There's Gold in Them Hills...

Toward the Gleam: a Pre-Review

2011-09-03T22:42:00.004-04:00

I haven't been this excited about a book in quite a while. I'm only three or four chapters into the book so far (having read Part I, titled "Discooperire", the Latin word for Exposition), but I have a very interesting theory about what's going on in this book, and I want to record it before I find any more clues one way or the other. Even if I'm wrong, the hints are so tantalizing and ingenious that it's worth having a record of these exciting first impressions.

My theory is that John Hill, the main character of the novel, is none other than John Ronald Rheul Tolkien. My first inkling (no pun intended) that this was the case occurred in the first chapter, when Hill, an old man in 1972, travels to a Sussex charterhouse to give a mysterious book to the abbot there. This description occurs on page 13:

The man's English was impeccable, though not his oratorical skills, Abbot thought. His guest had a tendency to be less audible, to mumble as he progressed with an idea.

If you've ever listened to audio or watched a video of Tolkien being interviewed, you'll recognize this at once. This is exactly how the professor spoke when he wasn't sure exactly what he was going to say. He had a tendency to reflect out loud rather than in his head; and he mumbled so softly and swiftly that one often has a hard time understanding what he's saying. Go to YouTube and search for "Tolkien interview" and you'll see what I mean.

On the very next page, Hill expresses his disappointment that the charterhouse no longer has bears in the vicinity. Doran writes, "...this statement by Hill contained not a trace of irony; that is, the man honestly believed that it was too bad bears didn't frequent these parts." This reminded me at once of Tolkien's wistful and earnest views on nature. He was especially regretful and resentful of industrial development, and often expressed his view that he would rather things were more primitive and dangerous than modern and comfortable.

As the story progressed in these few opening chapters, I began to see more and more parallels between Hill and Tolkien. For one, both are philologists. Both have a university career. Both view walking tours as a good way to holiday. Both fought in World War I, specifically at the Somme. Hill's wife is referred to only as E.M. I don't know Tolkien's wife's middle name, but her first name was Edith, which fits the first initial well enough. More interestingly, Hill finds a mysterious red book that he believes to be thousands of years old, from an ancient yet advanced civilization. This resembles the fictitious account contained in The Lord of the Rings of Tolkien's books' origin. Tolkien claimed not to have written The Hobbit and Rings, but rather to have translated them from a book he has unearthed...a book he names the Red Book of Westmarch. I don't know enough about Hill's red book just yet to be sure, but my personal theory so far is that the civilization in question is Atlantis. This would also be a parallel to Tolkien, as his fictional Red Book contains the story of the downfall of Númenor, Tolkien's version of the Atlantis legend.

And finally, as my wife most brilliantly pointed out when I shared with her all of my observations, John Hill's name even resembles a famous alias used by Tolkien's protagonist in The Fellowship of the Ring: Mr. Underhill.

I could easily be wrong about this, but if I am, I'd rather record these early impressions now than to do so after they've been proven misguided. At worst, these parallels will become an interesting sublayer of Doran's book, which, if it continues to have the same quality it has had so far, might just become a new favorite of mine.

Desire in a Dry and Weary Land

2011-08-11T07:28:00.016-04:00

Yesterday at work, a coworker of mine asked the office, in a moment of downtime between calls, "Why would someone say they're ready to meet Jesus in Heaven? Does that mean that they want to die, or are they just really that interested in seeing him? I don't understand that kind of thing at all."

I began to think of an answer for him, but at that moment the phones began ringing again, and I had to take a call. Luckily, we work for a company who doesn't mind what we do on the Internet, as long as we get our work done and answer our calls. So I fired up Facebook and sent him this hastily written chat message:

like i said it's impossible to answer questions of motivation as it's prob different for each person, but the scriptural, doctrinal view holds that jesus, as the son of god, represents all that mankind was created for, and so the fulfillment of every desire. so it shouldn't be a wish for death...but again, it's impossible to know when you're talking about a specific person. i can only tell you what i understand to be the correct, orthodox, ideal answer.

Of course, distracted as I was, it was choppy and not well written, as well as not well thought out. But it was a very good question, especially one relevant to most people day; and it deserves a better answer. This is the answer I should have given him.

This is a hard subject for both Christians and non-Christians to understand. How does one go about desiring God, or understanding that this desire is behind all others, when one does not feel as the Psalmist does when he says,

O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Think of it this way: we all know what it is to seek ardently and tirelessly after something we desire. But most of us also know what it is to finally attain the object of our desire at last, only to find that after a very short time it doesn't mean much to us anymore. Objects cannot and do not satisfy us. So we pursue a feeling or an experience. But, subject to the force we call Time, it is impossible that feelings and experiences can satisfy us for very long either, as they are only momentary. We are left only with memory, and memory does not satisfy us any more than things do. What we need is a person.

Many of us have found this out, and shifted the object of our pursuits to a friend or a lover. This is definitely a step in the right direction. As personalities, other people are inevitably different from us and can challenge us with their differences and, like the many facets of a crystal, refract things and ideas back at us in ways we had never before considered. But human beings, being what they are, will also inevitably disappoint. A friend betrays us, a lover finds that their feelings are gone — or we find that our feelings are gone — and few of us are strong enough to continue, unaided, to act out of love when its emotional aspect ceases.

So we must go beyond things, beyond emotion and experience, and even beyond persons — to a Person. If it is true that God created humanity, and if it is true, as Christianity believes, that God is a personal God — a being of infinite love, passion, and mercy — then it makes sense that he would create us in a such way that we are bereft of comfort and satisfaction without him. After all, he is love in himself, and, being three Persons within one Person, has no need of any other beings to love or to show his love to. The only reason he would create us is out of sheer superfluity, sheer boundless creativity and love: to relate to him. This is part of our nature as creations. And this is why we hunger and thirst continuously for something that nothing else in the world can ever satisfy.

As C.S. Lewis wrote,†

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.

What makes all this hard is that we are indeed imperfect; not just in the sense of being limited creations, but also in the sense of having lost innocence. It is for this reason that we sometimes have to find God in roundabout ways, being led through sorrows and sufferings, so that we can be made to see that the things that we think are best for us may actually be worst. This is a Christian idea, but it is one that is being found more and more even in secular sources. People are beginning to understand it, even if they don't believe in the faith from which it came. The television show Lost, for example, has as a major theme the idea that what the survivors of a plane crash thought was a terrible tragedy (their lives being disrupted and ruined by being stranded in a terrible, mysterious place without help or hope of rescue) is actually the best thing that could have happened to them.

So it is with us. It is hard do do the things we must do; but we retain this imprint of our creator, so that our desire — however muted or faded or faint we feel it to be, it is still there, even if buried — gives life and energy and direction to what would otherwise be (to our limited and benighted minds, at least) a drab pursuit, or, yet again, a dry and weary land.

† From the essay "The Weight of Glory".

The Cross and the Hammer

2011-04-20T13:12:00.025-04:00

Sometimes when you have memories of a certain place, it seems that every time you see it again you see those faces, feel those feelings once again. As if the place itself were filled with the memory, lit by it, made to be something more than it had been before.

That is the way I feel about Christianity and the North; specifically, Northern mythology.

I have been noticing for a while that a lot of people who follow my Tumblr blog and repost the photos I have on there seem to be great admirers of Northern mythology and religion; some of them seem to be wholehearted followers of this or some similar kind of Pagan religion. At first I was a little surprised, as I myself am a Christian. I've spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what aspects of Norway and Northern culture attracted so many of you, and what these aspects meant to me. I still really don't know the exact answer, but I suspect that many of these aspects are the same.

One thing that particularly intrigued me is how certain people seemed to favor things like stave churches. It is true that the architectural techniques and approaches behind the stave church (stavkirke) predate Christianity and belong to the older Pagan order; however, it's just as true that the stave church has become quite solidly and starkly a Christian tradition. I'm not saying any of this in an immature attempt to argue over cultural territory; rather to explore how certain aspects of Christian and Pagan culture overlap, and how sometimes these older things are transformed by the newer. I am not a progressive thinker at all, at least not in the modern, socio-political sense of the word. However, I definitely think there are aspects of Northern society that were changed for the good by the advent of Christianity. That it eventually succeeded in stopping the practice of exposure of unwanted children, as well as granting women the right to refuse an undesired marriage, is historically undeniable (See: Medieval Scandinavia by Birgit and Peter Sawyer, and also Women in Old Norse Society by Jenny Jochens for more details about this subject. Both are great books, but the latter is especially informative, well-researched, and well-written).

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the stave church is the intricate carvings on their doorposts, columns, and etc. Again, this is certainly an antiquated aspect of Norwegian culture, but it has been filled with and illuminated by something new. In the playfully-curved carven leaves and exuberantly twisted stalks and vines is not merely a love of and reverence for nature, but also a love of that to which it points — perhaps I should say he to whom it points. Christians see nature not as divine itself, but as an index, symbol and manifestation of the love that pours forth from the Creator. In this way, nature is emptied of divinity but is filled with deity. This is clearly seen in the high, rising columns and posts upon which these natural motifs are carved. It is something that is not present in the objects themselves but in the ways that they are used and the cumulative effect of the buildings of which they are a part.

In addition to the old things which have been taken up by the new faith, there are also several aspects of the old which resemble but remain distinct from the new. Probably the most obvious is the myth of the dying god. There are actually two of these in Northern mythology. First, there is Balder, the Beautiful, most beloved of the Aesir, whose tragic death is perhaps the most moving story in all of Northern myth. Then there is also Odin, whose sacrifice ends in his gaining knowledge and power. But though these elements are somewhat similar to elements of Christianity, they are more notable for their differences than their similarities. Balder does not rise again; Odin's act is essentially one of self-interest.

I know that this kind of discussion will probably not please most readers who believe in the old Pagan religions, for a couple of reasons. So first let me say that I am not at all trying to disparage the old culture and traditions. I love them myself; they are essentially what drew me to Norse mythology, long before I read Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize winning novel Kristin Lavransdatter and fell in love with Norway specifically. I am not trying to take anything away from the old North; only to say that there are a great number of things which were added to it and which surpassed it with Christianity.

Certainly, Christianity has done more than its share of pernicious deeds through the course of Northern history, as it has through its entire history. (But then, on the other hand, so have the Vikings.) But that is a sad reality which it has always known and which it has been told to expect from the beginning. When Christians sometimes act in these ways — converting other cultures by mere force, etc. — they are ironically acting outside of the very bounds of the religion they are trying to uphold. It's the result of sin in the world, which not even Christians can completely escape while the present order of things last. This should be an idea and sentiment very familiar to those who have deep feeling for Northern mythology. After all, the old religion told of Ragnarok, when all the forces of evil and chaos would make a final battle with the gods; and if the evil would itself be destroyed in the battle, it would not be before itself destroying the good and achieving final ruin. Evil's presence in the world was just as much a part of the old Northern world as it was of the new Christian one.

In the Northern view of things, the world was besieged by evil, the deliverance from which was not to be hoped. So. They would stand within the world regardless, backs to the wall if necessary, hope or no hope.

So the Christian view and the old Pagan view were very similar in that regard. The difference is that Christianity allows for hope in the end, when all things will be renewed; even Heaven itself.

The Völuspá and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún put this idea in a Northern mythological context. In the Völuspá, the völva or sibyl ends her prophecy with the aftermath of Ragnarok. Strangely, it is not dim, but hopeful:

Now do I see | the earth anew
Rise all green | from the waves again;
The cataracts fall, | and the eagle flies,
And fish he catches | beneath the cliffs
..........................................................
More fair than the sun, | a hall I see,
Roofed with gold, | on Gimle it stands;
There shall the righteous | rulers dwell,
And happiness ever | there shall they have (59-64)

In a section called "The Prophecy of the Sibyl", after describing the unloosing of the hosts of Hel and the offspring of Loki and of Surtur and his hosts from the South, and of the darkening of the sun and earth after the battle of Ragnarok, the poet of The Legend echoes the same scene:

At last once more uprising slow
the Earth from Ocean green shall grow,
and falls of water shimmering pour
from her high shoulders to the shore;
the eagle there with lonely cry
shall hunt the fish on mountains high.

The younger gods again shall meet
in Idavellir's pastures sweet,
.............................................
Unsown shall fields of wheat grow white
when Baldur cometh after night;
the ruined halls of Odin's host,
the windy towers on heaven's coast,
shall golden be rebuilt again,
all ills be healed in Baldur's reign.

The Völuspá is regarded as a document of Norse mythology, yet most scholars believe that it shows clear and undeniable Christian influence in this hopeful new beginning. Another similar aspect can be shown at the beginning of the Legend poem, in the section called Upphaf ("Beginning"), the poet again gives a different, and even more unique view of Ragnarok's conclusion.

If in day of Doom
one deathless stands,
who death hath tasted
and dies no more,
..............................
then all shall not end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head shall be helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
The Serpent shall shiver
and Surt waver,
the Wolf be vanquished
and the world rescued. (14-15)

The one referred to here is Sigurd himself, "seed of Ódin", so this account is steeped in the old Northern mythology from beginning to end. However, it is different from every other poetic or prose account of Ragnarok written. The difference stems from its author: J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a Christian himself, and in all of his fiction writing, if Christianity is not explicitly present, it is implicit on nearly every page; and none the less so here. In fact, it's hard not to draw comparisons between Sigurd and Christ, both "deathless...who death hath tasted", both rescuers of the world.

Tolkien's son Christopher comments on this deviation from the Ragnarok story: "But from the extraordinary complex of ideas that surround Ódin in Northern antiquity...a God is glimpsed in my father's work who has retained little of the subtle, sinister, and enigmatic deity of ancient writings: the god of war, lord of the Valkyries; exciter of madness; the initiate, the lord of the gallows...[rather,] 'Weighed with wisdom / woe foreknowing' (Upphaf 18), and seen by my father...as symbolizing prudence and wisdom beside the malice and folly of Loki, Ódin seems more like Manwë of his own mythology..."

Because of his own Christianity, Tolkien (as well as the Völuspá poet), seeing beauty and pathos in the old Northern myths, was able to transform them into something that is not only beautiful and tragic but hopeful as well. This hope is the light of Christianity that is not present in the old Northern religion. A hope which stems from its own dying God, just as beautiful and bold, hanging from a tree as a sacrifice — not from himself to himself, but of himself to the entire world, full of love and passion and compassion.

A Note of Caution

2011-01-07T21:09:00.003-05:00

“Objections to Christianity…are phrased in words, but that does not mean that they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available, then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defense of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper in the caverns of volition, of commitment. Perhaps this is why Saint Francis, so the story goes, instructed his followers to ‘preach the Gospel always, using words if necessary.’ It is not simply and straightforwardly wrong to make arguments in defense of the Christian faith, but it is a relatively superficial activity: it fails to address the core issues. A Christian who participates in a Socratic ‘debate’ about Christianity — one conducted at the level of argument and counterargument, as though what is at stake is simply figuring out what propositions to assent to — could be said to be falsifying the spiritual situation, or allowing it to be falsified. After all, an apologist for Christianity, to some degree at least, commits himself or herself to answering questions that Jesus himself consistently refused to answer. Here again we should recall Lewis’s frequent emphasis on the problems that arise when…our curiosity exceeds our faithfulness; here again we should remember Jesus’ reply to Peter’s question about the fate of another disciple: ‘What is that to thee? Follow thou me’ (John 21:22).”

- Alan Jacobs, The Narnian, p. 242.

"Good Taste" and "Bad Books"

2010-10-30T10:29:00.029-04:00

Despite the great number of literary genres, it is surprising and ironic how little attention we pay to the types of stories. There is a kind of person who believes they are showing how sensible they are when they read nursery rhymes about cows jumping over the moon, or fables about bears losing their tails by means of ice fishing, and declaring these stories to be ridiculous, irrational and useless. What they are really doing is showing how little sense they really have; for they are not paying attention to what type of story they are reading.

If a friend of yours told you a tall tale about his weekend exploits which you knew to be almost certainly embellished, or an elaborate joke about an Irish priest, you would not call him a liar.¹ Yet this is the kind of thing we do to stories on a regular basis. Similarly, if a friend of yours told you a story which stretched all credibility and presented it as a fact, then you would have an interesting dilemma in front of you. You would have to consider what kind of person was telling the story: are they the type that are prone to exaggeration? Or are they the kind of person who is generally very truthful and trustworthy? Faced with a strange, normally unbelievable story told by a generally truthful person as factual and accurate, you would either have to decide that the person was a liar after all, or were somehow suddenly deluded, or that they were telling the truth, regardless of how impossible the story seems.

How we approach a story, then, should depend to a great degree on how the story is presented: as factual, or as nonfactual; as historical, or as fabulous or fantastic. Folklore studies has taken strides toward taking such things into account, with terms such as memorat, chronicat, fict, dite, etc.; but aside from such technical jargon we are unfortunately very bad at this type of criticism.

On the same token, many people approach books in literary genres as if they were bad books outright. A common enough example is that of paranormal fantasy and/or romance. Whatever else it may be, Twilight is a book that has polarized the reading public. There are very few people whom I have met who do not have a strong opinion of the series; it is either trash, or gold. But very often the people who believe Meyers' writing to be bad, believe so for the wrong reasons. I happen to believe the books to be bad. But that is not because I dislike paranormal fantasy and romance. (I do dislike them, by the way; but I realize that this dislike impedes my ability to approach such books fairly.) To judge a book as a bad book merely because one dislikes its genre is poor criticism and an invalid judgment.

Lewis wrote of this type of criticism in his academic work, A Preface to Paradise Lost, when he wrote of those who “regard as faults … those very properties which the poet labored hardest to attain and which, rightly enjoyed, are essential to its specific delightfulness.” Similarly, in his essay “On Science Fiction,” he complained that “Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer’s dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies…” And very often, that is exactly what we do find.

Those who like a certain genre, then, are the best judges of the merits and flaws of a particular book within it, for they are the ones most in tune with the author's intentions and the aspirations of the genre's form. One may feel free to judge a book as not worth one's time, considering one's tastes. But to call a book bad simply because it falls within a certain genre is to ignore what the book actually is, and instead judge it according to what you feel it should be. In other words, it is to treat the subjective as if it were objective.

In order to say whether or not a book is bad one must abandon one's own aesthetic preferences, if possible, and open one's self to the book, not as what we wish it was, but as what it actually is. Therefore if one reads Twilight and concludes it is a bad book because it has bad philosophy, or because it treats as victory the fact that its heroine ends up with the lesser of two suitors, then one may safely dismiss it. Even then we are on shaky ground, as in some cases the better of two suitors in a romantic triangle is a subjective question.² But we are still inestimably more justified than if we dismissed it simply because it is what it is trying to be.

It may even turn out that an entire genre itself is a bad genre. But if so, it is because of the same sort of specific reasons, and not because it lies outside of our tastes. Until we look at stories this way we will never be able to appreciate them completely.

¹As regards the story of the weekend exploits, there are actually quite a few people who would call such a storyteller a liar. But that is, again, not a showing of good sense, but a showing of the weakness of one's taste. For many people it is very hard to appreciate such stories, and I sympathize with them. I am among them, to a certain degree. But this is no sign of refined taste, but of truncated taste. One is showing, in not appreciating this type of story, a deficiency in his range of appreciation.

²Bad philosophy, by the way, is not subjective. If philosophy means anything at all, then it is the search for truth, and those who disagree over what the best philosophy is are disagreeing over the best approximation of truth. They do not believe that their vision of the truth is as good as that of an opposing philosophy; if they did, they are not really philosophers and do not really understand philosophy. They really think that the one with whom they are arguing is really wrong, and that if they could just be made to see reason, all would be well. Any who feel distaste for this sort of view of truth do not understand the concept of truth, and nor, thus, of philosophy.

Justice and Mercy

2010-07-18T22:25:00.008-04:00

We are a people who do not know what we want. We are a race of hurting, aching, desperation which does not know rightly how to respond to the world or to itself. Our passions engulf us, beauty assaults us at every turn, and yet these things sting, hurt, all but kill, and we can only cry out a plea to cease and desist. Such is our response to the world; such is our comprehension of what is good for us. For we know so little, let alone what is good for us. We are but children.

One thing which we think we want is justice. We do not really want justice, though. If any of us ever encountered the face of justice, we might die of shock and fear. Justice is a hard master.

Justice is a good thing in and of itself; any other opinion is obviously misguided at best. But justice, strict justice, is one of those things which are so keen and so overpowering and so extreme (how we dislike things that are extreme!) that its goodness would be too much for us. Caught up in the pain it would bring, we could only see it for calamity, for disaster, for impending death. And so it would likely be. Justice is strong because justice is pure. Pure justice does not brook excuses, takes into account no extenuating circumstances. Justice pays like for like, pound for pound, measure for measure; it is like mathematics, whose cruelty is exact and whose degree is precise. Yet no one can safely say that justice is not good.

To take just a single example of how justice would not satisfy us, we often think of tragedy that has struck little children as especially unfortunate, for children, after all, are innocents. But children are not innocents. There is very little time in the life of a child in which it is not culpable. To be certain, a child may (or may not) be innocent of a specific crime. But there is very little time in the life of a child that passes before it is guilty of something. We all smile at the thought of the innocence of children, but looking back at our own childhood we blush, or snicker, or sink into regret at the thought of things which we have done.

We speak (and rightly so) of the injustice of terrible things which have been done to, or that have happened to, a child, but in reality some of the worst things that happen to us are not really all that harmful, and many of the hardships we undergo are merely a fraction of what we deserve. What we want is not justice, but something else, something quite different. What we really want is mercy. The real reason we speak (again, rightly so) in objection to the tragedies which happen to children is, not because they are instances of injustice -- in actuality they are not even fully just -- but rather because they are not instances of mercy. Whether we ascribe the tragedies to the work of an individual, a group, a society, or God, or even the random acts of nature, our primary complaint, though we seldom know well enough to express it as such, is that the outcome was not sufficiently merciful.

We rightfully want the best for our family, our friends, our selves, and often especially for children. But by the very act of wanting good things for these people, we are in actuality wanting for them things that are better than what they deserve. This is not justice; but neither is it injustice, for mercy is higher than and supersedes justice. We desire mercy with a strength and a passion that surpasses even our desires for food and drink, even if the mercy we desire goes no further than that we are provided with a comfortable bed, a roof over our heads, and sustenance to get through the day. This may seem petty to the overly legalistic, but its true beauty is overflowing.

The fact that every good thing we receive, whether though our own works or through mere chance, is not anything we deserve but rather an unearned (even if fully earned) gift, is a fact that resounds with the deepest truth of existence: the truth that absolutely nothing in existence of necessity had to exist. Everything in the universe -- the universe itself, even -- is superfluous. Nothing in existence had to exist, and there is no way of explaining the existence of existence itself.

And yet we begrudge mercy to others. When it comes to those we love and care for, we want mercy, but to those we hate or even slightly dislike, we want justice. They do not deserve mercy, we tell ourselves. This is an obvious truth. By the very nature of mercy, it is something which no one deserves. The most hardened, desperate criminal who has nothing to lose and everything to gain by committing genocide or an act of terrorism deserves mercy just as much as the most humble and selfless of saints. For, again, mercy, if it means anything at all, means a good thing which is not deserved. The desire for justice is a good thing, because no one can say that justice itself is not a good thing. Justice is appropriateness, symmetry. But justice is not ours to exact, and mercy exists above and beyond justice, surpassing it, fulfilling a greater and more beautiful criteria of goodness.

Mercy is something that is extremely hard to practice, and yet we all want it. No, even more: we all expect it. In a strange twist that seems legalistic yet is actually the very opposite of legalism, we think that mercy not given is injustice. But mercy not given is really justice. The injustice consists only in the fact that justice is not ours to mete out. Similarly, many of the things we think of as mercy are really only justice. The giving of money and food to the poor, for example; such things are required of us. The real act of mercy is when one gives to a man who one knows will only spend it on liquor. If there is anything that can be called mercy, it consists of doing good for those who do not deserve it.

None of us really want justice, whether we realize this or not. We are too weak, and justice is too strong, too inexorable. Justice works with the impassibility of Nature herself. No, even more: she is more impassible than Nature, for Nature often neglects to serve out those who deserve it. Mercy, then, is what we really wish for, but we are often too weak or too unwilling to give it ourselves. When we do not receive mercy ourselves, we must not think it an injustice, but rather continue to hope and to work for the good of others. If we desire mercy, we rightfully should work for it, even if we never receive the fruit of this work. For we are really entitled to very little in this world; we are not even entitled to the world itself.

Mercy, like sheer existence, is beauteous superfluity. And those who wish for beauty will work for mercy, even -- perhaps especially -- where it is least deserved.

The Existence of God: Probability, Definition and Empiricism

2010-07-09T14:22:00.008-04:00

A conversation with a friend of mine ended by touching on the question of the probability of God's existence. My friend's argument was that the fact of the lack of evidence for God is surely meaningful. I happen to agree with this, for reasons I'll get into below; but he meant something different than I do. He meant that it is wrong to say that there is just as much likelihood that God exists as that he doesn't, since there is no proof either way. It is wrong, he explained, because until we actually see proof, it is much more likely that God does not exist. I admit that this worthy fellow is much more well-versed with probability and statistics than I am, but I question his application of them.

As I myself argued, in the Middle Ages all sorts of fantastic creatures were thought up. Unicorns, horses with wings, and men without heads but with faces on their torsos. One of these fantastic creatures was the black swan. The black swan was thought to be mythical and ridiculous, until it was actually discovered to be true. In the same way, regardless of what odds there are against a fantastical creature existing, only a single instance to the contrary is necessary to render them irrelevant. It is probably a trillion to one against the possibility of flying horses existing. Yet if I see one outside my window tomorrow, that one is more important than that trillion.

Yes, my friend argued, but until the one is seen, the trillion is the weightier. But I have my doubts about this as well.

There is a famous thought experiment known as "Schrödinger's cat", which states that if we put a cat in a box and leave it there for two or three days without food or water, until we come back and check for sure, the cat is both dead and alive. To me this seems absurd. Either the cat is dead or it is alive, and not in some dual state. The fact of its life or death has no connection to our awareness to it. However, it does seem true that it is equally possible that the cat is dead or alive. Or that one possibility is just as likely as the other. It is a binary situation: its solution is one and only one of two outcomes. The same is true of the existence of God.

The one in this case is just as important as the trillion, and is no less significant. It is not true that our wealth of experiences indicating against God's existence skew the probability in that direction. The probability is in fact equal. Because these experiences in fact tell us nothing about this sort of thing. All these concerns are based on definitions, and our definitions may be wrong.

For example, if I said, "God is a being who likes people who wear yellow clothes, so if you wear yellow and go outside, God will stick His head out of the clouds and say hi to you," and then asked you whether God exists, you would be right to say, "Probably not." Experience has told us that in almost every case, if not in every case, God has not behaved thusly even if we wore yellow. So therefore, if this is what God is, then he probably does not exist.

This definition is similar, though obviously more absurd, to the unconscious definitions we have imposed upon God when we consult our experience in order to determine if God exists. We imagine (and, I think, not wrongly) a being who has an interest in showing himself to us at every possible moment, and we also imagine that he would judge the best methods of doing so to be obvious methods.

I think it is very probable that God wants to show himself to us. But is it legitimate to imagine that he would do so in overt ways, and thus judge that he doesn't exist since this very seldom, if ever, happens? I do not think so. I think it is based on a human assumption for which there is very little reason. In fact, the more one considers the question, the more one seriously considers the idea of God which Christianity has given us, the more it seems likely that any God who has the same concerns we are told he has would be much more interested in expressing and revealing himself in subjective, personalized, and non-apparent ways. We are told, after all, that he would have died on the cross even if you were the only human being who had ever lived. Why, then, would he not speak to you as if you were the only human being listening? If we approach our definition of God in this way, then experience tells us nothing, because anything which is subjective, personalized and non-apparent is impossible to verify empirically. But who says we are required to verify things empirically? We do not wish this kind of verification from any other people we love.

As to why these methods would not be apparent, Lewis sheds more light on this, in a letter of December 23, 1950.

As to why God doesn't make it demonstratively clear: are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which would be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend a trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn't be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona’s innocence when it was proved: but that was too late. Lear believed in Cordelia’s love when it was proved: but that was too late. ‘His praise is lost who stays till all commend.’ The magnanimity, the generosity which will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you would have paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Your error would even be so [much] more interesting & important than the reality. And yet how could that be? How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

Can there be a science of humanity?

2010-07-09T00:34:00.006-04:00

The other day I was looking over my old essay on folklore and folktales, and a couple of things struck me which I had not before thought of. It is easy to judge something which one has written by one's own beliefs and standards, but it is a bit more challenging to try to see a piece of work from outside of that spectrum of thought and sentiment. It was from this view, somehow, that I read over my rather long-winded article. I thought to myself that my thoughts were rather old fashioned, as they neglected to look at folklore from a scientific standpoint. They assumed as given a rather romantic view of the subject, a view more appropriate to the philologists of the mid twentieth century, like Tolkien and Lewis (to whom I am deeply indebted), than to a folklorist of the current day. But is this really inappropriate? I started to think about it tonight, unable to sleep, and this is what I came up with.

The scientific view of things like folklore, anthropology, and sociology, rests on several assumptions. Some of those assumptions are in general rather safe to make — for example, the assumption that everything in nature is subject to the law of causation. To put it in layman's terms, things that we observe around us are the results of hidden causes. The easiest way to understand this is to think of the popular explanation for "chaos theory," made popular by the movie Jurassic Park (which I still think to be a great movie), in which mathematician Ian Malcolm explains that "A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine." A recent commercial has also explored the same idea. We are shown a flash-forward of the inauguration speech of some far-distant President of the United States, and then from there the commercial skips randomly back in time to central moments in this individual's life, until finally settling in the present day, in which his parents meet for the first time on a subway car. The implication is clear: great things begin in small, seemingly unimportant places, and that every event can be traced back to a series of other events that came before it.

Science for the most part has told us that this is in general a pretty accurate way of viewing the natural world. But is it just as safe an assumption to make in respect to human behavior? The popular answer today is yes, but I think that this, again, rests on an assumption about the way things are rather than real reason or truth. I think the matter can be explored by taking what seems at first to be a very simple example, which I draw from the works of philosopher G.K. Chesterton. Suppose a man who has been working all day comes home and is hungry for a steak dinner. Again, this appears from the outside to be a very basic and primal urge which is easily explained away by the sociologist and anthropologist. It all seems very savage and elemental.

But is it really? A man's desire for beef may really be a purely animal response. But it may only be partly so. Part of it may come from a feeling of nostalgia, as steak makes him remember his father who grilled it every Saturday afternoon. Part of it may be a sense of wonder, flying in the face of all who think the domesticated cow to be one of the more routine and boring animals around; for he may think it an astonishing and singular prodigy of Nature, worthy of awe and admiration. Or he may not even have cared for steak at all until he met his wife, whose favorite dish it was, and to him it has come to symbolize her loving dedication and enthusiasm, and through this route it was that he has come to love it. It may be all of these things and a hundred more; it may be none of them. But for a sociologist or an anthropologist to say which of them it is, if any, or even to discuss how probable one factor may be over the others, requires that our well-meaning scientist actually know the hungry man better than the man knows himself. For he himself may not be able to tell you why he wants steak and potatoes for dinner. Notice, also, that while all of these are still causes, nevertheless none of them are possible to examine scientifically. All of them deal with sentiments and feelings, things like romance and even ritual or mystical considerations.

So I think it is very possible, and even probable, that trying to break down human thought and behavior in a scientific or rationalistic way such as this is extremely misguided. I think a more practical view of human thought and behavior is the one represented by the philologists and some of the older folklorists, such as Yanagita Kunio (if not the earliest, such as the Grimms and perhaps Asbjørnsen and Moe), in which it is freely admitted that in order to understand humanity one must not practice that motion of the human brain which is so helpful in understanding nonhuman things such as insect anatomy or the orbits of faraway moons. Such a mental movement consciously and purposefully takes one's self out of the merely human and attempts to touch the universal in Nature (that is, the natural or scientific laws). But in things like anthropology and sociology, it is precisely the merely human that we want to study, and the best way to understand humanity is to be human.

There is no scientific explanation for romanticism, for aesthetics, or for love. Certainly these things are closely related to and connected to aspects of the human body and experience which are governed by natural and physical laws. And it is almost impossible to determine where one begins and the other ends. But the distinction is there, and it is real. And even if, merely for the sake of argument, we were to admit that it was not real, give me a mechanistic explanation of romanticism, love and aesthetics, and I will at once say that it may explain the thing but it is not the thing itself. The mystery of the thing, the wonder of the thing, is something that we cannot possibly understand even if we understand how it is produced in the human body. I do not mean to undermine scientific effort or the real discoveries of human science. But these things must be viewed with the same suspicion one gives to outdated science, insofar as they attempt to approach things that are beyond them. And reason's final step, as Pascal wrote, is to recognize that there are an infinite number of things that are beyond it.

A writer of fantastic adventures once made a character say that stars are balls of flaming gas; a true enough statement, scientifically. But to this statement the reply was given: "That is not what they are, but only what they are made of." This is certainly a fanciful and romantic thing to say; but that is entirely the point. Humans will be fanciful and romantic, sentimental and overly dramatic, no matter what. These things are deeply felt, and it is the "act" (so to speak) of feeling that gives us the best understanding of them. In so feeling, we are in deep empathy with the greater part of humanity in nearly all ages. Stars are indeed balls of flaming gas. And, again, it is precisely this outer explanation which science is able to give. But beyond that it can go nowhere.

A Murder in the Monastery: the sad and convoluted tale of a foolish philosopher-monk

2010-07-01T00:34:00.009-04:00

“Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”
- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, p. 218.

What is The Name of the Rose?

The name of the rose (or one of them*) is Christ. But The Name of the Rose is about as far a thing from a Christian book as I can imagine. Why bother to make this observation? No book is under any obligation to be Christian, especially if its writer is not. In fact, to open a review of a book by stating right off the bat that it is not a Christian book seems to be tantamount with raising the red flag of biased religiosity. That is not what I intend, nor is that the kind of review I want to write. But Umberto Eco’s book concerns itself very closely with religion, namely the Christian one, and so it is with that subject that any review of the book must concern itself. And perhaps one of the best thing one can do in order to eliminate confusion about The Name of the Rose is to state what it is not. As to that, the only thing I feel competent enough to strike off its list of attributes is Christianity. Though Eco’s characters are nearly all monks, and though countless passages consist of these monks debating fine theological points, the actual presence of real Christianity occurs seldom and, it would seem, accidentally.

To be fair, Eco’s work is thought to be well-researched, and it does contain some historical elements, and insofar as these elements resemble history, it can be said that the historical figures pictured therein were not practicing real Christianity, either. The factious confusion of heretical offshoots, caused by the inability of some Christians at the time to see the trees for the forest, has always been one of the greatest weaknesses of the faith, and the best thing it could do is to cast off the sideline issues over which it disagrees and uphold the more important center of the religion, which all sects of Christianity uphold and always have done. Heresy is indeed something that Christianity must deal with when it raises its head, and I think most people would agree with this if the idea were put in a different context. Science itself is concerned with both orthodoxy and heresy, though it uses the terms “scientific canon” and “junk science.” To anyone who takes religion seriously, it will be obvious that, as with science, error can be deadly; and heresy is more dangerous because it spreads easier and is harder to fight.

So the concern with heresy is not a major flaw of Eco’s characters in The Name of the Rose. But most of them myopically view heresy as something that is all of the same kind, or else, in the case of the main character, William of Baskerville, something that is too different to be able to lump together. Both views seem a bit skewed. Instead of lumping all beliefs of heretical sects or individuals together, is it not better to pick apart their views, sorting the heretical from the orthodox? And, if heresy is really heresy, is there really a problem with rejecting it all equally? For example, the idea of the poverty of Christ (in other words, the idea that Christians should, like Christ, live a simple life, disdaining riches and excessive property) was temporarily labeled as heretical, in both history and in Eco’s novel. This was partly because of the corruption of the church at the time, but it also had a lot to do with other heretical beliefs held by the Fraticelli, the major heretical sect that upheld this idea. The Fraticelli, an offshoot of the order founded by Francis of Assisi, venerated St. Francis as a second Christ, denied the right of any Christian to own property of any kind, and even sought to forbid marriage. All these ideas are plainly against the grain of Christianity, and were rightly rejected by the Church. But because the idea of Christ’s poverty was associated with these heresies, this idea, too, was rejected as heretical.** William of Baskerville, the character Eco most often uses to put forth his own ideas, is heavily critical of all this, and rightly so. But he is critical in the wrong way, and of the wrong aspects.

Similarly, William has a lot of strange ideas that do not at all resemble the Christianity to which his life has been devoted. His interpretations of many issues are often mere opinions disguised as deep and unquestionable wisdom, and are presented as obvious truths to any who look at things rationally. But seldom is any proof or support given for these opinions, lending William’s words a veneer they do not deserve. He seems to have very little faith at all, and seems highly critical of this quality in others. Yet at times his own pronouncements feature some of the worst flaws of those who do have faith.***

To take a specific example of one of William’s problematic opinions, he and other characters early in the book discuss the roots of heresy and its effect on the common people: the poor, the peasantry, the diseased, the uneducated. These were all people with whom St. Francis was greatly concerned during his ministry, yet by the time of Eco’s story, the order he founded apparently had little to do with them. Even though he has sympathy with them on one level, however, William’s words on the subject betray a deep and ill-founded patronization. He says that most men are “simple,” that they are unable to understand the moral choices they make. His account of the origins of heresy — that they originate in movements of outcasts rebelling against the establishment — is theoretical and for the most part illogical. And no character recognizes that the words of Christ contain resources for condemning the abuse of outcasts, and that any criticism of such abuse is ultimately drawn from this source.

What is more seriously wrong with these views of William’s, is that they deny the heretic the seriousness of his own beliefs. If his actions and thoughts and beliefs, for which he is willing to stake his life, are only random results of his economic and social persecution, then no one should take the heretic seriously, least of all himself. He only wants to be fed and cared for, and then he will quiet down and be orderly. This seems to me to be patronizing in the worst way. If someone is willing to give their life for their beliefs — wrong though they may be — then the last thing we should suggest is that they don’t really believe them, that they really just want something else. In this way, even the heretics are better than William. They have taken their position (the meaning of the word heretic), and understand the idea of orthodoxy better than he. Further, this image contradicts William’s idea that the common people are simple, as in this and many other ways, he affords them an unreasonable amount of elaborateness in their actions and schemes which simply is not realistic. Such elaborateness seems to fly in the face of the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Finally, William himself later states, as if temporarily regaining his sanity: “Sometimes the simple understand things better than the learned.”

To give only a few more examples, William believes that the presence of natural or scientific laws make God a prisoner of his own universe. This is ludicrous, and highly original (in the worst sense of the word). All the Christian fathers have said that God was the divine legislator. He set the laws into motion, and could change them if he wishes. But he will not, for he made them and said that they were good. William is also, as stated before, quick to gloss over the differences between heretical and orthodox ideas. Early in the book, another character tells him, speaking of the differences between the Minorites (St. Francis’ order) and the Fraticelli, “The Minorites ask to be poor, but they have never asked others to be poor. You cannot attack the property of good Christians with impunity.” This seems to me to be good wisdom, and it actually mirrors an early incident of the saint’s own life. Yet William fails to see the crucial distinction here. Late in the book, he criticizes the lust for and will to knowledge that he finds in Benno, another monk, calling this quality empty and barren. But when he himself single-mindedly wills to know (“We must, that is all.”), shortly after being expelled from the abbey, this is to be seen as intellectual integrity.

William of Baskerville is not the only character with rational failings. Almost all of them are, though many of them show good qualities at different points. One speech of William’s, to an assembly of Minorites and papal emissaries, describes what is basically equal to the ideals of democracy and the separation of church and state. This passage was inspired and beautifully written, and its unique context and set of arguments proves that these ideas are more favorable to true Christianity than they are antagonistic to it.

But as I said, though there are bright areas, most of the characters at the unnamed monastery are misguided at best. Adso, the book’s narrator and William’s young friend and tutee, seems incapable of drawing real moral distinctions, despite his growing ability to draw up syllogisms. This seems characteristic of the people at the abbey. They are more interested in logic and a geometric vision of the universe, both physical and spiritual, than they are in their religion and their order’s calling. This selective blindness, so to speak, amazed me sometimes as I read the book. Adso once muses, speaking of his hope for future reform, “Things must not be transformed even though we hope for them.” This is antithetical to his religion, and the fact that he is so well versed in abstruse and obtuse academic concerns while having so little basic knowledge about the primary documents and figures of Christianity is, again, amazing to me.

When all is said and done, despite its many flaws, The Name of the Rose has a brilliant plot and an engrossing mystery. It’s too bad that this is about the only strength the book has. Eco’s writing is hard to read because of the frequent interjections of Latin and other languages, and were this not so, the abstruseness of many of the discussions would still render the same effect. So many debates on such irrelevant issues! The debate between William and Jorge on the licitness of laughter, which in many ways is one of the major questions of the book and serves to bookend the story, is presented in such a way as to suggest that it is of central importance to Christianity and Christendom. However, there is very little in these debates that touches on any issue that Christians have been concerned with throughout the religion’s history. Monks and academics may have given them thought, but never have they effected the lives of the common men and women, whose story is largely lost to us, is seldom told, and is the real story of Christianity.

This debate, in its final instance at the end of the book, surprises William even as it satisfies him with the fruit of his detective work. In the end, he is more shaken with the outcome (to say nothing of the conflagration which follows) than pleased, and this effect leads to some very depressing conclusions. William’s philosophical laments on the occasion of his defeat are understandable, in the empathetic sense. But rationally, they don’t go far at all. Stumbling on the fact that the pattern he thought he had discovered was nothing but a series of accidents, and not a pattern at all, William concludes, “Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.” He eventually doubts the existence of God as well. Because of his failure to rationally deduce the solution of the murders, Willliam despairs both emotionally and intellectually. Adso himself, however, is wiser than this, despite his youth. “Jorge has won,” he admits, “but you have defeated Jorge because you exposed his plot.”

His words deserve more credit than they are given, for the point of investigating is to solve the mystery. The point of all learning and philosophy is not, as William seems to believe, to become able to think rationally enough to figure everything out; rather, it is to discover the truth. William discovered the truth, but in his pride he was disappointed, for it was not the truth he had looked for. “All reality is iconoclastic,” wrote C.S. Lewis, and for William this is painfully and personally true. But he fails to learn from it. Rather than realizing that his vision of things was wrong and that, thus, there must be a better and truer understanding out there somewhere, he concludes that no understanding exists at all, for there is no real order. A modern scientist would scoff at this notion; it is antithetical to the whole scientific method.

And William is wrong, at any rate. Not just philosophically, but in every sense. There is order to the universe. Mathematics and science attest to this, and perhaps one of the most fundamental truths of the natural world is that wherever there seems to be an absence of order, it is only an instance of a deeper and more complexly beautiful order hiding under the mask of disorder. William lacks the proper faith, humility and reason to see this.

William also despairs, in the end, about the truth. “Fear prophets, Adso,” he warns, “and those prepared to die for the truth....Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

If we are to take these statements at face value (and I can think of few other ways to understand them), then we must conclude one of two things: either William is saying there is no real truth that is objectively true, and thus the best thing one can do is free himself from this spurious truth, or else that truth, while it does exist, is one of the most dangerous things one can encounter, and so we should not commit ourselves to it in a passionate way. The first of these possibilities is one of the self-refuting ideas common to modern thought. It does not take a philosopher to realize that if there is no real truth, then neither is it really true to say so. And it seems to me that the choice we’re left with, in interpreting William’s words, is between patent absurdity or cowardice. For truth may indeed be dangerous. So, too, is God. “He’s not a tame lion,” as Lewis so famously and beautifully put it. But the presence of danger and risk says nothing about the absence of goodness. There is danger and plenty in the universe; this the experience of all human lives tells us. But there is goodness, too, and we cannot shrink from the truth just because our approach is hard and our way perilous.

My final view of Umberto Eco’s writing is, therefore, highly mixed. On the one hand, his plotting and characterization is superb. On the other hand, it took so much exhausting effort to be able to properly appreciate these good qualities, that I wonder if the book is worth recommending to others. My first thought is to say no; and not only because of the work that must be done. But I have learned that it is not so important what a book says or how it is written, as it is how its reader responds. Though I mean by this something quite different from what the author himself would expect, the statement nicely mirrors Eco’s own views on books. In the end, I’d say the reader has to decide for himself. But enter with care, and hopefully with a healthy skepticism for Umberto Eco’s sometimes needlessly complex and often philosophically fragmented work.

Notes:

* Christ has been associated with the rose throughout much of Christian tradition. The red color symbolizes his shed blood, and the thorns symbolize the crown of thorns. Another name of the rose is Mary, the mother of Jesus. This is seen in the fact that a “Hail Mary” prayer is called a rosary. As Eco states, there are many other names of roses; but I find it particularly telling that he never states either of the ones most closely connected to his subject. But I don’t suspect, from this, that he was unaware. Given the book’s anti-religious slant it seems to have been a deliberate exclusion.

** Of course, the idea of Christ’s poverty was eventually upheld and recognized to be a core aspect of Christianity. But at the time, its entanglement in heresy, corruption and European politics made it a serious question of the day.

***A number of William’s views on things are less irrational than sheerly bizarre. In one place, he states that “natural philosophy and positive magic” constitute a “humane theology.” If anyone can explain how this is possibly so, I will call him a better man than me. He also holds forth that the eventual invention of airplanes (“flying machines” to him) will be the best way to combat the Antichrist, as if his conception of the Antichrist was some sort of King Kong or Godzilla.

Christianity: Adaptability, Identity, and Modernity

2010-06-29T15:26:00.004-04:00

Let me start out by saying something that will probably shock you. I don’t care about traditional cultures.

Actually, let me clarify that a little bit. Aesthetically, I love traditional cultures. I think they are romantic, I think they are beautiful, I think that even in ones where you find heathen religions, you can still find a lot of redeeming characteristics. Not in the sense that those characteristics redeem the heathenry, but rather in the sense that there is a lot of good already there that should not be done away with. However, all this being said, if you want to ask me whether I ultimately take issue on the side of traditional cultures for those cultures’ own sakes, I would say no. I would go a long way to fight for them. I would go a long way to argue for their good, to preserve them, because I think they are all good in and of themselves. But all things in the world pass away, and yet there is one thing that will not pass away. So ultimately, even traditional cultures must pass away — not because they must give way to progress, but because everything has an end. The end is sad, but it is an end — a finality, not a giving way to further change.

In that sense, though I love traditional cultures, and would do much to fight for them, they are not ultimately one of the things for which I would give my life and my life’s energy. And yet I do give to them a lot of my life’s energy. Why is this? It is not entirely for their own sake, for the reasons I described above. It is rather because in them there is something that is in fundamental agreement with that which does not pass away; that for which I would give my life and my life’s energy.

Christ was born into a life of poverty and Christ, for the most part, lived a life of poverty. He accepted gifts of riches, mostly in the form of food, festive entertainment, and non-hordeable things like ointment and perfume. The rest of whatever wealth he owned, he kept only for the purposes of giving it away. This is a well-documented aspect of his life. Christ also spoke frequently about poverty, both explicitly and in parables, so there is no real doubt, if we measure him by nothing but his actions and his words, as to what he thought about it. Poverty is thus a central aspect of true Christianity. In case there is misunderstanding, the idea is not that all should be poor; rather, it is that none should be afraid of being poor. None should be afraid of the future, for God provides. And so, even when you have little, it is good to give to others who have less. The poor woman who gave her last coin was better than the rich man who gave a whole pocketful of money. The sparrows of the trees and the flowers of the earth are all provided for and none of them worry about the challenges of tomorrow. It is a surrender to God; it is a complete trust and a complete faith, a sweet (however reluctant it may be) willingness to live in his hands, and from his hands. That is the Christian idea of poverty.

Christianity is a religion which has the ability to adapt to any culture with which it comes into contact. It started out a Jewish religion, and then quickly became a Greek religion as well. Given time, it became a Roman religion, and eventually a European religion. But it has never been just one thing. Nor has it ever been a Western religion. Saint Augustine was an African bishop, tending an African flock. Francis Xavier had great success among the Japanese before Christianity was outlawed by the shogun, its adherents persecuted in that country for over two hundred and fifty years. Today, it is neither America nor Europe that is the center of Christianity; that hub is quickly shifting to South America, Africa and China. It is not inconceivable that in fifty or a hundred years, African or Hispanic missionaries might come to the United States to preach to this nation of savage heathens. If this happens, it could be one of the best things to happen to America.

As African writer Lamin Sanneh writes, “Christianity answered this historical challenge by a reorientation of the worldview….People sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred nor their clamor for an invincible Savior, and so they beat their sacred drums for him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. After that dance the stars weren’t little anymore. Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not re-made Europeans.” This ability to adapt, to become a faith of whatever place accepts it, rather than remaining a specifically Jewish or Western faith, is unique among all other religions. Compare this to Islam, which, no matter where it takes hold, still relies, and must necessarily rely strongly on the Arabic language, the Arab worldview, and Arab practices.

The question has been posed to me why, given this enormous ability to adapt to whatever culture it finds itself in, I find it important to defend traditional cultures. Why cannot Christianity find itself within modern cultures, and then adapt to these modern forms? The answer is very simple, and it has to do with identity. The most adaptable organism you can imagine would still have its own identity, or else it would not be a particular species. After a certain point, if it underwent too many adaptations, it would cease to be that organism any longer. What is interesting is that Christianity adapts itself to, say, African culture, so that a faithful Christian from America could sit at a fireside with an African Christian, and — presuming they could somehow communicate with each other — immediately recognize each other by their common beliefs, even though the African dances to drumbeat in praise of Christ while the American sits still and reverent in his pew. But this is precisely because Africans are closer already to the Christian ideal of poverty. Most Africans must live with poverty daily, and to the extent that they are at peace with it, to that same extent, Christianity is compatible with them. There is such a thing as unreadiness to receive the gospel. There is such a thing as a life which, given the experiences, the expectations, and the habits it has become accustom to, responds to the world in such a way that it would reject Christianity.

Modern life is that sort of life. Or, rather — for we must make as many allowances as possible — modern life has a large amount of those sorts of qualities, and the further it goes along its present trajectory, the more such qualities it will have. Modern life abhors risk and uncertainty above all else. Perhaps it would be better to say that modern life is the progressive fulfillment of that abhorrence, itself a very old and ancient sentiment. That is the purpose of its vast accumulations of wealth and personal comforts (for even the most spoiled of people can gladly forgo comforts for a short time, so long as they know they will get them back very soon). That abhorrence is the original psychological cause of hording. And it is precisely that risk and uncertainty that Christ commanded his people to gladly and willingly subject themselves to.

It is for this reason that I so passionately and devotedly defend traditional cultures. Not because they are perfect — heavens no! Not because they are intrinsically of such great final value (for all things will pass) that they are worth giving one’s life’s energy for. Rather because they contain within themselves, in addition to all the things that are beautiful and romantic and good in and of themselves, certain patterns which are basically in fundamental agreement with that which will not pass away. Christianity can, and does, adapt itself to modern cultures. But there comes a certain moment — and this moment is near impossible to identify, but it comes nonetheless — where it is no longer itself. Not because it itself has changed, but because the changing culture itself has decided, whether realizing this or not, to step outside of the invisible boundaries that define Christianity. Again, there is a sort of life which is predisposed to rejecting Christianity. And that kind of life has never been more prevalent than within the modern societies. This is one of the major reasons why America is declining so much, not only in its practice of Christianity, but in its understanding of it.

The Invention of Gullibility

2010-06-28T01:44:00.007-04:00

Tonight, Heavenly and I watched the new Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying. I'm sure almost everyone is familiar with the premise from the trailers; Ricky Gervais is an unlucky loser, one of the many who are victims of the fact that no one, in this film's quirky universe, can tell a lie. Not only can no one tell lies, no one can even conceive of the possibility of a lie. This means that not only is everyone brutally honest one hundred percent of the time, they also automatically and unquestioningly believe everything anyone tells them. The concept that they should doubt anything they are told is inconceivable to them. Of course, this makes perfect sense if there is no idea of untruth. Inevitably, as the title and the trailers suggest, Gervais' character somehow learns to "say things that are not," beginning a process of hilarious and eye-opening change and social observation.

This seemed to me an extremely clever premise for a story. Going in, I suspected a dry, witty comedy with British style humor satirizing modern society and exploring ideas like how stretching the truth is sometimes beneficial, but ultimately doesn't get us anywhere meaningful. And to an extent, the movie did go in that direction. But much more than that, it was a thinly-veiled caricature of religion and religious ideas. This was disappointing, not only because the trailers suggested nothing of the sort, making me feel as if all this had been sneaked in under my nose, but also because the satirical elements were full of logical holes.

Beginning with the lesser of these holes, several references are made to modern life, to the fact that different historical ages had markedly different ways of life, and to the Industrial Revolution. Given that the viewer is to understand the film's fictional world as almost entirely identical with our own, save for the exception that no one in that world has ever lied, these things do not make sense at all. Certainly some progress has been made by sheer, blind trial and error. But science and technology as we know them could never have arisen without the capacity for humans to imagine situations and scenarios which might not be. This is how the scientific method starts: we imagine a possible situation, and attempt to subject the idea of our situation to a battery of tests. If it cannot be disproven, we accept the idea. If it can, we reject it. But to test a new idea we have to be able to conceive of something which may not necessarily be readily apparent. This capacity seems to be entirely nonexistent in the humans of Lying's universe.

Of course, with such satirical/comedic material, certain absurdities are to be expected and should not be counted against any satirical criticisms the film intends to make. But the worst logical holes are those which are present in the film's central idea: the suggestion that, in our own human history as well as in the film's fictional truth-ridden world, religion probably came about as a result of an individual or two stretching the truth in order to make life more pleasant and more convenient for those around them. Gervais' character, early on in the movie, gets the bright idea of telling his dying mother that she will not, in fact, dissipate into nonexistence, but will go to a better place where she can be eternally happy and live in a mansion and reunite with everyone she ever loved.

He says this, choked by emotion, in the sadness of the moment, but his words have unforeseen consequences. Overheard by the doctors and nurses tending his mother, who naturally have no capacity to suspect that Gervais may not be telling the truth, quickly spread this wonderful news, and soon the "fat, snub-nosed man" is a worldwide celebrity for his revelations of the afterlife. To fill in the blanks left by his loosely-constructed story, Gervais tells the world of a "Man in the Sky" who controls everything and hands out the celestial rewards. In an amusing scene, he writes all the details on the back of two pizza boxes, and displays them to an eager crowd: an obvious send up of Moses delivering the Ten Commandments. Much of Gervais' spur of the moment theology is ridiculous, from any possible viewpoint. The ridiculousness of these ideas helps bolster the impression that all of it is just as ridiculous. And later on in the film, Gervais confesses to the love of his life that he was lying about everything. "There is no Man in the Sky," he tells Jennifer Garner's character. "You don't really get a mansion after you die."

Being a religious man myself, I naturally disagree with these interpretations. But that's not the point. The point is that the entire structure of this story is based on some serious logical fallacies. Of course Gervais' character was being honest when he revealed that he had made the whole thing up. But that doesn't mean he was necessarily wrong. If I tell you that eight times eight is seventeen, I'm obviously wrong and should confess my error as soon as possible. But if I continue to say, "eight times eight is..." and then give random numbers, it is conceivably possible that I'll eventually come up with the right one. It's even conceivable that I'll come up with the right answer at the very start of the endeavor, without ever knowing I was correct. Just because I admit I didn't really say that eight times eight is sixty four because I really understood it to be true, doesn't mean it's not really true.

But there is a further and deeper logical fallacy to all of this. Before being told about the "Man in the Sky," the inhabitants of Lying's universe assume from the beginning that when they die, they will simply dissipate into nothing. It is very true to say that the idea that we will go to some sort of afterlife is based on faith, and thus not possible in a world which cannot conceive of anything that isn't readily apparent. But the same is equally true about the idea that there is absolutely nothing waiting for us after our death. Neither idea is verifiable, nor even remotely suggested by anything in human experience. The idea that sheer nonexistence awaits us after death is precisely the same kind of idea that Ricky Gervais feels guilty of spreading because he doesn't really know that it is true. And yet it is presented as the beginning assumption of all humanity in this non-lying universe. The writers might as well have presented us with a universe in which everyone starts out with religious assumptions, and an atheistic religion is built up by Gervais' uniquely speculative and dishonest character. Both would be equally illogical, given the starting premise.

Ultimately, The Invention of Lying is a funny movie, mostly driven by specific comedic situations and the strengths of its star-studded cast. It does attempt what few movies today try to achieve: a hilarious attempt at exploring relevant ideas in an original way. Unfortunately, the conceit fails almost before it even takes off, due to such fundamental flaws in the architecture of its assumptions. Lying is good for a few quite genuine laughs, but for anyone wanting some intelligent fare, it's a bit of a disappointment. Which is sad, because it has some very ingenious and memorable moments. It's worth seeing, if you're already interested. Just don't take it too seriously, and you'll be fine.

Tolkien as Translator: Language, Culture, and Society in Middle-earth

2010-06-05T18:39:00.005-04:00

I have no idea how long this will last, but anyone interested in Tolkien should check this out: a real live Harvard lecture on the man, in video form, for free!!

Tolkien as Translator: Language, Culture, and Society in Middle-earth

Wandering Stars: planetary romance in the Chronicles of Narnia

2010-05-09T00:51:00.016-04:00

“Nay, dear Prince,” said the Doctor (and he too spoke in a whisper). “The great lords of the upper sky know the steps of their dance too well for that. Look well upon them, their meeting is fortunate and means some great good for the sad realm of Narnia. Tarva the Lord of Victory salutes Alambil the Lady of Peace.”
— Doctor Cornelius, Prince Caspian.
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
— Eustace and Ramandu, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Just last night I finished re-reading C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, for the first time in almost ten years. It was a real pleasure, for these have been some of my favorite books ever since I was a child, and have remained so even among the troves of literary treasures I’ve accumulated. There is something special about these books. I will not even try to advance any theory on what it is; that is too solid ground for my shaky feet.

This reading of the Chronicles was made even more pleasurable by the fact that it is the first time I have read them since reading Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, a brilliant and painstakingly researched piece of literary archaeology, uncovering what was perhaps the last real literary secret left. I cannot recommend Ward’s book strongly enough. He convincingly argues that each of the seven books were written to express the essence of one of the seven planets, as understood in the Medieval age: Jove (or Jupiter), Mars, Sol (or the sun), Luna (the moon), Mercury, Venus and Saturn. Neptune, Uranus and Pluto had not then been discovered, and the sun and moon were thought to orbit the earth. This secret way of writing was what Lewis calls “the kappa element of romance,” everywhere present but nowhere explicit.

The theme of the medieval planets was one that interested Lewis his entire life, from childhood to his academic studies. He wrote a poem entitled “The Planets,” and even devoted an entire chapter to discussing their characteristics in The Discarded Image, his treatise on the whole medieval worldview — a work well worth reading for anyone interested in that age of history.

As this is the first time I’ve read these books knowing about this schema, I thought I would take notes during reading, trying to spot as many of the hidden themes and motifs as I could. The following were first published as reviews to my Shelfari account, but I thought I’d post them here, all in one place.

The governing planet of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series, is Jove, or Jupiter. One of the first things I noticed was the constant reference to birdsong, using the word “chuckling,” an unusual word choice which fits into the planetary schema decidedly, as Jupiter is associated with laughter. The theme of justice is invoked constantly: appeals to justice (in ridding Narnia of the Witch), the necessity of justice in satisfying the Deep Magic, Aslan forgiving Edmund his treachery, the children hunting down the evil remnants after their victory and judging them. Hunts, too, are a Jovial motif, and are referred to as early as Lucy’s visit with Tumnus; not to mention the wolves hunting down the children and the beavers, and the final hunt for the White Stag. Kingship is probably the most firmly Jovial image, and it can be said to be the dominant motif of Lion. A false queen is deposed, and no less than four monarchs instated in her place; Aslan first introduced as the King and the Lord of the woods. There is probably more on that note I cannot remember. But what I think is the strongest Jovial motif is what Tolkien called eucatastrophe: a sudden reversal of fortune, turning suddenly from a desperate and hopeless situation into victory unlooked-for. This happens all throughout the novel, in small (sometimes minuscule) ways as well as large ones, and the most notable is Aslan’s own resurrection. Eucatastrophe is important, because Jupiter as a symbol represents wrongs righted, the transition of justice and peace over injustice and tragedy. As Lewis’ poem on the planets said about Jupiter, “winter passed and guilt forgiven”; as apt a summary of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as one could imagine.

Mars is everywhere in Prince Caspian; war, revolution, restoration! From the moment the children arrive again mysteriously in Narnia, the planetary intelligence governing this book is present. Edmund talks about knights-errant surviving in the woods; the chess piece Susan finds in the ruins is a knight with a ruby eye missing. The first discovery the children make in the castle ruins is the treasury chamber, which contains their arms and armor. Trumpkin engages in a martial contest with the children before he can be convinced of their legitimacy. Caspian himself is urged to forget the old stories, and to concentrate instead on “battles and adventures,” as well as sword-fighting and other martial skills. Doctor Cornelius tells Caspian the history of his race, a history of conquest. The council at the Dancing Lawn is to be a council of war. A point is made of emphasizing just, that is, knightly, martial conduct, vs. unjustness and treacherousness: Peter’s and Edmund’s chivalrous treatment to Miraz and his men, contrasted with the two nobles’ scheming and backstabbing words and deeds. The mouse Reepicheep, first introduced in this book, is first and foremost a warrior, and is first described as “a very martial mouse.” Nearly every major character is made a knight at the end. Aslan himself is not as active in this book as in the first, as in that book he played a Jovial, and thus kingly, role; whereas here he allows the children themselves to take a more active role in the wars and in figuring out their own plans. But Aslan still plays a Martial role, embodying the other significant aspect of Mars: woodcraft and forests. Mars’ other aspect was the god of the forests (Mars Silvanus), and this theme is everywhere present in Caspian as well. Aslan wakes the Dryads, the spirits of trees, and sends them into the battle. The ruins of Cair Paravel are overgrown with trees, so much so that the land surrounding it is hard to explore. A man beating a child is turned into a tree. Mars, then, governs this book entirely; yet war for war’s sake is not glorified, only necessary and just war. Effort is actually made by Peter to end the violence quickly and with little bloodshed. This does not lessen, but rather reaffirms the Martial theme of this book: for, as dual lord of war and of forests, Mars properly understood upholds violence only as a thing of pure necessity; in its normal state, it is a symbol for ability, youthful ardor, and repose. Everywhere, chivalry, courage and knighthood are affirmed, alongside woodcraft and the triumph of Nature, bringing in a new era for the folk and creatures of Narnia.

The medieval planet Lewis chose to illuminate with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is Sol; that is, the Sun. (Again, to the medieval philosophers, the sun and moon were both planets, thought to orbit the earth.) Of course, the way Lewis wrote his adventures, this symbolic and thematic element is “everywhere present but nowhere explicit,” and the greatest amount of solar quality comes from the prose itself, which, though simple, shines brightly from the page in an almost ecstatic way. There is much to notice in the way of Solar motifs, though. The ship’s very name, for one. The voyage eastward, toward the rising sun; the very feeling of a sea voyage conjures up images of unceasing sunlight. The sun disappears when Eustace sees the dragon for the first time. The dragon’s gold horde alludes to the metal associated with the sun, as does the pool at Deathwater Island. The sun is the planet of knowledge, philosophy and theology, which Eustace gains when he becomes a dragon, realizing the truth about himself and his relationships with others. The sun rises as Eustace returns to camp, his normal self again. The sun comes out from behind a cloud just as the voyagers see the golden statue at Deathwater Island. The gold-lust this place inspires also alludes to Solar influences, improperly received. Two personified stars appear in the narrative; the sun itself is a star, and so stars are here a solar motif. Birds from the sun come to eat the feast at Aslan’s Table, and give Ramandu a fire-berry from the solar valleys. The sweet water near the end of the world tastes like “drinkable light.” And Aslan, when the children finally reach his far distant country, scatters light frm his mane, taking on Solar qualities in a literal way. A less obvious Solar motif is the presence of dragons. Eustace becomes one temporarily through enchantment, the ship encounters the Sea Serpent, and the Dawn Treader herself is carved to look like one. This is important because Apollo, the Greek sun god, is known in one capacity as Apollo Sauroctonos, that is, Dragon-slayer. Indeed Aslan dragon-slays himself, when he “un-dragons” Eustace.

Voyage has always been one of my favorite of the Narnia Chronicles (with The Silver Chair), and reading it again with the knowledge gained from Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia only enriches and deepens the sense of transcendent beauty and meaning. This book is radiant, and that, it appears, is no accident.

The fourth book of the Chronicles has more thematic and atmospheric elements pointing toward its governing planet, Luna (the moon), than it does motifs, and the scarcity of these motifs, so common in the other books, casts doubt upon the schema of each book representing on of the seven Medieval planets. Yet this very doubt itself is further proof of the schema. Luna was thought to be the boundary between the Heavens, a place where all was perfect and orderly, and the Earth, where all was flawed and uncertain. This doubt and uncertainty is one of the major effects of Luna’s influence, improperly received. There is also a sense of exile from Aslan once the children pass out of his country and into Narnia, where all becomes uncertain. (“Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken.”) The moon also has a wandering effect, which can be seen at many times in The Silver Chair. Characters constantly waver in their goal and stray from their paths. All but one of the four signs are botched. The level of friendship between Eustace and Jill waxes and wanes. The inconstancy of Time between the two worlds, present in almost every other book as well, here takes on its most personally painful manifestation as Eustace sees a dear friend of his on his deathbed. The moon also produces madness, or “lunacy”. The prince himself has his nightly fits of lunacy, which are in actuality his only moments of sanity. The metal associated with the moon is silver, which appears in the titular chair. Luna’s influence, properly received, enables a peacefulness and submission to God even in the face of doubt, uncertainty and distance from Him; a thing which we see at the final confrontation between the protagonists and the Green Lady. Puddleglum tells her that there may well be no Narnia and no Aslan, but that he will live like a Narnia and follow Aslan anyway. Luna is also a watery planet, and dewiness and moistness are a common motif in The Silver Chair, from Jill’s crying at the beginning, to the wet feeling she gets from being blown through clouds, to Puddleglum’s marshy home, to the many streams running through the Northern Wastes and the rising waters of Underland. Crowning all these Lunar motifs, the very first light seen by the characters as they emerge from Underland is moonlight. The Silver Chair is all infused with a melancholy, like that of a moonlit night. Though this atmosphere can be depressing, it is also filled with beauty and a bittersweet longing. This book ultimately became my favorite of the Narnian septology. Its distinct yet hazy atmosphere, the inimitable character of Puddleglum, and the affirmation of faith in the darkest and most hopeless of situations, all put The Silver Chair among the highest and best of Lewis’ writings, in my estimation.

The Horse and His Boy is a book I had to grow to appreciate, over multiple re-readings as a child; probably due to the exotic settings so far away from beloved Narnia. No one can read this book attentively and claim that C.S. Lewis was racist, as he plainly takes so much delight in his created culture of Calormen, misguided and ignorant though its people are. The planet whose symbolism and motifs pervade this fifth book of the Narniad is Mercury, and indeed the plot itself is very Mercurial in a literal way. As if mimicking the behavior of the metal mercury, characters, and the story itself, divide and converge and divide only to converge again. The children are separated from each other in Tashbaan, each getting pulled away in different directions, only to meet again outside the city; and they are separated again after arriving in Archenland, only to meet up again after the battle. Prince Cor and his brother Corin are separated shortly after birth, meet again in Tashbaan, are separated again and meet up just before the battle. While with her friend Lasaraleen in Tashbaan, Aravis walks a passageway in the Tisroc’s palace that divides in two; Shasta confronts a similar parting of ways on his way to Anvard after meeting King Lune for the first time. The original convergence of the horses, on the run from wild lions, is another Mercurial event. Mercury is also associated, by way of the Greco-Roman god of the same name, with messengers, speed, and thieving, all of which are prominent motifs in The Horse and His Boy. Bree justifies stealing from Calormene villages as they make their way through the countryside. Prince Rabadash tells his army that nothing matters but speed. The Hermit of the Southern Marches urges Shasta on to Anvard, telling him, “But run, run: always run.” The Horses repeatedly run from lions (actually Aslan in disguise). But probably the most obvious Mercurial motif is the messenger. Indeed most of the central characters of this book serve as messengers at some point. Aravis bears the message of Rabadash’s secret plans, while Shasta bears the message of the secret way into Archenland to Aravis; and the two (whose messages converge into one central mission) bear this news speedily and frantically to King Lune of Archenland himself, often after running to the point of exhaustion. Another Mercurial motif is twins; as Gemini is associated with the planet Mercury, twins and dualness are prominent in this book. Prince Corin and Cor are themselves twins, while Mount Pire, a prominent landmark, is a double-peaked mountain said to have once been a two-headed giant. Lastly, Mercury is associated with language and linguistic cunning, an art shown effusively in the oral habits of the Calormenes. Lewis repeatedly makes a point that Calormene storytelling is some of the best storytelling in the world. Though the atmosphere of this book’s governing planet is less pervasive than in others, the story is filled with elements pointing toward Mercury and its spiritual truths of activity, expression, revelation and reunion.

Though it is probably not my most favorite book of the Narniad, The Magician’s Nephew is without a doubt the most beautiful. And that is fitting, as it was written to reflect the character of Venus, the planet of love, of beauty, of fertility and youth and birth. And with these things it shines forth as with a song. Femininity and fertility are everywhere in the story. Digory’s admonition to his uncle Andrew is dismissed as the result of his being raised by women and old wives and their tales. The Wood between the Worlds is full of lush trees and grasses that one can almost here grow; “a rich place: as rich as plum cake.” Jadis is thought by Digory (though, it may seem to the reader, inexplicably) to be the most beautiful woman he has seen. Frank’s hymn in the dark Nothingness before Narnia's creation is about bringing in the harvest; that is, the fruits of the earth’s fertility. Sweetness is another notable quality of Venus, properly received. The very first page of the story describes sweets that would make the reader’s mouth water. The bell which Digory strikes is said to give off a sweet sound “with something horrible about it.” Narnia and Aslan are described as sweet more than once, and the children eat a supper of toffees. It is also notable that the fate of Digory’s ill mother is a major subplot, as Venus is also the planet of motherhood. Fledge’s wings are copper in color; copper being the metal of Venus. The most obvious and most central expression of the Venereal character is the creation of Narnia itself. Grass and trees spring from the earth at Aslan’s song, “making that young world ever softer.” The animals, birds and insects themselves erupt from the very earth. All creation is described as coming “out of the Lion’s head,” bringing to mind the image of Venus herself, in the old myths, springing full-formed from the head of her father. Digory and Andrew think the new Narnia to be the land of youth. Newborn Narnia is so vivid and bursting with fertility that even nonliving things, such as gold coins, a metal bar from a lamp-post, and a toffee, grow from the ground into trees where they are planted. Frank’s first command is to raise food out of the earth. Even uncle Andrew himself is planted in the ground in a comical moment. And the first thing the Narnians are commanded to do after awake is to Love. One interesting theme which emerges toward the end of the book is the importance of receiving good things rightly. Things always have their natures and their virtues, Aslan tells Digory; yet when taken in the wrong way or at the wrong time or for the wrong reason, they lead always to misery. “All get what they want; they don’t always like it.” This is brilliantly wise and true, and is relevant to the theme of the influences of the planets themselves (as Michael Ward discusses in his book, Planet Narnia). The Magician’s Nephew is a thing of rare beauty, the beauty of the morning unspoiled, of clarity and youth and beauty freely given. One knows, from reading the other books, that this clear morning will not last, at least not within the temporal Narnia. Yet it is a thing good to look back to, to be inspired by, to hope for in the future. For I think it is meaningful that when the Narnia septology ends, it ends not in the throes of ruin and death which the final book’s Saturnine theme would suggest, but in the garden which Digory visits in this book; an image which suggests the new creation, the eternal morning: Paradise restored.

Night falls on Narnia in The Last Battle; the end of all things and the beginning of all that is real. The medieval planet expressed in this final book of the Narnia septology is Saturn, symbol of death, decay, old age, ugliness, tragedy, and disaster. But received properly, its influence leads to contemplation and repentance. From the very first chapter, Saturn’s grim character is present. An earthquake foreshadows the coming disasters. Roonwit tells Tirian that there have never been worse portents for the past five hundred years. A nymph cries woe for the felling of Lantern Waste. Jewel feels that “We have lived too long. The worst thing in the world has come upon us.” Shift says he is really a Man, and that he is hundreds of years old, referring to the Saturnine motif of old age. Tirian, though by no means old himself at twenty-five, is the oldest of any of the Narnian heroes the children from our world must help. Tash appears in the woods, and his effect is a feeling of coldness and a smell of death. Jewel tells Jill that all worlds must come to an end, save Aslan’s own country. Narnia itself falls to the Calormenes, and Roonwit’s dying words tell the heroes that “noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.” Jill and Eustace discuss death, a thing the children of other books have never talked of. Every small victory is overshadowed by a larger defeat; all plans are thwarted in the face of Tash; and so many tragedies occur in the final battle itself that it would be tedious to list them all. Knowledge of Aslan has decayed in many parts of Narnia. Many animals cease to be Talking Animals. Aslan says, “Now it is time,” ushering the end of the Narnian world. He calls Father Time himself, whose name comes from the name Chronos (“Time”), the Greek name for Saturn. Father Time actually appears, his own hand blotting out the sun. Saturn is thus the only one of the seven medieval planets who appears as a character in any of the Narnia books.

And yet there are positive aspects of Saturn, as well. Saturn is like a solid cliff wall against which the water of our hopes is dashed against. And once those hopes are dashed, one has room to respond in a healthy way. There are several examples of this in the story. Realizing their misdeed early on in the story, Tirian and Jewel resign themselves to their fate and give themselves up to justice. In the wake of the Saturnine figure of Tash, Puzzle realizes the true nature of his passivity before Shift’s misdeeds. The Stable door is clearly meant to represent death, and once on the other side, Tirian observes with a smile, “It seems, then, that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from without are two different places.” This Saturnine realization lights the way toward the deepest beauty of The Last Battle, the ending of the Saturnine theme and the beginning of something brighter, more beautiful and eternally victorious. The children, the Kings, and the animals and all the others — even Emeth, a Calormene who mistakenly thought he was seeking Tash all his life — are brought to Aslan’s own country, which is the true reality behind everything they ever loved in Narnia and England alike. It is their true home, which they were seeking all their lives without knowing it. The beauty of these final few chapters is almost indescribable. They are perhaps some of Lewis’ best writing: high myth, good philosophy, beautiful literature. An imaginative vision of the core of Lewis’ thinking, and of the burning desire at the heart of Christianity. As beloved Aslan says, “The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

Reality and Romance

2010-05-02T15:36:00.007-04:00

A good friend of mine once said, just before walking out my door, that romanticism is, after all, an illusion. Unfortunately, this was said at the end of the conversation and not at the beginning; otherwise I would have had more to say about the subject. But the theme of romance seems ever-present to me; it is there every time I turn my head. This does not mean that I am a visionary; save in the sense that (though my sight may be weak) my eyes are open.

“Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality.” So wrote a wiser man than I, a true intellectual — something increasingly rarer and rarer to find. For it is possible, as he explained his words, to conceive of circumstances in which reality is not really real; but there are no circumstances in which romance is not present. Reality may turn out to be, as some men have said it is, all an illusion. Reality might be misleading. Reality might not be real itself. But if that were true, it would be very strange and mysterious indeed. That strangeness, that mystery, is romance.

Romance is the mystery, the beauty, and the poetry of the world; it is the sublimity and the awesomeness inherent in absolutely everything. It is a strong drink, a heady wine — more: an air that intoxicates merely by breathing it. The past century has labored to show us that romance is a subjective thing, a naïve feeling. It has shown us stark vistas and disquieting scenarios. "See," they say. "There is no romance there. It is not real, as those of us with strong intellects can easily see." But it is weakness, and not strength, that sees no romance. There is nothing in the world not romantic or poetic, as G.K. Chesterton, that wise man I mentioned above, has shown us. We say that romance comes from an artificial way of looking at this; this is the very opposite of the truth. The unpoetry we perceive is the result of over-thinking; a mere literary effect. Chesterton offers us two proofs of this, in the opening segment to his third chapter of Heretics. This segment contains what I feel to be some of the best writing, on any subject, that I have ever read. A mailbox is a very poetic thing. It is one of the last temples left to humanity, a place where the written word is sacred, forbidden to be tampered with. Even we are not to touch our own letters once they safe within. It is only the word "mailbox" which is unpoetic. A traffic-light, similarly, is a chamber of eternal vigilance, safeguarding human lives by lighting bright fires of green and red. It is only the word "traffic-light" which is unpoetic. To take an example of my own, a compost pile is a treasure trove of the very elements of life, where refuse is changed to fertility. It is only the word "compost pile" which is unpoetic. A printer is an oracle of human thought, transforming the efforts of our minds into material form, that they may be remembered or passed on for the benefit of others. All of this is what these things really are. If it were not so, there would be no reason for us to have them. It is only the rude linguistic tags we invent for them that sound dull and unimpressive. Familiarity is the greatest of all illusions.

Similarly, I do not enjoy football. Nor do I find pleasure in professional wrestling, or mathematics. But these are not mere tastes or whims. They are weaknesses. They are deficiencies in my self. If I were really strong, if I were really completely filled with life and energy I should find pleasure and delight in everything I came across. He to whom the world is eternally new, eternally exciting and wondrous, lives a life beyond the lot of mortal men. Writes Chesterton again, from that same brilliant chapter:

We might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as splendid as the swords of an army. The bore is stronger and more joyous than we are...to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.

It is, then, a common error to think of romance as something fleeting, something flimsy that has more to do with our own passing whims than with actual reality. Just the reverse is true. It is our tolerance for reality, our willingness to open ourselves up to the world surrounding us, that is fleeting and flimsy and pathetic. Romance is a reality. But it might be truer to say that all reality is romance. He who sees a thing as if for the very first time sees it in the truest way. For one cannot understand how bizarre and wonderful and mysterious the universe is until he realizes that all Nature is superfluous; that all existence hangs upon nothing; that there is nothing in the Universe that had to be.

Eurydice's Song

2010-04-03T11:49:00.013-04:00

But even that hardest of hearts unhardened...

Anaïs Mitchell’s voice is one that takes a few listens to grow on the ear. There are definite shades in it of Joanna Newsome’s childlike warbling, though without the sing-songiness or precociousness. But it is certainly true that she carries one of the most distinctive presences on her new album, Hadestown, even though she does not appear in every song. A folk-opera retelling of the Orpheus myth, Hadestown is not only a beautiful musical collaboration, but also a quite timely social commentary. For this, her magnum opus, Mitchell has recruited some truly stellar talent: Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon performs the role of Orpheus; Ben Knox Millar (of The Low Anthem) appears as Hermes; folk singer Greg Brown evokes a smoothly tyrannical Hades; Ani DiFranco portrays his wife, Persephone; and the Haden Triplets perform as the Greek Fates, with Mitchell’s own bittersweet but genuine vocal enacting Eurydice, Orpheus’ lover.

Mitchell’s version of the story is set in America, though the exact era of the story is a bit ambiguous, perhaps purposefully so. There are hints of the Depression Era, both musically and in little hints like the mention of mining towns and speakeasies. Also present are certain post-apocalyptic touches; yet perhaps the most interesting hints, if accidental, point toward the present day. In any case, the story portrays a society dealing with hard times economically, when making ends meet is a challenge and the specter of poverty is the biggest worry on everyone’s mind. All this is extremely relevant, as the opera's central theme is the way we give up our freedoms in exchange for security.

Hadestown starts out on a fairly sunny note, though not without its foreboding clouds. “Wedding Song” opens with a short instrumental section evincing a rustic landscape, windy and dusty and grey, but lightened by a hardened optimism. Eurydice gently asks her lover how they will be able to afford the necessary expenses for their wedding: the golden band, the wedding table, and their bridal bed. These concerns right away establish the tone of the opera: love is a given, a sweet balm over any other pain: but that pain is still present nonetheless. Orpheus gives what at first seems an unrealistic response: “when I sing my song,” the river, the trees, the birds, will provide everything we need. But I’ve come to the conclusion that these verses aren’t the naïve hippie poetics they would at first appear to be: instead, they figuratively express a deeply held faith, as if saying, “don’t worry about those things. What we need, we will be given. What we are not given, we do not need.” This beautiful thought echoes the famous words about the lilies of the field; and Orpheus is thus established at the beginning as the voice not only of poetry but also of philosophy.

From here the album continues on to a wider survey of this world of hard times. Orpheus sings of how Hades, a wealthy businessman, has built a town around the power of his pocketbook and his steely, magnetic charisma. Hades has employed a number of people in his mines, “paid them their wages and set them about, digging and dredging and dragging the depths.” Instead of the River Styx, his underworld realm is surrounded by a wall, built by “a million hands that were not his own.” In the third song, Orpheus gives his view on all this: Hadestown is filled with hunger, exhaustion, and thralldom, where “the wage is nothing…It’s a graveyard in Hadestown.” Despite this unequivocal rejection, and the leering cautions of Hermes, Eurydice begins to be glamoured by the thought of security from worry: employment with Hades, she begins to realize, would mean that her financial anxieties could possibly be eased. “Every little penny in the wishing well…where do you think they come from?” She imagines the town’s borders, despite the words of her lover, as full of wealthy employees and epicurean pleasures. All this appeals to her. But really, what Eurydice wants most is not so much these fine things as just to find “a nice, soft place to land,” to “lie down forever,” to “close my eyes and disappear like a petal on a stream, a feather on the air.” It is not so much poverty that Eurydice fears, but the idea of constantly working, of living a life without any change or progression. When she looks at the comfort and prestige of Hades, his wife and their entourage, “it kind of makes you wonder how it feels.”

It doesn’t take her long to find out. Hades sends to her, and rather than merely gratifying her curiosity, he makes her an offer. She balks at first, wondering what Orpheus would think. Hades’ response to this doubt is telling: “Let me guess: he’s some kind of poet, and he’s penniless. He’ll give you his hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth. He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.” This slick, smooth-talking magnate has the voice of the devil, agitating her doubts and appealing to her desires.

It must be said that Greg Brown’s voice is one of the central pleasures of the album. There is a blackness, a darkness, that is appropriate both to his character’s identity (a modern, non-supernatural version of the Greek god of death and the underworld), but also to his character’s personality. Hades is a slick salesman, well-versed in bait and switch, in manipulation; the listener indeed feels this power himself even from the benefit of perspective afforded by not actually being in the story. As Mitchell herself said in a recent interview on NPR, “You almost feel his voice in your body before you hear it. It’s got these weird subterranean tones.” Perhaps Brown’s greatest showcase on this album is “Why We Build the Wall,” a paean to the circular logic that underlies the philosophy not only of Hadestown, but of modern day America. In short, we build a wall to keep us free, the wall keeps us free by keeping out the enemy, the enemy being poverty, because we have and they have not. The song concludes, in a moment of glorious irony, “What do we have that they should want? We have a wall to work upon! We have work and they have none, and our work is never done…”

Probably one of the catchiest songs of the entire album is the Haden Triplets’ showcase tune, a lively and upbeat number that sounds as if it would not be out of place in a musical such as Chicago. Petra, Tanya and Rachel, daughters of jazz bassist Charlie Haden, have recorded material separately, but they truly shine as a trio. I have to think of their work on 2008’s Rambling Boy, a project involving all of the Haden family and some of their friends. This recording focused on the family’s country music heritage, and the Triplets’ contributions were particularly gems because of the old-timey hues draped all over their harmonies. Here, that effect is also put to use, but with a darker, more worldly overcast. “When the Chips are Down” presents an interpretation and justification of Eurydice’s choice to accept Hades’ offer and become a denizen of Hadestown: in short, that survival is of the fittest; that morality is fine and good for people who are well-fed and complacent, but “now that the chips are down,” everyone will act immorally. “Go ahead and lay the blame, talk of virtue, talk of sin. Wouldn’t you have done the same, in her shoes, in her skin?”

This relativist approach is certainly what is often called street-smart and practical, but the listener can’t help but doubt this interpretation. It is, he feels, morally horrendous, though subtly seductive. It begs us not only to forgive Eurydice (as if we were about to condemn her anyway), but to join her. After all, whatever affords the greatest amount of happiness with the least amount of effort and hardship… But the listener is right to listen to his doubts. For this utilitarianism comes from the mouths of the Fates, who later on tell Orpheus that there is no point trying to rescue his lover, as “you’re bound, you’re bound to lose…What’s done is done…Nothing changes anyhow.” A possible interpretation of all this might be found in Neil Gaiman’s comics epic, The Sandman, in which he identifies the Fates with the “Kindly Ones,” the Furies, who themselves work for Hades. And so moral relativity and fatalism, given one voice here, are shown to be but agents of that deathly figure which the Romans called Pluto, the Giver of Wealth.

From this point in the story, Orpheus is determined to rescue his lover from thralldom in the underground mining town. Along the way, he is helped and hindered by assorted characters, from Hermes to the Fates, and even Persephone herself. Hermes here is, quite appropriately and ingeniously, a hobo, who gives Orpheus directions and advice about the journey; for even he, a starving itinerant, knows what is what and what life is worth — he knows that there is such a thing as too high a cost to pay for easy comfort and advancement. “Don’t give your name,” he tells Orpheus, “you don’t have one. And don’t look no one in the eye. They’ll suck your brain, they’ll suck your breath…they’ll truss you up in your Sunday best, and stuff your mouth with cotton.” All throughout the album runs this golden thread, this subtle and imaginative identification of death with senseless labor, abandoned liberty, and thoughtless consumerism.

In another brilliant song, Persephone, though she is Hades’ wife, and though she genuinely loves him, provides a counterpoint to the ethos of her underground home. On the sly, she runs a speakeasy of sorts, catering to the denizens of Hadestown, to whom “six feet under [is] getting under your skin.” There are also hints of back-room pornography; but all of this illicitness is yet another example of Anais Mitchell’s singular vision. It is not alcohol or girls that Persephone is plying under the counter: “I can give you what it is you crave…I got the wind right here in a jar, I got the rain on tap at the bar, I got sunshine up on the shelf.” Similarly, “Maybe you’re looking for some stronger stuff? I’ve got a sight for the sorest eyes — when’s the last time you saw the sky?…Put a quarter in the slot, you’ll get an eyeful. You want the moon? I got her, too. She’s right here waiting in my pay-per-view.” This is brilliant! For Persephone (she is, at least in her place in original Greek mythology, the goddess of springtime) shows us that, in such a dreary and meaningless place as Hadestown (or our own industro-consumerist world, take your pick), what we really crave, as if an addiction, is the world itself, or what enclaves of the world are left. Her moonshine is literally the shine of the moon.

It is therefore not surprising that Persephone, upon learning of Orpheus’ quest, seeks to help him by turning to her husband. “If you had heard how he sang tonight, you’d pity poor Orpheus.” But Hades is unmoved, his philosophy the same as before: “Nothing comes of wishing on stars, and nothing comes of the songs people sing, however sorry they are.” His concern, again, is not for freedom, but for the security for which freedom is exchanged. Like any tyrant, he fears for what he has built with the blood and sweat of others: “Give them a piece, and they’ll take it all. Show them the crack and they’ll tear down the wall. Lend them an ear and the kingdom will fall, for a song.”

The kingdom does almost fall for a song, and it is because Hades refuses to listen. He later observes that “with his kiss, the riot starts.” And this is important. From the very beginning, practical, utilitarian Hades has discounted the power of art, of song, of poetry, likening Orpheus to a well-meaning hippie who doesn’t work and so cannot pay the bills. But in the end Orpheus’ art is enough to move not only the entire population of Hadestown to sympathy and action, but also Hades himself, in what is perhaps the folk-opera’s most beautiful moment. In “Epic, Part II”, Orpheus turns his song toward Hades himself, musing at how the heart of a king is a hard, untouchable thing. But he knows, too, that the heart of a king is also the heart of a man. I could not help but shed a tear, and I imagine the same of Hades, when Orpheus sings that “even that hardest of hearts unhardened, suddenly, when he saw her there: Persephone, in her mother’s garden…And suddenly Hades was only a man.”

This is too much for Hades, and he relents, though bitterly, and his actions even now are not entirely above board. “All my children came here poor, clamoring for bed and board. Now what do they clamor for? Freedom! Freedom! Have I made myself their lord just to fall upon the sword of some pauper’s minor chord?” True to the original Greek myth, Hades releases Eurydice, with the fatal caveat. For he knows what will happen. “Nothing makes a man so bold as a woman’s smile and her hand to hold. But all alone, his blood runs thin, and doubt comes in.”

In the end, Orpheus makes the same fatal mistake, losing everything. But, as hinted before, success is not everything. In a sense, Hades is right: Orpheus, when the chips are down, cannot succeed. But he fails because he is human. He doesn’t have enough trust, hope or faith to succeed. And yet he tried. That “poet,” “penniless,” who will “write you a poem when the power’s out,” has shaken the wall, has shown its builders its fatal flaw, and has pierced the armor of a tyrant.

“Some birds sing when the sun shines bright; my praise is not for them, but the one who sings in the dead of night: I raise my cup to him.” So runs the pledge of Persephone and Eurydice in the wake of the poet’s failure. As Mitchell herself said in the same NPR interview, “It’s not succeeding that is important, but trying as hard as you can in the face of futility.” This echoes what is perhaps G.K. Chesterton’s most startling paradox: “There is nothing that fails like success.” (Heretics, ch. 1 & 12) That he who is most concerned with whether a venture will succeed or fail, will not give every fiber of his being to a cause, and thus fails before he even starts. But that he who hopes in the face of the hopeless (the only situation in which hope is really a virtue), he who pits himself against an insurmountable wall, is the one who is most likely to move mountains and topple kings. That Orpheus failed is irrelevant. That he and got as far as he did, to the very threshold of success, is the point of this story. And he did so by giving himself up utterly to his cause, with no reservations and no concerns for safety or security, neither financial or otherwise. It’s a hard moral for us to take, but it’s not an impossible one. Anyone can perform it, though few do.

Hadestown is, then, many things. It is a brilliant story, it is a potent myth. It is a beautiful musical and vocal achievement, and a compilation of a variety of talents. Knox Miller’s gravelly voice is perfect as a hobo, Brown’s dark and stony tones the very aural image of darkness, authority and a hopeless land under the earth. Mitchell’s syrupy yet sympathetic voice lends itself well to a regretful and wistful Eurydice: while no one can imagine an Orpheus who does not have the poetry and beauty and pathos and daring of Justin Vernon’s soft, rich and understated tones. Hadestown is also a well-timed warning to a culture very sensitive to matters like security and worry for the future. Philosophically, musically, artistically, and mythically, this opera succeeds despite its hero’s failure — or perhaps because of it. Perhaps, one might say, and as the followers of a certain religion have said for over two thousand years, nothing succeeds like failure.

Wine as Metaphor: Lost's "Ab Æterno" Considered

2010-03-25T20:28:00.009-04:00

“No man is condemned for anything he has done: he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He is condemned for not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light.”
- George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons.

I can’t help thinking that this week’s episode of Lost, “Ab Æterno,” was both the strongest and the weakest episode the show has aired to date. We finally learned of Richard’s past, which was epic in every way. Richard has gone through the same sort of search for redemption which we have seen the other survivors undertake through their flashbacks and their time on the Island; although in Richard’s case, he should not have had to. This flashback showed him not as a mystery, but as a real human being, who has gone through real human situations that have scarred him and shaped the kinds of choices he has made. Richard’s story is only more mythological than those of the other survivors because he happened to run into Jacob and the Man in Black. We finally saw the destruction of the statue, as well as an early attempt of the Man in Black to find his loophole. Anthony Cooper’s theory of the Island as Hell resurfaced (which, interestingly, was first proposed aboard the Black Rock, both chronologically and contextually), only to be refuted and replaced with something more mythological and a bit less sensible. And this is where my problems with “Ab Æterno” arise. There seems to be a basic confusion of several important things, leading to a mishmash of doctrine and mythology, and a travesty to philosophy.

This basic confusion first reared its head in the form of Richard’s priest, Father Suarez. The padre tells Richard that he cannot give him absolution for murder, as one must do penance for one’s sins and he, as he will soon hang for his crime, does not have time to do anything. This is such a horrible representation of Christian, and even Catholic doctrine, that it made me grimace. No sin is unforgivable, so long as one repents before Christ, which is what Richard did. I later realized that this was probably intentional. Suarez says what he says because in every way he is a bad priest. His refusal to give absolution came after he realized that Richard spoke English, and thus that he was a good candidate for sale into slavery. His refusal of absolution was geared toward making Richard more compliant so that he could sell him. Still, it must be said that the whole idea of sin and Hell in “Ab Æterno” bears absolutely no resemblance to actual Christianity.

So where does the idea of evil that is presented here come from? As I noticed in the first scene of season five’s finale, “The Incident,” the portrayal of two opposing forces, one clothed in black and the other in white, hints toward a philosophical idea of good and evil called Dualism. Dualism holds that there are two equal and opposite powers, one good and one evil, who have been continuously striving against each other since the beginning of time (by the way, the translation of this episode’s Latin title). In this view, the good power is good simply for the sake of goodness, and the bad power is bad simply for the sake of badness. In mythology, this system is seen in Persian Zoroastrianism, in which the good Ahura Mazda battles the evil Angra Mainyu. Although C.S. Lewis said that, apart from Christianity, he considered Dualism to be the most sensible creed on the market, there are some major problems with this view of good and evil. In fact, these problems are so deep and so basic that Dualism has been effectively refuted.

In Lost, the Man in Black is clearly not an equal power to Jacob, though he is in opposition to him. To my mind, this fact is not a serious flaw in the reading of their relationship as an expression of Dualism, because there are simply too many clues pointing in that direction. Early in season one, Locke’s explanation of the rules of backgammon is essentially the summation of this Dualism, and it is obvious that this is to be taken for an early metaphor for the antagonistic relationship we are seeing now. Yet in some ways it is appropriate that the Man in Black should be slightly subordinate to Jacob, for it points to the central flaw in Dualism: that even in this schema in which they are supposedly equal, the evil power nevertheless relies on the good power for its very existence. For one can be good, and want good things, simply because he recognizes the goodness in good things; because goodness is good. But no one wants evil just for the sake of evil, or does bad things simply because they are bad. Whether we are discussing theft, murder, adultery, etc., these actions are always taken because it is seen that taking them is a shortcut to obtaining some result that is considered as good. So even an evil act is dependent on the existence of goodness. Therefore, it is impossible to have a power that is evil simply for the sake of evil. Any conceivable evil power must be subordinate to and weaker than the good power, simply because it cannot exist on its own.

This also hints toward another major flaw in the episode’s schema of good and evil. Jacob describes the Island to Richard as a cork in a bottle, keeping the dark substances of evil from spilling upward into the world. Whether this would happen in a literal way — evil as some kind of dark energy, a la the Dark Side of the Force — or in a more spiritual or abstract way, this idea simply does not make sense. It is simply not logical to speak of evil as a positive substance. Evil, as has already been discussed, is not something that exists in and of and for itself; it is always something that desires good, or is good, but in the wrong way. Evil is good twisted, good ruined. It is the absence of good, and an absence cannot — save as a mere figure of speech — be a presence. Goodness is like light, or heat, and evil like darkness or coldness. Light and heat are both positive substances, as they indicate a presence of something — in this case, energy. When there is an absence of the substance we call light, then darkness remains. When there is an absence of the substance we call heat, then coldness remains.¹ So when we have an absence of good, only then is there anything called evil, for evil is by nature a lack. Anything more than this affords evil too grand a place which it does not deserve. Anything more is either superstition or science fiction.

From here, these relatively simple errors in the understanding of good and evil begin to multiply into something more warped: Jacob’s schema of good and evil in respect to humans. Jacob believes humanity is basically good, while the Man in Black believes we are basically evil. Despite the relativistic views of this modern age, it must be stated that this dilemma of humanity is a philosophical relic of the ancient ages that really has no place in our discussions anymore. Like Dualism, it has been refuted, this time by Christianity. The old pre-Christian philosophers discussed whether mankind was basically good or basically evil, dividing the world and our hearts and minds into black and white checkerboards. That this outmoded and outdated question would turn out to be central to a show that has made black and white a central motif, pasted visually all over its canon of episodes, is therefore not altogether surprising. But mankind is neither good nor evil, neither black nor white. Christianity helped the world to understand that mankind has potential for both good and evil, and that while our desires are often to do good, our nature nevertheless often ends up selecting evil. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:19) To say, as some have done, that this reflects a pessimistic view of humanity is simply a very superficial understanding of Christian ideas, and misses a great deal of subtlety and intricacy. Even a modern writer so great as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Gulag Archipelageo:

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.”

Sin and evil are not something that must be kept locked up, like the evil spirits in Pandora’s box, in order that an innocent humanity may be kept safe from them. Pandora’s box exists in every human heart, and every human takes a peek inside every once in a while. The hope that humanity will eventually just choose to be good, and consistently so, does not rise from an accurate reading of the human predicament. And it only makes sense for Jacob to hope that humanity will choose to consistently act in a good way, because humanity’s evil acts are always peppered with good acts, and vice versa. Humanity has been good — and evil — for a very long time, ab æterno.

Only a couple more observations are necessary before ending this critique. As is hinted in the discussion of Dualism above, it is obvious that Jacob in no way resembles the God of Judeo-Christian tradition, nor is he any type of God. He does seem to resemble in many ways one of the Pagan gods, however. He is a flawed being; and he evidently operates under conditions and rules not of his own making. There is also the season three propaganda video which Karl is forced to watch, which tells us that “God loves you as He loved Jacob.” If God loved Jacob the way he loves other human beings, then Jacob is not God. Jacob’s view on interventionism is also in stark contrast to that of the Judeo-Christian God. Jacob says that he does not wish to interfere in human affairs, for if he does, what is the point? Whereas in Judeo-Christian tradition, God recognizes the plight of humanity, and acts several times on our behalf. The Jewish name for God, YHWH, is probably a shortening of the phrase ehyeh asher ehyeh, found in Exodus 3. This is often translated, “I AM WHO I AM,” but the previous occurrence of this phrase in verse 12 (“I will be with you.”) shows that the actual meaning is “I will be who I will be.” The name of God, then, means something close to: “I will be understood by my future acts and revelations.” Yahweh is the one who keeps intervening in human history.

While Jacob is neither God nor fully good, it must be said that the Man in Black, while not fully evil (as it is impossible to be evil just for evil’s sake), is definitely not good by any means. Yes, he does urge Richard to kill Jacob, and ultimately succeeds with Ben, but the ultimate mark of his twisted nature is not what he does to Jacob but the way he talks to Jacob. Resentment, hatred, and enmity are all plain to see in every exchange the two share. Indeed, his murder of Jacob is one of the least evil things about him, and we guess this already when we consider the fact that Richard, too, is guilty of murder. Murder is a crime of passion, and crimes of passion (while still remaining reprehensible, of course) are some of the least bad of all sins. As George MacDonald wrote, “It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our [mind], kills the image, the idea of the [one] hated.”

Lost has always been a show about the big questions. It has always been not merely a story, but a story that purports to show — and up until now, has largely succeeded in showing — truth and wisdom in addition to good drama. This is the reason why these major flaws need to be addressed. In any other kind of show, one could write these problems off, saying, “Well, it’s just a story, just go along with it.” The writers of a show that name-drops philosophers and depicts skeletons holding classical works of philosophy should know better.

Their main error, then, is this. They have ignored definite human discoveries in the moral world, discoveries as definite, though not as material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot go back to an idea of pessimism, because we know that pessimism explains away goodness as accidental and thus meaningless. We cannot go back to an idea of optimism, because we know that optimism does injustice to those who suffer by explaining away evil.

Perhaps the best thing to do, then, is to hope that there is some further truth to be shown us that extends beyond this outdated schema. If the Island really is a cork, it must (in order for the show to not fall on its face philosophically) be a cork upon something other than evil. Perhaps Jacob and the Man in Black are both lying. Perhaps neither of them knows the real truth. For to look to such beings for ultimate answers is ultimately to find futility. They are not in a position, as old and as mythological and as powerful as they are, to give us absolute answers. For there to be any kind of truth at all, there has to be something underlying them; for, as conditioned beings, there must be someone who did the conditioning. The real hope for answers in Lost, if there is any real hope, remains still hidden.

¹ There are chemical substances that produce coldness instead of heat, but these substances involve chemical reactions that are endothermic (absorbing or consuming heat) rather than the more common exothermic (producing heat) reactions.

Is Avatar the most important film of our time?

2010-03-09T15:29:00.008-05:00

“Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world and in here is the dream.”

The everyman’s reaction to Avatar — that is, the average moviegoer’s, rather the critical reaction — has been pretty fairly divided. It seems that either one loves the movie, and thinks it is one of the best offerings to come from Hollywood in a long time; or else one repeats a variation on the thought that it was “all special effects and no plot.” Now I am no fan of Hollywood. I, like many, cheered and laughed with hearty amusement when Rick Riordan put the underworld realm of Hades beneath Los Angeles in his stellar pentology, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. My objections to the film industry are many and varied. They provide a pretty materialistic and consumerist view of life. They portray love, hate, war, faith, good and evil, and other such important human concerns, in a way that is at once generically consistent and fickle. And they almost never offer up any serious criticism to the major assumptions of modern culture. So my objections are mainly philosophical, rather than merely reactionary.

Before seeing Avatar, therefore, I had mentally sided with the film’s detractors. A film that was all style and no substance was just what one would expect, not only from a Hollywood blockbuster, but also from director James Cameron. But it is possible, even from such a prejudiced frame of mind, to be convinced otherwise, so long as one keeps one’s mind open. This is not to say, of course, that an open mind always leads to enjoyment and acceptance. That would be absurd in any case in which it were true. But if the work in question is of sufficiently good quality, well…

Avatar is one such work. Slowly but certainly I was won over by its exotic and yet plainly familiar setting and dilemma. Set on a moon of a far away gas giant, the planet Pandora is the site of a battleground between mutually opposing ideologies. Pandora itself is a blending of many things; so many things, in fact, that it is at times hard to separate the various strands. But I believe that is necessary, as most of the strands are ones we would do well to consider fully and closely.

Though a moon, Pandora bears more resemblance to our own Earth, or at least Earth as it has been in the past. Covered with lush vegetation, exotic animals, and traditional communities of indigenous peoples, the planet shows a sort of almost unspoiled paradise. The Na’vi themselves perhaps take their name as a reference to the Navajo, whose own name for themselves — Dine — means “the People”. Anyone paying any attention at all to the interplay of the subtitles and the spoken language of the Na’vi knows that their own name has the same meaning. And this clue is not misleading. From the outset, the Na’vi appear to be alien versions of American Indians. Their clothing, their weapons, and their material culture all appears to have been drawn from Indian sources, and they have a tribal society and their own shamans. They even thank their prey after hunting and killing it (a practice a lot more sensible and philosophical than it first appears to those who are — and rightly so — cautiously on the lookout for New Ageism). Their spirituality seems roughly Indian as well, though not exactly in all places.

It is into this society that Jack Sullivan, a Marine who has lost the use of his legs in some sort of injury, is tasked with infiltrating, through the device of the avatar. An avatar is a genetically engineered body, combining Na’vi and human DNA so that the human consciousness can safely inhabit it. Sullivan is soon separated from his group, and is lost in the jungle, until he is rescued from wild indigenous fauna by a Na’vi woman, who soon convinces her people to take him in and teach him their ways, though reluctantly. The Na’vi knows what he is, and also what he is not — they call him (perhaps not so irrationally) a demon spirit inhabiting a mortal body. At first, Sullivan is there only for the sake of his mission and the benefit of his fellow humans, who wish to exploit the Na’vi for the minerals their planet contains. But his loyalty gradually begins to shift; and it is this shift that constitutes the main thematic body of the film.

As the film continues, it becomes clear that the emerging war between the two species is not a racial war, but an ideological one. On one side, the Na’vi are defending not only their homes and their people, but their entire way of life and even their philosophy of life. On the other, the invading humans not only represent the scientific, industrial and military interests, but the entire theory of life which we call technological progress and applied science. But in a way it is misleading to describe this conflict as a war between humans and aliens. The Na’vi are people, too, perhaps moreso than the humans (a fact neatly underlined by the usage of the word “aliens” to describe them) — in fact, their unique physiology and coloration are just a blue mask upon a human face; that is, the face of a human living under normal and healthy conditions. That is what the blue people really are: an alternate version of humanity that still lives responsibly, humbly and humanely.

For it is notable that never in the entire movie, that I can remember, does a human ever fight a Na’vi in hand-to-hand combat. This is not because the Na’vi are slightly bigger and have the obvious physical advantage. Were this not true, it is equally implausible to imagine the humans entering into such a physical match. For the humans, as much as they venerate scientific materialism and military might, are not even as physical a people as the Na’vi. They live only virtually, with technology as the medium between themselves and the rest of the world, as it is with us and our blackberries and cell phones. This is seen in many different ways. Even the few human heroes of the story can only really live and fight meaningfully by artificially becoming one of the People.

This fact is interesting in a literal way, as it adds to the thematic body of Avatar. Yet it also should be understood symbolically. It can be stated in a different way: the human heroes can only live and fight meaningfully by becoming one of the People: that is, by choosing to live according to the lifestyle and ideology of the People.

And so Avatar’s heavy environmental (and, arguably, sometimes primitivist) themes make the film quite possibly the most important movie of our modern time. It is an allegory of sorts, but it is not all theory and no substance. It is about heroism, about making difficult and definitive choices. It is about a man who realizes that the only way to be a decent and genuine human being is to stop being human — at least, the way humanity is understood by the technological, scientific and industrial ideals that humanity has identified itself with. One cheers for Jake Sullivan, and boos for the story’s main military figure, the grisly and hard-boiled Miles Quaritch, when he declares that Sullivan has “betrayed his race”. For he hasn’t. He has only upheld that which is good across all races. It is Quaritch himself, and those who think like him, who have betrayed their race.

Which is interesting. Until about halfway through the story, Quaritch and the other humans, as obviously wrong as their worldview is, are still likeable characters. Quaritch himself offers to pay for Jake Sullivan’s surgery and the restoration of his legs. Moreover, his personality is a salty blend of disdain for officialism and admiration for raw physical strength that is distinctly compelling. And this may serve as a warning for all. The beginnings of the disease shared by most of Avatar’s humans, and even the ends of it, can be outwardly attractive, and seem themselves to be indications of health. One must be a better moral critic to discern the disease beneath. For it usually takes longer than the span of a motion picture for it to emerge in a really visible way, and at that point much damage has already been done.

To be clear, the film isn’t anti-science in any way. It is against applied science that the story takes its stand, not science proper; a distinction that is often made by environmentalists, and especially agrarians. The presence of xenobotanist Dr. Grace Augustine and her associate, Norm Spellman, as human renegades, guards against a reading of the story as anti-scientific. Through them, the unique biology and pseudo-spirituality of the Pandoric world is expressed in decidedly scientific terms. And this is perhaps the film’s greatest flaw: a fundamental confusion between the spiritual and the material. Almost every overtly spiritual element is explained as being biological in nature, a fact which takes away from the spiritual power and purity of the Na’vi’s culture. The planet Pandora is itself interlocked in a way that is not just ecological but also neural: it is almost a gigantic brain. While an intriguing concept, it mars the idea of Eywa, the Na’vi’s version of Mother Earth. For Eywa, as the expression of this neural network, is not really any sort of supernatural god. The Na’vi appear Pagan in their practices (though oddly influenced by a sort of Eastern philosophy), but they do not worship anything like a god. Nor is Eywa a God; but this is fitting, as most American Indians, while having a Pagan religion, also kept hidden a mystical idea of a God who ruled over, and came before, and was the source of, all the gods and all of creation.

This isn’t a mere doctrinal quibble. The absence of the supernatural means the absence of the Absolute. Without a God or at very least a god, the Na’vi are just as much a part of a subjective world as the humans. By this I do not mean that they have no supernatural backing. But rather that without the existence of the supernatural, there is no ultimately absolute and objective foundation for the morality by which we can judge whether they are right or wrong. Without the supernatural, the humans are just as justified as the People. This is why Avatar is not in any way anti-traditional or anti-religious, or even anti-Christian. If anything, its very message depends upon a sort of abstractly assumed Christianity. This is perhaps hinted at in the name of Grace Augustine (a Christian name if I have ever see one), who among all the humans, save Sullivan himself, most deeply loved and understood the People.

A similar problem is a scene in which Sullivan prays to Eywa for help in the war. It comes late, but it does come. The revenge of the wild erupts from the forest as creatures heretofore portrayed as hostile even to the native Na’vi wreck havoc on the humans’ war machines. I felt this was a rather weak and unfortunate move, for if Avatar is to mean anything, it will be as an allegory for our present human situation, our present ideological war between consumerism and industrialism on one side and environmentalism and tradition on the other. And in this battle we cannot count on the forces of Nature to intervene so actively on our behalf. If it we could, then stories like Avatar would not be necessary.

Ultimately, despite these few flaws, Avatar provides what Hollywood rarely serves up: a searing and unequivocal criticism of some of the fundamental assumptions of our culture. As metaphors for cell phones, computers, automobiles and blackberries, we are shown how technology does not set us free but confines us from the reality of Nature around us. It becomes an extension of ourselves without which we are neutered. Moreover, it becomes a force which polarizes us against Nature, which is really the real world upon which all of our artificial civilization has been built. Fear of New Ageism (itself quite natural, but in this case — mostly — unjustified) seems to have frightened off a good portion of viewers, but the fact that a film with such an unequivocal message can be so popular is only a good thing.

Spirituality and Materialism

2010-03-03T12:03:00.017-05:00

There has been a fairly new trend (I say fairly, because it is only relatively new — the old spiritualists of the Victorian era were very well familiar with it), tending toward spirituality, perhaps as a segment of the great backlash against the overbearing rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. Now spirituality is nothing new. But this specific trend has an aspect that is totally new: it seeks spirituality without religion. Today, people say things like, "I am spiritual, but not religions." Most of these people subscribe to some aspect of the New Age movement, which I will not deal with just now. What I want to consider are the ones who deliberately put themselves outside of the mysticism of the New Age, or at least outside of the normal magical sense of this mysticism. Some have tried to have their mysticism and their materialism side by side; which just will not work logically, if you follow these ideas out to their inevitable ends. You have only two paths before you: the stark, bleak road of materialism (the view which says nothing exists save physical matter), or the bright, gleaming way of supernaturalism. There is no third road possible.

For the spiritual is supernatural, if it is anything at all. If we talk about our spiritual lives, but do not mean some sort of supernatural life, we are in reality talking about nothing but our mental or emotional lives. Now I don't at all mean necessarily seeing visions or having prophetic dreams or out of body experiences, though I don't doubt that these things happen, though probably very rarely. What I mean is that if you are thinking about spiritual things, you are thinking about things that are outside of nature, and are eternal — and thus supernatural. If you are talking about spiritual discovery or spiritual transformation, then you are talking about discovery of something outside of and beyond nature, or a transformation of a part of you that exists outside of and beyond nature — and thus, supernatural. The drabbest, most mundane aspect of your spiritual life must be supernatural in quality, or else anything said about it is inaccurate and probably nonsensical.

There have been some who have tried to smuggle spirituality into their materialistic view of the world. But they can only succeed by falling back on inconsistencies. We know the universe to have had a beginning, and we know that it will one day end. Anything that exists inside the material universe is temporary, and not eternal. So if there is any spirituality worth talking about, it must exist outside of the physical universe, and therefore outside of Time and Space. Whatever is outside of Time and Space is eternal by definition.

But some have put forth the idea that the spiritual could have possibly emerged, slowly and gradually, out of the material world as a flower emerges from the soil. But there are two problems with this. The flower is still rooted in the soil, and if the soil disappears the flower will die. If the spiritual has its root in the material, it will cease to exist when the universe itself ends, as science tells us it will. Secondly, nothing supernatural could have come about from the merely natural, for within the natural chain of causation nothing happens which is not essentially like what has happened before. A newly introduced chemical leads to a chemical reaction (or doesn't). A newly introduced animal leads to an animal reaction. A newly introduced biological agent, such as a bacteria, leads to a biological reaction. There is no way that the natural, simply by growing more complex overtime, could lead to something which is itself not entirely natural in quality. And if spirituality is not supernatural, then, again, it is not anything.

It may be replied that a miracle might have brought about this emergence. But if it were a miracle, where did the miracle come from? In order to supersede the natural laws there has to be something outside of nature to do the superseding; and thus, something or someone who is eternal and supernatural. Even if one ignores this fact, it remains the case that this miraculous, newly-created spiritual reality would still be outside of Time and Space, thus being eternal; and we might as well regard it as the same thing as the strict, traditional supernaturalism of the religious order.

(By the way, it is interesting that the Christian miracles are the least outlandish miracles that have ever been reported. None of them violates the laws of nature; they simply fast-forward them or rewind them. Christ's turning of water into wine really does reflect the speeded-up process by which water turns into wine. Christ's multiplying of the fish and loaves to feed the five thousand really does reflect the speeded-up process by which fish reproduce, and grain seeds yield more grain. Christ's healing of the sick really does reflect the speeded-up process of the immune system fighting off a pathogen, and his resurrection of the dead is only a reversal of the natural laws governing death. It is really possible to walk on water; it's just usually not cold enough to do it. We never see in Christianity a really outlandish miracle, one that breaks the natural laws, such as are common in Pagan myths: a man waking up with the head of a donkey, a woman being transformed into a spider or a cow or a swan.)

So there cannot be real spirituality without supernaturalism, if one is to be honest with himself. But what about the religion? Is it possible to be spiritual without religion, so long as one believes in the supernatural? Of course it is. And it is even possible to have deep and meaningful spiritual experiences. But they will not get you far. Religion and spirituality are in a kind of relationship like the feeling of the ocean's waves lapping at one's feet is with the contours of the coast on a map. Doctrine and theology are like a map: they are not the thing itself, and never will be. You will never experience God, or get anywhere in your spiritual journey, simply by studying a map. You must put the map down and go to the ocean before you can begin your journey. But this does not mean you will not need a map. It is well to deal with the ocean itself when one wants to go sailing. But it is dangerous and foolish not to know where one is going and how to get there. And perhaps the worst thing one could do, aside from staring at the map one's entire life, is stay on the shore enjoying the feel of the waxing and waning tides. If one likes what one feels there, then good! But the only way to get more is to set sail. And that requires religion.

Democracy, Kingship, and Spider-Man

2010-02-07T13:44:00.010-05:00

Anyone knows that the current classifications of Republicans vs. Democrats are unsatisfactory. Slightly more satisfactory, yet still lacking in fundamental ways, is the older dilemma of conservatives vs. liberals. I myself have bounced back and forth between these terms a few times, settling at last somewhat within the term “paleo-conservative”, a term coined in opposition to the horrid “neo-conservative.” The paleo element of the name is designed to call attention to the fact that this strain of conservatism is the oldest and original strain — the strain that has existed for centuries, and has fought the long fight against political innovation and unwise and abstract reform. Yet the more I read, the more I am exposed to history, ideals and the basic goodness that radiates from the core of my religion, the more I am convinced that, though definitely the lesser of the two evils (in context with modern liberalism), yet even this paleo-conservatism has its flaws. And one of them is its suspicion of democracy and its admiration of aristocracy.

Note that I say democracy with a lowercase D. I am not at all writing of the modern institution to which Barack Obama and William Clinton belong. But neither am I writing of the political system into which America's government is supposed to fall. I am writing of the older ideal of democracy, as understood by what are now called the classical liberals, a group which has almost nothing to do with modern liberals. These were a group of nineteenth century men who, Wikipedia tells us, were “committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and free markets.” One of my favorite writers, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, falls into this category. His definition of democracy may fall the closest to what I mean:

In a book called Heretics, a group of essays in response to the major literary and artistic voices of his time, Chesterton wrote thusly:

Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.

Chesterton was at every moment a champion and lover of the common man. He defended everywhere common sense against pure rationalism, and found conservatism just as flawed as the progressivism of his day, which is still a major driving force in modern American politics. Democracy, he felt, as well as the defense of the common man's interests, must depend on tradition. “Ordinary things,” he wrote, “are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary....This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.” And it is tradition, Chesterton felt, that forms the body of the things mankind holds in common. As he wrote elsewhere, “The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men — diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men — hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.” But perhaps most important, for Chesterton, was the fact that all of the bad ideas of history, all the horrible decisions and all the major trajedies and all of the main injustices, have originated not from the common people, but from the aristocracy. As he writes in Orthodoxy,

The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again.

And again,

We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world.

In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton speaks of the ideal historical democracy. “To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilization.” If this seems strange to the modern mind, it will be useful to note that a despotism “may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community,” (stemming from a complacency bought by greater comforts and luxuries) “the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.” But historically, several of these free, small-scale democracies have existed. To take only one example, let us look at medieval Norway.

Norway existed for centuries as a quiet, insular land filled (insofar as the land was arable) with these small agricultural communities. But even when it began to change, this fact about it did not change for a very long time. With the advent of the Viking Age, some Norwegians began to become less isolationist: they became pirates. Bands of Vikings would roam the West of Europe, raiding and trading, and return to their homes to enjoy their bounties. But even then they enjoyed a mostly democratic society, in which the head of each household had a say in the affairs of the village. Periodical gatherings occurred regularly, called tings or things; the most famous of which was the Icelandic Allthing. In these things a representative from every family would speak to the interests of those he stood for, debate certain issues, and as a group come to practical conclusions. Similar organizations existed on the local level throughout Japanese history, and likely in many such small agricultural communities worldwide. When Christendom came to Scandinavia, this basic aspect of Northern society did not change. It remained intact until the advent of modernity. In the old Northern democracies, even the king himself was but a servant of the people. He was forced at all times to accede to the demands of the things, and was their enforcer.

In this we can see the practical expression of Chesterton's definition of democracy as a society where every man is a king. But again, the word king may give pause to many modern readers. Here again it is good that we should go back to the old ideals. In The Discarded Image, his treatise on the old medieval worldview, C.S. Lewis describes the tone and character of the medieval symbolism behind the god Jupiter: “we must think of a king at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. [This] character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous. When this [king] dominates we may expect halcyon days and prosperity.” In other words, a king is ideally (as he was in practice in early Norway) a servant.

A skeptic will of course point out that very seldom in the history of mankind have kings behaved in this way. If we admit this ideal, he will tell us, we are admitting a fantasy. To this it will be useful firstly to respond that it did occur at some points historically, as discussed above, though by no means perfectly. And secondly that, to paraphrase Chesterton, while the kingly ideal may not have been based on the lives of actual kings, nevertheless the lives of actual kings were based on that ideal. That is the purpose of an ideal: to encourage something that does not yet exist to exist in the future. To give us something to live up to.

But in a certain way, everyone already knows this and, if it were not brought up in such a context, no one would ever think of denying it. For everyone who has read or watched the Spider-Man comics or films knows that with great power must also come great responsibility. And that is the real soul of democracy: not that every man should be freed to do whatever he wants, but that every man should be crowned and enthroned so that by his power he can live up to the duties and obligations that every man in actuality does wear. The true soul of democracy seeks not to unburden mankind, but to strap more burdens on. “Here, take this crown and this sword,” democracy wishes to tell us, “Go and fight the good fight, and do not at any time cease to be vigilant!”

And it is only this solid, starkly traditional and classical sort of democracy — a democracy founded on small, local, face to face communities — that will ever do us any good.

Lost: Decisive Moments and the Centrality of Paradoxical Truths

2010-02-03T16:47:00.014-05:00

With last night's "LA X", one of the most thought-provoking, emotionally engaging, and brilliantly plotted television shows has reached the beginning of the end. The main question of which the cliffhanger of last season's finale consisted, whether the detonation of Jughead would reset history or fulfill it, has been answered in a thoroughly unexpected, and thoroughly ingenious, way. The answer is Both. The bomb did and did not reset history. Oceanic Flight 815 did and did not crash on the Island. Our characters exist now in two alternate worlds — a move which, though technically involving the much more sci-fi device of alternate realities, nevertheless feels decidedly less science fiction than time travel — thus setting the stage for what could be the highest expression of a decisive choice: the choice, quite literally, between two ways of life: between two ways of seeing the world.

"LAX" showed us two alternate timelines. In one, Daniel Faraday's plan to reset history, as seen in last year's finale, "The Incident", has succeeded, and the characters we have come to know and love never crashed on the Island in the first place. In the second, the plan failed, and the resulting electromagnetic energy release triggered a final time flash, sending the survivors stuck in 1977 back to the present time, just after the death of Jacob. What happens in both worlds is extremely interesting — yet for the moment, I will only consider the device of separate worlds.

It is obvious that the two worlds cannot long stand. As series creator Damon Lindelof said during season four, "The problem with alternative realities is that you never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from under you. We want the audience to believe that the jeopardy is real. Postulating alternative realities would be an escape valve that would be damaging as a narrative value." He is right. The presence of two worlds takes away not only the sense of jeopardy but the sense of the characters' actions having any meaning. If in one world the characters make all the wrong choices, it won't matter as long as they make the right ones in the other. Or if one character dies, it won't really matter because they will still be alive in the other. What Lost is doing with season six's alternate worlds is immensely clever: showing us what would have happened had Flight 815 never crashed: letting us have our cake, and eat it, too. But this cannot last if the show's story is to be ultimately meaningful in any real way.

If either of the two worlds will become the cornerstone of Lost, I think it will be the one which Jack refused. Already there are fissures in this new world: Charlie, though alive, thinks his life not worth living. Others who have been healed — Locke and Rose, to name a couple — are broken once more; not to mention the countless others who were healed in a non-physical way on the Island. While interesting, this new world is a very tragic development. Yet it is one that affords a very deep, and a very religious theme. Very often what people think will be best for them is actually the worst; and what they feel are the worst things that could happen to them are in reality some of the best. It is a very Chestertonian paradox. One could just as well, and with a bit more accurately, say it is a very Christian paradox.

For this is the nature of all of the deepest truths and virtues: that they are paradoxical. Mercy is only merciful if it forgives the unforgivable. Hope is only really hopeful if it continues to hope when all is hopeless. Faith is only really faith if it believes in the unprovable. Nothing fails like success (Chesterton's version of "the meek shall inherit the earth"). He who would lose his life, shall save it.

If this is true — if one of the parallel worlds must ultimately end — then it will be a choice not only between two realities or even two lives, but between two ideals of what makes life meaningful. It will be a choice, not between two worlds, but between two worldviews. In this choice lies all the dichotomies with which humanity is now concerned. Safety, comfort and security...or risk, danger, and hardship? Complacency within the self's boundaries, or a painful, ever-vigilant self-sacrifice? Modernity, or tradition? Science, or religion? Reason, or mysticism? Rationalism, or romance? This choice, if it comes, will be a sublimated allegory of the deepest choices one makes.

Just before dying, Juliet wanted to tell Sawyer one thing: "It worked." This is very curious, as in that world, "it" (the reset) obviously did not work. But perhaps these two words hint toward the future of season six. If Juliet's knowledge of the other timeline was due to her proximity to death, then perhaps this is how the characters will come to know about the decision they must make. Perhaps those who die in the one world will find themselves in the other. If so, this is fitting. It is fitting that the choice should be made by the characters in the alternate timeline rather than in the original. For it is he who has left home who must decide to return. I, for one, am hoping that they will choose to give up their newfound lives — that they may save them.

The Lost Supper

2010-01-13T12:12:00.004-05:00

The new promotional image for Lost's sixth season features the main characters seated at a long table, strongly suggesting an allusion to da Vinci's "The Last Supper". Locke is seated at the center of the table, in the place of Christ. Whether this is because of some sort of messianic role he is to play in season six, or merely hinting toward the role he has always played in Lost as the focus for spiritual themes, is unknown. Also unknown is which Locke we are viewing: John, or the Un-Man type figure that arose when Flight 316 crashed on the Island.

The other characters' positions seem to be arbitrary, but a couple of clues suggest that they are not. Firstly, Jack is seated directly to the right of Locke, in the place of Thomas, a figure to whom he was overtly compared by Ben in season 5. Secondly, Sayid stands three places to the left of Locke, taking the place of Judas Iscariot. While this is more likely a hint of the role he may play in season 6, it also fits the rogue and deviant role he played in splitting away from and refusing to cooperate with his fellow survivors in season 5.

Now the only problem is that fa there are fourteen characters here, whereas there are thirteen in da Vinci's painting: the Twelve Apostles, plus Christ. If there is any remaining symbolism here, one of the characters must be eliminated. A clue as to how this might be done can be found in da Vinci's original painting. There are four groups of three Apostles, whereas in our promo image there are three groups of three and one group of four. If a figure is to subtracted, it should logically be from the group of four. This group includes Jack, Ben, Jin and Hurley. Now Jack, as already mentioned, neatly fills the role of Thomas, so his place at the table should not be disputed. Jin and Hurley are seated, while Ben stands, making him a possible candidate; but on this count, Sayid also stands; and Ben is not the only non-815 survivor seated at the table.

The characters whose places at the table can be identified are as follows: Ilana as Bartholomew, Richard as James, son of Alphaeus, Claire as Andrew, Kate as Peter, Sawyer as John the Apostle, Sun as Matthew, Miles as Jude Thaddeus, and Frank as Simon the Zealot. The places of James the Greater, and Phillip are taken by the group of four including (with Jack as Thomas) Jin, Ben and Hurley.

With a show like Lost, it seems that very little is done by accident. The modeling of a promotional image after one of the most famous pieces of religious art was surely chosen for the time and energy fans would spend trying to interpret it. The only questions remaining are, who is the fourteenth figure? And what does the presence of an extra figure mean?

Of the Facets of Religion

2009-12-30T18:00:00.024-05:00

I have written this post for a couple of different reasons. The first is that the comparative view of religion is extremely flawed. It takes things which are not at all similar, and by mere juxtaposition makes them to seem almost the same thing. It is doubtful whether any sort of comparative analysis of religion is likely to lead to the truth of the matter, or more properly, of the variously different matters. But if it will, we must take a different road than the comparative religion scholars have taken thus-far. This reason dovetails nicely with the second reason, which is that it is all but conventional today that religion be discussed (if it is discussed at all) as if it were all one lump experience, one broad category, one more or less uniform aspect of human history. "The more I think of it," a friend of mine remarked to me recently, "the more I am convinced that religion is by its nature unhealthy." Of course I disagreed with him. But apart from such disagreements, the statement seemed at once based on an extremely simplistic, and quite representative, image of religion that it is here my intent to dispel.

In attempting this, I believe I am quite justified by the best portions of human thinkers. After all, the best critics are those who insist on seeing the differences — the details, the unique soul or identity or essence of a thing. The worst are those who try to smear all into a simplistic and general gloss; they risk finding the end form of their approach in the thinking of the Monists, those philosophers who say that all reality is one thing, despite the wealth of diversity we encounter daily. Again, it is a lazy and rather complacent reviewer who says there are a very limited number of plots; it is a vigorous one who makes the effort to discover exactly how an author has made his plot different (if he has). Comparative scholars of folklore and religion are thus the most deluded about their subjects. For we see folklore and religion most clearly not when we see how they are all alike, but rather how each one is subtly, but substantially different.

And so I am attempting to lay out a very broad array in which we can understand what we are talking about when we talk about religion. On its own, this will not get us far; but it will at least serve to sever apart different aspects of religion which are usually considered all part and parcel with all the rest of it. (Of course, it is best not to have to do this at all — but if the matter is under question, distinctions must be made.) If we will criticize religion, we must find out what part of it we are criticizing. If a religion has a flaw in one facet, it may not necessarily have the same flaw, or any flaw, in its others. This is important to note, for critics and apologists alike. After all, truth is truth wherever it is found. The whole picture of a religion's effect upon the heart and mind may not consistently provide truth; but where the truth does exist, it is not any less truthful, nor any healthy practices or beliefs any less healthful, for being found in what is otherwise a less truthful or healthy religion.

* * *

Aspects of Religion

Ceremonial Practice: The everyday, outward practice, often enacted in a social and cultural setting. Going to the church or temple, singing hymns, etc., performing rituals, communal worship and prayer. Festivals, songs, celebrations, feasts, and holidays. This type of practice is seldom done alone, though this does sometimes occur. The chief characteristic of Ceremonial Practice is that it is an enacting of humility, an acceptance of dependence upon some Person or persons not under humanity's control. This aspect of religion is among the best and most praiseworthy that can be found in Pagan ¹ religions.
Ecstatic Experience: Feelings of nearness to divinity. Religious ecstasy, the performing of miracles, speaking in tongues, etc. In many religions, especially the ancient ones, this was not felt to be separate at all from the Ceremonial Practices; though it is a useful distinction for us, it is a very subtle one not worth over-emphasizing. Yet Ceremony can exist without it, and vice versa.
Asceticism: The renunciation of the comforts of the world. Attempts to purify body or mind, through fasting, abstinence from some certain comfort, or purposeful endurance of certain pains or ordeals.
Mystery: The unknown. Questions, paradoxes, worth contemplation but beyond real understanding; the presence of limitation. It is worth making the distinction that when we say "the unknown," we do not necessarily mean gaps in our understanding of the natural world. Though these have constituted part of the body of some religions' mysteries, the greater part of these questions is transcendental, and not natural, in scope.
Myth: Narrative traditions surrounding religion. Romances not wholly believed, but passed on for a dual purpose: the fulfilling of an imaginative need, and (in Pagan religions) the expression of a spiritual need. The character of myth is not found in the words chosen to tell the story, or in the degree of skill of the storyteller, but rather in the sequence of events that unfold. Myth is a great transmitter of truth, acting most of the time in such a subtle way that this aspect of it is almost wholly unnoticed. Myth sometimes features other concerns such as the description and architecture of the gods, demons, etc. Myth is related to the fairy-tale, but with the distinction that the latter usually includes the element of eucatastrophe. Myths are often the least religious elements of religion, and sometimes should not be classified as religious at all.

Aspects Unique to the Christian Religion

Doctrine: Orthodoxy (literally, "the acceptance of correct belief"). The objective aspect, acting as a corrective to individual sentiment, error, or heresy. A storehouse of wisdom, truth, philosophy; grounds for appeal to religious truth. This is almost completely lacking from Pagan religions, mostly because they were largely Ceremonial in focus and what morality they exhibited was in them because it was in humanity already.
The Narrow Road: Perhaps an arbitrary term for this aspect. The process under which one attempts to harmonize his feelings, impulses, priorities, beliefs and actions with God and God's commands. This aspect is impossible without the presence of doctrine, and is consequent to doctrine.

It is worth noting that not all of the preceding are found in every religion, and that some of these aspects are considered fringe activities. Ceremony is almost everywhere practiced and, in its role as expression or promotion of the feeling of humility, is one of the best and healthiest expressions of any religion.

¹ By Pagan I mean simply any non-Christian religion. This term is best used not in the widely understood (and chiefly negative) sense of a synonym for heathen, but rather in the sense of a pre-Christian religion. There is much that is healthy and good about Pagan religions; and in any case, in terms of human practice, "the higher cannot stand without the lower". For a good treatment of this distinction, see part one of G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, which, among other sources, has largely informed these ideas.

The abuse of religion and the danger of height

2009-12-30T00:22:00.009-05:00

A friend of mine has often argued against religion using a certain argument (one of many...this is by no means his only idea) which, though often elaborated in varying ways, in general takes the form: "Religion has so often been abused. If even religion can be abused, then it proves that nothing is sacred. Therefore religion cannot be sacred, and thus cannot be true." But this seems to me a fallacy, in the truest sense of the word. It is a logical error. Merely the idea that "nothing is sacred" implies that something must be sacred. The very language of the question means that there is a standard by which sacredness may be judged. At very least it means that sacredness exists as a meaningful and relevant metric by which religion (and, presumably, other things) may be judged, and that it exists as such in the minds of both the religious and the nonreligious.

It may be countered that the existence of this metric does not necessarily prove the existence of the quality it is measuring. After all, we can conceive of things as being magical and we know that magic almost certainly does not exist. Therefore we can conceive of qualities and invent metrics by which to measure them, even when they do not exist. But this is not quite the same thing as what we are discussing. Sacredness and sacrilege exist (at least in human terms) on a sort of sliding scale. We may say that a thing is bad, but that it is not nearly so much of a sacrilege as some other thing. C.S. Lewis tells us, for example, that all sins are bad, but that the purely physical sins are the least bad. Similarly, George MacDonald writes that no man is ever condemned for the acts he has committed, but for the fact that he continues to commit them. In God's eyes, we are told, all fall short of the standard of holiness. There is no man who is righteous. But this does not necessarily mean that holiness or sacredness is an either-or, black and white duality. It merely means that absolute whiteness is the standard by which God judges; and that the merest shade into greyness means we have fallen short. This does not mean, once we have left absolute whiteness, that there is no scale of deepening grey which descends at last into absolute blackness.

But the same cannot be said for something like magic, which is most likely an idea invented sheerly through the human imagination. Magic does not exist on a scale, nor is there any sort of standard by which it can be judged; at least, no standard in the form of a sliding scale. Thus there is no such idea of "magicness". We can imagine a process by which a simplistic life form gradually changes over millions of years into a complex life form. But this occurs under the laws of Nature, and so it is not magical. We can also imagine a man turning in an instant into a pig; yet this could never happen under the laws of Nature as we understand them, and so if it ever happened it would have been an instance of Magic, and not of Nature. So with the idea of magic, an event is either magical or natural. There is no room for middle ground. Now none of this proves whether or not an idea like magic exists. Magic may exist, hidden away somewhere; it may not exist at all. What it does prove is that, if there are ideas conceivable in the human mind which do not have any existence in reality, they are ideas whose measurement, if they did exist, would be in terms of either positive or negative, either black or white. Magic is not at all the same sort of idea as sacredness or holiness. There is no scale; there is no standard.

So much for "nothing is sacred." The more important question to attend to is whether the abuse of religion proves that religion itself is not sacred.

Lewis has written of an idea which I believe explains a great deal and a wide range of things. The idea is, in short, "the higher, the more in danger." It can be illustrated simply by imagining a group of criminals entering a feudal town -- or if you prefer a more modern image, a nation's capital -- intent on holding a ransom. These criminals, if they are smart at all, will not choose a cobbler's son or a mechanic's daughter. They will try, if they can, to kidnap the children of the castle town's lord or of the president or prime minister.

Now this does not mean that, because of the greater danger of such things happening to them, the children of these individuals do not really live a higher lifestyle. It rather proves that they do. The highest is always in danger, and this is truer of religion than of anything else. There is nothing more good than a good religious man -- and there is nothing more bad than a bad religious man. This is why the modern critics of religion point to all of the horrible things done in the name of religion. Whether these bad things happened as a real result of religion is another question. The fact worth noticing is that the acts were committed by religious men.

But, just as the fact that there is a greater danger of being kidnapped and held ransom if you are the offspring of a high official does not mean that you are not really living a higher lifestyle, neither does the fact that there is a greater danger of bad religious men doing horrible things mean that religion is not really a worthwhile pursuit. Indeed the worth, or unworth, of the religious life cannot be measured truly and comprehensively by these concerns at all. It is a curious thing that most moderns do not notice that this increased danger actually hints that you are on the right path, even if you may be going about it in a completely wrong way and taking dangerous, often fatal, detours. After all, it is a characteristically modern idea that if someone isn't offended, or challenging you, then you're not going far enough, and that, conversely, if someone is offended or is challenging you, then you're on the right track. Now this idea isn't necessarily true, and is often absurd. But neither is it the same thing as the idea of "the higher, the more in danger." Yet it is an approach to this idea, one that has been curiously blocked as of late.

Lewis uses this idea to explain the fact that some of the Psalmists sometimes exhibit more purely hateful thoughts and emotions than many of the Pagan poets. The fact that they were never tempted to such terrible depths does not make them any better for it. As in so many areas, it is not the way we feel or think about something that matters, but how we react to these thoughts and feelings. The fact that one man has never been tempted to steal doesn't make him any better than another who has been, and has acted on it. It may turn out that the one has a much worse temptation that he has succumbed to, that the other has been exposed to but has overcome. Even if this is not the case, the one mellow man who is in little danger and has less to atone for is not better than the other, imperilled man who has attempted more and fallen harder; just so long as he continues to keep getting up again.

But if we are not careful, this may seem to sound like an excuse and justification for certain adventuristic agendas such as technological progress, militaristic interventionism, and rebellion against tradition. To this charge we may be content to answer that while we wish to rise higher than the complacent man, in doing so we want to attain more than what he has, not less. "The highest cannot stand without the lowest." So the Christian man who throws away the ceremonial and communal aspects of the Pagan's religion is really giving up something which the mass of humanity and human experience has overwhelmingly declared to be good and worthy and appropriate. If a modern man wishes to attain more for his fellow men by achieving things like medical advancement, then he must do so without losing anything decent which has come before it. If these decent things are lost, he has not given his fellow men more, but less; or at best an equal measure, quantitatively speaking. Whether the measure be equal in qualitative terms is another question.

On Paganism: syncretism, mythology and holy wars

2009-12-23T20:08:00.008-05:00

I feel it necessary to clear up a few misconceptions about Pagan religions. Because almost all of the modern West has experienced Christianity in some form, even if in a very dampened, diluted and extremely indirect form, we have a very exceptional idea of what religion actually is, and feel that this idea applies to religion across the board. This is emphatically untrue, and ahistorical, and those who talk of Christianity and how similar it is to other religions are not out of sympathy with Christianity so much as they are out of sympathy with the Pagan religions. The briefest of studies in actual Pagan religions will reveal the folly of some of these ideas. I will attempt to point to a few of the facts here.

Christianity, and the other Abrahamic religions, are in at least one way very unique. They are driven by solid conviction, by real belief, as in a positive and objectively real reality. Christianity has orthodoxy (an exceedingly sane concept without which science could not function), has creeds, has heresies and heretics.

Pagan religions had no orthodoxies, because they had no doctrines and no creeds. They had rituals, and rituals were good, but they weren't really religious in the sense we mean today. They were customary, they were social, they were expressions of humility before the divine. They knew the divine existed, but they doubted the worthiness of their idols. In a real sense, though they realized the value and piety of worship, the Pagans didn't really believe in their gods; no one ever said "I believe in Jupiter and Venus and Mercury" or "I believe in Thor and Odin and Freya" the same way that the Christian says "I believe in God the Father, in Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit." Their rituals weren't moral. They had morality, of course, but the morality was social, practical, and non-religious, existing in the everyday realm of human interaction.

Another way in which Pagans didn't really take their religion seriously was that it had absolutely no contact with philosophy. Where philosophy existed, it did not oppress religion except in special, exceptional cases. Philosophers saw their concerns as completely separate from religion, even if they themselves practiced religious rites and rituals — they weren't rival ways of looking at the world, no more than the thinking of a football fan is a rival way of thinking to that of the marine biologist — because they have no overlapping concerns. The concerns of the two disciplines were seen as irrelevant to each other. No thoughtful or reflective Christian could feel that way. The reason is that since he feels his religion to be true, absolutely and objectively true, he feels that it thus has practical and real consequences and corollaries in both the way he lives and the way the world must be. In the entirety of human history, the Abrahamic faiths are the only ones to have married religion with philosophy.

A Greek would never have warred with a Hindu over religion. They might have disagreed on the aesthetics of the other's religion's material manifestations (art, iconography, the architecture of the temple, etc.), or the aesthetics of their mythic stories, but would not have been offended at any of the other's spiritual ideas — precisely because mythology is a search, and so any new place found in that search is just as good as any other place found — until you find and recognize the place you're really looking for. The overwhelming trend of human religious history — seen clearly today in the places where we have abandoned Christianity, the only corrective to this basically human way of thinking — is tolerance and syncretism. Indeed, the historians tell us that syncretism and tolerance is the origin of Pantheism (and, consequently, of mythology). Indeed tolerance and syncretism were the natural mood that even the ancient Israelites themselves were always gravitating toward, and which the prophets constantly had to fight against.

The mythology that has resulted from syncretism is among the greatest of treasures humanity has stored up. It is a specific genre of story which plays a unique roll and can only be enjoyed in one single, specific mood. That mood is, sadly, very rare today. And that is a shame; for mythology plays a dual role: it satisfies an imaginative need while expressing a spiritual need. As before, Pagans knelt before their idols in sincerity of feeling but were not convinced of the right of the idol to receive their worship. It was good to give a bowl of porridge for the god, to acknowledge that human life is frail and subject to other powers beside our own wills; but it was doubted often that these idols were the proper objects of those feelings. Mythology and the entire mood that pervades it, produces it, and arises when one enjoys it, consists primarily of this one statement: not that these things are, but that we wish so strongly and deeply that these things should be. This is the way in which mythology is a search: a series of trial and error: could this be what we perceive, what we are seeking? No; and so we shall make another myth and try again.

This process has gone on a long, long time. It was arrested with the death of Christ, who did not say, "No; let us try again," but rather, "I am the way and the truth and the life"; "let all who are thirsty come to Me and drink." That there was a god or gods in the heavens had long been an accepted fact in human belief; that that God had come down and declared Himself to mankind was a new, and shockingly new thing that had never before occurred. Christ was the fulfillment of the prophecy that was mythology: He was myth, married with fact: the desires of humanity given flesh and blood and bone.

Just a thought

2009-12-23T17:55:00.001-05:00

The romance of the interior, of the homely and homespun, is most easily visible from the outside; whereas the romance of the wild and exterior can be felt both from inside and outside. This says nothing of any qualitative difference or of any difference in value; but it does suggest that it needs a finer, more subtle sensibility to have a real, more than transitory enjoyment of the former.

C.S. Lewis and Serial Killers

2009-12-05T10:40:00.007-05:00

C.S. Lewis knew, perhaps more than anyone, the power of stories to approach truth. In stories, we apprehend reality at a very high and visceral level, almost without knowing it. And as philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote, “Theories lie more readily than stories. That is why our psychologists tell us we are good but our novelists tell us we are evil.” That being said, it is still a very strange thing, and all the more delightful for its strangeness, to find a proof for one of C.S. Lewis' central themes in a pop culture phenomenon, especially one so dark and macabre as Showtime’s Dexter.

In season one of Dexter, we are introduced to a very damaged and twisted man. Dexter Morgan, a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department, compares himself to a crocodile: floating at the surface is a small glimpse of him, but the real, sinister animal lies hidden below the surface. He has had a primal urge to kill things ever since he was a small child, and we discover the tragic and horrifying reasons for this toward the end of season one. His adoptive father, Harry Morgan, also a police officer, knew Dexter for what he was and taught him a code in order to make sure he never gets caught, and to make sure he only kills those who deserve it; criminals who have escaped justice through a technicality of law, for example. This is the basic premise of the show: Dexter kills the undeserving, as a sort of dark vigilante, but must work hard in order to pretend to be a normal human being.

When we first meet Rita, Dexter's girlfriend, we see that he has almost no emotional connection to her whatsoever. Dexter himself admits that she is only a mask or a shield, a strategy to make him look more normal. He feels little, if any, emotional connection to her. He acts well, even around her two children, and Rita believes that he really cares for her and them. This act is, in itself, chilling, but the viewer still has sympathy for Dexter because he recognizes his shortcomings, his inhumanity, and in this recognization there is a vulnerability.

But Rita is, perhaps, the key, the pivot upon which Dexter as a character has moved through the course of four seasons. Several times Dexter has seen that in order to protect his thin layer of disguise, he must step up his game and become more invested and committed, at least on the outside, to his relationship with Rita, his friendship with his co-workers, and his sister, Debra, also on the police force. But it is really Rita and her two children that are the crux of the show.

It begins in a small way. When Paul, Rita's abusive ex-husband, makes parole, Dexter is forced to defend his mask from this man (played by Mark Pellegrino, Lost’s Jacob), and in the course of this rivalry Dexter thinks about what makes the two men different, despite their shared violent natures. At some point, Dexter realizes that he actually cares about Rita and her children.

In late season two, when Dexter's co-worker Doakes becomes aware of Dexter's activities, our protagonist imprisons him in a cabin deep in the Everglades. During this time, Dexter debates with himself over what to do with the man, who has been a constant thorn in his side. Kill him? That would violate the code by which he has henceforth lived his life. Doakes suggests another option: turn himself in. Though the Doakes situation is ultimately taken out of Dexter's hands, it is an option which Dexter seriously considers for a long time. He imagines the lifting off of his mask: the world seeing him for who he truly is. He imagines Rita and the kids knowing. It is a scenario which both horrifies him, for the exposure, hate, and inevitable punishment it would bring upon him, and fascinates him, for the freedom of conscience it would afford. If he turns himself in, he doesn't have to lie anymore. Better still, he wouldn't have to -- or wouldn't be permitted to -- kill anymore.

It is a scenario that has a strange effect upon Dexter and upon the viewer. As invested as we are in this character, we feel the pulling in opposite directions of his emotions. And when he finally marries Rita and becomes a father to his own child, Harrison, he goes for a long period of time without killing due to his newfound fatherly and husbandly duties. When he faces off with season four's antagonist, played admirably and creepily by the amazing John Lithgow, Dexter realizes that his priorities have changed. He is not only pursuing Lithgow's character in order to kill him, and thus to feel the visceral satisfaction that he has always longed for, but in order to rescue the child that the man has kidnapped. As a father, he is able to put himself in the child's parents' place, and cannot stand for the Trinity Killer's actions. This shift in priorities occurs so subtly that the viewer almost does not notice it until it has been pointed out; because it is not an abrupt change, but rather a decisive moment in a long series of small changes, stretched out across the course of the show.

This is, perhaps, the overlying theme of Dexter. That as he tries more and more to protect his evil actions by seeming like a normal human being, his involvements in normality will lead him deeper and deeper into humanity. The self-confessed inhuman killer will begin to become human. Of course, this isn't a comment on all serial killers. Dexter is unique in that he has no illusions about what he is doing and the monster that he is. He is unique in that he sees himself as flawed, and therefore is able to aspire to something better.

Now this very fascinating character surprisingly serves as a case in point for one of C.S. Lewis' core ideas: that it is by pretending that we are good that we will begin to become good. That, in order to become a better human being, one must begin by pretending one already is. Regardless of whether we feel like loving our neighbors, or acting selflessly, we must act as if we do feel that way. The feelings, Lewis writes, will come later. George MacDonald, Lewis' self-avowed master, shares a similar idea: “By obeying one learns to obey.”

We see that this is decidedly the case in each of Dexter's major character developments. He doesn't feel love for Rita, but that changes when he acts the way a man would act when he is in love. He doesn't have a conscience, but that changes when he acts the way a man should act when he lives under a moral law. He is only interested in satisfying his urge to kill, but that changes when he acts the way a man would act when he has a family of his own to protect. All these choices were made in order to defend his mask. But, in a compelling inverse of the theme of the Japanese film Onibaba, in the course of perfecting his mask he has become the mask.

It only remains to be seen what Dexter will ultimately do about his crimes. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that turning himself in, as he considered doing at one point in season two, would be a logical and satisfying development. He might perhaps choose to sacrifice his life to save those around him. But in that case he may not be able to reveal his true self, along with all of his crimes. Yet this may be poetically just, if not legally just: for it seems the acts of a man who would sacrifice his life to save those he cares for is, if not who Dexter is now, very much who Dexter is becoming.

The Triumph of the God on the Cave

2009-12-01T16:14:00.011-05:00

I do not really understand the recent resentment of, or at very least unconscious suppression of, the triumphalism of the Christmas holiday. In the liner notes of his newest CD, If on a Winter's Night, Sting wrote that “like many people, I have an ambivalent attitude toward the celebration of Christmas. For many, it is a period of intense loneliness and alienation. I specifically avoided the jolly, almost triumphalist, strain in many of the Christian carols.” (P. 11) Yet this bright and dramatic flavor is healthy, exhilarating and has the potential to be an antidote to those very feelings of depression and loneliness. The Christian holiday of Christmas invites all men and women in to celebrate one of the things most worth celebrating. Unfettered by the cold iron chains of consumerism, Christmas is one of the warmest experiences humanity has tasted. This is true even of its less religious and more folkloric aspects: “Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that the snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold.”

Triumphalism really is one of the most exciting aspects of Christmas, both in an intellectual, and in a romantic way. It is a central religious theme in what is really a Christian holy-day, and also one of the holiday's most human aspects. It draws its roots from (and is one of the reason why Christmas is rooted in) the pre-Christian (or, one may say, human) tradition of celebrations, festivity, ceremony, etc. “When we say that they also have...periodical festivals,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, “we only mean that Pagans have more sense than Puritans.” And more sense than moderns, too, it would appear.

And there really is something triumphal about Christmas, in a very literal way. When Christ was born in the underground stable, that birth shook the earth above him, and the fact that his birth was like a revolution -- a secret invasion into enemy-occupied country -- was felt in the fact that the authority of that land saw him as a potential enough threat to warrant the slaying of hundreds of babies. He who cannot see this spirit of invasion, of jubilant rebellion, of hearty revolution, in the Christmas story, is missing the most vital side of it. He who takes the triumphalism out of Christmas has never understood the holiday in any meaningful way, whether he is a religious person or not.

Virginia Dare

2009-11-26T14:50:00.002-05:00

I thought this would be a neat thing to post on Thanksgiving: a truly American piece of folklore, a legend stemmed from the lost colony of Roanoke. I have read that it was once so widely known in this country that F.D.R. gave a speech on the occasion of Virginia Dare's 350th birthday. I have also read that the decline of this legend's popularity is due to the fact that it is slightly politically incorrect. I am not entirely certain that this is true, but if it is, so much the sadder for its disappearance. But it can still be found in a few books, most of which are rare or out of print. Here are a few. They are notable, as is all real folklore, for their wealth of variation and unique details. Enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving!!

* * *

"Virginia Dare"

I. The Lost Colony ¹

Shortly after the arrival of the settlers (at Fort Raleigh, Roanoke, July, 1587) there occured two events, or perhaps more properly three, of interest and importance not merely to the little community, but in their relation to the history of this country. These events are thus related in Hakluyt's Voyages, Volume III:

"The 13 of August our Savage Manteo ² was christened in Roanoke, and called Lord thereof and of Dasamonguepeuk in reward of his faithfull service. The 18, Elenor, daughter to the Governour (John White), and wife to Ananias Dare, one of the Assistants, was delivered of a daughter in Roanoke, and the same was christened there the Sunday following, and because this child was the first Christian born in Virginia, she was named Virginia."

These baptisms were, so far as is known to this writer, the first celebrations of record of a Christian Sacrament within the territory of the thirteen original United States. The baptism of Manteo, and his being made Lord of Roanoke were by order of Sir Walter Raleigh, and the latter, it is believed, is the only instance of the conferring of a title of nobility upon a native American. By the Indians, "Elenor Dare," the first mother of the white race known to them, is said to have been called, in their figurative and descriptive way, "The White Doe," and her baby, the little Virginia, the first white infant they had ever seen, "The White Fawn"; and there is a pretty tradition that after her death her spirit assumed that form -- an elfin Fawn, which, clad in immortal beauty, would at times be seen haunting like a tender memory the place of her birth, or gazing wistfully over the sea, as with pathetic yearning for the far-away mother land. Another tradition is that in that sweet form she was slain by her lover, a young Indian Chief, who had been told that if he shot her from ambush with a certain enchanted arrow it would restore her to him in human form.

Soon after the birth of Virginia, her grandfather, Governor White, returned to England to obtain supplies for the colonists.

* * * * *

On the 16th of October he arrived on the Irish coast, and coming to England, straightway made efforts to carry succor to his people, but never again did he look upon the faces of his daughter, or his grand-daughter, or any of their companions. England was in the midst of her bitter contest with Spain and the Invincible Armada, and had sore need at home for every man and ship. There was neither time nor means to be devoted to an obscure little company thousands of leagues away in an unknown land beyond the stormy Atlantic. Three years elapsed before White returned to Roanoke, and when he came he found it deserted, and the settlers gone -- whither? No one was left to tell and their fate was enshrined, and will ever remain, in mystery pathetic. The dead past will not give up its dead....

* * * * *

The colonists had evidently gone to Croatan, as we now have the word, the home of Manteo the friendly chief, the banks and islands of our coasts, extending from Hatteras to Beaufort harbor, but none of them was ever seen of white men again. They "died and made no sign"; though it is believed by many, and with considerable reason, that their descendants may still be found among the Croatan, or more properly, Hatteras Indians of Robeson county. White does not explain satisfactorily why he did not seek his daughter at Croatan, which was not very far away....

* * * * *

And little Virginia, what of her? Did she die in infancy, and does her dust, mingled with the soil of her birthplace, blossom there into flowers that blush unseen? Did her little feet join in the wanderings of the settlers from Roanoke to Croatan? Did she grow to womanhood in their second home, and did her life end in tragedy amid the darkness which enshrouds the fate of the Colony? From the deep abysm of the past comes no answer. Yet a faint echo, a possible trace of the lost White Fawn, comes to us which may have reference to her, and with it the record closes forever:

In his first volume of "The History of Travaile," William Strachey, Secretary of the Jamestown Colony, writing in 1612 of events that occured in Virginia in 1608-10, says:

"At Peccarecemmek and Ochanahoen, by the relation of Machamps, the people have howses built with stone walles, and one story above another, so taught them by those English who escaped the slaughter at Roanok, at what tyme this our Colony, in the conduct of Captain Newport, landed within the Chesapeake Bay, where the people breed up tame turkies about their howses and take apes in the mountains, and where, at Ritanoe, the Weroance Eyanoco preserved seven of the English alive, fower men, two boys and one young mayde, who escaped the massacre, and fled up the river Chanoke" (Chowan).

This "young mayde" may well have been Virginia Dare, who, at the time mentioned, would have been about twenty-one years of age. The extract is of interest, also as showing that the existence, and even the location, of certain of Raleigh's colonists were well known to the Jamestown settlers. Indeed both John Smith and Strachey made mention of scattered parties of those colonists several times, and the Virginia Company writes of some of them as "yet alive, within fifty miles of our fort, * * * as is testified by two of our colony sent out to search them who (though denied by the savage speech with them) found crosses * * * and assured Testimonies of Christians newly cut in the barks of trees." Here the veil of mystery falls around the White Fawn and her companions probably never to be raised!

II. The Legend of the White Doe ³

In the early part of the seventeenth century, that is, about the year 1615, or 1620, the Indian hunters who lived on Roanoke Island were greatly excited by seeing a milk-white doe among the herd of deer that were then commonly found on the island.

It attracted the attention of the hunters because it was the most beautiful one of all the herd, because it was the fleetest, and because the most skillful marksmen had never been able to kill it with an arrow. Okisco, a noted hunter, who lived among the Chawanooke tribe, was sent for, and he drew his bow upon the beautiful white doe, but he never could do her harm.

She came to be well known to the Indian hunters of Roanoke Island, and was often found on the situation of the old city of Raleigh, apart from the herd of deer, with her sad face to toward the east. Again and again she was hunted, but all the arrows aimed at her life fell harmless beside her. She bounded over the sand-hills with the swiftness of the winds and always turned in the direction of Croatan.

Hunting parties of Indians were made up to entrap her by stationing themselves along the tracks of her flight, which had become known to the hunters by her always taking the same course. But all their efforts were without avail. The swift white doe seemed to have a charmed life, or to be under the protection of some Divine power. Everyone now talked of the white doe, and everyone had his own opinion about her. The braves, the squaws, and the papooses talked of the milk-white doe. Some had fears of evil from the strange apparition. Some thought she was the omen of good, and some thought it was the spirit of some sad departed.

Sometimes she would be seen on the high grounds of Croatan, sometimes in the swamps of Durant's Island, sometimes upon the cranberry bogs of East Lake, often on Roanoke Island near Raleigh City, and sometimes, though rarely, on the sands of Kill Devil Hills; sometimes alone, always sad and beautiful.

The news of the white doe spread far and wide, and old Wingina determined to call a council of chiefs to determine what to do.

Okisco, chief of the Chawanookes, Kuskatenew and Kilkokanwan, of the Yeopoms, and others attended the council. They all came with their attendants, all armed with their war weapons, the bow and arrow. They determined to have a grand hunt in the early Indian summer time, and without delay. In November, when the leaves had fallen and the earth was carpeted with its brown and russet covering of forest leaves, all the friendly chiefs came to Roanoke Island to join the fierce Wingina in his appointed hunt for the milk-white doe, and each with his chosen weapon of the chase.

The chiefs, after their feast, prepared by the wife of Wingina, agreed that they should station themselves along the course of the white doe when pursued by the hunters, and either exhaust her in the chase, or slay her with their deadly arrows. Wingina, the most powerful of all, took his place at Raleigh City, where the doe always passed and always stopped.

Old Granganimeo, the brother of Wingina, took his stand at Croatan Sound, where she crossed to Roanoke Island.

Okisco took his stand upon the goodly land of Pomonik, in the low grounds of Durant's Island.

Kind old Manteo went up into the shaky land [of] Wocokon, among the prairies and cranberry bogs of East Lake.

Minatonon, the fierce chief who made his home at Sequaton, took his stand at Jockey's Ridge, by the sea, in the land of Coristooks.

Wanchese took his stand at Kill Devil, in the country of Secotan.

They had all brought with them their best bows and arrows, and also their chosen archers. But the bow of Wanchese differed from the others. When, long ago, he had gone over the sea to England, the great Queen had given him an arrow-head made of solid silver, like the stone arrow-head that Amadas carried to Sir Walter Raleigh with his other Indian curiosities. It was made by her most expert workers in silver, and she told him it would kill the bearer of a charmed life that no other arrow could wound. Wanchese carried this with his other weapons, and determined to test its power upon the swift white doe.

Manteo started the doe in the shaky land of Wocokon. She started unharmed at the twang of the bow-string. She sped with the swiftness of the north wind's breath. Through the tangle wood of Wocokon, through the bogs and morasses of Pomonik, across the highlands of Croatan, on, on, she went, and twang of the bowstring was the harmless music of her flying bounds. She plunged into the billows of Croatan Sound. She reached the sand hills of Roanoke, leaving the Indian hunters far behind her. As she came to the Island, old Granganimeo drew his bow and sped his harmless arrow. She stood upon the top of the old fort at Raleigh City, sniffed the breeze and looked sadly over the sea. Wingina carefully and steadily drew upon her panting side the deadly arrow. All in vain. She bounded into Roanoke Sound and across to the sea. Menatonen was at Jockey's Ridge, but his arrow, too, was harmless. The panting white doe found time at the Fresh Ponds to slake her thirst, and then, turning to the sea that she seemed to love with an unnatural affection, sped onward, until she reached the steep hills of Kill Devil. There, alas! was her doom. Wanchese, taking aim with his silver arrow, aimed at her heart, let fly the fated bowstring, and the sad and beautiful milk-white doe sprang into the air with the fatal arrow in her heart, and fell to the ground.

Wanchese ran to the spot and found the victim writhing in the death agony. She lifted her dying, soft eyes to the red man and uttered her last sound, "Virginia Dare." Under her throat the words "Virginia Daer" were plainly pencilled in dark hair, and on her back was pencilled in brown hair the name "Croatan."

¹ From Virginia Dare, by Major Graham Daves, North Carolina Booklet, Vol. I (May 10, 1901), No. 1, pp. 11-16. Raleigh: Capital Printing Company.

² A friendly Indian chief.

³ From Grandfather's Tales of North Carolina History, by Richard Benbury Creecy, pp. 15-18. Copyright, 1901, by R.B. Creecy. Raleigh, North Carolina.

-- From A Treasury of Southern Folklore, edited by B.A. Botkin.

From "Indian Tribes of Eastern North Carolina"

Okisko, a brave warrior of the tribe that had given shelter to the unfortunate Lost Colony of Sir Walter Raleigh, fell in love with the governor's granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first white child born on American soil. The jealous rage of Chico, the great magician, changed her into a white doe which baffled all the hunters’ attempts to capture it, for it had a charmed life, and nothing but a silver arrow or an arrow dipped in the magic fountain of Roanoke could slay the beautiful creature. Now Wanchese, the great hunter of Pomouik, had crossed the waters, and there had received as a present a silver arrow. Armed with this he lay in wait for the white doe. Near him also was Virginia Dare's faithful lover, Okisko, armed with an arrow that had been dipped in the magic fountain. The magician Wenaudon, rival of Chico, had explained to Okisko that only by piercing to the heart the white doe with this magic arrow could the fair Virginia be liberated and restored to him; thus, unknown to each other, the two warriors awaited the coming of the white doe, one armed with the silver arrow that meant death, the other armed with the magic arrow that meant restored life to Okisko's love. Suddenly out in the clearing jumped the startled doe; twang! wnet the bowstrings; both arrows fled straight to the mark. To the wonder of Wanchese he saw a beautiful white girl lying there where he had seen the doe fall. To the horror of Okisko he saw the arrow piercing his loved one's heart. As if shocked by the awful tragedy the magic spring died away. In its place Okisko saw growing a tiny grapevine; it seemed a message from his lost love; he watched it grow and blossom and bear fruit. Lo! the grapes were red; he crushed one, and lo! the juice was red—red as his dear Virginia's blood. Lovingly he watched and tended the vine; and, as he drank the pure red juice of the grape, he knew that at last he was united to his love -— that her spirit was entering into his -— that he was daily growing more like her, the being he loved and worshipped -— that the joy he had lost he now had found again in the magic seedling.

-- From Literature in the Albemarle, by Bettie Freshwater Pool.

"Virginia Dare the White Doe"

In 1587 Sir Walter Raleigh sent men and women from England to establish a colony in the New World. It was his second attempt, for the first colonists of 1585 had abandoned Roanoke Island after a number of disastrous events. The governor of the second colony, John White, had with him two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, who had earlier been taken to London. Also in the group was Eleanor Dare, the governor's daughter, and her husband Ananias.

A month after the colony's safe arrival, Virginia Dare was born on August 18. The first English child born in the New World, she was the daughter of Eleanor and Ananias. On August 27, three days after her baptism, Governor White sailed to England for supplies. In England, his country was preparing for war with Spain, and for several years he could not get permission to return. When finally he came back, he found no trace of the colonists. Virginia Dare had vanished.

Or had she? There is a legend that she grew into a beautiful young woman, educated by her good friend Manteo in the ways of the forest. She was loved by many but especially by the handsome young Indian chieftain Okisko. When an old witch doctor named Chico turned Virginia into a White Doe because she spurned his protestations of love, Okisko was determined to undo the magic. From a kindly magician he learned that the only way to do so was to pierce her heart with the arrow of an oyster shell.

Meanwhile, the evil Wanchese, who hated the English, also had been spurned by Virginia Dare and he was determined to kill the White Doe with a silver arrow given him by Queen Elizabeth while he was in England. Wanchese well knew that a White Doe lives a charmed life and death can only come from a silver arrow.

One day, as Okisko searched along the shore for the White Doe, suddenly there she was, springing from the deep forest down to the white sands where Governor White's fort had once stood. He raised his bow, aimed his arrow, and the pearl arrow sped away. At exactly the same moment, from another direction, a silver arrow came toward the White Doe from the bow of Wanchese. The two arrows pierced the heart of the Doe simultaneously.

The White Doe resumed her form as a beautiful maiden, but she was dying. Wanchese rushed away, and Okisko looked for the last time into the eyes of his beloved Virginia Dare. He sorrowfully buried her in the center of an abandoned fort.

-- From North Carolina Legends, by Richard Walser.

"The White Doe"

Along the yellow-gray sand hills and dunes of Nags Head and Kitty Hawk, and all along the thin island shores of North Carolina, and in the swamps of the Islands there is a tale of a wonder-white doe. Folks who live in cranberry bogs and who have magic sight can see at midnight that pure-white doe, standing still as a statue and looking out into the far, far ocean. She stands all alone, her moist, wistful eyes gazing longingly far away, where the Old Country is.

There is no end of tales running in those yellow sands of the North Carolina coast and other places about the White Doe. One story, sad and lovely, about Virginia Dare, the White Doe, has been told for more than three hundred years and is still told today. For it is a living tale that stands out like a white church spire in thick gray clouds.

Perhaps the most famous early settlement in the southern part of our land is the lost colony of Roanoke. There are many mysterious tales about this lost community and the first child born in it: Virginia Dare, the White Doe. Let me tell you the one I like best.

Soon after the settlers founded Roanoke, they were greatly in need of food and supplies, and when none came from England, Governor White went to get them. It took a long time and when he returned...three years later...there was no sign of the men, women, and children he had left behind. They had gone to the Indians and could not be found. The baby, Virginia Dare, was among the Indians and they called her the White Fawn, even as her mother was called the White Doe.

The White Fawn grew up lovely to see and soon she became known as the White Doe.

Two Indian braves courted the White Doe -- Okisco, a fearless young chief and a fine warrior, and Chico, who was the medicine man, the magician in the tribe. The young White Doe favored young Okisco.

There was hard feeling between the two rivals and anger flew like cold, fall winds between them.

When Chico, the priest-magician of the tribe, saw that Virginia, the White Doe, would not have him, his anger was like a wild storm on the water. He spoke words of black magic and young Virginia turned into what the Indians called her. She really became a pure-white doe, beautiful to see and fleet as the wind.

With magic feet she roamed through the green woods like a great gleaming white jewel. Lone hunters and whole tribes saw that wonderful white creature and tried to hunt it down, but no one ever succeeded.

Okisco was in wild sorrow and anger when he saw his love was gone. But no brave could battle the medicine man of the tribe. Chico had great secret power; only the medicine magic man of another tribe could challenge him. So Okisco went to see Wenando, also a great medicine-magician of a neighboring tribe, and told him his tale. Wenando listened and then he said:

"I will give you an arrow made of silver that has magic powers. Watch for the White Doe and when you see her, shoot her with your silver arrow into the heart. She will then become the girl that she was and you can marry her."

Okisco watched and waited. He followed the White Doe day and night until one day came his chance in a bright clearing in the green woods. He aimed steady and straight, and there was no wind. Swift and straight the silver arrow went, hitting tue. The White Doe fell down, Okisco ran up and...instead of the White Doe, a young white woman lay dead on the ground and...a White Doe was galloping with great leaps swiftly into the woods....

Since then, those who have magic sight have seen, at midnight, the White Doe fleeting among the sand hills and the dnes. Sometimes she is seen in the valley where the city of Raleigh now stands, sometimes in the swamps of the islands, sometimes in the cranberry bogs. She is seen everywhere, leaping, running, or standing still, and looking sadly and wistfully out on the ocean in the direction of the land from which her parents had come.

And even to this day, folks along those narrow islands of North Carolina say that those who have magic sight can see, at midnight, the White Doe, the ghost of Virginia Dare.

-- From Folk Stories of the South, by M.A. Jagendorf.

"The White Deer"

There is a legend told of a time long ago when a group of English colonists bravely left their homes to travel to a new world. They settled on the island of Roanoke, and while they were there, a small girl-child was born to the daughter of the new governor. The baby was named Virginia in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.

Concerned for the well-being of his small colony, the governor traveled back to his homeland for supplies -- and found himself trapped there by a war between England and Spain. For three years he was kept from his beloved daughter, his new grandchild, and the good people who had settled in his colony. Finally he boarded a ship and sailed for the New World and for the City of Raleigh he'd left behind.

The governor arrived on Roanoke Island on August 18, 1590 -- his granddaughter's third birthday -- and found it empty. No welcoming daughter and son-in-law. No toddling grandbaby. No settlers. The City of Raleigh was eserted, plundered, and surrounded by a palisade of great trees, as if it were a fort. On one of the palisades, he found the single word CROATOAN carved into the surface, and the letters CRO carved into a nearby tree.

Hoping this meant that the colony (and his family) had gone to stay with his friend Chief Manteo on present-day Hatteras Island, the goveror ws preparing to follow them hen a great hurricane arose, damaging his ships and forcing him to return to England. He was never able to fund another trip to America and died without knowing what had happened to his family. Indeed, no one ever found out what happened to the Lost Colony. It remains a mystery to this day.

But the whispers of American legend tell a further story about the lost colonists. Not the story of a people slaughtered or a people lost. It is a story of a family displaced from their home by the hostility of island natives, a story of a family taken in by a neighboring tribe on the far side of the island and welcomed with open arms. And it is the story of a little baby girl with bright blue eyes and long flowing hair who was beloved by all who met her and much missed by her grieving grandfather, who died alone in England.

Virginia Dare grew wise in the ways of the forest, strong in her understanding of man and beast. And with each year she grew more comely and desirable until all the eligible warriors in the tribe were in love with her. The young chief Okisko was the bravest an the most handsome of the warriors, and his suit found favor with the lovely Virginia Dare, and with her doting parents. But the medicine man Chico was not pleased by the match. He desired the lovely girl for himself and would not allow her to go to another. A wizard coached in the dark arts, he called on the spirits and caused a spell to fall upon Virginia Dare, transforming her into a white deer as she walked alone near the sound one summer evening. With a bleat of fear and confusion, the white deer fled into the trees nd bracken, lost to the sight of the cunning sorcerer.

The Dare family was alarmed when their daughter did not return from her stroll that evening. Everyone in the tribe was alerted; settlers and tribesmen alike searched the island for the beloved girl. But she had vanished and was presumed drowned in the sea. None of the people looking for the girl associated her disappearance with the appearance of a white deer that could sometimes be seen walking near the sound at dusk.

Only Okisko believed that she might still be alive. The grieving suitor spent many days in prayer and fasting, seeking knowledge of the lovely Virginia from the spirit world. On the afternoon of the third day, a brown pelican came to him on the winds of the sea and told him that Virginia had been transformed into a white deer by the black wizard Chico. The only way to free her was to pierce her heart with an arrow tipped by an oyster shell. Rejoicing in this good news, Okisko thanked the proud spirit of the brown pelican and immediately found an oyster shell, which he made into the head of an arrow.

Unbeknownst to Okisko, the evil Chico had revealed to one of the girl's rejected suitors -- Wanchese -- that the white deer grazing along the sound was none other than the missing Virginia Dare. Chico hoped that the jealous warrior would kill the doe, thus completing his revenge against the Englishwoman.

Wanchese hated the English who had settled among his people. Most especially did he hate Virginia Dare, who had favored Okisko's suit over his own. He had traveled to England with the first explorers and there had learned of a substance called silver that would kill the creatures created by black magic. Having some coins in his possession from that long-ago trip, he melted the metal in a hot fire and made an arrowhead of pure silver. As dusk fell over the island, Wanchese went hunting for the white deer down by the sound.

On the seaside of the island, the brown pelican flew urgently across the waves toward Okisko, who was affixing the oyster-shell tip to his arrow. "Hurry," the brown pelican called to him. "You must hurry. Another seeks the white deer and would take her life!"

Okisko gasped in horror and ran across the island as fast as his strong body would carry him toward the place where the white deer had been seen walking beside the sound. As he reached the abandoned place where the City of Raleigh once stood, he saw the white deer walking down on the sandy shore. He took aim at once, the gleaming oyster-shell at the tip of his arrow, and shot the white deer in the heart. At the same moment, a silver-tipped arrow flew through the air from the far side of the clearing, and it too pierced the heart of the white deer. The white deer gave a cry like that of a woman in pain. Its form shimmered, glowing so brightly that it blinded the eyes of the two warriors who had shot her. Then the light died away, and they saw, lying on the ground where the white deer had stood, the dying figure of beautiful Virginia Dare.

Okisko gave a wail of anguish and ran to his beloved's side. Behind him Wanchese laughed -- an evil sound -- and disappeared into the bracken -- never to be seen again. Virginia Dare died in her beloved's arms and was buried in the old fort where her people had first settled. Okisko went on to become a great chief among his people, but her never married. His people whispered that the source of his success came from his spirit guide -- a white deer who would appear sometimes to him at dusk down by the shores of the sound.

To this day, whenever a white deer appears along the shores of the Outer Banks, it is said that the spirit of Virginia Dare has return to watch over the land she once loved.

--From Spooky North Carolina, by S.E. Schlosser.

In the Blink of an Eye: Is There Evolutionary Science in Genesis?

2009-10-24T12:30:00.007-04:00

The first and foremost thing to establish about Andrew Parker’s new book on the Genesis creation story is what it is not. It is not a repudiation of evolution theory. And perhaps just as importantly, it is not any sort of proof of the existence of God. As I’ve written before in other places, I do not think that will or can ever be proved, and I think that is purposefully so. Parker is not setting about trying to prove or repudiate anything so drastic. Rather, he asks us to reconsider, in a scientific light, what was once seen as a crude and rather fictional tale. Parker’s basic thesis: “When [Genesis 1] is taken literally, it is left in the wake of an advancing science. But when it is read figuratively…it becomes a great unknown in the way it keeps pace with modern science.”

When I first saw the title of the book The Genesis Enigma at the bookstore, I was excited. A book about how science and the Genesis account agree? I had already recently written a short article on how the Genesis creation account is more scientifically accurate than any other mythic creation account, as it rejects the central tenet of pagan religions: the deification of nature. Yet as I began to read, I became more and more skeptical. Andrew Parker is a scientist, an evolutionist, even, so a book favorable toward religion from such a man is an interesting thing. But it seemed at first that he was stretching things too much in order to fit his idea: sure, there are some parallels between Genesis and the history of the universe — but other things are out of order, and some are missing entirely. This fact is something I have been aware of for a long time, and is why I — and some other Christian thinkers, such as C.S. Lewis — began to consider the Genesis creation as mythic (in the old sense, not in the newer one). As I continued to read, however, these reservations began to be eroded by the facts of the book. Firstly, that Parker was a scientist, with an established career no less, before he became interested in religious ideas, which removed the idea of bias (you can't discount science if you know the science intimately first, and only subsequently compare it to religion).

Secondly, one of Parker's ideas as a scientist began to change the way I think. Sure, there are discrepancies in the Genesis account, and its scientific accuracy is thus questionable, at least in terms of what we presently know. However, Parker urges the reader to start out with a frame of mind stripped of the last 2,500+ years of scientific progress, equipped only by what common sense and guesswork can provide. In other words, with the frame of mind that the Genesis writer would have had. “Michelangelo painted the creation story,” Parker writes, “as one would expect someone without scientific knowledge to represent it — using the human form. That way everyone could identify with it. But the writer of Genesis opted instead for a cryptic, more abstract description.” God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. This is the historical root of the idea of the Big Bang Theory, first proposed by Catholic priest Georges Lemaître. From here, the Genesis writer continues on, making a few blunders; but Parker's argument holds that it is not the presence of the mistakes we should note, but the amazing accuracy that the account has despite them. One would expect an occasional mythic creation account to get one or two points right, sheerly by accident. But, the book argues, it is inconceivable, when we consider the absence of our two plus millennia of scientific knowledge, that an Israelite desert wanderer could just happen to get so much correct, even if his language is vague and inexact.

This is the basic gist of Andrew Parker's creation chronology:

“Let there be light,” corresponds with the Big Bang itself. As science shows, energy (“light” to the ancient’s terminology) was the first thing to exist in the universe, and from this energy was formed matter. At first glance, the preceding mention of Heaven and Earth's creation in the first verse seems to skew this chronology, but this problem disappears with closer thought. For one thing, a later verse depicts the creation of the Heavens (ancient terminology for the skies and outer space). Add to this the description of Earth as “without form” (without shape) and “void” (without matter), and it becomes clear that Earth, while present in God’s mind, has not yet been created. The same verse in which we see creation of light mentions also day and night, implying the creation of the sun. Again, this seems to be skewed by the fact that the sun and moon seem to be created later on in verses 14-19, but this is countered by the fact that the Genesis writer — whatever else he was ignorant of — surely understood, by simple observation, that the presence of the sun means day, while its absence means night. No, Parker has an alternate and much more scientifically interesting explanation for the second mention of “Let there be lights.”

Following the creation of light and the sun, the Genesis writer describes a separation between waters to form the sky. The lower waters are obviously seas, and the upper — above the sky — can be read as clouds. As Parker explains, this reflects the scientific order, as the formation of water from hydrogen and oxygen, and the evaporation and precipitation caused by the high heat and subsequent cooling of the earth’s surface, occurred early in history, well before the emergence of life. It is also notable that Genesis has dry land appear before the emergence of life, despite the fact that sea life is the first to be created. This, too, reflects a scientific history of the earth. (The one curious thing about Genesis here is that the creation of the earth itself seems to have been left out. It obviously occurred sometime between the light and the sky, but when is never said.)

Here, Parker says, is where the odds for accurate guesswork begin to become really low; for the next stages in the Genesis account were not known to be accurate until after Darwin. Genesis next describes the creation of plant life, which Parker equates with cyanobacteria: among the first life to evolve from a single-celled organism, these photosynthetic cells are found integrated into plant cells and are known as chloroplasts. From here, the second “let there be light” is a bit trickier. Again, day and night, and hence the sun’s presence, has already been mentioned. Parker’s idea is that these words hint toward the evolution of vision, the sense which let the light into life’s perception, and allowed living creatures to become aware for the first time of day and night and the stars. The idea of signs is also mentioned here, a concept which is both useless and irrelevant unless vision is present. This interpretation would, admittedly, be very loose and shaky were it not for the fact that it interlocks perfectly, in a scientifically historical way, with the rest of the Genesis account.

Immediately after these references to light, day and night, and signs, Genesis says “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures…” This corresponds to the Cambrian explosion, which was brought on, recent science tells us, by the evolution of the eye. The first life did live in the sea, and most of it evolved there. Interestingly, Parker points out, Genesis does not say that God forms or presents the animals, but that He commands the waters to bring them forth, which Parker says “is to summon a process that will lead to the diversity of animals.” A similar expression in Genesis is “Let [life] increase on the earth.” (NIV translation.) All this hints toward evolution.

The main problem with this argument is that birds are created alongside marine life, instead of after land life; yet Genesis afterwards is correct again, in having land-dwelling beasts, and then humanity, appearing last of all. In summary, the Genesis author recorded scientific facts he could not possibly have known from observation, and that scientists did not know until relatively modern times: that the universe was created in a single moment, that energy was the first material thing that existed, that the sun (day and night) preceded formation of the earth, that the formation of seas preceded the rise of life, that the first life was plantlike, that the first animal life originated in the seas, that the rise of vision precipitated the explosion of variety in life, and that sea life preceded life on land. The presence of birds in the wrong place does throw some doubt upon this theory, but in light of all the precise placement of so many other things, which science itself has only recently discovered, this single error is forgivable.

So far, so good. However, several of the author’s comments and proclivities raise questions. Firstly, who is the book’s intended audience? Despite the fact that Barnes & Noble categorizes the book in its Christianity section, there is nothing specifically Christian about it. Perhaps religious people in general? Yet at many points Parker belittles the religious mindset, seeing that side of the science vs. religion debate as clearly wrongheaded, making such comments as, “Collectively, Walcott’s Burgess fossils…would appear as a nail in God’s coffin,” and seeming content to pigeonhole any believers who have at all thought about the subject of natural history as young earth creationists. This is an extremely simplistic viewpoint.

Parker even bizarrely suggests that a literal interpretation of Genesis is behind environmental devastation. He makes this statement without at all showing where the connection lies — right after emphasizing the importance of sound observations. Of course, he ignores the fact that the rise of applied science coincides perfectly with the increase in natural exploitation — not a religious observation, but an environmental one. Again, Parker relies on a skewed and stereotypical view of religion when he invokes the “God of the gaps” idea, as if humanity’s religious pursuits amount to nothing more than assigning God or a god to everything we couldn’t understand. In a short review of early philosophical poles, Parker treats the natural philosophy of Plato and Epicurus as their central and most important concerns. He misrepresents C.S. Lewis, concluding that we cannot ever know what God is; but ignores Lewis’ vehement insistence that we can know (a much more important question) who God is. Perhaps the biggest blunder is his attempt to equate God with energy. As we know energy is a material thing, this is patently ridiculous; or if not, then it at least flies in the face of something most religions have ever said: that this, this world, this material arena we call the universe, is not all there is.

A problem, too, is the book’s lack of focus. It is certainly not a book on religion; there is less religion in it than science, and there is even less science in it than scientific history. Large parts are devoted to profiles of early scientists, usually of the nineteenth century. Are these intended to be for human interest? As I’ve said elsewhere, if I needed such human interest pieces to keep my attention, then I would never have picked up the book in the first place. This is clearly a case of an idea being better than its execution. The core thesis of Parker’s book is intriguing, if a little shoddily executed, but given all the extraneous and, honestly, boring material he heaps on, Enigma could have easily been half its current size, if not less.

In the end, though it has some pretty original and insightful ideas, The Genesis Enigma suffers greatly from a lack of focus, a superfluity of tangents, half-baked thoughts on religion, and a failure to draw appropriate and relevant conclusions. Andrew Parker states a few times in its pages that he hopes the book will help bridge the gap between the two sides in the debate between science and religion: an admirable goal, but one that cannot be achieved by turning religion into science, or forcing religion to operate by science’s rules. That is not to say that religion is, or should be, free of rational thought or inquiry, but rather to say that that inquiry is by its nature of and about a separate realm than concerns the realm of science. This Andrew Parker seems to fail to realize. Again, there are some really good and insightful ideas in Enigma’s pages; but given the slough one has to wander through to get to them, it may be wiser to seek them in other sources.

Ecstasy in the Laundry

2009-10-12T10:54:00.019-04:00

At work last night I happened to glance a title in the Comparative Religion section called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. That immediately got me thinking. The book's description has this to say in explanation of its title: “Jack Kornfield, one of America's most beloved teachers of meditation, assures us that enlightenment does occur on the spiritual path but warns that it is not the end of the road.” While the book has many marks of the New Age spirituality movement, a movement I abhor for many reasons, its title does recognize something very true about spiritual experience: that there are dry times between the times of high joy and ecstasy. That even in the most devoted and dedicated life, there is still the laundry to do.

Yet despite the realism inherent in this type of realization and admission, there is in such statements a sort of pretext for giving up, for surrendering to weariness. But I think such resignation, while it is of course something we will all feel at times, does not afford us the best way of looking at the dry and mundane times and duties. Dryness and mundanity are, of course, matters of perspective, and it is important to have the right perspective.

Those who have never been in love, or who have been in love but have never seriously screwed up in a relationship, will perhaps not know what I mean when I say that it is possible for even doing the laundry to be an ecstatic occasion. Have you never realized what a huge ass you've been, and found balm for your guilt through work? A man who despises doing the dishes or laundry or cleaning house may find surprising happiness in these things because he is doing them for his loved one in such a situation. The chores may not -- and usually will not -- make up for the bad thing he has done, but they will help him with his guilt because he is simultaneously giving up his time and energy for the one he loves, as well as submitting to the necessity of a concrete and exterior activity. And such a situation (a man striving to atone, if only in the smallest of ways) serves as a very appropriate and accurate image of our relationship with God.

In this way, laundry, and other activities of spiritual dry times, can be seen as a sort of everyday ritual.

And it is the same thing with religious ritual: rituals are not good despite the fact that we often do not feel them, that we often feel we are just “going through the motions,” but rather because of it. It is the same thing with hard manual labor: this work is good because we are submitting to the necessity of something healthy and concrete and humbling, and something we'd usually rather not do.

Nineteenth century Scottish preacher and novelist George MacDonald has this to write about dry times: “That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, ‘Thou art my refuge.’” Again it is the perspective that counts, and having the right perspective is very often an act of will. It is not how we feel that matters, but how we react to how we feel and to what happens to us. Wrote C.S. Lewis, in his Screwtape Letters:

“As spirits [humans] belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while [the human] spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation -- the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks....[This undulation occurs] in every department of [one's] life -- his interest in work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness...are merely a natural phemonenon....it may surprise you to learn that...[God] relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks....The reason is this....
“Sooner or later [God] withdraws, if not in fact, at least from [our] conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves [us] to stand up on [our] own legs -- to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that [we are] growing into the sort of creature He wants [us] to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best....
“[The demonic] cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God's] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

An acquaintance of mine recently wrote that “we really control nothing.” As her point was a recognition of the fact that our lives are largely beyond our own control, I thought that that was a good attitude to have, but with one caveat: There is one thing we control, the one thing that matters most: how we respond. For emotion, and the dearth of emotion, are not things we choose, but events which happen to us. Everyone must deal with laundry; we are the ones who choose if it will be ecstatic or not.

Tolkien on Vinyl

2009-09-24T17:36:00.006-04:00

This is too amazing not to blog about. I've known for quite a while that J.R.R. Tolkien had recorded several passages of his writings from The Lord of the Rings, as a demo of what an audio version read by him of the book might sound like. I've managed to obtain two different .mp3 files from these recordings: "Of Herbs and Stewed Conies" from The Two Towers, and an Elvish song from "The Mirror of Galadriel" in The Fellowship of the Ring. I had not yet, however, heard about this vinyl recording (released by a recording company called, delightfully, Cædmon, after England's first known named poet), and imagine my surprise and delight upon finding that not only were there two additional .mp3s of Tolkien's readings, but .mp3s of the entire record, both sides!

Click here for the .mp3s: Tolkien on Vinyl

The contents of the recordings are mostly songs and poems, though there are some prose readings. Included is: (Side 1) The Three Hunters' farewell to Boromir, the Ents' list, Treebeard's memories of Beleriand and of the Entwives, the last march of the Ents (including a chant in Entish!), the Rohan song inspired by the Old English poem "The Wanderer", Gollum's complaints, Sam's song about oliphaunts, the aforementioned passage from "Of Herbs and Stewed Conies", the song of the Ride of the Rohirrim. (Side 2) The arrival of the Rohirrim at the Pelennor Fields and their entering the battle (this takes up the greatest portion of side 2), the song of the Mounds of Mundburg, the arrival of Sam and Frodo at Mount Doom, the song of the eagle to the Lords of the West, and the above mentioned farewell song of Galadriel (though this time actually sung, not spoken).

Why The Fellowship of the Ring is not included is beyond me.

Lost: Is humanity black or white?

2009-08-29T01:10:00.015-04:00

There are many iconic images and themes to Lost, some of which are more important than others. A plain crash, with many survivors. A monster that is either a beautiful bright light, or a cloud of black smoke. A paradise stained by a history of blood, yet shining with the light of redemption offered. And then there is the Island itself. A stage, perhaps, for a great unfolding drama? Or something more, with a will and a purpose of its own?

In the earliest and latest few minutes of Lost's fifth season finale, we were given a peek at what the show may really be about. Though the appearance of two new characters, the oft-invoked Jacob, and his murderous nemesis (called often "Esau", by counterpart), seem to cast light on everything that has happened so far, the idea which they represent has been present since the first few episodes. "Two sides. Two players," the enigmatic John Locke spoke shrewdly to Walt in the pilot, "One is light, one is dark. Walt...do you want to know a secret?"

What Jacob and Esau's conversation has really given us is a framework for this motif, this image of black v. white. Jacob, of course, wore a white shirt, while his rival wore black. What lies at the heart of these two characters' relationship is a fundamental disagreement: is humanity itself black or white? Is a pessimistic view warranted, or is mankind basically good?

While fascinating from a storytelling perspective, neither of the two options given therein presents a very complete or very philosophical idea of human nature. Each seems to be incomplete, to be very naive in its own way. Presented as different sides of an ideological spectrum, Jacob's theory of human goodness seems to be the most liberal, the most educated; but in reality it is the more primitive of the two. At whatever point humanity started to think seriously about its own worth, it seems almost certain that they thought optimistically; that living was good, and that things were well, if not with the world, then at least with themselves. The idea that we are naturally bad or corrupted is a newer idea (though still very old). It comes of a more careful re-consideration, of a doubt, or a seed of doubt: that things are not exactly how would wish them to be. What makes Jacob seem modern is specifically his idea of progress: the idea that humanity is not only improvable, but is all the time improving.

Esau, by contrast, seems bitter and pessimistic about human nature, observing, "They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same." If some theories are correct, and Esau is, or commands, or works for the smoke monster, then it is obvious that he not only does not want humanity anywhere on the Island, but is willing to go to quite violent lengths to ensure this.

Now it should be obvious that, aside from the idea of progress, both of these specific characters' views of human nature are rather primitive and unreflective. But there is something more about all this that is very strange. Thoughtful readers will have observed by this point that something rings quite true when Esau says that humanity as a whole will always be as wicked as it has ever been. History, if nothing else, has taught us this, and there is little use denying it. Yet an intelligent man cannot, on the other hand, look smugly down his nose at Jacob's fascination with and belief in the possibility of redemption, a theme which is core to Lost and always has been.

This really is not as big of a dilemma as it seems, however. There is no real contradiction between these two truths, for they are actually talking about two different things. If these late hints are correct, then Jacob has been acting behind the scenes (rather like the mythic Norns, whose weaving of the past, present and future was represented in the tapestry woven under the four-toed statue) for quite some time, guiding certain characters toward the Island, and thus, toward redemption. Season four's biggest theme, I would say, is that the Island affords more sanity, healing and promise for the survivors than their old lives ever did. And, though some of them have lapsed, everything that has happened after the crash has lead, slowly but surely, toward decisions in which a character must change, or (at least in an inner way) die. If they changed, they found redemption. If they refused to let go of their baggage, they went on and on down the same miserable road. So we can safely say that Jacob, as a hand guiding these men and women, is interested in redemption.

But has Esau ever shown doubt in this possibility of redemption? I do not think that he has. Even less if it turns out he is connected with the monster, for it has often been, if only indirectly, a catalyst in producing these moments of choice. But redemption is, in the usual sense of the word, a highly individual matter. Further, contrary to Jacob's view, it doesn't only end once. It happens again every day, unless we are talking about the history of a place (such as the Island), in which case whatever "end" is being discussed would necessarily be the action or actions of an individual or individuals. And Esau has never, so far as we have seen, spoken a word about any individual; rather, they come, they fight, they destroy. When Esau declares that "it always ends the same," he is not really talking about a specific human's story, but about every human's nature. It is in us, Esau believes, to always do the worst, regardless of our intentions.

In so far as he means we have the potential to always do the worst, he is right. It is only in his insistence that (if we are to take him literally) "it always ends the same" that he is incorrect. Because it obviously doesn't always end the same: Lost has shown us that again and again. But even characters who have seemingly moved on have been known to backslide. So Esau clearly has something right, even if his articulation of it is wrong. And it is only in this articulation that the views of Jacob and Esau disagree, because it is only here that they address the same subject; where Esau's very broad view of human nature meets Jacob's confidence in the possibility of individual redemption -- again, two different subjects. It is only in the idiom of expression that they seem to coincide, and thus conflict.

Of course, Esau is obviously very wrong to judge and kill and scheme as he has, driven by hatred for humanity and for Jacob. Yet there is something quite inconsistent as well in Jacob's statement that "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress." The idea of progress, in its most widely accepted and most modern form, is the idea of infinite progression, of constant improvement. Whether this idea is logical or not is a separate discussion. I only want to point out that, unless there is something deeply religious -- something almost Christlike -- in Jacob's plan (and, given the prevalence of the theme of skepticism v. faith, this is very possible), it makes little sense to say, if redemption for the specific characters in Lost occurs, even if it occurs for all of them, that "it only ends once," and that everything before "is just progress".

Summer Harvest

2009-08-08T12:38:00.004-04:00

This spring we planted a garden outside of the apartment. Four kinds of peppers, eggplant, various herbs, and lots of tomatoes. And various flowers. Our hope is, once we have succeeded in buying a home, to have a much larger garden and grow more and more of our own food. (I would like to buy a few chickens for the eggs, but Heavenly isn't too keen on that idea.)

Here's a photo of a small sample of this summer's harvest.

Genesis as a Creation Myth

2009-08-05T13:56:00.004-04:00

Much criticism has been given by the scientific community to the Genesis account of creation, perhaps because it is one of the few mythic creation accounts still widely believed to be historically true. But because of this, very little attention is ever given to the superiority of this particular mythic account over nearly every other mythic account given by other cultures. Though the Genesis account is mythic (a term correctly understood as "a story whose sequence of events and imagery apprehend a truth that is beyond approach otherwise"), it is the least mythological of any other nonscientific creation story.

Consider that many creation myths are locally centered: the Japanese story says the Japanese archipelago was the first place to be created, the Egyptian story says a hill in Egypt (there is debate as to which hill this is) was the place from which the rest of the world began. They usually feature a being or beings, whether they be gods, animals, etc., creating the world in some direct way. A pair of gods dip their spear into the water, and the salt which falls from its tip becomes the Japanese islands. In West Africa, two spirits fashion children from clay. In Finland, a golden-eyed duck lays a cosmic egg, which breaks and becomes the world. Polynesian accounts have a spider and a snail competing for living room inside a giant clam shell. The wingstrokes of a weary buzzard make the valleys of the Cherokee land. Sometimes the earth never gets created; it just always was there. (The Navajo story is representative of this; it describes only an ascent through underground worlds until humans and other animals finally make it to the surface.)

Some myths involve a battle between gods, the corpse(s) of the losers becoming the heavens and the earth. Examples of this type would be the Greek Uranus (sky) and Gaia (earth), Babylon's Tiamat (sky), and the Norse giant Ymir (sky, underworld, and all levels of earth). Other myths involve a great swirling vortex of chaos, whose dark, impure parts are heavier and sink down, becoming the earth, and whose light, pure parts are lighter and rise up, becoming the heavens. Nearly all mythic accounts (even the one which J.R.R. Tolkien, himself a Christian, spent his life's passion in creating) assign specific deities as being, or being in charge of, or being the force behind, different parts of Nature, such as the stars, the waters, flora and fauna, storms, etc.

Now compare this to the Genesis account, found in chapters 1-2. The author of Genesis describes all Creation as being the work of one God, but beyond this Authorship there is very little that is specifically mythic or magical. God speaks, and all creation bursts into being, where before there was absolutely nothing: a Void. This account is actually the origin of the Big Bang theory. (Before this theory, most scientists, ancient and modern, believed that the universe had always existed and would always exist. When the Big Bang theory was first proposed, by a Catholic priest of all people, most scientists scoffed at it and attacked the man for trying to smuggle religious ideas into science. The idea that once there was nothing, and suddenly an explosion of matter occured, struck them as purely magical. Yet years later proof was found for this picture of the universe's beginnings, and now it is widely accepted. I am not suggesting other seemingly magical features of the Genesis account might turn out to be true; only pointing out the curious anticipation of the truth by the Genesis author, alone among all other mythmakers.) Once the earth and the heavens and the stars and the flora and fauna are created, they have no gods to inhabit or guard them, but are themselves only: nonmagical, physical creations which are subject to the laws of Nature (even if the writer of Genesis didn't know what these laws were). “The Genesis account rejects the central motif of pagan religion: the deification of Nature.” As evolutionist Andrew Parker writes, “Michelangelo painted the creation story as one would expect someone without scientific knowledge to represent it -- using the human form. That way everyone could identify with it. But the writer of Genesis opted instead for a cryptic, more abstract description.”

Again, I am not arguing that the Genesis story is scientific, or more scientific than other mythic stories. C.S. Lewis, an Oxford and Cambridge professor of literature, linguistics and medievalism, as well as the twentieth century's greatest Christian writer and a shrewd and intelligent philosopher, wrote that the Genesis creation was most likely a myth. (In The Problem of Pain, Lewis devises what he thinks might be, given an evolutionary history, a possible account of mankind's early history with God.) However, he stated, its mythic quality does not mean it is less desirable or even less important. There must be, he insists, some hidden truth in it which we would do well not to forget, regardless of the question of its historicity.

To Lewis, myth was perhaps the most important kind of account there is. It is through myth, he felt, that we truly apprehend the most important truths, that are sometimes otherwise inexpressible. Even speaking of not truths but mere facts, it appears that the author of Genesis, through myth, was able to approach reality most closely; closer, at least, than any other ancient mythmaker. The Bible, Lewis points out, constantly makes use of story, which strengthens the propositional accounts of the nature of God. "Theories lie more readily than stories. That is why our psychologists tell us we are good but our novelists tell us we are evil."

George MacDonald wrote that "[the story of the Bible] may not be just as the Lord told it, and yet may contain in its mirror as much of the truth as we are able to receive, and as will afford us scope for a life's discovery. The modifying influence of the human channels may be essential to God's revealing mode."

Dylan at Taki's

2009-08-01T02:31:00.003-04:00

I just wanted to post a quick note and a link. Dylan Hales, a friend and co-worker of mine, has been largely absent in his normal blog, The Left Conservative, as he has been writing of late at a website called Taki's Magazine.

As that site apparently lacks the RSS feed option, I'm posting a link to his contributions here instead of the Further Reading section.

Christendom: an Appeal Concerning the Common People

2009-07-29T01:51:00.018-04:00

It has been fashionable for quite some time to attack religion and tradition, especially Christianity. It has been called all sorts of things, and its history smeared with blood. But to whom should that blood rightfully be accounted? To Christendom, or to sheer human nature? Most modern thinkers would prefer we blame Christendom.

But, as is proper to point out in respect to any human endeavor or experience, the story of Christendom is not the story of popes or kings or the Inquisition, just as the story of the Civil War is not, properly told, the story of presidents, nor the story of Egypt the story of pharaohs.

The story of any section of humanity, throughout history, is the story not of its authorities nor institutions (except as their actions bear upon the lives of others), but of the common people, whom Yanagita Kunio spoke of as "the abiding folk". Christendom's story is the story of Irish priests who lose many good nights' sleep to journey across the county to give last rites to sick and dying men. Of early American circuit riders, who had no permanent homes, but relied on the charity of those they served. Of Norwegian peasants striving to master their pride as they survey their fields in the early morning. Of missionaries who have hidden themselves among hostile societies, willing to give their lives out of love on unfamiliar soil.

(It becomes ever more clear that this is specially true in terms of Christianity, which has always held forth, however fully its authorities have ignored it, that wealth and power are dangerous and unhealthy things to possess -- indeed, are anathemical to its Way.)

G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but rather has been found difficult and left untried. That, to an extent, is certainly true. In a very wide sense. But it is the Christian brethren, the anonymous faces looked over in any study of human history, that truly exemplify Christendom as they have of any section of humanity in any age. For the story of the Greeks is not of battles or philosophy, but of farmers, soldiers, priests: and the story of modern America is not the story of Barack Obama but the story of plumbers, builders, mechanics, and doctors.

Too long has history overlooked the faces of its majority, preferring to study military defeats and victories, the eccentricities of philosophers, the corruptions of kings. The human race is a body of people stretched out through time as well as space, and in this view there has been too much energy spent on understanding its flaws and not enough on the trials, travails, small victories, and heirlooms passed down by the wider majority. In respect to Christianity, two quite obvious points should be underlined: the one made above, and the fact that all these great Christian sins were sins not of Christianity, but of men, for every time a Christian has sinned, for that moment he has ceased to embody what is characteristic of his religion. He has departed from his Way.

When we put together a jigsaw puzzle, we usually start with the outside pieces because they are easiest to find and easiest to fit together. Such is human history. What we have, the straight-backed pieces of military history and shiftings of policy, of the whims of kings and the stagings of rebellions, is merely the faintest hint of history's true story. To say that the entire picture, stretched out through Time, can be characterized by these fragments of the frame, is irrational.

The Work Delusion: meritocracy and the dignity of manual labor, in Matthew Crawford's Shop Class

2009-07-25T19:08:00.009-04:00

Matthew Crawford is a college educated, modern man who landed a job at a Washington think tank, thus ostensibly achieving the new American dream: to earn money not by doing hard work, but by trading in our country's much lauded "knowledge economy". But then something happened. He quit. Not only did this man with a doctorate in philosophy drop out of his Information Age career, he also started his own business as a motorcycle repairman, working at first from his own garage. Strangely enough, he felt happier working with his hands, getting dirty, and fixing things than he ever did doing his supposedly intellectual work.

Shop Class as Soulcraft is a very interesting examination of the intellectual, practical, and aesthetic value and worth of manual labor; the uncanny and artificial division between conception and labor, between thinking and doing, and where and when it arose; and the changing economic climate which is starting to revert back to reality, giving better value and credence to manual trades. It is without a doubt one of the sanest books I have read in a while, and while it does have its flaws its sheer wealth of wisdom recommends it as one of the best new nonfiction books a reader can buy today.

One of my favorite things about the book is that Crawford values, as I do, the ordinary, perennially undervalued lower classes, not just of this country, but of foreign cultures as well. He sees in their poverty, humility and directness of experience a brilliance which I have long admired. Though he doesn't always make the connection, many of the ideas he argues for best fit into traditional, small-scale lifestyles. Typical is his argument for agency, not as activity directed by the self, but as directed toward a real, objective good "not something arbitrary or private...[flowing] from an apprehension of real features of the world." Crawford champions for humility in our work and our outlook on life in general, a humility educated by periodic failure, knowledge of our fallibility, and the continual revelations which one who is attentive to and engaged by meaningful work routinely experiences. He sees that we need work which not only engages our attention, but is relevant to and has real context in a community, rather than work whose results only affect an abstract and distant economy one never really experiences. Most of all, Crawford argues against the "characteristically modern" delusion under which we believe the world can be subjectively manipulated to our -- or others' (such as corporations') -- personal whims, leading increasingly to a feedback loop of increasing privacy, loneliness, and autonomy of self.

Perhaps one of the most relevant aspects of Shop Class is its contrast of all this to what we are so used to in our modern lives. The white collar worker's office or retail store, he shows, usually requires him to submit to an arbitrary and abstract code or quota that is not real or external in any meaningful way, leading to learned irresponsibility, listlessness and a sense of being trapped in contradictions. The chronic blame-shifting, ass-covering, and manipulation which he so observantly describes is familiar to anyone who has done almost any kind of desk or sales job.

Also explored in the book is the history which has led us to this puzzling predicament. Crawford traces the decline of apprenticeship in the early 1900s, in the face of rising mass-production techniques, and explores how the workers of that age rebelled en masse against Henry Ford's new system: to meet a need of 100 workers, Ford had to hire 963, because most of them, used to an intellectually stimulating and satisfying manual career, found the factory work simply boring, and just walked out. It is only when one becomes used to this kind of work, Crawford shows us, that it seems to us inevitable and we resign ourselves to it.

As I mentioned before, the author holds forth that most white class jobs today fit more the mode of factory labor (characterized by highly managed, abstracted labor requiring very little actual brainwork, and judged by completely arbitrary and subjective standards) than do the manual trades which his book champions. This really makes a lot of sense: after all, it is the carpenter, the plumber, the repairman and electrician, etc., who must actively use their minds to meet the challenges of always unique situations, while the office worker deals with abstract regulations and codes and standards which have very little to do with reality, which, as C.S. Lewis said, is always iconoclastic.

Crawford also echoes, at times, such writers as Lewis and the Twelve Southerners, when he writes about how modern industry and corporatism controls our consumption through advertising, by maintaining a continual dissatisfaction necessary for the continuation of the industrial system. (Think about it: if you were ever suddenly completely happy with what you had in your life, you wouldn't participate very much in the economy.) This was the root of our consumeristic culture, and the beginning of debt viewed as a common and everyday thing: the idea that we need and deserve certain comforts, distractions and dalliances. And it is an idea, contrary to the economic mode of history widely prevalent today, which is decidedly new. Heretofore, people had had less comforts not because traditional life did not afford them, but because they chose to forgo them, to "be frugal and free" (Benjamin Franklin). The new culture of consumerism meant that people had to produce more, both to meet newly engorged demands, and to make enough money to fulfill their own demands.

There are also echoes of classic conservative thought in places where Shop Class argues against the technocratic/meritocratic view of education, maintaining that higher education is not for everybody, sometimes not even for the smartest of people. Once he even echoes Edmund Burke's argument for prejudice (not, of course, in the sense of racism, but in the sense of having a decision ready at hand for a situation before it actually occurs, provided by experience, or, in Burke's case, inheritance of experience) when he describes a typical mechanic's intuition of which method to use to eliminate resistance: DW-40, or compressed air. "I say 'intuit' rather than 'conclude' because he may not draw any explicit connections in his mind....Rather, he is familiar with typical situations, and their typicality is something of which he has a tacit knowledge."

As others have pointed out, Crawford does fall short in some areas of his treatment of work. For example, he fails to connect localism, personal integrity, and traditional ways of working with one's hands (all things he praises in the book) with their obvious sister, agrarianism. Perhaps this is because his fascination with motorcycles, engines, and mechanical work precludes any censure of industrialism. (As reviewer Conor Williams wrote, "his argument for localism and 'mastering our stuff' seems very much in tension with several of motorists’ key ideals: easy mobility and freedom from place.") Crawford shows us the basically unhealthy aspects of scientific management, corporatism, the separation of thinking from doing, and many related modern work phenomena, but does not see that all these aspects stem from our industrial society. He also claims that "work is necessarily toilsome and serves someone else's interest." Certainly this is true within industrialism, and has been one of the system's biggest indictments from its enemies since the writings of the Twelve Southerners. But whether it is necessarily so across the board seems to me debatable at best, and ahistorical at worst. This idea should be something Crawford's book would naturally oppose.

Nevertheless, the wide exposure of such a realistically grounded book is an encouraging trend, as it speaks against the progressivism, abstraction, corporatization, and globalism that are such damaging forces to both our community and individual lives. Crawford's call to personal responsibility, his exhortation that we seek agency instead of autonomy, and his insistence that experiencing reality directly rather than through the filter of media or technology, are splendid marks of sanity, the popularity of which cannot be a bad thing. While there are quite certainly better and more complete books out there, I'd hazard to say that Shop Class as Soulcraft is one of the best new releases one can read right now. It is at least quite a good starting point; and as I've pointed out to a friend, once the bubble of hysterical optimism is punctured, it cannot be long before a reader will begin to notice similar flaws inherent in the ideology of the modern age in many other places.

The Tyranny of a Circle

2009-07-21T09:43:00.006-04:00

Agrarianism and anti-Industrialism in the writings of Tolkien

With typical gymnastic ease with words and logical gusto, G.K. Chesterton once described the whole character of modern thought as a circle. “A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.” Modern philosophy, then, is complete and exhaustive, but it is not all that much human, and it certainly is not as healthy nor transcendent as the wisdom of the past. How appropriate, then, that not fifty years later J.R.R. Tolkien cast his symbol for inhuman evil as a Ring. For Tolkien, too, disparaged of all that was modern.

One can even see conservative thought in the way Tolkien crafted his epics. He drew together threads of mythic tradition that survived from older ages, knowing the power and worth inherent in them, and from them weaved his legendarium. This stands in stark contrast to almost all of modern fantasy, whose authors throw away the past, saving only the most superficial dressings of tradition, draping them atop a new, innovative, and largely inhuman creation of their own.

A common mistake in reading The Lord of the Rings — one quite evident in Peter Jackson’s recent film trilogy — is that Men are weak and flawed, while Elves are possessed of an otherworldly wisdom and moral strength. But this wisdom comes not from their being Elves, but from horrific experience: pride, lust for power, disregard of higher authority, among other things recounted in Tolkien’s account of the world’s first ages, The Silmarillion. The Elves are so wise in Rings not because they are Elves, but because they remember firsthand the fruits of abandoning restraint and the straight road. In essence, they had come to distrust any effort based on their — or anyone else’s — virtue alone, a decidedly conservative idea. The wisdom of the Elves dwelt in humility learned through experience. And if Elves disparaged of Men in the pages of Tolkien’s books, it was not because the latter were weaker or more flawed: but because they were more forgetful, more prone to trust their natures, and above all, faithless and quicker to change.

In the days of the First Age, in their long wars against Melko, the original evil in Middle-earth, the Elves took Men as servants and retainers, and the two kindreds were long in alliance with each other. From the Elves, these Men were able to learn many arts, skills, and fairness of speech, and through their service raised themselves higher than they otherwise would have been. This picture is a wonderful evocation of the traditional idea of an ordered society, wherein the lesser strives toward the greater and the greater serves by example and leadership. Eventually these families of Men became the kingdom of Númenor, living close to the holy lands and enjoying long spans of life and great prosperity. The downfall of their island nation (Númenor was Tolkien’s version of the Atlantis legend) was a forgetting of the tradition they had learned from the Elves. Their fall from a high grace was through envy, and a desire for an impossible equality: one might say they wished for a leveling of the privileges of Elves with those of their own people.

But perhaps the most important aspect of Tolkien’s work is the ways in which he portrayed evil. Melko Morgoth, the original enemy of all that is good and the Luciferian figure in Middle-earth’s creation story, was characterized by an unwillingness to serve, and a desire to become a power of his own. His resentment against all that is good in the created world is behind most of the universe’s suffering, and at every turn Melko is found seeking to infect others with his petty and willful philosophy. The Elves’ long war against him in The Silmarillion can even be seen as the fruits of his labors: the five-century conflict arose chiefly out of lust for the Silmarils, three jewels that symbolized pride, egoistic will, and individualistic passion; all characteristics of liberal philosophy.

* * *

The Silmarils themselves were created from the mingled light of the Two Trees of Valinor, in which dwelt thought of “things that grow in the earth”. These Trees are the origin of the sun and the moon, and were held to be the fairest things that have ever appeared in the created world before they were destroyed by Melko. It is important to consider the fact that though the three jewels made from the light of the Trees inspired such hubristic folly, they were nonetheless holy objects, which burned any evil or impure hand that touched them.

None of this is an accident. Tolkien doesn’t just stand against modernity, he stands for tradition, and some of the most wonderful things which he found in the world were green and growing things. “In all my works,” he once said, “I take the part of trees as against all their enemies.” There is a definite thread in the whole of his legendarium of environmentalism, decades before there was ever an environmentalism movement. The best and most effective way to preserve the wonderful things in creation, as well as to resist mankind’s lesser urges and lusts, Tolkien felt, was a traditional life — specifically, an agrarian life.

Nowhere is this agrarian ideal more apparent in his works than in the Shire of the hobbits. Despite the faded glory of Gondor, or the high ethereal beauty of the Elves, the hobbits are clearly characters the reader is supposed to associate with quite closely. We are told that they “are an unobtrusive…people,” that “they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skillful with tools.” They have “a close friendship with the earth”. Their time was chiefly occupied in “growing food and eating it”. Even government officials in the Shire are “in practice rather haywards than policeman, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than of people.” The first farmer the reader comes across in The Fellowship of the Ring, Farmer Maggot, is not an ignorant country bumpkin, but a “a person of more importance than [the protagonists had] imagined”, an individual of courage, shrewdness, and common sense. It is not despite this stout and earthy, cheery and slow-changing, agrarian and nature-grounded character that the hobbits are able to contribute greatly to the War of the Ring, but because of it.

Complementing this image of a traditional agrarian society are two peoples, both decidedly traditional in outlook and both defined to a great deal by their connection to and relationship with nature and the land: the Elves and the Ents. The kingdoms of Rivendell and Lothlórien are but echoes of the great elven lands of Beleriand, as described in The Silmarillion, but they are places of great and unique beauty nonetheless. Rivendell is “The Last Homely House,” a hidden dwelling in a precipitous valley that does not intrude or infringe upon nature in order to achieve its security as a refuge, but relies upon it. The same is true of Lothlórien, a land the name of whose capital means “City of Trees” and whose people dwell in buildings high in the canopies of groves of golden mallorn. Indeed, both Lothlórien and Rivendell actively draw on and are enhanced by the beauty and power of nature, water and air respectively.

As is true of the Old Forest in the Shire and Mirkwood in the east, Fangorn in the south of Middle-earth is a place where the wild growing things are “not evil; or what evil [there is,] it is far away…There is no malice … but there is watchfulness, and anger.” The anger that dwells in both of these remnant forests is due to the unbridled logging by Númenoreans in their latter days, and then by Sauron, the dark lord himself, who was lieutenant and second-in-command to Melko. In the case of Númenor, this logging was a result of dissatisfaction with a traditional lifestyle, and in the case of Sauron, as will be explored below, it is the beginning of industrialism. As the guardian of these forests, the Ents do not so much speak for an agrarian lifestyle as they do against modern industry. But as each is in opposition to the other, the Ents can be seen as allies to the agrarian cause.

* * *

But again, Tolkien’s views on agrarianism and industrialism are most obvious in his portrayal of evil. If Melko Morgoth represented the hubris of liberalism, the Ring represents the blind force and appetite of industrialism. As a symbol for industry, the Ring also stands at various turns for applied science, progress, and consumerism, and even, it can be argued, for egalitarianism.

For Sauron, though evil, is never encountered within The Lord of the Rings, and as the Ring was originally created as a tool to more efficiently use his power, one might also say — though with very little pity — that Sauron himself became merely a puppet of the machine he had created. Indeed the Ringlord’s personality is occluded and all but absorbed by the soulless and impersonal Ring. Thus it doesn't matter at all where industrialism comes from or whose motives it serves. In the end it overtakes everything in its wake, good or evil, and converts all users to its own philosophy. Before forging the One Ring, Sauron's efforts at evil were limited, and though they often caused great harm and sorrow, they usually affected only a small area or people. With the Ring, he could aspire to total world domination. And thus the drone of the Ring contains notes of globalism, as technology inevitably does. Sauron with the Ring would scorch the entirety of Middle-earth, until it was all poisoned and barren like the pits and crags of Mordor. Such invokes thoughts of the standardization that industry and technology bring — a McDonalds and Starbucks on every street corner, the decline of local variety and character — as well as the social and economic leveling that industry, and its companion philosophy of egalitarianism, seeks to achieve.

The Ring is not just a magical ring, but a Ring of Power. From the very first it is described as a vehicle intended to expand efficiency, to “save labor”, so to speak. Not surprisingly, the tendency to enslave is also inherent in its purpose and design. As agrarian writers have often pointed out, though technology was created in order to ease the burdens of mankind, it often ends up enslaving us, and we find that we have less leisure time than ever, and that our free hours are cursed by an increased awareness of time and a desire to make the most of it. One can hardly imagine a hobbit, or one of our agrarian ancestors, worrying about how to best occupy his evening.

We soon observe that though created by Sauron, many individuals nevertheless have faith in their ability to wield it. Before deciding against it, Galadriel states that she would “not be dark, but beautiful” were she to use the Ring. Boromir claims the Ring is “a gift to the foes of Mordor. It is mad not to use it, to use the power of the Enemy against him.” But we know that “what is done with it turns to evil.” The word tempt is used often of it. Because it is tempting. Just as technology and the fruits of industry are tempting: for they offer greater comforts, greater luxuries, greater promises of happiness. But just like Sauron, once called “The Lord of Gifts”, industrialism delivers on none of its high promises, giving us instead satiety, indolence, even greater weakness to temptation. We have exchanged leisure for luxury, and in the end have found that latter fruit bitter and unsatisfying. Even as Boromir, Denethor, and Isildur had faith in the goodness of Men to resist the Ring’s evil, so modern humanity continually claims that science and technology and industry can be harmful in certain hands, but that all one needs to conquer these evils are good will and faith in our own potential. The Ring, like industry, is not a neutral power. It twists ideals into something ever more like itself.

We see the practical results of industry not only in the inner trends of this world which are subject to propaganda and interpretation, but also in a much clearer symbolic state in the writings of Tolkien: chiefly, in Gollum and the Nazgul. The latter, called “Ringwraiths”, have no will at all outside of furthering the agendas of their master. So, too, modern society feels powerless to return to earlier, agrarian ideas, paralyzed by fear of the discomfort and hard work that it would entail. This fear is a twisted view of the truth: the word wraith, accordingly, derives from an Old English word meaning something that has been wrung and twisted. But the Nazgul succumbed not by chance, but willingly, by lust for power, which industrialism certainly promises much of to those who can take it into their hands.

Gollum, though, is perhaps much more relevant. Originally a hobbit, he represents the farmer who has been persuaded to give up old ways for something new and supposedly better. Like industrial technology, the Ring doesn’t work for those who live under its power; it uses them for its own ends, just as industrialism took shrewdness and economy and turned them into consumerism. As for fruits and rewards, Gollum’s and the Ringwraiths’ unnatural longevities (an oft-promised reward by modern industry) afford greater health and longer life, but at the cost of every happiness. Having got the Ring, Gollum becomes depressed with what it has given him, and he can be consoled only by more of the same poison. Because of this he both loves and hates it. His plight and misery, like that of the modernized farmer who finds his leisure and happiness continually lessened, are all the more wretched because of what he has lost.

It has been said that the fallen wizard Saruman is the most modern voice in Tolkien’s entire oeuvre. His is the voice of progress, of the inevitability of change. “A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all....This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise....” It sounds a lot like the typical progressivist claim that modernity, that change, is an inevitable trend, and that there is little use fighting. He sees goodness and tradition not as an end, but a means. “It serves as a beginning....[but it] may be overwritten.” “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is,” Gandalf counters, “has left the path of wisdom.”

Again, Saruman expresses faith in his ability to use the Ring for good: “...and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order...There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.” We would all do well to heed Gandalf’s reply: “I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of [those from] Mordor [sent] to deceive the ignorant.”

And Mordor is inevitably the ultimate destination of industrialism, in both physical reality and the state of despair that its fruits often bring. “Barren”, “gasping”, “choked,” “fire-blasted”, “poison-stained”, “defiled”, “diseased”: these are descriptors not only of Mordor but also of our environment’s face under progress and industry. It is no coincidence that there are hints of mass-production manufacturing and agribusiness in Mordor. Its “high mounds of crushed, powdered rock” recall visions of construction sites. The “pits and forges”, “axe-hewn stumps”, “iron wheels”, “vapours”, and “vents and shafts” of Isengard are only the first stages of the work of Mordor. This is what comes of having “a mind of metal and wheels” that “does not care for growing things”.

Though environmentalism is often more associated with liberalism than conservatism, anyone who has read Tolkien’s writing can easily see that care for nature and the environment is more a conservative sentiment than anything else. It is even inherent in the word “conservationism”. Caring for and preserving the past and traditional ways of life automatically means caring for and preserving “green and growing things”, even if (though not necessarily) by accident. Moreover, Tolkien shows the results of progress and industrialism, which were always throughout history associated with liberal thought.

Tolkien resented modernism deeply and loved the agrarian life even deeper. Yet he realized that modernism was a disease that, while not inevitable, was made stronger by mankind's inherent frailty and flawedness. The example left in his writings advised two courses, one optimistic, one less so: to fight modernism, as by seeking to destroy the Ring and as his returning heroes did by opposing its presence in their own Shire, or else to wait until the world is created anew, in a perfect form. Tolkien's hero Frodo has been wounded by the whole affair to such an extent that even in the Shire he cannot find rest. Ultimately, it is only through a journey into the Undying Lands — a Paradise of nature unstained, where no seed of modernism had ever been planted — that Frodo can heal and die in peace. What does this say about our situation? Ultimately, it suggests we cannot perhaps fight a surging, pulsing tide without aid from and belief in a higher power. This itself is an essentially conservative thought, because it implies belief in a universal and in a hierarchical structure in which we do not occupy the highest place — as Bilbo Baggins would say, “Thank goodness!” It is only through such humility that we can find real value in the created world and tradition alike.

So where, then, can we find a comprehensive model of how to live? The answer lies, I believe, in — as is typical in Tolkien's writings — one of the most unlikely places imaginable: the merry yet inscrutable Tom Bombadil. He lives in a forest that can be described as mysterious and menacing at best, and yet he does not strive against it. He raises fowl and has a vegetable garden, and if he does not grow his own grain he purchases it from local agrarian communities. His chiefest standards of beauty are the natural world around him, and his wife. But most importantly, he does not take himself all that seriously. He is happy to live his life with the good and simple things he has around him and delight in the particular wonders — even the darker ones — within his home territory. In short, he combines preservationism, conservationism, agrarianism, localism, and humble contentedness: not a bad model at all.

On Reason

2009-07-15T15:07:00.004-04:00

Reason cannot be learned from pure experimentation, because reason is something different from extension of past experience upon new experience. This extension is actually irrational: "as before, so now." When it works it only works by accident. Trial and error may be effective, but it is non-rational in approach. Reason involves distinction between rational and irrational arguments and approaches, not based on whether they correspond to reality as experienced but on whether they are logically valid. Reason apprehends validity, not reality (or, at least, apprehends reality only through logic: not directly but secondarily), and logic is not a material thing which can be experienced. Logic must be apprehended. Reason cannot learn logic from reality, for it learns reality from logic. (This is how science and philosophy have always been practiced: it is the basis of the scientific method.) Logic, and the ability to apprehend it, must come first.

Free will and determinism

2009-07-15T13:16:00.003-04:00

Every time I drive through the mountains, I regularly see signs warning me to watch for fallen rocks. I always look up out of sheer curiosity, not expecting to really see a falling rock, but wondering where these rocks might come from if they were to fall. Imagine that such a rock did fall. I would have to make a split-second choice. Should I slam on the brakes, should I step on the gas and try to get past it before it hits me, or should I swerve and try to avoid it? Or should I just ignore it and let it hit me?

This situation is an interesting one that affords much philosophical discussion. The laws of physics tell us that if a rock falls down a mountain, it did so not because it got bored with its montane life and thought it would see how things are in the lowlands, but because some physical situation caused it to do so. Whether this was a growing instability of the ground below it, or a sudden addition of weight or pressure caused by an animal, or one of many other possible reasons, the rock's falling had a natural cause, and that natural cause was a situation which in turn was caused by previous natural causes, which can be traced back to other natural causes and physical situations all the way back to the beginning of our planet's history. This fact can be called determinism: the idea that everything that happens naturally can be traced back, through the chain of cause and effect, to everything else that happens naturally. A storm is caused by natural phenomena, not the whims of the gods.

Now this is all very true when it comes to natural phenomena. But it creates quite a stifling, deathly process when applied to human behavior. I am sure that some of our behavior has natural causes, is simply our natural reaction to natural situations. Quite a lot of our behavior is probably this way, and humanity has known this since the ancient times. Whether we are talking about a Neanderthal hitting another Neanderthal with his club because he wants the other's food, or a soccer mom making an impulse buy at the grocery store, much of human activity is unreasoned surrender to our whims, moods and impulses. But that is not the extent of human behavior. There is also reason, which impels us to say, "It is wrong, or at least not socially conducive, to attack someone for their food," or "I shouldn't buy this tabloid magazine because I need to save money, and it's trash, anyway." It is when reason is used, or at least when it is used wisely, that we rise above our animal selves. A young woman chooses what college she wants to go to. A man chooses whether he will give the last couple dollars in his pocket to the homeless man, or save it to buy a candy bar for himself. A little boy strives to decide whether he should stand up to a bully, or merely avoid him.

And yet none of this is really rational at all if determinism can be applied to human behavior. (And the only way it can't is if there is some supernatural basis for Reason.) Our brain's activity is determined by the activity of brain cells, which are nerve cells; and all cell activity is subject to physical activity (that is, it is subject to the laws of physics) because it comprises of molecules and atoms. Just as if a rock falls it fell because its natural situation determined that it had to, if we choose to become a doctor or a lawyer instead of a con artist, it is only because the material situation of atoms and molecules and nerves within our brain determined that this was the only choice which the purely physical instrument of our brain could make, given the physical situations of the nerve cells, molecules and atoms within our brain.

Unless, of course, human thought and choice is not merely the results of material process, but also subject to a Rational element with an origin outside of Nature. This supernaturalism, in opposition to naturalism, is the only way to preserve human free will. If naturalism is correct, then anything we do or say or believe is not a result of choice at all. It is merely the only thing that could have happened given the natural law of cause and effect.

Science, education; knowledge, wisdom

2009-07-08T12:10:00.008-04:00

A discussion I am in the middle of right now has got me thinking back to a review I read a long time ago of a book called Why Evolution is True. (By the way, I must take issue with the book's title. There is little use asking, or discussing, why evolution is true. If it is true, it is true because it is true and for no other reason. Too often today we appeal to an idea not because of its factuality but because of its attractiveness. We speak of a philosophy's bravery, of its compassion, of its revolutionariness: but seldom of its truth or falsehood.) The review opened by saying, "But no intellectually responsible non-scientist can get away with ignorance about the sciences, which collectively constitute humanity's greatest achievement. There is no excuse for lacking at least a broad-brush sense of what is happening in fundamental physics, cosmology and biology..."

This seems to me incredibly false. These areas are not at all vital (however interesting they may be) concerns for the non-scientist, and to suggest there is no excuse for not trying to get at least a cursory understanding of them seems to me pretty unbalanced.

It would seem that the confusion arises out of the mistaken modern belief that knowledge is the supreme object of every human search. That "knowledge is power". But knowledge, while it may be power (historically not a good thing for a human being to have), is not of the greatest nor gravest import. There are two distinctions worth making here. One is between higher and lower knowledge, and the other is between knowledge and wisdom.

Of course, some knowledge is necessary. But there seems to be a hierarchy of knowledge. This may seem an objectionable thing to say in our democratic, egalitarian society, but think of it this way. Certain things you need to know, others you don't. And the value of the hierarchy seems to be inverted. An example of lower knowledge would be "Every day at a certain time the sun sets, and night comes", or "Every year at a certain time it gets colder, and one must make certain preparations if one is to survive", or "Fire burns". These lower facts, the easiest levels of knowledge to obtain, are the most important: without them, no human being could survive. Then higher up there comes knowledge which is harder to obtain, but more complex and less essential. "If I plant this seed in a certain kind of ground, and care for it in a certain kind of way, and wait a certain amount of time, it will grow into food." "If I tame an animal in such a way, and care for it in such a way, it will yield, or become suitable to be, food." These levels of knowledge are extremely useful, but not because they are higher knowledge, but because they are lower. And while they are some of the most essential areas of knowledge our species has, even they, as higher levels of knowledge, are not essential. Agriculture and husbandry are not essential to human life. Still higher up, you have what begins to approach the sciences, until you ascend the ladder of knowledge to the highest rungs, understanding the inner workings of the material universe.

But it should be immediately obvious that the higher you go, the less important the knowledge you receive will become. It will yield you greater power over nature, but it is not conclusive that this is a good thing to have, at least not on certain levels. And the higher you go, the more unhealthy the power your knowledge enables you to wield is, until you have societies managed by an elite intellectual few; markets ruled by a monopoly of corporations who wield scientific knowledge enabling them to construct higher technology; the nuclear weapon.

And so to say that even the non-scientist must have a rudimentary knowledge of physics, cosmology, or biology is untrue.

It is also useful, perhaps necessary, to make the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. As knowledge can be wielded as power, wisdom has fallen by the wayside as a pursuit highly sterile and hindering. But wisdom is more important than most knowledge. To know what you should do in certain situations, is more useful than knowing the atomic number of krypton, or at what point in history humanity branched off of the evolutionary tree. These latter things are merely incidental to human life. But wisdom, if it is real wisdom, is essential to the important things, such as contentment, love, relationships, and understanding. Even to right reason.

That wisdom is more important than almost all knowledge can be proven by considering mistakes. Imagine that you have obtained, whether by being told or by flawed observation, incorrect knowledge. You believe that the sun revolves around the earth or that the world is flat. Imagine you believe that storms are caused by vengeful gods, or that saying "Bless you" will keep a demon from re-entering a person's body after they sneeze. Fine. Now imagine that you believe that some human lives are worth more than others, or that violence is the best way to live happily and honorably in the world. Or that being impatient, and being self-centered, and never considering the perspectives and needs of others, is the best way to be liked and respected.

Which of these sets of mistaken beliefs is the more disastrous?

And so philosophy -- the pursuit of wisdom -- and right reason (for human reason is a flawed and weak thing, capable of brilliance but also of disastrous, horrible, incorrect conclusions), are more important than what is normally meant today by the word "education". It matters very little, unless one is determined to have materialistic and consumeristic success in this society (which numerous things have suggested at numerous points in history to be extremely unhealthy). Formerly, "education" was understood to include not only knowledge, but wisdom. Today there is very little of that, due to a belief in relativity: If anyone's worldview is as good as anyone else's, we can't impose one person's or one group's ideas of wisdom. This view misunderstands the character of real wisdom: that it is universal, objective. If it were not, it would not be as important as it is. In fact its very importance stems from its objectivity and universality.

Awesome television t-shirts

2009-06-17T01:09:00.006-04:00

I've been wanting a TAPS jacket for the longest time. Not a hoodie or a t-shirt, but the actual black jacket that the team members wore on the earliest episodes.

I already own a hoodie from TheOneRing.net. From back when they were actually talking about Lord of the Rings movies, and not every other breath which Peter Jackson, Ian McKellen, or Guillermo del Toro is taking these days.

Here are some pretty awesome t-shirts I found online while looking for news about How I Met Your Mother. They're mostly styled like every single Old Navy shirt in existence, but with clever television references instead of weird, nonexistent bars with occasional sexual innuendo. See if you can guess which tv show they are from:

Suit Up!
Yummy Fish Biscuits
MacLaren's Bar
The Jerk Store
Pie Chart (where's the one for the Bar Graph?)
We Have to Go Back
Canadians Are Afraid of the Dark (true story...)
The Bro Code
Slap Bet Commissioner
No Last Call!
Mangoes
Stop the Clock!
Best Burgers in NYC

Those sure are cool. Believe it or not, I once aspired to have my own t-shirt design company. I even came up with four designs. Needless to say, they weren't very clever.

Local

2009-06-05T00:10:00.011-04:00

Last week while visiting my home state of Ohio, I picked up a graphic novel at Dark Star Books and Comics in Yellow Springs, one of my favorite places to shop for comics, especially indie ones. It was there that I found Andi Watson's Slow News Day. The book is called Local. It is a very beautiful hardcover, with a cloth spine, black and white comics with a color cover section in the back and a series of essays by both artist and author about each of the twelve issues. There are also pinups by other artists (including some amazing talents), and some sketches and concept art.

So much for the physical product. Is Local a good read? The short answer is, Yes. The long answer is that it took me a while to really get what this story was about, and until I knew, I wasn't sure that I liked it at all. The series is told in the form of twelve stand-alone stories, which all string together to form a scattered, sketchy narrative of one Megan McKeenan, a teenager at the time of the first issue, a thirty year old woman in the final issue. Each story takes place in a different town in North America, and one of the most interesting aspects of the series is the accurate and detailed backgrounds, portraying many specific locations. The stories themselves focus on a year of Megan's life as she travels from place to place, unable to find a home for herself or else simply unwilling to settle down. A few times she is hurt very badly by some unforeseeable tragedy (mainly, the incident in "Two Brothers"). So Local, in addition to being a series of studies of specific places in specific times (always a great thing), is also a fragmented tale of one woman's quest for normalcy, for adventure, for...something she's not sure of exactly. By the final story, taking place in breathtakingly beautiful rural Vermont, Megan has come to a few conclusions, found a few answers, and, at last, settled down in a home of her own. There are several different themes that can be taken from this series, and this has partly to do with the fact that Brian Wood's vision for the book changed at least once in the telling. The weakest issues are the ones having the least to do with Megan, namely "Hazardous Youth" and "Bar Crawl". But the strongest points -- for my money, "Food As Substitute", "Wish You Were Here", and "The House That Megan Built" -- are really strong story, story that sticks with you and makes you wonder what life on the road, life with more risks and more mistakes, would be like. Local is a book which has to be taken as a whole, not as merely the sum of its disparate parts. It took a while to grow on me, but it is a work which rewards with every additional read.

So reading this book inspired me to make a soundtrack (probably because each essay by the artist and author is punctuated by a short playlist). The following are songs that generally follow the themes of Local: wanderlust and locality. I've tried to choose songs which were about specific places. Not surprisingly, many of them turn out to be folk or alternative-country.

"So Long, Astoria" - The Ataris (Astoria, Oregon)
"Carolina" - Benjamin Gibbard (South Carolina)
"American Skies" - Havalina Rail Co. (smalltown America in general)
"Ohio" - Damien Jurado (Ohio)
"Great Salt Lake" - Band of Horses (Salt Lake City, Utah)
"East Virginia" - Damien Jurado (Virginia, North Carolina)
"Thrice All American" - Neko Case (Tacoma, Washington)
"Wapato" - Ali Marcus (Wapato, Washington)
"Fast Car" - Tracy Chapman (wanderlust in general)
"Greenville" - Lucinda Williams (Greenville, South Carolina)
"Baker Lake" - Sera Cahoone (Baker Lake in Washington, or possibly in Colorado)
"Dig Me a Hole" - Dawn Landes (leaving a rural home for the city)
"Los Angeles" - Denison Witmer (Los Angeles, California)
"Follow the Lights" - Ryan Adams (coming home again)

If anyone has any additions they know of and love along this general theme, I heartily encourage them to post them in a comment.

This is a somewhat modern theme, regionalism (or "placeism", as Bill Kauffman puts it), mainly because before modernity the idea of leaving one's home was mainly a last resort, a measure of last resort, dreamt of only in fairy tales. But this makes sense. Like traditional culture, like folklore, like the natural beauty and variety disappearing more and more every day, there is no need for a conservation movement until the thing being concerved is almost gone.

Mockingbird in the gloaming

2009-05-19T21:49:00.009-04:00

I was taking a walk tonight in the area around where I live. Unfortunately, it's not a rural area at all. Our apartment in West Ashley is in the middle of a commercial area, although residential neighborhoods aren't too far off. We don't have many places worth walking to in walking distance, and no woods at all. But there are still little moments of beauty and wonder despite the choking sprawl and the commercialism, little remnants of nature amidst the choked and gasping asphalt and concrete.

I experienced one of these moments tonight as I was walking back home. A mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos, was singing on a wire. There are a lot of mockingbirds in South Carolina, probably as much as there were cardinals and house sparrows in the Dayton/Kettering area where I grew up. In a rare instance of inspiration (usually I would have thought to do this only after I'd left the moment far behind) I recorded several minutes' worth of the mockingbird's song. These birds, apart from being beautiful, have some of the most unique vocalizations among the birds of America. Their mimicry is legendary; bits of cats and dogs can be detected here, among with cardinals, a bit of robin, and (I think) a phoebe.

I took this one photo with my camera phone. The bird in question can be seen on the wire just to the left of the streetlight.

The northern mockingbird. (Photo not mine.)

Photo Essay: Bookstore Chaos

2009-05-19T21:08:00.026-04:00

When most people think of bookstores, they picture cozy, quiet, comfortable places, with scents lingering of old books and coffee. When I tell folks that I work at a bookstore, the usual response is one of approval, even envy. "Oh, nice, that must be a wonderful job."

There are certainly parts of it that are. But like any job, it has its down moments, too. And they are not at all infrequent. This image of the bookstore as a cushy job apparently dies quite hard, so I've been keeping a photo log with my cell phone's camera as an ongoing project to counter this. Bookselling is not at all easy. The bookseller is a combination of librarian, personal shopper, maid, and janitor. Apparently some people also think it includes babysitter. Here are a few samples of the messes we have to deal with on a regular basis.

Typical children's section mess. It's even better when they leave their frappuccinos.

Yes, two tables of it. And this is only the beginning...

The stage typically gets heavy traffic, and minimal parental supervision.

Children like to line things up...and then not put them away.

Recovery cart. This gets cleared off and then filled up again several times a shift.

This is the result of parents and children.

It's all right, they'll clean it up. That's what they get paid for, anyway.

Well, there was already a pile there. I just thought it was okay to leave mine, too.

Because booksellers don't have anything better to do with their evenings.

Playtime! No grownups, and definitely no supervision!

Two whole shelves? Really?

Not only do they leave messes, they re-arrange things...

There's no such thing as leaving too many books.

Well, there's adult supervision. But absolutely no responsibility.

Do these people's houses look like this, too, or do they only act this way because someone else will clean it up?

This could be modern art.

Well, at least they put these back on the shelf.

Looks somewhat geometrical. Again: modern art?

An entire shelf, emptied. Because this child was only interested in books with authors from N-R.

So next time you're in a bookstore...please...don't act like a slob. Don't assume someone else will pick up your mess. Because we don't get paid enough to do it. Parents, please, be...parents. Don't let your child be a slob. Remember, we don't mind if you treat us like a library and never buy anything. As long as you put the books back where you found them.

Thank you.

Two sides, two players

2009-05-15T12:18:00.012-04:00

SPOILERS if you haven't seen season five of Lost...

It is really quite clear now that Lost is coming into its final stretches as a story. We now know very much about the overarching story, thanks to a series of flashbacks focusing on one of the Island's central characters: the often mentioned, but never seen Jacob. The real authority behind the Others, and the spirit of the Island itself. Or one of them. After emerging from his dwelling "in the shadow of the statue", catching a red snapper, and dining leisurely on the beach, Jacob is greeted by an unnamed man who seems to have not only an essential disagreement with him, but a very deep desire to kill him. It is interesting to note that Jacob's shirt is white, whereas the other man's was black. One recalls Locke's explanation of backgammon early in season one: "Two sides, two players. One is light, the other is dark." Could this have been foreshadowing? Who knew that a board game could explain Lost?

But it really makes a lot of sense. Black and white has been a central motif in the show through every season. When taken with Locke's "dark vs. light" speech quoted above, it becomes clear that Jacob and his unnamed enemy (let's call him Esau, for simplicity's sake) represent these forces of dark and light, and are Dualistic beings. Philosopher and medievalist C.S. Lewis wrote, "Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war." Interestingly, he also added that "next to Christianity, Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed in the market." This set up is seen in different mythologies: the Russian gods Czernobog and Bielobog (meaning "black god" and "white god"), and, perhaps more relevant to the show, Egypt's Tawaret and Apep.

Tawaret was an Egyptian goddess with the head of a hippopotamus, the teeth and back of a crocodile, and the arms and legs of a lioness. Incidentally, this was the figure whom the four-toed statue was revealed to be. Tawaret was believed to be a fertility spirit, guarding over childbirth; but she was also a protective spirit. This is seen when one considers that Tawaret's mate was Apep, the god of evil in Egyptian mythology, depicted often as a snake. Their relationship was seen to be one of restraint: the good deity keeps the evil one from being too evil. This is stepping into the territory of speculation now, but perhaps this has been happening in the show as well. Consider the cabin with the ring of ash around it: clearly a magico-religious device designed to contain and weaken a spirit. We had thought this was Jacob, as it was on a visit to Jacob that we originally saw this circle, as well as heard a cry of "Help me". But we now know that Benjamin had never seen Jacob, and was only trying to impress or manipulate Locke by taking him to the cabin. What if it were not actually Jacob, but Jacob's antagonist whom they were actually visiting?

There are a couple of things to support this view. We know that Christian Shephard is strongly associated with whoever dwells in the cabin. And it was Christian who first confirmed to Locke the necessity of his death: "That's why they call it a sacrifice." This death was extremely useful to the Esau figure, as it provided his loophole and enabled him to point his instrument (Benjamin) at Jacob's throat. If the smoke monster is also the same person in the cabin, this makes even more sense, as the monster, appearing to Ben as Alex, told him to do everything that the Un-Locke asked of him. In that same episode, the monster was represented in a carved mural beneath the Temple. This mural showed the monster in the form of what looked like a zig-zagged snake. Remember the form usually given to Apep? Even the monster's smoky movements appear slithery and snakey. And when Ben summoned the monster this season, it did not come out of the jungle -- but Un-Locke did. Also there is the fact that while we, and presumably almost every other character, have seen the monster as a "pillar of smoke", John Locke stated early in season three that when he saw it, it appeared to him as a beautiful white light. Black and white -- perhaps the monster Locke saw was actually Jacob.

Whatever the case, Locke and Ben now share something painfully in common. They both were the biggest victims of this cosmic chess game -- or backgammon game -- between Jacob and "Esau". Locke nobly gave up his life for what he saw as the good of the Island, but it looks likely that his death resulted in tragedy for the forces of good. Benjamin, too, wanted only to be one of the "good guys", to be a leader and an important one, but was constantly told he was not yet ready to see Jacob. When he poured out his feelings to Jacob, he was met with the response, "What about you?" But I have a feeling this was not a cold denial of Ben's importance; rather, it may be that Jacob was trying to get Ben to step out of his petty and clamoring self and look at what the moment was really about: whether Ben would make the right choice, or the wrong one. Unfortunately, but also understandably, Ben made the wrong choice.

But it seems that Jacob may have foreseen this, and may have himself set up the time-travel elements of the show deliberately so that the actions of Daniel, Jack, Kate, Sayid, Juliet, Sawyer, Jin and Miles would reboot history and give the characters a second chance at playing out the most important stages of the conflict between good and evil. If, that is, history is changed -- the fade to white ending gives us no hint of which interpretation, fatalism or free will, is correct. I myself suspect that history will be changed, but only in very subtle ways. The plane will still land on the Island. But the Swan will have never been built, the Purge perhaps will have taken place much earlier. Widmore and Ben will perhaps both be leaders present on the Island, and perhaps Jack will be the cripple who is healed. This is all pure speculation, of course, but useful, I think, for giving an idea of the little ways in which history may be changed. Either way, this season's finale is unique in that it gives us absolutely no hint of what may come next. In the past we could make safe guesses about what would happen next. Now, absolutely anything can happen.

Which brings me to the one down note I believe plagued "The Incident". The events in 1977 are very interesting for the implications they must have on the final season and the story from here, but the characters' actions are not admirable from a moral or philosophical point of view. All of them acted out of despair, not hope. For Jack, if he really believed he had a destiny on the Island, the last thing he would do is to make sure that destiny never happened. The decisions of Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate to go along with Jack's plan amounted to giving up. Particularly unadmirable was Juliet, and then Sawyer. Juliet changed her mind because she had no faith in her man. Sawyer then gave up because he did not have faith in himself. The possibility of their relationship dissolving with the advent of Kate was there before them; but, as Jacob later said to another character, they had a choice. Both of them could have chosen to remain true to each other. But neither did. No wonder they lose their loved ones! None of them have any faith in each other when it really comes to the testing point. What this means for Sawyer and Juliet in the future, or the future of Lost as a character-driven show, remains uncertain. I only hope that it doesn't end with Sawyer getting back together with Kate.

The Book of Love

2009-05-11T01:58:00.009-04:00

Last week I turned on the television early five minutes or so before the new episode of Lost came on, and so ended up catching the ending of the series finale of Scrubs. I haven't seen the show too much, just a few episodes here and there, but I was watching it just because it was on before Lost. I'm glad I did, though, because the song playing in the last scenes (which I guess were a daydream in the main character's head about all the things he hopes will happen in his life) was one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

It was a Peter Gabriel song in the show, but I did some research and found that it was originally by the Magnetic Fields. I don't know how many people are familiar with them, but they are one of the two or three bands led by Stephin Merritt, a songwriter and singer with a quite unique bass voice. One of the things he did was the Gothic Archies, which was the soundtrack to the Lemony Snicket books. He's really wonderful in an unusual, quirky sort of way. Even though the song is so romantic, his sober and bland voice gives it a new layer: like he's either too cynical or too gloomy to feel worth being loved, but he's singing about love and romance anyway, and about being loved. While I like Peter Gabriel's version, too, it completely loses this wonderful aspect in his cover.

The song is called "The Book of Love". I uploaded both versions for anyone who wants to give it a try. It's really worth hearing, over and over and over. I think it's one of my favorite songs.

"The Book of Love"

The third man: a Lost theory

2009-05-08T15:32:00.007-04:00

SPOILERS if you haven't seen up to season 5 of Lost...

We have seen since season 4 of Lost that there is a rivalry of epic proportions between one Charles Widmore, former leader of the Others and current wealthy British industrialist, and one Benjamin Linus, former child of a Dharma Initiative janitor and Widmore’s successor, until just recently when he was forced by the will of Jacob to abdicate his position to John Locke. Ben has been seen to be on the side of the Island, despite his often extreme measures, while Widmore has been seen to be a self-centered and exploitive villain. But recent events in season 5 have suggested that this picture may be overly simplistic. Both Widmore and Ben desired the return of the Oceanic Six to the Island, and both seemed to bow to the new leadership of Locke (one albeit a bit less willingly than the other). There seems to be a third party involved, however, a group which seems to be aware of the activities of both, as well as some intriguing Island secrets (“what lies in the shadow of the statue?”). Perhaps this third party is the key to understanding the show. What if neither Widmore nor Ben are villains, but unwilling pawns in the agenda of a much more sinister individual, whose motives until now have remained unquestioned?

This person, of course, may well be Richard Alpert. He has been present on the Island since before the memory of any living character we have yet seen, and has always been shown to have some sort of leadership position over the Island and those who serve as the Island’s protectors. He has been seen, in 1954, to have been grooming Widmore -- as well as Widmore’s lover and confidante Eloise Hawking -- to become the leader of the Others, as well as having selected and nurtured Ben into that same role, in direct defiance to what he understands Widmore’s wishes to be. He claims to not answer to any leader we have yet seen, except Jacob. But we have never seen Richard communicate with Jacob. There have been hints (the grayish-white ash outside his cabin, his call for help to Locke in season 3) that Jacob is being controlled, or else manipulated, by some force. What if this force is Richard himself?

This would explain why he has been seen supporting both Widmore and Ben, and why the rivalry between these two, portrayed as so epic until this latest season, actually has quite petty, personal, and relatively unimportant origins. If Richard is the real villain, it makes sense that he would play both sides against the middle, so that whoever wins, he is the undisputed advisor without whose wisdom the day would not have been won. Leading the Others alone, the absence and unhealth of Jacob which we have seen might be attributed by his people to his own influence. With two bitter enemies to point the finger at alternately, the focus shifts away from him and to the activities of others. We can even see a bit of this happening now. Starting in mid-season 3, Richard has seemed to be skeptical of Ben’s leadership and desirous of Locke, the upstart newcomer; whereas now, as Locke is taking leadership competently (at last!) into his hands, Richard begins to express his doubts to Ben.

But the difference now is that Locke has died and been raised again. If Locke is not in fact evil (a distinct possibility, if this theory is wrong), then his resurrection, like the similar (but probably not exactly the same) resurrection of Christian Shephard, has put him more directly in touch with the wishes and purposes of the Island, and of Jacob himself. If Richard has some sort of power over Jacob, if he has placed some sort of curse or restrictive “magic” (for lack of a better word) on the invisible spirit of the Island, then it may make sense that the only way to free Jacob would be to “kill” this cursed form which Jacob presently occupies. Think of the Irish folktales in which a hero must kill his enchanted, magical horse in order to free it from its animal form and restore its proper one, that of a handsome prince; think Star Wars, a noted influence on this season, in which Obi Wan Kenobi tells Darth Vader that if he strikes him down, he will “become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Dead is dead, according to Ben. But what if it’s not? It wasn’t for Locke (if that is still Locke), and so it might not be for Jacob. If Jacob is something like the god or spirit of the Island, then there is a kind of appropriate logic in the idea of his having to die in order to return to full power.

On selective cultural memory

2009-05-07T11:26:00.024-04:00

In Barnes and Noble's latest Review, the retailer's online publication of original content, there was a feature for a book called Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, by Eula Biss. In this feature the reviewer, one Tess Taylor, muses on the awkwardness of being white, or partially white. She makes such scintillating observations as, "whiteness...it is not normal: It is a space of unease, often policed and reinforced by the images of fear on its margins". She also quotes the author's own words: "It isn't easy to accept a slaveholder and an Indian killer as a grandfather, and it isn't easy to accept the legacy a of whiteness as an identity"; and, "Perhaps it would be better if we simply refused to be white." The reviewer concludes her short feature by stating that this strain of thought "opens doors to a new chapter of American self-understanding".

Now this is really very curious. It shows a tendency I've noticed a lot in modern American culture, to venerate the traditions and cultures of other ethnicities, but to denigrate the traditions and cultures of white folks. It is a superb example of double standards, and its irony would be quite funny if it were not our own people we were talking about. Why is it that preservation of traditions and cultures are considered liberal pursuits, until we're talking about our own? (This is similar to the phenomena in which one sees -- and quite rightfully, I believe -- the "peasant" or "primitive" classes of another culture as delightfully simple and folkish, and legitimately cultured; but sees those of his own culture as mere ignorant, uncultured hicks. And it is not only in our nation that this phenomena happens.) This sense of white guilt, the sense that, for whatever reason, having Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon, or Irish, Scottish, German, Slavic heritage, etc., is somehow inferior to having a heritage from the Mediterranean or Latin America or Africa or Asia, etc., is plainly unhealthy to anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought. Whether the reason is guilt for American slavery (whites are by no means the only people throughout history to have had slaves -- most ethnicities have, at some point in their history), or the fear of being thought "vanilla" (even within the logic of that dubious idea, vanilla is only bad if it is the only flavor available, not because of its own vanillaness), or something else more elusive and intangible, this unease or guilt is irrational and destructive to American culture and heritage, much of which stems from these very sources being denigrated.

(I myself am partially white, though I don't think of myself as such; the biggest sources in my blood are Hispanic, Irish and Italian, though there are also traces of Apache, French, German, and English. I find it hard to cleanly identify with one specific heritage, although I believe the reason for this has less to do with this mixed blood (not at all a rare thing now, in this country) and more to do with the chaos of culture that has been simmering in America for a long time. Perhaps this is why I am a folklorist: because I am drawn to the traditions and heritages of many peoples, and realize that they must exist in their own systems, not in a potpourri of other traditions and heritages. But one thing is clear: with the diluting of specific racial experience, comes also the death of these traditions, whether you're talking about Anglo-Saxon, African, Hispanic, or any other. The less a group of people identifies with one specific racial background, the less relevant they see these traditions as being. America particularly is in danger of losing this history. Already the greater part of its traditional culture has given way to mass or popular culture -- no meaningful culture indeed, I would say.)

What's interesting about this is that this type of thinking could quite easily get me branded with a number of labels which are popularly considered unsavory, some of them deservedly so, some of them not. To those who are tempted to dismiss my thoughts in this way, I would again remind you that the ideas I've been discussing here are usually considered liberal, humane, and progressive (the latter in a certain manner of speaking) when the subject is another nation's people and culture. And again, I would remind readers that I do not see myself as a "white" man, but as a Hispanic man; and that identification has nothing to do with racial guilt or unease.

Lest there be any doubt that there is goodness and value in "white" cultural heritage, let me give a short list of cultural items that come from Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Scottish, or other typically "white" cultural sources:

Appalachian music
The Younger or Prose Edda, by Snorri Sturluson, a primary source of Norse mythology
The Magna Carta, and the Charter of the Forest
The heroic romance, the great-grandfather of modern fantasy
Golf
The university
The wedding ring
Chivalry
The Christmas tree, and the Easter egg
Celtic and Nordic knotwork ornamentation
Folklore studies (though ironic, as it was white ideas which first led to the necessity of folklore studies)
The Amish, one of the only remaining non-industrial, traditionally experienced and transmitted sources of agricultural knowledge in America
The usage of hops in beer
The vampire (as popularly known in the West)
Allodial property rights
Romantic love, as a basis for and centrally emphasized aspect of marriage

This is just a brief and likely unrepresentative list, but I believe it serves the purposes at hand. Of course, similar lists could be made for pretty much every other racial group existing. The point isn't which group is best, or has contributed the most, but rather that whites are no less cultured, or ethnic, or lacking in flavorful and textured traditions, than any other race or racial group. And, moreover, that white guilt or unease is not only unhealthy but ridiculous.

There's Gold in Them Hills...

Toward the Gleam: a Pre-Review

Desire in a Dry and Weary Land

The Cross and the Hammer

A Note of Caution

"Good Taste" and "Bad Books"

Justice and Mercy

The Existence of God: Probability, Definition and Empiricism

Can there be a science of humanity?

A Murder in the Monastery: the sad and convoluted tale of a foolish philosopher-monk

Christianity: Adaptability, Identity, and Modernity

The Invention of Gullibility

Tolkien as Translator: Language, Culture, and Society in Middle-earth

Wandering Stars: planetary romance in the Chronicles of Narnia

Reality and Romance

Eurydice's Song

Wine as Metaphor: Lost's "Ab Æterno" Considered

Is Avatar the most important film of our time?

Spirituality and Materialism

Democracy, Kingship, and Spider-Man

Lost: Decisive Moments and the Centrality of Paradoxical Truths

The Lost Supper

Top Ten Questions to be Answered in Lost: Season Six

Of the Facets of Religion

Aspects of Religion

Aspects Unique to the Christian Religion

The abuse of religion and the danger of height

On Paganism: syncretism, mythology and holy wars

Just a thought

C.S. Lewis and Serial Killers

The Triumph of the God on the Cave

Virginia Dare

In the Blink of an Eye: Is There Evolutionary Science in Genesis?

Ecstasy in the Laundry

Tolkien on Vinyl

Lost: Is humanity black or white?

Summer Harvest

Genesis as a Creation Myth

Dylan at Taki's

Christendom: an Appeal Concerning the Common People

The Work Delusion: meritocracy and the dignity of manual labor, in Matthew Crawford's Shop Class

The Tyranny of a Circle

On Reason

Free will and determinism

Science, education; knowledge, wisdom

Awesome television t-shirts

Local

Mockingbird in the gloaming

Photo Essay: Bookstore Chaos

Two sides, two players

The Book of Love

The third man: a Lost theory

On selective cultural memory