Recently my next door neighbor moved out, having failed to be accepted into the graduate program of her choice at the University of Colorado here in Boulder. I thought of her as The Swiss Miss, though I never said this aloud in her presence. Once, while helping her to edit the later-failing proposal (now, would I do that? Shame on you for even thinking it!) she referred to people of color as "other species." Just prior to her return to the Alpine canton that produced this peculiar mentality, I ran into her and a few friends as they were readying a garage sale, so I got the jump on the best stuff for way cheap. Among my scores was a small bookcase that I installed in my downstairs bathroom -- a furniture placement I highly recommend.

Granted, you didn't need to know all that. Just the usual warmup rhetorical filler.

What I was just noticing, and what I had intended to convey before that first paragraph intruded itself, is that most of the titles on those three short shelves come from university presses. If you've been reading CBO for a while, you'd certainly recognize many of these books, as I've been using screen snaps of their covers as cheap-thrill graphical embellishment on these very pages. Among the presses represented are those of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Duke, the University of Chicago, the Universities of Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, the State University of New York. And, of course, how could we forget Princeton.

I favor (and savor) these kinds of resources because the issues I'm researching for my own book (to be released sometime later this decade by some lucky publisher) are so politically charged and culturally thorny -- Oprahesque "spirituality," breathy-babe "feminism," triumphalist TechÜberAlles "new media," etc. -- and I want to be sure to remain fair and balanced in my treatment. Of course I've also been collecting quite a number of primary sources by various pointy-headed New Age numskulls.

But the credentialed professoriat is crucial to establishing my objectivity and critical distance from such highly popular and hugely sensitive themes as channeling, vision quests, spirit guides, do-it-yourself shamanism, and all manner of "quantum" hoo-hah. For this reason, I was quite excited to stumble across the following slim volume published just this last January (though it's been around for awhile) by Princeton University Press. It appears to be the definitive reference on the subject. Here's a clip...

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not--or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept.

Before I shell out for this marvelous sounding book, I'll check the reviews on HighBeam, see how it's been received by a jury of its peeers (two syllables, not a typo). Ah, here's one now...

from: Whatever ("On Bullshit"), book review by Jonathan Lear
source: The New Republic, 21 March 2005
via: HighBeam™ Research

The run-of-the-mill bullshitter goes through the motions of hiding his indifference to the truth or the falsity of what he is saying, but the bullshit artist revels in the fact that he can put his indifference on display. Since nothing is hidden -- the bullshit has in effect been declared to be bullshit -- the only thing that can sustain it is the bullshit itself. I am surprised that Frankfurt overlooked this phenomenon, since instances of it are not all that difficult to find in the academic world. Frankfurt reports that he originally wrote this essay to present at a humanities center. It begs credulity to think he was not trying to confront his colleagues with an exercise in collective self-criticism. But he seems to have blinked at the crucial moment.

Oh yes, that's rich. But read on, it gets even better...

This is all the more surprising since Frankfurt gets right to the nub of the problem: "The contemporary proliferation of bullshit ... has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are." Actually, skepticism is not the same thing as bullshit. There are genuine and deep ways of wondering about the reality and the possibility of objective truth. Skepticism can be an honorable calling. But in the contemporary world it often degenerates into a received attitude, a hip pose, a rhetorical ploy, a kind of academic party trick. Imagine such a skeptic coming to the humanities center: what kind of paper is he or she going to give? An earnest argument that there really is no such thing as truth? Of course not. Such a paper would lack "irony," which is these days the great validator of intellectual authority. (I put "irony" in scare quotes because the current version has almost nothing in common with real irony.) So the paper will inevitably be an "ironic" performance that the truth simply does not matter to the speaker. This is not skepticism, it is bad theater. And the point that the "ironists" are making is that in their bullshit-artistry they can get away with it.

The author of the article, philospher-cum-psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear -- who is no less than "the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy" at the University of Chicago -- has also (not surprisingly, given the above review) written a fascinating sounding book called Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony. Hmmm, I think I'll order that one too. I like to keep an open mind.

"Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected Pope last month, served briefly in Hitler Youth during the war, when membership of the Nazi paramilitary organization was compulsory."

Reuters ~ Thursday, 12 May 2005

It would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify (if classify we must) upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being? If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation?

Edgar Allen Poe ~ The Imp of the Perverse

I promised myself (in your behalf) not to write about religion for awhile. I thought I should maybe, you know, give it a rest for a while. At least a day or two. But this has turned out to be an idle, if well intentioned, intention. Because I almost immediately found cause to break my word -- as you will see for yourself, gentle (and of course highly valued) reader, if you but read on.

I have made it a habit, for better or worse, to admit my worst character defects publicly on the Internet (or [this one's for you Frank] internet). In keeping with this habitual pattern, I find myself compelled by my own inner imp of the perverse to admit that, at least in what we have come to call the real world (not to be confused with MTV), my home away from home is -- and you have no idea the shame it causes me to say this -- Barnes & Noble.

But it's true. And I went there earlier tonight. Or last night, I suppose, as it's now 3am Thursday morning. Oh my, and the things I found! Which is weird, as I go there nearly every day, and sometimes spend hours browsing (not an internet term; it merely entails walking around) without finding anything of even passing interest. Those are occasions of great disappointment, I can tell you, so this evening's foray, by contrast, was especially rich.

Now, bookstores are not all books these days, as I'm sure you already know. There are music CDs and spoken-word CDs, movie DVDs and even software, wow. But what you may not expect, even knowing all this, is that even the bathrooms (or the toilets, as the British say, in this case less Puritanically euphemistic than their American cousins) are potential sources of high-grade information. If I were training knowledge engineers, as we called them before artificial intelligence became utterly passè at the tail-end of the '80s, I'd have them all start in the toilet. Which, ironically -- though they never did begin there -- is where they ended up. But, characteristically, I digress.

[And as I just broke out of this to do some rare email processing, and actually replied to a few people, now it's 5:30am and I'd better get a move on if I plan to publish this Thursday morning, which it already is.] [A bit later: oh well.]

For the observation that follows to make the sort of sense (broadly speaking) to you that it made to me, I should first say that I've been wondering lately if my various researches into neo-Nazism, antisemitism, racist bullshit in general, etc., were really all that relevant to Our Modern World. After all, everyone is pretty nice and nothing hurts all that much -- sentiments that Kurt Vonnegut once said he wanted engraved on his headstone. The following helped me answer this question definitively (which sort of certainty is rare enough in itself). What I saw on the men's room stall-wall was this.

Someone had painted over it, but the graffito was still quite legible. Nice, huh? I asked a manager if he was aware of this lovely little lemma on one of the store's bathroom walls. He said he'd get on it right away, so I imagine somebody's scraped it off by now. Not quite as easy to scrape off the taste it left.

So that was one thing I discovered at Barnes & Noble that I wasn't expecting. Probably in some sort of direct response, I bought a book I'd previously only glanced at -- The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by cartoonist Will Eisner, with a foreword by semiotician supreme Umberto Eco. Let me just say: highly recommended.

I saw another book that captured my fickle and flickering interest. The publisher says of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization:

Ask a college student today what he knows about the Catholic Church and his answer might come down to one word: "corruption." But that one word should be "civilization." Western civilization has given us the miracles of modern science, the wealth of free-market economics, the security of the rule of law, a unique sense of human rights and freedom, charity as a virtue, splendid art and music, a philosophy grounded in reason, and innumerable other gifts that we take for granted as the wealthiest and most powerful civilization in history.

It would make this post a lot shorter if I could just say "no comment," but I can't quite bring myself to pass on this one. I haven't read How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization yet, but I'm going to guess it doesn't say a whole lot about the other gifts the Church bequeathed to us, like the Inquisition and the collusion of Pius XII with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Just a hunch. I was born into a devout (some would rightly say fanatical) Catholic family, so I know a fair bit about its doctrine and history. And yeah, I sort of take these issues personally. But I wouldn't want anyone to think my attitude represented blind prejudice. It represents informed prejudice.

There's a review of The Bad Popes on Amazon that reads...

Forgotten History, October 27, 2003

Reviewer:

Avid Reader (Franklin, Tn) - See all my reviews

One of the problems Catholicism has always had to battle is the notion that the Pope may appear to be a devil but when he is acting or speaking "ex cathedra" his words and deeds are said to be infallible. This is a story of such popes - those who led armies, who jocked [sic] for political position, who tortured, maimed, committed sacrilege so dreadful that it was only a whisper.

Yet, if one is a faithful Catholic, one would say that this is all just appearances - that they were REALLY the representative of Christ on Earth only they didn't act like it. It seems they never asked that ubiquitous question, "What would Jesus do?" It is hard to select the "worst" one...what is more awful - to massacre your opponent or to commit adultry [sic] on the throne? To lead a slaughter of "infidels" or join with Earthly political powers. Urban is a real winner, my candidate for Bad Pope of the Millenium [sic] but others are also listed.

This is not, by the way, an anti-Catholic tirade. If anything, the Church can claim to be truly divinely blessed for having survived these creatures.

Was this review helpful to you?

I marked it "yes." Because papal infallibility "in matters of faith and morals" is an article of faith, the Catholic Church cannot fully admit and truly apologize for its moral culpability in supporting and assisting the Nazi regime during WWII.

As the following is already fairly long, and the subject matter hugely sensitive, I've marked my elisions in red (...). You can see what I've left out for brevity by clicking on the link.

from: Long-awaited Vatican document on Jews defends Pius XII
by Frances D'Emilio, Associated Press Writer
source: AP Online, 16 March 1998.
via: HighBeam™ Research

VATICAN CITY (AP) _ The Vatican today expressed deep regret for the "errors and failures" of Roman Catholics during the Holocaust but strongly defended wartime Pope Pius XII in a statement promised a decade ago to Jewish groups.

The 12-page document stopped short of apologizing for any failures by church leaders, something bishops in several European countries have done in recent years.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II had promised a statement to Jewish groups based on what role, if any, the church might have had in the Holocaust.

In a preface, the pope, who has made improving relations with Jews a cornerstone of his papacy, expressed hope that the document "will indeed help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices."

But the document, prepared by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, seemed destined to anger those hoping for specific apologies.

Only hours earlier, Israel's chief rabbi expressed dismay after learning that the document would only refer in general terms to the church's attitude to the persecution.

Chief Rabbi Meir Lau, himself a Holocaust survivor, demanded an "explicit apology for the shameful attitude of the Pope (Pius XII) at the time."

Instead, the document defended Pius XII for using his first encyclical, in 1939, at the start of his papacy, to warn "against theories which denied the unity of the human race and against the deification of the State," and which could all lead to a real "hour of darkness."

The document praised the "wisdom of Pius XII's diplomacy," saying it had been acknowledged several times by Jewish groups. It quoted Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister, as saying in 1958 at Pius' death that he raised his voice "when fearful martyrdom came to our people." ...

Last fall, French bishops apologized for their silence during the deportation of Jews, and German bishops have said that the church did not do enough to fight Nazism and condemn the Holocaust.

Today's document did not move the pope's position beyond what he expressed last fall to a seminar on anti-Jewish relations: "In the Christian world - I do not say on the part of the church as such - erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people" engendered "feelings of hostility toward this people." ...

The last Vatican document of landmark proportions on Jewish relations was a 1965 statement that came out of the Second Vatican Council under Paul VI and said the Jews cannot be collectively blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus.

And I'd have to agree; that was mighty white of them. Though there are other views of the matter, to be sure...

For another but opposite instance, try the unmistakable impression left by the image to the left from The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The caption says, "When you see a cross, then think of the horrible murder by the Jews on Golgotha."

That provides a fittingly unnatural segue to the final bit of this way-too-long post. But we need a little context first, and what better source to turn to once again than the Catholic Encyclopedia -- a little out of date (thank you AKMA for the consult) but a valuable resource nonetheless. Here's what you need to know as background. According to the CE article linked here, Mount Calvary was:

The place of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The word Calvary (Latin Calvaria) means "a skull". Calvaria and the Greek Kranion are equivalents for the original Golgotha.

Hold that thought.

So the last thing I came across at Barnes & Noble last night (if you don't count Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which is what I went there looking for) was Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, as bizarre a tome as you're likely to run into anywhere, trust me. The relevant section for our purposes here -- which also constitutes the wholly-inappropriate-from-every-angle punch line to this post, is...

Golgotha Fun Park? Turns out it's a miniature golf course. I almost choked on a strangled sort of twisted laughter when I read this on the inner flap, and two seconds after picking up the book (what's this then?) I knew I had to own it, study it, marvel at its consummate, breathtaking weirdness.

The author writes:

It's not easy to venture a theological interpretation of Golgotha Fun Park. [but he tries. and then...]

For most of us, of course, it's not the course's outstandingly challenging or clever holes that draw us to this place. It's the name. "Golgotha," "the place of the skull," doesn't exactly go with "fun." Whether intentional or not, the jarring association of skulls, crucifixion, and fun is a stroke of poetic genius uncommon in the world of miniature golf, let alone theology.

The front flap also includes this nonpareil passage:

...he found himself deep in conversation with people like Bill Rice, whose Cross Garden envelopes the visitor in a surreal landscape of plywood boards, rusty old appliances, and makeshift crosses tilting this way and that, all bearing words of divine judgment, death, and hellfire: HELL HELL HELL. HOT HOT. JESUS SAVES. YOU WILL DIE.

Lest you think all this purest blasphemy, the back flap reveals that author Timothy K. Beal "is Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case-Western Reserve University..." Publishers Weekly says: "Although he can be critical, Beal is never cynical or snide, guiding readers to an informed understanding rather than simply proffering these sites as case studies in a religious freak show."

Yeah, but it is a freak show. And that, as they say, is all she wrote.

For now.

There was a lot going on in 19th century America. And I mean a lot. It's a period I was never particularly interested in until about three years ago when I proposed to write a book that started in the so-called Gilded Age (roughly 1880 to 1900) with the rise of the robber barons and beginning of the corporation as we know it today. I wanted to write about how nouveau riches industrialists highjacked The University by endowing huge B-Schools (starting with Wharton and Harvard) and thus gained entry to a society that had formerly treated them as uncultured and uncultivated pariahs. (Where "culture" and "cultivation," nota bene, derive from agriculture, and thus are core values of the landed gentry.) Not only gained entry, but took over, the MBA replacing the Ph.D. as the credential of choice by the late 20th century. I'm tempted to tell the whole story here, but there's much more to it. A whole booksworth, in fact.

I did write an article along these lines for Harvard Business Review, but it was rejected. And half-rightly so, as I wrote it in a deplorably slapdash manner and spiced it with way too much snarky attitude. Nonetheless, the real reason they rejected the piece was predicted in the piece itself: business doesn't want to know about anything that, by deus-ex-machina definition, lies outside its own borders, as such context might pop the bubble of heroic myth surrounding and sustaining the whole concept of business: a hermetically sealed recursively self-referential (not to mention self-serving) system of three-card-Monte abstractions and distractions, which, having achieved some notable degree of global traction, we're supposed to believe always existed as it exists today -- part of the natural order of things. Sure. Uh huh.

You see? I still can't resist the snarkiness. Which to me seems no big deal, really. I mean business used to be afraid of bomb-throwing anarchists, with good reason, but today it can't even take a little ribbing. Admittedly, a little ribbing wasn't my objective. It was more like trying to prove the old adage to the effect that, unlike sticks and stones, "words can never hurt you," is a crock. Business knows it; so do I. So here we stand faced off across the barricades. The time is now. Do you know who your children are?

Unfortunately, my publisher and agent thought my amorphous proto-book proposal about the history of business was unlikely to interest anyone in, well... business, and that therefore the only audience for such a book would be longhairs and other throwback ex-acidhead uncredentialed quasi-intellectual free radicals like myself, of which I think there are about 40 or 50 left. A mind is a terrible thing, etc. At any rate, not a great demographic to publish into.

I did revise the (genuinely awful) article I wrote for Harvard Business Review and this revision was included in Business: The Ultimate Resource, a 2208-page monster published in 2002 and now sales-ranked 58,432 on Amazon, which basically bankrupted my publisher. I think my business book would've sold better, but hey, that's just me. And since my own last book, Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, once top-rated by Amazon's editors and Harvard Biz Review itself, no less, is currently sales-ranked 485,757 (i.e., not good) and sells remaindered for 50 frickin cents, you may fairly take my braggadocio, above, with two grains of salt and call me in the morning.

But how many really "get" that Winning Through Worst Practices subtitle? Abject failure is all part of my plan. I'm right on schedule, right on track, you'll see. Save your Confederate dollars or whatever contemporary analog you can think up. Your considerate callers? Your inveterate hollers? Your blog?

Yeah well that's what it all comes down to, isn't it. Ricky don't lose that number, that fire, that password. We came here to bury Caesar, right? I mean, am I right, Dude?

Clearly, this kind of talk confuses Business People, few of them ever having heard of Marc Antony or The Big Lebowski. Ah well, as I once ended a fateful document of yesteryear: We are not waiting.

Are we?

Damn straight we're not.

You wait, you look like this.

But wait. Didn't I start this with something about spiritualism? Yeah, I'm almost sure I did. Something about Swedenborg, I think,18th century wingnut and inventor of the Swedish meatball. His metaphysical cuisine was sampled by my old pal (not) Ralph Waldo Emerson, who also wrote him up in Representative Men as "The Mystic." Oooh! But this is important, however skeptical I may at first glance (and second, third, ... n^th) appear.

Because Emerson -- with that Oversoul baloney he picked up off Radio Free Upanishads via the Bhagavad Gita run through an early prototype of the Enigma machine -- was core to much weirdness that was to follow, including but not limited to the New Thought crowd I wrote about last Friday and... ta-da ...spiritualism. Natch.

And I had planned to relate the brilliant insights of Spiritualism in Antebellum America (see initial grafik, above) to those of The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, 1874-1920. As I said, there was a lot going on in the 19th century. Zounds. Stuff you never hear about, or not much anyway. Try this. Go in any bookstore and look in the American History section. Tell me if this isn't what you see: stuff about The American Revolution, stuff about The Civil War, then some stuff about Teddy Roosevelt maybe, then a lot of stuff about Dubya-Dubya Two, then a lot of stuff about plain ol' Dubya, then a lotta lotta stuff about how liberals are the spawn of Satan.

Liberals. Jesus wept. There aren't even any truly scary left radicals left to point to as the Seed of the Dark One.

But that wasn't the point. The point is that both before and after the Civil War, a bunch of other stuff happened. And that other stuff has stealthily grown in the damp cellar of our collective ignorance until it has come to define roughly 85% of what passes for contemporary reality. And the problem I face personally, moreover, is continually hyperlinking from seemingly reasonable analyses of these strange cultic belief systems to, well... perhaps a visual demonstration would explain it better.

So you see what I'm up against. Also, it's somehow gotten to be 5am here in Boulder, so folks are already up on the East Coast, and in their thousands checking CBO for the latest word on the roots of New Age irrationalism and such. I hate to let You People down or make you wait, so I'll exit with this salient bit from the archives of my ultra-gracious underwriter...

from: Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History, book review by Paul C. Kemeny
source: Church History, 1 March 2004
via: HighBeam™ Research
Copyright © 2004 American Society of Church History

Religion, R. Laurence Moore argues, is always about something else. Following the passage of the First Amendment after the conclusion of the American Revolution, Moore contends, people's sense of the difference between the religious and secular widened considerably. Yet in a free society lacking an established church, religion organized itself in ways that resonated with the free market economy. Consequently, religion was naturally commodified. In Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History, Moore describes ways in which religious and profane interests have been inseparably intertwined in popular culture throughout the past two hundred years....

Clever, witty, and at times dripping with sarcasm, this book is an engaging description of how religious and secular interests have manifested themselves in different dimensions of popular culture. Moore... revisits many of the issues explored in his earlier books, most notably Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans ... [and] ... Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture...