Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 217

Christianity and capitalism reconsidered

David Bentley Hart’s essay on the incompatibility of Christianity and capitalism, featured in the new issue of Plough Quarterly, strikes me as absolutely essential — an argument that everyone who wants to think seriously about Christianity and the social order ought to reflect on and find a response to. That argument is not, in its broad outlines, new — but it does condense some vital points and express them in vigorous prose.

But before getting to Hart: One of the most frustrating elements of the current debates about Christianity and American life is the vagueness and abstraction of the relevant terms. When certain Christians decry “the liberal order,” what do they mean? My friend and colleague David Corey has offered a deeply intelligent and extremely useful response to Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed in which he points out that while liberalism is intrinsically associated with the securing and preservation of freedom, “freedom” has been defined by the key theorists of the liberal order in at least nine distinct ways. Which of those do the celebrants of the liberal order celebrate? Which do the denouncers of the liberal order denounce? Often it’s impossible to tell, and it’s highly unlikely that the typical celebrant or denouncer would even understand the question. (So please read David Corey’s essay.)

Of course, most people who make arguments about anything don’t really know what they’re talking about. But it seems to me that arguments about Christianity and politics have an almost unique ability to reduce the intelligence of the people involved by at least a third. We desperately need clarity about what, exactly, we’re arguing about. And that’s where Hart’s essay can help. In the first sentence of his essay he writes, “I have no entirely satisfactory answer to the questions that prompt these reflections; but I do think the right approach to the answers can be glimpsed fairly clearly if we first take the time to define our terms.” And indeed this is precisely where we need to begin.

Unfortunately, this promising opening leads immediately to the least satisfactory element of Hart’s essay, which I am going to address in the remainder of this post, and then go on, in later posts, to describe what I think is very right, or at least very useful, in the rest of his essay.

I have often praised a model of debate that I learned about from my friend Robin Sloan. Here’s Robin’s description of it:

Every so often, the Long Now Foundation here in San Francisco hosts a debate. It might be about nuclear power or synthetic biology or perhaps the very notion of human progress — high-stakes stuff. But the format is nothing like the showdowns on cable news or the debates in election season.

Instead, it goes like this:

There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction — a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument — and then, when he’s finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction.

David Bentley Hart is not interested in this sort of attempt to reach a common understanding of the terms of debate. Earlier I quoted the first sentence of his essay; but before the first sentence we get an epigraph from Baudelaire that begins, “Commerce is, in its essence, satanic.” At the end of that paragraph he cites the early anarchist Proudhon’s view that capitalism “is a system in which as a general rule those whose work creates profits neither own the means of production nor enjoy the fruits of their labor.” So Hart’s definitions of capitalism are those of its declared enemies. Thus, the incompatibility of capitalism with Christianity is not the argument of Hart’s essay, it is the essay’s premise. That the defenders of capitalism would not accept these definitions is, I suspect, of little interest to Hart.

But I think it should be. Consider Deirdre McCloskey in the first volume of her series of books on bourgeois life, The Bourgeois Virtues: “I mean by ‘capitalism’ merely private property and free labor without central planning, regulated by the rule of law and by an ethical consensus.” Her argument following from this definition is that liberal capitalism (a) makes us richer, (b) lets us live longer, and (c) improves our ethics. From these points she concludes: “Anticapitalism is bad for us.”

I don’t think that Hart would accept any of these points, but I wonder what he might say in refutation. One of the key points of dispute would surely be the characteristic effects of capitalism. Hart writes, “One can also concede that, now and then, the immense returns reaped by the few can redound to the benefit of the many; but there is no fixed rule to that effect, and generally quite the opposite is the case“ — but as we have seen, McCloskey claims that the best research tells us that Hart’s claim is flat wrong, that “generally” capitalist activity is a tide that lifts most if not all boats. (It’s funny how often McCloskey seems to be anticipating Hart, e.g.: “If modern capitalism is defined to be the same thing as Greed — ‘the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone … , this boundless greed after riches,’ as Marx put it in chapter 1 of Capital, drawing on an anticommercial theme originating in Aristotle — then that settles it, before looking at the evidence.” Largely this is because Hart’s critique of capitalism is a very familiar one, as, I’m sure, he would be the first to acknowledge.)

I also wonder whether, given disagreements like the above, it would be possible for Hart and McCloskey to agree on a definition of capitalism, and, if they did, what it would be and how it would affect their respective arguments. But to speculate about such possibilities is to live in a dream world.

I don’t want to try to adjudicate the dispute here. For one thing, it’s not a level playing field: Hart wrote one short essay and McCloskey three long books. I merely want to say that I think Hart could have started from a more neutral definition of capitalism and arrived equally securely at his anti-capitalist stance — indeed, could have arrived there more securely, and made his position more convincing to skeptics. It is even possible that everything that McCloskey says about capitalism is true and that capitalism is still incpmpatible with Christianity, because McCloskey does not tell the whole truth. (McCloskey is a Christian, by the way.) Hart’s essay has an unfortunate beginning, then, but after that it grows stronger. Hart confronts me with some powerful points that I would rather not confront — but I’m going to try to do so.

Everything I have to say from here on is directed to Christians who believe that what the Bible says, or at the very least what Jesus says in the Bible, matters to their thinking about our social and economic life — who believe that, once we understand what Jesus is saying to us, we are bound to obedience.

And that means being so bound even when obedience leads us onto paths that do not, or do not seem to, conduce to our flourishing. That is what I meant when I said that Deirdre McCloskey’s argument — that capitalism makes us wealthier, lets us live longer, and improves our ethics — could be right and even so Christianity and capitalism might not be compatible. Maybe God doesn’t want us to be richer and longer-lived, and maybe there are certain matters of faithfulness that transcend what most people call “ethics” (Kierkegaard famously called this the “teleological suspension of the ethical”). Christianity shares with the other Axial Age religions a thoroughgoing revaluation of what makes for human flourishing. As Charles Taylor points out in A Secular Age, Buddhism and Christianity diverge greatly in doctrine, and yet they have something vital in common:

This is that the believer or devout person is called on to make a profound inner break with the goals of flourishing in their own case; they are called on, that is, to detach themselves from their own flourishing, to the point of the extinction of self in one case, or to that of renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God in the other. The respective patterns are clearly visible in the exemplary figures. The Buddha achieves Enlightenment; Christ consents to a degrading death to follow his father’s will.

Jesus was not wealthy — “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” — and preached “good news for the poor.” He did not live to a ripe old age. His ethics were thought deficient by the leading religious figures of his time and place. Thus capitalism could be everything McCloskey says it is and yet we Christians could be called upon to disavow it.

Hart thinks this is precisely what Christians are called upon to do:

Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet: he has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim: “Woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full; woe to you who are full fed, for you shall hunger; woe to you who are now laughing, for you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:24–25). As Abraham tells Dives in Hades, “You fully received your good things during your lifetime… so now you suffer” (Luke 16:25). Christ not only demands that we give freely to all who ask from us (Matt. 5:42), with such prodigality that one hand is ignorant of the other’s largesse (Matt. 6:3); he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth – not merely storing it up too obsessively – and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matt. 6:19–20). He tells all who would follow him to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds away as alms (Luke 12:33), and explicitly states that “every one of you who does not give up all that he himself possesses is incapable of being my disciple” (Luke 14:33). As Mary says, part of the saving promise of the gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away starving” (Luke 1:53).

Gulp.

It is interesting to reflect on the number of Christians who insist that Scripture’s teaching on our culture’s topics du jour (whatever those might be) are explicit and obvious and so incontrovertible that anyone who disagrees with the Preferred Interpretation must be willfully blind — and yet simultaneously insist that the passages Hart quotes are subject to dramatically varying interpretations, and that it would be rash indeed to claim that we are actually literally being told to give all we have away to the poor?

This is why I am so fond of quoting this passage from Kierkegaard’s journals:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in this world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

I open the New Testament and read: ‘If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me.’ Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars! We would be sunk if it were not for Christian scholarship! Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would one, two, three, run us all down if it got loose (that is, if Christian scholarship did not restrain it).

As I say, I am fond of quoting this passage, but I am also judged by it in ways that make me profoundly uneasy. Kirekegaard’s savagely hilarious mockery prevents me from evading the force of the words of Jesus that Hart cites, and I suppose that’s good; but none of his words can compel me to obedience.

As far as I can tell, I am, as a Christian, bound to sell all I have and disperse the proceeds to the poor; but, also as far as I can tell, I won’t do it. And I won’t do it because I lack the requisite courage. I am afraid that if I obey Jesus on this point my wife and I will spend our final years in poverty and fear, that like Jesus himself we will have no place to lay our heads. I am afraid that if I give everything I own to the poor I’ll have nothing to leave to our son, who seems likely to be facing a more economically precarious life than I have had.

I don’t like being in this situation. I’d be much happier if I could convince myself that “Christian scholarship” is correct when it explains to me that those biblical texts Hart quotes don’t mean what it sure looks like they mean. But Kierkegaard forces me to see just how motivated my reasoning is, how desperately I want to avoid Jesus’s commands. So I suppose I should start praying for courage, shouldn’t I?

All that said, these reflections take us a long way from the question of how compatible Christianity and capitalism are.

The reason the reflections in the previous section of this post don’t bear on the relationship between Christianity and capitalism is simple: Jesus tells me what to do with my money, but He does not what sort of socio-economic order to build, or try to build. The focus of the New Testament is always on what persons do and especially what the ecclesial community, the koinonia, does. The relationship between those acts, that community, and the larger social order remains enigmatic. There’s no question that Jesus brings a revolution against all the existing Powers, but how that revolution is to be made manifest is hard to grasp. His statements about Roman power are famously ambiguous, and his lack of interest in leading or even participating in a political rebellion of the Jews against their overlords seems to have scandalized some of his early followers.

Hart tries to bridge the gap between statement and implication in the following way:

“There can simply be no question that absolutely central to the gospel they [the Apostles] preached was the insistence that private wealth and even private property were alien to a life lived in the Body of Christ.”
“Small intentional communities committed to some form of Christian collectivism are all very well, of course,” but “whatever prophetic critique they might bring to bear upon their society is, in the minds of most believers, converted into a mere special vocation, both exemplary and precious — perhaps even a sanctifying priestly presence within the larger church — but still possible only for the very few, and certainly not a model of practical politics.”
What must be kept in mind is this: “the full koinonia of the Body of Christ is not an option to be set alongside other equally plausible alternatives. It is not a private ethos or an elective affinity. It is a call not to withdrawal, but to revolution.”
In conclusion: “Christians are those, then, who are no longer at liberty to imagine or desire any social or political or economic order other than the koinonia of the early church, no other communal morality than the anarchy of Christian love.”

Before proceeding, I want to pause to digress on something that might be the only thing that really matters here. Deirdre McCloskey describes with enthusiastic intelligence the virtues that bourgeois-capitalist society cultivates; Hart, by contrast, writes of “the anarchy of Christian love.” It is a long-vexed question whether agape is a virtue in the same way that many other traits are virtues.

Since Aristotle, it is common for virtue theorists to describe virtues as finding some golden mean between two vices: hope, for instance, says Thomas Aquinas, may be found between the false extremes of desperatio and praesumptio, despair and presumption: the despairing person doesn’t think there’s anywhere to go, while the presumptuous person thinks that he has already arrived. (The hopeful person knows that she is a wayfarer: she hasn’t yet arrived, but she has a destination clearly in mind.) But while it’s easy to draw such a clear map of hope and its perversions, it’s harder to do that for love. After all, if your love is rightly directed, you can’t love too much.

McCloskey comments that some people who heard that she was writing about “bourgeois virtues” laughed, because they didn’t think that the bourgeoisie have any virtues. But in fact the classical conception of virtue is a useful way to think about middle-class life under capitalism. You don’t want to take unnecessary risks, but you don’t want to sew your money into your mattress either. You don’t want to hoard your resources, but you don’t want to waste them either. You don’t want to work yourself to death, but you don’t want to be lazy and feckless either.

But this balancing act may well be inappropriate to the life of agape, which in the New Testament is so often associated with what from the bourgeois point of view looks like extravagance. If someone takes your coat, give him your cloak also. Praise that old widow for giving all she has, even though a bourgeois virtue would counsel her to hold something back. Don’t try to escape persecution, but rather rejoice in it. Don’t even think about what you should say when called to account for yourself before some court — God will give you the words you need. Don’t try to maintain your emotional equilibrium but rather laugh with those who laugh and weep with those who weep. (Don’t save your money so you can give it to your son when you die.) This, I think, is what Hart means by “the anarchy of Christian love” — it’s a kind of flinging of yourself into the world without counting the cost and in defiance of the consequences. After all, look at what happened to Jesus when he flung himself into the world.

Practicing the bourgeois virtues makes the social world run more smoothly and predictably; practicing anarchic agape makes … we know not what. Hold on to your hat.

Anyway. Let’s posit that what Hart says in those five bulleted points I quoted several paragraphs back is true (especially since, as far as I can tell, all of it is true). Nevertheless: none of it tells us what we should do when we live in a society in which some people are Christians and some people are not. we may be called to revolution, but throughout history revolution has come in many varieties, varieties often incompatible with one another — so which variety is the koinonia supposed to follow? Or is its revolution essentially distinct from all other forms? Even when Hart says that intentional Christian communities don’t provide “a model of practical politics,” that doesn’t tell us whether we should have a model of practical politics. Maybe that precisely what a community of anarchic love shouldn’t have and indeed cannot have. Maybe that’s the nature of its revolutionary impetus. So not a great deal obviously follows from Hart’s argument.

But the primary imperative that surely follows is this: Do not make an idol of capitalism, do not see it as an ideal, do not see it as God’s Way, do not take it as a model for how to live. We are forbidden that by Scripture. In that sense capitalism is certainly incompatible with Christianity.

But having said that, it does seem to me that you could agree with Hart’s points and still hold a position fairly close to McCloskey’s, which is that capitalism, or rather the liberal social order which exists symbiotically with a market economy, is, for Christians and for everyone else, “pretty good.” Not great, not without significant flaws, but good enough to be going on with, and better than the available alternatives. Christianity is compatible with the liberal capitalist order in the sense that one can be a Christian within that order, though not easily and not without making trouble for yourself and for others.

But that doesn’t mean that one should be content with such getting by. The key question, I think, is to ask what, if we agree that Christianity is revolutionary, we mean by “revolution.” If you read Hannah Arendt’s great book On Revolution you will discover that the term has had many meanings over the centuries, not all of which are compatible with one another, and at least some of which — the violent overthrow of a government, for instance — surely cannot be reconciled with Christian faith and practice.

A related question — for Christians who are commanded to sell all they have and give to the poor, and to share all things in common — would be: May we strive to instantiate a political order that forces everyone within it to sell all they have and give it to the poor, regardless of whether they are Christians? I worry about this, because the track record of Christians when given the power of political coercion is tragically poor. Should not penitence for past sins, if nothing else, cause us to hesitate before attempting to enforce our convictions on those who do not share our faith?

Perhaps the best strategy would be to see if, in whatever political order we happen to find ourselves, we are able to be obedient to the commandments of King Jesus, at least for a period of time. Because we are unlikely to get other people interested in following a revolutionary banner that we ourselves aren’t strong enough to hold up.

eyeballs

The issue of my newsletter that I posted today is concerned largely with the Hong Kong protests, but let me add a note to that. In that post I quote Maciej Cegłowski, who has been in Hong Kong participating in the protests, and he recently tweeted:

Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags pic.twitter.com/6Wb0Km6GOb

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) August 17, 2019

So let’s keep this in mind for future reference, okay? If you are a tyrannical government, or you work for such a government, and you want to get your lies about what’s happening in your country before as many eyeballs as possible, Twitter is ready and eager to sell you access to those eyeballs.

nationalism and religion

We conservatives, however, have our own preferred division of the political universe: one in which Anglo-American conservatism appears as a distinct political category that is obviously neither authoritarian nor liberal. With the rest of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, we uphold the principles of limited government and individual liberties. But we also see clearly (again, in keeping with our conservative tradition) that the only forces that give the state its internal coherence and stability, holding limited government in place while staving off authoritarianism, are our nationalist and religious traditions. These nationalist and religious principles are not liberal. They are prior to liberalism, in conflict with liberalism, and presently being destroyed by liberalism.

— Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony. Setting aside for a moment the debate about liberalism, the conflation here of the nationalist and the religious is troublesome, to say the least. Nationalism is and always will be dangerous to the Christian faith, because it inevitably does what it does here: co-opt “religion” as the handmaiden of nationalist interest. And there’s a reason why so many people inclined to this way of thinking love to talk about “religion” in the abstract: it enables them to evade the universal and non-negotiable claims of Jesus.

In this context it’s good to recall what Augustine says in the City of God:

Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself, the other in the Lord; the one seeks glory from men, the other finds its highest glory in God, the Witness of our conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, ‘Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.’ [XIV, 28, quoting Psalm 3,3]

Perhaps nationalism and “religion” alike are inimical to liberalism. But if so, they aren’t inimical in the same way or for the same reasons. Faithful Christians will always earn the response Paul and Silas got in Thessalonika: “These people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also…. They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus.”

the most dreadful of gods

Am I the only reader who sees, in Eliot’s twinned stories of Dorothea and Lydgate (originally two separate novels, of course) an as-it-were Nausicaa/Odysseus implicit-tale of thwarted possibility? Am I the only person who thinks they’d make the perfect couple: both young, beautiful, idealistic, driven? Of course they can’t be together because Doroetha is married, and by the time she is free to marry again Lydgate is married. And I concede there’s nothing in the novel that explicitly reverts to any mutual attraction between them. Maybe it’s a mere will-to-neatness on my part that thinks in these terms, but still.

— Adam Roberts. Doesn’t every reader of Middlemarch feel precisely this way? I have always assumed so! But maybe I have a perverse expectation that the world will agree with me.

I believe that the way Dorothea and Lydgate just miss each other is one of the most important elements of the story. Had the timing of their lives been oh-so-slightly different Lydgate could well have met Dorothea before he met Rosamond and before she met Casaubon, and of course they would have fallen in love. Having met a woman of beauty and substance Lydgate would have been invulnerable to Rosamond’s shallower charms; and having met a young, good-looking man who was actually doing good to people in need, Dorothea would never for a second have considered the desiccated Casaubon as a possible love interest. Both would have been spared grief, and Lydgate would have remained a doctor committed to social reform rather than turning into a physician to the rich and gouty.

But it didn’t happen, because their social calendars didn’t quite match up. And — this is surely Eliot’s main point — on just such slender threads do all of our fates hang. She is describing for us a world in which people are not “meant for each other”: they find each other, or don’t, according to the whims of chance.

The other great novelist who shows us the world in this light is Tolstoy. I’m going to quote a (long!) passage from Anna Karenina featuring two minor characters who go out mushroom-hunting together. You’ll get the context as you read.

They walked on for some steps in silence. Varenka saw that he wanted to speak; she guessed of what, and felt faint with joy and panic. They had walked so far away that no one could hear them now, but still he did not begin to speak. It would have been better for Varenka to be silent. After a silence it would have been easier for them to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms. But against her own will, as it were accidentally, Varenka said:

“So you found nothing? In the middle of the wood there are always fewer, though.” Sergey Ivanovitch sighed and made no answer. He was annoyed that she had spoken about the mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to the first words she had uttered about her childhood; but after a pause of some length, as though against his own will, he made an observation in response to her last words.

“I have heard that the white edible funguses are found principally at the edge of the wood, though I can’t tell them apart.”

Some minutes more passed, they moved still further away from the children, and were quite alone. Varenka’s heart throbbed so that she heard it beating, and felt that she was turning red and pale and red again.

To be the wife of a man like Koznishev, after her position with Madame Stahl, was to her imagination the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost certain that she was in love with him. And this moment it would have to be decided. She felt frightened. She dreaded both his speaking and his not speaking.

Now or never it must be said — that Sergey Ivanovitch felt too. Everything in the expression, the flushed cheeks and the downcast eyes of Varenka betrayed a painful suspense. Sergey Ivanovitch saw it and felt sorry for her. He felt even that to say nothing now would be a slight to her. Rapidly in his own mind he ran over all the arguments in support of his decision. He even said over to himself the words in which he meant to put his offer, but instead of those words, some utterly unexpected reflection that occurred to him made him ask:

“What is the difference between the ‘birch’ mushroom and the ‘white’ mushroom?”

Varenka’s lips quivered with emotion as she answered:

“In the top part there is scarcely any difference, it’s in the stalk.”

And as soon as these words were uttered, both he and she felt that it was over, that what was to have been said would not be said; and their emotion, which had up to then been continually growing more intense, began to subside.

I read this for the first time when I was around twenty and found it utterly terrifying. It can’t be like that, I thought. (And for what it’s worth, I don’t now think that it is quite like that, though it would take me a long time to explain what I do think.) There’s a kind of clear-eyed mercilessness to the way that Tolstoy and Eliot alike reveal the workings of that most dreadful of gods, Hap.

vengeance

How much of fantasy, I wonder, is revenge fantasy? I’m asking this question, of course, because there’s a new Tarantino movie, and revenge fantasy is His Thing. But this does seem to be one of the primary functions of the fantastic: to create fictional worlds in which moral dramas can play out in ways that the authors like — and especially in which enemies are exposed and punished.

In Tarantino’s case this tends to involve simple rewriting of history, but this mode, or perhaps mood, of storytelling can take several forms.

The future fantasy, as in The Handmaid’s Tale: My enemies don’t have absolute power right now, but if they ever got it here’s the kind of thing they would do.

The alternate worlds fantasy, as in Pullman’s His Dark Materials: In our world the Catholic Church did not rule all of Europe with an iron anti-science fist, and John Calvin did not order the execution of children, but they very easily could have and might have, and see, in this universe right next door to ours we find the cold ugly logic of their position carried to its natural conclusion.

The feigned history fantasy with allegorical overtones: In The Lord of the Rings Saruman is a modern industrialist avant le lettre, and through him Tolkien gets to demonstrate how “a mind of gears and wheels” works and the kind of damage it does if its power is unconstrained. But we also get to see how that mind undoes its own plans, and how the natural world acts to restore a proper equilibrium. There’s a palpable longing in that strand of the tale: If only something like that could happen here and now.

The satirical fantasy, as in the this-world frame-story of The Silver Chair, where Lewis develops his idea that self-consciously “modern” education produces people “without chests,” without a moral foundation, and thereby unleashes the natural human propensity to nastiness. But a visit to Narnia gives Jill and Eustace the moral clarity to see and act (rather violently!) against the absurdities of Experiment House: “For, with the strength of Aslan in them, Jill plied her crop on the girls and Caspian and Eustace plied the flats of their swords on the boys so well that in two minutes all the bullies were running like mad, crying out, ‘Murder! Fascists! Lions! It isn’t fair.’”

So, again: fantasy as a means of exposing and/or punishing the author’s enemies. You could put a positive spin on this and say that fantasy is preoccupied with justice; and sometimes that would be right; Tolkien’s treatment of Saruman seems the least vengeful, largely, I think, because Saruman is so often and so explicitly given the opportunity to choose a different path than the one he settles on — an opportunity Tolkien doesn’t give to Orcs, as Auden was I think the first to note. It’s when enemies are portrayed as unreformable, as incapable of repenting or in any significant way changing, that the love of justice tends to be transformed into a crowing over their wickedness, or a delight in vengeance taken upon them.

(I got an email in response to the above from my friend Adam Roberts, and realized that I needed to be more clear. Here’s my response to Adam. I hope to develop these thoughts in more detail later.)

First of all, I think dreams of revenge are always moral — but of course are dreams of power too. We dream of revenge when we believe that some injustice has been done and we want to make it right, or at least redress it in some way, but can’t. Surely — to put it in Augustinian terms — the root of every dream of vengeance is a love of justice, even if the flowers thereof are fleurs du mal. I love that moment in Lord of the Rings when Sam tells Galadriel that if she had the Ring some nasty people would be paid out, and put in their place, to which she replies, “Yes. That is how it would begin.”

I’m thinking that one form of vengeance is exposure: I may not be able to stop you, but I can expose you. I see that in various ways in all the examples I give, but it seems to me especially clear in Atwood and Pullman. Atwood isn’t taking vengeance on reality, she’s taking vengeance on fundamentalist Christians who have done so much damage to women over the centuries. She is saying, “I will create a world which will give you the power you crave and in that way I will enable all my readers to see you for what you truly are, and to condemn you.”

We do learn at the end of the book that the Gilead Period eventually comes to an end, to be replaced by something not quite as bad perhaps, but there’s no real punishment for the wicked characters. That’s where Pullman goes a step further. Mrs Coulter and Father Gomez and Metatron are all killed, and Metatron’s afterlife Gulag is dismantled. So there is exposure — Pullman has said in interviews quite explicitly that Christians haven’t done the things that they do in his book only because they haven’t had the chance — but also punishment. We get to exult in the destruction of the wicked. (Lewis is playing the same song in a sillier arrangement when Eustace and Jill put the bullies to rout.)

posture

Was Adorno right? This is perhaps the wrong question to ask, because philosophy at its best offers not definitive answers but the encouragement to sustain a critical posture in all our questioning.

— Peter E. Gordon. I’ve been hearing some version of this line for around fifty years now. I don’t care for it. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, if the best that philosophy can offer me is to “sustain a critical posture in all [my] questioning,” then to hell with it. Because that “sustaining” would be an untrammeled good for me only if I never had to make any decisions, if I never had to act on the basis of what I believe to be true.

Far too often academics talk about philosophical ideas as though they are only contemplated by professional scholars for whom what matters is getting published, not acting decisively and consequentially in the world. “Sustaining a critical posture” is perfectly fine for them, because the position you take, or decline to take, has no necessary relevance to publication. (Though to be sure, academic life being what it is, if one wants to go beyond “problematizing” to affirmation there are many, many affirmations you’d better not make.)

This is why we have seen the creation of endeavors like the School of Life — institutions built for people who can’t stop asking the philosophical questions in which professional philosophers have no interest, because they’re too busy sustaining their critical posture. Which apparently is a full-time job.

great

Yesterday my son, who works in the Chicago Loop, saw a woman on a bicycle get hit by a car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but she was knocked to the ground, dazed. He ran up to her to see if she was okay and pulled out his phone to call 911 — but she quickly, urgently said, “No! No! I can’t afford to go to the hospital!” And after taking a moment to gather herself, she got to her feet, picked up her damaged bike, and wobbled off.

And so my son stood there on the corner, surrounded by the glories of Chicago’s architecture, the superb expensive shops on the Magnificent Mile, the wealth that fairly pulsates from every building, and reflected, as one well might, on American Greatness.

a road not taken

Lately I have been reading some of the wartime letters of Dorothy Sayers — who, I have just learned, pronounced her name to rhyme with “stairs” — and have been constantly reminded of something that I wrote about a bit in my Year of Our Lord 1943: the complex network, centered of course in London, of Christians working outside of standard ecclesiastical channels to bring a vibrant Christian faith before the minds of the people of England in the midst of war. People like J. H. Oldham and Philip Mairet and, perhaps above all, James Welch of the BBC — who convinced Dorothy Sayers to write the radio plays that came to be called The Man Born to be King, recruited C. S. Lewis to give the broadcast talks that became Mere Christianity, and commissioned music from Ralph Vaughan Williams — ended up having an impact on the public face of English Christianity that was enormous but is now almost completely unknown.

At one point in researching my book I thought seriously about throwing out my plans and writing this story instead — but I couldn’t bear to let go of the fascinating interplay between ideas being articulated in England and their close siblings arising in the U.S., especially in New York City.

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned it here before — a quick search suggests not — but I have long dreamed of writing a book called Christian London: a history of the distinctive and often profoundly influential role that London has played in the history of Christianity. However, no one I have spoken to about this project — my agent, various editors, friends — has shared my enthusiasm. I might write it one day anyhow, and if I do, people like Oldham and Mairet and Welch will be major characters in one chapter.

here and there

As some of you may have noticed, I’m not posting here very frequently. I think for the foreseeable future I’m only going to be using this blog for longer reflections — long by internet standards, anyway.

From day to day you’ll find me posting to my micro.blog account — and if you haven’t checked out micro.blog, please do! People sometimes describe micro.blog as a “Twitter replacement,” but that’s not quite right. It may be better to think of it as what services like Twitter and Instagram could have been if they had been devoted to the open web and not subservient to the demands of venture capital. It’s a great place for low-key connection with others, and the best possible way to get started in blogging. It’s not free, but then Twitter and Instagram aren’t free either — those services just make you may in currencies other than money. Micro.blog serves no ads, respects your privacy, and allows you to own your turf. Try it!

I continue to post bookmarks — with useful excerpts! — at my Pinboard page, which I have been using for … [checks site] … ten years and two weeks.

Finally, I think my newsletter is pretty fun — a bit of a break from the incessant seriousness of our political moment.

the airless room

This is an interview with Kathryn Scanlan about her very peculiar new book, which is made up of selections from a person’s diary — read the interview to learn more, it’s really fascinating.

But I want to talk about a distraction from the real subject of the interview. Here’s a passage:

Etter: Now this is a question I have coming from a journalism background: what does it mean for fiction to take a real life and remix it, scramble it, and fine tune it into something that becomes non-real? What is it like to play with that?

Scanlan: A little bit weird. From the beginning, I felt like it was a weird thing I was doing. I don’t necessarily think it’s any particular genre, I think it has elements of all genres. I think it can be called fiction and I would call it that because of the way it’s been selected. If you are only showing part of something, it’s fiction. If you’re omitting lots of things, or if you’re focusing on only something particular, it’s fiction in my mind.

Etter: I think most journalists would probably agree with that definition — maybe not our president.

I read that and thought: Is there any chance of my getting through a recent essay, an article, a story, an interview, without a reference to That Man? Is it really necessary for every member of The Cultured to signal their disdain for him in every single conversation?

I want to say: He’s not sucking the air out of the room, you are.

Yes, I know, it’s just a passing comment. But when “passing comments” of that kind show up twenty times a day, it wears on a fella.

This is why I make my newsletter. It’s a place that I can guarantee will be free from that kind of thing, that will allow me and my readers to spend time in a broader world than that of posted and tweeted and retweeted political vaporing, posturing, and rancor.

Many of you will know this famous letter from John Adams to his wife Abigail: “The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” Let not Adams have studied in vain.