We will welcome them with bullets and shoes.
- The Iraqi information minister, during the invasion of Iraq.
Shoes thrown at Bush on Iraq trip
In the middle of the news conference with Mr Maliki, a reporter stood up and shouted "this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog," before hurtling his shoes at Mr Bush, narrowly missing him.
"All I can report is a size 10," Mr Bush said according to the Associated Press news agency.
- BBC article
--
I approve of the throwing of shoes at politicians, and it is one of the great virtues of modern democracy that people can do such things and not get tortured to death. I seem to remember Baghdad Bob's late boss once gouged out a woman's eyes with his own hands for shouting insults at him in the street.
In other news, US man uses pizza in self-defence.
--
A day later - An Iraqi official was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the journalist was being interrogated to determine whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at President Bush.
He was also being tested for alcohol and drugs, and his shoes were being held as evidence, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
On the bright side, the shoe-throwing is uniting Sunni and Shia - the journalist being the former (if I don't misremember), while the latter are protesting his detention and calling him a hero.
"He [George Bush] deserves to be hit with 100, not just one or two shoes. Who wants him to come here?" said a man in Baghdad.
More: The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody.
Muntadar al-Zaidi has allegedly suffered a broken arm, broken ribs and internal bleeding, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC...
A spokesperson for the Iraqi military says the journalist is in good health and said the allegations were untrue.
It is unclear whether the reporter may have been injured when he was wrestled to the floor at the news conference, or at a later point...
Meanwhile, offers to buy the shoes he threw are being made around the Arab world, reports say.
"He has no ties with the former regime. His family was arrested under Saddam's regime," [his boss] said.
Mr Zaidi has previously been abducted by insurgents and held twice for questioning by US forces in Iraq.
In November 2007 he was kidnapped by a gang on his way to work in central Baghdad and released three days later without a ransom.
He said at the time that the kidnappers had beaten him until he lost consciousness, and used his necktie to blindfold him.
Mr Zaidi never learned the identity of his kidnappers, who questioned him about his work before letting him go.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Vindicated at Last
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
On the Musings of a Sociologist
I pause today to note an interesting talk by a sociologist of religion. There's many things worthy of note in what Prof. Martin has to say, but the ones that leapt out were when he reminded me of Screwtape. For instance:
I pause also, to pursue the comparison and the contrast between Western Europe and the United States with respect to a couple of related contemporary developments. They are the return of magic and the rise of spirituality that Heelas and Woodhead speak of as ‘re-sacralisation’.
Regis Debray in his extraordinary biography of God over the last three thousand years claims that ‘The Twilight of the Gods is Morning for the Magicians’... in the wide open spaces of the United States the gods and the magicians enjoy high noon together. The same applies to spirituality. In Western Europe spirituality, with art and music as further sources of consolation and inspiration, is often encountered outside the churches. Spirituality tends to offer an alternative to faith, as it does, for example, in Germany.
In Germany, I should note, it's common for the not-particularly-religious to say "Gaia knows" instead of "God knows" (which sounds better in German than English). I didn't spend my time in the Free State of Bavaria examining all the weird and wonderful ways in which human spirituality finds expression outside of established religion, but a kind of secular mysticism does tend to appear in their culture and music. It tended to repulse me so I didn't look deeper; mysticism is Jacob wrestling with God and limping through the wilderness to his family afterwards, blessed and exhausted and with a dislocated thigh; or Elijah, who listened while fire and wind and earthquake raged, but the voice of the Most High was not in them, but then came a whisper in the stillness, and he walked forth to talk to God, covering his face in fear. Post-modern mysticism seems oriented to leaving the soul self-satisfied, coming to an arrangement with that howling external need without actually acknowledging that it is an external need, so it exists to proper mysticism in the same relationship that onanism does to sex.
Although when the Germans do proper Weltschmerz, that's another matter, and they still can.
This reminded me, somewhat tangentially I confess, of Screwtape's oft-quoted comments that:
I have high hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to the Enemy. The "Life Force," the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight.
The modern state of affairs isn't quite what Unca Screwtape wants, but then, he's always looking to have his cake and eat it too. There's a lot more scepticism about science these days, and there's widespread acceptance of the fact that science doesn't describe everything worthwhile - the concept of "Non-Overlapping Magisteria" is pretty widely-accepted. So I don't know if it's necessary anymore to ally magic and materialism, although I guess it's a useful tool, if only because of the impoverished philosophical state of affairs - positivist logic has usurped the name and place of Reason, but man is a spiritual animal in spite of that; so Screwtape's Materialist Magus is actually pretty well adapted to the modern climate - a sense of reason in keeping with scientific philosophy, but an inchoate and diffuse sense of the spiritual that's carefully calibrated not to make too many moral demands on him.
Professor Martin was a lot closer to Screwtape's thought here, though:
I hope that... I have offered considerations undermining the idea that religion recedes as science advances. At least if I were an atheist anxious to disturb the faith of an intelligent young friend, I would recommend a course in biblical criticism, ‘penny plain and tuppence coloured’, or in psychobabble and sociobabble, or, best of all, a vigorous drench in romantic literary Weltschmertz. But not, definitely not, a bracing course in astrophysics. He or she might rather too easily suppose he or she was tracing ‘the Mind of the Maker’.
Uncle S. got there before him:
Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable 'real life'. But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is 'the results of modern investigation'. Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!
Monday, 8 December 2008
On the Decline of Manliness
According to a certain person, a number of years ago Matsuguma Kyoan told this story:
In the practice of medicine there is a differentiation of treatment according to the Yin and Yang of men and women. There is also a difference in pulse. In the last fifty years, however, men's pulse has become the same as women's. Noticing this, in the treatment of eye disease I applied women's treatment to men and found it suitable. When I observed the application of men's treatment to men, there was no result. Thus I knew that men's spirit had weakened and that they had become the same as women, and the end of the world had come. Since I witnessed this with certainty, I kept it a secret.
When looking at the men of today with this in mind, those who could be thought to have a woman's pulse are many indeed, and those who seem like real men few. Because of this, if one were to make a little effort, he would be able to take the upper hand quite easily. That there are few men who arc able to cut well in beheadings is further proof that men's courage has waned.
- The Hagakure, Book 1
...history is rife with legends of women disguised as men rising to great ranks. Ancient Greece and Rome had them. But the purpose of such legends was usually satirical: It was meant to show how weak or corrupt the men of the time and place had become. The moral of the tale was that the men were so spineless that a woman could assume leadership. And that means that the legend of Pope Joan... reflects a degrading and persistent animus toward women that lingered from pagan culture.
- Robert Lockwood, Catholic Answers
The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals... a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.
...Indeed, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign of feminisation. And a study at Rotterdam's Erasmus University showed that boys whose mothers had been exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls and tea sets rather than with traditionally male toys.
- Geoffrey Lean, Independent on Sunday, 7/12/2008
The fruits of human progress: after centuries of complaints that men are more womanish than they used to be, Science has finally made it come true.
And there's still no jetpacks...
(h/t: Daily Kraken, Instapundit)
Thursday, 4 December 2008
On the Pilfering of Festivals
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Certain atheists don't like it much and would rather celebrate... well, what do atheists celebrate? The illusory epiphenomenon of consciousness? Chesterton:
I would not read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.
...There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to.
Defy an atheist. Party today.
...OK, flippant. Tho if atheists want to make headway they could do worse than take GKC's advice. And, from what I can see, are doing far worse than taking GKC's advice. Non-religious festivals can and do occur - the Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, Martin Luther King Day, Independence Day; we celebrate Guy Fawkes day to commemorate an oppressed minority trying to blow up politicians - although what's actually celebrated is that the politicians survived and that some members of the oppressed minority got brutally tortured, which seems a little awry to me. But atheism doesn't (as far as I know) do much to push this kind of holiday, and certainly had little to do with their origins. (I can't imagine in what language Dawkins/Hitchens type atheists could venerate MLK - a Christian minister who framed his agenda in specifically religious language, and he's supposed to be some kind of hero? So much for religion being a blight on the world.)
My actual point, whereof I desired to write: there will doubtless be talk, as there always is, of What Everybody Knows To Be True, namely that Christianity shamelessly stole all paganism's festivals, with "all" apparently meaning Eostre and Yule (and the harvest festival being kept as well, but people don't care about that as much these days). Two minutes' thinking is enough to throw this dubious assertion into question, and I feel vaguely ashamed that I never did, until I read Mark Shea's cheerful demolition of this thesis.
The obvious problems to the assumption (as I made it) are: (1) Why would a religion that started in Palestine and later became the state religion of the Roman Empire steal a festival - Eostre - belonging to the northern barbarians? (Answer: it didn't. Easter was what the Jewish Passover turned into in Christianity, which is why it's called pascha in Latin and Greek, and something similar in a lot of other tongues too. If you do not believe me, look up what Easter is called in other languages - the links from the wikipedia article are helpful here. Only in a handful of Germanic languages is there a [vowel]-st-[vowel]-r name pattern.) (2) Did the pagan liturgical calender really consist chiefly of praising the sun in the depths of winter, springtime fertility frolicking, and partying a lot when the harvest came in? Because if so, then yes, Christianity ripped off Paganism wholesale; but if not, then the Christian calender was shaped by a Christian agenda as to what should be celebrated and what not; and where certain themes occurred that had Pagan counterparts, Christianity allowed some continuity of tradition in the specific holidays. Not really a big deal.
The reason it never occurred to me to ask these questions, I confess, was because I thoroughly approved of festival-theft, and was very disappointed to find that What Everybody Knows was not, in fact, true. I approved because Paganism had some things worth keeping; and compared to the modern world's approach, Christian thievery was positively respectful. Yule/Sol Invictus was a festival of hope reborn, of the sun reappearing, of winter losing its grip. From a Christian perspective this hope prefigures, or echoes, the hope of Christ. (The parallel with Sol Invictus may be overstated, though - in the Mediterranean basin, where the winter was less brutal, it wouldn't have had the meaning that Yuletide did. This is probably why the Romans got along without it so long - Sol Invictus didn't appear until the 3rd century AD.) Easter was a festival of renewal and rebirth, which dovetailed reasonably well with the remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus, there was some thematic continuity. The Pagan may be irritated by the Christian religion replacing their own, but I would have said that at the least, we found things in their religion worth stealing and upgrading. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; there are points of contact; something was preserved.
Now consider the modern Western world.
The Holiday Formerly Known as Christmas is not about light shining in the darkness, and the darkness overcoming it not. It is not about looking up into the dark winter sky and declaring that its time is passing, that winter is a fever about to break. If there is hope, it is the hope of presents (no, by any means, a bad thing). Christmas isn't just commercialised, it now breaks out in the superstores in October, or even earlier, and the bland consumerist cheapening of the Christ Mass constitutes a period of mortification longer than any in the Christian calender.
But, to do it justice, The Festive Season still has some core of recognisable good - "for the family", "the Christmas spirit", and so forth - a remnant drive to love and generosity that is worth praising. Easter? Easter is now about chocolate.
In comparison to this, I would regard it as a point in favour of Christianity that it stole pagan festivals, if the degree to which it did so weren't so overstated. Modern life has produced any amount of Cool Stuff that we ought to be grateful for, but its inability to preserve anything it didn't create is pitiful. Recall Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse - the Christian English had kept the pre-Christian White Horse from becoming overgrown, but the Pagan Danes had neglected it; and Alfred's condemnation applies to the modern remains of Yule and Eostre, as well:
Therefore the curse is on you,
on you and all your kings,
not for a fire in Ely fen
or that your gods are nine or ten,
but that only Christian men
keep even Heathen things.
And now to find coffee.
EDIT: I should confess that I was never one for affixing too much importance to holidays and traditions of great antiquity, at least when I was younger, tho I loved carols and affirmed the significance of what was celebrated; we always spent Christmas and Easter with relatives, and I've never yet attended church at Christmas as a result. But it always bothered me that people say "ZOMG Xianity stole pagan festivals" as if it somehow discredits the Christian festival, or is in any way a Bad Thing rather than a flaming indictment of modernity by comparison.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Berlin
I went to Berlin about two months ago, to get a work permit to come to the Great White North. (Not the Great White North of my first choice - I wanted a job in Tromso, Norway, but they never got back to me.) It was an interesting place, haunted badly by the ghosts of 20th-century totalitarianism. Bits of Berlin Wall all over the place, plastered with graffiti; communist detritus; Checkpoint Charlie and the various sectors Berlin was divided up into after the war; the foundations of the Gestapo HQ (now torn down, and being rebuilt as a commemorative museum). And a fair few older buildings too - the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, the Angel of Berlin - from a time when Germany was merely excessively militaristic, rather than being run by genocidal lunatics.
The Gestapo HQ, as I say, was being rebuilt, albeit not for its original purposes. But in the meantime, there's an exhibition among the dismantled foundations, with lots of photos and the occasional audio recording, tracking the history of the SS. I started at the wrong end and progressed back in time. There were a great many things that struck me; the most memorable was the section concerning notable prisoners held there, often later transported to a concentration camp somewhere. Each prisoner got photos and a short blurb in English and German, and often extracts from letters they wrote, and their stories were highly varied - a kind of martyr's gallery spanning the political spectrum. Quite a few communists, of course, several of whom wound up committing suicide due to torture; one priest was permitted to give a Christmas service to other prisoners, and was interrupted partway through by a loud thud - the guard informed him it was a communist jumping off the top of the stairwell. There were a fair few nationalist conservatives, who'd endorsed Hitler in peacetime, but didn't like the way the German military was reduced to committing atrocities in wartime - systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews and Slavs was going too far, so they rebelled. Some of these made interesting figures in their photos before the People's Court - looking scared but defiant, or just too old and cranky to care what was done to them. There was a Lutheran minister whose breaking-point was the euthanasia of the old and sick. There was Josef Mueller of the Catholic resistance, who ferried intelligence to the British via the Vatican. Admiral Canaris is well-known.
Adolf Reichwein stuck in my mind particularly. A friend saw in his face, during trial before the People's Court, the eventual triumph of humanity over the monstrosity they were facing; his last letter to his wife was affectionate and loving, and urged her to trust in God. You could see all of this in the court photo - he didn't have defiance written on his face, but serenity, facing death unafraid and trusting God. There's photos from the trial here and here; though sadly the exact photo I saw there doesn't seem to be on the internet.
There was information on the atrocities committed by the SS - revenge attacks on the civilian population, ordered sometimes by Hitler himself in response to partisan attacks on German soldiers. These were disturbingly well documented - a lot of Germans, for some reason, took cameras with them to the front lines. In one photo, a hanged Russian dangled before a crowd of German soldiers and civilian auxiliaries, several of whom were taking photos themselves. It made me think of the ubiquity of digital cameras today, and specifically of thugs filming themselves kicking the crap out someone while cheerfully announcing "this'll make great youtube material!"
There's an extract from a letter by an SS officer to his wife, casually stating that, because the war is all the Jews' fault, therefore the Jews bear the brunt of it, and as far as the German soldier advances, Russia becomes a Jew-free Zone. "Please do not tell Frau Schmidt", he adds. Of course, she and the kids want to know about his well-being; he says all the shootings are really doing his nerves no good (there were 96 again this morning). he'd be OK if it weren't for the shootings. The children want to know if he can get fresh fruit? An apple a day, and it's a hassle to get that.
Of all the many disturbing things there, though, the worst was the letter between SS operatives in the Netherlands tasked with deporting Jews. It was standard-issue beaurocratic quota management, except that the export quota was for human beings to go to the gas chambers. Our monthly Jew quota is XXX, we only deported YYY, we're missing 222 Jews, and such-and-such an office insists we make it up, right damn now, or it's our head on a plate. Where are we going to find 222 extra Jews on such short notice? The possible options are as follows...
Such was my trip to Berlin. A fascinating city, wild and varied architecturally, and with the fingerprints of 20th-century nightmares all over it.
Sunday, 16 November 2008
On Ottawa, Albertus Magnus and Prof. Michal Heller
I am now safely ensconced in Ottawa, with a new job as scientific researcher, a place to live, and a lot to do. There was a certain degree of culture shock in the first week or so, especially with regards to the increased friendliness of manner and artificial imitation of same by supermarket staff and others (my first encounter with a north american supermarket checkout clerk was a horrific and repulsive experience).
I post in honour of St. Albertus Magnus, Albert the Swabian, whose feast day is today (here's some art I did for the occasion last year). Albert the Swabian bucked his people's reputation as skinflints (legend says the Swabians originally lived in Scotland but were thrown out for being too tight-fisted) by joining a religious order with a vow of poverty, and thence proceeded to become a mediaeval renaissance man, studying just about every subject under the sun. He also discovered arsenic, which may not sound like a useful contribution to the world, but it wasn't hard to find poison if you really wanted to; and arsenic had medical uses as well, so a net plus for everyone.
According to the wikipedia page, he also studied Aristotle and argued for the peaceful coexistence of science and religion. You might think there wasn't much for science and religion to argue about in those days - of the really big potential trouble areas, the round vs. flat earth debate was already ancient history, and Copernicus and Darwin lay in the future. However, there had been voices sceptical of the value and reliability of Reason (I think that was a debate that Christendom had in the 9th century or somesuch - anyone know?), and there were still people sceptical of learning, of the accumulation of knowledge - Sts. Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi were both leery of the potential for arrogance, for steering off-course, of a mind too full of its own wisdom. I don't know how much Albertus did to address this; but the great answer to such concerns came in the form of his pupil, St. Thomas Aquinas, a highly intelligent individual who was also genuinely humble, and didn't seem to understand that there were people in the world less smart than he was. (His giant, unfinished Summa Theologica, a tome of dense, closely-argued philosophical and theological reasoning which scholars have been wrestling with ever since, has as its stated purpose "to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion, in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners".) The fact that Aquinas was rapidly sainted and his insights absorbed into the theology of the Church didn't hurt the scholastic case for the value of scholarship, either.
Leaping to the present, I attended a lecture last week by Prof. Michal Heller, polish cosmologist, philosopher and priest (though he only lasted a year in parish life before realising he wasn't cut out for it), and winner of the Templeton Prize for promoting understanding between Science and Religion. He talked about cosmology and the Big Bang, and what's known of it, outlining the evidence and describing projects that should allow the gathering of new data. It was pretty fascinating, and presented it reasonably easy to understand language. (I was expecting him to start grappling with issues of philosophy of knowledge and suchlike, so was a tad disappointed, but it was still highly interesting.) (I'd have asked the questions myself, but I lack the grounding, and up till a year or two back regarded scientific philosophy in unrepeatably obscene terms due to early exposure to it as a rhetorical club between evolutionists and creationists.)
At some point, he then went on to address the question, which he says he always gets asked: was the Big Bang the point at which God created the universe? (It certainly looks as if someone with root-level permissions said "let there be light!" and everything went from there.) He answer was, we don't know; and while we can't forbid God from having created the universe in this manner, we shouldn't engage in a God-of-the-gaps approach that reduces God to a label for our own ignorance. (He earlier commented on the term "dark matter" in the same terms - it covers our ignorance, and by giving it a label, we tame it, somehow.) He also said that physics is essentially investigating the Mind of God, and even that we can seek God through the equations he made the universe by (calling up a slide with some of these on). I think this is a tad dodgy and will get you along the same road as the Pythagoreans, worshipping numbers and abhorring beans because... actually, why did they abhor beans? I don't know. But I agree with his point that "God is not wilfully malicious" - God doesn't create the universe to mislead, or to maliciously mislead; it has an order that we can strive with, investigate, and (to a degree) master.
Then there were questions, which I made notes on but don't have with me. (If anyone asks I'll put up more details on Monday.) It came up that he knew John Paul II back in the day, and the pontiff-to-be would often go skiing with physicist-priests. There was a Creation Scientist who decided to studiously avoid the fact that all Prof. Heller's research flatly contradicts Creation Science, in favour of saying how much he & a lot of other Creationists respected Prof. Heller's work, and asking a question about whether there's religious revival now in the old communist bloc? To which Prof. Heller replied by sensibly stating that eastern Europe is a big place and you can't generalise, it's different from country to country and, withing Russia, from region to region. He also went on to say that from what he knows of Russia there's an increasing anti-rationalist, anti-science mood in some places, because Marxism was put forward as The Scientific Philosophy (there were a lot of good scientists in the USSR, too, tho he didn't mention that); and hammering the Communism = Science link means that Communism's atrocities and miseries now tarnish the name of Science as well; and that scientists there now find support from the Church against this sentiment.
I'd like to know more about this, as anti-rational sentiment is on the rise in the West as well, and I fully expect it to continue getting worse (or rather, more pronounced; I suppose you could argue that it's a reaction against a debased form of reason that reduces Man to a computer with squishy bits, to which I say "fair enough", but a reaction implies an alternative, and I'd like to know that alternative). The fellow who's now Pope said a few years back. “To my surprise, in a recent interview on the Galileo case, I was not asked a question like, ‘Why did the Church try to get in the way of the development of modern science?’, but rather exactly the opposite that is: ‘Why didn’t the church take a more clear position against the disasters that would inevitably follow, once Galileo had opened Pandora’s box?’” As a scientist that mindset scares the hell out of me, more than any aspect of the Creationist/Neo-Atheist symbiosis.
As I say, if anyone wants I'll dig out my notes. Apparently it's being put up on the internets somewhere as well, so interested parties can probably watch it themselves with a little googling. (Although he kept holding the microphone too far from his mouth so I was straining to hear him. It's probably not going to be easy to make his words out on a recording.)
Friday, 1 August 2008
Old One-Eye
From a comic that may or may not come to pass: Hsien K'odan, walker of the branches of the World-Tree. 
The mythological inspiration should be fairly obvious...
Apropos of which, the The Shattered Realm blog has come to an end, or rather been reborn as Traditio et Virtus, to coincide with its author's abandonment of neo-paganism and increased friendliness towards Catholicism. The Shattered Realm was a highly interesting blog; I hope for good things from the new enterprise.
In recent months, A Gentle Fuss has also died and risen (from the depths) as The Daily Kraken, where the eponymous sea-beast is blogging about all manner of things. Of particular interest to myself are his posts on the GK Chesterton poem The Ballad of the White Horse, which I am considering doing art related to, should I ever find the time. (A page or two done in the style of a mediaeval manuscript, with accompanying illustrations and heavily-embellished capitals and margins, cries out to be done; I can't think why it hasn't already.)
Other things on the sidebar worth your time include The Man Who Hates Fun, a now-defunct webcomic about a pretentious and bad-tempered (yet somehow admirable) modern Stoic. It's a lot of fun, and the main character being so like myself inspired me to acquire and read Epictetus, much to my benefit. Alas, it's now gone into indefinite hiatus, so a half-finished sketch update with a nervous Christian Union type acting dumb has been its front page for about a year now.
(Incidentally, John C. Wright also has love for the Stoics. I've noticed him lifting the odd argument from Epictetus on occasion.)
The sharp-eyed reader will also notice other pieces of sequential illustration linked for their perusal on the sidebar to the left; these reflect my (perhaps eclectic) tastes, and I may expand on why I like them at some later date.
I still hope to post on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion as soon as I have the time, but I don't know when that'll be. I wrote a long, pedantic and frivolous post previously, but decided against posting on the basis of, well, being long, pedantic and frivolous.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Notes from the Reading Table: The Scarlet Letter
In recent times I have read The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. It is an interesting book, and very quotable. I intend to quote it a lot. Click below at your peril, O reader; there is a lot of text.
The book is about guilt, secrets and sin; and specifically, the sin of adultery, which Hester Prynne (the heroine) has committed. For this, she is sentenced, by the stern puritan elders, to wear the Scarlet Letter of the title, a red "A" embroidered on her clothes, for the rest of her days. (Her youth and pregnancy save her from simply being executed.) Hawthorne does a very good job of emphasising the seriousness of such matters in puritan society, and in general of evoking the grimness and strictness of the early American puritans, who having sailed the Atlantic to escape persecution for their faith proceeded to persecute anyone who disagreed with them while passing laws against such dangerous practices as wearing colourful clothing. However, he generally delegates judgement of both the puritans' harshness and Hester's sin to the reader (despite his continuous authorial moralising), which I account a wise decision. Because Hawthorne sketches the puritans with enough respect and even sympathy to make them believable, I found myself getting very angry with puritan society; whereas most modern depictions of judgemental religious types just make me angry at the writer for their self-righteous reduction of anything they disapprove of to crude cartoonish stereotypes.
The Scarlet Letter, as said, is a study in guilt and secrets, and one of its fundamental arguments (as the book itself declares) is "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" This is in relation to the puritan priest, Arthur Dimmesdale, who has secrets of his own to keep; and whose guilt is made more poisonous than Hester's for being kept bottled up inside. Hester has her life made thoroughly miserable by the long penance of the Scarlet Letter, which makes her an outcast and a pariah for many years, but it's made clear that the Reverend has it worse - his guilt festers, and being a tender-hearted spiritual type, his life is made hell by the total disconnect between guilt and outward appearance. He can't properly confess for fear of scandalising his flock, who are devoted to him but who would be utterly horrified to know what he's done; so he tries telling them how evil he is, without going into the details:
More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit... cleared his throat and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once - nay, more than a hundred times - he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of the Almighty!
Unfortunately, his half-confessions are worse than none at all:
They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more... "The godly youth!" said they among themselves. "The saint on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would be behold in thine or mine!"... He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.
These were (technically) believers in Utter Depravity, but still, could not be brought to see their minister as Utterly Depraved in the absence of knowing the details by which his Utter Depravity should manifest itself.
On that issue, though - and on others - I have my doubts on how accurately Hawthorne captures his puritan ancestors' religious attitudes. One would expect puritans, at some point, to refer to the Biblical account of the woman taken in adultery, or maybe (being, y'know, Christians) to refer to Christ once or twice in a novel which focuses on issues of guilt and sin. But they don't. The only mention of Christ (that I remember) is near the beginning, when Hester comes out of prison with a baby in her arms and the Scarlet Letter on her breast, to stand before the public for three hours as part of her punishment: Hawthorne writes that if there had been a Papist among the Puritans, he would have seen in Hester & sprog an inverted reminder of the BVM and the infant Christ, working such effect that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.
However, even if Christ isn't too big a deal to Hawthorne's puritans (and in fairness, talking about Christ would have immediately gotten Hawthorne into serious theologising, which he may have felt uninclined to do, or felt unnecessary or inappropriate to the novel, or felt himself inadequate to), the spiritual universe assumed by the book is Christian, and very real - especially the Devil. There's a town witch, a relative of the governor, burnt (according to the author) some years after the events of the book, and she speaks as an emissary of the Devil (or the Black Man, as she refers to him) on several occasions. Once, she asks Hester, "Wilt thou go with us tonight? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one", and later she invites the Reverend Dimmesdale along. On both occasions the author himself casts doubt on whether this explicitly happened or was just a parable of spiritual conflict, however (the story being framed as based on old documents he'd dug up, he can do this). When the Reverend Dimmesdale decides to undergo primal scream therapy in the marketplace at midnight, the witch sticks her head out of her window, mistaking it for the clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well known to make excursions into the forest.
Although this is in the background rather than the foreground, the first half of the novel is somewhat oppressive and bleak due to this lopsided cosmology - the world of men is constricting and cruel, the Devil's ambassadors walk freely and fly with night-hags in the forest, and God is silent, having left the world to its own devices. Then, however, the story has a scene actually in the forest, and the novel suddenly changes tone - somewhat disconcertingly - from the constricted society of men to the airy spaces of nature, and suggestions of anarchy and freedom and escape. Out from under the thumb of society the soul can breathe more freely, and forget about the weight of conscience and obligation a minute, and become more amoral and pagan (or at least, more as we imagine the pagans to be). The overtones of the Devil's presence also change significantly: in the setting of the town, through the filter of puritan society, he's Satan the devourer, the seeker of damnation and destroyed of all good things; but in the forest, conditioning and morality drop away, and he becomes a more pan-like figure. Hester's daughter Pearl (wild and elf-life herself) requests of her mother a story of the Black Man, how he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him - a big, heavy book with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man offers his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write their names with their own blood. And then he sets his mark on their bosoms! She also requests, given that they're in the forest, that if the Black Man comes along, her mother will let her stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his arm? (Pearl hasn't quite grasped that the Devil is supposed to be bad news, or indeed many other things that good puritan children should know.)
The anarchic effect of the forest also causes renewed temptations to burn within the breast of the poor minister, who (on walking back from it) feels the sudden urge to speak horrible blasphemies into the ear of everyone he meets, or teach the young children swearwords. The narrator speaks of his being tempted by Satan, but the impression isn't of Satan the roaring lion, the malice of the alien in Independence Day ("What do you want us to do?" "DIEEEEE!"), but of a Puck-like, mischievous, Elberry-style Satan.
The witch's nocturnal cavortings also take on a less demonic tone: Many a church member saw I, walking behind the [processional] music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us! ...Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands, which they wore while they danced, be left in their hair! This might be said to be "more pagan" as well as "less demonic", but in truth, Christian society had dancing and garlands in the hair for centuries; it's only in puritan society that dancing and fiddling are to be frowned upon and exiled to the forest. It's in the puritan conception that Satan has a monopoly not only on devouring souls but also on dancing and partying; Christian society previously had a non-controlling share in the enterprises of Bacchus and Pan, but the puritans sold the entire franchise off to Satan for the proverbial mess of pottage. The author's aware of this defect, and doesn't take it to be the norm for society: he refers to the early puritans as being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day... the generation next to the early emigrants wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety. (This is from chapter 21, "The New England Holiday", which contains frequent references to the old land, England, where people knew how to make merry. It would probably be no consolation to Hawthorne that we've largely forgotten it now as well.)
At the climax of the book, things change, however; it's not stated that any spiritual agency was at work, but there is a quite definite sense of catharsis and grace - not only of the character, but also of their society and the novel as a whole, as the ending triumphs over the constriction and witch-haunted atmosphere of the earlier parts, and also moves away from the forest and its dreams of abdication of ties and bonds and responsibility. God hasn't appeared; but the world is not God-forsaken at the end of the novel, as it seemed for much of it.
To rewind a bit... one other thing missing from the novel was the lack of certain obvious inferences about Original Sin. This bothered me, because the novel was supposed to be about puritans, and puritans loved their Utter Depravity, and so I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the writer to start treating the Scarlet Letter as a metaphor for the inherent sinfulness of the unhappy race of Adam, and to make plain that, in fact, Hester wasn't unusual, because everyone else around was a sinner too. OK, maybe it would have trite for the author to moralise in that way, but at least one of the puritan ministers could have said that. (Hester finds herself frequently the subject of some sermon on sin; is it too unreasonable to expect that some priest might make that sermon on how everyone else is sinful too?) Additionally, the mixed lot of humankind could be seen in Pearl, wild and wilful, dealing with the consequences of her parents' sin, affected by it not for the better; her ostracism from the townsfolk mirroring the way "we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear", as Chesterton has it. But the insight that, actually, everyone's in Hester Prynne's situation only occurs to Hester (the character least able to derive any benefit from it), and, weirdly, is attributed to the whispers of Satan:
She was terrified by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's?... Sometimes, the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. "What evil thing is at hand?" would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint!
Satan has a compelling reason to voice these thoughts to Hester, however - O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere? - but given the puritan attitude to Utter Depravity, everyone in the novel should have been thinking the exact same thing, and they weren't. OK, narrative necessity (the townsfolk need to be judgemental and inflexible for the story to work), but still...
I've written mostly on the things I felt to be missing, because they were some of the things that struck me most; and also because a book can sometimes be more enjoyable for honest disagreement - it becomes a little like having a vigorous but friendly argument. And The Scarlet Letter was very much on this level - absorbing, but I wasn't passively absorbed. (Most of my reaction was along the lines of "dude, where's the Original Sin?" and "dude, someone needs to run amok in this town with a cricket bat", but... yeah.) Nevertheless, there's lots of interesting quotes and passages - his passing references to that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles (mercifully, the German ladies don't seem prone on this, but I remember English girls as being very vicious) and man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office; and a fine passage on mercy:
I said but now, that there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged, and hast it at thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless benefit?
Other notable quotes: Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!
The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. Reverend Dimmesdale also finds guilt a good teacher; he is able to be much more merciful, and have a kinder approach to poor sinners, due to the guilt that eats him up inside. Although he finds this hard to credit -
As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul like mine effect towards the redemption of other souls? - or a polluted soul, towards their purification?
In this he echoes the concerns of the Lollards, who considered that only those in a state of grace should be priests or governors. But Dimmesdale is flat-out wrong here, and in making him so, Hawthorne effectively takes more the position of the Catholic Church, that even a sinful priest can legitimately mediate grace - a connection that Hawthorne would doubtless not have enjoyed, had he made it.
Hawthorne describes the class of puritan divines as follows: All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven's last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought - had they ever dreamed of seeking - to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of familiar words and images. What Hawthorne kindly omits from mentioning is that the puritan patriarchs had excommunicated vast chunks of "the humblest medium of familiar words and images". Christ on the cross, and the stained-glass windows that were instruction for the illiterate, were familiar images until the puritans came along and vandalised as many churches as they could get their hands on. Images in general were spurned by the puritans, and dancing, and a lot of music, and plays - the English mediaeval mystery plays dramatised large chunks of the Bible, until the puritans decided to respond to them not by rewriting and adapting the theology but by throwing them out of the window. These were people not only unblessed with Tongues of Flame, but quite determined to mutilate their natural tongues because they had betimes spoken bad words or popish things.
And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired - I don't think this is entirely true, and it arguably reflects the state of puritan society and theology in the novel - very fixed on sin, no vision of Christ (and hence, little sense that "by his stripes we are healed"). Again, though, this arguably has a narrative function: the novel is kept essentially a grace-free zone, in which society and guilt can only be run away from (the forest), until the final catharsis.
In addition to these matters, Hawthorne also wanders further afield in time and subject matter, and briefly discusses feminism: A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated.
He also has Prynne, at the end, become a believer that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. I wonder how she, and Hawthorne, would have regarded how relations between man and woman have proceeded since; I doubt the sexual revolution would be regarded as the fulfilment of these hopes.
And finally, he considers Richard Dawkins and his ilk: In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. The Rev. Dimmesdale is less sympathetic to these characters than the narrator, however, although his burden of guilt makes him even somewhat envious of them - Were I an atheist - a man devoid of conscience - a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts - I might have found peace, long ere now. Nay, I never should have lost it! A fit note to end on; hopefully, within the next weeks, I shall have some thoughts on Pullman's Northern Lights and Dawkins' God Delusion typed up, and we shall ponder their wretchedness and coarse and brutal instincts (or higher and more subtile faculties, as the case may be). Until then -
Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die! Words to live by.
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
A Dream
I have dreamed this: my companion behind me, I flew to the skies, called upon Persephone and Aphrodite and Zeus, the last name most earnestly upon my lips, identifying Him (like the Stoics and St. Paul on Mars Hill) with the Most High of Heaven. I had been rescued from injury by animal spirits, and conversed with them on repaying the debt. At the shore of some redbrick English suburb, an intuition warned us off just in time, as the King of the Deep sent forth tentacles of ice to ensnare the mortal land-dwellers, each one paralysed and plated with ice as they tried to free the one snared before them (lovers, friends, family, or just complete strangers). With my companion (who never spoke, though I was conscious of her the whole time) I flew again up over the sea, calling to the King Below in defiance, until the ice rose from the sea to bind us together; and then I called loudly upon Apollo for deliverance, until my voice froze in my throat. And then the sun focussed like a laser, and blew the ice away.
It was a strange dream, I'm not sure what to make of it (why would I call upon Greek gods, even if I turned pagan? The gods of my distant fathers were Thor and Odin). (Also, the King of the Deep's ice magic was assisted by frozen ready-meals packets from Iceland, which served as conduits like metal to lightning. I'm not sure if this had any deeper meaning.)
In recent times I have been reading The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. I hope in the next week or two to post my thoughts on them; and after that, maybe follow up by dissecting the subtext of Phillip Pullman's Northern Lights, which was a great book, full of horror at science and materialist reductionism.
Wednesday, 30 January 2008
Quote; art
From The Mnemone, from Robert Sheckley's short story collection Can You Feel Anything When I do This?:
We are men: queer beasts with strange appetites. Who could have imagined us to possess a thirst for the ineffable? What was the hunger that could lead a man to exchange three bushels of corn for a single saying of the Gnostics? To feast on the spiritual - this seems to be what men must do; but who could have imagined it of us? Who would have thought us sufferers of malnutrition because we had no Plato? Can a man grow sickly from lack of Plutarch, or die from an Aristotle deficiency?
...Our past is a necessary part of us, and to take away that part is to mutilate us irreparably. I know a man who achieved courage only after he was told of Epaminondas, and a woman who became beautiful only after she heard of Aphrodite.
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If you can ever get a copy of this collection, read it just for that story. Sheckley's Journey Beyond Tomorrow is also drop-dead genious, and highly recommended.
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Art from the archive: a scene from the Garden of Gethsemane, according to the Gospel according to John Woo:
Saturday, 5 January 2008
The solstice is past; the year is renewed.
I have returned to Germany from the land of my ancestors, where I visited family and friends, including the famed and terrible Elberry. I supplied him with absinthe and he supplied me with wine and whisky and a good time was had by all.
Between drinks and viewings of such cinematic masterworks as the Seventh Seal and American Psycho, Elberry opined that there is danger in abstraction, and the possibility of great evil. Unfortunately I forget his exact words, because I have a memory like a sieve, but I agree. The abstract and invisible and ideal can seduce you not merely into doing evil for the greater good, but also into hypocrisy and slacking off in doing good.
Not that the evil necessarily lies in the invisible and conceptual - it's the disconnect between concept and reality, between thought and action. You can do evil with genuinely good intentions, or you can do evil with good intentions as a cover story (i.e. lie to yourself); it's easy to swap between the two. You can also wallow in admiration of a virtue so much you fail to practice it (thinking yourself, or any group you belong to, righteous because of the virtues you admire is dangerous - "we're better than they are because we care!", in any of its forms, is just asking for trouble). There's a world of quantitative difference between admiring charity and practicing it; self-sacrifice is a concept far easier to fall in love with than to practice.
Similarly for treating weakness. We are all sinners, all broken creatures in need of grace and forgiveness; this is not any big secret. Knowing this does not make it easier to forgive, nor confer immunity to despising people for their weakness. "$ACQUAINTANCE is a sinner and a stumbler" is easier to take when we don't know that, specifically, $ACQUAINTANCE does drugs, has cheated on their significant other, or looks at internet porn. Know the details and it may become yet harder to take.
Similarly for how we relate to God. Faith should be a lived experience - with dark nights of the soul when the experience dries up, admittedly, but there should be some reality to the soul's contact with God. A dry creed and/or intricate system of belief is, by itself, worthless (as all things are vanity and emptiness on their own). The soul hungers for God, not for a fundamental philosophical principle doubling as a distant imaginary friend. Our concept of God - or of anyone, for that matter - is limited, a spook in our heads that needs to engage in constant friction with the reality that corrects and transcends it to keep it alive. "No man shall teach his neighbour, saying 'know God'" - no man can teach his neighbour to know God, any more than he can teach his neighbour to know Fred down the road. (Which isn't to say he cannot tell his neighbour useful things about God (or Fred, for that matter), or that objective statements cannot be made about God (or Fred), or that God (or Fred) is merely an anthropomorphic expression of some existential principle, &c. &c.)
So, how does this apply to art? Art can be damaging (among other ways) if it encourages an attitude of complacency or superiority mentioned earlier, which it can do if it leaves a message of "you are better than X, as you care more than they do"; but it can also not only propose virtues but prime them for action. Art isn't real, but it isn't abstract either, so when it encourages, say, compassion, it's in the context of compassion to human beings flawed in particular, specific ways; when it encourages charity, it shows the action in a specific circumstance. (The power of a good example is similar; whether art should be said to provide canned good examples, or whether setting a good example is a form of performance art, is a question I have no answer for.)
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Regarding atheist morality, I shall return to the subject at some point, but not quite yet. I may also post extracts from recent reading material, including Robert Sheckley's excellent Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?, which I have almost finished. Happy new year, peeps.
