All – Page 14 – Two Strikes

That Old Time Religion would be Jewish, so I don’t understand why the Southern backwoods churches sing about it. A McClatchy news item today http://www.kentucky.com/faith/story/1079670.html reports a study showing religious belief and prayer is most strong in the South and to a lesser degree in the Western hands-off-my-guns states. Mississippi is the very epicenter of churchiness. It also sports the lowest median family income of all the States. One can’t help but think that there is a relationship of fundamentalist belief and the prevalence of violence, racial animosity, parochialism, poverty, tobacco spitting, and garden variety ignorance. As old Scrooge was told, the worst of these is ignorance. A Wiki posting on Religiosity and Intelligence cites numerous studies that show that intelligence and education are negatively related to religiosity. It may be that brighter and more educated persons are also more agnostic. Not only in American states, but in whole nations, as education is high, religion is low. The Wiki article mentions a controversial study by Helmuth Nyborg and Richard Lynn that showed that well educated nations are less religious. ‘Among the sample of 137 countries, only 23 (17%) had more than 20% of atheists, which constituted “virtually all the higher IQ countries.” The authors reported a correlation of 0.60 between atheism rates and level of intelligence, which is “highly statistically significant.” ‘

The McClatchy article carried in the Lexington Herald-Leader displayed a map which was striking in showing how prayer and church-going is most strong throughout Dixie-land. It is only natural to conclude that this seems to be trait that goes along the worst of Southern sentiments. The map has a prominent outlier: Utah, where Mormons reign supreme. Utah in general has a population that is relatively high in education and income. There is some evidence that Mormons who are more highly educated are more religious. This seems to indicate that perhaps one type of religious belief or the nature of literal belief systems is related to intelligence and education. The history of formal education, of universities and universal education is also the story of religious leadership at least in Catholicism, both in its aggressive Jesuit tradition, and in Catholicism-lite, the Anglicans. Possibly in Islam too, some of the great advances in education and science were made by highly religious persons and institutions, although in Muslim countries it seems like everything is religious except in Ataturk’s Turkey. Probably Jews have a corner on the greatest advances in literacy and science but Jews, at least today, are not often highly religious at least in the US and Europe.

Nonetheless, the map of the praying South is striking and scary. It may just be those stomping, snaky, shaking Bible-thumpers, but it is true that God and Guns and Goober go together.

Chris Hedges’ book Empire of Illusion was lent to me by T.B. and I finished it on this last day of anno domini 2009. Hedges is not a happy man. In this book, subtitled “The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” Hedges records the demise of the American Empire and its crushing devolution into the celebrity culture, the hyping of know-nothingism, the rapacity of the corporate economy, and the sleaze of pornography. T.B. cautioned me against reading Hedges’ chapter on pornography, and the first few pages of it convinced me to take his advice. Hedges is in serious need of an increase in his Prozac dosage, but his record of the swift decline of our culture, while decidedly over-the-top, was entirely appropriate to my final reading for the end of a decade where humanity endured, but did not prevail.

On a more positive note, I had been given, by E. as a Christmas present, the collection of essays What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite writers. Last week David Brooks awarded Gladwell a Sidney, the annual David Brooks award for magazine essays. Gladwell is always fascinating and perhaps criticized as not a deep thinker, he is an out of the box thinker and never fails to provoke thought and amazement. Brooks wrote that some critics assault Gladwell as “being too interesting and not theoretical enough. This is absurd. Gladwell’s pieces in The New Yorker are always worth reading.” I read several of the pieces and indeed they are worth reading. How any writer can learn and convey so much from an essay on ketchup of all things is nothing short of astounding.

Brooks himself is always worth reading and he also reminded me of some websites I had visited before and have neglected and some he helped me discover. “Fortunately there are a few Web sites that provide daily links to the best that is thought and said. Arts and Letters Daily is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. The Browser is a trans-Atlantic site with a superb eye for the interesting and the profound. Book Forum has a more academic feel, but it is also worth a daily read.”

The Arts and Letters Daily led me to a Kevin Carey article about college Pell grants http://www.democracyjournal.org/that_old_college_lie.html , which are so often wasted those colleges and their students, perhaps better called customers, who teach and seek higher education as some form of job training, and endeavor that generally ends in failure. Carey does regard the best of universities as truly worthwhile, however the costs are shameful. Graduate tuition and living expense at Princeton is more than $55,000 for a year. Carey says, “At the trend-setting high end of the market, higher education has become a luxury good, the educational equivalent of a Prada shoe. These are unusually nice shoes, of course, just as Harvard is an unusually good university. But in both cases consumers aren’t paying for quality alone–they’re also paying extra for scarcity and a prominent brand name, the primary value of which is to signal to the rest of the world that they’re rich and connected enough to pay the price.” Harvard is like Prada. I like that, it was worth reading.

Category: All

The Old Time Religion

Last Day