The sudden death of Michael Jackson wasn’t as personal as the death of my ex’s father, but it certainly was more shocking — I had never really pegged him as one of those famous people headed for an early grave. Then again, during the TV coverage of the event someone mentioned the “longtime rumors of drug abuse” that I’d been unaware of, so I guess I hadn’t been paying much attention.

In fact, I’ve realized that I hadn’t really thought about Jackson in a long time, not because of indifference but because I had put him on a sort of mental shelf labeled I Don’t Know What To Think. When Thriller came out I was twelve, and I was awestruck. Although I never actually bought the album, probably because Michael Jackson was always really an audio-visual experience. For a while there, he seemed not only to be a crossover artist in sound and format but to embody the meeting of opposites in his own person — black and white, male and female, child and adult. And of course, there was the dancing.

But as time went by, as his musical output thinned and his face turned into a death-mask, he also descended to a strange place of epistemological uncertainty. How many of those tabloid rumors were true? Was he really a victim of the press, or did he feed them to the tabs himself? And what of those child-abuse allegations? They were dropped, but they were dropped in that unpleasantly unresolved way that reminds us of how life is different from Perry Mason. And so I think that, half-consciously, I started tuning the whole thing out. Not only did I not know, I didn’t really want to know.

For death to claim him at this point leaves me with a sort of bleak feeling, similar, oddly enough, to the bleak feeling I had when Anna Nicole Smith died. I didn’t feel much about her in life, but there’s something upsetting about a person never having a chance to get out of the trash celebrity pit, never getting older and wiser and being able to reflect back and chuckle at the insanity of it all. But the insanity really does eat people, something we would all do well to remember, especially those of us in the press.

Sorry I’ve been so quiet, but over the last two weeks or so I’ve been following, vicariously over email, the sudden decline and death of my (still friendly) ex-boyfriend’s father. It happened rather quickly in the end, but it was not that big a surprise since he was 88 years old; John is 12 years older than I am, and his father had him late in life. The one time I hung out with Paul, over dinner about three years ago, I was amazed that someone nearly as old as my grandparents was still so sharp.

Paul had quite a remarkable life. He grew up in a little Mennonite town on the Canadian prairie, with a strong ethic of communal self-reliance. I gather this belief in looking out for one’s neighbors was part of what inspired Paul and his wife Frieda to foster ten troubled boys before they got around to having their own kids. I remember seeing from the expression on Frieda’s face, as she was telling me this, how hard it must have been, but it was probably educational for Paul’s eventual career as a psychotherapist.

Paul was, in fact, one of the founders of Fuller Seminary’s psychology department back in the early ’60s, bringing together two disciplines that were historically rather suspicious of each other. He later moved on to private practice in Twenty-Nine Palms, which put him in the peculiar position of being a pacifist treating patients who were largely military people. (John explained to me wryly, “As we all know, Marines don’t have any psychological problems. But somehow, their families do.”) When I met him he was still practicing, and even over the dinner table he exuded that combination of warmth and penetrating insight that good therapists tend to have.

It’s sort of a running joke that therapists screw up their kids, but I never saw anything to indicate that the family was anything but close and happy. Those of you who pray, please put in a word for Paul’s soul and for those left behind.

My last post, you may have discerned, was really a combo of a post responding to Helen’s piece with an abortion post I was already planning to write. As a result, the disability part of it kind of got short shrift. But I’ve been thinking about it further and wanted to add a few more thoughts specifically related to disability.

One, I’ve been out and about many times with my brother-in-law, who’s in a wheelchair due to an injury, and I thoroughly approve of ramps, curb breaks, lifts, etc. To my mind, they never represented an illusion of independence so much as simple infrastructure. I’m not up on the details of the ADA, but I don’t have a conceptual problem with the government getting involved in their building either. By building the highways and such for cars the government helped create a society where even basic socializing requires a greater level of mobility than ever before, so it seems a bit churlish to say that it’s special treatment to help the disabled get around on wheels, when everybody else gets around on wheels so much of the time.

I also noticed that Joe Carter made the same point that I did about Jesus’ going around healing people, only more forcefully. Actually, I’m a bit uncomfortable with making it that forcefully, because I think we have to recognize how contextual the definition of disease itself is, especially when it is mental. One country’s madman is another one’s shaman; homosexuality used to be a mental illness, and now it’s not. This is not to say it’s all relative, but I think any Christian who has reason to suspect the post-Enlightenment medical model of humanity (which includes everybody at First Things, I would say) should stop and discern before accepting all pronouncements on the subject. Jesus may have made the blind see and the lame walk, but it’s difficult to picture what his healing an adult with the mind of a 10-month-old would look like.

When it comes to persons with diseases of the mind, I invariably find myself thinking of Oliver Sacks. Unfortunately I don’t have a book on hand to quote from directly, but his recurring thesis is that doctors should consider neurology patients, even severely disabled ones, as whole people. In his case I think that’s different from either defining a person by their disability, or imagining the person without it. Rather, it’s saying that every person who has a disability is unique, and will incorporate it into his or her life in sometimes unpredictable ways. In some cases, that means they incorporate it so well that healing it may cause disruption (as blind people whose sight has been suddenly restored often find the experience more frightening and confusing than liberating). However, there are few generalities one can make in that regard, which is why Sacks tends to structure his books as collections of case studies. Before making broad philosophical claims about autonomy and eschatology, that might be a good thing to keep in mind.

Eve asked what people think of Helen Rittelmeyer’s article making a conservative argument for disability activism. She says that if someone offered a cure for her severely disabled sister her family probably wouldn’t take it, because they love her the way she is. Helen goes on to argue that loving the disabled this way is better to them than pushing them towards independence and autonomy; many of them will never achieve it, and it encourages the view that a dependant is somehow less human. She also urges us not to be so afraid of the fact that this means suffering. Although she shies away from shallow “suffering builds character” formulations, she says that taking the harder path can bring other benefits, and “When the compensating benefit is love, the answer is easy.”

This post intersects with another line of thought I’ve been having lately, brought along by the renewed focus on abortion in the media and the blogosphere. I’ve been nagged by a memory of a time when I was about eight years old, and my mother first explained the whole abortion debate to me. My mother is pro-choice, and so she explained it from that point of view; but I asked her why, given the contention over the life of the fetus, a woman who didn’t want to raise a child couldn’t just put it up for adoption. My mother said something like, “But when you have a baby you feel such a strong attachment, it’s just unbearable to give it up.”

I think this has stuck in my mind all these years partly because, for all the abortion debates I’ve heard or read, I don’t recall anyone else addressing this problem quite so directly. Most pro-choice arguments seem to focus on rights, and thus wheel off into ungainly analogies about dying violinists and whatnot. And some feminists seem suspicious of the idea of a strong innate mother-love to begin with. But it seems to me that without it, the argument for total free choice is actually harder to make. Most pregnancies entail some physical hardship, but in the modern world it is generally not greater than some of the other hardships that obeying the law inflicts on us, like military conscription, lengthy jury duty, paying taxes for undeserving causes and not being able to steal when you have no money. Some intangible emotional hardship, therefore, seems required in order to put unwanted pregnancy up there with torture and rape as experiences that any person has a natural right not to suffer.

But I think the other reason the comment stuck in my mind is the picture of mother-love that it offers — a picture that is not, when it comes to it, entirely positive. It makes getting pregnant at the wrong time sound sort of like falling in love with the wrong guy: you can’t live with him and you can’t stand to see anyone else live with him, so you feel a dark temptation to rub him out. In that way, some abortions may actually be crimes of passion.

But a more benevolent way of looking at it, which is probably more the case with my mother, is that mother-love entails a profound fear of the child suffering. If you give it up for adoption, you certainly run the risk that it will suffer badly: it might never be adopted, or it might be adopted by crazy people. Moreover, a mother who decides to keep the baby because of the tortured I-don’t-want-it-but-I-do feelings described earlier may be setting it up for a pretty difficult childhood also. I think my mother’s point of view, based on some other comments she’s made, is that some people are better off aborted than being raised by certain parents.

So in settling on love as a basis for bioethics, Helen is certainly hanging her position on one of the most complex and contested words in the English language. But for all that she talks about suffering, Helen still doesn’t quite directly address the question of the suffering of the disabled person — whether disabled physically or by a lack of a functioning family. Doesn’t love at least entail some aspect of not wanting to see a person suffer? Is every person who wishes to die really suffering from inadequate love, or does the natural instinct to end suffering sometimes overpower even that?

I also wanted to make a couple of theological points about the piece. In her link to it, Eve notes that “when Christ appeared to the apostles in His glory, the glorified body still bore the wounds of crucifixion.” True, but weighed against that is the fact that Christ spent much of his earthly ministry curing disabilities, including blindness, deafness and paralysis. Granted, there’s a pretty big difference between that and the modern ministrations of medical science, but it does seem to challenge Helen’s claim that disabilities are essential to a person’s self. Seeing “an imaginary version of that person minus his disability” actually seems to be a pretty big part of the Kingdom vision.

The question of a person’s ultimate condition gets even knottier when it comes to abortion. Certainly a materialist view of death as being simple non-existence can make it seem preferable to a life of suffering, and indeed, makes it not seem all that different from the state of being a barely-existent embryo. But a Christian view of the afterlife doesn’t necessarily help define what it is that’s so bad about death. I recall back when the Slacktivist was starting through the Left Behind novels (amazingly, he’s still at it!), the Rapture was described as taking unborn fetuses from their mothers’ wombs. The Slacktivist pointed out that this was making an anti-abortion point by asserting that fetuses do have souls. But a commenter pointed out that this makes abortion seem like doing a baby a favor: after all, they get straight to heaven this way, while letting them grow up just gives them an opportunity to damn themselves.

It is perhaps a measure of how much we are all Baptists now that I’ve never heard a pedobaptist make the obvious rejoinder to this, which is that a baby probably isn’t going to get to heaven without being baptized. To be fair, last I heard the Catholic Church itself is unclear about what happens to unbaptized infants, so that may be speaking out of turn. But it does seem that, in order to make a truly pro-life argument, one has to see life as more than a booby-trap on the road to heaven.

I noted in an earlier post — which, not coincidentally, also brought up mothering — that there is a strain of thought in the New Testament to the effect that living, suffering and dying are necessary steps toward the next phase of existence, one closer to God. And yet at the same time, it still generally regards the infliction of suffering as a sin and an outgrowth of a fallen world. And even less helpfully, despite the fact that infant mortality was extremely high back then it never brings up the question of whether a dead infant has, once and for all, been deprived of the opportunity to go through that process.

I should say that the fact that there are many people living difficult lives, who nonetheless assert they are worth it, gives me pause about the whole “abort to preempt suffering” idea. It does seem like going overboard with the whole children are horrendously fragile concept that has grown in the last 150 years or so. So despite my criticisms, I think Helen makes some valuable points here. It does, however, feel like it needs some filling out (which I guess the “towards” in the title is pretty much admitting).

A couple weeks ago I commented on one of Russell’s posts about America’s civic religion that if we really have such a thing, it’s Baptist. The comment was more in the spirit of floating an idea that staking out a position, but no one responded to it (the conversation seemed to be winding down anyway), so it didn’t float any further than that. Dwight’s recent post about faith and politics, however, made me think it would be worth pursuing further.

This idea came from a couple books I read a year or two ago: one was Robert Torbet’s A History of the Baptists, and the other one was … well, it was a book about the history of American religion, but I can’t for the life of me remember either the author or the title. So I’m afraid this post is going to be really fuzzily sourced. But what are blogs for, if not for writing essays that would fail to meet academic standards?

Anyway, one thing I took away from both of them was the way that the U.S. Constitution wound up favoring some denominations over others. I had already heard arguments that the document’s stance of religious neutrality really represented an ideology unto itself, generally of a secularist Enlightenment variety. But it became clear to me that it was also taking a side in a long-running argument between religious factions about the nature of church, and hence the relationship between church and state.

When the Baptists came into being in England in the early 1600s, there were several church-state models around Europe: the international parastate that was Catholicism, the soft theocracy of the Church of England, the hard theocracy of Calvinism, the “Two Kingdoms” model of Luther, and the separatism of the Anabaptists. The Baptists were started by an Englishman who hung out with Anabaptists and adopted most of their beliefs, but with a few modifications. One of these was that, while Baptists believed in separation of church and state, they didn’t think this meant total withdrawal from state affairs; Baptists could, and did, serve in the military and hold public office. The exact ramifications of this were just as fuzzy then as they are now. Some Baptists served Cromwell, for instance, hoping this would aid the cause of religious liberty, while others disagreed.

As unclear as the Baptist position was, this was more or less what the founding fathers enshrined in the Constitution. It presumed — indeed, demanded — robust citizen participation in government, and also preserved free exercise of religion, but forbade an established church. The fact that not all churches were equally prepared for this is apparent when you look at the dominant churches of the day. The Anglican church, where much of the Southern elite resided, had the obvious problem that it was in a country that had revolted against its formal head, the King of England. New England, meanwhile, was still controlled by descendants of the Calvinist theocrats who first colonized it. (Torbet’s book notes that a New England Baptist wrote to John Adams complaining of persecution; Adams said he was sympathetic, but he had as much chance of changing the course of the solar system as budging the Congregationalist establishment.) The Quakers and Mennonites held the majority in Pennsylvania, but, being pacifists, they largely sat out the Revolution. Most of the founding fathers formally belonged to one of the dominant churches, but many of them privately held deist or Unitarian beliefs. That sort of double life is pretty common in a world of state-supported churches, but with disestablishment it lost its point.

Given all that, it’s not terribly surprising that the American religious landscape started changing massively within decades of the Revolution. The biggest beneficiaries, in terms of numbers, were two denominations that had never been established anywhere: Baptists and Methodists. In fact, another thing I learned from my reading is just how important John Wesley was to the formation of American Christianity. I had always wondered, for instance, why churches are filled with small groups, and try from the outset to steer you into one. Turns out Wesley started that. He was also the one who emphasized the importance of having a “born again” experience, and of having a personal relationship with Jesus. American evangelicalism, for the most part, is a mash-up of Baptist ecclesiology with Wesleyan theology.

But getting back to the subject of church and state. The reason why Baptist ecclesiology was so well suited to the U.S.A. is not just its views on church and state, but the underlying belief in the voluntary religious choices of individuals. This may sound like the same thing, but it’s actually somewhat different. The government in Augustine’s day, for instance, tolerated a number of local religions but granted religious authorities a lot of judicial power over their membership — including, if need be, the power of the sword. By defending the rights of the individual to migrate from one church to another, the U.S. government is taking a position on the nature of church that favors a Baptist interpretation over others (certainly, over Augustine’s).

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this — true neutrality on this point would have been impossible, and I have no yen to return to Augustine’s Africa. But it is striking how now, all these discussions about civic religion and church/state relations resemble the arguments that Baptists used to have among themselves, rather than the larger arguments between different Christian groups. Even the fact that we have arguments in the first place is very Baptist; the Baptists were the pioneers of doing church based on the Bible alone with no central magisterium, so of course there were disagreements from the beginning.

This, I think, is precisely the source of Dwight’s frustration:

I have cited as an example that of Minnesota’s political mess: Because of a looming budget deficit and the inability of the governor to work with the legislature to reach reasonable accommodations in each party’s rhetorical stances, the state faces a situation in which the budget deficit will be made up by using accounting shifts (a dishonest, though apparently legal way to deal with things) and by the governor’s exercising what he calls his “unallotment” powers – i.e., his ability (also apparently legal) unilaterally and according to his own discretion to cut program funds wherever he wants. He has announced that most of his cutting will be to health and well-being programs (such as money for hospitals, nursing homes, and services for disabled people) and to GAMC, which is the state’s program of health insurance for the poorest people in Minnesota. In short, he is going to protect rich people from tax increases and balance the budget on the backs of poor and sick people.

Now the governor touts himself (he is quite open about) as a Christian. So I claim that by the counsels of Matthew 18, every Christian in Minnesota should be at his door or in his email in-box to rebuke him for a particularly cruel approach to public policy that ignores the warnings of Matthew 25. After that, we should go in two’s and three’s. Then we should address him through our bishops. If he fails to see the light, we should treat him as a “gentile and a tax collector” – most ironic, given his stance. But note that this doesn’t mean that we join the Democratic Party (heaven forfend, in my opinion) or pray for the success of a candidate who runs against him. Using the political-party system “as Christians” to work our will is not the way to go, any more than that it was Jesus’ way to become a Zealot in order to effect and manifest the reign of his Father.

Of course, the problem is that there isn’t really a unified Christian body to do all these things. The fact that vocal Christian Tim Pawlenty and vocal Christian Dwight P. find themselves in this situation points out an uncomfortable fact about how modern America is different from ancient Rome. The people are not divided into Christians and pagans; the people are divided into Christians and heretics. And the U.S. Constitution has pretty well prevented any consensus on which is which.

I should add that “heretics” include people like me, descended from two generations of non-believers. The decisions by my grandparents to turn away from their Congregationalist and Episcopalian upbringings transmitted both some of the values and assumptions of those upbringings, and the fears and aversions that caused the break. I think that is why I ultimately found Yoder’s and Hauerwas’ analogies between America and Rome unsatisfactory. However many Christians would like to be a counterculture, they can’t escape a certain responsibility for the culture they are countering. Whether or not we are all Baptists now, this is still pretty much a family quarrel.

Richard Beck has been doing a series on Freud from a Christian perspective. As with a lot of Richard’s writing I find myself sort of agreeing and sort of disagreeing with it. A good example is when he discusses the unique pressures Freud placed on parents:

Most cultures have tended to place adulthood at the center of culture, especially the elderly. Americans, by contrast, have inverted this widespread emphasis. The elderly in America tend to be marginalized and discounted. The elderly are not deferred to or respected the way they are in other cultures. Rather than respecting old age and wisdom, Americans idolize youthfulness and childhood…

Freud was significant in this shift of focus (from Jesus’s culture to our own) in that Freud was the first influential thinker to devote significant attention to the role of childhood upon adulthood functioning. Freud’s detailed theory of the psychosexual stages of development was unprecedented. Further, Freud detailed the way family relationships between parents, siblings and children can affect development, for good or ill. For Freud, the secret to who I am today is to be found in the past, in the early experiences of family and childhood.

This idea–the child is the father to the man–is so widely held that we fail to note how revolutionary it was when Freud began placing family life under the microscope. True, prior to Freud many acknowledged the importance of childhood. But Freud’s analysis and theory revealed just how much could get screwed up during those years. Suddenly, childhood became very, very fragile. Parents could really mess things up. Kids could get ruined very easily.

Overnight, parenthood became a minefield. One had to tread carefully. Kids won’t spontaneously recover from bad parenting. Thus, great skill was required. The Better Parenting obsession and industry was born.

I think he’s right that Freud had a lot to do with this, but it’s also worth asking how Freud found such a receptive audience. In an earlier post I quoted E.J. Graff commenting that the Victorian era (which had passed by the time Freud hit it off) brought “a new vision of children as malleable angels in need of love, rather than as wild beasties in need of discipline.” Freud, in his way, still saw children as beasts, but definitely as beasts in need of love.

This attitude towards parenting also makes the view of parenting in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, difficult to swallow. A few years back I remember Christopher Hitchens criticizing the Ten Commandments because, among other things, they command honoring your father and mother but don’t say anything about child abuse. This is one of those things that make the OT seem to favor the already favored.

I must say, though, that watching my grandmother die, along with reading James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh, gave me a rather different perspective on the subject. Before the industrial era, human relationships were governed by reciprocity and the gift exchange. In the case of parents and children, the deal basically went like this: I take care of you in your childhood, you take care of me in my old age. Although it sounds less romantic than the Victorian vision of family, it also placed parents and children on a fairly equal footing. Sure, you’re helpless and dependent on parents in youth, but eventually the situation will reverse itself — and be in a position to pay back, for good or for ill, however you were treated.

It’s not difficult to see, actually, how society would find it more necessary to enforce elder care than child care. When you’re the first one to give a gift, you take the risk you won’t get anything back. Children are cute, growing and mostly healthy, which makes them more appealing to be around than people who are shriveled, sick and dying. And adults in their prime would likely have children to look after at the same time they have ailing parents, which might put the elders lower on the priority list. This is not to say that child abuse never happened, of course; but it probably didn’t seem like a broad social threat.

The rise of the industrial economy, its attendant wealth, and later its attendant welfare state changed all that. The exchange between parents and kids became purely emotional. Which made it, in a way, more demanding for both of them. The idea of having kids so that they’ll support you sounds terribly crass and materialistic now, and has been largely displaced by the ideal of a parent as an altruist, devoting his or her life purely for the satisfaction of making another life. But, fallen humanity being what it is, hardly anybody does anything for purely unselfish reasons, so a lot of parents have kids hoping they’ll fulfill emotional needs. Which, really, kids are very badly equipped to do, being naturally egocentric, error-prone, and only vaguely capable of understanding other people’s mental states. Parents, bless them, usually love them anyway, but from the kid’s point of view it’s probably simpler to just help look after the sheep.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this still only applies to a certain affluent segment of the population. Ault points out that one of the major cultural differences between much of the Christian right and their urban liberal neighbors is that the former still hold to a more traditional, interdependent view of family while liberals see family more as a launching pad for successful individuals within a larger society. The interests of these pre- and post-Freudian viewpoints sometimes converge; every argument about violence in the media, for instance, brings out both conservatives worried about social morals and liberals worried that it will imprint children for life. The whole picture is really a lot more complicated than can be covered in a blog post. But I think these are pieces of the puzzle, nonetheless.

The compressed Star Trek.

I’ve been wondering many things about Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Such as, why exactly is it so awesome even for a non-metal fan like me? How much might this movie boost their career? And how did a documentary about an unknown metal band get a major theatrical release, anyway?

The last bit is partly explained by the fact that it’s being distributed by VH1 Productions. About ten years ago their TV station made a movie about Sweetwater, an unknown hippie band that almost got famous and then disappeared. The network may have realized that Anvil is the Sweetwater of Generation X — and on top of that, a real-life Spinal Tap.

But why do we watch things like that? The advent of reality TV has certainly filled the airwaves with old rock stars, and maybe there’s a schadenfreude in seeing the formerly rich and famous brought to earth. But that theory works more for has-beens than for never-wases. I guess in a culture that celebrates achievement and ambition as much as ours does — dreaming big dreams, doing your own thing, following your passion — failure can’t be too punishing. Otherwise no one would be willing to risk anything. And so ever since the first Rocky movie, at least, we’ve awarded a certain dignity to people who try and fall short.

If anyone is a model for dealing with falling short, it’s Lips Kudlow, the Yogi Berra of rock. “After all’s been said and done, I can say that all has been said and done,” he says as he drives to his crappy day job. After a European tour goes to hell, he points out, “At least there was a tour for things to go wrong on.”

Not that you’d want to imitate Lips on every particular. It’s difficult to escape the feeling that he and his bandmate, Robb Reiner, stick with it partly because they just don’t know how to dream any other dream. (The sense of fixation is amplified by the music, which sounds like it’s barely changed in twenty-five years of songwriting.) But getting in ruts is one of those hazards of age. While teenagers may look at rock stars as examples of the limitless possibilities of adulthood, as time goes on we see that all of us run up against limits.

That’s especially poignant when it happens to old-time metal musicians, because for so long they put on stage personas as Nietzschean supermen who knew no limits. Taboo, pain, death, God, and hell seemed not to bother them. I remember a fourth-grade classmate horrifying me by describing birds being bitten and stomped to death at a KISS concert, and he even sketched a picture for me. He also told me solemnly that Gene Simmons urinated on the audience.

None of this was true, and such transgression as did occur now looks less like fearlessness than like obliviousness. At one point in the movie, Lips and Robb reminisce about the first song they wrote together. In history class they learned about torture in the Spanish Inquisition, and thought it would be a cool subject for a song, so they came up with some nasty lyrics about hanging people by their thumbs. This is all done with such boyish glee that it’s hard not to laugh along with them. (This is made a bit creepier when you learn later that Robb’s father was imprisoned at Auschwitz for being Jewish.)

But however they may laugh at torture and death, even metal guys have something to fear from the jungle of human relationships. After the movie Lee mentioned seeing Metallica’s 2004 documentary Some Kind of Monster, which wound up largely being about how the band sorted out their personal issues. It was, he said, a little disappointing to see his heroes admitting to getting their feelings hurt by the same kind of stuff that hurts everybody else. I haven’t seen that film, but I remember hearing James Hetfield on Fresh Air, talking earnestly about how he had to learn to let go of his anger at his parents. He had learned that, in the words of Yogi Lips, “Family is important shit.” And even though Hetfield achieved everything Lips dreamed of, on that front they are equals.

(Post title pinched from Anthony Lane.)

The new Land of the Lost movie is probably horrible, but one thing I can thank it for is that it inspired the Sci-Fi Channel to run a marathon of the original series yesterday. Between that and seeing Anvil, I’m sure I melted many brain cells. But, looking at the show after 25 years or so, I’m impressed by how ambitious it was for a Saturday morning kids’ show. It even lurched into philosophy at some points, such as when our hero, Rick Marshall, starts arguing with a humanoid lizard with the personality of a Vulcan.

The lizard, named Enik, believes that his race is advanced and peaceful, unlike us human barbarians. But he has traveled through time and realized that his people are going to go all Morlock in the distant future, so he has to go back and warn them to control their anger. Marshall wants to use the same technology to get back to his own time and place (present-day Earth). This causes Enik to use his telephatic powers to give Marshall terrifying visions, which Marshall points out is awfully violent, given that Enik is supposed to be advanced and peaceful and all. “Using force is fine with you so long as it’s dispassionate — unfeeling!” he says, as I paraphrase it from memory. “That’s what destroyed your people! You don’t need to restrain your anger — you need compassion — feelings!”

This was all sounding awfully familiar, and I realized it echoed very closely a fascinating article I read recently about the evolution of the idea of compassion as a virtue. The ancient Greeks, says poli-sci professor Clifford Orwin, saw compassion as neutral to negative, because it was a feeling:

They recognized its power and therefore its utility in political life, but doubted its reasonableness and therefore its justice. It figures in Plato’s Republic primarily as a threat to justice (cf. Republic 415c, 606a–c). Aristotle treats it not in his Ethics, his account of those virtues for which human beings are to be admired, but in his Rhetoric, his exposition of those passions by which those lacking virtue are swayed. Since for both thinkers virtue consists of the proper (which is to say rational) disposition toward the passions, it follows that pity, as a passion, is not to be confused with the virtues. Just as virtue requires us to get a handle on our other passions, so it requires that we become masters of our pity.

Christianity took a more benevolent view of compassion, but during the Middle Ages its goals were distinctly otherworldly: doing the compassionate thing meant helping your neighbor get to heaven, with earthly concerns distinctly secondary. It took the Enlightenment, and particularly, Rousseau to start celebrating emotive compassion as a virtue:

Of the resources available to social man, only compassion addressed both the utopianism of early liberal thought and the harmful effects of commerce. It was not calculated but spontaneous, and the bonds that it forged with our fellow human beings were mutual and genuine. It alone permitted those who had received a proper education in it to transcend the barriers of inequality as of other divisions among human beings. Rousseau’s imagined paragons of compassion were the “great cosmopolitan souls” of the Discourse on Inequality, who “surmount the imaginary barriers that separate Peoples and who, following the example of the sovereign Being who created them, include the whole human Race in their benevolence.”

This is not the only time in the series that Marshall sounds kind of like Rousseau, and Enik sounds kind of like an ancient Greek. “No one has the right to rule anybody!” Marshall shouts to an alien with delusions of grandeur. At another time when Marshall needs his help, Enik goes along not out of pity, but because it shames him when a human shows more self-control and self-sacrifice than himself.

This probably doesn’t speak to how many philosophy courses the show’s writers took, as it underscores Orwin’s point that this debate is deeply embedded in our culture. A lot of academic theorizing seems pretty disconnected from reality to me, but it was neat to read that article and then see it confirmed in such an unlikely place. And I’m sure that’s one reason why it was already lodged in my brain, unarticulated, from so long ago.

Via Philocrites, an interesting article about a Unitarian Universalist boomlet in Kenya. The reasons Kenyans have for converting to it are familiar (its egalitarianism, its tolerance, its lack of rules) and not so familiar (it allows polygamy!). The piece also describes movingly the efforts to build orphanages and schools with practically no money. I wish, however, it had delved a bit more into a pastor’s early statement that “we take the Bible literally.” This is not something that one hears western UUs say, and it makes me wonder what the larger worldview is here. Everybody quoted in the piece converted to it from Christianity, so probably they carried a lot of that with them, but I keep hearing how Christianity is different in Africa — more faith healings and exorcisms, less western science. There’s also a distinctly anti-colonial bent to the Africans’ conversion to Unitarianism, including a pastor’s statement that homosexuality is largely a western import to Africa, and so should be opposed. One suspects that western scientific rationalism isn’t as prominent here as in western UUism, but it’s not clear what is in its place.

On a completely different note, LiveJournalist Sister Magpie has a moderately spoilery post praising the new Star Trek movie for letting its young heroes be doofuses. I hadn’t really thought about that, but it’s true: the Maverick-type heroes are incredibly annoying, while this movie says that young hotshots actually need wise elders. I will say, though, that at the end of the movie I still felt like Kirk got away with too much. He proved himself to be basically a reckless egotist who was awesome in battle. And so Starfleet’s response is … to put him in charge of a peaceful mission of exploration? Is this really the guy you want representing your society to strange new worlds?