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.

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.

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.

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.

Laura Blumenfeld’s father is shot at an already inauspicious time in his life. He and his wife are separated; she’s moved in with another man, and the father, it is strongly implied, never quite got over her. When Blumenfeld discusses the event with her father twelve years later, after they have both remarried, he remembers calling his wife to tell her he’d been wounded. “She put me down. She belittled it,” he recalls. “How can you be married for twenty-five years and not care if your husband was shot?”

As she goes searching for the shooter and learning about revenge, Blumenfeld realizes that there is a strong connection between revenge and family ties. “If no one cared, if no one remembered, if no one demanded justice, then the value of life was empty,” she writes after hearing her father’s haunted reminiscence. “If meant the people who were supposed to love you did not.”

The family connection becomes especially apparent when Blumenfeld learns that the terrorists responsible for the shooting spree have been imprisoned, in a high-security facility that only relatives can visit. So instead of visiting the terrorists, she visits their relatives, saying simply that she’s an American reporter researching a book about revenge. They pride themselves on their filial loyalty. It is, in fact, the brother of the group’s mastermind who gives Blumenfeld the line I quote in my first post about this book, to the effect that Westerners’ unwillingness to avenge their families shows how selfish they are.

Despite seeing the dark side of this — apart from the fact that the family supports a terrorist, she also hears about domestic violence from the women — to some extent she envies this solidarity. For a while she entertains an idea of rallying her whole family against his family, trying to get her nerdy brother into the vengeful spirit. “In seeking revenge I could confound the truth that our family had disappeared,” she reflects. “We might have scattered … but as long as we fought for each other, our family lived on. That, in itself, was a tantalizing goal. What was the definition of a family, anyway? In aboriginal Siberia, the word for kindred families is cin-yirin, meaning ‘collection of those who take part in blood revenge.’”

Again, her family reminds me a lot of mine, and I can recognize the feelings in a slightly different form. It actually kind of reminds me of the dinosaurs chasing me around the house, and the realization that the family unit actually meant more to me than my parents’ marriage per se. But her cultural observations make me wonder just how much the disintegration of the vengeance culture is related to the disintegration of family bonds — and if so, which came first. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an advocate of traditional family values wanting to return to the days when family members would avenge each other. Yet that was, not all that long ago, part of Western culture. According to a sixteenth-century English law, Blumenfeld writes, a son who did not avenge his father could not collect his inheritance.

It does seem to me that one reason modern secular society has trouble understanding these things is that it places a relatively low value on loyalty in general. Not only do people leave their spouses with some regularity, but we take it as a matter of course that we will leave our employers, or they will leave us, and that we change out our politicians and vendors and friends and whoever else when they are no longer working for us. It’s nearly impossible to defend the inherent value of loyalty from the standpoint of rational self-interest, and difficult even from a utilitarian standpoint of maximizing happiness. But what is it that makes people happy? Is the smoothness of a relationship always more important than its permanence? Is there a way for people to feel solidarity without always fighting something? And this, too, seems to rely on the assumption of social and physical mobility that I mentioned in the first post, not to mention a high population density. If one relationship ends, it is assumed, we can find another that is more satisfying. Not everyone in all places and times could assume such things. And even people like Blumenfeld and me, I think, find that not everything is replaceable.

Laura Blumenfeld’s odyssey of revenge starts right after her marriage to Baruch, a young federal prosecutor. At the time of their marriage he’s working on a big case against boxing promoter Don King, which provides a narrative counterpoint to Blumenfeld’s primeval desire for vengeance. “In ancient Athens,” Blumenfeld writes, “civilization was said to flourish once the Furies, avenging spirits with snakes in their hair and whips in their hands, were subdued, once Athena had institutionalized them under due process of law.”

The American justice system has gone a long way towards depersonalizing retribution. As King points out, the case is called The United States of America vs. Don King, with the actual victim put somewhat on the sidelines. But there are other places in the world that are in between, retaining both strict legalism and elements of personal vengeance. Blumenfeld, ever the intrepid reporter, goes to visit some of them.

Probably the most surreal episode in the book so far is her visit to Albania, a post-Communist country where a weak government encouraged a return of the old vengeance codes. This situation led to the formation — as if by some strange convergence of the Mafia and the Quakers — of the Blood Feud Committee. (This is one place where I feel the reportage is lacking. Who appointed this committee? Do they get paid?) Albanians follow a canon on revenge compiled by a fifteenth-century nobleman, which sounds as long and detailed a folk code as the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. Precept No. 906 deals with the type of head-grazing shotgun wound Rabbi Blumenfeld suffered, and calls for “three purses” in payment. This leads to a discussion among the committee members as to what that would be after inflation.

Blumenfeld writes that Albanian revenge is driven less by the sort of overwhelming emotion that she feels, than by a sense of duty. You don’t really have the option not to take vengeance, if you value your honor and your family ties at all. She does visit another place, however, where victims have some discretion as to the punishment. Curiously enough, it’s Iran.

Iran’s legal system seems to be somewhere in between the Albanian one and the American one. Islamic law believes in courts and evidence, not vigilantism. But once the sentencing arrives, victims can help determine the punishment and, if the wish, participate in carrying it out. When someone is convicted of murder, he has a chance to plead for mercy from the victim’s family. If they grant it, he pays a fine and goes to prison. If they don’t, he’s executed.

The process apparently goes for lesser offenses also. One ayatollah Blumenfeld talks to describes a case of a woman whose husband threw acid into her face, blinding her. (Oddly enough, I read this just after reading Johann Hari recount a similar incident in Bangladesh. Do Asians just have vats of acid sitting around the house for some reason?) The husband offered to pay damages, but the wife insisted that he should be blinded just like she was. The ayatollah talked her down to taking out just one eye. She performed this office herself: “The woman’s relatives guided her wrists, helping her find her husband’s eye socket. She used a metal spoon to dig.”

As much as people accuse Americans of having a cult of victimhood, it’s difficult to imagine Americans empowering victims in quite this way. Back when I was in college — and I assume, even now — there were feminist legal groups devoted to springing women from jail who’d killed their abusive husbands. But I doubt even they would go for the eyeball-scooping method of justice. It does underscore how detached most Americans are from our own penal system, which doubtless allows many of us to think of ourselves as more civilized than we are. Once offenders are locked away in prison, we can ignore what sort of life our laws and taxes are providing them. The sort of choices that Iranian justice gives you, I suppose, lets you find out just what you are capable of.

But oddly enough, this folds back on my movie violence post, because the movies are one place in American culture where gruesome revenge fantasies roam free. I am reminded of the middle section of Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws, comparing the infamous low-budget rape-revenge movie I Spit On Your Grave with the big-budget Hollywood courtroom drama The Accused. I don’t remember it in detail now (and I haven’t seen either film, which doesn’t help) but I remember Clover describing how the former ends with a close-up of the victim’s face, while the latter ends with a high-altitude shot of the courthouse. That, to her, summarizes aptly who the heroes of the two films are. So which one is really more empowering to women?

Not that I’m claiming the Iranian justice system is especially empowering to women. Apart from the ayatollahs, Blumenfeld talks to a woman who successfully got her ex-stepson imprisoned for killing her daughter, but can’t hang him because a male life isn’t considered an even trade for a female one. (It’s not impossible, but she’s have to pay compensation for it.) But it is interesting to look at how other legal systems compromise between personal feelings and the impersonal rule of law. There’s no one way to do it, and none of them is perfect.