More on Lear and Radical Hope

In this post I began a discussion of Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope, Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Here I would like to discuss more specifically the content of radical hope.

In Ch. 3, the "Critique of Abysmal Reasoning", Lear writes this about radical hope:

I would like to consider hope as it might arise at one of the limits of human existence. In the scenario outlined in the preceding chapter, Plenty Coups responded to the collapse of his civilization with radical hope. What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.

The reason Lear says that the hope transcends the current ability to understand it is that the Crow understanding of the good life was specific to their mode of living - hunting buffalo, roaming the plains, "counting coups" against their enemies. This way of life was inevitably doomed with the coming of the white man, a future Plenty Coups anticipated through several dreams he experienced as a youth. In these dreams he was advised to pay attention to the "wisdom of the Chickadee", a bird that is smaller than other birds yet is more intelligent and perceptive. Plenty Coups applied this wisdom as a chief, allying the Crow with the U.S. Army against the Sioux, rather than fighting a hopeless battle against irresistible U.S. government force. The end result was that the Crow were unusual insofar as they never suffered a defeat at the hands of the U.S. military, and they were also able to retain their ancestral lands under their own possession (with the usual encroachments and false dealing by the U.S. authorities.)

My philosophical interest in this post is Lear's statement about a hope that is directed toward "a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is." For hope to be any sort of hope at all it must have some content. Hope is hope for something. We can't merely hope that "things will be different" because things might become different by becoming worse; we only hope if we can anticipate some state of affairs that we recognize as desirable in itself. It must have a goodness that doesn't entirely transcend our current ability to understand it so we can direct ourselves toward it as an end. The situation is similar to the attributes of God. If the goodness of God is a goodness that utterly transcends any possible conception we might have of it, then God is not a being who can be an object of our desire. In fact, according to St. Thomas, we can have a genuine but limited notion of the goodness of God through analogy.

And, in fact, the hope of Plenty Coups was not a leap into the dark or across an abyss but had some content. Arguing the point that the radical hope of Plenty Coups was not simply wish-fulfilling fantasy, Lear writes:

Finally, it has been the aim of this entire chapter to argue that Plenty Coups's radical hope was not mere wish-fulfilling optimism (criterion 5), but was rather a radical form of hope that constituted courage and made it possible. After all, through a series of canny decisions and acts, the Crow were able to hold onto their land, and Plenty Coups helped to create a space in which traditional Crow values can be preserved in memory, transmitted to a new generation, and, one hopes, renewed in a new historical era.

Lear is certainly right that Plenty Coups was a man of outstanding virtue, a man who was able to transcend the concept of courage as it was taught him in the Crow tradition when it became clear that the traditional notion of courage was no longer relevant. But the fact that he and the Crow were able to preserve their lands through "canny moves" shows that they had some notion what they were doing. A man with a contentless hope can't make canny moves, because he doesn't know what he is moving toward. Plenty Coups saw in his wisdom that "counting coups" in the traditional sense against the U.S. Army was futile; he realized that planting the coup-stick in no way intimidates the man firing a Gatling gun. But by allying themselves with the white man, and learning his ways, he seems to have understood that some parts of the Crow nation might be preserved - in particular, their land. This is not a hope that transcends understanding, but a hope that is real but limited. Plenty Coups was remarkably successful in handling the encounter of the Crow with the white man, but there is a sense of melancholy in what he says of life after the Crow were included in the reservation system. "After this," Plenty Coups said, "nothing happened." This is a statement of limited hope fulfilled. 

Darwinian Logic and the Mind

The post Darwinists Check Their Logic at the Door over at Uncommon Descent brings up one of my favorite topics, the relationship of evolution to the mind. I think all three of the participants in the main post miss the logic of the situation.

The problem with Delurker's response in the first exchange ("To the extent that nature is comprehensible, modern evolutionary theory predicts that alignment with reality will be selected for.") is not that it is circular. Barry A. confuses an epistemological question with an empirical one in making that argument. No, the problem with Delurker's response is that it is a philosophical response rather than the empirically contingent one he seems to think it is.


There is nothing wrong with philosophical responses, of course, unless they are mistaken for something else. This is what happens here. "Alignment with reality will be selected for" cannot be a contingent conclusion from evolutionary science, but is a precondition for the possibility of evolutionary science itself. Is evolutionary science about the true world or merely about our impression of the world, an impression that may or may not have anything to do with true reality? (I.e. do we have a science of the noumenal or the phenomenal?) Evolutionary scientists to a man take it for granted that their science is about the world as it really is, which means that they already assume that their minds are "aligned with reality." Evolutionary science must predict that alignment with reality will be selected for, because only a mind aligned with reality can truly investigate how it is that the mind is aligned with reality. I happen to agree that our minds are aligned with reality, but not because I think it is a possible empirical conclusion, but rather because Aristotle settled the issue thousands of years ago in his Metaphysics Book IV.


The logic of Exchange #3 is similar. How did the mind and world become coordinated? The answer is that "organisms who don't deal with reality die (eventually)." This again cannot be a contingent conclusion from evolutionary science, but is a precondition for the possibility of evolutionary science itself. If it were a contingent conclusion, then we would have to seriously consider the possibility that "organisms who don't deal with reality fare quite well." But if this latter possibility were true, then since human beings have fared quite well, we may very well be the type of creature that fares well without dealing with reality. Our evolutionary science, in that case, might have nothing to do with the way things really are. The assertion "organisms who don't deal with reality die" is an assertion about reality only if it is spoken by a creature already confident of his connection with reality; if its negation is taken seriously as an empirical possibility then the mind has put itself out of its own misery.


In exchange #4, the point is made that "the nature of reality is not addressed by modern evolutionary theory. The fitness of organisms to that reality is." If the nature of reality is not addressed by modern evolutionary theory, but the fitness of organisms is, then the fitness of organisms must have nothing to do with the nature of reality. We are back to the point that the possibility of evolutionary science requires that the human mind be "fitted" to reality; if this fitness is not itself part of reality but only our imaginations, then evolutionary science as a science of the way things truly are is not possible.

Lear and Aristotle on Courage and Radical Hope

I recently finished reading Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope, Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear is also the author of the wonderful Aristotle, the Desire to Understand. I would like to discuss Lear's use of Aristotle in the former book, but to do so I must give a preliminary account of Lear's project in that work, so I ask the reader's patience.

Radical Hope is a meditation on the meaning of the virtues, and specifically courage, in a time of cultural collapse. Lear bases his investigation on the life of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation. Plenty Coups's life spanned from the 1850's, when the Crow were still a vibrant Indian tribe, through to the 1930's, by which time they had been relegated to a reservation for many years. Lear credits Plenty Coups with guiding the Crow through this transition in a way significantly more successful than most other Indian tribes. 

What happened to the Crow was something far more significant than merely a military defeat or occupation. Their traditional way of understanding themselves became unintelligible. Lear calls this event a loss of concepts. When Plenty Coups was raised, the traditional Crow life was still tenable. His moral character and imagination was developed in its terms. For example courage, for the Crow, centered on the feat of "counting coups." Counting coups was paradigmatically some sort of  bold exploit with respect to the enemy. Lear quotes the following account of counting coups from Plenty Coups:

To count coup a warrior had to strike an armed and fighting enemy with his coup-stick, quirt, or bow before otherwise harming him, or take his weapons while he was yet alive, or strike the first enemy falling in battle, no matter who killed him, or strike the enemy's breastworks while under file, or steal a horse tied to a lodge in an enemy's camp, etc. The first named was the most honorable, and to strike such a coup a warrior would often display great bravery.

The crow-stick was also used as a "line in the sand" in battle. If a warrior planted his coup-stick, he was obliged to hold the ground in which it was planted or lose his life attempting to defend it. As Lear describes it:

The planting of the coup-stick was symbolic of the planting of a tree that could not be felled. In effect it marked a boundary across which a non-Crow enemy must not pass. This was a paradigm of courage. A warrior culture will accord highest honor to the brave warriors - and the wise old chiefs who once were brave warriors.

Now what happens when a tribe such as the Crow is moved onto a reservation? Prior to the reservation, the Crow had a certain understanding of life's possibilities. Life is about hunting buffalo and beaver and fighting the Sioux and Blackfeet. The tragic possibilities of life seem accounted for. The worst thing that can happen is military defeat by their enemies. Lear's point is not that the Crow thought they would always be victorious, but that they had a conception of the range of life's tragic possibilities. "Either our warriors will be able to plant their coup-sticks or they will fail." 

But after the move to the reservation, what meaning does "planting the coup-stick" have? The Crow no longer fight the Blackfeet or the Sioux; inter-tribal warfare is forbidden by the U.S. Government. What has happened is something the Crow couldn't even imagine prior to their move to the reservation. Worse than failing to plant their coup-sticks, the entire concept of "planting coup-sticks" has lost intelligibility. How is a warrior raised in the Crow warrior tradition, where life revolved around counting coups, to understand himself on the reservation where planting the coup-stick would be a ridiculous act?

This is what Lear means by "ethics in the face of cultural devastation." He doesn't mean merely that your nation has been defeated and occupied; he means that your nation's entire way of life and means of understanding itself has lost intelligibility. You have suffered a loss of concepts.

Plenty Coups is interesting because he responded to the devastation of the Crow way of life in a novel and flexible way. He didn't "go down fighting" by planting his coup-stick in a doomed defense against the U.S. Army. Plenty Coups, in his youth, had several dreams that prophesied the destruction of the Crow way of life. They also gave a clue concerning a way he could deal with it, "the virtue of the Chickadee" :

Young Plenty Coups's dream calls on him, and it gives him ethical advice - advice that seems designed to help him survive the cataclysmic rupture that is about to occur: become a chickadee! "He is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom. The Chickadee-person is a good listener. Nothing escapes his ears, which he has sharpened by constant use. Whenever others are talking together of their successes and failures, there you will find the Chickadee-person listening to their words." Becoming a chickadee, then, is a virtue - a form of human excellence... Chickadee virtue called for a new form of courage, yet it drew on the traditional resources of Crow culture to do so. "The Chickadee is big medicine," Pretty Shield told her interviewer.

Lear makes the argument that, using the virtue of the Chickadee, Plenty Coups was able to transcend the culturally specific form of courage into which he was raised and discover a way the Crow could weather the storm of the White Man. This is what Lear means by radical hope; a hope that transcends the concepts with which one may understand it. The courage that Plenty Coups demonstrated in following the virtue of the Chickadee was outside the parameters of courage as it had been taught him in his Crow youth.

It is by way of analyzing courage and what it might have meant to Plenty Coups that Lear brings in Aristotle. He uses Aristotle's analysis of courage to analyze the courage of Plenty Coups. Lear then writes this:

In a period of cultural devastation such as Plenty Coups and the Crow had to endure, there would have to be a radical transformation in the risks associated with courage. At such a historical moment, traditional examples of risk - counting coups - have become weirdly irrelevant. And the risks that do arise are of a different order: the risks of facing a future that one as yet lacks the concepts to understand. Are there courageous ways of facing a future for which the traditional concept of courage has become inapplicable? This is not a question that Aristotle ever asked; and one can see that it has distinctive challenges.

Lear does not explore why Aristotle never asked this question; the impression he gives is that it is a simple lack in Aristotle. But there is a good reason that Aristotle never addressed it: His understanding of courage is not one that might become inapplicable through cultural devastation. In fact, this is the very reason that Aristotle's twenty-five hundred year old analysis of courage is still useful to Lear in his contemporary analysis of Plenty Coups.

The difference between Aristotle and Plenty Coups is that Aristotle was a philosopher and Plenty Coups, as brave and flexible as he was, was not. All of Aristotle's thought is based on the fundamental philosophical distinction between nature and convention. Aristotle analyzes courage in terms of nature; that is, in terms of the enduring characteristics of human being that are the same everywhere and for all time, and that transcend culture. Non-philosophical cultures, like that of the Crow, do not possess this distinction. For them, the conventional form of courage found in their culture - e.g. counting coups - is courage pure and simple. When circumstances change in a way that makes counting coups no longer intelligible as an act of courage, then courage itself ceases to be a meaningful concept. This is how the Crow can lose the concept of courage. Aristotle can lose his concept of courage only if human nature itself is transformed.

Lear introduces Aristotle's analysis of virtue this way:

For Aristotle, the virtues are states of character the exercise of which contributes to living an excellent life. He did not confront the problem that different historical epochs might impose different requirements on what states of the soul could count as courage. And thus the conception of courage I shall explore extends beyond the virtue that Aristotle explicitly considered.

Everything hangs on what is meant by an "excellent life." Does it refer to a culturally specific form of life, such as the nomadic warrior/hunter life of the Crow with its focus on counting coups, or the ancient Greek life specific to Athens? The original philosopher, Socrates, was executed for challenging the conventional forms of religious piety in Athens. For Socrates the "excellent life" could only be a life lived according to a reason informed by nature - "the unreflected life is not worth living." Aristotle followed Socrates by dividing the virtues into intellectual and moral virtues. The intellectual virtues are the virtues by which we know the truth about nature and man; the moral virtues are those that allow us to live according to the truth discovered by the intellectual virtues. The intellectual virtues inform the moral virtues. What makes "courage" truly count as courage is not its conformity to a culturally specific mode of life, but whether it reflects the truth about the nature of man; just as Socrates argued against Euthyphro that "piety" is only truly piety if it is based on the truth about the gods and not merely the conventional way of interacting with the gods.

Aristotle famously begins the Nicomachean Ethics by saying that "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." He then proceeds to draw a distinction between instrumental goods and goods that are ends in themselves, the former of which are pursued for the sake of the latter. Aristotle uses the example of the military arts, which are all subordinate to the end of victory. The end of victory itself falls under the science of politics, or the master art, which is directed to the end of man as such. When an instrumental good is no longer able to serve the end to which it is subordinate, it loses its status as a good. This is implicit in Aristotle's analysis. Counting-coups was an instrumental good conducing to the successful defense of the nomadic warrior/hunter Crow tribe against other Indian tribes. For Aristotle, when counting-coups no longer made sense in terms of the success of the Crow tribe, it would cease to be a virtue. This would not have been a world-shattering event for Aristotle; it was world-shattering for the Crow because they did not possess Aristotle's philosophical understanding of the distinction between instrumental and final goods. Here is more from Lear on what happened to the Crow:

The Crow had a conception of happiness, a conception of what life was worth living for. They lived in relation to a spiritual world in which they believed God had chosen them to live a certain kind of life. Happiness consisted in living that life to the full. This was an active and unfettered pursuit of a nomadic hunting life in which their family life and social rituals could prosper... With the destruction of this way of life came the destruction of the end or goal - the telos - of that life. Their problem, then, was not simply that they could not pursue happiness in the traditional ways. Rather, their conception of what happiness is could no longer be lived. The characteristic activities that used to constitute the good life ceased to be intelligible acts. A crucial blow to their happiness was a loss of the concepts with which their happiness had been understood.

I believe that Lear is in danger of reading into the Crow a philosophical attitude they did not possess. Nothing Lear quotes from the Crow indicates that they had a concept of "happiness." They had a way of life, the nomadic warrior/hunter life, that constituted their life as Crow. They weren't living their lives "for" anything; they were just living them. Hunting buffalo and counting coups are what Crow did, and there is no reason to think they did it self-consciously in terms of a concept of what life was about. This lack of self-consciousness, or philosophical innocence, in fact, seems to be what attracted Rousseau to "savage" people and led him to develop the notion of the "noble savage." The noble savage lives directly and immediately, without the philosophical reflection that leads him to develop a science and politics that ultimately enslaves him (or so Rousseau thought.)

Whether or not we are attracted to the philosophical innocence of aboriginal life, it is a life that is in danger of becoming unintelligible if its specific mode of living becomes untenable. In such circumstances the only possibility open to it is a "radical hope", or a leap into (and hopefully across) the abyss. What is on the other side of the abyss (i.e. what the Crow will be like after the encounter with the white man) is something the "noble savage" can't possibly conceive.

A culture that is philosophically based, on the other hand, as Western culture was from the time of the ancient Greeks forward, has the resources to persevere through civilizational collapse, as trying as those times might be. The premier case of this is, of course, the collapse of the Roman Empire. St. Augustine, in his City of God, drew on all the philosophical (and religious) resources of the West to teach us that what mattered about Rome was not anything that could disappear with the sack of Rome; it would endure as God and the nature of man endures.

The Elderly and the City

What does it say about a City (in Plato's sense of the word) that considers its elderly a burden rather than the expression of its greatest fulfillment? I write this after having made a comment on the secular right blog.

If human being means something more than mere productive utility, then it must bear a goodness that develops with time and is therefore expressed in the elderly or nowhere at all.  Traditional cultures do not see the elderly as burdens but as the fullest expression of the way of life of their City. The elderly possess an understanding of life and human nature, a wisdom, that can only come with age and experience; they are not a burden to the city but its greatest resource. We can always bear more young. A wise old man or woman can only be the result of many years of virtue and good fortune. 

The Enlightenment cut wisdom down to what can be demonstrated via an abstract reason married to empirical observation. This had the immediate benefit of sweeping away many old and obstructive prejudices. But it also undermined any serious notion of wisdom, and specifically the conviction that there are important things about life and human nature that can only be known through long experience and reflection. The young Descartes could only choose to embark on his universal doubt if he thought that time and experience were not essential to any important truths. In the twentieth century, the young Albert Camus could write the following only in an intellectual universe thoroughly penetrated by the Enlightenment understanding of reason and its lack of respect for the wisdom that is a prerogative of age:

After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this true for all our knowledge. With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences. (From the Myth of Sisyphus)

In the 12th century, someone who uttered such sentiments would be asked: What can a 29 year old possibly know? In the twentieth century, he is applauded for his bold vision.

We in the twenty-first century have difficulty finding reasons to keep the old folks around. We have eliminated the pursuit of wisdom as the goal of our universities; now we are contemplating severing our last link with the only people who might have finally learned wisdom on their own. What will happen to Athens when Socrates is given hemlock before he even has a chance to become the gadfly that wakes up the City?

 

Wizards and Muggles in the Potter series

The Harry Potter series of books has the uncanny feature that its critics (both pro and con) routinely overlook obvious features of the Potter universe. It is as though the series itself casts a spell of blindness on its readers.

Take the relationship between Muggles and Wizards. (Muggles, for the uninitiated, are ordinary folks like you and me who are without magical power. Wizards are able to use magic with the use of a wand.) The Boston Sunday Globe recently featured a lengthy article discussing the allegedly deep religious meaning of the series. The subtitle is "How the boy wizard won over religious critics - and the deeper meaning theologians see in his tale." Along the way, the article has this to say about the place of Muggles in the series:

Some religion scholars seem most interested in the Potter series as social commentary - in particular, they focus on Harry's refusal to take part in the anti-Muggle bias demonstrated by some pure-blood witches and wizards, as well as the hostility toward giants and ghosts and other menacing magical creatures that some characters in the series evince. "One of the overall themes of the Harry Potter series has to do with race and race-based persecution," says Lana A. Whited, a professor of English at Ferrum College in Virginia and the author of "The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter." And Dalton, of Brite Divinity School, takes the argument a step further, suggesting that the series's association of tolerance with the heroic characters is a critique of fundamentalism.

"To Dumbledore and Harry and his friends it didn't matter whether you were Muggle-born, or whether you were a giant," Dalton says, "whereas clearly the Death Eaters, the evil ones, were intolerant of people who were unlike them."

But not all scholars are quite so enthusiastic. Elizabeth Heilman, an associate professor of teacher education at Michigan State University and the editor of "Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter" says that, unlike Hermione, who adopts the cause of the house elves, "you don't see Harry Potter ever taking up a cause for the sake of the downtrodden. He's really a reluctant hero, and I'm not convinced the narrative has him effectively going beyond personal motives."

Now the most obvious characteristic of the relationship between Muggles and Wizards is its basic inequality. We can start with the names. "Muggles" is a name invented by Wizards to indicate ordinary, non-magical people (that is, you and me.) The vast majority of ordinary people have no idea that they are Muggles; they are unaware that a society of magical people has segregated itself into a largely separate world defined over against the ordinary world. This is because Wizards deliberately keep almost all ordinary people ignorant of the existence of Wizards. Nor are ordinary people aware that the border and any interaction between the ordinary and magical worlds is defined and policed by Wizards on terms determined by Wizards. These terms do not permit ordinary people entry into the Wizard world or even knowledge of its existence; should an ordinary person accidentally discover something magical, he has his memory erased (involuntarily) by a Wizard Ministry of Magic specifically charged with the task. Wizards occasionally allow ordinary people knowledge of the Wizard world when it suits their purposes (for example, when they wish help in tracking down criminal Wizards running loose in the ordinary world), but they keep this knowledge within strict limits.

The Wizard world has its own system of justice, courts and prisons. When you travel to Guatemala, you are subject to Guatemalan law, but this is not how it works for Wizards. When Wizards are in the ordinary world, they are subject to Wizard law and not ordinary law. Thus when the aforementioned bad Wizards run amok in the ordinary world, including killing ordinary people, the situation is not resolved by catching the Wizards and trying them before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. No, the equivalent of a Wizard posse tracks down the wayward Wizards and drags them back to the Wizard world for treatment by Wizard justice. What the next of kin of the dead Muggles are supposed to think is a matter of inconvenience to Wizards, but not one that demands that the Wizards tell the truth about what happened. Generally the Wizards hope that the Muggles will attribute the deaths to natural disaster and remain ignorant of the Wizard world.

When the Boston Globe article mentioned above says that Harry Potter refuses to take part in anti-Muggle bias, you might think that Harry resisted the whole Wizard-defined, Wizard-policed distinction between the ordinary and magical worlds. You might think that he objected to the policy of keeping ordinary people ignorant of Wizards, or of involuntarily erasing their memories, or of making Wizards not subject to ordinary law while in the ordinary world. Equality is only possible if everyone is subject to the same law and no one is kept in involuntary ignorance.

But that is not what is meant by "anti-Muggle" bias. The policies I have stated above are fully supported by all Wizards, both "good" and "bad", Dumbledore and Hagrid as well as Voldemort, and by most Harry Potter fans in my experience. When Hagrid, in an early scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, attacks the ordinary boy Dudley Dursley with magic in Dudley's own home, the notion that he has done something against ordinary law that might have ordinary legal consequences never occurs to him, Harry Potter, or even to the Harry Potter fans with whom I have discussed this scene. For them, since it is an assault by a Wizard on an ordinary person, it is not anything that might rise to legal categories, at least as far as the Muggle is concerned. Like a slave in the old South, Muggles have no legal standing in the Wizard world, or legal standing with respect to Wizards even in the ordinary world.

What is meant by "anti-Muggle bias" is the fact that sometimes Wizards are born of ordinary parents. When this happens the Wizard is introduced and admitted to Wizard society where, unfortunately, some Wizards hold a bias against Wizards born of non-magical parents, calling them "Mudbloods" and the like. The Mudblood "controversy" has a farcical quality about it, like the "old money" rich holding a bias against "new money" rich. Harry Potter and Dumbledore are insufferable because they are like the "old money" rich that nobly holds no bias against new money, it never occurring to their pure souls that they don't think the servants deserve rights or the vote anymore than do any of the other rich.

The situation is all the more ridiculous in the case of Hermione Granger, the advocate of the "cause of house elves" mentioned in the article above. What is fascinating about Hermione is that, alone among the three major characters, very little mention is made of her parents. Harry Potter's parents are dead but he makes retrospective acquaintance with them and discovery of their characters is a major part of the plot. Ron Weasley, Harry's other best friend besides Hermione, has Wizard parents who are significant characters in the action of the story. But Hermione's parents are barely mentioned in the thousands of pages of text.

The reason Hermione's parents are absent from the plot is that they are ordinary people, and therefore subject to all the general restrictions Wizards place on Muggles. They cannot visit or know anything about the Wizard world, except for the inevitable knowledge that there is a Wizard world and their daughter attends a school in it. Imagine a school that invited your daughter to attend, but told you that you could never visit, or know what goes on there, or even know how your daughter gets there. Nor can you ask for a demonstration of what your daughter learned at school, since Wizards are forbidden (normally) from using magic in the ordinary world. Your job is to write the check and demur from asking any inconvenient questions.

The archetype of "good Muggles", the Grangers know their place and dutifully send Hermione off to Hogwarts every year with no questions asked. Hermione reminds one of the college kid who agonizes over the fate of Tibet while ignoring her house-bound grandmother. It would have made a much more interesting story if the "elf rights" silliness were dropped and the Grangers given a more prominent role. Instead of spending every summer with Harry and his self-pity, why not a summer with Hermione exploring the pernicious rules the Wizards have set up with respect to Muggles? Does Hermione struggle with the fact that Wizard law does not permit her to tell her parents all the fantastic, life-threatening adventures she has had at Hogwarts? Or of the fact that she is at the top of her class and what it means? Suppose Mrs. Granger is a weak old woman who can barely do the housework. Is Hermione tempted to use magic to assist her in violation of the Wizard law? Wouldn't Hermione be a far more interesting character if the focus was on her decision to challenge Wizard law by using magic to assist her ordinary parents? This would make Hermione more genuinely Christ-like than any of the putatively Christ-like characters in Harry Potter, but more on that later.

Good Muggles, like good servants, do what they are told and do their job in the background, seen and heard as little as possible. Even the British Prime Minister is treated in peremptory fashion. The Wizard Minister of Magic (more or less the Wizard equivalent of a Prime Minister) occasionally needs to talk to the ordinary Prime Minister. He does so by magically appearing, unannounced and uninvited, in the Prime Minister's office. The idea that the Prime Minister is not at the beck and call of the Minister of Magic, and that the latter should get an appointment like anyone else, naturally never occurs to Wizards. The Minister of Magic tells the Prime Minister only the minimum of information necessary and generally leaves him in state of puzzlement. The Prime Minister has no way to call the Minister of Magic should he discover the need; communication is always a one-way street from Wizards to Muggles.

"Bad Muggles" get uppity and do not accept the place assigned to them by Wizards. They are seen and heard way too much. The most prominent bad Muggles are the Dursleys, Harry's relatives and the ordinary family in which Harry Potter is raised. The Dursleys are involved with the story because Harry Potter is dropped on their doorstep as an infant by Dumbledore, with written instructions concerning what they are supposed to do with him. Again, the notion that the Dursleys might have some say in their involvement with Wizards, or that their taking in Harry should be a matter of negotiation, is not one that occurs to Dumbledore. He has decided that the Dursleys are the best place for Harry to be raised and that is the end of it. The Dursleys place is to do what they are told without question, and like it.

As much as J.K. Rowling invites the reader to despise the Dursleys by making them mean, stupid, petty, vindictive and - worst of all - fat, I admit to taking an instant liking to Vernon Dursley, Harry's uncle. Virtually alone among ordinary people, Vernon refuses to kowtow to Wizards. When Hagrid shows up shortly after Harry's tenth birthday, demanding that Harry be turned over to him, Vernon refuses, leading to the magical incident with Dudley I mentioned above. Ordinary justice is, of course, on Vernon's side, since he is the de facto father of Harry (and by the Wizards' own choice, not his own!) and therefore has the right, not to mention the responsibility, to make decisions about Harry's future. Vernon doesn't like Wizards and thinks Hogwarts is a waste of time. The book presents Vernon as small-minded but, then, it is the prerogative of a parent to be small-minded. Dumbledore should have thought of this possibility before dumping Harry on Vernon, but then it never occurred to Dumbledore that Vernon might not simply submit to orders issued by Wizards. My respect for Vernon only increased as the series went on, as he consistently refuses to play the "nice Muggle" no matter how much the Wizards intimidate him with magic. The more Rowling insists that he is lacking in any virtue, the more I root for him to stick it to the Wizards.

The Globe article goes on to discuss the comparison of Harry and Dumbledore to Jesus Christ:

Eisenstadt sees Dumbledore and Harry, in different ways, as Christ figures - perhaps Harry representing the human Jesus, and Dumbledore the divine. And she posits that the New Testament depiction of elements of the Jewish community is represented by the goblins (unappealing bankers) and the Ministry of Magic (legalistic and small-minded).

Since we are casting parts for the New Testament, what part are the Muggles assigned? This brings up a basic problem with viewing the Potter series through a Christian lens. The New Testament has no place for the division of humanity into separate worlds based on talent or natural ability. It has no parallel to a self-segregated world of "extraordinary people" who live an existence deliberately disconnected from the "ordinary" mass of humanity. This is Gnosticism, not Christianity. In fact, we might say that Christ came in part to challenge such distinctions. But, supposing that such division can be sustained in Christian terms, what would be a legitimately Christian relationship between the magically endowed Wizards and ordinary Muggles? Hagrid gives a tissue-thin rationalization for why Wizards do not use their power to assist Muggles - "they [Muggles] would always be wanting magical solutions to their problems." Thank goodness that Christ did not have such an opinion with respect to his own miraculous power. Christ came precisely to use his power to serve the poor, humble and unknown, even though He knew it would cause him to be overwhelmed with crowds wanting miraculous solutions to their problems.

The Harry Potter series departs from the mainstream tradition of Christian-inspired literature by making Harry himself magical. Generally the hero of the Christian story is an ordinary fellow who encounters magic as a form of grace; as Cinderella is not magical but is graced by a fairy Godmother, or Snow White and Rose Red discover a prince hidden in the form of a bear. The heroic Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings are as unmagical as they could possibly be - the perfect Muggles. But they encounter grace through the magic of Gandalf and the elvish queen Galadriel.

The Hobbits imitate Christ the way Mary did; not by exercising a miraculous power that they do not possess, but by acting with a faith, love and humility that allows the grace of God to work through them.

Since Harry Potter, unlike Frodo Baggins, Cinderella, Jack from the Beanstalk, Mary or St. Francis of Assisi, is born with extraordinary magical power, for him to imitate Christ means something different than what it means for Frodo to imitate Christ. He must put his magical power to the service of the poor, humble and ordinary. But Harry never uses that power to challenge the pernicious distinction between Muggles and Wizards the way Christ used His miraculous power to give voice to the poor and forgotten and to challenge the rules of the Pharisees. Harry accepts the conventions of the world as given to him by the Wizard authorities; whatever "Christian" impulses he might have are restricted to the extraordinary world of Wizards and do not extend to the broader world of Muggles. At best, Harry is a good pagan who does not think Wizards should abuse Muggles, but it never occurs to him that the extraordinary (Wizards) are actually called on to serve the humble (Muggles), the way the magical Gandalf served the ordinary Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. It never occurs to Harry that the real problem with the Ministry of Magic is not that it prevents him from terrorizing Dudley Dursley with magic, but that it prevents him from helping ordinary folks like the Granger parents. The Christian "inversion of values", by which the talented and superior do not live for themselves ala Aristotle, but are called to serve the plain and ordinary, is the obligation Christ revealed to the world; any series that does not recognize this obligation can't claim to possess a Christian sensibility. But the possibility of this inversion never occurs to any Wizard in the Harry Potter series, from the evil Voldemort through to the good Dumbledore.

Transcending human nature through science.

Here is Steven Pinker in the Preface to his book The Stuff of Thought (the emphasis is mine):

There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic.

I love that last sentence. It is a neat summary of the philosophical assumptions of the contemporary philosophy of mind. There is the distinction between "a distinctively human model of reality" - to be taken with a grain of salt, for it is only "a" model among many possible models - and "the objective understanding of reality" given by science and logic, which suffers from none of the unfortunate drawbacks of the human condition and its models, transcending human nature entirely as the objective understanding of reality. There is the easy confidence that never wonders who or what it is that understands this "objective understanding" when it is understood, or wonders how an "objective understanding" saves itself from being oxymoronic, since an understanding is only an understanding if it is understood by someone and therefore is subjective; or wonders how we mere men can understand an "objective understanding" without it becoming a human model. There is the hint of a further perspective beyond both the human model and the objective understanding, the perspective that allows us to compare the lesser two perspectives and determine in just what "major ways" the human model differs from the objective understanding. Finally, there is the strange innocence that fails to notice that whatever we understand and do must happen in and through our own nature, and so reference to "the objective understanding of reality" is itself an expression of human nature and so destroys the distinction of which it is a part.

FPR on Space Travel

Over at Front Porch Republic, Jason Peters has an hilarious take on the proposed Mission to Mars.

I disagree with him on one thing:

I caught a piece on NPR Monday evening about the possibilities of a Martian voyage. If I got the story right, we’d need 180 days for the trip there and then a 500-day layover at the Red Dust Daze Inn to wait for a planetary alignment conducive to the leisurely 180-day commute back home.

So about three years without beer, baseball, and soft personnel.

If there is one thing of which we can be certain, it is that any forthcoming space mission will be exquisitely diversified along racial and sexual lines. So there will definitely be "soft personnel" stuffed in that interplanetary tin can for 860 days. Given the instability that may be lurking even in the unconscious of those with the "Right Stuff", the trip might more resemble a contemporary "reality show" than the path to glory of the Apollo program. How long into the trip will it take before the astronauts figure out that nothing has gone on, nothing is going on, and nothing will go on during that long trip? Especially when, after a week or so, everyone on Earth has lost interest in what they are doing?