Paul Vitols's Blog, page 28

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Fielding by Henry Fielding

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This romantic farce holds the mirror up to human nature, and in the maelstrom of passion, folly, vice, and also virtue, we see that while manners have changed (a little) since 1749, the animal who adopts them has not.

I might never have read this book if it were not for the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series, a whole set of which I acquired in 2010 from a lady farmer in Minnesota. The 54-volume set contains just eight novels (the other seven are Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick, War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov), so it’s intriguing to think of how the editors of the series selected them.

The editors refer to the Great Books as the Great Conversation, and as the best conversation is about ideas, the novels in the set are novels of ideas. Tom Jones is divided into 18 books, the first chapter of each of these being a short humorous essay on some aspect of the work; in book 1, chapter 1, page 1, Fielding, likening himself to a restaurateur, posts his bill of fare, and it is a single dish: Human Nature. While acknowledging that other authors set out to offer the same thing, Fielding asserts that it’s all about how the meal is cooked and presented. And for this reader, as for the editors of the Britannica Great Books, he has here shown himself to be a master chef.

The book is long and composed of a complex interweaving of incidents, but in brief, it’s the story of how a bastard baby boy is discovered right in the very bed of an upright country gentleman named Mr. Allworthy, and how this Mr. Allworthy, a childless widower, decides to raise the boy as his own. The boy, who comes to be named Tom Jones, is raised as a gentleman, and grows to be a handsome, passionate, and exceptionally good-natured young man. He comes to love a beautiful and similarly good-natured girl named Sophia, the daughter of the squire of the neighboring estate, but Tom’s status as a bastard precludes marriage with a woman of such quality. That’s a pity, for Sophia herself falls passionately in love with Tom.

Through the machinations of a step-cousin named Blifil, who is concerned about how much of Mr. Allworthy’s estate Tom is destined to receive, Mr. Allworthy is turned against Tom, so much so that he ejects and disinherits poor Tom, who must now make his own way in the world. Indeed, due to the dishonesty and opportunism of the people around him, including some whom Tom has done great favors for, Tom is stripped of the few resources he has, and his reputation with his family is completely and falsely blackened. With barely the shirt on his back and a few coins in his pocket he must seek his fortune.

A series of adventures ensues with a diverse array of colorful, well-observed characters, many of whom recur in surprising and unpredictable contexts. The story is an intricate clockwork of improbable coincidences, with Tom’s heart remaining devoted to Sophia, even as his good looks and passionate nature bring other women into his path who find him much too good to pass up. Sophia, meanwhile, is under siege by her own family to marry Blifil, whom she detests.

The action eventually converges on London, where, among fashionable society, people are even more hypocritical and cynical.

I was continually surprised by the behavior of characters in this book. The dominant human traits that I perceived were selfishness, fickleness, and opportunism. Mixed in with these, though, were generosity, love, and honor. The narrator takes pains at several points to caution the reader not to judge people too harshly, which is an excellent tip, and not just for reading his novel. It got me thinking about my own behavior, my own motives. How selfish am I? How fickle? How opportunistic? I think about a great scene in the TV adaptation of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, in which Colonel Merrick yells at an effeminate sergeant who is nonetheless battle decorated: “So which is it? Are you a hero, or a goddamned pansy?” The sergeant replies, “Quite honestly, major, I think that’s a question we don’t want to be asking ourselves.” Well, I found that Tom Jones got me asking myself questions.

Fielding’s narrator is arch, ironic, and does not hesitate to patronize the reader outright. He attacks literary critics repeatedly and mercilessly. And yet he also shows a becoming if ironic humility, and I get the feeling that his capacity for love was great. Fielding is explicit that he modeled Sophia after his own late wife Charlotte, and the biographical note at the beginning of the volume notes that Fielding’s friends all remarked on the intensity of his grief when Charlotte died after 10 years of marriage. I can’t help but feel that this novel was in some way a love-letter to her, and that the honorable, lion-hearted bastard Tom Jones himself was a gift to her of how Fielding wished he could have been for her sake.

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What You Should Know About Inflation by Henry Hazlitt

What You Should Know About Inflation by Henry Hazlitt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short, lucid primer explains everything you need to know about the current economy.

Yes, that’s right: the current economy. For although this book was published in 1960, when the author was 65, the process of monetary inflation, which Henry Hazlitt felt was already doing so much harm to the U.S. economy and society in the 1950s, has proceeded since then almost unabated. Hazlitt died in 1993, but had he somehow survived until today, he would no doubt be depressed at our collective failure to put a stop to this entirely preventable man-made evil.

I learned about this book while reading The Golden Revolution: How to Prepare for the Coming Global Gold Standard by John Butler, in which Butler refers favorably to a simple plan proposed by Hazlitt to restore a gold backing to the U.S. dollar. Having read and enjoyed Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, and being myself concerned about the runaway train of inflation, I immediately got myself a copy of this work.

While this book is not as good as Economics in One Lesson, being mainly an edited compilation of pieces from Hazlitt’s “Business Tides” column for Newsweek, it does treat the topic of inflation simply, thoroughly, and authoritatively. From the layman’s perspective, one of the many problems with inflation is that even the so-called experts–economists, businessmen, financial bureaucrats–don’t agree on the causes of inflation and indeed do not even use the word to denote the same thing. With things in such confusion, there’s no hope of coming to grips with the problem.

Milton Friedman is famous for saying “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” This appears in his 1963 book Inflation: Causes And Consequences. But I note that Hazlitt’s book, published three years earlier, has this sentence on page 1:

Inflation, always and everywhere, is primarily caused by an increase in the supply of money and credit.

The next sentence is, “In fact, inflation is the increase in the supply of money and credit.” This shift is important, for the first sentence takes inflation in the commonly understood sense of “generally rising prices”, but the second sentence identifies inflation as the cause of rising prices. Only by understanding the cause can we effect a cure.

In 44 short chapters Hazlitt deals with many aspects of inflation: what it is, what its effects are, the ambivalence of governments toward it, the difficulty of seeing it for what it is. He shows how inflation is destructive of wealth and of society, but that nonetheless it is promoted by governments and by most economists as necessary to realize “full employment” and to prevent or mitigate downturns in the economy. Hazlitt easily demonstrates the falsity of these notions.

Inflation is deliberately produced by central governments, who create money from nothing in order to fund operations which they know they could never fund through taxation. No new wealth is created by inflation. It is a zero-sum game in which some people benefit and others lose. Those who benefit are the ones closest to the sources of the newly created money and credit–the government, the banks, and their contractors and main clients. Those who lose are pretty much everyone else. The way we lose is by finding that prices keep going up faster than our income. The wealth that we’ve lost has been magically and involuntarily transferred to those who are printing the money.

This problem is not new. Even in the ancient world, when money consisted of precious metals, rulers would clip and adulterate the coins in order to spend beyond their means. And the boost of wealth they enjoyed was always exactly balanced by a loss of wealth by their subjects.

Because the only people who can stop inflation are exactly the ones who benefit most from it, inflation will remain a stubborn problem, and one that our rulers will never be candid about. If we wish to save our earnings and our savings, it is up to us in the grass roots to educate ourselves about this insidious evil. Hazlitt’s book, clear, short, and nontechnical, performs this task admirably.

The Occupy movement may never realize it, but this book should be their Bible.

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Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by V. I. Lenin

Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Inside the thicket of familiar Communist polemic are some thought-provoking and still-relevant insights.

In the 1990s I used to read The Globe and Mail, and one of my favorite contributors was Donald Coxe, who had a column in the business section. Coxe is an investment analyst and he manages one or more mutual funds of his own. Recently I was reading an interview with him on BullionVault.com, a British website devoted to buying and selling gold, and in the course of it he mentioned this book by Lenin, praising it as a brilliant analysis of how the business machinations of the European powers led to World War I. Intrigued by this recommendation from a capitalist I respected, I took the plunge and bought my own copy of Lenin’s Imperialism.

Now I’ve read it, and while I think that Mr. Coxe overstated the quality of this book, I did find some valuable ideas in it.

First the negatives: this is a Communist tract that is mainly preaching to the converted. It is filled with the typical rhetorical clutter of name-calling, sarcasm, and ad hominem jabs, all of which severely impair the seeming objectivity and credibility of the author. He spends much time excoriating other Marxist authors for their perversion of Marx’s doctrines. And it doesn’t help that Lenin himself went on to become a dictator and a tyrant.

Allowing for all of that, I found the book to be of definite interest. For one thing, Lenin is comfortable with facts and figures, and he presents a number of short tables showing the growth of industrial and then banking monopolies and cartels in 19th-century Europe and America. He observes how the frenzy of colonial land-grabs of the late-19th century followed hard on these developments, and he infers a causal connection: The original capitalism of free trade, which had made England so rich, had evolved to a later stage of monopolistic capitalism, in which competition has given way to coercion. He gives plenty of persuasive evidence of the predatory and anticompetitive behavior of the cartels in steel, railroads, oil, and electricity, to name a few. The tycoons at the top divided the world into fixed territories and set the prices. If competitors appeared, they were bought out or crushed.

Profits are bigger if you control the cost of raw materials yourself; this is achieved by capturing the territory where they’re produced. This is where a national element enters, for the cartels of different countries don’t necessarily play nicely with each other; their agreements can collapse. The cartels of each country drive their country’s colonial agenda. Lenin shows how Earth was completely parceled into colonies in the second half of the 19th century. And since World War I led to a big realignment of these, one has to wonder what role colonial competition played in that ferocious conflict.

In the last century, most colonies have achieved nominal independence. But war remains a big business. Why exactly is it that one country–one possessing vast resource wealth–is invaded to seize its nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction”, while another country–one possessing no resource wealth–is left alone, despite actually possessing such weapons? I’m speaking of Iraq and North Korea, but other examples come to mind.

War is justified to credulous voters in terms of ideology, “security”, or even emotional slights; but its real business appears to be what it has always been: the seizure of assets by force.

V. I. Lenin saw this 100 years ago. He thought that Marxism was the cure. Apparently it isn’t. So the disease rages on.

The ancient dictum still applies: cui bono?–”who benefits?” Or, in the words of the Watergate source Deep Throat: “follow the money.” Lenin followed the money, but neither he nor anyone else has been able to do much about it.

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The Cave of John the Baptist by Shimon Gibson

The Cave of John the Baptist by Shimon Gibson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This sometimes rambling account of an archaeological dig, along with side-trips and speculations on the life and teachings of John the Baptist, mostly delivers the goods.

I came across this book while researching the history of baptism, and knew right away I wanted to read it. I’m glad that I have, even though not all parts of the book were equally interesting to me. There is a lot of material here on things I found tangential, such as descriptions of churches dedicated to John the Baptist and a long chapter devoted to relics of the saint, which would not be of interest to me even in the unlikely event that any of them was genuine. Also, the author confesses that he talks nonstop during archaeological digs, and that garrulity comes through in his book. This, along with an undisciplined prose style, makes the book longer than it should be.

However, the things that I was seeking from the book are all here, and covered thoroughly. The cave at Suba, a place in the hills west of Jerusalem, is an interesting, provocative, and apparently unique archaeological find. For the cave, which is about 20 meters deep and 5 meters high, was hewn from the rock by hand during the Iron Age, and although it was apparently designed to catch and hold a large quantity of fresh water, it does not appear to have been a cistern in the usual sense. Its water was apparently used only for bathing–ritual immersion.

Since the cave is located in an area long thought to be John the Baptist’s home, and the cave itself contains an etched picture of a man that resembles his traditional image, it’s tempting to suppose that John did teach and baptize here.

Gibson explores this idea in various ways, but is candid about the scantiness of firm historical data on John the Baptist. The collected evidence can only be suggestive, although the author has a number of personal convictions which he shares. For my part I was glad to read these, and felt that as lead excavator of this site, he’s entitled to them. He supplies interesting historical material and lots of good illustrations and plates.

Gibson believes that John was connected with the prophet Elijah and with his expected return to Israel. John dressed like Elijah and practiced baptism on the lower Jordan River near where Elijah was thought to have been transported to heaven. When I reviewed my own notes I discovered that I’d come across this Elijah connection before, in Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology. In passing, Campbell makes this intriguing observation:

[T]he rite of baptism was an ancient rite coming down from the old Sumerian temple city Eridu, of the water god Ea, “God of the House of Water,” whose symbol is the tenth sign of the zodiac, Capricorn, the sign which the sun enters at the winter solstice for rebirth. In the Hellenistic period, Ea was called Oannes, which is in Greek Ioannes, Latin Johannes, Hebrew Yohanan, English John. I shall leave it to the reader to imagine how he came both by the god’s name and by his rite.

How indeed.

It’s not a question that Gibson addresses, and perhaps it is outside the scope of his book.

One curious thing for me was reading this line on page 145 of Gibson’s book:

[A]n appallingly bad book (which I shall not even attempt to identify) . . . proposed Qumran as the place of Jesus’ crucifixion. . . .

I’m assuming that this appallingly bad book is no other than Barbara Thiering’s Jesus the Man: Originally Published in Hardcover As Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I recently gave 5 stars in a review here. In concealing its title, it appears that Gibson is doing his bit to help suppress scholarly heterodoxy–an action which does him no credit in this reader’s eyes.

This, along with the author’s discursiveness and the inclusion of so much material that is not closely connected with the cave of the book’s title, has lowered my rating. But if you have an interest in John the Baptist or in baptism generally, this book is well worth a look.

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The Golden Revolution by John Butler

The Golden Revolution: How to Prepare for the Coming Global Gold Standard by John Butler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This sometimes academic-sounding book takes a levelheaded look at the implications of a global return to the gold standard–a return that the author regards as already under way.

From 2002 to 2011 the price of gold ran up from $300 an ounce to $1900 an ounce; its closing price yesterday was $1781.30. When I open National Geographic magazine I find ads selling gold coins; TV ads urge people to take advantage of high prices to sell their old scrap gold. Gold bugs have been saying “I told you so” for years, while mainstream financial gurus like Warren Buffett disparage gold as an unproductive, useless asset not worth the attention of serious investors. For the average, interested person who has no special knowledge of economics or finance, what is the right attitude to take toward gold?

In this short book, John Butler, an experienced financial “strategist” now running his own investment firm in London, argues that we all should be aware of what’s happening with gold, for the sake not only of our financial well-being, but also of the quality of society itself as it emerges from the transition to a world gold standard, which is now inevitable. It has been made inevitable by the explosion of debt in the world since the last link between gold and the U.S. dollar, the world’s reserve currency, was severed by President Nixon in 1971. For 41 years the world has been operating on a so-called fiat-money system–one in which money is created from nothing by central banks–and, like all fiat-money systems that have existed previously, this one is collapsing in an orgy of public and private debt financed with ever-increasing amounts of newly created money. We’re already in the end-game of this process. What’s next?

Next is a global gold standard. According to Butler, there is no possibility whatever of avoiding this, nor should we want to avoid it, for a world on the gold standard will be more rational, more honest, and more just than a world running on fiat money. As the value of paper money evaporates through the promiscuous printing of it, people will seek a more stable store of value for their earnings and savings; they will seek gold and silver. When that happens, the value of any currency will depend on how credibly it is backed by gold. Whoever comes up first with a credible gold-backed currency will have the jump on other countries in the next phase of the world economy.

The United States, which has (supposedly) the world’s largest reserves of gold, and whose dollar is still hanging on by its fingernails to world reserve-currency status, is, in Butler’s opinion, in a good position to do this. He presents a number of scenarios by which this might be done. There is nothing to stop the government from implementing the orderly, well-planned return to gold set out by Henry Hazlitt in his 1960 book What You Should Know About Inflation (showing that there were sober thinkers even then who wanted to avoid the mess that we have got ourselves into since). It would not require 100% backing of all dollars by gold, but only a “credible” amount of backing. And what we find credible is up to each of us, but Butler observes that the longer this step is delayed, and the greater the disarray that we allow the world’s finances to fall into, the higher this reserve requirement will be in order to seem credible.

But in any event, for this to occur, the dollar price of gold will have to be substantially higher than it is today. It could not conceivably be done at less than about $5,000 an ounce, and Butler presents a scenario for a reasonably credible gold-backed dollar, assuming a 40% reserve backing for today’s M2 definition of the supply of money of $9 trillion, which implies a gold price of $13,200 an ounce.

That’s right: a 640% increase from today’s price. But in Butler’s own words:

Some readers might express disbelief at the prospect of a gold price in excess of $10,000. I would advise these readers to express their disbelief rather at how the Federal Reserve has grown the money supply by such a colossal amount since President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.

This assumes a timely, orderly, planned transition undertaken by the United States government, but there is no particular reason to expect that (unless those running the country suddenly become wise, prudent, and concerned exclusively with the public good). Just as likely, or more likely, are transitions to gold undertaken by other governments, either singly or acting together, to shake off the ill effects of the monetary inflation being exported at ever higher levels by the U.S. (it was this exportation of inflation that prompted first France, then other countries, in the 1960s to start redeeming their dollars for U.S. gold–the international “bank run” that prompted Nixon to shut the window).

Then there is the possibility of a disorderly transition not planned by anyone, one in which people simply flee to gold in a global melee. No one knows what financial system would emerge after the smoke clears, but it’s certain that this scenario would lead to the highest prices for gold during the transition period.

Butler’s book is laid out logically in three parts, examining why the days of the fiat dollar are numbered, then looking at various transition scenarios, and finally examining the likely implications of the new gold standard for banking, investing, and society generally. Butler’s style is dispassionate and well-informed, but sometimes rather wonkish, as though he were writing for experts (there are even economics equations in a couple of spots). He is maybe too enthusiastic about certain niceties of economic theory for my taste, and his writing is marred by a few bad habits, like the persistent and incorrect use of the phrase “as such” to mean “thus” or “therefore” (an instance of what Bryan Garner calls “slipshod extension” of a phrase).

But I liked this book. Butler is optimistic and nonpolemical. Gold is a topic that usually provokes a lot of emotion, but Butler remains clear-eyed and practical in his treatment of it. He is not stridently trying to convince us that the gold standard is returning; he is simply informing us that a cool, objective analysis of facts shows this to be inevitable. And a person who is cool and objective will take the appropriate steps in good time.

The main takeaway is this: Get gold. Get it now, while you can still afford it.

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Jesus the Man by Barbara Thiering

Jesus the Man: Originally Published in Hardcover As Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Barbara Thiering

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This technical, meticulous, expository work of New Testament scholarship is the elephant in the room for all who wish to believe that the gospels are literal documents that portray events that actually happened as described.

My introduction to the idea that Jesus survived the Crucifixion (apart from seeing Ray Bradbury spitball a scenario for it on a TV talk show in the 1970s) was in 1994 when I read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, a book subsequently made even more famous in the frenzy around Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It was July in the Colorado Rockies, on one of two days off during an 11-week Buddhist seminary, and while other students were off hiking or making town trips, I spent the hot afternoon in the great dining-tent, hunched over my paperback. I knew I should stop reading, but I couldn’t. The idea that Jesus had not only survived, but had had children to perpetuate the royal dynasty of Israel–a dynasty that has survived–was too electrifying.

Fast-forward to January 1996. I was perusing my local bookstore (an excellent place run by a Korean couple, now long gone, alas), when what should I find but this book by Barbara Thiering. As soon as I realized what it was about, I knew I had to have it. I bought it, started reading, and again became electrified.

Many theories and stories exist about Jesus: Did he really exist? Was he really God incarnate? Was he actually crucified? Under what circumstances? And so on. What sets Thiering’s work apart from other alternative theories of Jesus is the nature of her evidence. Her main source is the gospels themselves (along with Acts of the Apostles and Revelation), but read in a new way. Thiering’s central contention is that the gospels, Acts, and Revelation are all documents of a particular type: documents intended to have what was called a pesher, which is Hebrew for “interpretation” or “solution” in the sense of solving a puzzle. They were all written carefully, deliberately, in a kind of code that was intended to conceal a literal, factual meaning behind the surface text, a code readable only to someone with special knowledge. That factual meaning is a history of the events leading up to the birth of what came to be a new religion, the one we now call Christianity.

The books of the New Testament were originally written in Greek, unlike the books of the Old Testament, which were written in Hebrew (except for the Book of Daniel, which was written at least partly in Aramaic). Scholars have supposed that the awkwardness of the Greek is due to the imperfect command of the language on the part of the New Testament authors, but Thiering denies this. On closer inspection, there is method in the seeming solecisms of the text. The apparently inaccurate use of plurals, pronouns, and gender arises from the rigorous application of this method of coding. There was nothing wrong with the authors’ Greek; their “clumsiness” is actually just our own ignorance of the texts’ real nature and purpose. Modern Bible scholars are among the exoteric group that was never intended to understand the hidden meanings in these documents.

Although I’ve read all of Barbara Thiering’s books and have studied her website, I don’t recall her ever explaining exactly how she developed this theory. It has been presented from the start as something already worked out. However, as presented, it is rigorously consistent and clearly the result of a huge amount of study and labor. To lay hold of the full meaning of these texts, Thiering had to become conversant with, among other things, the details of the solar calendar used by the sectarians who composed the texts–a calendar that was complex and that kept changing as different viewpoints arose. I mention this because I’ve done some study of calendars myself, and so I appreciate the quantity and caliber of effort involved here, and it is a lot. Everything else has been examined at a similar level of detail.

And what is the secret story underlying the gospels? Very briefly: Jesus was indeed a real person, and was indeed a dynast of the royal house of David. By the 1st century BC the David lineage had become attached to the group known as the Essenes, educated sectarians who had become alienated from the mainstream of Judean society in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt and the ensuing reformation of the Jewish state. The Essenes were centered at Qumran by the Dead Sea, and this monastic environment is where many of the events of the gospels actually took place–including the Crucifixion. For Jesus was indeed crucified, along with two others: Simon Magus and Judas Iscariot. Jesus did survive the Crucifixion, and, with his wife Mary Magdalene, did have children. He did teach a new understanding of the Law, and remained active in the movement to bring this to the world. His date of death is not recorded, but it apparently happened in Rome when he was in his 70s.

There is much more to this story, and a great deal of context. Thiering tries to give all this, but there are problems with providing so much information of different kinds in a single accessible book. She sketches in the story in the first 214 pages; the remaining 400 pages is a set of appendixes giving details about things like the sectarians’ complex hierarchy and their understanding of time and space. About 100 pages is a detailed chronology of events based on an exact pesher of the documents. But it’s not a narrative; the tone is scholarly and scientific, and this I think is a weakness in a book aimed at the mass market.

There’s much more to this book than I can give a sense of here–to say nothing of its implications. The book provoked enormous controversy when it was first published. I recall reading a dismissive review by Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Geza Vermes, and how Thiering had to point out certain large errors he had made in his review. It was as though he didn’t want to waste mental energy on such a crackpot idea, and no doubt many other scholars feel the same way about Thiering’s theory.

But it is a theory–not merely a hypothesis. It is worked out and, Thiering maintains, fully testable. The problem is that you need to be able to read ancient Greek in order to play, which makes this the preserve of Bible scholars or, maybe, some enterprising classical studies student. And Bible scholars, still comfortable with their paradigm, don’t see any need to go shopping for a new one. They’re more or less satisfied with their existing “explanations” for why the gospels’ Greek is so mangled, for why the gospels are so different in content and in outlook, for why the authors seemed not to know how big the Sea of Galilee was or how long it took to make certain journeys. People were just dumber then.

People weren’t dumber then. People, possibly, are dumber now. When I read this book I became convinced that it is a landmark in intellectual history. It has its weaknesses: it is a very technical work, and Thiering is no prose stylist. But Barbara Thiering has what no other Bible scholar now has: the right paradigm. I have no doubt that this will become the dominant paradigm for New Testament scholarship. It may take 20 years, or it may take 200, but this way of looking at the New Testament brings it into sharp focus. In the future, young researchers, if they are exposed to both paradigms and if they are not biased by religious faith, will choose this one. The image of semiliterate fishermen writing stories long after the event will be dropped.

As for Christianity itself, well, who knows. Thiering tries to minimize the impact that her theory might have on Christian faith by pointing to the importance of what Jesus actually taught, which remains intact. This to me seems naive. For as Joseph Campbell observed, if the events in the Bible are no longer seen as factual, then the Bible becomes simply a work of poetry like any other, with no greater authority than any other. Thiering’s work shows that the New Testament does present a factual narrative, but that this narrative is hidden behind a fabulous screen. And for all these centuries the fabulous screen is what we’ve taken for fact. In this we are not to blame, for the texts were designed that way. The factual content was intended to be secret. But now, finally, thanks to Barbara Thiering, that secret has come to light. And whatever the implications are for Christianity or for the world generally, I find it very exciting. And if you believe in divine providence, then you too must believe that it’s an idea whose time has come.

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my take on the greatest film of all time

Because I follow Encyclopedia Britannica’s Twitter feed, I was alerted to a blog-post on their site discussing a recent development in film criticism: the British Film Institute (BFI) had changed its determination of the best film ever made. Every 10 years the institute invites its members to rank the greatest films, and the results are collated to come up with a winner. In 1962 that winner was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), as it was in 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2002. But this year, apparently, another film has edged out Welles’s masterpiece: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

I’ve long been accustomed to the fact that Citizen Kane is hailed as the greatest film of all time, and my assumption has been that critics and others have tended to repeat this more or less out of habit, as a judgment that’s been established by convention. So I was surprised that the members of the BFI, anyway, have seen fit to anoint a different film. But while it’s possible that some critics and scholars have changed their thinking, I think it’s more likely the result of a phenomenon observed by the physicist Max Planck among scientists: that the holders of a particular theory tend not to change their minds; new theories replace old when the holders of the old theory die off, and a new generation, able to make a free choice, opts for the new theory. Without knowing any of the underlying facts, I suspect that this new anointing is the result of such a die-off.

But what struck me more was that I myself regard Vertigo as even less worthy of being called the greatest film of all time than Citizen Kane is. I regard them both as competently made and above average in certain respects. Citizen Kane I would also say is a striking film and a work of genius; I would not say that Vertigo is either of these. I have seen them both recently—that is, in the last couple of years—Citizen Kane for at least the third time, and Vertigo for the first time. But I placed them both in the category of “movies I don’t want to see again.”

What’s wrong with me? Why do I not see the virtues in these films that the scholars and critics of the BFI do?

Of course, I likely don’t know as much about film as those scholars and critics, although I have made a fairly serious study of film in my life, and have been a filmmaker and a screenwriter. But is the determination of greatness purely a matter of knowledge? (And if so, what kind of knowledge?) Or does the question of pure enjoyment matter? And if so, what is the relationship of enjoyment to knowledge? Should only that part of enjoyment count that somehow results from knowledge? Is such a distinction possible or practical?

Gregory MacNamee, who wrote the blog-post, observes that there is a “matter of taste” problem, but I think he dodges the question a bit when he says that some people’s taste is better. What makes it better?

This is the ancient question of criticism. As far as I know, it has no answer. But I’d like to disentangle my own thoughts on it.

I believe that enjoyment is the important criterion. No one would watch movies if they didn’t enjoy it, and no one would make them. But, if we’re honest with ourselves, enjoyment is a datum: it’s something that happens to us, not something we can will to happen. Yes, we can say we enjoy things in order to get along, but the actual experience, I believe, is no more under our control than the weather is. We enjoy what we enjoy. And we all enjoy different things.

But if that were all there is to it, then criticism couldn’t exist. Everything would boil down to: “I like this; you like that; and there we sit.” If that’s the case, what can taste possibly be?

One thought I have is that, in general, we don’t expect a 60-year-old to enjoy the same things as a 6-year-old. They might have the same enthusiasm and level of enjoyment for things, but the things themselves will be different. The key difference between these viewers can be summed up as experience. The 60-year-old has a much greater depth of experience than the 6-year-old, and that experience has caused his tastes to shift.

Does this make his tastes necessarily “better”? Maybe not. But I’m tempted to say that the operative factor here is maturity. We can call an artistic taste better to the extent that it is more mature. And what is maturity? I want to say that maturity is the ability to apply wisdom to one’s life. And what is wisdom? Here I want to say that it’s the kind of knowledge that allows one to avoid doing things that one will regret.

All right, but what does this have to do with movies? Well, I believe, possibly unlike many of the members of the BFI, that film is a storytelling medium. That means the most important questions pertaining to the quality of any film are: 1) how good is the story? and 2) how well is it told? The quality of a film with respect to question 1 is determined mainly by the writer; the quality of a film with respect to question 2 is determined mainly by the production team, led by the director. The quality of a story, I suggest, is measured by how interesting and relevant it is to a mature person. A mature person, who has already learned much about life, learns more from a good story.

So where does this leave Citizen Kane and Vertigo? Above I said that I regard Citizen Kane as a work of genius, by which I mean the product of an artist who has a particular vision and who does not compromise that vision in producing his work. To me, this does not necessarily make a work great, good, or enjoyable; but it does give it integrity. Citizen Kane has integrity in this sense, but it remains, at bottom, a shaggy-dog story: to paraphrase Wikipedia’s definition, “a long-winded tale resulting in a pointless or absurd punchline.” Kane’s life turns out to have been a tale told by an idiot—not much for a mature person to sink his teeth into. Great cinematography, though.

As for Vertigo, to be honest I don’t even really remember the story. It was a convoluted mystery with a gimmick ending of the type known in screenwriting jargon as a weenie. I didn’t find anything in the movie either believable or involving, and I dozed off by the end. I can’t call a movie great that I respond to in that way.

Does this mean I’m holding myself up as someone who is more mature than others? In some cases, yes. But this is where rhetoric comes in. The critic is someone who can support his views and persuade others of their validity, as I have tried to do in a small way here.

But can’t two people of equal maturity have different tastes and responses to a work? Yes they can—but that’s a topic for another day.

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The New Testament by Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The New Testament by Isaac Asimov

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first exposure to Isaac Asimov was in the Super-Valu grocery store on Upper Lonsdale in 1971, when I was 12. I was accompanying my aunt Jackie on the weekly grocery shopping for our household (budget: $20), and while we were awaiting our turn to pass through the checkout I was perusing the single rotating stand of paperbacks for sale. One book leaped to my eye: The Universe by a guy called Isaac Asimov (what a cool name! I thought). Subtitled From Flat Earth to Quasar, it was a nonfiction work about the history of astronomy, and had a gorgeous magenta-and-violet cover featuring a photo of the Horsehead Nebula in deep space. I knew I had to have this book. Problem: it was 95 cents, and I had no money of my own. So I begged Jackie to buy it for me. She was reluctant to spend 5% of our grocery money on my book, so I earnestly and urgently assured her that it was no frivolous purchase but that it was a worthwhile book and that my interest in it was genuine and intense. She was a soft touch in reality, so to my joy she put the book on the conveyor belt with the packaged cube steak and canned lima beans. Yahoo!

As soon as we got home I whipped over to the sofa (“chesterfield” as we called it) and started reading. I was immediately engrossed. Expecting the early parts of the book, about ancient astronomy, to be a chore to read before I got to the cool recent stuff, I was surprised to find that Asimov made the story of astronomical discovery interesting right from the start. On that hot summer afternoon I sat in the dim recess of our living room, reading and reading. In the next few days, when I went on a boating vacation up the coast with a friend’s family, I took the book with me and read it in every spare moment.

At that age I didn’t think about Asimov’s qualities as a writer, I just knew that he wrote about really cool stuff. A few years later, at about age 16, I made my first purchase of a nonfiction book with my own money when I saw his Life and Energy in a bookstore (price: $1.25). This was a work on biochemistry, which was outside my main interest area of space science and physics, but I knew that Asimov would present it in a cool way.

It was only years later, when I reread these books, and I had chosen the path of writing for myself, that I came to assess and appreciate Asimov specifically as a writer. And to this day he represents, for me, the gold standard of expository writing. (I’m less happy with his science fiction, which I find to be a bit flat and, well, expository.) He is a natural teacher, able to arouse and then satisfy one’s curiosity, and to do so with clear, fluent, and seemingly effortless prose. He makes writing seem easy.

I knew that Asimov had written many books on different subjects, but I was still taken by surprise when, while visiting the New Westminster Public Library maybe 8 years ago, I saw, on their reference shelves, the two big hardback volumes of Asimov’s Guide to the Bible. And, now working on an epic of my own about the events leading up to the action of the New Testament, I again had occasion to think, Wow! Cool!

I whipped out one of these volumes and quickly saw that it was just what I would hope for and expect in a work by Asimov: a clear, smooth-flowing examination of both testaments of the Bible, book by book, with plenty of accompanying maps. At some later time I made an online search for these books and found that they were available in paperback; I did not hesitate to buy a used set.

I’m glad I did. As ever, Asimov turns his clear, objective, common-sense eye to the matter at hand. He looks at the content of the Bible not from a theological point of view, but rather as an explicator of the places, persons, institutions, and terms used in it.

In the New Testament volume the largest chapter is on the book of Matthew. It contains about 82 subsections, the first of which is “The New Testament”, where Asimov matter-of-factly sets out the mission of the New Testament as a whole and contrasts it with that of the Old Testament. In his words, “The central theme of the Bible, in Jewish eyes, is the contract or covenant entered into between God and the Jewish people. The first mention of this covenant is God’s promise to give Canaan to the descendants of Abraham.” This is followed by an extract from Gen 15:18, in which the Lord makes this promise to Abram. The book is liberally salted with verses from the Bible as Asimov makes his points, often drawing attention to connections and allusions between the different books. In this subsection Asimov describes how the vision of the writers of the Old Testament books evolves to the point where Jeremiah envisions “a triumphant day when God would make a new start, so to speak, with his people; wipe the slate clean and begin again”–with an extract from Jer 31:31 provided as evidence. Asimov then says simply that “The followers of Jesus came early to believe that in the teachings of Jesus was to be found exactly this new covenant; a new contract between God and man, replacing the old one with Israel that dated back to Sinai and even beyond that to Abraham.”

Other subsections include examinations of who Matthew is; who the people are in the given genealogy of Jesus; where the term Holy Ghost comes from; what King of the Jews means; where and what Nazareth is; and much else. In general, Asimov sets out to answer, as much and as well as he can, your question, as you point to some element in the Bible, “What’s that?” And he does a darned good job.

These volumes are more like a reference work that the other Asimov books I mentioned, which have, incredibly, a strong quality of narrative flow. Asimov’s Guide to the Bible is not arranged around a central question, and this makes it a little less exciting to read. He’s not providing any theory about the Bible, and although he is candid about the difficulties it can present to the modern rational person, he is in no way a skeptic or debunker. And while he can’t avoid doing some interpretation, his mission is mainly factual.

I was a bit disappointed to discover that all those maps are actually in many cases just the same map, reproduced again and again to save the reader the inconvenience of flipping back to find it. Having a few more, different, and detailed maps would have made me feel I was getting more of an in-depth treatment.

But this is an excellent popular companion to the Bible. My favorite aspect is probably the many connections that Asimov makes between the different books and verses of both testaments. He doesn’t name his sources, but they must have been many. He gives the same impression of complete, effortless, encyclopedic command over the content of the Bible that he does over astronomy, biochemistry, and so many other topics. The real measure of his accomplishment is the clarity of his writing, which stands as a paragon to all who would write expository prose.

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Shakespeare I by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare I by William Shakespeare

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This Britannica Great Books edition of the complete works of Shakespeare offers a serviceable, robust, no-frills, and altogether high-quality experience of this most famous of writers.

It’s a commonplace that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English literature, and even, according to Harold Bloom and no doubt many others, the greatest writer of all time in any language, full stop. It’s quite a reputation, but despite my lifetime passion for reading and writing, I have had only a slight acquaintance with the Bard, beginning, as I recall, in grade 7 when our school staged a production of Julius Caesar, in which I played Mark Antony. But of course, even at age 13 I was already familiar with lines like “Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend my your ears,” and even “et tu Brute?“. I also would have known that “To be or not to be: that is the question” was also Shakespeare, from Hamlet, and will also have heard many other Shakespeareisms sprinkled into everyday speech around me without recognizing them as such: “what’s in a name?”; “the winter of our discontent”; “all the world’s a stage”.

As I grew up I had occasion to read a few of the plays and see several productions on stage and screen (and even read Mark Antony again in a high-school English-class presentation); but I never really felt comfortable with Shakespeare; I didn’t get Shakespeare. And I think now, at age 53, I still don’t. I find much of the language and the action obscure and hard to follow; I find the storytelling at times capricious and silly. Plus I’ve never been a reader or appreciator of poetry. I sum it all up with a rhyme of my own: the Bard is hard.

I probably would have put off the task of reading Shakespeare–all of him–indefinitely if I had not acquired a set of the Britannica Great Books with the intention of reading the whole thing. Shakespeare forms two volumes (26 and 27) of the 54-volume set; now I’ve read one of those, and I’m very glad I have. I have set about transforming Shakespeare from a reputation into a personal experience, and in so doing I feel I am truly joining the culture of my language.

This volume contains a short biographical note (one and a half pages) and 20 plays, arranged, I believe, in the approximate order of composition. It begins with The First Part of King Henry the Sixth and ends with As You Like It. Before starting the book I considered reading instead from another Shakespeare collection that I happen to own, The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, a handsome book that contains all the plays, plus commentaries. The Britannica edition is relatively sparse: after that short bio, you’re on your own–just you and the Bard for 626 pages (and another 500-odd in volume 27). No Virgil to guide you through the vast creation of this literary genius; no explanations; no summaries; no expert hand-holding. Whatever you’re bringing to the table as a reader, that’s all you’ve got.

I plumped for the Britannica partly because it was lighter and easier to handle, but mainly because I wanted to go along with the philosophy of the Great Books, which is exactly that no commentaries or interpretations are offered. The point of the set is to have readers commune as directly as possible with the greatest writers in the Western tradition. The editors maintain that most of the Great Books were addressed to the general reader. Be this as it may, I found, even though I am an experienced reader, that I was rather scared on my way in.

I soon got over it. It was like diving into cool water: a bit of a shock at first, but after a few strokes you’re on your way, invigorated by the freshness of the water and your own effort.

If, like me, you’re a Shakespeare novice, I recommend the approach I took: read one act a day, out loud. Every play is 5 acts, so you’ll knock down one play every 5 days. And do read them out loud. They are mostly in verse (only the lower-class characters tend to speak in prose, with one or two interesting exceptions), and the rhythm and music of Shakespeare’s language is lost if it is not spoken. And his language does have music and rhythm–he’s not called the greatest for nothing. Don’t look up the words you don’t know or try to do any research while reading. Accept that you won’t understand everything, sometimes not even what’s going on in the action, and least of all (in my case anyway) what the relationships between the darned characters are (OK, I did go back and look up their relationships sometimes at the head of each play). That action is almost always complicated, and if you try to get clear on everything you will bog down. Save fuller comprehension for future readings. In this reading, just let it wash over you. Let your mind meet with Shakespeare’s, and let the quality of that meeting just be what it is; it will be unique to the two of you.

If you do all that, you’ll do what I’ve just done, and I believe you’ll feel about it the way I feel: pretty damn good. I don’t want to say too much about the actual experience of reading it, because then I’ll be polluting your own encounter with the Bard. I’ll say only this: that not all of Shakespeare is equally good, and that I gradually realized that my disapproval of so many of the characters’ motives and actions was because they were so like the way people actually are.

But maybe that’s already saying too much. Try it for yourself. Turn Shakespeare’s reputation into an experience. Expose yourself to the works of one of the greatest users of our language, and step up to a higher level of culture in our Western civilization.

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The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph

The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric by Miriam Joseph

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This dense, authoritative textbook takes all of Aristotle’s teachings on logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and some of his teachings of poetics, adds some of the insights gained in the subsequent centuries, and presents it in a well-organized flow.

Sister Miriam Joseph (1898-1982) was an American nun who, inspired by a lecture by philosopher Mortimer J. Adler on the liberal arts, developed a course on the language arts at Saint Mary’s College which she called “The Trivium.” There being no existing textbook for it, she wrote her own, and The Trivium was published in 1937. And, luckily for those of us who would like to think, write, and read clearly, it’s still in print.

I have decided to do my best to acquire a liberal education through my own efforts. Toward that end I have read, so far, the two-volume Syntopicon of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World series, several other works by Mortimer J. Adler, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett, all six works of the Organon of Aristotle, plus Robin Smith’s guide to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. Now, having read Sister Miriam Joseph’s book, I think that her text should be the master text for the student of the liberal arts, and all other works, including Aristotle’s originals, should be read as supplements. Sister Miriam has boiled down and systematized the material, connecting and relating all the different aspects for the student.

For a book just 292 pages long, its scope is shockingly wide and deep. The student is taken on a sometimes overwhelming journey from metaphysics (the nature of reality and experience) to grammar (how language reflects our thoughts about reality) to logic (how clear statements can be ordered to discover truth) to rhetoric (how statements can be structured in discourses to persuade others). Every thought presented in the book is clear, complete, and connected with everything else. There is no vagueness, no subjectivity, no inconclusiveness.

I was fascinated to read about the concept of “general grammar”, as distinct from the “special grammars” of specific languages: general grammar is the way that speech conforms to thought. Sister Miriam shows how the familiar parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) correspond to Aristotle’s “categories” of thought: the specific ways in which the mind is able to cognize reality.

This book is not meant to be read casually. It is a whole course, or really a whole degree program, in a single binding. To master this material you will have to do a great deal of work, but the book itself contains only a few exercises; it would be great if some generous soul developed a workbook with plenty of exercises and quizzes to be used along with Sister Miriam’s text. For my part I’m going back and boiling the text down into longhand notes, and trying to come up with examples and exercises of my own.

I’m doing this because I believe that this material is worth mastering. Its loss from our educational system–a loss that has been progressive, apparently, since about the 14th century–has been a calamity. Homo sapiens has named himself after his supposed intellectual powers, and we are certainly the only species to have developed written language. Why would we not want, as individuals, to develop these powers? to take hold of as much of our specific nature as we can? to be as fully human as we can?

Well, I do, anyway. And if that possibility also appeals to you, this text is an excellent place to start. Start soon, for the journey is not short. But whenever you start, Sister Miriam has done her utmost to make your journey as easy as it can be made.

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