Movie 43 is an acquired taste, to say the least. Mostly inconsistent, but in between the misses, there were hits that almost broke me in two. Watch Jeremy Allen as the abused and irreparably confused son. Don’t try and look away. It doesn’t work. 😀
I am not an avid YouTuber, which leaves me fraught with conflict about why I haven’t taken advantage of it. Because there’s money to be made out there with material as written about here, that honestly, I find dumbfounding. But, no more dumbfounding than a million other sites, and postings that are just as puzzling.
Having spent so many years in advertising, sales and marketing, I have an instinctive belief to how these things seed, grow, and take shape for popular consumption. As always, as it was then, that is entirely what the money goal is about. Its not so much about memberships, or paid views. its about advertising revenue. Eyes, Minds, Pocketbooks, Wallets, and today, selling off your privacy as well.
Considering the demographic of most hyper active Youtuber viewers (not producers), I woudl venture to guess, they have either no clue about how much they give up of their privacy, or they just don’t care, waving it off as part of their life culture, as if its some type of generational badge of their moment in time. Sort of like saying, “we can’t beat’em, so lets join’em, stop being suspicious and paranoid, and assume the best for our interests is in the hands of every advertiser, and exploitative entity that has our info. Its rosy, but naiive to the nth degree.
The story below on A.S.M.R reflects one of many more similar stories in our current technoculture. I read it in full, decided it was a fad, an opportunity to make money based on the strange traction things of little importance can pick up today. But, as often happens after reading articles and reporting of quality depth and observation, I came away with two paragraphs that stuck with me, and made the whole effort worthwhile.
They are highlighted below, they are my takeaway:
Intimacy is a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
(If online link is restricted to subscribers, full text is pasted below.) Also, some YouTube samples are included below.
Via NYTimes Magazine, By Jamie Lauren Keiles
April 2019
When Jennifer Allen watched videos of space, she sometimes felt this peculiar sensation: a tingling that spread through her scalp as the camera pulled back to show the marble of the earth. It came in a wave, like a warm effervescence, making its way down the length of her spine and leaving behind a sense of gratitude and wholeness. Allen loved this feeling, but she didn’t know what caused it. It was totally distinct from anything she’d experienced before. Every two years or so she’d take to Google. She tried searching things like “tingling head and spine” or “brain orgasm.” For nine years, the search didn’t turn up anything.
Then, around 2009, it did. As always, Allen typed her phrases into Google, but this time she got a result on a message board called SteadyHealth. The post was titled WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD:
i get this sensation sometimes. theres no real trigger for it. it just happens randomly. its been happening since i was a kid and i’m 21 now. some examples of what it seems has caused it to happen before are as a child while watching a puppet show and when i was being read a story to. as a teenager when a classmate did me a favor and when a friend drew on the palm of my hand with markers. sometimes it happens for no reason at all
The poster went on to demand an explanation. In the discussion, nobody had one, but many described a similar feeling — a “silvery sparkle” inside the head, a euphoric “brain-gasm” or a feeling like goose bumps in the scalp that faded “in and out in waves of heightened intensity.” Many people agreed that the sensation was euphoric. (“Aside from an actual orgasm, it’s probably the most enjoyable sensation possible,” one user wrote.) Its triggers were as varied as watching someone fill out a form, listening to whispering sounds or seeing Bob Ross paint landscapes on TV.
Allen scrolled through pages and pages of discussion.
Oh my gosh, she remembers thinking. These people are talking about exactly what I experience.
In time, that post begot a second post: WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD – PART 2. As discourse on the unnamed feeling evolved, users shared accidental triggers found online — a man unlocking a damaged padlock, someone brushing her hair. These videos had a gentleness in common that many of the users found hard to describe. Some spoke of the need for a research group to better understand the sensation. Still others expressed fear over social repercussions: Were they perverts? Were they sick? Were they indigo children? Pleasure is rarely consequence-free.
“People had been told they were on drugs or that they had lice — things like that,” Allen says. “And then there was the factor of people calling it a ‘brain orgasm’ and it sounding like some sort of erotic fetish kind of thing.”
Allen had invested a lot in the discussion, even expressing interest in the fledgling research effort. She saw how the feeling had improved her sense of calm, but she worried that the subtext of a “tingling sensation” would hold the group back from legitimacy. The whole thing sounded too hokey — or too horny. If they wanted to generate scientific interest, they needed a more scientific-sounding name.
And so in February 2010, she sat down to brainstorm some ideas. Others had tried to describe the weird sensation, but spacey nicknames like “attention-induced head orgasm” had never quite caught on. Allen felt a debt to the feeling’s New Age fans, but she also saw the usefulness of more clinical language. When no existing term could meet both conditions, she made up a new one: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or A.S.M.R. She started with “autonomous” because it was a feeling from within; “sensory” was self-explanatory. “Meridian” worked triple duty, suggesting peak but also orgasm and the energy pathways of traditional Chinese medicine. “Response” was just to say that it was not a constant state; it happened in reaction to a set of stimuli, like whispering, gum chewing and tapping.
“I wish I’d made it a little shorter,” Allen says. But at least it sounded better than “brain-gasm.”
She debuted the new name on the SteadyHealth board by announcing the “ASMR Group” she had registered on Facebook. Discussion-board users migrated en masse, and soon membership spanned six continents: a blogger in South Africa, an artist in Detroit, an ethnobotany researcher working in Australia. They started sharing links to videos again — not the accidental triggers of before but a new genre created for the express purpose of inducing A.S.M.R. These videos often featured anonymous women delivering soft-spoken voice-over narration. According to message-board lore, the first of this type was a video titled “Whisper 1 – hello!” It was posted in 2009 but languished in the algorithmic scrap heap of YouTube on account of its weak, unsearchable title. Now, under the search-engine-friendly banner of A.S.M.R., this new genre offered an on-demand way to trigger the once-serendipitous sensation. A new crop of YouTube creators emerged to serve up the feeling to those who knew they felt it — at that point, a small but growing subset of the public.
Around the time when Allen found SteadyHealth, there were, by one count, 12 whispering channels on YouTube; three years later, that number had more than tripled. Soon a hard-won Wikipedia page would further extend the reach of the term — and further enshrine the new video genre. By 2015, the ASMR Group had made itself irrelevant. When Allen set out to name the weird sensation, she thought she was simply describing what she felt. She couldn’t foresee that her term would enable a whole new form of entertainment — or possibly something that transcended entertainment — born of the kismet of algorithmic fate as it brushed up against the crossed wires of the brain.
Today the action of A.S.M.R. plays out almost exclusively on YouTube, where legions of (mostly female) creators release, by my count, around 500 new videos each day. Over the course of reporting this article, I spent at least 200 hours on the site, watching women chew gum, swallow octopus sashimi, simulate eye exams, turn pages of books and peel dried glue off artificial ears. I watched a teenage girl role-play as a 14th-century nun, treating me for the bubonic plague. I watched a two-hour recording of hair-dryer sounds.
In the A.S.M.R. scene, new trends evolve quickly, driven by the spirit of innovation, corporate product-placement deals and a process of human-algorithm interaction that pushes the best new material to the top. Any trigger that starts to find fans is endlessly taken up and reperformed — ripped off by different channels for ad dollars — at least until the next trigger takes its spot. One month, cranial nerve exams are in. The next month, creators are all shaving bars of soap, chewing bricks of raw honeycomb or eating buckets of KFC. The feeling that fuels this growth is little understood, like the dark energy pushing our universe outward.
The internet is vast, but it brings like minds together. At its best, it serves to unite kinky freaks, dissidents of oppressive regimes and sufferers of obscure diseases. At the same time, this tendency can serve the cruel or misinformed — giving shared language to Nazis and incels and other bleak dopes who were once kept mercifully isolated from one another. This feature of the internet is, at best, value-neutral; in any case, A.S.M.R. tests its limits. The YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.
Thinkers since ancient Greece, if not before, have found themselves obsessed with the true nature of the senses; even modern philosophers get tripped up discussing qualia, the irreducible stuff of consciousness. Subjectivity is hard to isolate, by definition, and examples of new metaphysical sensations are not exactly a regular occurrence. Synesthesia, often experienced as associating numbers with colors, is one of the rare examples. Though individuals since at least the 19th century have reported tasting words, seeing sound or hearing colors, it took until the 1980s for scientists to prove that the shared experience actually correlated with real, observable activity in the brain.
Thanks to the internet, A.S.M.R. seems to have leapfrogged the science entirely. Like synesthesia, it was first discovered by way of individual reports. Unlike synesthesia, it has not depended on brain imaging for cultural acceptance. Our foremost “proof” of A.S.M.R. comes from some people searching for the term and others making videos to populate those searches. All these YouTube users may be right that the feeling is real, but the scientific research still lags far behind.
Craig Richard, a professor of physiology at Shenandoah University in Virginia, first heard the term in 2013, on a podcast. “I’m listening to the beginning of this episode thinking, ‘This is a bunch of woo-woo bunk!’ ” he told me. Just as he went to turn the podcast off, the subject changed to the painter Bob Ross — by then, a well known A.S.M.R. trigger. Richard’s eyes lit up. In childhood, he spent afternoons watching Ross paint landscapes on TV. He remembered caring more about the painter than the painting. “It was his demeanor. It was the sounds he made and the way he talked — the way he looked in the camera.”
When the episode was over, Richard went to his computer to look up the research on A.S.M.R. At that point, he found nothing academic — only websites and forums that led him to the Facebook group. He reached out to Allen, and in collaboration with a graduate student and member of the community named Karissa Burnett, they conducted an informal online survey that, over time, has received more than 25,000 voluntary responses. (Where do you feel tingles? Head, neck, arm? Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel aroused?) Richard also started ASMR University, an online archive that today remains a useful clearinghouse of research on the topic.
Still, scientific understanding has moved slowly. Funding for A.S.M.R. research is hard to justify, and the diverse nature of A.S.M.R. triggers can lead to “noisy” data. To date, ASMR University lists just 10 peer-reviewed papers. More than half of these were published in author-pay journals. The most rigorous studies use f.M.R.I. to map the activity of blood flow in the brain as participants report feeling the tingles. Outcomes have suggested, in very small samples, that A.S.M.R. might have something to do with socially bonding “affiliative behaviors,” known to release feel-good hormones like oxytocin.
Richard, for his part, considers these outcomes from an evolutionary-biology perspective. He believes that the tingles of A.S.M.R. are meant to assist in reproduction and survival, and points out that triggers like grooming, whispering and eye gazing all bear strong resemblance to the ways that humans soothe infants. In adulthood, a range of similar behaviors contribute to intimacy between mates. This may be the case, but our current understanding still leaves behind more questions than answers: If A.S.M.R. plays (or played) a key survival role, why does it seem that only some people can feel it? Why should it come to our attention only now?
It does not seem very likely that the pace and scope of research will ever catch up to the cycle of new content. For now, our chief authorities on A.S.M.R. are women and girls, alone at their computers, manipulating objects for a faceless, growing public.
Around the time that “Whisper 1 – hello!” was picking up speed in Allen’s Facebook group, Gibi — today one of YouTube’s top “A.S.M.R.tists” — was a sophomore in high school. (I’ve withheld her last name here for below-explained reasons.) Like many teenagers these days, she often had trouble falling asleep. Sometimes she would sneak her phone into her room and watch YouTube videos to relax her mind. This habit evolved by a haphazard process, led by the whims of an infinite sidebar. Makeup tutorials segued to massage, which soon gave way to A.S.M.R.
Since that fateful discovery, Gibi has watched A.S.M.R. videos every single night. The ritual followed her off to college, where the videos became a kind of white noise while she studied. A.S.M.R. was, by that point, not just for those who experienced the tingles. The genre had begun to find broader appeal as a sleep aid, an alternative to guided meditation and a drug-free, online version of Xanax. The medium had developed its own microstars, women with handles like Gentle Whispering ASMR and ASMRrequests, who filmed themselves crinkling paper, tapping their nails on large wooden bowls, dealing cards, brushing hair and pouring cold milk into bowls of Cocoa Krispies. One of Gibi’s favorites, Heather Feather ASMR, went beyond mere sound effects, performing full-scale role-play scenes infused with attentive, deliberate sound. In one, Heather administered a colorblindness test, tapping her wand on a laminated chart. In another, she played as a tattoo artist, trying on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. Watching Heather’s videos made Gibi feel as if her “brain was swimming, in a good way.” She played the same scenes over on repeat, returning to parts that gave her the tingles.
At that point, in June 2016, many A.S.M.R.tists treated YouTube like a hobby. Across channels, production value varied wildly. A creator might post the perfect tapping video, then disappear from the site forever. Gibi thought that maybe, with regular effort, she could produce a better product — a quality channel with a regular schedule that tested out new, creative triggers on a regular basis. And so, in the summer before her senior year, she started her own channel, Gibi ASMR. Six months after graduation, she was earning enough in ad revenue to treat it as her full-time job. Today she has about 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
I first met Gibi in Los Angeles at Daiso, the kind of Japanese discount store that sells lots of things that you didn’t know you needed. Our plan was to shop for some tingly props — any little odd or end that might yield good, recordable sound. Gibi was in town for a public appearance. That day, a video from her account was trending globally on YouTube, a role-play called “The ASMR Sleep Clinic | Tingle Experiment.” She scrolled through the trending tab on her phone, rifling through the other clips in the Top 10:
“… Ellen DeGeneres, bowling ball-versus-bulletproof glass, ramen, iPhone stuff. …”
If most entertainment aims to shock or delight, then A.S.M.R. is barely entertainment at all. It’s more like a massage for the mind. Gibi’s main goal is to relax her fans.
“If you fall asleep during my video, that’s a compliment,” she said. Sleeping fans tend to leave videos running — a boon on a platform that pays dividends for view length. In this way, for Gibi, the most valuable engagement is actually a near-total lack of engagement. Even when viewers stay awake, straightforward entertainment remains somewhat beside the point. On Gibi’s channel, some of the most-requested content is not a character or joke but the sound of fingers tapping on a bread-shaped piece of cork. Fans request the “toaster coaster” by name — the closest thing A.S.M.R. has to “Free Bird.” That day, she was searching for similar objects, made of soft, dull wood or thick glass. We entered the store to the whir of air-conditioning. Gibi made a beeline toward a rack of piggy banks.
“Whenever I pick something up, I’m always listening to it,” she said, tapping her nails on a piggy bank’s candy-coated glaze. The lacquer made a dainty, plinking sound, like the loose filament of a shaken, burned-out light bulb. She moved on to rustle a strand of orange tinsel, then brushed her hand against the grain of a vellum birthday card. We turned down an aisle of fake plastic swords.
“When I hit 300,000 subscribers, I did a 300 role play, of Queen Gorgo, Leonidas’s wife,” she recalled. “That one was really cool, but people were kind of like, ‘What is going on here?’ Sometimes I’m like, Why do I even try to put effort into a big role-play, or something like that, when I can pick something up and be like, ‘O.K., here’s an hour of me tapping,’ and I’ll get like, three million views?”
Gibi is the LeBron James of touching stuff. She touches things professionally. As she paused to fondle a makeup brush, I heard the grip of her finger pads reluctant to give up the cellophane wrapper. When she smoothed the fleece of a microfiber towel, I cringed at the drag of rough callus against terry cloth. Gibi moves with the demonstrative intent of a former high school theater kid. (She is one.) She is hot in the way of a friend’s older sister, projecting an air of humble self-assuredness.
“I think a lot of what has to do with why my channel has become popular is because I do put a lot of my personality — oh, my God!” She stopped to interrupt herself and crinkled a plastic package of pens. “I put a lot of my personality into my videos,” she said.
For those who watch her at home, this apparent emotional availability can foster a range of attachments. Gibi says that most of her viewers are kind and effusive. Under her videos, they leave thousands of comments, appreciating the sound of her voice and its power to alleviate their insomnia, anxiety and P.T.S.D. (“SHE CAN M AKE ADS RELAXING!” one fan delighted.) For others, the tender tone can be misleading.
Unloading her shopping basket at the till, she told me the story of one obsessive fan who believed she was talking directly to him. He sent her tens of thousands of messages, she said, and she filed a police report. Other fans have pried into her past, digging up old records from high school. Creepiness and harassment are widespread problems for the young female creators of the A.S.M.R. world. Gibi takes extreme precautions to protect her own privacy. She doesn’t share her last name, or her relationship status, or even what city she lives in. When she films in an airport, she is careful to choose an unplaceable background. If she happens to meet a fan on the street near her house, she pretends that she’s there on vacation.
“I’ve learned a lot about cybersecurity,” she said. “If you ever want to start a YouTube channel, delete everything, and then go back and delete more. Make everything private. Act like you have five million subscribers when you’re starting, because you can’t go back.”
Outside the store, Gibi laid her purchases out on the pavement. We surveyed the haul: the ceramic piggy bank, the strand of orange tinsel, a thick glass jar with a plastic lid, a stress ball shaped like a bakery bun and a random assortment of candy and snacks. Gibi unwrapped a pack of Hi-Chews and popped a fruit-flavored cube in her mouth.
“People are naturally curious,” she said, deforming it against the hollow of her cheek. The suction made a spitty sound. When she livestreams, she went on, she even gets nervous about the weather giving away her location. “They can look up if it’s raining where I am.”
“That’s scary,” I said.
“It’s scary,” she agreed, but all I could hear was the sound of her tongue, working the last bit of taffy from her teeth.
Intimacy is a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
It’s hard to talk about A.S.M.R. without nuanced language for the things that come near sex. In the absence of such terms, the genre seems doomed to appear sexual — a suspect jumble of tingles and pleasure and subservient women you watch alone at your computer. Who, in our time, can look at a video of a young woman doing anything and not wonder who else is watching — and why? Are those who feel the tingles just a bunch of repressed weirdos? Questions like these have plagued A.S.M.R. ever since Jennifer Allen first cringed at the word “brain-gasm.”
“A lot of the visuals you might see” in A.S.M.R. videos “relate to how you might visualize what happens during healthy foreplay,” Craig Richard says. “People talking gently to each other, people touching each other lightly, gazing into each other’s eyes, expressing physical or vocal care for each other — making the other person feel safe.” If A.S.M.R. is not sexual itself, then Richard believes it might still belong to a general complex of safety, caring, connectedness and trust. “It could heighten a sexual moment, in a way the same way that massage oil can heighten a sexual moment, but oil by itself is not sexual,” he says. “We get most of our nutrition from our food, but we may supplement with vitamin pills. That’s how I view A.S.M.R. videos. There are very few people that are probably going to substitute real-world relationships.”
Every activity has a threshold of acceptable intimacy. For most people in the United States, it is normal to express that you like having your hair shampooed in a salon. It is less normal to say that you derive pleasure from taking an eye test or by making eye contact with an inquisitive waitress. These affective norms can be counterintuitive, especially considering how many of our jobs require employees to feign loving attention. Still, they exist for a reason. It is one thing to ask someone to fit your shoes; it’s another to enlist them in your search for human comfort.
Part of the joy of A.S.M.R. is the way it allows us to invert the equation. In A.S.M.R. videos, people engage in regular tasks while drawing those second-order pleasures to the fore. The usual priorities of the eye test are distorted; now it’s less about nearsightedness and more about whispered instruction and warm light. A.S.M.R. combines the one-way sociality of podcasts with the outcome-driven imperative of porn. In an age defined by loneliness and dislocation, it’s a lot to ask someone to turn that away.
Nevertheless, the gender imbalance of performers seems suspect. The viewing pattern even looks similar to porn, but this perhaps goes beyond mere horniness. For much of human history, women have been cast into care-taking roles. With centuries of imbalance, it makes plenty of sense that our brains would find peace in these strange and gendered invocations of comfort. Is that healthy? Is that normal? Really, who can say? Sitting alone in front of a screen, nothing seems that weird anymore.
Here, I suppose is the place to come clean and admit that I’ve never felt A.S.M.R. In watching those hours of YouTube, I often felt calm (and I sometimes felt horny), but not even once did my brain let loose a tingle. By the end, I found myself feeling isolated — confusingly excluded from a mass phenomenon beloved for its success at assuaging loneliness. In a last-ditch attempt to feel it for myself, I flew up to Oakland to meet Melinda Lauw, co-creator of the service Whispers on Demand and a provider of one-on-one A.S.M.R. experiences.
Lauw grew up in Singapore and studied fine art and art history at Goldsmiths in London. She first got involved with A.S.M.R. through Whisperlodge, an immersive theater piece she produced with the playwright Andrew Hoepfner. Whispers on Demand grew out of that project — less theatrical, more therapeutic. Lauw’s clients were mostly women, many in the tech industry. The sessions cost $150 per hour.
Our meeting was held on a morning in September in a rent-by-the-hour conference room. I was invited to take off my shoes. In advance of the session, I’d filled out a form, confessing my tingle virginity. Lauw had arranged a pile of maybe-triggers in the style of a surgical instrument tray. The session began with us sitting side by side, and soon she was using each object on my body — rubbing the lavender oil on my wrist, crinkling the tissue paper near my head and pulsating my knee with the metal tuning fork.
I lay down on the couch, and she styled my hair with a wide cotton band, then let my hair down, then styled it again. She polished my ear with a ridged cotton swab. It felt nice to be touched, if just by way of a Q-tip, but only one time did I maybe feel a tingle. As the tip of a small, clean makeup brush outlined the greasy crease of my nose, I felt something creep on the side of my head, like a cold millipede crawling underneath my scalp — were these the famed tingles of A.S.M.R.?
Maybe so, but I pushed them away. I am not so libertine or well adjusted to make use of pleasures beyond a social script. Though Lauw was a calming and trustworthy guide, a few times I thought I might scream for no reason.
Soon enough, our session was over. We both stood up and walked to use the bathroom. Lauw waited for me outside the stall. When I was done, I leaned on the sink and offered a few words of thanks for the session. Lauw didn’t ask if I’d felt anything, and for this omission, I was grateful. Usually paid intimacy concludes with some kind of definitive transaction. I’d paid online, so I offered her a hug. We stood for a moment, embracing in the bathroom. Then I pulled away, thanked her again and returned to the noisy city streets, alone.
“A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity,” John Gray writes.
Really, really good. A lengthy read, but deservedly, requires it.
Ask me about my own views on this subject, or religion in general, and I will answer for as long as your attention span allows, perhaps in ways that will make your eyes glaze over. Then you will still ask me what my position is, or what I follow, and I will not be able to answer.
Articles, books, thinkers like those attached here, are what I am drawn to in trying to answer the question for myself. It has never been easy, and I don’t plan on it getting easier. To a fundamentalist, or deeply religious person believing in a divinity or creator, that is simply a statement of non faith. To which I ask, faith in what, exactly? To which their answer is the usual creator based template. To which, I would then reply with the usual challenge templates that “questioners” have been asking for centuries. There are several written in this article.
I used to make glib statements like “I respect all religions, except those that involve gunpowder.” Its still true, but, of course, as I have aged, I think more about this stuff in a serious way about where religion has its best place in our lives. Where does it help us most?
In spite of our cultural differences, and ways of deifying people, unseen/seen forces, or ethereal entities that have supposedly been here with us from the “beginning”, I have always chosen to believe, have faith, if you will, that all of them, have a common thread that connects every single, last one of our breathing earth bound souls. That common thread is about overcoming our collective fear of the unknown, and somehow finding peace with what we can know, do know, for sure, concretely, about ourselves here and now. That is a tall order as it is, but it draws us together. In spite of the tragic wars, the blinded rage of conflicts based on paranoias and fears from one another.
When I go to sleep and find myself thinking about these things, I find this belief is what helps me get through the nights easier, the mornings after, and each day after that. This is my religion, such as it is.
Balanced, scholarly writings on history, as well as thoughtful analysis, are tremendously valuable in helping provide contextual background to deep subjects like this. The subject deserves no less, as does our criteria on what decision we make for ourselves.
I’ve highlighted a few passages, but the final words sum up beautifully a lot of what I feel.
“All of us, nihilists included, believe something—many things, in fact, about ourselves, the cosmos, and one another. In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to.”
Via New Yorker Magazine, By Casey Cep
Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?”
Unsatisfied with the two available options—“Yes” and “No”—Seeger finally decided to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.” There were eight of those pages, and in them he described reading Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, all of whom “evolved comprehensive ethical systems of intellectual and moral integrity without belief in God,” and concluded that “the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven, and the essence of His nature cannot be determined.” For good measure, Seeger also used scare quotes and strike-throughs to doctor the printed statement he was required to sign, so that it read, “I am, by reason of my ‘religious’ belief, conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.”
By the time Seeger submitted his form, in the late nineteen-fifties, thousands of conscientious objectors in the U.S. had refused to fight in the two World Wars. Those who belonged to pacifist religious traditions, such as Mennonites and Quakers, were sent to war as noncombatants or to work as farmers or firefighters on the home front through the Civilian Public Service; eventually, so were those who could prove their own independent, religiously motivated pacifism. Those who could not were sent to prison or to labor camps. But while Selective Service laws had been revised again and again to clarify the criteria for conscientious objection, they still did not account for young men who, like Seeger, refused to say that their opposition to war came from belief in a Supreme Being.
Over time, draft boards came to resemble freshman philosophy seminars in their attempts to decide who did and did not qualify for C.O. status. A Jewish socialist who ran an engraving business did not, but a pulp artist and atheist who appealed to the idea of secular humanism did; some members of the Ethical Culture Society qualified, but not others; Jehovah’s Witnesses initially did not, on the theory that someone willing to fight the Devil during Armageddon ought to be willing to fight America’s enemies during a war; a writer turned financial consultant who belonged to no church but had read “philosophers, historians, and poets from Plato to Shaw” was granted C.O. status after two contradictory close readings of his antiwar play. Different boards reached very different conclusions, various appeal boards upheld and reversed those decisions without much consistency, and, inevitably, some of those appeals ended up before federal courts. When Seeger’s local board was unmoved by his argument, he took it all the way to the Supreme Court, where, in 1965, the Justices found unanimously that a draftee did not need to believe in God in order to have a conscience that could object.
Seeger’s victory helped mark a turning point for a minority that had once been denied so much as the right to testify in court, even in their own defense. Atheists, long discriminated against by civil authorities and derided by their fellow-citizens, were suddenly eligible for some of the exemptions and protections that had previously been restricted to believers. But, in the decades since U.S. v. Seeger, despite an increase in the number of people who identify as nonbelievers, their standing before the courts and in the public sphere has been slow to improve. Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or marrying them. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House, and some of them do not object to attempts to keep nonbelievers from holding other offices, even when the office is that of notary public. Atheists are not welcome in the Masonic Lodge, and while the Boy Scouts of America has opened its organization to gays and to girls, it continues to bar any participant who will not pledge “to do my duty to God.”
Such discrimination is both a cause and an effect of the crude way in which we parse belief, which has barely changed since Daniel Seeger completed his C.O. application: check “Yes” and endless questions follow; check “No” and the questioning ends. Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile. This is especially true in America, where an insistence on the idea that we are a Christian nation has tied patriotism to religiosity, leading to such strange paroxysms as the one produced by President Trump at last year’s Values Voter Summit: “In America, we don’t worship government—we worship God.”
As that remark suggests, the one wall the current Administration does not want to build is the one between church and state. The most evident manifestation of this resurgence of Christian nationalism has been animosity toward Muslims and Jews, but the group most literally excluded from any godly vision of America is, of course, atheists. Yet the national prejudice against them long predates Daniel Seeger and his draft board. It has its roots both in the intellectual history of the country and in a persistent anti-intellectual impulse: the widespread failure to consider what it is that unbelievers actually believe.
American antipathy for atheism is as old as America. Although many colonists came to this country seeking to practice their own faith freely, they brought with them a notion of religious liberty that extended only to other religions—often only to other denominations of Christianity. From John Locke they inherited the idea that atheists cannot be good citizens and should not be brought into the social contract; in “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” Locke had written, “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God.”
True religious liberty was rare in the colonies: dissenters were fined, flogged, jailed, and sometimes hanged. Yet, surprisingly, no atheist was ever executed. According to the Cornell professors R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick, the authors of the new book “Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life” (Norton), that is only because no atheists presented themselves for execution. Nonbelievers were either few and far between in Colonial America or understandably cautious about making themselves known; clergy and magistrates rarely bothered to mention them, even derisively.
One of the few who did was Roger Williams, who, after he was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions,” offered a view of the separation of church and state so extreme that it seemed to accommodate atheists. In his book “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience,” published in London in 1644, Williams wrote that “a pagan or Antichristian pilot may be as skillful to carry the ship to its desired port, as any Christian mariner.” He was referring to the ship of state, but his tolerance was never fully tested: no atheist ever tried to hold office in Rhode Island, the colony that he founded. Still, his argument was audacious for an era when most colonies had established churches and collected ecclesiastical taxes to support them.
It was striking, then, after the Revolutionary War, when the men who gathered for the Constitutional Convention banned religious tests for office holders, in Article VI. There would be no government church, no state religion, and, except for being signed in the Year of our Lord 1787, no mention of God in America’s founding text. Religious freedom was formally established in the Constitution’s First Amendment. “The Godless Constitution,” as Moore and Kramnick called it in a previous book, was mostly the product of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who fought to keep God out of the document. But, while neither was a creedal Christian, both men were monotheists, and, like John Locke, their ideas about tolerance generally extended only to those who believed in a higher power.
It was another one of the revolutionaries who became a hero for the nonreligious. Thomas Paine, whose “Common Sense” had sold half a million copies the year that the United States declared its independence, died an outcast because of a later pamphlet he wrote on religion. Attacking the King of England was fine, but when Paine, in “The Age of Reason,” set his sights on the King of Kings, he was derided as a “loathsome reptile” and a “filthy little atheist.” It didn’t matter that Paine, like Jefferson, actually identified as a Deist, or that his text opens with the blunt declaration “I believe in one God”; his criticisms of Christianity were so scandalous that he was written into history as a nonbeliever.
Such is the slippery label of “atheist” in the American context: slapped on those who explicitly reject it, eschewed by unbelievers who wish to avoid its stigma. Both atheists and their critics often make a hopeless muddle of the category, sometimes because it is genuinely complicated to assess belief, but often for other reasons. Some atheists try to claim as one of their own everyone, dead or alive, who has ever thought twice about religion—and there’s a bit of this slippage in Moore and Kramnick, where the religiously unaffiliated (the so-called “nones”) are all equated with the unbelieving. Some believers, meanwhile, use atheism to discredit anyone with whom they do not agree.
For atheists, at least, this definitional elasticity provided a kind of safety in numbers, however inflated: as their ranks grew, so did their willingness to make their controversial beliefs public. In the nineteenth century, Robert Ingersoll, “the Great Agnostic,” charged a dollar a head to the thousands who gathered to hear him critique Christianity; believers and skeptics had months-long exchanges in the pages of newspapers; and debates between the likes of the secularist J. Spencer Ellis and the theist Miles Grant packed venues the way that Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig and Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham do today.
With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. Blasphemy laws were enforced against those who insulted God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Bible. A former Baptist minister turned freethinker named Abner Kneeland was arrested in Massachusetts for an article that he wrote explaining why he no longer believed in a monotheistic God; not even the prominent Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing or the former Unitarian pastor Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom rose to Kneeland’s defense, could spare him jail time. In New York, a man named John Ruggles was sentenced to three months for insulting Jesus; in Pennsylvania, another man, Abner Updegraph, was fined for calling the Bible “a mere fable” that contained “a great many lies.” (Laws against blasphemy, though rarely enforced, still exist in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wyoming.) All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. (Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday.) One Jewish merchant took his case all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, only to be denied an exemption because, in the words of the court, “Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.”
Few, if any, of those prosecuted for violating Sabbatarian or blasphemy laws actually identified as atheists, but that didn’t stop their critics from denouncing them as such. Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s agnosticism and Ernestine Rose’s atheism were held against the early suffragists, and after eight allegedly godless anarchists were convicted of killing eleven people during Chicago’s Haymarket affair and President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist who had rejected Catholic teachings, atheism became linked, in the popular imagination, with domestic terrorism. “Public attacks on religion,” Moore and Kramnick write in their account of how atheism became un-American, “were presumed to lead to the advocacy of other dangerous ideas.”
That presumption became both more popular and more potent during the Cold War. It wasn’t politics or economics, some said, that distinguished America from its enemies—it was religiosity. “From the root of atheism stems the evil weed of communism,” the Catholic congressman Louis Rabaut declared, on the floor of the House of Representatives. Two centuries after the Founders wrote a godless constitution, the federal government got religion: between 1953 and 1957, a prayer breakfast appeared on the White House calendar, a prayer room opened in the Capitol, “In God We Trust” was added to all currency, and “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance. The Founders had already chosen a motto, of course, but E pluribus unum proved too secular for the times. Even as courts were striking down blasphemy laws and recognizing the rights of nontheists to conscientious-objector status, legislators around the country were trying to promote Christianity in a way that did not violate the establishment clause. They succeeded, albeit at a price: the courts upheld references to God in pledges, oaths, prayers, and anthems on the ground that they were not actually religious. The phrase “ceremonial deism” was coined by a Yale Law School dean in 1962, and in the decades since it has been used by court after court to explain exceptions to the First Amendment. Like saying “God bless you” when someone sneezes, the courts concluded, these “under God”s and “In God We Trust”s are innocuous; they belong to the realm of patriotism, not prayer.
Not surprisingly, neither believers nor nonbelievers believe this. Every such ruling is a Pyrrhic victory for the devout, for whom invocations of God are sacred, and no victory at all for atheists, for whom invocations of God, when sponsored by the state, are obvious attempts to promote religion. Legal challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, in particular, persist, because nonbelievers are concerned about its prominence in the daily lives of schoolchildren. Lawsuits to end the recitation of the Pledge in public schools began almost as soon as the words “under God” were added, and while “ceremonial deism” long thwarted those challenges, nonbelievers have lately begun to pursue a different strategy. Instead of arguing that the Pledge violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause, they have started arguing that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, because it presents an occasion for nonbelieving children to be ostracized. David Niose, the legal director of the American Humanist Association, is one of many who have suggested that atheists might even be a suspect class, the sort of minority who deserve special protections from the courts.
But are atheists a suspect class, or just a skeptical one? Unlike racial minorities, their condition is not immutable, but, like many religious minorities, they are subject to hostility and prejudice. Atheism, however, is not a single identity, ideology, or set of practices, and to speak of it that way is as reductive as speaking of “religion” rather than of Judaism, Buddhism, or Christianity—or, even more usefully, of Reform Judaism, Mahayana Buddhism, or Pentecostalism. “Atheisms” is a more precise concept, as the philosopher John Gray demonstrates in his new book, “Seven Types of Atheism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and one that could help Americans move beyond their intractable fight over the existence of God.
Gray, who taught at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and the London School of Economics before turning full time to writing, starts by offering a highly provisional and idiosyncratic definition of “atheist”: “anyone with no use for a divine mind that has fashioned the world.” As he concedes, that makes the category so capacious that it includes some of the world’s major religions: neither Buddhism nor Taoism features a creator god. Yet that capaciousness is appropriate, because it suggests, correctly, that there is no single atheistic world view. Much of the animosity and opprobrium directed at nonbelievers in America comes from the suspicion that those who do not believe in God could not possibly believe in anything else, moral or otherwise. The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court for so long was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment. Gray’s survey, while not comprehensive, is a welcome corrective to that ungenerous view.
It is also a refreshing look beyond the so-called “new atheists” who have lately dominated the conversation surrounding unbelief. Gray does not brook what he describes as their “tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion,” and, in contrast to Moore and Kramnick, who believe that new atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have generated an “Atheist Awakening,” Gray dismisses them in a single chapter. “New atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part,” he writes. By Gray’s account, they ignore polytheism and animism almost entirely, while insisting on reading verses of Genesis or lines of the Nicene Creed as if they were primitive scientific theories. Not all monotheists are literalists, and, for many of us, both now and throughout history, the Garden of Eden is not a faulty hypothesis about evolution but a rich symbolic story about good and evil.
Gray’s larger complaint is that the new atheists fail to offer a more coherent moral vision than the one they want to replace. The strategy they champion, scientific ethics, has been tried before, with a notable lack of success. Auguste Comte and his fellow nineteenth-century positivists envisioned a Grand Pontiff of Humanity who would preside alongside scientist-priests; unfortunately, scientists at the time were practicing phrenology. Later on, evolutionary humanists and monists replaced God’s order with “scientific” anthropologies, then constructed racial hierarchies and put white Europeans on top. Today, the voguish version of science as religion is transhumanism, which claims that technology will overcome human limitations both physical and mental, perhaps through bioengineering or artificial intelligence or cyborgs that can carry around the contents of our brains. Gray is not sanguine about such developments, should they ever occur, because we already have a model of the mayhem that takes place when some mortals are granted godlike powers: “Anyone who wants a glimpse of what a post-human future might be like should read Homer.”
On the whole, Gray is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, and what others regard as novel or promising he often sees as derivative or just plain dumb. He argues, for instance, that secular humanism is really monotheism in disguise, where humankind is God and salvation can be achieved through our own efforts rather than through divine intervention. Unlike the linguist—and new atheist—Steven Pinker, Gray regards the idea that the world is getting better as self-evidently silly. “The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics,” he points out. Religions are still thriving, as are wars between them, and secular regimes have wrought as much, if not more, havoc under the auspices of Jacobinism, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism.
Gray is especially interested in those atheists who, in addition to having no faith in the divine, have none in humanity. (Given his own intellectual bent, one suspects him of delighting equally in their pessimism and their unpopularity.) These aren’t misotheists—those who hate God, like the Marquis de Sade, many new atheists, and the literary critic William Empson, whose “Seven Types of Ambiguity” Gray cites as an influence. They are thinkers like George Santayana, a thoroughgoing materialist who scoffed at human progress to the point of indifference to human suffering yet loved Catholic traditions so much that he chose to live out the end of his days in the care of nuns. Similarly, the novelist Joseph Conrad had no faith in God, and lost his faith in progress after witnessing the colonization of Congo, but he wrote beautifully about those who faced their empty fate head on: sailors surviving the indifference of the sea. Such men—and almost all the atheists in Gray’s book are men—would not recognize the hopeful atheism that is all the rage today. (Gray does make space for Ayn Rand, who briefly steals the show, as her followers raise their cigarette holders in tandem with hers, marry mates chosen by “the Collective,” and tap-dance at their weddings because Rand deemed it the only truly rational form of dance.)
Gray is equally interested in, and especially drawn to, those who practice what he calls “the atheism of silence.” These atheists, like those who reject the notion of human progress, don’t often attract large followings. Instead of seeking surrogates for God, they try to acquiesce in something that transcends human understanding. Gray admires the mystical atheist Arthur Schopenhauer, who didn’t believe in God and didn’t particularly believe in reality, either. Gray also includes in this category thinkers who were clearly devout, such as Spinoza, who rejected a creator God but saw God as an eternal substance in all creation, and the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who wrote that reason had to be overcome in order for us to know God, and that revelation “carries us beyond the limits of all human comprehension and of the possibilities that comprehension admits.”
This kind of apophatic theology has a lot in common with godless mysticism, Gray argues, because saying that God does not exist is not so different from saying that we cannot comprehend God’s existence. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic. “A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think,” Gray writes.
Cosmologies, in other words, can make for strange bedfellows, and some of what Gray does best in “Seven Types of Atheism” is not only to draw distinctions among atheists but to make connections between nonbelievers and believers. Christians ignorant of their own history, for instance, will be surprised to learn that their earliest ancestors in the faith were themselves ridiculed as “atheists” because they refused to participate in polytheistic worship: in Greek, atheos means “without gods,” not anti-God. Meanwhile, those who came to atheism via the new atheists might be startled to find that many of their intellectual forebears did not wage war on religion, or even feel any distaste for it.
In fairness, contemporary American atheists may be inclined to wage war on religion because religion has been waging war on them for so long. A brief truce was reached at the end of the Obama Administration, when Congress passed, and the President signed, a new version of the International Religious Freedom Act that officially included nonbelievers. “The freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is understood to protect theistic and non-theistic beliefs and the right not to profess or practice any religion,” the law was revised to read
That law extended important new protections to atheists. Still, as Gray might have predicted, it is difficult, in this particular political moment, to believe that the circle of rights is expanding for atheists or for anyone else. Moore and Kramnick, who have written a thorough and useful history of the legal and political status of atheists in America, unsurprisingly believe that such work is salvific—that understanding the bias against atheists in the past can help end it in the future. Gray holds no such hope, and yet his book offers a way forward. In it, he helps us understand how those who do not believe in God, or, for that matter, those who do, have oriented themselves in the universe. Faith, after all, drove the Puritans to Plymouth Rock but then led them to execute three of their Quaker neighbors; it inspired American slavers but also American abolitionists; and, whatever else atheism is accused of doing in this country, it sustained the scientific curiosity and profound pacifism of the two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the art and activism of Lorraine Hansberry. All of us, nihilists included, believe something—many things, in fact, about ourselves, the cosmos, and one another. In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the October 29, 2018, issue, with the headline “Without a Prayer.”
Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her first book, “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee,” will be published in 2019.
While it may seem that heaps of plastic from meal kit delivery services like Blue Apron make them less environmentally friendly than traditional grocery shopping, a new study says the kits actually produce less food waste. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Via NPR
The study is weak on enough fronts that the headline is misleading. I don’t like this article.
First, the NPR sponsor tie-in is a factor. Sorry. It just is.
Secondly, the article author, and one particular researcher, gloss over any meaningful consumer behavior towards freezing. They simply dismiss it as a non factor due to the inevitability of discarded freezer burnt frozen food.
Wrong. That is only true if people don’t ever eat it. If you actually wrap food well, and actually thaw it properly, and actually eat it in the not too distant future, freezing is perfectly fine, and an excellent way to manage eating/cooking/conservation habits.
If people don’t know how to freeze food properly, that’s an education problem that can be overcome with more guidance. Freezer burn and food waste is a weak, unsubstantiated reason to justify and “sell” the meal kit concept. Especially if it’s put forth by vested interests in the business of selling it, or, by funded researchers.
Not to mention, .the excessive cost of figuring pre-made meal kits into your budget. Not to mention the industrial energy used in mass production lines to being said meal kits to you by mail, delivery, or pick up somewhere.
Carbon Footprints and energy usage contributing to global warming, or just the study of overall energy usage is a work intensive and complicated matter to calculate fairly, That is why there is often only partial studies done with disclaimers all over the place, that represent a vested interest somewhere along the line.
At least NPR mentions the sponsorship connection in the article. I should’ve stopped reading right there.