Dr. Metablog

Maureen Dowd's Theology for the New Millenium

Fifty years ago I enjoyed arguing with people of religion about the existence of god, but nowadays I find it to be a singularly unprofitable exercise. The believers and the atheists are so entrenched in their positions hat no one ever convinces anyone of anything. Moreover, the faithful are so damned touchy that it's no fun to talk to them! They are easily offended, I think, because the weaker their evidence and logic, the more intense their compensatory passion.

I give thanks that at this my moment in history and geography, the true believers may be angry with me but they don't have the power to bludgeon me into obedience. (In general, the less intelligible the religion, the greater its reliance and economic and corporeal sanctions to compel allegiance.) 

These philosophical musings are inspired by a New York Times article that has received an ungodly amount of attention. Maureen Dowd, who has made a career out of cracking wise at figures of authority, especially Clintons, has given over her space this Christmas week to a column on theology (or, as it is sometimes called, the Subject without an Object). She endorses the argument of a priest-friend. He (the priest) makes an end run around the classic Problem of Evil -- which is, that inasmuch as the world is very obviously a thoroughfare of woe, then an omniscient god must be either powerless or malicious. Here's Dowd's priests's formulation: "If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives?"

A very good question indeed and one that believers in a beneficent deity have failed to resolve yea all these many centuries. Dowd's priest's answer (which is loaded with a bunch of transparently obvious smuggled assumptions) is that "for whatever reason, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us....  We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not."

Let me try to understand this argument. This new twenty-first century god, the "dowdgod" let us call him, has entirely disappeared. He doesn't actually do anything at all. He's so hidden -- absconditus, in the traditional language of theology  --  that he permits all kinds of suffering and instead chooses to manifest himself merely as a comforting presence.

Is that the argument that Dowd thinks is worth a column of valuable newsprint? Yes, so it seems to be. Astonishing.

Faith," the priest continues, "is lived in family and community, and God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be in God’s presence...." (No god for the solitary, then.) "When my younger brother, Brian, died suddenly at 44 years old, I was asking “Why?” and I experienced family and friends as unconditional love in the flesh....  The many ways that people reached out to me let me know that I was not alone. They really were the presence of God to me. Suffering isolates us. Loving presence brings us back, makes us belong." His animating idea: the love of friends is a manifestation of the deity. Wow. How shallow, how trivial, how wrong!

No one would disagree with the notion that suffering isolates us and that friends and family console us.  I can't argue with such a proposition. It's plainly obvious. But what in the world does such an observation have to do with the existence or the nature of a supernatural being? It's not evidence for god, it's not proof of god; if anything, it's the contrary of a proof. Human beings console us, not "god"; the god part, the theology part, is utterly supererogatory and unnecessary. What Dowd's priest has done is to change the word "compassion" into the word "god." But we know that compassion is not supernatural; it's entirely and essentially natural.

So the dowdgod turns out to be no more than a feature of human nature that "soothes broken hearts." But what does it mean to believe in, or worship, the dowdgod. Not much.  All a person has to do is to notice that it helps to have some folks around when you're in pain -- and then to re-label the good feelings that emanate from friends as god. It's so very easy, so undeniable. And utterly meaningless.

And what a nice old friendly god it engenders. Whatever happened to Augustine, Calvin, Luther. Those tough old guys are turning over in their graves. The dowdgod is a far cry from from Jehovah, from Allah, and certainly from the demanding Jesus who came to bring not peace but a sword. Those were gods to reckon with. But now, out with Jupiter Tonans, the thunderer, and in with Jupiter Manus-tenens, the hand-holder. Or Jupiter Sussurans, the whisperer.

It hardly matters whether one believes or doesn't believe in a god so weak-kneed and thin-blooded, so positively humane.

Maureen Dowd might say, if she were surrounded by compassionate friends "You make me feel god." In the same situation, I might might say, "You make me feel good." The difference is only one minuscule "o" vowel, which, honestly, is very like a zero. And zero is all that this new theology offers.

Strigils

I doubt that I know any more about strigils than your average man in the street. I had read about them for years, of course, but I had never seen one with my own eyes until yesterday, when I took myself down to the Pompeii exhibit in Denver. There they were, kind of stuck away in the corner -- two bronze beauties.  

Strigils were used for cleaning the body, ancient Roman style. Early loofahs. The one posted below looks a lot like the one I saw yesterday -- a garden-variety Denver/Pompeii specimen that was retrieved from under 20 feet of Vesuvian ash: 

 Here's another strigil, this one a little more elaborate. 

They're kind of formidable, aren't they? 

If, two thousand years ago, you had been patrician enough to go to the thermae for your ablutions, you would have left the calida piscina, the warm bath, and hastened to the destrictarium, which was a room dedicated to strigiling. There you would have applied a mixture of olive oil and pumice to your skin, and then one of your slaves, who might be an aliptes, a masseur, or a simple balneator, a bath attendant, would have strigiled you clean.  

But why olive oil and pumice? Greasy and gritty. Why not soap?  Did the ancients have soap?  Who invented soap?

Fortunately, there's a website devoted to these important questions. Its forthright, unapologetic url is soaphistory.net.

The first traces of soap appeared among the Babylonians, some 5000 years ago. The recipe: mix animal fat with wood ash and boil. So soaps were around, but -- mirabile dictu -- they weren't used for personal hygiene. They were used for cleaning wool and cleaning pots; Pliny, who was there for the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius, and knew all there was to know, records only that soap was used as a hair pomade.

The world we have lost was a far dirtier place than we like to imagine. In point of fact, our familiar cake soaps and their widespread use are an industrial revolution-nineteenth century invention.

Considering the effectiveness and convenience of modern soaps, I'm not looking for a strigil revival -- no Mr. Strigil at every streetcorner. Nevertheless, there's not a brush or a washcloth in the modern world that can match the beauty of the best of the ancient strigils. Here, for example, is an old Etruscan strigil with a naked-girl handle (she herself brandishes a mini-strigil). It's less useful than a cake of Ivory, but -- let's face it--  a heck of a lot more glamorous. 

 

More on Sex Ed in Victorian England

George Drysdale (1823-1904) wrote, anonymously, Physical, Sexual, and Natural Religion (1854), a pioneering guide to contraception and sexual disease that was condemned by the pious as "the Bible of the Brothel."

Drysdale arrived at his progressive ideas after an adolescence and young manhood crippled by sexual ignorance and sexual panic. At the age of fifteen, he "accidentally'' discovered masturbation and found that the practice offered an 'easy mode of satisfying his passions, which had long been the source of unrest and torment to his vivid imagination.' He masturbated, poor Victorian fellow, two or three times a day and involuntarily endured occasional nighttime 'discharges'. He was overcome with guilt and even more so tortured by the fear that, as he was instructed by prevailing doctrine, the 'loss' of semen would sap his strength and inevitably lead him to madness. Hard to believe -- but such notions were commonplace among our recent, ignorant ancestors.  

It gets worse. He was so distressed by his uncontrollable onanism that on trip to Hungary, he faked a suicide, leaving his clothes and identification beside a river.

And worse still. While in Hungary, he underwent a series of procedures to deaden and destroy the nerve endings of the penis "by inserting into the urethra a thin metal rod coated in a caustic substance. He submitted to this procedure seven or eight times." It didn't work -- at least in the sense that it didn't diminish his passion for masturbation. I also suspect that it might have hurt.

It gets better, though. He resurrected himself and came back to his family after he consulted a doctor who offered the breathtakingly brilliant prescription that he "try coition." Intercourse with prostitutes, he discovered, quite cured his urge to masturbate. Holy moley, what a revelation! What a fucking breakthrough!

Drysdale never married but in later life he lived for many years with a woman named Susannah Spring. 

Now, if you were writing a novel about a person who "dies" and returns to life and you called his mistress or partner or whatever she was by the name Spring, with its obvious overtones of rebirth, you would be justifiably accused of moralism or allegorizing or heavy-handedness. Nevertheless, truth is truth to the end of the chapter and Susannah Spring she was.

I hope George and Susannah were happy together. I hope they frequently and joyously "tried coition." The poor boy deserved a few good years.    

(I've pilfered the story of George Drysdale from Kate Summerscale's revelatory  Mrs.Robinson's Disgrace [New York, 2012]).

Life after Football

Every year, football becomes harder and harder to watch. When the quarterback is blitzed and has his clock cleaned, or a receiver on a crossing pattern gets his bell rung, I no longer think, brilliant play. Instead, I think, pain and concussion.

Not a game goes by but that a lineman leaves the field of sport on a gurney, to admiring huzzahs and applause from the comfortable spectators.

Have I become more timorous -- or more compassionate?  I still admire the skill level of the players but I'm distressed because these gladiators have become permanently injured for my amusement.

There's a Washington Post article about a lineman named Tre Johnson, who left the game in 2003 after nine seasons in the NFL. Johnson, who earned two degrees before he was drafted, is now a highly-regarded middle-school social studies teacher at the private Landon School outside Washington. His is a post-career success story.

The Post article offers some information about Johnson's present state of health. He's forty-something years old and for three years has been walking three miles, twice daily, in order to shed some weight.  More power to him, he's now under 400 pounds and hoping to get back to his playing weight of 275. He suffers from diabetes, high cholesterol and elevated blood pressure. He's already endured nineteen surgeries (seven on his shoulders, seven on his knees, an elbow, hands and Achilles’ tendon). "He can't sleep more than three hours at a stretch. There’s not a morning he doesn’t wake up in pain, and it takes a full hour to get moving in tolerable discomfort." Although when he played, no one kept track of concussions, Johnson has some sort of brain injury, because he can't tolerate bright or fluorescent lights. To what degree his banged-around brain has been seriously disabled will not become clear for a few more years.

Tre Johnson is doing well, but what about other ex-players who are not quite so healthy?

Baseball, 1955 and 2012

In 1955, Duke Snider lived at 178 Marine Avenue (in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge). His was the middle house in this picture.

Gil Hodges lived here, at 1120 32 Street. Two floors, 1400 square feet. 

 
Harold "Pee Wee" Reese and family made their home in 970 square feet of 9714 Barwell Terrace. Carl Erskine's home, at 9318 Lafayette Walk, was even smaller,

   

just 910 square feet.

Sandy Amoros lived in Bed-Stuy, in this brownstone at 147 Bainbridge Street, most likely on just one of the three floors. His was the leftmost building.

 

 And here is Alex Rodriguez's 2012 house in Miami, Florida.  It's up for sale for $38,000,000,

      

which is what 19,681 square foot waterfront properties go for nowadays. A bargain, for all I know.

Amnesia on Film: I Love You Again (1940)

The ol' amnesia gimmick plus "screwball" comedy plus W. S. Van Dyke plus Willam Powell and Myrna Loy equals "I Love You Again" (1940).

Workaholic, unfun Larry Wilson gets conked on the head and wakes up as an amusing grifter named George Cary. (Hollywood amnesia will do that to you, apparently -- completely revise your personality.) But in his new and at the same time prior state, Larry/Geoge has to come to terms with Larry's wife Kay, who wants a divorce from the melancholy cheapskate half of the compound hero. And yet It comes to pass that Kay  prefers the grifter.

Much forced hilarity ensues. 

Once again, amnesia proves to be the most malleable of maladies. Bop on the head, he's Larry; another boy, he's George. Amnesia is a gas, even to the pont that Myrna Loy, unhappy with what she's got, picks up a vase to re-transform William Powell into the way she wants him. Mechanical (not medical) amnesia anticipates Danny Kaye in The Court Jester: a snap of the finger he's a duellist; another snap and he's a clown.

It's obvious a) that amnesia easily combines with the Jekyll-Hyde doppelganger scenario, and b) that even by 1940, movie-amnesia could be a target of ridicule. 

Guns in the Classroom? Why Not Swords?

The ancient Romans did not allow swords to be carried within the pomerium, the sacred central precincts of their city.

They were able to maintain the prohibition because they did not have a National Sword Associaion to argue that if swords are banned, only criminals with have swords; or that swords don't kill, people kill; or that it's a violation of personal liberty for free men to be forced to check their swords at the city wall. Nor was there a fanatic Roman electorate ruthless enough to donate to the campaigns of every soft-brained aedile, quaestor, praetor, or consul willing to proclaim the sanctity of swordsmen's rights.

Is it the case that swords were also prohibited in the Roman classroom?  I don't know -- but I suspect as much.

Here at the University of Colorado, in the infant millenium, guns may not be carried into the sacred precincts of the football stadium. However, they're sure-as-hell legal in classrooms, and have been ever since a State Supreme Court ruling forced the U to allow students with Colorado concealed weapon permits to carry their guns on campus -- even on days when exams and papers are returned to students by an historically-unarmed faculty. 

So what about swords? Why should guns be allowed in class and swords prohibited? I don't mean the modern rapier, which is so long that their presence would create, in every classroom, a noisy clatter and might even cause unwary students to trip and fall. I'm thinking rather of the Roman short sword, the famous gladius, which can easily be worn, in an unthreatening manner, under the toga or ski jacket.

Rapier (noisy and prone to cause accidents):

Gladius (inoffensive):

  
In point of fact, why the pusillanimous resistance to gladii at football games?  Fifty-thousand spectators, highly-partisan fans, gargantuan quantities of illegal booze and dope, and short swords -- what could possibly go wrong?