Hackers are fascinating—the good ones, the bad ones, the ones in between. From corporate elites like Bill Gates to fugitives like Edward Snowden, we look to hackers to provide for us, to excite us, to liberate us. But why?

This is the question that took hold of me in the midst of my summer’s journey with the Wisdom Hackers—a group of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and activists exploring elemental questions together. I traveled to Paris, Berlin, southern Italy, to Ecuador, and Silicon Valley, and wound up at a hacker congress in New York. This week, my chapter appears as part of our serial digital book. For just a few bucks, you can read my essay in your browser or in a dedicated app, along with Anna Stothard in defense of hoarding objects, Brett Scott on the creepy ecology of smart cities, Tom Kenning on festival temporality, Lee-Sean Huang on the thinking body, Alnoor Ladha on mystic anarchism, and our instigator Alexa Clay on being the Amish Futurist. And more.

Read a short teaser of my 7,000-word chapter, just published in Vice—”Our Generation of Hackers.” But don’t let that keep you long from subscribing to the book today. Spread the word about it if you can, too.

I’ll also be discussing my chapter on Twitter this Thursday morning at 8:30 am EST / 13:30 GMT (the Europeans set the time!). Join us on the hashtag #wisdomhackers.

Other odds and ends

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, I profiled Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian of struggles for shorter working hours and the dream of leisure. His latest book, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, is a must-read (and would make a lovely holiday gift).

As part of ongoing reporting on efforts to build a more cooperative, just economy, I wrote in Al Jazeera America about a historic conference on the commons, and published columns in the Catholic weekly America on the commons and cooperatives—oh, and a guide to the recent election with Simone Weil.

My books on God and Occupy are also no less available, either directly from University of California Press (God here, Occupy here) using the special discount code 13M4225, or wherever else books are sold.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

Here’s philosopher Mark Johnston to the rescue, with Saving God: Religion After Idolatry, a book published last year by Princeton University Press. It has met a warm, unusually wide reception; in The New Yorker James Wood called it “the non-fiction book I most enjoyed this year,” and it’s slated to wrangle an award at the American Academy of Religion meeting this November. In the elegant, one-page preface, Johnston spells out what we have to hope for, which tantalizingly coincides with what so many of us need:

One kind of ideal reader would be an intelligent young person who is religious, but feels that his or her genuine religious impulses are being strangled by what he or she is being asked to believe, on less than convincing authority, about the nature of reality.

What follows, true to his promise, speaks to the best features of the late-adolescent imagination, the mind of that crucial time when many people end up forming their lifelong religious commitments, hardly ever with the care and prudence such commitments might seem to call for. Somewhere between an academic monograph and a manifesto, Saving God alternates from epic, not-quite-substantiated pronouncements to obsessively-precise tangents. Either it’ll change your life or (to use Johnston’s words, not mine) waste your time.

The gist is this: most of what goes by the name of religion is really idolatry—especially the appeal to supernaturalism. The only kind of God that satisfies the ancient claim of being the “Highest One” is a God of this world, offering no selfish fantasy of paradise in the next. This God is perfectly in tune with the immanent, Carl Sagan-ite account of science, yet one can also find information about Him in scriptures and religious traditions, selectively read. It’s a God that calls to mind, for instance, Spinoza’s “God or Nature”; J. N. Findlay’s 1948 paper claiming that the object of the ontological argument for God’s existence must be something higher than the God of religion; and sociologist Philip Rieff’s critique of the gods we invent to serve our own desires—religious, clinical, and otherwise. The second half of Saving God features a series of technical moves that, as best I can gather, is an attempt to squeeze some kind of Heideggerian phenomenology into the back door of analytic philosophy, which in turn makes room for introducing a close-to Hegelian view of God as Being’s self-disclosure to beings in history—yada, yada, yada.

All this is to say (and here I am imitating Johnston’s alternating rhetoric referred to above) that God is here and now, not beyond. Inscribed in all the fluff and error of religion—even in the story of the Christian Passion—there are basic truths about the universe and the Mind that pervades it which philosophy, fortunately, has the means to extract.

I noted recently the use of this strategy of “truth-ing mythology” by Aristotle in the Metaphyiscs, the use of popular religious tradition as a bearer of hidden truth. Aristotle takes the belief that the planets and stars represent the eternal gods of myth to be the relic of a truer, ancient knowledge that the stars are actually eternal godlike orbs—not capricious Zeus and Hera, but geometric and impersonal. It’s a plausible conclusion for the fourth century BCE, though one rendered utterly false by modern astronomy; the stars are old, we now know, but they’re not eternal. Close, Aristotle, but no cigar.

It raises a troubling question for any such attempt: how can we be sure where mythology ends and true philosophy begins?

I’d like to carry this point forward with Johnston’s book further than I did before (distracted as I was by a reverie on the mythology of war). This same move of Aristotle’s is deeply-seated in the history and habits of how liberal-minded scholars study and think about religion today; Saving God is only the latest example. I previously mentioned the Eranos set: Eliade, Jung, and Campbell. But then there’s also Thomas Jefferson clipping away at his Bible, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Paul Tillich’s God as Ultimate Concern. Each took religious tradition as a thing which now needs to be translated and, most of all, extracted from. Each, in retrospect, can look rather silly and shortsighted—if not quite with the flat wrongness of Aristotle’s astronomy, at least as a mythology in its own right. If Jesus were just Jefferson’s moral teacher, everything else he said would’ve made him a lunatic. Feuerbach’s ideas took hold nowhere more than in the doctrines of Marxism. And Tillich’s eloquence aggravated and empowered the populist anti-modernists he meant to supplant.

One can see the appeal of going with Aristotle, with Johnston, with a reinterpretation by philosophy. I’ve done so myself sometimes. It offers both freedom of mind and the resources of tradition. It holds out the possibility of a necessary about-face, a brilliant and startling move that can change everything, saving God enough that God might be able to save us. But it’s not as easy as it looks. A few generations can pass and you’ll find yourself in error like Aristotle, or spouting mythology in your own right like Jung. Plus, philosophy is nearly always the occupation of but a few, who run the risk of losing track of what religion really is and means for most people in the rest of society.

If one is to take these risks, though, it’s hard to find an attempt that better satisfies the pressing need to reconcile science, human responsibility, and our debt to religious heritage than the brand of transcendence Johnston outlines here: “this world properly received.”

My passage concludes a particularly confounding chapter in the book—chapter 8—where he goes back and forth between whether there is one mover or many, a process which requires some weird resorting to prime numbers and the momentary conclusion that there are either 47 or 55 movers, only then to determine that there can be only one. Irrespective of that, however, he is quite satisfied to accept that the stars which these movers move are themselves eternal, and indeed are actually eternal gods. It’s obvious to his astronomy and his reason. And that’s where we begin:

We should also consider tradition. From old—and indeed extremely ancient—times there has been handed down to our later age intimations of a mythical character to the effect that the stars are gods and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The further details were subsequently added in the manner of myth. Their purpose was the persuasion of the masses and general legislative and political expediency. For instance, the myths tell us that these gods are anthropomorphic or resemble some of the other animals and give us other, comparable extrapolations of the basic picture. If, then, we discard these accretions and consider the central feature, that they held the primary substances to be gods, we might well believe the claim to have been directly inspired. We might also conclude that, while it is highly probable that all possible arts and doctrines have been many times discovered and lost, these ancient cosmologies have been preserved, like holy relics, right up to the present day. It is these, and these alone, that we can know clearly of the ancestral—indeed primordial—beliefs. (Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred; Penguin, 1998.)

Why does this strike me so eerily? However much scholars today would like to forget it, the modern study of religion was founded on just this impulse. It was the hope of figures like Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell to take the myths and ritual of the “primitive” imagination and, by comparing and contrasting, synthesize for ourselves the truth buried under all the fluff, the essential archetypes that are real beneath, as Aristotle puts it, the “extrapolations” and “accretions.” There’s a noble ambition in such historical phenomenology, even though, as in the case of Aristotle’s eternal stars, it can be as mistaken as the mythologies themselves: to rescue the absurdities of one’s ancestors from themselves and find in them the truth that couldn’t be adequately appreciated earlier. Well, says Aristotle, now we can. This is what gods actually are and always have been: stars. Those wild mythologies are messengers, carrier pigeons whose messages now we can finally open. We need not declare war against our traditions, though they be false, for we can distill the truths hidden in them.

Speaking of war—as Alexander the Great traipsed across the Mediterranean and the steppes and the deserts building his great empire, he kept two things under his pillow: a dagger, and a copy of the Iliad that his teacher Aristotle had given him. Now Alexander wasn’t such a great student; born conquerors like him know early on that they won’t have much need for syllogisms. Gathering as much, the teacher didn’t bother giving his student any of his subtle philosophy, like the Ethics or the Organon, for the road. He gave him a good story. A mythology, about battle and glory and love and gods, and Alexander loved it enough to take it along.

Alexander conquered everything he saw, but of course after his death at age 32, the empire he built crumbled in the rivalries of his generals. It was fleeting, though its legacy was not. Those conquests spread Greek culture around the known world. As Alexander was clinging to his knife and his war stories, he was making way for scholars from Egypt to Persia to study his teacher’s delicate arguments, though they hadn’t stuck with Alexander himself. He, whether he knew it or not, with mythology under his pillow, was the carrier pigeon.

If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a Christian mob marks more or less the end of Greek philosophy and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Now, for those of you who don’t know her, there’s a blockbuster historical epic movie about Hypatia (though it has scored only limited distribution in the U.S.). And, for those of you who don’t trust blockbuster historical epic movies, I’ve got a review of it on Religion Dispatches today:

Hearing about Agora’s success in Spain last year—the highest-grossing film of the year, sweeping up awards—couldn’t help but bring to my mind the empty insides of so many of that country’s churches, still charred after the various anti-clerical mobs of the last few centuries. I wasn’t the only one to make that association. With predictable ressentiment, an open letter came to Amenábar from the Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory, a Catholic watchdog in Spain, warning him: “Your film is going to awaken hatred against Christians in today’s society.”

American “Catholic evangelist” Fr. Robert Barron adds in his Catholic New World review, “I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenábar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians.” One can only hope that it’s not a good enough movie to drive people to the streets.

In an interview with the New York Times, though, Amenábar turned the tables on his pious critics. “Fundamentally, this is a very Christian film about the life of a martyr,” he explained. “Jesus would not have approved of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no good Christian should feel offended by this film.” In this respect, at least, his sentiments have historical basis.

Keep reading to find out why.

Trolling around on the Internet today, I found this Canadian Masonic website which denies the conventional wisdom that the pyramid on the back of an American dollar bill is truly Masonic. Concerned that everything I know might start crumbling, I shot an email to Samuel Biagetti, who joined me in seeing Angels & Demons last week. He studies Freemasonry in the history department at Columbia University which makes him, he says, “a real real history grad student and a fake real symbologist.” If his answer isn’t symbology, I’m George Washington.

Masons today will sometimes deny the Masonic nature of the seal reverse because of the claim’s conspiratorial overtones.? This is part of a genre of literature downplaying Masonic power and debunking conspiratorial myths, which has been common particularly since the anti-masonic movement.

The specific argument here has several flaws, and in my opinion is totally incorrect and disingenuous.? First, it is true that the “Eye of Providence” was a common element in Renaissance and Enlightenment art, often seen looming over a religious scene and set within a triangle.

However, the reverse seal does not show an Eye of Providence over a Christian mythological scene of animals or angels, but rather atop an architectural form, and an Egyptian one at that.? Most importantly, the architectural form is unfinished, with a gap in the pyramid preventing the base from reaching the Eye that would complete it.? The “all-seeing eye” looming over an unfinished temple or tower is a typical theme of Masonic iconography in the eighteenth century (an American example can be seen in Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 146), and the Eye of Providence is in fact very common in all Masonic iconography (an example in Ibid., 88).? It echoes the Masons’ founding myths surrounding both the Tower of Babel and Hiram Abif, the architect whose murder prevented Solomon’s Temple from being completed according to the divine plan.? The simple pyramidal form and the slogan on the reverse seal allow its message to be read quite easily: the earthly order must be completed and perfected in order to reach the divine.? Many of the elements for the reverse seal was of course available to anybody in the Enlightenment, but its overall form is clearly Masonic influenced.

Secondly, the argument dissociates the process whereby the seal was created from Masonry by labelling many people willy-nilly as “non-Masons.”? It may be true that Franklin is the only absolute, undeniable, and overt Mason on the committee, but that does not mean that the other men were not Masons. Masonry was hugely popular in the American literate gentry; there are contemporary references to Jefferson being a Mason, and it is quite possible that he was; and many other men of the eighteenth century were discrete about their Masonic activity, and have only been identified as Masons long after their deaths.? Probabilistically speaking, it is almost impossible that Franklin was the only Mason involved in the development of the seal.? The Masonic membership of Francis Hopkinson, designer on the second committee who proposed the unfinished pyramid, is uncertain, but he was the son of Thomas Hopkinson, a Masonic grand master and close associate of Franklin. In my opinion, based on the Masonic themes of the seal, I would say res ipsa loquitur-the thing speaks for itself; we may not know exactly how or through whom Masonic ideas gave shape to the seal reverse, but they clearly did.

The moral of the story: symbology is out there after all. It is just hidden in more useful disciplines like history, art history, philosophy, religious studies, and anthropology. I would suspect that Joseph Campbell-style pop scholarship (mainly nonsense, though it’s hard not to love) is to blame for Dan Brown’s impression that Harvard is crawling with people studying symbols for their own sake. Historical symbols are worth studying not because they are ladders to ultimate truth or because they’ll help you stop clerical terrorists from blowing up the Vatican. Interpreting them is simply a part of the far more interesting, sensible, and diverse questions with which scholars concern themselves. But it’s still great fun.

Anyway, one passage almost drew a tear out of my eye in the bookstore. It’s from the very end of Twain’s “Eve’s Diary,” a collection of journal entries penned by the mother of us all. I remembered this bit well from the claymation flick. Sure it’s sappy, but keep in mind that it comes after pages and pages of irreverent humor directed at religious absurdities:

FORTY YEARS LATER

It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from this life together—a longing which shall never perish from the earth, but shall have place in the heard of every wife that loves, until the end of time; and it shall be called by name.

But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it shall be I; for he is strong, I am weak, I am not so necessary to him as he is to me—life without him would not be life; how could I endure it? This prayer is also immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last wife I shall be repeated.

AT EVE’S GRAVE

Adam: Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.

I’ve been thinking of doing an essay comparing this collection of Twain on the Bible to more recent biblical humor, including A.J. Jacobs’s Year of Living Biblically and David Plotz’s Good Book. Any interest in that?

The poet Anthony Towne was, if you didn’t know, the extraordinary partner of the extraordinary theologian William Stringfellow (see my essay about Stringfellow at Religion Dispatches). Stringfellow memorialized Towne in A Simplicity of Faith, a work of theology-in-mourning. Together, they followed the circus, worked for the poor in Harlem, abhorred the idolatries of civilization, and settled in Block Island, Rhode Island, a place which, in this book, God reveals to have been the true location of Eden.

Excerpts came during a period when sociologists were feeling sure that secularization was inevitable. The cover of Time magazine on April 8, 1966 read, “Is God Dead?” Thinkers—such as Harvey Cox, Thomas Altizer, and Gabriel Vahanian—had begun developing theologies that would be ready for the death of God. Towne casts Altizer as the dying deity’s chief surgeon.

We follow God, along with His hypostatic pals J.C. and H.G., from the creation of the universe out of boredom, through some six thousand years of dinner parties, to His eventual (and, of course, eternal) death into the boredom from which He came.

I am bored with it all.

Here I sit. I am omniscient. I am omnipotent. I am omnipresent.
…
If only I had something to do. Something creative!

I am omnibored.

God has a beard and a bald head. He doesn’t have a very high opinion of women, whose very creation He assented to only reluctantly. Though He prefers “Jehovah” to “Yahweh,” “God” is by far to be preferred. As one might expect, God’s diaries also provide the answers some of the vexing theological problems that people wrestle over.

Celibacy?

The answer emphatically: No!

The same goes for birth control.

The same goes for abortions.

I want more life.

Give me more life.

Death is the denial of life.

There is an account of an all-night debate over just-war theory (to which God, a thoroughgoing pacifist, is opposed) with King David, Sigmund Freud, Paul, St. Augustine, Montezuma, A.J. Muste, and others.

He keeps getting annoyed—always with a piercing bon mot—at His children.

Billy Graham has halitosis of the soul.

In something close to a nutshell, Towne captures the distinctive theology that he and Stringfellow lived out. All the seriousness with which the world takes itself is, taken seriously, a sham. Life should be enjoyed. Poetry should rhyme. And churches, for all their delights, make a pretty shoddy tribute to the Creator.

To Towne’s vision from on high, earthly eyes look mighty foolish. The principalities and powers that we live and die by don’t make the least bit of sense. If God hadn’t been God, says God, he would have become a poet. Only poetry (and perhaps humor) can capture the ultimate failures of language and labels. Towne and Stringfellow had no patience for labels—most glaringly that of homosexual, which they lived out publicly yet never discussed in words except obliquely. Their literature, above all, was devoted to the task of living amidst human insanity, “living humanly in the Fall.” Take this passage from Excerpts on Harlem’s great preacher-politician—an attempt to be human in a racist society:

Poor Adam Clayton Powell, a fine and funny fellow! He has made himself a dark example of not having your pie and not eating it either.

Reverend Powell fancied he could be a Negro and an American. He ends up neither. I will welcome him here because at least he had the sense to know that he had to be either both to neither, not one or the other. He ends up neither. Heaven is filled with neithers and Hell is glutted with one or the others.

Thus says the LORD.

A conversation about it with Jeff Sharlet today made me think I should explain the role of theological imagery in my little songs a bit—not that they should be taken too, too seriously. Obviously, these days, Christian music is in a pretty terrible rut. The task, as I see it, is to combine heartfelt piety with honest uncertainty. “God Saved the World” begins with the words, “Some say…” in order to cast the only certainty about theology into sociology. That doesn’t mean they’re any less real or true, and I sing them with conviction. And then the theology is practicable. After the instrumental interlude, verses about Bible stories give way to stories about worldly things, though clothed in the same tropes of creation and salvation. I am grateful for those tropes because they give me the language to speak of two aspects of worldly life: love is the first, then the act of growing up into oneself.

I don’t know what to say about the cows. They happened to be who I encountered on the road to visit my friend Brother Benedict.

And sorry about the lousy quality. I filmed it on my tiny digital photo camera.

We’d like to do a lot more audio and video over at KtB, so if you’ve got any good stuff somehow related to religion lying around, send it along to us. Writing, of course, is always welcome too!

At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw a great burst of scholarship on images like these: the Great Mothers, the goddesses of wisdom and guile, the powerful matriarchs. These, the story goes, fell victim to the patriarchy of monotheistic religion (particularly Nicene Christianity) and were lost to the West, the lands of chivalrous knights, repressed popes, and femininity enslaved.

Through these figures, feminism found a prehistory. Its radical critique became more conservative than thou, a calling-back to those enigmatic epochs from which the stone and clay fragments came. The future no longer needed to be conjured out of thin air, for now feminism had a past to ground its future.

But who are these women? Do we know them, really? Are the psychohistorians correct? Scholarly whims can always change their tune—and in this case, often they did. Upon such rocks the future might be betrayed as well as built. Wouldn’t it be safer to make our revolutions ex nihilo, out of certainties in our hearts, rather than the vagaries of artifacts?

Eve ate of the apple and shared it with Adam, the apple that gave them knowledge of good and evil. Before you ask, Why Eve? (that important feminist question) ask, Why the apple? An apple isn’t some ancient flash drive upon which data might be stored. It contains no knowledge. Its contents download to the digestive system and only reach the brain when thoroughly rendered. Why, again, like the figurines, the object? Why are we so unable to conceive of new futures without entrusting ourselves to objects?

The objects, after all, have a life of their own.