Krista’s going to hate me for this, but the whole second half of the play I couldn’t stop thinking about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. I did consult our mutual friend Lily, my rare equal in knowledge of Star Trek and also in attendance, and she concurred that I wasn’t totally off-base. The whole intersection is no mere matter of trekkie trivia; it goes straight to the center of the intersection of freedom and suffering and faith and all that.

The relevant character in Phantom Band is Camille, the mysterious blonde from England, with the Queen’s accent, who takes people to the forest and plays them her beautiful siren song while they shout out all the things they don’t want to hear, Primal Scream-style:?the junk their parents and the mean football players are always saying to make them feel crappy. Afterward, they feel much better, but they’re also zombie-like; they don’t really hear much of anything and just keep saying, “What?” They’re free. Or are they?

Star Trek V is widely considered the worst of the original-cast Star Trek movies, not least because it was directed by William Shatner himself. Over the years, though, as I’ve dutifully watched it many, many times, I’ve come to like it more and more. Maybe that’s because it’s the “religion” one; the climax of the movie is going to the center of the galaxy to visit “God.” Or maybe because it includes the singing of my favorite song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are eating bourbon and beans over a campfire in Yellowstone.

But none of that’s important here, really. The relevant character in Star Trek V is Sybok, Spock’s long-lost brother. Rather than being a typical emotion-repressing Vulcan, Sybok left his homeworld, embraced his emotions, and became a cult leader. The way he gets cultists is much what Camille does in the woods: he makes people face their pain. Once they do, with his special formula, they become brainwashed and follow his orders. Here’s Sybok showing off his trick on Dr. McCoy:

This is, of course, a familiar feature of religious experience. Buddhism begins with the recognition of suffering in the world and shows it to be illusion. Christianity begins with the repentance of sin and ends with an executed savior. Scientology starts by telling you you’re stressed and ends with—TBA. Psychoanalysis begins on the couch and never ends. Simply confronting these pains at least somewhat more directly than we do in normal, repressive life is so shocking and cleansing that it can change the course of a person’s life for good. It can deliver pure, unshakeable beliefs about how the world works. The price of deliverance is conviction. It’s a simple, but really quite weird fact about human nature, and both Star Trek V and Phantom Band remind us of this.

Is facing your pain and getting it zapped away really such a great thing? I suppose it might be. But with Sybok’s zombies in Star Trek V we’re meant to see something familiar—in the kind of heavy-handed allegory so typical of the franchise, only sharpened by Shatner’s signature lack of subtlety. Maybe you’re meant to see the born-again relative who has figured everything out and wants you to figure it out exactly the same way. Or the suicide cults that folks were all so afraid their kids would join in the ’70s. Or maybe it’s something in yourself, I don’t know. But you know what I mean.

At the end of Phantom Band, the kids realize that they’d rather face the hard stuff in real life than keep being zombies. So they zap out of the trance by shouting?to themselves all the painful stuff they’d been la-la-ing out with Camille’s angelic music.

In another striking parallel, that’s almost exactly what Captain Kirk lands on in Star Trek V, with the line from the movie that fans end up quoting to each other probably more than any other: “I need my pain!” It comes a bit later in the same scene we saw earlier.

Dammit, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. [If] we lose them we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away, I need my pain!

That’s good stuff, isn’t it? Those lines have nourished me a lot over the years. There’s a freedom of its own sort in giving up the hope of pain disappearing like zap. It’s inescapably us. And maybe your pain can drive you, too, to being a daring, reckless, but always successful and heroic starship captain like Captain Shatn—I mean Kirk.

I am in no position to end with prognostication, to predict how all this business will turn out, or to recommend particular policy directives and consumer rules-of-thumb. The companies will have their way, of course; as the filmmaker Chris Marker once put it, I bow to the economic miracle. But I can end with a vision, and it can point to a posture.

Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below—the Library of Alexandria under Caesar’s assault all over again. Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered. They are all irreplaceable; their loss is exactly incalculable. They are now good only to fuel the fire. As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves. Everything is lost with them. Right?

Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy—a divine comedy—in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress.

Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to comment and encourage. Fleshing this piece out, in particular, and putting it before readers means a lot to me.

• $1 for a secret
• $1 for 2 minutes of conversation
• Recession special: $6 for a walk around the park holding hands

Most people, on the usual New York stimulus overload, didn’t even look up. A few pointed and laughed and kept walking. But after three hours or so, we had given away all of the $100, mostly $1 at a time, of our grant from some tiny entity with “creative philanthropy” in its name. Some recipients clearly did it for the cash but almost all, in the end, for the pleasure of conversation. Nearly every secret was about sex, including two who each slept with his wife’s relative. The single largest payout was for a fellow who took me on an hour-long walk around midtown to talk about theology. At the end he gave me a pamphlet and a handmade card that says “peace” from left to right and ???? (shalom) from right to left. At the very end, one woman, a lawyer in the financial sector hit by the meltdown, asked us if we were hiring.

Back in 2005, I started The Row Boat as an effort to start conversations among strangers. The idea was for it to be more of a community blog, a place where people could get to know each other and share ideas. In the end, when I was unable to generate a critical mass of contributors, it became a more bloggy personal soapbox. But there is still so much appeal to me in that dream of getting people talking, of creating a fluid medium. Doing it on the internet is one thing, but standing on a busy street corner on a freezing day in January is quite another. Afterward, sipping hot drinks in a cafe, surrounded by our piles of gear and telling stories from our day, the three of us couldn’t stop laughing.

UPDATE (1/19/08): Ben Brown has edited the film into a fantastic little clip that needs to get some love on YouTube. Enjoy!

I am a list-maker—about certain things. And I’ve learned a lot about friends by observing the things that they make lists of which I don’t. In my favorite film (after Star Treks I-VI, VII), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, I discovered that lists can be an art form, as they were in eleventh-century Japan:

Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor’s court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon [Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting for the queen] had a passion for lists: the list of “elegant things,” “distressing things,” or even of “things not worth doing.” One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of “things that quicken the heart.”

In the minds of computers, lists take on a more subtle beauty, a more mechanical one. The power of a computer lies partly in its incredible quickness in making and managing lists of data.

I’d like to try a new kind of post at The Row Boat, a post of lists. This is the first of what may be many. They’ll be brainstorming sessions put onto the wondrous internet in order to invite contributions from friends and passers-by. To inaugurate it, we’ll start with a list of lists—more or less important lists that come to mind as indicators of all the different forms and all the different significances that a list can take. Please, for now and forever, offer your contributions in the comments or (if in secret) by email!

• The six days of creation in Genesis
• The HTML elements <ul> and <ol>, of which so many parts of websites are structured
• Susan Sontag’s early journals
• The programming language Scheme, or its parent LISP (List Processing Language)
• The great Scholastic lists: deadly sins, theological virtues, sacraments, etc.
• Some of the earliest writing on Sumerian tablets were lists of goods
• For that matter, the Code of Hammurabi
• The list of Eugene McCarthy
• The Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“List of Prohibited Books”)
• Luther’s 95 Theses
• Shopping lists, to do lists
• The round robin, a list without a top
• Top ___ lists
• Honor roll
• “Did you make the list?”
• Endangered species list
• The lists of Sei Shonagon
• Phonebook
• The Open Directory Project
• Santa’s list
• The Fortune 500
• Angie’s List, Craigslist
• Blacklist
• Most wanted list
• This list (to keep things nice and recursive)

This, incidentally, comes about around the same time that The Immanent Frame has come out with its own similar feature, called here & there. I’ll be a contributor to that too. Follow here & there, follow Text Ticker, and you’ll never be bored on the internet again.

If that is so, I’d have to pin The Row Boat down as a skeptic.

But what does that mean? The term first became associated with the followers of Pyrrho of Elis, a traveling sage who spent his time refuting the certainty of whatever claims people tried to make about the world. Several hundred years later, his legacy was developed and preached by the Roman physician Sextus Empiricus in books with titles like Against the Professors, Against the Mathematicians, Against the Musicians, and so on. Despite being such a Negative Nelly, Sextus’s writings have a certain appeal. Like Pyrrho, he hedged most of his doubts on the recognition that people in different parts of the world from different cultures have different convictions about how the world works. How seriously, therefore, can we take our own convictions? And he carefully marked the limits of being skeptical. Just because you call into question the custom of eating three meals a day doesn’t mean you stop eating entirely and starve to death. You just don’t get so uppity next time you encounter a village that insists on having four.

European skepticism after the rise of Christianity was never quite the same. Being a skeptic could get a person in real trouble. The effort to throw off all that irrational dogmatism made it a rather deranged thing, prone to extremes. Descartes got it to a start, humbly suggesting that he could think himself to the point of making no assumptions except the fact of his own thinking. Hume came along , shunning miracles and special revelations. In the modern period their ideas have lead into a series of spin-offs in popular culture, all also under the banner of skepticism, though often forgetting the Classical sources. There is, for instance, the “stoner epistemology” that refuses to believe in the existence of the outside world and stays up all night arguing about it—this has become a favorite of Anglophone analytic philosophers before and after Wittgenstein. Or the Skeptical Enquirer folks who make it their mission to disavow others of their interesting beliefs about UFOs and paranormal powers in the name of scientific triumphalism. Then, at its opposite, is the brand of religiously-motivated skepticism of science that Phillip E. Johnson has so masterfully built into the intelligent design movement—all knowledge is so doubtful, why not give up trying and become a Christian? There are enough versions out there that a quick Google search comes up with a variety of varieties of skepticism.

In claiming a brand of skepticism for The Row Boat, however, I want to entertain my own taxonomy. By “my own,” rather, I mean to borrow a Heideggerian distinction: the worldless subject (which Heidegger associated with Descartes) and being-in-the-world (the Dasein of Being and Time). Non-Heideggerians, don’t get scared away—let me explain. I propose that there are two kinds of skepticism:

The first is a lonely skepticism. It treats the lone cowboy of a person, unsure about whether to trust the dusty world about him. Not even his horse. He points his gun at everything, shooting first and asking later. The truth of mirage-like appearances may be not what it seems. He is driven to search out the realities that lurk beneath, yet feels uncertain that his mind is capable of comprehending them. While skeptical of the world outside, he believes he can depend on himself—his instincts with a six-shooter and his convictions. This is the form of most scientific skepticism, as well as its anti-scientific outgrowths like intelligent design. It is analytic philosophy generally, with the possible exception of Wittgenstein, if only because of his ambiguity.

The second is busy skepticism—or cosmopolitan. Its mascot is a full-time city socialite, so immersed in clever conversation that she doesn’t think to question the reality or unreality of her world. She is thoroughly embedded in a social, artificial world, and can make no pretension of existing apart from it. In the course of her experience, she encounters people of all different sorts at fancy benefits and listens to their stories. As she takes a break from it all in the opera house bathroom, staring into a mirror, her existential crisis is not one of questioning the existence of the without, but of the within. Surrounded by the appearances of others, she recognizes herself as only appearance too. She is her world, bewildering as it is, and knows nothing apart from it. Rather than pretending otherwise, she throws herself into its contradictions. Her skepticism is of her own capacity to act authentically, though the actions of others are fascinating.

For better or worse, The Row Boat is more socialite than cowboy. As such, the goal is an empathetic posture that wants to grasp the perspectives of others because one’s own life depends on it. For that reason, her skepticism is worth struggling for. It is political. (See the treatment of political empathy in “Grounding Liberalism in Something.”) Rather than Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, who made it their business to dissect the fallacies of others, The Row Boat’s socialite prefers to enjoy listening. The fallacies aren’t what’s important (though she assumes they’re everywhere); curious stories are.

But she’d love to have a fling with a cowboy.

On this domain, The Row Boat can come into itself, it can self-actualize. No longer one among several hobby projects, it can claim to be decidedly public, leaving something private behind to wander and wonder, probably to fester.

Everything in the systemic public must serve a function, so I have also begun developing a “Readings” section (for now, it is in the sidebar at left) where I will keep track of worthwhile bits and pieces I come across that may do some good for others. In the future, that section may develop, as well all do in this ever-changing cosmos, into something else.

Take this very blog, for instance. The redesign last week was, in some respects, a departure from what The Row Boat has always been about. It (secretly) shares a motto with Small’s Clone Press, the wonderful phrase of Jorge Luis Borges: “I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.” Yet the purpose of the redesign was, in many respects, an effort to open The Row Boat to a world beyond, equipping it with the latest blog software rather than the homespun Little Logger program that I wrote myself and that worked perfectly well for me and those friends of mine who care to read. In New York, the instinct has been so much to hand out business cards, to self-promote, that I began turning The Row Boat into a business card without even knowing it. I even caught myself (and only half stopped myself) trying to use the site to boost the Google PageRank of my name, Nathan Schneider. Red-handed if I ever saw it!

In a lecture at UCSB last year (moderated by my graduate advisor, Ann Taves), Rabbi Michael Lerner asserted that American culture is permeated by the religion of capitalism, which other religions like Christianity and Judaism tend to be subservient to. They mold their anthropologies to frame capitalism as the only realistic practice. And this religion, in turn, molds us. According to Lerner, it makes it harder for us to love and care for each other by insisting always on fame, wealth, self-interest, and the bottom line. Now we could go on forever about whether capitalism could be called a religion, but it seems a much more straightforward claim to say that working in certain ways does adjust our values and habits. One need not even point the finger at capitalism as such, for there are all kinds of capitalisms. I might even call it, simply, the New York state of mind.

These things, however, are for the beholder. Anyone who has spent time in New York knows that what it is most of all is multiplicity; it is many things. The nicest people in the world, who will go forever out of their way to make sure you get on the right subway line, and the meanest. What this place is full of is choices—even, in Lerner’s terms, religions—to choose from. The gospel of wealth or the gospel of poverty. The gospel of non-profit or the gospel of for-profit (both come in all kinds, in turn). The gospel of Brooklyn or the gospel of Queens, even.

Remembering those words from Borges reminded me that there are different ways to go. We are not creatures of the plainest rational choice theory, simply maximizing money and reputation wherever possible. At worst, we participate in much broader kinds of economies, and recognize a whole range of capital. In some economies, kindness, charity, creativity, courage, reflection, and so forth are ends in themselves.

While I used to be content writing for friends and family alone (possibly more out of necessity than choice), I now economize and write almost exclusively when there is money or reputation to be gained in it. The redesign notwithstanding, though, The Row Boat is still an exception to this. I still write here with little expectation of readers, with only the desire to write, my little act of memory, my substitute for immortality in the very doing of it. I’ve tried Google ads, I’ve tried sharing links, I’ve tried everything you’re supposed to do to get traffic on the web, but still no money or reputation has come out of The Row Boat. Hardly anyone reads it. Maybe that is its greatest gift.

Until now, The Row Boat was one of the few blogs out there not running on one of the major software platforms. Little Logger is a blogging program I built in early 2005, using Perl, static files, and a lot of workarounds. It has served very well since then. But in recent months, it has become clear to me that a change needed to happen. In particular, working with WordPress at The Immanent Frame has shown me what a powerful platform it can be.

The conversion process has reminded me why I stopped being a computer science major in college and switched to religion. I have been quite unable to think about anything else ever since I’ve started, and now I am worried about whether I will fall asleep tonight. This was a regular phenomenon in my computer science days—thrilling, but also perfectly exhausting. It makes me long to be thinking speculatively again, which hopefully can begin again tomorrow. The topic, presently, is Anselm.