Down on Da Vinci

So I saw the Da Vinci Code movie last weekend. I hadn't read the book (except for the first 40 pages in French after blowing my last few Euros in Charles de Gaulle earlier this year) so I was pretty out of the loop when I walked into the movie theater. It was a poor movie--there was absolutely no character development and the plot consisted in little more than an endless series of clues whose solutions made little sense and who related to each other about as much as one section of the Phenomenology of Spirit does to the next. I walked out baffled: not only was the mystery boring and completely incredulous, but the philosophical import of the issues at hand (the authority of the Gospels, the Church's monopoly of interpretation, the character of Jesus, etc.) was very poorly developed. In fact, one of the most ridiculous and banal points of the movie comes when Tom Hanks (who was clearly bored to death playing this role) tries to be philosophical after he figures out what's-her-face is a descendant of Jesus. He says something silly about divinity and humanity and the divine in the human that sounds about as deep as a line from Half Baked. The movie sucked and, although I assume the book was at least more entertaining, I assume it generally sucked as well. But I've been thinking this week and, after following the leads of some other writers, have decided that maybe the Da Vinci craze will have some interesting results for a culture being taken over by orthodox and conservative Protestantism. I am of the opinion that the greatest challenge for Christianity is maintaining the legitimacy of the canonical 27 books of the New Testament against the scores of other Gospels who vied for interpretative authority before the canon was created. This seems particularly challenging for Protestants who cannot lay claim to a divinely inspired institution that could have legitimately assembled the authoritative scriptures without at the same time establishing some kind of extra-Biblical legitimacy for the Church, who--at least according to Catholics--would have ultimate jurisdiction over which Gospels were true. And if we resort to a Catholic or Orthodox answer--the Church got it right because the Church is the lawful representative of God on Earth--then the skeptical response of Protestantism (what Biblical authority does this institution have?) seems to make sense. Without going deeper into these issues, I simply offer the possibility that the Da Vinci Code (at least in that semi-decent scene with Tom Hanks in the house of the British professor) could raise some nagging questions to the consciousness of an America swamped by religion: Who put the scriptures together? What makes us accept one Gospel over another? After seeing some obscure Catholic group protesting against the book on the streets of D.C. the day after I saw the movie I realized how much the angry reactions of conservative Christians to the book's popularity are making Brown look like a religious iconoclast. And like Rushdie, there's money out for his head. Even if it's a historically inaccurate, poorly written, and generally crap novel, at the very least something challenging the status quo has caught the minds of the American public.

Saudi Schoolbooks

Spending the weekend in D.C., I had the opportunity to read a great article about our friends the Saudis in the Sunday print edition of the Washington Post. The article featured excerpts from standard Saudi textbooks for elementary through high-school age school-children. Check out some of these:

From a fourth grade textbook:

"Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ______________ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____________."

Sixth grade:

"As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus."

Ninth grade:

"The clash between this [Muslim] community (umma) and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills."

Twelfth grade:

"Jihad in the path of God -- which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it -- is the summit of Islam.


The existence of such intolerance in Saudi state-issued school textbooks (after the Kingdom had promised to rid its schoolbooks of intolerance after 9/11) raises some interesting strategic and theoretical questions for the West. Clearly, teaching anti-Semitic, anti-Christian dogma to all ages of children perpetuates the existence of radical anti-Western political Islam. Indeed, as we are constantly reminded by the press, 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi. Fed on pro-Jihad, anti-Semitic rhetoric from birth, young Saudi men are practically being groomed by the state for terror. (Ironically, the Kingdom has come to realize the extent of their own domestic terrorist problem as the same young men they have educated in radical Wahhabism have turned their violent focus on the corrupt and ambiguously pro-Western Saudi state). So what do we do? What can the West do to stem the creation of a new anti-Western generation of political Islamists? We kindly asked the Sauds to cut the intolerance out of their textbooks. But what I've posted above are quotations from the new "tolerant" versions of their textbooks. So that tactic clearly failed. What other pressure can the West exert on the Saudi state? Furthermore, how can the West convincingly argue against the publication of intolerant texts like these while seen in the eyes of the Muslim world as itself incapable of stemming the publication of anti-Islamic rhetoric (e.g. Danish cartoon controversy)? What legitimate political tools of the state exist to modify or influence discourse internal to a sovereign nation when this discourse poses such a palpable threat to the state's security? And how can the claims of Middle Eastern democratization be reconciled with the clear need to quiet certain violent, intolerant voices?

New Website

Here's a new political theory website featuring an online journal "The IPT Beacon" with articles about current international political issues: human rights, just war theory, democratization, etc. Looks promising, although it seems like it will take a while for all the articles to be made accesible.

Online Conference

Here's a link to an interactive online philosophy conference sponsored by some people at UFlorida and Georgia State. I haven't had a chance to see the papers yet but it seems like there's some interesting stuff here.

Gore in '08?

There's been some interesting buzz on the air-waves recently about the possibility of Gore in 2008, from Democratic and Republican sources. Check out the latest from FOX.

The Authoritarian Personality

Check out the nine so-called "personality variables" of "the authoritarian personality-type" from the Frankfurt School's sociological studies of the 1940's. After you read them, apply these categories to just about anyone you like in this country today. Good choices include anyone in the Administration and the leaders of the Christian Right:

CONVENTIONALISM. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.

AUTHORITARIAN SUBMISSION. Submissive, uncritical attitude towards idealized moral authorities of the ingroup.

ANTI-INTRACEPTION. Opposition to the subjective, imaginative, the tender-minded.

SUPERSTITION AND STEREOTYPY. The belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.

POWER AND "TOUGHNESS." Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.

DESTRUCTIVENESS AND CYNICISM. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.

PROJECTIVITY. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.

SEX. Exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on."

(taken from Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination).

Missing Metal

It's Metal Week on VH1 and, since I've been immobilized by an untimely case of strep throat, I have been soaking up documentary after documentary of different metal bands. Each band has the same story: start small worshipping Kiss and Van Halen, hit it big locally, get discovered, get fucked over by the recording company, change your image, get a drinking problem, get a heroin problem, break up, die. There was something beautiful and simple about these days of metal. Something that seems lost in the hyper-ironic and sophisticated era of rock music that came into being, I believe, after Nirvana. Observe:

Smokin' in the boys room
Smokin' in the boys room
Teacher don't you fill me up with your rules
Everybody knows that smokin' ain't allowed in school

Simple, unadulterated, childish rebellion mediated through outlandish costumes, hair-styles and wildly shaped guitars. With the advent of grunge, led by Nirvana, rock n' roll got dark. Not in the way Iron Maiden, Ratt, Ozzy Osbourne, or even Metallica had been dark. Their darkness had always been tempered by a hyper-awareness of fashion, sex-appeal and comical theatricality. With Nirvana rock n' roll grew up and became sophisticated. It now offered an earnest depiction of depression, desperation, disorder, compulsion, obsession, and addiction--all the things the metal-heads had suffered from but had cloaked by their on-stage pyrotechnics and demonic rituals. And where can rock go after Kurt Cobain's heart-wrenchingly poignant songs? To a realm of irony and self-consciousness that constitutes so much of post-modern rock (fill in this category with whomever you want). Sophistication in art obviously isn't a bad thing, but do you ever look back fondly on the days of Slash and Tommy Lee and wish that rock were more ridiculous and wild than whiny? Just a suggestion. I wonder what documentary is on next.

Christianism

I have found Andrew Sullivan's polemic about "Christianism" in America highly illuminating and on-target. And I am grateful for his introduction of the term to distinguish mainline Christians from the highly politicized and ideological Christian Right. Something I haven't seen him touch upon, however, is the new generation of Christianist lawyers, judges, and politicians being bred at Liberty University, the fundamentalist Baptist college in Virginia who boasted the country's top-ranked debate program in 2005. Even as the Bush Administration goes down in flames, the seeds are being sown for the continuation of hyper-conservative and religiously-fueled politics for the foreseeable future. What's interesting is the Christianists' abnegation of violence as a means to political ends--perhaps because they already wield considerable influence in the federal government. But why are Islamists so bent on overthrowing, for example, the Saud royal family in Saudi Arabia if Islam is already enshrined so deeply into the legal and political systems of the state? Because of corruption, ties to America, etc. and perhaps because of a greater tradition of armed conflict in Islam, although Medieval and Renaissance Christianity can certainly compete on these grounds. Islamists recognize that without being in charge themselves they cannot completely Islamisize the state, and the refusal of Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups to participate in legitimate political processes (a precedent which doesn't hold for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood) speaks loudly--Western democracy and participatory politics, in their view, cannot be reconciled with Islam. For Christianists, on the other hand, somehow it can. Indeed, it's not called "Liberty University" for nothing. This seems promising, albeit a strange coincidence of contingent historical processes. For some reason Christianists in this country love America, democracy, capitalism and the war-mongering Republican party. I have trouble seeing how these things, except perhaps democracy, can be reconciled with a literalist reading of the Bible. In particular, I can see no easy way--without recourse to historical precedent or wild interpretations of Jesus's teachings--for a Christianist to justify his support for capitalism. Of course, Weber points out the historical connections between Calvinism and the "capitalist work ethic," but shouldn't Bible literalists take the social teachings of Jesus a little more seriously ("In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple," Lk 14:33)? And I won't even comment on the obvious contradictions of a Christian party supporting an unjustified war like the one in which we're currently involved in Iraq. Christianists tie themselves up so much in contradiction when they involve themselves in party politics that, at least for their own beliefs to be internally coherent, they should pay more heed to Jesus's recognition of the absolute irreconcilability of the City of God and the City of Man (Mt 22:21). I think the rise of the Christianists represents the greatest threat to this country and what it has always stood for: the inviolability of the individual conscience against the intrusions of the state's ideological or religious dogma. I think we're entering the age of the new theocracies, folks.

History Exonerates?

A new CNN poll finds public opinion of former President Clinton higher than Bush on all counts. Wow.

Fear and Loathing

Here's an interesting parallel: while Bush's approval writings hover around 31%, a poll recently done by the Washington Post shows that around 63% of Americans approve of the NSA's campaign to track and monitor phone calls within the US. This comes amidst corruption charges and the resignation of CIA executive director Kyle Foggo. These are interesting times: while the Bush government seems to keep falling apart, there is still enough residual fear in this country to support its intrusive and extreme security measures. Also, take a look at Fred Kaplan's thoughtful take on it in Slate