And wisdom is early to despair

A diptych by Gerard Manley Hopkins. They’re not his best work, but these two poems are what first convinced me he was worth studying. They originated as chorus-songs in a play Hopkins was writing (he had strange ideas about what might work in a theater), and, like most of his work, should be read out loud. Here’s Geoffrey Hill doing so.

THE LEADEN ECHO

HOW to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Re-reading, I’m struck by how close much of the imagery here is to that of J.R.R. Tolkien. I suppose I’m thinking of the first line’s “bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key,” and the later “winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay.” Flowing hair and keys and tombs–all very faerie-like, more at home in Middle-Earth than Hopkins’ nature poems. “As kingfishers catch fire” describes a thing through what it does, while these poems describe a thing through its physical attributes. Faerie imagery, perhaps, is that which works through synecdoche.

But it’s the tone, not just the poetic logic, that seems Tolkienesque. These poems are leaden and golden, both colors of twilight, not of fiery day (as his nature sonnets) or blackest night (as his later sonnets of desolation). It’s closest to “Spring and Fall,” but lacks that poem’s motherly tone. Here, not yet trapped within “thoughts against thoughts,” Hopkins can see the world around him, but no longer does it “gash gold vermilion.” It is fading, as at the end of The Lord of the Rings the elves are fading and vanishing into the West. The “messengers of grey,” and, of course, the final word “Yonder,” could both be straight out of Tolkien. As the elves are leaving, heaven can seem “yonder,” far away but still somewhere; after they’re gone, it cannot be located, only anticipated. It’s the realization of time that takes away space. Hopkins’ early poems give a gorgeous landscape and a moment of buckled beauty, but little sense of what comes before or after. The later poems are obsessed with the tension of anticipation, but rarely show us the world around as one waits.

The Leaden Echo: “wisdom is early to despair”; and the Golden Echo: “beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it.” Wisdom despairs early in other Hopkins poems, but only here does he show us that act from the outside; here he does not despair, but shows us wisdom despairing, a strangely beautiful sight, the beauty of things passing away. Elsewhere in Hopkins it’s always bright sparks in dark rooms, but in these echoes, I sense a vision of what was always in Tolkien’s sight: the ghostly afterglow. Not the light’s origin, but the light itself as it permeates the room and fades away into darkness. Not ecstasy or entrapment, but catharsis.

Major American Writers

Apparently the MLA records the number of scholarly articles written about each author in the last 25 years, which can be used as a metric for “importance.” From this article, I take the following list of top 25 American literary figures. The number in brackets at the end is their change in position compared to when the list is compounded from 1947 to the present, rather than from 1987. My comments in bold.

1. Henry James (3,188 items) [+1] Meh. I’d have guessed he’d be a bit lower, but not that much lower.
2. William Faulkner (2,955) [-1] Good. The slight decline doesn’t surprise me either.
3. T. S. Eliot (2,659) [+1] Good! I knew the rumors of Eliot’s downfall were exaggerated.
4. Herman Melville (2,579) [-1] Interesting that Eliot and Melville switched places. I prefer Melville I guess but not by much.
5. Vladimir Nabokov (2,290) [+5] I do not understand the Nabokov-love.
6. Ernest Hemingway (2,220) [-0-] I wouldn’t have put him this high, but I don’t mind.
7. Edgar Allan Poe (1,958) [-2] I had no idea there was this much Poe scholarship. No idea.
8. Toni Morrison (1,950) [+9] Haven’t read her. But I find it hard to believe she’s this important.
9. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1,751) [-4] Too bad. Really, lower than Poe?
10. Walt Whitman (1,647) [-2] I don’t mind the decline. I guess he’s important. I guess.
11. Emily Dickinson (1,623) [+2] Good. Too bad she hasn’t passed Whitman.
12. Ezra Pound (1,620) [-3] Now this is interesting. He’s declined and Eliot has risen?
13. Willa Cather (1,482) [+5] This confuses me. Lots of people lower down seem obviously more important.
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1,326) [-3] Fall faster, American Transcendentalists!
15. Wallace Stevens (1,122) [-1] See, I’d have put Stevens much higher.
16. Edith Wharton (1,087) [+5] Haven’t read her.
17. Henry David Thoreau (1,076) [-5] Faster! Even faster!
18. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1,002) [-3] Huh. Weird. But I have no emotional investment either way.
19. Flannery O’Connor (935) [+3] Good to see her make an appearance. She doesn’t need to go any higher.
20. Mark Twain (882) [-4] I find it hard to take Twain seriously, but that might be just me.
21. John Steinbeck (823) [+2] Haven’t read him.
22. William Carlos Williams (772) [-0-] No comment.
23. Saul Bellow (706) [+2] He could stand to climb a bit, but not much.
24. Richard Wright (670) [+2] Haven’t read him.
25. Robert Frost (661) [-5] This fall angers me.

When you get up to the twenties it’s hard to find names that you were sure would make an appearance that didn’t. There’s plenty of names that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see: Anderson, Ashbery, Bishop, O’Neill, Lowell. (I haven’t read Anderson or Ashbery, I just know they’re important.) But Bishop is the only one whose non-appearance really surprises me. The list is weighted 8-15-2 poets-novelists-essayists (and no playwrights), which probably indicates why Bishop didn’t show up–poetry gets less attention from academics than prose.

These sorts of lists are flawed in obvious ways, but intriguing. It’s also somewhat depressing to think that over a thousand articles (this doesn’t even count books!) have been written in the last 25 years about such a minor figure as Edith Wharton. That’s what happens when you start treating the humanities as if they’re sciences, as if the task of academics is to do research that produces new knowledge that must be published.

Earth and Solaris

The University of Chicago’s on-campus movie theater (!) chooses each quarter a different theme for each night of the week. Spring Quarter began this week, and it seems Tuesdays are “Andrei Tarkovsky and Terrence Malick: the Sacred and the Dasein”. Since I’ve seen little of both, but loved what I’ve seen (of Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev and Stalker; of Malick, only The Tree of Life), I of course decided to get a season pass and go only and every Tuesday night.

Well, last night I saw Solaris. A good movie, all told; amazing, at parts; but immensely frustrating.

It’s no spoiler to say that it’s about aliens, literal and figurative. It follows a Kris Kelvin, a cosmonaut-slash-psychologist (whose name suggests both Christ and cold science), who travels to an understaffed research colony located above the titular planet whose Ocean it attempts to study. The nature of this Ocean remains vague till the very end; we might think of it as Being. We learn early on that it may be sentient and can either cause hallucinations or create human-like life, we don’t know which; and that the researchers have all but given up discovering its secrets, wanting now to just blast it with radiation and leave. Since the few scientists who remain are having psychological difficulties (this is one key detail I didn’t pick up on until long after I should have), Kelvin has been sent to try to rescue the mission. Instead, as one might expect, he encounters “psychological difficulties” of his own, which turn out to not be somatic (leading to an exploration of madness) so much as existential (leading to an exploration of philosophy).

Perhaps because it was Russian with imperfect English subtitles, the plot was difficult to follow, which matters only in that I often couldn’t tell what the stakes were. For too much of the film the characters were speaking in such philosophical abstractions that I couldn’t tell what they saw themselves as disagreeing about or why they were getting angry. This also led to the problem of all philosophical film, that straight philosophical pronouncements always sound simplistic when made on-screen:

Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we’ll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of man pursuing a goal that he fears and that he really does not need. Man needs man!

This gets at the heart of the film, and I can convince myself to accept it, but I would rather it had been only hinted at. Perhaps this is just my preference for American metaphysical obscurity over Russians soul-baring.

I don’t know if I would have made any sense of the film without these pronouncements. At times, though, they almost obscure the film’s true scope. Solaris confronts us with the impossibility of communication with a completely alien form of life, and the impossibility of ignoring it; and with the impossibility of preserving a loved one forever, and the impossibility of forgetting her; and through these, with both the desire for universal love and the temptation to philosophical abstraction. Kelvin ends up having to confront not only the ineffability of the Ocean, but the memory of his dead wife; nor are the two unrelated. Solaris came after 2001: A Space Odyssey and before Tree of Life, and, with its themes of theomachy and theodicy, alienation and mourning, it might be seen as in the spirit of them both.

Unlike either, however, it incorporates an erotic element, and an exploration of the nature of art. The former enters, of course, through the dead wife. The latter is never mentioned, but always present in the viewer’s mind, once he notices that the film includes several films within it (and films within those films) and that Tarkovsky lets the camera linger on paintings by Bruegel, most memorably this one, and brings in this organ piece by Bach. I want to take the memory of the dead wife as an exemplar of how art helps us to mourn.

As one might expect given the comparisons to Kubrick and Malick, plot matters less in this film than cinematography. There are many lengthy shots of Kelvin standing beside a lake with half-submerged trees, and of the roiling Ocean itself, and of water flowing and falling. If nothing else, it is a beautiful movie. Also a strangely stationary one; the camera moves even less than Malick’s (which at least slowly rotates and moves in and out). As if what Tarkovsky wants is to dilate time. When I came out of the theater and began the twenty-minute walk home I found myself looking up at the trees silhouetted against the night sky and noticing the vast emptiness dividing them, how while the trees moved the sky remained stationary. An uncanny feeling, and, I think, what the film was meant to inspire.

Language of the Church

Since moving to Chicago I’ve been attending mass at a church that does the Extraordinary Form, i.e. the Latin mass (though since the Novus Ordo can be in Latin too that’s a somewhat deceptive name). The main advantage to this is that I don’t have to listen to the awful hymns that dominate most NO masses I’ve attended. Instead everything is in Latin, except the homily, and, occasionally, the closing hymn (I suppose because it takes place after the Mass has technically ended?).

I definitely prefer for the music to be in Latin. Today the choir chanted “Adoro te devote” during Communion (youtube video here, though I don’t necessarily endorse the visuals, just the audio, which for some reason repeats itself–it’s actually only five minutes long; lyrics in Latin and English translation here). Not everyone knows that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote it, along with several other major hymns (including “O salutaris hostia” and “Tantum ergo”). “Adoro te devote” may be my favorite though. Two more excellent Aquinas facts: at the end of his life he said “all that I have written seems like straw”; and he’s patron saint for protection against thunderstorms. These should, though probably won’t, make him more acceptable to those aesthetically-minded Catholics who see scholastic theology as too systematic.

I haven’t quite made up my mind about everything being in Latin. Sometimes it makes it easier to not pay attention–if I don’t understand the words they’re saying, why listen to them? Sometimes, though, it almost makes it easier to pay attention.

Here’s what I find fascinating–it’s not as if I just don’t understand them. I just barely don’t understand them. Latin is close enough to English that I know what most of the words mean, and I often can see how they fit together without knowing the grammar, since grammar matters more for putting words together than for understanding them once they are together (take out all the grammatical markers in a complex sentence and it probably makes sense, but it would be difficult to write that way). I can find significance in what I hear, but I have to seek it out; otherwise it remains opaque, a sequence (not a series) of incomprehensible chanted syllables.

Another complication enters with the fact that I don’t own a Latin missal. Each day I pick up at the front of the church a booklet with the fixed prayers in Latin/English facing-page translation and a piece of paper with the readings for the day in English. I have Latin and English for most of what I hear; only English for some of it; and nothing at all for certain parts. What I said above applies most purely to when I have both, at which times I usually look at the Latin and only glance at the English for guidance. With only English it takes more effort to match up what I hear with what I see, and probably too much effort is spent translating. Even with nothing I usually have a good idea of what they’re saying, since e.g. the Preface for Lent isn’t too different from the Preface for the Holy Trinity, which is in the booklet, but the Latin goes by too fast for me to decipher it.

Of course the connection between sound and sense becomes boggled whenever I listen to music in another language. But with, say, Wagner, the meaning of the words drops out and all I’m left with is the voice, charged with emotion. With Gregorian chant the voice drops out and all I’m left with is the words, charged with meaning. When I figure out what’s being said, the meaning is just there. It’s as if I’ve moved from sound to meaning without even the possibility of sensing a cringe-worthy rhetorical infelicity.

Some people–I’m thinking here of Stanley Cavell, with his focus on speaking in one’s own voice–probably look at this and find it inhuman. I’d rather think of it as the community speaking with one voice and so removing the need to focus on voice at all. If I knew more about music I would try to read what Cavell has written about opera and think about it in relation to chant; it would probably be a way of finding out just how deep by agreements and disagreements with him go.

Bruce Schneier on Trust

Many years ago I read two books by Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert, and I remember hardly anything he said but somehow absorbed a worldview–those things happen when you’re thirteen. Since then I’ve been reading his monthly newsletter Crypto-Gram. This year he’s come out with a new book, Liars and Outliers. Based on this description of the book’s project, I definitely want to read it.

I’m particularly interested in what he has to say about the effect of technology. I’m never entirely happy with how people talk about technology; the people who love it seem to pay too little attention to its dangers as they advocate sweeping change, the people opposed seem to take its benefits for granted even as they advocate getting rid of it. I tend to trust Schneier on this issue, for reasons I can’t quite explain; probably because he focuses on the dangers technology poses, but also obviously has no interest in reversing history. In the teaser essay linked to above, he has this to say:

What’s really interesting to me is what this all means for the future. We’ve never been able to eliminate defections. No matter how much societal pressure we bring to bear, we can’t bring the murder rate in society to zero. We’ll never see the end of bad corporate behavior, or embezzlement, or rude people who make cell phone calls in movie theaters. That’s fine, but it starts getting interesting when technology makes each individual defection more dangerous. That is, fisherman will survive even if a few of them defect and overfish — until defectors can deploy driftnets and single-handedly collapse the fishing stock. The occasional terrorist with a machine gun isn’t a problem for society in the overall scheme of things; but a terrorist with a nuclear weapon could be.

His are the sort of books that are full of factual evidence and careful generalizations, often leading to conclusions one already suspected but now feel that one “knows.” Still, I don’t know if I want to call this sort of thing “science.” It’s like Steven Pinker’s book about declining violence (which Schneier recommends)–too much generalizing about human nature, thinking we can understand it; too much scientific secular humanism.

In Praise of War and Caricature

Various efforts at procrastination have led me tonight to read this New Criterion article from 2000, an attack on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I haven’t read Kuhn’s book, so I’m not 100% sure the critique is accurate, but I have encountered his ideas many times–so many that I feel as if I already have read his book. But maybe the book itself is more nuanced, makes an argument actually worth engaging? The article says that shouldn’t worry me:

As with many caricatures, one finds that the original consists of the caricature with the addition of a number of qualifications; the qualifications render the original inconsistent, and the author’s subsequent denials that he had said anything so radical increase further the number of inconsistencies. One observes also that the caricature has a historical career considerably more vigorous than the original, whose qualifications would have lessened its appeal. Besides its simplicity, the caricature makes the story of science into one of the simple emotive plotlines that literary folk find so engaging.

I don’t know. I often find it tempting to say this about philosophical figures; it’s so much easier to read a summary of Kant’s third critique than to read the critique itself (which, alas, I have not yet done). And if you’re doing intellectual history it’s often justified, because it often is just the caricatures that survive, while the nuances–those things that make the argument particular to its author–drop by the wayside. But attacking the caricature often leads to a position that is itself a caricature. The caricature of Kuhn is a relativist, but this article lets itself slip very nearly into positivism. For example, it allows itself to attack the eminently reasonable claim that “even if scientific theories were true, they could not cause reliable transmission of themselves”–i.e. we have to choose to transmit them ourselves. Denying this is just another way of taking the human out of history. It’s the old skeptic/anti-skeptic dialectic, where it seems the only winning game is not to play–or so Stanley Cavell thinks, I take it. But Christianity sees suicide as unacceptable, so what are we to do? Well, what I want to say: be nuanced. But “what I want to say” just means “a caricature of a thought”, not a particular thought at all.

*

I also recently read this more recent New Criterion article, an attack (the New Criterion does a lot of these) on the “new old lie” that war is always and everywhere bad. It makes a number of good points, particularly about how prosaic so much anti-war literature is, and how non-pacifistic works of art are denigrated as either crass commercialism or dangerous fascism:

None of this is to dismiss the merit of antiwar art. There is plenty of talent on the side of cynicism. Indeed, it seems the majority of the talent has been on that side, because the bias has become self-perpetuating: great artists depicted war as meaningless brutality; serious critics determined that such depictions were great art; and aspiring artists and critics, hoping to be taken seriously, followed suit. As a result, the Boston Globe is right. Nearly all war literature, both good and bad, has been antiwar literature. Jarhead, both the book and movie, stands out in this regard: writers and filmmakers tried so hard that they produced an unintentional parody of the form.

I was disappointed not to see a mention of David Jones or Cormac McCarthy, who both in very different ways reject the unreflective pacifism of modernist and postmodernist literature. I was also ultimately disappointed by the exaltation of patriotism as the proper alternative. There’s something to that idea–Jones’s In Parenthesis makes a big deal out of his soldiers’ Englishness, and McCarthy, in my reading of the Border Trilogy, has great disdain for those Mexicans who began civil wars for their own benefit, but great respect for those hombres del pais who fought for the good of their homeland. But it’s not a full answer. “Patriotism” may be where we want to end up, but so far it’s just a word, and one that doesn’t tell us how it differs from fascism, nor show us a path out of the darkness of the space between “the ends justify the means” and “violence is always and everywhere wrong”. Another skeptical dialectic.

Personally I’m uncomfortable with saying “well we should just undo modernism”. It’s interesting to note that, from what I remember of Aquinas, he can be read as saying that it’s not permissible to kill in self-defense, only in defense of others, and then only if it is really impossible not to save them otherwise.

Roses, Wax, and Fire; Matrix and Corinthian Metal

In Paul Valéry’s “Platonic” dialogue Eupalinos, or the Architect, published 1932, Phaedrus seeks out Socrates in Hades to discuss the nature of art. Near the beginning Phaedrus spends several pages recounting a conversation he once had with Eupalinos, an architect who, among other things, excavated a tunnel to bring water to Athens, and for this reason is called the first hydraulics engineer. In what follows Phaedrus’ version of Eupalinos is the first speaker, Phaedrus’ version of himself is the second.

“What is important for me above all else is to obtain from that that which is going to be, that it should with all the vigor of its newness satisfy the reasonable requirements of that which has been. How can one help being obscure?… Listen: one day I saw a cluster of roses and modeled it in wax. When I had finished this model, I put it in sand. Hurrying Time reduces the roses to nothing; and fire promptly returns the wax to its natural formlessness. But the wax having fled its heated mold and now being lost, the dazzling liquid of the bronze comes to wed in the hardened sand the hollow identity of the smallest petal….”

“I understand! Eupalinos. This riddle is transparent to me; the myth is easy to translate.
“Do not those roses that were fresh and that perish before your eyes stand for all things about us and for moving life itself? As for the model of wax that you made, employing it upon your deft fingers, despoiling with your eye the corollas, and returning laden with flowers to your work–is that now an image of your daily labors, enriched by the commerce between your acts and your latest observations?–The fire is Time itself, which would entirely abolish or scatter abroad into the wide world both the real roses and your roses of wax, if your being did not in some way preserve, I know not how, the forms of your experience and the secret solidity of its own reason…. As for the liquid bronze, it surely stands for the exceptional powers of your soul and the tumultuous state of something that wills to be born. This incandescent bounty would be dissipated in vain heat and infinite reverberations, and would leave behind nothing but ingots or irregular streaks of run metal, if you were not able to lead it by mysterious conduits to cool down and to bestow itself in the purest matrix of your wisdom. Your being must therefore of necessity divide itself and become, at one and the same instant, hot and cold, fluid and solid, free and fast–roses, wax, and fire; matrix and Corinthian metal.”

“Exactly! But I told you that I merely try my hand at it.”

“How do you set about it?”

“As best I can.”

I can’t help but think that T.S. Eliot read this essay before writing Four Quartets. Of course the connection of rose with fire is by no means original to either writer (it shows up, for example, in Dante’s Paradiso), but something about Eliot’s version reminds me more of Valéry than Dante. Valéry too talks about the “still points” that show up again in the last lines of the fifth movement of “Little Gidding”:

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

It’s hard to come by a copy of Eupalinos, at least if you can’t read French. (The only books I can find on Amazon that include it look extremely dubious.) For some reason he’s not popular in the English-speaking world. But it’s worth tracking down a copy if you care about modernist poetry, modernist poetics, the quarrel of art and philosophy, or understanding the myriad variations of “The point of intersection of the timeless / With time”.

Spammer Reads Shakespeare

And doesn’t do too bad a job.

Every once in a while I check WordPress’s spam trap, and usually there’s nothing worth looking at–just computer-generated nonsense on the theme of “great post”, or long lists of links to illicit-sounding places that probably give your computer a virus if you click on them.

But a few weeks ago I posted here a quotation from King Lear, Act III, Scene II, and today saw this comment caught in the trap:

If you have reached this article, with tips to [what is marriage] (this was the spam link), chances are high that you are going thru a separation of some sort and your spirits may be very low. Trust me, I know this feeling just too well. I have been down this road and I know the panic, desperation and everything in between. I do want to tell you, however, that even though he might say it is over, there is still a very good chance that the relationship can be salvaged. Why do I say that?

Now this is obviously spam, and obviously a template. But really, if I had been saying what King Lear says, rather than quoting King Lear, this wouldn’t be too implausible a thing to say to me. I’d like to think (though I’m probably wrong) that this wasn’t random, that they used some sort of word-analysis to determine that Lear’s voice here is low-spirited, panicked, desperate, and then chose the above from a series of options.

In any case, good job spammers! Maybe one day they’ll be able to sound like real people.

Technology and Conservative Progress

Probably it’s the fact that I spend my undergraduate years at a university most of its students would describe as a “conservative Catholic liberal-arts school,” but I had never fully understood the use of the word “conservative” as a pejorative. Of course I knew people who disliked conservatives but I hadn’t been in too many conversations where “conservative” was itself a form of criticism rather than something whose merits were up for debate.

Using it as a pejorative, of course, leads one to characterize a variety of positions under the same heading when they have next to nothing in common. The way ancient Greeks would call all other peoples “barbarians.” And the way conservatives use the word “liberal” for Lockeans, libertarians, progressives, socialists, etc… all’s fair in politics.

For example, this article on Steve Jobs, which I think makes a rather strong critique of the “philosophy” of Apple, concludes with the following:

[...] But Apple, alas, remains stuck in the most conservative, outdated, and bizarre interpretation of the Bauhaus, which was, ironically, a movement that flaunted its commitment to social reform and utopian socialism. Would a job applicant who spends weeks pondering the morality of washing machines get a job at Apple now?

Unfortunately, most of us are too addicted to Apple’s products to demand or to expect anything more of the company. As long as Apple can ship new devices every quarter, much like a dealer would ship new drugs, few questions are asked. How little has changed since Lewis Mumford complained that

“For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old. This may be good for a rapid turnover in business, but it is bad for continuity and stability in life. Progress, in an organic sense, should be cumulative, and though a certain amount of rubbish-clearing is always necessary, we lose part of the gain offered by a new invention if we automatically discard all the still valuable inventions that preceded it.

I find this for the most part quite compelling, but calling the view under consideration conservative just because it’s outdated is, well, “ironically” is one way to describe what happens when doing so leads to describing something as both conservative and utopian… What Mumford says about proper progress being organic and cumulative–that’s conservative.

Technological progress feels like a force of nature, but it also radically changes the community to which it “happens”, that is, the community that brings it about. So when conservatives want to question the assumed goodness of technological progress, they call supporters of it liberal: they’re supporting change without thinking through the consequences and perhaps yelling “stop!” And when liberals want to do so, they call its supporters conservative: they’re supporting letting things take their natural course without thinking through the consequences and taking an active role in controlling its development.

Really both positions, optimistic and pessimistic, are “modernist,” which is why that word too is almost useless. But “modernist” does seem appropriate here insofar as the Bauhaus was “modernist,” Lewis Mumford was a “modernist,” and debate about technology is itself central to “modernism”.

And of course all of this is true of history in general, not just technological history. But the concept of history is basically coincident with the concept of technological progress. I’m not sure how valuable it is to separate them.

Turning words on their heads like this almost makes me feel like a deconstructionist.

Of Biblical Proportions

Though it has other uses, the above phrase is most often applied to one of two things: natural disasters and wars. There’s a reason for that: the Bible is full of both, most of them commanded by God. That makes it somewhat hard to say, as one so often hears, that “Christianity is the religion of peace.”

Something like that is the claim of the book reviewed here. I haven’t read Laying Down the Sword, by Philip Jenkins, but the review, by Patrick Allitt, gives a decent summary (assuming it’s not inaccurate). Jenkins’ main concern is to make sense of the depictions of genocidal violence commanded by God in various books of the Old Testament, which after all we have to see as somehow divinely inspired if we don’t want to be Marcionites or gnostics. Jenkins, Allitt writes, offers the following solution:

Jenkins believes that these much later writers attributed to Joshua actions [viz. the divinely ordered massacre of the Canaanites] that never happened. Their motive was to exhort their own contemporaries to live up to the rigors of monotheism and not to let their attention be drawn away by the multitude of other gods, from the surrounding empires and societies, competing for their loyalty. He admits that praising their forefathers for genocide implies that they were familiar with the concept, but takes consolation from the fact that the pitiless massacres in question almost certainly did not take place.

[...]

What does all this imply for practicing Christians today? In Jenkins’ view, ministers and worshipers should face up to the genocidal texts because they are an integral part of the Bible, whose Old and New Testaments, he believes, depend on one another. He invokes the authority of Martin Luther, who reminded the excitable first generation of Protestant Bible readers not to take any passage out of context, always to think of the overall meaning of a book, and to be attentive to the setting and specifics of a passage. Deuteronomy 7, for example, can then be understood not as a claim that it’s right for Christians to massacre their enemies but as “a call to absolute dedication.” If we continue to ignore or deny these texts rather than face up to them in their proper context, we will be taken by surprise when another fanatic uses them to justify murder.

Sadly Catholics aren’t much better about this; I’ve certainly never heard a homily on “And the Lord thy God shall have delivered them to thee, thou shalt utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no league with them, nor shew mercy to them” (Deut 7:2). (Though I’ve also never heard… well let’s not get into the topic of the quality of Catholic preaching.) These are issues that demand our attention; that’s one of the main reasons I write so much here about violence, agony, theodicy. (If nothing else to come to some understanding of them myself.)

But one reason they demand our attention is that we can’t just say “well the Bible says it but doesn’t really mean it”. As Allitt ends his review:

On the other hand it’s hard to escape the feeling that he is making excuses for the biblical authors. Perhaps it is true that they used the language of genocide only figuratively, but in doing so they gave warrants to people who not only committed actual genocide but claimed God’s blessing for it into the bargain.

[...] That got me thinking about another biblical genocide—Noah’s flood. [...] It’s a horrifying tale but one that our culture treats as colorful and uplifting, a prelude to the first rainbow. I’ve never heard a sermon on it as an act of divine rage and apocalyptic destruction. Perhaps that just confirms Jenkins’ general point that we should be a lot more self-aware and self-critical when we think about our religion and a lot slower to condemn the violent tendencies in the religions of others.

I think Catholics are (or can be) more aware than Protestants of the bloody side of their religion. We do, after all, believe what we drink at Mass to be not fermented grape juice, but Christ’s actual blood. I think that’s why saying that the massacres didn’t actually happen is so unsatisfying. Perhaps they never happened (or at least weren’t as bad as the Bible makes them sound); maybe (probably) Noah’s flood never happened either. Maybe it’s just symbolism. But what do we even mean by that? Our religion is centered around the literal reality of a symbol.

And at times, it’s hard to see what difference it being “just symbolism” would even make make when our religion is about our killing God by nailing him to a tree. Not in mythic time–in history, sometime around 33 AD. Yet not just murdered by some ancient Jews and Romans–murdered by us. We want–need–for him to die because if he doesn’t, we cannot be saved. He is the sacrificial lamb–and before him, sacrifice was always an act of atonement, not what had to be atoned for. Is it now both? Do we commit an act of violence in order to atone for that very same act? What the hell are we doing saying Christianity is a religion of peace? It’s a religion centered around a successful theomachy.

I don’t think anything in the above paragraph is false; it’s simply mysterious. (An open mystery?) At the same time, it can be easy to slip from mysticism to mystification. There’s important differences between Christianity and the various mystery cults that sprung up around the same time centered on the killing of a god.

If the Wikipedia version of René Girard can be trusted, Girard has some interesting ideas about Christ’s death as an unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism and revelation of our complicity in it, and of the two millennia since as the instability that follows from this unmasking as society struggles to come to terms with it. I find these ideas intriguing (particularly Christianity as destabilization) but I have a vague sense that they don’t do justice to the way the Bible makes violence characteristic of not just humanity but also divinity.

In these speculations there’s always danger of heresy (a worry secular readers probably find incomprehensible, but so be it). Still, I’d like to merge Girardian anthropology with that of David Jones (whom some have called a “sacred heretic”), at least what we can extract from his writings. In In Parenthesis Jones makes the WWI soldier into sinner and scapegoat and sacrifice and faithful blasphemer. What I want to say is this: the only successful theodicy would be a kind of theomachy. (Which is, I suppose, one way to read Job.) But I can’t know if I can say that until I can answer, what kind?

—

Three postscripts.

First, I am very open to being challenged on this–more so than with most posts. But quoting the peaceful passages of the Bible can’t settle the matter, since the point is that we somehow have to reconcile the two.

Second, what I’ve tried to suggest here is that one just can’t read Christianity as a religion of peace, not if you take it seriously, not if you understand “religion of peace” to mean something even remotely akin to “religion of pacifism”. It’s a valid question, I think, why one would endorse such a violent religion at all–don’t we all know violence is bad?–but that’s a question for another day. It was actually on that topic that I thought I was writing when I began this, but the prologue ran away from me.

Finally, as you’ve perhaps guessed, I’m most comfortable cutting short the omnibenevolent leg of the stool; I lean towards fudging “freedom” rather than “omniscience” and don’t see how you can reduce omnipotence without it completely disappearing (note: SMBC is amusing but often extremely vulgar so don’t read beyond the one I linked to if you have a weak stomach for that sort of thing).