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March 5, 2010

“What’s on the telos tonight?” “Looks like a penguin!”

Filed under: Interfaith relations — Camassia @ 9:19 pm

Eve responds to my post on morality without God, and is not entirely convinced:

I do think they’re right to say you can’t get teleology from undirected nature–you need a Creator–and that most moral arguments do rely on teleology. Most moral arguments rely on an account of human nature which is about what humans should be, not what humans demonstrably are. In fact I’m not sure how you’d get a moral, “should” argument from a bare evidentiary “are” claim.

I think that the problem here is the assumption that, if you say nature as a whole has no direction, nothing within nature can have a direction. But I don’t believe that’s the case.

Consider how your existence started out: as DNA. It was not you, but it set you on a certain course. You progressed from being a zygote to a fetus to a baby to child and so on until you eventually grow old and die. Various things can influence, frustrate or even halt this process, of course. But the point is, it doesn’t just proceed randomly with no direction. You don’t have an equal chance of waking up tomorrow being physically a day older, and waking up having regressed to age six.

Also, to say that it’s natural is not to say that it doesn’t take work. You can’t just sit there like a plant, and grow. At the very least, you have to feed yourself, and protect yourself from the elements and so on. You have a drive to do these things, and wherever you have a drive, you have goals. You want things to be a certain way that they are not right now. And so, being human isn’t a fixed state, it is a process of becoming. That process is itself largely fixed, but it also takes some effort on your part.

There’s also a mental component to the process, and this is where we get to the matter at hand. If I had to posit a single source of a secular-humanist telos, it would be the assumption that the human mind is also set on a certain course from birth, but it is likewise a fragile process that requires some work to fully develop. And so, we get norms: there are some actions you can take that further this course, and others that pervert it. As with getting food (for most of humanity anyway), this can be difficult and frustrating, and the satisfactions only temporary. But still, the course is there.

The experience I described in the last post — seeing yourself, and judging yourself, as if you were another person — is a case in point. This capacity is something that babies don’t have, and that children develop only gradually. It takes effort, it competes with your other desires, and a few people seem never to develop it at all. That doesn’t make it unnatural, just difficult. But the very fact that it’s a struggle gives it direction. You can’t just sit there like a plant, and be just; you have to aim for justice.

Also, though I’m talking about individuals here, there’s nothing to say that groups can’t have a natural telos. Ant colonies, for instance, have life cycles resembling those of single organisms. Since people are also social beings, it’s reasonable to think such things happen with human societies as well, though it may be difficult to tell while it’s happening. So, it’s possible to have secular versions of these, “Is society headed the right way?” types of discussions.

I think that may relate to Eve’s question later in the post: “But within this human-scale morality, can we ever say you should love someone you don’t? Can we say to the Spartan citizen that he should see himself in the face of the helot?” That’s an interesting question, because I think most of us have a very unmystical familiarity with the feeling that we ought to love, or at least like, someone we don’t: a difficult relative, usually, or someone that everyone else seems to love but who just doesn’t do it for us. If that mandate doesn’t come directly from heaven, it generally comes from an ideal vision of social relationships: families love each other, friends like each other’s friends, etc. It’s also, I suspect, just a matter of identity: we are who our people are, so finding someone unlikeable within one’s group can be as distressing as finding someone unlikable in the mirror.

Now, the second part of Eve’s question: how do you convince someone to love someone who’s not in his group? The type of instinctive empathy I wrote about earlier does depend on an assumption of similarity, which is why a great way to start a fight among scientific materialists is to start talking about innate group differences (between genders, races, or whatever). Still, the funny thing about our modern world is that, although we encounter a lot more outsiders than in the past, this also makes us more likely to be outsiders in some situations, and so paradoxically identify with people precisely because of their otherness.

But really, the honest answer to what I’d say to Spartan is: I don’t know. Like I said before, I’m not saying this is the most fabulous grounding for a moral code. Because natural selection is about good-enough rather than perfection, it’s possible that human moral capacity has a very low ceiling. There’s also an obvious limit to how much justice we, as humans, can enact, which is why I find Marvin’s reason for believing rather more powerful than Fish’s. I’m also not saying it allows you to persuade nonbelievers of whatever you want; I don’t doubt that, to agree with every point of Catholic morality, you have to convert to Catholicism. What I am doubting, though, is Fish’s contention that there’s no way for a truly consistent scientific materialists to have morals. You might disagree with them, but there is something to disagree with.

March 3, 2010

Morality without God

Filed under: Interfaith relations — Camassia @ 11:00 pm

Eve links to a column by Stanley Fish disputing the idea that there are “secular reasons” for moral and political positions, and rounds up her own thoughts about the issue. She asks, “What are the possible objects for the philosopher’s eros, the nuptial meaning of the mind, in a fully secular worldview? I dunno, because I’ve never done it, but I welcome your thoughts.”

Well, I’m not sure I entirely understand the question, but here are my thoughts about Fish’s column. I think that first, we need to define “secular.” The way Fish describes it, it comes across as “logic without emotion.” For instance:

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

That’s true of course, but that’s simply because you have to add emotions to your facts to be motivated to do anything. Eve is right that love is the driving force here — both convictions and actions are caused by people caring about things. But I don’t see how that is opposed to secularity, unless you’re claiming that caring is inherently religious. It’s true that love of anything can probably take on religious qualities if it gets strong enough; but I don’t think that’s what people mean when they talk about religion as in “religion in public life.”

I suspect that what Fish is really getting at here is not that you can’t make decisions without religion, but that you can’t impose your decisions on other people without it. This is why he approvingly quotes Smith as saying that “truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of ‘public reason’ are insufficient to yield any definite answer to a difficult issue — abortion, say, or same sex marriage, or the permissibility of torture . . . .” I must admit, after having been to as many churches and theoblogs as I have, my immediate response is, “It’s not like religion has settled any of those things definitively either!” Sometimes in these discussions, it sounds like what people mean by religion isn’t religion as it actually exists, but the dream (or nightmare) of an authority who has an answer for literally everything.

But, overall, Fish has a point. When people complain about religion intruding into the public sphere, they are usually complaining that their opponents are invoking sources of authority that they haven’t agreed are authorities. Yet what, really, is a secular source of authority that everyone can agree on? The appeal to material facts stems from a hope that we can, at least, agree on those, since we all live here in the material world. But the motivating principle — emotion — is more elusive. How do you get other people to care about what you care about? And if you care about God more than anything, what do you do if you’re not allowed to talk about him?

Whenever I think about this question of how people have moral beliefs without God, strangely enough, I flash back to the movie City Slickers. I’ve never actually seen it all the way through, but it played at a theater where I used to work, so I saw bits of it when I did screening-room checks. At one point, a man goads his friend about his fidelity to his wife, demanding to know if would really refuse to cheat on her if he could be absolutely sure she wouldn’t know. The friend eventually says, “But I would know. And I wouldn’t like myself for it.”

This is, as I recall, a version of the question that starts off Plato’s Republic: why be good if you can just seem good? Plato somehow answers this with the hypothetical creation of an ideal state, but I expect most people would better understand the movie character’s more concise version. This experience of looking at yourself as if you were someone else, and liking or disliking what you see — in other words, having a conscience — is essentially a brute fact for nearly all people. They have varying explanations of why it exists, or they may have no explanation, but still it’s there. And this experience compels at least a rudimentary morality; if you like people who are good to you, then you must be good to them, if you are going to like yourself. By the same token, if you respect people who don’t take crap from you, you’re going to be uncompromising towards others if you want to respect yourself. I didn’t say this was all warm and fuzzy. But it’s also why I don’t entirely agree with Fish’s claim that ideas like justice and equality are totally empty without God. The ability to see yourself as a person among persons, to put yourself in another’s place, implies a certain equality, or at least similarity. There’s a certain justice that comes when you dislike yourself in proportion to the cause you’ve given someone to dislike you. And — this is the less obvious point — this identification with others also means that you assume other people have that capacity, and can therefore make claims on them. I think this is why these words have meaning for people, even if they can’t agree on precisely what they mean or how to apply them to a given situation.

Of course, you can readily object that this is an inadequate basis for morality, and I can’t really argue with that. But, like I said, it’s not like any religions have been able to overcome all these problems either. It’s why the gulf between the religious and the secular here may not be as great as all that. Without love of God, we still have each other; and that’s something.

February 28, 2010

The Last Station

Filed under: Arts and entertainment — Camassia @ 1:26 pm

Eve reviews The Last Station at Inside Catholic. Her reaction is very similar to my own, which was not a surprise since I saw it with her and we discussed these very points at some length afterward. (One’s impression of a movie can be greatly affected by who one sees it with…)

It’s kind of funny to me that a couple of commenters on her article suggest that Tolstoy’s problem was that he was a leftist — Deal Hudson compares him to Marx and Rousseau, as someone whose utopian ideas could never square with reality. But I think that the very reason the movie needed to spell out its characters’ ideals is that they don’t fit familiar modern American political categories. People planning earthly utopias don’t go around promoting celibacy, unless their idea of utopia is a world without humans. So why did Tolstoy do it? At one point, Bulgakov paraphrases Tolstoy’s writing as saying the body is an illusion. So what idea of reality are the characters mortifying their flesh for? We’re not told.

I also find myself wondering about the motives of Vladimir Chertkov. The movie portrays him as a sort of Machiavellian villain, but it also says in a postscript that he remained a committed Tolstoyan until his death in the 1930s. Now, at the start of the film we find Chertkov under house arrest, and life for a Tolstoyan wasn’t any easier under the Communists, who literally sent them to Siberia. Machiavelli probably wouldn’t have approved. Meanwhile, Tolstoy’s wife insinuates that he’s homosexual, and is fighting her out of jealousy. That would have interesting implications both for the politics and the celibacy question, but the audience has no way of knowing whether it’s true.

We also have no real way of assessing the Countess’ motives. She says — repeatedly — that the loss of Tolstoy’s copyrights will leave her “starving,” but it’s clear there’s quite a bit of family property apart from the novels. What are the Tolstoys’ finances actually like? Do the children have other means of making a living? The film doesn’t seem interested in these questions, instead framing the issue strictly as whether Tolstoy loves his wife or his ideals more.

This might be a bit much to ask of a two-hour movie. But I do think there was some fat that could have been cut. I felt like we kept watching the Tolstoys have the same argument over and over. Also, the Valentin-Masha affair could have taken up less screen time. In fact, the New York Times’ review of the novel doesn’t even mention Masha, suggesting that if she’s in there at all, she’s a much smaller character. I can’t help thinking that Masha was invented precisely to address the problem I mentioned earlier: no character in the true history really shared the values of the target audience, so somebody has to be in there espousing the gospel of personal liberation. Given what was coming in Russia’s near future, however, I have to wonder how much good it would have done. I sympathize with the movie’s valuing the personal over the political, but sometimes the political is inescapable.

January 24, 2010

More on Orwell and utopia

Filed under: Books — Camassia @ 1:16 pm

One of Orwell’s lesser feats of prognostication was his apparent belief that religion was not only headed for the dustbin of history, but was already being carried out to the landfill even as he was writing. As you might have gathered from the last post, Orwell didn’t regret its passing, but he did have some concerns about what was going to take its place. In a musing on Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Thirties, he writes that after the old order was brought down, “The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.”

Yet Orwell hasn’t completely lost hope:

The Kingdom of Heaven, old style, has definitely failed, but on the other hand ‘Marxist realism’ has also failed, whatever it may achieve materially. Seemingly there is no alternative except the thing that Mr Muggeridge and Mr F.A. Voigt, and the others who think like them, so earnestly warn us against: the much-derided ‘Kingdom of Earth’, the concept of a society in which men know that they are mortal and are nevertheless willing to act as brothers.

Brotherhood implies a common father. Therefore it is often argued that men can never develop the sense of a community unless they believe in God. The answer is that in a half-conscious way most of them have developed it already. Man is not an individual, he is only a cell in an everlasting body, and he is dimly aware of it. There is no other way of explaining why it is that men will die in battle. It is nonsense to say that they do it only because they are driven. If whole armies had to be coerced, no war could ever be fought. Men die in battle — not gladly, of course, but at any rate voluntarily — because of abstractions called ‘honour’, ‘duty’, ‘patriotism’ and so forth.

All that this really means is that they are aware of some organism greater than themselves, stretching into the future and the past, within which they feel themselves to be immortal. ‘Who dies if England live?’ sounds like a piece of bombast, but if you alter ‘England’ to whatever you prefer, you can see that it expresses one of the main motives of human conduct. People sacrifice themselves for the sake of fragmentary communities — nation, race, creed, class — and only become aware that they are not individuals in the very moment when they are facing bullets. A very slight increase of consciousness and their sense of loyalty could be transferred to humanity itself, which is not an abstraction.

Patriotism seems to have been for Orwell what God is for a lot of us — something that can’t really be proven or justified but that seems to be in the bloodstream anyway. In a different piece about The Thirties, he remarks that Muggeridge, despite his general nihilism, went ahead and volunteered for service in World War II, which Orwell takes as confirmation that this is a common feeling.

Yet the problem is apparent right in the quote I put here. People become aware of their collective nature “when they are facing bullets” — i.e. when they are under attack. How much of this patriotism is simply the rallying effect brought on by a common enemy? If that is so, it would not take a “slight increase of consciousness” to be transferred to humanity as a whole, but a change in its very nature. If your country all of humanity, then who is the enemy?

If you follow the thinking of Orwell disciples such as Christopher Hitchens, the answer comes to Heaven itself, or at least the idea of it. Orwell’s writings point in this direction, since in his essays on Gandhi and Tolstoy he singles out “saints” as a type especially repugnant to him, and somehow not even human, always rejecting earth in favor of heaven. “One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.”

But at the same time, Orwell surely realized that siding with Man didn’t necessarily mean willingness to die for others. In a long essay about Henry Miller, Orwell describes what he accurately assumed was an emerging type — the deracinated, hedonistic slacker who assumes the world is going to hell and so lives for today. Orwell met Miller on his way to Spain to fight in the civil war, and Miller thought his self-sacrifice was insane. Yet Orwell has a soft spot for Miller because he’s basically an Earth guy, with his affection for what Orwell calls “the process of life.”

The solution to this may be that heaven and earth, in the minds of most people, aren’t really as opposed as Orwell makes them out to be. A lot of people, including me, are uncomfortable with the way many soldiers go forth for “God and country” as if they were the same thing, but it does show how people bundle together the things they most value in life. And in fact, even a fairly simple concept like “patriotism” can bundle together some contradictory things. I remember spending the Fourth of July in 2008 with my father in South Carolina, and noticing the general outbreak of Confederate flags alongside American ones. On July 5, by local tradition, people laid flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers, as a sort of complement to the national holiday. And this, I thought to myself, is the place that politicians and pundits keep holding up to us blue-staters as the “real America,” the home of true patriots. It may be different in England, but I suspect everywhere, patriotism is complicated.

But anyway, maybe for most people there really isn’t a contradiction to be reconciled in this case. In popular piety, it seems to me, the existence of the afterlife may be no more or less than an affirmation that what we do in this life is actually important and consequential — and that however badly things go, somehow things will be set right in the end. It may not follow any rigorous systematic theology, but I wonder how much of this inchoate patriotism that Orwell relied on owes to it.

Another feature of Orwell’s thought this essay emphasizes is the idea that people are attracted to suffering. In a review of Mein Kampf, he asserts that Hitler became popular because of his understanding that “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.” Orwell seems to feel the same way himself, and is rather suspicious of what he calls “hedonism”; in fact, in a bit of turnabout logic, he argues that “saints” are the real hedonists, because they want to live in Heaven rather than Earth. That all may be so, but if you look at it that way, the Kingdom of Earth is really a solution in search of a problem. If people can’t be happy with being happy, so to speak, and need a heroic struggle now and again, that necessitates horrendous evils to struggle against. So bring on the Nazis! OK, I’m being flippant, but it’s a serious point. Did Orwell really want to win, or just to fight endlessly?

Meanwhile Muggeridge, who was born the same year as Orwell but lived much longer, eventually converted to Christianity. I don’t know enough about that story to comment, but it makes a curious epilogue to Orwell’s remarks.

January 21, 2010

The shape of things that didn’t come

Filed under: Books, Politics and society — Camassia @ 10:43 pm

If any readers have been yearning for a complete change of pace from Twilight, well, so have I. So for the last few days I’ve been greatly enjoying a collection of essays by George Orwell. Orwell’s essays were one of those inexplicable gaps in my reading life. As a teen I loved 1984, even though for the most part I missed its context and read it as an allegory of middle school (though, come to think of it, the author of “Such, Such Were the Joys” might have appreciated that reading). But I never read his essays, other than “Shooting an Elephant,” which like many in my generation I was assigned to read in school.

After 9/11 there was kind of a vogue for Orwell. He was ever quotable on the subject of facing radical evil, and tweaking a leftist intelligencia that just didn’t get it. Yet there are clearly some large differences between the leftist intelligencia of his day and ours. One of the most fascinating essays, written in 1941, critiques another favorite writer of my youth (and Orwell’s), H.G. Wells. Wells was apparently unenthusiastic about the war effort, not because of any fondness for Hitler but because he saw all forms of nationalism as roadblocks to the utopian one-world socialist state he wanted set up. Orwell fires back:

What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air? The whole question is how we are to get it. What is the use of pointing out that a World State is desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.

What’s so striking to me about this is how Orwell takes it for granted that a world government is desirable. Does anybody really say that anymore? It’s one of those things that right-wing paranoiacs accuse liberals of wanting, and liberals roll their eyes at its ludicrousness. Yet apparently, in 1941 it was the view of all “sensible” people.

I suppose the last real stand for a world state was the original Star Trek, which owed a great deal to Wells’ techno-utopia. (Pretty much all twentieth-century sci-fi owes Wells, I’d reckon.) The susequent films and TV shows inherited this from the original, but over time it receded into the background. The most recent movie was almost entirely apolitical.

Yet much as in Star Trek, the move towards world government seems to have gone on without much attention being paid to it. After Orwell’s death, the United Nations was formed, the European Union came into existence, and the International Criminal Court started prosecuting people. None of these indicate that a global state is near at hand, of course, but I think it shows how people are still following the thought processes that led Wells and Orwell to think it was a good idea. If you believe that rule of law is better than war, if you believe that foreigners have the same rights as your fellow citizens, if you believe that leaders should care about world opinion and not go “rogue,” then world government has a certain inexorable logic to it. It’s just that no one really wants to go there. Nowadays the very idea sounds — so to speak — Orwellian. (Though it’s worth mentioning that the world in 1984 did not have a single government.)

Another indicator of the disjunct between action and vision is in the left’s view of technology. Here’s Orwell on Wells again:

In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. …

The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. …

When Wells was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory business men, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side; there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting you to ‘get on or get out,’ your parents systematically warping your sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue. On the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had actually lifted their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising extent.

Orwell was, of course, one of the original dystopians who saw how technology could be used against social progress. But even he seemed to assume that the advance of the industrial age basically favored the little guy. In a lengthy essay on Charles Dickens, Orwell says that, although Dickens generally sympathized with the downtrodden, he had a blind spot when it came to servants. But that was probably unavoidable in an age before labor-saving devices: “Without a high level of mechanical development, human equality is not practically possible; Dickens goes to show that it is not imaginable either.”

A line like this sounds remarkably alien to my ears, I think because it shows how much, in my lifetime, technology has become wholly identified with capitalism. There are still techno-utopians out there, but they tend to be libertarian, not socialists. The alternative for most Americans is to go primitivist. Yet that goes against the grain of liberal culture in many ways. In fact, just now I was on the phone with my mother, who recommended that I see Avatar. Trying to explain my lack of interest in it, I said, “I’m tired of high-tech anti-technology movies!”

In fact, if you think about it, technology is naturally a friend to the artist, because all major advances provide new means of expression. We are taught that the invention of metallurgy was crucial to human culture because of its impact on agriculture and weaponry, but at the time I’m sure people were just as excited about what it did for sculpture and musical instruments. Likewise, intellectuals of all stripes feel the magnetic pull of gadgets. Who has been more enthusiastic about the latest smartphone or online-journaling technology than my neighbors here in the land of books and bureaucrats? And on a larger scale, they feel they are greatly fortunate in having things like modern medical and transport technology, and instinctively want to share the benefits with people in more “backward” parts of the world. Yet the same people who do all this often seem implicitly to accept the idea that technology is ruining the planet. Hence the dreams of the age have been more about returning to Eden than heading toward the Promised Land.

There are many reasons why this change has occurred, some of them justifiable. And indeed, the lack of grand utopian visions like Wells’ may not be entirely a bad thing; there were a lot of scary things about his ideas, and the more piecemeal, problem-solving approach probably has a better chance of success anyway. Still, reading Orwell one can feel the loss of the left’s optimism about the future — a solid, concrete optimism, not just a general Obaman hope. Orwell was already recording its loss, and yet it’s also comforting to realize that many of his worst fears, which he was at times solidly convinced would come true, never happened. The future was, as ever, both more and less than expected.

January 12, 2010

How Mormons see it

Filed under: Books — Camassia @ 9:19 pm

Russell commented on my last Twilight post that I “might be interested in some of the reflections which we Mormons have made about the creation and temptation narratives (such as they are) in her books.” I have wondered about the Mormon angle on this story, but my knowledge of Mormon theology is slight, and many aspects of the story that seem to point toward Mormonism could just as well point toward other things. In fact, one striking thing about the essay that Russell linked to on this subject is that it could just as well be written by and about evangelicals. The sense of apartness from society, the commitment to chastity, and the arguments over the value of fantasy and occult fiction are all themes that evangelicals would well recognize.

Even the concept of eternal, celestial marriage, which theologically is unique to Mormons, is hardly foreign to romance novels; think of all those stories of reincarnated lovers finding each other again, for instance. Perhaps more relevant to my post, though, is the Mormon view of original sin. Coincidentally, D.G.D. Davidson also posted on the Mormon-Twilight thing recently, linking to an article that, among other things, called the Mormon view on the subject “Pelagian.” A Mormon blogger responded that this is not the case: “(Mormons) unequivocally believe that the fall separates God from man, and that Christ’s atonement is the only way to restore that connection. What Mormons reject is the notion that humanity is born with inherent guilt. They believe humanity is born with the consequences of transgression, but that sin only comes when the difference between right and wrong is known. No baby is sinful.”

It occurs to me that my earlier post might have left the impression that only an Augustinian view of original sin and fallenness would qualify as “Christian.” I don’t think that’s the case, although I did ding C.S. Lewis for it since he purported to speak for orthodox Western Christianity. What I was getting at is that a universe with an omnipotent, benevolent Creator requires some sense of divine providence. Turning your characters into innocent victims of cruel fate is pretty much the same thing as making them innocent victims of a cruel God, which obviously raises some theological problems.

Moreover, if you believe that all goodness ultimately flows from God, then a revision in your view of God is going to affect your view of goodness. My complaint about characters making moral choices in a vacuum is that, in these types of stories, the characters tend to stick stubbornly to a mainstream modern American view of good and evil even when they find out the universe is very different from what mainstream modern America thinks it is. The Cullens stick to their basic idea that killing humans is wrong, which seems elemental enough; except that Edward implies that vampires might have been created as humans’ natural predators. I mean, I’m a vegetarian and all, so I understand the dilemma, but the naturalness of predation also stops me from making simplistic statements like “meat is murder.” On top of that, wouldn’t immortality affect your view of death? Would endless life be so boring that the immortals would actually covet it? The sheer lack of thought or discussion about death and the afterlife was a striking omission in Twilight, given how our heroine’s nose is rubbed in these matters.

Anyway, like I said I have no great knowledge of Mormon doctrine so this might not be what Russell was getting at. I would be interested in more links on the subject.

December 28, 2009

Twilight cont’d

Filed under: Books — Camassia @ 9:53 pm

Before the library takes my e-copy of Twilight back into the ether whence it came, I wanted to comment on its cosmology. There isn’t much of one, to be honest; maybe the subsequent books do more world-building, but in this one there’s not much indication of what kind of universe we’re operating in. Still, we get a provocative remark by Edward, when Bella asks him about the origin of vampires:

“Well, where did you come from? Evolution? Creation? Couldn’t we have evolved in the same way as other species, predator and prey? Or, if you don’t believe this world could have just happened on its own, which is hard for me to accept myself, is it so hard to believe that the same force that created the delicate angelfish and the shark, the baby seal and the killer whale, could create both kinds together?”

Edward here appeals to an issue near to my heart: the problem of natural evil. If God is such a bastard to make a natural world that runs on predation, then why not make vampires? And yet, the vampires as described in this story not only go against all Christian concepts of natural law, but against Darwinian laws also. Despite the rhetorical tone of his question, vampires couldn’t evolve as other species do. Immortality is unnatural, and even if some creature obtained it, it would obviate the need to eat. One of the visceral horrors of vampires is that they are cannibals, violating a nearly universal human taboo and to some extent a natural one as well. (Animals do cannibalize on occasion, but for obvious reasons no species has evolved to specially hunger for its own kind.) This isn’t really a scientific explanation or a theological one; it’s more a cry of despair at a random universe.

It’s interesting to contrast this with Bram Stoker’s version. In keeping with an ancient theory that evil can’t create things on its own, but simply mock and imitate creation, Dracula is portrayed explicitly as a perverted shadow of Jesus. The blood-drinking is a warped version of the Eucharist and also of marriage; approaching one victim, he even uses the biblical phrase, “blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh.” He has an acolyte prone to saying things like, “Master, give me eternal life!” And indeed, the eternal life of a vampire is a parody of the eternal life in heaven. Although I wouldn’t exactly call Dracula a Christian novel, you only really get the horror if you assume that you have a soul and that it should be headed for a Christian version of the afterlife. If you think you’re a soulless beast headed for oblivion, then what really is the downside?

It seems to me that most vampire stories of the last 20 or 30 years have struggled with this question, and Twilight is no different. Like many of its fellows, it falls back on the power of sentient minds to make moral choices — even in a social and spiritual vacuum. Sci-fi author D.G.D. Davidson did an amusing review of both the book and the movie last year; I don’t entirely agree with it, but he made an interesting observation down in the comment thread:

Though you are probably ultimately correct that vampires — if they exist — would be supernatural and evil with no free will, I would suggest that fiction, where the author can within certain moral limits make up his own rules, allows for vampires with free wills, capable of receiving grace and choosing to cooperate with it. However, when you add in Twilight’s paradox, in which the vampire can choose good and yet is barred from salvation by his vampiric nature, the idea of the good vampire becomes objectionable theologically, even within a fictional framework.

As a fiction writer, I can attest to the strong temptation to create repentant characters shunned by God. It has pathos. It is, in fact, an easy, instant recipe for pathos (probably a good reason to avoid it). I forgive Meyer and attribute it to well-meant, misguided naivete.

As I pointed out a while ago, even C.S. Lewis couldn’t quite integrate the needs of the heroic fantasy narrative with the idea that we’re all hopeless screw-ups without God’s grace. But as Davidson points out here, another problematic character of the genre is the innocent victim. You get instant pathos from someone who is damned through no fault of his own, or who is basically good but is persecuted for something he can’t help. Yet the Christian story insists there was only one truly innocent victim in all of history. It messes up our favorite stories in all kinds of ways, which I suppose is part of the point.

December 22, 2009

Twilight

Filed under: Books — Camassia @ 10:54 am

NOTE: I’ve always been a one-draft kind of a writer. Just get it together in your head, and slam the thing out. Which means that if I get stuck, like I did writing this review of Twilight, I’m not very good at getting unstuck. So in an unprecedented move on my blog, I am posting an unfinished rough draft for comment/discussion/critique/whatever. And any ideas about why I got stuck on this, of all things…

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Last weekend I gave in to curiosity and downloaded a copy of Twilight through my library’s digital check-out system. (This, by the way, turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. None of the usual cursing and gnashing of teeth that normally goes with me trying a new app.) I normally enjoy a juicy chunk of pop YA fiction, but I’d been uncertain about Twilight. Romance isn’t my favorite candy, and I couldn’t see the romance in a hero with cold, hard flesh. No matter how good looking he is, that’s just not sexy!

Well, having read it, I still don’t think it’s sexy, but it does suit the novel’s peculiar heroine. Stephenie Meyer’s writing is not terribly respected by other writers, but she does have the essential gift of a strong narrative voice. Bella Swan sounds like a real teenager — not in the self-conscious colloquial way of a Holden Caulfield, but like a literate teenager trying to explain, in the plainest way, what she is thinking and feeling.

Yet she’s not exactly a normal teenager. She actually made me think of the protagonist of a completely different kind of novel, P.D. James’ Innocent Blood, which I described in the second half of this post. That book implied that both the heroine and her criminal mother were, while not complete sociopaths, somehow lacking in the full range of human emotions, and lived at a kind of icy remove from most people. Bella, likewise, rather curdles the milk of human kindness. When she moves to a new school at the start of the book, the locals are as friendly and solicitous as a newbie could want, but she finds them all a little annoying; one boy who is attracted to her she rather harshly compares to a golden retriever. After getting a minor injury in a car accident, she dreads people fussing over her. Mostly, she likes being alone.

Her attitude seems to partly extend from her background; she’s accustomed to being the grownup for her divorced, feckless parents, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she assumes relationships will be an endless string of demands. But the overwhelming impression I get is a contempt for weakness, including her own. She fears embarrassment above all, and avoids any occasion for it, of which there are many since she’s physically clumsy. Sympathy doesn’t allay her mortification at the frailty that an injury exposes.

From that angle, the cold, hard flesh of her vampire paramour makes perfect sense. Last year I wrote about how superheroes and supervillains are the modern version of the dream of the transfigured, glorified body; and Twilight, while formally a vampire story, is at least as much as superhero story. Vampires, in this universe, are not only immortal but endowed with superhuman beauty, strength, speed and grace. Our hero, Edward, is an almost literal Man of Steel, or more accurately a Man of Stone. Bella is constantly describing him as a marble statue, pale and glittering. He looks “more like a Greek god than anyone has a right to,” she says at one point, gesturing back to superheroes’ cultural ancestors. In that respect, the stony flesh is the transfiguration of warm squishy mammals and all their terrible vulnerabilities.

That still doesn’t make it very sexy. It would have made more sense to take vampires somewhere beyond sex as we know it — they don’t need to reproduce anyway — or perhaps toyed with something like the Joker’s anti-sexy sex appeal. But ultimately Twilight is too tied to romantic conventions for that. So instead, the nature of Edward’s body keeps getting jarringly brought up at intimate moments. “I drifted to sleep in his cold arms,” she says, giving me a shudder.

To some extent, the book follows a by-now longstanding convention in making vampirism itself a metaphor for sexual desire. Halfway through, Edward tells Bella that her blood smells more delicious than anyone else’s, and so his struggle for self-control is an image of noble chastity. Everyone seems to read it that way, at least. Still, for me the metaphor of lust as vampirism was dampened by the fact that vampires also experience literal lust, as a separate sensation from blood-thirst. I don’t know, maybe this shows the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which also brought us Edward’s obvious predecessor, Angel), but as I remember it, the vampirism in Buffy wasn’t even trying to have an erotic subtext. In Twilight, the vampirism doesn’t heighten the eroticism so much as provide a distraction from it. Edward explains to Bella that they can probably never have sex because he might hurt her by accident (evidently he’s been reading Larry Niven), which would normally be devastating for a 17-year-old in love. But in the context, it’s the least of his problems.

November 5, 2009

Pop songs that are creepy in retrospect

Filed under: Arts and entertainment, Memes/Games — Camassia @ 8:10 pm

Lynn (who I forgot to thank for her nice comment) recently posted about pop songs that are creepy in retrospect. I actually don’t know the songs she discusses (well, I heard “Baby It’s Cold Outside” once a long time ago), but I certainly have noticed some songs emanating innocuously from the radio that, on closer inspection, make me go “WTF?” Such as:

–The Human League, “Don’t You Want Me” A staple of my middle-school dances, about a breakup between a possessive Svengali and his ambitious protege. “But don’t forget it’s me who put you where you are now/And I can put you back down too.” Way to turn on the charm, dude.

–Uncle Kracker, “Follow Me.” Not just an adultery song, but an adultery song narrated by a massive egotist who seems to think his lover is five years old.

–U2, “All Because of You.” A joyous praise song with a middle verse that visualizes God as a bullet train mowing down hapless pedestrians. And something about people with high-rises on their backs.

–Liz Phair, “Why can’t I?” There are a lot of pop songs that celebrate being helplessly tossed about by Eros, but this one is probably the most sunnily sadomasochistic about it. “Isn’t this the best part of breakin’ up/Finding someone else you can’t get enough of?” Umm, yeah.

–Miley Cyrus, “The Climb.” “I may not know it/But these are the moments that I’m going to remember most.” My inner logician always says, So, how can you not know it if you’re saying it? Which is not in itself creepy, except that it sounds like the sort of thing an adult would tell a child (”You’re too young to know it now, but …”) repeated in the first person so unreflectively that she doesn’t even notice it doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing wrong with teenagers sounding like their parents, but they should at least sound like they have their own brains.

Kids these days. Why, when I was your age, we were … well, listening to the Human League. Never mind.

November 1, 2009

Still alive, and the undead

Filed under: Arts and entertainment — Camassia @ 6:09 pm

Hi folks, sorry for the abrupt shutdown. Things are going OK, though torturously slowly as my brother-in-law’s treatment is being prepared. It won’t have to be as aggressive as they feared, apparently. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, and life trucks along.

In the meantime, Eve and I have seen a couple of interesting shows at the Synetic Theater, as she mentioned here. It’s difficult to describe the style — sort of interpretive dance mixed with pantomime. That’s just as artsy-fartsy as that sounds, but so well done that it still works. They make incredibly creative use of minimal props — some of the “props” are actually people posing as furniture or whatever — and brilliant use of lighting. It’s an ideal form for fantastical subjects.

Dracula wasn’t quite as successful as Midsummer Night’s Dream, though it was still remarkable. MND was entirely wordless, but Dracula included some dialog, much of it lifted straight from the book. I was amazed, actually, at how faithful to the novel it was, given how long and convoluted the novel is. They managed to fit in all the main characters and important set pieces, though they essentially eliminated the last act in Transylvania. The only additions were a strange dream sequence in the middle (I think it had something to do with Renfield and the rats, though it confusingly didn’t involve Renfield), and a sort of back-story at the beginning showing Dracula as a Christian warrior who is tempted and inhabited by a demon. (This gave me a horrified moment where I thought they might base the play on the Coppola movie, and they did lift a few elements from it, but not egregiously.)

The dialogue scenes didn’t work as well as the wordless parts though, especially since the Count, rather than playing the smooth aristocrat around Jonathan Harker, seems like a nutcase from the beginning. To be fair though, I don’t think any two-hour adaptation could build the suspense as wonderfully as the first act of the novel does; it would just take too much time.

Another problem that modern adapters always seem to hit, though, is that they can’t stop feeling superior to the novel’s complete and utter Victorianness. The program notes include this comment from the director:

Dracula’s three wives represent both a Victorian male’s dream and nightmare: the unbridled sexuality of the female. Their voluptuousness opposes the Victorian ideal so completely that it leaves the men of the story bewildered and fearful — seductive in the same way that their powerful, violent master is to everyone in the story.

The production, as you might imagine, makes the most of this, casting three gorgeous, slinky dancers in red dresses as the Brides. But it also completely leaves out their taste for infanticide. An early scene in the book, but not in the play, involves Dracula bringing them an infant to munch on at the castle, and later sending the wolves after the infant’s mother when she shows up to look for it. The play does show how Lucy develops the same taste for baby blood when she becomes a vampire, but the Brides, once they get to London, are shown only preying on adult men (which I don’t think was in the book). The connection between unbridled sexuality and women turning on babies is a real one, even if you don’t include abortion under that heading; certainly in Stoker’s day, a great many unwanted babies were left to die, or dropped off in foundling hospitals, which often amounted to the same thing. But vampires seem to have acquired such a porno-fantasy patina that no adapter seems to be quite willing to go with the novel’s full-on sexual horror.

I think what frustrates me about this kind of thing is that the really scary part of the novel, in my opinion, is that Dracula is a straight-up sexual predator. He sees his victims as — literally — meat. This ought to be readily translatable to 21st-century viewers, but no adaptation that I’ve seen, strangely enough, has been willing to go as far with this idea as a 112-year-old book. (Though this one was better about it than some; as another friend pointed out, the bite scenes were played straightforwardly as rapes.)

Speaking of the book’s political incorrectness, after the show Eve ventured the theory that it was also based on xenophobia. The Count, and the country he lives in, are frightening embodiments of foreignness. I objected that Van Helsing, the main vampire killer, is also a foreigner (and I might have added so is Quincy Morris, who as a Texan is foreign from an English standpoint). Eve thought that Van Helsing is considered OK because he’s less foreign, from someplace closer to England.

My own theory was that the conflict isn’t so much English-foreign as modern-premodern. It is an observable fact that what people often despise most in foreigners are cultural features that they themselves have recently thrown off. So Americans got passionately involved in the struggle against apartheid, but were mostly baffled by the Hutu-Tutsi conflict; and where medieval Europeans may have criticized Muslims for being infidels, now we criticize them for being sexist. Likewise, the book’s Transylvania could be a scene from England’s past: the arrogant, parasitic nobleman and his insular, superstitious subjects living in a state of mutual distrust.

From what I remember, it’s modernity as much as anything else that destroys Dracula. After seeming almost omnipotent at the beginning, he becomes less and less threatening over the course of the novel, as he is forced to grapple with shipping and train schedules and whatnot. Van Helsing describes him as having a “child brain”, fixed in his habits, incapable of abstraction or deduction. By the time we return to Transylvania in the end, the place is in literal and figurative daylight, and the Count’s eventual destruction is almost anticlimactic.

But of course, the viewing public doesn’t really want to remember Dracula that way. It wants horror to be about the dark places of the world unilluminated, and unilluminatable, by the Enlightenment. Yet this recent turning of vampires into objects of sexual fantasy, or even into superheroes of a sort, seems to diminish them just as much.

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