by Alon Levy

There's a genre of shows, above the level of House or Friends and below that of The Wire, that exude high quality even if the actual level of characterization and plot isn't deep. Julian Fellowes' Downton Abbey is one of the prime examples of this genre. It's beautifully done and acted, has enough characters and plots to keep anyone's interest, and is full of references that seem smart.

It just so happens that none of these references is particularly intellectual or obscure. Instead, they're the sort of history that everyone knows. The first episode discusses the Titanic; we do not live in an alt history in which James Cameron chose to make more Terminator sequels in the 90s. Every time Lord Grantham's American wife's mother comes, we're treated to the usual tropes of differences between British and American culture. In the season that just concluded with its Christmas special, two additional common references are added: a rich English expat goes to Munich in 1922 and is killed by the early Nazi party because he vocally disagreed with them; and there's a subplot regarding Edward VIII's playboy philandering. This is about as smart as an American mid-18th century period drama inserting a reference to Washington not being able to tell a lie.

The problem is that even the stronger points of symbolism on the show are like this. The biggest is the analogy between the upstairs and the downstairs. The servants form a tight group (except Thomas and O'Brien) in which Carson is the father, Hughes is the mother, and the rest of the servants have a hierarchy in which valets and lady's maids are above the rest. Bates/Anna is of course parallel to Matthew/Mary, and the stronger parts of the show are the ones that showcase the differences between their relationships, with Matthew/Mary having more resources and more clout than Bates/Anna so that they face more rich-people problems rather than a possible execution.

The only problem is, the show didn't really invent this view of the butler as the father, the housekeeper as the mother, and the other servants as lesser members of the house. It was common in that era. I don't think it's as well-known a reference, but that symbolism is still a trope, and the servants' order of precedence within the great houses reflected it. It works well enough as a reference, but as symbolism, it's trite.

Everywhere else, Fellowes' Tory baron biases show. The show can't write women well, and descends to a virgin/whore/mother trichotomy. The only man who is as conniving as the median woman is gay. The treatment of race is facile. Lord Grantham is self-consciously written as an upper-class twit, but he doesn't suffer any consequences for it and is always saved by more competent family members, nor does he have interesting moral dilemmas. The characters are never shown to engage in any effort – they do some work and succeed, without any of the failures that are associated with actual effort. The show wants to be about the aristocracy's struggles with its decline after WW1, but it's instead about an aristocratic family that weathered all the troubles, which is about as interesting as any riches-to-riches story could be.

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SHOCK AND STOICISM

A doctor in tailcoats

Makes a house call.

He straps her ankles,

Shoves a buffer in her mouth.

Her husband kisses her eyes closed,

Pins down her fleshy arms.

The doctor pads her temples,

Inserts wires into a black box.

Bulbs flicker as he smoothes

Moonlight back in her throat.

Doctor unplugs his machine.

A boy with birthmark on forehead

Tiptoes to his mother’s bed

Where she calmly asks my name.

by Rafiq Kathwari, the first non-Irish winner of the Patrick Kavanagh 2013 Poetry Award, representing Ireland Literature Exchange at the Hyderabad Literary Festival January 23-25, 2014.

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

One of the main aims of modern science is finding mathematical expressions to describe the relationships between observed quantities. For example, Newton's law of gravitation tells us that the force of gravity between two bodies depends in a certain way on their masses and the distance between them; thermodynamics tells us that the pressure of a gas depends in a certain way on its volume and temperature; and an economist studying income might conclude that income increases with educational level according to some functional form.

Sometimes these mathematical relationships emerge from an underlying model. We might model a gas as made up of molecules that collide with each other and the walls of the container, think that pressure is a measure of collisions with the walls and temperature a measure of kinetic energy, and then our functional form is a result of mechanistic insight into pressure and temperature. In other cases, the relationships serve to provide a summary representation of the data (instead of giving you a list of pressures at various temperatures, I could say pressure=3*temperature) and, even without providing an explanation of how the relationship came to be, allow us to make predictions about new data (for example, I might have observed the pressures at temperatures of 30 degrees and 60 degrees and want to predict the pressure at 90 degrees).

As we choose a relationship (or hypothesis) to explain a given set of data, the two goals of accounting for the existing data and making predictions for new data are often in conflict. Look at the graph below, which plots the simultaneously measured values of two quantities, X and Y.

Say we're trying to describe this relationship in a way that allows us to predict the values of Y at unobserved points (for example, we haven't measured the value of Y when X is 0.25 and we want to predict this). A common thing to do is to draw a line along the middle of this scattered cloud of points and use this as an approximation of the underlying relationship.

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by Ryan Seals

We are in the position, unique in human history, of possessing the knowledge of how to alleviate much of the unnecessary suffering in the world. What we lack is the knowledge of how to deliver and disseminate that knowledge, and of how to encourage its uptake. In an eerily prescient article of the sort at which he excelled, John Maynard Keynes wrote in The New Republic in 1932:

At present the world is being held back by something which would have surprised our fathers—by a failure of economic technique to exploit the possibilities of engineering and distributive technique; or, rather, engineering technique has reached a degree of perfection which is making obvious defects in economic technique which have always existed, though unnoticed, and have doubtless impoverished mankind since the days of Abraham.

Replace engineering technique with scientific understanding and economic technique with, well, some broadly defined sociopolitical will to implement our understanding, and Keynes's point is precisely applicable to the current state of health and longevity around the world.

Whether you read into modern medicine an amazing ability to deflect and defer nature's slings and arrows, or you bemoan the failed ‘War on Cancer' and the much-delayed genomic revolution, the fact remains that we now know the major ways for the majority of people to lead long, healthy, lives. It isn't medical technology that allows people to live into old age; with the exception of vaccines, the causes of good health aren't to be found in hospitals and medical clinics. Nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene are the keys to population health, and it isn't too great an exaggeration to say that health depends, above all else, on where you live, eat and excrete. The solutions are, for the most part and in a strictly technical sense, rather simple and well understood.

Keynes wrote that statement in 1932, before modern vaccines and antibiotics, without much (successful) interventional surgery, and with scant knowledge of the mechanisms of disease. The 80 years before he wrote had seen a revolution in human health – maximum life expectancy had long been on its steep upward trajectory, and infant mortality in the Western world was fast becoming a rarity.

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by Debra Morris

Until my grandmother—whose 100^th birthday we celebrated this year—took up residence first with my parents and then at the care center where three of her sisters also spent their last years, she lived independently and, in many ways, unconventionally. (Whereas she is content to describe her long life as “good,” my grandmother deviated from the norms of small-town Texas just enough, and in enough domains of her life, for that life to seem quite remarkable to me. That nearly everyone calls the lady “Morris”—a long story, but it originated when I was very young and couldn't replicate my mother's polite “Mrs. Morris,” so I shortened it and the name stuck—is only the first of many odd details that I'd need to explain to anyone meeting her for the first time.) When her husband suffered a fatal heart attack after a morning spent plowing, she inherited a prosperous family farm and kept it that way for four decades more. She hosted retired teacher banquets, a duty (though certainly not a grim one, my grandmother was the type to understand it as a duty nonetheless) born of a storied 40-year career as teacher and principal in the Quail Rural Consolidated School District (the largest such district in the country at the time). To this day, she is my family's only elected official, having served a term as the County Superintendent of Education. For many years she split her leisure time between a full slate of daytime TV dramas—what she called her “stories”—and virtually any televised sporting event. Whenever I asked, she could catch me up on the tangled relationships and intrigues of any given soap opera, somehow managing to dignify the most idiotic plot or one-dimensional character. She could conjure the same remarkable effect with sports; normally oblivious, I would suddenly understand the beauty and depth of a sport (who knew golf could be anything but tedious?), envying her effortless command of baseball stats and NFL playoff hopes, and sharing her quiet marvel at a beautiful swing.

And, on top of all this, every two years or so she would vote a straight Democratic ticket. This, at least, is how her only son, my father, tells it. About ten years ago—or it could have been fifteen, or five; it hardly matters because this stunning revelation came when Morris was already quite old, and long after Texas had turned solidly Republican—my father referred to my very proper grandmother as a “yellow dog Democrat” (meaning, to any Southerner, someone who would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican). He said it with what seemed like mild exasperation, as if he couldn't make sense of, or fully commend, this irrational allegiance to a political party. But I remember being secretly thrilled (I think he could have told me that Morris was an avid day-trader and I would have been less surprised). Maybe I felt vindicated, too; apparently the Democratic gene can skip a generation, but obviously it was there, deep in me, ensuring that a family's rich history would continue to bind, and instruct. Perhaps most surprising of all, I discovered that I was proud—suddenly proud of a party that could have earned my dear grandmother's life-long support.

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by Mara Jebsen

While I do not like the phrase, “at the height of her powers,” it comes to mind when I think of Taymor directing this comedy. I don't like the phrase because it seems to anoint the critic with a false sense of her own fortune-telling powers, and has an undue emphasis on the importance of being urgent–as if I were saying, “run, don't walk” to this play. But perhaps you should run–or, more accurately, sit. I had to sit in the stand-by line for a long time, because the play, now running at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center is officially sold out. Sit, and wait, for a long time for this production, because the images it gives you will delight at first, and then, over time, will resolve themselves into a sort of important pastiche that helps you think about love, madness, and Shakespeare.

I had to go because my mother made me. She was a theatre student, a mime, a theatre-director, and a folklorist before she became the director of a k-12 school in West Africa, where she finds an outlet for her enormous creative energy by putting on plays. This year it is Midsummer Night's Dream. “I can't get a feel for it, yet,'' she said. “But Julie Taymor directed it, and I love her, and they're putting it on in a theatre six blocks from your house. I read all about her troubles with Spider-man and had been following her before I had the idea to do Midsummer.It means something. Go. Find out what she's up to.”

I had no idea that my mother loved Julie Taymor. Or that she 'followed” anything that had anything to do with the internet. I promised to do it, but procrastinated, and when I saw that the tickets were sold out, I nearly panicked.

Anyway, here is the gist: initially, even if you are not compiling a list of directorial choices for your mother's use, you will be startled and awed by the choices Taymor makes. There is a stunning mixture of expensive technology and simple stagecraft, and a viewer feels safe the whole while–safe because they are in the hands of a person who will not bore them, who seems to have an exact sense of rhythm, scale and color scheme-and who presents recognizable character 'types' that amuse without degrading the people who make that type.

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by Tom Jacobs

Years ago an earnest young student entered his professor’s office for a brief chat about a paper topic he had been turning around in his head. The professor was esteemed and well-dressed and famous for being a cool and political yet accessible writer about cool and political things. The student was spangly mediocre, wildly intimidated by his professor because he knew that he (the professor) was indifferent to this object/student before him that/who didn’t know enough about the world or the past or theory to challenge him on any level that he might recognize.

They shook hands limply and then sat down across from each other, the power differential radiating out in all directions, but it was mainly felt by the beleaguered student. The student fumblingly explained that the paper was to be about the nature of emergent electronic communities (this was the mid-nineties). He babbled and referenced a few novels and sociological and philosophical works that seemed to him potentially useful.

The professor, un-noddingly and somewhat socially autistically stared at him from across his desk with a mixture of curiosity, interest, and pity, giving the student neither quarter or shelter. After a few moments of squirming awfulness he asked a depth-charge question: “What do we mean when we say “’community?’” The question exploded in the student’s mind, and the shockwaves resonated well into the future. To this very day, this very moment, to speak truthfully.

It’s not necessary to go into the student’s flummoxed response. What’s important is the question: what the fuck do we mean when we say “community?” Because we say it all the time, the media says it all the time, politicians say it all the time, and it does an enormous amount of work for us even if none of us know quite what we mean when we say it.

I know, I know, there are many sociologists and philosophers and so forth who have considered this very question, and I will refer to some of them below. But the feeling precedes the concept, and that’s what makes it so interesting. We all know that there is such a thing as a community, even if we can’t put our finger on it. In that regard it’s a bit like pornography or (as has been said, I’m told) the clitoris. So what’s important is to figure out how really smart people who have thought long and hard about what “community” means maps on to what it means to the rest of us. How might we make these two disparate worlds sing in harmony?

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by Omar Ali

Polio is an ancient scourge that spreads only within human populations and can cause paralysis, most frequently of the lower extremities, but can also be fatal when the paralysis extends to the muscles of breathing. For reasons that are not completely clear, the disease erupted in huge epidemics from the late 19^th century onwards, causing millions of victims to die or become paralyzed for life. Once a virus had been identified as the cause, the race was on to develop a vaccine. Finally, in 1952, Jonas Salk and his colleagues developed the first effective inactivated vaccine for this disease. Within a few years, mass vaccination decreased the number of victims in developed countries from hundreds of thousands to just a few hundred per year. In the mid-fifties, Albert Sabin and colleagues developed an effective live vaccine that was cheaper, easier to adminster and provided better immunity and that was then adopted by the WHO as the main vaccine for use in endemic areas. Thanks to mass immunization campaigns, the number of victims dropped precipitously and by 1988 the WHO was ready to launch a well-coordinated international initiative to completely wipe out wild polio from the planet. Like smallpox, polio does not have an animal reservoir, so if human to human transmission is completely blocked by mass vaccination the disease can be effectively wiped out.

Initially, the campaign proceeded well, with the Americas being declared polio-free in 1994 and Europe in 2002. Today, there are only 3 countries where polio still remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Unfortunately, the reason in all three is the same; the moronic wing of the international Jihadist movement has somehow picked up bits and pieces of chatter about risks from oral polio vaccine, combined it with pre-existing paranoia about modern international institutions, and created a robust anti-vaccine meme that is able to draw upon the ruthless killing power of Jihadi militias to effectively stop polio eradication campaigns in their area of influence.
I would like to clarify this a bit further:

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by Dave Maier

Last month in this space I discussed physicist Lawrence Krauss's suggestion that in advancing certain cosmological theories (concerning the early universe, dark matter, dark energy, and so on) he had thereby put to rest the age-old philosophical question “why is there something rather than nothing?”. I agreed for the most part with those who think Krauss misunderstands the question if he thinks a physical theory – any physical theory – can answer or dispel it. There were a lot of interesting comments on the post (go read them), but I think people were sometimes talking past each other. Some of the confusion and/or disagreement concerns the concept of metaphysics, so that's today's topic.

We often see “metaphysics” or “metaphysical” used as a term of abuse. (I myself use it this way sometimes.) But not all such abuse amounts to the same thing. What exactly is metaphysics “in the bad sense”? And why is there also a “good” (or at least not necessarily bad) sense of the term as well? How does the latter devolve into the former, and how can we avoid such a thing? Or must we part ways with “metaphysics” entirely, leaving only a “bad” sense of the term?

A good place to start is the entry on “Metaphysics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Its author might give us critics pause, since if there is such a thing as metaphysical Kool-aid, Peter van Inwagen has drunk as deeply of that toxic draught as any philosopher alive. However, except for the perfunctoriness of its final section, which grudingly examines (or at least mentions) the question “Is Metaphysics Possible?”, most of the article is perfectly uncontroversial, as is appropriate given the venue (really, check it out for a good introduction). Metaphysics has always been part of philosophy, whether in the ancient form of a “science of being as such”, or the modern welter of rather more specific questions about causation, modality, personal identity, mind and body, space and time, and so on.

Naturally this does not mean that such things must be unobjectionable. Maybe philosophy first barked wrongly up a single ancient tree (The Tree of Being?), turning in the modern period to bark equally wrongly up a number of related trees, and maybe what we should do now is cut out such barking altogether. But as van Inwagen points out, to say that the ancient “science” (as pursued, for example, in Aristotle's Metaphysics) was wrong-headed because there are no things that do not change is itself a “metaphysical” assertion in the modern sense; and the same is often true of contemporary dismissals of “metaphysics” broadly construed.

On the other hand, the Catch-22 nature of this defense of metaphysics, if that's what it is, should arouse our suspicions. It sounds like a “gotcha,” like the blithe, infuriating assertion that “it takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.” Indeed, it's the broader cultural spat between science and religion which provides a lot of the heat and lack of light (dark energy?) for most discussions of “metaphysics.” We have to detach, or at least locate, the latter discussion to see it properly – if not to resolve it, at least to see who the players are.

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Say Something Obvious

The geometry of moonlight is triangular
Its pallid glow is whole, homogeneous and crisp,
never granular. Moon, mating with Sun
cries out like a bell, her rings are ecstatic and annular

Under a condensing cloud you’ll be singing in the rain
if you carry a tune while following your bliss
If it falls upon the skin of lovers it will hiss

We had a Harley once, too small to ride
to Champaign from N J, but we went anyway
Later, not even a kiss

The forearm muscles of the young,
their Palmaris Longus and Carpis Ulnaris,
are means to an end
they’re not there for show, but to work
In the old they sometimes give sharp hints
of what’s left to spend

Behind a blower in the snow
if the wind whips the plume just so
(colder bitter cheeks with every flake)
you may as well have been with Scott’s expedition
in Antarctica freezing in determination
dying from mistake

There’s good to be said for caution
and brashness too
…………………………….. reticence or passion
—you’ll only know which one was called for
when the day is through

.
by Jim Culleny
12/22/13

by Brooks Riley

It is difficult to talk about metaphors without talking in metaphors: Metaphors are birds, around us all the time, but unnoticed unless we take the time to look at them. Or, metaphors are apples on the tree of life, the fruits of our search for meaning. You get the idea.

Here’s a riddle: What can a human being see that no other creature on earth can see? A metaphor. We and the creatures all see the same objects, in the literal sense. But humans are able to see those objects as providers of meaning, a tree as a symbol for family or immutability. a puddle as a small inconvenience on the path of life. A pothole? Life is full of them in the metaphoric sense.

What are metaphors anyway except a parallel way of looking at things—like stepping into a second life to explain the first one.

Some people are happy just to beat a dead metaphor: ‘Life is a bowl of cherries’, ‘All the world’s a stage’, ‘No man is an island’ (not true!) or Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s exquisite ‘. . . life is a dream, and the dreams are dreams.‘ La vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. Others look for unexpected analogous connections in unusual places or events.

Some metaphors are so parasitic, they kill the host–so deeply imbedded into the language of certain events that they have lost their role as metaphor. In America we don’t ‘stand’ for office, we ‘run a race’ for it, hence the image of two candidates at the starting line, Obama in his track suit, Romney in a body stocking, in the distance a tiny White House. When you pry the metaphor out of the electoral process, there are not enough words to describe it.

For reasons having nothing to do with literary endeavor, I have been searching for metaphors. Unlike Brad Leithauser’s metaphor (in his recent, lovely piece in the New Yorker ‘Meet my metaphor’), which simply came to him while he waited in an airport, mine are the result of an active search.

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by Charlie Huenemann

“… a lying tongue is a man's destruction.” – The Wisdom of Solomon, 1.11

When I was ten years old, I happily discovered that I could say whatever I wanted in response to a question without lying. If my mother asked me if I had cleaned my room, I could say, “Yes, mother” – because she didn't ask whether I had cleaned it today. Or even if she had thought to ask whether I had cleaned my room today, I could still say “Yes, mother” – because she didn't ask if I had cleaned all of my room today (and surely I had managed to put at least one little thing away). And so on. To the extent I had any theory about it, I thought that I couldn't be accused of lying if other people hadn't taken the trouble to ask specific enough questions. At the same time, of course, I knew it was an unreasonable request, and I was in fact being a weasel.

Now imagine my delight in discovering that this golden evasion ticket is not merely a young brat's subterfuge; it is in fact remembered in history as a codified policy of some early Jesuits. Their own need for the policy and their application of it is seen best through an example.

A Jesuit in England in the early 1600s (according to Mario Praz) reportedly swore never to have been a priest, never to have been overseas, and never to have known or even seen a certain William Hawkesworth, who was a suspect in the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate the king. Later, after he had been found out, the priest explained that he had meant that “he had never been a priest of Apollo, he had never been across the Indian sea, never known the said Hawkesworth scientia scientifica [that is, with scientific knowledge], and never seen him in visione beatifica [in a beatific vision]”. The priest's mind had been racing – as we can well imagine – and it was not his problem that the minds of his interlocutors simply had not kept up.

This is an example of what has been known as mental reservation, or honest dissimulation, or (even more colorlessly) non-mendacious linguistic deception, which the philosopher Jonathan Adler defines as “asserting what one believes to be true, inviting the drawing of a conclusion that one believes to be false”.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Winnie Mandela's tribute to the cause, to Nelson Mandela and to her own life is expressed in “Part of My Soul Went With Him.” (here). I read this back in 1986 and the title of the book says much about her: a remarkable, courageous and steadfast person. Tender and tough and above all loyal. I consider her story compelling.

Winnie Mandela was and is a hero to millions. Winnie Mandela kept Nelson Mandela present and amongst his people throughout his almost three decades of imprisonment. The mighty machinery of the Apartheid regime, sought to erase Nelson Mandela but she, Winnie Mandela, defeated them. In all those years, when even a photograph of him was unavailable to the people she kept his image vivid and present and vital. Nelson Mandela, prior to the West's and its media's embrace of him, was what he was to his people in a large part because of what Winnie Mandela presented him to be. She defined him. She carried out his principles. He did not renounce struggle by all means and she was his General in the battlefield carrying out his command. Body and soul. Other Generals. always men in other battles are decorated for their deeds of violence. Their excesses are forgiven and even lauded as part of the trauma and fog of war. There are others who are forgiven their transgressions given the context and go on to be Pope, Prime Minister or President.

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by Ben Schreckinger

Christmas is Wednesday, and as the recent (and absurd) controversy over the color of Santa’s skin indirectly reminds us, the holiday is an amalgam of various pagan and Christian traditions drawn from a diversity of times and places. In addition to the Gospel stories of Jesus’ birth, they include the hagiography of the 4th century Lycian bishop St. Nicholas, Roman Saturnalia, and the Scandinavian-Pagan Yule. It is remarkable that like a time capsule, this Christian holiday serves as a vessel in which parts of various pre-Christian belief systems, otherwise long-ago lost, stand preserved.

Their preservation is testament to the tenacity of human spiritual beliefs and traditions, which often manage to outlive the environments that first produced them. Far more fragile than beliefs are human institutions, whose shelf-lives only very rarely exceed a few centuries. The birth of Jesus represents the turning point Western history between its pagan and Christian periods, which are embodied by the institutions of the Oracle at Delphi and the Roman Catholic Church, respectively. The real Christmas miracle is that between them, these two institutions represent a continuity that spans the history of Western civilization, from about 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus right up to the present day.

To examine the two side-by-side tells us something about how Western civilization has evolved: from an individualistic, agonistic world into an organized, hierarchical one. It also teaches us about how human institutions live and die, giving us reason to suspect that the church will outlive every national government currently in existence.

The Oracle at Delphi was the product of an agonistic, individualistic world. Of those that sought its prophecies it made only one demand: “Know thyself.” The guidance it offered was ambiguous and could be a double-edged sword. In perhaps the most famous myth attached to the oracle (or the most famous moment in its history, if you believe Herodotus), the 6^th century Lydian King Croesus sought guidance on whether to pursue an invasion of Persia. “If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed,” came the prophecy. Croesus attacked, but it was Lydia, not Persia that was destroyed.

The story epitomizes the Greek relationship to the divine, at the intersection of which sat the oracle. The gods were not benign protectors of humanity, but powerful supernatural beings with all the flaws and complex motivations of people. Their word was not meant to be taken at face value. They were just another force in the cosmos that a person had to contend with, sometimes friend, sometimes foe, sometimes something in between.

Compare that to the paternalistic embrace of the Roman Catholic Church. By the time the institution had matured in the early medieval period, there were few things it wanted less than for all the members of its flock to know themselves. The parish priest was their father, and the clergy claimed the exclusive right of exegesis — no one else was permitted to interpret holy texts. It called for obedience, rather than self-knowledge. This difference, too, of course reflects the orthodox Christian relationship between humanity and the divine, in which God is a benign father.

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