By Patrick Blanchfield

Since the election, you’ve probably seen, heard, or read someone wringing their hands over the proliferation of “fake news.” The argument goes like this: fraudulent headlines and bogus stories are manufactured by cynical operators, spreading like wildfire via social media, and our capacity for informed decision-making, so vital to the welfare of our democracy, suffers as a result. If you believed that the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump, for example, you might have given him your vote; if you believe actors are being bussed in and paid to protest the election results, you might view all such dissent as in bad faith. And so forth.

Clearly, fake news is a problem. Perhaps you should consider avoiding the “news” from sites on aggregated lists like this one – at least if your news feed isn’t full of dubious headlines from still other sites telling you that those lists are also fake. And provided, of course, that the gatekeepers you turn to for such lists aren’t themselves operating with their own agendas.

But you know what’s also a problem, alongside – and, I think, just as much as – “fake news”? Bullshit news: “news” that grabs your attention, your clicks, and your outrage, sapping public energy and awareness. Bullshit news is news that screams “NEWS!” in inverse proportion to how much it actually matters – and that, not coincidentally, pulls your eyes away from news that does.

Let’s consider some examples. Weekend before last, you doubtless saw the stop-the-presses news that Mike Pence was booed by the audience at a weekend showing of Hamilton, and then addressed by cast members (remember?). This likely dominated your newsfeed in no small part because Donald Trump promptly spent much of the subsequent weekend tweeting about it. Meanwhile, in the glut of hashtag campaigns, thinkpieces, and impassioned defenses of the theater, free speech, and the truly political act that is dropping a thousand bucks for a ticket to a hip-hop musical celebrating the glorious promise of American democracy, what got lost in the shuffle was the nontrivial fact that our present-elect settled a massive lawsuit for running a massive con job that shamelessly bilked thousands of people out of their life savings. Of course, this was not a coincidence. The coverage analytics couldn’t be clearer on that score: the Trump University settlement was gaining momentum, and presto, Trump began tweeting about Hamilton, and that was that. In other words: the Hamilton story was bullshit news, but we ate it up, spent a weekend in high dudgeon, and then patted ourselves on the back for doing it. And now, this past weekend, just as The New York Times released a devastatingly thorough assessment of the Trump Organization’s myriad foreign entanglements, Trump took to Twitter and unleashed a firestorm by ludicrously claiming to have been stabbed in the back by fraud during an election that he won.

We need to realize now that this is how things are going to play out going forward: bullshit headlines, however grotesque and disturbing they may be, will serve to distract our attention from far more damaging matters. Precisely when we need to pay attention the most, to respond in sustained and focused ways, we’ll instead get served up some quick, tempting hit of bullshit – just enough to get our outrage fix, an opportunity to make some witty puns, to find solidarity in retweets, memes, and quick chuckles, and then move on to the next episode.

Fake news and bullshit news operate in tandem. Fake news may appeal to paranoiac, reactionary “low information” types, but bullshit news is catnip for outraged, ostensibly savvy liberals at the end of their tethers. On some level, it’s understandable. The past eighteen months have left us enervated and frayed, reacting reflexively, signal-boosting everything that’s come across our feeds in the buildup to a climactic showdown at the ballot box.

But that showdown is over now – and we’re entering a new phase. Before, it was a scramble, a sprint; now we’re in a marathon that’s all about judiciously consuming information and weighing priorities. Over the four years to come, remember this: Trump operates on the belief that “the American public has a two-to-three week attention span.” Trump still has some scores of lawsuits pending against him, and his administration’s conflicts of interest are only going to get more flagrant, too. Yet if we get thrown each time he does something vulgar and gobsmacking, none of these things will matter. In an ideal world, our attention bandwidth would be unlimited. In the real world, though, our susceptibility to novelty and outrage translates into shabby tradeoffs, particularly when issues demand longer-term follow-through. It’s hard to wrap our heads around a White House Chief Strategist who allegedly muses about the genetic superiority of various people and whose worldview basically boils down to a Decline of the West space opera – and so we’ll drown in endless chatter about some “new” twenty-something reactionary small-fry goose-stepping in a DC hotel basement instead (even though, as Kelly Baker argues, they’re not “new” at all). But we have to resist that temptation and buck the cycle.

Because if there’s one thing that Trump, bullshitter extraordinaire, can weather and outlast, it’s bullshit. Even worse: he thrives on it. Compare your sick burn or witty meme responding to Trump’s latest outrage to posting a dogshaming photo on Instagram. Odds are your pup, blissfully unaware of the social media exposure, will just piss on your couch again, because that’s what dogs do. Trump, though, revels in that limelight and embraces your umbrage, gleefully promising to do even worse next time – and playing up the spectacle of your distress and mockery over his bullshit as proof to his followers that you’re an oversensitive and feckless tool. He’s like a dog that pisses on your couch while snapping a selfie and tagging you in it. Shaming the shameless is a fool’s errand.

Here’s the bottom line. The danger of focusing attention on the latest installments of a demagogue’s florid personality politics is that that fixation directly serves their interests. Whether such is their conscious intention or not is immaterial – as is the question of whether Trump specifically is a puppet master or a hapless savant. What matters is that our focusing on such distractions leaves deeper structures of politics unnoticed, and more troubling developments proceed unremarked. So: reject the fake news, but also, please, resist the bullshit. We may all be lying in the gutter of our information silos, but if we can’t keep our eyes on the bigger picture, we’re done.

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In the Godforsaken Wilderness is a blog being written by Patrick Blanchfield in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. You can read past posts here.

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Patrick Blanchfield is the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

The post On Bullshit News appeared first on The Revealer.

Samuel Beckett photographed by Jane Bown, 1976

By Patrick Blanchfield

This is the first post in a blog, In the Godforsaken Wilderness, that Patrick Blanchfield will be writing in the coming days and weeks. 

The people are kept in urns, giant amphorae, immobile, up to their necks in dirt. They babble in fear and anguish, but they do not acknowledge each other. Their eyes are locked forward, their speech is so much rapid overtalking.is anyone looking at me?

am I as much as being seen?

it will come it must come there is no future in this

is there something I should do with my face other than utter? weep?

Samuel Beckett’s 1961 short theater piece, Play, offers a nightmarish landscape of alienation, pain, recrimination, and grief. As staged and filmed by Anthony Minghella, the dysphoria is palpable. The characters, unnamed, “so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of the urns,” tell fragments of a story of betrayal and heartbreak, a story which implicates all of them, and which they are condemned to repeat, infinitely, chattering past each other in the dark.

Surveying the past days, I cannot banish the thought of this play. Lives in desperation, immured apart from one another – what better image of us all, in our little silos of information and expectations, could there be? And then another image: an earthquake comes, a giant hammer, smashing the urns. Broken shards and spilled earth lies everywhere, mingled with writhing, naked limbs. The formerly sessile people are now rudely exposed to the sky. Will they die of exposure? Will they remain catatonic? Will the babbling continue? What will they do?

Make no mistake about this: for masses of people, the election news came not just as a shock, but as a kind of trauma. For Freud, trauma was defined by the element of surprise. Your body is, until the moment of disaster, in motion or at rest, under your control, a coherent part of a comprehensible world. Until suddenly – it is not. Tossed from your seat in a train wreck, flung into the air by an exploding shell, you become a rag doll: buffeted, powerless, at the mercy of forces indifferent or cruel, in any event beyond your control. It is telling that Freud reached in his examples for symbols of accelerating modernity: trains, long-range munitions. These embodiments of speed and power are monuments to human ingenuity – but also, by accident or design, things that can disrupt, dismember, and destroy, revealing us in all our vulnerability. Describing the First World War, Walter Benjamin framed such dislocation as collective, and epochal: “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of forces of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human life.” Technological innovation begets new dislocation; “progress” is also a word for novel flavors of pain, helplessness, and grief.

Still from Anthony Minghella’s film “Play”

How does one recover from such trauma? “You know how refrigerators have that hum?” an analyst who was one of my teachers would say. “That sound of the motor, it’s always running, continuous, so you forget it. You only notice it when it’s off. What I’ve come to think from working with traumatized people,” he’d continue, “Is that we all have a buzz like that going on in the background of our minds, a constant awareness, taken for granted: You are alive. With trauma, that sounds stops. You’re victimized, powerless, you have no choice but to dissociate as whatever happens to you happens to you. Part of what makes trauma so difficult, though, is that you don’t die – you come back. But once that sound stops, to whatever extent it returns, it’s never the same. You died. But here you still are, alive.” The task of working with trauma as a therapist, he’d go on to say, is helping the traumatized person reckon with this experience – perhaps not to integrate it into their “daily life,” so to speak, but to recuperate the possibility of Life as such.

We are lucky: we have not died. But to think that death and horror is not now more at our door than it was before – and even more now for those of us who were already more vulnerable – is a lure, a luxury. This was “just” an election, yes, and the exercise of the democratic transfer of power will proceed. But autocracy is not an equally indifferent option among a range of political preferences. The status quo of the American polity was already underwritten by violence and bigotry, yes, and the ideology of our noble exceptionalism was indeed always already an absurd lie. But this does not mean that the horrors to come cannot be even worse. And the edifice of American hegemony, such as it is, and the rule of law, whatever that means, will hold. But the norms that have been obliterated in the past months are gone for good, and while the old ones were indeed frivolous and hypocritical, what will follow in their absence will be grim and mean.

One of Beckett’s characters in Play seeks to convince herself that all is not as bad as it seems. I had anticipated something better. More restful. Less confused. Less confusing. And yet, she says, still: There are endurable moments.

The idea of a return to normalcy, to daily life, holds its comforts. One cannot abide without such things. But the mere existence of “endurable moments” is not Life: grasping at them is no way to live, and retreating into them is no politics worth the name. The urns are shattered, and now can choose either to finally face each other or to pretend, as we lie in the dirt, that we can crawl back in.

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Patrick Blanchfield is the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

The post There are Endurable Moments appeared first on The Revealer.

In Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016), Josef Sorett offers a retelling of African American literary history across two of the most celebrated moments in the tradition; from the Negro Renaissance of 1920s to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s. Exploring the work and lives of the some of the most celebrated black artists and intellectuals—including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lorraine Hansberry; Ralph Ellison, Roi Ottley, Ann Petry and Richard Wright; Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka—from a new angle, Sorett reveals the complicated, and at times contradictory, ways that religion shaped their literary visions. Ultimately, Spirit in the Dark captures a spiritual impulse at the center of the black literary imagination.

The following essay is a slightly revised excerpt from Chapter 1—titled “The Church and the Negro Spirit”—of Spirit in the Dark, which focuses on tensions between religion and aesthetics as they informed debates about black art and culture during the 1920s.

THE SPIRITUAL POLITICS OF NEGRO ART

Ninety years ago last month the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) publication, The Crisis, printed an essay by its editor-in-chief, W.E.B. Du Bois. While Du Bois’s commentary often graced the pages of the Crisis, this time was slightly different. Four months earlier Du Bois had taken the stage at the NAACP convention in Chicago to deliver a speech that he later titled, “Criteria of Negro Art.” He had been asked to speak at a ceremony awarding Carter G. Woodson the organization’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. Owing to popular demand, The Crisis printed Du Bois’s speech in its entirety in October of 1926.

Like Du Bois, Woodson was a Harvard-trained historian; and he was being honored for, among other contributions in the field of history, founding “Negro History Week” in February of that year. Yet Du Bois made the arts, and not history, his primary topic. To be clear, his decision to take the arts as his subject at the convention was no spontaneous gesture. By 1926 talk of a “Negro Renaissance” abounded; and although it was most commonly associated with Harlem, Chicago played a significant role in this nascent black literary movement. Alain Locke’s The New Negro, commonly considered the movement’s bible, was published in 1925. Crisis had since begun sponsoring a dialogue on race and literature on its pages. And, most recently, two of Harlem’s rising literary stars—George Schuyler and Langston Hughes—had just finished debating the idea of “Negro art” on the pages of The Nation. In fact, as a rebuttal to what Schuyler identified as “The Negro Art-Hokum,” Hughes’s now famous essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” appeared in The Nation on the same day that the NAACP opened its seventeenth national convention.

Du Bois’s speech observed that the accomplishments of New Negro art­ists had created a whisper across society: “Here is the way out. Here is the real solution of the color problem.” But he was skeptical of the suggestion that the mere recognition of Negro artists was an adequate resolution. He intended to impose more specific criteria on racial aesthet­ics: Negro artists ought to represent the race in a positive light. Not to neglect a his­torian’s perspective, Du Bois explained that standing narratives of Africa and the United States portrayed black people as little more than the spoils of European conquest and the mules of American slavery, respectively. In light of this history, the recent memory of minstrelsy, and a marketplace ever willing to serve such popular imaginings, Du Bois called on Negro artists to provide images of black heroism.

After all, documenting the details of such heroism was a theme in much of Du Bois’s historical work. Similarly, Du Bois asserted that Negro artists should offset racist stereotypes with their creative work. “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda,” Du Bois confessed. “But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.” Decrying those whom he described as “purists,” he explained further, “I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty and for Beauty to set the world right.” In his estimation, all art was necessarily implicated in a political order. All art was propaganda, either in service to, or against the best interests of, the race. So Du Bois self- consciously sought to direct the energies of Negro artists in accordance the aims of race politics. With regard to the color line, Negro art either supported social change or endorsed the status quo. Du Bois cast his vote unequivocally with the former. And the matter of religion was deeply entangled with his vision for the arts.

Two years before delivering his “Criteria of Negro Art” speech, Du Bois had published The Gift of Black Folk. In the book’s final two chapters, he argued that the contributions of black people to American society were uniquely aesthetic and religious. To be sure, such claims adhered to common caricatures of “the Negro” as both overly emotive and naturally religious. However, Du Bois’ discussion of religion in “Criteria of Negro Art” two years later revealed him to be more than simply a romantic racialist. Though religion was not the main theme of his speech, he offered a distinctive, if contradictory, account of the impact of Afro-Protestantism on black cultural production during the 1920s.

Similar to what Alain Locke claimed in his introduction to The New Negro, Du Bois observed in these novel “stirrings” the signs of a “new spirit” coming into sight. Although he and Locke seemed to agree on a basic spiritual assessment, Du Bois parted company with Locke in his interpretation of the conditions under which Negro art was produced as well as the direction it should take. Locke suggested that the emerging “race- spirit” apparent in the arts was rapidly supplanting religion’s hold over black life. Du Bois, however, com­plicated this secularizing teleology of racial progress. He also appeared to contradict his own insistence, earlier in the essay, concerning the necessarily political function of art. On one hand, “the white public” inter­preted all Negro art through a distorted “racial pre- judgment.” On the other hand, Du Bois explained, the “black public still wants our prophets almost equally unfree.” Negro artists were constrained by race politics within and without, which made the “catholicity of temper” required for creative freedom a tall order.

Given that he was addressing the NAACP, Du Bois devoted more time to the challenges imposed by black audiences. In this regard, he singled out religion as one source preventing the full development of a racial aesthetic:

We are bound by all sorts of customs that have come down as second- hand soul clothes of white patrons. We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people talk of it. Our religion holds us in superstition. Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying that we have or ever had a worst side. In all sorts of ways, we are hemmed in and our new young artists have got to fight their way to freedom.

Although Du Bois started to disaggregate the problem into black and white, his reference to religion acknowledged the degree to which the two were always entangled. Sex was taboo and religion (presumably the Negro Church) was, in effect, a talisman. As these two things coalesced, the black public embraced what historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has identified as a “politics of respectability.” However, while this politic was encoded within institutional Afro- Protestantism, it was, in fact, inher­ited— the “second- hand soul clothes” of whites. Indeed, the guiding logic of race politics had been formed in the likeness of American Christianity, specifically Puritanism. Du Bois explained that a “still young black public” was, by default, both unreasoning and overly emotional and opposed to all forms of pleasure such as dancing, drinking, and sex.

Interestingly, here Du Bois appeared to endorse artistic freedom rather than a program of racial propaganda. To be sure, Negro artists ought to direct their efforts toward countering harmful racial stereotypes. Yet he also acknowledged that one side effect of the racist ideology that jus­tified slavery and segregation was that, in response, black people had begun to deny “that we have or ever had a worst side.” In the face of white supremacy, the Negro often overemphasized the positive, Du Bois observed. In this way the black public kept its “prophets”— that is, young Negro artists— “unfree.”

This argument represented a departure for Du Bois. In both The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Gift of Black Folk (1924), he had lauded the cultural ingenuity apparent in black artistic and religious practices. In the first of these two books, he devoted an entire chapter to providing a historical account of the emergence of Afro- Protestantism. In “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” Du Bois highlighted the “the preacher, the music, and the Frenzy” (i.e., ecstatic worship) as the pillars of the Negro Church. It was a celebrated, if complicated, first black institution on American soil. In the latter, he referred more broadly to a capacious— vague yet generative— “gift of the spirit.” Now, however, he singled out churches as impinging upon aesthetic freedom. Under the best of circumstances, religion might be overtaken by the rise of a racial spirit, as Locke argued. At worst, Du Bois suggested, religion remained a repository of cultural superstitions that inhibited the creative flourishing of the race.

For Du Bois and Locke alike, a nascent racial spirit presented the pros­pect of different political possibilities for black people, even if the sources and substance of that politics were debatable. The arts might provide the occasion for spiritual rebirth, and vice versa. In this way, Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art,” essay illustrated the competing demands placed on Negro artists: the urgency of the “problem of the color line” (i.e., politics) and the presum­ably universal aspirations of true art (i.e., culture). This was a predicament that would be inherited by generations of black artists and intellectuals in the years to come. In many ways, Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art,” revisited and synthesized several of the arguments and tensions that defined the debate about race and art, but also religion, during the 1920s. The Negro Church— in all of its institutional and cultural diversity—at once harbored aspirations toward middle- class respectability (or white­ness), and was the marker of a distinct racial aesthetic. Afro-Protestantism, then, encapsulated the very complexities and contradictions that enliv­ened the idea of Negro art, and the racial spirit that many suggested was increasingly apparent during the heyday of the New Negro.

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1. E. B. Du Bois described the most recent generation of Negro artists as “prophets.” Arguing against popular opinion that the arts were ephemeral and detached from social concerns, he insisted that the arts served a practical purpose that was not at odds with the NAACP’s civil rights platform. Both were concerned with the creation of a more beautiful world. Du Bois explained that the demands of modern society made it nearly impossible for most people to appreciate the mun­dane beauty in everyday life, such as a sunset. Such decline was akin to spiritual disenchantment, which by all accounts was a “universal failing.” His prognosis and prescription again paired ethics (politics) and aesthetics (art). “We black folk may help for we have within us as a race new stirrings, stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be,” Du Bois told his audience. Enter here New Negro artists: “The Negro Youth is a different kind of Youth, because in some new way it bears this mighty prophecy on its breast, with a new real­ization of itself, with new determination for all mankind.”

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Josef Sorett is an Associate Professor in the Religion Department and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, where he also directs theCenter on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice (CARSS). As an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and race in the Americas, Josef employs primarily historical and literary approaches to the study of religion in black communities and cultures in the United States. His first book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016) illumines how religion has figured in debates about black art and culture across the 20th century. Josef’s second book – The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an African American Secular – is forthcoming, also with Oxford UP. Additionally, Josef is editing an anthology tentatively titled The Sexual Politics of Black Churches. Josef’s scholarship has been published in academic journals and anthologies; and his writing and commentary have also appeared in a range of popular media outlets, including ABC News, the Huffington Post, New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as on the BBC and NPR.

The post Excerpt: Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics appeared first on The Revealer.

Is it November 9th yet? (If it is, what’s it like? What happened? Have all of our collective chests un-constricted yet? Please say “yes.”)

Like many of you, we imagine, we’ve had a hard time reading much lately that isn’t about the election (even when we try, it’s always still about the election, right?). So, here’s a round-up of the best of what we’ve been reading. And some of it really and truly isn’t at all about politics (if that can be said of anything, ever).

Stacy Schiff  took on the topic of “Witchcraft on the Campaign Trail” in The New York Times, but once again, she steers a bit too wide of what’s really interesting here.

Fortunately, Edward Simon did a brilliant job of handling the subject in “Remember that The Devil is Quite a Gentleman” at Killing the Buddha.

Today screeds are composed on smart phones and computers instead of on vellum and parchment, and the details of who exactly are the dejected and spurned may have altered, but that there are the dejected and spurned is a constant. There is a direct genealogy between the marginalization of groups then and now; between the accusations of Luther and Bosch, and the black legends which impugns the immigrant; between the libels of Kramer and Sprenger and the diminishment of sexual violence and the legislation against women’s reproductive freedom. We are not so far from the electric potency and that corrupt trick which sees the Devil everywhere but in our own reflections. Projecting that accusation of devilry onto your enemy, so as to acquire a bit of that profane power offered to Christ in the desert, remains a venerable tradition among those that seek that supremacy that is the domain of the prince of this world. For, what else could embolden someone to stand in public, say, in Missouri (that most wholesome and middle-American of places), and with an accusatory and unironic point of the short finger declare, yet once again, that a woman is “the Devil?”

And Jessa Crispin had a whole lot of very smart fun in her take, “Madam Prescient: Raising the spirit of American radicalism” for The Baffler. 

Nor, for that matter, is Clinton all that similar to Victoria Woodhull, despite sharing with her the good fortune of having run for high office while female. But wouldn’t it be so much more interesting if she were? What if she ripped off the roof, called down the ghost of Emma Goldman, and achieved a truly liberal platform of economic justice, universal health care, strict environmental protections, and widespread education reform? In March, Clinton made extraterrestrial transparency a promise of her campaign; she told Jimmy Kimmel that as soon as she takes office, she will open the government’s top-secret files on Area 51. It’s a start. But what if she also pledged to open an investigation into our government’s drone warfare, which is an unexplained aerial phenomenon of an entirely different kind?

Well, let’s be honest: none of that is likely to happen. Perhaps, then, we should be wondering not how long it will be before we have our first female president, but how long it will be before we have our first witch candidate.

The dominant religions of our time, including atheism, seem unable to adequately inspire and sustain the revolutionary change that is needed to address racist policing, mass murder by semi-automatic weapon, and other everyday occurrences in America.

Alas, witch or not, “Hillary Clinton has an unfortunate way of talking about American Muslims” contends Ismat Sarah Mangla for Quartz.

On the face of it, Clinton’s rhetoric doesn’t seem blatantly problematic. But her framing of Muslims solely in terms of national security has an insidious effect in continuing to stigmatize them as something less than fully American.

American Muslims don’t possess some special knowledge of terror attacks. They are simply trying to live unsensational lives, serving as doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, artists and journalists. Their citizenship shouldn’t come with conditions—it’s not contingent on how “useful” they are in the war on terror.

That being said, we’re right there with Simran Jeet Singh “Denouncing Donald Trump, Finally” for On Faith. 

Racial and religious minorities have been living through the consequences of Trump’s hate speech for more than a year now. We have been calling on our fellow Americans to stop viewing Trump’s campaign as an amusing sideshow and to start treating him as a serious threat to our nation’s stability and security. On behalf of all minorities who have been waiting anxiously for this moment, I want to welcome you all and assure you that we are glad that so many of you are finally onboard

Because, seriously, just read this: “Trolls for Trump: Meet Mike Cernovich, the meme mastermind of the alt-right” by Andrew Marantz for The New Yorker. 

On his blog, Cernovich developed a theory of white-male identity politics: men were oppressed by feminism, and political correctness prevented the discussion of obvious truths, such as the criminal proclivities of certain ethnic groups. His opponents were beta males, losers, or “cucks”—alt-right slang for “cuckolds.” “To beat a person, you lower his or her social status,” he wrote on Danger and Play. “Logic is pointless.”

Candace E. West has a great take on a preposterous situation in “Confession is not Conversion: Giuliani’s Bizarre Comparison of Trump to St. Augustine”  for Religion Dispatches.

In the Confessions, considered one of the earliest works of western autobiography, Augustine tells a complicated story of a man driven by lust, vanity and pride. At the book’s end, Augustine has repented his misdeeds, recanted his heresies, and dedicated his life to the love of God.

Looking closely at Confessions, it becomes difficult to see where the parallel is.

Trump starts off with what looks like a confession (“I said it”), and a bit of contrition (“I was wrong, and I apologize”). But is it genuine? We can’t know what’s in his heart, but he was quick to downplay the severity of his transgression (for lack of a better word), and could barely complete his apology before changing the subject. Predictably, some found this approach uncompelling, and wondered if he could truly show remorse in the time leading up to the debate.

He could not.

And Caroline T. Schroeder argues the point beautifully in “On Not Ignoring Augustine” for Early Christian Monasticism in the Digital Age.

In our impulse to distance the Republican candidate from a Christian saint, we also cannot overlook the reasons Giuliani could so easily identify them.  Does Augustine, a fifth century North African bishop and theologian, have anything to do with the candidate’s morality after all?  Was this real estate magnate able to cultivate his position of power over decades without being held accountable for sex crimes in part because of Augustine’s influence on our cultural values?

To create a world in which sexual assault and harassment are not normative, we must askwhy they are normative now. Which means interrogating Augustine, perhaps the most influential Christian author in post-Biblical history.

Giuliani could reach to Augustine for at least two reasons:  his paradigmatic views on sin and grace, and his troubling views on women’s sexual autonomy.

Just can’t get enough of this stuff? The Immanent Frame has your back with its “The Politics of National Identity” forum.

Religion is increasingly recognized as a defining feature of political life and as a constitutive element of individual and collective identities. The question is no longer whether religion matters, but how. The contributors to this discussion—which began as a session at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, co-sponsored by the sections on the Sociology of Religion and Culture—explore this question through the lens of political contestation over national identity.

These essays show how groups in Western Europe and the United States draw on religious and secular symbols when determining belonging.

At this point, let’s just open all of the tabs, shall we? Because each of these profiles is fascinating on its own, but read together, each is even more so.

Kalefa Sanneh wrote about “The New Evangelical Moral Minority: If the Southern Baptist church can’t be bigger, Russell Moore wants it to be better” for the New Yorker.

In 2016, it is clearer than ever that American evangelical Christianity is a counterculture, which may mean that the church is freer to espouse ideas at odds with the egalitarianism that the secular mainstream preaches (and sometimes practices). This, then, is part of what Moore has in mind when he urges believers to rediscover “the strangeness of Christianity”: a roomful of servant-leader men, sitting around eating steak fajitas.

And Penelope Green about “The Power Pastor: How A.R. Bernard Built a New York Megachurch“ for The New York Times.

Once a Nation of Islam follower and teenage civil rights activist who read Alan Watts and Krishnamurti before he read the Bible, Mr. Bernard presents more like a professor than a bible thumper. That he is a motorcycle-riding family man and father of seven sons as well as a martial arts devotee — inked into Mr. Bernard’s forearm is a Chinese character that translates as “the unfettered mind” — adds to his allure.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay writes beautifully about”Being Black and Breathing: On ‘Blackpentecostal Breath” for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Blackpentecostal Breath compellingly extends this tradition that occupies breathing as a site of racial politics. Garner’s “I can’t breathe,” Crawley suggests, refuses the conditions from which it conveys physical strain. The statement at once points to an injury inflected by a racism that is ambient-but-not-only and speculates a breathable otherwise. Crawley’s project in Blackpentecostal Breath is, in a sense, modeled after Garner’s statement. Both document, and enact a break from, experiences of violence. And as the book’s subtitle, The Aesthetics of Possibility, makes evident, Crawley is adamantly optimistic about the ethical and political potential afforded by this break.

As does Randy R. Potts about “The Devil and #SandraBland” for Killing the Buddha.

I rejected religion at 18 not because I fell out of love with Jesus, but because I, like Wordsworth, found the trees and the air and my senses more reliable than the sentiments of the religious folk I ran from. Also: Wordsworth, and my 18-year-old self, were privileged fools. Fools who confused “faith” with the grave pronouncements of rich white men. Fools who confused the undeserved power of the church with the very real power of hope. I remember: in my next phase as an 18-year-old–when I was 31 and newly out of the closet and a new single father in a new city in a new job with no friends in town and no family anywhere–I decided that hope was a ruse; that if you had hope things would get better and then they didn’t that you would end up bitter. Better not to hope at all. Better to just play Sisyphus. Keep the ball rolling. I still think there’s truth there. Things don’t “get” better. Keep the ball rolling.

And yet, in the last two years roaming the underworld as a photojournalist I have found real faith, real hope, real “religion.” I realize now: Wordsworth was an idiot. Had he ever been a “Pagan suckled,” or stood before Proteus or Triton, Wordsworth would have died, almost immediately, crushed by his own privilege, which, in that moment, would have completely failed him. A defenseless human facing the wild world? Such a thing dies, and much sooner than later.

This isn’t beautiful at all, but man is it important. The Southern Poverty Law Center published a Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. 

Sadly, a shocking number of these extremists are seen regularly on television news programs and quoted in the pages of our leading newspapers. There, they routinely espouse a wide range of utter falsehoods, all designed to make Muslims appear as bloodthirsty terrorists or people intent on undermining American constitutional freedoms. More often than not, these claims go uncontested.

…

What follows are profiles of 15 anti-Muslim extremists who are frequently cited in public discourse. These spokespeople were selected on the basis of their presence in national and local media and for the pernicious brand of extremism and hate they espouse against Muslim communities and the Islamic faith. While not intended to be an all-encompassing list, this group of propagandists are at the center of what is a large and evolving network of Islam-bashing activists, elected officials and their surrogates. Groups currently designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are marked in headlines and text with an asterisk (*). Three groups that the SPLC will list as hate groups in 2017 are marked with a cross (+). This field guide can be viewed online and monitored for additional updates.

Samuel Moyn makes many excellent points in “Freud’s Discontents: Why did one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers fade from significance?” for The Nation. 

This skepticism toward the overarching theories of the 19th and 20th centuries has come to incarnate something of the spirit of our age and it is another reason why the prominence of psychoanalysis has declined. Today, we have acquired a preference for indubitable findings and cautious and often minimalist forms of theory and politics. It may be true that gargantuan structures like the one Freud erected proved to rest on shaky foundations; the trouble is that only small hideouts are left among the rubble.

The price of this growing skepticism toward general theories has been very high to pay. This is true for psychology and more generally the social sciences but also for the richest possible versions of liberalism and leftism, both of which intersected fruitfully with psychoanalysis at midcentury. The grand theories of an earlier age offered us an ability to look at the intersections between the self, society, and history; in comparison, their replacements look not just intellectually meek but politically unpromising.

Colin Dickey tells a very important story in “The Suburban Horror of the Indian Burial Ground: In the 1970s and 1980s, homeowners were terrified by the idea that they didn’t own the land they’d just bought” by for The New Republic.

The narrative of the haunted Indian burial ground hides a certain anxiety about the land on which Americans—specifically white, middle-class Americans—live. Embedded deep in the idea of home ownership—the Holy Grail of American middle-class life—is the idea that we don’t, in fact, own the land we’ve just bought. Time and time again in these stories, perfectly average, innocent American families are confronted by ghosts who have persevered for centuries, who remain vengeful for the damage done. Facing these ghosts and expelling them, in many of these horror stories, becomes a means of re-fighting the Indian Wars of past centuries.

Maybe worth reading alongside the incredible #StandingRockSyllabus.

This syllabus project contributes to the already substantial work of the Sacred Stones Camp, Red Warrior Camp, and the Oceti Sakowin Camp to resist the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatens traditional and treaty-guaranteed Great Sioux Nation territory. The Pipeline violates the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and 1851 signed by the United States, as well as recent United States environmental regulations. The potentially 1,200-mile pipeline presents the same environmental and human dangers as the Keystone XL pipeline, and would transport hydraulically fractured (fracked) crude oil from the Bakken Oil Fields in North Dakota to connect with existing pipelines in Illinois. While the pipeline was originally planned upriver from the predominantly white border town of Bismarck, North Dakota, the new route passes immediately above the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, crossing Lake Oahe, tributaries of Lake Sakakawea, the Missouri River twice, and the Mississippi River once. Now is the time to stand in solidarity with Standing Rock against catastrophic environmental damage.

The different sections and articles place what is happening now in a broader historical, political, economic, and social context going back over 500 years to the first expeditions of Columbus, the founding of the United States on institutionalized slavery, private property, and dispossession, and the rise of global carbon supply and demand. Indigenous peoples around the world have been on the frontlines of conflicts like Standing Rock for centuries. This syllabus brings together the work of Indigenous and allied activists and scholars: anthropologists, historians, environmental scientists, and legal scholars, all of whom contribute important insights into the conflicts between Indigenous sovereignty and resource extraction. While our primary goal is to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, we recognize that Standing Rock is one frontline of many around the world. This syllabus can be a tool to access research usually kept behind paywalls, or a resource package for those unfamiliar with Indigenous histories and politics. Share, add, and discuss using the hashtag #StandingRockSyllabus on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media. Like those on frontlines, we are here for as long as it takes.

The NYC Stands for Standing Rock committee is a group of Indigenous scholars and activists, and settler/ PoC supporters. We belong and are responsible to a range of Indigenous peoples and nations, including Tlingit, Haudenosaunee, Secwepemc, St’at’imc, Creek (Muscogee), Anishinaabe, Peoria, Diné, Maya Kaqchikel, and Quechua. We have joined forces to support the Standing Rock Sioux in their continued assertion of sovereignty over their traditional territories. We welcome the support and participation of Indigenous peoples and allied environmental/ community/ social justice organizations in the New York area. If you can offer your organization’s support, please email NYCnoDAPL@gmail.com to let us know how you would like to be involved. Connect with us on Twitter @NYCnoDAPL and our Facebook page NYC Stands with Standing Rock.

The answers may not be blowing in the wind, but Bob Dylan can still teach us a lot, too, argues Rob Horning in “No Man Righteous: Bob Dylan’s ‘Make America Great Again’ phase” for The New Inquiry.

Troubled by the sectarian, paranoid place America has become—and probably always has been—I sometimes yearn for a moment of negative capability that would allow me to understand where birthers, Tea Partyers, evangelical Christians, and all those who smell apocalypse in every current event could possibly be coming from. At such times I take solace in the album that inaugurated Bob Dylan’s notoriously baffling born-again-Christian phase, Slow Train Coming, which offers as complete a picture of the mind of a newly minted reactionary as one could hope for.

While we’re on the topic of singer/songwriter sages, “Leonard Cohen Makes it Darker” by David Remnick for The New Yorker.

Since his days davening next to his uncles in his grandfather’s synagogue, Cohen has been a spiritual seeker. “Anything, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, LSD, I’m for anything that works,” he once said. In the late sixties, when he was living in New York, he studied briefly at a Scientology center and emerged with a certificate that declared him “Grade IV Release.” In recent years, he spent many Shabbat mornings and Monday evenings at Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue on Venice Boulevard, talking about Kabbalistic texts with the rabbi there, Mordecai Finley. Sometimes, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Finley, who says that he considers Cohen “a great liturgical writer,” read from the pulpit passages from “Book of Mercy,” a 1984 collection of Cohen’s that is steeped in the Psalms. “I participated in all these investigations that engaged the imagination of my generation at that time,” Cohen has said. “I even danced and sang with the Hare Krishnas—no robe, I didn’t join them, but I was trying everything.”

To this day, Cohen reads deeply in a multivolume edition of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism; the Hebrew Bible; and Buddhist texts. In our conversations, he mentioned the Gnostic Gospels, Lurianic Kabbalah, books of Hindu philosophy, Carl Jung’s “Answer to Job,” and Gershom Scholem’s biography of Sabbatai Sevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah of the seventeenth century. Cohen is also very much at home in the spiritual reaches of the Internet, and he listens to the lectures of Yakov Leib HaKohain, a Kabbalist who has converted, serially, to Islam, Catholicism, and Hinduism, and lives in the San Bernardino mountains with two pit bulls and four cats.

A little more surprisingly, “How the Berenstain Bears Found Salvation” by Saul Austerlitz for The New York Times Magazine. 

I could practically hear a needle scratch when I opened up some newer editions my son had received as a gift, and I discovered that the Berenstains’ concerns had turned from the mundane to the theological. The new volumes, “The Berenstain Bears: Do Not Fear, God Is Near” and “The Berenstain Bears Go to Sunday School,” had a markedly different cast than my son’s old favorites. Even those without explicitly religious titles are still larded with Bible thumping. In my son’s new favorite volume, “The Berenstain Bears Show Some Respect,” the bears get snappish with one another during a search for the ideal picnic spot, as the cubs talk back to Mama and Papa, and Papa Bear, in turn, speaks disrespectfully to his father. Gramps grows frustrated and, in an impassioned monologue, makes reference to scripture: “You know, us old folks know a thing or two. As the Bible says, ‘Age should speak; advanced years should teach wisdom.’”

We’re happy to think of Peter Manseau curating which of these things is museum-worthy. Here, he and S. Brent Plate discuss the “State of the art: A Q&A with the Smithsonian’s new religion curator” for the Religion News Service.

Religion can be seen in a number of museum settings. What can museums do for the public understanding of religion in ways that other institutions cannot?

Museums strike me as a rare public space where we enter with the expectation of learning. And very often we expect to learn through direct contact. That expectation of learning through standing in the presence of something from another time and place makes museums powerful places.

And S. Brent Plate‘s By the Way: Dispatches, Devotions, and Deliriums from the Camino de Santiago is now available as an e-book published by Killing the Buddha. 

A moving, funny and fascinating account of a religion scholar’s 5-week pilgrimage down the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Is the journey is more important than the destination? Are some pilgrimages more “authentic” than others? Can agnostics have as deep a spiritual experience as true believer? Find out what happens when a scholar puts down his books and takes up his walking stick.

David Novack and Val Vinokur discuss Isaac Babel in “A New Documentary on Isaac Babel Highlights his Continued Relevance” for Literary Hub. (Editor’s note/boast: I was lucky enough to read Isaac Babel with Professor Vinokur at the New School when I was an undergraduate there.)

I think that the culture at large still thinks in rather stupid ways about identity, too schematically—either in a dualistic way, or else in a kind of naïve, hybridized fashion, as if we can all just kind of blend and be funky. Babel addresses both of those positions and makes both of these positions much more complicated and fluid. I think that’s why each fresh wave of students that’s introduced to Babel is shocked by it. They’ve never read anything like it in their lives. They’re thrown off balance, and then eventually they become obsessed with Babel—just like I did when I first read him in a windowless mailroom of a Downtown Miami law firm where I worked summers as a 16-year-old clerk.

While we’re on the topic of literature, Scott Korb writes about Marilynne Robinson in “Give Me Love” for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

We love despite incomplete access — and we very often project our own ideas and hopes onto those we love, in part, I think, because we can’t really know what occupies them, but also because we want to complete the story in our own minds of the love we supposedly share. This may sound somewhat cynical, but in fact I find this a hopeful position where love and relationships and perhaps even our democracy are concerned. Love, at its best, is an incomplete answer to the beloved’s call to be fully seen — a friend, a wife, a child, a stranger — it’s an enactment of sympathy.

If you need a break, we suggest checking out this piece: “Photographing the Incredible Costumes of Japan’s Supernatural Festivals: Bringing folklore to life with capes and masks” by Anika Burgess for Atlas Obscura.

And that’s it. We’ll sign off for now and hope to see you on the other side.

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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

The post In the News: Voting, Protesting, and Distracting appeared first on The Revealer.

Sleepers, II by George Tooker

By Ann Neumann

“No trial, affliction or sickness is to be regarded as an accident or a totally purposeless nuisance. It is right to seek immediate medical help and to pray for healing. It is wrong to lose patience and to throw away the promise – that all things work together for good to them that love God.” Dr Peter Masters, “The Healing Epidemic,” via “On Eagles Wings: A Christian Perspective on M.E.”^[1]

For decades, the causes and treatments for myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (or by the acronym ME/CFS), have been a complete mystery to patients and their doctors, but descriptions of illnesses with ME/CFS symptoms date back to the late 1700s: headaches and roving joint pain, swollen lymph nodes, memory loss and distraction, “unrefreshing sleep” and a leaden fatigue that keeps patients immobile in their beds. Likened to fibromyalgia, or conflated with it because of symptomatic similarities, ME/CFS as a disease has largely been misunderstood by the medical community ever since.

Medicine’s failure to explain or effectively treat ME/CFS has created a cottage industry of sorts, a panoply of cure-focused websites and books that offer help and hope to sufferers. Many of these are faith based, ascribing ME/CFS to spiritual doubt. They often prescribe getting right with God as the way to become healthy and whole again.

Take Howard, who is a sufferer. He lists a catalogue of ME/CFS causes in his “testimonial” at About Religion: “environment (pollution, chemical sensitivity), physical influences (viral, dietary), emotional influences (long-term stress, grief), medical influences (vaccinations), and spiritual issues (generational curses through occult involvement).”

That vaccinations have shouldered the blame for a host of illnesses is no surprise. When Edward Jenner conducted his first experiments with a smallpox vaccine in 1796, using minute injections of cowpox to immunize his subject, 8 year-old James Phipps, he was immediately ridiculed. Many declared that Jenner’s injections would turn children into cows (“vacca” is from the Latin for cow). A conspiracy-like fear of government has propelled anti-vaxxers (those who distrust and refuse vaccines) into the spotlight, blaming mandatory vaccinations for seemingly inexplicable illnesses, from autism to brain damage to infant death. (Thanks, Jenny McCarthy, Jill Stein, and Donald Trump.)

But the ascription of illness to spiritual causes goes back much further than 1796 – In fact, it’s ancient. You can find it in the meddling of jinn or the evil eye, punishment for sins against God and man, an imbalance of the humors, and failures to abide Jewish, Christian or Muslim laws of purity. It’s this much older health risk, “spiritual issues,” that Howard spends his time discussing:

Unlike native or indigenous peoples, our “western world, rational thinking mindset,” has difficulty accepting that physical harm can result from negative spiritual involvement. We hear much in the medical field about people being genetically predisposed to a certain illness or disease, including CFS. Perhaps not in all, but I believe in many cases, there is a spiritual predisposition, in the form of a generational curse, at the root of that genetic predisposition. Unless these generational curses are renounced and cut off, then there is a “freedom” for diseases to continue to manifest down a generational line.

Howard ultimately determined that he was being punished by the “curses that come about as a result of the oaths taken in Masonic rituals.” Three generations of his ancestors were Masons. He encourages his readers to know their own “spiritual histories” and he recommends that sufferers seek support from those who truly understand this cause of ME/CFS.

At All About Life Challenges, a website run by a nonprofit organization called All About God, an unnamed writer recounts his struggles with ME/CFS and writes of how he overcame his “plague”: “The misery-makers, frustration, helplessness, and my constant battle with despair were in fact His tools for strengthening my faith and trust in Him. Added to this, God was also teaching me through this experience to learn how to cultivate patience and endurance — something I had a very small stock of up until now!” At the end of his post, he makes the Internet equivalent of an alter call.

Woman at the Wall by George Tooker

Coming to God, refinding one’s faith, is seen as a kind of medicine against the damages of disease. Another site, Chronic Fatigue Help, promises readers that if they have faith in God they have a “huge advantage” over those who don’t believe. Family Life astutely tells readers that, “The fact is, our world despises fatigue. It hates weakness, dependency, aging, inability, and weariness. Our culture’s ideal is to be strong, independent, youthful, vigorous, capable, radiant, healthy, and energetic.” Family Life recommends that ME/CFS sufferers accept the fact that really, we’re all weak in the eyes of God, all dependent on Him. Recovery requires seeing fatigue as an opportunity: “God will use your fatigue as the door into a deeper knowledge of His love.”

ME/CFS provides us with yet another sad but fascinating way to view the medical industry’s gendered approach to suffering, pain and fatigue. In a 2013 article for Charisma magazine, “Why You Don’t Have to Suffer from Chronic Fatigue,” Kathleen Walter and Donna Scaglione write about a new book, The Fatigue and Fibromyalgia Solution, which offers desperate sufferers ways to cure their ME/CFS. “Unfortunately, mainstream medicine has not taken fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome seriously, which historically has been a typical reaction to diseases affecting mainly women.” It’s an apt observation.

Four times as many women suffer ME/CFS than men and the medical community has long failed to acknowledge or treat women’s pain. As I wrote in this column last month, female pain is too commonly seen as the “natural” or God-given state of childbirth and motherhood, it is punishment for being the weaker sex, or it is the malaise particular to housewives. And ME/CFS is often denigrated as an affliction of the weak, the lazy, the unmotivated; it flouts the ambitious and independent characteristics of a diligent, patriotic and capitalism-driven American and is often seen as a woman’s illness, much as hysteria was less than a century ago. For men, emasculated by ME/CFS’s symptoms, the shaming can be even worse. For all sufferers, who have been ignored, unhelped or disparaged by the medical community, any promise of hope is welcome.

A vast library of books offer spiritual cures for ME/CFS, including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Christianity, and Culture (2002), The New Bible Cure for Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia (2010, one in a series that addresses sleep disorders, depression and anxiety, and even diabetes), and Coping with Chronic Illness (2010). Their message is uniform: where science has failed you, God will not.

This swell of Christian self-help has been abetted by the medical community’s insistence that the disease is all in one’s head. “Historically, many doctors considered CFS a psychosomatic disorder that required psychological — not medical — intervention,” Cheryl Platzman Weinstock wrote at O, The Oprah Magazine in 2015.

The effectiveness of self-help solutions for ME/CFS was confirmed by a splashy study published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, in 2011. The study given the acronym PACE for the treatments it supported—Pacing, Activity, and Cognitive behavior therapy: a randomized Evaluation—found that the real cures for ME/CFS were not pharmaceutical or scientific but plucky determination. In short, the study advises sufferers to get some exercise, a good psychotherapist, and some gumption.

The recommendations were clearly dismissive of ME/CFS patients’ ailments, saying in short that they were weak-willed and needed to push their limits, to get out of bed and onto a therapists’ couch. The study concluded that its treatment regimen was effective 60 percent of the time. “The findings went on to influence treatment recommendations from the CDC, the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser, the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and more,” wrote Julie Rehmeyer, a science writer and ME/CFS sufferer, at Stat News in September.

The medical community rather too placidly accepted that ME/CFS was best left to the plodding, self-help tactics of the patient or the vague mysteries of the placebo effect on one’s mind-body connection, thus exempting themselves from seeking scientific solutions to a physiological problem. At stat.org, Rebecca Goldin lists the “get tough” articles that the release of PACE generated:

“Psychotherapy Eases Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Study Finds”— New York Times
“Pushing limits can help chronic fatigue patients”—Reuters
“Brain and body training treats ME, UK study says”—BBC
“Helping chronic fatigue patients over fears eases symptoms”—Fox News
“Chronic fatigue syndrome patients’ fear of exercise can hinder treatment – study”— The Guardian

Sufferers were chaffed by the demeaning advice that they try “pushing limits” or going for a jog. But because the study appeared in a reputable medical publication, few in the medical community questioned it. Those who did were rebuffed, their clamoring requests for trial data denied. Until September, that is, when a patient campaign led to the filing of a Freedom of Information request to force the release of the PACE trial’s data from Queen Mary University of London, where the researchers worked. As Rehmeyer wrote, the released data was then scrutinized by a group of patients and medical professionals. The results of their findings were published at Virology Blog on September 21. The conclusion is damning.

The PACE study was found to be bad science. When The Lancet conducted its own review, it found that the results of the study were inflated; patients did not recover 60 percent of the time under the prescribed rehabilitation methods of the trial but only 20 percent. (I won’t go into the detailed flaws of the $8 million study; related information and the criteria by which critics have found it to be unscientific and biased can be found here, here and here.) Rehemeyer writes that the real results of PACE are that it “inflicted damage on millions of ME/CFS patients around the world, by promoting ineffectual and possibly harmful treatments and by feeding the idea that the illness is largely psychological.”

Only one agency has so far retracted the recommendations of psychotherapy and exercise prescribed by the trial, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. But without further investment into new trials to study the causes of ME/CFS, Rehmeyer writes, “the lingering doubt” that PACE cast on the illness will continue.

Which likely means that those patients who rely on spiritual means of righting their illness will continue to do so. ME/CFS sufferers may have checked medical researchers’ pomposity and error by questioning PACE, but still they must wait for medicine’s legitimization of their pain. In the meanwhile, many ME/CFS patients will find relief where they can, including in the solace of God’s mysterious ways.

To be sure, science has never had the last word—even well-established medical achievements walk hand-in-hand with spiritual reckoning: Uncle Bob’s untimely heart attack, Mother’s inexplicable breast cancer. Much of the body and the world remain mysterious to us and we have long looked to other sources to fill in the (perhaps shrinking) scientific gaps. So, the “quiddities of fate” have always demanded holy explanation and filled in where science remained opaque or uncertain. But scientific explanations have still never been enough for us.

ME/CFS sufferers have long begged for medical attention for their disease. Their disproportionate faith in things unseen is not just a distrust of medical science, but rather a stubborn hope for its egalitarian, life-saving attention.

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^[1] (myalgic encephalomyelitis)

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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann is the author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon Press, 2016).

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’s Spiritual Causes and Cures appeared first on The Revealer.

Bhakti Fest 2016 (Drew Thomases)

By Drew Thomases

Smelling of sunscreen and fear, I stepped outside of my rented Dodge and took a deep breath. Bhakti Fest. I had months ago thought of researching this yoga festival in California’s high desert, but back then I was in New York City, and in air-conditioning, and hoping still that someone—anyone—would join me on my little adventure. Alas, I was here alone, in the parking lot of the Joshua Tree Retreat Center. But having done this type of fieldwork before, I knew that the best way to kick the ethnographic jitters was to jump right in. So it took all of fifteen seconds for me to greet and too eagerly complement a fellow parker on the fine parasol she held. Her name was Cathy. And she appreciated the comment, so we walked along and shared some shade.

Cathy’s first Bhakti Fest was in 2008, a time at which she was new to yoga, but looking to deepen her practice. She had never heard of the festival before, and did not know that bhakti was a Sanskrit word for devotion, but she figured that “there were going to be a lot of really interesting people on the spiritual path,” and said to herself, “you know, I’m gonna find something, or I’m gonna meet somebody, and things are going to happen.” And things did happen:

So I decided to come to it one day—just for one day—and I met a friend here because neither one of us knew what we were getting into, so we kind of clung to each other, for support I guess. And I got overheated, which is common here. So I went to the main sanctuary and I lay on the floor. It was nice and cool, air-conditioned. It was a lecture about divinely guided art, you know, painting or something, and there was something that the lecturer said that clicked something in my mind. It was about re-establishing a conscious connection with the divine…It suddenly occurred to me…that’s my problem…it was the separation. Separation anxiety, I call it, from the divine. That’s what it was. I walked out and I found my friend, and we each got a coconut. And I said ‘I need to tell you something that just happened to me,’ and I started to describe to her what I just said to you, and I started to bawl my eyes out. And I’ve come to every Bhakti Fest ever since.

As a “conscious seeker,” Cathy is far from alone in the endeavor to connect with the divine. Every September, a few thousand people from all over California and beyond come to the desert to do yoga, chant devotional songs, and participate in a huge array of workshops with titles like “Astrology in Changing Times” and “Unveil the Power and Beauty of Your Mystical Shakti Essence.” They are largely white, with a small, but not insignificant presence of South Asians, and a tiny handful of folk from the Latinx and African-American communities. Even so, Bhakti Fest takes all kinds. There are the people still dusty from Burning Man—called “Burners”—who come to Bhakti Fest for post-party relaxation, but whose furry boots, feathers, and ornate headgear make them easy to spot. Then there are the lithe yogis and yoginis sporting athletic gear and ready for complex posing. Some correspond all too well to Lululemon’s “Ocean” and “Duke,” the brand’s fictional names for their ideal customers—rich, fashionable, and urban. Finally, there are the children of the New Age, who we might call “hippies” for all intents and purposes, but who actually comprise a diverse group with varied orientations and interests. Some are into sound healing. Others have crystal collections. Many meditate. The list goes on. This group tends to be older, and tends to show more interest in the festival’s workshops and spiritual music than in yoga. But of course, all of these communities are intersecting, porous, and indefinite.

Still, what seems to drive everyone out to the desert—from the Burner brandishing a unicorn-headed hobby horse, to the grey-haired woman in tie-dye swaying left and right to the Hare Krishna chant—is the enthusiasm and impulse to “be in the bhav.” That’s the motto of Bhakti Fest—“be in the bhav”—the latter being a Hindi word that here refers to a heightened emotional state, often of devotion or ecstasy. And this urge towards the affective was fully on display throughout my weekend at Bhakti Fest. I cannot recall a time at which I received more kind hellos or sympathetic smiles. And the hugs! Perfect strangers hugged me time and again, often accompanied by a waft of patchouli or some other hair oil unknown to my novice nose. One could see the ecstatic side of things at any number of the musical workshops and concerts. During one of the more exciting kirtan (chanting) sessions—featuring Dasi Karnamrita, a West Virginia-raised white woman with a powerful voice and considerable following—I witnessed an audience enraptured: people stood and twirled, shook and bounced; couples performed acrobatic yogic postures; one woman danced the whole time, very much to her own beat; one man, muscular and tan and half-naked, leaped around the hall like a lamb on the pasture. These were people entirely without inhibition, and most definitely “in the bhav.”

Moreover, it is likely California itself—what Erik Davis calls “the Visionary State”—that encourages “the bhav” to really flourish. This was the argument put forward by Manoj Chalam, a Mumbai native who has come to every Bhakti Fest in order to teach workshops on Indian iconography and philosophy, and to sell his impressive collection of Hindu and Buddhist statues (murtis). Here is his take on “the bhav” in California:

I have another home in Massachusetts, Amherst. [It’s] intellectual, Buddhist, very activist. No bhakti (devotion), no bhav. The bhav is here, in California… They’ve embraced it, especially Southern California… [Here] a person smiles more, they look in your eyes more, they’re not abrupt. And they’re pretty relaxed, they give you time. And it’s an outgrowth of that. So you have that, and then yoga and kirtan. So automatically that fosters the bhav. It’s there on the East Coast, but it’s slower to develop. Because, you are the company you keep… On the East Coast, you go back, and everyone’s in a hurry. That’s a generalization, but largely true. So that’s my take. There’s more bhav, especially in Southern California. Northern, San Jose area, is more jnana (knowledge-based). When I teach there, people are more intellectually curious… Here, they just want to feel. So, somebody told me a couple of nights ago, they heard me speak before. And he said ‘I don’t remember what you said, but I remember how you made me feel.’ That feeling is very emphasized: that’s the bhav.

For Manoj, the festival’s California vibe—where the idiom of expression is emotional—would also ideally channel a certain degree of intellectual curiosity. And this requires a balancing act of sorts: without emotion, philosophical thinking has “no juice,” no sweetness or joy; on the other hand, without philosophy, a person might fail to grow and subsequently stagnate as “an experience junkie.”

Thus, Manoj brings this intellectual aspect to Bhakti Fest with his murtis and his lectures, where he “operates on the fuzzy line between the rational [i.e., philosophy] and irrational [i.e., the bhav].” Influenced by Deepak Chopra—who was, in turn, influenced by Carl Jung—Manoj lectures about Hindu and Buddhist deities as “archetypes,” which it to say, symbolic assemblages meant to inspire individuals toward action. As a lover, for example, Krishna might inspire compassion. As a warrior and devotee, Hanuman might encourage strength and resolve. So instead of worshipping deities for their supernatural agency, as would be the case in any number of Hindu temples throughout the world, people here “meditate upon” their archetypes.      And archetype-talk is everywhere at Bhakti Fest. Once, while standing in line for lunch, I complimented a woman in front of me regarding the Ganesh tattoo on her shoulder. “Is he your favorite deity,” I asked. “Yeah,” she said, “Ganesh is my archetype.” Over the course of the festival, I participated in and overheard many more conversations about archetypes, and I can think of at least two reasons why this might be the case. First, according to Manoj, the sheer number of gods and goddesses provides a “buffet” of options for the spiritual seeker: “you choose what you want, so it’s very American.” This “American” option is especially important for the people at Bhakti Fest, many of whom have felt constrained by the religious worlds into which they were brought up. For them, the possibility of a chosen archetype—or several—can seem very appealing. The second reason relates to the first, namely, that the discourse surrounding archetypes offers a taste of polytheism without really requiring a person to sink their teeth in. Here, the gods are merely representations, not realities. And while seekers may be, by their very definition, looking for something else or something new, the sensibilities of their older religious upbringings often leave lingering anxieties about idols of many gods with many arms. Thus archetypes provide a very American way of sampling from polytheistic traditions without raising the idol anxieties sometimes cultivated since childhood.

So, what can we make of Bhakti fest? What can I, an anthropologist of religion and specialist in the study Hindu traditions, say of these fascinating folk? One person told me that she was simply “Californian: kind of Buddhist, kind of Hindu, and fluent in astrology.” Indeed, most people saw themselves as “spiritual, but not religious” or “eclectic,” and therefore unwilling to submit to the categories and labels and boxes into which mainstream culture—and academics—demand they be corralled. Manoj steered a different course, telling me that everyone at Bhakti Fest is Hindu even though they might not say it or see it. After all, kirtan is the Hindu practice of chanting, and in India bhakti itself is synonymous with Hindu devotionalism. Yoga has become an increasingly global phenomenon—and is therefore more secularized and hybridized than the terms above—but it too emerges from a distinctly South Asian context. This represents the if-it-walks-and-squawks argument, which is to say, that a person is Hindu if they say and do Hindu things.

Bhakti Fest 2016 (Drew Thomases)

Yet, surely self-representation matters. On this front, very few at Bhakti Fest described themselves as Hindu. Replying to my question as to why this might be the case, one person simply said: “because maybe they don’t feel Hindu” [emphasis mine]. Given Bhakti Fest’s commitment to “the bhav,” such an appeal to feelings does not surprise. On the other hand, I also met a woman, named Lisa, who admitted that although she sometimes did, in fact, feel Hindu, she also wondered whether laying claim to a Hindu identity was too appropriative. In claiming such an identity, Lisa thought, was she somehow exploiting a culture and religion about which she did not know enough? For me at least, this raises an even more confusing question: what is more appropriative, to call oneself a Hindu when not totally versed in Hindu culture—and when not of South Asian descent—or to deny the label of “Hindu” when all the while doing many explicitly Hindu things? This is a curious analytical place, a point where the question of appropriation is both important, and risks collapsing in on itself. For people like Lisa, it is at this very point where intellectualizing seems to do little good. In that sense, then, why not just “be in the bhav”?

Regardless of the fact that people at Bhakti Fest distance themselves from organized religion and celebrate instead the eclecticism of the “spiritual, but not religious” ideal, they nevertheless share some family resemblance to far larger communities in the American religious mainstream. In particular, I’m thinking of the 80 million Evangelicals in the United States, for whom “spiritual, but not religious” is an increasingly popular mode of self-representation. Among this group, “religion” is said to distract from a personal, devotional relationship with Jesus Christ. Take, for example, this excerpt from Jefferson Bethke’s spoken-word poem, “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus,” now with 30 million views on YouTube: “One thing is vital to mention: how Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums. See, one’s the work of God, the other’s a man-made invention. See, one is the cure, but the other’s the infection.” Moreover, such a personal relationship with Jesus entails an experiential world in which “feeling the spirit” takes center stage. So “spiritual” comes to mean being filled quite literally with the Holy Spirit.

Of course, these two notions of “spiritual, but not religious” are far from identical; the family resemblance makes for distant cousins, once or twice removed at best. But given the comparison, how different or odd really is the notion of “being in the bhav”? Indeed, Bhakti Fest seems at first blush a narrow or circumscribed world, confined largely to California, hippie-types, and the New Age. And yet, that is only true when we focus primarily on the interesting, if obvious, conversation about extreme eclecticism. Such a conversation attends to the spiritual “buffet” of archetype-talk, Hinduism, crystals, sound healing, astrology, etc. But beyond eclecticism, there is a lot more going on here. And so, if we shift focus and look instead at devotion, emotion, and experience—bundled, as they are, in ideas like “the bhav” and “the Spirit”—we encounter an idiom of expression both popular and pervasive. Despite the furry boots, Ganesh tattoos, and half-naked ecstatic dancing, devotion in this desert is a lot like the devotion seen and felt across the country. And this suggests that the margins of Hindu and hippie might reside squarely at the center of American religiosity.

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Drew Thomases is assistant professor religion at San Diego State University. His work focuses on the anthropology of religion in North India—more specifically, Hindu pilgrimage and practice—though he is broadly interested in tourism, globalization, environmentalism, and theoretical approaches to the study of religion. His current book project, Guest is God: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Making Paradise in India, analyzes the dynamics of religion and tourism in the pilgrimage site of Pushkar, Rajasthan.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Devotion in the Desert: Religion and Emotion on the Margins of Hindu and Hippie appeared first on The Revealer.

Image via Next Nature

Jews, at least some Jews, have been asking if artificial flesh is kosher for a very long time. You can even find debates on the subject in the Talmud, depending on how you define “flesh” and “artificial.” In the Tractate Sanhedrin (65b), two Rabbis, Chanina and Oshaia, spend every Sabbath evening studying the Kabbalistic Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzirah). They use its teachings to create a calf, which they then eat, evidently without slaughtering it according to kosher law, or kashrut. Interpreters of the Tractate debated whether kashrut had been violated, a questionable point given the special genesis of the animal in question. According to Rabbi Yeshayah Halevi Horowitz, active during the late 16^th through the early 17^th century, the calf described in the Tractate was not a “real animal,” and thus shechitah (the practice of kosher slaughter) was unnecessary. It was a human creation, not part of divinely created nature. But other authorities, though they agreed that the calf was no natural animal, opined that the failure to perform shechitah violated a different principle, called marit ayin, or acting in ways that appear improper even if they are not improper. In another Talmudic narrative (Tractate Sanhedrin 59b), a traveling Rabbi who is threatened by lions on the road, prays to the heavens and receives an immediate response. Two hunks of flesh fall from the sky, intended to distract his assailants. Obligingly, the lions seize one hunk, leaving the Rabbi free to carry the other to a study hall, where it feeds a different kind of hunger, namely that for debate. The final judgment is that “no unfit thing descends from heaven.” The meat is good for the Jews.

Kosher law is ancient. The Talmud, fully compiled in its Babylonian form by around the 5^th century CE, considerably post-dates the origins of kosher law, or kashrut, in the Hebrew Bible, specifically in the books of Leviticus and in Deuteronomy. But kosher law is also modern. For hundreds of years, the practice of implementing kashrut has changed along with the transformations of the Jewish people, following the shifts in the ways Jews eat and the foods they can access.

Over the past hundred-plus years, like all other eaters in the developed world, Jews’ dietary patterns have been transformed by the industrialization of food. Everything from gelatin to white bread to meat, not to mention non-food household products such as hand lotion and shampoo, can be bought from a supermarket bearing a kosher label, all produced on a massive scale in factories. In the contemporary United States, Kosher foods are a business worth about $10 billion per year (one 2012 estimate had the global industry at $17 billion). But not all of this business is done on the Jewish dollar.

Only a relatively small percentage of kosher foods sold are bought by observant Jews for whom that label means compliance with Jewish law. This is partly because a large number of everyday foods, such as orange juice, are already produced under kosher supervision. So when a person looks at a new kind of food and asks “But is it kosher?” the question has implications that are simultaneously Jewish and much larger than the Jewish world.

One such potential new food, “cultured meat,” could be produced from a sample of muscle cells taken from a “donor” animal, which may remain alive; those cells are then encouraged to proliferate in a bioreactor, fed by a nutritive growth medium, often containing fetal bovine serum (FBS)[1]. In early Summer 2016, a representative from the non-profit organization New Harvest, which promotes the creation of meat and other animal-derived foods by cell culture and other sophisticated biotechnological methods, spoke in Oakland, California. When I asked if cultured meat would be kosher, she happily reported that the issue of kashrut had recently been discussed in an Internet forum, and that, yes, a Rabbi had suggested that laboratory-grown meat would be kosher.[2] There would be no reason for Jews not to participate in the future of protein.

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As T.S. Eliot put it in “The Hollow Men,” “Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow.” The real kosher status of laboratory-grown meat, often called “cultured meat,” is much more ambiguous.

The question “is X kosher?” has become standard for many English speakers, familiar both with Jews and their dietary laws (at least the basics that come up most often: no pork, no shrimp, no mixing meat and milk). “Kosher” also carries an aura beyond Jewish orthopraxis, a sense of “rightness” (the deep root word here is the Hebrew kasher means “fitting” or “proper”), and perhaps this has a value for those discussing where cultured meat fits into the future of food. To ask if cultured meat would be kosher might sound natural enough. But something so strange, so completely unprecedented as laboratory-grown meat, needs all the help it can get to win a smile from eaters accustomed to eating animals.

As of 2016, cultured meat does not yet exist as a food product, but many expect it to grace our tables and refrigerators soon. Scientists are crafting small pieces of muscle tissue, produced via tissue culture and tissue engineering techniques, in corporate and academic laboratories. Others are investing money in the technology, as venture capitalists, or investing time and reputational capital in it, as entrepreneurs. But the technology still lags behind the abundant hype, making speculation into cultured meat’s kosher status curious. Why has this question kicked up so early in the prehistory of the meat of the future? Why must the future be shot through with antiquity? It is tempting to joke that this is because there will be Jews in the future, and some of them might keep kosher – but Jewish interest is only part of the story. The Hebrew National hotdog brand (notably, not accepted by Orthodox Jews) uses the slogan “We answer to a higher authority,” in their advertisements. As Jewish as a “Hebrew higher authority” might sound, this motto also resonates with consumers who defer to non-Jewish higher authorities, or to none at all.

New Harvest is in the business of promoting what it calls “cellular agriculture.” Broadly speaking, this is the use of novel cell culture techniques to produce ingredients, from meat to eggs, that, historically, we have gleaned from animals. New Harvest thus has an understandable interest in presenting positive stories about the technologies whose development it advocates, such as cultured meat’s potential for kosher certification. Another organization that promotes meat produced via tissue culture, the Good Food Institute (GFI), has championed the term “Clean Meat,” remarkable for its ability to make Leviticus echo strongly into the 21^st Century.

The term “clean” always summons its opposite. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose gloss on Leviticus is enormously influential, writes “Defilement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a systematic ordering of ideas.”[3] Viewed through her lens, kashrut becomes just such a “systematic ordering of ideas,” less a matter of filth and cleanliness and more a way of structuring human experience and behavior. Not that meat can’t be filthy in several senses, but filth is in the eye and hand of the beholder. Douglas’s Purity and Danger was in my backpack when I found myself at a “pig-picking” in rural Kentucky, literally pulling cooked meat off a hog’s flank with my hands as steam rose from the apples that had been roasting along in its gut. The meat was clean to me, and, if memory serves, delicious.

Industrial meat production, with its Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and slaughterhouses, is ruinous from both environmental and ethical standpoints. Cultured meat’s premise, its sine qua non, is that the new meat will be more pure than the industrially-produced meat of today. The byproducts of our current meat include pollutants that contribute to greenhouse gases, and leak into ground water and waterways. CAFOs also create the ideal conditions for the development of diseases that threaten not only livestock, but human lives, and to raise animals this way means treating them like machines, little bioreactors for making meat.[4] Chickens’ beaks get cut off, cows and pigs stand in their own excrement, and everyone gets pumped full of antibiotics. Most present-day meat, viewed from this vantage, is unclean, and from such visions springs the demand that the human imagination journey in time to find something better. Some in the food world dream of an agrarian past in which animals were better treated and farming was done at a scale more congruent with environmental health. Others dream of industrial-scale meat production with the wickedness removed, naturally via biotechnology rather than the Sefer Yetzirah. Most promoters of cultured meat are well aware that a widespread, global reduction of meat consumption would be preferable; they just doubt that it is likely, given projections for population growth and increased carnivory in states such as India and China. In other words, cultured meat is a technology that would gratify human appetites while cleansing the blood from our teeth. This could be seen as a great boon, or, more cynically, as a kind of moral prosthesis for a civilization that cannot grow up on its own. Even more critical, is the suggestion that cultured meat examines the future of food security from the standpoint of production (and thus, from the standpoint of enterprise), rather than distribution (and thus, from the standpoint of politics). While some of cultured meat’s advocates are sensitive to the intrinsically political issues of food justice and regulation, the movement has centered around the business-friendly idea that our food system’s troubles can be fixed by a transformed means of production alone.

Given that so much hangs in the balance, it makes all the sense in the world that a representative from New Harvest was eager to answer the question of kashrut in the affirmative, and that she felt she had grounds to do so. The Rabbi cited in New Harvest’s Internet discussion, had opined that, since no animal need be killed to produce cultured meat, it would not, from the perspective of kashrut, count as meat at all. It might be considered pareve, the category for foods that are neither fleischig (meat), or milchig (dairy). The first Reddit commenter’s response – notably offered without a trace of anti-Semitism – was what we might call an heretical but high-spirited form of “bacon glee,” beginning with the suggestion that, if meat grown from cow cells need not count as meat at all, why not grow pig cells? Why not grow the delicious fatty ones that crisp in the pan? The transgression continued, spinning into full-on Jewish Humor mode: “Kosher bacon, the dream is real.” “We might make that our next fundraising campaign.” “If you make kosher bacon you need to film a Rabbi eating it.” It was tough not to think of the 1972 Everything You Ever Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), in which Woody Allen offered viewers a skit called “What’s My Perversion?” Here, a Rabbi is bound to a chair with rope, then whipped lightly by a blonde model while his wife sits at his feet, eating pork. A few years earlier, someone had created a web site in order to tell a different kind of transgressive joke. They claimed to have a company that could create cultured meat out of the muscle cells of celebrities; naturally, cultured meat presents us with the technical possibility of eating our bodies, ourselves, Jew or Gentile. Some have surmised that the sheer strangeness of cultured meat, has made it a catalyst for all manner of heretical and satirical thinking. It certainly crosses over a line that has long been firm in the modern imagination, namely that between organisms (edible) and artifacts (inedible) – never mind that industrial food production has meant that we transgress that line daily, in almost every meal.

New Harvest was not the first to broach the question of the kosher status of meat produced via tissue cultured techniques. Such questions began to pile up on the Internet around August 2013, when Mark Post, Professor of Physiology at Maastricht University, unveiled his famous hamburger made from cultured cells. The burger was cooked and eaten at a London media event, marking what remains the highest point of media hype around cultured meat, several years later. Early conversations about whether or not cultured meat might be kosher, have turned around the issue of which animals are permitted or forbidden to Jews, as is laid out in Leviticus 11. In other words, the first questions asked, presumed that the source animal for a cell culture would be one of the major determinants of kashrut.

But, as the Talmudic story of Rabbis Chanina and Oshaia shows, what makes meat kosher, is more complicated than animal type. First, sick or injured animals of any species are un-kosher. Second, even fit animals of the proper species are not considered kosher unless slaughtered correctly according to the rules of shechitah. Animals are not stunned before slaughter (as is the non-kosher convention) but are awake and alert as a long ritual knife, called the chalif, is pulled across the throat, meant to instantly kill the animal and begin draining it of blood; some even argue that this method of slaughter deprives the brain of oxygen swiftly and, thus, minimizes suffering. After the body has been drained, the carcass is carefully inspected for deformities, growths, ruptured veins and blood vessels, stagnant blood and so forth – this in conformity with the biblical injunction against eating blood or eating a diseased animal. The blood ban has, historically, meant that many kosher-keeping Jews (in the U.S., nearly all kosher-keeping Jews) eat meat only from the forequarters of an animal, rather than from the hindquarters, the veins and arteries of which are very tough to remove, and the sciatic nerve also being considered un-kosher. The process is, of course, labor-intensive, and as a result kosher meat usually costs significantly more than non-kosher; this also means that Jewish history is dotted with criminals seeking to sell non-kosher meat as kosher. Notably, and significantly for the production of cultured meat, according to the principle of aver min hachai one cannot remove part of an animal to eat while the animal still lives. The upshot of this is that much depends on whether or not a Rabbi judges that a biopsy of tissue, taken from a donor animal, counts as a “part” of that animal, or not – and would a hamburger grown from that sample, then count as part of that animal? This is a Jewish version of a philosophical question that has emerged about cultured meat, namely the relationship between the tissue culture made from an animal, and that individual animal itself. To what degree does a hamburger grown from cow cells, share traits with that cow? What is the ontological status of cultured meat? Its relationship with the donor species? And if cultured meat were judged to be pareve rather than fleishig, what would that judgment, in turn, mean for the broader and extra-Jewish question of the meatiness of cultured meat? What would such a Jewish opinion weigh, in a broader conversation about whether tissue-cultured cells can count as meat in all the conventional senses? It is easy to imagine that if a kosher authority judged cultured meat to be kosher, but because it was not actually meat, New Harvest would have to think twice before agreeing.

In 2016, a newer entrant into the race to create cultured meat, the Israeli startup SuperMeat, made much of the issue of kashrut. As Sarah Zhang pointed out in The Atlantic, company co-founder Koby Barak was transparent about the controversial status of kosher claims, particular ones based on still-nascent technologies.[5] Zhang (citing historian Roger Horowitz’s book Kosher USA) rightly points out that kosher claims on behalf of all industrial products must be based on determinations about individual ingredients.[6] In the case of cultured meat, one would have to get in the weeds and trace the growth medium, the scaffolding, and the original cells, to their points of origin. But even this might not matter, depending on how one interprets the principle of panim chadashot (“a new face;” ponim chadashos if one favors the Ashkenazi Yiddish pronunciation), one which is invoked by the rabbis consulted by SuperMeat. This is a principle that has been invoked again and again as Rabbis have sought to determine how Jews should relate to industrial foods. If a substance’s physical form is radically transformed, then an originally unkosher element may lose that status and be considered kosher. In one case, kosher status was granted to gelatin derived from the collagen in pig skins (an easier source to use than cow bones) – for the ultimate gelatin seemed to be of a completely different substance than the animal product from which it was derived. But panim chadashot’s application is not undisputed; the pig gelatin case led to scandal, and producers of kosher gelatin had to get their collagen elsewhere. And this case may have important implications for cultured meat, since collagen is a useful ingredient for making the organic scaffolding on which tissue cultures are often grown.

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The story of kashrut’s encounter with industrial food production is a complex one, too much so for easy recounting here; Horowitz’s aforementioned Kosher USA tells it in great detail. The story is filled with efforts to adapt kosher law to methods of making food, and to a scale of making food, that are unimaginable from a biblical standpoint. It is also filled with a question central to the modern Jewish experience: how can observant Jews participate in the non-Jewish world without transgressing the limits of the law? That question would take on a distinctive form in American life: could assimilation take place on Judaism’s own terms?[7] More prosaically, could one drink Coca-Cola in its original recipe, which included a small amount of glycerin that was not necessarily kosher, or was a kosher form of glycerin necessary? Of course, Jews have many centuries of experience adapting halacha, the legal system of Rabbinic Judaism, to the customs and resources of the nations in which they live. In some cases, premodern precedents retain their relevance. The case of davar hamamid is instructive: while ordinarily, according to the principle of bitul (or, nullification) the presence of a non-kosher element in a kosher food or liquid can be negated if the ratio between the two is 1-60 or greater; however, in certain cases the small non-kosher element may play a catalytic or shaping role in determining the overall structure of a thing, a classic example being the use of animal rennet (typically taken from the lining of a calf’s stomach) to turn milk into cheese. In a modern context, a great many industrial foods make use of such catalysts, whose kosher or non-kosher nature needs to be ascertained.

The story of kashrut in the 20^th century is also a tale of shifting regulatory regimes and shifting markets, and of what Benjamin Gutman, arguing in the Yale Law Journal, terms “interpretive pluralism.” This interpretive pluralism finds a secular, non-Jewish echo in the contemporary pursuit of “eco-labeling” and other ethically tinged labels.[8] Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews all tend to interpret kashrut differently, and different kosher authorities belonging to these denominations, effectively produce different brands of kosher certification. Consumers make their determinations about which kosher labels, or heckshers, they will trust, which often but not always tracks according to denomination within Judaism. Beyond this, there are federal laws that regulate the kinds of representations koshering agencies, as well as product manufacturers, may make, in addition to governing the private litigation to which businesses may have to resort. The result is a hybrid public-private regulatory environment for kosher products.

Gutman argues that this public-private hybrid is a promising model for the regulation of organic and other “eco-labeled” foods, which came under scrutiny in the United States during the 1990s because of what Gutman calls “understandable concerns about deception, fraud and confusion.”[9] Those concerns prompted government involvement, as well as calls for federal standards for the sake of consumers as well as manufacturers. Problematically for anyone interested in federal standards, “organic” is used in many ways, and different consumer groups demand different attributes from their “organic” foods – much as kosher consumers make different demands on kosher food producers and certifiers. This means that the market serves an important role in determining the types of regulation that apply to both kosher and organic foods, but not without the government also playing a role. Gutman’s argument has implications for the case of cultured meat, whose regulatory future (because it is nonexistent as a market product, as of this writing) is far more uncertain than that of organic foods. We do not yet know what kind of ethical labeling cultured meat would receive—be it couched in environmental or animal-protection terms—if it receives any at all. Nor do we know who would handle the accompanying regulation. What would be the mechanism for establishing relations of trust? Many in the cultured meat movement place their trust in the market: new food products will change the way we consume, and thus allow us to “pacify” the food system and reduce the harm it inflicts on the earth, on animals, and on our spirits. The question might be, how unregulated an environment do they want, for their new ethical products?

Perhaps it is not so strange to ask if cultured meat would be kosher, after all. The question takes the difficult question of whether this substance would be “clean” or “unclean” and fits it into a familiar framework, one in which an effectively secularized religious category might underwrite something strange and new, guaranteeing its ethical weight. The question of kashrut thus only appears to be a Jewish question. The stakes are larger than the Jewish world, and the symbolic “halo” around kosher status may in fact be a way of communicating about quality and ethics beyond the observant Jewish frame. In a 2013 promotional film describing cultured meat, Mark Post imagined that, in the future, meat products in the supermarket might bear marks (like today’s “ecolabels”) indicating that they were environmentally friendly or, perhaps, that no animals had died to produce them. Although Post made no reference to kashrut, the similarity between such marks and the traditional hecksher born by kosher products, is unmistakable, and it recalls as well the effort to label foods by geographic origin; the anthropologist Heather Paxson has noted that such labeling, pushes back on the sense of anonymity and place-lessness that have grown along with industrial food production.[10] The kosher status of cultured meat is still unclear, and it is likely that, should such products reach our supermarket shelves bearing markers of ethical promise, they would also be marked by the same “interpretive pluralism” attached to kosher meat. The story of cultured meat may turn out to contain not only those stories of saving animals or saving the planet that entrepreneurs favor, but also a near-Rabbinic level of disputation about tissue cultures, meat processing, and even the desirable physical form of artificial meat. We may need to reread Mary Douglas.

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[1] The search is on for a vegan replacement

[2] She was referring to a discussion thread that New Harvest had held at the web site Reddit.com, in March 2016: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/48sn01/we_are_new_harvest_the_nonprofit_responsible_for/

[3] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966) 51.

[4] See Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

[5] Sarah Zhang, “A Startup Wants to Grow Kosher Meat in a Lab,” The Atlantic, September 16, 2016.

[6] Roger Horowitz, Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

[7] See Horowitz 125.

[8] Benjamin N. Gutman, “Ethical Eating: Applying the Kosher Food Regulatory Regime to Organic Food,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 108, No. 8 (June, 1999), pp. 2351-2384.

[9] See Gutman, 2352.

[10] Heather Paxson: The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft lives in Oakland, and is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he writes about laboratory-grown meat and the futures of food. A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, he studied at Swarthmore College and did his graduate work in European intellectual history at Berkeley. In addition to his scholarly work, he regularly writes on contemporary food culture. His book Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt is out from Penn. He is @benwurgaft on Twitter.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post But Will The Lab-Grown Meat Be Kosher? appeared first on The Revealer.