In the New Yorker Larissa MacFarquhar tells the story of a Buddhist priest in Japan who conducts workshops for people who want to kill themselves:

Nemoto … tells attendees to imagine they’ve been given a diagnosis of cancer and have three months to live. He instructs them to write down what they want to do in those three months. Then he tells them to imagine they have one month left; then a week; then ten minutes. Most people start crying in the course of this exercise, Nemoto among them.

One man who came to a workshop had been talking to Nemoto for years about wanting to die. He was thirty-eight years old and had been institutionalized in a mental hospital off and on for a decade. During the writing exercise, he just sat and wept. When Nemoto came around to check on him, his paper was blank. The man explained that he had nothing to say in response to the questions because he had never considered them. All he had ever thought about was wanting to die; he had never thought about what he might want to do with his life. But if he had never really lived, how could he want to die? This insight proved oddly liberating. The man returned to his job as a machinist in a factory. Previously, he had been so averse to human company that he had been able to function only in certain limited capacities, but now he was able to speak to people, and he got a promotion.

We should all sit and think for a while about a man who made it to the age of thirty-eight without ever once considering, or being prompted by anyone else to consider, what value or purpose a human life — his own human life — might have. Perhaps this says much about him; perhaps it also says something about the cultural and familial environment in which he was raised.

MacFarquhar’s story is largely about Nemoto and his attempts to help suicidal people — attempts that were emotionally draining for him until he stopped trying to deal with people online and insisted that anyone who wanted his assistance needed to come to his remote temple and meet him face-to-face. The story ends with this remarkable Zen-like anecdote, one susceptible to more than one interpretation:

Once, a man walked for five hours to get to Nemoto’s temple. The walk was a heroic journey for this man, because he had been living as a hikiko-mori, and now suddenly he was outside in the sun, sweating and feeling his body move. As he walked, he thought about what he was going to say. It had been so long since he had really spoken to anyone, and now he was going to be expected to explain his most intimate feelings to a stranger. He sweated and thought as he walked, and when at last, after five hours, he arrived at the temple he announced that he had achieved understanding and no longer needed Nemoto’s help. He turned around and walked back home.

Previous installment here

When C. S. Lewis helped to establish the Socratic Club of Oxford, along with a group of fellow Christians, he often heard the charge that the Club was inherently biased, prone to the temptation of setting things up to favor the Christians. Lewis freely acknowledged this bias — but went on to point out that “argument . . . has a life of its own. No man can tell where it will go. We expose ourselves, and the weakest of our party, to your fire no less than you are exposed to ours. . . . The arena is common to both parties and cannot finally be cheated; in it you risk nothing, and we risk all” (emphasis mine). That is, the unbeliever whose case for unbelief seems weaker at the end of the day hasn’t “lost” anything more than Plinio has when he can’t answer one of Joseph’s arguments: at worst, he or she must do further thinking about the evidence for and against Christian belief. But the believer whose case for Christianity is undermined by such debates is in a radically more vulnerable position.

Thus the warning of Sir Thomas Browne in the seventeenth century: “Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity. Many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender: ’tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace, then to hazard her on a battle.”

Some of my philosophical friends are horrified by Browne’s argument, and remind me of St. Peter’s exhortation: “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). But I would reply by noting two things: there is more than one kind of preparation, and there is more than one kind of defense. All too often Christians think of preparation for “making a defense” as a matter of gathering information and training themselves in dialectical agility: anticipating arguments and coming up with clever responses to them. But the example of Joseph Knecht suggests that prayer — and contemplative prayer even more than the petitionary variety — is at least as important a mode of preparation. Indeed, I would suggest that it’s far more important, because in my experience it’s far less common for debating Christians to be uninformed than it is for them to be angry, truculent, and uncharitable.

To be continued…

In the course of reviewing a popular-science book by Frank Swain called How To Make a Zombie — which (spoiler alert!) doesn’t actually tell you how to make a zombie — the estimable Adam Roberts pauses to think about what this kind of book does. Here is the key paragraph:

The success of books designed to popularise science (‘Main Title Namechecking Famous Scientific Thingummy: Subtitle Framed As A Question?’) is a contemporary cultural phenomenon of great interest. Hundreds of titles have been published, and a good number have gone on to become bestsellers. This has brought a degree of understanding of science and nature to a wide audience, and that can only be a good thing. The question, I suppose, is whether such books fall foul of Pope’s Law (a little learning being a dangerous thing). Another way of putting this might be to see all such books, up to and including Swain’s, as examples of the QI-ification of contemporary knowledge. It feels heavy-handed of me to explain my reference, but for the benefit of those who don’t know: QI is a popular BBC2 TV panel show, hosted by Stephen Fry, where contestants strive to answer alphabet-themed questions in a manner that is quite interesting. The show, in other words, trades on a general appetite for trivia, leaning heavily on the patrician, schoolmasterish charm of its host. But a love of nuggets of trivia is not the same thing as a love of learning more generally conceived. A single datum of trivia — a trivium — gives its possessor the satisfaction of knowing specialised, non-obvious things without requiring her to invest the labour and time in actual learning. It can be traded, in a cultural context: at a dinner party, say, or down the pub with friends, a trivium can be swapped for a small increase in the esteem of one’s companions and a lightening of the collective mood. In this respect, a trivium is akin to a joke, or a piece of gossip. And that’s fine and dandy — I like jokes, and value gossip. But trivia, gossip and anecdotes do not add up to Knowledge, because Knowledge requires the effort of systematic and engaged effort. Knowing a whole bunch of anecdotal trivia will tend to make us feel cleverer, or at least better informed, than we really are. The problem with a general QI-ification of contemporary knowledge is that it dissipates knowledge as such, and corrodes the more effortful disciplines of science. Humans are grievously prone to generalise dangerously on the basis of anecdotes and decontextualized trivia; adding more decontextualized trivia isn’t the way to address this.

I’m reminded here of something that A. O. Scott wrote many years ago about Tom Stoppard’s plays:

Some writers demand erudition of their audiences. Stoppard supplies it. I am surely not the only person who walked into the Vivian Beaumont Theater to see Arcadia a few years back knowing next to nothing about English landscape gardening or chaos theory; by the time the play was over I felt as though I did. And while many theatergoers will arrive at Stoppard’s most recent play, The Invention of Love, with some notion of Oscar Wilde’s glorious career and tragic end (especially if they have already seen Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency or read Pat Barker’s novel The Eye in the Door), few will be familiar with the life and work of the Oxford classicist and poet A.E. Housman, and fewer still will have any prior knowledge of the differences between English editions of the ancient Roman love poet Propertius. But playgoers will leave the theater flush with the thrill of having learned something about these arcane matters, even if an hour later they will be hard pressed to say just what they’ve learned. Stoppard’s genius lies in his ability to excite our intellectual curiosity and, in a stroke, to satisfy it.

I don’t think Scott is quite fair to Stoppard — I know from my students’ responses to his work over the years how often he inspires people to learn more, to study further, and then to come back to his plays ready to enjoy them more fully — but both he and Roberts are pointing to a genuine problem: the natural tendency to want to feel knowledgable rather than to achieve genuine knowledge. And the particular value of Roberts’s piece is to indicate just why that is so problematic: “Humans are grievously prone to generalise dangerously on the basis of anecdotes and decontextualized trivia; adding more decontextualized trivia isn’t the way to address this.” No kidding.

Photo: Emily Wroe/Partners In Health

I don’t really have words for how much I admire the people at Partners in Health, who bring high-quality medical care to people throughout the world who desperately need it and if not for PIH wouldn’t have it. In a recent blog post, Adam Levine wrote about his recent successful resuscitation of a five-day-old girl — a powerful and moving story, but by no means merely triumphant.

The revived child is still very ill, and may not survive the infections that until Levine intervened had taken her life. And in that environment successes are always accompanied by failures. In the same blog post he tells this sobering story:

Just last week, while rounding with a Rwandan doctor on the inpatient ward at another hospital, one of the patients passed away while we were chatting with another man just a few beds down from him. The man who died had serious heart disease, but had been doing well when we saw him the prior day. We had begun seeing patients that morning on the far side of the large ward, three long rows of evenly lined beds away, and by the time we got to his row around noon he was already dead. Without the loud, shrill beeps and flashing of colored numbers that punctuate hospital life back home, we hadn’t noticed as his lungs filled with fluid, his breathing got faster, and the oxygen level in his blood began to fall. Nor had the patients and family members in the beds surrounding him wanted to interrupt us to let us know. We were two beds away when we finally noticed him, but by that time it was too late. Had we started our rounds on his side of the room that morning, he would have been one of the first patients seen, and we probably would have been able to intervene with some simple medications to stave off death. But by random chance, we hadn’t.

From these two experiences Levine draws, I think, the proper conclusion:

I can’t take credit for saving the girl’s life today without taking responsibility for the man’s death last week, so I choose to do neither. Instead, I prefer to simply keep working to improve the system as a whole: training more nurses and doctors, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of care through improved triage and other basic structures, pushing for steady supplies of basic drugs and equipment, and conducting research into new methods to improve the delivery of emergency care in poor settings such as this.

I prefer to do neither: no assuming of credit or blame. Instead, Levine just focuses on his job, on what he can control, on trying to make things a little better for the sick people in that part of Rwanda, day by day.

In this he’s following the example of the co-founder of PIH, Paul Farmer, about whom I have written before. From his reading of The Lord of the Rings Farmer learned the phrase “the long defeat,” and the power of that idea to sustain people who are doing impossible jobs:

I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory…. You know, people from our background — like you, like most PIH-ers, like me — we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.

You fight the long defeat. No credit, no blame, just today’s work to be done as well as you can do it. It’s a creed for saints and heroes — and for everyone else wise enough to practice it.

James Agee’s gift was not wasted, but neither was it fulfilled. He is best known for the florid, baroque prose of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but the more restrained beauty of his novel A Death in the Family is much to be preferred. He produced in addition a good deal of fine narrative journalism and one of the finest bodies of film criticism yet achieved.

Agee is being noticed again because the original version of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a report commissioned by Fortune magazine but never run by them, has recently been published. John Jeremiah Sullivan — the closest thing we currently have to a journalistic heir to Agee — has written a fine reflection on this original version and its place in Agee’s career. I look forwarding to reading Cotton Tenants as soon as my life is a little less complicated.

Some years ago, when Agee’s work began appearing in the Library of America, I wrote an appreciation in the Boston Globe, in which I argued that Agee is so far the only poet of the urban South. That essay is not available in full online, but here’s an excerpt, focusing on A Death in the Family:

Even the way that the book treats religion seems more appropriate to our own time than to what (we imagine) life in 1915 Tennessee must have been like. Jay’s wife Mary is a devout Christian, but not of the stereotypical Southern-evangelical variety: she is passionately Catholic. (Her Catholicism is of the Anglican rather than the Roman variety, but you can only tell that near the very end of the book when Mary, seeking consolation, reads aloud from the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer.) More noteworthy still is the complete absence of religious belief among most of the other characters, including Mary’s father — who proclaims himself an agnostic and reads The New Republic, at that time a daring and brand-new intellectual journal — and her brother, who as a teenager had modeled himself after the famously atheistic poet Shelley. Jay himself was a complete unbeliever, something which Mary can hardly think about until, in an extraordinary scene, she discerns Jay’s ghostly invisible presence among them and then among their sleeping children. This is anything but the “Christ-haunted South” of which O’Connor would later write; it is the skeptical, intellectual, pluralistic world of the modern city.

Agee himself, who lived almost his whole life in that pluralistic world, could never embrace nor wholly reject his mother’s faith. All his life he corresponded with an Anglo-Catholic priest, James Flye, whom he had met when, at age nine, he had been sent to St. Andrew’s School for Mountain Boys in Sewanee, Tennessee. In 1945 he would tell Father Flye, “It seems incredible to me not to be a Christian and a Catholic in the simplest and strictest senses of those words.”

Yet however incredible, such was his condition. A Death in the Family ends strangely but appropriately, with the newly fatherless Rufus poised uneasily between his mother’s faith and his uncle’s hatred of priests and their religion. Though Uncle Andrew’s fury is directed against the priest who would not offer the full rites of the church to the unbaptized Jay Follett, Rufus cannot help feeling that the anger is directed equally against Mary. (“He wished he could ask, ‘Why do you hate Mama?’, but he was afraid to.”) The last word of the book is “silence,” and the silence Agee leaves us with — leaves himself with — is meant for contemplating the mysteries of belief and unbelief, too deep for words.

The conceit of this piece by Josh Marshall is that there’s some great mystery to why some people feel differently than he does about whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. In fact it’s brutally simple: Marshall sees nothing to fear from authority and the state, because he is one of the Chosen People of authority and the state. Meanwhile, those who are not among the elect fear and distrust authority, because it daily oppresses them. This fear and distrust is as rational as a thing can be, but Marshall cannot bring himself to believe in it.

Marshall has that in common with Jeffrey Toobin, Richard Cohen, and David Brooks: no reason to fear the police state. Why should they? They are, all of them, American aristocrats: white, male, rich, and properly deferential to anyone with a title or a badge or authority or an office. Of course they don’t know why anyone would worry about limitless surveillance. They themselves have nothing to fear because they are the overclass. They can’t imagine what it might be like to be Muslim or black or poor or to have any other characteristic that removes them from the ranks of the assumed blameless.

I think Freddie is exactly right about this, and I also think that this is one of the key points where the people of the real Left, like Freddie, and traditionalists, like me, find their interests and viewpoints converging. We suspect the vast and ever-increasing powers of the militaristic surveillance state for very similar reasons: we see its infinite voraciousness, its lust either to consume or erase differences, and its willingness to persecute and prosecute anyone who won’t get on board.

This convergence is not new: consider, for instance, the astonishing overlap between the views expressed by the socialist George Orwell in 1984 and those expressed by the Christian conservative C. S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength, right down to the brilliant parodies in both of foully obfuscatory bureaucratic language. Both writers see the rhetorical subtlety by which the pink police state entrenches itself before ultimately revealing its true character. (Orwell didn’t seem to know quite what to make of Lewis’s novel when he reviewed it — he strongly disliked its supernaturalism — but it ended up having a significant influence on the development of 1984. Lewis for his part didn’t especially care for 1984 but thought Animal Farm was “a work of genius.”)

However, the concerns of the two groups are not identical. Traditionalists tend to focus on forming and sustaining their own “little platoons” in freedom from governmental interference; they want to be allowed to stay outside the main stream of American culture, at least to some degree. The genuine left is more focused on how to help those people who are forcibly excluded from that main stream, who, far from worrying about how to stay out, can’t figure out how to get in. But these are general tendencies. Traditionalists can also care about the forcibly excluded, and leftists can promote the flourishing of pockets of difference.

Our ideas about what constitutes a good society may be too different for us to make common cause in the arena of electoral politics, but we should at least listen to one another more often — and explore conversations that could tell us just how far a shared commitment to civil liberties can take us.

Keith Haring

The question of whether reading makes you a better person is an evergreen one, but in the past few months has been bouncing around a little more vigorously than usual. I trace this current inquiry to a February post on the New Yorker‘s site by Teju Cole, in which he wondered how it might be possible for so committed a reader as Barack Obama to do so many bad things — indeed, many of the same bad things that George Bush had done. (I have written before about this Cole post.)

Cole takes it as a given that our previous president “was anti-intellectual … he didn’t know much about the wider world, and did not much care to learn.” Presumably he didn’t know what a voracious reader George Bush is, but even if he did he surely would he said that Bush wasn’t reading the right books. Of Obama, by contrast, Cole says that

a man who names among his favorite books Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” Robinson’s “Gilead,” and Melville’s “Moby Dick” is playing the game pretty seriously. His own feel for language in his two books, his praise for authors as various as Philip Roth and Ward Just, as well as the circumstantial evidence of the books he’s been seen holding (the “Collected Poems” of Derek Walcott, most strikingly), add up to a picture of a man for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life.

So how come his political actions, especially in foreign affairs, are so much like those of the anti-intellectual and incurious George Bush? It must be that literature doesn’t have the ennobling effects we’d like it to have.

Recently, in the New York Times, a philosopher named Gregory Currie took up the question and concluded that, as much as we’d like to believe that reading great literature makes us better people, we just don’t have any reliable evidence to back up that hope — to which Annie Murphy Paul quickly replied, in Time, that “Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer.”

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, reported in studies published in 2006 and 2009 that individuals who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective. This link persisted even after the researchers factored in the possibility that more empathetic individuals might choose to read more novels. A 2010 study by Mar found a similar result in young children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their “theory of mind,” or mental model of other people’s intentions.

As a literature professor and a lover of reading, I can’t tell you how much I would love to offer a full endorsement of Paul’s argument — but I can’t. For one thing, in studying the effects of people’s reading habits on their moral lives, it’s impossible to control for all sorts of other factors. For instance, children who are read to aren’t just being read to: they are being attended to, loved, cared for. There is a significant body of research demonstrating that people who are read to as children will for their rest of their lives associate reading with affection and security. What reading might do for when extracted from this familial context … we just don’t know and probably can’t know.

Second, if you can “better … understand other people” and acquire a “keener … mental model of other people’s intentions,” that could make you kinder to them. On the other hand, it could also make you a better manipulator of them: the most successful con men understand other people’s motives and intentions very well indeed.

So I’m disinclined to think that reading alone will necessarily do anything for people’s moral character. But I believe reading has a powerful role to play in supporting and strengthening the character of people who are formed by strong families and communities of belief and practice. Annie Murphy Paul writes,

Their reading [that of most young people] is pragmatic and instrumental: the difference between what literary critic Frank Kermode calls “carnal reading” and “spiritual reading.” If we allow our offspring to believe carnal reading is all there is — if we don’t open the door to spiritual reading, through an early insistence on discipline and practice — we will have cheated them of an enjoyable, even ecstatic experience they would not otherwise encounter. And we will have deprived them of an elevating and enlightening experience that will enlarge them as people. Observing young people’s attachment to digital devices, some progressive educators and permissive parents talk about needing to “meet kids where they are,” molding instruction around their onscreen habits. This is mistaken. We need, rather, to show them someplace they’ve never been, a place only deep reading can take them.

To this I would say, no, not quite: deep reading all by itself can’t take them there, but deep reading as an essential part of a comprehensive moral education — three cheers for that, indeed.

All of us carry around in our minds timelines and maps by which we orient ourselves to history and place — and almost all of these mental constructs are wildly inaccurate. A somewhat sobering thought.

Popa Taungkalat monastery, Burma

Previous installment here

… But Joseph Knecht is not safe. Again, Waldzell resembles a monastic community: young men leave their homes, schools, and families to join it, foregoing marriage and career. Joseph has pledged his whole being to the scholarly world of Castalia; if that world is fundamentally frivolous and useless, the definitive choice of his life was a catastrophic mistake, and he is wasting his energies and his gifts. This is why, when Plinio can deflect an unanswerable argument with a witticism, Joseph has to go away and think hard about Plinio’s strongest claims. The stakes for him are very high — and not just for him: the young scholars gathered around to listen to these dialectical contests (which become increasingly popular) are depending on him to justify their own choices as well.

Thus, if Plinio thrives on these debates, Joseph is exhausted by them. He becomes ever more disciplined not just in his studies but also in meditation — the equivalent of prayer in this wholly secular monastery — because he knows that without the calm that arises from meditation he will break down altogether. But he comes close to breaking down anyway.

As I contemplate this section of The Glass Bead Game I find myself thinking of C. S. Lewis — more particularly, of some of the comments he made when, in the 1940s, he became a famous defender of the Christian faith. Speaking to priests and youth leaders on the topic of “Christian Apologetics,” he offered this warning: “I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of the Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar.”

Note that even success in argument is dangerous. Even if you leave your opponent speechless, you are probably aware that another, more skillful, opponent might have done the same to you. Indeed, if you are skilled in debate yourself, you may well know the strongest elements of your interlocutors’ positions better than they do; you may wipe your brow in relief when they fail to bring out their most powerful weapons. But you feel that relief because you also feel your own weaknesses, your limitations.

To be continued….

First of all, make sure you read Noah’s terrific post on wilderness and related matters. I think here Noah and I are just talking at different analytical levels. When he says that people live everywhere, including the wilderness, he is making a valid sociological and demographic point, and indeed the whole post is full of valid and worthwhile sociological and demographic reflections. But in my posts I was talking about our myths, our stories, and in our stories the wilderness is simply defined by the absence of humans from it. The wilderness is where humans don’t and can’t live, and we like to tell tales that prove that point: consider just two recent examples, 127 Hours and Grizzly Man. And in our stories, people who manage to survive in the wilderness usually do so only by becoming less human, indeed inhuman, as many of the tales of wild men demonstrate.

Albrecht Dürer’s wild men

So on the one hand we have sets of myths that distinguish between the human world and the wilderness; and on the other hand we have sets of myths that distinguish between the life of the city and the life of the countryside. Those are conceptually distinct. Perhaps we have only one myth of the suburbs — that suburban life is uniformly drab, conventional, and boring — because suburbs haven’t been around that long. For much of the history of human settlement, people walled themselves in and the dangerous world of enemies, animal and human, out: human culture had to achieve a certain degree of technological sophistication and political stability before it could accept a gradual transition from the densities of the city to the openness of the countryside. (And even today the American traveler in Europe will invariably be struck by how quickly that transition is made in many cities, especially smaller ones: riding out of a city on a train you can look down or away for a moment and miss the suburbs altogether.)

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Now to the really interesting stuff, i.e., Noah’s report on a performance of Measure for Measure. Noah writes, “The Christian apologetic tradition in interpreting the play reads Vincentio as a kind of figure of divine providence, working behind the scenes to arrange a happy ending for the drama.” Well . . . that’s a Christian reading of the play — by which I mean “a reading that sees the play as being deeply concerned with Christian theology” — but it’s not the only one. There’s another theologically-alert way to approach “the old fantastical Duke of dark corners” that starts from the point that, to quote Noah again, “Like Hamlet and Prospero, Duke Vincentio is a theatrical director.”

The Duke, Hamlet, and Prospero are not just garden-variety directors: they are directors of morality plays that they themselves have written and in which they cast others. (They also play parts themselves, but not always willingly.) That is, all of them write scripts and press other people into playing parts that — so these directors insist, and sincerely too — are for those other people’s own spiritual edification. Prospero wants those who have wronged him to be frightened into repentance and submission; Hamlet wants his usurping stepfather to be forced to acknowledge his guilt in a public setting — “The play’s the thing / Wherein to catch the conscience of a king” — then later takes up the role of the morally eviscerating preacher to try to bring his mother to repentance — “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.” And the Duke . . . well, Noah’s description of the play indicates just complex and how theatrical a web he is trying to weave.

But none of these go quite the way the playwright-directors want them to go. Hamlet catches the king, but discovers that Claudius’s repentance makes it harder to justify murdering him, and then soon thereafter is interrupted in his interrogation of his mother by the return of his father’s ghost. While Prospero is creating a beautiful masque for his daughter and her beloved, he forgets the machinations of his enemies — who have not been intimidated into repentance by the shows he has put on for them, not even by the great tempest itself — and when he recalls their plans to murder him the masque crashes to a sudden close: Enter certain Reapers, properly habited: they join with the Nymphs in a graceful dance; towards the end whereof PROSPERO starts suddenly, and speaks; after which, to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish. And as Noah points out, all of the Duke’s plans are going wildly awry until the situation is rescued by pure coincidence. (Maybe even not then, depending on how a given production stages Isabella’s response to his proposal of marriage. Since she is given no lines, we have to guess, though the most reasonable guess — that she is horrified and disgusted by his advances — is almost never dared. As far as I know John Barton, in his 1970 RSC production, was the first director not to have Isabella accept the proposal, though even he did not have her reject the Duke: all the actors exit, leaving Estelle Kohler’s Isabella alone on stage to ponder her options.)

Ian Richardson as Angelo and Estelle Kohler as Isabella in John Barton’s 1970 RSC production of Measure for Measure

If there is a sound theological reading of these characters and these actions, then, it is not the allegorical one that would have then seen as “God figures.” Rather, it seems to me, the better reading requires us to see in Hamlet, Prospero, and the Duke the immense moral dangers that powerful and intelligent men confront because the very greatness of their abilities encourage them to play God, to manipulate other people, for their own good of course. It is a temptation only the exceptionally gifted face fully, because only the exceptionally gifted can persuade others to play the assigned parts. Though none of these Shakespearean characters is contemptible — there is much to admire in Hamlet, Prospero, and the Duke alike — they endanger themselves and others precisely because of their eminence.

In an odd way they are reminiscent of Milton’s Satan, who comments about his own fall from greatness, “lifted up so high / I disdained subjection, and thought one step higher / Would set me highest.” Hamlet, Prospero, and the Duke come to think (though hardly consciously) that they are different in kind from those around them, and that the ordinary rules of human conduct don’t quite apply to them, can be suspended in a good cause. But that’s not true. They are in fact not gods. Two of them — Hamlet and Prospero — come to see this. I’m not sure the Duke does. At the end of Measure for Measure he seems quite pleased with himself. There might be a terrible crash in his future.

Consider this a placeholder post for some thoughts that need developing. The issues involved here are immensely complex but of first-order importance for those who care about genuine human flourishing. Today I just want to juxtapose two quotations.

The first is from an essay by Kyle Baxter called “On the Philosophy of Google Glass”:

What I find most troubling is the philosophy underlying Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s thoughts on devices like Glass. They say that Glass’s goal is to get technology “out of the way,” but that isn’t it. The idea is that we will all be better off if we’re always connected to the web, always on, and have uninterrupted and instantaneous access to it and humanity’s “knowledge.” The idea that Page expresses is that if I can immediately learn about something I don’t know much about, I’ll be better off. I’ll be able to make smarter decisions and live a deeper, richer life by spending the time it would have taken to research and learn about something on more meaningful and substantive tasks.

I think, though, that is a terribly deluded and shallow understanding of what it means to “learn” about something. When we — humans — learn about something, we are not simply committing facts to our memory so we can recall them in the future. That’s a very tiny part of a much larger and much more important process. To “learn” about something is to study the information (when historical events occurred, what happened, etc), find connections between it and other things we’ve learned and experiences we’ve had, and to synthesize it into something greater — knowledge. Knowing, say, the Pythagorean Theorem in isolation isn’t of much use, but connecting it to your need to identify another object’s location suddenly makes it very useful. And more abstractly, knowing Roman and Greek history isn’t very useful all on its own, but being able to learn from it and apply its lessons to current political difficulties might prove very beneficial.

Now, I’d like to consider that passage in light of another one, from the farewell speech of retiring historian Donald Kagan:

Because of the cultural vacuum in their earlier education and because of the informal education they receive from the communications media, which both shape and reflect the larger society, today’s liberal arts students come to college, it seems to me, bearing a sort of relativism verging on nihilism, a kind of individualism that is really isolation from community. The education they receive in college these days, I believe, is more likely to reinforce this condition than to change it. In this way, too, it fails in its liberating function, in its responsibility to shape free men and women. Earlier generations who came to college with traditional beliefs rooted in the past had them challenged by hard questioning and the requirement to consider alternatives and were thereby unnerved, and thereby liberated, by the need to make reasoned choices. The students of today and tomorrow deserve the same opportunity. They, too, must be freed from the tyranny that comes from the accident of being born at a particular time in a particular place, but that liberation can only come from a return to the belief that we may have something to learn from the past. The challenge to the relativism, nihilism, and privatism of the present can best be presented by a careful and respectful examination of earlier ideas, ideas that have not been rejected by the current generation but are simply unknown to them. When they have been allowed to consider the alternatives, they, too, can enjoy the freedom of making an informed and reasoned choice.

If Kagan is right, then one of the greatest challenges educators face — in any time — is to awaken students from their “dogmatic slumbers.” (This is what Kant said reading Hume did for him.) That is, students need to learn that they have been for almost all their lives the passive recipients of what the dominant culture around them designates as knowledge. Michel Foucault was right when he referred to that dominant culture as the “power/knowledge regime,” because dominance is precisely the command of the power that decrees what counts as knowledge.

But if awakening students from those slumbers has always been the task of the true educator, that task is all the more difficult in a time of technologies of knowledge, or “knowledge,” that asymptotically approach omnipresence. Google Glass, along with a whole range of similar technologies, enforces the very passivity which truly liberal education is concerned to defeat. Technological futurism and solutionism (to borrow a term from Evgeny Morozov) are looking more and more like the chief enemies of a truly liberal — liberating, empowering, humanizing — education.

Early in Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game there is a fascinating passage concerning debate. The novel is set in an imaginary country resembling Switzerland, some centuries in the future, and its action centers on the “Pedagogical Province” of Castalia, a series of quasi-monastic scholarly communities dotted throughout the land. Into one of those communities, called Waldzell, a visitor comes, an outgoing and rhetorically gifted young man named Plinio Designori. Plinio stands in the midst of a group of adolescent scholars-in-training and cheerfully explains to them that their studies are frivolous and sterile, and that they are indefensibly parasitic upon the larger society. Some of the scholars ignore Plinio; but “still there were always several schoolmates gathered around [him]; he was always the center of attention, and whether or not there happened to be an opponent in the group, he always exerted an attraction so strong that it was akin to seduction.”

The novel’s protagonist, Joseph Knecht, joins this audience, and eventually he assumes the role of Plinio’s chief interlocutor and opponent. It falls to Joseph to defend his community’s traditions, which he does with determination and increasing skill. Though he lacks Plinio’s verbal agility, he compensates for it by long hours of study and preparation. Eventually he is able to refute many of Plinio’s claims, which leads Plinio to become more serious and nuanced in his critiques, which in turn requires Joseph to study and think harder, and so on. Iron indeed sharpens iron. Plinio comes to understand that there is much more to Castalia than he had suspected; and for his part Joseph comes to see that his community really does risk preciousness and isolation from the concerns of the “real world.”

But the relationship between the two boys is not symmetrical. The narrator explains,

Even when [Plinio] was being defeated on a point, he managed to think of the audience and contrive a facesaving or witty line of retreat. Knecht, on the other hand, when his opponent had driven him into a corner, was apt to say: “I shall have to think about that for a while, Plinio. Wait a few days; I’ll come back to that point.”

These contrasting responses indicate the boys’ contrasting temperaments; but more important, they indicate how they are differently situated. For Plinio has nothing to lose in these debates except “face”: the worst that can happen to him is to be shown unable to respond to a particular argument. As I have noted, he is a visitor to Waldzell from the “outside”; his parents’ plan is to have him absorb some of the community’s intellectual discipline and then return to his world of wealth and privilege. Whether he wins or loses an argument has no necessary bearing on the rest of his life. Joseph Knecht, by contrast, is not safe.

To be continued…

paper sculptures by Junior Fritz Jacquet

Novels and stories describe for us their characters’ sexual positions: people enacting instructions from the Kama Sutra, or from the smooth rational sheets that accompany IKEA boxes. As though narration is verbal geometry or even topology, an accounting of objects’ situation in space, the angles of their relation to one another. This reminds me of the idea that the self is socially constructed. So, people, first you are constructed, then you are positioned. It is hard to find active verbs and clear agency here. A spiritual exercise: to trace the genealogy of one’s sexual positions. Did you see it at the movies, or do you imitate a scene from a Jonathan Franzen novel?

I have a friend who is now a priest but was once a set designer who specialized in operas. That first career began when he was a child in Vancouver, B.C., in a family for whom Texaco’s Saturday afternoon presentation of the Metropolitan Opera was their closest approach to sabbath rite. By age ten he had become fascinated with the stories as much as the music and, unable to cross the continent to see them for himself, had to be content with imagination. But he was not content. So he waited for the end of each broadcast, when Milton Cross would announce the opera to be broadcast next week, and then each Monday retrieved the relevant libretto from his local library. He read it with passionate attention. The story bloomed in his mind. He designed sets and characters, cut their shapes from cardboard, painted them precisely. On Saturday all was ready. When the broadcast commenced, scene by scene, aria by aria, the boy brought forth his magnificent fragile rooms and placed the elegantly dressed two-dimensional people in them. He moved them into their proper positions. Sometimes he propped two of them against each other in a cardboard embrace; later, he laid the dead ones to rest. They lay then perfectly still, perfectly flat, in that position of repose which has no successor.

My own view is that, so far, they have and they haven’t. That is, some strong themes have emerged but nothing that I would be so bold as to call a conclusion. And that’s fine with me: in general the world has too many conclusions and not enough explorations, especially about truly complex subjects.

What I want to do here is to point out some of the themes that have emerged strongly in my own mind, as a way of drawing together what I’ve done so far. I believe there will be more of these meditations, though I think it might be good for me to step away from the topics for a while to think and re-think.

• It is impossible to talk about the idea of the City without invoking its two opposites, the Countryside (where people dwell) and the Wilderness (where they don’t). I have not spoken of Wilderness much in these posts because my focus has been on human lives, human choices, and Wilderness is by definition a place where humans do not live, though they may visit.
• The City needs the Countryside so it may define itself by contrast as dense, fast, complex, and plural.
• The Countryside needs the City so it may define itself by contrast as spacious, slow, simple, and coherent.
• In the City’s narrative the key human virtues are courage (to face the strange and unpredictable) and tolerance (of cultural and moral difference).
• In the Countryside’s narrative the key human virtues are patience, persistence, and stability (“sticking,” as Wendell Berry might put it).
• Each narrative is largely self-praising.
• Each narrative depends on the belief that its own vision of human flourishing is somehow more authentic than the alternatives, though in general proponents of City and proponents of Countryside are united in their dismissal of all forms of human community that aren’t clearly urban or rural.
• There is a mythos of the City — by which I mean the very large city, the metropolis — and a mythos of the Countryside, but nothing of corresponding narrative power for any other variety of human placement.
• Those who live somewhere other than the Countryside or the vast City must content ourselves with stories about our lives that are not fundamentally place-based, that do not derive their contours from the particular configuration of homes and workplaces in which they dwell.
• Such people may feel their lack of place-based mythos as an impoverishment, but it may be a preservative against an idolatry of place that can produce both arrogance (in relation to those who live elsewhere) and weakness (in relation to the imperative of self-formation).
• That is, a person whose flourishing utterly depends on place — one who, for example, falls victim to paralytic boredom when not exposed to the stimuli of the big city — may be deficient in certain necessary human virtues. There is nothing wrong with preferring — even very strongly preferring — one kind of place to another, but it’s not good to be incapacitated by removal from that place.
• That previous point is complicated, and perhaps undermined, when the question of home is brought in. That topic will have to be dealt with another time.

So enough for now. Enough until I’ve had time to process all this and, who knows, maybe repudiate some or most of it.

from this BBC report

First drones, now LARs — lethal autonomous robots. As Nick Carr shrewdly writes, interacting with a presentation by United Nations special rapporteur Christof Heyns,

Beyond the obvious moral and technical questions, one of the greatest and most insidious risks of autonomous killer robots, Heyns writes, is that they can erode the “built-in constraints that humans have against going to war,” notably “our aversion to getting killed, losing loved ones, or having to kill other people”:

“Due to the low or lowered human costs of armed conflict to States with LARs in their arsenals, the national public may over time become increasingly disengaged and leave the decision to use force as a largely financial or diplomatic question for the State, leading to the “normalization” of armed conflict. LARs may thus lower the threshold for States for going to war or otherwise using lethal force, resulting in armed conflict no longer being a measure of last resort.”

It seems clear that the time to think about lethal autonomous robots is now. Writes Heyns: “This report is a call for pause, to allow serious and meaningful international engagement with this issue.” Once LARs are deployed, he implies, almost certainly correctly, it will probably be too late to restrict their use. So here we find ourselves in the midst of a case study, with extraordinarily high stakes, about whether or not society is capable of weighing the costs and benefits of a particular technology before it goes into use and of choosing a course rather than having a course imposed on it.

This is precisely right: why should our government hesitate before authorizing lethal force if it is confident that none of our own citizens will be endangered (except, of course, the ones the Executive branch decides it wants to kill)? People who support the use of LARs say that they could make warfare “less deadly” — possibly, to those using them, but what about those on whom they are used? And what if the very lack of danger to the user (whether real or perceived) makes the deployment of such weapons the kind of thing that leaders do without serious reflection?

It’s easy to see a time coming when the most powerful nations find it too much trouble to negotiate with weaker ones: Why send diplomats when you can get what you want so much more easily by sending robots and drones? And in the U.S. what’s interesting is that, since these warlike actions can be undertaken without committing troops to the field, it becomes easier and easier to bypass the checks and balances that would otherwise be offered by Congress and the courts.