mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

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Your search for errol returned 27 posts.
“Neither a pathology nor an index of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor.”

Avital Ronell. Is she right? Remember: both knowledgeability and intelligence have willed and unwilled components (including: genetics, class, development, luck). If intelligence has a moral quality because of its impact on the participatory polity, then stupidity is a moral lapse due to its effects.

This means that whether stupidity is “willed” or not, whether it is the result of developmental aberrations or a lack of access to education or a lazy preference for partying or a poverty of inspiration or a resentful incuriosity, its negative impact on the public good makes it immoral. Whom shall we blame, morally, for stupidity?

Ronell includes in that paragraph, from her book Stupidity, a mention of Hannah Arendt’s frustrated effort to determine how stupid Adolf Eichmann was and what the effect of that stupidity really was on his deeds. The effort to assess how error affects “the most dangerous failures of human endeavor” reminds me of my favorite Errol Morris quote: “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

Errol Morris asserts, and I believe, that intelligence offers only very flimsy protection from error; I see much historical and contemporary evidence that it is nearly as likely -in some of its contortions, likelier- than stupidity to produce disaster.

Tags: philosophy morality stupidity avital ronell errol morriss
A beautiful color photograph from 1942 by Jack Delano: “Steam locomotives of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards.” Delano was one of the photographers employed by the FSA, on whose work Errol Morris has posted a typically long and interesting series of articles this week.

A beautiful color photograph from 1942 by Jack Delano: “Steam locomotives of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards.” Delano was one of the photographers employed by the FSA, on whose work Errol Morris has posted a typically long and interesting series of articles this week.

Tags: jack delano errol morris photography
“[Politicians] never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.” -Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying,” quoted by Errol Morris on his Zoom blog; while this may be true of most contemporary politicians, there have always been exceptions. (Photo of toy Mussolini and company).

“[Politicians] never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.”

-Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying,” quoted by Errol Morris on his Zoom blog; while this may be true of most contemporary politicians, there have always been exceptions. (Photo of toy Mussolini and company).

“Perhaps rationality isn’t enough.”

Robert McNamara, quoted by Errol Morris in his phenomenal NYT obituary on him: “McNamara in Context.” Morris’ profound moral gift is his insistence that we view all humans in context, from those some consider war criminals to holocaust-deniers to murderers; reading the comments on his piece, one can see how rare this gift is.

In the clarity of their own purported rationality, of their own pristine, crystalline worldview -their own systems, all failures of integrity- the harshest judges fail to learn the most important lesson McNamara, and Kennedy and Johnson and all the others, can teach: rationality isn’t enough, systems of analysis aren’t enough, belief isn’t enough to safeguard against the real essence of human existence: error.

How morally culpable is someone who is in error? How do we judge the mistaken? Does the intent to do good mitigate the accomplishment of evil? If it doesn’t, how do we make it less likely that we err? More democracy? More technocracy? More intellectualism? More emphasis on morality? Every answer has attendant historical disasters.

McNamara wanted desperately that we should learn from failed history, and in his memoir noted that because we are not omniscient we should never act violently when allies who share our morality tell us we are wrong to do so: error is too easy, and only a kind of democratic deference to others can restrain our stupidity. I would add, although he wouldn’t, that without omniscience we ought try -harder than we think reasonable- to not make irrevocable decisions involving human life. We should not kill; we should not put to death; we should not make war. We don’t know enough, cannot predict enough, and are wrong too often.

But -and I don’t mean this flippantly- it is easy enough to problematize that assertion, easy enough to see that it too could be wrong: what about the necessary war? And if there is a necessary war, is there a necessary murder, to use Auden’s regretted phrase? All human judgments are subjective assertions that strive towards objectivity; we all aspire to rationality, and sometimes must act on it whether it is sufficient or not.

(See this note, too, from Gospel of Moll: that McNamara attempted to answer these questions honestly did not protect him from grave error; if sincerity won’t, if intelligence won’t, if morality won’t, what will?)

Tags: errol morris politics morality robert mcnamara war
“Think that you might be wrong.”

Will, quoting (and posting a photo of) a favorite piece of New Orleans graffiti. A perpetually interrogatory relationship with one’s conclusions can lead to the archetypal paralysis of Hamlet, but it is a crucial element of real humanism and the only possible defense against arrogance and intellectual atrophy.

The always-excellent Rabsteen added an amusing anecdote and, to complement a cited Karl Popper aphorism, this quote from Betrand Russell: “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” Immediately we see the tension between doubt and self-assurance, between the courage to question oneself and the courage to not.

Not long ago, Jeff Miller and I had an appropriately inconclusive discussion about the problem of certainty, of ideological passion: it drove the Inquisition and the abolitionists, the Nazis and the Founders, Lenin and Gandhi. Milan Kundera noted that the eternal precondition of tragedy is the “existence of ideals that are considered more valuable than human life,” but that is also one of the components of historical progress, individual transcendence, and heroism. For every erroneous conviction there may be one that advances us all. Certainty, then, cannot be the enemy; only error can. And, for the umpteenth time, “Error is the central feature of human existence.”

I’m fortunate to be wrong all the time, often in crucially important ways (as many here can attest). This idea is thus never far from my mind, although it scarcely saves me the frequent embarrassment. But it does remind me of my limitless fallibility, a lesson I cannot learn too often (apparently!).

Tags: karl popper new orleans errol morris milan kundera
To my wife You have put the little ones to bed dear wifeAnd coverd them ore with careMy Frankey Alley and FredAnd they have said their evening prair Perhaps they breathed the name of oneWho is far in southern landAnd wished he to were thareto join their little band I am very sad to night dear wifeMy thoughts are dwelling on home and theeAs I keep the lone night watchBeneath the holley tree The winds are sighing through the treesAnd as they onward roamThey whisper hopes of happynessWithin our cottage home And as they onward pasedOre hill and vale and bubling streamThey wake up thoughts within my soulLike music in a dream Oh when will this rebellion ceaseThis cursed war be oreAnd we our dear ones meatTo part from them no more? Amos Humiston, March 25th 1863. From Errol Morris’ NYT piece on Humiston’s life, death at Gettysburg, and above all the strange and sad story of how the photograph of his children -“Frankey Alley and Fred”- found on his body after the battle became a newspaper sensation and the manner for his wife’s discovery that he was dead (and much more). It is one of Morris’ finer efforts, I think, and besides: how moving to think of ordinary men who wrote such poems to their wives from the battlefield.
To my wife

You have put the little ones to bed dear wife
And coverd them ore with care
My Frankey Alley and Fred
And they have said their evening prair

Perhaps they breathed the name of one
Who is far in southern land
And wished he to were thare
to join their little band

I am very sad to night dear wife
My thoughts are dwelling on home and thee
As I keep the lone night watch
Beneath the holley tree

The winds are sighing through the trees
And as they onward roam
They whisper hopes of happyness
Within our cottage home

And as they onward pased
Ore hill and vale and bubling stream
They wake up thoughts within my soul
Like music in a dream

Oh when will this rebellion cease
This cursed war be ore
And we our dear ones meat
To part from them no more?

Amos Humiston, March 25th 1863. From Errol Morris’ NYT piece on Humiston’s life, death at Gettysburg, and above all the strange and sad story of how the photograph of his children -“Frankey Alley and Fred”- found on his body after the battle became a newspaper sensation and the manner for his wife’s discovery that he was dead (and much more).

It is one of Morris’ finer efforts, I think, and besides: how moving to think of ordinary men who wrote such poems to their wives from the battlefield.

This is the second example which came to me today of the literary nature of reality is, by which I mean how many elements of literature are not stylistic or formal deviations from ordinary life but instead reflect the interconnectedness of life’s themes, symbols, characterizations, and so on. It concerns pitch phugoids and mental illness. I have long been obsessed with plane crashes; I read, write, and dream about them often. Without question, the most affecting story I’ve encountered is that of United Flight 232, told by Denny Fitch in Errol Morris’ First Person series. Greg Brown posted the video of it; if you have time and can watch the entire program, you will never forget it. Without recapitulating the heroic and tragic story, I will say just this: after an explosion rendered the plane basically uncontrollable -without flight surfaces under the crew’s command- it began what is called a phugoid. In a phugoid, a plane’s natural inclination towards aerodynamic equilibrium sends it on a sine-wave roller-coaster: it oscillates up and down, up and down, up and down, attempting to find a stable speed (which it cannot), and with each oscillation there is a net loss of altitude. Rising and falling, but each time falling further, it proceeds towards an inevitable end. Fitch, who helped fly the plane to its eventual crash landing, referred to it in its phugoid state as a “missile.” Many years before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I commonly saw an image in my mind, an analogical image for what I felt: a cruise missile whose circuitry had malfunctioned, sending it spiraling frenetically and purposelessly around in the sky, awaiting either a self-destruct command or a lethal, ruinous collision with an innocent target. To anyone familiar with the oscillations of mania and depression, there is an immediately familiar quality to the phugoid: rising and falling, a machine out of control, blindly struggling for an impossible balanced peace, descending further and further with each cycle. Indeed, there is even a rather poetic resemblance between a phugoid state and fugue state. I have always uncritically assumed that my interest in plane crashes was spontaneous, casual, free from any deeper significance. I assumed that when I tell people that Fitch is one of my only heroes I am saying so only because his calm bravery and skill impress me as the precise opposite of my immaturity. This is an unexamined life. But as in a novel, my own characterization was suddenly laid bare before me the other day, when I read a doctor describing our bodies as having systems “of significant redundancy which prevent sudden failure” and recognized Fitch’s words for the systems of an airplane. The metaphor coalesced and I saw at once why crashes transfix me: Here are men and women guiding the unstable through the air through resolute focus and the overcoming of fear. And here are those who through their rashness and incompetence destroy themselves and those who depend on them. I admire the former so much but dread that I am one of the latter, and thus come the dreams, the stories, the fixation.

This is the second example which came to me today of the literary nature of reality is, by which I mean how many elements of literature are not stylistic or formal deviations from ordinary life but instead reflect the interconnectedness of life’s themes, symbols, characterizations, and so on.

It concerns pitch phugoids and mental illness.

I have long been obsessed with plane crashes; I read, write, and dream about them often. Without question, the most affecting story I’ve encountered is that of United Flight 232, told by Denny Fitch in Errol Morris’ First Person series. Greg Brown posted the video of it; if you have time and can watch the entire program, you will never forget it.

Without recapitulating the heroic and tragic story, I will say just this: after an explosion rendered the plane basically uncontrollable -without flight surfaces under the crew’s command- it began what is called a phugoid.

In a phugoid, a plane’s natural inclination towards aerodynamic equilibrium sends it on a sine-wave roller-coaster: it oscillates up and down, up and down, up and down, attempting to find a stable speed (which it cannot), and with each oscillation there is a net loss of altitude. Rising and falling, but each time falling further, it proceeds towards an inevitable end. Fitch, who helped fly the plane to its eventual crash landing, referred to it in its phugoid state as a “missile.”

Many years before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I commonly saw an image in my mind, an analogical image for what I felt: a cruise missile whose circuitry had malfunctioned, sending it spiraling frenetically and purposelessly around in the sky, awaiting either a self-destruct command or a lethal, ruinous collision with an innocent target.

To anyone familiar with the oscillations of mania and depression, there is an immediately familiar quality to the phugoid: rising and falling, a machine out of control, blindly struggling for an impossible balanced peace, descending further and further with each cycle. Indeed, there is even a rather poetic resemblance between a phugoid state and fugue state.

I have always uncritically assumed that my interest in plane crashes was spontaneous, casual, free from any deeper significance. I assumed that when I tell people that Fitch is one of my only heroes I am saying so only because his calm bravery and skill impress me as the precise opposite of my immaturity. This is an unexamined life.

But as in a novel, my own characterization was suddenly laid bare before me the other day, when I read a doctor describing our bodies as having systems “of significant redundancy which prevent sudden failure” and recognized Fitch’s words for the systems of an airplane. The metaphor coalesced and I saw at once why crashes transfix me:

Here are men and women guiding the unstable through the air through resolute focus and the overcoming of fear. And here are those who through their rashness and incompetence destroy themselves and those who depend on them.

I admire the former so much but dread that I am one of the latter, and thus come the dreams, the stories, the fixation.

Tags: crash plane memory dreams
A shadow waves goodbye. Errol Morris, an artist whose talents and moral vision I admire beyond words, asked the head photo editors of three news wire agencies (AFP, AP, and Reuters) to choose the photos of George Bush they considered most significant or reflective of his presidency and personality and interviewed them about their selections. It appeared on his NYT Zoom blog. It is truly fascinating, both its commentary on the iconic images of the departed administration and its inclusion of some photos I’d never seen before. I am inclined to note the deep morality of Morris’ persistent interest in the humanity of his subjects, but I don’t want to color the discussion; it will need to suffice for me to say that I consider it essential that we seek out the personal amidst the historical, the individual amidst the political, always, even if only to discomfit ourselves.

A shadow waves goodbye.

Errol Morris, an artist whose talents and moral vision I admire beyond words, asked the head photo editors of three news wire agencies (AFP, AP, and Reuters) to choose the photos of George Bush they considered most significant or reflective of his presidency and personality and interviewed them about their selections. It appeared on his NYT Zoom blog.

It is truly fascinating, both its commentary on the iconic images of the departed administration and its inclusion of some photos I’d never seen before. I am inclined to note the deep morality of Morris’ persistent interest in the humanity of his subjects, but I don’t want to color the discussion; it will need to suffice for me to say that I consider it essential that we seek out the personal amidst the historical, the individual amidst the political, always, even if only to discomfit ourselves.

Morality

Although I am an atheist, I am very fond of religions and respect belief in them completely (for reasons I’ve discussed previously). Much, though not all, religious tradition is codified morality of a very fine sort, the sort imbued with an otherworldly detachment from ends. While the practitioners of religious morality -being human- have often been deviously barbaric, the ideas themselves and their interwoven mythical justifications can be both beautiful and transformative.

Ordinary morality, concerned with praxis and outcomes, is problematized by subjectivity as well as human nature; as Nietzsche noted, “All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” From the start, any individual or collective assessments of reality and their according moral deliberations are debatable, endlessly so. This does not mean that nothing is good or that nothing is evil, but it does multiply the gradations of gray between those poles. And since “error is the central feature of human existence,” the most important moral decisions about when we may kill, when we should die, how many civilians we may incinerate incidentally and for what ends, are in my view fundamentally indecent to make. We are too likely to be wrong to take life. As J.U. Neuf put it in 1950, “The total wars of our time have been the result of a series of intellectual mistakes.”

When I say pure morality is unconcerned with ends, I mean it is concerned only with means, with the conduct of the individual. The state of the world is never within your control; only your behavior is. A pure moral system -which arbitrates your relationship with the world- cannot depend at all on variables beyond your control or it is worthless, contingent, ungoverning. Thus pure morality has little to say about justice or peace or other political concepts involving the group; rather, justice and peace emerge from aggregated individual morality.

(This is why efforts to “legislate morality” are deeply problematic. As social morality is an emergent phenomenon, it is not within our capacity to lead the horse with the cart by enforcing ends; we must be and inspire moral individuals, a process nearly impossible except on the interpersonal scale).

Long ago, I asked my father what was extraordinary about Jesus’ willingness to be crucified. After all, I asked: if I proposed to him that he might die painfully but would in doing so give eternal and blissful life to every human being who wanted it, wouldn’t he say yes? Given the context of the Gospels, wouldn’t he be elated to save sinful humanity? I ask this of parents: wouldn’t you die to give your child infinite life without suffering? Wouldn’t we all love to have this: a chance to sacrifice for the good of all humanity, a chance to redeem the world? And to know while doing so that an afterlife awaited you?

If we posit that there was a heroic and incontestably valuable end, we reduce the power of his self-sacrifice, though not completely. (My father proposed that Christians assume Jesus was so fully human that he didn’t know or couldn’t believe in those aspects of his mission, particularly while on the cross; if that is the case, I regret proposing my analysis).

In World War II, Gandhi advised Jews threatened by Nazism that they “…should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife… They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… Collective suicide would have been heroism.” We shudder at his morality, but that is purity: the “hatred of the world” Kierkegaard spoke of, the refusal to engage in any defense of self, family, or friend at the expense of another life. Gandhi will not defend Indians; Jesus will not save the crucified thieves. (This is why the Buddha felt that children were chains: they bind you in love to the world your status in it; you cannot, for example, martyr yourself resisting the SS if you have a family who will suffer for your deed).

This morality is difficult if one hopes to improve the world-which I why I would never engage in political action- and I admit that in any material sense it is indefensible. Civilization is the result of ever-improving efforts at implementing broader moral systems (efforts with fits and starts, to be sure), which is another reason why moral teachers and prophets are typically renunciatory: they have no business in society.

The world cannot and perhaps should not be composed of such people: pure in moral austerity, willing to die, willing to let kin die, willing to let the world do whatever it may without ever resisting, mindful of the fact that to fight for is always to fight against and disinclined therefore to fight at all. In extremity, morality becomes unacceptable to us; Gandhi’s ahimsa seems loathsome when we think of Hitler. And indeed, what would we say now to Jesus, who would not kill Bin Laden, or even assassinate Hitler himself?

This morality seems inhuman, practically, but it is in this morality that I am most interested, in how it problematizes the affairs of state, the laws we enact, the deeds we condone, and most of all in how in emulating the exemplars of this morality we achieve the very ends we’ve turned away from in doing so: justice and peace.

Hence Gandhi’s wonderful quote: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Do not seek it; do not legislate it; do not fight for it. Be it.

Tags: morality politics religion friedrich nietzsche errol morris gandhi soren kierkegaard

The Judgment of the Past by the Present

It is perhaps obvious how indebted I am to Milan Kundera for my political and artistic sensibilities; as often as I mention Errol Morris (thanks, Riaz!), it is Kundera who has primacy among my influences and for whom I have the most affection.

On a day when, as Doree noted, he has been implicated as a one-time informer (in 1950, when he was 21), I was heartened to see quoted by Bunnynico a passage from my favorite of his works, Immortality. She relates the following quote to our American election:

Of course, imagologues existed long before they created the powerful institutions we know today. Even Hitler had his personal imagologue, who used to stand in front of him and patiently demonstrate the gestures to be made during speeches to fascinate the crowds. But if that imagologue, in an interview with the press, had amused the Germans by describing Hitler as incapable of moving his hands, he would not have survived his indiscretion by more than a few hours. Nowadays, however, the imagologue not only does not try to hide his activity, but often even speaks for his politician clients, explains to the public what he taught them to do or not to do, how he told them to behave, what formula they are likely to use, and what tie they are likely to wear. We needn’t be surprised by this self-confidence: in the last few decades, imagology has gained a historic victory over ideology.(….)Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that could break this power.

Bunnynico has more very interesting analysis on these ideas here, and links to an article called Milan Kundera and Image. I consider his commentary on politics and media to be of tremendous value and quite accurate in their assessment; as I’ve expressed, I believe it is image (or we might say “the personal” or “the demographic-aesthetic”) that is responsible for almost all “political” beliefs.

But I want to mention something else: if you’ve read Kundera, you are familiar with his utter hostility to (1) the reduction of artists to their biographies, which he considers not merely a useless form of analysis for art but in fact one that misleads and distorts and (2) the judgment of the past by the present.

This latter phenomenon is perpetual and embarrassing: we are so happy to condemn those whose historical context was to them the fluid and impossible terrain of the present, but is to us the exposed and dissected landscape of the textbook. As Kundera once wrote, man proceeds through life as though walking down a path in the fog. He can see perhaps a few steps ahead of himself, and a bit to the woods on either side, but not more. When we look back on him, we see only the path and never the fog. It is all so clear!

Perhaps these themes interested him because he knew that in his early, revolutionary youth –at a time when most of our intellectual heroes were enthusiastically embracing murderous cretins like Stalin, Mao, and Che– he stumbled on his path. Or perhaps his interest was merely that of the artist: generalized, human, investigative.

Kundera never speaks to the press, but he’s spoken about this to emphatically deny it. My affection for his work biases me, so I offer no conclusion. I think, however, that we ought to remember the fog of the time, the youth of the man, and the impossibly inertial forces of history, which have now reached across fifty-eight years to grasp at an artist who’s spent his life fleeing them.

Tags: milan kundera history culture politics
“Maybe what we call consciousness is just the pattern of the interaction between our neurons. Our self-awareness could be nothing more than a beautiful set of pictures of neurological starlings.”

Brigno, in a comment to my reblog of Kateopolis’ starlings. It immediately brought to mind the concept of emergence.

It is a concept which has particularly captivated my dad, who I hope will describe it a bit in a comment below. Its solid Wikipedia article quotes an academic’s description in saying that emergence is

“…the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems… The common characteristics are: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems); (2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro “level” (i.e. there is some property of “wholeness”); (4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and (5) it is “ostensive” - it can be perceived. [Another quality is] supervenience — downward causation.”

This may seem utterly pedantic, but emergence is a powerful process that may explain many presently mysterious phenomena, such as the development of consciousness.

The spectacular Errol Morris film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control discusses emergence in at least two of its four threads: the behavior of the naked mole rats (and animals, and humans, in general) and the interconnectivity of the simple robots (their function as a system exceeds their complexity as units, as is true of human civilization).

Indeed, the quality of starlings flocking is exemplary of emergent behavior, as are many insect societies, climate patterns, physical qualities, and more. Perhaps thought, language, culture, and history are as well.

Note: see also Placebo’s excellent post on consciousness and patterns, in which she discusses materialism in neuroscience, divergencies in individuals’ experiences, and some practical applications of these ideas.

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”

David Hume, quoted by the always-fascinating Langer. I think this is one of the most interesting statements I’ve read; it immediately invites a slew of critical questions which, were it not Hume writing, one might assume the author had not considered; since it is Hume, it’s likely he had in mind answers to the following:

What are “errors in religion”?

Do we mean instances in which religion contradicts evident reality, such as counterfactual claims about the history of the physical universe? Or do we mean instances in which a religion is internally inconsistent, in which its own assertions violate one another?  Or do we mean errors in interpretation, as when someone suggests that “jihad” means the slaughter of innocents?

Many of these last errors, interpretive errors, result from texts remaining the same as culture evolves through centuries, so that what is reasonable to infer in one century is unacceptable in another; does Hume consider these to be a special class of error? How is one to avoid this sort?

Why religion and philosophy?

Hume was writing before ideology replaced religion as the primary credential system in human life.  In more recent history, errors in both religion and philosophy have been dwarfed in impact by “errors” in politics. As politics has replaced religion as the driving ideological force in the world, politics assumes responsibility for world wars and genocide, even when religious pretexts are used.

In Hume’s time, this was not as much the case; perhaps that is the reason he restricts himself to these fields. Nevertheless, it is a hole in his assertion: it seems that it is not errors in “religion” but errors in what we believe, what we hold sacred: that is no longer purely religious for many. Credential errors are the problem.

(And again, Errol Morris is right to say: “Error is the central feature of human existence,” errors in science, in reason, in faith, in love).

Power and danger

Last, is Hume interested in why errors in religion and ideology are dangerous while those in philosophy are not? The answer seems obvious to me: philosophy for some time has been in the habit of trafficking in the arcane and the pedantic, matters of import to few and emotional resonance to fewer. Religion, and now ideology, are where meaning is molded and made manifest in human life; when they are corrupted, as they often are, the consequences are serious.

People live and die and kill and love for their beliefs. Who can seriously imagine dying for Derrida?

Tags: philosophy religion
Bunnynico noted: Richard Mosse, Air Disasters Mosse photographs air disaster simulations: fire crews racing to put out temporary fires, amidst fake airplane bodies on the runways of airports all over Europe and the United States. Read an interview with Mosse here and view more photos at his website. I happen to be unfortunately obsessed with plane crashes for many reasons, some shallow and some more meaningful. I endlessly admire pilots and crew, and think that air disasters tend to evince the best in humans: focus, selflessness, sobriety, rapid intelligence, and heroism. I also think that Errol Morris’ “Leaving the Earth” episode of First Person is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. I think about it every time I fly, and the momentary terror that grips me when an engine changes pitch or a bank angle seems too steep always reminds me that I want to be alive.

Bunnynico noted:

Richard Mosse, Air Disasters

Mosse photographs air disaster simulations: fire crews racing to put out temporary fires, amidst fake airplane bodies on the runways of airports all over Europe and the United States.

Read an interview with Mosse here and view more photos at his website.

I happen to be unfortunately obsessed with plane crashes for many reasons, some shallow and some more meaningful. I endlessly admire pilots and crew, and think that air disasters tend to evince the best in humans: focus, selflessness, sobriety, rapid intelligence, and heroism.

I also think that Errol Morris’ “Leaving the Earth” episode of First Person is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. I think about it every time I fly, and the momentary terror that grips me when an engine changes pitch or a bank angle seems too steep always reminds me that I want to be alive.

Tags: art flight plane crash plane crash

Last night, Zachary Godshall -with whom I’m acquainted through Will and my doppelganger- screened for three of us his new documentary, God’s Architects. It was astonishing and extremely moving; if you care at all about art, obsession, and the expressions of love, devotion, hope, and madness humans undertake, you’ll love it.

The film is an immersion in five subjects: a blissful squatter in the California desert who is building “God is Love” mountain; a muscular Arkansas Mason erecting a protective memorial castle for his deceased daughter; a 92-year old minister in Vicksburg who preached on a converted bus and assembled a pink-and-red sculpture garden to attract converts; a Tennessean in mourning for his brother who created a castle next to the houses he built from spare lumber; and an absent and ghostly south Louisiana man, whose bizarre sculptural park is now unintelligible in its iconography.

I assume it is bland and banal to mention Errol Morris in discussing a documentary, but although Godshall’s film is in no way derivative in technique or concept to an Errol Morris movie, it shares something: a movingly non-judgmental evenness, a compassionate capacity to find humor and profundity in men who might otherwise be viewed as loons.

As a curation of astounding folk art -uninstructed architecture and strange decorations- the film is wonderful. But as an exploration of how people -some mad, some made miserable by tragedy- strike out to build structures of meaning and connect them haphazardly with religion, with art, with folk tales, the film is one of the most moving I’ve seen.

He’s still finishing it, and the next screening will be at LSU on October 28th. I hope that, should you be interested, you can see it some day soon. In the meantime, there is a MySpace page for it.

(Like all great movies, this one resists encapsulation in a trailer).

Tags: art film god godshall movie obsession religion folk art
KB posted this photo: “The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” as photographed by Roger Fenton in 1855. As the spent cannonballs attest, the Plain was the location of the Crimean War and the legendary charge of the Light Brigade. Errol Morris, to me one of the great artists of our time, has a prolix blog at the New York Times called Zoom, which tends to discuss the manipulation of truth through representational media (for example, he wrote at length about the infamous instance of Iran using the Photoshop cloning tool to alter the photo of their missiles). He started the blog by discussing about the Fenton photograph above, and in typical fashion wound up writing three extraordinarily long articles, replete with digressions about Fenton, the war, photographic development, and more. His interests: did Fenton, as is commonly assumed now, place the canon balls on the road? Is this photograph “staged”? What does it mean to “stage” a photograph? His investigation is exhaustive, but truly brilliant, and his conclusions were notable to me. If you’re into questions about media, representation, war, and history -and given the present conditions of the state and its news apparatus one should be- it’s fascinating. It has the trademark of all of Morris’ work: it demonstrates the fallibility of analysis, the eagerness of the knowledgeable to judge, and how persistently wrong we are about everything.

KB posted this photo:

“The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” as photographed by Roger Fenton in 1855. As the spent cannonballs attest, the Plain was the location of the Crimean War and the legendary charge of the Light Brigade.

Errol Morris, to me one of the great artists of our time, has a prolix blog at the New York Times called Zoom, which tends to discuss the manipulation of truth through representational media (for example, he wrote at length about the infamous instance of Iran using the Photoshop cloning tool to alter the photo of their missiles).

He started the blog by discussing about the Fenton photograph above, and in typical fashion wound up writing three extraordinarily long articles, replete with digressions about Fenton, the war, photographic development, and more.

His interests: did Fenton, as is commonly assumed now, place the canon balls on the road? Is this photograph “staged”? What does it mean to “stage” a photograph? His investigation is exhaustive, but truly brilliant, and his conclusions were notable to me.

If you’re into questions about media, representation, war, and history -and given the present conditions of the state and its news apparatus one should be- it’s fascinating. It has the trademark of all of Morris’ work: it demonstrates the fallibility of analysis, the eagerness of the knowledgeable to judge, and how persistently wrong we are about everything.

Tags: history art