Every documentary ought to consider this its standard.

Gerald Mordillat and Jérôme Prieur’s Origin of Christianity is the best documentary I have ever seen. It wins this position so completely, I cannot think of another which could even compete.

This is a scholar’s documentary. No corny reenactments, no simplifications made in the interest of time and clarity – this is hour after hour of scholars discussing the most complex and critical issues to their topic. They sit behind a blank, black background, free from the distractions of posters or book shelves behind them in a personal office – and in front of them they have their full supply of texts and books from which to read directly. What you get in this documentary is pure intellectual discourse, where one can really learn what scholars agree on, what remains unsettled, and the significance of the questions they attempt to answer.

It has other benefits. It is not a Christian’s documentary. The scholars address the early texts of the Bible as historical documents, and therefore the inconsistencies, fabrications and misrepresentations of various texts are fully explained and debated. I’m sure that an intellectual Christian could watch this film and walk away with faith unshaken, but it would have to be the type of Christian which already considers the Bible largely literature and subject to the process of history, hardly the revealed word of God. What version of Christianity comes out of such an approach I am unsure of – I suppose an acknowledgment of the lack of a rational base for faith and then a strict and total separation of those two spheres of cognition. But I’ve never understood people who succeed in this either (or, more accurately, why they would want to).

And then there are even more little perks. It comes in French or English, so when I feel like having soothing background noise without the distraction I just leave it on the TV in French, which is also helpful for improving my pronunciation, I am sure. The graphics and sound effects – carefully chosen presentation of quotes and close zoom-ins of ancient texts coupled with the noises of a microfilm viewing machine, it seems to me – are equally soothing, subtle and sophisticated, and invoke the sounds and spaces of a scholar.  I watch this documentary in English or listen to it in French to relax, and put me in a calm, scholarly state of mind where I can focus on issues more important than current emotional turmoil.

That is why this is in fact the second time I have Netflixed this documentary, and why I think I cannot escape having to buy it, although it will probably draw quite a price.

I am weirdly passionate about this documentary.

Letter to my best friend.

It is with a somber delight that I listen to the depressing songs on the Libertines list these days. With enough alcohol in my veins, I can recall; how encompassing these songs were to me – how packed with all my meaning they became, and all my world rolled into them; such intense immersion.

Of course, unlike a true sufferer I do not feel an aversion to the memory of these darker times, nor an overwhelming thankfulness that they are over. Oh contraire. No, there is instead a deep, steadily throbbing appreciation – a thankfulness for having had them, and yet an accepting understanding of their status as past tense.

Ironically, I listen to the prophetic line, “but you won’t like this at all – there is nothing to break your fall,” knowing that my comfort at the beauty of this song was intricately tied up in the fact that I was not, in fact, alone – and that you were quite there, all the while, to break my fall while I broke yours.

And I think this establishes that we have accomplished through each other what we worry every day we have not accomplished on our own. We are yet to publish our great novels, yet to have read our hopefully profound philosophies – but as surely as we have struggled, we have forged a story, a meaning and a purpose through our friendship. We have been to the places in those songs together, and we have the unique knowledge of what they mean.

And this, my dear friend, is why you are my best friend – this narrative of mine finally got a second character, and can never be adequately told without tales of drunken, desperate midnights, where everything was exorcised in the presence of mutual believers, and thus, really was. Because of this, we have already been everything we most dearly hope to become.

Conventions in scholarship I am already sick of.

And I imagine they apply to most humanities, although I can only speak for history.

1) The Classic Title: Explorations of the colon and subtitle through time.

This is very petty, I know, but the predictability of the rhythm of academic titles is nauseating at times. Let’s hope I can figure out a way to avoid this in my career as much as possible, although so far I’ve already failed at this.

2) The claim to something new.

This is articulated in many ways. There is the statement of, “however, despite all this research there has been a surprising gap when it comes to, oh, my topic!, making me therefore an authority, that’s a good thing” (I embellished on the last half there). There is also the “historians have as yet failed to seriously consider oh!, my approach!” and so on and so forth. You get this so often because nobody is allowed to write a book about something just because it is interesting anymore; no!, you must be brilliantly original or find a topic hitherto unknown to exist in the annals of human history!

The funny thing about this required claim of, “well no one’s done this before,” is that it is pretty easy to bullshit. You can always find “lacuna” in scholarship if you decide that your topic/approach has been neglected, and then it doesn’t matter if it has in fact already been discussed – you’re the first person to think it worth highlighting, and my, you turned it into a whole book!

3) Switching the question.

This one is less common but related to the second. Here is the case where a writer is trying to investigate a historical problem that a lot of people have opined on and there is no clear consensus. Instead of also throwing their opinion into the marketplace of competing ideas, this historian tries to appear above the intellectual fray and startling original by saying, for example, “But wait, instead of asking how religion and secularism interacted in the eighteenth century, why don’t we ask what they shared in their medium of communication and propaganda?” Which is really to say, I just spent this whole intro explaining a very interesting question, but I’m not actually going to ask that question, fools.

4) The lack of humor.

Besides the fact that they are generally uninterested and too dense to comprehend them, there is another reason why the common folk do not often read academic history books – because they are boring. Can’t we just make a joke every now and then, please? Unless we are talking about the Holocaust or gender history, there should be room for a little lightheartedness right? But usually, no – the historian is not supposed to be charismatic. Which is why I heartily look forward to the day when I have tenure, and I start inserting random jokes in the footnotes of my books, waiting for the attentive reader to find them. (Who will then try to figure out what they have to do with the topic of the book, which will be nothing).

And this is why Amandas is all sorts of kickass.

This is a perfect post for today — for while I’ve had a very nice day, I’ve also been contemplating all the idiocy I sometimes have to come into contact with on a daily basis. The frustration incurred from this is the worse for not having any constructive purpose; while the stupidity and pettiness of what surrounds you reaks so thickly you literaltey end up swinting at times just to keep quiet, there is no point in responding in even the most articulate, snarky way — firstly because it is deciedly not worth it, and secondly because it will do no good. And Amanda had a post up today which explains very clearly why it will do no good, which I happily reproduce bellow:

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My mother has never been to a town hall meeting, so we went to Bella Vista High School tonight to join in on Dan Lungren’s (our House rep’s).

OH MY GOD.

I don’t blame politicians for pandering to people. I blame the majority of the people for being uneducated, ridiculous, narrow-minded, and unable to function without the crap that is fed to them through political soundbites. In other words, for essentially asking people to exploit them. For serving themselves up on a plate.

I sat in the front row. I could barely contain myself. I spoke once and, shall we say, “powerfully”. I truly won’t be surprised if my colorful reactions to comments (including shooting myself in the head with my finger) make it on CSPAN tonight. I think I was right in line with the camera.

Despite being much more civil than what I’d expect from a far right wing conservative, the whole thing was pointless. Of course. One learns early not to expect any different. The schism between me and, well, not only conservatives but political discourse in general, is so huge and fundamental that what I said ended up being a throwaway, anger-fuelled patchwork of responses to various smaller arguments my ‘opponents’ made. You’d have to deconstruct their whole argument, establish a new set of assumptions, and recreate political discourse in order for a constructive debate to take place. Which isn’t going to happen from 7:00-8:30 pm in Bella Vista’s cafeteria.

I know it is a silly question, but it must be asked: Does anybody Out There think critically? Anybody? I’m not even asking that people think creatively, which is what is really needed. No, I want that they ask critical questions.

But they don’t!

And that is the end of my rant, which I could have predicted and written before even attending.

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And here is my repsonse:

As you said, the basic problem is so overwhelming and insurmountable one does not know where to begin. And the reason it seems to me that it is impossible to solve is because at the heart of it, you are explaining to people why and how they are ignorant, narrow-minded, and brainwashed. Ie, you’re informing them that they are stupid or, at the least, have been very severely duped. And somewhere inside it registers to them that they are being told they are stupid and/or duped, and therefore will revolt against you, call you an elitist (which of course you justifiably are) and return to the dangerously powerful rhetoric and simplistic assumptions they started with. Your entire attempt to complicate their world view has been fed into the machine of, “I told you so, those academic liberals are trying to spread their dogmatic lies.”

My solution to this is to abandon attempting to discourse intelligently with these people altogether, and declare openly their stupidity. No, you won’t win any converts from them; but the thing is, you won’t win any converts appealing to their intelligence either. It is too far gone.

And at least I get the satisfaction of venting my frustration at this stupid stupid culture with all its stupid stupid people. Yes I know, very sophisticated rhetoric for claiming to be one of the smarts ones.

I tried to make this into a whole post —

– but I couldn’t come up with enough material to flesh it out.

So I’ll just say what I wanted to: I fully advocate the use of the question mark in the middle of a sentence. I want to make clear that I am asking a question without completing a thought or, taking a breath. I might be wrong, but I believe this was in use in the eighteenth century.

Also, I love alliteration even if it is a clichéd writing device. So oh well.

How to write a gender analysis.

Step 1: Choose a time and place in history.

Examples: Medieval France, Bill Gates’ bedroom in the 1960s

Step 2: Choose a specific topic in your time and place.

Examples: Revolutionary discourse during the French Revolution or, eBay in the 1990s

Step 3: Fill a box full of photographs, essays, and personal ads.

Examples: Nietzsche’s writings or, the pictures of naked girls found in nerds’ bedrooms during the 1980s

Step 4: Create some categories with quotes around them.

Examples: “domestic sphere” vs. “public sphere” or, “objects of desire” vs. “sisters”

Step 5: Proscribe the “feminine” to one group of categories, and the “masculine” to the other.

Step 6: Send to a literary journal that keeps reprinting the same argument about gender ten billion fucking times and watch the congratulations roll in.

I’ll place my bets with Freud — he seemed like a happy man.

Today I watched The Question of God, a very well-made documentary which follows a course given by Dr. Armand Nicholi. Nicholi uses the contrasting world-views of Freud and C.S. Lewis to enter into the God question. The documentary includes segments about the life and work of both Freud* and Lewis, but most interestingly of all it is half-composed of a discussion panel where a group of seven people gather to discuss the issues at hand and debate their beliefs. It would seem there were about two Christians, one quite assured in his faith and the other seemingly tortured by it (he seemed very nervous and conflicted the whole time), a couple of typically New Age spiritualists (one was a Jungian analyst) and then one agnostic and one lone atheist.**

I really loved watching the discussions, but I have to say I was more annoyed than I thought I would be at all the religiously inclined folks. As an agnostic, I like hearing and having conversations like this because I am interested in people whose experiences and feelings on the matter are different from my own, whether in one direction or the other. I don’t have any positive belief in God, but I rather envy those who do. However, at every turn the arguments of the lone atheist (and his sometimes unarticulated scientific explanation which he did not always belabor himself to explain extensively, as obviously it would have taken forever and probably not convinced anyone there) seemed to clear up all the tricky problems that, starting with the assumption of God, no one else could quite explain or articulate. (Example: it is easy to grasp that bad things happen to good people when you do not think there is rhyme or reason to illness or catastrophe, but if you posit a benevolent God, then this becomes really difficult.) Anyway, this all agitated me enough to write out the thoughts that came to my mind that neither of the two dissenters were able to get in at the table amongst the five other contributors.

Preposition 1: Moral sense (conscience) comes from God.

Arguments for from the panel:

1) All people at bottom have a sense of right and wrong (one member asked pointedly if the Nazis really believed that there was nothing wrong with what they did to people – obviously he thought the answer was “no”).

2) No society has existed which finds cruelty, murder, rape and the such to be positive things; therefore, there is a reality to moral law which points to God.

Problems with these arguments:

1) Firstly, the claim that all people universally share a conscience of right and wrong when it comes to the really evil stuff, ie rape, murder, and the such, is pretty easy to disprove, it would seem to me. A good chunk of serial killers, for starters, do not feel any sense of remorse but rather the opposite, a high, from their evil-doing. Yes, they recognize that their society considers these acts immoral, yet they often delight in agreeing with this, and there are people who do not feel burdened by their bad deeds, but glorified by them. These people are sociopaths for whatever combination of reasons – biological issues or childhood trauma – but nevertheless they do not have this pang of conscience. The evolutionary machinery that provides for conscience has somehow had a stick thrown in it, along with the supposed nudging of God towards guilt and good behavior.

But we hardly have to resort to the sociopaths to support this. One of the largest lessons something like the Holocaust gives us is the insight of the so-called “banality of evil,” namely, that it hardly required a heated anti-Semite to participate in the Holocaust knowingly; rather, it only required a certain set of circumstances compelling ordinary men to shrug their shoulders and go along, rather indifferently at times, with incredible evil as the path of least resistance and most likely benefit. Most Westerns imagine the Nazi executioners as all-around horrific people, filled with hate – they do not realize that a lot of them were probably loving fathers, good husbands and amusing, light hearted company with friends. But historical circumstances, when so arrayed in a certain combination, overcome human decency fairly easily. This is the deeper and more disturbing reality that most people, when they are watching movies depicting the horrors of war or genocide, fail to consider. It does not require an immense amount of hatred or ill-feeling on the part of societies to commit horrors; rather it just requires a sustained set of circumstances which promote such behavior. In this light, the supposed conscience of God supposedly imprinted in every one of ourselves appears rather flimsy, probably not a basis for arguing for the existence of shared, spiritual base.

2) Secondly, the biological, scientific explanation here makes bundles more sense. We are social creatures by virtue of the species, and as we evolved into more intelligent beings, all the more fine tuned became the basic law that a society composed of social creatures cannot possibly function without such destructive behaviors being instinctively and institutionally stigmatized and averted. I was utterly surprised to see that no one on this discussion panel pointed out that animals seem to observe all the same basic moral laws we do – they don’t kill their own children or members of their own group/family, and they work to preserve the group as a whole to perpetuate their survival, basically. The golden rule makes an awful lot of evolutionary sense. Interestingly, even human depravity when the benefits of morals are trumped by the passions or promotions of violence can be seen in animals – chimpanzees will kill the baby of a rival clan whose territory they are attempting to obtain.***

3) Finally, no one mentioned how conscience, or guilt, is also largely the product of an upbringing and, to favor Freudian analysis here, the role of the parent in our subconscious. Did it not occur to anyone on the panel that one feels bad about that which is considered sinful at least in part because we know our beloved father or mother would disapprove? How about the fact that many of us are raised in a religious tradition which, from the moment of our consciousness, starts informing and molding our subconscious? Is this not a powerful explanation for the existence of the conscience as well? No one brought this up at all.

The superstition in which we grow up

Does not lose its power over us

Even when we recognize it.

Even those who ridicule their chains are not always free.

–G.E. Lessing, Nathan the Wise

Proposition 2: Jesus is different from similar myths and allegories in history because he was an actual person who walked the earth and left behind historical records.

Arguments for from the panel: people claim they are God all the time, but invariably they end up being insane; Jesus was clearly not insane, but rather the repository of great wisdom, and the only such man in history to claim he was God. Therefore, he must be something different, ie actually God.

1) There are so many things with this argument I do not know where to start. Firstly, I highly doubt that Jesus was the only known “sane” man to claim he was God – I’ll have to consult with an ancient historian on this, but that’s my guess. But even if there wasn’t a historical figure on record before Jesus, how does that prove there wasn’t one? Perhaps the people in this panel were not very steeped in the problem of historical data, and they do not realize how rare and unusual such documentation is. Very easily dozens of such men, with devout followers, could have existed in any place all over the ancient world, and then passed away without any recorded information. To make such a statement seems to suppose that all of ancient history is as well documented as last week in New York.

2) Secondly, since when have we opposed wisdom and sanity? Has the individual who made this argument not noticed that some of our most beloved literature, our most insightful poets and thinkers, were also conspicuously mentally unstable? Wisdom and brilliant inner insight has often come from the mouths of those most acquainted with inner instability. I’m not advocating mental illness as a way to inner peace, far from it; I’m only pointing out that brilliance and instability have often come coupled together, hence I hardly see that as a reason for finding Jesus somehow much more credible because he appeared relatively calm – but how on earth would we know this anyway? Is the historical record anywhere near complete or accurate enough for us to conclude that Jesus wasn’t, in fact, suffering from some sort of mental delusions? Weren’t the gospels written well after the fact of the death of Jesus, and riddled with contradictions, often resemble second-hand accounts played through a game of telephone more than the account of someone who had known Jesus intimately and could garner a psychological report with our modern standards for what constituted “sane” behavior? In short, WTF?

We will just stick with those two, as I can’t think of the others and am not entirely sure that I want to. I did enjoy watching this program though, but I experienced that great discomfort of wanting to interject into the conversation on the television screen and articulate the opposing arguments that the one agnostic (who came up with pretty run-of-the-mill queries and comments which weren’t very impressive) and the one atheist on the panel did not highlight as forcefully or clearly as I wanted them to. Or they did not offer them at all, and I wasn’t even able to see what response the more religiously inclined among them would have to such a point.

Anyway, an interesting and illuminating experience.

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* It strikes me as slightly unfair to choose Freud as the grand spokesman for atheism; as a lot of the particulars of his psychotherapy have since been discredited, and in fact quite mocked by a popular culture instinctually discomforted by his theories, doesn’t it seem like it is already a losing game in attempting to outshine the congenial, friendly Lewis of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

** The lone atheist was Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, and I must say, I quite liked him.

***Our evolutionary origins in general, I was amazed, were very little discussed in the panel. The atheist kept pointing at it, but never spelt it out like I wanted to, reminding everyone there explicitly that we used to be apes, and in fact, when you consider this a lot of our supposedly spiritual machinery makes a lot more sense.