This past year I read 92 books, eight short of my goal of 100. I guess if I wanted to reach for the number I could also count the additional 15 books that I listened to on my phone while running or driving. But I won't. Let's leave it at 92. And seeing as the year ends in a few days I don't think I'll be adding any more notches to this bedpost for the year. Below I will breakdown what I read and do something very gimmicky: list my book of the year. Fiction Of that 92, they breakdown into genres as follows: 41 novels, 25 theology/philosophy, five dramas, nine that focus on cultural or sociological issues, five on literary criticism, three on athletics, two on education, and two epic poems. Of the novels, roughly half were rereads, eight exceeded 600 pages in length, 14 were written within the past five years, 19 would count as canonical/Important books, five would count as genre fiction (mystery or sci/fi), and the rest were the new ones for which it's too soon to tell or ones that I read for the hell of it. My favorites, only including new reads were: Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and In Shadow T.H. White, The Once and Future King Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North Geraldine Brooks, The Secret Chord David James Duncan, The River Why I also read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time this year. I was mostly unimpressed, undoubtedly because I am too old and phony. Theology/Philosophy Of the theology/philosophy books, most were from the past 30 years, four would qualify as intellectual biographies, two were essay collections, and the rest more straightforward philosophical or theological treatises, usually on a particular point. My favorites were as follows: Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googolplex Sociology/Culture The only other category I'll cover in any depth is the sociological/cultural books. Here my favorite was far and away Michael Lewis's The Big Short, which doubles as one of my favorite movies of the year. I was also greatly entertained by Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
Read this book NOW!
Best Book of the Year My favorite overall book of the year was Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head. I wrote about it extensively on this blog, though not nearly as much as it deserved. Since reading it, anytime that I have spoken with someone who is lamenting anything about the state of our world I recommend Crawford's book. And thus I do for you as well. Read it. I'll post in a day or two some reading reflections and ambitions for 2017.
"For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you will break forth into singing, and all the tress of the field shall clap their hands."
Isaiah 55:12
"I tell you, if these were silent the very stones would cry out."
Luke 19:40
Ten years ago tonight my mom almost died when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain. My dad was in the shower when it happened; my brother was watching TV in the living room; my mom was ironing my dad's clothes for work the next day; I was driving across Kansas with some friends on my way to a church conference in the Ozarks. My dad gave her CPR--or his hodgepodge version of what he had seen in movies anyway--still dripping from the shower while my brother called 9-1-1. He kept her alive until the paramedics arrived and sped her to the local hospital. After my dad dried off and got dressed he followed with my brother. And I drove on down I70 oblivious. It is weird to look back on what has proved an epochal day in my life and try to remember it as it was and not as I have made it to be, inflating it over time as it came to be a Day and not just a day. I have snatches of that first night. My brother's first call and the confused nature of what had happened/was happening. The next call that told of the Flight for Life helicopter ferrying my mom to the old University Hospital location on Colorado. For that phone call I was at a truck stop in Salina, Kansas putting gas in my car. I was in my T-shirt because I was tough and I wasn't going to let a little thing like a blizzarded-over central Kansas force me into thicker layers. I remember crumpling towards the ground there, just outside, away from my friends. I remember the impulse to turn around and drive back but being shamefully frozen in place. We slept at my grandparents' church outside of Topeka that night. Or, some slept, I should say. I didn't blink. The next morning my grandpa and other of our family friends were at the church and prayed for me. I talked with my dad on the phone for the first time. This was the first time I heard the word 'aneurysm'. I had no idea what it meant. But he said he wanted me home. A family friend booked me a ticket back to Denver from the Kansas City airport. We went to my grandparents' home and I took a shower and tried to steel myself for what was to come. My friends drove me to the airport. It was the loneliest and perhaps the worst moment of my life when they pulled away. Having booked the ticket three hours before the flight I suffered the indignity of overzealous TSA scrutiny. A woman sitting next to me on the plane tried to hit on me--the first, so far only, and, giving my aging dadbod I can only assume, last time that has ever happened. My fiancé--now wife--picked my up the airport and we drove toward the hospital through Denver traffic. What happened next was almost unreal. My mom's inevitable brain surgery, a four hour ordeal to clip off the blood vessel and clean up blood that had accumulated on the brain, had kept getting delayed throughout that day (the 27th now) and when I landed the word was she was about to go in. I thought that there was no way I would make it. But then we did. My dad escorted me through to her room just as they were taking her out for the surgery. She looked so frail, hooked up to machines and sunken under hospital clothes and bedding. But I got to see her. I held her hand and told her that I was there and I wasn't leaving. She squeezed my hand back and I leaned over and kissed her and then she was whisked away. As far as we all knew she might not live through that surgery. Statistically she shouldn't still have been alive anyway. I crumpled into my dad's arms, sobbing for the first time. It was a great gift, though, to see her then. To touch her. To speak to her. I am forever grateful for it. So much of the drama was to come in the time that followed this first dramatic 24 hours. I don't have time to get into everything here. Plus, I am not sure I remember it right. I don't know what's been added on, embellished, what timelines have collapsed from a sporadic morass into a more cohesive and spatial whole. There are a few things I can cling to because there are dates tethered to the experience. For example, I know that I went home for the first time on the 28th to watch Kansas State play their bowl game. My dad, uncle, and brother headed back to the hospital after the disappointing performance but my best friend and I stayed at my parents' house. After drinking ample amounts of cheap whiskey--I don't remember the brand, just the price range--we called it a night. After he fell asleep I got back up, unable to slow my mind and rest. A few days before, Colorado had endured an historic snowstorm when a 36" monster bombarded the front range. On the night of the 28th the second storm hit, dumping another 20" on an already stressed infrastructure. I remember this particularly because unable to sleep, and depleted by the recurring lack of sleep, I went outside. I went outside in nothing but my boxer shorts and sat there as the snow fell and the cold quickly numbed my body. I sat there as long as I could bear it before going inside and curling up in a ball on the floor in the same spot where my mom had passed out. The ironing board was still out. I stayed there for a long time.
Here's another that I basically trust but still wonder about. I tried to go back to work one morning--shortly after the new year (and I am skipping over a lot here)--but stumbled around in a haze and decided to go home. A coworker mercifully talked me down from my original plan of just quitting. My grand plan was to cook a big pot of chili for my dad and me to eat. We had subsisted for the past week or so on takeout Thai and burgers and whatever else we could scrabble together or was kindly donated to our perpetual vigil. I went to King Soopers and as I walked into the house I got a call from my dad. I don't remember exactly what he said (sidetone: if anyone should try to recount dialogue when telling a story it's safe to say they're extemporizing; I can't remember verbatim discussions I had earlier this morning), but the gist of it was clear: mom was dying. In what turned out to be simply another in a set of scenes ripped from a Hallmark movie I sped away towards the hospital in my beloved old Nissan Pathfinder, alternately praying fervently and swearing ferociously at drivers with the temerity to slow my progress. I screamed into the parking lot at the hospital (the tires are screeching in my memory), vaguely aware that Sufjan Stevens' version of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" was playing through my iPod and ran towards the neuro unit. In what I can only find darkly comedic now, after dramatically running through the length of the hospital I got to the elevator to get to the floor my mom was on and, patients and visitors being denied stair privileges, I had to wait for an excruciatingly long time for the elevator to arrive. As I waited people I had previously bumped past in my headlong effort for the third floor walked past me. By the time I reached the floor the situation was calmed. I don't remember exactly the resolution or exactly the problem but they had to do an emergency angiogram on my mom and prevent something bad from happening. And they did. And now my mom is fine. She is literally in the 100th percentile for aneurysm recovery. If I remember correctly that was the last major scare. As fuzzy as those memories are of that time they are nevertheless incomprehensibly dear to me. Because of God's grace and mercy I can look back on them with joy. _____________________________________________________________________________ We just got back from Hawaii earlier today. My family and the two (soon to be three) grandchildren my mom might never have met, my brother and his girlfriend, my parents and my grandmother. We went to celebrate Christmas and celebrate the past decade. I cannot imagine the past ten years without my mom. I cannot imagine a world in which my kids don't have their gaga. Life is so normal and so uninterrupted by that event that it is easy for me to be tricked into forgetting what a blessing my mother's mere existence is. Her physical presence defies explanation. Her ability to walk with, talk with, play with, color pictures with, and get into the ocean with my kids is miraculous. Even if her natural timidity prevented the latter activity from getting above knee-high water. I don't know why things happened this way. I don't know why my mom lived and other people on her unit in that month died from the same thing. I've been asking that question for a decade and I'm no nearer an answer than I was then. But the miracle of my mother's existence and life has reinforced the miraculousness of all life. The blessing of each of her breaths reminds me of the blessing of every breath we unconsciously and ungratefully take. The beauty of watching her play with my children emphasizes the everyday beauty in the movements of my children and the physical suppleness of play. The utter undeservedness of drinking wine with her over a steak dinner overlooking the Pacific Ocean admonishes me to drink deeply of the undeserved grace that saturates our entire world. The lesson, in other words, is gratitude. If my mother's continued presence on this planet is cause for wonder it is really only slightly more wonderful than my presence here. Than yours. What I can cling to even as the memories fade or collapse into each other is the imperative of thankfulness. And I pray that I may cultivate this virtue of gratitude--of praise to God for all of these holy gifts--all my life. For, as Christ says, if you have been given much, much is therefore expected of you. And I have certainly been given much.
I haven't read much history this year. One of my goals at the beginning of the year was to read more philosophy and theology and while I've certainly accomplished this goal it seems like the Peter I robbed to pay the Paul of philosophy was history. Towards the end of this year in a belated attempt to rectify my neglect I started reading Shelby Foote's three-volume classic on the Civil War. I'll pick up Volume II at some point in 2017 but I took a break to read the biography of Alexander Hamilton that inspired the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. It is named, fittingly, Alexander Hamilton. Seven hundred page biographies are an interesting genre. I've waded through a few in my life and while I've always ultimately felt it was worth it, I've also had times where I've woken up with drool coating the page I was reading before falling into a doze. Which is only to say that I commiserate with my students when they complain about reading being boring. It certainly can be at times, particularly when slogging through financial data from the eighteenth century. Which I never make them do, so on second thought, shut up, students. Reading is great! One of the most enjoyable parts of reading this biography is all the resonances between Ron Chernow's book and Lin-Manuel Miranda's play. Miranda is an avid student of the work and even when he deviates from the source material, as all creative work must to do to one extent or another, the changes feel recognizable within the broader span of Hamilton's actual life and work. Another enjoyable and commonplace aspect of historical reading is tracking the resonances between the era described and our own. And here there are many: the size and role of government, the role of immigrants in national prosperity, true democracy versus republicanism, states' rights versus federal prerogative, etc. And then there is the figure of George Clinton, the seven-term governor of New York state, two time Vice President, and thorn in Hamilton's side (how's that for a resume?). See if this sounds familiar: "If uncouth in appearance, he was a wily politician who clung tenaciously to power. . . Clinton represented what would become a staple of American political folklore: the local populist boss, not overly punctilious or savory yet embraced warmly by the masses as one of their own. As his biographer John Kaminski put it, 'George Clinton's friends considered him a man of the people; his enemies saw him as a demagogue.'" Miranda is insistent in interviews that Hamilton's story is relevant for audiences today. I've not heard him mention this particular, but it is worth remembering that the figure cut by Trump is nothing new to the American political stage. George Clinton is but one example of a Trumpian precursor. And it is worth remembering, too, that Trump certainly will not be the last bombastic ass masquerading as a populist hero. I don't stand much stead behind the old saw about those not knowing history being doomed to repeat it--if pressed to logical conclusions the only validity such a saying can have is in very abstract applications, i.e. people still go to war! crazy!!!--but it is worth reading and reminding ourselves that what we're seeing here is nothing new. Call it the Solomonic wisdom rather thanGeorge Clinton had his day but is now an historical footnote. Trump, prayerfully, will be the same.
To pay for her nursing school my wife
worked as a CNA in the alzheimer's unit of an assisted living facility. She
worked with people whose former lives were shrouded in darkness. They were
often angry, lashing out at her with biting words they never would have said in
another context. They were often sad, dissolving into panicked tears
randomly. Perhaps most often they were lonely. About one half
of nursing home residents receive visitors; the rest pine away in front of
daytime TV, watching The Price is Right, Matlock and Murder,
She Wrote reruns while commercials for class-action lawsuits against
pharmaceutical companies and used car dealerships play in an infinite loop.
One of the obsessions of
my thought life is memory, specifically related to time and its
effects. After reading the famous madeleine scene in Proust's Swann's
Way I was reminded of a segment I had heard on NPR years ago
about the power of music to awaken the memories of patients with Alzheimer's. A
few seconds of Googling yielded me the story and the name of the documentary
that was being profiled: Alive Inside, a profile of a man, Dan Cohen,
who has made it his mission to put music into the ears of the forgotten
elderly.
While the movie traded in the scientific
for the saccharine all too often, the effect was nonetheless moving and
beautiful. There are no other words to describe the feeling of watching someone
locked out of her memory come alive and start singing and dancing (relatively
speaking) and smiling and telling stories. I am sure there were painful periods
of therapy and buildup to the epiphanies catalogued in the film that were
less camera-worthy, but the central point--that music has the power to unlock
our degraded and obscured memories--is vital.
I encourage you to watch the
following clip which went viral and gave Cohen's work a higher profile:
Isn't that beautiful? That moment when
this nearly unresponsive old man perks up and starts moaning and scatting and
remembering who he once was. Music restored his humanity, his dignity. I
cried, often profusely, through this film.
A philosopher I really enjoy, Michael
Polanyi, wrote about what he called "tacit knowledge," the stuff that
we pick up on implicitly, that we can't be directly taught in the manner
of the multiplication table or Latin declensions. It can be argued that most of
the important things we "know" we know tacitly. So much of the formation
of our children, of ourselves as moral beings, of citizens for a state, depends
on tacit knowledge development.
Music shapes us without our being aware of
how we are shaped. It teaches us how to feel and validates emotion. It teaches
us how to move and how to respond in synch with another human. It is so
powerful that it can overcome the degradation of the mind that comes with
dementia. There is a reason that for centuries peoples of various faiths have
sung their prayers. For in so doing songs, too, can shape our theology, our
metaphysics.
And what this film taps into is the
importance of what we listen to and what we love. For if music has this great
power--and it certainly does--it can also be wielded without care and
shape us badly. I don't mean to sound more conservative on this topic than
I actually am--I'm not listening to Christian music right now, after all, but
Neutral Milk Hotel--but it should at least give us pause.
But what this film points to just as
profoundly is our startling lack of reverence for our elders, for
any conception of elderhood at all. The film argues that we privilege
adulthood as the pinnacle of existence, an assertion that a generation that has
turned the word "adult" into a verb, as in "I don't want to
adult today", would surely contest. We don't privilege adulthood because
we have a sad lack of adults. And, as my recent posts on Neal Postman's book The
Disappearance of Childhood note, we don't really have childhood
either. We privilege ease and luxury and the notion of perpetual youth and
a pain free dotage (which we steadfastly refuse to think about).
Old people remind us that we'll get old;
old people have pill dispensers for their daily intake and remind us of the
eventual breakdown of our bodies; old people die and remind us that we will
die; and, perhaps most pertinently, old people retain belief systems
discredited by our enlightened peers and therefore have nothing to teach
us.
All of this is, to quote Donald Trump,
"Sad." And what this film shows is that there is life after adulthood,
there is richness to be mined from the last years of life. It shows us that
we're wrong. It is a lesson I pray that I heed in my own life.
I just started reading Victor Lee Austin's book Up With Authority.Austin is a resident theologian at an Episcopalian church in New York City and most recently published a memoir on his wife's multi-decade fight with cancer and slow diminishment and death, called Losing Susan: Brain Disease, the Priest's Wife, and the God who Gives and Takes Away.I am hoping to read the book soon, but in the meantime if issues of God's sovereignty and pain are on your radar I recommend this excellent first things conversation between Austin and R.R. Reno. This conversation and an interview in Ken Meyers' extraordinary Mars Hill Audio first brought Austin's work to my attention. When I saw that he had written a book on authority, a subject near and dear to my own heart, I had to pick up a copy. The dearth of respect for and trust in authority is undeniable in our culture. And there is without doubt good reason for mistrust. Washington, our national emblem of authority, is a cesspool of corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and ethnically insensitive NFL teams. Despite clear abuses of authority in our culture, Austin's thesis is that, paradoxically, submission to authority frees us to be more free. The modern desire for a manager rather than a leader is symptomatic of what Austin sees as "leaders' who stand for nothing except fair process"--harnessing the energies of their subordinates rather than actively leading them. This lack of understanding of true leadership signals a "cultural impoverishment that we have a lack of a notion of authorities who have something to convey to us, have a place to lead us toward, authorities, that is, who embody a sense of what the human good is and who exist to help us flourish in it." In reaction to bad authority (coupled with the human desire for complete autonomy), we have rejected all formative authority and exalted the individual. But true authority rightly exercised leads us to a more human and more excellent existence, unleashing potentials that will remain forever latent outside of submission to authority. Austin's final encouragement in the introduction is that Christian believers must of necessity embrace paradox. Our faith is shot full of paradox of which freedom through submission is perhaps one of the least vexing. We believe in the incarnation where the God-man came to earth to grow as a child and teach and heal and die and rise. But the church has forever maintained that Christ's dual position of fully God and fully man is not a contradiction but a paradox. Something, while outside of the bounds of our full understanding, we still can recognize as true. The modern mind has little room for paradox.I just taught my juniors Donne's great poem "Batter My Heart Three-Person'd God." They bristle, as they ought, at Donne's final request in the poem that he cannot be "chaste" unless he is "ravish[ed]" by God. But Donne is not literally asking God to overpower him sexually, but expressing the paradox that our moral purity depends on God's overpowering our weak desires with fulfillment beyond imagination. The lines prior to the shocking conclusion are just as paradoxical (though less incendiary): "But I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free." There it is. Freedom through enthrallment. Freedom through imprisonment to the will of God. Freedom through submission to be who we were made to be and thus be truly free. (I plan on blogging more in detail through this book as I go. In my faltering manuscript on obedience and Paradise Lost the philosophical underpinning provided by Austin will be invaluable. And, while the index isn't overly-detailed, it doesn't seem that he covers Milton as an authority on this matter.)
I am slogging right now through Shelby Foote's three volume Civil War masterpiece, about halfway through Volume I: Fort Sumter to Perryville. It is fascinating historical reading. It is weird to say that a series of books weighing in at close to 10 pounds and including nearly 3,000 pages of densely-packed and meticulously-researched work could ever feel like it's leaving stuff out but Foote is such a good writer that he makes me wish he had written more (editorial note: I reserve the right to reverse this opinion at any time during Volume III). An interesting thing that cropped up early in the first volume is the absolute Southern confidence in quick victory. They were so assured of the Southern man's dominance that they thought a single Confederate soldier was equal to ten Federals. But here's the thing: they were so good at selling this narrative that not only were the Union soldiers scared of the fighting ferocity of the Southerner, everyday residents of the South believed it too. This made the early successes in the war, especially in the western theater, particularly hard for the South to understand. If one Confederate was equal to ten Union, then why in the world were the Union soldiers riding roughshod over their Confederate opponents? In other words, the propaganda convinced both the enemy and the friends. When the enemy punctured the propaganda it was shattered for both sides. This is all notable to me now in the wake of our recent election. The propaganda machine of the left (i.e. nearly every major media outlet) was so efficient in ensuring the easy victory of Hillary Clinton--even imagining a congressional shift because of the public distrust in Trump--that they forgot it was actually just propaganda. That elections are nutty. That they didn't actually have a clue what was going to happen. And just as the reaction in the South to the first defeats of the war was open and confounded disbelief, so the reaction amongst the left to this election has been the same. Combined, in both cases, with lots of anger and recrimination. I don't know what the lesson is here, exactly. Reach some golden mean of propaganda saturation and believability? Avoid propaganda altogether? Maybe. But at the very least it ought to inject a bit of humility into people. There is so much that we cannot know; so much that we assume based on half facts and half truths.
This past Thanksgiving my family headed with my parents east across the great Kansas rectangle to our ancestral town of Overbrook, Kansas. Overbrook is such a nondescript town that the name gets a red squiggly line under it from Microsoft Word and the town motto is a pleading "Don't Overlook Overbrook." Alas, most do. The picture posted adjacent to this paragraph is of the first house I lived in in this town. We moved when I was six and lived there until shortly after I turned 10. It is a short amount of time, relatively speaking. Three, three-and-a-half years. But those years are incredibly formative in the life of a person. So it is a place that will always be special to me, always close to my heart. After getting cabin fever at my grandparent's house the other evening Clara and I went for a walk. It does not take long to perambulate through most of the streets in the town and we made short work of the highlights. But when we got to this old house which I hadn't seen in a few years I unexpectedly teared up. This is not an altogether uncommon experience for me, but I was a bit taken aback. It was a weird feeling. I had a desire to be in the house again. Literally. (The temptation toward a minor case of B&E was mitigated by the presence of my wife). I wanted to play pickle in the side yard with my dad and brother; pop wheelies on the uneven sidewalk out front; climb as high as I dared in the trees between the sidewalk and the road; barricade myself behind the stone walls of the porch steps, fighting off Confederate soldiers as a proud Kansas Jayhawker; eat dinner in the beautiful dining room; sleep in a bunkbed in the back bedroom with my brother; watch the Royals on our wood-paneled television in the living room. And on and on. It's been 21 years since I was inside those walls but the place remains a part of me. And maybe that's why I had to choke back tears. Because for a minute again I was an eight year-old boy playing around with my six year-old brother and my 33 year-old father and 30 year-old mother. Because the place hasn't changed all that much. The porch and steps are still red. The same swing still sways. The same trellises still guide the rose bushes. The same black trim still enwraps the windows. I write about time a lot here. I write about the way in which the linearity of time--second leading to second; minute to minute; hour to hour; day to day; week to week; month to month; year to year; decade to decade until our death--can be broken. And this moment smashed it. The past 21 years were a non-factor. I was there in that yard in front of that building that housed my hopes and prayers and pains and joys. And for a time it still did. And in a way it always will.
I am at long last reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time or, depending on your translation, Remembrance of Things Past. My plan is to tackle the massive work one volume at a time with some other novels scattered in between. My hope is that this will prevent the burnout that can accompany a book that tops out at well over 2,000 pages. I started reading Volume I, known as Swann's Way, the other day and came upon the famous madeleine scene. The scene recounts an older Proust being transported back to his childhood in Combray by a sip of tea mixed with a madeleine cake. Proust is unable to say why the taste has such an overpowering effect on him. He writes that a "delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence." As he says, he is unable to say exactly why this taste of cake has such an ecstatic effect on his consciousness. He eventually tracks down the memory to his childhood in Combray when an aunt would give him a taste of madeleine dipped in tea. The sight alone of the madeleine he ate had no power to conjure this long-forgotten association. He had seen madeleines in baker's windows regularly since this childhood experience. It required taste and smell to transport him back in time to the boy in his aunt's bedroom enjoying a surreptitious treat. And then he writes, in what I imagine is one of the better known lines of the book:
But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, upon the ruins of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.
Apart from the stunning beauty of the prose, Proust is elucidating something that all of us know implicitly: things long dead in our waking consciousness live on and are capable of being resurrected in a moment. It really is amazing the way our senses--here Proust privileges smell and taste, but I would include aural memory here*--can return us to moments before we can even pin down why they matter to us. We follow the train of a certain smell or taste back into our past and find the linearity of time collapse on itself again (a themebeloved in the thingsI write about). "The immense edifice of memory" is held by what might seem fragile--the faulty senses of a limited mind--but turns out to be extraordinarily powerful. *I want to follow up particularly with aural memory and its power with the extraordinary film Alive Inside
I noted in my first post on Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood that one thing I appreciated is his epistemic humility at the book's outset. Too often people reach too far in attempting to provide pat conclusions to complex issues. I appreciated Postman's reticence to do anything in his book beyond diagnosis. However, upon finishing the book a clear suggestion is implicit: opt out. Postman's argument is that childhood is disappearing in our culture because we have replaced text-based literacy with image-based illiteracy. Whereas mass literacy prompted the development of childhood as an age distinct from adulthood--little kids can't read at advanced levels of cognition and adults can--our culture is removing the distinctions by flattening the differences. You can see these previous posts that spell out how Postman comes to this admittedly controversial thesis. But as I finished the book it became evident that a solution exists: resist the flattening caused by television and other mass media. Refuse to let your kids be indoctrinated into the world of the image and adhere to the world of print. In a move that would make the reformers proud, be iconoclasts. Smash the icons and idols of the modern technocracy. Postman himself gets to this in the concluding chapter. He offers there a set of questions and responses for what to do if you happen to accept his thesis. His final question is "Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening?" The very wording of the question certainly implies that there might be a way forward (or backward, depending on your point of view). I'll quote his answer at some length:
The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.
Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.
There is much to unpack here and by no means do I intend to do justice by all of it. The parts that I have put in bold are indicative of what I am focusing on for now. I have long had the sense that parenting in the way I feel called to do it is both an implicit and explicit rejection of our culture at large and even some of the subcultures I inhabit. The values that my wife and I value are out of step with the pull of American culture. The way we pursue them strikes others as extreme and over-the-top. But you cannot subvert a decadent culture with half-measures. Moreover, as Postman affirms in dubbing this the Monastery Effect, the goal of such parenting is firmly rooted in this world. The parents who make the decision to defy the culture are doing so for the good of the culture, ultimately. Christians, and here I break from Postman's own classically liberal concerns, are to live our lives for the life of the world. We reject culture not to reject the people that comprise that culture but in order to better love and serve them. This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow.
Getting back on track with my Neil Postman posts. In The Disappearance of Childhood Neil Postman compares the theories of what exactly constitutes childhood that developed during the Enlightenment. His chapter, "Childhood's Journey," is fascinating stuff and will be required reading for my Sophomore Honors class as we begin tackling Lord of the Flies next week, a novel that the French teacher at my school lovingly referred to as Golding vs Rousseau.
In this chapter, Postman compares the philosophies of childhood of the two thinkers. Most succinctly, Postman delineates the difference as follows:
We might call them the Lockean, or the Protestant, conception of childhood, and the Rousseauian, or Romantic, conception. In the Protestant view the child is an unformed person who through literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame may be made into a civilized adult. In the Romantic view it is not the unformed child but the deformed adult who is the problem. The child possesses as his or her birthright capacities for candor, understanding, curiosity, and spontaneity that are deadened by literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame.
These differences in the goal of childhood was extended into the metaphors each used to describe childhood. Locke is famous for his tabula rasa, or blank slate. Rousseau, on the other hand, compared children to plants that grow naturally and can only be minimally aided by cultivation. Postman makes clear the contrast: "Locke wanted education to result in a rich, varied, and copious book [making the blank slate filled with meaningful material]; Rousseau wanted education to result in a healthy flower."
Postman then goes on to argue that the major educational philosophies of the twentieth century--Freud in the Lockean camp; John Dewey in the Rousseauian camp--have left us with a synthesis position between the two doctrines. In other words, we want to maintain the Lockean emphasis on education as a developing and civilizing force, but one that does not constrain the natural exuberance of children praised by Rousseau.
The natural tension between these two positions is obvious; everywhere in our culture we see children being tugged towards these poles. On the one hand, children are made to attend government-run schools (many of which look startlingly like prisons) from 7:30 to 3:00 each day. On the other, the teachers at these schools tell them that they are unbridled vessels with unbounded potential. We agree with Rousseau that children need playtime to cultivate their natural virtues, and we schedule such playtime with Lockean precision from 4:30-5:15--after homework is completed and before soccer practice.
It is hard, I imagine, for children to live under two dispensations. My students struggle with this all of the time. They are told to seize the day! but also get into a good college and therefore participate in 17 clubs, sports, and other civic organizations. Oh, and take 5 AP classes per year each with an hour of homework per night. But still be a kid. High school, ah, what a great time! Isn't this fun, damn't!
I might personally be more Lockean in my view of children and their education, but I think the real problem here isn't that there are competing schools of thought but that we want to have both at once. This strikes me as basic opportunity cost economics: you simply can't do everything; to adopt any theory is to say no to its various competitors. To adopt two competing theories is simply to pull yourself apart.
Posting has been light lately. This is a hellish time of the school year, with end of semester work starting to flow in and trying to get our team solidified for next summer's trip to Kenya. I should resume normal frequency here in a week or so. But for now let me share a snippet of something I read this week that stood out to me on a topic near and dear to my heart: time. Every now and then when you're reading a murder mystery novel you are struck by a profound insight into the nature of life. This is from Noah Hawley's recent book Before the Fall.
Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?
Isn't that so good? Doesn't life feel that way at times? I love the minor dualism of the quote: our bodies have moved on but our minds stay entranced by past catastrophic experiences. In a sense that is hard to articulate we never leave those vital moments in life. We can close our eyes and relive them, be transported back by a scent or a vague reminder in a book or the face of a stranger or the way the sun plays through the trees. We try to convince ourselves that time is linear because it has explanatory power and helps to keep life intelligible, but the moments that blow up this construction--that hook us into the feedback loop or circular time that Hawley describes--are frequent enough to cause doubt. And anything that smashes the power of time is alright by me.
I could never have imagined a few days ago that Donald John Trump would be president-elect of our country. I understand the arguments in favor of him, and I think that while it may be cathartic for liberals to believe that any Trump supporter is perforce a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, crypto-Fascist, there are real fissures in this country and deeply-felt estrangement in middle America and the Rust Belt that Trump both exposed (and, let's be honest, exploited). Indeed, part of the problem with last night is just the type of fracturing displayed on my Facebook wall in the past 24 hours. We no longer merely disagree with each other; the other is evil and motivated by nefarious intentions. We alone are pure. I hope that cools off over time and this morning I began my day by praying for Trump. That God would break him and drive him to repentance. That he would surround himself with and heed the word of wise counselors. That the gravity of his office would humble him. But I want to offer a word that applies no matter what happens in the next four years. It is, fittingly, from Scripture. Here, without abridgment, is Psalm 146: Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD, O my soul! I will praise the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praises to God while I have my being. Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind. The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; the LORD loves the righteous; The LORD watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. The LORD will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the LORD! I bolded the verse I find the most pertinent now. And, as I said, this is true whether your guy or the other guy is in office. We, as followers of the one true God, are not to place our trust in the worldly powers. Every president, governor, congressman, senator, mayor, and city councilor will be a footnote in the history of the new earth governed by King Jesus. Every worldly ruler will fail. There is much wisdom in acknowledging that. It helps us to avoid a spurious utopianism in the church. But the rest of the psalm is important, too. For in God's work in the world we see the church's mission in the world. If God executes justice for the oppressed, so should we. If God gives food to the hungry, so should we. If God sets prisoners free, so should we. If God opens the eyes of the blind, so should we. If God lifts up those who are bowed down, so should we. If God loves the righteous, so should we. If God watches over the sojourners, so should we. If God upholds the widow and the fatherless, so should we. If God will bring the way of the wicked to ruin, we should long for that day. As we long for his forever rule. When the church unites itself to political rule and puts our hope in princes to do our bidding we lose sight of this mission. We become more concerned with minimum wage laws than with feeding the hungry. We become more concerned with "protecting" ourselves from people unlike us, rather than caring for the sojourners among us. When we unite ourselves to someone who preaches fear of other races and religions, we forget that it is God who reigns forever and over all and will one day bring all wickedness to justice. One of the perennial temptations of Christianity is to want the kingdom without the King. On the wall of my classroom I have a poster of Gustave Dore's illustration of Christ being tempted by Satan with the kingdoms of the world. The careful reader will remember that he spurns this temptation. He says, in words it bears committing to memory, "You shall worship the LORD your God, and him only shall you serve." It saddens me that his church seems eager to claim that throne he rejected. May we learn to await our true King and trust only in Him.
I don't watch much TV these days. Between kids, work, and reading I don't have a lot of spare time. I still enjoy the periodic pleasure of falling under the spell of a show, though. And that happened last week, with the multi-part documentary on Netflix called Last Chance U. I knew virtually nothing about the show as I started watching, only that it came highly recommended from someone in my Twitter feed. The show follows a national champion junior college football time from East Mississippi Community College as they try to win back to back titles and their fourth championship in six years. Most juco players are Division I washouts or kids unable to land scholarships at a more prestigious school or kids whose grades or encounters with the justice system have kept them out of football's upper echelons. They come to EMCC in tiny Scooba, Mississippi for one last chance at making "the league" and thus fulfilling all of their hopes and dreams. This show is unbelievably sad. One thing that becomes quickly apparent is that the players give absolutely zero shits about being students. The governing body stipulates that the players must maintain a 2.5 GPA. While it never outright reveals that these numbers are massaged by the athletic department and willing instructors, the implication is clear. One of the main characters of the show is the academic compliance officer for the school. She is frequently seen in the show rushing through the halls of the academic buildings escorting players to class, making sure they have pencils and notebooks, making sure they at least appear to pay attention. Meanwhile the players are entirely uninterested in their scholarly pursuits. They often congregate in the compliance officer's office and sit, faces glued to the glowing screens of their smartphones, while she drones on (from their perspective) about the importance of attending class and receiving an education. They glance up from time to time and grumble a reply. School is clearly an annoyance to them, an obstacle to be overcome. They are football mercenaries, not students. Race, too, is an undeniable feature of the show. Most of the prominent players on the team are black. Most are from bad backgrounds. Most don't have a fallback plan. Most are at the end of their line. And football seems to offer salvation. What's the point in going to class? They're not going to go on to run a bank or teach high school after they leave here. They repeatedly worry about having to return home and into a way of life they know is futureless. But football seems to them, despite the long odds, their only way out. The coach is a petty tyrant, lording his small world and authority over a group of desperate man-children. One scene juxtaposes his daughters calling him a sweetheart and a teddy bear with him cursing vociferously at an 18 year-old for a minor infraction on the practice field. In another scene he is swearing at and arguing with an official to an embarrassing extent over a forward progress call in a game his team wins 69-20. In a later game he so provokes an official that the official responds to a shove from the coach by punching the coach (by this time in the show I expect most viewers are likewise lining up for their chance to take a swing). It is embarrassing to watch. This man's entire world is juco football. One of the culminating events of the show is a bench-clearing brawl in the final regular season game of the year. In response the coach lectures his players--in language dripping with racism--for being thugs and responding as if they were on the street (this as they are mostly defending one of their teammates who is literally being beat with helmets). After the brawl the team is disqualified from participation in the postseason and therefore unable to defend their national title. The last clip of the show is the coach recruiting next year's batch of hopeful athletes, promising the chance to attract D-I eyes and stressing the school's firm commitment to academics. While there is something slightly admirable in the coach's pluck, it made me want to throw up. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The whole show made me sick to my stomach. I have felt estranged from sports lately. In our culture we don't let sports be sport. Everything is zealously managed and supervised and utilitarian. The goal is a college scholarship or acceptance to a good club team or the long shot professional hope. No one plays just because it's fun anymore. I've heard people complain about trophies for every player and the refusal of municipal leagues to keep score as hearkening some sort of death of competition in our culture. That's bullcrap, though. Competition is alive and well. Too alive and too well. What we need is a bit more relaxation and joy in our sports. They are games after all. Watching a grown man yell and curse at another grown man over the placement of a football in a game is a good reminder of how ephemeral sports actually are. And, to me, ephemerality is what makes sports glorious. They don't last. Every game is different. But our culture tempts us into thinking--with the myth making machine of ESPN and other sports media as zealous accomplices--that the glory of the football field (and the soccer pitch and the basketball court and the baseball diamond) is eternal. After my beloved Royals won the World Series last year, I realized that it wasn't actually that big of a deal. I woke up the next morning and went to work, much the same man as I was the previous day. In talking with my son about sports I have tried to communicate this to him. He learned the word ephemeral in The Wind and the Willows and has since been trying to think of things that are ephemeral compared with things that are more lasting. One night at dinner I told him sports fit into the ephemeral category. They are great and beautiful but very temporary. I told him that something sad in our world is how many people forget this. The cursing and the angst and the elation that fill my Facebook feed on a Sunday afternoon are inordinate to the importance of the event. They put more weight on sport than sport can possible hold. They blind us to the things that matter and last. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the repeated lines from the school's compliance officer in Last Chance U--often used when a student can't bear the thought of attending class--is, "What's 'plan B'?" And no one has an answer for her. There's only Plan A: the League. But that is patently unrealistic for most of the athletes documented. There just are not enough roster spots in the NFL to accommodate the vast amount of athletic talent pumped through our system. But these kids are all trapped in this dream, thinking that it's just around the corner. This might be the saddest part of this series for me. There is actually very little hope for these kids. The biggest hope, and sorry to sound all square and teacherly here, is the education they are spurning. But the program, as much as the coach might sweet talk parents with the idea of academics, ultimately doesn't care about anything academically apart from the players' GPAs. They are not being crafted into men--the goal of any sport worth its salt--but being used as tools in the quest for more banners in the stadium and gaudy rings on the fat fingers of a conceited man-child coach. And, like even the best tools, their utility at some point expires. Then they are thrown away.
If you happen to be much of a reader I trust that you have had the experience of reading a book that somehow seems designed with you in mind. As if the author was addressing you personally, individually. That books can create this type of intimacy across centuries and cultures is incredible. Reading truly is, in the words of Frankenstein's monster, a "godlike science." This short paean to reading is not distracting from the purpose of this post but directly to the point. In Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood he makes the rather controversial claim that it is precisely the decline of print-based culture and its replacement by the image-based culture of television that is quickly killing off childhood in our culture. For anyone who has read Postman's more famous work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, this thesis might not be altogether surprising. As Postman convincingly argues in that work, we are becoming a people addicted to entertainment, obsessed with glowing screens to the detriment of our humanity. Postman's argument here is a slight shift: here he asserts that it was precisely mass literacy that created childhood in the first place, creating a distinction between literate adults and pre-literate children. Television, with its flattening tendency, is destroying childhood and, as Postman will proceed to argue, adulthood as well. I plan to spend some time lingering in the arguments of this book. I mentioned in the prefatory post that one thing I appreciated about Postman's introduction is its epistemic humility. He insists from the outset that he will resist offering solutions to this seemingly intractable problem. As I will argue in the concluding post, though, his solution is fairly implicit throughout.
_____________________________________________________________________ For right now I want to briefly expound on the crucial first step in Postman's argument: the idea that childhood was created by the dissemination of print culture in the early modern period. Before I get into his ideas I want to note that this idea is not altogether new to me. In the hand-wringing of my parent's generation over these darned millennials (that they, ahem, raised), the emergence of an understanding of adolescence is cited as developing about 100 years ago. With sentimental children's literature beginning in the nineteenth century it is clear that our understanding of childhood shifted, but Postman's argument goes deeper than that. Postman argues that, with their emphasis on education, the Greeks came the closest to inventing childhood. Though they would be flabbergasted by contemporary ideas of child nurturing, their ideas were close enough to ours to be recognizable. Postman further credits the Romans with another indispensable link in the development of childhood: the notion of shame. He asserts that "without a well-developed idea of shame, childhood cannot exist." In particular, children must be safeguarded from adult secrets especially relating to sex. The Graeco-Roman conception was snowed under with the Middle Ages, according to Postman's reading. Literacy was basically non-existent outside of small cadres of scribes and education, too, was mostly dead. He sums up the medieval view thusly:
What we can say, then, with certainty, is that in the medieval world there was no conception of childhood development, no conception of prerequisites or sequential learning, no conception of schooling as a preparation for an adult world. . . The seven-year-old male was a man in every respect except for his capacity to make love and war.
The entire world was open to children. There was no effort to protect adult secrets from them. While some of this is certainly attributable to high childhood mortality and the resistance, therefore, to commit too much emotional energy into any one child, but Postman claims that this argument cannot be given too much weight. For example, in England in the mid-eighteenth century half of all total deaths were children under the age of five yet the idea of childhood flourished in that dark environment. The major difference between childhood of the post-Renaissance period and its lack in the medieval period was not death rates but the printing press. I'll pick up there in the next post.
