supply and command

Two Random Links

Here are two links that have nothing at all to do with one another.

A few days ago, it was announced that Venice now has a female Gondoliera. Chapeau!

Plus I came across this essay on stupidity by Robert Musil (couldn't find an English-language link, for which I apologise). It was completely unknown to me until now. And God knows how much I am interested in the philosophy of stupidity.

Update: Now the BBC has also a nice little film on Signorina Gondoliera.

20 Years On

And now it's been 20 years that the Berlin Wall fell. Media commemoration has been pretty much alike across the board - but this web documentaire on France 24 stands out, as it features a brief interview with German historian Hubertus Knabe. His most recent book, Honeckers Erben ("Honecker's heirs") lucidly demonstrates that political agitation from former SED-members is among the main causes of widespread Ostalgia (= nostalgia for the communist dictatorship) in the former East Germany.

His Academic Eminence, Live on Stage

Don't miss out on today's book launch:

The one and only Amartya Sen is going to lecture on The Idea of Justice, this evening at 6.30pm (GMT) in the LSE's Sheikh Zayed Theatre. The event can be followed on the LSE live webcast here.

And isn't it comforting to know that even great authors procrastinate (why the heck didn't he launch the book last year, when I was at LSE???).

Quote of the Month: Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn on how to become a professional writer:

"The first thing is: you just have to do it. If you sit around waiting for the great opening sentence, you will never write anything. My father was an art expert and, for years, was planning to write a book on art. He used to leave notes for himself by the telephone, and the note would be "go to post office, pay gardener, write book". And, of course, if you just leave notes by the telephone, you never will write the book. A lot of it is just doing it. When [...] you're like a cocky young punk, and you can't quite understand why it is that some of these guys who you think are just middle-aged bores who haven't written anything interesting in 25 years are holding down all the jobs: my limited experience in the editing rooms of newspapers is that often it's because they're the guys who are reliable, that if you say "we need this by 5pm" they deliver it by 5pm. We have this awful phrase "he's just phoning it in". You'd be surprised, from the editor's point of view, how grateful you are for the guy who phones it in. Compared to when it's 5 o' clock and you haven't got the copy. I think at a certain level, you just need to be reliable, you've got to get on and do it. If you really don't want to be spending a couple of hours a day writing, you really should not be writing. I'm a painfully slow writer compared to a lot of people. I'm always horrified when I hear people saying how long they take to write a book. It comes very slowly to me. But even when it comes slowly, you've got to actually sit down there and do it."

Couldn't have stated the philosophy of this blog any better!

(Found in Conversations with History)

Rodney Stark on "Discovering God": Sociology meets Pseudoscience

In his latest work, "Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief", sociologist Rodney Stark of Baylor University sketches the history of religion from its tribal beginnings up to the rise of Islam as the last great monotheism. Highlights include some discrediting thoughts on cultural evolution, a lot of swipes at the so-called "New Atheists" (mainly Dawkins and Dennett), a useful characterisation of supply-side aspects, a revealing chapter on Christianity, and a shocking outing on the final pages. Some parts are as strong as his "Acts of Faith" (2000), others just as embarrassing as John Lennox's "God's Undertaker".

In the Introduction to the book, Stark describes his new paradigm as antithetical to some of the classics of the sociology of religion and to his own past work (in particular, his 1987 essay "Evolution of the Gods"). The "discovery" that he examines doesn't relate to social theories on the causes of religious belief; specifically, he detects methodological shortcomings in Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890), sees no value in Durkheim's analysis of Australian aboriginal totemism (1912), and even gets a chance to repudiate more recent analytical work on the foundations of religious belief, such as Roger Boyer's "Religion Explained" (2002). In contrast, his prime interests lie in the spread of religious traditions, the dynamics of religious groups and denominationalism, and comparative religious history. The "evolution of belief" can be understood as either "the evolution of human images of God, or as the evolution of the human capacity to comprehend God" (his italics), with cultural evolution being a process of conscious selection without social forces acting as a "mechanical" transmitor. Stark dismisses the explanatory power of the "meme" analogy as "unobservable entity imagined by [Dawkins] for polemical purposes" without further discussing or referencing literature on memetic theory. Consequently, he asserts that cultural evolution "differs substantially from theories of biological evolution", which may or may not be "guided by Intelligent Design."

Anyone willing to overlook such peculiar statements may be comforted by the third chapter, in which Stark elaborates on the religious life in ancient Rome with reference to principles of the economics of religion, a field on which he has had a considerable influence. As Stark explains, the Roman Republic (509-27 BCE) lends itself well to the illustration of the natural state of religious economies, which is one of religious pluralism. Since any given society incorporates a wide range of religious tastes and needs as well as different degrees of religiosity, religion suppliers will compete for adherents by occupying particular market niches. No single supplier, however, will capture the whole of the market, and hence a competitive religious economy develops, yielding high levels of religious participation. Stark shows that this theoretical benchmark is a good fit to Roman religious history, as the Roman Republic neither purported a subsidised state religion nor restricted the influx of foreign religious cults. The supply-side analysis explains the success of "foreign" deities such as Isis, Bacchus, and Cybele and the rise of Christianity in the early Empire by pointing to the specific competitive advantages of the new religions. The Isis cult, like early Christianity, propagated a hitherto unknown message of love, individual salvation, and moral conduct; both the Bacchanalian and Cybelene religions were based on written texts and thus trailed most traditional Roman cults in theological sophistication; and even before the gender revolution of Christianity, Bacchanalian religion offered considerable freedoms to women. However, as Stark also points out, only the high degree of commitment demanded by these cults had the potential for causing religious conflict. The congregationalism of Bacchalanian religion ultimately resulted in its restriction by the authorities, while the political dimension of Christianity led to the
persecution of Christians.