Canned Dragons

“The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.”

~ N.T Wright

In this piece (NYT gift article), Tish Harrison Warren interviews New Testament scholar N.T. Wright about Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus. The scholar makes the point, as others have, that the Resurrection was just as unbelievable in Jesus's time as it is in ours. Therefore, for those that knew him closely to carry on his ministry in the way that they did, and in the face of almost certain death, the only explanation is that they saw and they believed.

It’s hugely instructive because even Jesus’ most loyal disciples clearly had not expected him to be raised from the dead. They were flattened by his death. But then his Resurrection, plus what happened afterward, which was Jesus doing this very strange thing of somehow bequeathing them his own personal presence, which they came to call the Spirit, or the Holy Spirit. This absolutely revolutionized them. And it’s not just that they were fearful before and completely emboldened and ready to go to the ends of the earth afterward. It’s that the agenda changed.

The agenda that Wright refers to is one of radical peace. Of praying for those who were persecuting the disciples. It represented a total change from the instinct to survive and the values of the Roman world. The former disciples, who then became the apostles, were reborn with a different outlook. This can be attributed to having seen the risen Christ. Fearful before, following the death of their lord. Emboldened after, having seen Him risen.

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. (1 Corinthians 15:17)

The difficulty, even if you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, is in how to keep centered with that focus. How do you live that miracle out, day to day? It reminds me of a time of disruption in my own life where my everyday reality was shattered. When I found out that I had cancer, the cares that seemed so important before that day diminished massively in size. From one day to the next, my mental priorities shifted completely. No longer was I concerned about my grades, or my issues with my girlfriend. I just wanted to live and continue to taste the abundance of life. The struggle became so all-encompassing that I didn’t have room in my life for other cares. This is what I imagine it is like to truly live out a belief in the Resurrection. Exclusive focus.

What I found, through my cancer experience, is that — your focus can shift radically very quickly, but the challenge is in keeping that focus when the cares of life threaten to steal it. Gradually, the cares of life come in and take over mindshare. I am reminder of the Parable of the Sower in the 4th chapter of the book of Mark. Jesus explains the meaning of the parable to His followers:

The farmer sows the word. Some are like the seeds along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.

Some are like the seeds sown on rocky ground. They hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But they themselves have no root, and they remain for only a season. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.

Others are like the seeds sown among the thorns. They hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.

Still others are like the seeds sown on good soil. They hear the word, receive it, and produce a crop—thirtyfold, sixtyfold, or a hundredfold.”

I feel like the seed, in modern America, is sown among thorns. The worries of this life choke the word. My prayer is not only to have faith, but to be able to hang on to that faith in the midst of the thorns.

I recently listened to an episode of the Art of Manliness podcast about the ability to shut up in a world that won't stop talking. The guest on the show was Dan Lyons, who recently wrote the book STFU: The Power Of Keeping Your Mouth Shut In An Endlessly Noisy World. Unfortunately, at least a few people who read Lyons' book thought the author himself had a problem shutting up. Ironically, Lyons couldn't help himself from putting partisan political jabs in a book where they didn't really fit the subject. "This tracks," as they say. These days, high on social media, people really have trouble suppressing their urges to get those little jabs in.

With so many places in which to express themselves, it's hard for people to resist the compulsion to overshare. This has lowered the bar for discourse and allowed a lot more hateful rhetoric to proliferate. As the nation grapples with laws that are bringing forceful disagreement, I see people more and more willing to almost casually demonize their ideological opponents. Just about a week ago, I read a statement that actor Wil Wheaton delivered at the Southern Kentucky Book Festival. The statement was made after new legislation called Senate Bill 150, which related to children and how sexuality is handled in schools, was introduced. The bill, at the very least, seems to be clumsily worded and confusing.

Wheaton included these lines about the bill and the people who support it in his remarks:

A cruel, deliberate effort by people who have nothing to offer but hate, to hurt as many people as they can, including children.

[…]

That it will actually hurt children and the people who love them is not a bug, it is a feature. The cruelty is the point.

Saying that people who are supporting the bill have "nothing to offer but hate" is a deeply dehumanizing statement. I can't think of any way to more vociferously denigrate the worth of your neighbors than by saying they have nothing to offer but hate. Regardless of whether you disagree with how sexuality is handled in schools, to say that those on the other side have no human worth and that they want to hurt children is a tactic that represents some of the worst tendencies of discussion and debate. There are places, such as Sweden and Finland, that have an entirely different view of topics like gender medicine. Are the Swedes and the Fins hate mongers as well? Do they prize cruelty to children? Or do they have a debate about these issues without the sort of rancor that's taken for granted now in the U.S.? I'm sure people in those countries may disagree (perhaps rightfully so) with the national stance in areas like this, but the arguments don't typically seem to take the same shrill tone.

I hesitate to use the word “desensitized,” because, despite their ubiquity, I think we are very sensitized to these kinds of statements. I know I am. As we see these things said over and over again, they become a kind of irresistible truth in our minds. Boosts and retweets just get the hyperbole so firmly entrenched that it’s no longer recognized as exaggeration. Anger wins the day.

Far from being unusual, though, remark's like Wheaton's are the standard mode of discourse now and praised by many in the U.S. In fact, I wouldn't have even come across the talk given by Wheaton if it hadn't been boosted on Micro.blog with a significant amount of enthusiasm attached to it. Of course, there are probably many examples of this that lean more right, but I'm not readily exposed to those and most people that I know tend to believe instinctively that those are wrong. Plenty of good people that I know, though, seem to adopt the view that hating people who are more conservative than they are is almost an imperative. Even on the Micro.blog network, which is usually pretty congenial, I've read Christians referred to as "demon assholes" and "myth believing cretins."

I write this following a tragedy in which a shooter walked into a conservative religious school and killed students and staff. The shooter wrote a manifesto, which is assumed to contain anti-Christian sentiment that drove the violence. The manifesto is expected to be released at some point after a review by psychologists. Russell Moore makes the point that this manifesto is probably not materially very different from what we have now become used to seeing every day online.

Yet I wonder about all the “manifestoes” we have seen. I’m referring not to the deranged screeds of mass murderers but to the hate and rage that have become so commonplace in our society that we barely even notice them anymore. How long can we live like this and pretend we are powerless to change it?

[…]

But can we seriously believe that such derangement is not influenced by a culture that now seems to be in a permanent state of limbic distress—a society in which hatefulness is so “normal” that the only question seems to be which group of people we should hate?

Many leaders—no matter their ideology or political or religious category—have decided that what “works” in this present moment is to convince people that we are in a constant state of emergency. And the emergency is so great that all the norms, manners, and habits that have kept a country like this together for so long are no longer operative.

Indeed, just after reading the piece that Moore wrote, I read what can very certainly be classified as a mini-manifesto on the social network Mastodon. It was from a person who calls himself "Bleak Future."

I hope this is a wake up call for people who aren’t taking this creeping christofascism seriously — they are coming for EVERYTHING that doesn’t fit into their worldview.

If you ever wondered what you would have done in WW2 or Jim Crow, you’re doing it now.

This call to arms came to my attention because it was boosted by popular blogger Jason Kottke. It sounds like a disturbing prelude to an act of violence, but to Moore's point, it's easily shared and boosted without regard to the hatred for neighbor that it engenders. I hesitate to use the word "desensitized," because, despite their ubiquity, I think we are very sensitized to these kinds of statements. I know I am. As we see these things said over and over again, they become a kind of irresistible truth in our minds. Boosts and retweets just get the hyperbole so firmly entrenched that it's no longer recognized as exaggeration. Anger wins the day.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for policing speech or even "self-censorship." What I would advocate, though, is a more mindful way of bringing your thoughts into the world. At the very least, you should give a thought to your ideological enemies as human beings. That should be a pretty low bar to get over.

This is where we are, and "Bleak Future" may be right about one thing and that is, if this is how we handle debate about difficult topics, we are indeed slouching towards a bleak future.

Adam Wood hosts a show called Flux Observer that features one of my favorite podcast concepts: Wood reviews a cultural artifact from years ago to determine how his relationship to it has changed over the years. I've always wanted to do something like this, though I never considered doing it via a podcast. For years I've talked about revisiting albums that I enjoyed years ago to write about how well they hold up.

The latest episode of Flux Observer is an examination of Metallica's S/T record from 1991 (also known as "The Black Album).

"The Black Album" was a huge commercial success, but I always dismissed it as a product from a band past their prime. I had been into the earlier output from Metallica when I was going through a bit of a thrash phase and grouped them with Anthrax and even D.R.I. Master of Puppets was my jam, Metallica at their most potent. By the time the black album came out, it felt like time to move on (and indeed I did). I remember an almost sleepless night at my cousin Andy's house, seeing "Enter Sandman" played multiple times on MTV and just wanting to escape it.

Wood's enthusiasm for Metallica comes through in his vivid memories but the years that mark his distance from the work allow him to dissect some of the more complex themes, as when he goes into the meaning of "The God That Failed" and what Stephen King refers to as "dark Christianity." I'd urge a listen, even if you don't love this particular album, just to appreciate the experiences and insights that another person retrospectively analyzing one of their their treasured pieces of art can yield.

Jonathan Haidt and his colleague, Greg Lukianoff, believe that the enormous increase in mental health issues for young women who are identified as "liberal" has to do with going through a sort of reverse CBT process. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is one of the most effective tools for combating depression and a process that greatly helped Lukianoff recover from his own difficult bout with the dark clouds. CBT, in short, helps an individual to regain their sense of agency over mental processes like catastrophizing or intrusive thoughts.

Haidt found that the culture that had its origins on Tumblr about a decade ago went against the mechanisms on which CBT works. Therefore, those who were a part of that culture tended to have some of the emotional health problems that CBT is designed to help with mitigating.

Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed.

One of the reasons this analysis fascinates me so much is that I tend, at least some of the time, not to self-conceptualize as a resilient person, in respect to managing criticism. I'm not exactly really thick-skinned. So, I can somewhat identify with some of the cognitive and behavioral patterns mentioned here, which partly explains my concern with this phenomenon. Although, I never liked this particular aspect of Tumblr culture, which is one of the reasons I rarely visit that site. It seems to invite and even to breed problematic outlooks.

Since Tumblr has lost a lot of users over the years, the mindsets popularized on that platform have been popping up elsewhere. Haidt mentions users migrating to Twitter, but now Mastodon is a primary online hangout where you can experience this culture. For example, a couple of weeks ago, two people were arguing on Mastodon about a tech company's trustworthiness. Someone quickly stepped in to suggest reporting the person who was disagreeing about the company not being trustworthy to the instance moderator. The person who was actually in the argument declined to do that, but the issue of harm was brought up. Again, this was over a discussion about a tech company.

By many measures, the very people who are experiencing depression are actually pretty well off. Due to the mental frameworks they've constructed and perhaps their overexposure to the internet and social media, though, they don't feel that way.

The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.

I think we need to keep asking ourselves what is driving these problems, particularly to the extent that they are manifest in young people.

John Paul Brammer wades into the candy culture wars (which are adjacent to the chicken sandwich culture wars and seem to provoke no less depth of feeling, if not many true casualties) on his Substack.

No one really asked for the M&Ms to be more relatable or for Velma to call out toxic masculinity. These are decisions massive corporations made because we are living in an era where personal morality is almost entirely defined by consumption habits, because consumption habits make up a good chunk of our daily lives.

In a plastic-packaged, disposable society, the consumer is king. We look to cookie and candy manufacturers like Oreo and Mars to provide us a package of values because these are the places to which we keep returning. Consumption is an ever-present cycle, perpetuated by the need to replenish what has been consumed.

The humble black and white sandwich cookie that once divided us over the questions of whether or not to dunk or if it was proper etiquette to eat the icing first now attempt to teach us lessons in basic humanity or sexual anthropology. Contemporary corporations step in to give moral direction in the absence of institutions that once held our trust.

The thing is, though, that companies by their very nature can’t provide that moral clarity. The morals of a company are pretty straightforward: to turn a profit. What they can do, though, is produce the aesthetic, the vibe, the feeling of moral clarity. They can put on a pair of stripper boots and tell you “gay is okay” or whatever, and there will indeed be a number of news outlets willing to celebrate them for it.

This consensus consumerism has become big business, with brands performing to show us which has the most worthwhile values. Mainstream media, populated by pop-culture aficionados who long ago gave up on traditional guideposts, seems to love and support this turn of events without any real sense of the absurdity.

The recent piece on the new wave of American shoegaze in Stereogum was nothing if not exhaustive. Spanning obscure sub-genres and scenes, it shone a light on some of the mostly heavier U.S. based bands carrying on the tradition of outfits like Catherine Wheel and Ringo Deathstarr. The piece demanded a desire to dig deep and attention span to match that ambition. I spent some time this week going through the bands. It was not time wasted. Though I didn't come out of the exercise with a lot of new favorite music, I did benefit from hearing how the upcoming crop of bands was bending old sounds.

I was unaware of the existence of Blue Smiley, considered a seminal Philly based shoegaze band that inspired a number of the new scene's players. I've enjoyed listening to the limited material by the band, whose frontman, Brian Nowell, died in 2017 at the tender age of 26. It's got a watery, lo-fi charm that almost contrasts with the methodical understanding of song dynamics. It's not hard to imagine what they band could have been with a few more years under their belt.

A more current band to watch is Knifeplay, which has been around since the demise of Blue Smiley, but is just now coming to my attention as they release a new double-LP entitled Animal Drowning. Their expansive sound encapsulates the best ethereal fuzziness of Starflyer 59's Gold and mixes it with some of the melody and scope of Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream. The result sounds like something that could have been produced by Alan Moulder in the mid-90s. A standout track is "Lonely Sun." It's all carefully controlled chaos until the end, where the decomposition brings to mind the dramatic dénouements of the songs off Sonic Youth's Goo.

I'll be devoting more time to digging into Animal Drowning in the upcoming weeks to see if I'm ready for another record in my growing-too-big for its storage record collection. Buying new vinyl is the highest compliment I can pay to any band at this point.

I've been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a "last known good" configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a process or driver) did something that put the operating system in a bad state, you could always roll back to the last known good state and get things up and running. It was like being able to go back in a time machine to before a failure (a power most of us would like to have IRL). It was a chance to correct something and make it right, and then avoid the negative consequences.

When I look around at American society in the last few years, I sometimes think about what it would be like to have the ability to go back to a time when things were a little more settled and certain. Some of our experiments haven't exactly turned out as planned, and it would be nice to roll back to a last known good state. A colleague recently shared this article by Steve Goldstein in MarketWatch about findings of a strong correlation between declining religiosity and deaths of despair among a certain demographic. The article notes that, "So-called deaths of despair such as from suicide or alcohol abuse have been skyrocketing for middle-aged white Americans." A new paper postulates that the reason for this trend is fewer and fewer people (particularly those without college degrees) are attending church services.

The troubling trend of rising "deaths of despair" started to occur in the late 80s, even before the opioids often blamed for the problem had been released to the market. Church attendance declined in a manner parallel to the mental health decline seen most especially in lower-income or rural communities.

The paper makes the distinction between having a personal spiritual practice and attending something like a communal worship service.

What’s also interesting is that the impact seems to be driven by actual formal religious participation, rather than belief or personal activities like prayer. “These results underscore the importance of cultural institutions such as religious establishments in promoting well-being,” they said.

Despite the paper's findings, I think we need to be careful about ascribing what seems to be a multivariate issue to a single cause. However, the loosening of community bonds has long been known to be a factor in increasing loneliness and negative mental health outcomes. We are bearing witness to this phenomenon in some very distressing ways.

Belief In Belief

I don't share these findings because I think there is an easy solution. For one thing, we can't simply instrumentalize faith. Freddie deBoer writes about "belief in belief" in this piece.

It is one thing to argue that religion is true or is not true. It is another to say "it isn't, incidentally, but go on pretending, it's good for you." In the inherent condescension of that attitude I see something worse than Christopher Hitchens ever unleashed against the faithful. Whatever Christianity is, it is not worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Judaism is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Islam is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. And in fact if you take the precepts of those religions at all seriously, you can see praying to the God-shaped hole for what it is: idolatry.

Not only does it seem wrong to look at other people and think that the protective effects of faith are simply a positive delusion, but there's a fallacy in thinking that you can simply conjure true belief. It's not possible. I know someone who would love to believe and participates in rituals that are centered around belief, but does not in his heart truly believe. It's a certain kind of torment for him. Throughout my life, I've heard various stories about the futility of trying to resovle yourself to a faith that you can't totally reconcile in your mind and spirit. So, there's no easy prescription to solve this problem. Which brings me back to last known good.

It's a temptation to stare at the past through rose-colored glasses. As a lover of history, though, I feel like we should learn from our mistakes and successes when examined through clear eyes. Despite all of our progress, there are things that the ancients, the primitives, and even people in the 80s did better than us. Sometimes perhaps we should to look back at the last time we can remember something working, examine the conditions, and learn from the exercise.

Canned Dragons is a weblog about faith, noise and technology, written by Robert Rackley.

"For the memory can both provoke the dragon and the memory can also subdue him."

~ St. John Chrysostom

The song "Heaven's On Fire" by the Radio Dept. starts out with a clip from the movie. It's a sample of Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth talking about the record industry.

In one sense, it's just Thurston being Thurston, spouting off nonsense that sound like a stoner's Doritos-fueled dorm room philosophical insights. In another sense, though, he does a fairly good job capturing the zeitgeist of the time: major labels were ruining punk rock. The aging punk rock principle of not "selling out" was being stretched a bit thin after the success of Nirvana's Nevermind. How did underground bands take their shot at success and avoid the heavy criticism that came with making it big and potentially making artistic compromises to do so?

Thurston to fan: People see rock and roll as youth culture and when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do? Do you have any idea? I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture by mass marketing and commercial paranoia behavior control - and the first step is to destroy the record companies. Do you not agree?

Damon Krukowski, formerly of Sonic Youth contemporaries Galaxie 500, uses The Year Punk Broke as a reference point in a piece that despairs of the state of the music industry. Krukowski contrast the musical landscape in 1991 with what musicians are facing now. He comes to the conclusion that, despite the pessimism about corporate interests invading punk rock at the time, musicians had it much better than they do today. At least the major record labels cared about music (certainly as their ticket to making money, if for no other reason).

Now that you have companies like Apple and Spotify with a vise grip on the industry, there is truly no vested interest at the top looking out for the survival of music and the artists who make it. Although they are more invested in services now, Apple's core business is still centered around selling high-margin devices. Spotify takes for granted that music is a loss-leader, bringing in customers while their strategists figure out how they really want to make money. Krukowski doesn't miss the fact that Spotify has had their stock price drop 70% in the past year.

It's an uncertain time to be a musician. This is taking a toll on the mental health of the artists who make music for a living. It doesn't help to have Daniel Ek from Spotify telling them they just need to make more music. Something has to give here. As a consumer, though, it's difficult to know how to contribute. We can start, though, by buying music from services like Bandcamp and going to shows when we can catch our favorite artists touring. Beyond that, it feels like we have to sit back and watch the fallout, hoping and praying that the people who bring us so much delight through their work have safety and stability.

I generally don't do year-end lists, but I like to share a couple of my favorites things from the past year. In this interstitial time between Christmas and New Year's, I get a chance to reflect back on what I've enjoyed, while having very few demands on my time.

I first wrote about Scout Gillett earlier in the year, when she covered a Broadcast song, before her debut record No Roof, No Floor was released. I was looking forward to the full-length, but since Americana/country/folk is not my most-loved genre, I wasn't sure how much I was going to get into it. Though I enjoyed it at first listen, it's taken me a few months to come back to it and really give it the attention it deserves. The title track is my pick for my favorite song of the year. The song has stuck to me in a way that no others in 2022 have. It doesn't hurt that it follows familiar patterns set by the Angel Olson song "Sister" from 2016's My Woman.

"No Roof No Floor" starts of slowly and softly, carefully welcoming the listener into Gillett's world and letting them get settled. It rumbles along at a steady pace, convincing us that, as Gillette says, "lovin' should be this easy if we just would believe it," until a break in the middle. It's just enough time for Gillett to catch her breath along with a simple strum before belting out the chorus with her powerful voice, with all emphasis on those lines that she keeps coming back to. It's as if she's spent almost all of her lyrics in the first part of the song, and she has to put the full force of her emotional energy into those particular words.

In this live version of "No Roof No Floor" from the Chicken Shack, you really get a sense for the physical effort performing the song takes. While Gillett stretches her mouth as wide as it can possibly go to give the chorus the punch it has in the studio recording, Athena from her backing band shreds the guitar solo that makes it feel like the whole room is going to implode. Nothing actually comes down, and you still have a roof as well as a floor, but the space is changed from all that has transpired.