Needing the Secular World: A Thought Experiment and Some Rodney Stark

In the last post, I discussed the idea that Haredim, while they might possess individual scientists, are incapable of creating their own genuine scientific culture. This brought up an argument from the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz of the necessity of being able to fill out all jobs required by a society. It is not enough for Haredim to say that other people should be doctors or lawyers and, for that matter, policemen and garbage collectors; Haredim need to be able to fill these positions themselves. The fact that Haredim cannot do this, in the long run, poses a major ideological challenge far beyond any particular scientific argument. I would like to further develop this idea with a thought experiment and consideration of the Rodney Stark model of conversion. 

Imagine a town divided between secular people and Haredim. No one has a political advantage to allow them to force their values on anyone. Both Haredi and secular parents are keen to pass on their values to their children and keep them from going over to the other side. One major advantage that secular parents would have is that, ironically, it would be easier for them to raise their children without ever interacting with the other side. The reason for this is that there is no job that they require that they cannot simply fill in with their own people without recourse to Haredim. They can make sure that their children only visit secular doctors and have their trash picked up by secular garbagemen. Haredim, for all their talk about maintaining their purity, are forced to lead relatively open lives. Every day Haredi children will walk past secular policemen and garbagemen. If they get sick, they will be hard-pressed to make sure that they are seen by a religious doctor. It will not only be that these people happen to be secular, but the children will be conscious of these facts as they have been taught to think of these as non-religious jobs.  

Haredim, of all people, should be able to instinctively appreciate how such casual contact with the outside world can become spiritually dangerous. To understand the problem at an intellectual level, it is useful to turn to the sociologist Rodney Stark and his model of conversion. Stark argues for the importance of social relations in causing people to convert to a different denomination or even to move outside of one's religion. People are unlikely to be converted and even more importantly stay converted due to some argument made by a stranger in the street. By contrast, they are very open to their friends and family. 

There are two major reasons why a personal connection is so much more valuable than an intellectual argument. Human beings are social creatures. Even if we wanted to, we are unlikely to be able to change our lives around an argument, even one we believed. By contrast, we do readily change our behavior to match those around us. Furthermore, it is social relations that are going to keep a person within a movement. An argument can be countered with another argument. By contrast, you cannot will a new set of social connections into place; it takes years of work (particularly if you are not a neurotypical).

A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in Mormonism. The LDS Church, decades ago, recognized that having missionaries try to "cold call" strangers was essentially useless. By contrast, having a potential convert meet with a missionary at the home of a Mormon friend was very effective. Hence the LDS Church has now built its entire missionary program around this premise. 

Everyone has their moments of crisis. People with a strong spiritual sensibility are likely to have more of them and they are likely to involve their chosen faiths. Keep in mind that, if you never expect much from your religion, it can never disappoint you. It is precisely the true believer who can become disillusioned. When that happens it can only benefit the LDS Church if you have a Mormon friend that you can find yourself falling into a theological conversation with. This friend can then suggest that perhaps you might want to come over to his house sometime to continue this conversation with some of his other "friends."

This idea that people are ultimately converted by their friends leads us to a particular narrative of conversion. There is a first stage in which a person "socially" converts in the sense that they take on a group of friends, who happen to follow a particular religion. At this point, there is nothing intellectual involved. In fact, the person would likely insist that they have not converted or changed in any significant way. That being said, this is the truly crucial stage. At some point, a person is going to realize that he has come to associate with people from a particular religion and that religion carries a particular ideology that needs to be taken into consideration. A person who fully converts is likely to look back and reframe their narrative to make themselves seekers who found their faith when, in truth, it was the religion that found them.  

This idea of social conversions can be seen in Chabad. The society around a Chabad house consists of a series of circles. At the center is the Chabad emissary couple. Around them, you will have some observant people. But most people at a Chabad house are not Orthodox. You can have people who have been associated with Chabad for years as an important part of their lives without ever becoming Orthodox. They like the Chabad rabbis and perhaps recognize some need for Jewish spirituality, but have no interest in being ritually observant. 

This state of affairs is possible because Chabad emissaries tend to be both remarkably nice and tolerant. Non-religious Jews are amazed at how tolerant Chabad emissaries are and want to be friends with them. In the long run, this model has proven to be incredibly effective even if that is hard to see on a day-to-day level where it appears that what you have is an observant rabbi surrounded by a non-observant congregation just like you would see in a Conservative synagogue.

My wife an excellent example of this. As a teenager with a non-Jewish mother, she started going to the Chabad in Pasadena on Friday nights mostly as a matter of convenience as it was easier to get there by bus than the Conservative Temple. Her taking on ritual observance and then realizing that, if she ever wanted to get married, she needed an actual Orthodox conversion was a process that took years. This process was made possible by the kindness and tolerance of the Chabad emissaries for someone who was not halakically Jewish.

As to ideological conversions, consider the example of C. S. Lewis. The most dramatic moment of Lewis' journey from atheism to Christianity was a late-night conversation with a number of religious Christians, including J. R. R. Tolkien, in which Lewis argued that the main ideas of Christianity came from ancient paganism and therefore should be taken with equal seriousness. One might enjoy Greek and Norse mythology and even see it as a source of great moral teachings, but one cannot be expected to seriously believe in these religions. The response was that the ancient pagans intuitively understood certain truths that were ultimately fulfilled in Jesus. 

Now what can easily be lost in this story is that Lewis did not simply walk up to some random Christians at his favorite pub, the Eagle and Child, and start an argument with them. At this point in his life, he had started believing in God largely because the writers he most identified with were theists and he found that he could not disassociate what he admired from that theism. He had even started going to church as an exercise in being part of the theism team. This led him to become friends with a number of intellectually serious practicing Christians and it was with these Christian friends that he had his famous late-night conversation about pagan mythology.    

To bring this back to our earlier thought experiment, in order to keep their children in the "faith," both the secular and Haredi parents are going to have to keep an eye out for alternative social circles as opposed to some guy handing out leaflets. The secular parents have nothing to worry about as there is no reason why their children would consciously ever have to interact with Haredim. They will know that Haredim exist as theoretical abstractions walking in the streets in strange clothes almost like philosophical zombies. There will never be a reason to take them seriously as individuals with names. Haredi parents will be able to work with no such advantage. Their children will have to interact with secular people, such as doctors and policemen, as individuals with names. This can form the basis for a friendship or at least enough of one that, when that inevitable moment of crisis comes and they feel frustrated with the Haredi community, they might think to go talk to that secular person in their life. The moment we cross that line, the child might still be a long way from leaving and may have no conscious desire to do so, but his soul is now in play.

Narnia, Game of Thrones, and the Stormlight Chronicles: the Reenchantmant of Fantasy (Part I)

(Happy birthday to Lionel Spiegel.)

I drive my son Kalman to and from pre-school most weekdays. In the car, he usually asks to listen to Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. You can clock an average trip as the amount of time it takes to get from the beginning of the book until Mr. Tumnus confesses that he is in the pay of the White Witch as her kidnapper. Kalman knows that the White Witch is bad because she is the government and she makes it always winter. I guess I can live with him not picking up on the "and never Christmas" part.

Lewis opened with one of the finest dedications ever. Writing to Lucy Barfield, the daughter of fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield, Lewis apologized to the teenage girl that she grew up faster than he could write but he hopes that one day she will be old enough to read fairy tales once again. This is a good example of one of the key concepts in Lewis' writing, reenchantment; that one can once again fall in love with the things of childhood that one's more cynical self had abandoned as part of "growing up."

Reenchantment should be understood as a response to Max Weber's notion of disenchantment and Friederich Nietzsche's more poetic "God is dead." Disenchantment is the notion that under modernity our very way of thinking is materialistic and does not allow us to truly operate within a supernaturalist framework. For example, early in LWW, the other children are simply unable to believe that Lucy has traveled to Narnia; to them, it is simply not possible that she could be anything else but either a liar or insane. They are prejudiced against belief even though logically there is nothing to suggest that portals to other universes do not exist.

It is important to understand that contrary to conventional secularist theories of modernity, Weber was not claiming that modernity had intellectually refuted religion and that people, particularly the educated, no longer believed. On the contrary, the prospect of modern secularism could cause many people to cling more tightly than ever to the outward forms of religion. Thus, it may even appear that religion is doing better than ever under modernity with more people attending church and insisting on hardline fundamentalist interpretations of the faith. That being said, such religiosity only serves to cover the fact that religion has been fossilized into something that people practice out of tradition. As such, it lacks the ability to truly inspire its adherents. In this sense, disenchantment stands as a far graver threat to religion than simple secularism. If people are convinced by argument to abandon religion then it might be possible to engage in apologetics and win them back. On the other hand, if people stop believing not because of any argument and without even realizing that they no longer believe then it is practically impossible to ever bring them back.

In addition to religious disenchantment, Lewis, in his own personal experience, confronted a more tangible disenchantment, World War I. Lewis was part of a generation of young Englishmen, who listened to their teachers and did the "right and honorable thing;" they marched off to the French trenches to be slaughtered in the mud, sacrificed to pay for the political and military miscalculations of their elders.

World War I was the death of heroism. In an earlier generation, a man could be said to be brave to stand tall in the face of enemy fire and resolutely march forward. One might die in the attempt but one could believe that he was sacrificing himself to spur his comrades on to victory. During World War I, that became suicide. Thus, the very ethos of heroism led men to their deaths in utter futility. It should be emphasized that dying was never the issue. Young men have always been marched off to war by their elders and died in great numbers. What was new here was this sense of futility that robbed one even of the ability to honor the dead for their sacrifice. By contrast, World War II could once again offer a cause to die for even as it brought the new disenchantment of the massive aerial bombardment of urban centers. As with disenchantment with religion, what was at stake was less an intellectual attack on heroism but the inability, at a gut level, to take heroism seriously in the first place. Someone who seems heroic must either be a scoundrel trying to deceive others or a fool to have bought into such nonsense.

As with fellow veteran J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis' use of fantasy can be seen as an attempt to become reenchanted with heroism. For example, in Narnia, the children are able to abandon the air raids of World War II for a land in which chivalry is still possible. This reenchantment must be understood as something distinct from enchantment. The horrors of the World Wars were real and there can be no going back. That being said, the fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien were attempts to acknowledge the incomprehensible horror of what they experienced yet still allow for heroism. If the blood and the mud were real, the courage shown by the men was equally real.

This project of using fantasy to resurrect heroism must be understood within a larger effort to bring about the reenchantment with religion. Was it not that earlier generation of disenchanted believers, with their mixture of Christian ritual now supplemented with a sense of duty to king and country and a confidence in progress all while being hopelessly naive regarding the implications of industrialized warfare, that had sent all those young men to die? Perhaps, it was not heroism that was obsolete, but the ideologies of modernity? (See Joseph Loconte's Hobbit, a Wardrobe and a Great War.)

If one could recover heroism, perhaps it could lead back to faith and to a religion that might once again be relevant to a modern world. As Screwtape, the Satan of Lewis' disenchanted world, notes, the very fact that non-believers (much like the teenage Lewis, who was then an atheist) march off to war, to give themselves to a cause larger than themselves places them at risk of becoming open to the "enemy." Part of what is going on here is the ability to believe in things that are beyond the physical senses. Disenchantment works precisely by taking the physical as the gold standard of what is real. Thus, before the debate even begins, the spiritual has already lost to be relegated to being less real. The moment we introduce something that is non-physical yet more real than the world of the senses, the spell of disenchantment is broken and the process of reenchantment can begin.

Regardless of this wider religious context, a major aspect of Lewis and Tolkien's legacy to fantasy as a genre has been a kind of optimistic faith in heroism in the face of modern cynicism. (In Lord of the Rings, this optimism is only sharpened by the fact that the book is fundamentally a tragedy.) Thus, it could only be expected that if Lewis and Tolkien represented a kind of enchantment with heroic fantasy, it would produce a backlash of disenchanted fantasy. The most important example of this has been George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. This series is a repeated exercise in both the physical and ideological murder of heroism. Those like Ned Stark and his son Robb, who risk themselves doing the right thing, do not come out ahead. It is not even that they die achieving some noble goal. On the contrary, they come to ignominious ends marked by utter futility. On the other side, you have the anti-heroism of Jaime Lannister. Jaime commits regicide and incest even as the former probably saved lives and he is faithful to his sister as his one true love. To Martin's credit, Jaime fails to be a simple caricature of chivalry. Rather, (much like the more comic Harry Flashman), readers can still love Jaime for his simple honesty in knowing himself to be a scoundrel. In a world without moral absolutes, hypocrisy is the only sin and honesty in one's sinfulness the only virtue.             

2011 in Reading

So for the year 2011, between Kindle, iPod and traditional print, I read or listened to about 100 books. Here are my nominations for the best books. Some of these books are recent, others are not. I would be curious to hear from readers any thoughts on these particular books or favorite books from their past year of reading.

Non-Fiction Related to My Dissertation

1)      The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker - A series of lectures on the Enlightenment, which Becker viewed a product of rather than a simple break with the Middle Ages. If I ever teach a historiography course this book will be assigned along with Sir Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History for the topic of the Whig narrative and why it fails to explain the origins of modernity.

2)      The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement by Pawel Maciejko - The best history hands down on the Frankists, an eighteenth-century heretical movement in eastern Europe, which resulted in a mass conversion of Jews to Catholicism. I would particularly recommend this back as an example of counter "great man" history. Not in the sense that Jacob Frank was a pretty infamous character, though he was, but in the sense that Maciejko places the Frankist movement as the center, as opposed to Frank himself. In fact, Maciejko's central argument is that a strong Polish Sabbatian movement existed apart from Frank and outside his control; Frank reacted to and was the product of "Frankist" movement much more so than the other way around.    

3)      Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History by David Ruderman - There is little original with this book, but Ruderman does a great job bringing the major issues of interest to me regarding early modern Jewish history together, particularly the relationship between conversos, Sabbatians and the early Enlightenment. As I am doing with my own discussion of Sabbatianism, Ruderman places a heavy emphasis on mobile networks of individuals.

Non-Fiction Not Related to My Dissertation

1)      Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali - A powerful autobiography by a Somali ex-Muslim. What particularly impressed me about Hirsi Ali is that she is remarkably non-bitter and non-polemical in her account of her family and of Islam, particularly if you consider how easy it would have been for her to have made it so. Yes she places Islam as a threat to Western Civilization, but this book is hardly of the "Muslims are evil" or even the "religious people are evil" genre. I particularly relate to this book as someone who has taken a step away from a fundamentalist religion, though not as radical a step as Hirsi Ali, via means of classical liberalism. This is a conscious rejection of the authority of community and tradition in favor of the individual and reason, backed by a nation-state. Because of this experience, Hirsi Ali thinks in terms of either classical liberalism or religious fundamentalism. Her objection to modern multi-cultural liberalism is precisely that it fails to appreciate the attraction of religious fundamentalism. As I see it, how can someone appreciate the attraction of something that never appealed to them in the first place and which they cannot seriously imagine themselves having followed? This unwillingness to take religious fundamentalism seriously at an intellectual level means that modern liberals are not prepared to go up against fundamentalist apologists, who use modern liberalism's own abandonment of the absolute authority of the individual, reason and the placement of any type of national culture as fascism to justify the continued existence of fundamentalist enclaves funded by public tax dollars.    

2)      The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto - As with the previous book, this is a defense of classical liberalism that focuses on the experiences of those outside the West. De Soto makes the libertarian case that government bureaucracy causes poverty in third world countries. More importantly, de Soto, following in the tradition of Frederick Hayek, is an eloquent defender of rule of law. He is not anti-government; on the contrary, he believes in government based on principled rules as opposed to arbitrary whims of politicians and interest groups. As in the case of Hirsi Ali, I think there is something about living in a society where a belief in liberal principles is not a given and where one must consciously defend such positions against intellectually serious non-believers to force one back to the basics of liberal principles. In de Soto's Peru and the other countries he describes there is no two-hundred-year history of a constitional system which commands the loyalty of the entire political system. If one is going to take a stand for constitutional government and the rule of law then that stand must be a principled one or stand in line with those willing to use force of arms and politics to take what they believe to be rightfully theirs.       

3)      Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas - If I ever were placed in charge of Artscroll's hagiography division for the writing of gedolim biographies I would assign this book to everyone working for me as an example as to writing inspirational biographies. There is little need to use over the top rhetoric to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer sound heroic. He was an anti-Nazi German pastor, who returned to Germany right before the start of World War II because he felt he needed to actively oppose Nazism on the ground in Germany. He did not survive the war. With that out of the way, Metaxas is free to spend the book explaining Bonhoeffer's theology and offering some background on early twentieth century Protestantism. This book also makes some useful arguments for viewing Nazism as something other than a conservative movement.  

4)      Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis - Certainly the most interesting book on sports I have ever read. For those who like the Freakonomics/Malcolm Gladwell style counterintuitive arguments, Lewis offers a different way of thinking about sports and possibly about life as well. If you wish to articulate why sports announcers are full of nonsense, who consistently fail to say anything useful about the game this is the book for you. What I particularly took from Moneyball is a lesson on the vulnerabilities of self-replicating elites; they tend to recruit people who look the part rather than genuine capability. Baseball scouts tend to jump for athletes who are tall, well built, fast and can throw over 90 miles an hour as opposed to hitters who can rack up walks. One wonders if the Haredi leadership and the journalists who empower them place too much emphasis on people who come from the right families, make the right public statements and are photographed at the right weddings as opposed to engaging in actual scholarship.   

Fiction (I Will Leave It as an Open Question as to whether Any of This is Related to My Dissertation)

1)      Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill - One of the best-written horror stories I have ever come across. It takes a very simple concept, a suit with a ghost attached to it, and scares the pants out of you with it. It makes little use of graphic violence; who needs gore when you have a deliciously psychotic dead hypnotist to talk people into suicide. The book also features lead characters who are actually likable as opposed to a parade of hunks and blondes just lining up for the slaughter. If the writing sounds a bit like Stephen King's, the author happens to be his son.     

2)      Elantris by Brandon Sanderson - There is something to be said for handing characters over to true destruction, the sudden loss of family, position, and reputation. Death is too easy and for it to actually matter it almost needs to render the character narratively useless. So it is to Sanderson's credit that he can craft a truly unique vision of a Hell on Earth to cast his Christ-like hero. As with Orson Scott Card, Sanderson's stories are first and foremost about characters and relationships. In this case, a hero faced with the task of rallying the denizens of an inescapable Hell into a community. (He does this brilliantly as well in Way of Kings.)

3)      Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson - More Sanderson. This one features a pair of princesses, one of them in a Queen Esther type scenario, a pair of comic henchmen, who go off into libertarian style monologues in defense of their profession and a really cool system of magic involving colors and souls.  Sanderson's fantasy is not about heroes off questing to defeat evil dark lords and save the world. Keeping to the best of the Tolkien tradition, Sanderson is a world builder. If Tolkien built his worlds through language, Sanderson works through systems of magic. Imagine a world governed with a slightly different set of physical laws (Sanderson's magic is always based on clear and consistent rules) and ask yourself what sort of society would spring up under such circumstances. Any system that allows a minority of people to become even slightly more powerful than most is going to be hierarchical, but what sort of hierarchy and how might it become vulnerable?        

4)      Song of Fire and Ice Series by George R. R. Martin - Murder, sexual immorality and idolatry and I am loving the series. I have never read a fantasy author who gets the medieval mindset like Martin does. These books should practically be classified as historical fiction. Is it that big a deal that the books do not actually take place during the War of the Roses and involve some dragons in one of the side plots?

George R. R. Martin on Fantasy and Historical Fiction

James Poniewozik of Time blog has a long interview with fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin, whose Game of Thrones is now being made into an HBO show. Martin discusses his view of J. R. R. Tolkien, balancing his respect for him with not slavishly imitating him. He makes the interesting point that when fantasy writers try imitating Tolkien what usually happens is that they simply pick up on the worst elements of his writing. Martin's favorite Tolkien character is Boromir so it is probably not a coincidence that they got Sean Bean, who played Boromir in the movie, for Game of Thrones.  

As a medieval historian I often struggle with political fantasy, finding it implausible. I can easily suspend disbelief when it comes to magic, but your political structure has to be coherent. The problem is that most writers do not understand the inner dynamics of a pre-modern society. Worse, coming to the issue loaded down with modern liberal biases, they either turn to polemics against the pre-modern society they are writing about or try to eliminate the most troublesome elements to the modern mind, without taking into consideration the logical underpinnings of the society.

An example that I often present to my students is that of women's rights. In a militarized society, where the primary issue on everyone's mind is not suffering sudden violent death, and in which women did not actively fight in the same numbers as men (in other words every pre-modern society that has ever existed) not only would women not have equal rights, but the very thought would be absurd. Any woman who complained about her second class position and demanded to be treated as an equal to men would rightfully be laughed at, told to pick up a sword and, until she could do that, to shut her mouth, get back to cooking, cleaning and children and be grateful for having a man to protect her. It would make no sense for a fantasy novel to both maintain a pre-modern militarized society and either equality of the sexes or plucky heroines giving proto-feminist speeches. (See "Toilet Training.")
        
I was glad therefore to see Martin confront this issue of plausible pre-modern societies

And then there are some things that are just don't square with history. In some sense I'm trying to respond to that. [For example] the arranged marriage, which you see constantly in the historical fiction and television show, almost always when there's an arranged marriage, the girl doesn't want it and rejects it and she runs off with the stable boy instead. This never fucking happened. It just didn't. There were thousands, tens of thousand, perhaps hundreds of thousands of arranged marriages in the nobility through the thousand years of Middle Ages and people went through with them. That's how you did it. It wasn't questioned. Yeah, occasionally you would want someone else, but you wouldn't run off with the stable boy.


And that's another of my pet peeves about fantasies. The bad authors adopt the class structures of the Middle Ages; where you had the royalty and then you had the nobility and you had the merchant class and then you have the peasants and so forth. But they don't' seem to realize what it actually meant. They have scenes where the spunky peasant girl tells off the pretty prince. The pretty prince would have raped the spunky peasant girl. He would have put her in the stocks and then had garbage thrown at her. You know.

I mean, the class structures in places like this had teeth. They had consequences. And people were brought up from their childhood to know their place and to know that duties of their class and the privileges of their class. It was always a source of friction when someone got outside of that thing. And I tried to reflect that.

Wandering through Fantasy Worlds with Kvothe and Harry Potter (Part I)

If I were to describe Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles series in one sentence it would be that it is Harry Potter's more mature and sophisticated sibling, who, instead of going to grade school to study magic, went to college. In a similar vein, my reaction to watching the first season of Heroes (the only one worth watching) was that it was the younger smarter sibling of the X-Men, who went of to university and got into heroin. (In the case of Heroes there actually is a character whose superpower is to be able to see and paint the future while high.) As with Harry Potter, Kingkiller is about a teenage orphan, Kvothe, whose parents were murdered off by dark powers, studying magic. As with J. K. Rowling, Rothfuss' chief strengths as a writer are his ability to create interesting characters, backed by witty dialogue and a world for us to explore through the eyes of these characters.

What Rothfuss has over Rowling is that, like Tolkien, he offers the impression of depth to his world; that it is not just a prop that will collapse if touched. Rowling's wizarding world, in contrast, while utterly fascinating as a concept striking deep into the collective subconsciousness of readers (I cannot think of another fantasy world that I so desperately wanted to be real), remains an immensely clever joke. Even by the end of the series one does not get the sense that Rowling ever bothered to work out the mechanics and limitations of her magical system and the inner workings of her wizarding society. Particularly the question of why wizards, even muggle-loving ones like Arthur Weasley, live in secret outside of general society and in ignorance of it. (See "Yeshiva Hogwarts.") One suspects that this is the reason why Rowling kept her story so narrowly focused on Harry, only allowing us to experience the wizarding world from Harry's limited perspective and kept Harry's own experience of the wizarding world to specific set pieces, like the Weasley home, Diagon Alley, and Hogwarts. Allowing Harry broader range would have forced her to take her own wizarding world seriously and not just as a prop.  Rothfuss, in contrast, treats his magic with a level of sophistication surpassing the "science" of most science fiction. As Tolkien managed to invent several fully functional languages for Lord of the Rings that people can study today, one suspects that Rothfuss would, if pressed, be able to present a plausibly sounding "scientific" lecture on his magic. The same goes for his world's various races, religions, countries, and politics.

Rothfuss' other major advantage over Rowling is in creating, in Kvothe, a fully flesh and blood lead character the likes of which exist in few other works of fantasy. With Harry Potter, the interest is always the world and characters around him. Harry serves as a means to explore Hogwarts and characters like Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, Dumbledore, Sirius, and Lupin, all of whom are far more interesting than Harry in of himself. Harry starts off the series as a star-struck modern-day version of T. H. White's young King Arthur, Wart, before evolving into a moody teenager. It is only in Deathly Hallows, as Harry contemplates the necessity of his death to defeat Voldemort, that Harry steps in as a worthy protagonist in his own right. (It is for this reason that, whether or not Deathly Hallows is the best book in the series, it is certainly the best written of the series and the one in which Rowling stepped into her own as a mature writer.) One suspects that this is why Rowling never allowed Harry to exist on his own but always has him interacting with other characters, even going so far as to make Harry's chief strength his connection to his friends as opposed to Voldemort who is completely self-contained. (See "Adolescent Military Genius.") Kvothe, in contrast, is the star attraction, not just a cipher through which to tell a story. Rothfuss does not just focus his narrative on Kvothe, he tells almost his entire story from inside Kvothe's head. One almost gets the sense that Rothfuss could have eliminated his entire world, leaving Kvothe floating in ether, and still hold on to the reader's attention.

This places Kingkiller as one of those rare fantasy series that is only incidentally about fantasy. In much the same way that Orson Scott Card novels are about characters and relationships and only incidentally take place in a science-fiction universe, Rothfuss has one utterly compelling character, Kvothe, and a world for Kvothe to operate in. The fact that this world is a beautifully rendered fantasy world only serves to establish Rothfuss as one of the greatest writers of this generation of any genre. 

(To be continued ...)                

Kvothe High on Asperger Syndrome

For my birthday present, I bought myself Patrick Rothfuss' Wise Man's Fear on Kindle. Considering how often Rothfuss has been compared to Tolkien, it would have been appropriate for me to take this "precious birthday present" and make it ours. To ensure that no one steals it we could run off to a secret cave underneath a mountain with plenty of fish. There we could read the precious all by ourselves and not share it with nasty thieving hobbit readers. As I am not Gollum I did wish to share one particular piece which, for reasons that should soon be obvious, I found humorous but also personally very meaningful.

At one point early in the novel, the hero Kvothe is tricked by his archenemy at the university, Ambrose Jakis (like Draco Malfoy but a bigger bastard), into ingesting a substance that completely takes away his ability to read social conventions. This is done right before Kvothe is supposed to be examined by the administration in order to determine his fees for the next term. This leads to the following interaction between Kvothe and his friends Simmon and Fela as Simmon tries to keep Kvothe in line with a series of number rankings as how socially not acceptable something is.


There was a knock on the door. "It's me," Sim's voice came through the wood. "Is everything all right in there?"


"You know what's strange?" I said to him through the door. "I tried to think of something funny I could do while you were gone, but I couldn't." I looked around at the room. "I think that means humor is rooted in social transgression. I can't transgress because I can't figure out what would be socially unacceptable. Everything seems the same to me."



"You might have a point," he said, then asked, "did you do something anyway?"



"No," I said. "I decided to be good. Did you find Fela?"



"I did. She's here. But before we come in, you have to promise not to do anything without asking me first. Fair?"




I laughed. "Fair enough. Just don't make me do stupid things in front of her."

I promise," Sim said. "Why don't you sit down? Just to be safe."



"I'm already sitting," I said.



Sim opened the door. I could see Fela peering over his shoulder.



"Hello Fela," I said. "I need to trade slots with you."



"First," Sim said. "You should put your shirt back on. That's about a two."



"Oh," I said. "Sorry. I was hot."



"You could have opened the window."



"I thought it would be safer if I limited my interactions with external objects," I said.



Sim raised an eyebrow. "That's actually a really good idea. It just steered you a little wrong in this case."



"Wow." I heard Fela's voice from the hallway. "Is he serious?"



"Absolutly serious," Sim said. "Honestly? I don't think it's safe for you to come in."



I tugged my shirt on. "Dressed," I said. "I'll even sit on my hands if it will make you feel better." I did just that, tucking them under my legs. Sim let Fela inside, then closed the door behind her.



"Fela, you are just gorgeous," I said. "I would give you all the money in my purse if I could just look at you naked for two minutes. I'd give everything I own. Except my lute."



It's hard to say which of them blushed a deeper red. I think it was Sim.


"I wasn't supposed to say that, was I?" I said.



No," Sim said. "That's about a five."



"But that doesn't make any sense," I said. "Women are naked in paintings. People buy paintings, don't they? Women pose for them."



Sim nodded. "That's true. But still. Just sit for a moment and don't say or do anything? Okay?



I nodded.



"I can't quite believe this," Fela said, the blush fading from her cheeks. "I can't help but think the two of you are playing some sort of elaborate joke on me."



"I wish we were," Simmon said. "This stuff is terribly dangerous."



"How can he remember naked paintings and not remember you're supposed to keep your shirt on in public? she asked Sim, her eyes never leaving me.


"It just didn't seem very important," I said. "I took my shirt off when I was whipped. That was public. It seems a strange thing to get in trouble for."



"Do you know what would happen if you tried to knife Ambrose? Simmon asked.



I thought for a second. It was like trying to remember what you'd eaten for breakfast a month ago. "There'd be a trial, I suppose," I said slowly, "and people would buy me drinks."



Fela muffled a laugh behind her hand.



"How about this? Simmon asked me. "Which is worse, stealing a pie or killing Ambrose?"



I gave it a moment's hard thought. "A meat pie, or a fruit pie?" (Kindle 1557-89.)



This has to be one of the best descriptions of Asperger logic I have ever read. Of course, if you are an Asperger you do not need to ingest anything and the effects are lifelong. By the time any Asperger has become an adult he will have developed a two-sided attitude toward social conventions. One the one hand Aspergers do not read social cues and therefore regularly step right over all sorts of conventions, giving the appearance of not caring about them and of even being downright rude. On the other hand, by the time one reaches adulthood, even an Asperger has come to realize that there are very real consequences to not operating according to social conventions. Because of this they will obsequiously bend over backward, constantly apologizing to others and asking to make sure they are acting in a socially acceptable manner. In my own personal experience, I have had a number of rather hilarious conversations with other Aspergers in which we both found ourselves apologizing and asking the other whether what we were saying was socially appropriate or not, neither of us knowing and, for that matter, neither of us caring.

This obsequiousness, in of itself, leads to a counter reaction. Much as with divine commands, eventually one gets tired of living under the burden of neurotypical social conventions that seem to make absolutely no sense, but which carry extreme consequences for their violation. This leads one to try break free, deny their value and systematically break them. This, in turn, leads to guilt, a renewed awareness of the consequences for violating social conventions and a return to bending over backward to try keeping them. Thus with Asperger adults, you will find that they both care and do not care about social conventions. This duality exists from minute to minute and even at the same time.

(Stay tuned for a full review of the novel.)

Meeting Patrick Rothfuss

Last night I went with Lionel Spiegel to meet Patrick Rothfuss, who was speaking at a Borders in Northern Virginia. For those of you who are not familiar with him, Rothfuss is one of the leading fantasy writers today. My only hesitation in putting him in the league of Tolkien as one of the greatest fantasy writers ever is that he has only written one book so far, the Name of the Wind. I will say that Rothfuss' Kvothe is the most interesting lead character in a fantasy since Thomas Covenant. Fantasy is a genre that usually focuses on building interesting worlds, populated by odd side characters to take over the story, leaving the main character trapped in the role of hero. It is Rothfuss' gift as a writer that can create a world as interesting as he does with so many great side characters and still have them play second to Kvothe.

I went to the bookstore simply for the pleasure of meeting a man whose work I so admired in the flesh and to hear him talk about his work, perhaps even to catch an unguarded slip as to what is going to happen in his next book, Wise Man's Fear, which fans have been waiting three years now for. What I was completely unprepared for was how much fun Rothfuss was in person as he mixed responding to questions with reading various pieces of his, including a pathologically hilarious gerbil story and yes the prologue of his next book. Writing is a solitary task and one has no reason to expect authors, even those who can create personable characters, to have it themselves. Watching Rothfuss, I was struck by the fact even if he lacked the romance cover long red hair of Kvothe, (in fact the original cover for the book was dropped because it looked too much like a romance novel) here was Kvothe, with all of his wit and charm, in the flesh. Even if I am unable to convince you to try reading a nearly 700-page work of fantasy, I would still recommend, if you have the chance, going to see Rothfuss on his book tour. He is worth it all for himself and if I cannot convince you to read him, seeing him perform might.

I will be circumspect as to what Rothfuss spoke about as he asked at the beginning that there be no video recordings for fear that something could come off the wrong way and end up on Youtube. (The speech was an adult affair, though hardly smut for smut's sake, and not for children, even if Name of the Wind is perfectly fine.) There were a few things that I think should be alright and worth mentioning. Rothfuss spoke passionately about the value of fantasy as speaking its own truth even as a work of fiction. He challenged the assembled group of, assumingly, fantasy lovers, as to what meant more to them, Narnia or Peru. (Asking forgiveness from my friend who studies Early Modern Peru, I must confess that I raised my hand for the former.) I asked him what he would advise aspiring fantasy writers as to how to avoid the trap of rewriting Tolkien and turning out clichés. (Another of Rothfuss' strengths is how he took a story with a hero going to magic school to learn to be a wizard that could have so easily turned into a cliché and made it stand on its own as something clearly within the fantasy tradition and yet so original.) His advice was to start off at the age of twelve and read a fantasy book a day. (At least that is what he did.) If you understand the genre you can work with it, know what has already been done and avoid repeating it.

If I have talked about how talented Rothfuss is, I would end by noting what a nice person he is as well. After speaking, he posed for a picture with the entire crowd and stayed to sign books. It was close to an hour by the time I got to him and there were still plenty of people behind me. These are people who have already bought the book and will likely buy the sequel no matter what. Rothfuss has nothing to gain, particularly as he does have better things, like his newborn son and the mother of his child, to deal with.

I went back and forth as to whether to bring my copy to be signed. I picked it up off a library used pile. In the end, I agreed to bring it; Rothfuss was a fellow follower of the vow of poverty known as graduate school and I do have Wise Man's Fear on pre-order whenever it comes out. Rothfuss was kind enough to sign it to Izgad. (It is easier to say and remember than Benzion.)

Alice in Pretentious Artsy Self-Satisfied Modern Bigotry Land (Part II)

(Part I)

I wanted to scream at the audience around me: don't you people understand. This society of nineteenth-century Victorian England was one in which the vast majority of people, except for a narrow elite, lived in a poverty that we cannot even imagine. Do you know what it means to have a society in which starving to death is a real issue? The only thing saving our elites from falling in with the wretched masses is the force of tradition. Anyone who plays with convention is pulling at the spider's web that keeps not only them feed but everyone around them. I would like to see you tolerate such a person. This was particularly true for women, who were limited in their labor prospects and lacked the sort of education that might have allowed them to hold well-paying jobs even if society let them. Can you imagine the position of a widowed mother, living with the trappings of wealth and its expectations, knowing that without her husband to support them there is nothing to stop her and her daughter from sinking into abject poverty? And by poverty we do not mean food stamps, but the slow demise over years due to malnutrition and disease as you work yourself to death. The only thing saving this person is the prospect of a good match. How dare you any of you smirk or feel superior when such a person decides that whether her daughter is in "love" might not be of utter importance.

We now move from the film's pointless introduction to having Alice fall down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. My father often likes to say that comedy is the hardest genre to perform. Comedy is an either/or proposition. Either you are funny or you are not. There is no in-between or partial success. With drama you can always hope to salvage something even if the project fails as a whole. Humor is not a science; it is something that happens sometimes, but cannot be created at will. You can have genuinely talented people who get out there and, through no one's fault, the material just does not work. Without a question, there were some talented people in this production. The team of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Helen Bonham Carter is nothing to be laughed at. (Just watch Sweeny Todd.) There is no logical reason that this team should not have once again produced something absolutely magical. Except that for some unfathomable reason the material just failed to click.

This failure may have had something to do with the fact that, as Lionel put it, they tried to mix whimsical fantasy with epic fantasy. It was not enough that Alice should explore this strange and downright psychedelic world; the film also had to have her go on a quest to defeat the Red Queen, restore the White Queen to her rightful place and defeat the Jabberwocky. Tolkien just does not go with Carroll. This could have still worked as tongue and cheek. The problem is that of all comedy, I would argue that tongue and cheek is the hardest. For tongue and cheek you have to succeed on two counts. In terms of comedy, you still have to actually be funny and as drama you still need to produce characters who make sense and whom the audience connects with on a deep emotional level. One can always try to cover trash by saying that it is only meant tongue and cheek. Saying that something is meant only tongue and cheek can in no way be an excuse for bad writing. I have so much respect for people like Joss Whedon, J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer who use tongue and cheek and make it work. To all those who turn their noses up at their work as popular entertainment that "anyone" could do, I say give it a try.

I could not end this without saying something about what happens back on the top side of the rabbit hole once Alice comes back to her Victorian world. She rejects her upper-class twit of the year and approaches her father's old partner about a really radical business venture, trading with China. Someone needs to offer the writers a history lesson and explain that even our stuffy Victorians were up to trading with China; there was nothing radical in the nineteenth-century about such a prospect. The West even fought several opium wars to open China to western trade. Even people in the Middle Ages were imaginative enough to try trading with China. This was how we got Columbus accidentally discovering America in the first place.

I really wanted to like this movie. I was waiting for it since I heard about it this past summer. I even had a poster of it up as my desktop background. (This proved to be a mistake as some of my little Haredi cousins wanted to use my laptop and started screaming about the not "tznisudic," immodestly dressed, girl in the picture.) However much I respect the people behind this film, it was a failure and not even having it in 3-D could save it.

Patience with Frank Schaeffer

In discussing Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God, James Pate suggested that I would be interested in Schaeffer’s upcoming book Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion {or Atheism}, saying: “…it addresses people who aren't satisfied with fundamentalism or atheism. That kind of reminds me of what the top of your blog says: seeking a third path, other than secularism and religious fundamentalism.” I just got the book and read it over last night and this morning. I sincerely wished to like this book, since I see Schaeffer as being one of the people on “my” side. That being said, I found myself disappointed with the book as a whole, though there were parts that I found worthwhile. The fatal weakness of the book is that it lacks much in the way of a sustained argument. Rather it is a running meditation, one that fails to say anything that has not been said and better said in other places. This would not be considered a fault at all if this was a series of blog posts. If this was a blog I could just take it as is, the rambling chaff of an intelligent person written on the fly, which contains numerous valuable nuggets. I would like to pay my respects to those specific parts of the book worthy of consideration while acknowledging the larger failings.

The book opens with a beautiful prologue about Schaeffer feeling the need to pray upon holding his grandchild and a sober summation of the danger of our ghettoized media culture where everyone has created their own news and reality filters. The book itself is divided into two sections. The first part, containing the central thesis of the book, confronts both the New Atheists and Christian Fundamentalists, who Schaeffer sees as having a lot more in common with each other than they themselves would wish to admit. In particular, Schaeffer goes after Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, on the atheist front, and Rick Warren and the authors of the Left Behind series, Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, on the fundamentalist front. The chapters on atheism are the weaker ones. They certainly fail to match up to Terry Eagleton’s Ditchkins attack. Even here, Schaeffer has his moments. I particularly liked his comparison of Dawkins selling Scarlet A Letter pins to his mother’s Gospel Walnuts, which, much to Frank’s embarrassment, she used to start witnessing conversations with random strangers. “So Dawkins, it turns out, is my mother, circa 1959! Hi Mom!” (pg. 30) This illustrates an important thing about Schaeffer; he is strongest when talking about his personal life and experiences. There is also something to be said for Schaeffer’s discussion of Dennett, mainly because Schaeffer is actually quite positive about certain elements of Dennett’s thought even if he comes to different conclusions.

Patience takes an upward swing when Schaeffer turns to fundamentalism. Again, I think this is because Schaeffer is one of those writers who is best when there is something personal at stake. One may find it interesting that Schaeffer would target someone like Warren, who has risen to fame largely on his reputation for being a more “liberal,” social-action evangelical preacher. Schaeffer's main objection to Warren is that he sees Warren as an example of one of the principle weaknesses of the entire Protestant legacy, its lack of a tradition and the need, in the absence of such a tradition, to create larger than life cult-figures to stand in its place. This argument is one of Schaeffer’s valuable intellectual points and it is a pity that he, in both Patience and Crazy for God, does not delve more deeply into this issue. I would love to see Schaeffer do a book just on this point. It would make it even better if he did more to place this attack on Protestantism in the context of an explicitly Eastern Orthodox position. I suspect that Schaeffer fears, and probably rightfully so, that such a book would fail to reach a general audience. My thinking is that, in this religious climate, the most important thing for American Christians to see is a serious and vigorous Christianity, any Christianity, that is not Evangelicalism. Similarly, on my particular front of the religion wars, one of the key things to defeating Haredism is merely to show that such a thing as a serious non-Haredi Judaism even exists.

I loved the fact that Schaeffer discusses C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and the fact that the same Christian colleges that adore them would never put up with their drinking and their theology. I must object, though, to Schaeffer’s categorization of Lewis as someone who “ruined what could have been a decent literary career by slavishly working Christian propaganda into his ‘novels,’ especially once he began to cater to the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture after he became a star.” (pg. 102-103) Lewis, to the end of his life, was a professor of literature, who incidentally wrote books on Christian apologetics and one of the best-selling series children’s books of all time. Lewis never tried to make a living from being a “star” on the Christian circuit. Even Lewis’ most propagandistic novels, the Chronicles of Narnia, are filled with elements from pagan mythology. Lewis, long after he became a "Christian star," wrote Till We Have Faces, a reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth that remained explicitly pagan, and a Grief Observed, in which he muses over whether God is a cosmic sadist, torturing us for his own amusement. One of Lewis’ strengths was that he did not sell out; he was willing to put people out of their comfort zone. As a Tolkien fan, I will treasure Schaeffer’s description of one of his school teachers, Bubble:

Having Bubble for a master was something like having Gollum for a teacher. Only Bubble didn’t disgust us by gnawing raw fish. Rather, he revolted and riveted us by snorting huge quantities of filthy, face-staining snuff, he never bathed, and he smelled oddly of pepper and was clearly drunk at times, although he did know a lot about music and made science interesting. (pg. 132)

Schaeffer’s attack on LeHaye and Jenkins also deserves mention. Schaeffer remarks:

If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine. (pg. 109)

Schaeffer’s primary concern with LaHaye and Jenkins, though he knows them both and personally finds them to be decent people, is that they feed a radical element that could easily turn to violence in order to bring their particular version of the end about. Schaeffer again makes an important point about the religious right and its failings.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.” (pg. 113-114)

The second half of Patience is largely a rehash of material from Crazy for God, with some more theology thrown in. At this point, it is still interesting to hear Schaeffer talk about his life, even if it is beginning to wear a little thin. This takes time away from talking about belief. All the pity, because it is precisely this element that could have used more elaboration. It is fair enough to say that belief is something that goes beyond reason, but if one is going to go this route one needs to make all the greater effort for clarity and, dare I say it, “rationality” in one’s writing in order to avoid the obvious counter-argument that one has lost the argument and is now trying to cover up that fact by hiding behind mystery. Every chapter of Patience is headed by a quotation from Soren Kierkegaard, the Christian thinker who best exemplifies this notion of faith as a leap into the absurd. It is unfortunate that Schaeffer did not make the effort to integrate Kierkegaard more into the book itself.

For those looking to understand how Kierkegaard can be made relevant to modern religious issues, Abraham Heschel wrote a book comparing Kierkegaard and Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk called a Passion for Truth. I would particularly recommend this book to readers of this blog. It is about analyzing a type of religious “fundamentalism” that instead of walking lock stock and barrel behind the establishment, attacks and ultimately rejects the religious establishment precisely because the establishment fails to live up to the true standards of the faith. This is the sort of thinking that tells you that anyone sporting clothing that costs thousands of dollars in a world in which children are starving is not a real Christian regardless of how “orthodox” the gospel he preaches sounds. On the topic of Jewish thinkers influenced by Kierkegaard, another person who comes to mind is Rabbi Josef Soloveitchik. I first learned about Kierkegaard from reading Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith which discusses Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

Probably the greatest flaw in the book is the fact that it lacks any footnotes or even an index. For example, I would be interested in finding out Schaeffer’s source for Baruch Spinoza (yes Schaeffer refers to him as Baruch and not Benedict) being offered one thousand florins to remain within the Jewish community. Such a story smacks of legend to me. This indicates a book that was rushed to print without much thought or effort. In the end, in judging this book, I feel like I am in the position of a teacher being handed a B paper by a talented student, whom the teacher knows could have done an A paper if only he had put in the effort. My inclination would be to hand the paper back and say: “Please go back and write the paper that I know you can.” Mr. Schaeffer, you have written a mediocre book. From most people, I would accept this, but I know you can do better. You have the talent to write the sort of defense of non-fundamentalist religious beliefs that needs to be written. Could you please go back and write that book!

International Medieval Congress: Rhiannon

Here I am at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds. There are over one thousand medievalists packed in here on the complex surrounding Bodington Hall on the north side of the University of Leeds. The conference is dedicating to the theme of heresy and orthodoxy. So far there seems to be minimal causalities and no one has been burned at the stake or hacked to pieces in a religious crusade yet. While I wait for things to get interesting, I will be reporting on the sessions and the various presentations, including one given by me.

Sunday evening, after I had settled down in my room and before the conference began in earnest, I attended a telling of Rhiannon by Katy Cawkwell. Rhiannon is based on several stories from the Mabinogion, a collection Celtic myths. I am most familiar with the Mabinogion through the lens of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, a wonderful series of children’s books, particularly useful for preparing children to read and appreciate Tolkien. The story of Rhiannon goes as follows:

Pwyll, king of Dyfed, stands upon a hill in his kingdom upon which it is said that such an action will bring either blessing or curse. Pwyll challenge to fate leads him to rescue Rhiannon, a beautiful woman from the other world, from having to marry the Grey Lord, a man of stone with no heart. As the two lovers leave, the Grey Lord curses them and promises to have his revenge. For many years Pwyll and Rhiannon do not have any children until, on the advice of a man named Manawydan, Pwyll catches a silver fish and gives it to his wife to eat. Rhiannon and Pwyll have a child, but this child is stolen from the sleeping arms of his mother right under the watchful eye of six midwives. In order to save themselves the midwives accuse Rhiannon of having eaten her own baby. To make this work they slaughter a puppy, smear the blood on Rhiannon's face and scatter the pieces of the body around the bed. (I do love it when fairy tales turn really gory.)As a punishment, Rhiannon is forced to wear a bridle and a saddle and wait at the city gate. She is to tell all strangers of her crime and offer to let them ride her. This goes on for some time until a farmer and his wife come, bringing a small child with them. The child was named Gwri and his parents told the remarkable story of how he had come to them on an arm shaped cloud. It is confirmed that the child was truly the one lost to Pwyll and Rhiannon, who is released from her torment. The family is thus reunited, but not for long.

Pwyll and Rhiannon call their son Pryderi and the lad grows. Unfortunately he is forced into manhood sooner than expected when his father is killed by a giant white boar with red tipped ears. Pryderi becomes king of Dyfed. He takes for himself a woman named Cigfa, but is called to war with the rest of the kings of Britain against Ireland. After many years Pryderi comes home with a companion, who had become like a father to him. Upon seeing him, Rhiannon realizes that this man is Manawydan. There is peace for a time until Pryderi resolves himself to imitate his father and go to the hill to risk either blessing or curse. Unable to stop him, Rhiannon, Cigfa and Manawydan join him on the hill. When they look out they see that the entire kingdom has been desolated. With Manawydan’s guidance they manage to survive, first in the woods and then by traveling from town to town. Their luck changes again for the worst when Pryderi chases a giant white boar with red tipped ears into a tower where he is magically ensnared. Rhiannon follows after her son to try to rescue him but is also caught. The tower disappears leaving Cigfa and Manawydan alone. In an attempt to free their companions, Cigfa and Manawydan resolve to replant the kingdom of Dyfed. If the land will grow again perhaps the king will spring up with it. They plant three fields but these fields are attacked by an army of white mice with red tipped ears. Manawydan catches one of the mice, who is pregnant. Resolved to do justice, Manawydan sets out to hang this mouse. A man approaches Manawydan and begs him not to kill the mouse, even offering him gold. When Manawydan refuses the man reveals himself as the Grey Lord and confesses all the harm that he has done to Rhiannon and those close to her ever since she left him, from kidnapping Pryderi as a baby to changing his people into mice to attack the fields. The pregnant mouse is the Grey Lord’s woman and she is carrying his child. Manawydan agrees to give up the mouse in exchange for Rhiannon and Pryderi.

Calling what Ms. Cawkwell does storytelling fails to do her justice. She offers a full play, of her creation, in which she performs the role of narrator and all characters. Ms. Cawkwell’s performance has a remarkable lyrical quality to it, at times one can almost think that she was singing. After the performance Ms. Cawkwell thanked the audience and remarked that this was the first time she ever performed at an academic setting in front of people, many of whom are familiar with the Mabinogion. The post modernist in me notes that the tone of her storytelling takes on the mode of modernist commentary and satire with its strong sense of tongue and cheek. All in all, a truly remarkable performance.

At the Pub with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien

For me, no stay at Oxford would be complete without a visit to the famous Eagle and Child pub where C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the other members of the Inklings used to meet.


I guess the sign is not in keeping with rabbinic thinking. According to Rashi and the Midrash, the great virtue of the eagle is that it carries the young on its back in order to shield them from men’s arrows.

I went inside and had a pint of some of the local stuff. To quote Pippin in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings film, but not the original novel: “it comes in pints?” You can tell that the stuff was good because I drank all of it. This the first time in my life that I have ever drunk a full pint of beer. I think Lewis would be proud of me. I am not much of a beer drinker, but I have recently been getting into it. I am now the sort of person who will go through a bottle over the course of watching a game. In the back of me is a letter from the year 1948 drinking to the health of the proprietor of the establishment. The letter is signed by several people among them are C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Christopher Tolkien, who was then an undergraduate student at Oxford.

Later, I was helping out at the Chabad house when I mentioned Lewis to Mrs. Freida Brackman. She responded that she taught Lewis’ grandchildren. I response was: “so you know David Gresham.” Lewis late in life, married an American divorcee named Joy Davidman. She was an ex-Communist, who had converted to Christianity. Joy was originally from a secular Jewish family. Joy had two children, David, and Douglas Gresham. (Lewis actually dedicated the Horse and His Boy to the two of them.) Joy died of cancer leaving the two children with Lewis. As a teenager, David Gresham became an Orthodox Jew. Interestingly enough, Lewis actually paid for David’s Yeshiva education. According to Mrs. Brackman, David and his wife are extremely eccentric. I would certainly love to meet them. Judging from the fact that there is little information available about David on the web, I assume that he is a very private person, who likes to avoid the public spotlight.

Sex, Power and Albus Dumbledore II

There was no reason to make Dumbledore gay and doing so seriously harms the character. Why did Rowling feel that she had to give Dumbledore a sexual side? The fact that she felt that Dumbledore must have a sexual side, to me, shows a fundamental misunderstanding, on the part of Rowling, as to nature of fantasy.

In fantasy characters are faced with temptations beyond mere sex. In the Twilight series, Bella asks Edward if vampires were capable of having sex as humans do. Edward responds “… most of those human desires are there, just hidden behind more powerful desires.” (Twilight pg. 310) Normal vampires focus on their thirst for blood. The Cullens, who one can argue are meant to stand in for the Ex-Gay movement, are focused on being able to transcend their nature and avoiding causing harm to anyone. I would see this confrontation with power, as encapsulating what happens to almost all characters in fantasy. Fantasy, more than any other genre, is about characters dealing with extreme powers and extreme responsibilities. It is normal in fantasy to have characters, who possess supernatural powers and or find themselves in situations where they quite literally find themselves carrying the fate of the world. Such characters have far greater temptations and far greater concerns than mere sex. As such, it makes perfect sense for characters in fantasy to not be particularly concerned with sex. Not only that but to have them become interested in sex “just like any normal person” would in most cases be a letdown.

Take Lord of the Rings for example. I never seriously wondered about the sex lives of Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins. If the hobbits had been living in any other genre of fiction, the fact that both of these characters live by themselves as bachelors for decades in Bag End would raise questions. What precisely was the nature of Bilbo’s adoption of Frodo? What precisely is Frodo’s relationship with Sam? The reason why I never wondered about such things is because both Bilbo and Frodo have to deal with the Ring of Power. I do not imagine Bilbo and later Frodo, during all the decades that they spend alone in Bag End, scoring on young hobbit girls or boys, jerking off or reading porno. I imagine them obsessing about the Ring. Either sitting around and looking at it or thinking about it. Once the story gets going and Frodo finds the fate of the entire Middle Earth resting on his shoulders and the Ring literally eating his soul out, Frodo is not in a position to consider wither he has sexual feelings for Sam or anyone else in the Fellowship. Sam can still dream about going home and marrying Rosie. Destroying the Ring is not his responsibility and the Ring is not destroying his soul.

Now imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien would have gotten up in front of a crowd of his adoring hippie fans and told them: You all thought I was some stuffed up professor of Anglo-Saxon but guess what. Frodo was gay and he really had a crush on Sam. So you see I am really a hip person, bravely fighting against the Man. Besides for thinking that Tolkien must have been smoking too much of the hobbit’s pipe-weed, I would feel let down because now the whole character of Frodo makes so much less sense. The whole point of Frodo was that he finds himself utterly consumed by the quest and his struggle with the Ring. If Frodo is able to take a time out and indulge in having a sexual nature then we have no all-consuming struggle and I have no reason to be interested in him.

And Now a Taste of Something Whigish

A friend of mine, who works as an archivist and has an interest in the history of science, sent this to me before Yom Kippur. It is from the introduction to a book published in 1883 titled: Zoological sketches: a contribution to the outdoor study of natural history. The name of the author was Felix Leopold Oswald

"The tendencies of our realistic civilization make it evident that the study of natural science is destined to supersede the mystic scholasticism of the Middle Ages, and I believe that the standards of entertaining literature will undergo a corresponding change. The Spirit of Naturalism has awakened after its long slumber..."
"...Whatever is natural is wrong, was the keystonedogma of the mediaeval schoolmen...The worship of joy yielded to a worship of sorrow, the study of living nature to the study of dead languages and barrensophisms...The moralists that had suppressed the Olympic festivals compensated the public with autos-da-fe. The whole history of the Middle Ages is, indeed, the history of a long war against nature.
[Note that he doesn't blame religion or even Catholicism but the scholastics for everything wrong in Western thought! Safer in England and America to do that]
"But nature has at last prevailed. Delusions are clouds, and the storm of the Thirty Years' War has cleared our sky...Ghost-stories are going out of fashion...And, moreover, the progress of natural science tends to supersede fiction by making it superfluous-even for romantic purposes."

What I find interesting about this piece, besides for its total distortion of the Middle Ages, is its assumption that modern civilization would have no need for fantasy. As we know so well, stories about boy wizards do not sell over 300 million copies in our modern civilization. This does raise an interesting question though as to what is the relationship between the writing of fantasy fiction and belief in the supernatural? It would seem to be reasonable to classify fantasy as a genre for religious people and science fiction as a genre for secularists. Religious people, who put their hopes in a supernatural world, should find it very easy to suspend their disbelief when confronted with fantasy supernatural. Secularists, who place their hopes in science should be open to suspending their disbelief at the scientific fantasies of science fiction. Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia were written by Tolkien and Lewis, who were both deeply religious individuals. On the other hand science fiction was pioneered by the likes of H.G Wells, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, all quite hostile to organized religion. The only problem with this theory is that it does not pan out in reality. Orson Scott Card is one of the greatest science fiction writers today and he is a Mormon. Not only that but his science fiction has very explicit religious overtones. One of the greatest fantasy writers today, Philip Pullman, is militant atheist. His Dark Materials, besides for turning Paradise Lost on its head, is an atheist allegory written to open children up to the idea of overthrowing God and all those who claim to speak in his name. (Its a brilliant series of book, so please do not let any religious qualms you may have get in the way of reading it.) Furthermore, as we saw with Harry Potter, fantasy, even when it is not explicitly hostile to religion, can still raise its ire.
I happen to be a fan of both science fiction and fantasy. I believe that these forms of fiction have an important role to play in society in that they force us to think outside of the normal box of our reality. They tyranny of everyday expectations and of the society around us is one of the hardest things to fight against. It is only by being able to break outside of the box of what our own preconceptions of reality that we can truly become free thinkers.

Name of the Wind

I happen to be a very big fan of Orson Scott Card's books, particularly Ender's Game and the two series of books that it spawned. He regularly publishes reviews on various things of interest on his website http://www.hatrack.com/. I enjoy his take on things and take his recommendations very seriously and with very good cause. You can blame him for making me a Browncoat. He said that Firefly was the greatest piece of science-fiction ever to hit the screen and I took him up on it. It was also due to his recommendation that I read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Sure enough Jonathan Strange was every bit as good Card said it was. This brings us to Name of the Wind, part one of the perspective King Killer Trilogy, by Patrick Rothfuss. And again I can only echo Card in proclaiming this to be one of the best things to hit fantasy as of late. (Lets leave off the discussion of a certain book to be published July 21.)
Name of the Wind shares certain similarities to Jonathan Strange and I suspect they will appeal to the same crowd. They have very academic senses of humor. Academic, not in the prissy sense, but more in terms of satirizing academia. These are both very atypical works of fantasy in that in both of them the fantasy element almost becomes incidental. A reader could very easily forget that he is reading fantasy. (Jonathan Strange in fact won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction in 2005.) While both of these books deal with the study of magic, they approach magic from an almost science-fiction like perspective. These books are both, above anything else, centered around the creation of well drawn characters. In terms of character these books can hold their own with anything from any genre of literature. One cannot read these books and say that the genre of fantasy has no place as high literature.
Rothfuss is in a very selective league of sword and sorcery fantasy authors in that he has learned all the right lessons from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This book is not about dark lords, major quests and apocalyptic battles or about wizards and dragons. (There is a dragon in the book but it is more of a dinosaur like creature than a mythological one.) Rothfuss though, probably better then anyone besides for Tolkien, offers that sense of unexplored horizons. The world of Name of the Wind has very rich mythology which Rothfuss only gives glimpses of.
As to what this story is about. I will not be able to do it proper justice and what I say will fail to properly capture the spirit of the book. It is the life story of Kvothe, a famous hero now living under an assumed name in a small village, being told to over a three day span to a chronicler who tracked Kvothe down. Name of the Wind is day one. It covers his childhood as a member of a traveling theater group, how he was orphaned and came to live on the streets and his teenage years studying magic at the university. (I know what you are thinking orphan boy who goes to study magic, sounds like Potter. This is a very different sort book from Potter. Kvothe is not Harry and the University is not Hogwarts.) So far this book has set up an incredible love story which I assume is going to end tragically. It has some great action and a wonderful sense of humor about itself. But above everything else I love these characters and I cannot wait to get more of them.
Since I will not have Potter to be waiting for in another few days its nice to know that I will have another book that I will have to count the days until publication for.