Sunday, August 22, 2010

Old BBC TV interviews of novelists

Via Piece of Monologue, I've happened upon many televised interviews of British novelists in a BBC archive. I've just watched Malcolm Muggeridge's interview of Somerset Maugham from 1954. When asked about Harold Nicolson's silly claim that the novel is dead, Maugham interpreted it to mean merely that Nicolson was tired of reading novels.

I also watched John Lehmann's interview with a very modest Aldous Huxley. Simon Raven's short interview with Kingsley Amis (who according to the host 'likes living in Swansea') was intriguing, though I had the impression that throughout the roughly five-minutes of the session Amis was only just suppressing a desire to leap forth, punch, and then strangle Raven (and that Raven would have enjoyed that).

There are also interviews there of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Golding, etc. And a delightful segment on Tolkien (with interviews of him and his students).

Swinburne interviewed

I hadn't heard Richard Swinburne speak until I saw this clip at the Centre for Public Christianity. He's quite good. In this clip, he elaborates on the traditional Christian approach to the Old Testament as texts to be read for their metaphorical, not literal, meaning. The rest of the clips from the longer interview with Swinburne are available at the Centre.

The violence of the Old Testament from CPX on Vimeo.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

August religion links

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University has a good collection of articles on the civil rights movement and on King's theological influences (inc. entries on Barth, Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the social gospel movement, a tradition that wielded much influence in my home and native land). King's work is situated in the tradition of African-American preaching in Preaching With Sacred Fire, ed. Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas. Here's an NPR interview (ht) with Simmons. The interview includes a recording from a sermon by C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father).

The influence of this same tradition on President Obama is analyzed by Ronald F. Thiemann, and it's the subject of this CNN piece, which features quotations of Gustav Niebuhr, Richard Crouter (whose new book on Reinhold Niebuhr was just released), and former Senator John Danforth.

Two more reviews of Newman's Unquiet Grave, one by Terry Eagleton and one by Anthony Kenny
Francisco Ayala: 'Evolution can be religion's friend'

Siris has an interesting treatment of James' 'Will to Believe'

Gary Gutting poses challenges to theists and to atheists

Laura Miguélez reviews Stephen Williams' The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity

From Gordon Marino's article on Kierkegaard: 'Philosophers gravitate toward epistemological problems such as what makes a belief true or false. Kierkegaard, however, is unusual in that he fixes his attention firmly on the belief or appropriation side of knowledge: on our personal relationship to ideas.'

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Passionate distortion can be fun, I guess

A common objection to the New Atheists is that their own atheistic movement bears many of the hallmarks of a religion.

I don't know if that's true (partly because I'm unsure of how to define 'religion'), but many of the New Atheists do put me in mind of a particularly irksome kind of religious person, the moralizing prude.

I'm afraid my example of this sort of religious adherent is my own maternal grandmother -- may she rest in peace (though she probably won't). Her moral judgments were quick, passionate and about as amenable to rational critique as a tornado. Righteous indignation was her favourite pastime and no one was going to spoil her fun by quelling it with reason.

I got a similar impression while reading the comments to a couple of blog posts about Harriet Baber's article in the Guardian. The blog posts are at Pharyngula and Butterflies & Wheels. (See Siris for more intelligent commentary.)

I don't agree with Baber's hedonistic position, but I don't think her view is as bad as it's made out to be in the comments at those two blogs. E.g., Baber said that the truth is overrated. Several of the commenters misinterpreted her as saying that the truth is unimportant. I piped up in the comments in order to correct the misinterpretation, but got the impression that there was little point in doing so. It would only spoil some of the other commenters' fun, which seemed to reside in bashing Baber herself.

If these commenters were really so concerned with the truth, they wouldn't devote so much time and energy to ad hominems but would, instead, simply consider Baber's argument and the reasons for being unpersuaded by it. Also, they would expend more effort in trying to tease out of her article a chain of reasoning that is more plausible than the silly views that they've attributed to her. Attributing to someone the best argument that fits her words is an important step in getting at the truth. When people don't do so, when they instead interpret the other person as giving a weaker argument, that's a sign that they are primarily concerned not to arrive at the truth but, rather, to depict their interlocutor as a miscreant, a worthy target of their passionate, righteous indignation. In such a context, anyone who tries to point out the uncharitable nature of their interpretation is likely himself to become the target of their moral outrage.

In the comment threads at Pharyngula and Butterflies & Wheels, many of the commenters got into a royal tizzy and subjected Baber to all manner of insult and character assassination. But insult isn't argument. In fact, it often has negative value, since it tends to divert people from the dispassionate search for the truth. Dialogue that aims at truth should be a lot less fraught.

Update (Aug. 17, 2010): Maverick Philosopher takes a line similar to Baber's.


Monday, August 9, 2010

Who is Don Draper? My only Mad Men riff

Spotted on a fridge magnet today: "Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."* From the ground up, ex nihilo? Creating from what and with what? Who's doing the creating?

Similar questions confront me after watching Mad Men. Don Draper's presented as a self-made man, someone who made himself a new self, a 'personal brand', the self of his dreams, the kinds of dream that he, as an ad-man, is in the business of selling. He becomes an extension of this business, a made-up person playing at being a husband, a boss, a playboy, a player in everything he does.

What do authenticity and integrity mean for such a person? Draper's a good example of someone who lacks integrity in the rudimentary sense. His diverse roles aren't well integrated; in fact, he's riven by conflicting principles. He's not so much unprincipled as multiply principled.

Authenticity? Being 'true to oneself' in one's endeavours? In the moment of self-creation (if there can be such a thing) there's no self yet to which to be true. And it's unclear how any attempt at self-re-creation could escape the guiding influence of one's old self, the self that one found oneself already to have had when one first became able to entertain such questions.

I hope we learn more about Draper's upbringing, about the influences that shaped his principles.

* The saying is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. I do know that Paris Hilton twittered this saying.

Update (Aug. 13): This is amazing: "The problem with the current season's approach to the characters is it's using them to describe the era, not using the era to describe the characters." Which reminds me of Northrop Frye's idea of displacement (applied to ideas more generally and not just to traditional mythology). The characters are less displaced, that is, they've become more one-dimensional and expressive of a particular idea or theme -- this guy is Sexism, this young lady is Moxy-But-Losing-Part-of-Herself-as-She-Makes-It-In-a-Man's-World, etc.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

All of Life Magazine is on Google Books

All the contents of Life Magazine (1935-1972) are available via Google Books! It's searchable, so it's easy to find pieces on or by Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Bertrand Russell, etc.