Notebooks

Ross Douthat’s ‘Believe’: reviewing the review

Published at The Orthosphere on 16th of May, 2026.

A friend sent me the text of Robert P. Baird’s hostile review, in the New York Review of Books, of Ross Douthat’s book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Lest anyone mistake the intent, the article is titled God of the Gaps. I responded as (slightly edited) follows. Quoted blocks are from the review, except where otherwise indicated.

I was surprised at the venom in Baird’s dismissive introduction of Douthat, a venom drawn down by Douthat’s conservatism. What place such criticism has in a review of this particular book escapes me. Maybe it is just an indication of the vindictiveness of the political divide in the USA. Orthodox (lower case) Christians are, by definition, conservative, and I imagine that such considerations will tend to dispose NYRB readers against the book.

What is it like to be…?

What is it like to be a human being?

Published at The Orthosphere on 10th of June, 2025. This version has slight corrections.

Writing a half-century ago, Thomas Nagel, in his essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat?, sent a wake-up call to purveyors of “[t]he recent wave of reductionist euphoria” who claimed to have explained phenomenal consciousness in materialist terms.

…we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless…no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it.

He then reveals the purpose of his curious title.

[F]undamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.

This poses a severe problem for materialist analysis of consciousness.

It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. Without some idea, therefore of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of a physicalist theory.

On the Peculiar Difficulty of the Ascension

First published at The Orthosphere on 23rd August 2022, and not republished here by an oversight.

I had a lot of trouble with the Ascension. Every time I recite the Rosary, to take the most frequent example, I start with a declaration of belief—The Apostles’ Creed.

In saying the Creed, I assert a series of beliefs that are jarring to modern sensibilities, but not, for the most part, to me. I believe in God, and in his only-begotten Son. I believe in his conception, by divine intervention, in the womb of the Virgin. I believe that, his body in the tomb, Christ descended into Hell. There is much here to ponder, but it is all comfortably within the assent of faith.

Secret Women’s Business

First published in Quadrant as Secret Western Women’s Business on 29/08/2024 (now behind a paywall.) The article does not include the Victorian education graphs, but does include many mother and child art works.

Back in March, Janet Albrechtsen wrote a subversive article in The Australian, as is her wont. It was given the title Secret Truths of a Stay-Home Mother, and was accompanied by some delightful snapshots of Ms Albrechtsen with her three children. Her dander had been elevated, she explained, because…

…prominent [company] director Diane Smith-Gander claimed women were making a “false” choice to stay home to care for kids…being forced to make this “false choice” by taking on lower-paid work in order to care for children. She bemoaned a society that perpetuated a “gender stereotype that Dad goes out to work and Mum stays home with the kids”.

She recalled a conversation from her late 20s with a group of her peers by a playground at a Sydney beach who privately shared how much they loved staying home to care for their young children, and joked, sort of, that such a confession could not be made publicly.

We knew better than to rave in public about loving being stay-at-home mums – for two reasons. Hanging about playgrounds, wiping little noses and hands and bums wasn’t what we were meant to be doing after graduating from university with fine degrees, suiting up and working hard for big flash law practices and other professional firms. The other reason was we didn’t want our husbands edging us out of a role we loved.

The Gates of Gaza

(Published at New Catallaxy on 5th February 2024)

¹ Samson went to Gaza, and there he saw a prostitute, and he went in to her. ² The Gazites were told, “Samson has come here.” And they surrounded the place and set an ambush for him all night at the gate of the city. … ³ But…at midnight he arose and took hold of the doors of the gate of the city and the two posts, and pulled them up, bar and all, and put them on his shoulders and carried them to the top of the hill that is in front of Hebron. Judges 16

The term “gates of Gaza” has a more contemporary application. The Nahal program was set up in 1948 by Ben-Gurion as a way of combining military service with the founding of settlements and the associated farming. All told, 108 kibbutzim and other agricultural settlements were established. Many of these militarised settlements were set up on Israel’s borders, and served as the first line of defence. Nahal Oz was the first Nahal settlement. I’ll let Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, take up the story.

Gaza Postmodern

First published on NewCatallaxy.blog on 31st January, 2024

One of the first declarations of intent was reported from an unnamed official.

The unnamed defense official told Israel’s Channel 13 that the Palestinian territory, home to more than 2 million residents, would be reduced to rubble. “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.”

There have been plenty of others. In November the Agriculture Minister and Security Cabinet member Avi Dichter announced that, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” That is, the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

In Her Lane

First published in Quadrant Online on 10th November, 2023 as The Language and Logic of Sedition

Whether she was aware of the threat from early on in the campaign, or only fully realised its extent in conducting the post-mortem, Janet Albrechtsen exposed the wound in her article entitled Radical Idea About ‘Occupied Australia’ Must Be Confronted, published a fortnight after the referendum in The Weekend Australian.

She noted that, as if to validate the concerns of those like her who had vigorously opposed the referendum proposal, an anonymous group claiming to represent the “collective insights and views of a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, community members and organisations who supported Yes” brazenly claimed in an open letter that

Australia is our country … We do not for one moment accept that this country is not ours. Always was. Always will be. It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around. Our sovereignty has never been ceded.

Priorities

First published on NewCatallaxy.blog on 26th January, 2024

For most of 2022, and until the great counter-offensive broke on the Russian defence lines of Zaporozhzhia on mid-2023, it seemed that the greatest priority of the Biden administration, and most of Congress, was promoting and resourcing Ukraine’s proxy war against Russia. The problems were mounting up even before the June-July catastrophe. The NATO countries discovered that the demilitarisation of Western economies came at a price. Even though the US had been carrying the NATO defence budget, not even the home of the military-industrial complex was all that industrially productive. The NATO nations realised that, combined, they could not match Russia’s production of artillery shells to serve the god of war. Even so, Russia could not produce enough to match its usage, and purchased shells from Belarus, North Korea, and perhaps, Iran. NATO scoured the former Warsaw Pact countries for ammunition for Ukrainian legacy artillery, and then Bulgaria and South Korea for NATO standard shells and Japan for TNT. As the supply became more and more critical, the US went to its magazines in Israel, where it maintained ammunition to supply Israel at short notice.

Al Shifa, et al.

First published on NewCatallaxy.blog on 22nd December, 2023

On the 16th of November, White House spokesman John Kirby said, “We have our own intelligence that convinces us that Hamas was using Al Shifa [hospital] as a command and control node, and most likely as well as a storage facility. We are still convinced of the soundness of that intelligence.”In this, he was giving what we might call independent support to the frequently proclaimed Israeli assessment. For instance, Reuters’ report on the Israeli capture of the hospital included this assessment.

Al Shifa hospital had become the chief target of a Gaza City incursion by Israeli forces, who said the “beating heart” of the Hamas fighters’ operations was headquartered in tunnels beneath it. Hamas denied the accusation and on Wednesday dismissed the Israeli statements as “lies and cheap propaganda”.

In preparation for the attack, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) released a video with a 3D representation of the tunnels and command centre supposed to be under Al Shifa.

Building Hamas

First published on NewCatallaxy.blog on 15th December, 2023

On the 8th of October, an angry article appeared in The Times of Israel. For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces, or so ran the headline. One has to read some way into the article to discover that it was not only Netanyahu-led governments that followed the policy of “propping up Hamas.” Presumably, The Times of Israel is part of the extensive opposition to Netanyahu, but that does not diminish the seriousness of the charges.

What was the point?

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.