http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_b...6MWk0DN6wY

[...] It is to these great questions of culture and religion that Terry Eagleton returns in his latest collection of lectures, as he has done so often in his work for nearly half a century. Surveying the decline of religious faith, and the diverse attempts to forge ‘surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been’, he observes that ‘the Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of’.

Though as an economic system capitalism is ‘intrinsically faithless’, relying on the dull compulsion of the market, it is a ‘true believer’ in the value of traditional religion in the sphere of morality and social conduct. The problem here is not only that the advance of market forces, science, technology and education have had a corrosive effect on popular faith.

It is also the case that the distinctive ideologies of capitalism – pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism – lack an affirmative, affective quality that might inspire the masses. Eagleton quotes the judgement of the (recently beatified) Victorian Anglo-Catholic John Henry Newman, that liberalism was ‘too cold a principle to prevail with the multitude’.

The quest for a ‘viceroy for God’ has been long and arduous. Eagleton, who likes a list, provides a long one: ‘Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.’ The very survival of religion confirms the difficulty of replacing the complex role it plays in the life of human societies.

[...] He wades through an hilarious assortment of leftists, philosophers, materialists, positivists, atheists, reluctant atheists, agnostics, deists who just can’t leave religion alone: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Régis Debray, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, George Steiner, Roger Scruton, John Gray, Simon Critchley, August Comte, Edward Gibbon, Denis Diderot, JM Synge, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Matthew Arnold, Montesquieu, Hans Vaihinger, Leo Strauss, Emile Durkheim, Voltaire, John Toland. They don’t believe a word of it, of course, but, well, it might come in handy.

The philosophers turn to theology in search of more productive questioning. The social scientists can’t stop pressing religion into socially useful service – to provide the ceremonial, the ritual, the cohesion, the unity, the discipline, the order, the sweetness and light, all of which appear to have gone out of the church window. And then there’s Alain de Botton who says he finds religion ‘sporadically interesting, useful and consoling’. As Eagleton remarks, it sounds ‘rather like rustling up a soufflé when you are feeling low’....

http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/...h-feminism

EXCERPT: [...] The Americanization of Narcissism, by the historian Elizabeth Lunbeck, is a deeply researched account of the long and complicated life the concept of narcissism has had among psychoanalysts, as well as its short, oversimplified one at the hands of the social critics who in the 1970s chose to make polemical use of it. As such, this book is by way of being a corrective. Its author seeks to rescue narcissism from the distortions she feels it has been subjected to by the critics who, instead of addressing the noisy discontent of their time with sympathetic interest, sought only to castigate it, and in the process did irreparable harm to any working definition of narcissism that was ever in analytic use.

“From the beginning,” Lunbeck writes, “analysts used narcissism to account for the best and worst in us, to explain our capacities for creativity and idealism as well as for rage and cruelty, our strivings for perfection and our delight in destructiveness.” In its fullest sense, narcissism is a complicated theory of human development that, to begin with, includes a description of the healthy selfishness that an infant or a youth demonstrates in seeking to stand on its own two feet. When one matures, this infantile selfishness drops away as one becomes an independent person with a proper respect for one’s own needs as well as the needs of others. When the process goes off the rails, and there is a failure to mature, elements of primitive self-involvement linger on throughout one’s adult years. Then, if a person is dominated by infantile self-absorption, we say they have narcissistic personality disorder.

In America, in the 1970s, two eminent analysts became famous for arguing the polarizing characteristics of narcissism—on the one hand it was normal, on the other pathological—and the analyst who argued for the pathological won the day....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/a...zlitt.html

EXCERPT: The 19th-century radical was a scathingly brilliant writer, thinker and art critic – so why is he so little read today, asks Alastair Smart? [...] The radical, early-19th-century essayist died in poverty in a Soho lodging house, aged 52, his reputation in tatters, his stomach riddled with cancer, and with two broken marriages behind him. Eager to let his room again forthwith, his landlady even hid his body under the bed as she showed around would-be, new tenants. Judging by his last words, however, Hazlitt had died content – after a decent life’s work.

Certainly, even by the non-specialist standards of his day, he had a mighty range: a philosopher, journalist, political commentator, grammar theorist, theatre critic, art critic, travel writer, memoirist – not to mention, biographer of Napoleon. Here was a serious thinker, for whom every pursuit fed into life’s deeper questions. His rise coincided with that of Romanticism. Indeed, though our popular image of the movement is dominated by its poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Co. – Hazlitt was a key figure too.

[...] Whether you find yourself agreeing with Hazlitt or not, what’s undeniable is the vigour and lucidity of his prose. He was a critic as artist-in-his-own-right, redeemed from being the mere servant of an artist, poet or playwright.

Hazlitt was also a pioneering critic, appearing at a time when public galleries were first being established (the National Gallery in 1824, for instance); and when technological developments were bringing newspapers to a mass audience. The steam press’s invention in 1814 meant they could be printed in thousands (rather than hundreds), while mail coaches allowed them to reach all corners of the land quicker than before....

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014...-lovecraft

EXCERPT: [...] Far from disappearing from view as he expected, Lovecraft has been repeatedly resurrected by successive generations. No one would now write of him as the critic Edmund Wilson did, in the New Yorker in 1945: “The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” The true horror was in fact that of judging Lovecraft by the standards of a defunct literary culture. In H P Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991) Michel Houllebecq, who has championed Lovecraft much as Baudelaire did Edgar
Allan Poe, noted that: “There is something not really literary about Lovecraft’s work.” Lovecraft’s distance from “literature” is one of the sources of his power as a writer.

That’s not to say he had no literary influences. At the Mountains of Madness, a novella describing an expedition to the Antarctic and the ancient species found there, shows affinities with Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, while “The Dunwich Horror”, a seminal tale of the “Cthulhu Mythos”, is heavily influenced by Arthur Machen, the Welsh writer of unsettling tales. Lovecraft acknowledged these debts, as well as his admiration for the work of Lord Dunsany, M R James and Walter de la Mare, among others.

Yet these influences only accentuate the singularity of Lovecraft’s vision. He discovered Poe when he read him as a young boy, and admired him ever after; but (despite superficial resemblances in subject matter) Poe exalted the human imagination over the natural world with a Romantic passion of which there is little trace in Lovecraft. In terms of philosophy, Machen and Lovecraft had little in common. De la Mare’s suspension of disbelief in everyday reality is far removed from Lovecraft’s unyielding materialism, while Dunsany’s wistful fairy tales lack his uncanniness. There may be a greater affinity with M R James, but there is nothing in Lovecraft of James’s nostalgia for the late-Victorian world.

Lovecraft was too much of an outsider to have any firm mentors. The world-view from which he fashioned his stories was distinctively his own. His atheism and materialism weren’t unusual in America at the time; H L Mencken, for one, held similar views. What is striking is what he made from this familiar philosophy.

[...] H P Lovecraft set out a view of things that animates pretty well everything he wrote thereafter: the human mind is an accident in the universe, which is indifferent to the welfare of the species. We can have no view of the scheme of things or our place in it, because there may be no such scheme. The final result of scientific inquiry could well be that the universe is a lawless chaos. Sometimes called “weird realism”, it is a disturbing vision with which Lovecraft would struggle throughout his life. [...]

The weird realism that runs through his writings undermines any belief system – religious or humanist – in which the human mind is the centre of the universe. There is a tendency nowadays to think of the world in which we live as an artefact of mind or language: a human construction. For Lovecraft, human beings are too feeble to shape a coherent view of the universe. Our minds are specks tossed about in the cosmic melee; though we look for secure foundations, we live in perpetual free fall. With its emphasis on the radical contingency of the human world, this is a refreshing alternative to the anthropocentric philosophies in which so many find intellectual reassurance. It may seem an unsettling view of things; but an inhuman cosmos need not be as horrific as Lovecraft seems to have found it.

He is often described as misanthropic, but this isn’t quite right – a true misanthrope would find the inhumanity of the universe liberating. There is no intrinsic reason why a universe in which people are marginal should be a horror-inducing place. A world vastly larger and stranger than any the human mind can contain could just as well evoke a sense of excitement or an acceptance of mystery....

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/w...17754.html

EXCERPT: [...] But what counts as slang? Where does it come from? And why does it exert such a powerful hold on the middle--class imagination? Jonathon Green sets out to answer these questions in the course of charting the development of slang as it is recorded in literature, from medieval beggar-books to World War II soldiers’ pornography.

Perhaps appropriately, “slang” has proved a slippery word for dictionary-makers to trace. As Green points out [...] no formal attempt was made to pin down its origins until 1859, and no etymology has been proven. [...] Green, however, has a strong view of where slang originates and why. It is, in his view, a product of the city. It can absorb dialect words and those of professional jargons, but its role is distinct. Slang, he argues, exists as a counter-language, a “language that says no.” It is necessarily oppositional to “standard English” and is spoken to reinforce a community that needs to express itself, often in coded fashion, in a vocabulary that signals its disregard for polite norms.

Some of the earliest written records we have of slang are in books that profess to warn the reader against the cant used by professional criminals and false beggars to evade detection by law-abiding citizens. This genre of book flourished between the 14th and the 16th centuries and endured in various guises into the modern era.

[...] Green shows that in the 19th century, America and Australia both took a more positive view of slang than Britain did. Dickens mocked the vulgar nature of American newspapers by satirizing them as “the New York Sewer, the New York Stabber, the New York Plunderer, and the New York Keyhole Reporter.” But the American popular press, particularly in its court reports, was a creative medium for representing the irreverent voices of a diverse population. It gave us expressions such as the “Bible Belt,” “blurb,” the “Chicagorilla” (gangster), the “cliffhanger,” the “hick,” the “goofball,” and the “pushover.” Walt Whitman, an avid slang collector, observed that “language is .  .  . like some vast living body. .  .  . And slang not only brings the first feeders of it, but is afterward the start of fancy, imagination and humor, breathing into its nostrils the breath of life.”

America’s greater tolerance for the genius inherent in grassroots language may well explain why its literature, from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, is better connected to the “workingman” as a speaking subject rather than as an object of anxiety. In the 21st-century world, where informal oral media (TV, film, YouTube) shape global discourse, it is American slang that has “gone the distance.”...

Review - Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, by Rebecca Solnit
Review by Sven Birkerts

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/danger

EXCERPT: [...] In these essays, developing the subplot of cultural transformation at the hands of techno-visionaries, Solnit gives impassioned opposition to the flourishing digital ethos. Her 2013 essay “We’re Breaking Up,” in particular, lays out a chilling portrait of a culture gone rudderless on a sea of signals. She begins by observing how close we are, in calendar time, to the divide. “On or around June 1995,” she writes (echoing Virginia Woolf, who marked December 1910 as a watershed moment in the history of the modern era), “human character changed again.” Before that, we lived in the old familiar world of the daily newspaper, the housebound phone, the writing and receiving of letters, the evening newscast … After, arriving in a cataract of innovation that has not yet abated — well, we all know the litany. We know it because we are in its toils, caught up on every side: with email, texts, newsfeeds, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — do I need to go on?

Solnit grants that the changes have brought their benefits: giving people more chance at uncensored expression, helping organizers to coordinate movements of resistance, allowing us to reconnect with old friends. But she also draws lines and distinctions. “Previous technologies have expanded communication,” she affirms. “But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat.” Formerly we lived moving back and forth between two poles, solitude and communion, privacy and public interaction. “The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection.”

There is always the danger, in these kinds of discussions, of sounding like a scold — to harken back is to indulge in nostalgia, and to question the momentum of new technologies is to declare yourself old-school. But Solnit steps up unapologetic, speaking for what David Foster Wallace in another context called “single-entendre values,” and what here might be thought of as a former understanding of the proportions and values of things. Here she is on Google glasses:

I tried on a pair that a skinny Asian guy was wearing in the line at the post office. (Curious that someone with state-of-the-art technology also needs postal services.) A tiny screen above my field of vision had clear white type on it. I could have asked it to do something, but I didn’t need data at that juncture, and I’m not in the habit of talking to my glasses. Also, the glasses make any wearer loom like, yes, a geek. Google may soon be trying to convince you that life without them is impossible.

Not unexpectedly, Solnit brings the essay around to what she hopes will be the emergent countering momentum, some push toward slowness and reengagement with material process. She sees some confirmation in the slow food movement, and in a return in certain quarters to gardening and handcrafting. She fantasizes that “the young” will set up “rebel camps where they will lead the lives of 1957, if not 1857, when it comes to quality of time and technology.” Of course she knows the unlikeliness of this, but she knows, too, what the consequences will be if we continue on our track of relentless digital mediation of all parts of life. They will be grim, but “with a grimness that would be hard to explain to someone who’s distracted.”

And so here we find ourselves, coming to the end of this gathering — in a world besieged by natural and political disasters; living in an almost capsized imbalance of haves and have-nots created by unrelenting corporate greed; threatened on all sides by environmental calamity; in need as never before of real democratic solidarity, of cooperative action, even as we fixate on our mini-screens, cocoon ourselves in signals. That last metaphor suggests the eventual emergence of some surprise of bright beauty, the likelihood of which is pretty slim....

“Where’s my flying car?” is something of an informal motto among technology malcontents, annoyed that the science fiction of the 50s never materialized – but that funeral selfies did.

Well, there’s a solid answer to this question now: your flying car is in Vienna, but you’ll need a few hundred thousand euros, a personal airfield and a pilot’s licence to use it."------http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/...25958.html

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11865...-certainty

EXCERPT (Carlo Rovelli): ...in my field, fundamental theoretical physics, for thirty years we have failed. There hasn’t been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades after the standard model, somehow. Of course there are ideas. These ideas might turn out to be right [...] or not. But we don’t know, and for the moment Nature has not said yes, in any sense. I suspect that this might be in part because of the wrong ideas we have about science, and because methodologically we’re doing something wrong—at least in theoretical physics, and perhaps also in other sciences.

[...] The very expression “scientifically proven” is a contradiction in terms. There’s nothing that is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices. In our conceptual structure for grasping reality, there might be something not appropriate, something we may have to revise to understand better. So at any moment we have a vision of reality that is effective, it’s good, it’s the best we have found so far. It’s the most credible we have found so far; it’s mostly correct. But, at the same time, it’s not taken as certain, and any element of it is a priori open for revision. Why do we have this continuous "?"...

[...] This takes me to another point, which is, Should a scientist think about philosophy or not? It’s the fashion today to discard philosophy, to say now that we have science, we don’t need philosophy. I find this attitude naïve, for two reasons. One is historical. Just look back. Heisenberg would have never done quantum mechanics without being full of philosophy. Einstein would have never done relativity without having read all the philosophers and having a head full of philosophy. Galileo would never have done what he did without having a head full of Plato. Newton thought of himself as a philosopher and started by discussing this with Descartes and had strong philosophical ideas.

Even Maxwell, Boltzmann—all the major steps of science in the past were done by people who were very aware of methodological, fundamental, even metaphysical questions being posed. When Heisenberg does quantum mechanics, he is in a completely philosophical frame of mind. He says that in classical mechanics there’s something philosophically wrong, there’s not enough emphasis on empiricism. It is exactly this philosophical reading that allows him to construct that fantastically new physical theory, quantum mechanics.

The divorce between this strict dialogue between philosophers and scientists is very recent, in the second half of the 20th century. It has worked because in the first half of the 20th century people were so smart. Einstein and Heisenberg and Dirac and company put together relativity and quantum theory and did all the conceptual work. The physics of the second half of the century has been, in a sense, a physics of application of the great ideas of the people of the ’30s—of the Einsteins and the Heisenbergs.

When you want to apply these ideas, when you do atomic physics, you need less conceptual thinking. But now we’re back to basics, in a sense. When we do quantum gravity, it's not just application. The scientists who say “I don't care about philosophy” —it’s not true that they don’t care about philosophy, because they have a philosophy. They’re using a philosophy of science. They’re applying a methodology. They have a head full of ideas about what philosophy they’re using; they’re just not aware of them and they take them for granted, as if this were obvious and clear, when it’s far from obvious and clear. They’re taking a position without knowing that there are many other possibilities around that might work much better and might be more interesting for them.

There is narrow-mindedness, if I may say so, in many of my colleagues who don’t want to learn what’s being said in the philosophy of science. There is also a narrow-mindedness in a lot of areas of philosophy and the humanities, whose proponents don’t want to learn about science—which is even more narrow-minded. Restricting our vision of reality today to just the core content of science or the core content of the humanities is being blind to the complexity of reality, which we can grasp from a number of points of view. The two points of view can teach each other and, I believe, enlarge each other.