Category: Religion
*Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy*
That is the new book by Costin Alamariu, who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP. It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory. It has been selling very well.
It still comes across as a doctoral thesis, but I feel any reviewer should excuse the unusual modes of presentation. The doctoral thesis of BAP is going to come out, one way or the other, and better something than nothing.
I am more worried that the main claims are a mix of not true and also too bold. Take the opening sentence — “The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market.”
In contrast, I find it odd how little of contemporary society revolves around sex and breeding, relative to what a reading of Darwin might predict. You might feel, a’la Hanson, that so many of our social proclivities evolved from initially sexual and mating impulses, but how autonomous they have become! People spend so much time not having sex. Fertility rates are plummeting, and that is at best a marginal political topic. Rich CEOs very often utterly fail to create the harems that some might be expecting. If there is a missing figure in this book it is Adam Smith and his TMS, who can explain so much of our social world with only minimal reference to sex.
Or take this sentence, again from early on: “Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted.”
That seems obviously false. There is simply a massive influence through socialization, and much of that is quite separate from the roles people may or may not have as “breeders.” For the most talented, breeding in fact might be a highly inefficient way to influence the world’s broader future. Intermediary institutions are systematically missing from the narrative of this book, so already the stage is set for everything to be darker than it needs to be, and for nature to have a stronger role than it ought to.
In any case it is hard to stay on the track of this argument, as the book is sprawling and repeatedly starts over again with new building blocks. Perhaps the actual underlying belief here (see p.45) is that the Western intellectual class is boring and decrepit? (Compared to what? Has the author spent too much time at Yale? It never has been easier to learn real stuff.)
We are led down paths of Nietzsche, Strauss, decaying political regimes, Pindar, and the ancient Greek world. Frazer enters with the Golden Bough. What I like best in the author is his willingness to throw himself into these worlds with convincing abandon. What I like least is how little space is carved out for morality, or for the view that there is still plenty of progress in the world, and that there is a broadly common intersubjective judgment that some states of affairs are better than others. I long for the Masons, and chatter about Hiram the Master Builder — there is a reason why ancient Greek philosophy no longer fits our world. The simple truths of a suburban real estate developer, and the spouse and kids and dog back home, are swept under the rug.
The truly dark move would be to argue that nature must be violent, that man cannot remove himself from nature, and thus to flirt with the fascist view that violence amongst humans must be acceptable as well. And, in this take, all of our moralities are phony adjuncts to the desire to breed. But the exposition is somehow too winding and too replete with fresh turns for those issues to surface in a meaningful way. Maybe some would argue they emerge from the Straussian muck? I would have no objection to seeing them addressed directly, as surely the author at current margins is not afraid of additional cancellation.
Would more adherence to the hypothesis testing methods of the economist have done Alamariu some good?
I do agree with his view that Nietzsche was more sympathetic to Christianity than is usually realized. The expositions and interpretations of Nietzsche probably are the best part of the book.
By the end we are given a new conclusion: “The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated with tyrants — to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that philosophy was associated with tyranny.” On that I can agree, but a simple libertarianism would have gotten us there more easily. Alamariu can’t quite bring himself to make this conclusion either an empirical claim (too little actual hard evidence), or a logical claim (too many other variables in the model), and so it continues to hover uncomfortably in between, being put on the table with lots of drama but never receiving actual validation.
There is definitely material of interest in here, but it remains a book of its time. Unfortunately, too much of our era has an emotionally negative predisposition toward too many things, including our current elites, and for reasons that are mimetic rather than justified, whether rationally or even by our impulses to breed.
BAP once wrote: “I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time…” For all its pretense to the contrary, that is exactly what this book does not achieve.
Is this about the poll or about the people? (model this)
The sexual orientation of 18-25 yr old college students from @TheFIREorg.
85% of Muslims ID as straight.
84% of Protestants.
83% of Catholics.The biggest shock to me? Latter-day Saints.
Only 78% say they are straight!It's 55% of atheists.
53% of agnostics. pic.twitter.com/o7DddewhT6— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) September 18, 2023
What should I ask Masaaki Suzuki?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is the opening of his Wikipedia page:
Masaaki Suzuki (鈴木 雅明, Suzuki Masaaki, born 29 April 1954) is a Japanese organist, harpsichordist and conductor, and the founder and music director of the Bach Collegium Japan. With this ensemble he is recording the complete choral works of Johann Sebastian Bach for the Swedish label BIS Records, for which he is also recording Bach’s concertos, orchestral suites, and solo works for harpsichord and organ. He is also an artist-in-residence at Yale University and the principal guest conductor of its Schola Cantorum, and has conducted orchestras and choruses around the world.
He is not just an incredible artist, he is one of the most remarkable achievers of our time. So what should I ask him?
IFOs
While strolling in the garden one day…a priest said to him, ‘Father Joseph, oh, how beautiful God has made heaven!’ Then Joseph, as if he had been called to heaven, gave a loud shriek, leapt off the ground, flew through the air, and knelt down atop an olive tree, and—as witnesses declared in his beatification inquest—that branch on which he rested waved as if a bird were perched upon it, and he remained up there about half an hour” (Paolo Agelli, Vita del Beato Giuseppe di Copertino, 1753).
What kind of nonsense is this? Who is this liar quoted above? Human beings can’t fly or kneel on slender tree limbs like little birds. So, how is it that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the very era that gave birth to aggressive skepticism and empirical science—countless people swore that they had witnessed such events? And how is it that some of these sworn testimonies are legal records, archived alongside lawsuits and murder trials, from all sorts of people, not just illiterate peasants but also elites at the apex of the social, intellectual, and political hierarchy?
…Levitation is one of the best of all entry points into the history of the impossible, principally because it is an event for which we have an overabundance of testimonies, not just in Western Christianity but throughout all of world history.
Carlos Eire argues in CommonWeal that these events should be taken seriously. Eire is cagey about what he means by take seriously but I agree that we can say something about the form such visions take and when and why they rise and fall in frequency. Eire notes, for example, that reporting of such events changed significantly with the Protestant Reformation.
…Protestants of all stripes also rejected the proposition that God had continued to perform miracles beyond the first century, a doctrine that came to be known as “the cessation of miracles” or “the cessation of the charismata.” The miracles mentioned in the Bible had really occurred, they argued, but such marvels became unnecessary after the birth of the early Church and would never happen again. Consequently, all of those miraculous supernatural phenomena associated with holiness throughout the Middle Ages, including levitation, could not be the work of God. But by designating these phenomena “false”—that is, not attributable to God—Protestants did not declare them impossible. As most Protestant Reformers and their later disciples saw it, ecstatic seizures, levitations, luminous irradiance, and all such phenomena did in fact occur, but they were all diabolical in origin.
…Given the religious, social, political, and intellectual turmoil caused by the advent of Protestantism and its great paradigm shift, it is not at all surprising that miracles became a marker of difference between Catholics and Protestants, as well as a flash point of discord and a polemical weapon.
That’s right but the author would have done better to refer to the work of my GMU colleagues. GMU (oddly?) is a leading center of experts on witch trials. See most notably Leeson and Russ and Johnson and Koyama.
People don’t report seeing flying people the way they used to. Is that because people have become more rational or because the socially acceptable form of vision has changed?
How Credible is the Credibility Revolution?
When economists analyze a well-conducted RCT or natural experiment and find a statistically significant effect, they conclude the null of no effect is unlikely to be true. But how frequently is this conclusion warranted? The answer depends on the proportion of tested nulls that are true and the power of the tests. I model the distribution of t-statistics in leading economics journals. Using my preferred model, 65% of narrowly rejected null hypotheses and 41% of all rejected null hypotheses with |t|<10 are likely to be false rejections. For the null to have only a .05 probability of being true requires a t of 5.48.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Kevin Lang.
Misandry
John Tierney lets loose in a well-researched piece:
Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore—or work to suppress—the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect,” based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly—women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence—and it’s obvious in popular culture.
“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.” Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.
Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies—and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.
The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males—a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.
Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.
Read the whole thing.
*All the Kingdoms of the World*
The author is Kevin Vallier, and the subtitle is On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. This is an excellent and important book, starting with its defense of classical liberalism over Catholic integralism and indeed illiberalism more generally. But do note that Kevin, although a professional philosopher is also a Christian (Eastern Orthodox), and he is writing from a Christian perspective. This is also an excellent book simply for learning what integralism is. Overall, perhaps this is analytic political theology!?
In the final chapter, Kevin considers illiberal strands within Chinese Confucianism and Sunni Islam as well.
To be clear, if you are interested in neither religion nor political philosophy, this is not for you. But it is likely to be one of this year’s books that turns out really to matter.
“What Harvard can learn from Olive Garden?”
That is the title of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit from it:
One lesson is that it’s harder to convince poorer individuals to mingle with wealthier individuals in settings where the culture is shaped to align with a higher socioeconomic status. Churches, for instance, are usually free and open to all — but the poor do not seem so keen on attending religious services in wealthier neighborhoods. Maybe that’s because they don’t view the wealthier church as a “better service” (however that might be defined) but rather as an environment where they do not feel entirely comfortable or welcome.
In other words: Wealthier institutions or establishments attract a mixed customer or user base only when they give up cultural control. Taller stained-glass windows and more comfortable pews can do only so much to attract lower-income churchgoers. (An aside: One nice feature of marketing “culture” — for lack of a better word — on the internet is that it can be broadly appealing. Classical music on YouTube, for example, is not only free but also free of snob appeal.)
The business model of America’s nonprofit sector depends on producing status and reputation, both for itself and its affiliates. Many nonprofits work at creating environments of a very particular sort, both to raise money and to boost their influence. To elites, those environments are innocuous, even inspiring. But those same elites are starting to realize that what is inviting to one person is off-putting to another.
Here is a related (and very good) column from Catherine Rampell.
What should I ask Jacob Mikanowski?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is Jacob’s self-description from his home page:
I’m a freelance journalist and writer based in Portland, OR. My academic training is in the history of Eastern Europe, but for over a decade, I worked as a critic and a science journalist. I write about art, books, movies, ancient history, anthropology, and – occasionally – food. I especially like to work on stories about the intersection of science and the humanities, photography, and people who are helplessly obsessed with whatever they’re doing.
For the past few years, I’ve been working on single project which combines all my interests: Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land – a book-length history of Eastern Europe, covering culture, politics, religion and ideology (essentially, everything which made Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe over the past 2000 years)…
I loved the book, and that led me to Jacob. Here are some of his articles. Here is Jacob on Twitter. Here is a good WSJ review of Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
The Real UFO Story
Erik Hoel writes that the “the UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism” which makes a lot more sense to me than the other explanation. Here’s a key bit:
To sum up the story as far as I understand its convoluted depths: diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research” and being the “sole bidder” for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to Lacatski himself, the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including—you may have guessed it by now—dino-beavers. Viola! That’s how there was a “government-funded program to study UFOs.”
Our current journalistic class, unwilling or unable to do the research I can do in my boxers in about five hours, instead did a big media oopsie in The New York Times, running the story and lending credibility to the idea the Pentagon did create a real serious task force to investigate UFO claims. The fervor in response to these “revelations” memed into existence a real agency at the DoD that now does actually study UFOs, simply because everyone “demanded answers”—which is totally understandable, given the journalistic coverage. However, the current UFO task force is staffed by, well, the people willing to be on a UFO task force. According to the Post:
And who was in charge, during the Trump administration, when the Pentagon created a UFO Task Force to investigate incursions of unknown objects over America?
Stratton—who believes the ghosts and creatures of Skinwalker Ranch are real—officially headed up these Pentagon investigations for years.
The “chief scientist” of this Pentagon task force was Travis Taylor, who is and was a co-star of “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel. He currently stars on “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” on the same network.
This official embedding makes it difficult to break the veneer of legitimacy unless you know the whole story, simply because there’s likely a lot of coordination by professional UFO enthusiasts behind the scenes, which is why you’ll occasionally read stuff about how anonymous sources from other insiders confirm the accounts.
See also my previous post on Uri Geller and the government’s Stargate Project.
Don’t Doubt: Saint Thomas in India
Christianity in India has roots at least as old as in Italy. Millions of Christians in Kerala today believe that their tradition traces back directly to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who traveled to India in the first century AD. According to the Acts of Thomas, the apostles divided the world and drew lots to decide their respective regions for spreading the gospel. Thomas, drew India but, ever the doubter, he demurred. “It’s too hot and the food isn’t kosher”, he said, more or less. Jesus appeared to Thomas, however, and bade him “go to India!” Amazingly, he still demurred–what a doubter!–but by a minor miracle just as this was happening an Indian merchant arrived in Jerusalem calling for a master architect and builder to return with him to India. Finally, with this sign, Thomas’s doubts were allayed and his India adventures began.
For a long time, The Acts of Thomas were considered to be more of an unreliable fantasy novel than a historical account and of course the Acts does contain fantastical stories. Nevertheless, the Acts of Thomas have gained credence over time as certain names and places mentioned in the Acts and once thought to be purely imaginary, turned out to be accurate historical references. As William Dalrymple writes in an excellent piece:
…a series of remarkable discoveries have gone a long way to prove that the story contained in the Acts seems to be built on surprisingly solid historical foundations. First, British archaeologists working in late 19th-century India began to find hoards of coins belonging to a previously unknown Indian king: the Rajah Gondophares, who ruled from AD19 to AD45. If St Thomas had ever been summoned to India, it would have been Rajah Gondophares who would have done it, just as the Acts had always maintained.
The fact that the Acts had accurately preserved the name of an obscure Indian rajah, whose name and lineage had disappeared, implied that it must contain at least a nucleus of genuine historical information. Archaeological discoveries have since confirmed many other details of the story, revealing that maritime contacts between the Roman world and India were much more extensive than anyone had realised.
Aside from the Acts, a considerable amount of oral history and circumstantial evidence suggests that by AD 50-52, Thomas arrived on the Malabar coast of what is today Kerala and he began converting an older Jewish population as well as Hindus to Christianity. Indeed, the evidence is strong that the followers of Thomas in India have preserved one of the oldest versions of Christianity. Dalrymple again:
If St Thomas had carried Christianity to India, it is likely that he would have taken a distinctly more Jewish form than the Gentile-friendly version developed for the Greeks of Antioch by St Paul and later exported to Europe. Hence the importance of the fact that some of the St Thomas Christian churches to this day retain Judeo-Christian practices long dropped in the west – such as the celebration of the solemn Passover feast.
Hence also the significance of the St Thomas Christians still using the two earliest Christian liturgies in existence: the Mass of Addai and Mari, and the Liturgy of St James, once used by the early Church of Jerusalem. More remarkable still, these ancient services are still partly sung in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and St Thomas.
The more you investigate the evidence, the more irresistible is the conclusion that whether or not St Thomas himself came to India, he certainly could have. And if he didn’t make the journey, it seems certain that some other very early Christian missionary did, for there is certainly evidence for a substantial Christian population in India by at least the third century.
Not only is there is a substantial presence of Christians in India from at least the third century, many early Western and Eastern Christian sources attest that it was Thomas who was sent to India. Kurikilamkatt writes:
From the third century onwards it had become an undeniable and incontrovertible tradition and belief in the Christian world that Thomas preached in India. And these Fathers and early writers had no doubt that the Thomas they speak about was the apostle who declared for the first time in history that his master was the Lord and God.
Historians tend not to trust oral history but to me it’s the oral histories, the genealogies of Indians who trace their lineage back to someone who was personally converted by Saint Thomas, and the songs that are most convincing. Indians have orally preserved the vedas for some four thousand years so I trust them on Saint Thomas. In the 4th or early 5th century, Saint Jerome wrote that “Christ lives everywhere. With Thomas in India and Peter in Rome.” And of the two, I’d put more money on Thomas.
After founding seven churches in Kerala, Thomas journeyed to the eastern region of the Indian peninsula, near present-day Chennai. Here Thomas’s mission was ended when he refused to bow down to Kali and was killed. Even so he was held in such reverence that his place of death was marked and his body kept and entombed. Fifteen hundred years later the Portuguese built a cathedral over his tomb, both of which you can still visit today as I did recently. Even for those not of Christian faith or any religious affiliation, connecting with 2,000 years of history and considering the distances Thomas traveled is quite moving, especially when it happens in a place which stills seems far from the Christian world.
That was then, this is now (sacred robot edition)
From the Amazon summary of the forthcoming book by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd:
An abundantly illustrated narrative that draws from the history of art, science, technology, artificial intelligence, psychology, religion, and conservation in telling the extraordinary story of a Renaissance robot that prays.
This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny, rare object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to legend connected to the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562.
In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.
Ross Douthat, telephone! (I did, of course, pre-order the book.)
Sinead O’Connor, RIP
Sinead O’Connor was a great singer–never more evident than in her collection of standards, Am I Not Your Girl? The entire album is wonderful. So sad to hear of her passing. Here on the painful decline of a marriage, Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home. Kills me every time I hear it.
From Faith and Courage, I love The Lamb’s Book of Life.
Out of history we have come
With great hatred and little room
It aims to break our hearts
Wreck us up and tear us all apart
But if we listen to the Rasta man
He can show us how it can be done
To live in peace and live as one
Get our names back in the book of life of the lamb
Here to cheer me up is Sinead in happier times, Daddy I’m fine, also from Faith and Courage.
Amazingly, her album of reggae songs Throw Down Your Arms, is very good. Who else could have pulled that off?
One more, from the Chieftain’s Long Black Veil–many great songs but none better than Sinead’s Foggy Dew, now the definitive version.
And back through the glen, I rode again
And my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men
Whom I never shall see n’more
But to and fro in my dreams I go
And I kneel and pray for you
For slavery fled, O glorious dead
When you fell in the foggy dew
RIP Sinead. Thank you for the great music.
Victory City
In the upper deccan of India lies Hampi, today just a village and ancient ruins but once the seat of the Vijayanagara Empire which ruled most of South India from 1336 to 1565. The Vijayanagara Empire was the last big Hindu empire in India before the Mughals and then the British took over, so it holds a special place of admiration and wistful longing among many Indians. The glory of the empire is attested to by foreign visitors. Will Durant writes:
The capital, founded in 1336, was probably the richest city that India had yet known. Nicolo Conti, visiting it about 1420, estimated its circumference at sixty miles; Paes pronounced it “as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight.” There were, he added, “many groves of trees within it, and many conduits of water”; for its engineers had constructed a huge dam in the Tungabadra River, and had formed a reservoir from which water was conveyed to the city by an aqueduct fifteen miles long, cut for several miles out of the solid rock. Abdu-r Razzak, who saw the city in 1443, reported it as “such that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, of any place resembling it upon the whole earth.” Paes considered it “the best-provided city in the world, ‘ .. for in this one everything abounds.” The houses, he tells us, numbered over a hundred thousand-implying a population of half a million souls. He marvels at a palace in which one room was built entirely of ivory; “it is so rich and beautiful that you would hardly find anywhere another such.”
The Vijayanagara Empire and its capitol are the subject of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City. The conceit of Victory City is that it’s told through the life of a demi-god, Pampa Kampana, who literally breathes life into the city and lives through its 229 year history. It’s a fine story, although not one of Rushdie’s best. Wordplay is kept to a minimum which makes it more accessible but less challenging. As the subject is the city, the characters fade somewhat into the background leaving less at stake. Vijayanagara was a commercial city, open to people of all faiths, but Rushdie also feels the need to insert into the narrative 21st century notions of gender equality which stick out like a sore thumb.
Still, if you were planning to visit Hampi (a short flight from Bangalore), Victory City would be a fun primer. Let’s turn back again to Will Durant;
We may judge of its power and resources by considering that King Krishna Raya led forth to battle at Talikota 703,000 foot, 32,600 horse, 551 elephants, and some hundred thousand merchants, prostitutes and other camp followers such as were then wont to accompany an army in its campaigns…Under the Rayas or Kings of Vijayanagar literature prospered, both in classical Sanskrit and in the Telugu dialect of the south. Krishna Raya was himself a poet, as well as a liberal patron of letters; and his poet laureate, Alasani-Peddana, is ranked among the highest of India’s singers. Painting and architecture flourished; enormous temples were built, and almost every foot of their surface was carved into statuary or bas-relief.
…In one day all this power and luxury were destroyed. Slowly the conquering Moslems had made their way south; now the sultans of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golkonda and Bidar united their forces to reduce this last stronghold of the native Hindu kings. Their combined armies met Rama Raja’s half-million men at Talikota; the superior numbers of the attackers prevailed; Rama Raja was captured and beheaded in the sight of his followers, and these, losing courage, fled. Nearly a hundred thousand of them were slain in the retreat, until all the streams were colored with their blood. The conquering troops plundered the wealthy capital, and found the booty so abundant “that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses and slaves.” For five months the plunder continued: the victors slaughtered the helpless inhabitants in indiscriminate butchery, emptied the stores and shops, smashed the temples and palaces, and labored at great pains to destroy all the statuary and painting in the city; then they went through the streets with flaming torches, and set fire to all that would burn. When at last they retired, Vijayanagar was as completely ruined as if an earthquake had visited it and had left not a stone upon a stone. It was a destruction ferocious and absolute, typifying that terrible Moslem conquest of India which had begun a thousand years before, and was now complete.
…It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
My excellent Conversation with David Bentley Hart
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious scholar, critic, and theologian who has authored over 1,000 essays and 19 books, including a very well-known translation of the New Testament and several volumes of fiction.
In this conversation, Tyler and David discuss ways in which Orthodox Christianity is not so millenarian, how theological patience shapes the polities of Orthodox Christian nations, how Heidegger deepened his understanding of Christian Orthodoxy, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970, the simplest way to explain how Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, the future of the American Orthodox Church, what he thinks of the Book of Mormon, whether theological arguments are ultimately based on reason or faith, what he makes of reincarnation and near-death experiences, gnosticism in movies and TV, why he dislikes Sarah Ruden’s translation of the New Testament, the most difficult word to translate, a tally of the 15+ languages he knows, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Hart is probably the best-read CWT guest of all time, with possible competition from Dana Gioia? Excerpt:
COWEN: If you could explain to me, as simply as possible, in which ways is Orthodox Christianity not so very millenarian?
HART: Well, it depends on what you mean by millenarian. I’d have to ask you to be a bit more —
COWEN: Say the Protestant 17th-century sense that the world is on the verge of a very radical transformation that will herald in some completely new age, and we all should be prepared for it.
HART: Well, in one sense, it’s been the case of Christianity from the first century that it’s always existed in a time between times. There’s always this sense of being in history but always expecting an imminent interruption of history.
But Orthodoxy has been around for a while. It’s part of an underrated culture, grounded originally in the Eastern Greco-Roman world, and has a huge apparatus of philosophy and theology and, I think, over the centuries has learned to be patient.
The Protestant millenarianism you speak of always seems to have been born out of historical crisis in a sense. The rise of the nation-state, the fragmentation of the Western Church — it’s always as much an effective history as a flight from history.
Whereas, I think it’s fair to say that Orthodoxy has created for itself a parallel world just outside the flow of history. It puts much more of an emphasis on the spiritual life, mysticism, that sort of thing. And as such, whereas it still uses the recognizable language of the imminent return of Christ, it’s not at the center of the spiritual life.
COWEN: How does that theological patience shape the polities of Orthodox Christian nations and regions? How does that matter?
HART: Well, it’s been both good and bad, to be honest. At its best, Orthodoxy has cultivated a spiritual life that nourished millions and that puts an emphasis upon moral obligation to others and the life of charity and the ascetical virtues of Christianity, the self-denial. At its worst, however, it’s often been an accommodation with historical forces that are antithetical to the gospel, too.
It’s often been the case that Orthodoxy has been so, let’s say, disenchanted with the millenarian expectation that it’s become a prop of the state, and you can see it today in Russia, in which you have a church institution. Now, this isn’t to speak of the faithful themselves, but the institutional authority of the state — of the institution, rather, of the church more or less being nothing but a propaganda wing of an authoritarian and terrorist government.
So, it’s had both its good and its bad consequences over the centuries. At its best, as I say, it encourages a true spiritual life that can teach one to be detached from ambitions and expectations and the violent projects of the ego. But at its worst, it can become a passive participant in precisely those sorts of projects and those sorts of evils.
Recommended, interesting throughout, and yes I do ask him about the Baltimore Orioles.