My new-found patriotism @3QD

Here’s my latest 3QD article: Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. The opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. They’ve highjacked America. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I’d read our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, decades ago. I knew about the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Washington at Valley Forge, all that and more, it was in my blood. And now...well, why don’t I just get on with it and tell my story.

Then the essay. I begin by pointing out that “patriotism” is an abstract thing:

You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, or spirit. Just how abstract concepts are defined and how we come to understand them, that is not at all clear.

I then introduce a definition from Claude 3.7. It ends by asserting:

Different people express patriotism in different ways – from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.

The rest of the essay is about how I have experienced and expressed my patriotism at various points in my life. I start with the childhood, where I said the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school, pointing out that the abstract words in the pledge – allegiance, republic, liberty, justice – probably didn’t become meaningful until my adolescence. Before that, just word forms devoid of substantial meaning.

Then I have sections on becoming a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war, travelling to a Mennonite college, Goshen College, to talk about my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil), finally on Project Apollo, the moon landing in 1969. That’s all about how I became attached to the abstract ideas on which the United States of America was founded. When I talk of attachment I mean, fundamentally, the biological mechanisms by which infants become attached to their mothers.

I learned about attachment when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I took a course in developmental psychology from Mary Ainsworth and then went on to do an independent study with her. Attachment was the subject. She was one of the co-founders of attachment theory. She’d worked with John Bowlby, the first founder, and then done field research in Uganda where she looked at how infants became attached to their mothers. She introduced me to Bowlby’s Attachment (1969) before the manuscript had been published and had me read some of the early ethological studies of primate behavior in the wild.

However, it is one thing for infants to become attached to their mothers, and mothers to their infants. That’s done by biological mechanisms. How then can those same mechanisms be directed toward abstract objects, like nations in the case of patriotism. As far as I can tell, not much is known about that, though there has been some work. Clearly extensive cultural mechanisms are involved.

My 3QD article isn’t about those mechanisms. Rather, it shows the kinds of behavior that are made possible through those mechanisms. If you want a glimpse of the mechanisms, I have a long and complex paper that examines how they operate in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Talking with Nature in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.

Nationalism

As part of my current project aimed at understanding my new-found patriotic feeling I decided to take a look at nationalism, which is closely related to patriotism. First, I offer some comments that Claude made on the relationship between nationalism and patriotism. Then I offer three examples of the political uses to which nationalism can be put, one is about civil rights, the second is about World War Two, and the third is a passage by Yuval Noah Harari on the meaning of life.

Claude 3.7 on patriotism and nationalism

I asked Claude about the relationship between patriotism and nationalism. I have placed its response after the asterisks:

* * * * *

Patriotism and nationalism are related concepts that both involve feelings toward one's country, but they differ in important ways:

Key Differences

Scope and attitude

• Patriotism typically involves love for one's country alongside an acknowledgment of its imperfections and a desire for improvement
• Nationalism often emphasizes national identity and interests as superior to those of other nations, sometimes fostering an "us versus them" mentality

Relationship to criticism:

• Patriotism generally accommodates critical evaluation of one's nation and its policies
• Nationalism tends to reject criticism as disloyal and may demand unquestioning support

Historical context:

• Patriotism has historically been associated with civic values and commitment to shared principles
• Nationalism emerged more strongly in the 19th century with the formation of nation-states and has sometimes been connected to ethnic or cultural exclusivity

Points of Overlap

Both patriotism and nationalism:

• Involve emotional attachment to one's homeland
• Celebrate national symbols, histories, and achievements
• Can motivate people to sacrifice for collective goals

Academic Perspectives

Political theorists often note that the line between patriotism and nationalism can be blurry. The historian Eric Hobsbawm observed that nationalism often "requires too much belief in what is patently not so," whereas philosopher Martha Nussbaum has advocated for a "purified patriotism" that transcends national boundaries while still valuing local attachments.

In practice, patriotic and nationalistic sentiments often exist on a spectrum rather than as entirely separate categories, with healthy patriotism potentially sliding into exclusionary nationalism under certain social and political conditions.

War and Civil Rights in America

The paragraph following the asterisks is from a blogpost on war and America’s national psyche.

* * * * *

My thinking on these matters has been strongly influenced by an essay Talcott Parsons published in 1947 on “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.

For the most part I have used Parsons, and others as well, in arguing about the nature of racism in the USA. While Africans were brought to this country for economic reasons it seems to me that during, say, the 19th century African Americans increasingly assumed a dual psychological role in the white psyche. On the one hand, they were a source of entertainment. On the other, they were convenient scapegoats, as became evident with the lynchings that emerged during Reconstruction and continued well into the last century. That is to say, African America served as a geographically internal target for the ethnic and nationalist antipathy Parsons discussed.

Thus we have the thesis in Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March (U. Chicago, 1999). They argue that African Americans have been able to move forward on civil rights only during periods where the nation faced an external threat - the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the major wars of the first half of the 20th century. When the external danger had subsided, gains were lost. From my point of view, they’re arguing that, when external danger looms large and demands attention, the citizenry can focus aggression there and so ease up on the internal colony. Beyond this, of course, it becomes necessary to recruit from the colony to fight the external enemy, both physically and propagandistically - be kind to your black citizens when you fight the Nazis, etc.

Mario Cuomo on national unity

Here is a statement by Mario Cuomo in a post entitled: Fables of Identity, European and American. It’s from The New York Times Magazine (March 19, 1995):

The Second World War as the last time that this country believed in anything profoundly, any great single cause. What was it? They were evil; we were good. That was Tojo, that was that S.O.B. Hitler, that was Mussolini, that bum. They struck at us in the middle of the night, those sneaks. We are good, they are bad. Let's all get together, we said, and we creamed them. We started from way behind. We found strength in this common commitment, this commonality, community, family, the idea of coming together was best served in my lifetime in the Second World War.

This is an extraordinary statement by an astute politician, uttered with no apparent sense of irony. What kind of dissension afflicts this American family if it can find deep unity only in battle with an external enemy? What happens to that unity when the enemy is defeated or simply collapses?

Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain’

Finally, I quote a passage Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017). It is from a section, late in the book, entitled “The Meaning of Life.” It is about the often cruel power imaginary entities – such as nationalism – can wield over us if we believe in them, passionately. I’ve appended the passage (pp. 302-304) immediately after the asterisks.

* * * * *

The narrating self is the star of Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘A Problem’. The story deals with Don Quixote, the eponymous hero of Miguel Cervantes’s famous novel. Don Quixote creates for himself an imaginary world in which he is a legendary champion going forth to fight giants and save Lady Dulcinea del Toboso. In reality, Don Quixote is Alonso Quixano, an elderly country gentleman; the noble Dulcinea is an uncouth farm girl from a nearby village; and the giants are windmills. What would happen, wonders Borges, if out of his belief in these fantasies, Don Quixote attacks and kills a real person? Borges asks a fundamental question about the human condition: what happens when the yarns spun by our narrating self cause great harm to ourselves or those around us? There are three main possibilities, says Borges.

One option is that nothing much happens. Don Quixote will not be bothered at all by killing a real man. His delusions are so overpowering that he could not tell the difference between this incident and his imaginary duel with the windmill giants. Another option is that once he takes a real life, Don Quixote will be so horrified that he will be shaken out of his delusions. This is akin to a young recruit who goes to war believing that it is good to die for one’s country, only to be completely disillusioned by the realities of warfare. And there is a third option, much more complex and profound. As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting, but once he actually kills somebody, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because they are the only thing giving meaning to his terrible crime. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

And there is a third option, much more complex and profound. As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting, but once he actually kills somebody, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because they are the only thing giving meaning to his terrible crime. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

In politics this is known as the ‘Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain’ syndrome. In 1915 Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Entente powers. Italy’s declared aim was to ‘liberate’ Trento and Trieste – two ‘Italian’ territories that the Austro-Hungarian Empire held ‘unjustly’. Italian politicians gave fiery speeches in parliament, vowing historical redress and promising a return to the glories of ancient Rome. Hundreds of thousands of Italian recruits went to the front shouting, ‘For Trento and Trieste!’ They thought it would be a walkover.

It was anything but. The Austro-Hungarian army held a strong defensive line along the Isonzo River. The Italians hurled themselves against the line in eleven gory battles, gaining a few kilometres at most, and never securing a breakthrough. In the first battle they lost 15,000 men. In the second battle they lost 40,000 men. In the third battle they lost 60,000. So it continued for more than two dreadful years until the eleventh engagement, when the Austrians finally counter-attacked, and in the Battle of Caporreto soundly defeated the Italians and pushed them back almost to the gates of Venice. The glorious adventure became a bloodbath. By the end of the war, almost 700,000 Italian soldiers were killed, and more than a million were wounded.

After losing the first Isonzo battle, Italian politicians had two choices. They could admit their mistake and sign a peace treaty. Austria–Hungary had no claims against Italy, and would have been delighted to sign a peace treaty because it was busy fighting for survival against the much stronger Russians. Yet how could the politicians go to the parents, wives and children of 15,000 dead Italian soldiers, and tell them: ‘Sorry, there has been a mistake. We hope you don’t take it too hard, but your Giovanni died in vain, and so did your Marco.’ Alternatively they could say: ‘Giovanni and Marco were heroes! They died so that Trieste would be Italian, and we will make sure they didn’t die in vain. We will go on fighting until victory is ours!’ Not surprisingly, the politicians preferred the second option. So they fought a second battle, and lost another 40,000 men. The politicians again decided it would be best to keep on fighting, because ‘our boys didn’t die in vain’. [...]

Priests discovered this principal thousands of years ago. It underlies numerous religious ceremonies and commandments. If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient.

I became a conscientious objector during the War in Vietnam

I don’t remember just when I became aware of the war in Vietnam, but 1964 seems like a good year. That’s when the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which, in effect, authorized the country to provide military aid to South Vietnam (in its war against North Vietnam) without Congress having to pass a formal declaration of war. The war in Vietnam had begun.

I have a vague memory of being in the basement recreation room, where the TV was. I forget just what I was watching, perhaps a news report on the war, perhaps something else. My father was there. I think he’d just come down the stairs and was looking into the rec room, but wasn’t actually in the room. As I said, things were vague. I recall saying, “Don’t worry, if I have to, I’ll go.” While there had been some anti-draft protest before passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, protest activity increased after the resolution and in a year or two became large-scale protest against the war.

I would certainly have been aware of that activity – perhaps that’s what prompted my remark to Father. But I would also have been skeptical. I’d been reading Bertrand Russell by that time. I’m pretty sure I’d read his 1963 Playboy interview, in which he discussed nuclear disarmament and civil disobedience. Thus, regardless of what I actually said, that remark was surely an expression of my skepticism and uncertainty. I entered Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1965. My skepticism would grow, but it wasn’t until 1969 that I was forced to choose.

Johns Hopkins and the antiwar movement

I don’t remember just how I came to join the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There were a number of political clubs. I assume there was some organization based on the Democratic party and another on the Republican. I know there was a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Wikipedia says it was founded in 1960 at a meeting in the home of William F. Buckley. I thought of it as the right-wing near-crazies. None of those appealed to me, but I liked the sound of “participatory democracy,” so SDS it was.

I don’t remember much about SDS. We had meetings. A guy named Pete Davidovich was a sort-of leader. He had some kind of relationship – friend, girlfriend, I don’t recall – with a cool fair-haired blue-eyed blonde who went to Goucher College, an elite women’s school in Towson that functioned as a “sister” school to Johns Hopkins. There was another guy, tall, sandy-haired, dark glasses, whose politics led him to drop out in his junior year and take a job in the steel mill at Sparrows Point. And I remember that I somehow was asked to lead a meeting. So, I sat on a table at the front of the room and led the meeting. Davidovich remarked that I was the first hippie to lead an SDS meeting. I guess I was something of a hippie. I certainly had the long hair.

We went on anti-war demonstrations in Baltimore. I don’t recall how many or how often. I do know that I didn’t go to the big demonstration in Washington, the October 1967 march on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer wrote about in The Armies of the Night. It’s during this anti-war activity that I hooked up with the people I mentioned in my post, Breaking Down Monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s.

I also hung out in the Chaplain’s Office. Well, it wasn’t the Chaplain’s Office at first. It was just the Johns Hopkins branch of the YMCA, directed by Dr. Chester Wickwire, one of the most remarkable men I’d ever met, and who had a tremendous influence on me. He was from Denver and had toured as the tenor with an evangelist early in his life. He’d had polio and walked with a pair of arm crutches, you know, the ones that had cuffs that went around forearms and handles you gripped in each hand.

During the 1950s he led student trips to the Soviet Union in the summers. One summer his group was arrested for subversive activity of some kind and put on trial. They were acquitted, of course. It was just a sham, for propaganda. It radicalized Dr. Wickwire, who we knew affectionately as Chet the Jet. He became determined to see that that never happened in the America.

When he returned to America, he threw himself heart and soul into the civil rights movement, which is another story. When the antiwar movement emerged on campus, he championed it. When SDS held meetings, we met in Levering Hall, which was owned by the YMCA. That’s probably how I fell into Chet’s orbit.

He also ran a coffee house on Friday and Saturday nights, The Room at the Top. It was open on Friday and Saturday evenings and featured mostly local musicians, many of whom were quite good. The walls were covered with graffiti and line art, including an elaborate five-foot caricature of a 17th century aristocrat with an elaborate coat and a wig two feet high. In 1968-69 a local artist, Robert Hironimus, covered the walls with an elaborate psychedelic mural:

 

But I digress.

The point is simple, Chet the Jet had his fingers in a lot of pies, including the anti-war movement. When the Selective Service system instituted a lottery in December of 1969. Since I had graduated in the spring, I no longer had my student deferment, a status granted to full-time college students making them exempt from conscription. As I had drawn the number 12 in the lottery, I was certain to be drafted. What could I do?

I’m drafted

I weighed my options. The easiest thing to do was simply to enter the military. But I objected to that, not simply because it was convenient, but because I objected to this particular war and to war in general. I was a pacifist. As a practical matter, with my education, I would not have been drafted into a combat unit. But I didn’t want to enter the military at all.

I could pay a psychiatrist to write a letter that would likely exempt me from service. I knew people who knew people and I was attached to one of the greatest universities in the world. If I’d wanted to, I could have done this. But it was undignified and dishonest. I could also have gotten messed up on drugs the day before my pre-induction physical in hopes of failing the drug test. This was iffy at best, but rumor had it that it sometimes worked. This was too was dishonest and distasteful.

There was another possibility. I could become a conscientious objector. That was a status established by the Selective Service System for people who were pacifists through religious belief. However, I had no conventional religious belief. I was a member of no church and didn’t attend religious services.

What is patriotism?

As I have indicated in my ramble of April 9, I have decided to write an article about patriotism for 3 Quarks Daily. My tentative title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Apollo.” I expect the article to appear during the week of April 21.

If I’m going to write about patriotism, then perhaps I should define it. That’s tricky. Why? Because patriotism isn’t a concrete phenomenon. You can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it. It is abstract, like gravity, the unconscious, evolution, spirit, or sodium chloride. Just how abstract concepts are defined is not at all clear.

David Hays, my teacher, mentor, and colleague, proposed that abstract concepts are defined over patterns of concrete events. Our standard example is “charity.” What is charity? Charity is when someone does something nice for some else without thought of reward. Any pattern of events that fits that pattern qualifies as an act of charity.

When a Boy Scout helps a little old lady to cross the street, that’s an act of charity. When Girl Scouts go to the Old Folks Home, serve a meal to the residents, and then play cards and board games with them in the evening, that’s an act of charity as well, several acts in fact. Giving alms to the poor, charity. When a rich nation donates food, clothing, and medical supplies to a poor nation, that too can be an act of charity. Acts of charity come in all shapes and sizes, and can be performed by both real actors, like those Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but also artificial actors (“juristic persons” in legal parlance) like nation states.

With that in mind, I consulted Claude 3.7 Sonata, asking it to define patriotism. Here’s what it said:

Patriotism is a feeling of love, devotion, and attachment to one's country or homeland. It encompasses a sense of pride in a nation's achievements, culture, and values, as well as a commitment to supporting its interests and well-being.

True patriotism often includes:

• A deep appreciation for one's country's positive attributes while acknowledging its imperfections
• A desire to contribute to national improvement through civic engagement
• Respect for national symbols, traditions, and institutions
• A connection to shared national history and identity

Patriotism differs from nationalism in that patriotism is generally considered more moderate and inclusive, focusing on love of country without necessarily claiming superiority over others, while nationalism often emphasizes national identity and interests above all else, sometimes leading to an attitude of superiority.

Different people express patriotism in different ways - from serving in the military to participating in democratic processes, engaging in constructive criticism of government policies, or working to uphold national ideals like freedom, equality, or justice.

Notice that that final paragraph lists some general classes of actions through which one exhibits, through which one enacts, patriotism. Thus, my article will, at least in part, be about some of the actions I have taken that exhibit patriotism.

After Claude had offered that definition, I continued our discussion. I have appended that to this post. As always, my statements are in bold face type while Claude’s are plain face.

* * * * *

Can one commit civil disobedience and still be a patriot?

Yes, civil disobedience and patriotism can absolutely coexist and often have throughout history. In fact, many who engage in civil disobedience view their actions as deeply patriotic for several reasons:

Civil disobedience can reflect a commitment to a nation's highest ideals rather than blind allegiance to its current policies or laws. Those who practice it often do so precisely because they love their country and want it to live up to its professed values. Historical examples illustrate this relationship:

• Henry David Thoreau, who wrote the influential essay "Civil Disobedience," refused to pay taxes to protest the Mexican-American War and slavery, based on his understanding of American ideals of freedom and justice.
• Martin Luther King Jr. explicitly framed his civil rights activism as patriotic, arguing that by challenging unjust laws, he was calling America to fulfill its promise of equality for all citizens.
• The suffragettes who broke laws to advocate for women's voting rights did so because they believed in the democratic principles their nation espoused.

Patriotism that includes critical engagement with one's country's flaws can be more substantive than patriotism that demands unquestioning loyalty. As James Baldwin noted, "I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

In this view, working to reform one's country through peaceful but unlawful protest when other avenues have failed demonstrates a deeper commitment to national improvement than passive acceptance of the status quo.

Rambling into April: 4th Arena, Patriotism, Mystery Box + stuff

Lot’s going on. Time to sort things out.

The Fourth Arena

I’m committed to writing a book with the tentative title: Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising. Here’s my current elevator pitch:

"Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising" charts humanity's next great leap - not toward obsolescence, but toward unprecedented forms of existence. Just as life emerged from matter and culture from life, we're witnessing the birth of entities that transcend traditional boundaries between human and artificial. Drawing on complexity science and cultural evolution, this book offers an optimistic vision of how human-AI partnerships could create genuinely new forms of consciousness, relationship, and being. For readers seeking a fresh perspective on our technological future that goes beyond both utopian and dystopian clichés.

I contacted my agent from Beethoven’s Anvil, but he’s getting out of the business so he can’t take me on. But he’s agreed to help me with the proposal. I’ve got a chapter outline (17 chapters) and a decent idea of what goes in each chapter. I’m in the process of putting finishing touches on a draft of the introduction, “The Four Arenas,” which is based on an article I’d published in 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve started work on drafting Chapter 14: “Science Fiction Imagines the Future.” That will use some material from an old 3QD piece plus some new material. This working paper contains early pre-draft material for the final chapter and background material for the two preceding chapters: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising.

My New-Found Patriotism

I’m sure you’ve heard a saying that goes something like this: You don’t understand the value of something until it’s gone. Well, sometime during the last week, as I was thinking about the damage that Trump, with the help of Musk and a bunch of others, is doing to the country, and the world, I felt patriotic in a way I’d never felt before.

It’s MY country these people are destroying! NO.

I’ve decided that’s the topic for my next article for 3 Quarks Daily. Tentative title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Apollo.”  From a note I sent to friends:

Patriotism is an abstract thing, like justice, gravity, charity, evolution, and dozens and hundreds of other phenomena. All of these things have definitions, which are easily enough learned, and stories associated with them. But at some point, these things must resolved into often complex patterns of concrete events. So this article is about some of the (more or less) concrete events which give meaning to my patriotism. For someone like Trump, “patriotism” is just a word, a powerful word, he uses to get what he wants. It’s detached from any meaningful committee to and participation in the large collective effort and experiment that has been America to date.

So, the piece will be largely autobiographical, with a concentration on my years in Baltimore, when I got bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins, protested against the war in Vietnam, got drafted, and performed alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins.

I’ll also be talking about my trip to Goshen College to talk about my book on music. Why? First, because I was invited. Beyond that, Goshen College is a Mennonite school and Mennonite men are pacifists. During WWII many Mennonite men went to prison rather than serve in the army. Consequently, in order to avoid the expense and bother of criminal proceedings and imprisonment, the government decided to allow pacifists the option of performing some kind of civilian service as an alternative to going into the military. That’s what I did. I owed a debt to the older male relatives to the students I would be speaking to.

The Mystery Box Show

I’ve discovered a very interesting YouTube channel: The Mystery Box Show. Here’s how the channel describes itself;

Take a bit of The Moth, a bit of TED and throw a lot of sex into the mix and you've got The Mystery Box Show, a storytelling podcast where people tell their true stories all about sex. From the vanilla to the kinky, from hilarious mis-adventures to inspiring sexual revelations, our storytellers bare their souls and deliver their sexy secrets directly to your ears.

I’ve watched a bunch of them and have enjoyed most of them, some more than others. I’ve included one of the videos in a recent post: Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?

Other things I’m working on

I’ve still got to finish my commentary on Harold Bloom and then gather that whole series together into a single document with the (tentative) title, A Quixotic Essay about Literary Criticism: Thinkers, Methods, Authority.

I’ve got to prepare some working papers. There’s that literary critics one. I also want to do something with my series on melancholy and at least one more Claude conversation: Dialog with Claude 3.5 on the Intellectual Potential of Man-Machine Interaction.

Finally, I’ve decided to write some more about my years in Baltimore, which was a very important period in my life. Between a number of posts here – most recently, Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s – and at 3 Quarks Daily, I’ve already written quite a bit about that period. I’ll be writing more in the course of my patriotism essay. Then, I suppose, I could gather them all together into a single document.

And so it goes.

A Letter to Mary Douglas about God, Religion, and Music

I’m in the process of thinking through my next column for 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve given it a provisional title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, Music, and Apollo.” I’ll probably include something from a letter I wrote to the late Mary Douglas some years ago. As you may know, she a well-known anthropologist best known for her book, Purity and Danger (1966). She’d been kind enough to blurb my book about music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Once the book was out my editor, William Frucht, gave me her email address and we began corresponding.

While the book was reviewed in both Science and Nature, and other places as well, it was not the smash success I’d hoped it to be. But it did get me some speaking invitations, one of them at Goshen College, which is a Mennonite College in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The Mennonites are conservative Christians. How do I, an atheist, talk to devout Christians (about music)? Since Douglas was a devout Catholic, I asked her about it in a letter I wrote in October of 2002. I’ve appended my letter in full (though I’ve corrected a typo or two) along with her brief response.

* * * * *

Dear Mary,

I feel the need for a different kind of conversation. I’ve been asked to deliver an address at Goshen College in Indiana in the Spring of 2003 and I’ve accepted the invitation. Goshen College is a small school (c. 1000 students) affiliated with the Mennonite Church. Music is very important to the Mennonites, which is I why I’ve been asked to deliver an address. I can speak on any musical topic I wish but, given the nature of my book, on the one hand, and the importance of music to the Mennonites, on the other, the whole confused business of science and religion is going to be lurking in the background.

I don’t know much about the Mennonites, but I’ve been doing a bit of reading. As I said, music is important to them; they see it as a way to communicate to God. In particular, they have a long tradition of a capella four-part singing. This music is relatively austere. I note, however, that Charlie Keil has heard recordings of African Mennonites who sound like they’ve just invented four-part harmony. There are about 1,000,000 Mennonites world-wide, with c. 450,000 in North America and c. 350,000 in Africa.

Mennonite doctrine is fairly conservative. In particular, they believe in the “literal” truth of the Biblical account of creation. They are pacifists and also believe in a strict separation of church and state, so, for example, they refuse jury duty. They look at the world rather differently than I do. But the professor who made the invitation observed: “While I simply accept your scientific arguments on faith, I am entirely convinced that you and I 'hear' music the same way.”

When I say, in the first chapter of B’s Anvil, that I’m firmly anchored in the Western scientific view of the world, I am, of course, quite serious. When I said that, however, I was quite aware that I spend a great deal of time in the book discussing experiences that have little “purchase” within that worldview. I think that’s a real problem and that not only do such experiences need to be discussed, but that we need to reconsider how we think about cultures and groups. To the extent that that book is “science” (not something I fret over) science is seeming stranger and stranger to me.

When I started writing the book I wasn’t looking for the attractor stuff that I eventually put into it. That came late in the process, and something as a surprise. But it does mean that things like “group minds” are no mere metaphors; they are entities as real as quarks and dark matter, and equally strange. I can almost see my way to saying that, when Leonard Bernstein “becomes” Mozart, Mozart’s soul is, in fact, taking up residence in Bernstein’s body. If I admit of that, then it’s but a step to say that the same pretty much happens when anyone performs Mozart well, or listens to such a performance. As the same line of reasoning pretty much suggests that nothing remains of Mozart’s wife, not even her soul, I doubt that it would bring much comfort or satisfaction to a standard sort of religious. 

“If we are his creation, we should be this complicated and exciting, especially the brain.” 

But nonetheless I find it a rather striking and remarkable argument to make. In part what makes it so remarkable is that it follows directly from my insisting on treating the brain as a physical phenomenon, albeit an astonishingly complex one. Those musical attractors are beings most strange, remarkable in that once they come into existence, they can be passed down from person to person, group to group, generation to generation, yet they are, by nature, fluctuating and evanescent in the extreme. How can we comprehend that, when first a group of apes began to dance, they changed the world forever and began the trek to us?

And I find myself feeling a bit of sympathy with those fundamentalists who’ve been battling for years to have their view of human history presented in the schools, alongside Darwin’s view. It seems to me that one thing that’s going on is that they look out on the world in a commonsense way and see that man is quite different from animals. When they look at science, they see science telling them that, no, man is an animal, no more and no less. They cannot reconcile these views and so they reject science. I think that the science they are rejecting is wrong on that point and so I’m sympathetic with their rejection, even if I’m not sympathetic to creationist biology. And, given the time and energy this particular conflict has taken in America over the last century I’d be seriously inclined to allow creationism into the public schools, along side modern biology, just so we can stop wasting time with this particular squabble.

As you know, there is a well-established body of thinking on the vexed relationship between religion and science. I’ve read a little of this, and dip into it every now and then. But don’t mind much there to engage me. But those musical attractors, they are strange things to form in groups of human brains. As strange as spirits and gods.

I have no idea what I will tell the Mennonites about music. But whatever it is, I’ll be most interested in what they have to tell me in return.

Regards,

Bill B

* * * * *

Good luck with the Mennonites.

I don't really see the problems that loom in your mind about science and God. If we are his creation, we should be this complicated and exciting, especially the brain.

Have you come across the poetry of Fred Turner? especially a book of essays on Beauty. I find it inspirational about your kind of work.

Thanks for writing,

Mary