Scott Adams’ Reframe Your Brain is, by all accounts, a useful book. In the spirit of “the purpose of science is to confirm the commonplace,” let’s shallowly dip our toes… Read more Reframing Reframe Your Brain: Memory Reconsolidation →
The “perpetually incomplete and insecure,” find in fundamentalist doctrine protection from a complex and ambiguous world. They will sacrifice reality for this security, and will just as readily sacrifice the… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism, Part XIII: The Scapegoat →
Why is trauma, as we know it, a distinctively modern disease? Why do we observe PTSD in domesticated, but not wild, animals? Trauma is physiological—it’s not just in your head. While it need not involve violence, death, or rape—in fact, it is reliably amplified by boring things like office buildings and public schools—its mechanism includes more than mean people and scary opinions. Let’s start with an example from 9/11: “Sharon,” at work in the World Trade Center, felt a shock and an explosion, and tried to run, but found the… Read more Industrial Trauma Robots: Two Commonplaces →
The “fat sex therapist” is a familiar lunatic. Her neatly dualistic scheme recalls Chesterton’s description of a madman: “He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism: Part XII →
Status and function or abstraction and love—distinctions made by the Iliad and Genesis, respectively—may be getting at the same thing. This is a case I intend to make in examination… Read more Footnote: Degree is Shaked →
Genesis associates abstraction and adultery, suggesting that abstraction is the opposite of love. This is, curiously, one of the themes that emerges from the CPTSD or complex trauma literature. Proper… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism: Part XI →
Bill Hurrell’s recent Human Events article continues his efforts towards a taxonomy of leftist thought. “REVEALED: The 2010 Essay That Explains What the Woke Want” digs up an Orbis essay… Read more Religion, Fundamentalism, Gnosticism: Part X →
When we might write a sociology book, the ancients would tell a story. Our preference for the literal, explicit, and linear should not be allowed to persuade us that our science is more sophisticated than narrative—as we have seen, the Iliad and the “Judgment of Paris” long anticipated sociology’s distinction between “ascribed” and “acquired” honor—nor to authorize our reading ancient narratives in the same manner as a textbook. On this note, let’s return to Genesis. With a merely literal reading, we purchase six-day young-earth creationism at the cost of reducing… Read more Degree is Shaked II →