Monthly Archives: February 2010

So, as I lazily surfed the internet this morning, I pulled up ScienceDaily, my favorite one-stop-shopping site for scientific news of all sorts. (Yes, I do have scientific interests: technology, especially nanotech and edgy materials engineering; exoplanets; archaeology and paleontology—basically anything that would make for a neat story.) While scrolling past tedious stories about reindeer RNA and stickleback genomes, I stumbled upon a headline that seemed tailor-made to irritate me: “Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds.”

I’ve seen this kind of article before, though usually conservative religious folks are being pathologized—viewed as a special kind of crazy or stupid. This is the first time I’ve encountered that old argument with an evolutionary spin: that the liberal atheist is not only smarter and saner, but actually evolutionarily more advanced.  So, let’s prod at this article a bit, shall we?

Here’s the summary of the study’s findings at the beginning:

The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values.  The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.

Get that? Their thesis in a nutshell: smart people are more likely to believe and do things that aren’t instinctive, i.e. biologically ingrained through the development of the species. How does this translate into liberalism?

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel.  So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Ah! Things are a little clearer now: conservatives only care (or mainly care) for their own, while liberals care about everybody; caring for one’s own more directly ensures the survival of one’s group; ergo, conservatism is “evolutionarily designed,” while liberalism is “evolutionarily novel.” But are these even useful definitions of conservatism and liberalism? Are they not rather criticisms of conservatism elevated to the status of definition? Moreover, this model seems not to follow from history and experience, especially if conservatism is wed to theism, as this article does. (Obviously there are atheist conservatives, just as there are theist liberals. My point is simply to answer the muddled, and sadly all too common, taxonomy of this one article.) I know many generous people, of all ideological and religious stripes: two of the most generous people I’ve known are an atheist libertarian and a rather mystical socialist. (They were also both Anglo-Saxonists, a factor this article omits from its taxonomy.) But even considered politically, there’s evidence to contend against the notion that conservatives don’t care for others beyond their inner circle. (Caution: the linked article is partisan, its tone contentious, and its analysis open to criticism. Nonetheless, the statistics are interesting as an answer to the “conservatives = Grinch” canard.)

Another point: theists usually do “car[e] about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with.” We theists call them “coreligionists,” and we Christians call them the Church Universal: a union of strangers across time and space, bound as brothers and sisters in one family, joined into one body through our Living Head, Christ. True, the article was making a point about conservatism; my point is merely to contest this article’s essentialist linking of the theism and conservatism.

But what of religion proper? How is that “evolutionarily defined”?

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena.  “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa.  This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers.  “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Again we find an insult presented as its definition: theism = paranoia. A theist might just as easily say that atheists are cosmic sociopaths, incapable of the natural empathy that humans ought to possess with their Creator. Both approaches are fundamentally unfair, killing a debate before it can happen. However, to pursue the article’s line of thought ad absurdum, could we not argue that theists have highly developed minds because of their perception of a divine intention at the back of natural events? After all, empathy and “theory of mind”—awareness of others possessing thoughts and feelings like one’s own—are both higher order concepts, distinguishing humans from lower animals, at least in degree in the case of empathy. A theistic psychologist might posit that the human perception of the divine—the sensus divinitatis—is a natural extension of human empathy. Again, I don’t think that psychology is the proper arena of contention between theism and atheism; my point is simply that the article has problems even on its own terms.

Here’s my biggest problem with this article—not its specific arguments, but its whole premise. It’s just another manifestation of what Chesterton called “the great human heresy”: “that the trees move the wind.” In his essay “The Wind and the Trees,” he tells of a small boy on a windy day who, seeing the trees moves violently, suggesting removing the trees so that the wind would stop. He thought that the trees moved the wind. Chesterton expands this notion into a parable of two great approaches to philosophical, political, religious, and social realities.  The first, “the great human dogma,” is that “moral circumstances” (or mental) lead to “material circumstances”; the second, “the great human heresy,” that “material circumstances” lead to “moral circumstances.” Chesterton explains succinctly what the latter approach is flawed:

When people begin to say that the material circumstances have alone created the moral circumstances, then they have prevented all possibility of serious change. For if my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I be certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?

The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts—including that one. To treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority is necessary to any kind of thinking, even free thinking. And nothing will ever be reformed in this age or country unless we realise that the moral fact comes first.

I believe the ScienceDaily article does precisely this: it claims the trees move the wind. In doing so, it commits the unfortunate epistemological error of “sawing off the limb it sits on,” as C.S. Lewis puts it in Surprised by Joy.* In other words, attempts to explain ideological or philosophical positions—ideas—in terms of biological states (“material circumstances”) result not in the refutation or defense of those positions, but in a perilous epistemological position that undercuts all rational thought. It makes reform impossible, as Chesterton says, because reform comes from inside of a mind. But if philosophies are pathologies, reform is impossible, analysis is impossible, judgment is impossible—science is impossible.

But what do I know? I’m just a dumb ol’ conservative theist.

* A related but more sophisticated version of the argument is put forth by Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in his 1994 paper “Naturalism Defeated.” A lecture based on these ideas was delivered by Plantinga at BIOLA University: notes are here, as well as audio—which, sadly, is only in the odious RealPlayer format. In response to critiques in intervening years, Plantinga published a tweeked version of his argument in Knowledge of God (2008). There is also a book defending Lewis’s argument: C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (2003).

I can’t come up with anything academic to write about today, so I’m going to do something I very rarely do on this blog or my old one: talk about my personal life.

I’ve lived in Tallahassee, Florida, for eight months now, and it’s only recently I’ve stopped hating every minute of it. I moved here when my wife got into the PhD program at FSU—she’d applied to seven schools, and only got into this one, and since we’re basically Calvinists we’re forced to believe God must have had a reason to send us here. I’m functionally unemployed, doing engineering work for my father while I’m studying for my comprehensive exams. I leave the house once a day, to pick up Victoria from work.

The weather broke me for six months. I don’t mind hot weather, not even humid weather—I am from Georgia, after all—but I can’t abide it overstaying its welcome, and when it was 90 degrees on Halloween, that’s when I decided I’d had enough. Not that my having had enough actually meant anything. In my impotent rage, all I could do was listen over and over again to the Wilco song “You Are My Face”:

Why is there no breeze,
No currency of leaves,
No current through the water-wire,
No feelings I can see?
I trust no emotion.
I believe in locomotion.
But I turn to rust as we’ve discussed,
Though I must have let you down too many times
In the dirt and in the dust.

This is not the sort of song that’s conducive to making peace with a place you hate.

And it wasn’t just the weather, though that affects my mood much more than I’d like to admit. It was the fact that it took me nearly an hour to drive to the other side of this city of 300,000 people, that the lights seemed timed so that I’ve have to stop at every single one of them (truly a metaphor for Tallahassee’s status as the waiting room of my life). It was the biweekly reports of sexual assault on the FSU campus. (A woman got raped at 10 a.m. in the main library, for example.) It was the complete lack of a music scene. (I didn’t go to many shows in Athens, but I was somehow comforted by the knowledge that fifty were going on every night.)

Our pastor in Athens lived in Florida for several years, and he told us before we moved here that no books were ever written in Florida because everyone was too happy. I have to believe it’s the exact opposite—no books were ever written in Florida because it’s so hot that no one can move their fingers. No great bands come from Florida because the humidity destroys amplifiers. (Yes, Tom Petty is from Gainesville, but the Heartbreakers didn’t start up until he moved to Los Angeles; you can point to Lynyrd Skynyrd, I suppose. Or the Backstreet Boys.)

You don’t realize how thoroughly you belong to a place until you leave it. I was embarrassed to be from Georgia—to be from the South in general—until I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, for my master’s degree. Those coastal elites Sarah Palin hates so much are sometimes apt to combine the South and the Midwest in their minds as “flyover country,” but they’re not that much alike. Again the weather is helpful, as is the topography. Midwesterners struck me, by and large, as cold and flat; as I wrote in 2007, near the end of my tenure in Nebraska, “The Midwest is Thomas Kincaid, composed and nonchalant / And the people tell you everything but what they really want.” I’m not sure this is all that true, but it’s how I felt.

So I missed Georgia like crazy when I lived in Nebraska. By and large, I preferred the weather in Nebraska—it was nice to have four real seasons, complete with snow—but I went to college in the foothills of the Appalachians, and I found myself longing for the mountains in the autumn. Eastern Nebraska is not as flat and treeless as people sometimes imagine it to be, but it’s not Northeast Georgia, and it wasn’t the same.

Now that I’m even further south, I miss the Midwest, for reasons I can’t explain. I was miserable in Nebraska, through no fault of the state’s. I lived in downtown Omaha—probably, considering my chosen career, the only time I will ever live in the middle of a city—and I miss it now, in the middle of the winter.

I miss walking through the not-quite silent falling snow on Sunday mornings, the city barren and empty, the chords of the Gymnopedies ringing through my head. The city seemed like something out of a pretentious European movie, all atmosphere and no plot.

I miss smoking cigarettes in the alleyway between my apartment building and the Orpheum Theatre, trying to light them in the falling snow and watching the people file into whatever middlebrow show was playing that weekend. I don’t smoke at all anymore, and there’s something sad about that, too, even though it was obviously a good thing to give up.

I miss the signs of spring. They’ve already shown up here but mean very little without the deliverance from the snow—the freshness in the air and the return of the birds and the first signs of the green. There’s nothing like six months of winter to make you appreciate spring.

I guess what I’m getting at is that your geographical identity is not so much bound to where you were born and where you grew up—it’s malleable. The places you live become a part of you as much as the people you meet, the music you listen to, the food you eat. I am somehow a Nebraskan, even though I lived there for only two years and four months and was rather glad to leave when I did.

(When I moved back to Georgia, I was sure I would get to see my old friends from college on a regular basis. That didn’t happen—one of life’s deepest sadnesses is that most of your friends are umbrellas, there when you need them but designed to be folded up with no bitterness whatsoever when the rain ends.)

The strange thing is that this philosophy means that I will be a Floridian when I leave this place and move beyond this awful time. I will miss…something about Tallahasse, I am sure, though I have no idea what it will be. (My best guess is my backyard, which opens onto a pond complete with little turtles, Canadian geese, and the occasional blue heron. I do like my backyard.)

In the meantime, I am in a waiting room, waiting to take my comps, waiting to send out job applications, waiting to get hired somewhere—waiting to go to the next place that will form the next part of my identity. And all I can do until that time is try to be thankful, which does not come naturally for me.

We’re back to our standard theme song this week: Neko Case’s “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” from Middle Cyclone (2009).

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- Sam Mulberry wins a windbreaker

The Death of Conservatism
- Introduction to Sam Tanenhaus
- Our gut reactions to the book
- Three thumbs pointing various degrees of down

Could This Book Have Been Released in 2004?
- GOP on the ropes
- George W. Bush as ultimate movement conservative ideologue
- Why David feels like Abe Vigoda
- Things have changed
- Nathan uses a passive verb

Philosophical vs. Movement Conservatism
- Is this a fair distinction to make?
- The “kindred spirit” approach
- Philosophical vs. movement liberalism
- Openness vs. closedness

Conservatism vs. Radicalism
- Too broad a movement
- Tradition as status quo
- What do conservatives actually want to conserve?
- Why liberals like Leave It to Beaver now

Dialectical Politics
- “The dragging heels of the body politic”
- Theory vs. observations
- How Tanenhaus confuses effect with goal
- Is there an inevitable trajectory of history?
- Why attention to the particular matters
- Flattening historical moment

Orthodoxy vs. Compromise
- Blue dogs and rhinos
- Impotence vs. acquiescence
- Do liberals eat their own?
- Left-wing complaints about Obama

Republican Disinterest in Specifics
- A healthy disinterest, David argues
- Turning libertarian
- Are conservatives simplistic?
- Conservatism as keeping to yourself
- Polarization on both ends of the spectrum
- Nathan plugs his candidate

The Culture War™
- Is it a part of the past?
- Sarah Palin’s elite-baiting
- Who counts as an elite?
- Michial declares his Catonism; Nathan contends
- How democracy leads to tyranny
- A fourth ex-cathedra pronouncement: You’re the man now, dog

The Death of Social Conservatism?
- Mores, not populism
- Celibate vampires vs. prime-time television
- The libertarian uprising
- How big of a voice do social conservatives have now?
- Social conservatism as a consumer choice
- Michial’s socially conservative fatalism
- Nathan’s humorless, quasi-Anabaptist, lunatic sanguinity

Looking to the Future
- Making a new way
- Becoming more conscious
- Nathan is tired of being a wannabe Anabaptist. He wants to be an Anabaptist!
- Taking the best from all movements

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

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New York: Penguin, 1976.

Hauerwas, Stanley. Resident Aliens. Nashville: Abingdon, 1989.

Kirk, Russell. The Essential Russell Kirk. Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Postman, Neil. Building a Bridge to the 18^th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Tanenhaus, Sam. The Death of Conservatism. New York: Random House, 2009.

Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Wood, Ralph C. The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1988.

In case my point was too vague in my post last week about dragon-slaying, this is what I meant.

Today, February 24, is the birthday of many people, obviously.* I have selected four whom I find especially interesting for personal reasons. Strangely, however, I see an order among them: namely, the act of seeing order itself. I leave these tidbits uninterpreted and undigested–you may find in them what order you like, and attempt a thesis statement in the comments, or simply leave them unassimilated and enjoy each for its own sake. Also, do follow the links: some are quite fun, in a bookish way.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (2.24.1463–11.17.1494): Note those dates and do the math: Pico died about three months shy of his 32 birthday–which means I’ve outlived him by almost five months. Still, Pico managed to cram more into his 31.75 years than I’m likely to, even if I make it past a century. From an early age, Pico studied pretty much everything there was study: all the languages, philosophy, theology, and science his milieu had to offer. So, having learned everything, he then proceeded to try and make it all fit together. (In fact, this was such a consuming interest for Pico that his friends dubbed him “Princeps Concordiae,” or “the Prince of Harmony.”) After laying the foundation for his project with his De hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man), Pico issued 900 theses that attempted to harmonize pretty much every school of thought he knew about. (Here’s a chart of the project.) A problem arose, however, in the form of a papal bull: it seems that along the way, Pico had made a few claims the Pope thought heretical. There was an inquisition, Pico did time in a French jail, and his 900 theses become “the first printed book ever universally banned by the Church.” Less than ten years later, he was dead under suspicious circumstances. Still, 31.75 years was enough: De hominis dignitate became the manifesto of the Italian Renaissance and Pico himself a “founding father” of the humanist endeavor.

Wilhelm Carl Grimm (2.24.1786–12.16.1859): This fellow you should recognize, dear reader, especially when I pair him with his brother, Jacob. Yes, Wilhelm was the younger of the Brothers Grimm, who were famous for collecting fairy tales and, if you believe Terry Gilliam, fighting monsters. (Wilhelm was Matt Damon, if you’re curious.)

For me, though, the important thing about the Grimms is their philological work in Germanic languages, most famously manifest in the eponymous Grimm’s Law. (Usually Jacob alone is credited with this work, but the brothers were partners in all their endeavors, so it seems stingy to deny Wilhelm his share of praise.) Grimm’s Law is an observation about a particular pattern of phonetic changes among diverse Indo-European languages. These phonetic changes were a big part of what made some families of IE languages distinct from others: specifically, Grimm’s Law describes what sets the Germanic languages (German, English, and Scandinavian languages) apart from non-Germanic IE languages like Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. For example, in the shift to Germanic, “p” becomes “f” and “t” becomes “th” (like “thorn”): therefore, the same ancient word that became “pater” in Latin, became “father” in English. Do not be fooled by the dullness of this endeavor: for scholars of the Grimms’ time, this was like lightning from the blue. Think of the possibilities: if the distinctions between languages can be reduced to predictable patterns, why can we not work backwards–reverse Babel, learn the language of Adam, learn the language of God? That may sound too grandiose, but it’s not too far from what did arise out of this work: the reconstruction of the proto-Germanic language. (Want to read a story in proto-Germanic?  Here you go.)

Winslow Homer (2.24.1836–9.29.1910): Perhaps you recognized the painting at the head of this post, dear reader; I certainly hope so. That is The Gulf Stream, painted by Winslow Homer in 1899. It’s a painting from his later years, his so-called “Darwinian” phase, which is typified by brutal realism. And, truly, what could better symbolize man at the mercy of chaotic elements than this lonely boatman, tossed by the tumult of the waves, hunted by a frenzied mob of sharks? But all is not chaos in this painting. Click to expand it, and look again: see the tiny ship in the upper left, opposite the waterspout? Now look back to the central focal point of the picture, the dark cavity of the tiny boat’s hold, with the boatman’s right foot lying on the deck in front of it. Move your gaze from the foot to the ship in the upper left, now across to the waterspout on the right, then back down to the foot. See it? A symmetrical upside-down triangle. There’s a second triangle as well: begin at the waterline in the upper right, and follow the dark line of waves to the center of the left side, then back down the black ridge of shark-infested water to the bottom right. Again, symmetry. Both triangles can be read as thematic, I think. The first shows man in the balance between the might of civilization (the three-masted ship) and the might of nature (the waterspout); also, perhaps, the result of collision between the two, manifest in his own tiny boat with its single broken mast. The second triangle is a more aesthetic effect: an acute triangle of light water in an otherwise black sea, with the darkness ready to snap down jaw-like on the boatman. Did I make those triangles up, or did Homer put them there on purpose? Not sure–I’m just an amateur who can spot a triangle!

August William Derleth (2.24.1909–7.4.1971): Ah, August Derleth–how he frustrates me! I first met this gentlemen after he had introduced himself as someone else. When I bought The Watchers Out of Time, it was because H.P. Lovecraft’s name was on the cover. I became suspicious a couple stories in when it suddenly struck me that both stories I’d read were longer, flabbier versions of Lovecraft tales I liked better. Then I turned to the front of the book and saw the copyright citing August Derleth, and knew I’d been snookered. That bit of imposture is probably the publisher’s fault, not Derleth’s; still, Lovecraft fans do have good reason for holding strong opinions about August Derleth. True, we owe him much: because of Derleth, much of Lovecraft’s work that might have been lost was preserved and stayed in print, initially through Derleth’s own publishing company, Arkham House. On the other hand, he also coined the term “Cthulhu Mythos” to describe the shared universe of Lovecraft’s many stories of eldritch horror. This phrase, catchy albeit unpronounceable, is to some Lovecraftians his greatest offense, for it implies that there is a system, an ur-plot, in a fictional corpus best characterized as a paean to chaos. Derleth believed there was such a system, and in his pastiches of Lovecraft he enthusiastically imposed it, settling Lovecraft’s nihilistic nightmares within a cosmos of ordered good and evil. It is an ill fit, and, to my mind, blunts the force of Lovecraft’s horror. Which is more frightening: the ultimate evil who hates humanity and seeks to destroy it out of actual malice, or an utterly alien being of god-like power who doesn’t even notice when it melts our world? My money is on the latter, and that’s Lovecraft’s brand of horror. So, thanks, August, for all your hard work in preserving Lovecraft for us–but I’ll just read him, thank you. No offense meant!

* It is also Steve Jobs’s birthday, but that’s an entirely different sort of imposed order.

Last week’s Christ the Center podcast (a show I almost always enjoy but always find something to get angry about) featured an extended interview with Michael Haykin, who has apparently compiled a book full of excerpts from the love letters of famous theologians, an idea that never would have occurred to me but that I am now very interested in. (Frequent listeners to the podcast may find themselves wondering if any of N.T. Wright’s letters will make their way into a later volume, but alas, he’s apparently not in this one.)

It was an interesting interview regarding what sounds like an interesting book, but true to form, I have to take issue with something said in it. I’ll quote the offending passage verbatim and in total:

Nick Batzig: You make the point in here that the Reformation really revived our understanding of marriage. Could you talk a little bit about that? I think you say that in the little short summary of Luther.

Michael Haykin: Mmhmm. Yeah, I think it’s critical to see in the history of Christian marriage that there’s a real low point during that long period called the Middle Ages. And that’s for a variety of reasons. Critical to that was certainly the theological notion that celibacy was a higher plane of Christian discipleship than marriage. And that certainly was pushed by men like Jerome at the end of the Roman Empire. And Jerome, when he’s asked about, “Should young women get married?” advises them not to but that they should retreat into a nunnery. And Jerome’s a very influential figure. He’s the translator of the Bible into Latin, becomes known as a very significant theological figure, and thus has enormous influence. Even in Augustine, who is nowhere near as acidic regarding marriage, also fails to understand appropriately the biblical reasons for marriage. For example, in his commentaries on Genesis, he asks the question, “If Eve could not have had children for Adam, would she have been of any value to him?” And the answer is “No.” And so marriage becomes primarily, for Augustine, a context for procreation, a reflection, yes, of Christ’s love for His Church, but the whole area of spiritual companionship is not there.

I do not want to defend Jerome and Augustine’s views on women here, partly because I haven’t read enough of either of them to do so, and partly because I don’t think there’s a sufficient defense to be made. But I think Haykin displays in this interview a rather typical disdain you find in Reformed Christians as regards their Medieval Catholic forebears. (David Grubbs, our resident Medievalist, and Nathan Gilmour, our resident theologian, are more than welcome to fill in my own theological gaps here.)

There’s a knee-jerk attitude you sometimes find among the heavily Reformed (even, alas, in Calvin himself) that would suggest that if the Medieval Catholics did it, it isn’t for us. Thus there aren’t very many Presbyterian “nunneries,” as Haykin and Jerome put it. Thus, marriage becomes a much higher ideal than a life of celibacy, to the point where most Evangelical circles secretly or not-so-secretly believe there’s something wrong with a person in his or her thirties who is unmarried. Our culture’s simultaneous elevation and devaluing of sex to the point where it’s everything and nothing at the same time (how else could it be used to sell Doritos, body wash, and the latest version of the MLA handbook?) only makes things worse. If you attended an Evangelical youth group, I suspect you, like me, got far more lectures about how to date in a godly manner than sustained discussions on whether everyone should date. You date, you get married, you have kids, and then you die–this is the life cycle of the American Evangelical.

The problem is that the biblical backing for it is sketchy at best. Christ Himself, if we’re to believe the traditionalist scholars and not Martin Scorsese, never married, but we can sidestep that, since “WWJD?” bracelets aside, most of us aren’t really all that interested in doing exactly what Jesus did or would do. But He’s also rather clear that the institution of marriage exists on this plane only, and that neither in heaven nor in the new heavens and new earth will it hold water: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30, NAS). Both Jesus and Paul use marriage as a metaphor for the relationship of Christ to the Church, and if Paul gives some rather specific guidelines for marriage in his epistle to the Ephesians, he seems to see marriage mostly as a second-best–the same thing Hawkin condemns Jerome and Augustine for: “But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:8-9). Notice the hierarchy Paul implicitly sets up: It’s better to marry than to be in a constant state of lust, but it’s better to live alone and in self-control than to marry. This is clearly a biblical attitude, and to the extent that Protestants condemn abbeys and monasteries merely out of fear of something different, we’re wrong for it.

None of this is to say that we should abolish marriage. It’s been traditionally viewed as a sacrament (notably, in the Catholic Church but not most Reformed congregations), and there is such a thing as Christian marriage, and Haykin is very interesting and helpful when he talks about it in that interview. I am myself married, and I’m glad, because I’m useless in social situations without my wife. (Oh, and I love her and all that.) But it’s clear that St. Jerome was right–marriage is a secondary blessing for those of who weren’t blessed by being built for celibacy.

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 28 February 2010 (Year C, Lent)

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 •  Psalm 27 •  Philippians 3:17-4:1 •  Luke 13:31-35

Abraham’s story is one that tempts me towards sloppy thinking in all sorts of directions.  When I’m tempted to regard Hebrew traditions before Jesus as obsessed with bloodlines to the exclusion of other realities that define human existence, there’s the promise of offspring.  When I’m tempted to think of “the Jews” before the Rabbis as unable to expand their imaginations beyond the Mediterranean, there’s the promise of the promised land.  When I’m tempted to a sort of bodiless neo-Platonism, there’s always Paul to misread as “spiritualizing” Abraham.

This week’s Genesis reading, though it does not dispel those temptations, at the very least makes them harder to hold in my pocket comfortably.  Abraham, after all, does become father in a biological sense to a great many, but many slaves join them and become Hebrews in some sense on the way out of Egypt (Exodus 12:37-38).  Moreover, the biology isn’t supposed to work that way; in some sense, but not in a disembodied one, Abraham produces offspring by the grace of God, and in the face of his great age.  Moreover, God communicates these realities to Abraham at once in a mystical trance, in the midst of animal sacrifices, and by the vehicle of a disembodied fire pot.  No matter where my stereotypes want to turn, they get pounded.

And just when I’m fairly convinced that Jesus is one who is entirely done with Jerusalem and its temple, he begins weeping for the city.  But when I think that he clings very closely at all to the city, here comes today’s Luke reading, in which he calls its king a fox and sneers about a city so wicked that prophets are entirely safe outside of it.  (I remember Augustus Caesar’s one-liner about Herod the Great: it’s much safer to be his pig than his son.)  There were times when Jesus wanted to protect them from themselves, but Jerusalem continued on its path towards self-destruction, refusing to be the place that welcomed the Son of David, instead killing the one who would speak the truth.

And when I think of these two difficult passages, I realize just how radically Paul re-divides the world in Philippians.  Folks like me who dig the Anabaptists often talk about being citizens of Heaven as opposed to subjects of the king or members of the Party or partisans of other sorts.  But we often forget Paul’s follow-up punch, namely that those who are not citizens of Heaven are not properly Romans or Soviets or Patriots at all but in reality serve “the belly” (one wonders whether Jesus knew the story of Coriolanus) and whose minds are set on “earthly things.”

In other words, and I realize that I’m mangling both Luke and Augustine here, but preacher-types are allowed to do that, Paul seems to realize that any City of Earth is liable to be a City that Kills Prophets, that even Jerusalem, the City of David, spiritual center of the land that God promised Abraham, is nothing but dirt unless animated by God’s Spirit that moves in the world.  Ultimately, though God might in God’s wisdom bless this or that city or nation or even flag for a season, still those who claim such things instead of the LORD as their strongholds ultimately become murderous, glorying in their shame even as they cry out “Lord, Lord.”

May God save us from the idols whom we call LORD.

I’ve always been a sucker for a good monster story. As a boy, I would browse through my parents’ books, especially the encyclopedias, and stop whenever I saw an illustration of a monster. This was particularly true of dragons, of which I was specially fond. This was also how I first encountered Beowulf: as a story in which a hero fights a dragon. It was many years before I actually read Beowulf, of course, but my first knowledge of that Old English epic was as a dragon story.*

When I finally got around to reading Beowulf—years later and at the instigation of Tolkien—I naturally focused on the end: Beowulf’s last great monster fight against the dragon. It’s a particularly satisfying example of the dragon-slayer’s tale, both heroic in tone and dramatic in action. There’s also a note of tragedy, though: the dragon is slain, but so is the hero, who is old but goes down fighting. (Hopefully I’ve spoiled no-one’s Beowulf experience by revealing this: it’s over a thousand years old, after all.) It is the fitting last movement of a heroic life, one last act of bravery and sacrifice, but—alas—only a temporary solution, for Beowulf’s people are doomed to suffer and be scattered.

This theme in Beowulf—the balance of triumph and tragedy—is one of Tolkien’s chief concerns in his magisterial essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” For Tolkien, in fact, it is what the poem is about: “[M]an at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time.”

[A]s in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat. (67)

Inevitable defeat—yet the hero goes anyway. But why do it? Is it merely foolish bravado? Should not the hero rather be wise than brave, yield to the natural order, and treat dragons with sensible caution? Better a live dog than a dead lion, after all! This is sometimes the rejoinder to Tolkien’s model of heroism, and other readings of Beowulf have been suggested, that cast Beowulf’s last fight as foolish error, or vainglorious bravado, or even ill-considered mercenary greed. (The dragon did have a treasure, after all.)

I’m sure it will surprise no-one to learn that I favor Tolkien’s perspective over the others. This is not, however, out of a naïve acceptance of the inherent heroism of hopeless last stands. Instead, Tolkien’s perspective (and my acceptance of it) arises from a prior belief in human dignity—even humans after the fall. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien shares a poem, written in a letter to a friend, which describes his view of postlapsarian humanity:

[…] Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned.
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned […] (74)

This image of mankind appears in the Lord of the Rings in the character of Aragorn: the crownless king who wanders as a vagabond, his broken sword the sign of ancestral rank and ancestral failure. But before that, it appeared in Beowulf, in Beowulf himself:

To Beowulf the news was quickly brought
of that horror—that his own home,
best of buildings, had burned in waves of fire,
the gift-throne of the Geats. To the good man that was
painful in spirit, greatest of sorrows;
the wise one believed he had bitterly offended
the Ruler of all, the eternal Lord,
against the old law; his breast within groaned
with dark thoughts—that was not his custom. (2324-32)

This is Beowulf after the dragon attacks: old Beowulf, fifty years after his youthful adventures in Denmark, now a venerable king. Only, now his hall is burned, along with his throne, “the gift-throne of the Geats.” And in this moment, his first anguished thought is of God, of divine justice, and of his own sin—but still he fights the dragon.

But let us proceed to a reason—at least, a reason I find plausible and personally compelling. (Caution! This is not peer-reviewed scholarly content, but the romantic musings of a student. Also, they’re my unpublished first thoughts, and they may end up being useful down the road, so don’t jack my style!) In my pursuit of all things Old English, I encountered an Anglo-Saxon homilist named Ælfric of Eynsham. His sermons are lucid, rhetorically sophisticated, and often nearly lyrical. One in particular has drawn me back repeatedly: “De Falsis Diis,” or “Regarding the False Gods.” The purpose of this sermon is two-fold: to contrast the true God with his false rivals, and to explain the origins of idolatry. To introduce his subject, though, he explains the nature of the true God, according to the ecumenical creeds accepted in the West in that era, and then describes the primal relationship between humanity and their Creator. Why do I bring this up? Because here there be dragons:

… [I]t is better for us to believe truly in the Holy Trinity (halgan þrynnysse), and to profess belief in them, than it is for us to ponder excessively about it.  The Trinity made the shining angels, and Adam and Eve afterward as humans, and gave them authority over the earthly things of creation; and they did not break that single command of God (an Godes bebod).  Then Adam lived carefree in bliss, and no creature could injure him, while that he kept that heavenly command (heofonlice bebod).  Fire did not harm him, though he stepped his feet into it, nor might any water drown the man, even if he ran suddenly into the waves.  Nor could any wild beast, nor any kind of serpent (wurmcynne), dare to injure the man with its mouth’s bite.  Neither hunger nor thirst, nor grievous cold, nor any extreme heat, nor sickness was able to trouble Adam in the earth, while he with faithfulness kept that little command (lytle bebod).

Afterward, when he had sinned, and God’s command broken, then he lost that blessing, and lived in trouble, so that the louse bit him boldly and the flea, the one who before the dragon (draca) dared not even touch.  Then he needed to be cautious with water and with fire, and to take care warily that he not fall down too hard, and to provide food for himself with proper difficulty; and those natural virtues that God made into him, he had then to keep, if he would have them, with great care, just as yet the good do, that with difficulty keep themselves from sins. (25-55; translation mine)

I hope, dear reader, that you note Ælfric’s careful parallelism and the drastic contrast it creates: humanity before the fall, fearless, untouchable, healthy, happy, and good; humanity after the fall, timid, fragile, frail, desperate, and wicked. And the pivot upon which this inverted world turned upside down was God’s single command—that little command (lytle bebod). I do not think the preacher’s emphasis on the command’s lytlenes is meant to cast God as unreasonable, but instead to heighten the foolishness—and the tragedy—of humanity’s violation of it. Ælfric, in essence, muses with Boromir in Pete Jackson’s version of LotR, that “it is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing—such a little thing.”

But Ælfric’s sermon does not leave man in an utterly wretched state. No, along with the loss of blessedness comes a new duty of obedience for the man: work, labor,  to get “for himself with proper difficulty” some remnant of the goods he has forfeited. The obvious one he mentions first, God’s edict that “by the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread” (Gen. 3:19). The second is less obvious, the hard labor of living rightly and resisting sin. However, there is a third good, other than sustenance and virtue, which Ælfric’s prelapsarian humanity possessed, which Ælfric does not redress: the threat of the natural world against weak, mortal man. The reversal the preacher describes is utterly pathetic—”the louse bit him boldly and the flea, the one who before the dragon dared not even touch”—but he names no labor of man to alleviate it.

But that, I think, is Beowulf’s labor, the hero’s labor: to still face the danger of the world, incarnate in the dragon, and to fight it. Not because the dragon can be beaten for good and all—it cannot, any more than one day’s sweat can make bread forever, any more than one temptation resisted can make a man pure forever. No, Beowulf fights the dragon because it is his duty and his proper labor. He does not to surrender to the natural order because it is not the natural order: we were not meant for this, to be the meat of dragons, to fear the fire that warms us, the water that sustains us, and even the ground that supports us. We were not meant for fear, but we surrendered our primal fearlessness. What remains is courage, and that is Beowulf’s labor.

So, in the end, I see dragon-slaying as more than just a good subject for a ripping yarn: it is the emblem of dignity in fallen humanity. Ceasing to be kings enthroned, we have become knights errant, finding our honor in work, not privilege. We must eat bread with the sweat on our brows, we must labor to keep our virtue, and, yes—we must fight dragons.

* These days my loyalty has shifted from dragons to giants, also because of Beowulf—come for the dragon, stay for the cannibal demon troll. I still have great affection for dragons, though.

Works Cited

Ælfric. Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection. Vol. 2. Ed. John C. Pope. London: Oxford UP, 1968. 2 volumes.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. R.M. Liuzza.  Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000.

Tolkien, J.R.R.  “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.” An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism. Ed. Lewis E. Nicholson.  Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame, 1963. 51-103.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” A Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1966. 33-99.

On the Road slid into the American canon like a little boy under a garage door, running on pure energy and speed and getting there without anyone really thinking about it. Like Catcher in the Rye, it’s the sort of book one used to be assigned in high school but now reads on one’s own—a classic of blindly rebellious youth that loses its luster as one gets older and joins the establishment. Unlike Catcher, it’s a remarkably positive book, in that the rebellion enacted by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and the rest of them is not a tearing-down of society but a sort of cosmic yea-saying to life itself:

Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other, “so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,” and “so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!”—and off we’d rush to eat.

Dean can protest against society merely by living apart from it; there’s no need to throw potato salad at CCNY lecturers, which makes him a far more attractive figure than many counter-culture icons. And yet even Sal Paradise, his hagiographer, notices from time to time that he is a “mindless cad,” remarkably self-centered and unconcerned with the harm he inflicts on those around him—particularly the women who worship him for his animal magnetism. One’s disgust at Dean grows each time the novel is read.

And yet the novel itself, to say nothing of the myth it relives, maintains its Benzedrine edge. You can’t help but be swept up into the flow—the only other option is to be left behind, adrift in Kerouac’s dislocated and disembodied words. The critic finds himself by necessity swept up and left behind. He must examine the novel critically and thus with an outside eye, and yet to see the novel for what it is, he must hop in that ’49 Hudson along with the characters. (This is, of course, true of all novels and all criticism, but it’s much more evident when you’re attempting to say something about On the Road—odds are it’s all going to fall flat like a joke that was only funny after fifteen hours of driving.)

John Updike said of his Rabbit, Run that he wished it to be read as a response of sorts to On the Road:

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, had just come out and made a great stir. As an even younger American writer, I was, of course, jealous of any stir that was being made, and I read the book with some antagonism because it seemed to me to be so very unreal, so very evasive—about these more or less privileged people zipping back and forth across the country with no visible means of support. And I was trying to make the good Protestant point that we’re all involved with our fellow man, and we’re all members of families, and so the basic image of [Rabbit, Run] is of a man running or leaving or going on the road and disrupting his own family.

Rabbit, Run, however, is unnecessary as a response to On the Road—the tension that Updike wrote into his own novel is already present to a lesser degree in Kerouac’s. (Note: There are many other, better reasons to read Rabbit, Run, and to a lesser extent the other three Rabbit novels, which are almost certainly better and more successful books than On the Road.) Indeed, there is a dialectic in On the Road between home and the road, one in which the former gets a larger slice of the pie than you might have anticipated.

The most famous passage in On the Road is probably this one, from the first chapter:

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

This “insanity as a spiritual virtue” theme is very common among the Beat writers, of course. Kerouac wrote On the Road in 1951, though it wasn’t published until six years later. In between came Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which probably gives you a better idea of what beatnik insanity was really like. “I’m with you in Rockland,” he tells Carl Solomon, “where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void.” Those roman candles aren’t so pretty up close.

But that’s beside the point. You’ll notice that Sal Paradise has put himself outside of the insanity equation—he is more or a less a journalist who follows Dean Moriarty and the other loony saints across the country. That’s why the guiding image of On the Road is not the bursting roman candle at all, but rather something that comes along not too long after it. Sal and Carlo Marx (Ginsberg, if you’re keeping score) are saying good-bye to Dean as he leaves for Chicago:

Carlo and I saw him off at the 34^th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs they had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and looked sinister. Dean made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who’d kill anybody who said anything against his mother. This picture Carlo and Dean neatly cut down the middle with a razor and saved a half each in their wallets.

Kerouac doesn’t note specifically that Sal is in the middle of this picture, but that is the obvious implication. As such, the straight razor cuts directly down the center of his face. Half of it goes to Dean, boarding a Greyhound—and half of it stays with Carlo back at home. This is the essence of Sal Paradise and thus the essence of On the Road (which is always his book, Dean’s charisma notwithstanding): Half of him goes on the road, and half of him stays at home.

An example: In the following chapter, Dean wants to go to San Francisco to visit his friend Remi Boncoeur. (It will, of course, take him nearly two weeks to make the three-day trip.) He lives with his aunt, though, and though he is a grown man, he seems to need her permission to do so. She, like all the other women in On the Road, is a grand old obliging gal who understands that boys will be boys and thinks only of his mental health: “[S]he said it would do me good. . . . All she wanted was for me to come back in one piece.” For the road to exist, home—with its self-sacrificing matrons concerned only with the well-being of their traveling men—must exist. For the one leg of the conference to make the circle, the other must stay as John Donne’s “fixed foot.” For Sal Paradise to stay an eternal child on the road, his aunt must be a grown-up at home.

And Sal is a child. Absent his aunt’s watchful eye, he is apparently incapable of taking care of himself. The only thing he eats for the three weeks it takes him to get to California is apple pie, one after another, always topped with ice cream. “I knew it was nutritious,” he tells us, as if we didn’t know that it’s not. This is the sort of diet a nine-year-old boy dreams of having when he grows up. On the road, one either doesn’t eat, or one eats the wrong foods entirely. It’s no coincidence that the first thing Sal does when he arrives back at his aunt’s house is “eat everything in the icebox.” His aunt, as always, is indulgent: “Poor little Salvatore . . . You’re thin, you’re thin. Where have you been all this time?”

Sal’s sexual relationships with women are just as basic and just as dependent on the road-home dichotomy. The most notable of these is with Terry, a chicana mother and migrant farm worker. Sal sees her son, Johnny, as an enemy, someone to get between him and Terry in bed (though Johnny’s presence in the room doesn’t keep him from making love to her). Eventually, it’s time for Sal to hitchhike back to New York:

“See you in New York, Terry,” I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with her brother. But we both knew she wouldn’t make it. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. She just walked on back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head and watched her. Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.

Terry has supported Sal emotionally and to some extent financially for several months—he is content to leave her and her baby forever with the childish expression “lackadaddy” and an eye turned back to the freedom of the road. (The nonsense word also reminds the reader that Johnny will now “lack a daddy,” as so many children in this novel do.)

That Sal’s last glimpse of Terry includes his breakfast plate that she must clean is perfect—it only cements the relationship between women, home, and food. So does the girl he “necks” with on the way home from his second trip. He’s blown all his money on the sort of things beatniks blew their money on, and so she buys his food for him. Kerouac doesn’t even bother giving her a name, just a paragraph’s worth of identity wrapped up in sex and food.

However bad Sal is in this regard, however, Dean is a million times worse. Sal needs to be at home from time to time; it is his relationship with Dean that pulls him back out on the frantic and unstable road. Dean only goes home when his friends, tired of traveling, have deserted him. He goes through a series of women in the novel, women who only rarely join him on his escapades—most of the time he leaves them behind to know that he is cheating on them with anyone who will let him. At one point, Dean is sleeping with his first wife and his second wife, along with any number of women Sal doesn’t know about.

On Sal’s left stand his aunt, Terry, the woman on the Greyhound, etc., etc. On his right stands Dean Moriarty, debased but somehow innocent saint of the road. Sal belongs to both sides simultaneously—though it must be said that Dean clearly exerts the stronger pull on him most of the time. If there were no left side, there wouldn’t be four parts to the novel, only one, long, Benzedrine fantasy, no doubt ending in Sal’s and Dean’s deaths; if there were no right side, there would be no novel at all.

The dialectic is thus absolutely necessary for Kerouac’s artistic success. Updike’s innovation in this regard is that he devotes several sections of Rabbit, Run, to the thoughts of the women his Pennsylvanian Sal Paradise leaves behind, thoughts we’re not privy to in On the Road, mostly because Sal needs these women more than he desires them.

This week’s music: The Wallflowers’ “6^th Avenue Heartache,” from Bringing Down the Horse (1996).

General Introduction
- Stamps, pogs, and other collections
- What’s on the blog this week?
- Response to Sam Mulberry

Introduction to Tragedy
- Will we all be dead in an hour?
- Our fearful, pitiful show
- Euripides, Hippolytus, and the quarrel with the gods
- Senseless tragedy vs. deserved tragedy

Aristotle’s Poetics
- Exclusion of the gods
- The Triangle
- Aristotle’s misreading of Sophocles
- The limits of Aristotle
- Characteristics of the tragic hero
- A tragedy in miniature for the information age

Plato’s Republic
- Why Plato hates poets
- How St. John resolves Plato’s contradictions
- Theory of forms
- The tragicomic irony of Plato’s legacy

The Pardoner’s Tale
- David tells the tale
- The Pardoner’s Tale and the heist movie

Shakespearean Tragedy
- Shakespeare as a student of Seneca
- Departures from Greek tragedy
- What feels modern about Hamlet
- Is Flash Gordon a tragedy?

We Finally Get to Movies
- The Godfather as tragedy of ambiguity (spoiler alert!)
- Yakuza films
- In which we spoil everything but Citizen Kane (you’re welcome, Victoria)
- Another tiresome discussion about the Coen Brothers
- Greek-flavored tragedy movies
- Oceans 13 is a tragedy?!?

Christian Attitudes Toward Tragedy
- Tragedy as precursor to the Gospel
- Flannery O’Connor’s false-bottomed tragedy
- Why Christianity goes beyond tragedy

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. New York: HarperOne, 1977.

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

Euripides. Heracles. Trans. John Davie. Heracles and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 2002. 8-46.

—. Hippolytus. Trans. John Davie. Medea and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 2003. 135-174.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Neil Taylor and Ann Thompson. London: Arden, 2006.

Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. Robert Fagles. The Three Theban Plays. New York: Penguin, 2000. 155-252.