Margins of Permission
2 days ago
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Chances Are
Chances Are...: Adventures in Probability
Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (2006, Viking.)
The dedication of Chances Are... gives a marvelously concise precis of what it’s about: “To Jane, who likes probability, Bob, who likes chance, and Felix, who likes risk.” What might that mean, exactly? What does it tell us about Jane, Bob, and Felix? Probability, chance, and risk are constant conditions of human life, but we haven’t always understood very much about them. Ellen and Michael Kaplan, mother and son, have written an elegant book both on what we need to know, and why we should care.
Though the ancient Romans had games of chance, it was not till the seventeenth century that Blaise Pascal set forth proofs of some fundamental issues in probability. Pascal, with his Wager and his triangle, is a relatively familiar figure; I didn’t know about Isaac Newton’s contemporary Abraham de Moivre, whom the Kaplans bring to life with superb economy. Of de Moivre’s parlous circumstances as a Huguenot refugee in England, they write, “This shabby man, ensconced at the window end of a greasy table in Slaughter’s Tavern, had, through the clever manipulation of abstract terms, discovered–or created–a way to describe how things happen the way they ‘ought’: how Chance scatters itself around the central pillar of Design in the shape of a bell.”
With economical clarity, we are introduced to the Marquis de Laplace, his student Poisson, Henri Lebesque, and Richard von Mises. And who could forget Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, born in 1903 on a train crossing Russia: “He remained interested in everything, from metallurgy to Pushkin, from the papacy to nude skiing.” His interests included mathematical logic, algorithmic complexity, and, “with characteristic verve, he hoicked up the tottery edifice of probability and slipped new foundations underneath.” As they’ve done with all those other singular minds, the Kaplans let us stand at the door of Kolmogorov’s work and look in.
Of course, the mathematics are only part of the story. Chances Are... is equally concerned with the human element. What’s the difference between the apparently pure hand of fate at the roulette table and the swagger and bluff of poker? Which kind of game is the stock market? In any case, it helps to start with a pile of money; even in a perfectly fair game, deeper pockets win.
Insurance is another complicated game of numbers and the human factor. Lloyds of London still operates as a series of face to face encounters between the buyers and sellers of risk. As the Kaplans say, “...each time probability leaves its cozy study full of urns and dice and descends to the marketplace of human affairs, it reveals its dependence on human capabilities–on judgement and definition. As powerful a device as it is, it remains a hand tool, not a machine.”
Medical science calls for judgement, too, complicated by ethics, and by the fact that bodies, and diseases, are often more different than they are alike. Science is based on repeatable events, and statistics on aggregated events, but we get sick as individuals. Doctors are pretty poor at guessing where in a range of outcomes our case will fall, which is, of course, the only thing we really want to know. Our peculiar psychology complicates the case further: “Red sugar pills stimulate; blue ones depress–brand name placebos work better than generic. And higher dosages are usually more effective.” It’s a wonder that clinical trials give any useful information; indeed, the truly informative trial often comes only after a new treatment is released for general use.
Often, in medicine, we’d benefit from an understanding of the likelihood of false positive results, as in tests for rare conditions. Courts of law suffer under the same deficiency, because crimes are such rare acts that we don’t have a strong intuitive background. Unfortunately, we’re not usually offered a strong statistical background to compensate for that lack; judges may be suspicious of statistical reasoning because they aren’t equipped to tell good reasoning from rhetorical hokum, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be helpful.
Chances Are... combines such utility with great pleasure. It’s very clear on the math, but also on a vast swath of biography, history, and science. At heart, it’s a deeply humanist endeavor: the philosophical strands lightly flavor the whole. Like this gem: “The formal calculation of probabilities will always feel artificial to us because it slows and makes conscious our leap from perception to conclusion. It forces us to acknowledge the gulf of uncertainty and randomness that gapes below--and leaps are never easy if you look down.”
Factual certainty is elusive and contingent; if that’s the case, we are wise, and brave, to acknowledge it. Here’s to the courage for the leap.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
The Cello Suites
The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece
Eric Siblin (2009, Grove Press)
In 2000, Eric Siblin was away from home and at loose ends, when he decided to go to a concert of music he didn’t know, by a performer he’d never heard of. He had worked as a popular music critic for a Montreal paper, a job, he says, “that had filled my head with vast amounts of music, much of which I didn’t want to be there.” Three of the Bach Cello Suites, in a concert by Laurence Lesser at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, were a different story altogether. Not only was the music appealingly complex, but Lesser’s program notes hinted that there was a story behind it that might bear looking into.
Look into it he did, or, you might say, he fell into it head over heels. Though he had no classical music background to speak of, Siblin became a certified Bach geek, and the result is delightful. He delves deeply into Bach’s life and times, as far as they can be known; he also looks into the career of Pablo Casals, whose performances and recordings brought the Suites forth from deep obscurity. For both men, Siblin gives us a fascinating view of how their musical and domestic fates were affected by money, politics, and war.
Consider the question of why the suites were written for cello in the first place. The viola da gamba was generally considered the melodic or virtuosic instrument, while “the cello was a background instrument in 1720, expected to hug the shoreline of a tune’s progression, not an adventurous solo vessel.” At that time, when he composed the Brandenburg Concertos, and probably the Cello Suites, Bach was employed at the court of Prince Leopold of Cöthen. Prince Leopold was an ardent amateur player of the viola da gamba, and the sixth Brandenburg Concerto has a part for that instrument that he might have been able to play, while the cello part is written for a more skilled professional player.
Such a player was available for the relatively minor court of Cöthen because Prussia’s King Frederick William, preferring the austere arts of war over the creative (and frequently decadent) pursuits of his father’s regime, had disbanded the court orchestra in Berlin. Prince Leopold made the most of the chance to improve his own Capelle: he hired as many of the fired musicians as he could afford, which left Bach well-positioned to write some of his most brilliant instrumental works. This golden era ended when Leopold married a woman who was not particularly musical, and Bach left for what he hoped were the greater opportunities of Leipzig.
Siblin’s tales of Pablo Casals have similarly to do with matters of patronage and opportunity, complicated immensely by the political and military convulsions of Republican and Fascist Spain. As a boy, Casals enjoyed the favor of Queen Maria Cristina, who sponsored some of his training on the cello. In 1931, when Spain’s Second Republic spelled the end of the monarchy, Casals was named president of the Council of Music, but within five years, Fascist rebels gained the upper hand. Casals “buried papers and burned his letters from the royal family. He was a leftist in conservative eyes, but extreme leftists saw him as a well-connected monarchist.” His epoch-making recordings of the Cello Suites took place in 1938, as all of Europe was getting caught up in the conflagration. He never again lived in Spain.
The Cello Suites ingeniously follows the general structure of the suites themselves, comprising six sets of six chapters. Siblin gives roughly the first half of each set to Bach, followed by a couple of chapters on Casals. Then, in the final position, which is occupied in the suites by the lighthearted Gigue, he talks about his own immersion in Bach’s musical world. In addition to reading widely in the voluminous literature on Bach, and listening to innumerable recordings, he follows Casals to Catalonia and Puerto Rico, and Bach to Leipzig. He talks at length with various fine cellists about their association with the suites, and with Casals. He even tries to play the cello, progressing as far as a couple of Bach’s easiest tunes. On his own instrument, the guitar, he gets a little closer, mastering one movement of the suites. Not surprisingly, he learns that this stuff is hard, which is to say that, like all the best things, it repays a lifetime of study, and leaves you wanting more.
The Cello Suites whetted my appetite for the regions of Bach’s universe I haven’t spent much time in. It reminded me of how many treasures await, and how very fortunate we are that so much of his work survived the decades after his death when it was considered painfully dry and old-fashioned. A friend recently said to me, “I need more Bach in my life,” and, though I generally hear more Bach in a week than many people hear in a year, I know exactly what he means.
February 1, 2012
Eric Siblin (2009, Grove Press)
In 2000, Eric Siblin was away from home and at loose ends, when he decided to go to a concert of music he didn’t know, by a performer he’d never heard of. He had worked as a popular music critic for a Montreal paper, a job, he says, “that had filled my head with vast amounts of music, much of which I didn’t want to be there.” Three of the Bach Cello Suites, in a concert by Laurence Lesser at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, were a different story altogether. Not only was the music appealingly complex, but Lesser’s program notes hinted that there was a story behind it that might bear looking into.
Look into it he did, or, you might say, he fell into it head over heels. Though he had no classical music background to speak of, Siblin became a certified Bach geek, and the result is delightful. He delves deeply into Bach’s life and times, as far as they can be known; he also looks into the career of Pablo Casals, whose performances and recordings brought the Suites forth from deep obscurity. For both men, Siblin gives us a fascinating view of how their musical and domestic fates were affected by money, politics, and war.
Consider the question of why the suites were written for cello in the first place. The viola da gamba was generally considered the melodic or virtuosic instrument, while “the cello was a background instrument in 1720, expected to hug the shoreline of a tune’s progression, not an adventurous solo vessel.” At that time, when he composed the Brandenburg Concertos, and probably the Cello Suites, Bach was employed at the court of Prince Leopold of Cöthen. Prince Leopold was an ardent amateur player of the viola da gamba, and the sixth Brandenburg Concerto has a part for that instrument that he might have been able to play, while the cello part is written for a more skilled professional player.
Such a player was available for the relatively minor court of Cöthen because Prussia’s King Frederick William, preferring the austere arts of war over the creative (and frequently decadent) pursuits of his father’s regime, had disbanded the court orchestra in Berlin. Prince Leopold made the most of the chance to improve his own Capelle: he hired as many of the fired musicians as he could afford, which left Bach well-positioned to write some of his most brilliant instrumental works. This golden era ended when Leopold married a woman who was not particularly musical, and Bach left for what he hoped were the greater opportunities of Leipzig.
Siblin’s tales of Pablo Casals have similarly to do with matters of patronage and opportunity, complicated immensely by the political and military convulsions of Republican and Fascist Spain. As a boy, Casals enjoyed the favor of Queen Maria Cristina, who sponsored some of his training on the cello. In 1931, when Spain’s Second Republic spelled the end of the monarchy, Casals was named president of the Council of Music, but within five years, Fascist rebels gained the upper hand. Casals “buried papers and burned his letters from the royal family. He was a leftist in conservative eyes, but extreme leftists saw him as a well-connected monarchist.” His epoch-making recordings of the Cello Suites took place in 1938, as all of Europe was getting caught up in the conflagration. He never again lived in Spain.
The Cello Suites ingeniously follows the general structure of the suites themselves, comprising six sets of six chapters. Siblin gives roughly the first half of each set to Bach, followed by a couple of chapters on Casals. Then, in the final position, which is occupied in the suites by the lighthearted Gigue, he talks about his own immersion in Bach’s musical world. In addition to reading widely in the voluminous literature on Bach, and listening to innumerable recordings, he follows Casals to Catalonia and Puerto Rico, and Bach to Leipzig. He talks at length with various fine cellists about their association with the suites, and with Casals. He even tries to play the cello, progressing as far as a couple of Bach’s easiest tunes. On his own instrument, the guitar, he gets a little closer, mastering one movement of the suites. Not surprisingly, he learns that this stuff is hard, which is to say that, like all the best things, it repays a lifetime of study, and leaves you wanting more.
The Cello Suites whetted my appetite for the regions of Bach’s universe I haven’t spent much time in. It reminded me of how many treasures await, and how very fortunate we are that so much of his work survived the decades after his death when it was considered painfully dry and old-fashioned. A friend recently said to me, “I need more Bach in my life,” and, though I generally hear more Bach in a week than many people hear in a year, I know exactly what he means.
February 1, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
Reason, Faith, and Revolution
Any Good Books
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton (2009, Yale University Press)
I’m late to the party--Terry Eagleton delivered the lectures on which Reason, Faith, and Revolution is based in 2008, when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were making headlines with the so-called God Debate. Most prominently among a handful of high-powered scientists and social critics, they had published books (The God Delusion and God is not Great, respectively) proclaiming the imminent triumph of Reason and Science over Religion, which they characterized as necessarily superstitious and evil, something of which no good could possibly come.
Eagleton is not a believer himself, but he knows enough about what the Gospels say to vigorously contest that assessment. Mixed as the history of religious belief may be, it surely includes some good, and it’s only fair to acknowledge it. “Insofar as the faith I have described is neither stupid nor vicious, then I believe it is worth putting in a word for it against the enormous condescension of those like Ditchkins, who in a fine equipoise of arrogance and ignorance assert that all religious belief is repulsive. That a great deal of it is indeed repulsive, not to speak of nonsensical, is not a bone of contention between us.” (Conflating Dawkins and Hitchins as ‘Ditchkins’ is a rhetorical convenience. Eagleton does make distinctions, such as considering Hitchins the better writer, but heinously wrong in his support of the Iraq war.)
Eagleton easily makes his case that the militant atheists are arguing the wrong questions: “Science and theology are for the most part not talking about the same kind of things, any more than orthodontics and literary criticism are. This is one reason for the grotesque misunderstandings that arise between them.” Orthodox faith would actually agree with Ditchkins that God is not an entity to be looked for in the world, and hence the question ‘Does God exist?’ is the wrong question; but Ditchkins has not looked into the matter seriously enough to see what’s wrong with it.
In the real world, some people of faith are mindlessly dogmatic and others are not, and this is true whether what they are faithful to is God, science, or reason itself. The zealots, of whatever stripe, tend to resemble each other: “Hitchens dislikes people who ‘know they are right’ but most of the time he sounds very much like one of them himself.”
Eagleton himself is commendably willing to entertain exceptions to his arguments, and he gives due credit to dogma, in its place. “The liberal principles of freedom and tolerance are dogmas, and are none the worse for that. It is simply a liberal paradox that there must be something close-minded about open-mindedness and something inflexible about tolerance.” Whatever positions we hold, whatever dogmas we embrace, it behooves us to remember that we can’t prove them all: there’s no logical reason to suppose that logical reasoning can make sense of everything in the world. Nor is there any reason to suppose, with Ditchkins, that human beings are growing in moral stature faster than we’re developing the means to commit mayhem.
Eagleton’s own quarrel with Christianity is, all in spite of himself, a more passionate matter. In his reading, the gospel story is about a world turned upside down, where justice prevails and the hungry are fed. God’s presence on earth is presented as “homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, ...and a scourge of the rich and powerful.” A religious culture that pays obsessive attention to sexual purity and personal salvation has, in his view, gone sadly off the rails.
The notion of Christianity as the putative standard of the capitalist Free World is, if anything, even more of a travesty. “Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins. Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive.” In fact, says Eagleton, “Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic.” But we don’t like to admit it. We don’t want to live as though the bottom line were the last word; dogmatic religiosity is one natural reaction.
But we are living in a time when our hope lies in facing our situation authentically. It’s more than possible that we will not be able to solve our problems by more aggressiveness on the one hand, or more cogitation on the other. “In the end, only love (of which faith is a particular form) can achieve the well-nigh impossible goal of seeing a situation as it really is, shorn of both the brittle enchantments of romance and the disheveled fantasies of desire.”
This book is a feast; there is far more richness its 170 pages than I have room to tell you about. The author of some forty books, Eagleton is as erudite and witty as he is prolific. If I’m ever tempted to try to read about literary theory, or Marxism, I’ll be sure to start with him; he brings valuable insights to the subjects I already like.
Email January 2012
Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Terry Eagleton (2009, Yale University Press)
I’m late to the party--Terry Eagleton delivered the lectures on which Reason, Faith, and Revolution is based in 2008, when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were making headlines with the so-called God Debate. Most prominently among a handful of high-powered scientists and social critics, they had published books (The God Delusion and God is not Great, respectively) proclaiming the imminent triumph of Reason and Science over Religion, which they characterized as necessarily superstitious and evil, something of which no good could possibly come.
Eagleton is not a believer himself, but he knows enough about what the Gospels say to vigorously contest that assessment. Mixed as the history of religious belief may be, it surely includes some good, and it’s only fair to acknowledge it. “Insofar as the faith I have described is neither stupid nor vicious, then I believe it is worth putting in a word for it against the enormous condescension of those like Ditchkins, who in a fine equipoise of arrogance and ignorance assert that all religious belief is repulsive. That a great deal of it is indeed repulsive, not to speak of nonsensical, is not a bone of contention between us.” (Conflating Dawkins and Hitchins as ‘Ditchkins’ is a rhetorical convenience. Eagleton does make distinctions, such as considering Hitchins the better writer, but heinously wrong in his support of the Iraq war.)
Eagleton easily makes his case that the militant atheists are arguing the wrong questions: “Science and theology are for the most part not talking about the same kind of things, any more than orthodontics and literary criticism are. This is one reason for the grotesque misunderstandings that arise between them.” Orthodox faith would actually agree with Ditchkins that God is not an entity to be looked for in the world, and hence the question ‘Does God exist?’ is the wrong question; but Ditchkins has not looked into the matter seriously enough to see what’s wrong with it.
In the real world, some people of faith are mindlessly dogmatic and others are not, and this is true whether what they are faithful to is God, science, or reason itself. The zealots, of whatever stripe, tend to resemble each other: “Hitchens dislikes people who ‘know they are right’ but most of the time he sounds very much like one of them himself.”
Eagleton himself is commendably willing to entertain exceptions to his arguments, and he gives due credit to dogma, in its place. “The liberal principles of freedom and tolerance are dogmas, and are none the worse for that. It is simply a liberal paradox that there must be something close-minded about open-mindedness and something inflexible about tolerance.” Whatever positions we hold, whatever dogmas we embrace, it behooves us to remember that we can’t prove them all: there’s no logical reason to suppose that logical reasoning can make sense of everything in the world. Nor is there any reason to suppose, with Ditchkins, that human beings are growing in moral stature faster than we’re developing the means to commit mayhem.
Eagleton’s own quarrel with Christianity is, all in spite of himself, a more passionate matter. In his reading, the gospel story is about a world turned upside down, where justice prevails and the hungry are fed. God’s presence on earth is presented as “homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, ...and a scourge of the rich and powerful.” A religious culture that pays obsessive attention to sexual purity and personal salvation has, in his view, gone sadly off the rails.
The notion of Christianity as the putative standard of the capitalist Free World is, if anything, even more of a travesty. “Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins. Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive.” In fact, says Eagleton, “Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic.” But we don’t like to admit it. We don’t want to live as though the bottom line were the last word; dogmatic religiosity is one natural reaction.
But we are living in a time when our hope lies in facing our situation authentically. It’s more than possible that we will not be able to solve our problems by more aggressiveness on the one hand, or more cogitation on the other. “In the end, only love (of which faith is a particular form) can achieve the well-nigh impossible goal of seeing a situation as it really is, shorn of both the brittle enchantments of romance and the disheveled fantasies of desire.”
This book is a feast; there is far more richness its 170 pages than I have room to tell you about. The author of some forty books, Eagleton is as erudite and witty as he is prolific. If I’m ever tempted to try to read about literary theory, or Marxism, I’ll be sure to start with him; he brings valuable insights to the subjects I already like.
Email January 2012
Friday, December 2, 2011
Breaking up with God
Any Good Books, December 2011
Breaking up with God: A Love Story
Sarah Sentilles (HarperCollins, 2011)
In her memoir Breaking up with God, Sarah Sentilles uses the extended metaphor of a love affair. She has some reservations, though: “Figuring it as a romance seems simultaneously so medieval-mystic, so patriarchal, so oedipal that it makes me cringe. Ever worse, calling it a breakup means I have to come out: I have to admit to myself and to the rest of the world the kind of God I loved–namely, a man.” Yes, a man: loving, tender, and wise, but also jealous and moody, and sometimes a little scary.
Of course, he’s an old family friend, someone she’s known all her life. Sentilles was raised in Catholic schools and churches, though her mother brought an Episcopalian sensibility to her parenting. “Her ongoing critical commentary gave me an early theological education: People tell a lot of stories about God, but only some of them are true.” The prevailing story in the church where she was confirmed included a God who took attendance in church, but when Sentilles got to Yale, she was ready to leave that behind. She majored in literature, with a side helping of philosophy.
After college, she moved to southern California, working in Compton with Teach for America. She discovered a much warmer and more welcoming God at All Saints, Pasadena, where she became so enraptured that she decided to become a priest. “By the time I arrived at All Saints, I had lived most of my life trying to be the person I thought other people wanted me to be because I believed that was the only way I would ever be loved. ... All Saints offered me a way out of this. God loves you God loves you God loves you, I heard every single Sunday. The priests promised God loved me exactly as I was, with all my flaws and failings and shortcomings.” But, at twenty-three, Sentilles was far from free of the urge to be what others wanted her to be, and becoming a priest was a very good way to feel special.
The master of divinity program at Harvard can lead to the Episcopal priesthood, but the way is hardly straight. It leads through “Martin Luther’s belief that to fulfill the law you had to love the law, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s ‘ditch,’ Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Paul Tillich’s ‘ultimate concern,’ and Gordon Kaufman’s ‘serendipitous creativity.’” In the course of all this theologizing, Sentilles found that “a canyon began to open between the God I was in love with and the God I was studying.”
If God is fundamentally beyond our comprehension, Gordon Kaufman suggests, then everything we say about him is a construction of the human imagination. This is both a profoundly liberating idea and a dangerously disorienting one, which deepened the chasm between Sentilles’s head and her heart. If God is a fundamentally unknowable mystery, then what was the God who loves her so much but her own wish fulfilled?
The conceivable attributes and constructions of God multiplied on every hand. Feminist theology, liberation theology, and the Nag Hammadi texts all opened up worlds of conjecture and contention, and Sentilles was intoxicated by the possibilities. “I wanted to share what I had learned with a community–to show the kind of expansive thinking about God that was possible, to illustrate how God language could change the world, to work together to do good.”
Meanwhile, ominously (from the standpoint of the priesthood project) she had never found a church to worship with on Sundays. No church she visited held a candle to her beloved All Saints, and because she was not yet in the ordination process, she had nobody in a counseling role to force the issue. So it was something of a shock when Sentilles, after earning her degree, went to work in a suburban Boston church. “Theology, it seemed, was not the point of running a church. Being an institution was the point. Raising money, obeying the hierarchy, following rules, being right, counting the number of people in the pews, ... –that was church work.”
The congregation also disappointed her: “They came to figure out how to live a life with meaning, how to do go work in the world, how to give back, how to be better people. They came to church to be fed, with bread and wine during Communion. They craved connection, and church seemed like a place where this might happen. God was almost incidental to the whole enterprise–background noise.”
She sounds so young, doesn’t she? Those don’t sound like such terrible reasons for going to church, particularly since her own craving for connection had drawn her in at All Saints. Though she had a discernment committee at last, through the church she was working in, the fracture between what she had learned about God and what the church was prepared to entertain had widened beyond healing.
Her sense of fracture and confusion led her to be madly honest with the discernment committee, in the secret hope that they would turn down her application and let her off the hook, which is how it turned out. “I broke up with God that night. I broke up with the priesthood. I broke up with the river and the sky opening and the dove calling me beloved. I broke up with chosenness and salvation and belonging. And I imagined God held me while I cried.”
Her anguish notwithstanding, I see it as good news that Sentilles was not permitted to become a priest. And it’s not terribly surprising that her faith was also a casualty, though I can’t call that good news; it’s just the way of things, a natural consequence of misguided expectations and hopes. Her metaphor is apt: she was like a bride who was so taken with the role of bride that she never spared any thought for what being a wife would be like. Standing up at the bridal shower and calling the whole thing off was the hardest thing to do, except for going through with it. It was a healthy crisis.
Sentilles landed on her feet, partly by becoming attached to a flesh-and-blood man, and learning how not to give away all her power to him. She finished a doctorate in theology at Harvard, and then became a teacher and a (very good) writer. She moved on to engage with the world in a new way; I wonder if God is still waiting for her.
Email column, December 2012
Breaking up with God: A Love Story
Sarah Sentilles (HarperCollins, 2011)
In her memoir Breaking up with God, Sarah Sentilles uses the extended metaphor of a love affair. She has some reservations, though: “Figuring it as a romance seems simultaneously so medieval-mystic, so patriarchal, so oedipal that it makes me cringe. Ever worse, calling it a breakup means I have to come out: I have to admit to myself and to the rest of the world the kind of God I loved–namely, a man.” Yes, a man: loving, tender, and wise, but also jealous and moody, and sometimes a little scary.
Of course, he’s an old family friend, someone she’s known all her life. Sentilles was raised in Catholic schools and churches, though her mother brought an Episcopalian sensibility to her parenting. “Her ongoing critical commentary gave me an early theological education: People tell a lot of stories about God, but only some of them are true.” The prevailing story in the church where she was confirmed included a God who took attendance in church, but when Sentilles got to Yale, she was ready to leave that behind. She majored in literature, with a side helping of philosophy.
After college, she moved to southern California, working in Compton with Teach for America. She discovered a much warmer and more welcoming God at All Saints, Pasadena, where she became so enraptured that she decided to become a priest. “By the time I arrived at All Saints, I had lived most of my life trying to be the person I thought other people wanted me to be because I believed that was the only way I would ever be loved. ... All Saints offered me a way out of this. God loves you God loves you God loves you, I heard every single Sunday. The priests promised God loved me exactly as I was, with all my flaws and failings and shortcomings.” But, at twenty-three, Sentilles was far from free of the urge to be what others wanted her to be, and becoming a priest was a very good way to feel special.
The master of divinity program at Harvard can lead to the Episcopal priesthood, but the way is hardly straight. It leads through “Martin Luther’s belief that to fulfill the law you had to love the law, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s ‘ditch,’ Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Paul Tillich’s ‘ultimate concern,’ and Gordon Kaufman’s ‘serendipitous creativity.’” In the course of all this theologizing, Sentilles found that “a canyon began to open between the God I was in love with and the God I was studying.”
If God is fundamentally beyond our comprehension, Gordon Kaufman suggests, then everything we say about him is a construction of the human imagination. This is both a profoundly liberating idea and a dangerously disorienting one, which deepened the chasm between Sentilles’s head and her heart. If God is a fundamentally unknowable mystery, then what was the God who loves her so much but her own wish fulfilled?
The conceivable attributes and constructions of God multiplied on every hand. Feminist theology, liberation theology, and the Nag Hammadi texts all opened up worlds of conjecture and contention, and Sentilles was intoxicated by the possibilities. “I wanted to share what I had learned with a community–to show the kind of expansive thinking about God that was possible, to illustrate how God language could change the world, to work together to do good.”
Meanwhile, ominously (from the standpoint of the priesthood project) she had never found a church to worship with on Sundays. No church she visited held a candle to her beloved All Saints, and because she was not yet in the ordination process, she had nobody in a counseling role to force the issue. So it was something of a shock when Sentilles, after earning her degree, went to work in a suburban Boston church. “Theology, it seemed, was not the point of running a church. Being an institution was the point. Raising money, obeying the hierarchy, following rules, being right, counting the number of people in the pews, ... –that was church work.”
The congregation also disappointed her: “They came to figure out how to live a life with meaning, how to do go work in the world, how to give back, how to be better people. They came to church to be fed, with bread and wine during Communion. They craved connection, and church seemed like a place where this might happen. God was almost incidental to the whole enterprise–background noise.”
She sounds so young, doesn’t she? Those don’t sound like such terrible reasons for going to church, particularly since her own craving for connection had drawn her in at All Saints. Though she had a discernment committee at last, through the church she was working in, the fracture between what she had learned about God and what the church was prepared to entertain had widened beyond healing.
Her sense of fracture and confusion led her to be madly honest with the discernment committee, in the secret hope that they would turn down her application and let her off the hook, which is how it turned out. “I broke up with God that night. I broke up with the priesthood. I broke up with the river and the sky opening and the dove calling me beloved. I broke up with chosenness and salvation and belonging. And I imagined God held me while I cried.”
Her anguish notwithstanding, I see it as good news that Sentilles was not permitted to become a priest. And it’s not terribly surprising that her faith was also a casualty, though I can’t call that good news; it’s just the way of things, a natural consequence of misguided expectations and hopes. Her metaphor is apt: she was like a bride who was so taken with the role of bride that she never spared any thought for what being a wife would be like. Standing up at the bridal shower and calling the whole thing off was the hardest thing to do, except for going through with it. It was a healthy crisis.
Sentilles landed on her feet, partly by becoming attached to a flesh-and-blood man, and learning how not to give away all her power to him. She finished a doctorate in theology at Harvard, and then became a teacher and a (very good) writer. She moved on to engage with the world in a new way; I wonder if God is still waiting for her.
Email column, December 2012
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
The Belief Instinct
The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life
Jesse Bering (2011, W.W. Norton)
There was no way I could resist a book called The Belief Instinct, even on discovering that it was intended to debunk the fallacies about God that make us religious. Jesse Bering’s stance is psychological and evolutionary, rather than philosophical, on the one hand, or neurobiological, on the other, and this is all to the good. I have other sources for MRI images of the parts of the brain that seem related to transcendent experience; for Bering’s purposes, I’m content with the brain as a wet Black Box.
I am a big fan of evolutionary stories, and the ingenious ways modern psychologists try to test them, whether by comparing humans with apes and monkeys, or by practicing elaborate deceptions on small children. As it turns out, evolution has provided us with very robust tools for dealing with the social world. We find it easier than not to imagine that other people reason the same way we do, or that events have causes. If we feel that we are being watched, or that a deceased loved one might be alive but out of town for a long stretch, it’s only natural. It’s but a small step to extending such imaginings to the supernatural realm, with or without a specifically religious apparatus in place.
After demonstrating all this, Bering continues, as a rationalist atheist, to rue it. He says, “We can squint our mind’s eye so that the glare of our subjective biases is reduced, but in general we’ve evolved a powerful set of cognitive illusions preventing us from sustained moments of clarity.” Many people won’t even go that far, because such moments of clarity are so much less satisfying than the comfort of the illusion.
In short, viewing these things as illusions dispels them only in very tough-minded people, (or people with Asperger’s syndrome, which may tell us something in itself.) Bering’s conclusion is that we are the first generation with the psychological insight to see the Man behind the Curtain of our evolutionary heritage, but he doubts we’ll do it, and he admits that it’s an open philosophical question whether we’d be better off for it. (His passing suggestion that today’s social-tracking technology, all those traffic-cams and closed-circuit video systems, could replace our natural sense of an all-seeing, all-judging Almighty, strikes me as distinctly dystopian.)
In the end, I was hoping for more philosophy than this book has room for. Yes, our sense of the presence of God may be an illusion, but what then? Bering’s work stops short of grappling with the experiential reasons people might have for finding his purely logical reflections somewhat beside the point.
The short answer, and one which Bering slightly too humorless to come up with, is the joke at the end of Woody Allen’s "Annie Hall", about the guy who goes to a psychiatrist.and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,' and the doctor says, 'well why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.’
E-mail edition, November 2011
Jesse Bering (2011, W.W. Norton)
There was no way I could resist a book called The Belief Instinct, even on discovering that it was intended to debunk the fallacies about God that make us religious. Jesse Bering’s stance is psychological and evolutionary, rather than philosophical, on the one hand, or neurobiological, on the other, and this is all to the good. I have other sources for MRI images of the parts of the brain that seem related to transcendent experience; for Bering’s purposes, I’m content with the brain as a wet Black Box.
I am a big fan of evolutionary stories, and the ingenious ways modern psychologists try to test them, whether by comparing humans with apes and monkeys, or by practicing elaborate deceptions on small children. As it turns out, evolution has provided us with very robust tools for dealing with the social world. We find it easier than not to imagine that other people reason the same way we do, or that events have causes. If we feel that we are being watched, or that a deceased loved one might be alive but out of town for a long stretch, it’s only natural. It’s but a small step to extending such imaginings to the supernatural realm, with or without a specifically religious apparatus in place.
After demonstrating all this, Bering continues, as a rationalist atheist, to rue it. He says, “We can squint our mind’s eye so that the glare of our subjective biases is reduced, but in general we’ve evolved a powerful set of cognitive illusions preventing us from sustained moments of clarity.” Many people won’t even go that far, because such moments of clarity are so much less satisfying than the comfort of the illusion.
In short, viewing these things as illusions dispels them only in very tough-minded people, (or people with Asperger’s syndrome, which may tell us something in itself.) Bering’s conclusion is that we are the first generation with the psychological insight to see the Man behind the Curtain of our evolutionary heritage, but he doubts we’ll do it, and he admits that it’s an open philosophical question whether we’d be better off for it. (His passing suggestion that today’s social-tracking technology, all those traffic-cams and closed-circuit video systems, could replace our natural sense of an all-seeing, all-judging Almighty, strikes me as distinctly dystopian.)
In the end, I was hoping for more philosophy than this book has room for. Yes, our sense of the presence of God may be an illusion, but what then? Bering’s work stops short of grappling with the experiential reasons people might have for finding his purely logical reflections somewhat beside the point.
The short answer, and one which Bering slightly too humorless to come up with, is the joke at the end of Woody Allen’s "Annie Hall", about the guy who goes to a psychiatrist.and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,' and the doctor says, 'well why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.’
E-mail edition, November 2011
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