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Atheism Growing disbelief
Aug 22nd 2012, 19:30 by The Economist online | WASHINGTON
【speed 1】
AMERICA is not an easy place for atheists. Religion pervades the public sphere, and studies show that non-believers are more distrusted than other minorities. Several states still ban atheists from holding public office. These rules, which are unconstitutional, are never enforced, but that hardly matters. Over 40% of Americans say they would never vote for an atheist presidential candidate.
Yet the past seven years have seen a fivefold increase in people who call themselves atheists, to 5% of the population, according to WIN-Gallup International, a network of pollsters. Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans who say they are religious has fallen from 73% in 2005 to 60% in 2011. Such a large drop in religiosity is startling, but the data on atheists are in line with other polling. A Pew survey in 2009 also found that 5% of Americans did not believe in God. But only a quarter of those called themselves atheists. The newest polling, therefore, may simply show an increase in those willing to say the word.
This change may have come about because of an informal movement of non-believers known as “New Atheism”. Over the past eight years, authors such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens have attacked religion in bestselling books, appealing persuasively to logic and science. Mr Dawkins, a British biologist, has especially encouraged people to declare their disbelief.
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【speed 2】
Earlier this year he spoke at the “Reason Rally”, a gathering of thousands of secularists on the Mall in Washington, DC. “We are approaching a tipping point”, he predicted, “where the number of people who have come out becomes so great that suddenly everyone will realise, I can come out too.”
Some are doing so loudly. When Democratic convention-goers arrive in Charlotte, North Carolina, they will be greeted by a billboard sponsored by a group called American Atheists that claims Christianity “promotes hate” and exalts a “useless savior”. A similar billboard mocking Mormonism was planned for the Republican convention, but no one would sell the group space.
American Atheists is also trying to block the display of a cross-shaped steel beam at the September 11th museum in New York. The beam, found in the wreckage of the World Trade Centre, was a totem for rescuers. The atheists see its inclusion as an unconstitutional mingling of church and state. The museum says the cross is an historical artifact, and that anyway it is not a government agency. Fights like this are unlikely to enhance atheism’s growing appeal in America.
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【speed 3】
Towards a new enlightenment?
Aug 18th 2012 | EDINBURGH | from the print edition
From the sublime to the frankly nutty
“IT’S a show about friends who hate each other!” declares a woman handing out flyers. Nearby, a lad with his trousers around his ankles tries to sell tickets to a comedy sketch show. It is August in Edinburgh, when more than 25,000 artists and performers from around the world come to peddle their wares at a clutch of famous festivals, among them the counter-cultural Fringe. In a more subdued bit of local theatre, representatives from nearly 40 countries gathered this week for the first-ever Edinburgh International Culture Summit.
A high-level chin-wag about culture is about as hard-hitting as it sounds. There were speeches on the power of art by a festival director in Sarajevo, a theatre director in the Middle East, and ministers from the British and Scottish governments, among others. The word “dialogue” cropped up a lot; the “challenge” of funding was discussed. Some Scottish protesters in “Free Palestine” T-shirts outside the building lent a titillating air of controversy to the otherwise bland proceedings.
But the event, sponsored by the British government and others, mattered to many, not least the ruling Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP). It was a chance to spread Scotland’s cultural offerings before a wider audience, underlining its claims to a separate identity in the run-up to the referendum in 2014 on whether to leave the union.
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【speed 4】
Between the queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, Scottish nationalists have found it a trying summer. Scottish athletes—dubbed “Scolympians” by Alex Salmond, leader of the SNP and first minister of the Scottish government—won or contributed to 12 of Britain’s 65 Olympic medals. But Sir Chris Hoy, the Scottish cyclist who is Britain’s most successful Olympic athlete, was quick to say he was “proud” to be part of the British team. Andy Murray, a Scottish tennis star, accepted his gold medal draped in a Union flag and his lips were seen to move during “God Save the Queen”.
The summit served to drag the spotlight briefly from London to Edinburgh, and at a time when Scotland’s arts scene similarly punches above its weight. During August Edinburgh becomes “international by audience and artist”, says Jonathan Mills, the head of the Edinburgh International Festival, attracting more than 4m spectators. The summit was his idea, as he realized the world’s culture ministers would already be in Britain for the Olympics and might be lured to the “Athens of the North” for some high-minded schmoozing. 。
Edinburgh’s role as a cultural hotbed dates from the 18th and early 19th centuries, when Adam Smith, David Hume, Walter Scott and others capitalists on the city’s concentration of printers to write some of the wisest and most widely read books of their day. Scots often bristle at the fact that a number of their leading lights are described by others simply as British.
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【speed 5】
Scotland has had “an extraordinary revival of culture” recently, says Nick Barley, the head of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He attributes this partly to its festival culture, which began after the Second World War. Festivals have given Scottish artists and writers a chance to polish their own creations and get to know work from elsewhere. Shows such as “Black Watch”, which won awards in New York in 2011, and “Stomp”, which enlivened the closing ceremony of the London Olympics, first found audiences at the Fringe.
Many trace Scotland’s modern literary renaissance to a 1962 writers’ conference in Edinburgh when Americans Norman Mailer and William Burroughs tussled with Hugh MacDiarmid and Muriel Spark over the meaning of the novel, talking quite a bit about sex and drugs en route.
Mr Barley thinks there is a growing desire among writers and artists to celebrate a culture that is uniquely Scottish. The government is keen to oblige, devoting more than £8m this year to special cultural projects. There is more to come as the referendum approaches (as indeed do the Commonwealth games, which are to be held in Scotland in 2014). But with opinion polls showing support for leaving the union languishing at around 30%, it may take more than cultural summits and the like to change public sentiment.
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[Obstacle]
How to Be a Critic
Posted by Richard Brody
Criticism is a damned and doomed activity, because critics have (or should have) a sick feeling of bad faith every time they lift the pen or strike the keyboard. Criticism is a parasitical operation that depends not only on the activity of others (most jobs do—a builder doesn’t hew the wood or design the building) but also on the greater activity of others. It takes months or years to make a film or write a book, a few hours or a few days to dash off a review (a long and serious study is another thing altogether). A review, however rapidly composed, may well have an aphoristic brilliance or a mercurial insight that’s missing from a work under consideration (at its best, criticism is aesthetic philosophy practiced in a periodical or is in itself a literary performance). But even in the midst of such inspirations, the critic ought to harbor the shadow of a doubt whether these flourishes are conceived in the spirit of the art or at its expense.
Of course, an awful lot of art and music is made and sold and much of it isn’t particularly worthwhile; plenty of movies are deadening to watch, and the attempt to give a neutral parsing of something that sparks revulsion or even boredom is a task made in hell, because it’s a further deadening of the writer’s emotional responses. Negative criticism is as much an obligation of the nervous system—indeed, of the soul—as it is a part of the critics’ job, a responsibility to readers. But the fact that it is so—that negativity is undertaken both to save one’s sanity and to win one’s bread—is all the more reason for critics to submit their own judgments to questioning, to take their own reactions as a crucial part of what’s under their own consideration, reevaluation, and skepticism. It’s crucial for critics to acknowledge their activity as the personal enterprise that it is. If criticism is the turning of the secondary (the critic’s judgment) into the primary, then the judgment should, in turn, be judged. Criticism, if it’s worth anything at all, is, first of all, self-criticism.
It’s an impractical and difficult thing for critics to do. It’s also a reason why it’s unseemly for self-interested critics to beat their breast in pride over negativity. But this has become a popular stance, as in a Jacob Silverman’s recent post at Slate. Its very title, “Against Enthusiasm,” rankles. Enthusiasm should be more or less the only thing that gets a critic out of bed in the morning, except in the case of ghouls who are aroused by the taste of blood. But Silverman is worried:
If you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every other writer’s biggest fan.
And, who knows, it could be so; but I doubt it. Certainly, in the online discussions about movies, invective, endorsement, (often superbly trenchant) analysis, and personal discussion all blend together into a remarkably vigorous and enlightening virtual conversation. Are things really that different in the world of books? Silverman thinks so, and so does Dwight Garner, who wrote in the Times last week in favor of negative criticism. Citing and praising Silverman’s post, Garner says,
What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics—perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.
“Punishing”? “Abusive”? It sounds like the strap-wielding father who tells his children that they’re being beaten for their own good, and that’s the institutional menace of criticism—the sense that the critic represents a kind of order or rule to which the unruly artist needs to be recalled. Garner doubles down on the violent metaphors in this strange passage:
To writers, Edna St. Vincent Millay offered the wisest counsel. It rings down the decades. “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down,” she said. “If it is a good book, nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him.”
To me, it seems obvious that a person appearing in public with his pants down is susceptible to being grievously hurt or kindly helped, whether his book is good or bad. Millay may (for all I know) be right that the knowledge of having written a good book may make it easier to endure a resulting act of cruelty with stoic restraint, but this doesn’t justify the cruelty. It’s certainly the case that artists do well to ignore the nastiness and simply continue creating (Daniel Mendelsohn recently pointed out to me via Twitter that Euripides wrote “The Bacchae” in response to the caricature of him in Aristophanes’ “Thesmophoriazousae”), but critics can’t have it both ways—it’s naïve to think that negative reviews have no effect on artists’ psyches or careers, and critics should consider what it takes to recover from wounds before inflicting them.
It’s as silly to deplore nasty criticism as it is to deplore snarl or wit or sarcasm or just plain crankiness. It’s how we are—it’s how I am—and nastiness is as inseparable from criticism as it is from family life, from politics, from business, from the playground, and, for that matter, from art itself. One of the defining qualities of art is its implacability—its representation of violent and dangerous emotions, its ardor for and even embodiment of the negative, the destructive, the repugnant. Art is a place of maximal danger; it endangers the soul of the artist no less than the soul of the reader or viewer or listener. Exaltation comes at a price; sublimity, after all, involves a type of terror. Critics don’t need to be nice (programmatic niceness is itself another sort of self-falsification and self-punishment, and is at least as sanctimonious as self-justifying meanness), but they do need to know where they stand.
I’m reminded of a great scene from a great movie—Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” in which the protagonist, an actor (played by Stephen Dorff) strips naked for a massage. His masseur (not his usual one) prepares to administer the massage by taking off his own clothes, telling the actor, “I feel that if my client is naked, it’s more comfortable if I meet them on the same level.” The relationship, of course, is not on the same level— the actor is prone and vulnerable and the masseur looms above, active and handling the client—which renders their nakedness altogether incomparable. There’s no particular method for practicing criticism, no technique to prescribe and no tone to recommend, any more than there is for art. It’s a matter of sensibility—and of sensitivity.
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发表于 2012-8-25 22:57:46
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