want to face all the things that I wish I could fix.
When I finally do have to face those errors and poor judgments, I can’t help thinking of a second, revised edition somewhere down the line — even when I know that that’s highly unlikely or simply impossible. I turn over in my mind the possibilities, the changes I would certainly make, the ones I might or might not make. The book’s still a living, developing thing in my mind. As a character in one of my favorite novels, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, says, “Nothing’s over. Ever.”