Ladder on Wheels

New Blogs

2010-01-30T09:25:00.003-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen:

I will no longer be posting on Ladder on Wheels for the time being, saving my posts for the collated blog over at the Christian Humanist Podcast website. So if you like the sort of thing you read here, you'll get three times as much if you add www.christianhumanist.org/chb to your RSS feed reader. I won't be deleting this blog, and if something happens and the podcast folds in wrath and acrimony, I'm sure I'll come back. But for the time being at least, my thoughts will be here, not here.

The other announcement: If you liked my music or just wanted to laugh at it, I will be posting more of it at asymposiumofpopularsong.blogspot.com. There's nothing up there just yet, but add it to your reader and you'll be alerted when something is. I'll start with old songs and then eventually record some new ones. (I have a back catalogue since 2007 that hasn't been recorded.)

Thanks for reading Ladder on Wheels, and we'll see you at The Christian Humanist Blog.

The Christian Humanist #10: Literary Hell

2010-01-27T11:10:00.005-05:00

It should be up on Feedburner and iTunes sometime this afternoon; in the meantime, here's the show notes. Also, please visit the new Christian Humanist Podcast website!

General Introduction
- Response to listener email and the CWC
- Football talk

The Greco-Roman Underworld
- Odysseus in Hades
- Aeneas in the underworld
- Awkward!

Anglo-Saxon Hell
- Beowulf fights Grendel’s mother
- Do we need to make Beowulf into a theological allegory?
- Hell without flames
- Hel as a person

Tactile vs. Abstract
- Why are modern minds so nervous about physical location?
- Anxiety over falsification?
- TBN reads The Weekly World News

The Master of the Afterlife
- Our favorite translations
- The Allen Mandelbaum story
- The division of the circles
- Our favorite punishments

Milton’s Hell
- The pathos and anxiety of counteroffensive
- Genesis B
- The role of self-deception in literary hells

20^th-Century Hells (And More!)
- “Don Juan in Hell”
- Trying to make sense of William Blake
- Lewis’ bus ride over the moon
- The Orthodox version of hell
- Purgatory
- One-dimensional sin and Piers Plowman
- Hell is other people

Lightning Round
- What are the dangers?
- Is literary hell a good thing or a bad thing?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica. New York: Pearson, 2008.

Barth, Karl. Dogmatics in Outline. New York: Harper, 1959.

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Ed. John E. Grant and Mary Lynn Johnson. New York: Norton, 2007.

The Blickling Homilies. Trans. Richard J. Kelly. New York: Continuum 2003.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Everyman’s, 1995.

---. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002. 3 volumes.

---. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, 1952.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Trans. Andrew Galloway. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute, 2006.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman. New York: Norton, 2006.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: HarperOne, 2009.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings. Ed. R.M. Liuzza. Florence, Kent.: Routledge, 2002.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2008.

The Christian Humanist #9: Pat Robertson, Haiti, and Suffering

2010-01-22T11:44:00.003-05:00

The latest episode of The Christian Humanist will be on iTunes and Feedburner soon. A word about the music: You'll notice I let the song play much longer than normal at the end of the episode--that's because it's one of the saddest, most beautiful songs I've ever heard, and the artist could use your support. The song is "Resplendent," the artist is Vigilantes of Love, and the album is Audible Sigh. You can get it at www.volsounds.com. Highly recommended. (And yes, that's Emmylou Harris singing along.)

General Introduction
- The creek done rose

Pat Robertson and the Haitian Earthquake
- Robertson as a boon to mediocre seminary students with blogs
- Michial gets amused; David gets irate
- Why the world needs more David Grubbses

The Veracity of Robertson’s Claim
- Is he just making stuff up?
- Haitian voodoo
- Robertson’s flattening of Bois Caïman
- The equally flattening response of Robertson’s critics
- Voodoo as political ritual; Bois Caïman as ongoing event
- Does voodoo deal with the demonic world?
- The all makes Nathan nervous

Pacts with the Devil
- Robert Johnson at the crossroads
- Medieval witch trials
- Evolution from Christ’s temptation
- Do Haitians believe in the pact?
- The U.S.’s earthquake weapon and global warming

The Cause and Purpose of Suffering
- Biblical views of suffering
- The Christian Humanist podcast teaches the Book of Job
- Extrabiblical ancient theodicies
- Punishment as an act of kindness
- Calvin on providence
- WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!
- “The Wanderer” and the convergence of providence and fortune
- C.S. Lewis on suffering
- Why abstract theodicy doesn’t work
- Does God will suffering?

Back to Pat Robertson
- Reliance on 1 Chronicles’ view of suffering
- Polygonal theodicy
- Can we stone Pat Robertson to death yet?
- Pretending to be a prophet but actually being Job’s friend
- Jesus dodges the question

The Appropriate Response to Tragedies
- David Brooks responds appropriately
- Help and humility
- Suffering as a call to repentance
- What does it mean for creation to groan?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: A Tragedy. Trans. Walter W. Arndt. New York: Norton, 2000.

Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: HarperOne, 2001.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Trans. George Bull. New York: Penguin, 2003.

The Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. New York: Norton, 2004.

Thompson, Francis. Hound of Heaven and Other Poems. Wellesley, Mass.: Branden, 1978.

“The Wanderer.” Trans. S.A.J. Bradley. Anglo-Saxon Poetry: An Anthology of Old English Poems. London: Dent, 1982.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Search for the No Man's Land

2010-01-19T22:02:00.002-05:00

Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which I managed to go 27 years without reading—is really a remarkable book, particularly its first half, before Harriet Beecher Stowe completely devolves into sentimental pulp. (I spent at least one hundred pages wishing Little Eva would just go ahead and die already.) The most effective and interesting parts of the book are the ones in which Stowe leaves behind her plot and the conventions of sentimental fiction in order to rage against the reader and present her (really quite radical for the time) views on the race question. For example:

I know the feeling among some of you northerners well enough. Not that there is a particle of virtue in our not having [slavery]; but custom with us does what Christianity ought to do,—obliterates the feeling of personal prejudice. I have often noticed, in my travels north how much stronger this was with you than with us. You loathe [African Americans] as you would a snake or a toad, yet you are indignant at their wrongs. You would not have them abused; but you don’t want to have anything to do with them yourselves. You would send them to Africa, out of your sight and smell, and then send a missionary or two to do up all the self-denial of elevating them compendiously. Isn’t that it?

Well, Randy Newman agrees, anyway. Uncle Tom is at its best in passages like these, in which Stowe loads up an ideological shotgun and hits absolutely everyone she can with its debris—no one in her world is safe from her indictment, which is what makes her most famous novel something beyond self-righteous; it’s what makes it a good novel rather than a merely important one. (I can’t bring myself to say great—not when the last third of the book is so weak and bound to convention.)

But I’m not writing to talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Instead, I want to say a few words about her much less known 1859 novel The Minister’s Wooing, another sentimental novel of protest—only in this case she’s protesting the hard Calvinism of her lineage rather than slavery (at which she nevertheless gets a few shots off).

Let’s define our terms first. The sentimental novel—however much American critics want to pretend it’s not so—has been the dominant form of the novel for most of the genre’s existence, beginning with Samuel Richardson and moving on through Sister Carrie and up to—I don’t know, Twilight. There is a formula: boy tries to seduce girl; girl resists; girl undergoes incredible feeling; then, depending on whether the novel is a comedy or a tragedy, she either marries the right boy or is left ruined by the wrong one.

The best writing I’ve read on sentimental fiction is Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. Fiedler tells us that the sentimental novel, arising as it does at the end of the Puritan era, replaces Protestantism with something called the “Sentimental Love Religion,” a nebulous faith with limited dogma that posits “love between the sexes as the fountainhead of virtue and joy.” On a more primeval level, it posits emotion as a higher path to truth than reason and thus stands as a precursor to Byronian Romanticism.

This is why it’s safe to call both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Minister’s Wooing “sentimental novels of protest”; Stowe may use logic in her attacks on slavery and Calvinism, but her indictment of her readers is an indictment of a failure to feel, not to think, properly. And that’s her indictment of Calvinism, as well: at its worst, it is a cold, unfeeling dogmatic system rather than a religion meant for real human beings. It has its high points, of course,

But it is to be conceded, that these systems, so admirable in relation to the energy, earnestness, and acuteness of their authors, when received as absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had, on minds of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producing life-habits of morbid action very different from any which ever followed the simple reading of the Bible.

Thus Stowe proffers a new religion to replace it—only the new religion she proffers is the same old sentimental love religion with a thin veneer of Christianity over it. At times, her faith sounds downright blasphemous, as when she notes that

Of old, it was thought that one who administered poison in the sacramental bread and wine had touched the very height of impious sacrilege; but this crime is white, by the side of his who poisons God’s eternal sacrament of love and destroys a woman’s soul through her noblest and purest affections.

It’s rare to find such a concise and blatant statement of the changes sentimentalism makes to Christianity, but there it is. The one sacrament for the sentimentalist is love, and not the agape of the New Testament. Romance is king, eros by another name. The rampant piety of The Minister’s Wooing and other novels like it only masks the fact that sexuality is at its center, only imperfectly disguises the sexual longing at its core.

The plot is thus. (Spoilers follow.) Mary Scudder is a pious young woman of feeling in late eighteenth-century Newport. She’s halfway in love with her cousin James, an unbelieving sailor, whom she wants to marry but cannot because of her faith. Meanwhile, she is passively courted by her middle-aged minister, Dr. Hopkins, a staunch Calvinist and abolitionist. James goes off to sea for two years, and after a short time word comes back that his ship has sunk and he’s dead. Mary and other members of the community have a crisis of faith. Dr. Hopkins proposes, and Mary says yes, even though she doesn’t love him the way she loves James. Just before the wedding, James shows up and announces that he’s become a Christian, at which point Hopkins lets Mary off the hook. Everyone lives happily ever after.

(There’s also a standard “seduction” subplot, starring Aaron Burr, of “Got Milk?” fame, in the role of the seducer, but this part of the novel seems uncomfortably attached to the main plot.)

The Minister’s Wooing is most interesting in its philosophical conversation (as is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, leading me to conclude that Stowe must have been privy to some wonderful conversations among the famous members of her family). Its plot is mostly sentimental convention, but for a time I thought it was going to go in a more satisfying direction. There is a brief moment (“brief” being a relative term in a novel of nearly 600 pages) in which it appears that, even though James has returned from death and the sea a Christian, Mary will fulfill her vow to Dr. Hopkins anyway. As she tells a friend who has told her she will be miserable in a marriage without eros,

I believe, that, if you go on patiently in the way of duty, and pray daily to God, He will at last take out of your heart this painful love, and give you a true and healthy one. As you say, such feelings are very sweet and noble; but they are not the only ones we have to live by—we can find happiness in duty, in self-sacrifice, in calm, sincere, honest friendship.

What a revolution it would have been in the history of the sentimental novel if our heroine had become Mary Hopkins and lived a happy life devoid of eros! The novel would have grown and adapted; it would have been a critique not just of cold Calvinism but of the warm (and for some reason, I want to say moist) sentimental love religion. Instead, Hopkins appears, a deux ex machina, and allows Mary to renege on her promises and marry her true love.

No one would blame her in real life, of course, but the plot of a sentimental novel bears so little resemblance to life as it was ever lived that I can’t help wishing that Stowe had been braver in her attacks—as brave, in fact, as she is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where no ideology escapes her penetrating stare. As it is, she takes a look at the battle between Calvinism and the sentimental love religion, nods at the no-man’s land in the center, and sanguinely takes her place in the sewing circle.

The Christian Humanist #8: Apologetics

2010-01-12T12:14:00.001-05:00

The triumphant return of The Christian Humanist!

General Introduction
- Emmanuel College’s takeover of The Christian Humanist Podcast.

Our Experiences with Apologetics
- Ethical apologetics
- Archaeological apologetics
- David Grubbs, head librarian
- Michial’s apologetics class
- The BLT department

Justin Martyr and Tertullian
- Philosopher made theologian
- Justin and the Logos
- The advantage of prophets
- Are they even considered apologists?
- Tertullian’s exorcism throwdown

Aquinas and Anselm
- Aquinas’ “proofs of God”
- Integrating Aristotle and revelation
- Faith seeking understanding
- Aquinas’ rejection of Anselm
- What role does reason play in faith?
- Dawkins’ philosophical tone-deafness

C.S. Lewis
- Looking at his life before his argument
- Lewis’ fear of God’s wrath
- Eternal homesickness
- Materialism to idealism to Christianity
- The moral argument
- Michial admits his ignorance of N.T. Wright

Christian Existentialism
- Is “faith seeking understanding” the majority opinion?
- Enlightenment disputation in the neutral public square
- Pascal’s Wager
- Kierkegaard’s radical subjectivity
- Do Enlightenment apologists throw out revelation?
- David defends Ken Ham (kind of)
- Rescuing Jesus
- God’s billboards and man’s submission

A Disclaimer
- Are we saying that science is wrong?
- Are we saying that science and faith have no compatibility?
- Are we saying that there’s no way to use apologetics in science?
- I’ll see your Locke and raise you a Nietzsche

The Rise of the Nü Atheists
- How has the discipline of apologetics changed?
- The overall tone-deafness of the nü atheists
- Where’s the real battle?
- The MC Hammer defense
- Apologetics as an inside tool

What’s the Role of Apologetics Now?
- Know what the questions are
- Being an apologist for learning to the Christian
- Proceed in humility

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anselm. Monologion and Proslogion with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm. Trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Aquinas, Thomas. Of God and His Creatures: An Annotated Translation of the Summa Contra Gentiles. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2006.

---. The Summa Theologica. New York: Pearson, 2008.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

---. Essential Sermons. Trans. Edmund Hill. Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City, 2007.

Barth, Karl. The Word of God and the Word of Man. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner, 2008.

Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader. Ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.

Ham, Ken. The Revised and Expanded Answers Book: The 20 Most-Asked Questions About Creation, Evolution and the Book of Genesis Answered! Green Forest, Ariz.: Master, 1990.

Justin Martyr. The Writings of Justin Martyr. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Berkeley, Ca.: Apocryphile, 2007.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992. Two volumes.

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. San Francisco: Harper, 2001.

---. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

McDowell, Josh. The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Fully Updated to Answer the Questions Challenging Christians Today. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998.

Tertullian. Tertulliani Liber Apologeticus: The Apology of Tertullian. Trans. Henry Annesley Woodham. Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2009.

Voragine, Jacobo di. The Golden Legend: Selections. Trans. Christopher Stace. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Wright, N.T. Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. New York: HarperOne, 2010.

Quare Me Repulisti, et Quare Tristis Incedo

2010-01-01T15:08:00.004-05:00

If you’re looking for the first American masterpiece of the Modernist era, look no further than Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short-story collection (really a loose novel more than anything), Winesburg, Ohio. A mentor to both Hemingway and Faulkner, Anderson manages to maintain a connection to the realist traditions of the preceding decades and bring them into the Modernist world, breaking his characters down into the “grotesques” he uses to make a philosophical point but never allowing them to lose their efficacy as human beings. Winesburg manages to do something that most of the fiction of the era can’t—which is to say that it’s both interesting and moving.

And the most moving story in the collection is the first (or second, depending on whether you count the anecdote about the writer and the carpenter before the title page. The story is titled “Hands” and deals with a strawberry picker with the improbable name of Wing Biddlebaum. Wing serves as Anderson’s depiction of the otherwise unremarkable man with an incredible and uncontrollable power, one that separates him from those around him and leads him to a life of utter loneliness.

Wing Biddlebaum, at the beginning of his story, is one of the clearest images of alienation in American literature. We see this from the opening paragraph, in which he stands “Upon the half decayed veranda” and looks “Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds” at a group of children whom he longs to embrace but cannot. This field is an image of broken dreams, the broken dreams that separate him from the rest of the town.

Indeed, Anderson tells us outright that “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, [he] did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.” The townsfolk don’t hate or mock him—rather, they are amazed at his ability to harvest strawberries and are “proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which [they are] proud of Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.” He is an object among objects—or at the very best an animal, but never a human being.

He is an outsider, nearly purely alienated—except for his relationship with a teenager named George Willard, which allows him to “lo[se] something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world.” In other words, he becomes human through this act of communion. When he touches George Willard and sends him away in horror, the town has lost its last opportunity to learn Wing’s story.

We get it, though. Wing was once named Adolph Myers, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher who had a peculiar sort of religious power which manifested itself chiefly through his hands: “By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream.” He is a priest, mostly unconsciously, who can heal people by merely touching them.

The predictable happens, however, and Wing is accused of child molestation, at which point “Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.” He has been made into a grotesque by the truths of others—not even by adopting his own truth. (I should note here that Sherwood’s big philosophical theme in the novel is that the process of accepting a truth as one’s own converts one into something less than human and makes that truth into a “falsehood.”) Once he flees Pennsylvania for Winesburg, he can no longer trust his religious power: “Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame.”

And yet, and yet. Wing cannot control the power that lives in his hands. It is for this reason that he isolates himself from the other Winesburgians, for this reason that he warns George Willard that “You are destroying yourself . . . You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in this town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them.” Unlike George, Wing cannot imitate them—his hands are uncontrollable, and the end of the story finds him enacting religious rituals alone and unconsciously:

A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.

The message is clear: The sort of religious power Wing Biddlebaum/Adolph Myers possesses can only be misunderstood by the society in which priests must live, but they cannot get rid of it, it being a curse as much as a blessing. The only solution is to retreat behind a dusty field of broken dreams and sever the human connections one so sorely needs. The dispensation of grace comes only rarely and at great personal cost. Such is the role of the undogmatic priest in a world hungry for doctrine—he can communicate only subconsciously, an action which will always be viewed suspiciously by outsiders.

Someone must have written about Anderson’s influence on John Updike—the description I’ve given of Wing Biddlebaum in this post echoes Updike’s portrayal of Harry Angstrom, particularly in Rabbit, Run. (Updike’s essay for the New Yorker, “Twisted Apples” serves as the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Winesburg, Ohio.) The difference, of course, is that Rabbit is instinctively loved by most of the people in his society, even as his religious impulses destroy lives. This must say something about the difference between 1919 and 1959—but I’m not ready to tease that out yet.

Post of the Year

2009-12-31T09:06:00.003-05:00

According to my blog tracker, my most popular post is the two part "Deep in the Big Black Heart of the Sunshine State," about the deep existential darkness in Disney/Pixar's best movies. It wasn't even close, and it's all thanks to John Frost over at The Disney Blog, who promoted the posts. Frost's generous promotion was followed by cross-posts on The Journal of Cartoon Overanalyzations and, improbably, on the message boards at ultimate-guitar.com, both of which boosted those posts skyward.

The message, of course, is that the Internet cares far more about what I have to say about cartoons than what I have to say about literature--which isn't really surprising. Too bad I'm pretty much out of thoughts on cartoons.

If anyone is interested, our most-downloaded podcast is Episode #4: God and Country. It's not one of my favorites, but that's the one people apparently were intrigued by.

Happy New Year, everyone (and new decade, whatever the naysayers say). Here's hoping 2010 is better than 2009--and that the teens are better than the aughts.

The Semi-Puritan Mind of Thomas Paine

2009-12-30T12:46:00.004-05:00

There were two Americas in the beginning, as there were in the nineteenth century and as, if the 24-hour news networks are to be believed, there are now. The geography and principles have changed, but the split always exists. On the one hand, you had New England, founded by the Puritans not, as the history books told me in elementary school, for freedom of religion but for the freedom to practice their religion and to punish or banish all others. On the other, you had the mid-Atlantic states, beginning with Jamestown, Virginia, settled for financial reasons—if God was involved in the settlement at Jamestown, He had to share the space with gold and glory, as the old saying went.

(And yes, there were others—New York, settled by the Dutch as a fur-trading outpost and a center of American business ever since; Savannah, Georgia, originally founded as a refuge from English debtors prisons and the best laid-out city I’ve ever visited; St. Augustine, the oldest city in North America, or so the board of tourism says, founded by the Spanish while John Winthrop was just a gleam in his daddy’s eye. But it’s Massachusetts and Virginia, with Philadelphia in between but belonging mostly to the latter, that made the difference during this country’s infancy. Of the seven men labeled as the major Founding Fathers by Richard B. Morris, only two—John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, of New York City—and it wasn’t until Andrew Jackson in 1829 that we’d have a president from anywhere other than Massachusetts or Virginia.)

And yet these two Americans were not as separate as it might appear, in that the Puritan worldview—stripped, to some extent, of its religious baggage—filtered its way down to Philadelphia and Virginia. In his book The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch notes that the two baseline principles of “Yankee” America, “multidenominational religion and the sacral view of free-enterprise economics” were natural heirs of Puritanism:

Both these developments were rooted in the heterodox tenets established a century before: the moral distinction between the Old World and the New (as between Egypt and Canaan), the chosen people whose special calling entailed special trials, and above all a mythic view of history that extended New England’s past into an apocalypse which stood “near, even at the door,” requiring one last great act, one more climactic pouring out of the spirit, in order to realize itself.

Bercovitch’s analysis explains something puzzling at the heart of the political tracts put out by Deists at the time of the American Revolution. How could a group of people who didn’t believe in God’s providence still see America as, in Winthrop’s famous words, “a city on a hill”? For there can be little doubt that this is how our Founding Fathers saw their country.

Let’s take the instructive example of Thomas Paine, the Deist or atheist (the debate rages on) who coined the phrase “The United States of America” and who wrote the wildly popular anonymous tract Common Sense a mere six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Very early on, he makes the bold statement that “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” Leaving aside the truth or falsity of this statement for now, we can safely say that it is an early, though probably not the earliest, instance of secular American exceptionalism. Paine may use the language of the Puritans, but he’s not claiming that it will be the avenue to lead all of the elect to Christ and thus bring on the tribulation and the millennium. Rather, it is America’s secular government that will serve as the Great Example for the rest of the world.

But Paine’s very secular purpose relies on the Bible for much of its argument. A Deist, he did not believe in the accuracy of the Bible, but he nevertheless appeals to its authority, spending several pages conducting what amounts to a Puritan-style exegetical and political sermon. Problem is, his exegesis is lousy: “In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throw mankind into confusion.” Such a statement is true only if one considers Moses, Joshua, and the Judges to be kings—war very clearly predates kingship in the Hebrew Bible.

But Paine has to use the scriptures to make his point precisely because of the remnants of the Puritan legacy in America—our New England forefathers always viewed themselves as a sort of new Israel, whose success was guaranteed because of biblical prophecies that predicted the maintenance and triumph of the faithful remnant. (This was not a metaphor for the American Puritans; they saw themselves speaking literal truth when they equated ancient Israel with seventeenth-century America.) So Paine’s use of the scriptures has a specific historical purpose, and, as Bercovitch notes, it marks a turning point when Puritan rhetoric became distinctly secular.

I am more interested in the present-day effects of Paine’s rhetoric, however. I argued in episode three of The Christian Humanist that America is not and never has been a “Christian nation” in the sense that the Christian right asserts that it was. My co-host David Grubbs quite rightly brought up the religious language of our (mostly secular) Founding Fathers, and if he agreed with me that the Christian right misreads the facts, he insisted that they have a leg to stand on.

Fair enough, and now we understand why. You’d have to flash forward 225 years from Tom Paine to Karl Rove to find a nonbeliever so cynically willing to use religious language to persuade religious believers to adopt a political viewpoint, and, as with Rove, it worked for Paine. The Revolution was conducted, if not on religious grounds, at least using religious language, even though Paine, Jefferson, Madison, et al, had no real intention of making the United States a “Christian nation.”

And yet it backfired. Every time a Christian conservative appeals to the mythic past of those religious founding fathers (you simply must watch this video, for example, which must have required more time and effort to upload to YouTube than to research and write), they are seizing on an intentional ambiguity in the writings of men like Thomas Paine. Use religious language when you don’t wish to adopt that religion, and you end up with generations of people who can’t tell your real views.

The Christian Humanist Episode #7: Wars on Christmas

2009-12-10T13:50:00.003-05:00

The last--and in my opinion best--episode of our first semester should be up on Feedburner and iTunes shortly.

General Introduction
- More on science fiction and fantasy
- Book recommendations for Sam Mulberry

Christmas in the Medieval Era
- David reiterates the complexity of Medieval Europe
- Christmas and kings
- An Arthurian Christmas
- Where have all the jousters gone?

Washington Irving’s Rediscovery of Christmas
- The Puritan and American Wars on Christmas
- Geoffrey Crayon goes to England
- Mix of secular and religious traditions
- The weird bachelor uncle
- Irving misses tradition
- Santa Claus

A Christmas Carol
- Why are we so afraid of Scrooge?
- David questions his cynicism
- Warning: Don’t let your children listen to this section!!!!
- Scrooge’s rational skepticism and misanthropy

How the Grinch Stole Christmas
- Michial prepares for the flame emails
- Scrooge removed from motivation
- Physical disability

Merry X-Mas, Everyone
- “JESUS IS NOT AN X!!!!!!”
- Michial defends X-Mas objectors
- In which Nathan Gilmour looks like a total bumpkin
- Dreaming of a White Christmas with the KKK

The 21^st-Century “War on Christmas”
- Not an attempt to destroy Christmas
- Born of inclusivity
- Protests against public display of religious paraphernalia
- Economic impetus for Christmas
- Ties to the 24-hour news cycle
- Ham-fisted inclusivism
- Why is this only in America?

Is There a Conspiracy?
- Are there supernatural forces at play here?
- A question of data interpretation
- Are we dealing with a broader intellectual or cultural trend?

How Shall We Then Live?
- Secular and religious Christmas festivals
- Advent carols
- David Grubbs tells us the real story of St. Nicholas
- You can’t go home again

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbott, Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007.

Irving, Washington. Knickerbocker’s History of New York, Complete. Teddington: Echo Library, 2007.

---. The Sketch-Book. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Morte Darthur. Ed. Stephen H.A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2003.

Moore, Clement. The Night Before Christmas: Heirloom Edition. Philadelphia: Running Press Kids, 2001.

Powers, Tim. Declare. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.

---. On Stranger Tides. Northridge, Cal.: Babbage, 2006.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Seuss, Dr. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! New York: Random House, 1957.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Trans. Marie Borroff. New York: Norton, 2009.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Fawcett, 1996.

Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves

2009-12-07T00:54:00.003-05:00

My knowledge of early American women writers is embarrassingly small. I’ve read the usual poems by Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, and once in a survey course I struggled through Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, which I ended up abandoning in disgust. My situation is, I suspect, not that different than other literary scholars who focus on other eras, and to my credit or debit, I’d never read other writers of the era (Charles Brockden Brown, for example) until very recently.

My committee added a few women writers of the early days of the republic to my comprehensives list, however, and it was with a certain amount of dread that I looked forward to Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. How wrong I was. These two books are by far the most enjoyable and interesting pieces I’ve read thus far from the days before the American Renaissance—and the fact that I’d not heard of them until this year suggests a tragic and gaping hole in my education.

Charles Brockden Brown is justly called the father of American literature, but just as often he’s rather unjustly called the first American novelist of note. I am, let me be clear, a fan of the Canon and think that every student of literature, no matter what his or her specific area of study, should have to read the “classics” (preferably in a multiple-semester and interdisciplinary core curriculum required of all university students, but that’s a topic for another post).

I am therefore generally unsympathetic toward arguments that call the Canon racist or sexist or otherwise exclusionary—I am certain that women writers from the Elizabethan era would be added to the Canon were there enough of them of the same quality as Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc., and it is not Shakespeare’s fault that there is no female Hamlet, Aphra Behn notwithstanding. (Another topic for another time: I do accept Paul Lauter’s suggestion that the Academy should have multiple canons, but even so, I wish to maintain the large one in the center, even though it’s composed of Dead White Men. Oronooko is simply not as important as Dr. Faustus, not as influential or as important to Western culture. I have not read it, but I suspect it is also not as good. Please no comments calling the Canon into question.)

So it means something when I say that Brown is unjustly called the first American novelist of note. One of the first things one learns about Charlotte Temple is that it was the first American bestseller, and among the next things one learns is that more than two hundred editions of the novel were printed between its first appearance in 1791 and its virtual disappearance from study in the early twentieth century. It sold far more copies than Wieland or Edgar Huntly, inspired far greater devotion, and was much more of a cultural touchstone. It seems obvious that Rowson is both the mother of American literature and our true first novelist of note.

But its cultural impact wouldn’t matter if it were a mere eighteenth-century version of Twilight, a weepy melodrama for young women that had nothing to say to the larger world. (God help my academic descendents who will have to fight against Stephanie Meyer’s inclusion in the Canon.) No, Charlotte is incredibly rich for its genre (sentimental romance) and length (just over one hundred pages in my edition); its message is complex and not easily stated, and its actors move beyond the stock characters who generally populate such novels.

Rowson sets Charlotte Temple up as a moralistic tale of a fallen woman, taking breaks throughout the narrative to reassure readers (constantly assumed to be either impressionable young women or their censoring matrons) that the moral is forthcoming. But it never really does—Charlotte falls, but she does so even after doing her very best to live uprightly, and unlike many other novels of this type, her seducer genuinely loves her and provides for her even after external circumstances move him to leave her.

You can find the criticism in your local university’s database that will tease out the implications of the plot-moral dualism in Charlotte Temple to much more effect than I am willing or able to in this space. I bring it up only to note that it’s far more complicated and intellectually engaging than the canonical novels of Charles Brockden Brown—who set out to raise moral questions, best I can tell.

As good as Charlotte Temple is, however, it pales in comparison to Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, first published several decades later as Early Times in Massachusetts. When Sedgwick is discussed at all—apparently a relatively and tragically rare occasion—it is as either a domestic novelist amongst domestic novelists, i.e., an American Jane Austen; or else it is as a female counterpart to James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier romances.

I must take this opportunity to express my absolute loathing of James Fenimore Cooper. I don’t hate him as much as Mark Twain famously did, but I’ve read both The Last of the Mohicans and The Pioneers, and if the former is bearable for the interest of its implications about race, the latter is among the most boring books I’ve ever read. Cooper has a lot of characters in these novels—characters who never, with a very few exceptions, rise above their status as characters to become human beings (especially not Natty Bumppo). The plots are interesting enough in places, but Cooper can’t write a battle scene to save his life. These are, simply put, bad books.

Not so with Hope Leslie, which covers the Pequod uprisings of the seventeenth century with far more grace than that with which Cooper handles the French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans. The characters ring true—the titular protagonist has more depth in the course of her three hundred pages than Cooper grants to Bumppo in more than a thousand, and her ideas (which, big surprise, is what I really read for) are far richer and more complex than anything Cooper can come up with.

Critics read the novel particularly for Sedgwick’s remarkably progressive views on race and gender. Her most likeable character is Magawisca, an Indian woman who does her very best to function as an emissary between Pequod and white society and ends up torn to pieces for her efforts. (She doesn’t die, but in one particularly gory scene, she has her arm chopped off by a tomahawk while trying to re-enact Pocahontas’ defense of John Smith.) She is tragic but never melodramatic, never approaching the “tragic mulatto” portrayal of race that would prove so popular later in the century. Magawisca is the route by which Sedgwick can express her views on racial reconciliation and female empowerment, but the incredible thing, to say it again, is that her use as a symbol does not detract from the verisimilitude of her portrayal. She is one of the most memorable characters in American literature.

I am ready, in fact, to name Hope Leslie the single greatest American novel before The Scarlet Letter, and to pronounce ex cathedra that no American literature class should ever teach The Last of the Mohicans without teaching it alongside Sedgwick’s far superior novel—unless, of course, the class is called “Novels Called Classics That Aren’t That Good.” It is leaps and bounds above Brown, Cooper, Poe, and all but the best sketches of Washington Irving; it stands with the best of our literature from any era.

I have joked before that I don’t read women authors. Susanna Rowson and Catharine Maria Sedgwick are going a long way in convincing me to change that habit.

More on Science Fiction

2009-12-03T16:18:00.004-05:00

As Nathan Gilmour says, I “really have a way of drawing the ire of scientists.” After this week’s podcast on Fantasy literature and Science Fiction, we received a very long and well-reasoned dissenting opinion from Beth Crompton, who’s probably our most faithful listener who is not married to one of the hosts. She has two problems with the episode, and since both of them seem to have been sparked by things I said, I’ll be responding to them here in this post.

Her first problem is that our discussion of science fiction is “too general,” a fact that I admitted to during the podcast itself and will reiterate here: I’ve not read a lot of science fiction, especially the hard genre stuff, and so what I know about the genre is going to be based heavily on the literature that has been picked up by the Academy as transcending its genre.

My entire knowledge of literary science fiction thus boils down to four novels by Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough for Love, and The Number of the Beast), Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (I’ve not seen Blade Runner, however), and a larger number of novels in the related “dystopian” genre, particularly Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, both of which I have taught in classroom settings. So any statement I make about science fiction is going to be rather limited, a fact which I will freely admit and perhaps should have stressed further on the podcast. I am not qualified to make broad statements about science fiction as a genre.

Beth’s bigger caveat with our discussion revolves around my final mini-lecture on the podcast, in which I talked about some points Percy makes in his excellent self-help parody Lost in the Cosmos. (It’s absolutely the best starting point for Percy, in my opinion—don’t just pick up The Moviegoer; it’ll bore you to tears.) We were running short on time, and since the podcast wasn’t on Percy, I didn’t go into a whole lot of detail about what else he says in that book. Since I have as much space as I want here and since his argument is important to Beth’s objections, I’ll do so now.

One thing Percy does in this book—the main thing for what we’re talking about—is to expand Kierkegaard’s ethical sphere, really to move it into the modern world. Kierkegaard, as you may know, says there are three “stages on life’s way”: the aesthetic, in which a person lives for himself and the moment; the ethical, in which he lives for an idea; and the religious, in which he lives for God. (It’s much more complicated than that, and Kierkegaard wrote at least three books elucidating the spheres.)

So Percy goes about trying to find out who in the modern world best represents the ethical sphere, and his conclusion is that it’s represented by two groups: artists and scientists. The former, however, collapses back into aestheticism too easily, whereas the latter remain firmly convicted of their ethical beliefs “Because science works better, this is the age of science, scientists are the princes of the age.” So scientists are the modern embodiment of the ethical sphere and thus feel most at home in the world.

So when Percy brings up Carl Sagan and asks why he’s so lonely, he’s looking for chinks in that armor. Beth claims that she is “sort of depressed by the assertion that scientists are any more particularly lonely and depressed than anyone else.” The addition of the word depressed changes the meaning of the assertion. If I used it in the podcast, I certainly did not mean to. Percy never claims Sagan is depressed—only that he is lonely, a different kettle of fish. He has a worldview that seems to explain everything, an ethos by which he can live his life—and yet he’s looking for more, against what he knows is all reason. David was right to mark this as a “religious itch”—from my own Christian existentialist perspective, the desire for aliens to come down and increase our knowledge, or fulfill us, or whatever else, is a misdirected version of the first section of Augustine’s Confessions, i.e., “our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.”

(Our introductory music this week was very nearly Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien” incidentally, which is a great musical version of this same notion. The poor narrator of the song is lost in a world where everything is tied up and longs for something outside the circuit to come in and break it.)

Beth points out quite rightly that “just because something is well-understood and categorized doesn't mean it's not still freaking cool” and that scientists often have a sense of wonder about the universe. This is very true. But I didn’t accuse scientific materialism of not having a sense of wonder about the universe (at least I don’t think I did—I have not gone back and listened to the podcast). I accused them of having a worldview that does not allow for mystery as the word is typically understood. It’s true that mystery and wonder are related things, and I could have this wrong, but I see no place for mystery in Enlightenment scientism and the materialism that has followed in its wake and floats around scientific discourse to this day.

She also says that “there's a lot more to science than classifying things, and also, it would be a strange categorization indeed that left out humans,” responding to my reference to Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, that he designed a system that explained everything, then stepped back and saw that he didn’t fit into it. Obviously science does more than classification, but it begins at classification, or at least classification takes place near the beginning of things—and when scientists can’t classify something (the unclassifiable is coterminous with the mysterious, of course), they are forced to leave it out, to leave it untouched.

(An example: in this Salon.com interview, a journalist asked Richard Dawkins what science can do about the why questions that science cannot answer. Dawkins, somewhat incredibly, actually claimed that such questions are just not worth asking. In other words, there’s no point in asking if there’s a meaning to life. Obviously not every scientist—not even every materialist scientist—is Richard Dawkins, but his attitude is instructive here.)

And while scientific systems may have a place for “humans,” I would argue that materialist science (a distinction which I am sure to make) has no place for the Self as understood by everything from Christian theology to Sartrean existentialism to 18th-century political thought. In my encounters with scientists (popular scientists, of course) who wish to deal with the concept of the Self, they either ignore it altogether (leave it out of their systems as something not worth talking about) or attempt to force it into a narrowly materialist worldview, as I heard Michael Shermer do just last week when he was talking about neuro-biology. The Self is a set of chemical reactions. Under such a schema, the scientist as a Self is left out of his own system in any meaningful way.

Beth helpfully gives me a list of science fiction that is life-affirming, which I appreciate and which I will try to read if I ever finish my comprehensive exams and dissertation (a dodge, yes, but at least I’m admitting it’s a dodge), but I do want to stress that I did not claim science fiction was depressing or nihilistic. In fact, when I brought up Carl Sagan’s loneliness, I said specifically that I was talking about sci-fi in its more optimistic strains. So the relative sadness of T.S. Eliot and Nathaniel Hawthorne vs. Neil Gaiman or Ursula LeGuin is not really relevant here. If anything, I’d argue that the realism I read is far more depressing than the sci-fi I’ve read—and of course there are materialists and non-materialists writing in both genres.

I do have to say one thing about depressing literature, however. Beth specifically calls out Hawthorne for his depressing approach to sin in The Scarlet Letter. (I respectfully disagree.) But she praises an R.A. Lafferty novel that I am not familiar with. Here is her description:

Sin in Lafferty's novels exists to be ridiculous. In The Annals of Klepsis, there is a woman who was exiled for committing the Unspeakable Sin, and she is badgered throughout the novel to reveal the nature of her sin, not so that she can be judged, but just because everyone is really curious about what it was. The most frustrating thing about the novel for the reader is not that this woman sinned and what this says about the treatment of women and society's lack of compassion, but that we never figure out what the Unspeakable Sin was either and we would really like to know, because it sounds fascinating.

I have two points here: (a) From my Christian point of view, making sin “ridiculous” rather than something very serious indeed is a grave misstep, and I’d much prefer a depressing novel that treated it seriously than an upbeat one that treated it as a joke; (b) the plot Beth describes parallels Hawthorne’s short story “Ethan Brand” to such a degree that I can only assume it’s an homage to him. So it’s a good thing, I suppose, that not everyone hates Hawthorne. [Insert smiley-faced emoticon.]

At any rate, I hope that clears up any misconceptions I may have given Beth or other listeners about my feelings on science and science fiction. I must again reiterate that I’ve got nothing against science. I just don’t trust materialism; I think it’s bankrupt as a worldview and is a complete failure at explaining the peculiar mystery of what it means to be a human being. Echoing Percy’s question about Carl Sagan’s loneliness was my way of suggesting that something deep inside the materialist is afraid of the same thing.

Thanks to Beth for writing such a long and thoughtful email. She clearly knows much more about science fiction than I do and has thought a lot about it. If you want to respond to anything you hear on The Christian Humanist Podcast, send us an email at thechristianhumanist@gmail.com.

Episode #6: Fantasy and Sci-Fi

2009-12-01T12:29:00.003-05:00

This is our seventh episode, and we're finally talking about literature. It oughta be up on Feedburner and iTunes sometime this afternoon.

General Introduction
- Things were busy while David was gone.
- Brief feedback notices.

A Moment of Confession; or, It’s All Geek to Me
- Nathan Gilmour, dungeon-master extraordinaire
- Michial’s Back to the Future obsession
- Has David ever read anything without dwarves in it?
- “Oh, not another [expletive] elf!”

How does speculative fiction relate to mundane reality?
- Questions at the borders of our knowledge
- Humanity as an aesthetic category
- Science fiction and the novel of ideas
- Sex and science
- Realities of human experience
- How black-and-white is the world of fantasy literature?

Speculative fiction and literary realism
- Metaphor and literality
- Madeleine L’Engle’s probable vs. possible
- Separate spheres or cross-pollination?
- Fantasy novel as novel

Ideas in Fantasy Literature
- Interiority interacting with fantastic elements
- Proliferation of Tolkeinian beings
- The nonhuman face of humanity
- To be human means to have potential

Ideas in Science Fiction
- Walker Percy’s ontological lapsometer and the Cartesian split
- Disembodied heads galore!
- How death leads to life
- Man and technology

Christians and Speculative Fiction
- Should Christians read about witchcraft?
- Why witchcraft doesn’t mean today what it used to mean
- The shift from romance to realism
- The materialism of science fiction
- Why is Carl Sagan so lonely?
- The evolution of the vampire

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Writer’s Digest, 2001.

Chesterton, G.K. Tremendous Trifles: Humorous Sketches. New York: WLC, 2009.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Gilgamesh: A New English Version. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Gibson, William. Count Zero. New York: Ace, 2006.

L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Picador, 2000.

---. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Picador, 1999.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: One Volume Edition. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Episode #5.1: More on New Calvinism and Emergent

2009-11-24T10:23:00.004-05:00

It's just me and Nathan Gilmour in this week's short episode, responding to criticism about last week. Please pardon our technical difficulties.

General Introduction
- How this show will work.
- Nathan’s blog addressing Sam Mulberry’s email.

Emergent and Poststructuralist Philosophy
- Is poststructuralism “out” in the Academy?
- Michial gets cynical; Nathan gets sanguine.
- Existentialism and poststructuralism.
- Effusive praise for James K.A. Smith.
- Radical Orthodoxy.
- Calvinism Outside of New Calvinism.
- Ecumenism.
- Michial refuses to call heresy.
- The difference between Christian existentialism and the Emergent Church.

Self-Definition
- Can a postmodernist nail things down?
- Definition under attack.
- Enlightenment thought and systematizing.
- Does the Emergent Church subvert itself?

More on Celebrity Culture
- We badmouth the absent David Grubbs.
- A consequence of Calvinist intellectualism?
- “The dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity.”
- Home video feeds.

Feedback
- Tripp Fuller and Tony Jones.
- Why don’t the Neo-Calvinists respond?
- Were we kinder to Neo-Calvinists?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: An Introduction. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1994.

Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

McLaren, Brian. A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Milbank, John, et al. Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Pinnock, Clark. Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2001.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988.

Schaeffer, Francis A. A Christian Manifesto. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2005.

Smith, James K.A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006.

Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Fawcett, 1996.

LINKS
Nathan Gilmour's Written Response

Nathan Gilmour Responds to Podcast Questions

2009-11-21T21:38:00.005-05:00

Right here, folks.

I can second most of what he says, except when he talks about knowing mostly Emergent people in their 40s and 50s; this has definitely not been my experience. I will particularly get behind the following sentence: "I wanted to do a show on Emergent and the New Calvinism because I thought that each corrected a deficiency in the other." I believe this, as well, and have been kicking around a related episode of the podcast on why denominations are a good thing. If we do that one, however, it'll be in the spring semester, as I've only got one more episode to moderate this season, and it's going to be on Apologetics. (UPDATE: No, it won't be. We've switched the schedules around, and I have no more moderations this semester. Apologetics was supposed to be our first episode; now it appears it'll be the first episode of the second season.)

Thanks for listening and reading, and if you've got any questions, comments, or complaints, send 'em along to thechristianhumanist@gmail.com.

Karl Barth, Christian Humanist

2009-11-21T09:50:00.003-05:00

I’m afraid I’ve been spreading a vicious lie about my favorite theologian, Karl Barth, for several years now, and I feel I need to clear the air a bit. I brought it up on the very first episode of The Christian Humanist Podcast (TCH if you’re me; the CHP if you’re Nathan Gilmour or teach at Bethel University), and I go into more detail in this post from two summers ago.

The lie: Karl Barth did not believe in what Calvinists call “general revelation,” and more specifically, that he distrusted Christian humanism and thought it a quest at best quixotic and quite possibly heretical. Turns out, this may not be true.

I should admit straight out that I have not read as much Barth as I should. I’ve been through Helmut Gottwizer’s 260-page selection of the three-kabillion-page Church Dogmatics several times, and I’ve read The Humanity of God and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. Hardly enough, it’s true, to make me an expert. (It may not even be enough for me to call him my favorite theologian, but I’m going to anyway.)

I think I make a pretty good case for my position in the post linked to above, both defending my position that he mistrusts natural theology and, in the sequel, giving a few historical reasons why that might be the case. I may only have half of the story, however, as I’m realizing as I make my way through Ralph C. Wood’s The Comedy of Redemption. Wood seems to have read every word Barth ever wrote five or six times and devotes two full chapters in his book on American novelists to the other great Swiss theologian, and he says I’m wrong:

It is a commonplace to say that Karl Barth’s work is Christocentric. It is even more conventional to dismiss his theology as antihumanistic. The aim of this chapter is to show that, while the former is incontestably true, the latter is demonstrably false. Barth’s theology of culture, far from being misanthropic, has a profound regard for humanity and all its works. Yet it is not built upon our native longing for God. Barth makes a radically evangelical estimate of human creation, rooting it in the Gospel’s own unapologetic claim that God in Christ has shown himself to be ineluctably for us rather than against us.

As usual, I have overstated the case, though it’s good to know that I’m at least following the crowd in my misreading of Barth. The major counterexample is Barth’s deep love for Mozart. He apparently began and ended every day by listening to a Mozart record, and “Barth’s study contained a picture of Mozart that was hung—as Barth always pointed out—at a slightly higher level than Calvin’s.” The theologian saw Mozart’s music as a major signifier of God’s grace and wrote what is apparently a very famous essay about him. According to Barth, the composer

heard, and causes those who have ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time—the whole context of providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway. Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the shadow.

(To which I say, whatever. I’ve never liked Mozart very much, even though he appears to be the official composer of Christian existentialism, between Barth’s adoration of him and Kierkegaard’s long essay in Don Giovanni in Either/Or. I still like Beethoven, Chopin, and Erik Satie better.)

It is important that Barth is talking about Mozart and not, say, Bach. (According to Wood, in fact, Barth believes that “Mozart . . . is content to play while Bach is determined to preach. The angels may perform Bach when they are before the throne of God . . . but when gathered unto themselves it’s always Mozart.”) Finding theology in Bach would be easy; his music is full of theological themes. But not Mozart, who “did not intend his music, at least not his secular work, to resound with the praise of God’s prevenient grace.”

So Barth is finding echoes of faith in a work meant for a secular audience and written by a person who (by all accounts) was thoroughgoingly secular. This is, in fact, the task of the Christian humanist as I define it—to “demonstrate[] what surprising echoes of the Gospel can be heard within human creation whenever it is not made the basis for faith in God.” Barth’s trouble comes when we start with the secular work and try to move toward the Bible; this cannot be because “Only by first hearing God’s unique and saving Word spoken in Christ can we later catch its worldly resonances.”

This explains Barth’s antipathy for what he calls, in the Church Dogmatics, “Christian humanism.” The Christian humanist moves from the world to the Gospel instead of vice versa and is thus in danger of building Towers of Babel. Wood calls Barth “a humanist Christ rather than a Christian humanist. In the latter formulation, the noun always overwhelms the adjective.” (I disagree, incidentally, which is why the podcast is still called TCH instead of THC.)

But Wood’s final thoughts in the chapter are worthwhile to anyone who considers him- or herself a Christian humanist or a humanist Christian or whatever else:

Hence Barth’s refusal to set a so-called Christian humanism in opposition to scientific, existentialist, Marxist, or other humanisms. Because they are all abstract programs, says Barth, Christian faith must not seek to compete or to compare itself with them. The Gospel, Barth insists, differs from all humanisms not in degree but in kind. It “is neither a principle, not a point of view, nor a moral philosophy. It is spirit and life, a good message of God’s presence and work in Jesus Christ. It does not form some Front or Party either, not even for the sake of a certain conception of man. It forms congregations, and these exist for service among all men.”

Wise words from Barth, as usual—words that all Christian scholars in the humanities should take to heart to avoid moving in the wrong direction. Sorry for the confusion.

The Christian Humanist Episode #5: Neo-Calvinists vs. the Emergent Church

2009-11-17T10:40:00.003-05:00

It should be on Feedburner and iTunes very soon, but in the meantime, here's the show notes for the latest episode--in which we criticize the arch-enemies of Neo-Calvinism and the Emergent Church.

General Introduction
- Listener email.
- Response to the CWC’s crossover idea.

Our Experiences
- Nathan stumbles, Forrest Gump-like, upon the movements.
- Piperians and Edwardsians.
- Joshua Harris and the outlaw hideout.
- Emergent at Toccoa Falls College.
- The popular face of postmodern theory.

Celebrity Culture
- Origins of Neo-Calvinism and Emergent in the critique of Evangelical criticism.
- A sign of the times?
- The Emergent Church’s position in the multimedia age.
- Neo-Calvinist video feeds and Reformed history.
- The cult of Joshua Harris.
- Has Christianity always been a celebrity culture?

The Emergent Church and Ecumenism
- Emergent claims that the history of Christianity is the history of competing claims.
- You can’t compress diverse traditions into a singular culture.
- The “yes, but on the other hand” tradition.

The Movements and History
- Michial answers another question instead.
- Neo-Calvinists or Neo-Puritans?
- The free-for-all ecumenism of the Emergent Church.

The Curse of Exclusivity
- Neo-Calvinism’s concern with the minute details of confession.
- Emergent’s hipsterism.
- Calvinism clubs.
- The reason for David’s mistrust of Emergent.
- Christ the Center and the PCUSA.
- Our second ex cathedra pronouncement.
- Why we want our pastor in a comb-over, not a faux-hawk.
- What a good church should look like.

The Future of the Movements
- Are they sustainable or the new Rosicrucians?
- Neo-Orthodoxy vs. Neo-Liberalism.
- Neo-Calvinism as not all that “neo.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2006.

Carson, D.A. Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2005.

DeYoung, Kevin and Ted Kluck. Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be. Chicago: Moody, 2008.

Driscoll, Mark. The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out without Selling Out. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2004.

Hansen, Collin. Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2008.

Harris, Josh. I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2003.

Kimball, Dan, et al. The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2003.

McLaren, Brian. A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Miller, Donald. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003.

Piper, John. Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2003.

The Whiteness of the Whale

2009-11-16T07:39:00.002-05:00

If you ever read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for a class and want to make your teacher very, very angry, try to steer every conversation around to the “meaning” of the white whale itself. Your teacher won’t appreciate it, but you’ll just be following the early trends of Melville critics, for whom the whale absolutely must have represented some huge secret to the meaning of life. Is it God? Evil? Purity? Humanity? Sin? Sexuality? You name it, and someone’s proffered it as the secret meaning of the novel.

The best thing I’ve ever read on this front comes from R.P. Blackmur’s The Lion and the Honeycomb. Blackmur is pretty tough on Melville as a writer. The author’s problem, he says, is that “he did not write of characters in action; he employed the shells of stock characters, heightened or resounding only by the eloquence of the author’s voice, to witness, illustrate, decorate, and often as it happened to impede and stultify an idea in motion.” The truth of Blackmur’s assertion should be obvious to anyone who has spent any time attempting to decode the myriad symbols in Moby-Dick. Melville attempts to write an allegory here, but he fails:

Successful allegory—La Vita Nuova and Pilgrim’s Progress—requires the preliminary possession of a complete and stable body of belief appropriate to the theme in hand. Melville was not so equipped; neither was Hawthorne; neither was anyone in nineteenth century America or since. That is why Melville’s allegorical devices and patterns had to act as if they were agents in a novel; and that is why we are compelled to judge Melville at his most allegorical yet formally as a novelist.

Putting aside the question as to whether there is something intrinsic in the American character—then or now—that keeps us from having that “complete and stable body of belief,” I think that Blackmur has it absolutely right here. Moby-Dick is an allegory without a key to decoding, a mass of signifiers without steady signifieds behind them; it is, perhaps, the first poststructuralist novel.

I am generally suspicious of the type of reading—enormously popular in the 1970s and ‘80s, the tragic heyday of Critical Theory—that would claim that a given text is not about what it appears to be about at all but is instead all about the act of literary production and the attempt to interpret it. This is typically lazy reading, in my opinion, a refusal to engage with the author and a violent overlay of fashionable criticism over his or her work.

But there’s no way around it here. The author’s intention in writing Moby-Dick was clearly to demonstrate that the author’s intention doesn’t matter. Moby-Dick is such a glorious, sprawling mess, covering dozens of genres and hastily thrown together, that any attempt to map it out based on Melville’s autobiography or personal philosophy is bound to fail. It contains too much for such an approach to be at all effective. The novel deals with so many subjects and yet is “about” none of them that it can reasonably be said that what it is “about” is the concept of being “about.”

And we’re clued in on this from the very beginning. Moby-Dick does not begin at sea or even in New Bedford but rather in a library, in a series of other books. We’re given eleven pages or so of quotations about whales, presented to us by a “sub-sub librarian” —a person lost in the depths of the library, lost in a vast series of words and pages, just as the reader will shortly be. He gives us a variety of sources on whales: symbolic, literal, mythic, and so forth. But he can’t pin down the whale; nor can the reader of Moby-Dick, who could spend a lifetime concocting various signifieds for the signifier of the white whale and never get any closer.

When our actual narrator, the enigmatically named “Ishmael,” shows up, he, too, presents us with a catalogue, though in his case it is not about the whale but about the various types of people who are drawn to the ocean. His catalogue, however, has the effect of simplifying rather than complicating our interpretation—he’s making a universal case for the importance of the ocean, a universalizing moral point.

This should provide comfort and a structure for interpretation, but it doesn’t—Ishmael’s overarching point about the power of the ocean is quickly lost in the maze of genres and narratives that follow it. He doesn’t even make it to sea until ten chapters later, demonstrating that land is in fact just as important as the sea. His point has been overthrown, and Ishmael moves from being an infallible guide of the sort to which readers are used to being a voice among voices, no more important than Father Mapple or Captain Ahab or Queequeg.

And even when he does try to act as our guide, Ishmael can’t resist teasing us with the knowledge to which he is privy and we are not. For example, he refers to “an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy extant.” He advocates a sort of Gnosticism, a secret knowledge that only he can access; the reader cannot look for real guidance to an unfriendly speaker like him.

But the early image that best serves as an emblem for the novel itself is the painting at The Spouter-Inn. Ishmael is taken in by it, is fascinated by it, but he cannot for the life of him figure out what it’s a picture of. Then he figures it out—it’s a whale destroying a whaling-boat (a rather grim image for an inn for whalers). The painting retains its mystery, however, and in this it mirrors the novel itself.

Ishmael’s attempt to make sense of it resembles the task that critics have faced in reading Moby-Dick for decades, and Ishmael’s statement about interpretation—“at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain.” But because Melville’s allegory is at the very best slippery, that thing in the middle, the meaning of the white whale, will never be truly found out, and the rest of the picture/novel will never be plain.

This is the power and the frustration of Moby-Dick, perhaps America’s first great novel and a production wholly singular in the history of literature. But to be fair, Melville tips the reader off from the very first page that this novel will not be a sign to be interpreted but rather a series of words and images, thrust together violently until they make your head spin.

Golden Blunders

2009-11-13T18:42:00.003-05:00

It goes without saying that Henry James knew exactly what he was doing when he made Isabel Archer, the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, an American lost abroad in Europe. Doing so allowed him to make a grand statement about the values of the country he’d left behind without making it overtly; he was able to hide the meaning behind the layers and layers of baroque social pleasantries that fill the 600-plus pages of the novel. Like his characters, James talks a lot, but his intent is mostly subtext.

Isabel is prototypically American. Newly orphaned in her late teens, she finds herself brought to England by her aunt, Lillian Touchett, a brash and independent woman who never fails to tell people exactly what she thinks of them. Isabel is not rich and not as pretty as her sisters, but she’s intelligent and committed to living a full life. More than that, she’s committed to her independence. Her notions of freedom manifest themselves in her taking a stand against society, in her repeated refusals to join the crowd and to do what is expected of her. Isabel is who she is, to use a tautology, and while she captivates everyone she meets, she rarely does what it would take to enter their full good graces.

But everyone still loves her, to the point that when her uncle dies, her cousin Ralph, who has known her for less than a year, gives away half of his own inheritance to make her independently wealthy. The idea here is that Isabel will be able to refuse the marriage offers that are bound to come her way—she has in fact already turned down a suitor from New York and an English lord—and to travel and think on her own, to maintain her independent self. This, as you might imagine, is not to be.

The seeds of Isabel’s destruction are planted when she meets her aunt’s friend Madame Merle, who describes herself as belonging to the “old, old world”—an explicit rejection of American ideas of freedom and individuality. If Isabel’s personality has little or no social element, Madame Merle has nothing other than the faces she shows to the world. She turns spiritual homelessness into a virtue. There is no authentic human self hiding beneath the surface of social pleasantries, but Isabel is unaware of this absence because she is not particularly good at looking beneath the surface. The reader, however, on his or her second time through the book, is easily able to spot the warning signs:

She was in short the most comfortable, profitable, amenable person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault it was that she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was either affected or pretentious, since from these vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt, but that her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away. She had become too flexible, too useful, was too ripe and too final. She was in a word too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons in the ages before country-house life was the fashion.

Madame Merle’s complete self-alienation—in fact her total lack of a cohesive self—leads her to a social position that removes all social alienation. She can navigate the world just fine because there’s no need to mesh what is inside with what is outside. Instead, she’s completely surface, all motion with no act.

It’s no shock that Isabel likes her, of course; James presents her as something almost superhuman, as evidenced by Ralph’s description of her midway through the book: “she pushes the search for perfection too far . . . her merits are in themselves overstrained. She’s too good, too kind, too clever, too learned, too accomplished, too everything. She’s too complete, in a word.” One can’t achieve this superhuman completeness without sacrificing something, and Madame Merle has sacrificed her authentic self in favor of a self composed of the me rather than the I.

She is in the end quite sinister, as Mrs. Touchett’s summary of her demonstrates: “She can do anything; that’s what I’ve always liked her for. I knew she could play any part; but I understood that she played them one by one. I didn’t understand that she would play two at the same time.” But how can a person composed only of social sides not be two-faced? It’s in the job description.

I will refrain from giving away too many of Madame Merle’s secrets, but suffice it to say that most of the bad things that happen to Isabel in the second half of the novel are mostly her fault. Foremost among them is her marriage to Gilbert Osmond, an American dilettante living in Florence whom Isabel is manipulated into marrying, against the wishes of all of her friends. Once they are married, Gilbert turns into an oppressive monster, one who will not allow Isabel her own opinions or actions. He married her for her money, of course, and once she becomes his wife, he sees her as nothing but a painting to display on the wall. And paintings don’t talk back.

The reader is hard-pressed to discover a reason for Isabel’s attraction to him; he is vastly inferior to her cousin Ralph, who’s in love with her, and not even as good as the self-loathing Lord Warburton, whose proposal she callously turns down. Isabel is attracted to his poverty; she knows that, unlike Warburton, Osmond will not be taking care of her once they are wed, and she extrapolates from this fact the idea that she will not have to sacrifice her independence.

It is, in the end, her commitment to independence and freedom that get her into so much trouble. Her desire for independence traps her in a terrible marriage (in an era in which it was very difficult to get a divorce), and her rebellious streak causes her to disregard all the warnings she receives from her friends and family. And in pursuing independence, she sacrifices independence. The warning here, I suppose, is against unchecked freedom, which is in the end not the highest ideal—wisdom is.

But the story does not exactly end in Isabel’s abject misery. She is married to a tyrant, stripped of friends and family, and drifting through life without purpose or hope. But two good things come from her alienation. The first is that her friends, who could not get along before, suddenly understand one another and form real relationships of the type Isabel is no longer capable of having. She has become the sacrificial lamb for their emotional and spiritual health; her misery has allowed them to escape their own.

The second is that she forms a close relationship with her stepdaughter, Pansy, who is not particularly bright or ambitious but is kind and does not deserve a manipulative cad like Osmond as her father. (Near the end of the novel, Osmond attempts to make her marry Lord Warburton for money and social position, refusing to listen to her protests that she loves another, less wealthy man.) Isabel stays an Osmond because someone must protect Pansy from the sinister machinations of her father and Madame Merle; she has lost the efficacy of her own private, independent mind, but she can still provide one for Pansy, can still help her stepdaughter exist in a world other than the cruel social one.

It’s not a happy ending, of course, but it’s not exactly a sad one, either. Isabel, who set foot on the continent as a naïve romantic committed to the very American ideal of personal liberty, has discovered that the evil in the world makes something more important than freedom: responsibility. She gives her life meaning by submitting it, unasked, to another.

The Christian Humanist Episode #4: God and Country

2009-11-10T11:17:00.006-05:00

We've uploaded the latest episode of The Christian Humanist to the FTP site, and it should be available via iTunes this afternoon and our Feedburner site even earlier.

General Introduction
- Response to CWC: The Radio Show regarding visual art
- Response to listener Beth regarding science

Our Three Assumptions
- The United States is not and never has been a “Christian nation.”
- It is not a particularly admirable goal to make the United States into a theocracy.
- No one political party fulfills the mission of Christ.

Our Experiences with Christianity and Politics
- Evangelicalism and Limbaughism
- Pro-life churches
- Home schooling and conservativism

Constantine’s Conversion
- David clears up a common misconception
- A defense of Constantine
- Early reaction to Constantine’s conversion
- Oh, those complicated Middle Ages!

Anabaptist Politics
- Nathan’s not a Mennonite
- Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder
- Divine vocations that are not for Christians

The American Revolution
- David clears up another common misconception
- What was the American Revolution actually about?
- Were the Christian colonists right to revolt?
- Paul’s appeal to his rights as a Roman citizen
- The difference between kings and emperors
- The pragmatism of the Church Fathers

Modern-Day Protest
- Should Christians make the world safer?
- The role of prophetic speech
- Who should pull the sword out of the sheath?

Should Christians Run for Office?
- Does Washington corrupt otherwise pure people?
- Should we be serving in academia?
- Blame it on the system
- The importance of postmodern theory
- Nathan’s letter-writing campaign

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Estep, William. The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1996.

Grafton, John, ed. The Declaration of Independence and Other Great Documents of American History 1775-1865. New York: Dover, 2000.

Hauerwas, Stanley. After Christendom?: How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas. Nashville: Abingdon, 1991.

Wulfstan, St. Homilies of Wulfstan. Ed. D. Bethurum. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957.

Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1994.

Hey, I Hate Ayn Rand, Too, But Aren't You Going a Little Far?

2009-11-09T06:24:00.006-05:00

I'm not going to do a full post about this (mostly because I haven't really decided what I think about the universal health-care plan currently making its way through Congress), but I want to make one point about this article from Peter Laarman.

Laarman turns the tables here on the Religious Right, who are fond of saying that if you're at all sympathetic to pro-choice politics, you care more about convenience or respectability or whatever else than the teachings of Jesus. I don't like that argument when James Dobson uses it because it ignores how complicated these things are--how complicated belief itself is and how hard it is to boil down a person's religious commitments to a set of political issues.

So it makes me pretty angry when Laarman says the following of Christians who dare to oppose universal health care:

The reluctant conclusion I draw is that these are Ayn Rand Christians who were never touched by the spirit of the Christ whose ministry was emphatically defined from the start by his compassion for the sick and for his healing of the multitudes who came to him with all manner of diseases. Jesus did not seem to think that it was taking anything away from the already-healthy to restore the health of the physically and psychologically afflicted. He did not operate from a zero sum mentality nor from a neoliberal economics of scarcity. In his economy of radical abundance—one version of what Lewis Hyde calls the “gift economy”—the more health you give, the more health you get.

He gets at least two things wrong here. One, he compares the healings of Jesus to the healings of State-funded medical institutions, which is at the very least short-sighted and, depending on how you want to spin it, is blasphemous. Jesus' miracles didn't cost money, and they were guaranteed to work. I'm not even sure what Laarman means when he says that Christ took "away from the already-healthy to restore the health of the physically and psychologically afflicted." I don't recall His passing a hat around the crowd before healing the blind man.

Two, he throws up the classic liberal smoke screen of refusing to recognize the difference between a person's not thinking a government can or should make it its business to take care of poor people and a person's not caring about poor people. (Lest someone throw me in with the reactionary right, I'll point to the classic conservative smoke screen of confusing government care with government instrusion.) I can think that Obama's universal health-care system is a wasteful boondoggle that will not accomplish what it was created to accomplish without wanting hundreds of millions of sick people to die, uninsured, in the street, and it's a particularly ugly form of bad faith for Laarman to suggest that's not true.

The stories from this website tend to be blindly offensive blanket statements without any middle ground or connection to reality--last week, for example, one of their authors declared ex cathedra that the homosexuality debate had been settled and that there was nothing wrong with it, a proclamation that doesn't seem to have been based on anything or to have had an effect on anything. But this one struck me as particularly one-sided, writing off, as it does, an entire political party as un-Christian on the strength of a cheap and faulty argument.

(For the record, I am vaguely in favor of universal health care but would prefer a complete revamp of the system rather than the current subsidization plan, which I think is just going to waste a lot of money.)

The Anxiety of Influence

2009-11-05T16:06:00.003-05:00

Most Western cultures have an epic poem that attempts to tell the mythological history of the country. The Greeks, of course, had The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the Romans, building from those two poems, had The Aeneid. The British have The Faerie Queene; the French have La Chanson de Roland; the Italians have the little-read Orlando Furioso.

America, as you’ve no doubt realized, does not have an equivalent poem. To some extent, I suppose, the notion of the “Great American Novel” is our corollary to the nationalist epic poem—but the fact that no one has ever been able to agree on what exactly that novel is (and the more recent assertions that we should just eliminate it as an ideal category altogether) suggests that America’s mythological history is to some extent up in the air.

(Were I to suggest an American epic, incidentally, it would be neither poetry nor in the strictest sense fiction. Instead, I’d say Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography is about as close to the mythic roots of this country as it’s possible to get. Franklin makes a lot of stuff up, mostly to make himself look better, and in the process of doing so creates the American Dream, the bugaboo that has haunted American writers ever since.)

The absence of a national epic—and the unwillingness or inability of our early American authors to construct one—created in the first literary century of the new country an enormous anxiety, one that is never far beneath the surface of the fiction of the era. We’d thrown off the chains of “oppression” from our Mother Country and earned our freedom, and we’d come up with a radical system of government that we were enormously proud of.

But Britain still had Shakespeare, and Milton, and Spenser, and Chaucer, and Beowulf, and a whole host of lesser writers who were nevertheless more respected and more widely read than anyone produced in the colonies. We had, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, a few other notable Puritans—plus the political and social writings of the founding fathers. We couldn’t compete on the global market, and American books did not sell well in England and on the Continent—even when they were printed there.

The result of this imbalance of artistic power is a dual impulse on the part of American writers of the early 19th century. On the one hand, they wished to say in no uncertain terms that American had its own literature, one that could compete in philosophy and artistic effect with the best Europe had to offer. On the other hand, they were forced to lean hard on the models of the past—none of whom were American.

James Fenimore Cooper is probably a good place to start. Cooper wrote enormous bestsellers that dealt with the American frontier and wilderness; they are historical romances with a heavily patriotic edge. Like many other authors of the time, Cooper begins each chapter in his novels with a quotation from an outside source. The texts he quotes are illuminating. In his most famous and popular novel, The Last of the Mohicans, he provides the reader with 34 epigraphs. Only two of them come from American writers, William Cullen Bryant and the now-forgotten Fitz-Green Halleck. The rest are all British, with Shakespeare receiving the lion’s share (twenty chapters, more than half of them, feature a quote from him).

This is a way of asserting America’s equality, both political and literary, with its Mother Country. Further, several of the epigraphs are clearly used ironically—one, from The Merchant of Venice, is just a bunch of nonsense words—suggesting that Cooper is taking down British literature at the same time he is praising American works. And finally, the last epigraph in the book is from Halleck, suggesting that America has come out on top in the final analysis. Cooper dismantles the master’s house using the master’s tools.

That’s not to suggest that he wastes any opportunity of making fun of the British outright, of course. Early in the novel, our narrator informs us that the Britain who fought the French and Indian War was a dying animal, waiting to be euthanized by its colonies just a few years later. This may be my favorite paragraph in the entire novel:

The imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of energy in her councils at home, had lowered the character of Great Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed, by the talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators.

Charles Brockden Brown is less up front in Wieland, America’s first novel. Wieland owes less to British sources than to the Continent, specifically the rich German tradition of the Gothic novel, into which it fits like a hand into a glove—with a single exception. Perhaps the most defining feature of the Gothic novel is the great castle in which it takes place. The castle allows the Gothic novelist to present her reader with a score of easy thrills—cobwebs, creaking doors, unexplained drafts, etc., etc.

Not so with Brown. America, of course, does not have thousand-year-old castles the way that Germany does, and so there’s no castle in Wieland. (There’s not even a cave, the other grand setting of the European Gothic romance, although caves play a major role in Brown’s later Edgar Huntly.) One might be tempted to imagine that the castle is absent from the novel because it is absent from America. Brown disagrees, saying that his “one merit [is] that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathies of the reader by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstitions and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras are the materials usually employed for this end.” The setting of Wieland—along with Brown’s unfortunate need to explain everything that happens—is in itself a protest against the literature of the Old World and an attempt to forge a new American literature.

Of the three major American writers of fiction before the American Renaissance, Washington Irving is the most read today and the most interesting in terms of his treatment of Britain. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon is openly nationalistic and patriotic but begins with a lengthy explanation as to why Europeans are better than Americans:

I had read in the works of various philosophers that all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore be as superior to a great man of America as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was confirmed by observing the comparative importance and swelling magnitude of many English travelers among us, who, I was assured, were very little people in their own country.

Irving, obviously, is being sarcastic here; later, in an essay on the treatment of America by British authors, he will say that America has heretofore been “visited by the worst kind of English travelers . . . the broken-down tradesman, the scheming adventurer, the wandering mechanic.” And if the book begins with “Crayon” traveling to England to see a superior race, it spends an awful lot of time in the New World instead.

So he’s forever ambivalent on the subject of Europe vs. America, an ambiguity that is only heightened in his two most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” These have come to be regarded as two of the most quintessentially American short stories—I can’t get close to Halloween without thinking about upstate New York, thanks to Irving—but they’re not American at all, strictly speaking, as they are based on German and Dutch fables. Irving cannot create an American literary identity out of whole cloth but must borrow and adapt.

This is, in fact, Irving’s solution to the anxiety of influence. Unlike Cooper, who openly mocks the Old World and subverts their literature to use against them, and Brown, who simply purges Old World styles of the elements that don’t mesh with rural Pennsylvania, Irving suggests a common lineage with the British and suggests a more open and universal approach to reading and writing:

Generation after generation, both in animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity and the species continue to flourish. Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them—and from whom they had stolen.

Literature becomes the bearer of a kerygma, and authors become merely the birds who drop the seeds. The question of a national literature thus becomes, at least to some extent, moot. Irving reaches higher than creating an American literature—he wishes to be ranked outside of nationality and by truth instead. Two hundred years later, now that American authors generally do not feel inferior to their European counterparts, his route to authorial courage seems much more attractive: Admit your smallness in the grand scheme of things and your importance in transmission.

Addendum: Poe and the Patristics

2009-11-04T07:30:00.003-05:00

I misspoke a bit on the podcast yesterday—if you haven’t listened to it yet, what are you waiting for?—when I said that the Church Fathers play virtually no role in American literature. (If you didn’t notice, I had actually forgotten about Updike’s Roger’s Version until the second before I brought it up.) In fact, there’s at least one other major American author who leans on them from time to time: Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe was not a religious man. The quote you see on atheist websites from time to time (“No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I; and all religion is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry”) seems to be more or less an accurate statement of his views. But the man was something close to obsessed with subjective experience, which leaves a space open not only for semi-traditional mysticism but for Kierkegaard-style religious existentialism. (My first paper in my PhD program was on this topic.)

So when Poe brings up the Church Fathers, which happens only very rarely, it’s generally to serve a higher purpose—to demonstrate a character’s intense subjectivity. The most famous instance is in the short story “Berenice,” one of his very best. Our narrator is one of Poe’s typical hyper-sensitive artist types, this time named Ægeus. He’s a half-cousin to Roderick Usher, sickly and gloomy. Indeed, his entire existence seems bound up in his family’s enormous library, in which his mother died giving birth to him.

His cousin Berenice, on the other hand, is “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy . . . roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path.” It takes a paranoid and neurotic subjectivist like Ægeus to see the shadows, of course, and he watches as his cousin develops an illness that strips her of her personality and identity. His own illness, at this point, “grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form . . . This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive.” He has become a hysteric—or a mystic.

His monomania is fed by his choice of reading material, which consists primarily of “St. Austin’s great work, the ‘City of God;’ and Tertullian ‘de Carne Christi.’ ” The operative sentence in the latter, of course, is the famous “Mortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est”: “The Son of God died; it is wholly credible because it is unsound. And, buried, he rose again; it is certain because it is impossible.” Ægeus’ hypersensitive mind takes this paradoxical statement to heart, and when Berenice dies and is buried, he unconsciously slinks out to the grave, exhumes the corpse, and uses dental equipment to pull out his cousin’s teeth.

That’s when we learn that Berenice hadn’t died after all; she was merely in a swoon, and this act of amateur dentistry has brought her out of it. (Biblical scholars: When did the “swoon theory” against the resurrection first enter theological conversation?) Her cousin’s monomania, fueled by the absurdist writings of the most unpleasant of the Church Fathers, has saved her, albeit in a horrifying way.

(I have the vague sense that the Patristics pop up in another of Poe’s tales, but I can’t place which one. I had assumed it was “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” a heavily philosophical conversation between two corpses buried in the same grave, but I was wrong. So this may be Poe’s lone reference to the Church Fathers.)

What this demonstrates is that the attitude we described in the podcast as typical of Evangelicals is by no means exclusive to Evangelicals. If the Church Fathers are our crazy uncles to whom we are related but to whom no one wishes to speak at the family reunion, we’re in good artistic company in thinking so. Poe asserts here that they have something valuable, perhaps even life-saving, to say—but in saying it they threaten our souls and our sanity.

The Christian Humanist Episode #3: The Crazy Uncles No One Talks To: The Church Fathers

2009-11-03T14:05:00.006-05:00

The third episode of The Christian Humanist Podcast should be up on iTunes shortly. In the meantime, you can download it here (not at the time I'm writing, but soon). In this episode, we discuss the Church Fathers and our relationship with them today. Listen as I display my utter ignorance of Church history! Listen as David and Nathan put me to shame! Just listen.

Show Notes

General Introduction
- Who are the Church Fathers?
- Are all Fathers saints?

Our Own Experiences with the Patristics
- And how do we feel today?
- Reformers and Patristics
- The hazy lines between Apostles and Fathers

The Fathers' Relationship with the Classics
- Their concern with philosophers
- Augustine's City of God
- Tertullian's denunciation of Christian humanism

The Church Fathers in Our Own Disciplines
- John Updike's Roger's Version
- The Wife of Bath objects!
- The Patristics up for grabs in the Renaissance

The Elephant in the Room
- Are we incorrect in our interpretations of the Bible when they differ from the Patristics'?
- The tyranny of the democracy of the dead
- C.S. Lewis suggests a via media
- The big Orthodox question
- What does "unanimous consent" even mean?
- Apostolic succession or unanimity of teaching?

Are the Patristics Fathers to Protestants, Too?
- Too influential to ignore
- Don't skip fifteen centuries of theology
- The Christian Classics Ethereal Library

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005.

Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. Ft. Collins, Co.: Ignatius, 1993.

Fathers of the Church. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Charlotte, N.C.: TAN, 2009.

Justin Martyr. The Writings of Justin Martyr. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Berkeley, Ca.: Apocryphile, 2007.

Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994.

Luther, Martin. The Bondage of the Will. New York: General Books LLC, 2009.

McGrath, Alistair. Christianity's Dangerous Idea. New York: HarperOne, 2008.

Milton, John. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 182-226.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.

Norris, Frederick W. Christianity: A Short Global History. Oxford: Oneworld, 2002.

Tertullian. On Idolatry. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004.

Updike, John. Roger's Version. New York: Knopf, 1996.

LINKS
Christian Classics Ethereal Library
The Catholic Encyclopedia: Fathers of the Church

'The Birth-Mark' Takes on Enlightenment Scientism

2009-10-30T05:41:00.003-04:00

In his excellent and highly recommended essay “Contemporary Southern Literature,” Richard M. Weaver posits the South as the only American region—and probably the only region in the world—capable of saving literature from two deep anthropological errors. In one corner, we have the Emersons and Thoreaus who spend their lives denying humanity’s capacity for wickedness; in the other, we have the later naturalistic school (Dresier, Crane, et al) who claim that human beings are mere symptoms of their environment. (If these two schools sound familiar, it’s because they largely survive today.) “One school of writing,” says Weaver

tried to present man as all glory. A later school tried to present him as all jest—for that is what he must be if he is considered merely the pawn of circumstances. Only the contemporary Southern school has combined the glory and the jest and remained faithful to the riddle of man which may never be answered.Weaver, like many of the South’s most strident advocates, is prone to overstatement. It’s true, of course, that the two movements he discusses—both of them peddling what is in the end a destructive philosophy of humankind, although I don’t think Emerson is as bad as he says he is—began north of the Mason-Dixon line. And it’s true that in 1959, at the time of his writing, the Southern Renaissance was presenting us with numerous writers who did justice to the terrible mystery of humanity.

But it’s not that simple; the South has always had its share of novelists who lean too far to one side or the other (Faulkner, who is fatalistic to a startling degree, is the most obvious kinsman to Crane and Dreiser; the post-Civil War writers who would have given everything they own to return to the era of happy slaves and virginal young women fit, in their way, in with the Transcendentalists.) And besides, you can always find counterexamples from other parts of the country. It’s patronizing for Weaver to claim the South as the spiritual center of American literature, even if he does so chiefly because as a region it has been undervalued through the years.

How he could read Hawthorne, for example, and not see a philosophical kinsman is beyond me. Hawthorne famously descends from the Puritans of Salem, Massachusetts, a name now synonymous with spiritual oppression and persecution, and he does not shy away from telling the story of that oppression in stark and disturbing terms. But he does not have a knee-jerk reaction to his Puritan ancestors the way Emerson and Thoreau do; in terms of his literature, at least, he pretty much remains a Puritan his entire career, whatever he actually believed.

Weaver should have been able to get behind “The Birth-Mark,” in particular, a story that anticipates Walker Percy’s skepticism of science’s reign over the popular mind and which, in the end, could have been written by Harry Crews if not for the absence of obscenity. Hawthorne seems to have written it for the sole purpose of taking all the air out of Enlightenment optimism of the variety that created Emerson. (The Transcendentalists were not, strictly speaking, Enlightenment men; they were instead Romantics in the Byronian/Keatsian mold. But the Enlightenment lead to Romanticism, which borrowed from the movement it deposed an overwhelming optimism as to the nature and destiny of humankind.)

Our protagonist is Aylmer, a scientist hell-bent on progressing his discipline until human beings conquer the world around them. In his world, “Nature seemed to open paths into the region of miracle.” Indeed, his scientific experiments are “of a spiritual affinity more . . . than any chemical one.” Aylmer’s philosophy is one in which the categories of physical and spiritual have collapsed into one. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it was true of the Middle Ages, as well, and largely true of Hawthorne’s own work. But Hawthorne reads the physical through the spiritual, whereas Aylmer wishes to read the spiritual through the physical.

Enlightenment-style scientism, then, is a reversal of the natural order of things, an attempt to reduce the complicated spiritual world to the easy world of appearances. Aylmer is sinister not because he is a misanthrope but because he loves humanity so much, and so blindly. The central plot of the story involves his relationship with his wife, who is nearly perfect but who has a small, hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek. This will not stand with her husband, who can’t look at it without turning it into “the visible mark of earthly imperfection.” He therefore elects to use his knowledge of chemistry to remove it and to create the perfect human being.

These, then, are the two marks of the Enlightenment’s abuse of science: Humanity is seen as ultimately perfectable, and it is humanity itself that can perfect it. Hawthorne is clear that what Aylmer and his real-life counterparts practice is not science but rather a sort of base superstition; we know this is true because of Aylmer’s appeal to the alchemists, who he really believes were onto something even if “a philosopher who should go deep enough to acquire the power would attain too lofty a wisdom to stoop to the exercise of it.” (Again, there’s the innate goodness of man on full display in a sort of free-market scientism. We must never ask if we should do something; we need only know that we can, and we must trust that we’re wise enough not to screw things up too badly.)

The problem with scientism’s obsession with the perfectability of humanity is that it completely ignores what it means to be human. Aylmer’s wife, Georgiana, has lived with this birthmark for her entire life, and no one has ever told her that it is a blemish. Her husband’s obsession over it leads her to a strong and irrational self-hatred, leading her to submit to Aylmer’s bizarre tests, which will eventually kill her.

The reason, of course, is that to be human means to be blemished. Once we attempt to remove all of the problems from a person—once we explain them away, for example, as the trend seems to be in modern psychiatry, or once we put to death that tricky old word, sin—we also remove something at the very core of their humanity. Aylmer kills his wife and grants to “the veriest clod of earth . . . a soul”; the two moves are not unconnected. What separates humanity from the matter around them is not just the ability to have faults but the inability not to.

The Christian Humanist Episode #2: Christian Humanism Meets John Calvin

2009-10-27T13:07:00.012-04:00

This week, The Christian Humanist podcast discusses John Calvin's influence, for good or for ill, on Christian humanism.

A brief technical note: If you subscribed last week to our feed on iTunes, you need to delete that feed, re-search for the podcast, and resubscribe. We had to delete and resubmit the podcast because things didn't show up the way we wanted them to.

General Introduction
- Response to questions from CWC: The Radio Show.
- How can Christian Humanism include both Erasmus and Aquinas?
- We refuse to comment on the relationship between faith and reason?
- Nathan begs Christian colleges to hire David and Michial.

Our First Encounters with Calvinism
- No polemics here.
- Southern Baptists and Calvinism.
- Calvinism as a solution to total depravity.
- A moratorium on Calvinist dating strategies.
- Personal questions and intellectual debates.
- How much Calvin have we read, anyway?
- What does Reformed mean in terms of Calvinism?
- Is Open Theism an option?

Calvin's Minimalism
- The Institutes as apology.
- Calvin as cherry-picker of the classics.
- Calvin's intellectual theology.
- Is there a place for visual art in Calvinism?

Calvin in Our Own Research

- Calvin as a giant of the 17th century.

- Reading Anglo-Saxon literature through Calvin.

- Calvinism and Christian existentialism.

Predestination

- Is it fair to bind Calvinism to predestination?

- Is predestination a comforting or horrible doctrine?

Calvin's Legacy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anselm. Monologion and Proslogion with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm. Trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1994.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

Perkins, William. “Perkins’ Diagram of the Path to Salvation.” Religion and Society in Early Modern England. Ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell. New York: Routledge, 2005. 139-140.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “The Humanism of Existentialism.” Essays in Existentialism. Ed. Wade Baskin. New York: Citadel, 1993. 31-62.

In God's Country

2009-10-22T07:55:00.003-04:00

Of the many aggravating buzzwords that cropped up around the administration of George W. Bush, perhaps the most aggravating was “the ‘blame America first’ crowd,” an epithet directed at anyone who dared to suggest that perhaps the events of September 11, 2001, were not undertaken merely because the terrorists “hated our freedom.” To say that America had any culpability was, for a time, tantamount to saying that we deserved it and that any nuclear weapon exploded over Chicago or New York or Los Angeles would also be well-deserved.

I suspect the general attitude that informed the use of this phrase springs from the notion of American Exceptionalism, which began long before the colonies became a country, continued on through Manifest Destiny, and got firmly attached to the Republican party about the time Ronald Reagan called the country a “city on a hill.” Exceptionalism sets up a false binary: Either America is the greatest country in the world—God’s country, in fact, created to be a shining example of democracy and Christianity, which are, in the eyes of some people, the same thing—or else it is the worst country in the world, a cesspool of intolerance that’s far inferior to anything in Europe. Republicans, in the eyes of some Democrats, say the former; Democrats, in the eyes of some Republicans, say the latter.

I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and so I suppose I’m somewhere in between the poles. I believe in American Exceptionalism to a limited extent in that I believe in the “mission” of the country and that I believe that democracy is a good system of government that beats out a lot of other options, but I don’t believe America holds a special religious status or (God forbid) that Christianity is somehow summed up in democracy. (In fact, I suspect God moves more freely in more oppressive countries, but I’m no church historian.)

Further, I believe that one thing that makes America great is its capacity for self-doubt. I think it means something important and good that one reaction to September 11 was for some citizens to ask what we did to deserve it. The proper attitude for both the individual and the nation is constant self-scrutiny, constant self-improvement, and, if you’re of a religious mindset, constant repentance. So maybe blaming America first isn’t such a bad thing.

That being said, I think the term is misapplied largely because the people in question often aren’t blaming America qua America first; rather, they’re blaming their political enemies first. Thus, anything negative that happened to America from 2002 to 2008 was, naturally enough, George W. Bush’s fault (including Hurricane Katrina, you’ll remember); and, for Glenn Beck, et al, anything that’s happening bad right now is Barack Obama’s fault. The correct position is instead an inward stare. When the economy hits the skids, the first question we should ask ourselves is, “What did I do to make this happen or to keep it from not happening?” That’s the right way to blame America first; as Langston Hughes says, “I, too, am America.” Starting with self-doubt is a very good way to save yourself from self-righteousness when you actually start looking around at other causes.

That’s one reason I like Nathaniel Hawthorne. I hated The Scarlet Letter for a long time until I finally came around last summer. I’m rereading the novel yet again, and I’m noticing more and more the degree to which Hawthorne suspends judgment before enacting judgment. A popular 20^th-/21^st-century reading of the novel, for example, is to say that those awful Puritans were wrong to treat Hester Prynne as if she’d done something sinful. (See, for example, the truly execrable 1995 film version starring Demi Moore.)

But Hawthorne doesn’t allow for that reading. Hester Prynne does the wrong thing when she sleeps with Dimmesdale, however understandable her loneliness and their connection is. She even admits her wrongdoing to herself and undertakes her sewing career with “an element of penance” in it. Nor is the scarlet A an unequivocally cruel punishment; it alienates her from her fellow colonists, it’s true, but by the end of the novel it’s come to signify something else entirely.

So Hawthorne’s problem with the Puritans is not that they blame Hester Prynne for doing something wrong—indeed, he goes along with that blame to a certain extent. His problem with them is that they enact this condemnation on someone outside of themselves, ignoring the sin that most certainly dwells in their own hearts, thereby using Hester as a scapegoat for the wrongdoing of the entire community. It’s the same thing we see in politics when we blame an entire financial crisis on one political administration—things just aren’t that simple.

Ah, you might say, but when Hawthorne points a finger at the Puritans, he’s got three pointing back at himself. Isn’t he just using Puritan sins as a way to cast the reader’s eyes away from his own sins or the sins of his society? Well, no, he’s not, as is evidenced by the (at times boring but overall worthwhile) introduction to The Scarlet Letter, titled “The Custom-House.” Here he comes clean about his own ancestry. If you’ve read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, you’ll no doubt remember Judge Hawthorn of the witch trials, who was an ancestor of Hawthorne’s and who put dozens of presumably innocent people to death:

I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed.

The only way, in other words, that Hawthorne can even get down to telling the condemnatory tale of Hester Prynne, is by implicating himself, via his ancestry, right away, and asking forgiveness from God and the reader for his own culpability, however unlikely or small.

It’s a remarkably humble move, one that greatly enriches the subtext of the novel, and one that could teach today’s political commentators (yes, including myself) quite a bit.

The Christian Humanist Episode #1: What Is Christian Humanism

2009-10-20T13:50:00.010-04:00

After a few misfires and foul-ups, I'm proud to announce that the first episode of my podcast with Nathan Gilmour and David Grubbs, "The Christian Humanist." We'll be recording these every Tuesday (at least this semester...things can always change) on a variety of topics. (We've got the first six or seven lined up, and they look like winners to me.) We've submitted the episode to iTunes, so it'll be up there before too long, and you can subscribe to it there if you are so inclined. I'll also post a link to the MP3 and the show notes here each week. Happy listening, and let us know what you think!

Episode #1: What Is Christian Humanism?

General Introduction

Definitions of Humanism

- “Secular humanism”

- Study of the humanities—discipline and education

- “Philosophy is the handmaiden of theology”

Humanism in the Early Church and the Medieval Era

- Justin Martyr’s adaptation of the Logos

- Tertullian’s rejection of Athens

- Alfred the Great as humanist

Humanism in the Renaissance

- Desiderius Erasmus vs. Martin Luther

- Francisco Suarez as heir of Aquinas

- John Milton’s classicism

- Francis Bacon’s New Science

General and Special Revelation

- John Calvin, the Seneca scholar

- Is Christian humanism intellectual arrogance?

20^th- and 21^st-century Humanism

- New Critics

- “Heroic Critics”

- The dismantling of the Canon

- Christian colleges and humanism

Theological Objections to Christian Humanism

- Pauline objection

- Augustinian objection

- Barthian objection

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1994.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1995.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Carson, D.A. Christ and Culture Revisited. New York: Eerdmans, 2008.

Denby, David. Great Books. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly and Other Writings. Ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton, 1989.

Justin Martyr. The Writings of Justin Martyr. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Berkeley, Ca.: Apocryphile, 2007.

Kurtz, Paul. Humanist Manifestos I and II. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1984.

L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. New York: Shaw, 2001.

Milton, John. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: HarperOne, 1987.

Suarez, Francisco. On Creation, Conservation, and Concurrence: Metaphysical Disputations 20-22. Trans. Alfred J. Freddoso. Chicago: St. Augustine’s, 2002.

Tertullian. De Praescriptione Haereticorum ad Martyas. New York: General, 2009.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Del Rey, 1986.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Links:

thechristianhumanist@gmail.com

Nathan Gilmour's blog

Columbia University’s Literature Humanities

Torrey Honors Institute

Bethel University’s Christianity and Western Culture

Bethel University’s Western Humanities

Why I Like Christian Colleges

Book Review: 'My Father's Tears and Other Stories'

2009-10-17T12:09:00.004-04:00

The party line on John Updike is that, while his novels are pretty good, it’s his short stories that will be his true legacy. I’ve always resisted this notion, not because there’s anything wrong with Updike’s short fiction but because his novels are so good. It’s in the longer fiction that we see the extent to which, contrary to some critics, Updike had something to say—given 300 pages to stretch it out, he moves beyond his famous descriptive skills and endows characters like Rabbit Angstrom or Roger Lambert with real philosophical import. The stories, on the other hand, are over in a flash, and more than any idea, you remember the turns of phrase and the images their author packs in.

The problem is that Updike didn’t release a good novel in the last thirteen years of his life. His last winner was 1996’s In the Beauty of the Lilies, which took everything he was good at and expanded it throughout four generations of would-be saints. It somehow hits all the things you associate with Updike—sex, death, popular culture, and religion—and puts them in an unfamiliar context, far from the dulleries of suburban wife-swapping that plagued late-period novels like Villages.

I’d mostly written Updike’s final decade off, in fact, after spending the first few months of 2009 reading Gertrude and Claudius, an interesting but not particularly successful “prequel” to Hamlet, and Terrorist, which tried its best to present a sympathetic portrayal of an Islamic radical but came out weak and flaccid. (It’s not quite as bad as everyone says it is, but it’s at best a noble failure.)

So reading My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, Updike’s final book, was a revelation. (I should say that it’s his final book as far as we know—one might imagine a Prince-esque vault full of unpublished fiction and poetry in Updike’s recently sold Beverly Farms estate, but given that the man published at the rate of 1.3 books per year, I find that prospect, however titillating, unlikely.) Updike had not lost his powers; he’d only lost the ability to express them in spurts of 300 pages. Indeed, the eighteen stories in this volume rank among his most effective work, bolstered by a new sort of melancholy one does not find in the best of his novels.

It’s impossible to read My Father’s Tears and Other Stories without thinking of Updike’s death, which followed the last story in the volume (“The Full Glass”) by eight months and which preceded the publication of the collection by five. With a few exceptions (“Morocco,” first published in 1979 and dealing with events a decade earlier, being the most obvious), Updike creates shadow-selves in these stories only to watch them decay or destroy them outright. There’s thus an air of suicide here, coupled with an obvious grasp at immortality, since Updike knows people will be reading his fiction long after his body has decayed.

The selves he presents us with are familiar—most of them could easily be Rabbit Angstrom or Piet Hanema or Roger Lambert, or for that matter, the Updike we discover beneath the fiction in his memoirs, Self-Consciousness. But, presented as they are in the winter of their lives, they are simultaneously unfamiliar. They’re aware of what awaits them in months of years, aware that the life they have drank so eagerly from for decades is about to slip through their fingers.

Their reactions vary; some, like our old friend David Kern, who shows up in two stories, do everything they can to recapture the past and make it part of whatever small future they have remaining for them. In “The Walk with Elizanne,” Kern meets his first girlfriend at his high-school class’s fiftieth reunion, discovers the secret meaning of life in male-female relationships:

Elizanne, he wanted to ask her, what does it mean, this enormity of our having been children and now being old, living next door to death? He had been the age then that his grandsons were now. As he had lived, he had come to see that for a man there is no antidote to death but a woman. Yet from where, he wanted now to ask Elizanne, does a woman draw this antidote, her cosmic balm? And does it work for her as well?

The story ends with a lovely description of the titular walk, one that redeems David’s sadness at the ravages of age and makes a sacrament of their innocence and exploration. David’s spiritual brother is the unnamed narrator of “The Full Glass,” who spends the story reminiscing on his attempts—successful and otherwise—to grasp life by the horns, to truly live it, to drink from a full glass.

Other characters can’t muster this effort. Martin Fairchild, the protagonist of “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe,” finds himself faced with a cruel and uncaring universe, devoid, the scientists tell him, of a benign or benevolent divine presence. He can transcend it only through the violence that is done to him, as when he is injured by a purse-snatcher in Seville.

But this strangely pleasing incident only goes so far, and Martin finds himself alone when he returns home. He retreats to his barn, the home of an ancient cupboard owned by his mother before her death, a home for “Souvenirs of a life of which Fairchild was the last caring witness” (151). The story’s Flannery O’Connor-esque ending allows him a final moment of transcendence of his memory and of the universe’s blind watchmaker.

Some of Updike’s protagonists finally learn morality in their final years. Updike has always been a frustrating novelist for his steadfast refusal to judge any character or to present any clear moral; combined with his own antinomian sexual history and his continued profession of belief in Christianity, he and his autobiographical characters have always been an enigma. But in several of these stories—“Free” and “Outage”—they finally learn to love their wives and submit to a conventional sexual morality. I can’t say much more without giving away the ending of the story, a move that violates Updike’s own rules for reviewing books—but it’s nice to see their author taking a stand for once.

The true gem of My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, however, is “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” written shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. Updike takes the point-of-view of four participants in the terrorist attacks—an Episcopalian who, like Updike, watched the towers crumble from Brooklyn Heights; Mohamed Atta, who hijacked Flight 11 and spends his section of the story in a strip club, drinking whiskey and trying to fit in; an elderly woman who witnesses the heroism of those aboard Flight 93, who prays for mercy seconds before hitting the ground outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania; and a bond trader on the top floor of the North Tower, who has his final conversation with his wife before jumping out the window.

Writing about such a horrific event, especially so soon after it happened, must be one of the very hardest thing an author can do, and numerous others—Don DeLillo comes to mind—have failed to produce compelling work out of the wreckage of the towers. But Updike succeeds largely because he refuses to draw conclusions; he presents these four stories without sentimentality and therefore succeeds in moving the reader. His use of religion is understated but effective; the Hand of God doesn’t appear in the wreckage, and the characters who maintain their faith in the face of tragedy do so for reasons even they don’t understand, which strikes me, at any rate, as accurate.

Aside from a few stories about his childhood—these have never particularly interested me—and a few that go nowhere (“Spanish Prelude to a Second Marriage,” for example, is overwhelmingly boring and detracts from the overall mood of the collection), My Father’s Tears and Other Stories is a moving end to the career of the person who may be the quintessential fiction writer of 20th-century America. Anyone disappointed by Seek My Face or The Widows of Eastwick would be wise to turn here before writing off Updike’s final decade.

The Jewish-Presbyterian World of the Coen Brothers

2009-10-14T06:33:00.003-04:00

I don’t write much about movies on this blog—aside from my numerous Disney posts—mostly because I haven’t seen enough of them to have much of value to say. The exception to my general ignorance, however, are the films of the Coen Brothers. I’ve seen all of them except this year’s A Serious Man (which I’m dying to see and which I will probably use in my dissertation once I do), and I like them all, even The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty.

The complaint you frequently hear about the Coens is that their movies are all style and no substance. They’re not—critics must be thinking of the beautiful but vapid work of Tim Burton. The Coens’ work is ripe with profundity, even as it defies analysis; they’re fond of playing tricks on the audience, throwing out red herrings and, presumably, laughing as the bad analyses pour in. (A few examples: the claims that O Brother, Where Art Thou is based on The Odyssey and that Fargo is a true story, both of which they’ve later denied.)

No, the meaning of the Coen movies are hidden beneath the flash and glitter of the cinematography (always perfectly planned and perfectly executed), beneath the complicated dialogue that almost never fits the characters, beneath the layers of postmodern “clues” that lead nowhere as surely as a Thomas Pynchon novel. The meaning, furthermore, belongs as much to John Calvin as it does to the Coens’ secular Judaism, to the first point of his famous TULIP, total depravity.

Calvin, as is obvious to anyone who’s read him or anything about him, is no fan of humanity. God has implanted in each of us an inborn religious drive, but it is “either smothered or corrupted, partly by ignorance, partly by malice” (Institutes I.IV). Man is totally depraved, which, despite the occasional defenses of Calvinists, does indeed mean that every single part of every single human being is tainted and untrustworthy.

This is not an optimistic view, to understate the obvious, and it becomes even darker when one disregards the other four points of TULIP, which serve to lessen and mitigate it. The Coens are forced to disregard the other four points, of course, since they all (unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints) require an active and gracious God. The Coens’ God, best I can tell, is absent and/or cruel, in the tradition of the darker books of the Hebrew Bible, and so there’s no room for election or grace in their theology. (Apparently A Serious Man makes this even clearer; someone should buy me tickets to this movie.)

But they’re almost wholly on board with total depravity. Their dramas, in particular, all feature a force of unrelenting and unexplainable evil. No Country for Old Men’s psychotic serial killer, Anton Chigurh, is the most obvious example, even though he was created by Cormac McCarthy. But all the dramas feature a similarly evil character—think of Gaear Grimsrud in Fargo, or Julian Marty in Blood Simple—that is almost unstoppable by the other, more sympathetic, characters. The amazing thing about the Coens, however, is that these figures of evil never lose their humanity; they maintain the image of God, however perverted and corrupted by violence it may be.

Of the dramas, Barton Fink has the most sophisticated and interesting portrayal of evil. No character in the film is good—even its protagonist, whom we’re set up to like given his similarity to the Coens themselves and his name’s presence in the title, proves himself a patronizing and pompous fool. He’s a “friend of the common man,” as Pappy O’Daniel will be nine years later, but he’s completely blocked out the stories around him.

No, the most likeable character in the movie is John Goodman’s Charlie Meadows, a traveling insurance salesman who lives next door to Barton at the Hotel Earle. He’s a big, gregarious guy, a little stupid perhaps, but he has a good heart and is the “only person in Hollywood [Barton] can talk to.” Problem is, Barton doesn’t listen to him; when he finds out his new neighbor is a writer, Charlie repeatedly declares that “I could tell you some stories,” but before he has an opportunity to do so, Barton launches into rant after rant on the state of American drama, which should belong to people like Charlie instead of “the fifth earl of Bastrop and Lady Higginbottom and . . . Nigel Grinch-Gibbons.”

So the audience likes Charlie Meadows much more than it likes Barton Fink, and that’s why it comes as such a shock when [SPOILER ALERT] he turns out to be the notorious serial killer Karl “Madman” Mundt, who “likes to ventilate people with a shotgun and then cut their heads off.” He’s done just that, it turns out, to a woman with whom Barton has slept—and he’s somehow done it silently, as Barton slept next to her.

The obvious question, of course, is, How could Barton have slept through a murder committed six inches from him? The answers are suggestions rather than statements. The movie takes place in 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor necessitated U.S. involvement in World War II and several years after Hitler’s death camps became known. So one possible answer comes in the form of another question (in the Jewish tradition): How could the United States, and in particular the Jewish liberals in Hollywood and on Broadway, have slept soundly while millions of people were being gassed?

That’s the political answer. The theological answer is that we’re not quite sure that Karl Mundt committed the murder. He seems genuinely shocked when Barton goes to him for help, after all, and he doesn’t seem to have a key to the room, nor could he move silently through it. Barton claims he didn’t kill his lover, but he could have done so unconsciously, in his sleep, which would certainly fit with the Coens’ dim view of humanity. Charlie gives Barton a head-sized box just before he skips town; we never find out if it contains Audrey’s head or not, but when Barton is asked at the end of the film if it is his, he can only reply, “I don’t know.” He finally recognizes depravity—not just around him in individuals or in social structures, but in himself.

Evil is less obvious in the comedies, perhaps, though it’s still there in the form of Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona or Sidney J. Mussburger in The Hudsucker Proxy. More often, however, the Coens show the darkness of human nature in their comedies by flat-out stupidity. The three convicts in O Brother, Where Art Thou have to be three of the dumbest people ever to be projected onto a movie screen, for example; and nearly everyone in The Big Lebowski is so stupid they’d be ejected from a public kindergarten (and probably were).

This is in keeping with Calvin’s view of total depravity, in which God’s presence in the world is blocked not only by evil but by human ignorance, or, as Calvin prefers to call it, stupidity. And this stupidity is exacerbated by vanity: “their stupidity is not excusable, since it is caused not only by vain curiosity but by an inordinate desire to know more than is fitting, joined with a false confidence” (Institutes I.IV.1). If there’s a better description of Ulysses Everett McGill, I don’t know what it is—he even uses his limited knowledge of history, science, and society, to declare that the age of religion has passed, even as God clearly saves him and his friends from execution. The hardened and ignorant human heart denies the presence of grace.

The Coens are not completely committed to total depravity, however, as a viewing of Fargo demonstrates. Frances McDormand, who is married to Joel Coen, plays small-town sheriff Marge Gunderson, whose politeness and kindness are very real (as opposed to every other aw-shucks Minnesotan in the movie) and whose detective abilities save the day. I spent the entire movie waiting for the very pregnant Gunderson to be savagely murdered, but it never happens; indeed, she performs the coda of the movie, the moral, a speech that demonstrates the way in which she accepts but can’t quite understand the depravity of those around her. (Fargo is to some extent Melville’s Billy Budd with a happy ending—Marge is as innocent as a lamb but as crafty as a serpent. She can recognize evil but refuses to participate, whereas Billy can scarcely believe it exists.)

This is in the end a very different vision of depravity than Calvin’s, in that it holds out the possibility of a human-based redemption or exemption from the big T in TULIP. (The Coens, who are getting bleaker as the years progress, may go back on it when they cast McDormand as the truly vain and vapid Linda Litzke in Burn After Reading, a comedy so black that it may be darker than No Country for Old Men.) They don’t hold out hope for a God who intervenes, at least not in benevolent ways, and so if there’s to be hope in this world, it must come in the form of genuinely “good people” like Marge Gunderson. Still, Calvin might approve their oeuvre with reservations. Out of the hundreds of characters in their fourteen movies, we’re given only one who is neither debased nor stupid—hardly a good sign for the human redemption of humankind.

Stephen Crane and the Destruction of the Human

2009-10-11T08:53:00.003-04:00

The popular wisdom is that the great national theme of American literature is that of the heroic individual vs. the cruel and robotic society. Thus we get Natty Bumppo single-handedly winning the French and Indian War; thus we get Huck Finn lighting out for the territory to escape the Missouri slave trade; and thus we get the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, with Cheever’s and Updike’s disgusted suburbanites doing anything they can to escape the suffocating ennui around them.

Millions of readers have seen the same forces at play in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—the only Crane most people ever read, apart from the early free-verse experiment “War Is Kind.” (I’m not much better, mind you; I read “The Open Boat” in my sophomore year of college, but I don’t remember anything about it.) It’s not exactly a misreading if you read Henry Fleming’s army misadventures as his struggle against society, but it’s not entirely accurate, either.

Certainly Henry feels oppressed. Who wouldn’t? Crane never refers to any character in this novel by his Christian name. He gives us only “the youth” or “the tall soldier” or “the loud soldier,” leaving us to discover through dialogue that their names are actually Henry, Jim, and Wilson. These men—boys, really—are faceless and nameless, pieces of meat to catch the fire of the pieces of meat who fight for the other side.

The war itself doesn’t seem to be worth much. We’re never told in the novel that this is the Civil War, and while Shelby Foote reveals that the battle in which Henry disproves, then proves, his mettle is Chancellorsville, you’d have to be a Civil War historian of his magnitude to figure it out from the text, since there’s no reference to place or person. No deeper reasons are given for the war; the soldiers themselves seem innocent as to why it’s taking place, and all they want is personal glory, to prove themselves in the context of mythic warriors like Homer’s Achilles.

But, as Crane shows us, this glory is not forthcoming. Henry finds himself “merely as part of a vast blue demonstration. His province was to look out, as far as he could, for his personal comfort” (14). In such a vast and ugly machine as the Union regiment, personal glory is impossible, and all you’re left with is a base selfishness. Self-interest becomes self-assertion.

So when Henry runs away from his first battle, we’re inclined to think him an existential hero even as he is a traditional failure. We’re inclined, in other words, to read his desertion as a Heideggerian action, a rebellion against the cruel strictures of society. After all, before his desertion, he finds his Self nearly wholly subsumed into the machinations of his unit:

He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part—a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country—was in a crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee, no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand.

The pre-revolutionary reader—if such a person existed for a novel published in 1895—would no doubt see this subsuming of the self into a larger purpose as a good thing. A person reading after the October Revolution and particularly after the end of World War II would see it as an unequivocal evil, since it involves the utter lost of the self and the triumph of an oppressive and violent whole. Crane is somewhere in the middle.

Crane, it should be noted, wrote into a very specific cultural and literary milieu. The late 19^th century was, in America, the heyday of naturalism, possibly the bleakest artistic movement in American cultural history. The movement began in the wake of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which took man’s unique place in the universe from him and made him an object among objects.

Thus these writers (Jack London, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser are the most notable naturalists in America; Émile Zola is the most famous outside of the States) presented their characters as doomed by the machinations of their societies, destined to fail and to be destroyed by a culture that was much more powerful than them. It’s the bleakest parts of Calvinism without a benevolent deity calling the shots.

So Crane is neither valorizing nor judging the system; the naturalists, apart from Dreiser (who is more preachy than any Victorian novelist I’ve ever read), are notorious for their utter lack of moralizing. Instead, Crane gives us life as he sees it, with no harsh words for the society that makes Henry one of their own, nor any praise for the young man who deserts it out of fear for his life.

In fact, when Henry deserts his regiment, he’s no more acting from his own volition than he was when he was caught up in the collective heat of battle. Crane tells us that another deserting soldier does so from the call of “a revelation” (76), and when Henry himself runs, he does so “like a blind man” (77), mechanically and thoughtlessly. Henry, it seems, has been so conditioned by the social forces that have shaped his entire life to this point, to run; it’s not something he thinks about and not something he chooses. He’s not responsible for it, to bless or to blame. He’s an animal or a robot.

Henry’s problem, in Crane’s judgment, is that he can’t accept this state of things. He shifts between twin poles of total heroism (as when he enters the battle at the end of the novel and saves the American flag) and total debasement (as when he calls himself a worm for his desertion), when the truth is something else entirely. Henry, like the rest of us, is not responsible for his deeds or his misdeeds, and it’s society that makes him what he is.

That’s why I say that Crane destroys the human in The Red Badge of Courage. Henry is freed of responsibility by the narrator and by the reader, which is an attractive proposition, especially when he’s being let off the hook for his cowardice. But he’s done so at the expense of his individuality and his nobility—he’s let off the hook because he is little more than a cog in a vast machine, with no help of ever asserting any kind of authentic self. If his authentic self existed, it would be that of an animal, unthinking and instinctual. This is no way to live, but Crane shows us clearly that it’s the way man must live under a wholly naturalist system. And he does so better than Dreiser and London, perhaps better than anyone.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Charles Brockden Brown

2009-10-05T18:17:00.004-04:00

In my last post on Charles Brockden Brown, I complained that while, in the words of one critic, he may have been the first American novelist of ideas, he lacked the philosophical courage and the literary talent to follow those ideas through to interesting conclusions. This impression has been slightly lessened upon my reading of his later novel Edgar Huntly, which is more willing than its more famous predecessor to interrogate humanity’s inner being but which still betrays a reluctance to see the heart of darkness lurking behind Enlightenment thought.

Edgar Huntly is for its first third or so a detective knowledge (decades, you will note, before “Murders in the Rue Morgue”), in which the titular protagonist tries to find out who has committed the savage murder of his best friend. The subtitle of the novel informs us that Huntly is a sleepwalker (a practice which no doubt signified the same sort of mystical pseudo-science as ventriloquism and hypnotism in the early days of this nation), and so the reader is led to believe that he will himself have murdered his friend in his sleep and be unwittingly hunting himself, seeking punishment.

Brown encourages us to scoff at Huntly; as we know before he does that he sleepwalks, we are able to notice how hypocritical he’s being when he says of another suspect that

The incapacity of sound sleep denotes a mind sorely wounded. It is thus that atrocious criminals denote the possession of some deadly secret. The thoughts, which considerations of safety enables [sic] them to suppress or disguise during wakefulness, operate without impediment, and exhibit their genuine effects, when the notices of sense are are shut out from a knowledge of their intire [sic] condition.

The double self he sets up for Clithero could, no doubt, apply to himself as well, and indeed, he is remarkably double-minded. For example, he remarks at one point that “Curiosity is vicious, if undisciplined by reason, and inconducive to benefit,” then turns around, just two sentences later, and says that “Curiosity, like virtue is its own reward.” He is in possession of a remarkably sunny attitude toward human nature, prizing a self-righteous benevolence in the face of Clithero’s supposed sin, setting himself in the position of a judgmental but forgiving God.

So yes, we’re expecting that he will receive his come-uppance in the form of the revelation of his own double self, a shadow-side that takes over at night and murders those closest to him. But that doesn’t happen. The detective story drops out 100 pages in, and we’re left with a Cooper-esque wilderness adventure. Clithero confesses that, yes, he is a sleepwalker, and yes, he accidentally killed someone, but that was a long ago and has nothing to do with Huntly’s friend. Then he disappears into a deep cave, presumably to starve himself to death in penance.

Huntly himself has become a sleepwalker by this point, however—apparently it’s contagious—and he wakes up in that same deep, dark cave. These actions, both the sleepwalking and the cave, set Clithero up as Huntly’s shadow-self, a prefiguring of the döppelganger trope that would prove so popular half a century later in the American Renaissance. But Clithero is nowhere to be found; instead, Huntly runs into a panther, which he kills with a tomahawk and eats raw, and a tribe of American Indians in the midst of raping a young white woman. He kills them, too. He has become a savage, a shadow-self.

Problem is, we’re not encouraged to condemn him for his slaughter of the Indians. They are, after all, “savages” and are committing a terrible crime against an innocent woman, and besides that, they would probably have killed him if he hadn’t gotten them first. Huntly is disgusted at himself for eating the panther, but the reader is inclined to let him off the hook; he was starving, after all.

So Huntly manages to rise above the “savagery” around him, even when he is in the dark, sinister cave, the site of amorality and license. (Think of the woods in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.”) Indeed, by the end of the novel (and after a series of increasingly mystifying and poorly conceived adventures), he is proven to be nearly completely innocent.

The small exception is that his sunny view of humanity has been disproven. Clithero, it turns out, is a madman who did not actually kill the woman he said he did all those years ago. In fact, she has arrived on American shores, a fact which Huntly relates to him in an attempt to ease his conscience. The result is that Clithero attempts to kill her again and then drowns himself en route to prison. Huntly is safe, free, and relatively innocent, but he has learned something about human nature.

It’s true that this sequence of events is more philosophically interesting—if less well-written—than those of Wieland, but they are not what they could be. The Enlightenment mind is now aware of the presence of evil in the world, and, unlike Clara Wieland, is aware of slippery morality. But this evil remains a presence outside of the mind itself; it exists in the savages and in the madman, even if that madman is a döppelganger of the hero. Evil is therefore made “safe” for the observer; the hero is kept pure, and we will have to wait for Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to show us where the darkness really lies: in the heart of every human being.

I’ve now read a third of Brown’s novels—his two best, by popular opinion—and I can declare with some certainty that his place in the American canon is primarily chronological. He’s not that good of a literary stylist (though he is better than all but the best of Poe), and his philosophy is thin and, in the end, flaccid. It’s been an interesting experience reading him, but what will stick with me is the questions I had to pose to myself—not the ones he attempted to pose to me.

Killing the Father

2009-10-03T15:40:00.004-04:00

Poor Bronson Alcott. All but forgotten today, eclipsed by his much more famous daughter, Louisa May, he nevertheless practically invented the modern educational system and introduced veganism to American culture for the first time. And yet we know him, for the most part, secondhand, whether it’s from Mr. March in his daughter’s Little Women or from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brutal portrait of “Hollingsworth” in The Blithedale Romance. He’s a pathetic or sinister footnote to much more substantial texts.

But it’s not for lack of trying on his fault. Alcott desperately wanted to do something important, whether it was his two unconventional schools (the Temple School in Boston and the Concord School of Philosophy and Literature), his utopian community, Fruitlands, or his Transcendental philosophy, never formulated particularly cohesively and eclipsed in a major way by that of his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even Margaret Fuller, a name known mostly only to students of the American Renaissance, has a better reputation than Alcott.

Alcott lived a long life, however, long enough to see his daughter become a popular success. (In fact, he died only two days before her, and she never learned of his death.) I am not aware of his reaction to her books, although we’re given a clue in Good Wives, the second volume of Little Women, in which Mr. March, upon seeing Jo’s literary success, tells her that “You have had the bitter, now comes the sweet. Do your best and grow as happy as we are in your success.” But if Bronson Alcott said something similar to his own daughter, it must have been through clenched teeth.

Little Women is famously autobiographical, telling the story of the Alcott sisters (Anna, Louisa May, Elizabeth, and May) without changing very many details at all. Other than Jo’s popular opinion-forced marriage at the end of the second volume, the only major change from life to novel comes in the person of Mr. March. The Alcotts were as poor as the Marches, by all accounts, but Louisa was too ashamed or proud to present the reader of Little Women with the real reason for their poverty. Bronson Alcott, unlike Mr. March, never served in the Civil War, and the family was destitute because of his utter failure at everything he tried.

So Mr. March figures in the first volume of the novel only as an absence, whereas Bronson Alcott was apparently there in his family’s life the entire time, presumably playing a role in his daughters’ various adventures. Louisa’s sending Mr. March off to war strikes her father from her published memory, simultaneously making him unimportant to literary history; it’s cruel, from a certain perspective, even if it’s probably more interesting for the narrative.

Mr. March returns from the front at the end of the first novel and is thus present in the second. But he is only present in the most technical of senses and in fact has less influence in the second volume than he did in absentia in the first. In the writing of her most famous novel, Alcott emasculates her father; instead of being a noble failure, Mr. March is a pleasant inconsequentiality. Some critics, it is true, would argue that this move had to be made, since the March household is a feminine bower, a seat of female power against the harshness of the masculine world outside. This may be true, but it’s also true that the novel is based very directly on real people, and so there can be no purely artful decision for Alcott—changing Mr. March changes forever the public’s perception of her father.

(On the other hand, it may be better for Bronson Alcott that his daughter mostly left him out of the novel; when Elizabeth Alcott died in 1858, it may have been because her father’s strict vegan diet left her malnourished and weak. As things stand, if the reader of Little Women wishes to cast blame on anyone for Beth’s death, it likely falls on Mrs. March, for insisting she take care of the baby from whom she catches scarlet fever.)

These sins of omission are enough to make one feel sorry for Bronson Alcott; however, they are not the only violence his daughter perpetrates on him. The entire structure and focus of Little Women can easily be read as a rebellion against her father’s concerns and methods. As Nina Auerbach points out, whereas the Platonist Bronson cared mostly for the invisible and eternal world, Louisa “stubbornly clings throughout her novels to the primary reality of physical things.” There is almost no Transcendentalism to be found in Little Women; the novel’s style belongs much more clearly to the burgeoning Realism movement, and its philosophy is decidedly pragmatic: Here is how a young lady should act.

In fact, when Transcendentalism finally does briefly enter the novel, it does so only so Alcott can dismiss it. Jo finds herself at a dinner party of illuminati, no doubt similar to the meetings of the Transcendentalist Club that Louisa May Alcott must have witnessed:

The conversation was miles beyond Jo’s comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms; and the only thing “evolved from her inner consciousness” was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before; that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God.

Jo ends up rejecting this philosophy, and part of the reason, one suspects, she marries Professor Bhaer is that “Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo; the old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new; God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact.” Alcott creates the character of Professor Bhaer so that she may marry her alter-ego off to him, leaving her father’s oppressive house for good. The invention, it is true, was dictated by popular opinion, but it has the unintended consequence of breaking her from her father’s failures and philosophies once and for all.

With this in mind, perhaps it’s time for a rediscovery of Bronson Alcott’s work. I’ve not read him myself (what a hypocrite!), but apparently his work has much to say to the modern age, with its emphasis on animal rights, sustainability in agriculture, and a humane diet. Perhaps it’s time we released Alcott from the grip of the venomous and unfair fictional representations of him that have colored our understandings for more than a century now.

There's Seven People Dead on a South Dakota Farm

2009-09-28T16:05:00.002-04:00

I’d never read Charles Brockden Brown before I was forced to for my comprehensive exams. I’d always thrown his Gothic novels in with the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and so my distaste for Poe always kept me away from him. In last night’s fit of insomnia (it’s strangely appropriate), however, I read through the entirety of Wieland, an interesting if not successful novel.

Warren Barton Blake calls Brown the world’s first novelist of ideas. I’m not qualified to make that call, knowing almost nothing about Continental fiction, but there’s little doubt in my mind that Wieland is a novel fixated upon an idea. What I noticed, however, is that Brown’s fixation on this idea is in constant tension with his desire to (a) provide a tidy moral to the story; and (b) make sure we know that he doesn’t believe in the supernatural.

The idea at the center of Wieland involves the possibility of divine revelation, and its central question is, “If you think God is speaking to you, how do you know?” It’s a good question, for sure, and one that has been a major concern of Western culture ever since Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac on that mountain. Kierkegaard, for example, wrote his most philosophically successful book on the subject, praising Abraham for suspending every ethical principle he had to obey the terrible commands of God.

When I reread Fear and Trembling earlier this year, I was made uncomfortable. In a year in which the tanking economy and whatever power you want to ascribe to Satan has driven numerous men to kill themselves and their families, it is not possible to read the story of Abraham or any speech in praise of him in a blasé fashion. If divine revelation is inherently subjective (and for Kierkegaard it nearly always is), and if it always goes against prevailing moral and logical systems (and for Kierkegaard it nearly always does), how can we simultaneously praise Abraham and condemn the out-of-work banker who slaughters his entire family? Couldn’t God be speaking to the latter as much as the former?

Kierkegaard presents this argument almost before we can, but his response to it is frustrating at best. If a parishioner hears the priest praise Abraham, goes home, and kills his own son, it is the priest’s fault because “he hadn’t known what he was saying”—because he hasn’t taken the story seriously enough. But that doesn’t offer those of us who do take the story seriously much to go on, and the question still stands: If religious decrees are personal, and if they can go against morality, how can we wholeheartedly condemn the man who murders his family?

Well, Charles Brockden Brown raises the question, however briefly. We are presented with a family of religious fanatics. The elder Wieland (we’re never given his name) is a model of Kierkegaardian belief, a sect unto himself, one that admits no outsiders and refuses to judge outsiders. One night, he refuses to do something God commands and spontaneously combusts; his wife kills herself soon after, leaving their children orphans. (Literary historians: Is this the first instance of spontaneous combustion in literature?)

His son and daughter grow up as “bosom companions,” as the old novels are fond of saying, and soon become the center of a very tight-knit community of thinkers and gadabouts. Then a mysterious stranger blows into town, and everything falls apart. The end result is that the younger Wieland, in a fit of religious frenzy, ends up murdering his wife, servants, and children; further, he insists that, while he certainly performed the act, he is not morally culpable for it because “my deed was enjoined by heaven . . . obedience was the test of perfect virtue, and the extinction of selfishness and error.”

Had Brown left it here, we’d close the novel with something big and important to think about; in fact, had he left it here, it would have been the biting statement against the Second Great Awakening I think he meant for it to be. But he doesn’t. Instead, he reveals that nothing at all supernatural has happened, that in fact that mysterious stranger was a ventriloquist who tricked Theodore Wieland into the murders. In wrapping the novel up this way, Brown takes a fantastic open question and shuts it tight—depending on your perspective, he either lets God off the hook for Wieland’s crimes or else makes Him nonspeaking or nonexistent, and neither of these options is anywhere near as interesting as what the novel could have been.

So, two hundred years later, let’s tear out those pages of the book and let the question stand by itself: Assuming you believe that God spoke to Abraham and told him to kill Isaac, on what basis can we tell anyone that any horrible thing they do does not come from divine command? What do we make of this most horrible story of the Hebrew Bible?

Esther's Version

2009-09-24T16:49:00.003-04:00

Last time I wrote on John Updike’s Roger’s Version (please note the warning at the top of that page), I went somewhat outside the field of my own expertise and talked about the homosocial undercurrent that runs all through the novel. I returned to the book again this week while studying for my comprehensive exams, and this time through I focused much more on the theological parts of the novel than the sexual parts.

All for the best. I love Updike, probably more than I love any other author, but I hate his sex scenes—truly, viscerally hate them. They’re almost always unnecessary (though my last post gets to some of the reasons they might be present in Roger’s Version), and as the author aged, they just made him seem like a dirty old man. It was not for nothing that he won the Lifetime Achievement Bad Sex award.

So let’s ignore the sex scenes and focus on the theological debate. Roger’s Version presents us essentially with two versions of Christianity. In one corner, we have Roger, a professor of divinity who loves Karl Barth even more than he loves fantasizing about his wife sleeping with other men but who has completely lost his faith, at least as far as the reader can tell. And in the other corner, we have Dale Kohler, a graduate student in computer science who sets out to prove God’s existence via computer.

We are set up to trust Roger and to distrust Dale—after all, this is Roger’s version; he narrates the novel, and the only time we’re privy to Dale’s thoughts is when Roger imagines them. We know that Updike followed Barth on theological matters, and so when Roger quotes The Word of God and the Word of Man and says things like this—

If [God] is omnipotent, I would think it within His powers to keep hiding. And I’m not sure it isn’t a bit heretical of you to toss the fact of God in with a lot of other facts. Even Aquinas, I think, didn’t postulate a God Who could be hauled kicking and screaming out from some laboratory closet, over behind the blackboard—

we are inclined to believe him. Dale, meanwhile, is annoying in his fundamentalism and his tunnel-visioned zeal; however much he knows about science, we are inclined to believe him an arrogant fool.

But as you get to know him more, you start to realize how perceptive he is in his analysis of Roger, who uses God’s unknowability as an excuse to do anything he wants to do, including (spoiler alert) sleeping with his niece late in the novel. (His moral sense, like that of so many Updike protagonists, is nonexistent; he refers to his incest/adultery as “a small secret to protect.”) So Dale is exactly right when he tells Roger that

You don’t want God to break through. People in general don’t want that. They just want to grub along being human, and dirty, and sly, and amusing, and having their weekends with Michelob, and God to stay put in the churches if they ever decide to drop by, and maybe pull them out in the end, down that tunnel of light all these [near death experiences] talk about.

What we have in Roger’s Version, then, are two competing versions of nonbelief. Roger recognizes that the whole Christian enterprise is built on faith, but while he memorizes everything about Christendom, he doesn’t seem to have much faith at all. Dale, on the other hand, belies his own claims at faith when he attempts to remove the need for faith, proving God like a mathematical theorem. Both of these are unsatisfactory.

The odd twist in the novel is that Dale himself becomes an object of faith about midway through. Roger’s wife, Esther, cues us into the move when she says that “Dale sounds like a rather touching young man,” a declaration which Roger is quick to inform us comes “on no evidence.” That Roger imagines Esther sleeping with Dale does give us a limited explanation for the inclusion of the sex scenes (though it doesn’t explain why they have to be so disgusting): These fantasies are neither psychosis nor prophecy; they are something concrete for Roger to put his faith in.

As my Salinger post hints, however, faith qua faith is not the issue; it must be properly directed to be helpful or meaningful in any real way. Thus, any religious leanings Roger’s fantasies about Dale and Esther reveal are tainted with the stench of Karl Barth’s Towers of Babel, false paths to a false God. These fantasies thus reveal Roger’s lack of faith in the Christian God even more clearly. All he has to trust in is sex, and not even his own sex: sex he may be completely fabricating between his wife and his worst enemy.

Again, the novel’s ending appears to confirm Roger’s theology at the expense of Dale’s. At a cocktail party, Dale talks with Myron Kriegman, a snide and fast-talking atheist who causes the young man to lose his faith nearly completely. Roger’s brand of fideism has seemingly been proven right—his faith, however mediocre and lukewarm, is safe from the proofs of materialism and the meanness of the world. It’s an ugly picture of faith for many evangelicals. Given the choice of being lukewarm and secure like Roger or being fervent but precarious like Dale, a lot of people would gladly choose the latter.

There may be a third way, though. In the novel’s final scene, Esther—who has shown absolutely no interest in religion heretofore—tells her husband she is going to go to church. Her reason is that she wishes to annoy her husband, but this is obviously a dodge. I have the feeling Updike is slyly offering us a third way at the end of the book, but I can’t figure out what exactly it is, what kind of faith is viable for him at the end of the 20^th century. Is there a via media between her husband’s cold fideism and her (possible) lover’s hot rationalism? I may have to read the book a fourth time to answer that question.

Waxing Nostalgic

2009-09-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

I never talk about my long-gone musical career on this blog, but I spent three years or so in what was more or less a band. We made three albums and an EP, and since I’ve come to grips with the fact that record labels are never going to beat down my door—and since I’ve chosen an alternate career—I’ve attached to this post a zip file with our entire recorded legacy on it. But first, a few words of warning, apology, and wistfulness.

I wanted to be in a band basically since I started seriously to music when I was twelve years old. And I knew even at that stage that I didn’t want to do live shows so much as I wanted to make records, lush records with hundreds of takes and dozens of instruments, records where I could layer sound upon sound until I came up with something transcendent.

That never happened. I had a band in high school that never did anything, and I mean anything, so when I got to college I was determined to make a career of it. Problem was, my personality was such that I couldn’t find anyone willing to spend an hour alone with me. So I made a “solo” record, a poorly written, poorly recorded little EP called Appalachia. It may be proof of its quality that my copy of it no longer plays, and so I am pleased to say that for all intents and purposes, it is lost to history.

That wasn’t what I wanted, though; I didn’t want to record into a computer microphone and play without percussion or bass. I wanted a band, a real band, one where all the members contributed ideas and maybe even songs and vocals. I had a friend who owned a studio, so I booked some time to make a real record; he also had a band, so I paid two members of it $50 or so to act as sidemen, both playing instruments other than their main ones. We knocked out a record called The Lame Shall Enter First in a few sessions. Thus The Shots of Perspective were born.

It’s a stupid name, yes, overly long and pretentious and any number of other things. (For those of you who are interested, the name comes from a line in a Vigilantes of Love song: “Take one shot of perspective, a couple more to kill the pain.” We would later hijack the second part of this line for a stopgap EP between our second and third albums.) The record’s title, too, is overly long and pretentious, a Flannery O’Connor reference put to entirely different use when we made the cover art a picture of Bible college students walking into chapel. Wordplay.

I had fun making the record, and it even gave me an excuse to spend some time with a girl I had my eye on. It’s hard for me to listen to it now, seven years later, though. I wrote most of the songs at the ripe old age of eighteen, and the lyrics are full of things an eighteen-year-old English major thought profound. I’m particularly embarrassed at the song “This One Is Not So Down,” an incredibly ill-conceived attempt at irony or hopefulness or God only knows what. You can tell I had taken English Lit. II that semester. (You should have heard the verse I left out. Or maybe not.)

My skills as a musician at this time were also rudimentary at best; you’ll notice there are no solos on the album (aside from a very poorly planned piano piece on “Iconoclast”), and there’s a reason for that: I had no idea how to play the guitar. I was so bad at it, in fact, that I had to remove the high E string from the guitar so I could play an F chord. (Actually, now that I think about it, there isn’t a true F chord on that record. I guess I removed that E string as a gimmick.)

And yet I’m at least a little proud of the record, especially given that it was my first real shot at this sort of thing. I think “The Pittsburgh Waltz” maintains its paranoia pretty well, especially with H1N1 potentially closing in on us just like the Spanish Flu did, and my Luxury tribute “Let It Be an End” still sounds pretty cool to my ears. (My producer, Jamey Bozeman, who was in Luxury, purposely mixed the blasted thing to sound as little like his erstwhile band as he could. My original plans were much more like the live version on A Couple More to Kill the Pain.) “Your Song” cops Elton John for its title, but the song itself was the best I could do at imitating Springsteen, and I am mostly pleased with the result.

I still didn’t really have a band, though—Jordan and Chris played in the studio, but if I wanted to do anything in front of people, I had to go it alone. So it was that I put up an ad on my college’s bulletin board. It got no responses. Finally, I somehow got in touch with a friend from high school who played bass, and Josh Altmanshofer, who worked with me at the college’s radio station, volunteered on drums after weeks of hearing me complain that I needed a drummer.

We played a few shows with this lineup and then decided it was time to make a second record. I was already more or less embarrassed by the first, and at that point in my life I was writing more songs than I knew what to do with. (I spent the summer as alone as I’ve ever been in my life, with no cable and no internet—so all there was to do was write songs.) We spent twice as much time on our follow-up, called Nothing Personal (after my friend John Hawbaker told me my initial title, Destined for Mediocrity, was far too self-effacing. Thanks, John. You were right.)

The time I spent in the studio making this record was likely the best time of my life. I have dozens of studio stories—many of them unrepeatable on a family blog such as this one—but I get the feeling that you mostly had to be there to get the jokes. At least, my wife never laughs at them.

(Okay, just one: We were mixing “Everything That Keeps You Down,” the first song we recorded for that record, when I referred to the band as S.O.P. Jamey, no doubt delirious with the hours spent in the studio, replied, “Yeah, but if you were the Shots of…BEAR PLANTATION…you’d be S.O.B.” Told you you wouldn’t get it. Incidentally, we always swore we’d make a disco record under that name, but as I’m in Tallahassee and Jamey’s well on his way to becoming a priest, that’s apparently not going to happen. And so it goes.)

I can still listen to Nothing Personal: the songs are way better, for one thing, but it’s the production that really stands out to me five years later. An example: Jamey and I self-consciously stole the background vocals from “The Only Living Boy in New York” and the percussion from “The Boxer” for “Sing It on TV” as a gift to Josh Altmanshofer, the biggest Simon and Garfunkel fan I know—and the results are beautiful, at least to my ears. The record is loaded down with synthesizers, maybe to a fault; I said at the time that we were aiming for a 1970s sound (you can hear us come close on “…Until You Do”) but hit the ‘80s instead. I think the synths sound pretty great, or at least as tasteful as synthesizers can in rock songs. (Their shining moment is the third verse of “Amy,” where we decided to pull out everything else. I love that part.)

I wasn’t much better as a musician. I play a few solos on the record; I like what I did on “…Until You Do” and I’m decently satisfied with the double solo on “Something with a Girl in Summer,” but I could not possibly be more embarrassed about the last two minutes of “The Diamonds in Her Hands.” It’s Jamey, Jordan, and Garth Rivers (who would join the band full-time not too much later) who shine on guitar here. And once again I took the opportunity to invite a girl I had a thing for to sing on the record; if anything can save “Diamonds,” it’s Lisa’s vocals.

A Couple More to Kill the Pain was hastily thrown together because we knew I was moving to Omaha and figured we wouldn’t get a chance to do another record. It has two live tracks, an outtake from Nothing Personal and a bunch of demos.

Our magnum opus, our best album if you ask me (and who else are you going to ask when we only sold 50 or so copies of any given record?) is our third, Anywhere but Here, which took a good three years to record and mix, not because it’s so intricate but because I moved to Omaha and got really lazy. After I recorded my many parts, Garth and Max flew out from Georgia to record additional guitar and to help me mix it. (Josh Altmanshofer moved to China, apparently permanently.) We nearly had a fist-fight a couple of times, but I ended up fairly happy with the results. None of us are the engineer Jamey is, and you’ll notice that several of the tracks are so “hot” that they “clip.” I’m particularly embarrassed by my hatchet job on Garth’s only song, “It’ll Be Over Soon.”

I’m proud of these songs, most of them anyway. I’d put "Ruthless" (the going vote for our best song), “Success Lives Here” or “I Don’t Know What to Think” up against any indie rock or alternative country song of the era—even if the latter never sounded right without the duet vocals. (The gal who was supposed to sing them and I agreed never to speak again, which makes it hard to organize the recording session.) And I finally have a guitar solo I love—the monstrosity at the end of “I Am Bound to Her”—even if the other members of the band, not to mention my wife, never agreed with me.

Anyway, here you have it, the entire recorded legacy (a mere 38 tracks) of The Shots of Perspective, a band no one ever really heard of. We were never going to make the big time—I realized this after the second record came out, and that made it all the better. Our practices and recording sessions turned from an attempt to be successful into an attempt to stay alive, personally and collectively. We took over the college chapel, turned our amps way up, and sang my pretentious—but maybe pretty good sometimes—songs. I hope you find something to like here; there’s a lot of me in them.

Shots of Perspective discography

Why Franny Glass Lost Her Mind: More on Religion without Belief

2009-09-14T05:52:00.003-04:00

Every misunderstood teenager loves J.D. Salinger, and most adults find themselves drifting further and further away from him as they get older—or at least from Catcher in the Rye. Since I never much liked Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters or Nine Stories, that leaves me only with Franny and Zooey, one of the few truly great American novels about spiritual crisis.

Franny and Zooey is really a collection of one short story (“Franny”) and one novella (“Zooey”), but the two are so intimately connected that there’s not much point in reading them in the abstract. They deal, like much of Raise High and Nine Stories, with the devastatingly clever and heartbreakingly unsuccessful Glass family, the obvious inspiration for Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. When the youngest sibling, 20-year-old Franny, has a nervous breakdown in a restaurant after committing herself to The Way of the Pilgrim, a 19^th-century Russian theological volume, she returns home to the family’s New York apartment, where she is counseled, lectured, and ridiculed by her older brother Zooey.

The Way of the Pilgrim seeks to answer the question of how one prays without ceasing, one of the New Testament’s more difficult commands, and its answer is to repeat the so-called “Jesus Prayer” (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me [, a miserable sinner]” to oneself, mechanically at first, until one means it at the very depths of one’s soul. It is the act of following this advice that makes Franny faint in the restaurant and return home.

At first glance, Salinger seems like he would be a spiritual brother to James P. Carse, who recommends in his book that we divorce religion from belief and focus on the nondogmatic wonders of the universe. After all, Salinger is famously interested in nearly all religions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, and sees them all as streams leading to the same vast ocean. And indeed, according to Zooey, part of Franny’s problem is that she uses the Jesus Prayer to swap a consumerist dogma for a spiritual one:

You talk about piling up treasure—money, property, culture, knowledge, and so on and so on. In going ahead with the Jesus Prayer . . . aren’t you trying to lay up some kind of treasure? Something that’s every goddam bit as negotiable as all those other, more material things? Or does the fact that it’s a prayer make any difference? I mean by that, is there all the difference in the world, for you, in which side somebody lays up his treasure—this side, or the other?

In other words, Franny takes Jesus’ warning in Matthew 6:19-21 and makes it into an ugly and exclusionary dogma, one that she uses to separate herself from other people, putting herself inside the fold and others outside it—the very essence of belief, according to Carse. Further, Zooey prefers to remove the very notion of sin from the formulation, noting with satisfaction that “none of the adepts in either of the Pilgrim books puts any emphasis—thank God—on the miserable sinner part.” Religion becomes something malleable, something to change with the times—an orientation rather than a doctrine. Carse would be proud.

And yet the end result of the book is to suggest that Carse couldn’t be more wrong. One of the best-written parts of The Religious Case Against Belief is a long section where Carse presents us with dozens of Jesuses, that is to say, dozens of interpretations of Jesus. One can use the footnotes and play “name that Christ.” The point, though, is that, as Carse says about the results of the Protestant Reformation, “One Jesus is as authentic as the next.” He elaborates:

All of this gives the strong impression that the New Testament as we have it is a somewhat errant representation of a true text that hovers somewhere behind it, unseen, even unseeable—a precise and accurate account of what Jesus said and did. Apparently no one is granted the talent or privilege to state it exactly as it is. As a result, we remain necessarily ignorant of the “true” text. It is inconceivable that Christians will someday reach total agreement on what the text may be.

Thus, Rudolf Bultmann can give us “a mysterious Galilean preacher whose proclaimation to the world (or kerygma), although encased in mythic thinking we know now to be false, still causes us to confront our own inauthenticity” while George W. Bush gives us “a private voice guiding elected leaders responsible for America’s salvific mission to the democratic world,” and that is, to a large extent, just fine with Carse, since the “real Jesus” is undiscoverable.

Zooey disagrees. Sure, The Way of the Pilgrim has turned his sister into pious trash, into a sanctimonious twit—but that’s not her real problem:

I don’t think you understood Jesus when you were a child and I don’t think you understand him now. I think you’ve got him confused in your mind with about five or ten other religious personages, and I don’t see how you can go ahead with the Jesus Prayer till you know who’s who and what’s what.

Franny’s problem is that she’s tried to turn Jesus—who, fictional not, is a real person, at least according to Zooey—into St. Francis of Assissi or their brother Seymour or God knows what else. One Jesus is not, in other words, as good as another; it matters who you pray to, and if that’s not doctrine exactly, Christians have always known that doctrine flows from one’s conception of Christ—and that that conception can be more or less accurate, something Carse doesn’t seem to recognize.

None of this in any way disproves Carse’s book, of course—Franny and Zooey are fictional characters created by a man who’s so maladjusted that the only reason we’re still sure he’s alive is that he sued someone earlier this year. And in real life, true Christians seem to be far less well-adjusted than other people—and I think that’s actually how it’s supposed to be, if neurosis is the inability to create a cohesive self; after all, Christians are all but commanded to live in two worlds at once.

But it seems important to me that it’s the loss of doctrine—in the form of a biblically accurate portrait of Christ—that causes Franny to momentarily lose her mind. If Christianity recommends a certain loss of self, I think Carse recommends an even greater and more malicious one.

Book Review: 'The Religious Case Against Belief'

2009-09-11T17:07:00.003-04:00

As the debate between the neo-atheists (or, as I prefer to call them, the nü-atheists, since Hitchens and Dawkins operate with all the subtlety and grace of Fred Durst screaming for the “nookie”) and their rivals, the neo-apologists, heats to a fever pitch, we’re seeing more and more voices insert themselves into the middle of the conversation. Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God and Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution are the two most prominent books of this sort. I haven’t read either of these, but I want to, and I’m planning on reading Wright, at least, and reviewing him on this blog sometime soon.

James P. Carse’s The Religious Case Against Belief predates both of these books, but it has slipped between the cracks to a large extent. Carse is professor emeritus of religion at Harvard University and an avowed agnostic; with this latter fact in mind, upon reading the title of his book, it’d be easy to assume that it’s another screed against those idiot Christians, tempered, perhaps by some sort of social defense of religion as a necessary institution for the survival of civilization. It is not.

Instead, Carse divides the world of faith into two factions: We have on one hand “religious” people, whose world is “more complicated, often foggy, sometimes hidden, and increasingly varied” (111); on the other, we have believers, whose worldview

thrives on conflict, depends on the clarity and restricting power of its surrounding boundaries, has a one-dimensional understanding of authority, possesses a kind of atemporality that denies any possibility of an open history, and builds on a severe form of self-rejection.

(5)

On the on hand, we have people interested in asking questions; on the other, we have people interested in providing answers—even if those answers are arbitrary and given in response to questions that don’t even have answers.

Carse, much to his credit, does not limit believers to members of any particular confession, but extends it to a wide variety of -isms: Marxism, nationalism, Nazism, Maoism, creationism, and, yes, nü-atheism. He is also magnanimous enough to point out that the association of Evangelicals with Nazis is not an equation of evil or of degree but merely of orientation: the world of the belief system is narrowly defined and discourages thought.

Against the systematic theologians of the spiritual and materialist worlds Carse sets a few examples of genuinely religious people: Jesus and Buddha, of course, but also Galileo and Abraham Lincoln. What these figures have in common is something Carse calls “higher ignorance”:

What we see in [Galileo’s] life is that there is no end of truths, and not one of them beyond challenge. There is always something new and unexpected to be learned. What drove him, in other words, was not his knowledge but his ignorance. He knew that he did not know. He also knew he never would know it all.

(12)

This is undeniably an attractive proposition. Carse is essentially calling for a humility in the face of the wonders of the universe, and who’s not for that? The answer, of course, is believers, who all believe “that they have been brought to the end of their ignorance” (59). When he puts it that way, of course, it’s hard to come down in favor of belief over religious, and since he describes the two as essentially incompatible. “When ‘true’ believers claim that their convictions have been validated by a given religion,” we are told, “they are patently unaware that in doing so they have just rejected it” (4).

Thus, religions cannot have any kind of doctrine, at least not in their capacity as religions. Instead, religion is something akin to poetry, which, Carse declares (arbitrarily, in my opinion) “does not translate into belief, or into rational thought of any kind. It can be little more than a random insight, or a puzzling oracular declaration” (102). Like Oscar Wilde, who famously says in “The Critic as Artist” that “Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing," Carse has poetry (and with it, religion) performing as nothing beyond aesthetic spectacle—it may suggest, but it never says.

Curiously, he includes in the category of religious texts both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, large chunks of which are explicit and specific laws and more-or-less systematic theology. Carse claims that these texts are “a glorious confusion” and that their “power lies precisely in the fact that every attempt improve [them] is doomed” (118). We can’t interpret these books; all we can do, if we want to remain intellectually and existentially honest, is to “join in to make a joyful noise of our own” (118). Poetry stirs us to create more poetry, which, when Carse talks about it, often sounds more like turning cosmos back into chaos.

Oddly enough, although he instructs us that religion must be separated from belief, he maintains a very heavy division between the various world religions, each of which “has an identity that sets it apart, so far apart that it cannot even be said that one religion is like another” (138). This is where I got confused. If religions are not permitted to have doctrine, what is it that sets one so clearly apart from another? If I am not permitted belief, can I worship Shiva and the Goddess and still maintain my particular identity as a Christian?

This is the main weakness of Carse’s otherwise elegant and compelling argument. In the end, religion divorced from specific beliefs seems like it should end up with every religious person in the same large pot, perhaps the Unitarian Universalist Church, where from my understanding you don’t need to believe in anything in particular. Carse points out that Christians don’t agree with one another on some very large issues; this is true, but it’s also true that the glue that binds them together is belief in some even larger ones.

In the end, then, Carse seems to want us to replace the specificity of belief systems with a more-or-less vague religious impulse—that “sense of wonderment at the vastness of the universe” that atheists sometimes talk about to replace the gods they do not believe in. This is a very, very serious suggestion—one that would almost completely destroy the structures of religions as we know them. Beliefs are serious business, and to pretend that religions could get along without them would be closing your eyes to what they’re really made of.

There is one type of believer whom Carse likes and respects, by the way: the kind who says,

“My faith has uncertainty, even outright doubt, woven right into it. Nevertheless, I embrace the risk of a leap into the unseen.” I want to emphasize here that this kind of belief, with an acknowledged unknown at its heart, is not the kind that has led to the Age of Faith II with its absolutisms, its certainties, its martyrdoms, and its inevitable drift into violence and warfare.

(119)

The belief he describes is a Kierkegaardian one, built on the Dane’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” (later renamed by scholars the “leap of faith,” a phrase Kierkegaard never uses). What Carse doesn’t seem to recognize is that Kierkegaard’s leap is toward a very specific God, a personality, in fact, one who has rules and laws and who demands an obedience and a set of beliefs, even if He makes the leaper suspend them momentarily. A leap into the dark only works if one is leaping in the right direction.

That’s not to say I hated this book. Carse has some very interesting things to say, especially if we temper some of his points. We can adopt his notion of “higher ignorance,” for example, and recognize and admit that we don’t know the metaphysical structure of the universe—in fact, we can’t know it—the way that we know more certain things in everyday life. But that doesn’t mean we should just chuck beliefs out the window, not as far as I’m concerned.

The Emergent Church in particular will find a lot to like here, particularly in Carse’s exposition of religion as composed of communities and his call for legitimate dialogue between believers and non-believers of every philosophy and theology. And Evangelicals of a more traditionalist stripe will definitely appreciate his defense of faith against the nü-atheists. But I’m just afraid Carse takes things too far—instead of a Reformation of belief, he wants an abolition of it, and I just don’t see any way to do that and make religion vital and meaningful.

Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

2009-09-06T09:36:00.002-04:00

Walker Percy, it’s strange to say, was brought to his strengths as a Catholic novelist by Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the 20th century’s most famous atheist. Confined to a sanitorium by tuberculosis, he made it his project to read through the literary and philosophical existentialists. After he was brought to theism by Kierkegaard, he came across Sartre, whom he loved. As biographer Jay Tolson explains, “Percy’s enthusiasm for Sartre may seem strange. After all, Sartre’s militant atheism could not have been more different from Percy’s convinced fideism. But Percy found the difference a tonic and a challenge” (238). He may have needed Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel to help him bring Sartre’s ideas into a Christian context, but Sartre is clearly a much bigger influence on him than most of his Kierkegaard-happy critics notice.

I didn’t notice it either until I started reading through Being and Nothingness with Nathan Gilmour. The whims of my reading list for my comprehensive exams have dictated that I read Percy’s Lancelot while still in the middle of Being and Nothingness, and the two books play off each other in ways I never noticed before. I’ve written about Lancelot before on this blog without really understanding what Lance’s quest for sin is really about; Sartre explains most everything.

This is, at its bottom, a novel about freedom and responsibility, about one’s relationship to one’s past self and about the lies one tells oneself in order to live comfortably in the present. In his old life, Lancelot was marked by bad faith. He instructs Percival to “Imagine a man sitting in Feliciana Parish for twenty years practicing law (yes! “practicing”), playing at being a “moderate” or “liberal” whatever that is, all under the illusion that he was living his life and was not even aware that he was not.” It’s a sham; it’s pretending to be something he’s not; it’s attempting to force oneself into an objective role.

That’s the essence of bad faith for Sartre. In the most famous section of Being and Nothingness, he gives the example of the waiter who

applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.

The problem with bad faith is that it is an attempt to treat oneself both as subject and object, as both being-for-itself and being-in-itself. This formulation is impossible for Sartre. His problem with God, in fact, is that He would need to be both being-for-itself and being-in-itself, an impossibility. So any act of bad faith—of self-deception as regards one’s freedom—is an attempt to be God.

The solution, one might imagine, is to be authentically oneself. Not so fast, says Sartre, and offers us another example. He gives us a closeted homosexual and his friend, who gets annoyed at his bad faith and demands “that the guilty one recognize himself as guilty, that the homosexual declare frankly—whether humbly or boastfully matters little—‘I am a paederast.’” The friend, too, is in bad faith, since he “demands of the guilty one that he constitute himself as a thing, precisely in order no longer to treat him as a thing.”

Attempts at “authentic” living are, in other words, yet another type of bad faith. Sartre acknowledges that to end the state of bad faith, one needs a “self-recovery we shall call authenticity” but immediately says that “the description of [it] has no place here.” To my knowledge he never presents such a solution. His view of the world becomes cynical—we’re all trapped in self-deceit (including, it seems, Sartre himself), and there’s no way out. Percy might present such a way, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

As the waiter plays at being a waiter, of course, Lance plays at being a liberal lawyer—he fits himself neatly into the role and does all the things he is expected to do in that role without questioning them. He’s broken out of this habit by his discovery of his wife’s infidelity; when he discovers that his daughter does not belong to him, he also discovers “my freedom. I can’t tell you why, but the second followed directly upon the first.” The reader knows the reason, however: It’s that his bad faith has been revealed to be a sham, and Lancelot realizes that he’s able to do anything he wishes.

The end result, however, is that he ends up literally imprisoned. I will direct you to my post about Karl Jaspers, Emerson, and Milton, where I finally solve the problem of religious existentialism once and for all. (Note my irony, please.) We see it again here. Lance improbably likes his imprisonment; he is “glad to be here.” Sartre would no doubt define this as a further manifestation of bad faith, but Percy has other ideas. The prison (or more probably the mental institution) is a submission to a higher power, and furthermore, it is voluntary; he says that “Yesterday I simply got up, went to my door, opened it, and went out in the hall.” Thus, his suspension of freedom is largely self-enforced.

And that, Percy seems to be saying, is what breaks us out of bad faith—it’s what allows us to move from potential freedom (which is, after all, the way most of us live—we’re free but we don’t really acknowledge it) to submission to a higher authority to genuine or actualized freedom, which is why Lancelot ends the novel out in the beautiful countryside of Virginia. But he needed to submit himself to the mental institution in order to do so.

If this schema sounds familiar, it’s because it basically conforms to Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence. The aesthete is free, although he acts for all the world as though he is not. The ethicist voluntarily submits himself to an ethical system. The religious personality is given true freedom once he takes the leap away from that ethical system. For Percy, as for Kierkegaard, the whole thing revolves around God; we see this when he reproduces the lyrics to Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee”:

Freedom’s just another word, Lord, for nothing left to lose
Nothing ain’t worth nothing, Lord, but it’s free
Feeling good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues
Feeling good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and Bobby McGee

Fans of Kristofferson will immediately notice that Percy adds two Lords to the lyrics, suggesting an added religious dimension to the song’s exploration of freedom. If freedom is indeed just another word for nothing left to lose, then Lance receives his freedom by having his illusions shattered. His illusions were all he had to cling to.

The novel’s violence becomes clear now. Man’s humanity is bound up in his ability to do the wrong thing, i.e., his freedom. To put this in Sartrean terms, man, confronted with vertigo on the edge of the cliff, absolutely must be able to jump. This is why the modern world’s elimination of sin bothers Lance so much—if man cannot sin, if he cannot do something truly terrible, he is not a human being. So in order to become a human being again, to truly break out of his bad faith, he must kill the movie director and accidentally/on purpose set fire to his old life. It is in this way that he is confined to the mental institution that will eventually bring him genuine freedom.

Torn Curtain

2009-08-31T08:20:00.003-04:00

I wrote my master’s thesis on the novels of Walker Percy and Frederick Buechner and tried desperately for months to find one of them commenting on the other one. Far as I can tell, Percy was completely unaware of Buechner’s existence, but I did manage to track down an interview with Buechner in which he spoke very unfavorably of Percy:

I must say he just leaves me literally cold. That’s just the right word for it. I don’t feel any excitement, any passion. It seems very cerebral and planned out and cold. I always feel that the characters sound like what I imagine Walker Percy would sound like. I have a hard time believing in them as real human beings.

Buechner actually understates it. Percy’s characters are for the most part a royal bore, and his own voice, evidenced in his nonfiction writing, is far more nuanced, elegant, and interesting. I’ve now read every word Percy has written (he’s probably the only author about whom I can reasonably be considered an expert), and I’ll shout it from the rooftops: He’s not a novelist. He’s a philosopher who wants to be a novelist. Of his seven novels, only two, Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome, have anything resembling an interesting or coherent plot; the rest are mere philosophical exercises.

Not that that’s a bad thing. At their best, Percy’s novels serve to inject his philosophy into more-or-less real-world applications, and taken on these terms, they’re pretty good. In some respects, they are more or less interchangeable—they all take some aspect of Kierkegaard’s “spheres of existence” and throw characters into them. They’re all about the sick condition of the modern world, and they all hint at the same solution for that condition. (It’s not for nothing that one of the worn-out descriptions of Percy as a philosopher is that of the dianostician.)

The problem with the modern world, for Percy, is that the human being has been completely split along Cartesian lines. On the one hand, you have a soul/mind; on the other, you have a body, and never the two shall meet. (Obviously, Percy is following his existentialist forbearers in this diagnosis; both Heidegger and Sartre describe Descartes’ sins along these lines.)

One of Percy’s main concerns in the split modern world is sex, an act which he variously portrays as splitting the self further and bringing it back together in a type of religious redemption. (This was the subject of my thesis, incidentally—if you’re interested, Buechner’s Lion Country portrays only the latter; virginity is atheism in that novel, and sex is redemption.) This concern with sex and alienation and wholeness might make you think of John Updike—by all means a reasonable connection, since Updike and Percy share similar religious views and have a similar mission in writing.

But Percy hated Updike as a theologian, as much as he might admire him in terms of sheer writing. Biographer Jay Tolson reports that Percy’s reaction to Updike’s controversial Couples was almost entirely negative, calling the novel muddled Kierkegaard and noting its treatment of “[sex] elevated to a kind of religion” (351).

Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that in The Last Gentleman Percy gives us a thinly veiled version of Updike in the novelist Mort Prince (the name, of course, suggests “prince of death” in French). Here’s one character’s description of his latest novel:

You know what that guy told me with a straight face. I asked him what thiis book was going to be about and he said quite seriously: it was about ----ing. And in a sense it is! . . . But it is a beautiful piece of work and about as pornographic as Chaucer. Indeed it is deely religious . . . It is essentially a religious book, in the sense of being a yea-saying rather than a nay-saying . . . Mort has one simple credo: saying Yes to Life wherever it is found. (Bowdlerization Percy’s)

That sounds like Updike to me. The Last Gentleman precedes Couples by two years, but this description could just as easily apply to 1961’s Rabbit, Run. Percy’s protagonist, Will Barrett, is confused by this description; he wonders, “What the devil does he mean telling me it’s about ----ing? Is ----ing a joking matter? Am I to understand that I am free to ---- his daughter? Or do we speak of ----ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of ----ing anyone in the vicinity?” Updike/Prince and his fans, then, are guilty of taking sex too seriously and simultaneously not seriously enough. It’s a type of religious rite, but at the same time it doesn’t mean anything.

Unsurprisingly, then, Percy compares Mort Prince multiple times to Descartes, suggesting that he is the product of the mind-body division that is the chief ill of the modern age. With the body split from the mind, we’re left with desire for carnal knowledge and desire for angelic knowledge—but no knowledge whatsoever of what it means to be human, between the extremes of the angelic and the bestial. That’s why Prince can see sex as simultaneously disconnected from the soul, that is, purely bodily, and as an attempt to reunite the soul and the body.

Will Barrett, however much he is offended by Mort Prince, tries to make the same connection when he sleeps with his asinine girlfriend, Kitty Vaught. (Kitty, I suspect, has the name she does because it suggests curiosity, Heidegger’s word for a sort of constantly moving stasis.) But you can’t have a real relationship with another person if your own identity is constantly in question, as it must be in a world split into mind and body. Thus, Will promises her that “I’ll be both for you, boyfriend and girlfriend, lover and father. If it is possible” (167). Of course, that’s not possible, and Will’s relationship with Kitty, like every sexual relationship in Updike’s novels, leads only to further alienation.

All of that said, I suspect Percy is slightly misreading Updike here. The latter’s reliance on sex (and his steadfast commitment to depict every nauseating detail of it) can mask the fact that sex almost always fails to produce the effect his characters would like for it to produce—that is, the reunion of soul to body. If anything, Percy has a more optimistic view of sex, as evidenced in the sequel to The Last Gentlemen, 1980’s The Second Coming.

Why I Like Christian Colleges

2009-08-27T06:50:00.002-04:00

I’ve spent the last several days listening to a series of public lectures from Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco (you can access them on iTunes from the UChannel podcast), the subject of which was, “Does College Matter?” Delbanco’s answer, as you might imagine, was “Yes, but not in the ways you think it does.”

Once a college diploma became the minimum requirement for most jobs (a relatively recent development), American society had to find a way to justify pushing people into going. It came up with a social model: It’s good for the culture at large, both financially and intellectually, to have a lot of college graduates. Delbanco disagrees, saying that you can’t force a primarily financial model onto something as nebulous as a college education. No, he says, the reason college is valuable is that it is valuable for the individual—or at least it can be.

Almost all colleges in America two hundred years ago were religious schools, including Harvard (Puritan), Yale (Congregationalist), Princeton (Presbyterian), Columbia (Episcopalian), etc., etc. You can still see this heritage in some of the school mottos; Columbia’s, for example, is “In Thy light shall we see light,” even though the school no longer has a religious mission.

Even after the Ivy League (and other, smaller private colleges) abandoned their status as divinity schools, the mission of the university remained mostly the same, at least according to Delbanco: Teachers must transmit the accumulated knowledge of the ages (possibly creating some of their own, it’s true), and in so doing, they must help create and develop the whole student. College, in other words, was supposed to make you a better person—that’s what the doctrine of in loco parentis was meant to accomplish.

I think most professional academics would scoff at that idea nowadays. Their job may be to transmit an increasingly narrow field of knowledge (which is why humanities folks typically don’t know much about the sciences and scientists don’t know much about the humanities, a development that has taken place over the last 150 years). But it certainly isn’t to make students better people—we’d never dream of telling people how they should live.

And we don’t. Students run wild at universities, at least according to the horrifying statistics Delbanco quotes—your average undergraduate, he tells us, watches four hours of television per day (and presumably that doesn’t include the hours she spends on Facebook or text messaging), binge drinks at least once per month, and feels no qualms whatsoever about buying her term papers online. He tells a tragicomic story about two friends of his, Harvard professors, who spend each graduation day pointing out students they personally knew cheated and who nevertheless graduated with honors. Character doesn’t seem to count at college anymore.

Further, we’ve disconnected all knowledge from itself. Students attend a biology class on one side of campus, take the bus to their literature class, and see absolutely no connection between the two. Part of the problem is doubtless that we don’t treat education as an end but as a means to an end—you go to college not to learn (or to develop character) but to get a piece of paper that will allow you to enter the workforce.

Delbanco, however, says that the reason students can’t, by and large, connect their classes, is that the university lacks a cohesive philosophy. Columbia, perhaps, doesn’t have this problem as much as some schools; their Core Curriculum of Great Books requires that all students learn a little about all areas and discuss them with the same students and the same teachers. But most schools, it seems, don’t have many cohesive goals other than attracting good students and raising their position on U.S. News and World Report’s annual college ranking list.

I’d never heard of that particular list until it was time for me to apply to graduate school. I applied to exactly one school for my undergraduate work—I honestly have no idea why—and it was an unranked school, a combination Bible and Christian liberal-arts school. In my days at Toccoa Falls College, they seemed to admit just about anyone who applied; the rumor on campus was that the average student SAT score hovered around 950.

I had my problems at TFC; the place just about drove me nuts sometimes. But as I look back on it from an increasingly large distance, I see everything they do right. TFC and other religiously oriented schools are not subject to the problems of larger and sectarian schools. My alma mater’s motto is “Developing Character with Excellence,” and I think that, unlike Columbia’s, that slogan is in earnest. Christian colleges seem to be the last refuge of legitimate character-building in academia.

Further, since the school revolves around a Christian worldview (and a fairly specific one—as far as I know TFC administration still hasn’t made it official, but the school has always been closely affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance), the problem of disconnection is to some extent abated. All the classes, from the humanities to the sciences, are oriented toward theology—sometimes this may get ridiculous, but only a student who doesn’t pay attention could see his classes as disconnected from one another. The unofficial motto of the school seems to have been “All truth is God’s truth.” That puts everything on the same foundation.

My major research area these days is the intersection of theology and literature, and I’m almost certain I wouldn’t be able to do that if I hadn’t gone to a college where the teachers were convinced the two were built on the same ground.

By the way, I am not trying to suggest that Christian colleges are the only ones that can achieve a healthy balance of character development and underlying philosophy. I do think it must be easier for a school with a set doctrinal statement, one that does not have to deal with the pluralism of the student body at a major university. But I’m sure it’s a goal that can be met in some way by even the largest and most secular of schools. I’m just not sure what that would look like.

Too Awful to Ignore

2009-08-26T08:00:00.001-04:00

When I was in high school, I used to claim pretentiously that Flannery O’Connor changed my life. I have no idea what I meant by that, and if I was honest with myself at the time, I’m sure I would have admitted I had no idea then, either. Such was the depth of my ignorance and my pretention, in fact, that I made this claim after reading through the Complete Stories and being completely unable to point out the religious dimensions of her work. College did that for me, along with a book I picked up at a Christian music festival, Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner’s Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring. Baumgaertner’s book is the perfect introduction to traditionalist readings of O’Connor—she goes through her work story by story and explains what she’s up to.

The phrase you hear bandied about in O’Connor studies—I don’t have the energy to comb through Baumgaertner’s book to see if it’s in there, although it’s not listed in the somewhat skimpy index—is tragic grace. However sophisticated you want to get with your interpretations, it’s a hard thing to ignore, and it’s certainly the method endorsed by the author herself, who famously notes in “The Fiction Writer and His Country” that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

So to get her very premodern point across to those of us numbed by the modern and postmodern worlds, O’Connor kills off her main character in pretty much every story. (In the few stories where the main character doesn’t die, something nevertheless terrible happens to her, as we see in Mrs. Turpin’s public come-uppance in “Revelation,” a personal favorite.)

In O’Connor’s Catholicism, a character who receives a flash of grace just before her death is given a chance for full acceptance of that grace in Purgatory; thus, it really counts for something that the Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” “would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” She’s a good woman for 35 seconds on earth, and she’s given a chance to be a good woman forever. Furthermore, the reader is made aware of divine presence and grace and given his own chance to accept that grace by viewing someone else’s tragedy.

All of this is de rigeur O’Connor criticism; throw a rock up in the air on a college campus, and you’ll be sure to hit someone who wrote a paper to this effect. What I didn’t recognize until I reread, for the first time in 15 years, the previously uncollected work at the front of Complete Stories, is the extent to which her own biography created and then necessitated this approach.

The stories in question—“The Geranium,” “The Barber,” “Wildcat,” “The Crop,” and “The Turkey”—were part of O’Connor’s master’s thesis at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, from which she graduated in 1947. The future, presumably, was wide and open in front of her at this point; she would attend the Yaddo Writer’s Retreat in a few months and move in with lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzpatrick shortly after that, and these appear to have been happy times in her life.

What these stories have in common is their weakness, at least when viewed in the larger context of her later work. (O’Connor, best I can tell, got much better as she went along—A Good Man Is Hard to Find is better than Wise Blood, and Everything That Rises Must Converge is better than both of them. We’ll ignore The Violent Bear It Away.) Readers looking for tragic grace in these early stories will not find it, not without stretching credulity to its limits. “The Barber,” the best of the five, sets up the reader for a great fall that never comes; death permeates “Wildcat” up until the very end, when it mysteriously vanishes; and “The Crop” is a very ill-advised attempt at John Barth-style metafiction (even if it was composed before Barth was a blip on the radar). We get in these stories all the elements that make O’Connor such an entertaining and philosophically interesting writer—but without a catalyst to put them all together.

Then came 1950. O’Connor was hospitalized for a floating kidney, and while she was there, she discovered she suffered from the lupus that claimed her father eight years earlier. She was dying—there was no cure and not much treatment for the disease in those days. She finished Wise Blood while recovering from her surgery and adjusting to her new lifestyle in Milledgeville.

I am not sure of the degree to which her conception of this novel changed once she learned of her illness. It’s obvious from the fragments published earlier (also collected in Complete Stories) that it gained a certain measure of darkness, a darkness which her later stories would not only replicate but intensify. Hazel Motes blinds himself in penance, but the Grandmother, say, or Mrs. May, aren’t given a choice in the matter. Fate or God takes over, and we’re to them as flies are to errant boys.

We can see the difference between pre- and post-lupus O’Connor in the twin stories “The Geranium” and “Judgment Day,” the first and last stories she published. The latter is a rewrite and expansion of the former; they both deal with an elderly Southern man adjusting to life in New York City by staring at a plant on a balcony across the street, but the tone of their endings is radically different. “The Geranium” ends with a thud, the potted plant falling off the balcony. Old Dudley survives, at least for the time being, but the story ends in alienation and ugliness.

“Judgment Day” is somehow less dark, despite Tanner’s ending position with his head stuffed into a balcony. His death is made explicit here—and it’s one of the most horrifying in O’Connor’s entire corpus—but the story offers redemption. He’s explicitly given the judgment day he’s so hoped for, and he makes it back to Georgia, even if he does so in a pine box. “The Geranium” is a tragedy; “Judgment Day” is a comedy of sorts.

So American literature may have received its own form of tragic grace in O’Connor’s untimely death; as Walter Clemons remarks on the back cover of my edition of Complete Stories, “What we lost when she died is bitter. What we have is astonishing: the stories burn brighter than ever, and strike deeper.” The point is, however, that those stories wouldn’t burn at all without her knowledge of her impending death—for whatever reason, she needed that time limit in order to create her own unique vision of the world.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

2009-08-24T07:23:00.004-04:00

Bernard Malamud seems to be the forgotten giant of Jewish-American fiction. Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth receive the lion’s share of recognition in the genre, and so it’s easy to forget just how good Malamud is. His personal life may have been less exciting than his peers, but his writing snaps and crackles and is, in its way, far more indebted to the Jewish way of speaking than theirs is. (His authorial voice, I mean to say, utilizes Jewish diction far more than Bellow’s or Roth’s; for example, the narrator of The Assistant remarks that “Twice he had painted all over, once added new shelving”—this diction recalls the reversals in Jewish humor: “An artist he wants to be,” as Asher Lev’s father might say.)

The Assistant, Malamud’s second novel, takes Judaism as a culture and a religion as seriously as any I’ve ever read. World War II had been over for just a bit more than a decade when Malamud wrote his novel, and Elie Wiesel had not yet come up with the term Holocaust to describe the German slaughter of the Jews. The book itself takes place in the 1920s or ‘30s and thus does not deal with the war itself, but the main Jewish protagonist, Morris Bober, is a Polish refugee living in New York, and in 1957 this could not have been an accidental decision on Malamud’s part. The Assistant, in many ways, functions as an allegory of the World War II refugee experience, but its setting before the displacement allows the author to talk about the event indirectly, without getting bogged down in historical details or horrific images. Morris is thus meant to be a typical post-war Jew, and his story is supposed to suggest—although not stand for—those of others.

Morris is hardly Orthodox—he sells and eats pork products and does not celebrate Jewish holidays—and yet he is disgusted midway through the novel when his gentile assistant, Frank Alpine, asks him if he considers himself a “real Jew.” Morris’ survival is based off of selective Judaism; pragmatic concerns take precedence over religious ones. “Sometimes,” he says, “to have to eat, you must keep open on holidays. On Yom Kippur, I don’t keep open. But I don’t worry about kosher, which is to me old-fashioned. What I worry is to follow the Jewish Law." Frank, understandably, points out that holy days and a kosher diet are part of Jewish Law, and Morris’ response redefines 6,000 years of Jewish history:

Nobody will tell me that I am not Jewish because I put in my mouth once in a while, when my tongue is dry, a piece ham. But they will tell me, and I will believe them, if I forget the Law. This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means to other people. Our love is hard enough. Why should we hurt somebody else? For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me. We ain’t animals. This is why we need the Law. This is what a Jew believes.

Morris thus elects to follow the spirit of the law over the letter of the Law.

In this respect, he resembles existentialist Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Their two names are similar enough to beg the comparison, and indeed, it seems as though Malamud meant for the reader to make this connection. The essence of life—the “why we need the Law”—is, according to Buber, to be able to face another person in the full implications of one’s humanity. He deals with this in some detail in his dense and complicated philosophical treatise I and Thou. Buber postulates two forms of human relationships, the “I-It” and “I-Thou.” The “I-It” treats the other as an object; it is by nature dehumanizing and objectifying. But the “I-Thou” encounters the other at the full extent of its being; in doing so, it humanizes both the I and the Thou. The I-Thou becomes the fullest expression of humanness:

Whoever says You does not have something for his object. For wherever there is something there is also another something; every It borders on other Its; It is only by virtue of bordering on others. But where You is said there is no something. You has no borders.

The “I-Thou” relationship therefore becomes the essence of proper human relationships; Morris Bober agrees with his namesake when he says that the individual laws are less important than the way people interact with one another.

And it is clear that Morris treats Frank Alpine as a Thou. Frank, having already been involved in a robbery of Morris’ grocery store that results in a dangerous head injury to the grocer, begins to hang around the grocery store and begging for a job. Although it is clear that Morris at least suspects Frank’s involvement in the robbery, he not only gives him a job but also allows him to live in his basement (and later, he procures him an apartment upstairs). He talks to his assistant, spiritually reveals himself to him, and answers the questions Frank asks about Judaism. Morris seems to view their relationship as one of self-sacrifice:

“But I think if a Jew don’t suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing.”
“What do you suffer for, Morris?” Frank said.
“I suffer for you,” Morris said calmly.
Frank laid his knife down on the table. His mouth ached. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you suffer for me.”

Morris equates suffering for the Law with suffering for another person, with seeing another person as “Thou” rather than as “It.”

Frank Alpine, on the other hand, does not seem concerned with Buber’s system of ethics. He is interested in Judaism, but in some respects, he is interested in Judaism only because he is interested in Morris’ daughter, Helen. His interest in Judaism, in other words, has no discernable element of either religion or ethics. This is reified when he and Helen grow closer. Helen gives him a list of books to read, which he does dutifully, not making much connection to the likes of Flaubert and Tolstoy, but Dostoevsky strikes his interest. This is not an arbitrary choice on Malamud’s part. Crime and Punishment is one of the classics of religious fiction, and it is important both that Frank has a revelation while reading it and that the revelation is not religious in nature. As Frank reads the book, he connects to it, the first time he has connected to one of Helen’s novels; he has, Malamud says, “this crazy sensation that he was reading about himself.” More specifically, the book makes him feel “as if his face had been shoved into dirty water in the gutter” and “as if he had been on a drunk for a month.” Dostoevsky seems to speak directly to Frank’s life; no doubt, he connects Raskolnikov’s brutal murder with his own unconfessed crime.

But the connection Frank feels to Crime and Punishment is a double of a scene in Crime and Punishment itself. As Raskolnikov serves a seven-year sentence in Siberia, he looks at a copy of the New Testament:

The book belonged to Sonia; it was the one from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him. At first he was afraid that she would worry him about religion, would talk about the gospel and pester him with books. But to his great surprise she had not once approached the subject and had not even offered him the Testament. He had asked her for it himself . . . He did not open it now, but one thought passed through his mind: “Can her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at least…”

With the power of Sonia’s religious faith embedded into her New Testament, Raskolnikov is ready to live a “new life” and views his sentence as “only seven years.” The Bible gives him an existential revelation that cures his alienation, explicitly comparing his own redemption to the resurrection of Lazarus. Frank Alpine’s redemption, on the other hand, contains no references to God or to Lazarus or to anything else associated with religious belief. It is a secular redemption, coded as a rite by its association with Crime and Punishment.

Morris Bober dies of pneumonia two-thirds of the way through the novel, and his family wants nothing to do with Frank because of his involvement in the robbery (and because of his frequent shoplifting after beginning work at the grocery). Frank, however, takes over the grocery out of necessity—who else is there to do it? Who else can take care of the family?—and passes his time reading and dreaming of the day when he can again talk to Helen. Frank becomes Jewish in the last paragraph of the novel: “One day in April Frank went to the hospital and had himself circumcised . . . The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew.” This ending is ambiguous, however; it is not clear whether Frank is engaging in a rite stripped of its religious connotations—does he become a Jew so that Helen’s mother will approve of him?—or whether Morris’ memory has won out and he suffers the pain of the circumcision because he finally sees Helen as a Thou and views Morris’ Judaism as the best way to express that.

Either way, the central conflict in the novel—perhaps the central conflict in the majority of post-war Jewish fiction—remains intact: Belief in God is difficult if not impossible in a post-Auschwitz world. But Jewish culture, heritage, and ritual remain worth preserving and worth protecting, even if that preservation and protection result in a rite free from religion.

Friday Links

2009-08-14T08:00:00.006-04:00

Yale UP chickens out.
David Updike says good-bye to his famous father.
So what's Gladwell's problem with Harper Lee, anyway?
How Richard Dawkins poisoned his own well.
Stop working on your "relationship with God."

Seeking Whom He May Devour

2009-08-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

Existentialism is not exactly a breed of romanticism, but the two philosophies are connected by their reaction against Enlightenment thought—Descartes and Hume for romanticism, and Hegel for the existentialists. Because of these shared enemies, we should not be surprised to find certain parallels in the two movements, and one of the biggest of these parallels is a focus on uncivilized humanity.

The term noble savage is often attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but the French philosopher never actually used it. But he still—more or less—subscribed to the notion that it is civilization that corrupts human beings and that there’s something freeing about primitivism. We see this idea resurface in Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandanavian Vikings—they all shared this need. (I.11)

Notice, however, that Nietzsche strips away whatever vestiges of Enlightenment thought were lurking around in Rousseau; his blond beast is definitively not moral, is indeed marked by a complete abandonment of morality in favor of raw power. (Also note that the Nazis who took this passage and used it as an excuse for their idea of the master Aryan race are misreading Nietzsche, who loved the Jewish race and hated the Germans, as evidenced by Ecce Homo.)

Martin Heidegger doesn’t go quite as far as Nietzsche in his return to primitivism, but he is always concerned with the feelings and observations that lie at the very baseline of human consciousness—which explains why he uses the word primordial about eight thousand times in Being and Time. He is also adamant about the need for a connection to one’s body—a rejection of Cartesian dualism.

So it’s no surprise that this theme pops up with some regularity in existentialist fiction. Think of Saul Bellow’s Henderson, who is freed from the nothingness of his comfortable existence by his trip to Africa and his becoming a lion and a “rain king.” Or—less successfully—think of Rabbit Angstrom’s complete immersion into his body, be it for sex or sports or overeating. (Updike, perhaps, was critiquing this idea, though it’s always hard to tell exactly what Updike is critiquing.)

But nowhere is the return to animality more clear than in the short fiction of Franz Kafka, where it’s mixed and contrasted with the life of the writer. I am generally not a big fan of critical readings that make everything in a given work of fiction about writing fiction, but it’s difficult to get around it in Kafka’s case—most of his stories either feature a literal artist or a metaphorical one, and much of his work has something to say on what it is to be a writer in a society that can’t possibly appreciate “real” art.

The animals in Kafka’s work occasionally mark dehumanization—the obvious example is poor Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis,” who turns into an insect (a better translation would apparently be vermin, as he appears to have more than six legs), a transformation that demonstrates just how dehumanized he always was, with his terrible desk job and ungrateful family. But in its way, his metamorphosis sets him free—he’s no longer forced to go to work and no longer labors under any delusions about what he really is. And when he becomes a bug, his family is forced to go to work, making the whole thing a sort of tragic grace.

Meanwhile, after the protagonist of “The Hunger Artist” starves himself to death in front of an uninterested audience, he is replaced in his circus cage by a panther, a vast improvement on its previous occupant:

Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary. The panther was all right. The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it; somewhere in its jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away.

Kafka describes this panther in artistic terms—his roaring is a type of storytelling—but the animal is superior to the man because he harbors no delusions; he is what he is, and he’s okay with that. The human artist, then, could be improved by becoming more like this wild animal, less inhibited, stronger, more noble.

Elsewhere, the mole in “The Burrow” is paranoid and neurotic precisely because he’s so much of a human being, eloquent and fastidious. But his human thoughts and emotion lead him only to a state of anxiety, constantly afraid that someone will be able to enter his perfectly constructed home. One assumes that most moles don’t live in this fear but are something closer to the panther, even if they’re less powerful.

It’s not until “Josephine the Singer” that we find an appropriate combination of the artist and the animal. The titular mouse maintains her mouse-ness but manages to create something so beautiful that no one can possibly resist it. Her singing takes her mouse brethren away from their worried lives—away from their resemblance to humanity—and brings them back to their animal natures, to the point where they cannot even look at her but “bur[y their] face[s] in [their] neighbor’s fur”—a connection both to community and to animality, the best parts of the human and bestial worlds.

It’s this expansion of Nietzschean animalism—rather than the introduction of angst into literature—that is Kafka’s true legacy to writers. It is “Josephine the Singer” that will allow Saul Bellow to bring Henderson the Rain King back to the United States, allow him to become an animal and thereby to connect to his fellow human beings and resume his—much happier—life in the suburbs.

On Blame and Psychiatry

2009-08-10T06:37:00.002-04:00

We’re still three years from the release of the DSM-V, the updated version of the Bible of psychiatry, but the controversy has already begun. Debate has swirled around this book from the very beginning—this is, after all, the reference work that until 1974 classified homosexuality as a mental illness. But the American Psychiatric Association seems determined to outdo themselves this time around, as this article from Slate demonstrates:

The APA isn’t just deciding the fate of shopaholics; it’s also debating whether overuse of the Internet, “excessive” sexual activity, and even prolonged bitterness should be viewed, quite seriously, as “brain disorders.” If you spend hours online, have sex more frequently than aging psychiatrists, and moan incessantly that the federal government can’t account for all its TARP funds, take heed: You may soon be classed among the 48 million Americans the APA already considers mentally ill.

I am by no means hostile to psychiatry, not in a knee-jerk manner, anyway; but I’m disturbed by this relatively recent pathologization of day-to-day life. The problem is not so much that psychiatrists are now free to see “normal” things as harmful—excessive sexual activity can certainly be a problem, if it results in the breakdown of relationships—but that it turns them into behaviors outside of our control.

I’m torn even on that phenomenon, however; I believe that alcoholism and drug addiction exist, and I believe to some extent that addiction is beyond the individual’s power to correct. (I’ve not read the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I suspect I could get behind most of it.) But once we start to see all harmful behaviors as symptoms of mental illness, we step into a world where individual actions don’t count for much. Addiction medicine—especially once it gets applied to the world outside of drug abuse—can result in an odd destruction of the human being. We become machines, completely controlled by the data that gets put into our systems.

An example: I’ve listened to the radio program Loveline for several years now, and I enjoy it and respect Dr. Drew Pinsky for what he does for his callers. (If Pinsky annoys you on the radio or on the television, I highly recommend his memoir, Cracked, in which you’ll see an entirely new side of him—you’ll see exactly how much he bleeds for those under his care.) My wife and I both read his latest book, The Mirror Effect, this summer, and while I was intrigued by his examination of celebrity narcissism and could get behind some of his assertions about how it destroys our society—I’ve seen what he calls the Don’t you know who I am? phenomenon in my students—I was disturbed by his steadfast refusal to label narcissism as anything other than a mental illness.

His concern for his patients, then—including many of the celebrities he interviewed for this book—cuts both ways. It allows him to treat alcoholics without their feeling that he thinks they’re terrible people, but he, and those of us who would like to listen to him, is left without the capacity to make moral judgments. (Because of this, Loveline was much better when Adam Carolla co-hosted the program—Carolla was always perfectly willing to judge. His harshness and Pinsky’s gentleness balanced each other out in helpful ways.)

So I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth after reading Pinsky’s book, to the extent where he’s starting to irk me even on the radio; there’s no doubt in my mind addiction hardwires the brain to harmful behavior, and there’s no doubt that narcissism in some cases springs from childhood abuse or tragedy. But for us to be human beings in what that has always been understood to mean we must be able to be jerks and to be held accountable for it.

The same goes for the DSM-V: If my (hypothetical) debt is the product of a mental illness, should the credit card company let me off the hook? If my (very real) bitterness is turning people off, should they assume I’m a good person who’s suffering from a “brain disorder”? As usual for critiques of psychiatry, I turn to Walker Percy to make my point for me:

suppose you could show me one “sin,” one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.

Percy is right; for us to be human beings—for us to be capable of doing good—we must be capable of doing wrong, and we must be held responsible for it when we do so. I’m afraid that the APA is moving further and further away from this, into a world where human beings are mere medical cases, lab rats waiting for the doctor’s cure for issues of the soul.

Friday Links

2009-08-07T08:00:00.007-04:00

Friday links triumphantly returns!

Why can't people accept their own mortality?
Return of the Promise Keepers.
Malcolm Gladwell's reductionist reading of To Kill a Mockingbird.
The death of the public intellectual.
On judging the intellects of the past.
James K.A. Smith doesn't like Mad Men. Yeah, me neither.
And he doesn't like modern country music, either.

The Transcendence of 'The Transcendence of the Ego'

2009-08-05T09:41:00.004-04:00

I tried my best to just “jump into” Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical masterwork, Being and Nothingness, but I just couldn’t—not even after seven months of struggling through Heidegger’s Being and Time. Being and Nothingness is as difficult (the cynic in me says “incomprehensible”) as Being and Time, but it’s even more frustrating. It’s easy to blame the difficulty of Being and Time on Heidegger’s failure as a writer; it’s easy to say he was just no good at it and that it wouldn’t be fair to expect him to write clearly. But Sartre is a good writer, even a great one, when he wants to be, as you can tell from his fiction and from his wonderful little essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” So why is Being and Nothingness so incredibly hard to understand?

For answers, I turned to Paul Vincent Spade, whose excellent and extensive class notes on Being and Nothingness are available online. Spade is clear where Sartre is obscure; I can’t imagine going through Sartre without him. But before he discusses Being and Nothingness, Spade has his students read through an earlier work of philosophy by Sartre, 1937’s The Transcendence of the Ego, which, he warns, may be even more difficult.

He’s right. I took Transcendence slowly and used Spade’s notes, but it still made my head hurt. But halfway through, his points began revealing themselves to me. Essentially, Sartre argues in this book that there’s no such thing as a “transcendent ego”—that mysterious creature posited by Kant and Husserl that creates the world “outside” of the human mind. I’ve not read Kant and Husserl, and so I struggled with this part even after reading Spade’s explanation of their thought.

But when Sartre turns to philosophical egoism, I understand him completely. Egoism, as I’m sure you know, is the notion (put forth by Ayn Rand and some people who are possibly even more unpleasant than her) that human beings necessarily follow their own best interests. Thus, there’s no such thing as altruism; if I see someone in need and I give her something to help her out, I’m doing so only to assuage my own guilty conscience, not because I care about her.

Sartre rejects this notion outright, not because he believes in the goodness of humanity but because it’s a philosophical and psychological absurdity. The reason, it seems, goes back to Husserl, who says that every act of consciousness must be a consciousness of something—consciousness, in other words, is always transitive in the grammatical sense. Thus no consciousness is consciousness of itself—if one wishes to turn the eye of consciousness onto itself, one can do it only by examining a prior act of consciousness. (I’ve believed this for years without knowing the philosophical terms for it; you can’t examine yourself wholly because you can’t examine the part of yourself conducting the examination.)

So how does this assertion disprove egoism? Simple: it disproves the notion of an unconscious ego. (Sartre, I believe, rejects the notion of the unconscious mind altogether, since the word mind designates consciousness and consciousness cannot be unconscious—but one need not go this far to agree with his dismissal of egoism.) Consciousness cannot be consciousness of consciousness, so a person absolutely cannot be aware of herself when she is focused on someone else’s problems. Jane sees Charlie suffering; in her consciousness of Charlie’s suffering, Jane’s ego does not exist, since you can’t be simultaneously conscious of someone else and yourself. The ego enters only later, when Jane reflects upon her response to Charlie. There’s no unconscious egoism involved when Jane gives a dollar to Charlie—there’s only her response to Charlie.

Thus there’s a gulf between consciousness of the world (an imprecise term, and Sartre prefers the more focused but more obscure being-in-itself) and consciousness of oneself (which Sartre calls being-for-itself). Spade describes the act of crossing from one to the other as something violent, something painful in a spiritual sense—even though we do it hundreds of times a day.

I think this explains why The Transcendence of the Ego (as well as Being and Nothingness and other works about consciousness itself) is so difficult to read. Oftentimes, when you read a book, you “lose yourself” in it—you get bound up into the plot of the novel or the argument of the philosophy, and you’re not conscious of your own ego. But that absorption is not possible when reading a book about consciousness; the argument (another controversial term, since Sartre, with his phenomenological background, doesn’t technically “make arguments” but merely “observes,” but let’s not worry about that for our purposes) involves a nearly constant shift from consciousness of being-in-itself (the book) to being-for-itself (my act of reading the book). A writer may be able to write a book about consciousness well or poorly, but it’s going to be difficult no matter what—because the act of reading is always already violent; it constantly shifts your attention.

It’s either that, or I’m just making excuses for my short attention span.

Femme-Tropy

2009-08-03T08:00:00.001-04:00

I’ve liked Ernest Hemingway’s work ever since 10th grade, where I first encountered A Farewell to Arms and lost myself in its quiet horror. My affection for that novel, however, never really translated into full-scale obsession the way it did, at the time, for T.S. Eliot or William Blake; more than a decade later, I haven’t read much more of Hemingway than I had at the time, and the one time I did read The Sun Also Rises, I did it in three hours one cold Sunday morning—and I didn’t pay much attention to it.

I’m reading Sun again for my comprehensive exams, which of course forces me to slow down and pay more attention this time, and as I go through it I remember the things I liked about Hemingway in high school and the things I learned that I should probably hate about him—the ridiculous “hard-boiled-ness” of his protagonists, for example, wears thin after awhile for any reader who’s safely made it through puberty.

(Funny story: I had to reread A Farewell to Arms for a class in college. I’d just seen the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, a pastiche of film noir and existentialism, and I couldn’t make it through Hemingway’s novel without cracking up, imagining Frederic Henry’s monosyllabic responses coming from Billy Bob Thornton’s laconic barber. Okay, I guess that story's not that funny, but it makes me laugh, anyway.)

Probably the first thing you learn in any classroom scenario critical of Hemingway’s work is the feminist objection to him. There’s a group of scholars now who are desperately trying to “reclaim” A Farewell to Arms, saying that Catherine Barkley is a strong character and perhaps even some sort of role model. These people are insane. Hemingway seems incapable of writing a female character with any kind of depth or verisimilitude to her; women are, for him, either mannish sexual aggressors or submissive and docile objects of masculine sexual aggression.

But that’s not even the biggest problem with Hemingway’s portrayal of women. A long passage from The Sun Also Rises demonstrates:

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something from nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth.

Obviously, masculinity’s a big deal for Hemingway. His protagonists may be cerebral and literate, but they always have a connection to the body; they’re always fishing or boxing or bull-fighting. Masculinity—even mere male-ness—is a restorative condition in Hemingway’s work. Feeling down? Play tennis for four hours, and you’ll get your soul back.

Accordingly, male-to-male (or “homosocial,” to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s famous term for it) relationships are generally positive in his fiction. Think of the male relationships in Hemingway’s novels—think of how much more vivid, for example, Frederic Henry’s relationship with Rinaldo is than his romance with Catherine. Men are able to achieve Heideggerian being-with-one-another only with other men—the entrance of women into the equation creates an economy of relationships in which no one gets anything for free and in which even gifts have huge and heavy strings attached to them.

Furthermore, women move homosocial relationships from the realm of the being-with-one-another into the realm of the being-against-one-another. Jake and Robert Cohn, for example, have their falling-out over their conflicting relationships with Brett. Women, in Hemingway’s novels, are poisonous and contagious, infecting everything and everyone they touch. And yet they’re unavoidable; even Jake Barnes, who’s unable even to have a sexual relationship, can’t stay away from Brett Ashley.

Hemingway’s feminist critics are right, in other words. The problem with his novels from a gender standpoint is not that he doesn’t know how to write a believable woman without making her into a man; it’s that his women are, to paraphrase the Hollies, King Midases in reverse, destroying everything they touch.

Not that Hemingway was alone in this, of course—The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan, for example, seems to exist mostly as a way to take Nick's model of masculinity away from him. Nor is he a mere product of his time, one that we can look back on in innocent disgust, as Judd Apatow’s “bro-romance” comedies demonstrate. (Seth Rogan’s friendship with Paul Rudd in Knocked Up is far more compelling than his sexual relationship with Katherine Heigl.)

I’ve written about the kinks in male-female relationships elsewhere, and I wonder to what extent those who take Genesis 1-3 seriously as mythology can blame this phenomenon on the Fall. Male-female relationships are obviously more complicated than male-male or female-female relationships, since there’s an entirely new brain system to deal with in the latter.

As I (jokingly) tell my wife, I don’t read women authors, so I’m wondering if we see a similar structure in fiction by women. Are men mere agents of entropy and destruction? I’m not sure, but I suspect not: Women are for the most part capable of greater nuance and complication than are men, a product of the superiority of the X chromosome to the small and decaying Y.

This went a long way off track from The Sun Also Rises, but you’ll have to forgive me—I haven’t written one of these in quite some time.

Smash Your Computer

2009-07-21T11:07:00.004-04:00

It's been awhile since I posted, and it'll likely be awhile longer, as I'm pretty intellectually and emotionally spent right now, but I did want to call readers' attention to this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's the main thrust:

A study published in the April issue of British Educational Research Journal found that 59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. The survey consisted of 211 students at a university in England and was conducted by researchers at the University of Central Lancashire.
Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs. "The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions," said the report. In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging.

I realized that pretty quickly. My first semester of teaching, I used a lot of technology aids, which ended up mostly being crutches for me, and the students didn't respond very well. I had a much harder time getting them to speak up about something on the screen than about the things they read, and my evaluations reflected that problem.

Last year, I used technology only twice--once in Comp I when I showed them a variety of clips from Disney films and shorts to demonstrate racial stereotypes (it's hard, after all, to do visual analysis without technology!), and once in Comp II when I gave an introductory lecture on poetry and needed to be able to flash poems up quickly and efficiently. The rest of my classes were composed of group discussions, with very little lecturing on my part. This, it seems to me, is as it should be. It demands something from the students, and while they're resistant for the most part at the beginning, 75 to 80 percent of them will eventually get into the rhythm of the class and will offer their opinions. Unsurprisingly, they know the material much better this way than through lecturing--perhaps surprisingly, they engage more with the material this way than the times I tried to use technology.

Two caveats: (a) I'm not a particularly technologically advanced person even in my private life, and so the possibility exists that if I were creative in that arena, I'd be able to come up with an interesting and effective way to utilize technology in the classroom; and (b) the Chronicle, as usual, manifests a humanities prejudice. It's all very well and good to conduct English or philosophy classes via group discussion, but I can't imagine that science and math classes don't benefit from technology. Then again, it's been half a decade since I've taken classes of that sort, so I'm out of touch. Anyone have any thoughts?

Heidegger and the American Dream

2009-06-29T08:00:00.002-04:00

I've been struggling through Heidegger's Being and Time for six months now, with varying degrees of success. The book is nearly impenetrable in its early chapters, even though the second half of the book is almost readable. One of Heidegger's most appealing and resonant ideas is that there is no such thing as a break with one’s history; such an idea is built on the notion that a person is only what he is at the present time—or even that one is what one chooses to be today. No, says Heidegger, a person is what he has always been, including things that happened to him before he had any kind of real agency, that is, his birth and his upbringing:

The “between” which relates to birth and death already lies in the Being of Dasein. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that Dasein “is” actual in a point of time, and that, apart from this, it is “surrounded” by the non-actuality of its birth and death. Understood existentially, birth is not and never is something past in the sense of something no longer present-at-hand; and death is just as far from having the kind of Being of something still outstanding, not yet present-at-hand but coming along. Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death. As long as Dasein factically exists, both the “ends” and their “between” are, and they are in the only way which is possible on the basis of Dasein’s Being as care. (374)

Such a notion flies directly in the face of the American dream, which is, after all, built on the idea that at any time a person can remake himself into anything he would like to be. We see this in the early history of America—or at least the modern popular conception of it—in which the colonies make a clean break with their mother country, forming something new and beautiful and pure. We see this in the conception of America as the “New Eden,” a completely new society with new rules and new life. We see this in the American idea of the “self-made man,” typified in Benjamin Franklin, who throws off the shackles of his upbringing in Boston to become a cosmopolitan Renaissance man.

(On another note, think of the famed American pasttime, baseball. It's sometimes called a "game of redemption" because a player can strike out three times, but he's newly made a hero if he hits a home run to win the game. Baseball may be the ultimate pop-culture expression of the American idea of secular rebirth.)

Problem is, as everyone knows, that Franklin lies all throughout his autobiography, fashioning himself as self-made when he was anything but. No one escapes his past—you are always what you were, even as you add to that at every moment. Indeed, Heidegger suggests that man is the sum total of his experiences—those that “happened,” those that “are happening,” and those that have “yet to happen.” Dasein does not so much exist in history as it is itself history: “In analyzing the historicality of Dasein we shall try to show that this entity is not ‘temporal’ because it ‘stands in history,’ but that, on the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist only because it is temporal in the very basis of its Being” (376). Just look at his stern face up there, as if he's wordlessly telling all us Americans that we're deluding ourselves.

I realized this long before I read Heidegger, when, at the age of 21 or so, I was preparing to leave the South in which I was raised, the South in which my entire family was raised. I had fashioned myself as cosmopolitan, as a person outside my region, outside my upbringing. Then I went to a family reunion, looked at the “hillbillies” around me. (Fun story: My last name is Farmer, and my maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Hicks, so my family literally started where the Farmers met the Hicks.) I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I would never free myself of this background. I am to some extent my family, which means, I suppose, that I am ontologically (on some level) a hillbilly.

This was to some extent a freeing realization. It freed me from the burden of trying to escape this past—an impossible task, as Heidegger points out. And when I moved to Nebraska, I began to realize in a practical way exactly how Southern I am. But I shouldn’t over-simplify, since after all I am to some extent a Nebraskan as well, after spending three years or so as one. And my own children will have all of this in their Dasein—they’ll be a Farmer and a Hicks and a Georgian and an Alabaman and a Nebraskan; they’ll be from the suburbs of Atlanta, like me, and the small towns of South Georgia, like my wife. And they’ll be whatever we make them, wherever they are born, and whatever they make themselves.

I think all of this jives completely with the Christian notion of original sin, which after all posits that people are their ancestors, that the sins of the fathers will be passed on to their sons. It jives less well with the Christian notion of the New Being, of Christ’s deliverance of man into a second creation, a second and fuller humanity, one in which the sins of the past no longer hold sway over us. But it’s important to note that we have not quite received that New Being—as Paul Tillich says, we glimpse it only Now and Then, and as St. Paul says, we have received only the first-fruits of the New Creation. So we’re still grounded in time, at least in this life.

What the American dream attempts, in my opinion, is a secular version of the New Creation without waiting until after death. The country reinvents itself apart from England (and apart, depending on whom you ask, from any redemption through God, even as the Founding Fathers couch their ideas in religious language). Heidegger is right to reject this notion, even though Christians have to reject his assertion that there’s no way out of historicality. It just requires something outside the circuit, and even then the circuit will not be broken in this Zeit.

Friday Links

2009-06-19T08:00:00.006-04:00

Does Flannery O'Connor use her characters as an excuse for grandstanding?
Trying to get to Thomas Pynchon.
The dirty jokes in Twelfth Night.
David Kessler on the Unholy Trinity.
What kind of Christian was George Tiller?
Dawkins can't quite chip it all away.
Why sex is overrated.

Activists: Questions for Liberals and Conservatives

2009-06-17T08:00:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, I took offense at the implication in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that the words Law and Justice are essentially coterminous. I’m halfway through the Politics now, and he’s addressed this issue, clarifying it to some extent, but it’s left me with a whole new set of questions. Here’s what he says:

Suppose we say the people is the supreme authority, then if they use their numerical superiority to make a distribution of the property of the rich, is not that unjust? It has been done by a valid decision of the sovereign power, yet what can we call it save the very height of injustice?
(III.10)

So the laws of the State must be subject to some higher authority, although Aristotle is a little fuzzy on what that authority is and how we should access it. But the important thing is that he makes it clear that the law is not always just, and III.10 ends with an outright declaration of the distinction:

It might be objected too that it is a bad thing for any human being, subject to all possible disorders and affections of the human mind, to be the sovereign authority, which ought to be reserved for the law itself. But that will not make any difference to the cases we have been discussing; the law itself may have a bias towards oligarchy or democracy, so that exactly the same results will ensue.

He doesn’t say it in these exact words, but obviously his point is that the law is a man-made institution rather than something handed down verbatim from an outside authority, and therefore any objections one makes about human rule must also be made about the law itself.

So who has sway? The rulers or the law? Predictably, Aristotle suggests a balance. On the one hand, “the laws enunciate only general principles and cannot therefore give day-to-day instructions on matters as they arise” (III.15); however, “On the other hand, rulers cannot do without a general principle to guide them; it provides something which, being without personal feelings, is better than that which by its nature does feel” (III.15). Aristotle privileges the law slightly, as he recommends that rulers “only depart from the provisions of the law in cases which the law itself cannot be made to cover” (III.15).

But then he throws a wrench into the gears. As I discussed in an earlier post, for Aristotle, the human soul is divided into two sections: the intellect (strong) and the will/passions (weak). So when he equates the Law with the intellect and human rulers with the passions, we’re back to the drawing board:

he who asks Law to rule is asking God and Intelligence and no others to rule; while he who asks for the rule of a human being is bringing in a wild beast; for human passions are like a wild beast and strong feelings lead astray rulers and the very best of men. In law you have the intellect without the passions.
(III.16)

So we’re back to Law and Justice being coterminous, and the question still stands: Who makes the Law, if it’s not handed down to Aristotle from Mount Sinai?

My question for my readers: How does this schema relate to so-called “activist judges” on the Supreme Court? Should the law—the general principle, in other words—be changed based on changing times, or when the specific situation would require a complete overhaul? The political right seems to see the law as sacrosanct, the left as a general principle. I think Aristotle falls into the former camp, but thankfully we don’t have to accept his word as—no pun intended—law.

So if you’re a conservative, I want to know why the Constitution is a sort of quasi-divine document that Supreme Court Justices can’t change without suffering the slings and arrows of “activism” (and more recently, “empathy”). If the people who wrote it were human beings, why can’t the Constitution be wrong?

And you’re a liberal, I want to know how much we can change the Constitution before we stop having a guiding principle for our government? If the Law is supposed to hold true in general cases, how much can we change that Law without having nothing on which to rest our society?

I have no answers, myself.

Does Democracy Rot Your Soul?

2009-06-15T08:00:00.001-04:00

When I was a secretary for an academic department a few years ago, the professors were a little surprised to learn that I—apparently unlike many other secretaries they’d had—was perfectly willing to bend my will to theirs. My anti-authoritarian streak began early, it’s true, but by the end of my undergraduate years, it had to a large extent died out. This happens, I suppose, as a person grows up. Or at least it’s supposed to.

“Some people,” said one of the professors, “take ‘All men are created equal’ to mean that we’re all on the same level in a practical sense.”

“Well, of course not,” I replied. “We’re all created in equal in terms of ontological value, but obviously your job is higher than mine and I shouldn’t pretend we’re on the same social level.” The problem, as I saw it then and as I continue to see it, is that somehow we’ve equated who we are as people with what we do—deep down, I think Americans believe that if you have a better job you’re worth more as a human being. That, for obvious reasons, leads to the attitude “You can’t tell me what to do.”

One thing that surprised me when I first started reading Plato was that he’s no friend of democracy. The ancient Greeks, after all, invented the form. I learned this fact in middle school, and I can’t remember if my teacher bothered to tell us that the most notable of them hated it with the depth of their beings.

In The Republic, Plato places it at the very bottom of his analysis of political systems, warning that if people aren’t careful, their societies will slide into it. “Democracy,” he says, “originates when the poor win, kill or exile their opponents, and give the rest equal civil rights and opportunities of office, appointment to office being as a rule by lot” (557a). This is a nightmare for him because poverty makes a person incapable of choosing correctly. Democracy becomes an exercise in smoke and mirrors, and if people like it, they like it in the way that “women and children [like] gaily coloured things” (557c).

His language here makes it easy for us to dismiss him. The poor are human beings like everyone else, and they’re not in all cases or completely responsible for their poverty. Marx has told us the ways in which the system creates its own caste system and that the dream of social mobility is to a large extent a lottery rather than a meritocracy. And the sexism of the ancient Greeks (way worse than the sexism either of the Hebrew Bible or of the New Testament) just doesn’t work in a modern world. But we should still take his remarks on democracy seriously, especially when he talks about its effects on the soul.

Before we look at those remarks, though, I should say a word about Greek opinions on the nature of the soul. The common opinion, best I can gleam from reading Plato and Aristotle, is that the soul is composed of two elements, the reason and the will. The reason sits in natural authority over the will—the rational over the emotional. Aristotle uses this schema to justify any number of things, including the rule of men (rational) over women (emotional), but we need not accept that implication to recognize the wisdom of a natural hierarchy of character traits.

So under a political system of democracy, the individual character begins to become democratic, which is to say that the emotional elements of the soul begin to rebel against the rational elements:

For the rest of his life he spends as much money, time and trouble on the unnecessary desires as on the necessary. If he’s lucky and doesn’t get carried to extremes, the tumult will subside as he gets older, some of the exiles will be received back, and the invaders won’t have it all their own way. He’ll establish a kind of equality of pleasures, and will give the pleasure of the moments its turn of complete control till it is satisfied, and then move on to another, so that none is underprivileged and all have their fair share of encouragement. (561b)

It’s hard to ignore this warning given the current economic crisis, which is built from people of all levels of society allowing their pleasures, their unnecessary desires, to rule over their rational minds. Why should a CEO who’s completely trashed his company receive bonuses of millions of dollars? On the other end of society, why should someone who makes $6 an hour—or worse, who lives off of Welfare—own two or three televisions and a satellite dish?

The answer is the same: We’re to a large part controlled by our pleasures. Poor Jimmy Carter tried to tell the country this in the late 1970s and was crucified it: Living with your means requires sacrifice; it requires allowing the rational element of your soul to rule over the emotional element. Unfortunately for Carter, democratic people naturally rebel against this instruction.

Additionally, we begin to believe that no one can rule over us. “Every man is a king,” claimed Huey Long, the populist Louisiana senator, and Lord knows this is what Americans believe at the core of their beings. If it’s true, though, we need to start worrying, lest we end up with one of the two kings given in Aristophanes’ The Knights: the vicious, wicked Cleon, and Agoracritus, the idiot sausage-seller. (It’s true that in Aristophanes’ play, Agoracritus ends up being a pretty good ruler. I think most of us will agree it wouldn’t happen that way in real life.)

Besides, even if it were a good thing for every man to be king, it’s simply not plausible. Long devised the slogan and its accompanying song not to elevate every man into his own ruler but to become their ruler. Americans are told from childhood that anyone can become president—we’ve heard this a million times over—but it’s simply not true. By the time you finish college (and possibly even by the time you enter it), you know if you have a shot of being president—and the overwhelming majority of people don’t. And it’s a good thing.

But there’s a tendency to hold onto this myth, to believe that it’s some stroke of luck and not your native ability that keeps you from ruling the world. And that’s where the anti-authoritarianism comes in. That’s where democracy begins to rot your soul—there’s no reason to listen to the people in charge, since we’re all capable of doing it. You may as well secede.

I’m just kicking this idea around, so I’ll present a few caveats before people start to think I’m advocating some kind of dictatorship or suggesting that there’s never a time to overthrow oppression:

(a) I’m a Protestant, which means my Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends have every right to point out my hypocrisy here. Protestantism is built upon the notion that we can all be our own priests, and in some of its forms, it completely negates Church hierarchy. Presbyterianism happens not to be one of those forms, but it does suggest a sort of hermeneutic self-rule: Anyone can read the Bible and come up with the correct meaning, and we’re not dependent upon the Church to tell us if we’re right or wrong. The Orthodox are fond of saying that the Protestant Reformation removed the Pope and created billions of little popes.

(b) Plato is unable to come up with a political system that’s more appealing or realistic than the ones he condemns. He essentially advocates the society in Brave New World, with a small group of Guardians ruling over everyone else. No one owns anything, not even his family; women and children are shared equally by all. He somehow believes that the Guardians won’t take advantage of their situation and grow rich off of the fat of the land.

Aristotle rightly condemns aspects of Plato’s republic and advocates instead his typical Golden Mean—not too much tyranny, not too much democracy. I am not far enough into the Politics to evaluate this system.

(c) There’s no doubt that there are leaders, democratically elected and otherwise, who are just plain bad, who drive their societies into the ground and who oppress their people. I have little problem with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s plot to kill Hitler, for example. (Of course, Hitler was democratically elected and for the most part did what he did with the approval of the masses.) So I have not yet worked out what we should do with tyrants, that is, when submission should stop and self-rule should begin.

(d) Finally, I recognize that I’m as much a product of democratic thought as the rest of us and that our political system is not going to go away any time soon. Further, I don’t particularly think that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t like going back to a monarchy or an oligarchy or (God forbid) Plato’s republic.

What I’m interested in, I guess, is finding a way to have the political advantages of democracy without its corrosive effects on the individual. What do you guys think? Does political democracy necessarily lead to the democracy of the soul and to the selfish and lazy citizens that believe it’s all owed to them? Is there any way out?

Friday Links

2009-06-12T08:00:00.007-04:00

The last vestige of the Brontës.
The seven types of bookstore patrons.
Why Western culture is so morally outraged.
Where the Academy went wrong.
An interview with the man who's going to save 2-D animation.