Lost Between the Notes: My Top Album Reviews, Part 3

In a little while, I’ll be gone – Radiohead, “How To Disappear Completely”

Sadly, I can’t recall my initial reaction to Radiohead’s stunning critique and deconstruction of modernity, “Kid A,” from 2000. I just remember thinking that whatever this was, I needed to hear more of it, and so I enthusiastically gobbled up the band’s followup record, “Amnesiac,” upon its release a year later. I was working at a Clemson University souvenir shop called Mr. Knickerbocker at the time and told a fellow employee as I was opening the CD package something to the effect of, “I expect to be amazed at what I was about to hear” in light of the greatness that was “Kid A,” greatness of which I hope to elucidate in this post. Amnesiac continued the artistic and musical themes of “Kid A,” but it was the latter that captured my imagination and my heart.

I came to appreciate and adore Radiohead’s musical innovation and lyrical power fairly late in the game. Somehow I missed a lot of the hype surrounding the band’s first single, “Creep,” and its first record, “Pablo Honey” (1993). I also largely missed out on the band’s 1995 release, “The Bends,” and didn’t listen until sometime in the late 1990s after a friend recommended it. And even when I listened, I was on the fence about whether I actually liked most of it or not. I was a big fan of “Fake Plastic Trees,” but the rest of the album took some time for me to process. It grew on me by slow degrees. In fact, Radiohead’s DVD release, “7 Television Commercials” (1998), which was a collection of music videos from “The Bends” and the band’s next album, “OK Computer” (1997), had a lot to do with me getting into the band in more than just a casual way. The video for “Paranoid Android,” much like the song, was a wild and frantic ride, while the production for “Fake Plastic Trees,” all bright and colorful juxtaposed against the rather dull backdrop of a grocery store or retail outlet, punctuated a statement about the often artificial and superficial nature of society and culture.

But it was the video for “No Surprises” that spoke to me in ways that I hadn’t experienced before that point with Radiohead.

“Twinkle” is more of a visual word, but the opening guitar riff twinkles with the same beauty as the opening flashes of light reveal that Thom Yorke is inside a glass chamber or helmet that is slowly filling with water, which could symbolize the opening lines:

A heart that’s full up like a landfill

A job that slowly kills you

Bruises that won’t heal

As the song continues, the singer is sinking literally and figuratively under the weight of life until he makes the fateful decision:

I’ll take the quiet life

A handshake with carbon monoxide

With no alarms and no surprises

No alarms and no surprises

Silent

And finally, there is a moment of release at the end when he rises out of the water and relishes the sight of a “pretty house” and “such a pretty garden.” Watching this video was one of the most touching and inspiring moments of my early adulthood such that I could write an entire essay on this song alone, but the point is that this particular video symbolized for me the sense of existential dread that I was beginning to feel about life — trapped in this world and this life, surrounded by peril and knowing full well that there was only way out of the world, as Dave Matthews wrote. The feeling was made stronger by the fact that I was suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the time and, however much I felt isolated and alone in my social life, I was even more depressed by my health situation. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, and I felt physically trapped by my circumstances. In a word, I was drowning, and no one could stop my slow march toward the grave. So, in this video, in just three minutes, Radiohead summarized for me, in a very personal way, my own struggle and hopeful liberation from certain annihilation. (After living with breathing problems for all of my childhood and most of my adult life, that liberation finally came in the form of a lung transplant three years ago.)

In any case, this is the backdrop for which I arrived at “Kid A” in the early 2000s. I listened to “Kid A” three times all the way through to prepare to write this piece because, number one, it’s a joy to let the pulsating beats and rhythms wash over me again and again, but number two, I wanted to listen for things that I might have missed before or open myself up to any new revelations about the music.

I chose “Kid A” for this list over “OK Computer” because, while the latter certainly has more than a few sublime songs, among them “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Let Down,” “Karma Police,” “Lucky” and the aforementioned, “Paranoid Android,” “Kid A’s” aesthetic and artistic direction spoke to me in the ways that few albums have. First, consider the artwork, which was created by the band’s longtime artist, Stanley Dunwood. The darkened and almost sinister looking background beyond the snowcapped mountains. The erupting volcanos. The rough-hewn lines and jagged edges. The void and barren landscape. The viewer brought almost to eye-level with the mountain peaks, as if floating in suspended animation as the artwork trails off in an ocean of white space and fractured lines.

This approach echoes that of the music, and generally, listeners get a sense that modernity itself is fractured, and the songs, awash with drum machines, synths, sparse guitar and Thom Yorke’s sometimes confident and buoyant, sometimes barely audible falsetto drowned out in a wail of noise, is all part of the plan.

Everything in its right place.

This album holds the position of number three on my list because first, it represents elements of my own existential philosophy, which I more or less adopted as a student at Lander (Greenwood, S.C.) and Clemson University (Clemson, S.C.) after studying the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and others. For more on Radiohead’s tie to philosophy, see The Pennds: An Academic Approach to Radiohead:

Here is how it goes: In OK Computer, we stare into an impending and growing nihilistic despondency. In Kid A and Amnesiac, we are submerged in it. In Hail to the Thief, we are lamenting over it and losing faith. In In Rainbows, we accept it and trudge forward nonetheless. This is the story of a band that grew up and got comfortable, as much as they could, living in a world in which they felt they did not belong.

That leads me to the second reason why “Kid A” holds such a revered position with me. “Kid A” is about not belonging. It’s about losing one’s individuality and identity in a world consumed by consumerism, by popular culture, by all of the trappings of modernity. It’s about being drowned out in the claptrap. It’s about feeling invisible and the erasure of self. And it’s about disappearing completely.

The combination of the tracks, “Everything In Its Right Place;” “The National Anthem” with its blaring cacophonous wonder; “How To Disappear Completely,” with a swirl of strings and falsetto; “Optimistic;” “Idioteque;” “Morning Bell” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” present a relatively cohesive and bleak musical aesthetic of one who is lost in the modern collective, never to be found.

Finally, I come to the album’s final song, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a devastating — devastating — song, with the accompanying video, that never fails to send chills up and down my spine.

The speaker in the song, presumably Thom Yorke or a character of his creation, is addressing his unrequited love and describing how desperate he is for her:

Red wine and sleeping pills

Help me get back to your arms

Cheap sex and sad films

Help me get where I belong

She interjects and says, “I think you’re crazy, maybe” and in the beginning of the video for the song, the words, “I’d really like to help you,” are etched into the sky, as if to suggest that the subject of this guy’s affections really cares for him but nonetheless sees how desperate he has become and must stay away. The music video for the song, which I watched over and over ad infinitum in my Mr. Knickerbocker days, pans through the bleak “Kid A” artwork landscape as if it was a real place. The camera then changes to a wintry scene in which a person is laying in the snow and another person, presumably the subject of the speaker’s forlorn desires, is gingerly walking away from the dying man as frozen precipitation cascades down.

Thus, the one thing that matters above all other more cerebral concerns — philosophy or statements about societal status or individuality — is love, but even in that, the speaker feels lost, alone, isolated and abandoned. What “Kid A” lacks in comfort or optimism — despite a song that is actually titled “Optimistic” — it makes up for in emotion, power and a coherent aesthetic. This album, and knowing that others have struggled with feeling small, alienated and lost by circumstances or by the culture, has helped me through many a dark day and because of that, “Kid A” will always hold a treasured place in my heart.

Hinduism: ‘No essence?’

Here is Jonardon Ganeri, visiting professor of philosophy at New York University Abu Dhabi, during an interview with The New York Times’ Gary Gutting:

G.G.: How does Hinduism regard other religions (for example, as teaching falsehoods, as worthy alternative ways, as partial insights into its fuller truth)?

J.G.: The essence of Hinduism is that it has no essence. What defines Hinduism and sets it apart from other major religions is its polycentricity, its admission of multiple centers of belief and practice, with a consequent absence of any single structure of theological or liturgical power. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism or Islam, there is no one single canonical text — the Bible, the Dialogues of the Buddha, the Quran — that serves as a fundamental axis of hermeneutical or doctrinal endeavor, recording the words of a foundational religious teacher. (The Veda is only the earliest in a diverse corpus of Hindu texts.) Hinduism is a banyan tree, in the shade of whose canopy, supported by not one but many trunks, a great diversity of thought and action is sustained.

That’s a stunning statement for a religion with 1 billion adherents. If there is no essence, why bother? Seems to me if the goal is to gain knowledge, enlightenment, awareness, peace and tranquility, humans can do all that simply by studying the cosmos and reflecting on our place in it. No [insert god or gods] needed.

Read more here: What Would Krishna Do? Or Shiva? Or Vishnu?

Who deserves to sit at the ‘adult table?’

I really wasn’t going to comment on the recent disagreement that seems to have erupted among folks in the online atheist community. It stems from this tweet from Peter Boghossian, author of “A Manuel for Creating Atheists:”

Taylor Carr has chimed in in sharp disagreement, calling Boghossian the “Deepak Chopra of Atheism:”

Many of the most devastating critiques of religion have come from philosophers of religion. The field may have a majority of religious believers in it, but there have been quite a few notable atheists published in philosophy of religion journals, too, such as J.L. Mackie, Paul Draper, Ted Drange, Graham Oppy, Erik Wielenberg, Stephen Maitzen, and William Rowe. Theistic philosophers have also done their share of worthwhile criticism of theistic arguments, among which would be Tim and Lydia McGrew for their attack on fine-tuning, as well as Wes Morriston for his work against the cosmological argument.

These philosophers who Boghossian would exclude from “the adult table” are far more deserving of those seats than Peter and (many of) his New Atheist buds. I say this not just because of Boghossian’s childish behavior, but also because each of them writes on an academic level that just is miles above the others. Many of the arguments against god proliferated in atheist circles today are owed to these philosophers of religion. Dr. Boghossian frankly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and his principal objection seems to stem solely from the fact that “religion” is part of the philosophy of religion name.

I’ve seen a few comments on Facebook calling Boghossian “our version” of young earth creationists, saying that he almost seems like a viral marketing gimmick for the God’s Not Dead film. To this I’ll add that he’s like the Deepak Chopra of atheism. Chopra is a new age ‘guru’ who spouts wisdom that’s eaten up by his followers, yet is less wisdom than it is gibberish. In similar fashion, Boghossian plays to an audience that he knows, one that disdains anything and everything remotely connected to religion. These “cultured despisers” of religion, as Schleiermacher once called them, are quite happy to agree with whatever fits the us vs. them narrative they’ve constructed, along with its clear emphasis on the inherent and unavoidable evils of religion, while little things like arguments, facts, and honest dialogue take a backseat.

And Ed Brayton, from Free Thought Blogs, reposted parts of Carr’s post in agreement.

On the flip side, former pastor John Loftus has written a blog post in defense of Boghossian (so has Chris Hallquist). Loftus concluded:

I’ve spoken with Peter and he stands by what he said, although he didn’t exactly say why. Let me try to be charitable with him.

The only reason the philosophy of religion exists is because there are people who believe without sufficient evidence and seek to defend by logic what doesn’t have sufficient evidence for it. The only reason why atheist philosophers enter this discipline is because, as C.S.Lewis said, “Good philosophy must exist because bad philosophy must be answered.” In other words, if no one accepted anything based on insufficient evidence this discipline wouldn’t even exist.

When talking he and I agreed that we have no respect for a scientifically uninformed philosophy, or a scientifically uninformed philosophy of religion. But look at what this does. Any scientifically informed philosophy of religion authors worthy of the name are atheists, and they only enter in the field because of bad philosophy, the kind that Peter is writing about. So people who do bad philosophy of religion without sufficient evidence should be disqualified to sit at the proverbial adult table, and if this were to take place then the discipline might not even exist. After all, if there was no bad philosophy then good philosophy wouldn’t have to exist (per C.S. Lewis above). What we would have instead is neurology, physics, astronomy, psychology, etc.

Now, that’s the most charitable explanation of what Boghossian is saying. If I understand him correctly there is more meat to his tweet than first meets the eye. You can still disagree with him, of course, but his point is deeper than an uncharitable understanding might lead some people to conclude. At the very minimum he’s being a provocateur, which is good enough. At the most he’s calling for an end to scientifically uninformed philosophy of religion, perhaps in the same way as Dr. Hector Avalos has called for the end of biblical studies in his book on the subject. I fully support Avalos’s project so why wouldn’t I also fully support what Boghossian is probably saying? I do.

Now, I could be missing something in all of this, but are they all just arguing about semantics? The philosophy of religion is part of most, if not all public university philosophy programs in the nation, and as Carr points out, plenty of atheists are published in these studies, which obviously doesn’t just include theology, but the study of world religions, biblical scholarship, etc.

Why didn’t Boghossian just say “being published in theology should disqualify one from sitting at the adult table,” although I don’t know that I agree with either, but that would have at least avoided the confusion, if that’s really what he meant.

Simply dismissing people like William Lane Craig (or other theological “scholars” or whoever he had in mind) as “children” with childlike ideas, as Peter has implied, isn’t going to make them stop disseminating their faulty ideas to the public, and it’s highly unlikely that a tactic like that is going to lead anyone away from the fold or from faith. In fact, it seems to feed this perception that atheists are arrogant and hostile to people of faith, when we should be exuding a humbleness and willingness to engage in respectful dialogue.

How are we to convince anyone of the virtues of living a life free from faith if we begin with such an attitude? Further, Boghossian in his book suggests that his “street epistomologists” should engage with and challenge people’s ideas and not attack people of faith as individuals. But isn’t implying that adult believers are approaching the most important questions in life from a child’s perspective a form of insult? I fail to see how taking this approach is going to help people begin to question faith; I posit that it will only lead them further away from atheism, since it supports what religious leaders often erroneously tell them about nonbelievers, that we are insufferable, scathing, arrogant, know-it-alls.

Of course, as Loftus points out, if people did not see faith as a virtue, religion would not exist all, and the world would be a better place for it. But this is not the world in which we live, and we can only react to reality. It would be great if cancer did not exist, either, but we study cancer to try to figure out how to eradicate it. Likewise, an appreciation of world religions helps us understand the terrible mistakes mankind has made throughout history and hopefully ensures that the various human rights violations committed in religion’s name never happen again. Nonbelievers can also study religion and apologetics to get fuel for any discussions they might have with believers. Further, studying religion also exposes students to the numerous positive contributions that have been made in music, art and literature. Slavery was a terrible blight on mankind too; do we denounce American history professors as not being worthy of sitting at the adult table just because they teach students about the record of racism and oppression in this country?

I dare say that the world would be a slightly dimmer place without the graceful, museful pens of John Milton or John Donne. I, for one, can’t imagine a world without the majesty of “Paradise Lost.” In short, we can appreciate the music of Handel without believing in its message. We can marvel at the beauty of the Sistine Chapel without believing that angels are hovering in our midst. We can study religion, as many nonbelieving scholars do every single day, without being advocates for it.

Albert Camus re-examined

If readers need a new translation of “The Stranger” to understand that Mersault was not a “monster” but “painfully without pretense,” they have not understood “The Stranger.”

Also, Andrew Sullivan, quoting Claire Messud writes:

Claire Messud picks up on another aspect of Camus’s thought – his complicated relationship to Christianity. She praises Sandra Smith’s recent translation of The Stranger for realizing the subtly religious aspects of his prose:

Camus, of course, was more complex in his atheism than we might commonly expect: he was an atheist in reaction to, and in the shadow of, a Catholicism osmotically imbued in the culture (of the French certainly, but of the pieds noirs in particular). The inescapable result is that his atheism is in constant dialogue with religion; in L’Étranger no less than in, say, La Peste.

Sandra Smith has, in her admirable translation, plucked carefully upon this thread in the novel, so that Anglophone readers might better grasp Camus’s allusions. Here is but one key example: the novel’s last line, in French, begins “Pour que tout soit consommé,…” which [Matthew] Ward translates, literally, as “For everything to be consummated.” But as Smith points out, the French carries “an echo of the last words of Jesus on the Cross: ‘Tout est consommé.’” Her chosen rendition, then, is “So that it might be finished,” a formulation that echoes Christ’s last words in the King James translation of the Bible.

Sullivan seems to imply here that just by referencing the Bible, Camus’ writing has some “religious aspects” or theological meaning beyond the reference itself. Sullivan was just vague and succinct enough to leave this open to interpretation, but as a Catholic, Sullivan seems to be implying — as the Christian narrative goes — that even atheists must necessarily infuse their writing with theology, however veiled, since all humans are God’s creation and thus endowed by the Holy Spirit with spirituality, regardless of whether one chooses to acknowledge it. Why else would Sullivan pick out this passage as one of two to highlight from this long essay on the new Camus translation.

‘God’s Not Dead’ early thoughts: An exercise in intellectual dishonesty

I’ll avoid writing a full review of “God’s Not Dead” until I see the whole movie, but just based on the trailer, it looks like another disingenuous, self-confirming Christian apologetic film that will get high praises from Christians themselves and poor marks from everyone else. I might not get around to a full review for a couple months, however, because I’m not wasting $10 on a intellectually dishonest film made by and for believers.

Just judging from the trailer, I can say that like pretty much every argument from Christian apologetics, the movie begins with a false premise right from the start. No philosophy teacher in a publicly funded school would force a student to take a stance for or against God in general, much less to pass the class. Philosophy includes the study of deism, theism, polytheism, atheism, agnosticism, the Buddhism and numerous other strains of thought that attempt to address being and knowledge. Only at privately funded Christian institutions are students asked to leave their brains at the door.

It’s also no coincidence that Kevin Sorbo, the Christian actor who plays the philosophy teacher, is made to look like this scathing, close-minded egomaniac, while the above-reproach Christian student is really the open minded one. Riiiight.

Falling down a wormhole courtesy Alvin Plantinga

 from over at the Cross Examined blog on Patheos recently considered philosopher and Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, which essentially states that if evolution is true, human cognitive function developed in such a way as to support survival, but not necessarily beliefs as truth. Thus, according to this argument, how can we trust what we think we know about the world? And if we can’t trust our own ability to glean truth reliably, God must be the conduit by which we mere humans can know things.

As Seidensticker phrased it:

In brief, the question is: how can a human mind that’s the result of the clumsy process of evolution be trusted? About “Darwin’s doubt,” Plantinga argues that only Christians can have confidence that their interpretation of the world is correct. Naturalists can’t prove that minds are reliable until they’ve proven that the source of this claim (the mind!) is worth listening to. … He says that if evolution is true, human beliefs have been selected for survival value, not truth, so why trust them? And yet our beliefs are reliable, suggesting to Plantinga that something besides evolution created them.

As Seidensticker correctly points out, Plantinga presents some rather strained logic that through the example of a man named Paul, who Plantinga reckons could in theory just as easily act arbitrarily in response to stimuli in the environment rather than based on a system in which desires or needs correlate with action. Take Plantinga’s example about Paul:

Perhaps [Paul] thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it.

There’s no reason that I can see to suppose that a person would act in this way given all we know about human nature and our environmental behavior, but nevertheless, here are two charts showing some expected actions of humans versus arbitrary responses to stimuli based on Plantinga’s logic:

Expected action. Credit: Bob Seidensticker

Expected actions. Credit: Bob Seidensticker

Arbitrary actions. Credit: Bob Seidensticker

Plantinga’s arbitrary actions. Credit: Bob Seidensticker

Here’s Seidensticker’s basic conclusion about Plantinga’s argument:

Paul’s response to the tiger was just a roll of the dice, and he got lucky. But Plantinga supposes that all of Paul’s beliefs are arbitrary, not just those about tigers. Some actions in this chart are benign, but some are dangerous. When Paul sees something scary, his reaction is to walk toward it. When he’s drowning, he’ll try to sleep. When he’s hungry, he’ll satisfy that need with fresh air, and so on. With his basic desires paired with ineffective methods, this guy is clearly too stupid to live.

This is where natural selection comes in. Natural selection is unforgiving, and belief sets that don’t lead to survival are discarded. Evolution easily explains why Plantinga’s Paul didn’t exist.

This explanation is straightforward enough. For Paul to continue to exist, he would not take arbitrary actions such as are listed in the second chart. If he and his clan acted in this way all the time, they would surely die off very quickly. But Plantinga went further, as hinted at in the first quote presented above, asserting that if we assume both naturalism and evolution are true and that our cognition may be unreliable — known as Darwin’s doubt and dubious in any case — that God must be the one behind our ability to know and understand the world.

According to Plantinga:

… this doubt arises for naturalists or atheists, but not for those who believe in God. [How does he know?] That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals.

Of course, even Plantinga is wise enough to know this is pure sophistry, and such is the apologist’s propensity to knowingly pedal shit to the masses behind the ruse of philosophically sophisticated rhetoric.

First, this argument rests on the far-fetched assumption that God, even if he created us in his image, would “want us to resemble him” in knowing things. How do we know that God wasn’t more interested in keeping us in the dark all along? If you read Genesis, God created man in his image only in some nebulous, undefined sense. Perhaps he was created in God’s image based on physical appearance, for instance. Clearly, God did not create man “in his image” based on an ability to know truth, as Plantinga seems to claim. God explicitly attempted (poorly) to hinder man from obtaining knowledge by forbidding him to eat the fruit he so conspicuously placed in the garden. By eating the fruit, man gained knowledge of his own nakedness, basic human anatomy, and therefore, biology, and his own mortality. Doctrinally speaking, this was obviously not the plan, and man was supposed to stay in a state of innocence, that is, lacking knowledge and being familiar only of his immediate surroundings, the animals, plants, etc. (Of course, God’s designs not going “as planned” presents all kinds of problems for claims of God’s omniscience, but I’ve covered that extensively elsewhere on this site).

Presumably, knowledge about science was indeed not in “God’s plan” since for many people after 1859, evolution and the recession of creationism from the mainstream were big reasons many believers left the fold, which, presumably again, was not in God’s plan either. So, the argument that God was a sort of conduit of knowledge for us humans falls flat.

The only complaint I had with Seidensticker’s piece was that he kept referring to Plantinga only as a “philosopher” rather than the Christian apologist that he actually is:

As an aside, let me admit that I have a hard time maintaining respect for those at the leading edge of philosophy. Do they do work that’s relevant and pushes the frontier of human knowledge? …

My advice to philosophers: when you get the urge to play scientist, it’s best to lie down until the feeling goes away.

As such, I would take a large measure of exception with describing Plantinga as joining other mainstream scholars in being at the “leading edge of philosophy.” Plantinga isn’t playing science. He isn’t even playing philosophy. He’s playing rhetorical  games to attempt to make his theological mind, which only leans slightly toward philosophy, right with what he knows to be true, even if he won’t admit it, about science and evolution.

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