The fate of truth in America today

I am always glad when two good writers come my way, each saying something important on a similar theme. This week it was an interview with George Saunders, the noted author, and an article by Andrew Sullivan (nymag.com).

Sullivan is reacting to the violent student protest recently at Middlebury College when a conservative (and controversial) speaker, Charles Murray, was invited to speak. More and more on liberal arts campuses, where one expects a respect for free speech and the open exchange of ideas, there is an ideological move to prevent a speaker whose views are politically incorrect, according to the prevailing culture.

Those who saw the video of students shutting down the talk by Murray, whose work I don't know, called it frightening. Sullivan compared the event to the shunning of heretics in 17th century Puritan New England. He finds the academic orthodoxy on such campuses alarming because it insists that all experience must conform to the prevailing ideology of gender, race, class, and sexuality; if a view differs, it is to be banned.  "Shut it down!" the students at Middlebury chanted. "We see this talk as hate speech."  Yet they didn't want to listen to what the man had to say!

As I read about this latest event in campus un-freedom of thought and expression, I wonder, Why not listen to an opponent's views and try to respond to  them intelligently? If they are factually wrong, offer a reasoned response that corrects them.  Why not respect an invited speaker's right to speak on a campus where ideas are meant to be aired and challenged?
Isn't that what an education is all about?

The irony, as Sullivan notes, is the bizarre similarity of this episode to the Trumpists among us who insist on discounting facts, and truth, if they do not correspond to the ideology of the ruling party.  Donald Trump and his followers show hostility and contempt for facts that don't fit their view of reality. A judge who challenges him is called a "so-called judge."  Experts in intelligence gathering at the CIA are ignored or maligned as politically motivated. This notion that orthodoxy of any kind is superior to facts and reason is dangerous and alarming.

It is one thing for him to try to distract the American public from his problems by making wild allegations (Obama bugged his phones?); it is quite another to undermine truth by scoffing at facts and at those who uphold them. Or to have his appointees to high office hold views on the environment contrary to that of established science. It would all be laughable if it were not so serious.

This is where George Saunders comes in: He sees America today as fragile, for the first time; the American experiment could actually fail, he says, because of "the horrible degradation of our notions of truth, decency, and civility have undergone." Notice, our traditional notions: the received wisdom of our laws and traditions are being questioned, along with common sense.

He, like Sullivan, and many others refer to the present situation as Orwellian.  This is especially frightening when this also applies to what happens at a prominent liberal arts college.

Saunders has the final word: "Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seemed more important to me than it does at this moment.  It's what's between us and chaos."

Blogging in memory of Sully

Andrew Sullivan has not, thankfully, died, but his wonderful blog, after fifteen grueling years, has folded up, leaving many readers wondering where to go on the Internet for a stimulating mix of politics, culture, and religion, among many other things.

So, as a small simulacrum of what he and his team did daily at the Dish, I post several brief items found on the Internet, including a note of my own.

VALENTINE'S DAY
 If you want love in your life, you'd better be prepared to tell and believe some lies, according to Clancy Martin in his new book Love and Lies.  Kant, who said it is always wrong to lie, was a lifelong bachelor with no apparent experience with romance and the way lovers must bend the truth. Does flattery count as a white lie?

OBAMACARE

It's a great success, apparently, according the latest figures, with ten million Americans enrolled. Gail Collins in the NYTimes today (2-12-15) has a wonderful Op-Ed column: you can tell Obamacare is great, she says, by looking at the people who oppose it.

CLERGY SEXUAL ABUSE

An acquaintance asked me this week, "Have you been excommunicated yet?"  His tone was sardonic, even bitter, as if he expected that I, a layman, would be censured for openly criticizing the Catholic church in the Orlando Sentinel on the issue of the priesthood and its practice of admitting only celibate men.  He was unaware that it is my duty to speak up in the spirit of the ongoing reform called for by the Second Vatican Council. The most recent Synod in Rome expects input from the laity.

My acquaintance also was unaware of how commonplace my ideas were: I merely stated what millions of others have been writing and saying in progressive organizations like Call to Action for thirty years and more.

Of the many bouquets I have received for my article, most focused on a man going to bat for women's ordination. But my real target was the clericalism rightly criticized by Pope Francis and the celibate culture that is at the center of clericalism.

To a critic who said I should have left out sexual abuse by priests in my otherwise "excellent article," I quote a member of the papal commission on abuse, as reported in the National Catholic Reporter this week.  Peter Saunders, an abuse survivor, said that the only positive thing he can say about the priests who raped him was that they were "desperately lonely people."  To me, that speaks volumes about the state of the Catholic priesthood, at least as it has been in recent decades.

On that sad note, I say farewell to Sully (Andrew Sullivan and his team) and a profound thank you for enlivening my reading and broadening my mind.

Sundays with Andrew

I have learned that spending a bit of time each Sunday with Andrew Sullivan is worthwhile. I mean reading his popular Daily Dish blog, where he and his clever associates post pieces on religion and spirituality, along with all the rest: politics, gender and sex, legalizing pot, and the usual rich cultural mix of poetry and popular culture that this pioneer blogger and thinker is famous for.

This week I glanced at pieces he posted on cosmology, the Hagia Sophia, a poem by William Stafford, and article on the quest for meaning--all helpful in slowing us down as we tend to rush through stuff on the internet.  Even non-theists and materialists can find material for reflection here.

Last week, Sullivan and Co. introduced me to a theologian named Martin Laird, author of Into the Silent Land.  Here, in a generous selection from the book, the Daily Dish gave us a passage on union with God that reminded me of Thomas Merton.  "Separation from God is not possible," writes Laird; "God does not know how to be absent."  We created in our minds the illusion that we are separated from the God, whom we meet in stillness and silence, beyond words. Laird writes beautifully, and I am grateful, as always, to find someone else, with a stronger background in such things, to say what I have been trying to say.

I am also grateful to Andrew for a piece by Robert Barron on why and how the new atheists miss the boat: God, as Aquinas found and Merton (among many others) re-discovered, is the sheer act of being itself. God is not a being separate from us.
Then there was a piece on awe and wonder, the kind found in architecture (I think of the Gothic cathedral), based on an article by a psychiatrist who rejects the taboo on combining psychotherapy and spirituality.  He defines spiritual people as those who exercise their innate ability to experience awe and wonder.  It seems that buildings that inspire awe and wonder are healing because they inspire positive feelings that are quite separate from religious expression.

All this I would have missed without dropping in on Andrew last Sunday.

Cursive Redux

There has been a lively debate this month on Andrew Sullivan's Dish about cursive writing, with persuasive arguments on both sides.  One of these comments prompted my latest post here.

I still think that, while printing may be more legible in many cases, students should be taught the basics of cursive handwriting since taking notes in college and at meetings requires the speed of handwriting; and they should be familiar with it so they can read the cards and notes (and maybe even old-fashioned letters!) of retro-folk like me who refuse to print my greetings in ink.  I am unsure if cursive is really better for cognitive learning.

I encourage those interested in this issue to visit www.dish.andrewsullivan.com.

Sullivan and his team have, for years, provided one of the most diverse and interesting series of posts imaginable, with links to articles and books in many fields.  Reading it, even when I disagree or get turned off, is an education.

The value of writing

Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish" has an amazing diversity of links, making it an ideal internet site. Today, readers are directed to a brief but very valuable bit of advice on writing by James Somers.

He says, in no uncertain terms, that more people should write. Like me, he has friends who are thoughtful and intelligent, who read a good bit, but tend to keep their ideas to themselves.  Somers' thesis is that "you will live more curiously if you write." 

You will be more open to nature, people, and the world around you. You will pay closer attention and also remember what you observe. I might add that the writer cultivates an interior life, a kind of spirituality that many of us unknowingly long for.

He reminds us, as I always do to my students feeling nervous about committing anything to full sentences, that writing need not be formal; you can "just talk onto the page."  If you can talk, you can write. The rest is revising and editing. Don't be crippled by old fears of not knowing "the rules" or of remembering your high school English teacher's red marks.

As Somers says in his post, writing emails in which we share our thoughts and feelings with others might draw out from them a similar type of thoughtfulness and interiority.  I find talking on the phone personal and immediate, but I would rather engage with my far-flung classmates and old friends in writing emails since it is in this medium that I can explore my thoughts more thoroughly and express them more clearly.

So I am grateful to Mr. Somers (jsomers.net blog) for this fresh bit of encouragement to the many people who want to write but are reluctant to do so.

Thanking the Universe

Here in the U.S., as we celebrate Thanksgiving, various celebrities are invariably asked by the media what things they are most grateful for. Their responses usually avoid mentioning God. The question is, can we be grateful without acknowledging the existence of God? And: can life have meaning without a belief in God?

Although I am a theist, I believe the answer is Yes--in a sense. Each day as I acknowledge the little things around me or the events that have made my life more bearable, I am grateful--without explicitly thinking of or thanking God or recognizing a supernatural hand in my daily routine. Right now I am grateful to have this blog, and for those who read it in various parts of the world, and for the computer itself: none of this was part of my life 15 years ago. So I am grateful to the universe, I suppose, since I do not believe that God is necessarily involved in arranging the details of my days.

Chance plays an enormous role in the traffic flow that makes driving easy or hard, in the coincidences that make serendipidty happen. At the same time, I believe that gratitude in general is a spiritual as well as religious phenomenon; by this I mean, to be grateful for beauty, for a chance encounter with a friend, is to recognize and affirm the good. It is a recognition of the optimistic side of life and its many positive features.

The basic question is whether meaning can be found without belief. As a recent reader of Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog said (11-15-11), it cannot be said that if there were no God, life would be without meaning: the lesson of the universe, from stars to atoms, is one of amazing life. Yet she goes on to say that all this--the 7 billion of us on this planet, the rumbles and earthquakes, the fleas as well as the planets--are all part of God. If the universe is vast and uncaring, there is a "constant explosion of love and sadess through the enormous sweep of the cosmos" (the correspondent writes).

We must rid ourselves of the stereotype of God as a bearded man up in the sky controlling everything. As Thomas Merton discovered in his reading of medieval philosophy, God is not a being but Being itself; God is the unknowable but loving presence that underlies all existence and is the ultimate source of all.

So for me, even when I am grateful for little things, this is an implicit recognition not merely that the world makes sense despite evil and suffering but also that God is present in the suffering as well as the joy. To be grateful is to implicitly recognize that reality.

Reader's Block?

When I check out Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog, I am invariably introduced to articles I would not otherwise discover. Most recently, comments by the British writer Geoff Dyer, who, while shaped by his wide reading, has, for whatever reason, begun to suffer, not from the usual writer's block, but from an aversion to reading.

Perhaps, as he confesses, he is overdisciminating, maybe even lazy. He feels guilty, apparently, in not being motivated to read as he did twenty years earlier. He is right in saying that much fiction being published is a waste of time. Perhaps he is impatient and thus affected by the immediate gratification we all quickly learn from the media.

There are so many options out there for anyone intellectually curious, as Dyer obviously is. It is hard to concentrate on reading because, I think, we have learned from the computerized world of messaging that speed counts; the result is a scattering of our attention. Some would say that too much reliance on the web makes our thinking shallower.

Adam Gopnik, quoting Nicholas Carr in the current New Yorker, makes this
point. I suspect that Dyer has much in common with Sven Birkerts (author of "The Gutenberg Elegies"), who laments the loss of inner life that has long been made possible by the leisurely reading of fiction.

The way the social media and even the web make being unavailable a sin has clear implications for any serious reader, who needs uninterrupted time and attention, which are all too rare given the extensive competition.

Dyer no doubt would nod in agreement at the words of Rumi (the 13th cent. Sufi mystic): "I have lived too long where I can be reached."