Chesterton, the Internet and Community

What would G.K. Chesterton have thought of the Internet?

We can get an idea from his essay On Certain Modern Writers originally published in Heretics and recently republished in the excellent collection In Defense of Sanity. Chesterton discusses Christianity, the family and community in this essay, and makes the point that small communities like the family force different types of people to know and get along with each other. Ironically, it is the small community that is truly more broad than the large one:

In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy; and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colors than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. 

That last sentence contains a typical Chesterton surprise. We might tend to think of "spiritual coherence and contentment" as something good, or at least not positively bad;  and Chesterton plays on that conceit, leading us along in the sentence until shocking us at the end with his view that it is actually hellacious. What is hell like? It is a place where everyone has the same kind of soul, and far from being a place of discord and conflict, in fact there is "coherence" and "contentment." It is place where everyone is content in his sins. It is not a happy place, however, and so we can conclude that Chesterton sees a distinction between contentment and happiness. I am picturing Chesterton's hell as one of drabness and dullness, where everyone is "content" with his situation only because he doesn't have the energy to do anything about it. All the souls are the same because they are all worn down to the nub. Heaven, then, must be a place of glorious diversity (in the real sense, not the PC sense, of that word) where the souls are very different, and express the energy of their difference yet in the unity of God.

Back to the theme of this post, it seems clear Chesterton would have some problems with the Internet - the chief being that it is an ideal clique-forming ground, beyond anything Chesterton might have imagined. Now one doesn't need to be in physical proximity to spend all his time with the like-minded. A few clicks of the mouse and you can find somewhere online where everyone thinks exactly like you do. The everyday encounters that bring us into contact with a variety of people - like shopping, taking the bus, going to the library - may also be minimized via online shopping. "Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations" Chesterton tells us. On the internet, as soon as you experience any discomfort or any degree of renunciation, there is always another more comfortable page to repair to.

There is no neighbor on the Internet in any real sense, and thus no place for the second great commandment. "We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour." God commands us to love the man who is given to us in our circumstances; but what if our circumstances (e.g. online existence) are such that no one is given to us?

We have, in Chesterton's words, "a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge."

Of course I can't leave off here without discussing the irony of making this point on the Internet itself.  The Internet itself is neither good nor evil - Chesterton would certainly agree with that - it is our use of it that makes it turn for good or ill. And so it is when internet "communities" begin to displace real communities that we begin to have a problem, and especially when people begin to think of online "communities" as real communities.

Chesterton and Original Sin

From the introduction to The Defendant in the collection of essays In Defense of Sanity:

This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall.

The rest of the animal kingdom has an advantage on us: They are what they are and can be nothing else. A bear cannot fail to be bearlike, or a worm wormlike. But man can fail to be human. Chesterton's wonderful description of Original Sin, imagining what it might be like should an animal suffer it, illuminates what it means for us. Imagine a fish that forgets the sea; meaning, I think, a fish who forgets how to live in the sea as a fish. Such a fish is never home, for the only home it could possibly know, the sea, is foreign to it. It must live its entire existence as a stranger in its own home.

Even better is the ox who forgets the meadow. Unlike the fish, for whom the entire sea is all home to it, or should be, the meadow is peculiarly the home for an ox. An ox in the city or on a mountain is not home. But the ox who forgets the meadow is still not home in the city or on the mountain; like the unfallen ox that finds itself in the city, it would search for home. But while the unfallen ox would recognize the meadow as home should it find it, the fallen ox may find the meadow but would, tragically, not recognize it as home... it would wander right through home and continue to pine for the home it already found.

The great fall for man means that he has lost the knowledge of how to live as man in the world; he feels that he is not at home, or that he should be home but somehow isn't. So what does he do? What can he do? A man at home lives naturally; he doesn't have to figure out how to live. Since we are not at home - or at least we have forgotten how to live at home - we must construct ways of living. And these ways are at some level false simply because they are constructed - they can never replace the natural way of living of unfallen man.

Rousseau noticed this artificiality but rejected Original Sin; for him, the social constructions of man are the fall rather than a consequence of the fall. This has the convenient consequence that the fall lies outside us rather than in us, and in dealing with it we don't have to change.

But the truth is that there is no state of nature that is our true home, and in which we would be at peace could we find it. We are already in our true home. We just don't know how to live here.

Chesterton and Kierkegaard on the Difference of Christ

What difference does Christ make?

This question has many answers in many different contexts. Two of my favorite writers, G.K. Chesterton and Soren Kierkegaard, focus on the difference Christ makes in terms of human possibility.

Man is different from other animals insofar as he lives self-reflected in a world. Beavers and dogs don't worry about how they relate to the world; they just exist as they are unselfconsciously in the world. They are the world. But man knows himself as who he is in relation to the world. Kierkegaard describes this difference in The Sickness Unto Death in terms of the self as "a relation which relates itself to itself." The fact that man by nature relates himself to the world means his existence, unlike that of non-rational animals, is a dialectic of possibility and necessity. I understand who I am (or think I understand), and I also understand the world and my place in it, and in terms of that relationship life presents a present reality of necessity and a horizon of possibility. I exist as a relationship to the world, but I can know that relationship and (perhaps) change it - I can relate myself to the relationship which constitutes my self in the world.

But I can do that only in terms of the possibilities available to me, and those are constituted by my philosophy. What sort of possibilities are available to the natural but pre-Christian man, that is, the pagan man? Chesterton in Orthodoxy describes the pagan world as a world of pink. The great pagan virtue is moderation; a little of everything but not too much of anything. Red and white mixed together, not too much of each. This is a natural and sensible policy, and in the pagan world it produced great men like Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius. The ideal gentleman is a little bit of a warrior and a bit of a scholar as well. He drinks wine but not too much; he loves others but not too much of that either. For love is a form of madness and madness is unbalanced. Above all he maintains self-control, for he knows that the world contains good things as well as evil things, and that it ends in death. He keeps these facts before him and holds himself well so that he is neither carried away by good fortune, nor destroyed by misfortune, for life inevitably involves both. There is no better wisdom in a world without Christ, especially in a world that cannot imagine Christ. The life of balanced moderation is the best life that the best pagan mind could imagine; it defines the horizon of pagan possibility.

What has changed with Christ? The Gospel of John tells us that His first miracle occurred at Cana, and involved the replenishment of wine at a wedding feast that had run dry. We can assume that the host of the feast had on hand an appropriate amount of wine for the celebrations. It would seem, then, that any additional wine would violate the principle of moderation; we've gone from having a sensible good time to getting drunk in excess. But this is why it is a miracle, for a miracle is more than merely the suspension of ordinary physical expectations; it is a sign and revelation of a new order of existence, an order that breaks through the old pagan compromises and proposes a way of life that answers to the transcendent meaning of Christ. The exhaustion of the wine at Cana symbolizes the exhaustion of pagan virtue and the existential hopes it offered. The party is over; it is expected to be over and the celebrants are prepared to go home; no one can imagine the party continuing, or at least continuing with any propriety. But Christ can imagine it, and through His grace he turns water into wine, that the party may continue, theoretically indefinitely. From that moment forward the horizon of pagan hope has been forever shattered, for the possibility that it is not the final limit, that there is a way of life that is not bound by pagan compromises, has been permanently introduced into the human imagination.

Chesterton describes the difference as a world of pink becoming a world of bold reds and whites; reds for the warriors and whites for the monks. There were warriors in the ancient world, of course, and pacifists as well. But the pure warrior, like the pure pacifist, could not express an ideal human type because he violated the principle of moderation or balance. More significantly, the warrior and the pacifist had nothing to do with each other. Each might despise the other and, if they didn't, by the nature of things they at least expressed different philosophies of life. But in Christendom the martial Knight was as much an expression of the authentic Christian life as was the peaceful Monk. Far from expressing opposite philosophies of life, they both expressed different ways of performing the same mission: Redeeming the world in the name of Christ. Chesterton states the difference this way: In the ancient world the balance of existential possibilities was expressed in the single individual of the moderate, virtuous gentleman. In Christendom, the balance of possibilities occurred in the Church as a whole rather than individuals:

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescencies exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold an crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionnaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not walkways in one man's body ad in Becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon.  - Orthodoxy, Ch. 6

For both Chesterton and SK, the advent of Christ permanently changed the nature of existence and of the world - and that whether you believe in Christ or not. The key point they share in this regard is that Christ revealed possibilities that were unimagined prior to the Incarnation. After the Incarnation, those possibilities cannot be eradicated from the human spirit, even if Christ Himself is later denied. The price of denying Christ cannot be a simple return to the pre-Christian world, for the possibilities he revealed will remain in the human imagination- it is only their fulfillment that will become impossible, since that fulfillment is only possible with the grace of God. The result is that post-Christian life can never be a simple return to paganism; it will instead be one of melancholy and despair.

The Cult of Suffering and Assisted Suicide

Andrew Stuttaford at the Secular Right has a post on what he calls the Cult of Suffering and assisted suicide.

I was struck by Stuttaford's objection to a certain Sister Constance Veit:

That last paragraph is, I have to say, disgusting. Sister Veit's argument that those wrestling with the later stages of a cruel disease are on a "mission" on behalf of the rest of us, a mission that they never asked to be on, is an expression of fanaticism, terrifying in its absence of empathy for her fellow man.

The "a mission that they never asked to be on" reminds of Chesterton's discussion of this point in the chapter "The Flag of the World" in Orthodoxy:

 A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag, long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

In other words, we are born on a mission, and have accepted that mission, long before we ever have the chance to "ask" whether we want to be on it. GKC calls this the "primary loyalty" to life and, like all primary principles, it can be difficult to defend because it is generally what one argues from rather than what one argues to. Historically this primary loyalty was taken for granted as obvious and commonsensical, like patriotism and loyalty to one's country - in this case, "cosmic patriotism."

Life begins in suffering - birth is a traumatic experience - and involves suffering of some sort until death. Until very recently, regular and persistent pain was a fact of life. Imagine having a toothache before novocaine or a kidney stone before modern surgery. My grandfather's generation would pull their own teeth with a pair of pliers. And I remember reading about an instrument people once inserted in themselves all the way up to their kidneys in order to crush kidney stones so they could later be passed in excruciating pain.

And yet, historically,  persistent suffering of a physical variety was not what generally drove people to suicide. Those reasons were typically emotional - Romeo and Juliet or stockbrokers jumping off buildings after the 1929 crash - or matters of honor: Roman (or, recently, Japanese) generals doing themselves in after a defeat, or pederasts caught in the act (King George V: "Good grief! I thought chaps like that shot themselves.") If persistent suffering were something that could only be answered with death, everyone would have killed himself 200 years ago. So much for the human race.

The problem with suffering is that it is a fact of life that doesn't go away whatever your philosophy. (Well, that is not quite true: Death makes it go away.) Mr. Stuttaford speaks of "empathy for your fellow man" but I wonder what his "empathy" actually means in practice. The Little Sisters of the Poor minister to the dying who are beyond hope of recovery. Whatever Stuttaford thinks of their empathy, they at least make sure the dying do not die alone or friendless. And they offer them the hope that their suffering is not meaningless. Does Stuttaford spend any time with the dying, or does his "empathy" extend only so far as the abstract position that they should be offered a lethal syringe? I find such "empathy" far more horrifying than anything Sister Veit says - and in fact is not empathy at all but merely an embrace of the Cult of Death. To that I prefer the Cult of Suffering.

The Quotable Chesterton

"A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read." - G.K. Chesterton

It's virtually a cliche to point out that Chesterton is among the most quotable of authors. But it's easy to misunderstand the Chesterton quote taken out of context. For instance, take the quote above, from his essay "Tom Jones and Morality" in All Things Considered. Our first reaction to it may be to think that GKC is being ironic and taking a swipe at people who talk up a classic without having read it. But in context it is clear that GKC means no such thing and intends just what he says.

Chesterton's point is ultimately conservative in the best sense of the word. A great classic becomes so based on the developed opinion of mankind over many decades or centuries.  We can praise a classic without having read it based on trust in that common, longstanding opinion. I can, Chesterton says, talk of "great poets" like Pindar without ever having read Pindar because "a man has got as much right to employ in his speech the established and traditional facts of human history as he has to employ any other piece of common human information." And the status of great classics is one of those "established and traditional facts.

While GKC defends the right of men to praise a classic without having read it, he disputes a right to condemn a classic without having read it. The reason should be obvious. Praising a classic is submitting to the historically developed consensus concerning a work; condemning one is contradicting that tradition and, so, going it on your own. If you are going to contradict the received opinion, you've got to have some reasons for doing so, and it is hard to see how you could have good ones without having read the work in question.

GKC never wrote pithy quotes for the sake of being quoted. His wit is always a spur to more considered reflection - a reason for us to be careful of a GKC quote absent context.

VDH and Chesterton

Victor Davis Hanson (VDH), in a series of books, most especially in Carnage and Culture, develops the theme of the peculiar Western advantage in war-making. Hanson traces this all the way back to the emphasis on rationality in the ancient Greek origins of Western culture. He shows how, throughout subsequent history, the West has consistently (although of course not perfectly) subordinated other considerations to rational ones when it comes to the martial sciences. This has given the West a decisive and enduring advantage in war over the East, an advantage that is by no means absolute but that eventually resulted in the civilizational domination of the East by the West.

The standard line on why the West has dominated the East traces the cause almost exclusively to technology. The West, for whatever reason, was able to develop modern weaponry before the East and the East simply could not compete. Spears vs. machine guns.

But, of course, the Western development of military technology is itself the expression of the emphasis on rationality that has distinguished it from the East. It is well-known that many of the crucial breakthroughs in military technology - gunpowder, for instance - were first developed in the East. It was the West, however, that typically imagined the military innovations possible with these breakthroughs and exploited them - in the case of gunpowder, with firearms. The West has consistently maintained a lead in military innovation, with the East playing catch-up and never quite getting there.

Neither can the Western dominance be attributed entirely to technology. Hanson uses the example of Cortez who, with a few hundred conquistadors, was able to conquer a sophisticated Mexican empire that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The crucial difference between Cortez and the Aztecs, Hanson shows, was the way Cortez interpreted Mexican civilization vs the way the Mexicans interpreted Cortez. The Mexicans interpreted Cortez's advent in terms of myth and religion: Was he the white God foretold by their myths? They eventually came to the conclusion that he wasn't, but they never made a genuine attempt beyond that to understand the Spaniards in themselves. Neither did they make efforts to adopt and master Spanish weapons (e.g. swords, armor and cannon) after the superiority of those weapons was made manifest. The Aztecs had access to swords and armor from captured Spaniards as the conflict endured, yet they never made a systematic effort to exploit the captured weapons. Aztec warriors never appeared in captured armor wielding swords, something a Western army would have done as soon as possible when it encountered novel but superior enemy military hardware.

Instead, religion dominated rational considerations of warfare and the Aztecs stuck with their religiously based methods of fighting. Their weapons were designed to stun rather than kill, so that the enemy might be dragged back for ritual human sacrifice. The Aztecs never changed this tactic even when it was obvious that such tactics were particularly unsuited to attacking men wearing chest armor and helmets.

Cortez, on the other hand, made a rapid and systematic evaluation not only of Aztec military technique but also of the political structure of the Aztec empire. He was able to turn the subject peoples of the Empire - who were required, among other things, to provide regular victims to Aztec human sacrifice - against the Aztecs. And after his first attempt to conquer the city failed, Cortez analyzed his failure, came up with a plan based on Aztec vulnerabilities, exploited them, and ultimately conquered.

That's just a brief foray into Hanson's work on cultural history. My real point in this post is to point out that G.K. Chesterton anticipated much of this work way back in 1906, in his August 18 column in the Illustrated London News. (Randomly reading through Chesterton's essays is an exercise that is rarely disappointing, with the occasional discovery of real treasures). What is especially interesting about Chesterton's take on this theme is that he explicitly links it to the Western moral imagination, in contrast to Hanson, who emphasizes what he believes is the amoral character of Western rationality applied to military matters. Here is Chesterton:

Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general proposition I suggest is the plainest common-sense. The elements that make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilization are precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because this picturing of the other man's point of view is in the main a thing in which Christians and Europeans specialize that Christians and Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace and war.

Hanson would point out that men like Cortez were hardly humanitarians. One thing the Aztecs did figure out, and pointed out to Cortez's native allies, was that Cortez was not interested in liberating them but in exploiting them. But the natives made the calculation that whatever Cortez was about, it had to be better than serving as a victim in the lethal religious ceremonies in Tenochtitlan.

I don't think Chesterton's point, in any case, was that every Western encounter with the Other had noble intentions. I think it is more that the Western imagination made it possible for Western man to have treat his enemy humanely, because he could imagine him as a human and imagine his point of view. The man who cannot imagine his enemy's point of view doesn't really imagine him as human. In this context Chesterton references another case Hanson treats, that of the conflict between the English and the Zulus:

They [Christians and Europeans] alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for the same reason for which they invented machine-guns. Both involve a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East, with all its wisdom, is cruel, that the East, with all its wisdom, is weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are still - merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy's sufferings they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the Englishman's head he might really borrow it. For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, you probably will not.

Well, Chesterton's example of the Zulus is itself a counter-example of that sentiment, since the English certainly did crush the Zulus after the disaster at Isandlwana. But his broader point remains, which is that the Western man, because he can imagine the point of view of his enemy, creates at least the possibility that he will treat him humanely. Aztecs, on capturing Spaniards, would drag them off to be sacrificed, it never occurring to them to do otherwise, even if interrogating them and, possibly, learning from them were they only ways to avoid conquest by the Spaniards. For purely selfish reasons the Aztecs should have treated the Spaniards more humanely.

And I think Hanson would agree with that.

Chesterton and Harry Potter

I'm a longtime Harry Potter hater, having once waged an unsuccessful mini-crusade to keep the series out of my kid's Catholic school. I haven't thought about Potter much in the last few years, but I've recently been reading In Defense of Sanity, a collection of Chesterton essays compiled by Dale Ahlquist, Joseph Pierce and Aidan Mackey for Ignatius Press.

One of the more frustrating aspects of being both a Potter hater and a Chesterton fan was the - to me - perplexing affection some Chestertonians had and still have for Harry Potter. One of the primary reasons for my Potter hatred, and one of the qualities of the series that struck me almost immediately on reading it, was its anti-Chesterton imaginative cast. I never could understand how anyone who read deeply of Chesterton could stomach Harry Potter.

My anti-Potter jihad is long over (and failed), so it is too late that I stumbled across the essay "Magic and Mystery in Fiction" in the Ignatius Press collection. The essay includes a passage relevant to what Chesterton's view of Harry Potter might have been:

In contrast with this, it will be noted that the good miracles, the acts of the saints and heroes, are always acts of restoration. They give the victim back his personality; and it is a normal and not a super-normal personality. The miracle gives back his legs to the lame man; but it does not turn him into a large centipede. It gives eyes to the blind; but only a regular and respectable number of eyes. The paralytic is told to stretch forth his hands, which is the gesture of liberation from fetters; but not to spread himself as a sort of Briarean octopus radiating in all directions and losing the human form. There runs through the whole tradition the idea that black magic is that which blots out or disguise the true form of a thing; while white magic, in the good sense, restores it to its own form and not another.

In these terms, the magic in Harry Potter is all black magic, whether used by Harry himself or Voldemort, for it bears no relation to form. What it does bear relation to is will - the will of the wizard himself and his desire to impose himself on the world. Thus the beginning magic classes in Hogwarts feature students turning small items arbitrarily into other small items, precisely what is of no consequence, since the goal is not to respect the form of the thing but to develop the power of the wizard. For the point isn't what it is with Christian miracles (or the genuinely good magic in Lord of the Rings), which is to restore things to the forms originally intended for them by the Creator, but to practice the technique of forcing things to be what you want them to be, whatever that might be.

The key to understanding the Harry Potter universe is to understand that it is a world without a Creator. A world with a Creator is a world made in the light of transcendent intelligence, in which everything is brought into being according to a pattern of wisdom that includes both the forms of things themselves as well as their relationships to each other. The wisdom of the creature is measured by the extent to which he knows, respects and conforms himself to the Divine Wisdom. "Magic" in such a world - another world for which is "miracle" - is really just another name for a specific act of Divine Grace. The great saint who has submitted himself extraordinarily to the Divine Will also becomes an extraordinary channel of Divine Grace, and so may appear "magical" to the ordinary man when, of course, he is no more magical than anyone else. He is simply more in tune with the way things really are, like the Elves in the Lord of the Rings. Sam Gamgee, on being presented with the gift of an Elvish cloak, asks if it is magical, a question that puzzles his Elvish benefactor. The Elves simply understand and conform themselves to nature to such an extent that they can produce from nature things that others, less consonant with nature than they are, can only interpret in terms of magic.

A world without a Creator is a world that does not express any deep wisdom in its origin; a being in this world has no assurance that his own nature is intelligible or that he necessarily bears any intelligible relation to anything else. Such a world is chaotic. It is chaotic not just in the relationships of things to each other, but in the relationships of things to themselves. Thus Hogwarts is populated with ugly, distorted and disproportionate things, like ghosts with half-severed heads and plants that have babies for roots, the cry of whom is dangerous. Why would a plant have a baby for its roots? Who knows? It's not a question anyone at Hogwarts, teacher or student, is interested in asking. In a chaotic world, questions of form are not worth asking since they don't have answers. Only questions of expediency matter, which is why the students concentrate on the most practical way to handle the Mandrake plant (that's the one with babies for roots) without getting injured. It's also why the students practice seemingly trivial exercises like making a pineapple dance across a desk or turning a beetle into a button. Why would one do either of those things? Again, that is not a relevant question at Hogwarts since beetles and pineapples are not created things with a nature and end informed by the Divine Wisdom, but merely random items that are grist for the will of the wizard.

The point is that the Harry Potter world, not being a created world informed by Divine Wisdom, is not an imaginatively Catholic world; and for Chesterton, this would have been a fatal flaw. Chesterton loved the children's literature of the Western tradition because it made us all imaginative Christians whether or not we ever became confessing ones. The fact that we no longer instinctively recoil from a story in which the "good" magic is less than a metaphor for grace, and is not restricted to creatures like Gandalf with the nature and wisdom to wield it, but is instead distinguished from "bad" magic only in the supposed moral character of those who wield it, should tell how deteriorated our cultural imagination has already become.

Derbyshire and the Red Pill

John Derbyshire's latest column is an interesting example of what happens when an intelligent but non-philosophical mind bumps up against some realities that can only be addressed philosophically.

The most fundamental of these realities is that most people live non-reflectively and accept uncritically whatever the conventional wisdom tells them. One reason this happens is that it is simply easier to live as one of the crowd ("the herd" as Kierkegaard put it). Challenging the conventional wisdom, the established ways, is perceived by the crowd as a threat to the stability of the established order (which, in truth, it may very well be); so the critical thinker will naturally find his life more difficult than one who just goes along with the prevailing wisdom. As Derbyshire puts it:

It is also antisocial. Who wants to hear you say that the emperor has no clothes, when everyone else they know—including all the cool people!—says otherwise.

Those who follow the crowd are known as the "well-adjusted."  In the terms of Derbyshire's column, they have taken the "blue pill", an apparent reference to the film The Matrix (which I haven't seen). The far fewer people who take the "red pill" are the "realists", the ones who take the truth as it is and damn the consequences. Naturally, Derbyshire includes himself in this latter group. (How can one be sure which pill you actually took? Maybe the red pill is just a blue with some food coloring on it.)

Derbyshire finds demoralizing the fact that most people are non-reflective, and so not open to the truth he wants to tell them. He consoles himself that there are still, in fact, some redoubts of reason left in the modern world:

Crazy as the social and political worlds undoubtedly are, looking at things realistically, reason still holds its fort. Mathematics, the homeland of reason; science, the mostly-well-behaved offspring of math; and technology, the child of pure science, continue to produce wonders and enlarge our understanding.

Noticeably absent from the list of citizens Derbyshire welcomes into the fortress of reason is philosophy. But without philosophy, the fortress of math and science will not last long, for the question of the value of math and science is a philosophical one, not a scientific one. No wonder he is depressed. His own canon of reason is in effect a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of those who would undermine the things he loves.

 

Putting yourself outside the circle of reason would make anyone gloomy. Yet Derbyshire's occupation - writing pop math books and opinion columns - qualifies as neither math, science nor technology, and so does not qualify as reason under his requirements. This gives Derbyshire's columns their peculiar flavor: He desperately wishes that everyone would take the red pill and deal with reality, but can't make an argument to that effect since no such argument is possible in terms of math or science. All he can do is lament the fact and report that he, unaccountably, prefers the red pill to the blue pill.

The fact that most people do not prefer to face the truth, and resent those who would reveal it to them, is no recent discovery. It is, in fact, one of the original insights of philosophy and is memorably allegorized (yes, that is a word) in Plato's parable of The Cave. The difference between Plato and Derbyshire (or, at least, one of them) is that Plato didn't simply throw up his hands in light of this situation, but thought deeply about it and its implications for the practice of philosophy. The result was The Republic, one of the great philosophical documents of Western culture, in which Plato makes the argument that the city in which philosophers rule is not only ideal for the philosopher, but for everyone else as well. Plato's ideal city was never realized in fact (and, indeed, even in The Republic he acknowledges that it was never really practical), but that doesn't mean the work was without influence. The alternative to crowning the philosophers kings is to make kings, to the extent it is possible, philosophers. Another way of saying it is that it isn't necessary that the mass of people become philosophers - it is only necessary that the influential ones become philosophers. That has happened in history - Marcus Aurelius comes to mind - but most notably in the founding of our own nation. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are nothing if not documents claiming to found a nation on reason.

Derbyshire ends his column with a note of demoralization, lamenting the fact that he is on the red pill:

I want to believe the pretty lies. I’ve had enough of depressive realism. I want to take the blue pill. Where’s the nearest retail outlet?

It's a little hard to take Derbyshire seriously in his melancholy, for there is about him a bit of what G.K. Chesterton called the "boyish delight in the grim and unapproachable pose of the realist." In any event, the answer to depressive realism is more realism, not less, and we can only hope that Derbyshire's depression might drive him to the point of reconsidering the scientistic (not scientific) dogmas that prevent him from thinking truly philosophically.

On Browsing Bookstores and Libraries

Here I am thinking particularly of used bookstores and, at the library, the new arrivals shelf. Just this afternoon I was at the library to pick up a book on hold and, as is my custom, I browsed through the new arrivals shelf and came away with three books: Bad Religion by Ross Douthat, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism by A.C. Grayling, and World War Two: A Short History by Norman Stone.

I remember as a child browsing through the library with the excitement of a treasure hunt. I still get that excitement on entering a used bookstore or a library (not at the same intensity, naturally) and it is an experience that you can't get online. It is possible to browse through amazon.com but it is not quite the same thing; the physical element is essential, the feel and look of the book, its heft, and the experience of wandering through the shelves wondering when and if that one special work will catch your eye.

I've started on the Douthat book and I can tell already I'm going to like it, maybe because Douthat is so obviously influenced by G.K. Chesterton. Page 11 includes these Chestertonian paragraphs:

What defines this consensus, above all - what distinguishes orthodoxy from heresy, the central river from the delta - is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Mysteries abide at the heart of every religious faith, but the Christian tradition is uniquely comfortable preaching dogmas that can seem like riddles, offering answers that swiftly lead to further questions and confronting believers with the possibility that the truth about God passes all our understanding.

Thus orthodox Christians insist that Jesus Christ was divine and human all at once, that the Absolute is somehow Three as well as One, that God is omnipotent and omniscient and yet nonetheless leaves us free to choose between good and evil. They propose that the world is corrupted by original sin and yet somehow also essentially good, with the stamp of its Creator visible on every star and sinew. They assert that the God of the Old Testament, jealous and punitive, is somehow identical tot he New Testament's God of love and mercy. They claim that this same God sets impossible moral standards and yet forgives every sin. They insist that faith alone will save us, yet faith without works is dead. And they propose a vision of holiness that finds room in God's kingdom for all the extremes of human life - fecund families and single-minded celibates, politicians and monastics, queens as well as beggars, soldiers and pacifists alike.

And, of course, as soon as I turn the page I see that Douthat has explicitly quoted GKC on page 12.

Incidentally, I think I would disagree with Douthat that what defines consensus in (American) Christian orthodoxy is a commitment to mystery and paradox. Missing here is the subject of mystery and paradox. Zen Buddhism certainly has a commitment to mystery and paradox but it has a different subject than orthodox Christianity. What constitutes orthodox Christianity is mystery and paradox with respect to a particular subject, who is Jesus of Nazareth. And for that union of subject and paradox you need authority, for the difference between a genuine paradox (which is also a merely apparent self-contradiction) and a genuine self-contradiction is a deeper truth that is not immediately intelligible to us. Our access to genuine Christian paradox, then, must be mediated by an authority that can distinguish for us between the genuinely paradoxical and the merely self-contradictory. For Protestants, this authority is the Bible and for Catholics it is the Magisterium; but for either, the commitment to authority is what makes the commitment to mystery and paradox possible. And it is the eclipse of authority, I believe, that is the ultimate cause of the "bad religion" in America.

The Pope and Conservatism

The Maverick Philosopher has a post here on the recent election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. He notes that people drawn to religion tend to be of a conservative bent and that conservatives don't like change, tolerating it only when necessary. In his view, "The Church ought to be a place of stability and order, an oasis of calm, a venue where the ancient is preserved as a temporal reminder of the eternal." The Mav is not at all approving of the election of Pope Francis.

I am certainly of a conservative bent, and am sympathetic to preserving the ancient, but this misses the essence of Christianity. Christianity is not primarily about the eternal, or remembering the eternal, but is the news that the eternal has broken into the temporal in a decisive way. This gives the Catholic Church a fundamentally revolutionary nature despite its ancient Sacraments and rituals. Or, rather, the Catholic Church embodies the paradox of ancient rituals in service of ongoing revolution. Chesterton captures this perfectly in his description of Christianity as the "Eternal Revolution."

The mission of the Church is to preserve and proclaim the Gospel to the world, and to provide the concrete encounter with Christ in the Sacraments. The conservative aspect of the Church comes from the fact that it is the authorized proclaimer and interpreter of the Gospel, but is not its author and has no authority to modify or "improve" the Gospel message in any way. Christ established the means of transmission of the Gospel through a Church founded on twelve hand-picked apostles, the successors of whom are the bishops, and the Church has no authority to modify this structure (by making the Church a democracy, for instance, or making the authority of bishops subservient to biblical scholars).  The revolutionary aspect of the Church comes from the fact that the Church is charged with challenging the world (and itself) with the Gospel, as Christ challenged the world when he walked the Earth. The paradox of this revolutionary challenge is that it loses its force as it is routinely proclaimed; the words are worn down to nubs and gradually lose their ability to effectively communicate, and the Church, despite itself, settles into a worldly conservatism that has nothing to do with the genuine conservatism of the Gospel. At such times a radical personality is called for, one who renews the Gospel challenge, with words, yes, but words proclaimed in new ways and also, and perhaps more significantly, with his actions - a St. Francis.

Our new Pope seems to capture this truly Catholic paradox of the Eternal Revolution. The progressive types aren't even writing their usual false hopes that the new Pope will change basic doctrine on abortion or married priests, as Francis has been rock solidly orthodox on doctrinal matters. On the other hand, Francis's ascetic life, obvious humility, and public eschewals of the perquisites of status are an existential rebuke to our indulgent, celebrity obsessed and self-absorbed culture. Just the man the times call for, it seems.

GKC on Self-Censorship through Moral Intimidation

Chesterton, from his Illustrated London News column of March 10, 1906:

"A state of freedom ought to mean a state in which no man can silence another. As it is, it means a state in which every man must silence himself. It ought to mean that Mr. Shaw can say a thing twenty times, and still not make me believe it. As it is, it means that Mr. Shaw must leave off saying it, because my exquisite nerves will not endure to hear somebody saying something with which I do not agree."
 

Steyn, Chesterton and Monsters

Mark Steyn may be my favorite contemporary pundit, not least because I find him so "Chestertonian." Like Chesterton, he writes in an original, humorous style (not in the style of Chesterton, of course, because then he would not be original!) that clearly comes naturally to him. Also like Chesterton, he never makes a joke (or in Chesterton's case, proposes a paradox) merely for the sake of effect. And, most significantly, the lightness of his style conceals a depth of philosophical insight that is easily overlooked. Chesterton and Steyn both believe that it is culture that is most significant, and are penetrating in tracing economic or political problems back to their cultural roots. Get the culture right, and the politics and economics will take care of themselves; get the culture wrong, and the politics and economics will eventually degenerate whatever policy decisions are made. (Chesterton and Steyn are joined by JPII in this assessment)

I don't know if Steyn has ever read Chesterton; he's never referenced him to my knowledge and GKC does not appear on Steyn's list of influences. Yet occasionally Steyn seems more than merely Chestertonian; he makes a point that was earlier explicitly made by Chesterton. This happened at least once on the in-depth BookTV interview that was aired on CSPAN2 this past weekend. Steyn mentioned in passing Sesame Street and the "de-monsterization" of early childhood. Sesame Street is full of monsters but the monsters turn out to be funny and friendly or, at worst, grouchy. There are no monsters that give any hint of terror. But the world actually is replete with monsters, if by monsters we mean dangerous realities that we must respect and of which we should be "afraid, very afraid" in the old movie cliche. Presenting the appearance of danger, then undermining that appearance by revealing the monster to always be in the end harmless, is to teach a very unfortunate lesson. It is to teach that there are no genuine evils out there in the world, and that evil is always superficial.

GKC somewhere (I have not been able to dig up the quote) makes a similar point. There is no point to removing monsters from childhood stories, GKC says, because children are already aware of monsters - and that is a good thing. They are afraid of the undefined presence in the closet or under the bed before they have been told any stories. What the stories do is put a name and a shape to the menace, and show that even though the monster is genuinely evil, terrifying and apparently unstoppable, there are yet forces in the world that are good, strong, brave and dedicated to protecting the child. The stories only achieve their cathartic effect if they answer to the genuine terror the child feels; the terror in the story must be as real as the terror the child feels when he is alone in the dark, for only then can he say, yes that is the monster I dread. The child wants to see that terror faced; and a good story will leave him with both the healthy fear of the monstrous and the hope that comes from knowing that there are forces of good just as powerful, and that are on his side.

I'm not sure GKC ever anticipated the modern trend of not merely avoiding the monstrous, but of positively undermining the symbolic meaning of the monstrous. The modern idea is not to educate the young child to face the reality of the dangerous and evil, but to numb his sensibility to it by consistently undermining its symbolic manifestations. I hope GKC would be as appalled as I am by things like the Shrek series of films, which takes the ogre, a traditional symbol of dumb, brute evil, and turns him into a misunderstood outcast suffering from low self-esteem. My unrequited hope watching that film was that some real ogres from the traditional tales would show up and kick Shrek's ass on general principles.

Our natural reaction to the monstrous is to be repelled by it; as much as contemporary sensibilities don't like this, it is a healthy reaction. The monstrous is, in the strict sense, that which exists in defiance of the natural order; Frankenstein's monster is a monster because he was generated in an artificial rather than natural means, by cobbling together pieces of bodies followed by reanimation through electric shock. Now the contemporary view is correct in the sense that not everything that appears monstrous is in fact a monster (that is, evil and dangerous).  Some things that appear monstrous (e.g. the Elephant Man) are actually things that are good and deserve our kindness and compassion. And it is also true that some monsters do not appear monstrous at all, as in the apparently normal family man who is actually a serial killer (e.g. the Green River Killer). But these points may be called "advanced lessons" that can be learned only once the basic reality of the monstrous is learned; and by learned I mean conditioned into one's being so that it becomes a natural reaction. The fundamental lesson of the monster is that there are realities that are evil and dangerous and about which one must be constantly on guard; the great mistake with respect to a monster is not recognizing him before it is too late. This truth is told in devastating manner in the original Boris Karloff Frankenstein film, when a little girl befriends the monster and picks flowers with him; she meets her end in a manner not shown on camera and all the more horrifying for that.

Steyn, like Chesterton, prefers the old, robust traditional tales to modern fluff. Steyn, in fact, mentioned on BookTV that he is planning to publish an anthology of his favorite traditional tales. I look forward to it, and I hope GKC sleeps a little easier knowing someone is carrying the torch.

On the Commercialization of Christmas

This is about the time of year we begin to hear laments about the "commercialization of Christmas." Christmas, it seems, has become nothing more than a materialistic bacchanalia celebrating the worst aspects of our greed, all for the purposes of corporate exploitation. It has always struck me as odd that a holiday dedicated to buying things for other people should be denounced in these terms. The guy who otherwise spends his money on a new BMW and fancy clothes for himself, instead spends it on gifts for his relatives and friends. This is a bad thing? Money represents buying power and nothing else. The question is ultimately not whether it should be spent, but on what it will be spent. An annual celebration that involves a cultural tradition of spending your money on others seems like it should be far down our list of social sins.

Perhaps it is the whiff of excess that fuels the scolds. Christmas isn't just about buying a gift or two, but about buying a lot of stuff for a lot of people. But it is this element of excess that distinctively reflects its Christian origins. A distinguishing principle of Christianity is the notion of unmerited reward. Christ becomes Incarnate to save sinners who don't deserve to be saved. And not only that; Christ offers the greatest of all possible rewards, friendship and union with God Himself. I remember as child anticipating the cornucopia that would greet me Christmas morning. It wasn't just one or two things that would be under the tree for me, but a whole bunch of stuff. And although Santa supposedly knew who was naughty and nice, it didn't seem to make any difference as far as the amount of booty inevitably found under the tree. This is strictly in line with Christian principles: Christ grants the greatest of rewards to saints and sinners alike, so long as they simply believe in his willingness to do so. As I have remarked in the past, it doesn't really matter that you ultimately discover that the Santa in the red suit who lives at the North Pole is a myth, for someone was providing that unmerited reward, and the mere fact of its provision proves that a will capable of doing so exists in the world. This is part of what G.K. Chesterton describes as the education of the imagination that occurs when we are very young. In the innocence of youth, we are open to the association of seemingly contradictory ideas that we not only accept, but that form our perception of the world to the extent that they seem perfectly natural.  Anyone who grew up with the story of the the Nativity, for example,will forever have the association of infinite power with perfect vulnerability in his imagination. Our early experience with Santa stamps us with the idea of an infinite reward that is unmerited - a distinctively Christian fusion of seemingly contradictory ideas (isn't a reward a reward for something?)

What about those businessmen who cynically exploit Christmas for commercial gain? In this fallen world, there will always be people looking for a way to make a buck. The question is how that energy is channeled. The sort of guy who is looking to make the quick buck could be spending his time in far more destructive activities than trying to dream up the toy that every kid will beg his parents for next Christmas. This is one example of the famous compliment that vice pays to virtue. Because Christmas is about gift-giving, the businessman can't appeal to the consumer's own temptations or selfish desires; he's got to convince him that what he is selling is what someone else might like. In other words, the businessman, in order to make a profit, has got to get the consumer thinking about other people than himself.

What's really behind the complaints of the commercialization of Christmas has something to do with the psychology of a Judas, I think. Not Judas insofar as he was a betrayer, but insofar as he objected to expensive perfume being used to anoint Christ (John 12:4-6). Judas's pride prevented him from sharing in the mystery of Christ's redemptive act as did Mary. What follows is envy and the will to destroy the good of another. So he objects that the oil could better have been used for the poor. Similarly, some see the joy of Christmas expressed in others and are unable or unwilling to share it themselves. So they must find a reason to poison the fruit, and the method at hand is the condemnation of Christmas as too commercial.

Old vs new philosophy

One thing of which I am thoroughly convinced is that there is no such thing as a perfect philosophy. By that I mean a philosophy free from any knotty problems or apparent contradictions. If someone claims to have such a philosophy, what it means, invariably, is that the philosophy has not been thought through enough to make the problems apparent. Chesterton's dictum that "nine out of ten new ideas are old mistakes" is appropriate here.

I believe one reason people avoid classical philosophy is because, having been thoroughly thought through, its problems have been exposed and are apparent to the uninitiated. Plato's philosophy, for example, struggles with the problems of the ontological status of the Ideas (where exactly do these things exist?) and their relationship to the physical world (how do physical beings "participate" in Ideas?) The long history of struggling with such questions led to Aristotle's revision of Platonic philosophy, through the philosophy of the Middle Ages, and culminated in the synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas, each step having its own peculiar difficulties. Since the opponents of classical philosophy are quick to home in and advertise the problem areas, even those only passingly acquainted with classical philosophy are likely to know what they are.

But another way to look at the situation is to recognize that there won't be any surprises in classical philosophy. Whatever the difficulties are (and there will always be difficulties), they will have been smoked out by the centuries of philosophical reflection. There is virtually no chance that a philosopher will come along who notices some grave difficulty that hadn't already been noticed; anyone who thinks he has stumbled across such a thing only proves that he is not familiar with the history of philosophy. In vulgar marketing terms, in classical philosophy you can rest assured you will get a product that has been thoroughly tried and tested. (And not just in abstract philosophical reflection; classical philosophy has been tested in the court of life as well, forming the foundation of Western civilization in Greece and sustaining it for millennia through the Middle Ages).

It is tempting, in the face of some of the difficult problems classical philosophy has struggled with, to abandon the tradition altogether and start afresh from a clean state. This is essentially the attitude that gave birth to modern philosophy, most explicitly stated in Descartes. The experience can be heady, but it soon becomes apparent that the modern philosopher has only exchanged one set of problems for another. Descartes may have been satisfied with his philosophy, but the philosophers who followed him certainly weren't. Yet rather than drawing the lesson that it may have been foolish to abandon the classical tradition in the first place, modern philosophers adopted an attitude of permanent revolution. Each one starts philosophy afresh, convinced that his effort, finally, will put philosophy on the one absolutely sure footing. The most serious effort in this regard was that of Immanuel Kant, who was convinced he had established with his "critical philosophy", once and for all, the permanently sure foundation of philosophy. Alas, his followers were not convinced, but only drew the lesson that they themselves must begin philosophy yet again anew. The history of modern philosophy is a form of degenerate tradition; not a tradition that absorbs and organically grows an ongoing project of philosophical knowledge, but a "tradition" that repeatedly rejects as problematic all that came before and starts philosophy afresh. The hope of a modern philosopher is not to understand his philosophical predecessors and expand on their reflections, but to discover a "revolutionary and new" technique or principle in terms of which philosophy must be recast, and which will free philosophy from the problems discovered in the last revolutionary cycle. Since the problems latent in this new technique are as yet undetected, this ignorance offers the philosopher the illusion of the hope that he has finally "solved" philosophy. This continual cycle of creation, revolution and destruction is what gives philosophy its bad name in the modern world; it actually does go nowhere as its critics claim.

In any event, the upshot is that there isn't much point in trying to convince someone of the value of classical philosophy who is under the illusion that he possesses a problem-free modern philosophy. Classical philosophy is preferable to modern philosophy because the problem areas of classical philosophy are the problem areas of reality; trying to escape them is as futile as trying to escape from reality. But the appropriate response to someone attempting to escape from reality is not to convince him of the benefits of reality; it is to show him that in trying to escape reality he has only exchanged one set of problems for a worse set and, furthermore, the problems of reality remain. In other words, before introducing classical philosophy, a modern mind must first be convinced of the unsatisfactory nature of whatever modern flavor of philosophy he has adopted.

My experience commenting on philosophy blogs bears this out. I've found there is no point in discussing the virtues of Aristotle or Aquinas immediately, because whatever their virtues might be, the modern thinker usually only knows some of the problems associated with them, and he is usually convinced that he himself is in possession of a philosophy that does not suffer similar flaws; his own philosophy, at best, suffers from minor problems. (On the blogs I haunt, this philosophy is generally some form of empiricism.) Why waste time on some ancient philosophy with unresolved problems when there is a straightforward modern philosophy that suffices? Only when someone sees that the modern philosophies not only have a raft of critical problems of their own, but evade rather than face the problems addressed by classical philosophy, will Aristotle and friends get a hearing.

Kierkegaard and Chesterton

I make no secret that Soren Kierkegaard and G.K. Chesterton are two of my favorite thinkers. I've often thought there was a great deal of similarity between their thought, and if I were doing something like pursuing a master's degree in philosophy, I might propose as a thesis an exploration of their commonality. For, instance, the following passage is a pithy summary of SK's message:

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? - that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking. The aeons are easy enough to think about, any can think about them. The instant is really awful: and it is because our religion has intensely felt the instant, that it has in literature dealt much with battle and in theology much with hell. It is full of danger, like a boy's book: it is at an immortal crisis. 

It uses some of Kierkegaard's favorite ideas expressed in the Kierkegaardian way: "The instant" as the true subject of philosophy, opposed to "huge syntheses" that distract a man with "talk about ages and evolution", etc. Of course, this passage isn't from Kierkegaard, but from the chapter "The Romance of Orthodoxy" from Chesterton's Orthodoxy. As far as I know, Chesterton never read Kierkegaard and perhaps never heard of him; SK did not become well-known in the English-speaking world until later in the 20th century. The fact that two such distinct thinkers, one Danish in the first half of the 19th century, the other English in the first half of the 20th, could speak with the same peculiar yet nearly synonymous voice is a reason for confidence in their message. The truth, when discovered, is what it is, whether it is discovered by a spiritually-tortured Dane, or a jolly Englishman.

GKC, Christian Paradoxes, and the the Secular Right

In his chapter "The Paradoxes of Christianity" in Orthodoxy, Chesterton discusses the contradictory charges that are often leveled against Christianity:

As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind - the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.  No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than nother demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. 

Chesterton goes on to give several examples. The Secular Right provides another one in this post and this post. In the first, Heather MacDonald explains that her main problem with religion is that it falsely offers a "special friend" who will protect you from suffering:

That, to me, is the essence of religion: I have a special friend who will keep me safe from the usual disasters that rain down on my fellow human beings (see killer earthquakes and tsunamis, town-destroying tornadoes, fatal car crashes, children born with half a brain, and other Acts of God).

This understandable desire for a few strings to pull in the great random play of fate, for a special someone to get you out of tight fixes and to mop up messes, is an even more fundamental impetus behind religious faith than the hope for an exemption from death, in my observation.  The desire for a personalized leg-up lies behind the constant propitiation of the gods in the Aeneid and continues unbroken into the Christian cultivation of saints and the nonstop din of petitionary prayer...

In the second, Andrew Stuttaford explains that the problem with religion is that it teaches people that suffering is a blessing. He quotes a grieving father to that effect:

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling—that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.

With Chesterton, we might ask how Christianity can both sell people on the idea that God will protect them from suffering, and also sell them on the idea that suffering is a blessing and should be embraced. Chesterton did not immediately conclude that the attacks were baseless; but he did draw the deduction that if they were true, Christianity must be an extraordinary thing:

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, [masochistic yet hiding from suffering behind a divine skirt- DMT], if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. 

Chesterton eventually had the inspiration that the problem may not be with Christianity but its critics:

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while Negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane all its critics that are mad - in various ways.

And with respect to suffering, it may be that Christianity is the sane center. There seem to be two truths with respect to suffering: The first is that we would like to avoid it; the second is that no matter how much we try, some suffering in this life is unavoidable. A philosophy that answers suffering must speak to our desire to avoid it, but also provide meaning to the suffering that will inevitably come our way. Christianity speaks to our desire to avoid suffering by affirming it. It was not always thus; man was originally created in a world without suffering, but since has come to suffer as a result of his sin. Our repulsion from suffering is not merely an animal reaction against pain. It reflects a knowledge, deep in our being, that things are not supposed to be this way; our outrage at suffering is a dim memory of Eden. (Pascal: we are fallen Kings.)

But despite the legitimacy of our outrage at suffering, suffer we will in this life, one way or the other. The Christian answer to this is Hope. Even a small amount of suffering absent hope rapidly becomes unbearable; this is one reason our hopeless culture is a slave to convenience. Suffering becomes more bearable the more one possesses hope. This is one of the truths that is meant when Christians sometimes speak of the "blessings" of suffering. It is not that suffering in itself is ennobling; but in our distress we may turn to the source of Hope, and in that hope discover a power to persevere through suffering that we imagined would destroy us. Yes, Christians pray that God relieve us of suffering; that is part of hope. But they also understand that following Christ must involve suffering. The Christian's attitude to suffering is summed up in Christ's prayer at Gethsemane:

Father, if you are willing, remove this chalice from me; nevertheless not my will but yours, be done. (Luke 22:42)

 

Feser On Kant

Excellent post by Edward Feser on the influence of Kant.

The following statements by Feser:

 Idolatry is in fact the defining sin of modernity, and it is all the worse for being directed at man. The ancient pagan at least knew enough to worship something higher than himself

allow me to publish one of my favorite quotes from Chesterton:

 Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. - GKC, Orthodoxy, Ch. V. 

Kant is absolutely critical to understanding oneself in the modern world. We are all Kantians by default; it is in the air we breathe. Only by a conscious effort at self-education is it possible to see our Kantian assumptions for what they are and, possibly, overcome them.

Douthat on Shrek

Ross Douthat has a review of the latest Shrek film in the June 21 National Review that reassures me that I'm not just a lone, crazy voice in the wilderness when it comes to this series, which I've hated from the get-go. He nails it exactly right:

What Sex and the City did for the love story, Shrek has done for the fairy tale: It's taken a classic genre and purged it of any trace of innocence, substituting raunch, cynicism, and a self-congratulatory knowingness instead, and then tying up the jaded narrative with a happily-ever-after bow.

Our culture robs children of their innocence as early as it can; and it is only in that innocence that the real meaning of fairy tales can be perceived. I believe this is one of the primary truths we learn from G.K. Chesterton. When we are older, we cannot but assume a critical distance from what we read. The child is still in the process of forming his self; what he reads (or is read to him) becomes a part of him in a way it never can again. For Chesterton, every truth worth knowing he learned in the nursery.

It is bad enough our children are exposed to things that destroy their innocence early on, and make the appreciation of fairy tales more difficult. Now, in the Shrek series, the fairy tale tradition itself is subverted. This constitutes a kind of inoculation against the power of fairy tales. Douthat is as depressed about this as I am:

I have a horrible feeling that the Shrek franchise offers millions of kids their first exposure - and worse, their last - to the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.

The result is the sort of impertinent, self-satisfied young adults whom I encounter among my children's peers. They are not exactly insolent; but they are already jaded at age 17 and unselfconscious in their conviction that the world offers nothing before which they should bow. The notion that there might be something out there that might be more grand, significant and awesome than themselves is something that can't occur to them; they've been inoculated against it as they might have been inoculated against small pox. That such youths are somewhat unpleasant is not the major point. It is that they have been robbed of the virtue of humility that is the prerequisite for eros, the deep and mysterious longing in the soul for it knows not what. To draw on Chesterton one more time, we can perceive the gigantic only to the extent that we are small.  This is one of the primary lessons of fairy tales, a lesson our children can no longer learn... at least as long as Shrek and its ilk is available to them.

Why We Fail to Understand Islamists

I found a Moslem service called dirty or disgusting because it involved the idea of blood. A few hundred years ago we should have realized that our own religion involved the idea of blood. But we have got further away from understanding their religion by ceasing to understand our own.

- G.K. Chesterton, Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, 1908-1910: 28, May 9, 1908.

Chesterton on Thriving Religion

One of my favorite pastimes is reading at random through Chesterton's old Illustrated London News columns, which have been collected by Ignatius Press. They are always worth reading for the style, and every so often you come across a gem... like his column for January 11, 1908, "The Survival of Christmas."

Just like today, the skeptics back in 1908 were predicting the imminent demise of Christianity, including the celebration of Christmas.

I have been reminded of all this by the inevitable discussions in the current papers about whether the keeping of Christmas is destined to die out, whether Christmas itself will disappear.

GKC immediately answers with one of his trademark paradoxes:

Of course, Christmas will not disappear. Christmas is one of those very strong things that can afford to boast of its own approaching disappearance.

Chesterton never writes like this merely to be clever. He uses the startling paradox as a way to shake the reader out of his common (and probably modernist) preconceptions, and open him to a deeper point. The point in this column is, I think, the supernatural life that animates the Christian religion.

How is this supernatural life made manifest? One way might be the way of direct supernatural glory, as in the voice of God emanating from a burning bush or the Lord transfigured in a supernatural light. But there is another way, a via negativa, that reveals supernatural life paradoxically in that which should die, but doesn't. The supreme example is, of course, Christ, who should be dead and buried forever in His tomb, but nonetheless appears alive in the Resurrection. Christ sets the pattern for everything Christian. The Christian can boast of the impending demise of Christmas because, by all natural reason, it should disappear, as all natural traditions inevitably disappear; yet the Christian knows through faith that Christmas will never disappear because its life is not really that of a natural tradition, despite appearances. In general, Chesterton tells us in a wonderful turn of phrase, Christianity "could thrive as a continual failure." (Chesterton speaks here in terms of Christianity rather than the Catholic Church because this was written prior to his conversion.) It is this thriving in failure that paradoxically reveals the hidden supernatural life in the Church.

What is the consequence of this supernatural life? The philosopher seeks happiness, but Christianity, Chesterton says, asks a man not if he is happy, but if he is alive.

Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one's heart or thickening one's head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas, while philosophy always tends to despise them. Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christian customs destroy the human habits. And while customs are generally unselfish, habits are nearly always selfish. The object of the religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead.

That last image of the smiling dead man is one of the elements that makes Chesterton so worth reading. Chesterton is sometimes accused of being glib or superficially clever, or dismissed for not brooding on the darker side of life as is the modern fashion. But the image of the smiling dead man is as horrifying as anything in M.R. James, and all the more effective for coming on the reader all of a sudden; at least in James, we expect and are indeed hoping for the disturbing specter. This dark undercurrent is a subtle but pervasive presence in GKC's writing, and is worth more than thousands of pages of existential angst from someone like Sartre.