The documentary film-maker Adam Curtis takes another perspective and is using a radical form of experimental theatre to enable people to grasp the argument intellectually, and to feel it emotionally. He argues that we need to interrogate much more closely what he describes as the current “moment of stagnation”, our incapacity to bring about political change. What is paralysing the collective will? His new work opens the Manchester International Festival on Thursday. What continues to fascinate Curtis – as aficionados of his television series such as The Century of the Self and The Trap will recognise – is the dominance of individualism. How it came about and what it means for how power is exercised.

“What we have is a cacophony of individual narratives, everyone wants to be the author of their own lives, no one wants to be relegated to a part in a bigger story; everyone wants to give their opinion, no one wants to listen. It’s enchanting, it’s liberating, but ultimately it’s disempowering because you need a collective, not individual, narrative to achieve change,” explains Curtis.

His analysis is that power uses stories which shape our understanding of the world and of who we are, and how we make sense and order experience. Powerful, grand narratives legitimise power, win our allegiance and frame our private understandings of how to measure value and create meaning. They also structure time – they fit the present into a continuum of how the past will become the future. This is what all the grand narratives of communism, socialism, even neoliberalism and fascism offered; as did the grand narratives of religion. Now, all have foundered and fragmented into a mosaic of millions of personal stories. It is a Tower of Babel in which we have lost the capacity to generate the common narratives – of idealism, morality and hope such as Sandel talks about – that might bring about civic renewal and a reinvigorated political purpose.

Curtis argues that we are still enchanted by the possibilities of our personal narratives although they leave us isolated, disconnected, and at their worst, they are simply solipsistic performances desperate for an audience. But we are in a bizarre hiatus because the economic systems that sustained and amplified this model of individualism have collapsed. It was cheap credit and a housing boom that made possible the private pursuit of experience, self-expression and self-gratification as the content of a good life. As this disintegrates and youth unemployment soars, this good life will be a cruel myth.

H/t to Alexa.

via Market dogma is exposed as myth. Where is the new vision to unite us? | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | The Guardian.

There is a metaphysical question at work here. In Aristotelian philosophy, everything must have a cause—indeed, several different kinds of causes operating at different levels. Therefore, on the one hand, I could say that I am letting myself be anxious. But I could also speak of the material causes, the neural engines at work in anxiety. Or, somewhat more removed, the formal reasons why I might be anxious, the contexts in my life that set the stage for anxiety to arise. And so on. It seems to me, therefore, that Michael’s suggestion that “I” should be the ultimate arbiter of anxiety is a choice among a multitude of possibilities—useful in certain cases, perhaps less so in others.

via The Metaphysics of Anxiety < Killing the Buddha.

In addition to the church service, Seelye discusses the rising rates of gun-buying in this country, as well as NRA-stoked fears that Obama—who has mainly ignored gun issues so far—will take away their weaponry.

Even better than the article, though, are two posts on the Times’s Lede blog, which have more details from the church service and other insights from Seelye’s reporting. There’s even a discussion forming in the comments about whether a church service about guns is “heresy” and the meaning of Jesus’s mysterious remarks about swords. In America, gun control isn’t just a public policy question; it’s a theological one too. And even in Kentucky, one of the country’s most gun-friendly states, not everyone is happy to see religion conflated with gun-toting.

Terry Taylor and Diana Fulner

They’re not mentioned in the original article, but at the bottom the first of Seelye’s Lede blog posts, she discusses other Kentuckyans who are bent on doing things differently.

Clergy from some other churches and peace activists are sponsoring an alternative event, called “Bring your peaceful heart, leave your gun at home,” and today I visited with the organizers.

[…]

The executive director of the Interfaith Paths to Peace, Terry Taylor, one of the organizers, told me that he and 18 co-sponsors planned this event because they were “deeply troubled by the idea of wearing weapons into sacred space.”

He said they did not consider themselves “protesters,” per se, and did not want to be part of a demonstration at New Bethel.

They appear quite insistent on avoiding the posture of protest, and have a graceful way of explaining why:

“A protest is not the way we do things,” Mr. Taylor said. “We’re not against things, we’re for things. Going and carrying signs at that event would build unhappiness and could potentially be confrontational. They have the right to do what they want. We’re going to give people an alternative that we think is better.”

Those of us so eager to protest violence could probably stand to keep this approach in mind more too. After all, there is violence even in pulling somebody’s gun from their holster. Much better is to offer them something else that they’ll want to carry around even more, that will make them feel even safer.

Weekend Competition: Define Faith

Hundreds of co-vocabularists offered their definitions of “Money” in April, and “America” in May. This weekend, Schott’s Vocab is soliciting definitions of faith.

Faith is described in the Bible as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

H. L. Mencken called faith “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

And, Samuel Butler said of faith, “You can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.”

Co-vocabularists are invited to submit their own definitions of faith, the pithier the better, by appending a comment to this post.

via Weekend Competition: Define Faith - Schott’s Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com.

But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning onto Dekalb— See the little bulbous shapes down at the bottom-center, right next to the building? Well, just before I got into my building to run up the five flights of stairs carrying my bike on my shoulder, in that exact spot, there was a beautiful field of mammatus clouds—so named because they resemble the shape of a woman’s breast. The sun was setting, its orange light slipping under the dark cumulonimbus that had just delivered a thunderstorm, illuminating the space between the earth and its cloudy ceiling.

Mammatus clouds are the strangest things, rare as precious rocks. The only other time I remember seeing them was during the summer I spend driving around the West with my book of clouds, looking for every new variety I could find. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia. Pretty close. But not the surrounding mystery of the city.

Why do you slip away before I can trap you, you little animal? Nobody else saw you. Will they even believe me that I did? It was only you, and me, and the moments of life that disappear the instant they happen, leaving us passing things to wonder whether they (the moments) are enough.

A sketch by Thomas V. Curtis, a former Reserve M.P. sergeant, showing how Dilawar was allegedly chained to the ceiling of his cell.

I’m gratified to see, this morning, a front-page report at the BBC on the prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Hundreds of people have been held at Guantanamo; thousands have been held at Bagram.

When I joined Witness Against Torture earlier this year to protest torture and unjust detention, people passing by were often confused. Didn’t Obama promise to shut down Guantanamo? And end torture? When asked, virtually none of them had ever heard of Bagram, a place that represents a troubling wrinkle in the new administration’s attempt to look like a meaningful departure from the excesses—even crimes—of the last.

This passage is particularly telling:

Since coming to office US President Barack Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month.

But unlike its detainees at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.

The inmates at Bagram are being kept in “a legal black-hole, without access to lawyers or courts”, according to Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a legal support group representing four detainees.

She is pursuing legal action that, if successful. would grant detainees at Bagram the same rights as those still being held at Guantanamo Bay.

But the Obama administration is trying to block the move.

Thanks to the BBC for publishing this. Next step: get it all over American publications. Brew unrest. It’s time people are made aware that Guantanamo is only the beginning.

Atheists have an image problem. According to a study led by University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell, published in 2006, Americans have a lower opinion of them than homosexuals, Jews, Muslims and African-Americans. They can’t get elected to political office, and most people view them as outsiders. Yet the disdain is comparatively quiet and abstract, rarely erupting into palpable conflict. Part of the reason may be that nobody seems to know who atheists are, including atheists themselves.

I’ve really been enjoying the Belief section lately—highly recommended. Be sure to catch Simon Critchley’s ongoing series on Heidegger’s Being and Time.

YouTube - Arlington: The Rap.

I think this can be especially hard for Christians to grasp, since a very deep part of our moral formation has been the belief that human identity is ultimately wrapped up in the suburban bliss of family life. (On which, see the TV series Mad Men…) This is also why our churches are often so strangely inhospitable to “single” (read: pre-married) people. We simply can’t really believe that these people are fully formed human beings. And so we treat them with all the sympathy or suspicion or indifference that their estate demands; our charity might even compel us to subject them to the peculiar indignity of a “singles” social event, all in the hope that the bright truth of sex will at last dawn in their dark lives.

So what’s the upshot of all this? For one thing, I think Christians ought to take much more seriously the category of friendship, while thinking a good deal more critically about the unbridled theologisation of marriage and the so-called “family unit”. Is it at least possible that the idle carefree banter of friendship might tell us more about “what it means to be human” than any anxious confession of one’s darkest sexual longings or secrets? Might friendship itself – so lacking in anxiety, so free and undemanding – provide a much-needed critique of our culture’s profound sexual anxiety, an anxiety which is simply part and parcel of the dubious (and ultimately theological) doctrine that the truth of our humanness is disclosed in the truth of sex?

Faith and Theology: Why sex tells you nothing about what it means to be human.

I feel bad for the children of the freakonomics guys. Weird incentive experiments with allowances and stuff like that, I imagine.

Vegetarianism as a Sometimes Thing - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com.