“Semper Idem”
The Vaughan Monroe crowd will recall “Semper Idem” to have been the motto of the late Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, much to the predictable merriment of certain “liberal” (as contrasted with open-minded “progressive”) circles.
I am coming to the view that “Semper Idem” deserves to be the masthead motto of The New York Review of Books, once popularly known in the Bronx as The New York Review of One Another’s Books.
If the issues pile up as (let’s be honest) they tend to do, it is hard to distinguish one issue from another, and, especially, one roster of contributors from the next. At least you can tell the different New Yorkers apart by their covers.
I thus face the inevitable November choice — not Biden or Palin, but renew or cancel? While contemplating this eschatological decision, I am assisted by the reflections of Steven Weinberg in the current issue — the one that announces in barely legible script: *Fall Books*.
Weinberg’s article is portentously titled “Without God,“and pretty much lives up to its billing. Thus he writes:
It is not my purpose here to argue that the decline of religious belief is a good thing (although I think that it is), or to try to talk anyone out of their religion, as eloquent recent books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have…Rather, I want just to offer a few opinions, on the basis of no expertise whatsoever, for those who have already lost their religious beliefs, or who may be losing them, or fear that they will lose thier beliefs, about how it is possible to live without God.
Whew! He then goes on, with the modesty to which we have grown accustomed in the pages of TNYROB, to offer reassurance.
I do not think that we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes.
Weinberg concludes with an appeal to heroic virtue:
Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation — that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking — with good humor, but without God.
Sounds more like grim humor than good humor, but as the dour old Swiss Calvinist told me when he learned I hoped to become a priest: “chacun à son gout.”
So ghost-writing aside, I need some good ghostly counsel: to renew or not to renew?
I used to subscribe to the TNYROB, but as you note, Fr. Imbelli, they do tend to pile up, and I always seemed to be behind in my reading. Finally, my inner tree hugger emerged, and I decided that I wouldn’t renew on eco-friendly grounds. Any intellectual disadvantage I suffered as a result
was hardly noticeable among the many other intellectual infirmities I suffer from. :)
So Richard Weinburg thought that Christopher Hitchens’s book on atheism was “eloquent”? Weinberg obviously failed to read Eugene McCarraher’s devastating critique of Hitchens’s book in Commonweal.
My favorite comment by Prof. Weinberg was his hope that there are beings more intelligent than us “out there” who will verify our mathematical sciences. [Mr. Spock, anyone?]. As a matter of fact there are: but they are not in outer space. Rather they are outside space. He has an instinct, or an inherited intuition, that there really is something “out there”.
Prof. Weinberg should have read Viktor Frankl’s MAN SEARCH FOR MEANING, about his life in a concentration camp. I find it a great sadness that so many Jews – and particularly those who have found comfortable jobs in the U.S. – have given up on God. “The fool says in his heart…”.
And especially when one considers that it is Judaism which has survived so much persecution, and for so long – because of their beliefs. It is the one religion that has survived for 5000+ years. It is a pity that the professor does not turn his thoughts to the significance of that. Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens are and should be beneath his intellectual notice. They would have been of no comfort at Auschwitz.
Maybe you could hire a ghostreader.
Renew, Fr. Imbelli, renew! Yes, it’s uneven and, yes, it’s cosmopolitanism is often weirdly narrow. (Will we soon see an essay titled “With God” in NYRB? Don’t hold your breath.) But there’s still nothing else like it: Updike on art, Eamon Duffy on Church history, Tondy Judt on political philosophy, Ian Buruma on just about anything. Of course, not every article is that good; but then, if it were, you’d feel even worse about falling behind. If you read only three or four articles from each issue, I’d say you’re getting your money’s worth.
I say renew! There is at least one interesting review in each issue, often two or three. I also recommend the London Review of Books. (And I have been accused of being a Republican!)
As for Mr. Weinberg he seems to have a talent for self-mockery, unconscious, I suspect, but amusing, and amusingly delivered as spiritual advice.
Finally, anyone who believes that Judaism is 5000+ years old must be living in the world of Bishop Ussher. Really, Mr. Austin.
Don’t renew. But don’t tell people you didn’t renew. They’d never forgive you.
Ah, Adeodatus, a subtlety worthy of your progenitor.
And Mr. Boudway: Updike is ubiquitous, Buruma lacks a self-critical bone, Tondy is too hard on Condi, and is twice-a-year Duffy worth all the moolah? (Oh for a Cole Porter to set the lyrics!).
Thanks for the counsel. I may wind up flipping a coin — like in “The Dark Knight.”
Such subtlety is no surprise from a son of Aurelius Augustinus.
Mr. Gannon,
“Finally, anyone who believes that Judaism is 5000+ years old must be living in the world of Bishop Ussher. Really, Mr. Austin”.
Who am I to argue with the Chosen People whose calendar this year is 5769? I am not learned enough to know whether that dates from a year before the Creation or from Abraham or whatever.
Mr. Austin
Yes, 2008 is 5768/9 in the Jewish calendar, but that calendar starts with creation, not with the beginning of Judaism, which most people would associate Abraham. If you want to use the long survival of Judaism in a polemical context, you need to pick a defensible starting point.