FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.
The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.
This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.
Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.
In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.
Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.
In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.
Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke — or about a presidential candidate.
Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.
Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students’ impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.
In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.
In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’s ideal.
Archive for June 2008
“The Future Has Been Shown to Me to the Year 2037″: Jeane Dixon and the Marketing of Miracle, Mystery, and Authority
This is the back cover of a 1973 book by Jeane Dixon, a self-proclaimed psychic, prophet, and astrologer who died in 1997. When her popularity was at its height in the 1960s and 70s, her books sold in the millions of copies.
I thought that the marketing represented on the back of this book was especially mendacious. Notice the following:
- She wears a cross, and speaks of Jesus and prophecy, giving her the appearance of having pious “street cred,” especially with Protestants and Catholics.
- She dresses conservatively, giving her the appearance of a non-hippie, non-feminist, patriotic American.
- She inverts the last two digits of the year of the publication of the book, 1973, into the year in which the prophecies are fulfilled: 2037.
- 2037, of course, is a full generation away from 1973. Thus her predictions are sufficiently distant that they cannot be skeptically evaluated for accuracy (at least not by the readers in 1973, when the book would have made money for the author).
- The book sets a power trip on the audience, as if there’s something special about Jeane Dixon. Dixon gets things from God that other people do not. In this instance, the future has been revealed to Dixon, but not to you: “The future has been shown to me to 2037.”
- The title of the book, The Call to Glory, gives the impression that purchasing the book will give you inside information on how to reach a ‘glorious’ (whatever that means) spiritual state. It is a path that is not your own, but one that you are called to from the beyond. Thus the difficulty of making your own decisions can simply be bypassed by submitting to some mysterious ‘call,’ presumably from God.
- In short, the book’s back cover is a good example of Dostoevsky’s critique, in The Brothers Karamazov, of conning people by “miracle, mystery, and authority.”
On the other hand, there are three interesting undercurrents of feminism at work here, and which may account in part for Dixon’s once wide readership among women:
- She is a woman engaged in prophecy, subverting the stereotypical notion that God, or the beyond, only communicates through male prophets.
- She is addressing topics in the traditionally male realm of the civitas (the public arena), as opposed to the traditionally female realm of the oikos (the home).
- In the hierarchy of the universe, she sets herself above many men, as one with special gifts that most men do not, presumably, possess.
Enkidu’s Woman: Carla Bruni and the Civilizing Sexfiend in the Epic of Gilgamesh
This past week, New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had a wonderful profile of Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Sarkozy. Money quote:
The French are different from you and me.
Yes, they have Sarkozy.
And they have Carla.
And they have “the Carla effect,” as it’s known in Paris.
If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-eating” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The View” to sweeten her image.
It’s hard to imagine the decibel level on Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics like “I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child”; and this song, “Ma came”: “You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white. …/My guy, I roll him up and smoke him.”
Carla Bruni’s boast of exercising her ‘woman-power’ to tame men recalls wild Enkidu’s first encounter with a woman in the wilderness. She was a temple prostitute brought from the city to seduce Enkidu, and gradually bring him under the spell of the feminine, and civilization. The couple did it, says the Gilgamesh Epic, for a whole week straight:
For six days and seven nights they lay together.
Before long, his new girlfriend had Enkidu out of the wilderness, and in civilization, dressing properly and using a cup to drink from:
He rubbed down the matted hair of his body and annointed himself with oil. Enkidu had become a man.
From Greenpeace Man to Neoconservative Man: Enkidu, in the Gilgamesh Epic, Gets Religion
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu is a hairy Dionysian wild man whose power, and ability to instill terror in lesser mortals, is equal to that of his civilized Apollonian opposite, Gilgamesh.
At least that’s how his story starts.
In Book 1 of the Gilgamesh Epic, an animal trapper reports to his father:
Father, there is a man, unlike any other, who comes down from the hills. He is the strongest in the world, he is like an immortal from heaven. He ranges over the hills with wild beasts and eats grass; he ranges through your land and comes down to the wells. I am afraid and dare not go near him. He fills in the pits which I dig and tears up my traps set for the game; he helps the beasts to escape and now they slip through my fingers.
Enkidu, in other words, is Greenpeace Man on steroids, disrupting the expansion of civilization and siding with the animals, liberating them wherever he finds them trapped. He is human literature’s first hippie eco-warrior, even the first terrorist, who would have driven the ratings of Fox News through the roof.
But the trapper’s father, through wisdom based on experience and reflection, does not suggest to his son a direct confrontation with the wild man. Instead, the trapper’s father offers his son astute psychological and sociological advice on how to deal with Enkidu:
My son, in Uruk lives Gilgamesh; no one has ever prevailed against him, he is strong as a star from heaven. Go to Uruk, find Gilgamesh, extol the strength of this wild man. Ask him to give you a harlot, a wanton from the temple of love; return with her, and let her woman’s power overpower this man. When next he comes down to drink at the wells she will be there.
There are two things to note about the father’s saavy advice:
- First, the father is a clever diplomat, bringing on allies in the fight against the wild man. The father understands that Gilgamesh will take the tale of this Dionysian wild man as a provocation to his own Apollonian power, and will arouse his pride to fight on behalf of the trapper, generating a “coalition of the willing.”
- Second, the father is, at heart, not only a cunning psychologist, but a sociologist. He understands that wild men are invariably single, without kids, and that the surest route to weakening the energies of the wild male against conservative civilization is to attach him to a woman.
And sure enough, on meeting the woman, Enkidu is seduced and “knows” the woman. Like the biblical Adam, sex is the route from innocence to experience, and Enkidu rapidly moves from adolescent spontenaity and harmony in magical nature to adult irony, hesitation, and alienation. Like the boxer whose knees are stereotypically drained away by love, so Enkidu’s strength is diminished:
For six days and seven nights they lay together . . . Then, when the gazelle saw him, they bolted away; and when the wild creatures saw him they fled. Enkidu would have followed, but his body was bound as though with a cord, his knees gave way when he started to run, his swiftness was gone. And now the wild creatures had all fled away; Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart.
Enkidu, now bound to his woman as if by an umbilical cord, submits to her:
So he returned and sat down at the woman’s feet, and listened intently to what she said, ‘You are wise, Enkidu, and now you have become like a god. Why do you want to run wild with the beasts in the hills? Come with me. I will take you to strong-walled Uruk, to the blessed temple of Ishtar and of Anu, of love and heaven: there Gilgamesh lives, who is very strong, and like a wild bull he lords it over man.’
The chords of civilization are slowly entwining Enkidu, giving new meaning to the phrase, “sex and the city.” Sex and the city are the civilizing forces that tame wild men, and now his woman is even wanting him to start going to church with her! The woman will bring him behind the “strong walls of Uruk” (the city) and bring him to “the blessed temple of Ishtar and of Anu” where he will learn about “love and heaven.”
But Enkidu has not lost his wildness entirely. He imagines the city as a place that he might yet conquer for wildness, and put forth a Whitmanian barbaric YAWP in. Enkidu, in terms familiar to any young and innocent revolutionary, prepared to Oedipally overcome the city fathers, boldly announces:
I will cry out aloud in Uruk, ‘I am the strongest here, I have come to change the old order, I am he who was born in the hills, I am he who is strongest of all.’
Ironically, even as he makes this declaration, the woman is mentally sizing him for appropriate and stylish clothes. He can’t just go into the city all smelly and ungroomed!:
O Enkidu, there all the people are dressed in gorgeous robes, every day is a holiday, the young men and the girls are wonderful to see. How sweet they smell!
And he needs table manners, which the woman, with the assistance of some shepherds, teaches him:
Enkidu could only suck the milk of wild animals. He fumbled and gaped, at a loss what to do or how he should eat the bread and drink the strong wine.
And that matted, wild hair. It has to be tamed too!:
He rubbed down the matted hair of his body and annointed himself with oil. Enkidu had become a man.
Here’s wild Enkidu’s transformational markers in a nutshell: sex, city, religion, cultivated eating habits, clothes, and grooming.
Lastly, the family resemblence of this Mesopotamian story with the opening chapters of Genesis is rather striking:
- Like Adam, Enkidu is created from clay.
- Like Adam, Enkidu is alone of his kind in a rather innocent, harmonious, and Edenic garden world.
- A woman introduced into Adam’s world brings Adam to sexual gnosis and alienation from the harmony of the garden. Ditto Enkidu.
- The move from innocence to experience in the Bible is accompanied by the covering of the body. Likewise Enkidu.
- Adam’s expulsion from the garden is accompanied by the development of the lifestyle of cultivation (labor by the sweat of one’s brow) and, ultimately, city-dwelling. Likewise, Enkidu learns to eat and drink the products of cultivation (bread and wine) and leaves his wild paradise for the city.
- On leaving the garden, consciousness of death accompanies Adam; likewise, Enkidu.
Poor wild Enkidu, Horatio, I knew him well!
Whatever: Something, eh, Patriotic for the 4th of July
Okay, it’s not Kate Smith singing the Star Spangled Banner, but it still strikes me as kind of patriotic. But whatever.
Ten Good Reasons to Think Gay Marriage Will Survive in California–and Three Reasons to Think It Won’t
Ten pretty good reasons to think that gay marriage will survive in California:
- Though the anti-gay marriage amendment to the California Constitution will be on the ballot in November, conservatives are divided about it. Economic conservatives and libertarians are generally in favor of gay marriage, and religious conservatives oppose it. By contrast, Democrats in California are generally united in their support of gay marriage.
- The Orange County Register, the most conservative big paper in the state, has came out editorially in favor of gay marriage.
- Economics favors the pro-gay marriage side. For example, a UCLA Williams Institute study estimates that gay marriage stands to bring 700 million dollars in new revenues into the state. For a discussion of gay marriage that raises this interesting angle to the issue, see this link: http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2008/06/i-dont-but-i-might-soon/ .
- Campaign contributions are likely to favor the pro-gay marriage side. From Hollywood, to large gay communities, to Republican business people who are happy to benefit from the positive economics associated with gay marriage, a lot of money is likely to go toward saturating the state with pro-gay marriage messages.
- Deep pocket Republicans, the ones who finance the Republican party and conservative causes in California, may sit the gay marriage fight out. They may do this as a strategic gesture, feeling that anti-gay passion hurts the Republican brand, and may represent bad politics over the long run, given that, over the next decade or two, gay marriage, as a concept, is likely to become even more culturally accepted than it is today. Conservatives were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and some conservatives don’t want to be on the wrong side of the civil rights movement of this era.
- Obama is likely to bring Democrats out to the polls in record numbers in California, and John McCain may not energize an equivelently strong turnout among Republicans. Thus turnout may prove decisive.
- California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger opposes the anti-gay marriage amendment.
- There are 100,000 gay couples in California, and they have a vital interest in working and contributing money to keep gay marriage legal in California. People fighting for something that directly impacts them are generally more energized than people who are fighting against something that, as a practical matter, may have little or no effect on their day-to-day lives.
- The big cities in California have substantial gay populations, and they will work hard to get their supporters to the voting booths.
- Polls seem to be trending toward greater acceptance of gay marriage. Since the late 1970’s, for example, support for gay marriage has doubled.
And here are three pretty good reasons to think gay marriage is toast in California:
- In 2004, eleven states voted on anti-gay marriage amendments to their state constitutions, and every single one of the amendments won passage.
- Religious conservatives vote, and if they are sufficiently animated about gay marriage to organize and come out to the polls in November, they may well prevail.
- Unease about homosexuality, and even disapproval, outright revulsion, and straight-forward bigoty, are still factors in many people’s psyches. More than 50% of the population may feel that gay marriage is simply too large a cultural change to support.
Whatever happens in November, it’s likely to be very close.
California Gay Marriage Hysteria Watch: James Dobson Compares Gay Marriage to Pearl Harbor
Dorian Davis, a contributing writer to Business Week and the New York Daily News, claims that James Dobson, in one of his books, compared gay marriage to Pearl Harbor. Here’s Davis’s quote:
James Dobson, in his 2004 book Marriage Under Fire, casts same-sex marriage as a threat to civilization, comparing it at one point to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Davis makes this claim in a very interesting and astute analysis of gay marriage and the Republican party, which you can find at this link: http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2008/06/i-dont-but-i-might-soon/ .
Obviously, Dobson’s analogy is, to be polite, strained, and, if applied seriously, would make for ridiculous public policy.
If, for example, the 100,000 gay couples in California represent a Pearl Harbor level existential threat to the country, would Dobson wish to do with gay couples what California did with Japanese Americans during World War II?
As you will recall, through the duration of World War II, California set up internment camps along the eastern side of the Sierras to isolate and monitor Japanese Californians. In other words, they were under arrest, and detained against their will, not for any particular crimes that they had committed, but because of who they were, and the threat they supposedy represented to the American war effort.
I seriously doubt, for example, that Dr. Dobson would ever actually propose the reopening of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar for gay couples.
But if he wouldn’t, then why did he make the analogy between gay marriage and Pearl Harbor at all? How, exactly, are they analogous, and what are the consequences of the analogy supposed to be?
Dr. Dobson? Dr. Dobson?
To read the Wikipidia article on Manzanar, here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzanar
Apollo and Dionysus, or Gilagmesh and Enkidu: A Nietzschean Reading of the Epic of Gilgamesh
In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh there are two chief characters: Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
Both are male, and it is striking that ancient Mesopotamian culture hit upon the same overriding tensions between these two characters as those that Friedrich Nietzsche, in his Birth of Tragedy, postulated for Greek tragedy between its two chief archetypal male characters, Apollo and Dionysus.
Apollo, for Nietzsche, represents order and Dionysus represents wildness, and it is the tension between these two that sets the stage for drama and tragedy.
Why? Because it seems inevitable that the Apollonian assertion of order and persona into the otherwise Dionysian world of disorder, wildness, and multiplicity will always ultimately end badly for Apollo.
Dionysus, in the long run, seems to hold most of the cards. I am reminded of the response that the philosopher Gregory Bateson gave to one of his children about why it is so difficult to keep one’s bedroom in the way that we call ‘clean.’ Bateson replied (and I’m paraphrasing here):
Because there are so many more ways that we call a room ‘dirty’ than the ways that we call it ‘clean.’
In other words, the sheer force of entropy and numbers makes the world move toward the Dionysian; that is, toward the way that we don’t want it.
Apollonian meticulousness and assertion is thus difficult to maintain without a constant effort.
This Batesian, and ultimately Nietzschean, model for understanding the human condition, applied to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, actually functions pretty well as a way of reading The Gilgamesh Epic, wherein Gilgamesh is an Apollonian figure, setting forth a dynamic persona against the world, and Enkidu is a wild Dionysian figure to be tamed.
Here’s how the The Gilgamesh Epic describes Gilgamesh in Book 1:
Gilgamesh went abroad in the world, but he met with none who could withstand his arms . . .
In other words, Gilgamesh is an assertive Apollonian persona, travelling and subduing. He is also a builder of civilization, managing the intercourse of men with men, and men with gods:
In Uruk he built walls, a great rampart, and the temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu, and for Ishtar the goddess of love.
It sounds like religion at Urdu had a balanced, Jesus-Mary Catholic quality to it, in which both a male sky god, Anu, and a female deity, Ishtar, are given equal attention and appeasement. Gilgamesh is clearly about the maintaining of order, balance, and safety for his people. But his imperial Apollonian assertion is also dangerous and Dionysian when directed at others. He is interested in bringing his own energetic persona ever further out into the world. The gods, noticing this,
cried to Aruru, the goddess of creation, ‘You made him, O Aruru, now create his equal; let it be as like him as his own reflection, his second self, stormy heart for stormy heart. Let them contend together and leave Uruk in quiet.’
The goddess responds in the creation of Enkidu, in a fashion that is striking for its similarity to the book of Genesis, in which God forms Adam (which means clay) from the dust of the earth:
She dipped her hands in water and pinched off clay, she let it fall in the wilderness, and noble Enkidu was created.
Enkidu, unlike the armored and civilized Gilgamesh, is a Dionysian hippie:
His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman’s; it waved like the hair of Nisaba, the goddess of corn. His body was covered with matted hair like Samuqan’s, the god of cattle. He was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land. Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at the water holes; he had joy of the water with the herds of wild game.
Recall that Adam, in the Hebrew Bible, is at first also a forager and innocent. It is ultimately the loss of innocence and cultivation of the land by the sweat of the brow that becomes Adam’s curse.
Like the Biblical story, in which Adam is driven out of his innocence and into the reality of a harsh world where he will ultimately die, so Enkidu will have a similar transformation through his encounter with Gilgamesh.
Doubters of the World Unite: Peter Ustinov on Belief and Doubt
The British actor Peter Ustinov, who died in 2004, made this rather astute observation:
Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
The quote is taken from Jack Huberman’s The Quotable Atheist, p.306.
The way I read the quote is that expressions of certainty make for emotional rigidity and a disinclination to walk in the shoes of others, or to see things, however briefly, their way.
Confessions of doubt, by contrast, open the field to sympathy for others’ experience and ideas. Doubt unites humanity in the recognition that we are limited, mortal beings in time and space, and that no individual sees the truth whole.
Belief, by contrast, is essentially dead, because it closes down discussion, or drives it into a space where it must run in pre-determined grooves, or with pre-determined defenses.
Let a million doubts bloom.
Distorted Recall and False Belief: A New York Times Essay on Why People Believe Weird Things
The following essay, titled “Your Brain Lies to You,” by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, appeared in the New York Times on June 27, 2008:
“Miracle, Mystery, and Authority”: A Poem by Santi Tafarella
A brown robed
friar
among mission
flowers.
A child spins
before him.
Sun-gleaming,
dizzying the
motion.
Will the heavens
never stop
in their orbits
and explosions?
Death Proof: Quentin Tarantino Finds His Mojo in Foot Fetishism—and Shows His Feminist Side
I thought that with the two “Kill Bill” films, Quentin Tarantino had lost his way as a filmmaker. “Death Proof,” for me, is his comeback film. It’s an enduring, “Jackie Brown” quality piece, with a great feminist subtext (though if you watch only the first half of the film, you might not believe this assertion).
The film is also exquisitely structured. Watch, for example, the role that the female foot plays throughout the film, both as erotic attractant and as kung fu lethal weapon. The film begins and ends with the female foot.
The second half of “Death Proof” is Thelma and Louise for hypomanics. I found the film, for all its absurdity and horror, actually life affirming, and I’ve watched it now half a dozen times. It’s that good.
No Matter What You Do, Cosmo, You’re Still Going to Die: Gilgamesh as a Superman, But Not Quite a God
Two-thirds they made him god and one third man,
is how the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic describes Gilgamesh in its prologue. Like its sister texts, the Mesopotamian creation myth the Enuma Elish, in which the gods also fashion human beings after their image, and the Hebrew book of Genesis, in which, in the first chapter, the head of the Elohim (council of the gods) says, “Let us make man in our image, and in our likeness,” so the Gilgamesh Epic makes of Gilgamesh a being with god-like attributes.
But what of that “one third man” part? That “one third” seems to allude, perhaps entirely, to what is common to all men: mortality. Gilgamesh, like all of us, is a “god” nevertheless destined to die. This recalls to the modern ear Shakespeare’s own eloquent description of humanity in Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man . . . in form and motion how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! . . . and yet what to me is this quintessence of dust?
This too is the great question of the Gilgamesh epic–what does it mean to be born with attributes so different from animals, and yet be fated to nevertheless die like one of them?
The Gilgamesh Epic is thus not a morality tale–though there are moral lessons one can read out of the epic–but a mortality tale. In other words, it is perhaps our earliest surviving human text in which there is a sustained existential grappling, in mythic form, with ultimate questions of meaning, change, life, and death.
Most notable among Gilgamesh’s attributes is that, though mortal, he nevertheless possesses knowledge or gnosis. Gilgamesh was one who “was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things.” In other words, the Gilgamesh Epic links Gilgamesh and the gods in an ambivalent relationship between knowledge and death.
This is, of course, also the formulation in Genesis, in which knowledge and death are entwined in the garden of Eden. We also see this in other places in Genesis, such as in the story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), in which the realm of the gods must not be approached too directly lest the gods act to remind humans of their limitations, and put them in their place again:
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they may begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
Likewise, Gilgamesh, in his quest for the realm of the gods and immortality, must inevitably be thwarted, despite getting closer to this realm than other mortals. He may be two thirds god–a kind of Mesopotamian superman–but he is still mortal and subject to the vissitudes of change. Utnapishtim, the mythic Noah-figure in the Gilgamesh Epic who survived the great flood, tells Gilgamesh in language that sounds like the pre-socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus,
There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritiance to keep for ever, does the flood-time of rivers endure?
Thus the Gilgamesh Epic, at least in part, is a meditation upon, and a grappling with, impermanence.
In the 1980s film, Moonstruck, a woman tells her husband,
No matter what you do, Cosmo, you’re still going to die.
This is also one of the messages to take away from reading the Gilgamesh Epic.
There is a Certain Slant of Light: The View from Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom Window
Dickinson family’s Amherst homestead. Emily’s bedroom was on the second story. Here’s one of her poems:
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind–
As if my Brain had split–
I tried to match it–Seem by Seem–
But could not make them fit–
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before–
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound–
Like Balls–upon a Floor–
Gay Marriage Terror Alert: California Pastor Says Gay Marriage Portends “the Dismantling of Western Civilization”
Conservative clergy members throughout California appear to be attempting to mount a formidable organizational pushback against gay marriage in California, and turning the rhetorical volume up to HIGH.
Gay marriage represents “the dismantling of Western Civilization,” my local paper, the Antelope Valley Press, which serves northern Los Angeles County, quoted one pastor as saying.
The paper also states that no less than 75 of my area’s clergy members gathered today to strategize by conference call with 2000 of their colleagues throughout the state. Apparently, lawyers and James Dobson were also in on the call. Here’s the money quote:
The state Supreme Court’s blessing of same-sex unions portends “the dismantling of Western civilization,” a San Diego pastor told a Wednesday telephone conference that united an announced listenership of 2,000 church pastors at sites in California and other states – including a fervent audience of 75 area faith leaders gathered at Central Christian Church.
I was thinking, given that Western Civilization weighs in the balance come November, that perhaps the pastors, in the run up to the election, can get Fox News to carry an hourly updated Gay Marriage Terror Alert:
Blue = All clear. No gay couples seen loitering around county clerk’s offices. Safe to walk dogs and let children play outside.
Yellow = Sightings of gay newlyweds eyeing real estate “for sale” signs throughout the state. Consider selling your house–but not to a gay couple.
Orange = Sightings of gay newlyweds at state adoption agencies. Store one month minimum supply of food and fresh water in the event of earthquake, flood, or fire.
Red = California voters reject amendment that would have banned gay marriage in the state of California. End of Western Civilization imminent. Order a complete set of the Harvard Classics Series from Amazon.com. Take them to northern polar regions and establish remnant communities devoted to their study and copying. And this time, actually read them.
Here’s the link to the full Antelope Valley Press article: http://www.avpress.com/n/26/0626_s1.hts
Albert Camus on Religion
The French novelist of The Plague, in his The Myth of Sisyphus, wrote:
There is only one religion that exists throughout all history, the belief in eternity. This belief is a deception.
Escher’s Ants on a Mobius Strip: Blake’s Moving Image of Eternity, Kafka’s prison, or Dostoevsky’s Spider?
The number “8,” placed upon its side, is the symbol for infinity (as perhaps many of us remember from the Schoolhouse Rock song). And if we think of the Schoolhouse Rock video that accompanies the song, in which a young girl, as day rolls calmly into night, quietly ice skates in quiet “figure eights,” perhaps we associate infinity with a stilling of time into divine wholeness.
But what happens when MC Escher turns the symbol for infinity into a gridded mobius strip, and runs ants over it? What is it now?
For me, it feels not so much like the blissful ice skater of Schoolhouse Rock, or William Blake’s ”moving image of eternity,” and more like a symbol of eternal entrapment, as Joseph K. might feel while under arrest in Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, or as Dosoevsky imagined, in The Brothers Karamazov, of the terror of finding, not God, but a spider at the beginning of creation.
Escher’s image is visually suggestive of why most people, against compelling reason, and the consensus of scientists, instinctively resist belief in evolution. Evolution seems to turn the symbol of infinity away from an anthropomorphic god who sees all things at once, and is in control, and makes existence into a blind mechanism upon which inhuman forces move. Like entering a roach motel, once you crawl into the evolutionary universe, many fear that you can’t crawl out again. Escher’s mobius strip is the mechanism of infinity stripped of its gleam and mystery. It is the Wizard of Oz’s curtain tugged back by Toto. It exposes the realm of the rationalized and the Kafkaesque, where nonhuman-sized bureaucracies, Dostoevskian spiders, and Escher ants make the world go.
If God does not exist, Escher’s mobius strip threatens to become the rack on which the body of humankind is crucified, or to which Prometheus is chained and abandoned.
Literature Major or Prophet to the One True God?: Gilgamesh, Akhenaten, Moses, and Mohammad
The Epic of Gilgamesh opens with this sentence:
I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh.
I hear in this opening an evangelical purpose, as when the gospel of Mark begins with, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” It is not merely sufficient to start the epic of Gilgamesh with a simple, “Let me tell you the story of Gilgamesh,” as if sharing a campfire story to a half dozen people. Instead, the speaker adopts the persona of one heralding to all peoples across the world a story of central purpose.
And although the epic is filled with stories of the gods, one can feel in its opening sentence an ancient culture that might have, given sufficient time, made a subtle drift toward monotheism. In other words, a story of local Mesopotamian gods, had it accompanied a civilization more successful at colonizing the imagination of others, might have become the gods of all people, and by consolidation, evolved into a monotheistic religion. The Epic of Gilgamesh is, in short, imperial in tone, marking status, not just for the superiority of its culture and gods, but for its founding father Gilgamesh:
This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us the tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.
Gilgamesh was a kind of Mesopotamian Moses. He had knowledge. He knew mysteries–things you’ll never know. Unlike you, he travelled to distant places, and spoke with gods. His story was never forgotten, as other tales are, for he engraved them with his own hand, permanently, on that most permanent of materials, stone. Our civilization is built on what this man learned about the world–so pay attention!
This prologue mesmerizes and hightens expectation. It is an appeal to intimidation and authority. You’re not a man-god, as was Gilgamesh. You have never had your words engraved in stone. You’re a nobody. So now listen with receptivity to your superior, and discover second-hand what he knew first-hand.
This heavy-handed status marking before telling the story suggests that the epic of Gilgamesh was bound up with Mesopotamian temple practice, and the education of children. It was copied and kept in circulation because it was important for the maintanance of the culture.
The Epic of Gilgamesh’s sixth and seventh sentences, which begin the story proper, continue to lay out status markers:
When the gods created Gilgamesh they gave him a perfect body. Shamash the glorious sun endowed him with beauty.
Not only was Gilgamesh wiser than you, and better travelled, and knew the gods, and had access to mysteries, but he was also better looking than you are! This suggests that there was a Mesopotamian cultural assumption that attractiveness was a sign of one’s favor with the gods.
It should also be noted that Shamash, the sun god, plays a large role in this story, and like the Egyptian sun god, Aten, who scholars trace as the first god in world history to be worshipped (during the reign of Akhenaten) monotheistically, it is possible that Shamash, had Mesopotamian culture evolved further, might have become the name of God (as Allah and Yahweh, both originally local dieties, ultimately became identified, by competing cultures, as names for God).
So in the opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh we find Shamash and Gilgamesh, who, like the Egyptian god Aten and his prophet Akhenaten, as potential monotheistic also-rans who never quite made it. Allah and Mohammad and Yahweh and Moses still have their followers, but poor Gilgamesh and Shamash, and Aten and Akhenaten are consigned, at best, to literature courses.
Gilgamesh gave us the Epic of Gilgamesh and Akhenaten gave us his wonderful poems to the sun-god Aten. Both make it into college literature anthologies. But that’s the best they can do.
Ah, the contingent turns of history! What a fate–to find oneself a prophet or god revered by scores, or stuck in literature class for all eternity!
The Office as a Burial Ground: Undated Image of a Writer
In an oral culture you are with others in groups, and you hear living voices, and you are frequently out of doors and engaged with the world. In a literate culture you value withdrawal from groups and withdrawal from voices, and are indoors a lot. You want to be alone. You want to disengage from the world, and step aside from the world, and set it onto a table top for examination at your liesure. You want quiet behind your mausoleum of desk drawers, behind the stacks of papers that surround you like stacks of burial shawls waiting their turn for your attention, only to rise over you and bury you. You are the writer who has lost control of your office. You are like the bee that has come through a window and cannot find its way out again, worrying the tables and the walls and substituting the flower it finds on the wallpaper for the living flower it has lost in the warm buzzing garden, which you are.
Stuff Happens: Donald Rumsfeld, the Free Will Defense, and the Problem of Suffering
After the invasion of Iraq in April 2003, George Bush’s Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, provided a free-will defense for the rampant street looting in Iraq. Why was it occurring, and why wasn’t the United States actively engaged in stopping it? Here’s Rumsfeld’s answer:
Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.
Note five striking parallels between Rumsfeld’s response and the free will defense of suffering commonly offered by theologians:
- Stuff happens, but it’s not God’s (the United States’s) fault.
- God (the United States) values freedom above all other values, and so does not interfere with a free people, even when they are choosing badly.
- Sin (looting) causes suffering.
- People (the Iraqis) can start choosing differently, and get behind God’s (the United States’s) plan, and when they do, then everything will be “wonderful.”
- Things look bad now, but things are going to get better soon. You’ll see. Be patient. God (the United States) is not finished yet.
I can imagine George Carlin right now, at the gates of heaven, like a reporter, shouting tough questions at Saint Peter:
Carlin: Hey, Saint Peter, what’s up with the Holocaust?
Saint Peter: Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.
Earthquake in Reagan Country: The Orange County Register Endorses Gay Marriage
Calling the California high court’s decision justified, the Orange County Register, probably the state’s largest conservative newspaper, in its lead editorial on Sunday (June 22,2008), succinctly and articulately endorsed gay marriage. Money quote:
Our preference would be for the government not to be involved in marriage, the most fundamental of institutions in a civil society. Why two people who want to be married should be required to get a license from the state is something of a mystery. Marriage existed long before the California or U.S. governments came into being and will continue long after they have been consigned to history. Whether a marriage is valid should be up to the people involved and the churches, synagogues, mosques or other religious institutions that choose to perform them or not.
As a practical matter, however, the government has so entwined itself into our daily lives that state recognition is important. Filing taxes as a married couple or as individuals makes a difference, as does the ability to own real estate, make end-of-life decisions or adopt children. Considering all this and the importance of equality before the law, the high court’s decision was justified.
It is argued that allowing same-sex marriage will infringe on the religious freedom of people who have a religiously based objection to it. It is hard to see the validity. Church and state are correctly separate in this country, and the fact that the state recognizes a union as a marriage doesn’t mean that a religious person or institution has to recognize it or approve of it. It’s hard to imagine a minister, rabbi or imam who objects to same-sex marriages being forced to perform one, and we would be the first to object if anybody tried it.
We’ll see what the mood of the California electorate is in November, when citizens will vote on whether to add language to the California constitution once again banning gay marriage in the state, but right now things are looking pretty good for the equal treatment of gays under the law. To read the full editorial, here’s the link: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/marriage-state-sex-2073700-marriages-people
