Psybertron Asks

Still reading my way through Clive James Cultural Amnesia one essay at a time. Half-wayish in the M’s, the chapter notionally about Lithuanian poet and writer Czeslaw Milosz has an excellent and timely passage on Christian culture. I may just make this a long quote.

You can be a non-believer […], and still be amazed how even the believers are ready to let the Bible go. In England, the most lethal attack on the scriptures has been mounted by the established church itself. The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece compiled at a time when even a committee could write English. The modern versions done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Version was the work of men who did not realise they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that: Dwight MacDonald had to give up looking for traces of majesty and start looking for traces of literacy […] For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy, and the perpetrators like vandals. […] It was my book too. […] For me, the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics – all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion. […] We are talking about our love for a book, and what we love is the way it is written. Rewriting it is not in the realm of the possible, and any attempt to do so should be seen for what it is: the threat of destruction.

Sooner than become the enemy of its own classical texts, the Anglican Church would have done better to seize the first opportunity of disestablishing itself. However tenuous, its official connection to the state has been enough to saddle it with the doomed ambition of maximising its popular audience, like a television channel in desperate search of more viewers who eat crisps. Separated from a full secularised state, it might have fully enjoyed the only civilised condition for a religion, which is to provide a spiritual structure for private life. Only a secular state can be democratic; although the democracy will soon be in trouble if the private citizen is deprived of a spiritual code, to be acknowledged for its moral example even if he does not believe in its divine provenance.

With the possible exception of Buddhism, no religion we know about is capable of allying itself to the state without working to the destruction of liberty. Less commonly noted is that it will also work to the destruction of itself, by trivialising its own teachings, or rendering them obnoxious in the attempt to impose them legally, instead of by exhortation, example and witness.

Evelyn Waugh’s correspondence teems with bitter complaints at the time when the church adopted vernacular liturgy. He hadn’t, he said, become a catholic in order to applaud the church’s clumsy adaptation to the modern world. He wanted it not to adapt. He wanted, that is, a refuge. Those of us brought up as Protestants, but who later lapsed, found out, when the doors closed behind us that we hadn’t lapsed quite as far as we thought. We had lapsed into unbelief, but not into stupidity […] If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair. […] without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counselling. We are surrounded by voices telling us that everything will come right if we learn to love ourselves. Imagine the torments of Jesus in his passion, if on top of the sponge of vinegar and the spear, they had offered him counselling as well.

We may be getting somewhere, slowly.

One of my agenda threads is that the naturally tendency of science and many scientists to defend themselves against (so-called blind, unreasonable) “faith” is to treat all accepted scientific models as objective fact (despite formally qualifying themselves with concepts like evidence, contingency and empirical falsifiability) – something, after Maxwell, I refer to as “scientistic neurosis”. A denial of doubt where it matters most, at the boundaries of “known” science, as if to give an inch is to concede the whole nine yards. It does real science – and knowledge, and wisdom, and understanding – a major disservice.

Well, fundamental foundations and origins of the cosmos are precisely the areas where such major contingency in the accepted “standard model” exist – by definition. There is such an edifice of cards built on these (contingent) fundaments, that the ratio of the inch to nine yards understates the odds. More butterfly to rain-forest. Chaos is not to be permitted.

Fellow science-worrier Rick unearthed this physics conversation on Space Daily over the weekend. Attempts to probe remaining evidence of the big bang (according to the standard model) yet again, throw up inexplicable anomalies. Surprising evidence, where either adding a fudge to the standard model (no longer massless neutrinos, say), or the possibility that the standard model is fundamentally flawed as a “cosmological principle” are equally valid hypotheses.

Oh for a cadre of working scientists to investigate rather than defend. Trouble is the defenders have multi-$billion budgets to protect, the real scientists don’t.

It is so unwise to have scientific academe justify itself by objective inputs and outcomes. Honesty has more real value.

——-

Facebook thread captured for posterity:

[If the subject matter interests you, see the key reference links below too.]

The Muscle Shoals Music Foundation has involved the actual participants and interests from all sides of the Muscle Shoals story. Their achievement in making Muscle Shoals The Movie, makes it clear that the common success under the drive of Rick “it was war at the time” Hall far outweigh any differences.

In fact seeing the movie on DVD, the differences already presumed to involve some hitch over the Aretha Franklin sessions, turn out to be non-existent musically, and on the scale of what actually did get created, a trivial misunderstanding or lovers’ tiff. Real life stories are made of such stuff.

The movie itself is excellent by any standard.

The musical content should come as no surprise given the name-droppers heavenly list of voices and musicians involved, but the story told in the mix of a surprising amount of old footage, many old stills (uncredited Cher, Paul Simon), and the ubiquitous talking-head rock-doc interview clichés amidst the retrospective on-location monologues, tells the whole story very effectively at length. The real surprise is the cinematic production values are first-class. You get a tremendous sense of the Tennessee River location amid the north Alabama swamps and cotton-fields – even The Walls of Jericho? – enough to make me sweet-home-sick.

I loved the irony, given that The Swampers feature throughout, that you don’t get even a hint of the Sweet Home Alabama riff until the closing credits, and quite rightly since it really did happen pretty late in the story. With so much excellent material to work with, everything can be given proper balance.

Apart from learning the real Aretha Franklin story, and getting a dose of the wonderful Keith Richards “The Beatles beat us to Muscle Shoals by about 4 days!”, there are so many untold surprises that needed a documentary to tell. The Jerry Wexler / Atlantic Records / Rick Hall tie-up was central to the whole story – success that drew in the Stax and Sun artists and more from East and West for a little of that swamp magic. A bunch of nerdier-looking-white-guys-working-the-local-supermarket you could hardly expect to be doing the business, colour-blind in 60’s/70’s Alabama. You couldn’t make it up.

Worth it for the Wilson Pickett interview alone, that and Spooner Oldham’s “unblocking” keyboard riff , but packed with good stuff throughout, all orchestrated by Rick Hall – one of a kind.

=====

[Post Note: An apology. When I first posted my summary of the “Muscle Shoals” music connection back here, I kinda damned with faint praise the FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) connection, just mentioned Rick Hall as a name, and overplayed the split between FAME and MSSS (Muscle Shoals Sound Studios) from the MSSS side, set up by The Swampers after they decided to go it alone. My one-sided perceptions maybe arose from arriving at the connections via Noel Webster then the current owner of the 3614 Jackson Highway (MSSS) Studio and a fellow Huntsville resident. (I acknowledged the developing situation several times since.)]

Not been tempted to interject yet in the PM “Christian Country” vs the BHA Open Letter response, but there is one point I need to make.

Fact: we are a Christian country in the sense that not only cultural but also deep and long-standing institutional “traditions” have arisen from Christian values.

That says nothing exclusive about whether equivalent values could not have arisen from any other religious or secular traditions, nor whether the values inherited from Christian tradition were themselves inherited from earlier mythologies and practices, nor continuously evolving with parallel traditions.

It also says nothing about God or belief in any god, or modern religious and secular practices of any current population. Christ was a human prophet, or at least the imperfectly-attributed preachings of a collection of human prophets, together with a whole lot of baggage concerning mythical and metaphorical explanations and exhortations.

Humanist values may not need a Christian tradition, but they don’t need amnesia either. It is (probably) possible to build a fairly comprehensive set of rules of thumb regarding human behaviour starting with the golden rule, though it is equally improbable that the golden rule could itself be derived from first principles in any absolute sense. The point is we’d need “our values”  enshrined in some “tradition” – we can’t afford every human to learn every value by individual empirical experience, nor by popular vote in each generation.

Life is not a repeatable experiment.

On the big questions, of time and causation, the origins and composition of the universe, even science long since left empirical falsifiability far behind, so let’s not tie-up real-life politics with the scientistic neurosis of exclusive logical objectivity.

[Post Notes]

[Previously here. And update here, Miliband “Jewish but not religious.”]

[Plus 8 arguments.]

[Post-Archbishop. Finally, as usual, the (now ex-)Archbishop agrees with me. “Cultural memory is strongly Christian”, unless of course you are a wilful amnesiac, as I said. He uses the expression “post-Christian” in the sense of post-Modern, as in not excluding Christian, but taking it further. I’ve always seen him as “extra-Christian” much to the annoyance of practising Christians in his time. Too clever for the Archbishop’s good, but the lord-spiritual spot-on as usual. He and Wilby make a great double-act as the post-Archbishop said to the Archbishop.]

 

As 300 more go to a watery grave, can I just point out the the biggest problem facing us is not terrorism or evil conspiracies, rather the globally endemic cock-up of systematically lousy decision-making. My agenda to understand why and how to fix. (Some of the terrorism and reactionary evil is no doubt a symptom of dissatisfaction with dominant prevailing decision-making memeplex / paradigm / genre.)

My thought seeing the first photos the other day was, how come only two of the many dozens of inflatable life-rafts seemed to have been deployed. State of the art ship – yet the crew paralysed between standby and prepare to abandon ship, and …. appropriate action.

Talking of enjoying success, here’s hoping the Geneva Ukraine / Russian talks prove fruitful.

If the Ukrainian “Ambassador at Large” Olexander Scherva is anything to go by, interviewed on Newsnight last night and the Today programme this morning, there is good reason for hope. A very impressive and credible representative putting things into both immediate and historical perspective.

Even when expressing hope, Putin still can’t resist the rhetoric of power and “rights” though. As I said before, turn down the rhetoric, please. If you have the rights (and the power) and hope not to use them, why say it?

[And that’s a two-way street of course Stop Poking the Bear – Engage with Putin, don’t castigate.]

Apropos nothing in particular,
great to see Gareth Bale enjoying success in the Champions League semi-final.

Pic courtesy the BBC (oh, and Getty Images of course). And an excuse to try out the new WordPress 3.9 image drag / drop / resize features in the post editor. Simples.

Despite the obvious direction of motion frozen in the sporting context, hard not to see him being drawn up to the heavenly light 😉 In fact, what with his foreground scale against the crowd, and the tiers in the stadium, not so much spot-the-ball as stairway-to-heaven.

[And success at the other end of the scale, well done to John Still and Luton Town for regaining their football league status.]

[Finally – you couldn’t write this stuff – Gareth’s season did have the fairy tale ending he deserved.]

I’m reading Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, picked-up along with his much acclaimed new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. More on the latter later.

The title resonated with a recent quote from Eagleton in Culture and the Death of God:

Like most avant-gardists,
[… when it comes to Christian culture …]
Nietzsche is a devout amnesiac.

Tend to forget, brought up on James’s quick fire TV and Magazine pieces, that he’s a seriously polyglot, well-read poet and cultural historian, pulling in references he’s clearly read in the original French, German, Russian and Italian, not to mention Spanish / Portuguese and classical Greek and Latin. You can hear his voice in the rhythmic prose delivery, but the content is both wide and deep.

I’m only up to the C’s but already loving it. It’s a series of essays, loosely-based on named individuals, triggered by contemporary marginal notes from his 20th century readings, then arranged (arbitrarily) in alphabetical order. Many recurring themes; popular culture naturally, the Jews, world-wars I & II, American cultural dominance from his antipodean perspective – but the common thread is the poetry, with Dante leading the field. The expression of culture in well crafted phrasing of the day, often borrowed, evolved by judicious selection (or typesetter’s error) and re-purposed from another day.

So many people and references new to me, but so far all excellent, absolutely wonderful. Exemplary piece on Gianfranco Contini analysing poetic criticism on “rules” of rhyme and rhythm, and the concept of “learning  by heart”. The latter we may pejoratively translate as almost robotic or mechanical – uh oh – don’t forget the heart. It’s a kind of imperfect recall compression skill that comes from real learning and near-perfect appreciation. Fascinating.

Another from Contini: You heard the idea of no such thing as problems, only opportunities ? Well try this

The departure point for inspiration is the obstacle.
[Varianti – essays 1938-68]

A cheaper, less inspiring idea for a book it’s hard to imagine, which means James’ imaginative content stands by itself. An immense and unexpected pleasure, and being in essay form, an easy piecemeal read, no rush.

Piece in The Spectator to read later. Tweeted by Andrew Neil.

Dreadful piece it turns out, too exclusively Christian, but the main point is true enough.

The new atheists may not like it,
but they’ve had their say.
It’s time for a serious discussion.

It’s a plug for a book that’s clearly been a long time in the writing, the Terry Eagleton reference is from 2009, as opposed to his 2014 book. (Which, ironically, I criticised for being written a decade too late. Better late than never I guess.)

Came across this Kent University page on presentation skills, which as well as including many common sense, tried an tested rules, also included some useful original key quotes and examples.