Love and Vice

Steinbeck, channeling my beliefs about humanity:

In uncertainty I am certain that under their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

A Brief and Accurate Critique of Contemporary Politics

This is another post riffing off Matthew Crawford's excellent newish book, The World Beyond Your Head. I heartily recommend it for those dissatisfied with contemporary culture and the cult of individualism.

While the focus of Crawford's book is moral philosophy, by nature any assessment of current mores requires analysis of the political environment that gave birth and fostered those mores. One thing that I have sensed in the past several years, and part of the reason my interest in politics has waned in the way that it has, is that there is very little that actually separates the political left and right in our country. When you think of it, how different really were the presidencies of Bush and Obama? Both parties are completely and entirely in bed with and in the pocket of (pick your metaphor) big business. Both are unwilling to make any broad changes to our current climate. Both parties seem content to tinker around the edges of the political institutions and economic theories of 50 to 100 years ago. Crawford writes about this synthesis of right and left: 

Few institutions or sites of moral authority were left untouched by the left's critiques. Parents, teachers, priests, elected officials--there was little that seemed defensible. Looking around in stunned silence, left and right eventually discovered common ground: a neoliberal consensus in which we have all agreed to let the market quietly work its solvent action on all impediments to the natural chooser within. 

Another way to put this is that the left's project of liberation led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever 'choice architect' brings the most energy to the task--usually because it sees the profit potential. 

The combined effect of these liberating and deregulating efforts of the right and left has been to ratchet up the burden of self-regulation. Some indication of how well we are bearing this burden can be found in the fact that we are now very fat, very much in debt, and very prone to divorce.

In other words, the political project of the right was deregulation and preventing the government from meddling in the affairs of business. The left's political project was thwarting the previously beloved sources of moral authority. With no regulations in the broad economy and no mitigating moral institutions in the public trust, people are now left to their own devices in terms of navigating our political and moral landscapes. And, we're failing. By all accounts. Across any demographic. 

This reminds me of something I read in Alastair McIntyre's hugely influential work of moral philosophy, After Virtue. Writing in the early 80s and sensing the broader trends we see coming to fruition now, MacIntyre writes, "But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and individualist as that of self-avowed liberals." In other words, it is not just that the left has capitulated to the right on big business and economic deregulation, but the right has got on board with the left's project of individual self-determination. Conservatism is supposed to be about community and the wisdom of tradition. Now it's about being able to buy whatever you want. We have hollowed ourselves out intellectually and spiritually and we are left with 1500 calorie cheeseburgers. Nice tradeoff, that one.

A Thing I Try While Teaching

As the new school year dawns I have been meditating on my profession. I have believed for some time that we do children no favors by talking down to them, even fewer favors by dumbing down the content of what we teach them. If we are "over their heads" we can do it in an aspirational way, helping them desire to be better, smarter, wittier, and more verbose than they currently are. It is a hard line to toe, especially given the disparate intellectual capacities in a given classroom, but it is a goal I find it worth shooting for. 

I read the following in T.H. White's excellent Arthurian novel The Once and Future King. It is describing the early days of Arthur's education at the hands of Merlyn.

"The Wart (young Arthur's unpleasant nickname) did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of a porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas."

This is the goal--to make them reach and to help them delight in so doing.

The Ascetics of Attention

It is perfectly natural--and necessary--that at this time of year my thoughts turn to the classroom and the 96 (at last count) students who will be coming into my room starting next Monday. Teaching is the first job I have ever had that feels more like a calling, a vocation and it is one that I think about with pleasure even when I am not in the classroom.

One battle every teacher has to fight in our current intellectual climate is the temptation to replace instruction and dedication to a craft, even if this at times and of necessity borders on rote instruction, with mere entertainment. I have no idea how in the hell this organization got my email address and why they keep hitting me up (no one else in my department gets these emails), but I get monthly emails from Pop Culture Classroom with tactics for making learning fun and one invite to their Denver ComicCon booth. How well they know me! That's an interesting phrase, though: Make learning fun. I cannot help but think the adjective here is actually of more consequence than the gerund. For if we are not entertaining above all, so the thinking goes, how can we expect actual learning to occur?

It also seems as if the teachers who capitulate most readily to the entertainment model are popular teachers. Take two teachers, each teaching Frankenstein to a group of high school junior: Teacher 1 sits her students in front of a text and makes them practice the rigorous task of rhetorical analysis. Teacher 2 just shows his students the movie version of Frankenstein. Which one is likely to be more popular? All things equal, it's Teacher 2. In the same way my son would prefer a dinner of pizza and apple juice and ice cream every night of the week, most students would prefer the academic equivalent of Little Caesar's pizza over, I don't know, a kale salad. But we eat kale salad because it is better for us, both in the long term and the short term. 

I devoured over the last week Matthew Crawford's new book The World Beyond Your Head:  On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. While not explicitly about education, the need for proper education undergirds the entire book. I will write more about this book in the time to come as I process it and return to it, but for now I wanted to throw out an observation Crawford makes in the introduction. In a section titled "The Ascetics of Attention" he writes:

"The existentialist writer Simone Weil and the psychologist William James both suggested that the struggle to pay attention trains the faculty of attention; it is a habit built up through practice. Grappling with a problem for which one has little aptitude or inclination (a geometry problem, say) exercises one's power to attend. For Weil, this ascetic aspect of attention--the fact that it is a 'negative effort' against mental sloth--is especially significant. 'Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely associated with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.' Students must therefore work 'without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help to form in them the habit of attention which is the substance of prayer.'"

To educate is to form a young person. Not simply their mind and the content that fills it, but to form their emotions, passions, convictions, and ability to attend to difficult, sometimes intractable problems. Education that cuts off any ascetic element--any rote memorization, deep rhetorical analysis, quiet, contemplative reading--is going misshape the students being taught. Attention has always been hard to cultivate; the difficulties are exponentially greater now than they ever have been. But to attend to the world around us is to be human. To pay attention is indispensable in becoming an individual. I pray for myself, and for all teachers, at the cusp of this new year that we are mindful of this charge. That we seek to educate the whole person under our charge and give them what they need rather than what they think they want.

Mortal Insufficiency

My last Gilead post at least until I reread it in another year or two. This passage is so remarkable that I recommend not even reading what I write further down. 

There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us. Augustine says the Lord loves each of us an only child, and this has to be true. "He will wipe the tears from all faces." It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.

The sublime beauty of this book overpowers me. I don't remember this passage landing with as much weight the first time I read the book. I wasn't much of a reader back then and tended to treat reading as conquest more than absorption. 

I think part of the reason, too, that it didn't land is that I did not love this world the way I do now. In other words, I never felt my mortal insufficiency to the world, only it's own towards me. Love of the world is a fraught thing for a Christian. I exchanged emails with a friend this week on the temptation of pantheism. It is real and especially so for people who love the outdoors like I do. 

But the fear of pantheism shouldn't lead us into the opposite error of denying the splendor and beauty (more than we can bear), the God-hauntedness, the very groaning of creation. It, like us, waits for redemption. It, like us, is marred by sin. It, like us, will be made new. Christ came because he so loved the world, as my son memorized when he was not yet three. I have no reason to think that love confined simply to humans.

The Mystic is the Only Sane Person

I have been reading Chesterton again for the first time in too long. There are a handful of authors--Dostoevsky, Marilynne Robinson, Dickens, Lewis, and Chesterton--that whenever I find myself reading them I wonder how it is that I could ever read anything else. The experience is so delightful that I sometimes wonder why I don't read Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov in a sort of infinite loop.

One thing I have been learning a lot about lately, thinking and reading about, really, is the utter insufficiency of reason to answer to the world. I am working on a longer article on the failure of apologetics, I have written two chapters in a surely never to be published book on the importance of emotional obedience in Paradise Lost, and as I raise my kids and see their sin and my own sins reflected back to me, I realize how little grip rationality really has on the world. 

I used to hold great hope for rationality. One of my major papers in graduate school was on natural law in Milton. I hoped that if I could convince myself and my readership (which basically doesn't exist for a grad school essay; I'm not entirely convinced my professor read the whole thing) that God has so ordered this universe with evidences of himself and implanted into every human consciousness knowledge of this truth and his power then we would inevitably turn back towards Christianity. 

What a freaking idiot I was. Our problem with following God is not primarily rational. We don't reason ourselves out of the faith, whatever that annoying college sophomore says to the contrary. We desire something more, choose it, and ex post facto come up with a flattering rationalistic explanation for our emotional collapse. I was talking with one of my students recently about spiritual habits. He told me that he wanted to read his Bible more. I told him, "No, you don't. If you wanted to read your Bible more you would. If you want to use your iPhone, you use it." He agreed. The problem wasn't time or energy or knowing whether or not it is a good thing as a spiritual habit to read one's Bible; the problem was that there is a universe of things he would rather do. 

Anyways, back to Chesterton. I am reading Orthodoxy for maybe the third (perhaps fourth) time. In the first chapter, "The Maniac", Chesterton sets out to undermine the idea that the problems facing the world are problems of reason. He points out, with characteristic wit, that the madman is actually the most rational person you're ever likely to meet. The problem is that his rational capacities work in what Chesterton identifies as a "perfect but narrow circle." The madman's theory "explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way." So, for example, if a madman believes himself to be the subject of a massive conspiracy there is no using reason to lead him out of this wood. Everything reasonable--that cop just pulled you over for speeding, that man made a phone call after you walked past because he forgot to pick up his dry-cleaning--can be fit by the madman into the conspiracy: Of course that's what they would say. They have to have some cover.

Materialism and determinism, two popular philosophies of his day that have scarcely gone away, have the same problem for Chesterton. Similar to the case of the madman, they are marked by a "combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense." In inflating reason they deny what actually makes us human. 

Chesterton's cure for these maladies is not argument, but mysticism: "Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity." The problem of the madman and the materialist and the determinist is that they try to explain too much. They engage in what we called "strong theory" in graduate school. They are not partial explanations of segments of reality; they explain everything whole hog. But this totality of explanation stultifies and denies the acceptance of paradox necessary to human living. 

Chesterton writes that if a healthy man "saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them." For example, "he has always believed that there was a thing such as fate, but such a thing as free will also. . . It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man." There are things in this life that are not explained by simple explanations. There are things in life--sometimes the best things--that make us forget that we are rational creatures at all. 

Chesterton concludes the chapter in one of his more famous examples of symbolism. He writes:

"As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers."

At the very heart of our faith is paradox. Contradiction. Clash. Our faith is not without reason, but is beyond and above reason at the same time. We worship a God who has revealed part of himself to us, but who would argue that we can or should or ought or maybe even ever will understand God in his utter glory and profound mystery and incandescent beauty? We all see in a mirror, dimly. Which is why the heart of Christian faith is not reason or intellect, but love, the chief emotion of paradox and mystery and glory and beauty. May it ever be.

Creation Transfigured

I will cool it with these Gilead posts at some point. I finished the book a few weeks ago, but just keep circling back around to so many of these ideas.

It has seemed to be sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance--for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

One of the great glories of this book for me is how it teaches us mindfulness of the mundane, to see the beauty in the everyday, the common, even the ugly. I love how the first part of this can strike us as true--yes, this world does seem illuminated at times as if by God's special grace--but then the second part comes home as even more true as it diverges from the first. It's better than that: this world is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins "charged with the grandeur of God." It is we who are unable to see it. Obscured by our sin and grime and muck we have lost the vision that is there, the world pulsing with transfiguration and glory.