John C. Wright's Blog, page 147

You've Got Open Mail

Matthew Surridge who writes at Black Gate address yours truly in an open letter, concerning a piece I wrote here, where I argued, among other things, that High Fantasy revolves around nostalgia for virtues and beauties now lost from the world, and for shining truths now called hateful.

http://www.blackgate.com/2011/12/13/the-enjoyment-of-fantasy-open-letters-to-adam-gopnik-mur-lafferty-and-john-c-wright/

I admit to being mildly surprised that my comments would inspire any controversy at all.  I would have written a more serious and thoughtful piece had I realized I would be called upon to give a line-by-line defense. It is a call time does not permit me to answer.

I will instead made a general denial. Mr Surridge is misreading or misinterpreting what I wrote. There are misreadings and disconnects in several places: but his main argument is against the position that one must agree with the author's political views to enjoy his works, or arguing against the position that one must agree with my views to enjoy High Fantasy.

This, I assume he is aware, is a straw man, as nothing I said even remotely implies either position.

At least one other critic of this article attempted a similar straw man argument, but upon inquiring, I found out that he was not aware and could not be made aware.  As you can imagine, this somewhat limited my options for reply.

No doubt the fault is mine for not being more clear.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Transhumanism and Subhumanism

I am intensely skeptical of Transhumanist ambitions. Much as I admire the intermediate goals of increasing human lifespan or human comfort through medical technology, the long term goals cause me reservations, or even revulsion. Allow me to explain using the most indirect means possible: by discussing fantasy stories.

Anyone who does not sense or suspect that modernity is missing something, something important that once we had and now is lost, has no heart for High Fantasy and no taste for it.

I don't regard the statement as controversial. To me it seems not worth discussing that the present age differs from the past. The only question worth discussing is the nature of the differences. And, by extension, the nature of the future the present trends will tend to create.

What is wrong with the world? Where are we heading?

Are we heading toward the higher peak of the superhuman, or to a subhuman abyss? If I may be permitted a drollery, let me phrase it this way: shall our children be the Slans of A.E. van Vogt or the Morlocks of H.G. Wells?

A philosophical discussion would use different terminology and would bore to tears readers not philosophically inclined. So instead of discussing the nature and extent of the influence of Locke and Marx and Shaw and Nietzsche, let me discuss instead more popular manifestations more fun to read, that is, the science fiction writings, and discuss the nature of the influence of JRR Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, of Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Peter Watts.

This may seem an odd way to proceed, to discuss a philosophical problem in terms of science fiction yarns. It is not odd at all. Art, including popular art like genre fiction, is an attempt to put one's view of the world into a succinct and concrete example or image: and the drama of art issues from the innate drama of the world, its wonders and horrors.

Readers of science fiction have an advantage of perspective over readers who limit themselves to mainstream books, namely, that any work taking place in a year as yet unborn, or in a world as yet unknown, must concentrate the attention on those things we take for granted; because in worlds to come they may indeed no longer be taken for granted, nor exist at all.

The science fiction reader, as if from the vantage point of some shining skyscraper of the future, can look back through time to this our present, and see what we here might not.

Fantasy likewise occupies a different vantage. A reader of Fantasy stands outside of time altogether, as if atop the haunted mountain of far and unvisited Kadath topped by the onyx citadel of the dream gods, or the scarred and smoking slopes of sinister Mount Doom where evil was forged, and he looks from a dreamland or a Middle Earth where magic lives in all its horror and wonder into a world, our world, a grayer world, where magic does not.

The main difference between Fantasy fiction and realistic fiction is the presence of magic. The main difference between Tolkien style Fantasy and Robert E Howard style is the attitude toward magic.

In High Fantasy magic is usually not magic at all, but miracle: a wondrous good beyond hope reaching from without the edges of the world. When Gandalf the Gray returns from the dead as Gandalf the White, that is not a Raise Dead spell. There is also, like its shadow, black magic, which has a satanic character and tone. The practitioners are necromancers and witches, and not friendly witches like Glinda or Sabrina or Samantha or Hermione, but cruel witches like Achren or Jadis.

High Fantasy occupies the mental universe where (1) truth is true (2) goodness is good (3) life is beautiful unless marred by sin and malice: and when marred, life may yet, not without terrible price, be saved.

That this is an honest, virtuous, and sublime picture of the universe is a high matter for debate beyond the scope of this essay: for now, let us accept for the sake of argument that it is healthy view of the universe, one suitable for the psychology of human life, and joy.

In Sword-and-Sorcery, by contrast, the magic is malign: Conan kills evil sorcerers with the edge of the sword. There is magic afoot in the world, but it is cruel, and to study it leads one along the paths of madness. Any benevolent magic tends to be the aid of wise men or the caprice of unseen powers as unexpected as a dolphin helping a drowning sailor stay afloat. This is the view of magic the pagans of old had: something that disgusted and terrified even those who indulged in it.

There is not a separate name for the genre that follows Gary Gygax or Michael Moorcock or Jack Vance, but we should note many a story where the magic power is nothing more than an alternate technology, to be used for good or ill as the practitioner sees fit. There is no spiritual element to such depictions at all. Let us call it Sword-and-Magic-User fiction.

In the mental universe depicted by Sword-and-Sorcery or Sword-and-Magic-User the noticeable thing lacking is a figure like Aslan in Narnia or Elbereth in Middle-Earth. There is no Christ, no Virgin Mary. Men like Conan and (ironically) Solomon Kane are on their own. Elric, Corum, and the like: a universe torn between forces of inhuman law and inhuman chaos lack the sense of hierarchy implied by High Fantasy, where Prince Caspian serves Aslan serves the Emperor Over the Sea.

High Fantasy has a Roman Catholic flavor to it, whereas Sword-and-Sorcery is somewhat Protestant. Conan in particular represents the rebellion of a healthy barbarian against a corrupt and over-civilized decadence. Truth might still be true, but you are on your own to find it: no authority speaks with authority. Gandalf may come from the Blessed Lands, but not Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. Sword-and-Magic-User tales are syncretic, polytheistic, disinterested in things of the spirit. Call it Unitarian.

Science fiction is stories about the magic of the future. It differs from other magical stories because the magic is metaphorical: it concerns the miracles of modern science rather than the miracles of God, the magic of technology rather than the magic of hobgoblins. If differs from other genres because we or our children may one day see those miracles come to pass, even as readers of Jules Verne and their children saw in their day such fantastic things as the submarine, the flying machine, the moonshot.

But then again, even among Hard SF writers, we find their most famous works seeped in magic as much as any tale of King Arthur or Achilles, it is merely called by other names. The powers of Paul Mu'ad-Dib or Michael Valentine Smith or the prophecies of Hari Seldon or the luck of Teela Brown are not called magic, but they are. These characters hale from Hard SF classics of the genre. Nor does this differ for softer science fiction, Darth Vader from can read minds as easily as can Mr. Spock, and can levitate objects as easily as Bill Bixby's uncle from MY FAVORITE MARTIAN.

In Science Fiction the role of magic is ambiguous, and this reflects the ambiguous attitude of the modern age toward all things supernatural.

To be sure, we all tell ourselves that no modern enlightened man believes in magic, and many an enlightened modern treats science as a useful tool by which means he can make for himself what sort of life he pleases: but then again, an unusual number of we modern men substitutes an attitude toward science which is indistinguishable from a cult belief, as if science will discover laws of history or psychiatry and tell us the truth about human nature that will set us free; or else it is indistinguishable from an occult belief, as if new discoveries will harness parapsychological or psionic powers, and New Age will dawn of mystic revelation, or an expression of some life-force or evolutionary end-purpose moving us down the channels of time toward Utopia; or else it is indistinguishable from devil worship, as if science justified or required the extermination of the unfit, the unborn, the unwanted, or the genocide of lesser races in the name of dry-eyed and ice-hearted Darwinism, or looks upon mankind as an expendible raw material out of which to build the superman.

These four types represent the four stages of a decay toward the nihilist abyss: the worldly man, the cultist, the occultist, the anarchist.

In sum, science fiction precisely reflects both the exhilaration and also the discontent of man in his modern world, particularly his attitude toward the magical and supernatural.

The exhilaration comes from one source: the greater liberty, knowledge, technology and wealth we enjoy than our medieval and ancient forefathers. The discontent comes from the same source as the discontent of our forefathers, which our greater liberty, knowledge, technology and wealth cannot assuage and indeed quite aggravate, which is the depraved, corrupt and self-destructive nature of human nature.

The writings of Robert Heinlein serve as a perfect example of the Worldly Man, that is, the man who rejects Revelation, and seeks truths nowhere but in practical morals and empirical facts. The attitude portrayed in his writings toward religion is ecumenical neglect and contempt. Christianity is a source of a threat to liberty, as personified by Nehemiah Scudder (who, at the time of this writing, is due to be elected next year, in 2012!)

Other religions, particularly esoteric or even Martian, are worthy of respectful disbelief.  The attitude tolerates religion provided it is castrated and kept as a private pastime for lesser beings. One day we will outgrow it.

The Worldly Man is content to mind his own business and seek his own pleasures after his own fashion, and demands his neighbors do the same. The business he minds is to maintain the public peace (as in STARSHIP TROOPER) and to get laid (as in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND).

The virtues needed to accomplish this can be lauded—no one waxes more poetic in his praise of the sacrifices of servicemen than Mr Heinlein— but those virtues have no metaphysical or theological foundation. For the Worldly Man, "absolute truth" is a question for folk with too much time on their hands.

Ayn Rand does not display this avuncular tolerance for Christianity: the religion is condemned as an unambiguous evil, and its practitioners as hatred-eaten mystics. (Other religions, one assumes, find no more favor in her eyes, but there is only one she condemns.) This is not the impatience of a worldly man for the mirage called absolute truth; this is the odium of one who defends an absolute truth against its rivals, or, to be precise, the hate of a heresiarch for orthodoxy.  

She is an example of a Cultist amid the science fiction community. (And do not tell me Ayn Rand is not a science fiction writer: an inventor discovers the secret of a self-generating power source from atmospheric electricity, and combines in a secret society with other inventors of supermetals and voice-activated locks and mirage-casting ray-screens and with masters of pirate battleships to overthrow the evil world masters who control a sound-wave disintegration ray? John Galt is cut from the same pattern as Doc Savage or the Gray Lensman.)

The Cultist takes the science and industry which affords the Worldly Man his pleasures, and scorns his pursuit of mere pleasure: truth, hard truth, absolute truth is the object of the Cultist search. Nothing but matter exists, hard facts, and the question of how to organize human life on earth is a deduction from fact. Any opposition or lack of enthusiasm is seen as treason.

Don't be misled by my example to think I am singling out Libertarian writers for scorn. Socialists like H.G. Wells and Atheists like Philip Pullman would serve just as well. What gives the Cultist his particular flavor is the humorlessness, the intolerance, and the zeal of his pursuit. I call it Cultic because the poor fool is trying to place a simplistic or mechanistic understanding of the universe in the place of divine revelation: he serves an idol.

The Cultist believes he has discovered the secret to a life of happiness on Earth, and the discoveries always retain an eerie simplicity. I remember hearing one science fiction writer once saying how everything in life would be better if only religion were abolished. Really? Everything? Religion is the source of ALL evils? Cultists of other breeds select a different one simple scapegoat whose abolition will usher in the Utopia: for Ayn Rand, eliminating altruism is the panacea; for H.G. Wells, eliminating private property. I can think of at least one feminist SF writer who thinks the abolition of men would do it, or, at least, of all masculinity.

The Cultist, whether he wish it or not, is always an enemy of virtue. This is because the nature of virtue is a matter of the careful balancing of extremes between two relative evils, and the extreme repudiation of absolute evils. The Cultist is an absolutist, and admit of no balance, no median. The Cultist is bedeviled by the alluring simplicity of his panacea, his one idea, and so compromises with absolute evils as if they were matters of taste. It is no accident that both Heinlein and Rand praise keeping one's oath in their writings, and both portray favorably the violation of matrimonial oaths by fornications and adulteries.

In the same way the Cultist rebels against the worldliness of the Worldly Man, the Occultist rebels against the Cultist, and insists that there is more than just a material world and one brief and stoical life lived within it.

Ursula K LeGuin seems to me to be the most famous and most articulate representative of this stance within the science fiction community: while her books have favorably portrayed an anarchist utopia (as in THE DISPOSSESSED) she lacks the grinding dogmatism of an Ayn Rand. Note the gentle parable of LATHE OF HEAVEN that no direct solution to problems actually solve them, or the explicit teaching of the relativity of all truth in FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS.

I don't mean the word Occultist here to mean a palmist armed with Tarot cards. I am using the word in its original sense. I mean it is one who believes in a hidden reality, a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear.

In the modern world, the Occultist is more likely to select Evolution or the Life-Force as this occult object of reverence, rather than the Tao. Occultists, in the sense I am using the word, explicitly denounce no religion nor way of life except the religion of Abraham, whose God is jealous and does not permit the belief in many gods, nor the belief in many views of the world each no better than the next.

Postmodernism which rejects the concept of one over-arching explanation for reality is explicitly Occultic: the truth is hidden and never can be known.

Occultists tend to be more wary of the progress of science and technology than Cultists or Worldlies. They see the drawbacks, the danger to the environment, and the psychological danger of treating the world as a mere resource to be exploited, rather than as living thing, or a sacred thing.

The Occultists believe in undemanding virtues, such as tolerance and a certain civic duty, but even these are relative and partial. There is beauty in his world, indeed, this is often his only approach to the supernal, but that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no absolute truth and very little goodness aside from good manners and political correctness.

Of the final stage, the pure nihilism I here call anarchy, I can think of only one representative in science fiction, Peter Watts, and at that, only one of his books, BLINDSIGHT. As with Heinlein, I am not speaking of the author himself, whose opinions I do not know and refuse to guess, I am merely speaking of the worldview as portrayed in his fiction.

(The nihilist viewpoint is more often seen in fantasy or horror, as in H.P. Lovecraft, where the universe has literally nothing but roaring madness at its core, with crawling chaos serving it.)

The Anarchist rebels against the soft mysticism of the Occultist as against the zealous dogmatism of the Cultist, but he also despises the Worldly as weak and inconsequential, if not an enemy.

For the Anarchist, the only truth is that there is no truth, no absolute truth, and even the few virtues maintained by the Worldly necessary to maintain the social order are despised. Contrast the soldier Amanda Bates in BLINDSIGHT with Juan Rico in Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS. The virtue of loyalty which forms the core of Rico's character is utterly lacking in Bates.

There is no discussion of morality in BLINDSIGHT: all decisions are at first merely a matter of expedience, and then, after the universe eliminates the uselessness of human consciousness as an evolutionary excrescence, no decisions whatever are made. The meat machines merely carry out their inbuilt programming.

The aliens turn out to be unintelligent in the sense of being unselfaware, but more intelligent than man in terms of being more highly organized. They are the 'Chinese Rooms' of Searle's famous thought experiment brought to life, and, in this tale, the Chinese Room is better organized than the human brain and can out-think it. The entire Earth at the end of BLINDSIGHT is overrun with vampires the human race created itself (a bizarrely meaningless and self-destructive act) and society fails when too many humans enter the artificial paradise of electronic nirvana, uploaded into worlds of their own dream-stuff, so that the remaining real life population cannot maintain the machinery (a bizarrely selfish and self-destructive act).

This is pure quill nihilism. For the Anarchist, life is meaningless, and destruction is the only creative act. The destruction of human life on Earth is part of the necessary evolutionary process to eliminate the ineffectiveness called the soul. Only the vampires are left, sleek and efficient and not human in any sense of the word, not even self aware.

In the anarchist world, (1) the only truth is that there is no truth (2) vice and virtue are interchangeable, equally meaningless, and human action is an epiphenomenon of biological motions (3) beauty is ugly and ugliness is beautiful. Here we have reached the mere opposite of the world of High Fantasy.

Here we have reached the abyss. In the anarchist world, no act is meaningful except to throw a bomb, and blow up the innocent. Man is lost in a despair so huge that it does not even seem like despair any longer.

If you wish to see a visual metaphor of this state of mind, stroll through any modern art museum, and look at the distortions and aberrations of the human form displayed there. All of modern art is nothing but propaganda for one Anarchist principle, namely, that beauty does not exist, and that ugliness can be made beauty merely by all of us agreeing it is so. The proposition is false, and cannot be made true, and more than modern art can be made free of technical defects, much less aesthetic ones.

Now we can see what the modern world is missing, aided by the admirable clarity of the blindsight of BLINDSIGHT. The Anarchist is rightfully devoted to destroying everything in the world, including himself, if in fact there were no truth, goodness, nor beauty in the world, or no way to achieve them. If we are all just programmed meat machines, suicide is the noblest option.

But if there is beauty, even it is ineffable, something never to be captured in words, a mystic feeling elusive as a ghost, then the Occultist is right to eschew all talk of truth and virtue.

But if there is truth, even if it is hard and cold and tinged with bronze, the Cultist is right to impose it on the world, no matter the cost in human suffering, and let all competing truths and claims of other virtues be damned. The only beauty is what serves the Cause.

But if there is virtue, then men must get along with each other, and also go along with each other just enough to maintain the public weal. The talk of truth can be tolerated as long as no violence is done in its name, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

But if there is magic, then there is a force in the world which sets the standard of truth and beauty and goodness, and bright magic is both more fair than dark magic, and merits our loyalty. Each man must find that light for himself, because no authority is to be trusted.

But if there is miracles, and I mean miracles from God, then there is an authority, a divine and loving Father who has both the natural authority of a parent and of a creator and of king. If one of those miracles is the Resurrection, then to all these other claims of authority, the divine can also claim the most romantic of all: merit. Christ has authority because he earned it by suffering the quest to the end, and rescuing the fair bride from the red dragon.  The crown of thorn is his reward.

If there are miracles, there is at once truth and beauty and goodness, for all these issue from the same source.

The question, finally, is one of philosophy, and, all drollery aside, it cannot be reduced to an analogy to science fiction. The philosophical question is whether Revelation is Truth? Unfortunately, without going into a long discussion of how Descartes and Hume and Kant attempted to ground philosophy on an epistemology of rationalism or empiricism, and failed to produce a coherent account of life, that last question cannot be answered.

That question must wait for another day. We asked what is wrong with the world. What is wrong is that modern thought is caught in the disease of nihilism, the idea that there is no revelation.

That disease causes the worldliness of sophisticates who wish religion would not bother them. They say that whatever truth there is or is not, it is not central to the business of life.

That disease causes the stiff ferocity of zealots in any number of political movements with semi-religious or cultic overtones, from libertarianism to totalitarianism. They say truth is what the Cause says it is.

That disease causes the tiresome vagueness and severe intellectual disorganization of moral relativism and postmodernism. They say truth is private, partial, relative, ineffible.

That disease causes the madness of nihilism. They say truth is not truth.

The rise of science and technology did not cause this disease, but the prestige of science aggravated it, because theology and philosophy cannot be reduced to algorithms, nor can skeptics willing to bow to the results of an experiment be persuaded to bow to virtues, powers and principalities they cannot see.  There is a scientific method and a Socratic method, but there is no method for making revealed truths a living part of your soul.

Transhumanism, beyond its near term goals of improving human life through medicine and expanded human life span, has a long term goal of abolishing human mortality. This is a worldly doctrine carried to an extreme.

Immortal humans would be devils, since we would decay in our sins over the centuries, becoming ever more selfish and arrogant. Ah, but another long term goal of transhumanism is to eliminate human sin and selfishness through technological manipulations of whatever bodies or housing our thought happen to occupy in the days after the Singularity. The Transhumanists, which childlike faith, merely assume the technology to redact, edit, program and condition human thoughts and personalities one day will exist. And we can turn our leaden souls to gold.

The problem of who would program whom, and who conditions the conditioners, can only be solved by reversion to the cultic frame of mind. Simplistic absolutes are the only things the Thought Police can impose on the human cattle. Sinners themselves, their ability to envision, much less create sinless epigone is no greater than the ability of men and women now, here in this era, to raise perfect children. We cannot even picture what such Perfect People would be like, except unless we picture a simplistic caricature: the John Galt of the Libertarians, or the New Man of the Marxists.

The Perfect People would, of course, assuming anyone survived the perfection operations and the surrounding wars and genocides, would still retain the mind-conditioning technology. Now there are only two possible options: first, they would retain enough of their human nature to be discontent with life. Seeking contentment, and not finding it in perfection, they must of course turn to what I call occultism, the search for hidden things that cannot be put into words. But the mere process of trial and error, some other form of being will eventually be created, perhaps intelligent, perhaps self-aware, but not human in any sense we mean the word.

The second option is that the Perfect People would not retain their human nature. Creatures without souls but with intellects capable of free will are devils. The only thing they can do is destroy. At that point, eventually, the great anarchy will reign, and the only thing these heirs to the one-great human race will find to occupy their immortal and endless and meaningless time, is discover ways to destroy themselves and each other.

That is why I am skeptical of the Transhumanist ambitions.

 

 

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Being Asked to Add Material

CPE Gaebler writes and asks when is the first time I was asked by an editor to add material to a story.

Let me explain the basis for his curiosity: I am almost never asked that, not once, but several times, I have gone over the word count limit editors have asked for. For example, my short story 'Awake in the Night' was more than double the acceptable limit posted by Andy Robertson in his NIGHT LANDS website. I wrote a short story for the Jack Vance tribute anthology called SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH where I also flagrantly, and to my discredit, went over the upper limit, and I asked the great Garden Dozois to send me the manuscript back. He replies in words akin to those of an NRA member — 'you will get this manuscript out of my cold, dead hands' — so apparently he found the manuscript acceptable despite that I was a scofflaw.

Unless I am misremembering, and it was the great George RR Martin who said that. The co-edited the work, and collected what must be the greatest names in the fantasy field, from Silverberg to Gaiman in the anchor position, peppered with names like Tanith Lee and Dan Simmons midmost.

In both cases, I am very grateful to the kindheartedness of the editors involved, and chagrined at my inability to write work to specification like a professional can do.

However, on one occasion, even I with all my orotund loquaciousness, was asked to expand rather than cut material.

I fear that if I tell you, some reader seeing the information will detect a seam or discontinuity in the work which otherwise would go unnoticed.

But, despite that risk, let me speak. Potential spoilers for an unwritten book below the cut:

The editor asked me to split what was originally going to be the concluding volume in the Orphans of Chaos duet into a two, making it a trilogy, due to shelving considerations — if the second book were too fat, we could not get it distributed in chain bookstores. He asked me to add an additional hundred pages or so.

Fortunately, I had written notes and scenes for a proposed sequel, including a scene I very much had wanted to include in this story. The final book was split into two, now called FUGITIVES and TITANS OF CHAOS, and the extra material, where the youngsters learn more about how to use their powers, forms the first part of the third book. I then rewrote sections of the battle scenes that form the end so that everything they learned got put to use.

The visit to the deserted island (which is indeed, a real deserted island) and the trip to Mars (and astronomers can figure out what year the scene takes place, because I established the orbital positions needed for a Hohmann transfer orbit) were written after several scenes of the running fight which leads from the department store to the woods to parallel dimensions.

Originally, I had meant the Mars trip to be the opening scenes of a proposed sequel EXILED FROM CHAOS, but now the opening scenes concern Amelia's life as a waitress in a truck stop known as the Chicken Pit near-abouts Cumberland, Maryland.

The entrance to Hell is near there (sorry, Marylanders) and the young Chaoticists are nearby, and take the blame, when Ixion, with the aid of a goddess who shall remain unnamed, Sisyphus and Tantalus break out of Hell, eager for revenge against the Lord Descender (Jove)who imprisoned them — but the trio is disappointed to find him no longer among the living. Jove's older brother Hades, who is blind, reports not seeing Jove in Tartarus.

Intrigue and hi-jinks ensue.

I was planning on using a version of Tantalus whose crime was that he wanted to spread the food of the gods among mortal man, a motive perhaps which modern Americans might find more sympathetic than ancient Greeks; and Ixion a man of implacable justice, whose crime was that he retaliated in kind when Jove seduced his wife.

If I ever get that book written. I have several other projects in the hopper, and a day job.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Seems Worth a Shot

As one of the two members of the Shea-Wright mutual admiration society, I admired this post from a reader over at Mark Shea's blog 'Catholic and Enjoying It.'

A reader has an interesting brainwave:

I have been thinking lately about how OWS has brought into the public realm the idea of using public space to make a point. For many years Nativity scenes have been declared unwelcome and in violation of the law, but really, aren't they just "a demonstration of speech representing a point of view"? Maybe we could all go out this Advent and "occupy" various parks and public spaces in front of city halls with living nativity scenes. This would work especially well if the space has already been claimed in the name of free speech by OWS. The mess necessitated by the presences of animals would blend into the general OWS atmosphere, and people dressed "alternatively" would not necessarily stand out.

Read the rest here.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Rattling the Tin Cup

Well, I just got a call on the phone from my wife, and we are not going to be able to take the children Christmas shopping this year, because we had promised a stranger in need, a friend of my daughter, to send her back to China; and the ticket prices hopped up between the time we borrowed money from a family friend, the time it arrived, and the time required to put it on the credit card.It just vacuumed away the entire Christmas shopping money. No toys this year.

So if anyone wants to get his favorite science fiction author a donation, here is the link to John Scalzi!

On the other hand, if you want to help me out for Christmas, please click the Tip Jar button to the right. Donations gratefully accepted.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

The Common Man and Christlike Presumption

In reference to my recent post on Advent, where I challenged heathens to live according to the precepts of Christian for a month, and chided my fellow Christians for failing to do so, Nostreculsus writes:

What about the opposite challenge? For one month, some nice Christian must worship the Dark Lord, cultivate the Lucifer Principle, and, in general, walk in the Shadow of the Black Sun. I realize, this isn't very specific, but, possibly joining the Occupy Wall Street herd would serve. Or are those the sheep that are to be culled? I'm so confused.

It would make an interesting sitcom, though: Christian and Sorcerer swap places for a month. Wacky hijinks ensue.

My reply:

Thanks, but I am a convert. I used to be on the other side, not for a month, but for 35 years and more.

The hijinks consist mostly of misery created by being surrounded by a world of fools, and the only pleasure comes from the contemplation of one's own wondrous and Promethean superiority. From time to time one meets a follow Prometheus, as lonely as oneself, alone in the cold and metallic knowledge that life is brief and meaningless, and that all the countless millions of present and past, everyone from Einstein to Aristotle, who thought there was something more, were fools and charlatans.

One develops a cool and ironic sense of bitter humor, as well as a bloated ego, and this personality characteristic is the defining trait of atheists ancient and modern. If there is a meek and humble atheist or sorcerer brimming with the milk of human kindness, I have yet to meet him.

Atheists of the Left reserve their pity for animals, atheists of the Right reserve their pity for supermen, geniuses and industrialists: both agree in being pitiless toward the common man.

***

Robert J Wizard, Objectivist, registers an objection to my characterization, not without some justice, and asks a few questions honor requires I answer in full.

***

Let me answer in order:

Q1. Was [egotism] your only source of pleasure?

A1: Yes.

Q2. You derived no pleasure from friends, spouse, reading, writing, work? Only from clenching in front of a mirror (speaking figuratively… I hope)?

A2 The question contains a false assumption. I did not say my only pleasure was egotism, I said my only source of pleasure was my ego. Friends and spouse and reading and writing were seen to be goods in so far as they served my good, and nothing was good in and of itself. (I should mention that, as a Stoic, I also held the position that there were goods in and of themselves, duties one should serve whether it afforded one pleasure or not, and that this second line of reasoning slowly, over years, drove out the first.)

Q3. On the basis of what did you affirm your own superiority?

A3 The question is a little tricky. I both pretended that I took no notice of where I stood in relation to other men, and I also considered myself to be an intellectual elite, smarter and more willing to face hard truths than the common lot of mankind.

Q4. By reference to other people and their beliefs that you judged to be inferior to your own?

A4 Yes.

Q5. If you suddenly converted everyone to your atheistic view, what would happen to your ego then?

A5 I would congratulate myself on having enlightened them. I converted several people to atheism, each time to my great satisfaction. I felt as if I have saved them from a degrading swamp of superstition.

Q6. Can you honestly tell me you thought Einstein and Aristotle to be fools?

A6 For believing in supernatural things? Yes. I took it to be proof that even men as wise as Merlin or Solomon in a given field could be as easily flattered and fooled by the poison of religion as Merlin by Nimue or Solomon by Sheba.

Q7. The choices are bloated ego or humility?

A7 Yes. The sin of pride and the virtue of humility are binary opposites, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive. Obviously a man can be arrogant about some things and humble about others, but for a given area of his life, that is the choice. Either you are NUMBER ONE, or you are not.

Q8. Is there a such thing as a healthy ego, or is it meek to blowhard?

A8  There is such as thing as gratitude, which is healthy, where you give thanks that your work and accomplishments have been bestowed upon you. Pride of workmanship is not the same as the Sin of Pride, which you call demanding the unearned.

Q9. Is it possible to have a healthy ego (and by that I mean a healthy assessment of one's self) and be kind?

A9  A healthy ego recognizes the sad truth about oneself. Humility is honesty.

There is, of course, the pagan virtues of magnanimity and largesse and noblesse oblige. In that limited sense, one can be proud, and yet be kind and condescending, but only to lesser folk who do not threaten or challenge one's ego.

Q10. Would you claim that any rational person would feel pity for Jobs, but not some child dying of cancer because Jobs was a "superman" and the kid didn't contribute to society?

A10  My claim is that atheists of the Right regard the businessman and the superman as oppressed by the envy and mediocrity of the society around them, like Prometheus being tormented by vultures: and so they feel pity for them. I have not heard many expressions of pity from Rightwing atheists for Little Nell. That bathos is almost entirely the province of the Leftwing.

Q11. Why does the common man deserve no pity if something befalls him?

A11 By my values, all men deserve pity, for they are sinners condemned to die. By yours, my dear Objectivist, common man filled with a common amount of laziness and envy and a desire not to be disturbed by the ruthless energy of capitalism craves the material benefits of industrialization, but then also condemns his benefactors. That unambiguously is Ayn Rand's depiction of the mass of the human race throughout human history. To be sure, she blessed bus drivers and fry cooks and manual workmen, but if and only if they share the ambition and rationality of the elite: Eddie Willers is the example of this, as is the nameless roughneck of Galt's Gulch who did not wish to remain a truck driver.

The idea that a man can be brought low by mere misfortune is address in Ayn Rand's writings only with the optimism that any such man, who is rational and productive, will work heroically to mitigate or undo the damage of the disaster, blaming no one, asking help from no one, except for such help as can be purchased by the exchange of something of equal value. No character of hers is reduced to beggary who then begs. Instead, he goes and gets a manual job as a laborer in a quarry or something of the sort.

So I am not sure how to answer the question. It is merely a blindspot in Objectivist thinking. There is no moral imperative in Objectivism to aid widows and orphans, or to visit the sick in the hospital or the prisoner in goal.

Q12. If an average schmuck with an average IQ, an average job etc., but an otherwise good fellow is struck by tragedy, by what standard does one say he gets no pity (F- him in other words) but the same befalling a "superman" does?

A12 Ayn Rand herself does not admit the possibility of tragedy in her world view. Your conclusions may differ from hers. She was primarily concerned with the harassment of the productive and rational superman at the hands of subhuman moochers, looters, and destroyers. The response to unforeseen disasters by rational men, according to her, is heroic attempts to repair the damage. Her characters are all perfect Stoics, unable to be broken-hearted by the random evils of blind fate. Only other men can bring them down and only if they themselves cooperate and consent to their own destruction. The Greek idea that great men could be destroyed by gods or fates or random chance is nowhere addressed in her writings: she regarded the possibility as absurd. Man was the master of his own destiny.

Q13. Are you claiming we should pity him because he is common?

A13Yes.

Q14. That would be presumptuous!

A 14 My arrogance is truly Christlike in its scope.

Q15. What is the criteria of "common"? A certain median of income, intelligence, skills, fame, hobbies – what?

A15 The poor, the weak, the miserable, the downtrodden, the helpless and hopeless men who live lives of quiet desperation, scraping from paycheck to paycheck, working with their hands or working petty dead-end office jobs, with no fame nor fortune nor future nor any hope of any such thing. I mean someone of what is now called the lower middle class.

Q16. Of course common man is simply that large collection of people who are not famous and don't stand out in any particular way to your level of perception. Meaning they are people you do not know.

A16 Speak for yourself, friend. As a newspaperman and a GP lawyer, I met a lot more of the common man and his common woes and miseries than the common man has. He knows his neighbor's problems. I wrote about the problems of everyone in the neighborhood, and the town, and the county. I rubbed shoulders with crooks and cops and petty politicians and guys who dug gravel for a living or hauled garbage, tobacco farmers and welfare moms and the struggling, uncomplaining owners and workers in small shops and restaurants, and the elderly living on so called fixed incomes which actually shrank year by year.

Possibility my attitude is somewhat darker than the norm, because no one calls the newspaper or their local attorney when things or going well, but I think I have seen life beyond the ivory tower of beloved books well enough to have an opinion.

I know them well enough.

*** ****

In the spirit of the season, let me give Mr Wizard the last word. He writes:

I have a couple follow-ups. But I have to go serve the common man his beer first.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Quote for the Day: Not Hard to be Christian, Impossible

In his journal, Father Seraphim wrote: "Let us not, who would be Christians, expect anything else from it than to be crucified. For to be a Christian is to be crucified, in this time and in any time since Christ came for the first time. His life is the example–and warning–to us all. We must be crucified personally, mystically; for through crucifixion is the only path to resurrection. If we would rise with Christ, we must first be humbled with Him–even to the ultimate humiliation, being devoured and spit forth by the uncomprehending world.

"And we must be crucified outwardly, in the eyes of the world; for Christ's Kingdom is not of this world, and the world cannot bear it, even in a single representation of it, even for a single moment. The world can only accept Antichrist, now or at anytime.

"No wonder, then, that it is so hard to be Christian–it is not hard it is impossible. No one can knowingly accept a way of life which, the more truly it is lived, leads more surely to one's own destruction. And that is way we constantly rebel, try to make life easier, try to be half-Christian, try to make the best of both worlds. We must ultimately choose–our felicity lies in one world or the other, not in both.

"God give is the strength to pursue the path of crucifixion; there is no other way to be Christian."

You might be fascinated, dear reader, by the account of this convert to Russian Orthodoxy. http://www.deathtotheworld.com/seraphimrose/index.html

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Wrights Writing Corner: On Angels

Oops. Forgot to post a link to my lovely and talented wife's weekly essay on writing.

Better late than never:

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/217683.html

Some time ago, I promised to begin a series of articles about writing about the Great Ideas. The first Great Idea listed by Mortimer Adler happens to be Angels. So, today, I thought I would write about writing about angels.

Some things are intrinsically hard to write about. Angels may be one of those things. I have almost never seen them done well in fiction. I have, however, read really stirring accounts of people who believe that they have seen real angels. While I have no way to judge the veracity of their stories, I can feel the power of the narrative. It come with a sense of awe and wonder.

 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

The Onset of Advent

Brought to you courtesy of the Shea-Wright Mutual Admiration Society, this is a post from Mark Shea's blog, which I reprint here in full.

Grace is Dark Matter
Posted on December 2, 2011 by Mark Shea

The history of the Catholic Church is simply chockablock with people like Br. Rick Bunch, quietly and humbly laboring on behalf of the poorest and most defenseless people in the world. What's amazing to me is how some people can seriously look at something like this and see nothing but evil. As Caesar begins to press harder to crush the Church here in the US, the astounding thing to me is that people don't seem to realize that they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces when they pressure the Church out of works of mercy and try to replace it with the State. It's like a man with an umbrella watering plants in a rainstorm. it's a fine way for control freaks to corner the watering market, but a lousy way to water a garden. As priest friend of mine used to say, "I don't worry that the Church will survive persecution in the US. I do doubt that the US will survive persecuting the Church." A serious assault on the Church is a serious assault on what is, hands down, the greatest charitable organization on planet Earth. You may as well drain all the oil out of a car engine and expect it to run at 60 miles an hour as destroy the work of millions of volunteers who supply the vital lubrication that allows a society to function. Thanks be to God for the generosity of the millions of Br. Rick's out there who do for love what Caesar and Mammon cannot do well for the sake of power or money. Like dark matter, the gracious work they do accounts for most of the mass of history, and nobody ever sees it or hears about it.

My comment is provoked not just by Shea's message, but by events in my personal life, both pleasant and unpleasant, of which it would be either discourteous or unrewarding to speak. Therefore let me hide the root of my thought but share the fruit:

When I first became a Christian, I had been warned by sundry writers, CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, that being a Christian was difficult. I often in jest lamented that I had not been visited in my hour of distress by Thor. Dying in battle during some act of brigandage against treasonous relatives, then to be carried aloft by singing fierce-eyed Valkyrie to endless feasting until foredoomed Ragnarok, to fall as loyal as his wolves at the feet of dark-hooded Odin was much more in accord with my natural inclination. Given my druthers, I'd much rather be a pagan. Unfortunately, and despite what your modern teachers tell you, reality is what it is, and you don't get a vote.

It was not until long after that I encountered those who scoffed that following Christ was the lazy or the easy path. Even if the teachings of Christ are a false and pernicious as a Dawkins or a Hitchens scoffs, they cannot honestly call the disciplines false. (Not that honesty is their strong point.)

I suggest that even those who despise the Christian religion would benefit themselves by trying to live according to our discipline for even so short a time as a month.

You will be reviled and scorned by friends and coworkers in public, but be unable to answer them as natural ire prompts.

You will give to the poor and needy with both hands, regretting only that you do not have more to give away, but he unable even to hint at any charitable work you are doing.

You will turn the other cheek when struck.

You will obey worldly authorities even when in they are in the wrong.

You will heed spiritual authorities even when your proud and smug philosophic schools and political factions urge you most strongly to defy the Church and follow instead whatever admired teacher or leader taught you your most cherished ideals.

You will be chaste. This forbids not merely adultery, but adultery of the eyes — try turning off the porn stream from the internet, male readers, and see if you can go for a month without.

You will also eschew gluttony (which includes a gluttony for intoxicating drugs) and sloth, and greed, and anger, and envy, and pride. This includes giving up any political partisanship, of any party, which masks envy or greed or anger.

If you are Catholic, you will regularly confess your sins to a priest, do penance, and vow yet again to amend those besetting sins which you hate and yet do over again. If you are Protestant, you do just the same, but without leaning on the staff of the priest.

Even to admit a sin is sin is a heroic effort of self discipline, since the busy mind naturally seeks to excuse itself from unpleasant blame, and the modern world naturally seeks to bolster your self esteem by telling you whatever your natural desires might be, are licit if you decree them so. I'm OK, you're OK.

You will endure pain rather than commit suicide, and bear a child rather than commit prenatal infanticide. This requires considerably more courage than worldly men can muster, more, perhaps, than they can imagine. (Admittedly, this requires more than my hypothetical one month commitment.)

You will not divorce except in cases of infidelity. If you are Catholic, you will not use contraception nor fertility drugs.

If you are Mormon, you will not drink wine or beer. If you are a Christian Scientist, coffee, tea and cigarettes are forbidden.

Finally, if you are Christian of any denomination, or an observant Jew or faithful Muslim, you will denounce the culture of death, and all the works and all the ways of the august and hellish Prince whose inspires that culture and reigns with usurping iron scepter over it.

And you will return for hate love, and pray for those that despise you.

And if you attempt this discipline for a month, but live in a nation less civilized than this, you may be called upon to suffer beatings, wounds, maiming, humiliation, loss of liberty, loss of life. Ask the Copts in Egypt, or inquire of the Christians in Iraq or Africa.

Try it for a month.

Is a month too long? Try it for the season of Advent. By ancient usage, this begins with the Sunday nearest to the feast of Saint Andrew the Apostle and embracing four Sundays. This year is the longest of Advent, beginning 27 November, and lasting twenty-eight days.

Saint Andrew the Apostle

The experiment will produce an interesting result: you will fail. You will not be able to do even half these things, even for half a month. Human effort alone is insufficient. So, logically, if anyone can do these things at all, it means something beyond the human is assisting them.

Now, a worldly skeptic might scoff, "Ah, but the test is one designed to fail! These arbitrary rules, and standards set arbitrarily high, are meant to trap the unwary into a sense of unearned guilt, which is merely a sinister means for priests and authorities to control the weak-minded!"

This is the conspiracy-theory theology. It assumes there is nothing in the human conscience that recognizes and responds to the demands of the virtue, even extravagant virtue. In reality, any man whose conscience is not numb within him feels a twinge of conscience when he gives into lust or gluttony or sloth or wrath or pride, even if he calls these things good, or invents excuses to call them good.

It also assumes that, just because you fail, there are not those who succeed. But there are: We call them saints. Human effort alone is insufficient. A saint is one who has surrendered to the Holy Spirit.

To be a saint is the only kind of heroism that anyone, young or old, hale or weak, can obtain. No one is barred by race, color, creed, national origin or condition of previous servitude.

War heroes need to wait for wars. Not everyone can be a Washington or a Napoleon: without the revolution, Washington would have remained a farmer, and the Emperor a Corsican. And even swift Achilles could not have won eternal renown from Homer's song had he had a bum leg. Likewise, artists need genius. Athletes need strength, politicians a gift of rhetoric, statesmen a gift of leadership, not to mention a state in need. Time and circumstance and fortune have a unearthly and arbitrary influence to determine where fame shall fall.

But anyone can be the Virgin Mary. All you need do is say, "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Be it done to me according to thy word."

Anyone can be Saint Stephen. All you need do is pray for your murderers.

Anyone can be Saint Paul. All you need do is realize that you are blind and come to the Church to have your eyes opened.

Anyone can be Saint Peter. All you need do is stretch forth your hands, and another shall gird you, and carry you whither you would not go.

Anyone can be Saint John. All you need do is abide until He comes.

Sounds simple? Without the spirit, it is impossible to do these simple things.

Unlike every other form of hero or leader or admirable figure, the saint alone elevates those below him rather than depress them. The genius is not respected unless his genius is rare: the hero not victorious unless there are vanquished. But excesses of charity and love are loved even by those who say they have no use for saints.

My suggestion again, is that those who despise the Christian religion attempt to live by our precepts for a month, in order to see and understand what it is you imagine you hate.

Unfortunately, I have a much, much stronger suggestion to make to those who profess the Christian religion: Let us live by our precepts for a month.

The pagans of ancient times were converted not by words only, but by the silent example of Christians living in their midst: in their midst but not like them. How can the modern men, less even than the pagans of old in dignity and intellect and uprightness of stature, be led by our example if we live as they do?

What? You cannot find any poor who need food, clothing, shelter? Are there no prisoners in jail to visit, no sick in the hospital, no aged in the Old Folk's Home waiting in loneliness to die?

Have you truly no enemy to forgive? Is there truly no one in your life who has cursed you or reviled you or said all manner of evil against you falsely?

If not, you might be doing something wrong, O ye faithful: if you are true servant of Christ, you well know that the world will not treat the servant better than it treated the master.

Let us abide by what we have been commanded to do, if not for a whole month, then at least for Advent.

Or a week. Or a day. Or an hour.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Sometimes We Need Hobgoblins

My conservative friends must wonder why I am so kindly disposed toward libertarians, various breeds of whom advocate a number of social reforms — from open borders to re-legalizing recreational drugs to an all-volunteer tax code to the abolition of marriage as an institution recognized by the state to isolationism — which conservatives of various breeds regard as ranging from the Utopian to the diabolical.

The simple answer is, I used to be one. If you accept their axioms, their conclusions follow logically — and they abide by them. Consistently. I can think of few compliments as weighty to a philosophical mind.

They are, in effect, the logical end-result of the Protestant movement away from institutional loyalty and toward the individual conscience: Puritanism taken to a secular extreme.

Indeed, the most telling complaint against the libertarian mind is this consistency, an unwillingness to make an exception when an exception is due. The argument against them is that a foolish consistency is he hobgoblin of little minds. Of course, by its own logic, an argument against consistency cannot be applied to all situations: sometimes we need hobgoblins. Especially the hobgoblin called conscience.

It lends an air of intellectual unreality to their discussions, as when they might debate whether a private street owner has the right to forbid a private fire-fighting company from rushing to the aid of a burning church, if the street-owner is motivated by hatred for that church; or as when they debate whether to abolish intellectual property law; or repeal all laws against fraud, on the grounds that free market mechanisms rather than courts of law will operate more efficiently to discourage breech of contract.

But they are consistent during the times when it is more important to be consistent, as when an unpopular minority abuses an otherwise sacred right, such as freedom of speech and assembly.

Here, for example, is Steve Greenhut over at LewRockwell.com, in an essay about police pepper-spraying seating protesters.

I disagree with most of what the Occupy protesters are saying, quite obviously, but when I see lines of riot-gear-clad officials standing in front of these unbathed wretches, my heart goes out to the wretches. They need a lesson in economics and politics. The policies they advocate – to the degree that many of them have any well-defined grievances – range from the silly to the disastrous. They are inconsistent, foolish and hypocritical. Many of them are lazy freeloaders. Such is life. They do create filth and chaos in public parks, but if one cannot protest in a public park, there are not many places to have a protest. It's in everyone's best interest for the authorities to provide as much latitude as possible for protesters of any political persuasion. We still do pretend to live in a free society, right?

Without commenting on the case itself, let me mention that the police may use force in situations other than when they are physically threatened. Whether this situation was one where lawful force of this degree was authorized, I leave to those who know more than I to discuss.

But were I the lawyer involved, I would rather be arguing the ACLU case, which is clear and dramatic, rather than the Police case, which is problematical, and has a high threshold to clear.

No matter which side I am on, my heart goes out to the wretches.

They may be wrong in this case, and need a bath, but I have been wrong in similar cases, and also need a bath, let me be not hasty to condone the use of force b y Caesar, who is eager to be unleashed, with equally cavalier brutality, against anti-abortionists and tax-protesters and other causes I support, no more popular than these.

hat tip to Mark Shea.

Legal notice: Mark Shea is a member of the SHEA-WRIGHT MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY. Come to think of it, he is the only other member, aside from me. Every link and compliment issued to Shea is because we admire each other. 

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.