Jonathan Miller - A Brief History of Disbelief

The Final Hour


The history of disbelief continues with the ideas of self-taught philosopher Thomas Paine, the revolutionary studies of geology and the evolutionary theories of Darwin. Jonathan Miller looks at the Freudian view that religion is a 'thought disorder'. He also examines his motivation behind making the series touching on the issues of death and the religious fanaticism of the 21st century.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=502247489673453933

Jonathan Miller - A Brief History of Disbelief

Noughts and Crosses


With the domination of Christianity from 500 AD, Jonathan Miller wonders how disbelief began to re-emerge in the 15th and 16th centuries. He discovers that division within the Church played a more powerful role than the scientific discoveries of the period. He also visits Paris, the home of the 18th century atheist, Baron D'Holbach, and shows how politically dangerous it was to undermine the religious faith of the masses.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3162184064060187674

Curtis White on Against the Grain

In "The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves," Curtis White contends that the American imagination has become dangerously impoverished. Capitalism, according to White, has become expert at managing our creativity.

Against the Grain -  February 10, 2009 - 12:00pm

Curtis White on Paula Gordon Show

Bold imagination should drive America, not paralyzing fear, says cultural observer Curtis White. He is highly critical of what he calls America’s "middle mind." What's that? It's the market-driven media and institutions now defining what's serious in America -- movies that do not confess their politics; revolutionary images trivialized on umbrellas; art museums and concert halls where the radical is entombed instead of experienced; universities substituting problem solving for critical thinking; and pseudo-serious broadcast programs which consistently fail to distinguish the distinguished from the hack.

Americans have yielded to the driving force of managed entertainment, Dr. White says, accept the packaged instead of demanding the authentic. The "middle mind" -- on the airwaves and the newsstand, in universities, concert halls, museums -- is a fraud, Curtis White says. In fact, he believes, the society's ubiquitous "middle mind" is why Americans no longer think for themselves.

How did this "middle mind" get its grip? Dr. White believes it filled a vacuum created while the Left and Right were consumed by their "culture wars," fighting over what got into and was left out of the academic canon. The middle was empty, he says, so the "middle mind" flooded in to fill the gap. It did it with entertainment that turned the arts and the imagination into products, displaced individual critical thinking and discrimination with commodities. We were busy. And yielded to the temptation to be passive, he says.

Curtis White targets all of today's institutions -- educational, social and cultural -- for being painfully successful in taming our social, technological and artistic imaginations, defending the status quo at the expense of change. That's a problem, says Dr. White: When we stop changing, we're dead, he says, speaking both for individuals and for cultures. He wants us to start over. Refuse to yield to anyone, Left, Right or Middle. It's time to think hard about exactly what it is that American culture needs in order to do it's most serious thinking, he says. Reclaim our imaginations. Reclaim the sense that the future is open to possibility and that we are all welcome participants in that future. We’ve done it before, he says. It was called "The Sixties."

To be alive, Dr. White maintains, we must engage with every aspect of the culture, "read" all media critically. He's convinced that today's "middle mind" leaves us empty, distracted by distractions, spectators to a static, frightened, unhealthy culture whose differences are papered over. America is not one culture, Curtis White insists, it is many cultures and the differences are America's strengths.

How much better, Dr. White urges, to be active participants in creation. Slough off the role of spectator. Re-engage. "Read" what is really being said. Be discriminating. Don’t take someone's word for what is "beautiful," or "good" or "worthy." Sort things out so you know where you are in the culture. Curtis White's prescription for the antidote to the "middle mind"? Make something beautiful; misbehave; and try to win. Then see what happens.

Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves

The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work

The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature

Curtis White is a professor of English at Illinois State University. A novelist and essayist, he has written several widely acclaimed books, including The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves. His essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Orion, Playboy, and The Village Voice.

Lewis Hyde: "Remembering and Forgetting"

What would it mean to “Remember who you are”? Why might we want to “Forget the Alamo”? Listen to Lewis Hyde’s talk on the mythology of memory and forgetting, delivered as the Osher Fellowship Lecture at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, June 17, 1998.

In the talk, Hyde refers to this photograph, which shows the demolition of San Diego’s original Victorian train depot and, in the background, the Mission Style depot that replaced it.

The lecture is posted here.

Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures

This panel demonstrates provocatively how literary criticism and cultural history have come to accommodate and embrace contemporary media. Says David Thorburn, the session’s moderator, “The founding texts of Western civilization belong to a textual category or engage in textual behavior that make it resemble something much closer to an ongoing, unfinished TV series...” Indeed, says Thorburn, “In his own day, Shakespeare was the equivalent of what TV is in our society, or what the movies had been in the studio era.” A new idea of the text is emerging, one that undergoes constant revision, in diverse media, and which never achieves a finished state. Consequently, notions of authorship, and ownership, are under siege.

Thomas Pettitt offers the Gutenberg parenthesis, brackets around historical periods of artistic achievement. Before the parenthesis lie such glories as Elizabethan theatre and traveling players, where “the distinction between author and performer is problematic.” The text is neither fixed, nor authoritative, says Pettitt. Within the center of his parenthesis sit “original compositions, to passive reproductions.” As the digital age proceeds, Pettit observes culture “paradoxically advancing into the past,” our own a mirror age of Elizabethan times, with rock, rap, reggae and other vernacular traditions that emphasize performance coming to the fore.

In Lewis Hyde’s telling, Benjamin Franklin operated as “the first intellectual property pirate in this country,” perhaps a hero to the open access movement. Franklin was instrumental in spiriting out of England printing technology that was in the 18th century subject to laws forbidding the export of skilled labor and machinery. “Franklin is essentially supporting free movement of labor and ideas,” says Hyde, opposing tyrannical law and “underwriting the liberty of ideas and citizens.” Behind his actions lay the belief that the “true and good were best discovered collectively,” and that sacrifice of individual interest was essential in a republic concerned with the progress of knowledge and “public virtue in politics.”

A dialogue with the past and communal ownership of art (the latter vilified by corporate interests), serve as the foundations of African American cultural practice, says Craig Watkins. He traces the origins of rap music to slave songs and narratives, and black preachers and protest politics. This “oral culture created a space in which people could engage in dialog with each other that allowed them to survive horrific conditions.” The idea of sampling in music is consistent with African-America oral tradition and participatory culture, says Watkins. It’s central to art creation, building new kinds of musical experiences and “paying homage to the past -- an act of respect, inserting the past into present.”

Allison Fine on Web Activism

On April 1, Allison Fine was the guest speaker at Berkman's weekly luncheon series. She talked about Social Citizens, young people ages 15-29 who practice a nascent model of civic participation that combines immersion in social causes, idealism, digital fluency.