“I don’t think in history — you look back, I don’t think there’s that many examples of the middle class inventing anything you know, culturally. So when I put on a tape and I hear, you know, well-educated-white-person strumming a guitar, I’m looking at my watch, I’m saying ‘I’ll give this another fifteen seconds.’”
Sure, this is subjective. But it still stings, in a real ‘the-truth-hurts’ kind of way. I think about this a lot lately: the more I take on to cement my own and my family’s security and comfort, the less I have to say.
The Radiolab podcast has a terrific 15-minute segment on poetry and translation.
When Douglas Hofstadter was 16, he read a poem. Just an innocent little poem, a few short lines, nothing special. But the poem burrowed deep into his brain, and many years later, he set out to translate the thing…
(Radiolab: “100 Flowers”)
The common Western idea of death is that once you die you are transported immediately to a place of ultimate comfort (or torment), with no intervals. Your consciousness continues seamlessly into the next life, just no longer tied to your physical body.
Suppose, though, that while consciousness does continue in some way after death, it remains thoroughly joined to your physical remains. As your body decays, so does your personality, your capacity to reason. Your emotions, having been all along largely the product of your fluids and nerves, transmute ever more into the mute horror which your remains increasingly depict.
This consciousness-in-death was a running theme of Edgar Allen Poe. His genius, in my view, was to paint this horror only at the edges — premature burials, loss of breath, the unwillingness of the “deceased” to actually die — so intimately that we often mistake the edge for the abyss at the center. But in a kind of artistic truth, the madness of Poe’s narrators increases in proportions as that abyss (the experience of actually being dead) is really approached — whenever we see a lady of Usher, for example, or hear the beating of a murdered man’s heart — it is nearly always seen through senses that are themselves being damaged.
C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, gets right inside this idea, describing it in lucid detail in Perelandra, when his villain Weston temporarily recovers his senses and tries to articulate his experience of death:
“…All the good things are now — a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then — the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre — to live one week, one day, one half hour longer — that’s the only thing that matters. … [Humanity] knows — Homer knew — that all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying… Then there’s Spiritualism…I used to think it all nonsense. But it isn’t. It’s all true. You’ve noticed that all pleasant accounts of the dead are traditional or philosophical? What actual experiment discovers is quite different. Ectoplasm - slimy films coming out of a medium’s belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish.”
I wonder whether this idea of death is common in other cultures, or times of history. It seems to me something very Other — definitely not Christian, but not exactly Pagan either.
The song ‘Bottom of the River’ by Tom Fun Orchestra seems an appropriate example as well. Interpreted by some as concerned mainly with environmental vandalism, it seems to me more straightforward to read it as the experience of those “beneath the rind”: dead yet conscious, still chained to their remains, enduring a never-ending passage of time where light is distant and the idle time-marking movements of the living all too close.
Oct 24, 2014 — It’s been seven weeks since the original post, and no one is talking about it anymore, which is probably for the best; but I have some followup.
First of all, I’ve amended the article to reflect that Atwood’s move was not, in fact, classy.
The following are additional facts that have absolutely no bearing on this dispute, but which are nonetheless interesting in a purely historical sense:
Markdown the format (not the implementation) had heavy input from the now-deceased Aaron Swartz. Swartz posted his own announcement of Markdown on March 19 2004 (four days after Gruber’s announcement). In that announcement Swartz seems to consider himself pretty much a co-author of the Markdown syntax. Gruber’s announcement of March 15 said only “I’ve written”, with no mention of Swartz; the main Markdown page did (and does) mention Swartz at the bottom, saying he “deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his feedback on the design of Markdown’s formatting syntax. Markdown is much better thanks to Aaron’s ideas, feedback, and testing.” Except for the curious disparity of credit between their two announcement posts, I have to say I feel Gruber’s handling of Swartz’s involvement has been appropriate, especially in light of Swartz’s tragic death.
Markdown was originally licensed under the GPL, and was free for personal use with a suggested payment of $50 per domain for commercial use. By early 2005 the license was changed to the current BSD-style license.
Help. I’m embarrassed. I’m just too dull to understand the attraction of tilde.club.
You end up posting text & images at yet a different address. It’s charming that they’ve used modern code to look like a circa 1987 dial-up bulletin board, but…
I do miss my 1969 Plymouth Valiant. But I’m not sure I want it back.
Jerry Walls spoke on ‘What’s Wrong With Calvinism’ more than a year ago at a Christian university. I started watching this presentation reluctantly, but found it much more interesting than I expected (not to say it isn’t annoying). If you are a patient person and this subject interests you, I’d encourage you to watch it.
Wall’s major problem with Calvinism turns out to be this: taking God’s nature (Love) together with their view of his all-powerfulness, the only serious conclusion is that God will save everyone — and most Calvinists1 of course don’t accept this. In order to keep their premeses and still avoid the universalist conclusion, they commit all kinds of rhetorical folly, and make God out to be a moral monster.
Interestingly, this is the same problem I have with Calvinism, so I was pleased to hear someone else make the same criticism. The difference is that I take seriously the idea that all might be “saved”, and Walls doesn’t; in fact he takes it for granted that therefore, universalism makes his whole argument an absolute cinch as a reductio ad absurdum. This is turns out to be the biggest weakness in his presentation.
Central to his thinking is this explainer about two competing views of freedom. From the slides in the video:
Libertarian Freedom: A free action is one that is not determined by prior causes or conditions. As he makes the choice, the agent has the power to choose A and the power to choose not-A, and it is up to him how he will choose. [10:48 in the video]
Compatibilist Freedom: A free act is not caused or compelled by anything external to the agent who performs it. It is, however, caused by something internal to the agent: a psychological state of affairs such as a belief, desire or some combination of these two. The agent performing the act could have done differently if he had wanted to. [11:50 in the video]
In his talk, Walls off-handedly refers to the “libertarian” definition as “common sense,” and, winking and nodding at us as though prompting us with a correct answer, leaves it at that. But this isn’t common sense at all. No one in the world has ever had an experience of making decisions that “aren’t determined by prior causes or conditions.”
Indeed, common sense is the only reason2 I now hold to the “compatibilist” understanding of freedom — the kind of freedom that is fully compatible with a predetermined fate3. Simple observation about how we all live our lives will lead you straight to it. Do you, in this moment, have perfect freedom to choose whether or not to eat a hamburger, or put on a bikini? Or do you find that, faced with the question, your answer was pretty much already decided by your preferences, beliefs and circumstances?
Although understanding and defining freedom is central to his argument, Walls never bothers to directly determine what freedom is. He says that if you’re a compatibilist and not a universalist then your God is a monster; but weirdly, he has nothing to say about universalism, only an implication that the very idea of it must somehow mean “libertarian” idea of freedom is the only correct one. This is a convincing maneuver for many Christian audiences, but not actually conclusive, and actually pretty unfortunate if you actually want to understand anything about your own or others’ freedom.
So for now, my preferred solution for correcting the errors of Calvinism remains the same: all Calvinists should become universalists.
It’s worth noting that the first evangelical I heard offer a statement and defense of the idea that “all will be saved” came from a Calvinist background. Here is some of his writing on the topic (a PDF); if you have the patience for evangelical sermons, you can also see him preaching about it. ↩
My views on this subject certainly owe nothing to any theological work. In some ways I am proud of this; more often I find it a little embarrasing to admit. I’ve never read John Calvin’s work, and, I am sorry to say, have no interest in doing so. I did read a John Piper book once when I was too young to make any sense of it. ↩
If you’ve read my pieces Your Choice and Choose Your Fate you’ll recognize that they are essentially (I now realize) retellings of what Walls is calling the compatibilist idea of freedom. I didn’t know there was a term for this until I saw this video — as far as I could tell, I had puzzled this whole idea out on my own. Experience has of course taught me, though, that any idea I can work out is unlikely to be really original. ↩
As some of you know, I was on twitter at an opportune hour last week and found myself with a shell account and a little home page at tilde.club.
Things are going much like they did the first time around, twenty years ago. We’re sorting into different — well, not disciplines, exactly, but maybe modes: those who work in code, those who work in words, and the Glyphs.
Words are easiest: blogs, taxonomies, chronicles. We observe and take notes, we paint signs. We’re social animals, in spite of ourselves. Maybe sometimes we hack together scripts pasted in from hasty searches — but only so as to augment our toolchain for cranking out more and better-organized Words.
The coders, too, traffick in information, but by parsing it, plumbing it, and refactoring it for possible future use, seen or unseen — in short, by any other means than simply narrating it.
What’s great about the plain old web is that it accomodates all these modes of expression easily within the same playground — the hand-assembled web page.
What happened last time? The coders cooked up tons of tools for connecting the words, the writers took advantage of them, all kinds of new Value was created, the advertisers showed up, and the writers and coders of course wanted to be able to afford to spend all day doing their thing so they took the advertisers’ checks if they could get them.
At some point our own tools, freeing us from the tedium of typing any HTML whatsoever by hand, so distanced us from the essential thing, the underlying web, that — perhaps? — these groups grew apart, and now don’t talk to each other as much as they used to. I now occasionally see people who write on the Web for a living confide that they would like to know more about HTML.
I’ve been writing this with a sort of conceit in mind (shared by others) that tilde.club is a microcosm of how the World Wide Web was when it began to take off. But it might also be a microcosm of any economy that moves toward specialization. Tilde.club is refreshing for the same reason that summer camp is refreshing: suddenly we’re not specialists any more. Suddenly the elaborate setups and lifestyles and processes we’ve erected for ourselves are kind of gone and we all eat and go to the bathroom in the same places, and gosh it’s nice weather out.
