Some Thoughts From the Heart

In an article entitled “The Way of Lust,” (NYT, 12/1/13), the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom describes how he and a team of researchers used Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits in an experiment published in the The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The shots in Greenfield-Sanders’s book, which pictured porn stars clothed and naked were a perfect template to determine whether nudity resulted in objectification. Never mind that the results of the experiment seemed inconclusive. “Consistent with the objectification view, naked people were thought of as having less agency, “ Bloom reports. “But contrary to this view, they were also thought of as being enhanced experiencers, capable of stronger feelings and greater emotional responses.” However, Bloom makes the following even more telling remark earlier in the piece, “the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Leslie Green have pointed out, being treated as an object isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Imagine that you are sitting outside on a sunny day, and you move behind someone so that she blocs the sun from your eyes. You have used her as an object, but it’s hard to see that you’ve done something wrong.” This utilitarian view of the body seems to fly in he face of psychology (though Freud reputedly said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”), yet the implicit reticence to pathologize may shed light on how pornography can work as an agent of disinhibition. Sure pornography is rooted in misogyny and misandristy (the female equivalent of misogyny) and it can be both addictive and monotonously predictable. But if we look at an Oedipus or Electra complex as being the equivalent of the burning sun, then pornography might be seen as shielding the viewer from its effects by exorcising them. On this day devoted to the ideals of romantic love, some couples  may seek out less exalted images, as they seek to open their hearts to each other.

Religion Without God

Photo of Ronald Dworkin by David Shankbone

Ronald Dworkin was a big thinker and carried on the legacy of Isaiah Berlin. His Justice For Hedgehogs paid homage to Berlin’s famous dichotomy in intellectual history between the fox and the hedgehog (the hedgehog referring to thinkers who depend on a unifying idea and the fox referring to multivalent philosophers). He was also part of a triumvirate of philosophers, which includes Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago and his colleague Thomas Nagel at N.Y.U., whose inurement in juridical questions has always given a unique twist to their pronunciamentos on ethical and moral questions. Only recently in a review of a work evangelical Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (“A Philosopher Defends Religion," The New York Review of Books, 9/27/12), Nagel made the argument that though he was an atheist, he found it impossible to make a valid philosophical argument challenging the existence of God. “Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism,” he says, “are directed at the deepest problem with that view--how can we account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves." On the basis of the excerpt from Dworkin’s last book, Religion Without God, recently published in The New York Review of Books (4/4/13), it seems, in fact, that Nagel and Dworkin might have been discussing similar ideas as they walked through those airy regions of the Ivory Tower that still resemble Plato’s Academy. Dworkin first asks if religion can exist without God? Here’s how his legal background informs his discourse. “Judges often have to decide what ‘religion’ means for legal purposes,” he avers. “For example, the American Supreme Court had to decide whether when Congress provided a ‘conscientious objection' exemption from military service for men whose religion would not allow them to serve, an atheist whose moral convictions also prohibited service qualified for the objection. It decided that he did qualify.” Having offered up this and other examples including a quote from Einstein (that discountenances the  scientism described by Max Weber in his concept of disenchantment), he goes on to ask, what religion then is? Dworkin cites two conditions “life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life” and concludes “What divides godly and godless religion—the science of godly religion—is not as important as the faith in value that unites them.” Dworkin offers up a wonderful anecdote about Richard Dawkins who has argued for so called scientific or “naturalistic” thinking. “’There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dream of in your philosophy.’ ‘Yes,’ Dawkins replied, ‘but we’re working on it.’” To which Dworkin might well have rejoined, “can man survive on bread alone?”

Sewage Lagoon

Martha Nussbaum begins her recent review/essay on Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity and Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (“Sewage Lagoon," TLS, 10/12/12 by enlisting Dickens to speculate on the difference between data and narrative in describing human suffering. “It is said of Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times that she learned of the poor of Coketown as if they were so many ants and beetles, ‘passing to and from their nests.’” Nussbaum, who teaches philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, then goes on to brilliantly link Dickens to groundbreaking work in social psychology. “What Dickens knew intuitively has now been confirmed experimentally. C. Daniel Batson’s magisterial work on empathy and altruism shows that a particularized narrative of suffering has unique power to produce motives for constructive action.” In his essay “Human Rights, Storytelling and Narrative,” (The Journal of Human Rights, Vol l0, No. 1), Titus Levy delineates literary techniques of both empathy and alienation in the context of a more modern British novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Human suffering is so ubiquitous. The connoisseur has so many choices and vantage points from which to view it (genocide, apartheid, famines and earthquakes) that there is literally a Darwinian struggle in which the varying catastrophes with which mankind is afflicted or which he afflicts upon himself compete for our attention. Just opening the mailings of human rights organizations like Medicins Sans Frontieres and Amnesty International can be mind numbing. Kony 2012, about the exploitation of children by the Lord’s Resistance Army, received over 93 million hits. But there were all kinds of problems with subsequent calls to action, not the least of which was that the creator of the film, Jason Russell, had a mental breakdown in which he was found wandering naked and incoherent in the streets. Kony 2012 was sui generis and unless you are a Bono, the odds are not high that your story will be heard. This is where literature and genius come in handy. “The English novel was a social protest movement from the start,” Nussbaum remarks, “and its aim (like that of many of its American descendants) was frequently to acquaint middle-class people with the reality of various social ills, in a way that would involve real vision and feeling.” Another aspect of empathy that Nussbaum doesn’t discuss in her essay is the fact of its curative effect on those who might otherwise have perished from self-absorption.