Homecoming

I’m coming home at last.
That is, I’m returning to blogging,
But but under a new guise.
In the last several years,
Photography has increasingly become a passion of mine.
And now I’m building a business around it,
As I enter a new phase of my career.
I bring this to your attention
Because my blogging at 1103 Photography is deeply influenced by what I read.
If you’re curious, please swing by for a visit.
Thank you, and happy reading!
—Mr. Interpolations

facing the darkness of ignorance with aplomb

I’m reading To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I read the novel years ago without understanding. I know that for certain because I’m reading it now with little to modest comprehension. It’s a great enjoyable challenging read, moving obliquely, as it does, from tangles of sensations to things, moving from the swirl of feelings and musings and reveries to objects like books, trees, oceans, children, windows, and so on. It’s a profound novel. I sense how profound it is, I sense it when I read it, and I sense the world around me becoming profound when I read it. Experiences and things mysteriously conspire or happen in parallel; they goad and anticipate each other in surprising ways. I sense all this when I’m reading at lunch as I’ve been doing every day this week, sitting on a bench that’s perched on a spit of land near the bay, slowly rising and eating away at the shore where I sit, alone. And while I sit and read at the edge of the sea, I come upon this miraculously-phrased passage, which performs the very thing it’s been describing all along: “It was his fate [Whose: his or mine?], his peculiarity [Yes, yes.], whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land [!!!], which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand like a desolate sea-bird, alone.” Him or me, or both? And how comes it that the bay and the sea rise up at just that moment to meet on a spit of land, where I’m perched on a bench reading, alone—wait, no, together-alone with a novel and my own reveries? I close the book and smile on my ignorance and the serendipity of it all.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Or saving an angry, bitter soul.

Fans of Marilynne Robinson’s gentle storytelling style know that Lila has hit the shelves.

Revisiting the setting and characters of Gilead and Home, Lila is an unabashed exploration of grace or the power of connection to save us.

Bitter, injured psyches are healed mainly by their connections to others but also by their connections to texts, memories, and the little glories of nature.

Little glories, big significance.

Like shimmering leaves, sweet elderberries, and a burning bush.

“She had never been at home in all the years of her life. She wouldn’t know how to begin. But the shade of the cottonwoods and the shimmer of their leaves and the trill of the cicadas were comfort for her. The pasture smell. Elderberries grew in the ditches by the road, and they picked them and ate them as they walked. Sometimes it was dark when they turned back toward Gilead. Once, he noticed a bush glimmering with fireflies. He stepped into the ditch and touched it, and fireflies rose out of it in a cloud of light.”

I have a love affair with fireflies and can’t resist them, in nature or in literary texts.

I’ve enthused about this delightful little insect before, here and here. And when I read this passage in Lila, I knew I’d share it with Somebody.

Which is after all the first step in connecting with others.

Ars Poetica For The Ones Like Us

Simple language, complex effects.
A poem about a story about a man
Whose song becomes a never-ending poem.
That is, a poem about a poem.
Ars poetica, indeed.
This unending poem is like a home that protects and shuts out the world,
With an attic “where aesthetic and spiritual innuendoes / Float.”
Leakages occur across the inside-outside divide,
Life and art with their competing demands.
This poem by Terrance Hayes deserves a wide readership.
But remember to open the windows
And let the world in.
Yes, you.

The Dark Side of Sympathy

If you think reason is the better angel of our nature, think again.

According to Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind, the noblest aspect of human nature is revealed in our sympathetic dealings with others. Sympathy, not reason, is the royal road to overcoming selfish and destructive behaviors. Yet even sympathy has a dark side, as indicated by the title of the book. But before we explore the dangers of sympathy, here’s a quick overview of Haidt’s fascinating work.

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt plumbs the latest in neuroscience, genetics, social psychology, and evolutionary theory to provide an account of how people think and the evolutionary forces that have shaped our thoughts and feelings. Ultimately, he advances three principles of moral psychology:

1. Intuitions come first, strategic reason second

“We don’t reason about moral matters to discover the truth,” says Haidt. “We reason to justify our beliefs.” In the early 90’s, Haidt conducted interviews to probe reactions to the morality of harmless but offensive stories. Thirty eight percent of those he surveyed claimed someone was harmed even though the stories were carefully crafted to exclude harm. He found the people quickly condemned the action in a snap judgment. Haidt construes this as evidence that reasoning often serves intuitions, not the other way round.

2. There’s more to morality than harm and fairness

In the Western world, we’ve embraced an ethic of autonomy, which protects rights and liberty and balances justice for individuals. We tend to think that actions are permissible so long as they don’t harm anyone else. But there are other moral frameworks in the world, as a simple matter of fact.

In an ethic of community, moral concerns center on duty, hierarchy, respect, and patriotism. Here people are viewed as members of a group, not as separate individual people. Tribes, groups and families are worthy of moral regard, independently of what a person thinks or feels.

In an ethic of divinity, central moral concepts include sin, sanctity and purity. People are seen in relationship to God, gods, or something supreme that’s worthy of worship. In this worldview, moral concerns focus on the need to protect the “divine” dimension of life.

Now if you’re like me, you’re at home in an ethic of autonomy. But before you shrug off the moral language of community and divinity, ask yourself, “Is it OK for a brother and sister to have consensual yet 100% protected sex?” Or, “Is it OK to use a dead chicken for sexual gratification?”

Well, is it?

Like Haidt says, there’s more to morality than harm and fairness.

3. Morality binds and blinds

Morality has a light and a dark side. On the one hand, morality enables people to get along within a group.

“When I say that human nature is selfish,” Haidt explains, “I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups. We are not saint, but we are sometimes good team players.”

On the other hand, morality, in enabling us to overcome selfishness and form cohesive groups, creates a new problem, namely, out-group tension and conflict.

“Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.”

Beyond the righteous mind

One of the finest aspects of Haidt’s work is that he suggests a path forward, a way for us to accept the brute facts of in-group and out-group dynamics, while identifying areas where interventions, both technological and educational, can help minimize the effects of our moral blind spots.

Full piece is cross-posted on the HopeLab blog.