Posts Tagged C.S. Lewis

General Introduction
- Reunited and it feels so good
- Some talk about offices
- What’s on the blog?

Etymology
- Mental? Mentos?
- Turning to the Greek
- Why it’s wrong to say “mentee”
- Divinity enters in
- A relationship between unequals
- Grubbs goes allegorical

Paul and Timothy
- A new kind of mentor
- Apostolic succession
- Distinguishing mentor from friend
- Put me in, coach
- Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-San
- Teachers and pastors
- About the Stone-Campbell tradition

Our Stories
- Personal mentors
- Michial’s discomfort with literature changing lives
- Nathan’s crushing guilt
- Girl trouble!
- David’s tribute to his fallen mentor

Authors as Mentors
- Can a person you’ve never met be a mentor?
- Walter Brueggemann and Stanley Hauerwas
- Walker Percy
- C.S. Lewis, of course
- Gods do answer fan mail

How Do You Get a Protégé?
- You beg, obviously
- Don’t major in English!
- Being yourself
- Getting mentored by the prof-bots
- The frustrations of the major university
- Why it helps to have no social life
- Is it better to be young or old?
- Oh, snap!

Forcing or Facilitating Mentors
- Can you require it?
- Faculty advising
- “Barnabas Groups”
- Eating with the students
- A notice to Christian colleges re: hiring
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brueggemann, Walter. Journey to the Common Good. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2010.

Hauerwas, Stanley. Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010.

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

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do With the Other. New York: Picador, 2000.

Smith, James K.A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2006.

Wood, Ralph C. The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1991.

Music this week is “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?” from Bruce Cockburn’s 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu.

General Introduction
- What’s on the blog?
- All hail Craig Farmer (no relation)
- Old Man Gilmour tells us all to get off his lawn

Friendship in the Ancient World
- Aristotle’s friendship between equals
- Can friendship exist without sexual contact?
- Cicero’s common pursuit of good things

David and Jonathan
- David Grubbs’ personal connection
- Why were David and Jonathan friends at all?
- (LACUNA)
- The “homosexual” reading of David and Jonathan
- (Please pardon our oscillating fan during this segment)
- Exploding the dichotomy of sexual identification
- In which we cast David and Jonathan in a Judd Apatow movie

Christ and His Friends
- Nathan gets technical
- Jesus shakes things up
- A new kind of philia and agape

The Friendship of the Inklings
- Michial admits that he ripped this episode off
- Who were the Inklings?
- The friendship of common interests
- When friendship gets brutal

Michial Extemporizes About Existentialism
- Seeking a jingle for this segment
- The glory of the isolated individual
- Why is hell other people?
- How religion solves the problem
- Buber’s I and Thou, and Marcel’s testimony
- Let’s get linguistic

Literary Friendships
- Jeremy Irons speaks some sense!
- Achilles and Patroclus
- Watson makes Holmes more human
- Tolkien’s interracial friendships
- American literature and friendship
- Ishmael drops Queequeg
- Huck and Jim vs. Marlowe and Lennox

Ephemeral Friendships
- MICHAEL W. SMITH LIED TO US?
- Grubbs invokes Old English (as usual)
- Do you have real friends in high school?
- The we and the that
- (Sorry—I can’t make this edit sound natural. Blame Skype!)

Friends and the Internet
- Michial’s 221 Facebook friends
- No offense if you like The Matrix
- Mutual pursuit of intellectual excellence
- The illusion of mutuality
- Getting rid of Aristotle
- David endorses South Park blanketedly

A Specifically Christian Friendship
- Let’s talk ecclesiology
- Radical inclusivity
- “In Christ There Is No East or West”
- “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
- “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1984. 1729-1867.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1970.

Chandler, Raymond. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Cicero. Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio. Trans. J.G.F. Powell. Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 1991.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 1991.

Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existentialism. Trans. Manya Harari. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1956.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 2001.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. 506-536.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1956.

—. No Exit. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1989. 1-46.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.

This week’s music is the 1982 Daniel Amos classic “The Double,” one of the few songs I know about Platonism. It’s crazy out of print (and just crazy), so it plays in its entirety at the end of the episode. Enjoy.

General Introduction
- An apology for blog silence
- An explanation for repetition

Platonic Idealism
- David explains the Theory of Forms
- Where the math comes in
- Plato’s bizarre theory of learning and knowing
- Children remembering heaven

Democracy
- Will Michial rant about populism?
- Plato’s terrifying ideal society
- Four types of lesser societies
- Why American society is an oligarchy
- How literal is The Republic?
- The poet at the gates

Augustine and a New Kind of Platonism
- Thank God for Plato
- Why it’s a waste of time to talk to atomists
- Augustine’s dissatisfaction
- How antimaterialist is Augustine?
- Autobiography and theology
- C.S. Lewis and the sins of ideas

The Search for the Historical Socrates
- The progression from real to original
- Who is The Stranger?
- Aristophanes and The Clouds
- Is Socrates a sophist or just a jerk?

C.S. Lewis as Neo-Platonist
- “It’s all in Plato, it’s all in Plato.”
- The Narnia beyond Narnia
- The blades of diamond grass
- Platonism in the apologetics
- Independent Platonist traditions
- Did Plato read the Pentateuch?: In which we go off-topic

CL Cool P
- Why do conservatives love a radical like Plato so much?
- The shift of ages, the worship of the ancient, the distrust of the masses
- The rebellion against analytic philosophy
- Absolute truth
- How conservative was Allan Bloom, anyway?
- A long digression about what conservative and liberal really mean, anyhow
- Our modern-day Sophists and why David Grubbs is a total fascist

How Christians Should Read Plato
- A stepping stone
- Be careful
- Gilmour tries to find a place in the middle
- The importance of revelation

BIBLIOGRAPHY
I’ll refrain from giving an individual citation for all of the Plato dialogues we talked about today and just include  the edition of the collected works that I use.

Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2008.

Aristophanes. The Clouds. Lysistrata and Other Plays. Trans. and Ed. Alan H. Sommerstein. New York: Penguin, 2002. 65-130.

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

—. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Collins, 1932.

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

—. The Last Battle. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

—. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

—. Mere Christianity. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001.

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. New York: Delacorte, 2006.

Plato. Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. New York: Hackett, 1997.

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: Out of respect for Hulu watchers, TiVo devotees, and other folks who didn’t watch the Superbowl-length extravaganza on May 23, I’ve waited until now to start writing about LOST for this blog.  That said, this series of posts is going to begin with the last scene of the last episode of the last season of the show, and I’m going to work elements from the show’s entirety into these posts.

You know what that means, you with the last two episodes sitting on your DVR hard drive: bookmark these posts and come back to them, because I am going to talk about the episodes you haven’t watched yet.

Alright.  Now on with it.

In The Last Battle, the final novel in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Eustace and Jill, along with other characters from Narnia, find themselves locked in an apocalyptic battle for the fate of Narnia.  (I don’t think that’s a spoiler, since the novels are fifty years old, and since the book’s called The Last Battle.)  By circumstances that each of you should read, many of the characters find themselves in a new world, a place where human beings and centaurs alike can run without growing weary, can enjoy the presence of Aslan the Lion uninterrupted, can remain together after experiencing a life that tears people apart from one another.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s corpus, specifically in The Great Divorce, Lewis makes modifications to Dante’s version of Purgatory.  Dante’s vision of Purgatory is a place for those already saved by the grace of Christ, so there’s no sense that people are “working” for their salvation, for God’s favor, or for anything else.  However, because of their choices while living among men, the souls in Purgatory still desire wrongly, be those desires misdirected (such as the prideful man’s desire for his own glory rather than God’s) or out of proportion (such as the lustful man’s desire for women or men, as the case may be, that overcomes his desire for God).  Their term in Purgatory in most cases is not set by judicial fiat but lasts until they want to go to Heaven, which in turn means that their desires have grown strong enough (as in the case of the slothful) or have reoriented themselves (as in the case of the avaricious) to the extent that they can genuinely enjoy Heaven.  Lewis, a Platonist at his core, modifies the picture slightly (influenced, I think, by G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman, but there’s no proving that) in that his Purgatory is also his Hell.  The desire to ascend is, in theory at least, available to all in the “grey city,” but most people in Lewis’s allegory seem perfectly content to dwell eternally with the shadows of real things, while the desire for reality (the signature mark of a Heaven that is reminiscent of Plato’s world-beyond-the-Cave) is relatively rare among the dead.  So, like Shaw’s Heaven, Lewis’s is for those who have decided that they want something more than the shadows of Hell, and Hell is for those who are comfortable living in those same shadows.

I’m sure that by now, the evangelical blogosphere will have commented at some length on the visual elements of that last scene in LOST–the fact that the stained-glass window in the “church” where Jack finally arrives has (among other things–you can find these blogs, I’m sure) a Menorah, a cross, a crescent and star, a Yin-Yang, and other religious symbols, communicating as heavy-handedly as one could imagine that, in this universe, the content of religious traditions is effectively irrelevant.  So I’m not going to start there.  Far more interesting in that last sequence is the marked borrowing from C.S. Lewis, something that certainly does not start with the last episode or even the last season but nonetheless dominates the last fifteen minutes or so of the series.

That the “flash-sideways” world of season six is the afterlife became more than evident in the final episode.  After all, Christian Shephard, Jack’s father who is also dead, tells him he’s died.  In order to account for the presence of people who survived longer than did Jack, Christian tells him that in the place he’s entered, there is no “when,” that people who died long before Jack and people who died long after Jack simply exist there together.  (Granted, the writers could have gotten that from Boethius, but the locution on the show sounded more like Lewis.)  So far, that establishes the Boethian eternity of the place.  But the actual narratives that occur in the “sideways” world point to this afterlife as at least kin to Lewis’s purgatory.

Each of the characters who persisted through all six seasons (along with some others, but not all of them by any means) come into contact with one another, especially those whom they have loved in the world of the living, they become aware that they’ve lived in the world of the island, but some of the characters that the viewer finds familiar do not leave the sideways-world for the final reunion.  As the newly-aware spirit of Hurley has an encounter with the spirit of Ana Lucia, one of the Oceanic 815 survivors who died in the second season, she takes the bribe that Hurley offers to free Desmond, Sayid, and Kate.  When Hurley silently motions his confusion, Desmond says to Hurley that she’s “not ready yet” to join the awakened.  At the door of the “church,” Ben Linus watches the others go in but does not himself enter.  When Hurley invites him, he says that he’s got a few things “to work out” before he can come.  Finally, the characters wandering lost (get it?) in this world seem entirely unaware of their previous existences until near-death experiences, physical contact with others from the island, and other moments bring them to the awareness that here, in this world, they can indeed have what the other world denied them.

If that jumble of character-names baffles you, that means that you’ve not watched the show.  Join Netflix, start with season one (the first five seasons are available both as DVD’s and as Internet feeds), and realize what some of us felt like over the last ten years when people discussed Harry Potter novels!

So where Dante’s purgatorial souls need to cleanse their souls so that they only desire God, and where Lewis’s souls in the “grey city” need to extend their desires outward from shadows to reality, the “sideways” souls in LOST need to let go of those things that kept them from connecting with one another in the land of the living, embracing one another so as to replace obsession with community. Folks rightly point out that this is the communitarian thrust of the show, and the marginalization of particular spiritual traditions in the final scene makes the most sense as the natural outgrowth of a universe in which those traditions no longer serve to connect people, a place where a pretender Catholic priest and a mostly-atheistic physician and various devotees of a magical island are not brought together by those powers that transcend the relationships between people but stand secondary to them.

As a parting thought, I have read some commentators on the Internet who worry that the “sideways” world and its last word in the series threatens to render the comings and goings on the island meaningless.  Once again I’d point to Narnia as the inspiration for that relationship between Island and Purgatory.  When Eustace and Jill and the Calormene warrior pass on to be judged by Aslan, their bliss in the world-after does not mean that all that has happened in Narnia is meaningless; it simply means that all of that, just as all of the realities that define Peter’s and Susan’s and Nathan Gilmour’s world, stand not absolutely but in some sense related to Eternity.  Although LOST (to nobody’s surprise) will not even send Ben Linus to whatever would be the equivalent of Hell in that reality, nonetheless Ben’s delay in entering into communion with those whose communion he needs in that Purgatorial existence seems connected to his ruthless and manipulative treatment of other human beings in his quest to connect himself to the Island and to Jacob, whose only concern for him was to ask the dismissive question, “What about you?”.  Ultimately the souls in the Purgatory of LOST, like the souls in the Purgatory of Dante, must suffer greatly before they realize that there is only one desire worthy of enjoying.  For Dante, following Augustine, only God is to be enjoyed.  For LOST, what leads one out of Purgatory is connections to other people.  Purgatory is… OTHER PEOPLE!

I don’t know how many of these posts I’m going to write, but this one has been fun, so look for more over the course of the summer.  I should point out now that the real LOST bloggers out there have been writing about the show as it took place, that I’m at most a Johnny-come-lately commentator.  Go look at those blogs for a glimpse at just how complex and fun this series has been, and come back here when you’re ready for another dose of LOST-and-theology musing.

General Introduction
- Congratulations to David Grubbs, teacher of outstanding merit
- What’s on the blog this week?
- Buy our stuff!

Renaissance and Reformation Education
- Religious education
- The move toward State education
- Apprenticeships and grammar school
- Calvin as the father of the Christian college
- The birth of humanism
- A new kind of rhet/comp

The Scottish Model
- Where Calvinism meets the Enlightenment
- Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments
- Is this theory still viable?
- Why Critical Theory hasn’t progressed beyond Smith and Hume
- The Scottish tradition in conservatism

The Rise of the German University
- Cf. “research-one” schools
- A newfound freedom
- The “scientification” of the university
- On specialization
- Philological research and fierce competition
- The elective system

Cardinal Newman Protests
- The Idea of the University
- The university vs. the academy
- The necessity of theology
- Perpetuation of the grand unity of disciplines
- Newman gets apoplectic

The Masters of Suspicion
- Karl Marx turns Hegel upside-down
- Nietzsche’s attack on conventional ethics
- Freud and the depths of the irrational
- The word phallus comes up again

Twentieth Century Conservative Revolt
- C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot dislike analytical philosophy
- The Southern Agrarians object to industrial capitalism
- William F. Buckley gets mad

The Battle Royale Begins
- What’s at stake here?
- Is knowledge objective or subjective?
- Where stands the learner?
- Is the canon liberating or oppressive?
- Why Nathan prefers Marx and the feminists to Foucault

Misuse of Critical Theory and Great Books
- Michial is too much of a humanist
- The hegemony of critical theory
- Melville’s Marxist grasshoppers
- The unified Western tradition and free-market capitalism
- The chivalry of Morte D’Arthur
- The self-subversion of warrior culture
- We take yet another shot at Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf

Why the German Model Breeds Curriculum Battles
- Publish or perish
- Newman’s “periodical culture”
- Readings are easy
- The marginalization of the English department
- Is the “elective culture” to blame?
- The vicious cycle
- The loose canon of Critical Theory

Where Do We Go From Here?
- Hermeneutics of suspicion
- An “canonversation”
- Dialectical tension
- Incorporation of Critical Theory into Great Books
- Critical Theory as one in a line of hermeneutic techniques
- Continuities of criticism and research/teaching

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrett, William. Irrational Man. New York: Anchor, 1958.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

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

Booth, Wayne C. “Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self; or, Does Amnesty Have a Leg to Stand On?” Freedom and Interpretation. Ed. Barbara Johnson. New York: BasicBooks, 1993. 69-101.

Campbell, George. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Ann Arbor, Mich.: U of Michigan P, 2010.

Eliot T.S. Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949.

Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1995.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008.

Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte Darthur. New York: Norton, 2003.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1992. Three volumes.

Melville, Herman. Redburn: His First Voyage, Being the Sailor-Boy, Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Muir, Bernard J. (ed.) The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2000.

Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1990.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. A Nietzsche Reader. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 1978.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: CreateSpace, 2009.

Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006.

Westphal, Merold. Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism. New York: Fordham UP, 1999.

The music this week is Bruce Cockburn’s “Creation Dream,” from Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws (1979).

General Introduction
- Reader feedback
- What’s on the blog this week?

The Genesis Account of Creation
- When did we first encounter it?
- Oh, those strategic bushes!
- We take another shot at Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf
- The Breeches Bible
- We plan Nathan’s first book

Scholarly Approaches to Bereshith
- Is the first clause independent or dependent?
- A plurality of versions of every story
- The “telescope” theory
- Other creation stories in the Hebrew Bible

Extrabiblical Ancient Creation Stories
- Enuma Elish
- The Rig Veda
- Gilgamesh
- What do we have to fear from these similarities?

New Testament Creation Accounts
- What does John 1 add?
- Christ as the “first fruit of creation” and “wisdom of God”

Greco-Roman Creation Stories
- Plato’s Timaeus
- How do the Gospels react to Platonic ideas?
- Where does John get his Logos language?
- Hesiod and Ovid
- Love as the first element

English Creation Stories
- Caedmon’s Hymn
- Anthropocentrism
- Why Caedmon is not the first English poet
- Mystery plays
- Paradise Lost: Milton’s hedged bets

Where Have All the Creation Stories Gone?
- The Enlightenment
- Romantic individualism
- Post-Darwin literature
- Evangelical anxiety
- Lewis and Tolkein
- Hesitancy as hallmark of modern creation story
- Scientific origin stories

Advantages and Disadvantages of Creation Stories
- A call for humility
- Making doctrine out of poetry
- The multiplicity of stories

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. 471-492.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of the History of Creation. Trans. L.W. King. New York: FQ Classics, 2007.

Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield. Trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Lewis, C.S. The Magician’s Nephew. New York: Collier, 1977.

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

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. David Raeburn. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Robin Waterfield. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Rig Veda: One Hundred and Eight Hymns. Trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Simarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkein. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

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).