Does God need evolution to make a world? Not if you’re a hick-hillbilly creationist like these folks. Yes, that’s “folks” with the s. The new Big Unanswerable Question for the completely uneducated is, “How do black people evolve from white people?” And to think I was going to write a post about Paul Berman’s exciting new book, Flight of the Intellectuals. Goddamit, YouTube!
Ron Rosenbaum’s agnostic howler
Ron Rosenbaum has written a piece for Slate called An Agnostic Manifesto. It’s a complete howler from start to finish. A full-scale rebuttal of Rosenbaum’s argument – and that’s being generous – can be found at Pharyngula.
As anyone who reads this blog already knows (there are some of you, I promise!), I like Ron Rosenbaum. He’s a top-notch investigative reporter who wrote one of the most engrossing books I’ve read in recent memory (Explaining Hitler). That’s why I’m dismayed by his article. He’s going after scientism and calling it atheism. And how confused he is.
His arguments for agnosticism- there aren’t any new ones here at all – are meant to “hold it apart from the certitudes of both theism and atheism.” But atheism is not a certitude. As Sam Harris – that world-famous atheist – never tires of pointing out, the word atheism shouldn’t even need to exist. It only does because religious belief is so widespread. We have no word for non-astrologer. This is worth considering as Rosenbaum makes his way through the muck of his own misunderstanding.
Rosenbaum actually gives the game away early: “Let me make clear that I accept most of the New Atheist’s criticism of religious bad behavior over the centuries, and of theology itself.” This is just after he makes clear that “I still consider myself Jewish in everything but the believing in God part.” So Rosenbaum doesn’t believe in God, agrees substantially with the “new atheists'” arguments agains religion, but for some reason feels the need to distinguish himself. They just aren’t punk enough.
Rosenbaum’s gripe, if I have it correctly, isn’t with atheism at all; it’s with scientism, which he scandalously and sloppily attributes to people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. But this is like confusing meliorism with utopianism. His Big Unanswerable Question for the atheists is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He apparently is of the opinion that many, if not most, atheists think they have the answer to such a (trick) question. He hasn’t read much of the literature, clearly. Nowhere in my reading have I come across such an inane claim as to know “why” the universe exists, unless you count various scriptural claims. He has it ass backwards.
So obsessed has he grown with what he believes to be his pot of gold that he even posits the Rosenbaum Challenge:
In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.
Even if we all agree that we cannot know the answer to such a question, science at least suggests it may be knowable. Rosenbaum accepts the Mystery as eternal. Why? If scientists thought that way we would still be the cowering subjects of priests and shamans, trembling at the wrath of the gods each time we heard thunder crack beyond the hills. The anti-science posture among some intellectuals has really got to go.
Anyway, one could go through the whole article in similar fashion. But, again, why? Perhaps this “agnostic manifesto” gives some of the best reasons to just come out of the closet and go atheist. Rosenbaum’s agnosticism is little more than a caricature of what he pretends to detest (which is just what he says about the atheists). And if he really wanted the scientific-cum-atheist community to take his ranting seriously, he should’ve kept his mouth shut about his Templeton Fellowship.
Willis Barnstone interviewed in Tikkun
Tikkun has an interview with Willis Barnstone in which they discuss Barnstone’s Restored New Testament. I’ve read through a fair share of the RNT (my own interview with Barnstone should be coming out soon in the Journal of Italian Translation), though not all of it – 1500 pages! – and not only is it a strikingly fluid translation in modern English, but it also importantly restores the book to its original Jewish context. You don’t get that, for some reason, reading previous versions.
Money quote:
Basically, in the New Testament only the bad guys are Jews. The hero Jews, meaning Jesus, disciples, and family, come through anachronistically as from a world of later church fathers. In the Old Testament, the Jews are annoyingly called Israelites, children of Israel, Hebrews, anything but Jews (except in Esther), while in the NT the word Jew is used everywhere as a curse. Yet the New Testament was written about Jews, for Jews, and by Jews. Who else were they? Galileans descended from Mars?
The Jewish question in Southern Italy
Haaretz ran a long article back in April on the Jewish revival in Southern Italy. Long story short: once upon a time Italy’s south was brimming with Jewish life, from Roman antiquity straight through the Arab conquest of Sicily, which came to an end with the Christian Inquisition. But the Jews didn’t just disappear. They weren’t murdered off, though there was violence. They were converted to Christianity, their culture was appropriated by the Church (synagogues made into churches, Jewish books used to bind Christian ones, mikves [ritual baths] turned into pigstys, etc…) and all memory of them repressed for centuries.
So in places like Calabria or Sicily, places which almost everyone thinks of as cradles of traditional Catholicism, there are essentially huge numbers of marranos, or secret Jews, similar to what happened in Spain and Portugal during and after the Inquisition. This has led to a number of modern-day conversions back to Judaism, sometimes even of whole communities like that of Trani, in Puglia. Often informal groups sprout up, doing things like getting together on Friday evening or sitting shiva after a death in the family. Many of them are surprised – but not all – to learn that they in fact are enacting traditional Jewish customs.
I interviewed Rabbi Barbara Aiello, an Italian-American of Calabrian-Sicilian descent, about her activism in the South two years ago. She runs Calabria’s first (legal) synagogue in 500 or so years, celebrating bar- and bat-mitzvahs and Jewish weddings in the Calabrian hills, and offering anyone interested an encounter – perhaps their first – with Judaism. The story is a very interesting one, of course, as is marrano history in general. History is a very amorphous thing at times, and notoriously difficult to pin down, especially when records have been deliberately erased and modified, and physical signs eradicated. The Church officials couldn’t get everything, clearly, and there still exist churches with Hebrew writing in them and Jewish quarters and ritual baths fallen into disrepair all over the south of Italy. In fact, an incredible number of small towns all over in Italy have “ghettos” where Jews once thrived, but haven’t lived for centuries, attesting to their once widespread presence on the peninsula.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the officially Orthodox Italian rabbinate isn’t really interested in Aiello and the other “new” Jews of the South. But I imagine if these small communities continue to grow and proliferate – regardless of whether all these people are or are not Jews in the rabbinic sense – at some point they won’t be able to ignore them any longer. They’ll have to admit that they alone cannot be the arbiters of Jewishness from Venice to Marsala, and will in fact have to open up to the possibility of non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. It will be in their best interests. Otherwise they might be thought of as acting in imitation of the Vatican. And I know they wouldn’t want that.
The banality of conspiracy theories
David Aaronovitch explains:
Cricket match in Rome
I was at the park this morning, which is about the best place to be in Rome this time of year. Typically without camera, I saw all sorts of things worth photographing. One was a cricket match, which was kind of exciting because it was some sort of championship (there were trophies on the table and a sound system blasting Europe’s “Final Countdown”), and the other was a turtle sunning itself on a rock which looked suspiciously like a female turtle. My first thought was, “Turtles having sex!” but then I realized I’d been duped by nature. Just a turtle out getting a tan, I guess.
So you mean my mother’s not a Khazar?
The genetic evidence is in and we Jews are basically what we’ve been saying we are all along – a people. No, not a “race.” But a people with a long history which goes back to, you guessed it, the Middle East. So say the results of two recent genome studies as reported a few weeks ago in the NY Post.
This already raises spectres. Who wants to have their identity confirmed by genetics? Suppose the results were negative. Then would Jews not be a people? Jewish history is absorbing and complex, brimming with migrations and intermarriage (shhhh!), conversions and just about anything else that can happen to people over a period of thousands of years, and then some. Somehow, we are still here, which is the really interesting part. How did we get to where we are?
The Khazar theory has apparently bitten the dust, and with it will go The Invention of the Jewish People, last year’s shock-schlock bestseller (well, if you count France and Britain). Shlomo Sand’s thesis was essentially that what we call “Jewish history” is little more than a Zionist construct. Cui bono, you ask? Clearly to appropriate Palestine from its rightful occupiers, then swindle the world with tall tales of expulsion and diaspora.
Martin Goodman reviewed it for the TLS, concluding that:
In a self-glorifying preface to this book, Sand describes his role as that of a revealer of inconvenient facts suppressed by a malicious political and academic establishment. Some of those who have expressed approval of his book may believe that, like the Israeli New Historians whose discovery of genuinely new data on the events of 1948 has indeed caused much discomfort to that establishment, Shlomo Sand, too, has faced opposition because he has unearthed something new. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Shall Shlomo Sand now eat humble pie?
* If any of you are seriously interested in critiques of Sand’s book, Anita Shapira reviewed it here; Hillel Halkin’s review is here.
Zizek!?
Lately I’ve been perplexed by the seemingly unstoppable popularity of Slavoj Zizek. Not only does his incomprehensible rhetoric annoy me (that would hardly make him special), but his actual positions are puerile when he finally gets around to articulating them. Nonetheless, I actually sort of like him despite his best efforts to be monstrous. He’s said similar things about Jesus – and Stalin, too.
Because that’s what Zizek does. He plays on our preconceptions (Hitler was evil; Jesus was good)) and turns them against us (Hitler was less evil than Stalin; Jesus was a monster), which isn’t always a bad way to make a point. I just wish he could do it without all that Lacanian-Derridean-derived jargon that gets in the way of everything. I found a review of Zizek! by Johann Hari which gets it right:
When you peel back the patina of postmodernism, there is old-fashioned philo-tyrannical nonsense here. At some level, Zizek knows that this is preposterous – he lived under Soviet tyranny, and even joined the opposition. Simply by putting a camera in front of him and leaving it running, Taylor sees his facade and his ideas crumble.
Hari came under fire for this review. Ophelia Benson defended him. There was a massive comment-volley on Butterflies and Wheels (Benson’s site) which is worth reading. Essentially, Hari was attacked for not having read and thoroughly considered the whole of Zizeks’ work (this was back in 2007 by the way), as if that were necessary for a film review. Hari wrote in plain English, and for this he was called a “reactionary anti-intellectual.” He was lambasted for “denouncing” Slavoj Zizek.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Summer Reading
Lauro De Bosis
Since I first read about him, I have always been intrigued by the little-known Italian poet Lauro De Bosis. Born in Rome in 1901, he vanished while flying solo over the Mediterranean at the age of 29. Apart from a Rome piazza bearing his name — which, ironically or not, houses an obelisk with the vertical inscription MUSSOLINI DUX down one side — De Bosis is lost to history.
I first came across his name in “The Oxford Book of Italian Poetry,” which I found while scavenging the shelves of the Gotham Book Mart for anything in Italian. He edited the volume before his death.
Though the book was a goldmine, it was his personal story that caught my attention. He was the son of Adolfo De Bosis, an esteemed poet and translator of Whitman, Shelley and Homer, and Lillian Vernon, a New Englander and daughter of a Methodist minister who grew up in Italy. Since I’m the son of Roman and a New Englander, the story was irresistible.
In the years before Mussolini rose to power, De Bosis’s Rome home was a kind of intellectual salon. Like many thinker of his day, De Bosis had flirted briefly with fascism in its early phase, though he grew quickly disillusioned with Mussolini after the murder of the anti-fascist politician Giacomo Matteotti.
His verse drama “Icaro”, written in 1927, was an anti-fascist allegory disguised as a retelling of the Greek myth of Icarus. The poem culminates, as does the legend and De Bosis’ own life, with the hero’s glorious flight and subsequent fall into oblivion.
I kept the New York Public Library’s copy of “Icaro” on loan for months. De Bosis’s companion, the American actress Ruth Draper, had translated it in the early 1930s. By then, my curiosity was obsessive. Had De Bosis really prefigured his own end? The symmetry between his only completed poetic work and his actual death was an eerie footnote to his legend. Or rather, it was his legend. I finally bought my own copy of “Icaro” from an online bookshop.
De Bosis shuttled back and forth between Italy and the United States, where he taught Italian literature at Harvard. While abroad, many of his friends and family were arrested by the regime, including his mother. He crime? She had assisted her son’s dissident political activities by operating his mimeograph machine in his absence.
According to historian Gaetano Salvemini, when the arresting officer courteously asked her, “Why did you do it?”, she fell back on Mussolini’s recent reference to the Italians as “40 million docile Italian sheep” who gave wool to the government. “Because I am not a sheep,” she replied.
De Bosis then devised a plan. He purchased a small plane, filled it with hundreds of thousands of pamphlets denouncing the atrocities of Mussolini’s regime, and dropped them over Rome at the crowded dinner hour.
The pamphlets’ were dated “Rome, year VIII since the murder of Matteotti.” The mockery of the regime was obvious: It’s own dating system had started 1922, a perverse satire of the Christian Anno Domini. The De Bosis pamphlet contained a 10-point message to the Italian people on the need for resistance, accompanied by a letter to King Victor Emmanuel II. It was signed “The Director.” Among the points:
- 1. Never attend fascist ceremonies.
2. Don’t buy newspapers. They are all full of lies.
3. Don’t smoke.
4. Say and do nothing that may be interpreted by the regime as obedient.
The final point was the essential one, and it runs through his poetry and letters: “Have faith in Italy and in Liberty. The defeatism of the Italians is the real basis of the fascist regime. We are in full Risorgimento. Don’t despair.”
After De Bosis completed his run, he and his plane vanished over the sea.
When I left the United States for Italy I was busy working on my own translation of “Icaro.” I was even in touch with author and translator Arturo Vivante, De Bosis’s nephew. Nearing his eighties, he lived in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and ran a small press called Delphinium. I sent him a few verses of “Icaro.” He responded in tiny, almost illegible script: “Lauro, who cared a great deal for his play, would have been very pleased.” Vivante died in 2008.
I had planned to continue working on “Icaro” once in Rome. Maybe I was put off by De Bosis’s seeming anonymity among his countrymen, or maybe I was just too busy perfecting the language and letting the city flow through me to be bothered, but the incomplete translation is now in the dusty bottom drawer in my writing desk. I pick it up from time to time. It is written mostly in pencil on broad-lined yellow stationary and makes me marvel at the ambition of a younger self.
After years of chasing down De Bosis’s shadow, his other surviving nephew, the engineer and author Roberto Vacca eventually contacted me. He’d found me through a piece I’d written for this magazine on the Roman poet G.G. Belli. Generous and encouraging, he has often regaled me with anecdotes about the lively De Bosis household.
But I don’t despair over my half-finished work. A day will come when I’ll feel up to the task of finishing up “Icaro,” and give this literary curio a second life. Circumstances could not be more favorable.
Marc Di Martino 