Culture – Page 38 – Into the Woods

And they lived happily ever after

Note: This post contains no spoilers if you have watched the series through Season 6, episode 3.

Those in the U.K. have already said goodbye to Downtown Abbey. Here in the U.S., we have five more episodes to go. I never gave up on Downton Abbey the way some did. Sure, it’s a soap opera. But it’s a good soap opera. It’s also a fantastic period piece, a marvel of language and accents, and a visual spectacle. The characters are superb and now feel like family. Season 6 is when we get to have our long goodbye with all these characters — and, I’m pretty well convinced, see almost all of them happy.

Downton Abbey has always relied on honest, classic storytelling. I’ve started watching lots of series but stopped, usually because the screenwriters (especially in series set in the here and now, which I almost never like) tried to overcome our jadedness and boredom by shocking us, or by being quirky.

Classic, honest storytelling means that, in the end, the wicked are punished and the deserving get their heart’s desire. And this — rightly so — is clearly where the last season of Downtown Abbey is going to leave us.

For the most part, the wicked have already been punished. Some characters who served as villains for a while transformed and redeemed themselves and now should have their reward.

Let the happiness roll:

In episode 3, Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes get married. Now that their legal troubles are over, it appears that John and Anna Bates will have a child at last (though there will be a bit of trouble first). Tom Branson realizes who his true family is and comes home from Boston, grandchildren and all. Lady Edith clearly has found a new beau and perhaps a husband. Daisy will better herself through education and see Mr. Mason settled in a new home. Mr. Molesley will probably find that he’s a true scholar after all, not just a scholar wannabe. Robert and Cora Crawley will land on their feet and nobly carry on, even if it’s in reduced circumstances. Lady Mary will probably end up alone, but isn’t that probably what’s best for her? Even Thomas Barrow, who has been repeatedly rejected and humiliated, seems likely to end up happy, with the boyfriend he has never had.

We’ll remember these characters for many years, and the DVDs that we bought are DVDs that we will watch again.

Book review: a biography of Theodore Parker

American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, by Dean Grodzins. University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 656 pages.

It’s surprising that Theodore Parker isn’t better known than he is. Parker (1810-1860), a transcendentalist, was a friend of Emerson. He inspired Thoreau. He was in the thick of things in the Boston-Concord area during his era. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. picked up some famous rhetoric from Parker. For example, Parker’s words, talking about slavery, were:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

This inspired Martin Luther King’s famous words:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

In his Gettysburg address, Lincoln was paraphrasing words that Parker used in a speech in 1850: “A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”

Parker was a Unitarian. The Unitarians had more room for Parker than, say, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, but even some of Parker’s Unitarian friends shunned Parker as Parker became increasingly heretical.

What were some of Parker’s heresies? For one, Parker pretty much threw the entire Old Testament under the bus as primitive and unbelievable (not to mention lousy even as metaphor) and dominated by a cruel and immoral God. The question of miracles, and whether miracles were important or not, apparently was a big theological issue in Parker’s time. Parker came to believe that New Testament miracles were of no importance and probably didn’t really happen, that a revelation stood or fell on its own merit. Parker believed that some of the teachings of Jesus — not to mention the apostles — was wrong and morally flawed. Parker also rocked the boat. He became an outspoken abolitionist. Even Boston churchmen during this era who disapproved of slavery were careful not to preach too vehemently against slavery, because it got people too excited. Abolitionists were expected to be discreet in genteel society.

In many ways, this book is a theological history as much as a biography of Theodore Parker. These guys weren’t just preaching sermons to their congregations. They also were carrying on a theological debate with each other, a debate that also reached into the newspapers and the many church journals that were printed at the time.

I think it would be fair to say that Parker’s heresy boiled down to this: That ultimately, conscience, not scripture, is the only reliable guide. Note that in his statement about justice, it is conscience that allows Parker to divine the arc of the moral universe. I think it also would be fair to say (nor does Dean Grodzins say such a thing in this biography) that Parker left theology behind and became a moral philosopher instead. I think it also would be fair to say the same of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually gave up the ministry because it held him back. As for moral philosophy, Parker certainly was influenced by Kant. Parker also read in twenty languages, and he was particularly interested in German philosophy of that era. On a year-long trip to Europe, Parker tried to visit Goethe’s widow, but she was out.

It’s a shame to lose the thoughts of people like Theodore Parker who were so far ahead of their time. It’s amazing, really, how much progress was made in the 19th Century by the intellectual elite, though very little of that filtered down to incurious common folk. The white Protestant churches preach the same old fundamentalist, know-nothing stuff today, as though Emancipation and Civil Rights and all that thought and progress never happened. One of Parker’s complaints about social injustice, actually, was that working people had to work too hard and had little time for reading and study and bettering themselves intellectually. I wonder what Parker would think of television. Congregations at the time — at least Unitarian congregations — actually followed these debates and got intellectually involved. As Parker’s fame grew, people packed large halls in Boston to hear him speak. Who buys tickets to lecture series today? Are there even any lecture series to buy tickets to?

This biography ends around 1846, about 14 years before Parker’s death in 1860. Is Grodzins planning a second volume? Or was it that Grodzins was primarily interested in tracing the development of Parker’s heresy, and that was a done deal by 1846?

The ability (and inability) to judge character

You would think that after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as social beings, we humans would be pretty good at judging the character and intentions of other humans. The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson has written, for example, that we humans constantly study other humans and that this explains our insatiable demand for stories, or why we love to gossip. Even our pets are very good at perceiving our intentions.

And yet a sizable chunk of the American population is dangerously bad at judging character. Not only that, this sizable chunk of the population all too often sees deranged and narcissistic people as political and religious leaders and sends them money by the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. This is one of the most frightening and unpredictable facts of American politics. I am not terribly concerned about sexual peccadillos, except for the extreme hypocrisy of all-too-many preachers. Private sexual peccadillos don’t get us into wars or prey on the poor so that preachers and millionaires can ride around in jets and avoid paying taxes.

Can the ability to judge character be tested? Are there ways of impartially establishing who is good at judging character and who is not?

As early as 1929, MacMillan published Studies in the Nature of Character: General methods and Results by some academics from Columbia University. Since then, a good bit of research has been published on how good we are (or are not) at judging the character of others. How is this research done?

The basic method, as far as I can tell from my own admittedly limited research, is to go to a group of people who know each other and to ask those people to predict how others will perform on “personal inventory” tests. There are many such personality tests that clinicians use, for example the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Then you compare people’s predictions with other people’s actual performance on the tests and look for statistically significant correlations.

What are some of the factors that correlate with being a good judge, or a poor judge, of character? Here are some of the candidates, with a rough description of what researchers have found:

• Age: Though children improve in their ability to judge character between the ages of 3 and 14, there is no evidence that older people get better at judging character.

• Sex: There no convincing evidence that men or women are better at judging character.

• Family background: This area has not been well studied, but so far there is no evidence that family background matters much.

• Intelligence: Now we’re getting somewhere. Smart people are indeed better at judging the character of others. Smart people also, unsurprisingly, are better at judging the intelligence of others.

• Training in psychology: This is murky, but it may well be true that trained psychologists are no better than the rest of us at judging character.

• Sensitivity and artistic ability: There is pretty good evidence that artistic and sensitive people are better judges of character. People with literary abilities may be particularly good at judging character.

• Emotional stability: The evidence here is scant, though it is pretty clear that people who are excessively anxious, troubled by obsessions, etc., are poorer judges of character.

• Social skill and popularity: Though good social skills seem to help people judge character, those who are the best judges of character tend to be capable of a kind of scientific social detachment. For example, physicists may be better judges of character than psychologists. Poor judges of character are more socially oriented than better judges. It may follow (though I did not find any specific research) that introverts are better judges of character than extraverts.

And finally:

• Good character: People of good character are probably better equipped to judge the character of others. It’s important to keep in mind a famous statement by Gordon Allport:

As a rule, people cannot comprehend others who are more complex and subtle than they. The single-track mind has little feeling for the conflicts of a versatile mind. People who prefer simplicity of design and have no taste for the complex in their aesthetic judgments are not as good judges as those with a more complex cognitive style and tastes.

Unfortunately I could not easily find any research that looked for correlations between religiosity and the ability to judge character. But insofar as I myself am able to judge the character of others (feel free to judge me!), I would have to say that evangelical, salvation-oriented religious types are among the very worst judges of character. As for why people send millions of dollars to preachers like Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart, it helps to remember that half the population have IQs of under 100 and live pretty hard lives. Getting money and votes out of people who are not so smart and not doing very well is now a think-tank science — the smart studying the not-so-smart so as to take political and economic advantage of them. Unfortunately, that may be the No. 1 key to American politics at present.

Celestial divination

Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination, edited by N.M. Swerdlow. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999.

An Analysis of Celestial Omina in the Light of Mesopotamian Cosmology and Mythos (master’s thesis), by Robert Jonathan Taylor, 2006.

How did the ancients predict the future using the stars? Why do I care?

I care because, in Oratorio in Ursa Major (to be released April 1, 2016), Jake will meet characters in 48 B.C. who do celestial divination. As with all the science and history in my novels, I don’t want to just make stuff up. Research is required. A year or so ago in another post on another book, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, I described how the ancients knew quite a lot about the science of astronomy. They were careful observers of celestial events, they developed pretty accurate theories, and they were much better at math than we might think today.

But divination — that is, prediction — obviously went much farther than astronomy. What were their methods?

As with astronomy, much of the work that went into celestial divination was done first by the Babylonians, and from there it spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Kings were particularly interested in predicting the future, and kings could afford astronomers. Will the crops be good? If a war begins, who will win? Is the king at risk of dying? Those were urgent questions, and the stars were believed to hold the answers.

Books such as Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination are more concerned about how the ancients did the observations than the kinds of predictions they made. The master’s thesis by Robert Jonathan Taylor was a lucky find, because Taylor is less concerned with the science and more concerned with the predictions.

Briefly put, the ancients composed catalogs of omina, also called omina series. The catalogs of omina lists celestial conditions determined from observations, then tell you what the observations mean. [If … then.] These predictions were based on experience, it seems. Though no doubt there was an intuitive element and some kind of reasoning.

Here are some examples of omina (taken from ancient clay tablets that have survived and that scholars have carefully catalogued and published):

If Venus is dimmed in month I: in that month the crop of the land will not succeed, the market will decrease.

If Venus enters Jupiter: the king of Akkad will die, the dynasty will change, either a soldier will go out or the enemy will send a message (asking for peace) to the land.

If the star of Marduk is dark when it becomes visible: in this year there will be the asakku-disease.

If an eclipse begins and clears in the north: Downfall of the army of Akkad.

Eclipses were very ominous. The observations listed in the omina had to do with the moon, the planets, certain stars, the sun, and even the weather. The planet Venus was of particular interest because (since Venus is close to the sun) it moves across the sky pretty speedily. Jupiter was thought to be especially predictive of dynasty changes.

As you can see, ancient celestial divination was not really the same as the kind of zodiacal astrology that many people believe in today.

New music on Dec. 18?

My mention of John Williams’ “Leia’s theme” in a recent post got me wondering about the sound track for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which will open on Dec. 18.

The Wikipedia article confirms that Disney commissioned John Williams to compose the score. We also know that Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill will return (somewhat older) in their old roles. So it stands to reason that the score will include the old themes. In the Wikipedia article, Williams confirms that we’ll hear the old themes, but he doesn’t say much about new musical themes:

[The old themes] “will seem very natural and right in the moments for which we’ve chosen to do these kinds of quotes. There aren’t many of them, but there are a few that I think are important and will seem very much a part of the fabric of the piece in a positive and constructive way.”

As you can imagine, Star Wars fans worldwide have been sleuthing and looking for leaks. Amazon France apparently accidentally leaked the track list for the soundtrack CD:

1. Main title and the attack on the jakku village
2. The scavenger
3. I can fly anything
4. Rey meets bb-8
5. Follow me
6. Rey’s thème
7. The falcon
8. That girl with the staff
9. The rathtars!
10. Finn’s confession
11. Maz’s counsel
12. The starkiller
13. Kylo ren arrives at the battle
14. The abduction
15. Han and leia
16. March of the resistance
17. Snoke
18. On the inside
19. Torn apart
20. The ways of the force
21. Scherzo for X-wings
22. Farewell and the trip
23. The jedi steps and finale

It sure looks like there’s some new stuff there. I have pre-ordered the soundtrack CD from Amazon. Though I have a lot of doubts about what Disney will do with Star Wars, we can surely count on John Williams to get the music right. Dec. 18 will be not just a big day for cinema. It also will be a big day for music.

The Tristan chord

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. By Bryan McGee, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2000.

When I bought this book, I expected only to browse it. I ended up devouring it. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, you never know where research for a novel might lead you. In this case, I was thinking about musical metaphors and interesting ideas for the Socratic dialogues in Oratorio in Ursa Major.

Truth be known, I am not that great a fan of Richard Wagner. I even have been to a performance of “Tristan and Isolde” by the San Francisco Opera, and that did not win me over to the music. I find the music (four hours of it!) difficult to listen to. Still, the legend of Tristan and Isolde is archetypal in Western culture. Jake, my protagonist and hero in Fugue and Oratorio in Ursa Major, often makes drawings of unusual buildings, and he has a bit of a thing for towers covered with vines and thorns (like the tombs of Tristan and Isolde in some tellings of the story).

Nevertheless, I think it’s very important to know just what a landmark Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” was in the 19th Century. The music was like nothing ever heard before. Orchestras declared it impossible to play. Singers said that it was impossible to sing. There were more than 70 rehearsals of the opera in Vienna between 1862 and 1864, but the performance was called off and the opera was declared unperformable. Finally Wagner succeeded in staging it, in 1865 — 150 years ago.

After 150 years, the debate still runs hot in some musical circles. Just what is Wagner’s Tristan chord? Is it just a modified minor seventh chord? Or is that G-sharp an appoggiatura to the A, putting the chord in a whole different light? (It’s not necessary to understand the music theory here. The point is that the experts have been arguing and disagreeing for 150 years, and there are several theories about what the chord is.)

Here is what the music looks like:

Here it is played on the Acorn Abbey organ:

Stephen Fry did an excellent documentary on the Tristan chord called “Wagner and Me” back in 2010. (More about this Fry documentary in a moment.) Fry emphasizes the unbearable longing that the chord expresses. Our ears want the chord to resolve, but in four hours of music, it never does — not until the very end of the opera. No wonder some people consider the opera to be torture.

What do we mean by a chord resolving? Even if you can’t read music and don’t know a thing about music theory, your ear knows all the rules. For example, if I sing the first line of this ditty:

Old MacDonald had a farm!

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear that musical phrase resolved:

Eee-aye eee-aye oh!

There. That resolved it. Or think of the last note of pretty much any song:

And crown thy good
With brotherhood
From sea to shining —

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear the last note, in which the dominant chord, as it always must, resolves to the tonic:

Sea!

Believe me, even if you think you know nothing about music, if you love music and listen to music, your ear knows all the rules. I doubt that any metaphysical system will ever be able to explain why music has the emotional effect on us that it has, but part of that musical effect, surely, is creating tension — even longing — in unresolved harmonies and melodies, and then taking us along for a nice ride toward the resolution.

In many ways, John Williams (who wrote the music for “Star Wars”) is the Wagner of our time. Listen to this performance of Leia’s theme and think about how the music creates longing and tension and demands that we listen until we hear these tensions resolved. The final resolution comes quietly at 4:11, with a lonely note from the violin, followed by the remainder of the tonic chord in an arpeggio from the harp. Again, it doesn’t matter what the “tonic” chord is or what an “arpeggio” on the harp is. Your ear knows when it has finally got what it wanted. When the final chord finally comes, the orchestra quietly takes over the chord from the violin and the harp and holds the chord for many beats, to let the resolution sink in and to give our ear the peace it was longing for:

You’re not in a hurry, are you?

Here’s an excerpt from Stephen Fry’s “Wagner and Me” documentary:

Part of what makes Bryan Magee’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom greatly influenced Wagner. Over the years, I have made repeated attempts to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and each time I have been turned back by the impenetrable density of Kant’s writing. Magee acknowledges that Kant’s writing was unnecessarily turgid and boils Kant down. We are all Kantists now. Magee does the same thing for Schopenhauer. And thus I learned that I am pretty much a Schopenhauerian, though not quite as pessimistic.

Magee is an engaging writer and has written a number of books aimed at making modern philosophy comprehensible to ordinary people.

The just world hypothesis

The Yoda fountain in the Presidio of San Francisco, a place that I used to frequently visit

When you’re writing a novel, you never know what line of research you might get pulled into. Writing Oratorio in Ursa Major required that I think a great deal about justice. I’ve posted previously on this subject in “A little moral reasoning,” about Cecil the lion, and “Should we tolerate the intolerant.” One of the questions that interests me is why we tend to be so bad at moral reasoning and how much harm that does in the world.

Just recently at a meeting of the Walnut Cove town board, I heard a bitter old fundamentalist preacher haranguing the board about its prayer policy, saying that atheists have no moral foundation. How strange, to think that a species that can produce a Mozart or an Einstein is unable to grapple with the principles of moral philosophy without referring to ossified old texts.

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were stories in the media about research (also here) showing that the children of religious families are meaner and less altruistic than the children of non-religious families. This obviously is the opposite of what religionists would have us believe.

But religion certainly is not the only factor that distorts thinking. The just world hypothesis is another big one. It might be better to call it the just world fallacy.

It was the social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner who came up with the term, based on research going back to the 1960s. It boils down to a cognitive bias toward thinking that people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. It is particularly damaging to the social fabric when people believe that some people deserve misfortune because they somehow brought it on themselves.

For example, the Republican Party — and many religious people — believe that poor people are poor because they’re lazy, or there’s something wrong with their culture. The flip side of that is believing that rich people possess some kind of virtue that makes them deserve to be rich.

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has written some popular books that touch on the just world fallacy — for example, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

In a YouTube video of a reading she gave at the Harvard book store, she talks about how preachers of prosperity doctrine such as Joel Osteen teach their poor followers mantras such as, “I admire rich people, I bless rich people, I love rich people, and I am going to be one, too.” According to this theology, “God wants to prosper you.”

It follows that, if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. You’re crossways with God. And, if you’re rich, you’ve pleased God and God is “prospering” you. Many rich people seem to believe that. Lots of essays and op-eds have been written about rich people strutting as though they’re the masters of the universe, automatically deserving of our deference and respect.

But the just world fallacy is not by any means limited to Republicans and religious charlatans such as Joel Osteen. New Age types buy into it, too. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, this type of magical thinking is everywhere: “Do what you love, and the money will come … You control your destiny.” Think of self-help books such as, How to Get the Love You Want in 48 Hours. Everywhere there is the idea that you always get what you attract to yourself, that your thoughts and attitude have some sort of magical power to reshape the universe according to your desire. To be “negative” is to open the door to the devil. We’re told to avoid “negative” people, because their attitude is holding them back, and it’s contagious.

The concept of karma, actually, in Buddhism and Hinduism is a codification of the just world hypothesis. It helps sustain the Indian caste system.

I don’t know about you, but I hate seeing people get what they don’t deserve when so many people don’t get what they do deserve. Just-world doctrine would say that my attitude must be condemned as envy. Lerner’s big concern about the just world hypothesis is that it blinds us to the real sources of inequality and injustice and stands in our way of being motivated to do what we can to achieve greater justice.

It happens that John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, has a good bit to say about envy. He acknowledges, of course, that envy in many circumstances can be toxic to the social environment. But Rawls describes a type of envy that he calls justifiable envy — envy of goods that some people acquire (and that others are deprived of) because of unjust or unequal social arrangements:

Yet sometimes the circumstances evoking envy are so compelling that given human beings as they are no one can reasonably be asked to overcome his rancorous feelings. A person’s lesser position as measured by the index of objective primary goods may be so great as to wound his self-respect; and given his situation, we may sympathize with his sense of loss. Indeed, we can resent being made envious, for society may permit such large disparities in these goods that under existing social conditions these differences cannot help but cause a loss of self-esteem. For those suffering this hurt, envious feelings are not irrational; the satisfaction of their rancor would make them better off.

Many social movements including the Civil Rights movement have been at least partly driven by justifiable envy for undeserved goods and privileges that some have and others don’t have (and — admit it — can’t get no matter how hard they try). And note Rawls’ references to self-respect and self-esteem. Not only are we blind to ways in which people are deprived of goods and privileges that others take for granted, we also put down the have-nots. We believe in the inferiority of the have-nots and expect them to believe in their own inferiority. They are children of a lesser God, creatures of a separate (and not equal) moral universe. Some will be crushed; it’s just too much for them. Among the stronger, sooner or later, rebellion is guaranteed, even if it’s a lonely rebellion of one.

In the world as it really is, most of us will never be rich. Sometimes what goes around does not come around. Sometimes what comes around is not what is fair and just. This is one reason we love stories — stories are a compensation for an unjust world. Stories (this is especially true of science fiction) are a vehicle for trying out ideas about how things might be otherwise.

In fiction and in stories, the just world hypothesis usually applies. In the end, protagonists get their heart’s desire, but not until they have striven and suffered to get it — not until they deserve it or have defeated the forces that stood in their way. And at the end of the story, bad actors get the punishment they deserve. I realize that there are dissident or experimental forms of fiction in which the just world hypothesis does not apply, but in “classical” form storytelling, the just world hypothesis applies. The justice we find in stories serves as an escape from, and a compensation for, our inability to write the story of our own lives however we please. Yoda was right about the Force, but only because Yoda lives in a story.

There is a substantial body of academic research and literature on justice and the social psychology of justice. Lerner’s books, for reasons I have not been able to figure out, are very expensive. As far as I can tell, though, this material is scattered and is often behind paywalls. Though Barbara Ehrenreich’s books have helped bring the just-world fallacy to our attention, I’m afraid the world is still waiting for a popular book that pulls all this research together and shows how it affects our world.

The Inklings

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. Published June 2, 2015, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 656 pages.

I have long been fascinated with how in the world J.R.R. Tolkien managed to produce The Lord of the Rings. A year or so ago, I read his letters. Last June, a new book was released that adds a tremendous amount of scholarship not only to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, but also to Tolkien’s literary group, the Inklings, and to Tolkien’s biography.

This book focuses on four members of the Inklings — J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. Barfield and Williams are not nearly as well known as Tolkien and Lewis, of course.

How much fun they all must have had! They met regularly at a pub in Oxford, read from their works in progress, drank, smoked, ate, and butted heads up a storm. Part of the fascination for me is Oxford life. Oxford University has been a center of the intellectual life of the English-speaking people for almost a thousand years. The university press publishes an astonishing 6,000 books a year. And of course in my own post-apocalyptic novels it is Oxford from which the intellocracy is drawn that sets out to remake a post-apocalyptic world.

I have never been able to read C.S. Lewis’ books. My criticisms are much like Tolkien’s (though Tolkien and Lewis got along pretty well most of the time). Lewis’ books are oozing with Christian didacticism and allegory. Lewis was a proselytizer. He was glib. He was argumentative. His personal life was a mess. Though Lewis was not a fundamentalist, there are strong fundamentalist elements of his personality. For much of his life, he was virulently anti-Christian. Then he went through a transformation. As my old friend Jonathan Rauch wrote in one of his first books, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, fundamentalist personalities have a hard time with gradual, steady, evolutionary personal growth. Rather, they undergo sudden transformations and reversals, rejecting their former selves and heading in a whole different direction. Lewis was like that. To me he was not an interesting person, or an interesting writer.

J.R.R. Tolkien was very different.

It’s important to remember that it has been almost 100 years since Tolkien and other Inklings underwent their formative experiences as young men in the trenches in World War I. The war was an enormous existential challenge to those who lived through it. Then, in middle age, they went through it again with World War II. Oxford at the time was a kind of center of Christianity, a reaction, I believe, to the existential challenges of living in the first half of the 20th Century. They needed a state-of-the-art, Oxford-smart Christianity to make sense of their times.

Not all writers write for the reason Tolkien wrote — to try to find meaning in his life and in the times in which he lived. Tolkien always denied (not least, perhaps, to distance himself from didactic writers like Lewis) that there was anything allegorical in The Lord of the Rings. And yet it’s easy enough to see how his life shaped the story he told — a great struggle by the common folk against a great evil, his hatred for modernity and for machines, his love of untrampled nature, his belief in the power of myth, and his love for the English language.

Though by all accounts Tolkien truly loved ordinary people and loved to talk with them on his long country walks, he was not above calling them “orcs,” when, for example, they cheered for retribution against the Germans. The Inklings were not saints. They argued. They competed for the same academic posts and sometimes went in for a bit of backstabbing. They held grudges at times — sometimes for decades, in Lewis’ case. Lewis’ love life was a disaster (the splendid films “Shadowlands” give a very limited and one-sided view of Lewis and his brother Warnie).

Tolkien, however, comes across as the most likable of the Inklings, the Inkling with the soundest character. And of course it is Tolkien whose literary theory I find most appealing.

Should we tolerate the intolerant? (updated)

Kim Davis, an elected county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, according to news reports, is continuing to deny marriage licenses today, despite an order by the U.S. Supreme Court that she cannot refuse to do so.

She believes that she is defending her religious liberty and that her religious liberty trumps not only the law, but also the rights of the people in Rowan County, Kentucky, to acquire marriage licenses in accord with the law and their own religious beliefs. “This searing act of validation would forever echo in her conscience,” her lawyers told the Supreme Court. According to the New York Times, she is in her office this morning with the door and blinds closed.

First of all, let’s pull away the mask. Anyone who believes that Ms. Davis’ conscience is kind and conscientious is greatly deceived. She is a hateful, hypocritical (married four times) and intolerant person. She is being used by, and financed by, other hateful and intolerant people for political purposes. After this is resolved, keep an eye on what she does. Michael Savage predicts that she will become well-off and popular on the right-wing lecture circuit.

For the rest of us, she presents a problem that goes beyond the law. The law is clear. But the attitude that truly conscientious people should take toward the hatreds and intolerant mischief of people like Kim Davis is not so clear.

In a post a few weeks ago, in the matter of Cecil the lion, I mentioned John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which for decades has been the leading text in the field of moral philosophy. Rawls’ 500-page book includes a section titled “Toleration of the Intolerant.”

“Some political parties in democratic states,” Rawls writes, “hold doctrines that commit them to suppress the constitutional liberties whenever they have the power.” Check. We’ve got that — a Republican party, allied with the Christian right, that is fanatical about the privileges and liberties of the privileged but determined to keep down anyone who would challenge or dilute the privileges of the privileged.

Rawls writes, “Now, to be sure, an intolerant man will say that he acts in good faith and that he does not ask anything for himself that he denies to others. His view, let us suppose, is that he is acting on the principle that God is to be obeyed and the truth accepted by all. This principle is perfectly general and by acting on it he is not making an exception in his own case. As he sees the matter, he is following the correct principle which others reject.”

And yet: “Each person must insist upon an equal right to decide what his religious objections are. He cannot give up this right to another person or institutional authority…. From the fact that God’s intention is to be complied with, it does not follow that any person or institution has the authority to interfere with another’s interpretation of his religious obligations. This religious principle justifies no one in demanding in law or politics a greater liberty for himself….”

In other words, Kim Davis is claiming the right not only to deny people marriage licenses, but also the right to be a religious dictator for the people in her county.

Rawls again:

“Rather, since a just constitution exists, all citizens have a natural duty of justice to uphold it. We are not released from this duty whenever others are disposed to act unjustly…. Knowing the inherent stability of a just constitution, members of a well-ordered society have the confidence to limit the freedom of the intolerant only in the special cases when it is necessary for preserving equal liberty itself.”

I have put the last sentence above in italics because I believe that, setting aside matters of law, that is the moral principle behind the Supreme Court’s ruling — that denying this liberty to Kim Davis is necessary to protect the equal liberty of others.

“The conclusion, then,” writes Rawls, “is that while an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and within reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger…. The liberties of some are not suppressed simply to make possible a greater liberty for others. Justice forbids this sort of reasoning in connection with liberty…. It is the liberty of the intolerant which is to be limited, and this is done for the sake of equal liberty under a just constitution….”

Rawls was writing in 1971, though his book was revised in 1990. Rawls died in 2002. Religionists imagine that no moral framework exists outside religious authority and ancient texts. But most religionists would not know a moral framework even if a modern moral framework saved them from stoning or being burned to death for their own Old Testament crimes.

One of the gross moral flaws and limitations of religions such as Christianity is that they contain no principle for deciding between competing claims other than, ultimately, “I am right and you are wrong, on the authority of the texts.” To make this situation even worse, sects and individuals disagree on the interpretation of the texts, and on what to conveniently ignore in the texts and what to emphasize. They claim liberty for their own arbitrary choices and the end of a stick for everyone else.

As for Kim Davis, I say that she is a common sort — a hateful and vindictive person hiding behind religion. I also say that one of the dangers of religion, and of the authority-loving people who are drawn to it, is that religion tends to produce not good people (though certainly some religious people happen to be good people, not necessarily on account of religion but often in spite of it), but rather that religion tends to produce minds incapable of moral reasoning. Think of Abraham, who was ready to kill his own son because God told him to. As far as I know, the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac is still taught to children to instill the desired concept of unquestioning obedience to authority, and faith.

Take your place, Kim Davis, among the vilest moral imbeciles in American history.

UPDATE

According to news reports today (Sept. 3), a federal judge has ordered Kim Davis to be sent to jail until she complies with the order to issue marriage licenses. While she is in jail, a county judge will issue marriage licenses.

There is an interesting quote in the New York Times story:

“They’re taking rights away from Christians,” Danny Kinder, a 73-year-old retiree from Morehead, said of the courts. “They’ve overstepped their bounds.”

Dear clueless, deranged, and insufferable Christians: You are overstepping your bounds. Your rights to discriminate end where other people’s legal and religious rights begin.

A plague of industrial authors: A further answer to Le Guin

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post Are You Sure, Ursula, in which I questioned whether Ursula K. Le Guin knows what she’s talking about when she charges Amazon with the crime of controlling what Americans read and dumbing down American publishing. As part of my argument, I mentioned local public libraries, in which books by a single author fill one, two, and often three shelves. These industrial authors dominate the stacks.

I was in a library today and took 25 photos of examples of this. Those 25 photos were just a sample, because I was in a hurry to get to an appointment. I’ve attached only one sample photo to this post. More would be redundant.

Who are some of these industrial authors? I recorded some of their names and looked them up on Wikipedia:

Clive Cussler has published more than 60 novels.

W.E.B. Griffin has published 38 novels under his own name, but he also has published under 11 pseudonyms.

Gilbert Morris has published more than 100 novels.

James Patterson’s books have sold more than 300 million copies.

Anne Perry has published around 90 novels.

Tracie Peterson has published around 90 novels.

Karen Robards has published about 50 novels.

Stuart Woods has published about 65 novels.

Danielle Steele has published more than 100 novels and has sold more than 800 million copies.

Stephen King has published at least 54 novels and has sold about 350 million copies.

Karen Kingsbury has published about 55 novels and has sold 13 million copies.

Robin Cook‘s novels have sold about 400 million copies.

I have never read a single book by any of these authors and never will. But industrial novels like this fill more than half the shelf space in our local libraries. Industrial authors obviously make a killing for the publishing industry. They hog the shelf space and push other authors out of the libraries. Their dominance of the publishing industry greatly reduces the odds that new authors will be published, read, and discovered by the reading public. How is any of this Amazon’s fault? This has been going on for years.

If you look at the bindings on these industrial books, you’ll find that the editions often are the same size, with the same cover design. They are meant to be identifiable as a set on library shelves. The author’s name on the spine often is more prominent than the title. In other words, it’s a brand.

Nobody could possibly write 100 good books. In fact, I question whether most people could even write 100 books at all. I suspect that, in many cases, ghost writers are doing the work.

Whether this is the fault of the publishing industry, or whether the public’s bad taste is at the root of it, is probably a chicken-and-egg question. The phenomenon also reminds us of the bell curve. Most people are pretty much just like other people, and weirdos like me live out on the fringes of the bell curve. This does puzzle me, though, because I would have thought that people who read are more individuated than that. Clearly I’m wrong.

In any case, I cannot see how Amazon can be blamed. In fact, I buy far more books from Amazon because of it, since I can’t find anything to read at public libraries.