On the final night, I’m in a taxi with one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, arguably a doyen of his field. During the ride, I ask this brilliant man of science a delicate question...
I rediscovered Christianity as a university student in Quebec City. This was at a church that served the small English-speaking Protestant community, and it seemed to belong to a kind of Protestantism that had died out elsewhere in Canada. I wouldn't say that the English community in Quebec City was culturally isolated — they were up-to-date on the latest music and the latest fashions. But they seemed to come from an earlier time in the way they thought and behaved. They were nice people — friendly, humble, and decent.
I would say that they were ideologically isolated. Very few stores sold English-language newspapers or magazines, at least not in the mid-1980s. Most people in that community either subscribed to the Chronicle & Telegraph (a local weekly) or simply got their news from the French press. This was what made the local population so charming, both French and English. They were different in a fundamental way — and not just in the outward manifestations of culture.
All of that would change a decade later, as would the larger French Canadian community. Today, Quebec is dominated by the same generic neo-Western culture that now seems to prevail everywhere. And the church I attended has become just like churches elsewhere in Canada.
Whenever I go to a church today, I confine myself to speaking pleasantries. I avoid talking about anything else, and most other churchgoers seem to have adopted the same reflex. On one occasion, halfway through the service, I and my wife simply walked out. The sermon was devoted to Vladimir Zelensky — "a good man, a saintly man, a man in the image of God, a servant of the people who wants a world where children can play in peace."
When I discuss this with other people, they suggest joining a more "conservative" church. But those churches, too, are going in the same direction. The only exceptions are those that isolate themselves as much as possible from the dominant culture, like the Amish or certain ethnic communities that live their lives in a language other than English.
When living in Berkeley, I always joked that it had two kinds of weather: 70-and-dry and 70-and-wet. If it weren’t for all the Californians, it would be a great place to live!
Excellent article, particularly in its capacity to highlight that an increasingly expansive substratum of our modern college-educated population, especially those with a more harmonious relationship towards the classics, are beginning to sympathise with our perspective on the world.
Minor note: von Neumann was, for the majority of his life, ambivalent towards God, displaying a minor tendency towards belief. His conversion during the concluding days of his life largely resulted from the existential panic he was facing about his death, which conversion did nothing substantive to alleviate.
I would have loved to be at that conference... Were people feeling free to express their thoughts, or was there a heavy cloud hanging over the proceedings with a lot of posturing going on...?
An essay to emulate - Berkely dear to my heart - herewith my own Nietzschean soliloquy. With Dawkins, his revisiting became a dreary repetition lost in religious acrimony. Better to leave these issues of reverence to your master storytelling. https://humanism.substack.com/p/embracing-overlapping-lifetimes.
One of my heroines, Alex Kaschuta, also cringes when looking back at her previous militant atheism. Yet apart from the impolite stridency and the fact that it's rather gone out of fashion, in what way were the New Atheists wrong in claiming that today, knowing what we know about evolution etc., we have no good reason to believe in a God who made us, the heaven and the earth. Even from people who regret having been swept along by the New Atheist movement in the early 2000's, I still haven't heard what it was precisely that Dawkins et al got wrong. Can anyone enlighten me?
"Well, for one, the higher comparative fertility of Christians. Lots of things like that…"
Is it really necessary to poiint out that this is an argument for Christianity giving a Darwinean advantage =(over some background) rather than being an argument for its truth?
"I guess I inherited my creativity from my white dad and my high IQ from my Asian mom" is just a clever way to brag about how smart and creative you are. To my mind it doesn't bode well for our hereditarian future.
"Perched next to it that first morning was Greg, a sane, sober homeless guy in his late sixties who secretly lived in the campus woods. He’d fought in Vietnam. "
The fall of Saigon was in April 1975, so 48 years before this article was written. So this is just barely possible, if the author's estimate of this guy's age is right. But homeless people look older thsn their actual age. And claiming to be a Vietnam vet is a fairly common falsehood. Remember that Indian, Nathan Phillips, who banged a drum under the nose of the kid from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky on a field trip to the Lincoln Memorial? He would be abouty 68 now, and he claimed to be a Vietnam vet, too.
An Open Catacomb: Four days with the Nietzschean Right
This was wonderful
This gave me the most intense feeling of FOMO. It's a sign of hope that gatherings such as this are taking place, in the belly of the beast no less.
I rediscovered Christianity as a university student in Quebec City. This was at a church that served the small English-speaking Protestant community, and it seemed to belong to a kind of Protestantism that had died out elsewhere in Canada. I wouldn't say that the English community in Quebec City was culturally isolated — they were up-to-date on the latest music and the latest fashions. But they seemed to come from an earlier time in the way they thought and behaved. They were nice people — friendly, humble, and decent.
I would say that they were ideologically isolated. Very few stores sold English-language newspapers or magazines, at least not in the mid-1980s. Most people in that community either subscribed to the Chronicle & Telegraph (a local weekly) or simply got their news from the French press. This was what made the local population so charming, both French and English. They were different in a fundamental way — and not just in the outward manifestations of culture.
All of that would change a decade later, as would the larger French Canadian community. Today, Quebec is dominated by the same generic neo-Western culture that now seems to prevail everywhere. And the church I attended has become just like churches elsewhere in Canada.
Whenever I go to a church today, I confine myself to speaking pleasantries. I avoid talking about anything else, and most other churchgoers seem to have adopted the same reflex. On one occasion, halfway through the service, I and my wife simply walked out. The sermon was devoted to Vladimir Zelensky — "a good man, a saintly man, a man in the image of God, a servant of the people who wants a world where children can play in peace."
When I discuss this with other people, they suggest joining a more "conservative" church. But those churches, too, are going in the same direction. The only exceptions are those that isolate themselves as much as possible from the dominant culture, like the Amish or certain ethnic communities that live their lives in a language other than English.
So wish you had recorded that ‘sermon’. Thanks for a beautiful essay.
When living in Berkeley, I always joked that it had two kinds of weather: 70-and-dry and 70-and-wet. If it weren’t for all the Californians, it would be a great place to live!
Excellent article, particularly in its capacity to highlight that an increasingly expansive substratum of our modern college-educated population, especially those with a more harmonious relationship towards the classics, are beginning to sympathise with our perspective on the world.
Minor note: von Neumann was, for the majority of his life, ambivalent towards God, displaying a minor tendency towards belief. His conversion during the concluding days of his life largely resulted from the existential panic he was facing about his death, which conversion did nothing substantive to alleviate.
You're a gifted writer...
I would have loved to be at that conference... Were people feeling free to express their thoughts, or was there a heavy cloud hanging over the proceedings with a lot of posturing going on...?
An essay to emulate - Berkely dear to my heart - herewith my own Nietzschean soliloquy. With Dawkins, his revisiting became a dreary repetition lost in religious acrimony. Better to leave these issues of reverence to your master storytelling. https://humanism.substack.com/p/embracing-overlapping-lifetimes.
....and great narration.
Beautiful
One of my heroines, Alex Kaschuta, also cringes when looking back at her previous militant atheism. Yet apart from the impolite stridency and the fact that it's rather gone out of fashion, in what way were the New Atheists wrong in claiming that today, knowing what we know about evolution etc., we have no good reason to believe in a God who made us, the heaven and the earth. Even from people who regret having been swept along by the New Atheist movement in the early 2000's, I still haven't heard what it was precisely that Dawkins et al got wrong. Can anyone enlighten me?
"Well, for one, the higher comparative fertility of Christians. Lots of things like that…"
Is it really necessary to poiint out that this is an argument for Christianity giving a Darwinean advantage =(over some background) rather than being an argument for its truth?
"I guess I inherited my creativity from my white dad and my high IQ from my Asian mom" is just a clever way to brag about how smart and creative you are. To my mind it doesn't bode well for our hereditarian future.
"Perched next to it that first morning was Greg, a sane, sober homeless guy in his late sixties who secretly lived in the campus woods. He’d fought in Vietnam. "
The fall of Saigon was in April 1975, so 48 years before this article was written. So this is just barely possible, if the author's estimate of this guy's age is right. But homeless people look older thsn their actual age. And claiming to be a Vietnam vet is a fairly common falsehood. Remember that Indian, Nathan Phillips, who banged a drum under the nose of the kid from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky on a field trip to the Lincoln Memorial? He would be abouty 68 now, and he claimed to be a Vietnam vet, too.
But he wasn't.
what was said by 「genius」?
The man of science was obviously Jonathan Anomaly