Category: Religion

German Opera House “Falling On Its Knees Before the Terrorists”

   "A scene added to “Idomeneo,” shown in a 2003 rehearsal, includes Muhammad and other religious figures."  Source of photo and caption:  online version of the NYT article cited below. 

 

(p. A1)  BERLIN, Sept. 26 — A leading German opera house has canceled performances of a Mozart opera because of security fears stirred by a scene that depicts the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad, prompting a storm of protest here about what many see as the surrender of artistic freedom.

The Deutsche Oper Berlin said Tuesday that it had pulled “Idomeneo” from its fall schedule after the police warned of an “incalculable risk” to the performers and the audience.

. . .

Political and cultural figures throughout Germany condemned the cancellation.  Some said it recalled the decision of European newspapers not to reprint satirical cartoons about Muhammad, after their publication in Denmark generated a furor among Muslims.

Wolfgang Börnsen, a culture spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc in Parliament, accused the opera house of “falling on its knees before the terrorists.”

 

For the full story, see:

JUDY DEMPSEY and MARK LANDLER.  "Opera Canceled Over a Depiction of Muhammad." The New York Times  (Weds., September 27, 2006):  A1 & A12.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

A Tale of Two Churches: Russia Has an Entrepreneurial Tradition Too

 

Two old and exotic churches, St. Basil’s in Moscow and Kizhi in the Russian north, survived the Soviet era and are invariably depicted in brochures and books to suggest the distinctiveness of Russian culture.  Both feature the tent roofs and onion domes that dominated the skyline of medieval Russia.  But each bears mute witness to a very different tradition:  one, imperial centralism; the other, entrepreneurial regionalism.  Both are embedded in Russia’s history; the conflict between them may well determine Russia’s destiny.

St. Basil’s, looming over Red Square, is an enduring symbol of theatrical autocracy; the Kizhi church, of frontier inventiveness.  Authoritarian centralism has been growing recently under President Putin.  But he also is fond of Kizhi and brought its new priest with him on his last trip to New York.

. . .

Tolerance was implicit in the northern tradition of dvoeveria:  the simultaneous belief in both the old pagan spirits and the new Christian God.  Medieval petroglyphs of the Kizhi region freely intermixed symbols of both.  Peasants in the region were not enserfed.  The northern region lost much of its independent power when Moscow sacked and subdued Novgorod.

. . .

Many more people have seen St. Basil’s on Red Square than Kizhi on an island in Lake Onega — and most see Russian history in terms of autocratic power in Moscow rather than creativity amid adversity in the regions.  Kizhi is the supreme monument to this forgotten tradition that continued to unfold as the vast Russian domain spread north to the Arctic Ocean and across the Pacific to Alaska in the 17th and 18th centuries.

No one knows who was the architect of either monument.  But Russian popular folklore suggests that the creator of St. Basil’s was forcefully either blinded or drowned to assure that it could never be duplicated.  In contrast, the creator of Kizhi is said to have simply thrown his ax into the lake and lived on peacefully as a holy man in the northern forests.

During that time, Moscow autocrats looked out from the closed front porch of St. Basil’s to see the enemies of central power drawn and quartered publicly in Red Square.  By contrast, the Kizhi church was wider and open to the sky — and where local people gathered to solve practical problems, facing a vista of lakes and forests.

Much of the renewed vitality in Russia today is coming from young people in the regions.  Their hopes for a more participatory and accountable political and economic future depend on the kind of open community that created Kizhi — not the closed circles that cling to St. Basil’s.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

JAMES H. BILLINGTON.  "MASTERPIECE; Two Churches, Two Russias; One born of authoritarian centralism, the other of entrepreneurial regionalism."  Wall Street Journal   (Sat., September 16, 2006):  P18.

 

Iranian Cartoon Exhibit Ridicules Jews

  “Visitors to the Palestinian Contemporary Art Museum in Tehran Thursday viewed entries in a contest for cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust.” Source of caption and photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below.

 

I believe in free speech, which includes freedom of expression in cartoons, and art, even when that freedom produces results that I find distasteful, outrageous, or evil. 

What is strange, is the hypocrisy of some radical Islamists, who cause death and destruction in rioting over Danish cartoons depicting Mohammad, but who only smile at cartoons attacking Jews.

 

The Iranian cartoon exhibition attacking Jews, is documented in:

MICHAEL SLACKMAN.  "Iran Exhibits Anti-Jewish Art as Reply to Danish Cartoons."   The New York Times   (Fri., August 25, 2006):  A1 & A8.

(Note: the online version of the article has the title “Iran Exhibits Anti-Jewish Art.”)

“Capitalism has Not Corrupted Our Souls; It has Improved Them”


Source of book image:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226556638/sr=8-1/qid=1153708722/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2835260-2878345?ie=UTF8

 

Deirdre McCloskey’s unfashionable,  contrarian and compelling manifesto in favor of what she calls the bourgeois virtues starts with an uncompromising "apology" for how private property, free labor, free trade and prudent calculation are the fount of most ethical good in modern society, not a moral threat to it.

The intelligentsia — in thrall for centuries to religion and now to socialism — has for a long time snobbishly despised the bourgeoisie that practices capitalism.  Ms. McCloskey calls such people the "clerisy."  Their values and virtues, like those of the proletariat and the aristocracy, are widely admired.  But almost nobody admires the bourgeoisie.  Yet it was for anti-bourgeois ideologies, she notes, that "the twentieth century paid the butcher’s bill."

As Ms. McCloskey explains:  "Anyone who after the twentieth century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing nineteenth-century proposals for government action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention."  By contrast, she argues, "capitalism has not corrupted our souls.  It has improved them."

 

For the full review, see:

MATT RIDLEY.  "Capitalism Without Tears; Fashionable thinkers sneer at the free market and its practitioners, but economic liberty may actually be a force for personal goodness."   The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., July 22, 2006):  P10.

(Note:  in the passage above, I took the liberty of correcting a misspelling of "Deirdre.") 

 

The full citation to the McCloskey book is: 

McCloskey, Deirdre N.  The Bourgeois Virtues:  Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2006.  (616 pages, $32.50)


Jefferson Believed: “redemption lay in education, discovery, innovation, and experiment”


Source of book image: http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0060598964.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

(p. 43) Jefferson was not a man of the Enlightenment only in the ordinary sense that he believed in reason or perhaps in rationality. He was very specifically one of those who believed that human redemption lay in education, discovery, innovation, and experiment. There were many such in the American Revolution. Thomas Paine spent much of his career designing a new form of iron bridge to aid transportation and communication. Dr. Joseph Priestley, another man who fled royalist and Anglican persecution and who removed himself from England to Philadephia after a “Church and King” mob had smashed his laboratory, was a chemist and physician of great renown. Benjamin Franklin would be remembered for his de- (p. 44) ductions about the practical use of electricity if he had done nothing else. Jefferson, too, considered himself a scientist. He studied botany, fossils, crop cycles, and animals. He made copious notes on what he saw. He designed a new kind of plow, which would cut a deeper furrow in soil exhausted by the false economy of tobacco farming. He was fascinated by the invention of air balloons, which he instantly saw might provide a new form of transport as well as a new form of warfare. He enjoyed surveying and prospecting and, when whaling became an important matter in the negotiation of a commercial treaty, wrote a treatise on the subject himself. He sent horticultural clippings from Virginia to the brilliant French consul Crevecoeur in New York, comparing notes on everything from potatoes to cedars. As president, he did much to further Dr. Edward Jenner’s novel idea of cowpox vaccination as an insurance against the nightmare of smallpox, helping Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of Boston—the initiator of the scheme in America—to overcome early difficulties in transporting the vaccine by suggesting that it lost its potency when exposed to wamth. Henceforward carried in water-cooled vials, the marvelous new prophylactic was administred to all at Monticello. (Not everything that Jeffrson did on his estate was exploitation.) For a comparison in context, we might note that Dr. Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale and to this day celebrated as an American Divine, was sternly opposed to vaccination as a profane interference with God’s beneficent design.

Christopher Hitchens. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives). New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. ISBN: 0060598964

Solow’s Wit (But Not Wisdom): Treat Schumpeter “Like a Patron Saint”


(p. 195) As Robert Solow wrote acidly in 1994, commenting on a series of papes on growth and imperfect competition, “Schumpeter is a sort of patron saint in this field. I may be alone in thinking that he should be treated like a patron saint: paraded around one day each year and more or less ignored the rest of the time.”
Schumpeter was a most unwelcome guest at the neoclassical table. Yet it was hard for the mainstream to reject him out of hand, since Schumpeter was such a celebrant of capitalism and entrepreneurship. He thought it a superb, energetic, turbulent system, one that led to material betterment over time. He hoped it would triumph over socialism. He just didn’t believe it functioned in anything close to the way the Marshallians did, and he was appalled that economists could apply an essentially static model to something as profoundly dynamic as capitalism. Schumpeter wrote presciently, “Whereas a stationary feudal economy would still be a feudal economy, and a stationary socialist economy would still be a socialist economy, stationary capitalism is a contradiction in terms.” Its very essence, as the economic historian Nathan Rosenberg wrote, (p. 196) echoing Schumpeter, “lies not in equilibrating forces, but in the inevitable tendency to depart from equilibrium” every time an innovation occurs.



Source:
Kuttner, Robert. Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

“How Great Thou Art”

(p. 1A) SAGO, W.Va.–Twelve coal miners who were trapped underground for more than 41 hours after an explosion were found alive late Tuesday night, triggering a joyous celebration among relatives here.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” gasped Anna McCloy, a 25-year-old mother of two whose husband, Randal, 26, was among the missing.
“They’re alive. I can’t believe it. They’re alive.”
Around her, townspeople were singing the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

The elusive miracle was credited to God. Later, when the real tragedy was learned, the same people who credited God with the miracle, inconsistently blamed human beings for the tragedy.
Good luck finding the article quoted above–as far as I can tell, the Omaha World-Herald has deleted this article from their online archive. The Omaha World-Herald credits the source of the article as having been The Washington Post. The citation to the hard copy of the Omaha World-Herald version is:
“A Miracle: 12 Miners Found Alive.” Omaha World-Herald (sunrise edition, Weds., Jan. 4, 2006): 1A & 2A.