The creation story in “Genesis” is a far more modern thing than it is usually credited with being It is a kind of philosophical presentation and so very different from mythology which, as Ovid, that great student of mythology, noted, there are always biological transformations of things even while the gods remain subject to the forces of nature and the raging of human passions. Narcissus may become his image only symbolically, and not all narcissists become their images, but these are still myths because of the element of biological transformation.. The stories that follow the creation story are best explained, on the other hand, as fables, which are stories that explain a set of circumstances that do not seem to be created but which somehow were at a point in time and have become part of nature. Tigers have stripes and the Red Man got baked right, neither too dark or too light.. Fables suggest that there is a history for what seems natural, a sometimes serious, sometimes fey attempt to make explicable what seems not to need explanation or else to make explicable something which seems paradoxical: how something could come into existence when it already had to be there. Good examples of fables that follow soon after the creation story are the tower of Babeel, which is an exaggeration of what people can build and what happens to them, which is to have multilingual peoples, or Noah’s ark, which is an exaggeration of a boat that could be built rather than transforming animals so they could swim.

RELIGION, LITERATURE

FILM, LITERATURE

"The Night Manager"

FILM, LITERATURE

John Le Carre is a serious novelist.

The secret of spy novels and movies is that they describe ordinary people doing universal things, however exotic is the setting and the premises are and that the people act outside the law. People can’t escape from or suspend their human nature evgen if they think they are beyond the restraints of the law. A good or even exemplary item of that is available in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” where an anarchist wanders around London with bombs wrapped around him under his coat feeling comforted that at any moment he could explode himself. That seems bizarre or crazy until the reader recognizes that this is a kind of freedom. The anarchist has freedom to destroy himself which is an ultimate freedom because his control over it is absolute and without the constraint of others, purely subject to personal will. All people want to some extent to do what they want, to say fuck you to the world however ugly it may be and that gets externalized in the image of that anarchist.

FILM, LITERATURE

POLITICS

A Short Post on Epstein

POLITICS

ART CRITICISM

New Yorker Covers

ART CRITICISM

RELIGION, LITERATURE

Updike's "Toward the End of Time"

RELIGION, LITERATURE

The first of a two part post on John Updike’s “Toward the End of Time” through the analysis of generic types.

Persistently undervalued, except perhaps for his Rabbit novels, because he is regarded as covering up facile meaning with an engaging writing style, the quintessential New Yorker writer, John Updike deserves more appreciation, even in one of his lesser novels : Toward the End of Time”. But in order to appreciate the novel’s achievement, step back a few steps and consider the kind of book it is, which is what I call a deficient epic. Updike is very careful about what each of her novels are, whether the saga of “In the beauty of the lilies” or the polemical politics of “Terrorist” or “Couples” as the romantic serio-comedy.

RELIGION, LITERATURE

RELIGION

Noah the Technologist

RELIGION

POLITICS, SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The Battle of Minneapolis

POLITICS, SOCIAL STRUCTURE

ART CRITICISM, PHILOSOPHY

Celebrity Images of Old Age

ART CRITICISM, PHILOSOPHY

POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY

Three Kinds of Government

POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY

Why there are only three kinds of government--monarchy, legislative authority, and mob rule--is a good question.

There are only three kinds of government. All the other types are variations of the three however spectacular some of them may be. The three types can be found in Aristotle’s “Politics”. There are governments controlled by the upper classes, and those can be dictatorial. There are those run by the middle class, and those are sensible and responsible. There are those controlled by the lower classes and that results in mob rule. The modern formulation was identified in the seventeenth century by Spinoza who identified there to be monarchies, which rested in agriculture, governments led by legislatures, which are based on commerce, and charismatic governments led by mob rule.. Consider the basic types and their variations.

POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY

RELIGION, LITERATURE

Adam and Eve

RELIGION, LITERATURE

The story of Adam andEve work as fables, while the storyu of Samson and Delilah work as romance.

The creation of a woman should not be seen as an afterthought by a God who had previously provided each of his animals with a mate but overlooked doing it for Adam. God may have thought that Adam was a special enough creation, meant to rule over the rest of it, and so he did not need a mate. But either God changed his mind about that or always knew that he would make a special creation later. Woman was a special creation so as to emphasize that in the actual world the relation between man and woman is not like it is with the pairings of the other animals; some special kind of creation was required. Eve was as close to Adam as his own rib. As a legend might, the story of Eve’s creation suggests that woman has thereafter an ambiguous relation to man: part of him, descended from him, and yet a companion to him, and so clearly something different from what happens with some other created species no matter how much it might occur to a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve that the two sexes had different natures. We can see this more clearly if we consider the type of literary undertaking the story of the Garden of Eden is.

RELIGION, LITERATURE

RELIGION

Genealogy and "Genesis"

RELIGION

Longevity is a weighty matter in “Genesis” and beyond.

The geneologies listed in “Genesis” are usually treated as filler so as to show the passage of time, allowing the reader to get to the next juicy story. but the geneologies have literary weight in themselves even though most of the names listed in the “Genesis” genealogies do not have stories associated with them. These people are described only by their lineage and their longevity. The genealogies would seem to say that in those distant times men were indeed titans. How are they titans? “Genesis” says it is not a matter of size or of wisdom or of language or of power but a matter of age. Descent simply ties together people noteworthy for how long they lived.

RELIGION

EVERYDAY LIFE, RELIGION

Christian Forgiveness

EVERYDAY LIFE, RELIGION

Christianity turns the practical social purposes of forgiveness into a nightmare that requires eternal repetition of every person’s shamefulness

A functional understanding of forgiveness is to repair a transgression of social customs and structures so as to maintain those customs and structures. These practices are functional in that the consequences of what has to be restored are necessary even if people are so accustomed to them that people do not recognize that restorative purpose. Here are four examples of the varieties of forgiveness. There are matters of etiquette such as saying you are sorry if you have stubbed someone’s toe or been late for an appointment. The insult is easily repaired though the person who has to wait may be leery of meeting someone on street corners. Apologies are easily made in that no great harm has been committed in the first place. It is hardly satisfying for someone who killed a love one in a car accident to phone and say sorry about killing someone.

EVERYDAY LIFE, RELIGION

PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION

Three Kinds of Ethics

PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION

An ethic is a combination of a group ethos, an individual inclination and some slogans that together constitute a form of mental organization for religion and elsewhere that is superior in descriptive power to dogma and experience.

Philosophers strictly distinguish between morals and ethics even if in popular parlance the two are interchangeable. Morals are commands to be obeyed by all adherents or as inevitable strictures on personal will given the nature of things. The first of the Ten Commandments Thou shalt obey no other God is a moral commandment even though scholars prefer to think of some of the commandments as not really moral but a religious injunction when that first commandment has a moral injunction in that people ar being proper if they obey it because otherwise they are unbelievers and so are not part of the moral community at the least and are sacrilegious. Ethics on the other hand, are the often difficult question of how to navigate in life when what to do is uncertain and the details count and nowadays ethical matters are left to opinion columnists and professional psychologists. Kant discussed morals in the “Critique of Practical Reason” and took morals to be, like his followers, a theory of obligation, and so founded in the nature of human life rather than in religion. Kant’s ethics are found in his “Critique of Judgment” whereby people have to weigh the pros and cons of what to do, consulting practical rather than definitive advice. Spinoza remains radical in thinking that ethics can completely dispense with morals. There is just the examination of how people alter their feelings in response to other feelings and ide and inputs.

Ethics themselves, however, can also be subdivided into at least three types. There are communal, individual and credal types, the first of which is most familiar because of the association of ethics with “ethos”, which means the point of view of a collectivity, how a tribe or a nation or a social class characteristically engages in behavior and in thought, people from a different social grouping making preferences about thoughts and behavior and often but not necessarily thinking that those preferences are natural or easy or having the power of morals.

PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION

RELIGION

Noah and God

RELIGION

Noah invents the idea that the relation between man and God is private, which means God is inside a man’s head.

The redactors of “Genesis” were concerned with the development of technology, something that is immediately experienced, pervasive, and stands out from the natural world as a human artifact that confounds otherwise ordinary senses of scale and distance. That is true of even the creation fable that leads off “Genesis”. The creation fable does not offer creation done instantly by a powerful god nor does it relate a story of conflicts between gods that would motivate a god to create the world. Rather, as was suggested previously, it offers the set of processes that have to be performed in a particular sequence whereby the natural world, as humankind would know it, might become established. What is more fundamental comes earlier in the sequence. The separation between night and day had to proceed the separation of the water from the land and that had to proceed before the animals could be created. God stepped back after each day’s labor to note his accomplishment. So He made the heavens and the earth rather than simply called them into being. Joseph, at the other end of “Genesis”, offers the social technology whereby the results of a famine can be avoided. That, on a more mundane level, is also a story of how to get from here to there, the creation of an agricultural surplus a process and not simply an intrusion.

RELIGION

LITERATURE

The Conventional Novel

LITERATURE

Social life, like literature, is conventional in that the participants in life, like the audiences for literature, are able to grasp what is going on because what is presented is as familiar and routine and signaled as to the kind of story it will be.

Popular culture is conventional. That means, strictly speaking, that popular culture fals into generic categories and the reason proposed for that is so as to simplify the story and presentation so that viewers and audiences can easily relate to the type of story being offered, easy to digest, and not at all troubling, because the audience is prepared to know what it will be shown, following a usual story line, just because the audience will appreciate the familiar and just wanting tyo see it reenacted just as it has been done before just for the pleasure of going through that arc one more time, these basic stories ringing a bell and attesting to something deep and enduring about the way fantasy or, on the other hand, reality, is the way things work. So people like romcoms whether well done, as in Norah Ephron movies, or trite, as in Hallmark Christmas movies, those trite because the conflicts are manufactured or nonexistent but pleasant to withhold just because you know that the couple will find a way to find one another. It’s the pattern rather than any of the minor surprises that make the film appealing. The same is true with other genres, which means, after all, “generic”. People watch disaster movies for the same reason and what were called “women’s movies”, because Bette Davis or Joan Crawford would put up a brave front despite adversity, Even the later Bette Davis in “All About Eve” was about a star having to cope with being overcome by a younger woman. Women age and encounter other difficulties, like madness or death and for some reason men don’t get how the women suffer. Add also westerns like “Bad Day at Black Rock” where Spenser Tracy arrives at a small town like a frontier sheriff to correct wrongs and manages to do that and the strangeness of “High Noon” is that the sheriff doesn’t want to be a hero and so is violating and so intensifying the conventional story just as Hitchcock starts Psycho” with a successful heist story and then halfway through changes to another story and expecting the audience to adjust. War movies since “The Big Parade” are about recruitment and training and the inevitable battle followed by the recovery after the war is over and happens in Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, Kubrick’s “2001” follows from George Pal’s “Destination Moon” but has so many fresh story twists and fresh visuals that space movies since then have imitated his techniques, down to showing a spacecraft slowly emerging into the visual scene, with Lucas in “Starwars” improving the Kubrick shots which are impressive by also comparing magnitudes of smaller vehicles becoming embedded into larger ones, the romance of spacecraft prior to the sense of the power of spacecraft. And so on, with other genres, such as film noir, or Lucy and Ethal finding ways to to do something exciting when all the two restless women are drinking coffee while Ricky is off performing in show business.

LITERATURE

Stories & Analysis of the Intersection of Culture & Social Structure