Thought du Jour

What is the appeal of war? Best-selling author Karen Armstrong, in a new book, attempts to answer this question. As might be expected from a former nun, she concludes that faith is not responsible for our violent nature. The prospect of killing, she argues, is a substitute for faith, not a complement. These, however, are my words: the vocabulary of an economist. Ms Armstrong uses different words to express the same idea.

I truly hope that violence and faith are substitutes, but doubt they are. In these difficult times, I would welcome more religious ritual and less violent conflict.

The prospect of killing may stir our empathy, but in the very acts of hunting, raiding, and battling, this same seat of emotions is awash in serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for the sensation of ecstasy that we associate with some forms of spiritual experience. So it happened that these violent pursuits came to be perceived as sacred activities, however bizarre that may seem to our understanding of religion. People, especially men, experienced a strong bond with their fellow warriors, a heady feeling of altruism at putting their lives at risk for others and of being more fully alive. This response to violence persists in our nature. The New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges has aptly described war as ‘a force that gives us meaning’. [….]

The warrior, therefore, experiences in battle the transcendence that others find in ritual, sometimes to pathological effect. Psychiatrists who treat war veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have noted that in the destruction of other people, soldiers can experience a self-affirmation that is almost erotic. Yet afterward, as they struggle to disentangle their emotions of pity and ruthlessness, PTSD sufferers may find themselves unable to function as coherent human beings. One Vietnam veteran described a photograph of himself holding two severed heads by the hair; the war, he said, was “hell,” a place where “crazy was natural” and everything “out of control,” but, he concluded:

The worst thing I can say about myself is that while I was there I was so alive. I loved it the way you can like an adrenaline high, the way you can love your friends, your tight buddies. So unreal and the realest thing that ever happened …. And maybe the worst thing for me now is living in peacetime without a possibility of that high again. I hate what that high was about but I loved that high.

“Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent,” Hedges explains. “Trivia dominates our conversation and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us a resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.” One of the many, intertwined motives driving men to the battlefield has been the tedium and pointlessness of ordinary domestic existence. The same hunger for intensity would compel others to become monks and ascetics.

Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

HT Delancey Place.

Here is the promised second post from Leonard Shlain’s book. Leonardo da Vinci, without doubt, was the very first Renaissance man. He was also, quite possibly, the greatest creative genius to have ever lived.

Leonardo … outright rejected astrology, calling it “that deceptive opinion by means of which (begging your pardon) a living is made from fools.” His stand was, for its time, exceedingly nonconformist. The age was infected with a deeply ingrained belief that the positions of the stars determined whether undertaking earthly ventures on a particular date was propitious or foolhardy. He grasped that Earth was a spherical globe and not the flat tabletop imagined by so many of his contemporaries. One of his notebooks contains the entry “The sun does not move,” strongly suggesting that he knew that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system. He had a grander vision of our place in the cosmos when he declared that “the Earth was but a speck in the universe.”

Leonardo’s interest included the age of the Earth, which he estimated was markedly older than the four thousand years that had been proposed by the followers of the Bible. ….

Leonardo … also speculated that the various species, like the Earth itself, were the product of ongoing processes. He rejected the view held for the subsequent four hundred years — that the Earth was unchanging and that an omnipotent Creator had lavished all the diverse species of plants and animals upon the Earth in just a few days.

Leonard Shlain, Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s creative genius (Lyon’s Press, 2014), pp. 120-121.

I recently read a wonderful book by Leonard Shlain on the life, art and brain of Leonardo da Vinci. I would like to post just two small excerpts on the TdJ blog. This is the first, on art. The second will be on science.

In 1473, at the age of 21, Leonardo da Vinci stood on a hill overlooking a valley near his home town of Vinci, Italy, and drew a sketch in his notebook. (See below. Click on the image for a better view.) The subject of the composition was nature, not humankind. This is remarkable because the sketch predates by half a century the work of Albrecht Altdorfer, leader of the Danube School of Bavaria and Austria, who is widely credited with painting in oils the first Western European landscape to exclude humans, animals, and supernatural beings.

Leonardo’s sketch is all the more impressive when one considers that the three monotheistic Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Isalam, had a very contentious relationship with depictions of nature. They had supplanted earlier “pagan” religions, each of which worshipped nature and venerated sensuality, fertility, and sexuality. …. Early adherents banished flowers and plants from the interior of any synagogues, churches, or mosques.

It is not a coincidence that the second commandment … proscribes the making of images — and not just graven images, but images of anything:

Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth. (Deuteronomy 4:16-18)

Authorities representing the principal Western religions considered any likeness created by the human hand depicting any aspect of nature an “abomination,” because it could possibly detract from the worship of an invisible deity. “Though shalt make no images” is the gist of the Second Commandment, and “Thou shalt not kill” is the sixth. Question: Why did the West’s three major religions all rank art more dangerous than murder? ….

Pope Saint Gregory the Great (590-604) effectively annulled the Old Testament’s Second Commandment, but insisted that the Church … play the leading role in censoring what exactly the artists chose as proper subjects for their art. In the midst of the heavy religiosity that still characterized much of the Renaissance, it too a mold-breaking sensibility for an artist to focus on the pleasing arrangement of rocks, hills, trees, and distant vistas.

Leonard Shlain, Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s creative genius (Lyon’s Press, 2014), pp. 46-47.

Author and surgeon Leonard Shlain died from brain cancer in May 2009, shortly after completing this book.