Marking the day: Montaigne

If I could have only one book, I’d choose Montaigne’s Essays.

He was a lawyer, and the word “essais” to him meant “attempts” or “trials.” He retired early, went to his library and tried to sort out what he thought about things.

I like to think that when he sat down to write an essay, “essay” just meant that he was taking a stab at the topic. It helps me to follow his example.

He wrote about every topic imaginable, but the most puzzling subject was himself. Here’s a sample:

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.

The more simply we entrust ourself to Nature the more wisely we do so … I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero.

Were I a good pupil there is enough, I find, in my own experience to make me wise. … Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own… Is a man not stupid if he remembers having been so often wrong in his judgment yet does not become deeply distrustful of it thereafter?

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on this day in 1533. Feb. 28 is a red-letter date in my calendar of heroes.

If you want to know more, I have an essay on Montaigne at hebertaylor.com.

• Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 1217-8.

Marking the day: Steinbeck

I promise I’m not marking all the days that are in my pocket calendar. I didn’t say a word about W.H. Auden on Feb. 21, although I’d rather celebrate Auden than Presidents’ Day.

But I’m thinking of John Steinbeck, born Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, Calif., for two reasons:

• Travels with Charley is one of my favorite books. Steinbeck, worried that he was going downhill as he approached 60, took a trip across the country in 1960, driving a GMC truck with a camper on top. It was an experiment, to see if was still in touch with the country, or rather, if he could still get in touch with it. Charley, if you don’t know the book, was his dog.

• Sweet Thursday is a good read. I prefer short stories to novels. But this one held my attention. When I was growing up, Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck were the stars of contemporary American literature. Most of the folks I talked writing with considered Steinbeck a distant third. Maybe, but I can’t imagine Faulkner or Hemingway pulling off a love story like Sweet Thursday. Can you?

A few words on war

 In 1897, Stephen Crane rushed off to cover the war between the Turks and Greeks. The Ottoman Empire was bigger and stronger. The Turks had better equipment. The Greeks fought bravely with outdated weapons, but their commander, Crown Prince Constantine, was not competent. The result, quick and brutal, was the Thirty Days’ War.

Crane, already famous for The Red Badge of Courage, a fictional account of war, described battles, dead soldiers, fleeing civilians, hungry children.

The mind returns to the wonder of why so many people will put themselves to the most incredible labor and inconvenience and danger for the sake of this — this ending of a few lives like yours, or a little better or a little worse.

• Source: Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021, p. 494. 

Writing in two steps

 I’ve been reading two books on writers I admire. Virginia Woolf and Stephen Crane were different — probably incompatible — personalities, but as writers they were after the same thing, I think.

Yesterday’s note on Woolf was about her habit of keeping a notebook for sketches in words. She practiced sketching, just as a visual artist keeps a sketchbook to practice capturing visual details.

David Bradshaw, the Oxford fellow who wrote the introduction to the collection, says the sketches are “new evidence of Woolf’s enduring professional urge to train her ‘eye & hand’, to pick up her pen and record anything which might one day be of use in her fiction.”

He quotes a journal entry from 1908 in which Woolf said she wanted “to write not only with the eye, but with the mind; and discover real things beneath the show.”

Compare that with what Paul Auster calls the “Crane project.” Here’s Auster’s description: “ … at the heart of his writing the keenest attention is given to the vagaries of the perceived world, the eye looking out and trying to make sense of what it sees and the mind looking inward at the jumble of contradictory impulses and emotions that continually bombard consciousness …”

To me, it’s the same two-step project. First, you report an event, paying attention to the details. Second, you look inside yourself for meaning, context, concepts — tools that can help the observer and her readers make sense of what’s been witnessed.

It has always amazed me that some people think you can skip step 1.

To my eye, Woolf’s best sketch was “Divorce Courts.” Although she was not employed as a reporter, she went to court to hear the case of an Anglican minister whose wife alleged cruelty.

Auster’s comments were about a story that Crane wrote for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper The New York World called “The Devil’s Acre.” Crane went to Sing Sing to see the electric chair and the graveyard for prisoners.

• Sources: Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches; London: Hesperus Press, 2003. Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021.

Writing, as practiced by Virginia Woolf

 When Virginia Woolf was 27, she kept a notebook for sketches.

It’s the kind of book everyone who wants to write should keep. If some dean of a liberal arts college lost her mind and assigned me to teach a course in freshman composition, that’s the way I’d do it.

I’d tell the students: If you want to write, go get on the bus. Go do things, see things, observe things. Then come back and write about them.

It’s what reporters do, and for decades I was a newspaper editor, that is, a teacher of reporters.

I think everyone who is interested in writing should take a stab at reporting — at observing and then sketching what you saw and heard.

Woolf observed that artists keep sketchbooks. They practice capturing visual details. She was looking for something analogous in these written sketches.

The title piece in the collection I have is “Carlyle’s House.” Woolf got on the bus and went to see the house of that great, cantankerous thinker Thomas Carlyle.

She noticed the portraits of Carlyle’s wife, Jane, and wondered whether Mrs. Carlyle would have tolerated the visitors. Woolf caught what was absent from the house, which had become a museum: the bright little “contrivances.” That was Thomas Carlyle’s word for his wife’s efforts to spruce up the place.

Woolf imagined Mrs. Carlyle telling about her day to Mr. Carlyle, who listened, smoking his pipe.

“Did one always feel a coldness between them? The only connection the flash of intellect. I imagine so.”

• Source: Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches; London: Hesperus Press, 2003. The seven sketches are short, 18 pages total. Hesperus had a series called 100 Pages, each of which about 100 pages long — a good size for a book, in my view. This is one of them. The book has a forward by Doris Lessing and an introduction, notes and commentary by David Bradshaw of Oxford.

A bit of garish green in winter

 One of the sights of late winter is the Retama tree with its green branches and even greener stems. The green is garish.

It’s also called paloverde (green wood) and Jerusalem thorn.

It’s called a tree, and some are 30 feet tall. I don’t think I’ve seen one taller than 10.

It’s a tropical. We’re on the northern edge of its range.

They are just beginning to leaf. Each leaf has twin stems that are about 18 inches long and put on rows of leaflets. The leaflets look like tiny pine needles. One plant I examined had a few leaflets, and another had none.

The leaflets tend to shed in the summer, and those green stems take on the role of leaflets.

The retama usually flower by early May. They have beautiful yellow flowers, five petals each, which give the plant a common Spanish name, lluvia de oro, gold rain.

A few years ago, when we first moved in, I was surprised to see brown-maroon spots on a lot of the flowers. The spots were so distinct I thought they were mirids — common bugs — and took a closer look.

It turns out one of those five petals has a honey gland in its base, which changes color and can become bright red.

But I have to admit it: I was looking through books on insects before I figured it out. 

• Source: Mark Gustafson, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Texas Hill Country; College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015.

They watched the old mesquite

 It’s February, and temperatures are in the mid-80s.

It’s almost too hot to plow. You can see how the early settlers who were trying to make a living farming might have gotten confused.

I’d be tempted to plant. If it’s not safe to plant when the highs are in the 80s and overnight lows are in the 60s, what kind of place is this?

It's the kind of place that might see a freeze next week.

The old timers advised against planting too soon. Watch the old mesquite, they’d say. Not the young trees, which are young and foolish. The old mesquite. When those ancient trees start to put out leaves, it’s safe to plant.

What are you doing when you forgive?

 Yesterday’s note on moral mitigation raises the question of how one goes on after a moral failure. That gets us to the concept of forgiveness. What happens when you forgive someone?

We seem more confident when we state what forgiveness is not.

It’s not just pretending that nothing happened.

It’s not forgetting a wrong.

And forgiveness doesn’t depend on anything that the offender does or fails to do. The concept of forgiveness makes sense even if the offender is unrepentant or dead.

So what is forgiveness?

In a paper published in 1987, Joanna North took the concept apart, as philosophers do, and found these parts:

• The offense is taken seriously, not lightly dismissed. (Forgiveness doesn’t work unless the wrong is serious. We don’t really forgive the dog for chewing up a shoe. We might overlook the dog’s flaws, but we don’t forgive them.)

• We acknowledge that the victim of the wrongdoing has a right to anger and resentment.

• The victim gives up that right and instead tries “to offer the wrongdoer compassion, benevolence, and love.”

Forgiveness is a choice, after being wronged, about how to proceed.

I like the analysis.

Incidentally, North’s article has been cited hundreds of times. One of the interesting discussions is the relationship between forgiveness and pardon. It seems that most people take them to be logically distinct. A victim of a crime can forgive the wrongdoer, but the wrongdoer must still face the consequences of his behavior.

The ideas are distinct. In some cases, victims of crimes ask that the offenders be pardoned or paroled, and the state denies the requests.

But here the analysis has gotten murky to me. What is the state doing in such cases? Asserting its own right to anger and resentment?

• Source: Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy 62 (242): 499-508.

Orwell’s theory of moral mitigation

George Orwell, in “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” told of the 16^th century clergyman who exhorted his flock to be Catholic or Protestant depending on the political winds. The vicar was a notorious failure at giving people moral guidance, but he did plant a yew in his churchyard in Berkshire. The tree was magnificent when Orwell saw it.

Here’s the principle Orwell derived from the tale: “It might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.”

When I lived on the coast, the papers were filled with stories about “wetlands mitigation.” The theory was that if developers destroyed an acre of wetlands, they’d have to “create” an acre of wetlands somewhere else.

It seemed to me that the manmade creations were never equal the original. But they were better than nothing.

Orwell has a utilitarian idea, which assumes that it makes sense to talk of greater and lesser goods, as if moral goods  and evils — like French fries, soft drinks and coffees — came in various sizes. I don’t think the idea makes perfect sense, but I like it.

A note on the source: I love Orwell's essays, but this line of thought was prompted by Frances Wilson's "Invitations to Dig Deeper," an essay on Rebecca Solnit's book Orwell's Roses, in the Feb. 24 edition of The New York Review of Books.

The wondrous ways of cattails

 I’ve spent the past couple of days inspecting the cattails on Zarzamora Creek.

Typha latifolia is a marker for wetlands. That is, it’s one of the species that biologist use to define a wetland.

Their habitat is in or near water. They’ve been found growing in water more than 6 feet deep. Water can be acidic to slightly basic, a pH range of 5.5 to 7.5.

Cattails can reproduce sexually, by seeds, or vegetatively. Their rhizomes can travel 60 meters in two years.

They are monocots. Their alternate leaves are upright. The stem grows to a height of 5 to 10 feet.

Ecologically, the rhizomes are food for geese, muskrats and humans. The rhizomes are high in starch. Studies of grinding stones from campsites in use 36,000 years ago suggest humans were eating cattail rhizomes then. They were used by Native Americans when Europeans arrived.

The modern gatherers say the shoots taste like cucumbers or cabbage when steamed.

Cattails have specialized seeds. The pericarp opens only with water. If a seed lands in a dry place, nothing happens. It lies there. The unpredictable forces of nature might move it to a hospitable environment.

Birds eat them and spread them in birdly ways.

I’ve combed cattail seeds out of the coat of the enormous dog.

I think that might be a good project for a science fair: Take the dog for a walk every day for a month and collect the seeds you comb out of his coat. If you know a student who’s willing to take this on, I’d love to hear the results.

A biological mechanism not in the textbooks

 Here’s one method for dispersing cattail seeds you don’t find in the textbooks: The head of a cattail was broken off by the 20 mph north wind and was skidding across the lawn near the university.

The enormous dog that lives at my house picked up the reed. A gust of wind hit the cattail spike, and seeds with their parachutes flew everywhere. The dog, astonished, looked at the equally astonished human at the other end of the leash. The dog gave the stalk a shake. Seeds flew everywhere.

The wind chill at the time was a degree above freezing.

This is what passes for winter in South Texas. We are spreading seeds like mad.

Seeds are dispersed by wind and water. They stick, as burrs, in the coats of coyotes and on the feet of ducks. So much we are told. But that account is incomplete. It overlooks the tiny but indisputable presence of another factor in the dispersal of seeds: the psychological proclivity for play among dogs — and boys.

A couple of days ago, I saw a little boy tugging at a cattail spike. I could see the clouds of seeds flying on the wind. From a distance, I thought I was seeing one of those machines that make soap bubbles.

If we understood the world, we would understand how seeds are dispersed. And that theory would include forces such as wind and water. But it also would include a note on what it is in dogs and boys that makes them want to play with a cattail spike.

It's winter, and the seeds are flying

 The cold north winds we had recently have shredded the cattails that line the banks of Zarzamora Creek. The seed heads — called spikes —are in all states of disintegration. Some are relatively intact. Some are almost gone. But invariably, spikes come apart from the top down.

The spikes have both male and female flowers, the male above the female. When the north winds come, the males unravel first.

Each spike can contain 117,000 to 268,000 seeds. If cattail seeds were people, you might fit the population of San Antonio into five or six spikes.

February in Texas

A week ago, we had four nights that dropped into the 20s. Yesterday it was 84.

J. Frank Dobie used to tell about a Texas cowboy who saw a front coming and tried to race home to the barn. He ran his horse so hard it lathered him, as they used to say. But he only beat the Norther by a head.

Inside the barn, the cowboy tended to his horse. He wiped sweat off the front quarters, and treated the hindquarters for frostbite.

A man who lit a candle in protest

A while back (Feb. 4), I was thinking about what psychologists call CREDs, credibility enhancing displays.

We all know that children pay attention to what their parents do, rather than what they say. But children sometimes pay profound attention when an adult takes a moral stand that costs something. We remember stories of people whose principles cost them a job, a beating, even a life.

Maybe I’m a child at heart. I’m still fascinated by people who stand on principle.

A.J. Muste — most people pronounce his name “musty” — was such a person. He was a boy when his family left the Netherlands, seeking opportunity. Muste was working in a furniture plant in Michigan when he was 11. He became a minister, but his views about what was required of a person cost him his career.

Muste became convinced that a Christian is by definition a pacifist. Jesus of Nazareth was clear about violence.

Muste gave up a comfortable pulpit when the United States entered World War I.

Muste’s life took a turn. He was increasingly interested in social justice. He’s probably better known today as a labor organizer than as a minister.

In later years, he protested the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War. He would light a candle and stand, often alone, outside the White House.

One evening, a reporter asked him if he really believed he would change anything by doing that.

Muste replied: “Oh I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

I think that children have a sense of self, which is at the root of a sense of integrity. That sense of self can be lost when we give up our own principles and go along with the crowd. 

I think children pay attention in these cases because they have a sense of the real danger. Sadly, some adults lose that sense along the way.

A love story on Valentine's Day

 I think it’s obvious that “A Half-Pint of Old Darling” is by far the greatest love story that ever appeared in a journal devoted to draft horses.

Wendell Berry, one of the great living American writers, farms in Kentucky using traditional methods, including mules and draft horses. Some of his stories appeared in The Draft Horse Journal, this one in 1993.

The story is about Miss Minnie and Tol. They’d been married a dozen years in 1920, when women got the right to vote and Prohibition began. The story is about how people who love each other and know each other can still discover new things. 

It took Tol a while to figure out Minnie could whistle. He was delighted when she reeled off some folk tunes, although he thought of the proverb:

These will come to no good end:

A whistling woman and a crowing hen.

In the fall, the two go shopping. It’ a good trip to town by horse and buggy. They buy presents for each other. Without thinking about it, Tol stops at the pharmacy for a half-pint of whiskey, which he uses during lambing season to encourage weak little hearts to beat.

Tol is the kind of thinker who can get lost in his thoughts, and on the way home he’s off somewhere when Minnie discovers the half-pint under the wagon seat.

She is so disappointed in her husband.

Crushed, she decides to save him from himself. In a dramatic gesture, she takes one snort after another. Tol rejoins the world when Minnie starts hollering campaign slogans to people in oncoming buggies.

I like the story because I think a long, happy marriage can include moments of surprise and anger, maybe even blind fury. 

• Source: Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Civil War to World War II) ; Library of America, 2018. Library of America offers a free Story of the Week, a service I love. You can find this story in the archives. You can sign up here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org.

Can reading really do harm?

 A footnote on yesterday’s note on allowing an idea to incubate:

Graham Wallas thought that the greatest danger might be the habit of passively reading. Instead of letting the mind rest, we engage it on someone else’s work.

Wallas quotes Schopenhauer’s statement that “to put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

Einstein had a similar notion: “Reading after a certain age diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.” 

I can’t believe any of this.

Reading can be mindless recreation. Wittgenstein famously turned to detective stories when he tired of logic. But Wallas’s whole point about an original idea requiring a period of incubation is that we can’t reason nonstop. At some point, we need to stop straining to reason and rest. When we do, the brain can and does continue to work in ways we’re not aware of.

Letting it work that way is not a waste of time.

The overlooked step in the creative process

 Graham Wallas, the social psychologist, was interested in the creative process. He contended there were four stages in the formation of a new thought: (1) preparation, (2) incubation, (3) illumination and (4) verification. We tend to overlook the second step.

We spend a great deal of time preparing ourselves with an education. We study a subject. But we keep trying to reason our way toward an answer to our question, rather than letting the unconscious processes  work.

Wallas, who studied the creative processes of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and the mathematician Henri Poincairé, suggested a good walk.

Wallas said it would be interesting to read a series of biographies of creative people to see how they worked. He suspected we’d see more clearly the importance of letting an idea incubate.

Poincairé, for example, had a breakthrough in mathematics after a period of reserve duty in the military. A.R. Wallace came up with a theory of evolution while confined by malaria to his cabin at sea. Darwin suffered from ill health and was urged, even as a child, to rest often.

I mention this because almost all the writers I know are dismayed when an idea is incubating. They feel as if they are not doing anything. They are not being productive.

I’ve been curiously immune from that anxiety all my life. Perhaps there’s an advantage to a natural turn toward laziness.

The obstacles make you sing

 Interruptions, annoyances and heartbreaks give us a voice. That which we struggle against defines us. In our struggles, we make “a blundering noise made out of stumbles.”

That phrase comes from “A noise of stumbles,” a short poem by Norman MacCaig.

This poem relies on a wonderful metaphor:

Stones in the throat make the hill burn sing.

It’s in the stones in the creek bed that make the brook babble.

If you hear the call, you have to answer

 The poet Mary Oliver kept her wants simple and made it a point to hold undemanding jobs to pay the bills. She focused her best efforts on her poetry, not on earning a living.

She wrote: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Yesterday’s note was about the creative process, about how the difficulties of life almost demand some kind of expression in creative work. Oliver’s warning about those who hear the call but don’t answer it rings true to me. 

• Source: Mary Oliver is known as a poet, but she should also be known for her essays. The quotation comes from “Of Power and Time,” which was collected in Upstream: Selected Essays.

For a note on Mary Oliver’s famous list of things she could do without, see Jan. 6.

A story about grief

 Maybe some people wake up in the morning and have a desire to create something.

It’s not so for me. If I write something, it usually comes from a drive to work out a difficulty in my life.

One of my friends recently lost his wife. I naturally want to console him — and I know that’s impossible.

It’s a miserable, impossible feeling. We love our friends, and it’s a human impulse to want to comfort them. But it’s also part of being human that we must face certain things alone.

Here is how Luigi Pirandello, a Sicilian writer who won a Nobel Prize, turned that difficulty into art:

 “The Soft Touch of Grass” tells of Signor Pardi, who has lost his wife. The old man is waiting for the procession that would take his wife’s body to the church.

He hates every intrusion — those of the callous undertakers and those of well meaning family and friends.

What did they know about her? They could not even imagine what it meant to him to be deprived of her.

Just so. Pirandello got it as it is.

Or maybe look at a story by Faulkner

 Joe Murray, the old editor in East Texas, used to point to a line in Faulkner’s story “The Bear.”

At one point, the boy who is the hero of the story gets close to the bear. Faulkner could have just said that the bear was very, very close.

Instead, he has the boy kneeling to examine a track. The boy can tell the track is fresh. But then he notices that the track is gradually filling with water. He watches the water seeping in. The bear was there just seconds ago — he hasn’t been gone long enough for the track to fill with water.

That’s the kind of detail that lets a reader feel the boy’s wonder and fear.

If you want style, look at Borges

 If I were going to give an example of style, it would be Borges’s story “The Dead Man.”

It’s the story of how Benjamín Otálora died. Otálora was an Argentinian who had to leave the country quickly. He worked for Azevedo Bandeira, a wealthy cattleman in Uruguay.

Otálora starts as a cowhand on one of his boss’s ranches. He gradually realizes his boss’s affairs are numerous and the most lucrative is smuggling. Otálora moves up the chain of command in the organization. He always wants more. He wants to command the organization. He wants Bandeira’s red-headed woman. He wants the friendship of Bandeira’s bodyguard and enforcer.

Otálora takes all these things. He realizes, just before he is executed, that Bandeira allowed him free rein, to see what he would do. He realizes that all of them — the enforcer who would kill him, the red-headed woman who loved him — had betrayed him, had said nothing to warn him as his ambition carried him to his doom.

Borges foreshadows the fall this way: Otálora finds the workers preparing for a visit from the boss. “He asks why, and is told there is an outsider among them, an outsider-turned-gaucho who is trying to take over. Otálora realizes that they are joking, but he is flattered that such a joke has become possible.”

That to me is style. It’s not the rhetoric. It’s the details that Borges chose to make this story.

The details give you, the reader, a perspective, a view as the story unfolds. Borges treats his readers as honored guests. They are given excellent seats. That courtesy to the reader is Borges's style.

What should we make of style?

 I’m thinking about writing because a young fellow I know is working on his first big story. It’s a story about a couple of kids who have to grow up in rough circumstances. I got interested in the characters as the writer was talking.

He’s at the point where he’s thinking of style. Does the story work better in first person or third? How do you know?

I had a professor in college who loved Erasmus and made us read him. Erasmus published a textbook called Copia: Foundations of an Abundant Style. One of the chapters is a demonstration: He wrote the same simple sentence 195 ways, each variation subtly different.

Raymond Queneau wrote the same short story 99 times in Exercises in Style. Each telling is different.

I’ll admit that I’ve written a story in first person and then rewritten it in third to see what it would look like. And I like to tinker, which is all trial and error.

But this focus on style is foreign to me. I invariably get interested in a story and forget about style or I fail to get interested in the story and abandon it.

I want to know the story, and so I appreciate a writer whose sense of style relies on clarity and brevity.

A short lesson on writing

 The shortest writing lesson might come from Chekhov.

He once said: “I can speak briefly on long subjects.” Just follow that example.

Then again, I once asked my father what made for good writing.

He replied: “Short words. Short sentences.”

A project to remember people who were enslaved

 My friend Phil Latham has started Identifying Slaves, a project to collect and publish information on people who were enslaved.

It’s a subscription service, $5 a month. Each piece includes several short stories, drawn from public records. Each is about a person, each with a name — often only one. Each has a little information about a life. 

It’s heartbreaking. We know so little about the human beings who were treated so unjustly — and of course that lack of information was a choice. People who were enslaved were given little attention, little consideration, for a reason. People doing the enslaving didn’t want to think about what they were doing.

We know little. But it seems doubly wrong to forget what little we do know. That, too, would be a choice.

When he started doing research, Phil said the information was overwhelming. Hard to read, he said, and yet hard to stop reading. I’ve had the same reaction.

If you’d like to see a sample, you’ll find it here:

https://substack.com/profile/13854354-phil-latham

Can you have an identity when everyone claims it?

 Yesterday’s note was about a study led by Daryl R. Van Tongeren, a social psychologist at Hope College. The paper is “Religious Residue: Cross-Cultural Evidence That Religious Psychology and Behavior Persist Following Deidentification.”

In brief: The “nones” — people who do not identify as religious — are not all alike. People who were once religious but no longer are — the “dones” — are cognitively different from people who have never identified as religious.

I’m fascinated by the paper. One thing I want to think through is how religious identities are acquired. The authors mentioned parents and how children are influenced by adults who sacrifice for their beliefs and values.

Those behaviors that cost something are known as CREDs, credibility enhancing displays. When children see adults taking a moral stand even when it hurts, they take note.

My reservation about this account is that religious identity was murky in the environment I grew up in. Almost all the people in that environment claimed to be religious. The Civil Rights Movement, the great moral issue of my childhood, was not fought between those who identified as religious and those who did not. The movement was supported and opposed by people who claimed to be religious.

The biggest acts of courageous moral behavior I witnessed as a child were by religious people. So were the most despicable acts of hypocrisy.

In that day, people who were not religious didn’t advertise that fact in the rural South.

The philosophers in ancient Greece argued about the nature of the primal stuff of the cosmos. If everything is made of “earth,” you have to jiggle that concept of a solid to explain fluids like blood and gases like air. If air is the primal stuff, and everything is made of air, you have to jiggle the concept to explain things like swords and mountains. One philosopher eventually suggested that the fundamental substance be called “the boundless.” Trying to fit all experience into one concept stretches the concept until it’s meaningless.

And so the ancient philosophers blundered into the troublesome Problem of the One and the Many.

A concept of religious identity — at least the version I grew up with — strikes me as that kind of problem. A concept of religious identity that includes both great moral courage and despicable hypocrisy isn’t really a concept at all.

I’m not sure what that says about identity. And I’m not sure what kinds of identity are possible from that kind of environment.

The difference between 'nones' and 'dones'

 Does religious belief leave a residue?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Some psychologists think you can get at that question empirically and that the answer is “yes.” Religious belief does leave a residue when it’s gone.

I’ve been reading a paper by Daryl R. Van Tongeren and his colleagues and am trying to decide what to think.

Tongeren’s team is interested in the increasing secularization of some societies, particularly in the number of people who identify as nonreligious. These folks are known as “nones” in popular culture.

The researchers’ hypothesis was that nones are not a homogenous group — that those who are never religious are cognitively different from those who were once religious but are done with it — the “dones.”

Psychology is one of many glaring holes in my education. But I can see that the notion of identity is central to any notion of psyche, person or personality. We invest a lot in forming identities. Once an identity has been formed, changing it — “deidentifying,” as the researchers say — is a big deal.

According to the study, you can see the difference in self-reported levels of prosociality, that it, behaviors intended to benefit others beyond oneself and one’s family. 

People that self-identify as religious report that they donate more time and money than people who were never religious. People who were formerly religious fall in between.

The authors take this as a residual behavior. They found consistent differences in these behaviors that would allow you to predict whether someone identified as religious, never religious or formerly religious.

The authors also identified residual beliefs. You’d expect that people who identify as religious would report stronger positive associations with God than those who were never religious. People who were never religious don’t have anything to report at all. People who are formerly religious fall in the middle.

Predictably, people who are formerly religious report the highest negative associations with God. Again, people who have never been religious just don’t have anything to report, good or bad. So people who identify as religious fall in between. (The Bible has characters, like Jacob, who fight with God or his representatives. Even those who claim a relationship say it’s not always rosy.)

I found the report fascinating. I’m still thinking.

• Source: Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Hope College; C. Nathan DeWall, University of Kentucky; Zhansheng Chen, University of Hong Kong; and Chris G. Sibley and Joseph Bulbulia, University of Auckland, “Religious Residue: Cross-Cultural Evidence That Religious Psychology and Behavior Persist Following Deidentification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 2021, Vol. 120, No. 2, 484 –503.

A place can change the way you see the news

 I wonder how my view of the world is influenced by this place, the barrio along Zarzamora Creek.

The state and national newspapers were full of accounts of Donald Trump’s speech in Conroe.

But in this neighborhood, people are focused on other things. People mark Jan. 31 as the date of the start of the Pecan Shellers Strike in 1938. It was led by a 21-year-old woman named Emma Tenayuca.

Workers were paid a pittance for their labor. One day, 12,000 just stopped cooperating with a system that wasn’t fair.

The Trump speech was the usual "Make America Great Again." The observances in this neighborhood recalled how "great" America was in 1938: segregation, discriminatory voting laws, economic injustice. 

People around here haven't forgotten any of that.

The case of Russell's teapot

 Yesterday’s note was about the American logician C.S. Peirce’s account of belief. Bertrand Russell got to a similar point with a parable.

Imagine that someone asserts that there is a china teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars. It’s too small to be picked up by a telescope.

We can imagine such a thing: the assertion violates no logical laws.

But verifying the truth or falsity of that claim is a practical impossibility.

What do you make of the claim? Russell’s point is that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. You, the person on whom the claim of credibility is being made, are not obligated to do anything.

You are not obligated to accept or reject the claim. You’re not obligated to do — or, in this case, believer — anything at all.