What Is the Point of Teaching?

 

As a teacher, imagine that you could wave a magic wand and do one of five things in your classroom:

1) Turn your failing students into D students.

2) Turn your D students into C students.

3) Turn your C students into B students.

4) Turn your B students into A students.

5) Inspire your A students to become life long learners. 

Just to be clear, for the purposes of this thought experiment, we are going to assume that these letter grades represent real standards and not the sort of grade inflation that dominates modern education. 

At a gut level, my choice is to try to inspire the A students. It is not that I believe that the other choices are unimportant or that I ignore most of the class. That being said, what puts a smile on my face in the morning when I walk into my empty classroom is the possibility that something I present is going to get into a kids head so that they find themselves thinking about it at home. 

When I prepare a lesson, my first question is why is this topic interesting. If I can figure out how to make the material interesting to me, there is a chance that I might make it interesting to someone else. When I teach, I am loud and passionate. In this sense, I am very much the product of the Haredi yeshiva system. You can think of me as a somewhat secularized rebbe.  

This attitude has its downsides. Consider the problem of skills training. Under the surface of every topic lie certain discreet skills. For example, reading requires phonics decoding and vocabulary. A good student can usually learn how to decode words and develop an advanced vocabulary passively by being exposed to books. That being said, most students need to be explicitly taught phonics and vocabulary even though they are not the interesting part of reading. Part of the appeal of Whole Language methods of teaching is that this approach allows teachers to actually sit down with students and read with them. The hard truth is that this approach does not meet the needs of most students who need to be explicitly drilled in the individual skills that make up affective reading.   

When I teach literature, what I want to do is present a book that fascinates me and make the case that they should share my fascination. The book does not have to be complicated. I have been blessed with a childlike mind and remain interested in children's things. For example, this past year, I taught A Wrinkle in Time. I loved having students bounce a ball in class and recite the multiplication table. Then, playing the role of It, the villain in the novel, I announced to the students that there is only one right answer to multiplication problems and we need to make sure that everyone answers in the right way. There is only one right way to bounce a ball and we need to torture kids to make sure that they bounce the ball properly. My way is the only way to live. I know what is best because I am a giant brain who is totally rational. As long as everyone is not like me, society will not be perfect and people will not be truly happy. We better get rid of all the people who are selfishly ruining society and making everyone else miserable by not simply complying. 

The reality was that, even though A Wrinkle in Time is listed as being for fifth graders, most of my students struggled with the vocabulary. I recognized that my students needed explicit instruction in vocabulary and was willing to do so, but my heart was never in it. This was always merely a chore that, like a kid going to school, I had to get through in order to be allowed to get back to the teaching I wanted to do. My antics in the classroom were certainly memorable and helped some students. That being said, I was not always what most of my students needed.

The year has passed and hopefully my students and I both learned something. It is summer now and I have the opportunity to think of how I can do a better job next year.  

     

The Moral Implications of Magic: Lord Voldemort (Part II)

 (Part I)

While Harry grows up under the Dursleys, Voldemort lives as a bodiless spirit in the forests of Albania. Then, not long before Harry gets his Hogwarts letter, Voldemort meets Professor Quirrell and convinces him to help steal the Philosopher's Stone. It is a pity that the book does not deal much with the relationship between Quirrell and Voldemort. We only see them interacting at the end when Voldemort has already become the dominant partner in the relationship, with Quirrell agreeing to be possessed by Voldemort and to drink unicorn blood. One imagines Quirrell as someone with low self-esteem, beaten down by a sense that no one respects him. When he first meets Voldemort, he sees Voldemort as a source of dark knowledge that he could use to gain power for himself and get back at everyone who ever looked down upon him. Clearly, Voldemort, lacking a body, needs Quirrell more than Quirrell needs Voldemort. Yet, somehow, Voldemort manages to turn the tables on Quirrell, making Quirrell the dependent one. One imagines Quirrell, afraid of being caught after his failure to rob Gringotts, becoming increasingly desperate and willing to do anything Voldemort says. This would have been particularly interesting to see because Voldemort is supposed to be a master manipulator on par with his power in the dark arts. 

Voldemort's attempt to steal the Philosopher's Stone is thwarted by Dumbledore's use of the Mirror of Erised, which makes it that the stone can only be found by someone who merely wants to find it but not use it. This is the perfect trap for Voldemort. It is Voldemort's own philosophy of power that prevents him from solving the Mirror of Erised and gaining the stone. By contrast, Harry can get the stone precisely because he does not subscribe to Voldemort's philosophy. Like being protected by his mother's sacrifice, this is another power that Voldemort knows not. 

The Philosopher's Stone ends with Voldemort back at square one, having lost Quirrell and still lacking a body. The Chamber of Secrets deals with Tom Riddle's diary, which he turned into a Horcrux. This memory of the young Voldemort is able to manipulate Ginny Weasley to the point that he is able to possess her and eventually force her to go to the Chamber of Secrets to serve as bait to lure Harry into a trap. Riddle, though, because he only understands conventional power, fails to appreciate what he is up against and that he is really walking into another of Dumbledore's traps.  

He assumes that just because Lucius Malfoy has removed Dumbledore from Hogwarts, Dumbledore has been defeated and can no longer help Harry. When Fawkes arrives with the Sorting Hat, Riddle simply doubles down on dismissing Dumbledore: "This is what Dumbledore sends his defender! A songbird and an old hat! Do you feel brave, Harry Potter? Do you feel safe now?" (pg. 316)  

Beyond killing Harry, Riddle is curious about Harry. How is it that he survived Riddle's future self? Even though Harry explains to Riddle that it was his mother's sacrifice that saved him, Riddle fails to appreciate the true significance of that sacrifice and what makes Harry special. 

So your mother died to save you. Yes, that's a powerful countercharm. I can see now ... there is nothing special about you, after all. I wondered, you see. There are strange likenesses between us, after all. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself. We even look something alike ... but after all, it was merely a lucky chance that saved you from me. (pg. 317)

Riddle needs to dismiss the thought that Harry might be special, but he clearly fears that it is true. He therefore turns to Slytherin's basilisk to kill Harry. He needs to show that it is he, with his power of Slytherin, that is special and not Harry. 

What Riddle fails to see is that Lily sacrificing herself was not merely a countercharm, but something that transcended magic, making Harry special in ways that have nothing to do with his ability to cast spells. This deeper spiritual blindness is mirrored by Riddle's practical blindness. He does not see that a phoenix like Fawkes can blind the basilisk, his tears can heal Harry, and that the Sorting Hat can call forth the Sword of Gryffindor to kill the basilisk. These objects, the practical manifestations of Harry's Gryffindor bravery and loyalty to Dumbledore, are enough to defeat Riddle, proving once again how special Harry really is. 

Just as Voldemort's attempt to kill baby Harry not only failed, but created the danger that Voldemort was trying to avoid, so too does Riddle's attempt to kill Harry here create the weapon to ultimately defeat the Horcruxes. Harry is able to use a basilisk fang to destroy the diary. By sending the basilisk against the Sword of Gryffindor, Riddle allows the sword to absorb the snake's poison, giving it the ability to destroy Horcruxes in the future.      

Voldemort next appears in The Goblet of Fire when Peter Pettigrew and Barty Crouch Jr. join him. Like Quirrell, these are people who turned to Voldemort out of an imagined sense of their own inferiority and not being appreciated by those they looked up to. Pettigrew felt that James, Lupin, and Sirius merely tolerated him, and Barty felt unloved by his father. With the Philosopher's Stone destroyed, Voldemort now wishes to use Harry's blood to refashion his old body. Still thinking of Lily's sacrifice in conventional terms, Voldemort calculates that using Harry's blood will allow him to touch Harry. What he does not consider is the possibility that there may be unforeseen consequences in further connecting himself to Harry. This is because Voldemort does not connect Lily's sacrifice to a higher moral order in the universe. As such, he fails to realize that he cannot simply manipulate it for his own ends as if it were simply a morally neutral form of technology. 

Upon capturing Harry and using his blood, it is not enough for Voldemort to kill Harry the boy. Voldemort needs to fight Harry in front of his Death Eaters to destroy the notion that Harry was ever anything special. Even after all these years, Voldemort is caught by this petty jealousy where he needs to feel uniquely special and is threatened by the possibility that Harry might be more special than him. Voldemort fails to properly evaluate Harry as a dueling opponent. Harry's power lies not in his ability to cast spells to counter the Unforgivable Curses, but in his willingness to resist Voldemort even under hopeless circumstances and his connection to Voldemort that Voldemort himself accidentally created. 

Because of the connection between Harry and Voldemort, manifested in Harry's scar, Harry was chosen by the brother wand to Voldemort's. This leads to the Priori Incantatum effect when the spells from the two wands connect. Voldemort's wand starts producing ghosts of the people he has killed, allowing Harry to escape. Voldemort's willingness to kill people to further his drive for power creates the obstacles to hinder that same drive for power. Furthermore, Voldemort has unwittingly strengthened Harry's wand, giving it the power to perform spells on its own. Voldemort believes that, now that he has been resurrected, his victory is inevitable, but the stage is merely being set for his eventual defeat. 

(To be continued ...)   

      

The Moral Implications of Magic: Lord Voldemort (Part I)

 

Contains spoilers for the Harry Potter series. 

In the previous post, I wrote about why magic is so closely intertwined with the struggle of good versus evil. If magic is real, you can either turn to evil and see magic as a form of power disconnected to any moral questions, or you can turn to good and recognize that, behind the magic, lies a higher moral authority. I would like to further examine this idea through the lens of Lord Voldemort, the villain of the Harry Potter series. 

Voldemort's philosophy is stated by Professor Quirrell at the end of Philosopher's Stone:

I met [Voldemort] when I traveled around the world. A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it. (pg. 291)

Voldemort consistently interprets events in the series from the perspective of power while ignoring the moral authority behind that power. Every opportunity to reconsider what he is doing simply confirms to him that he is right and there really is no moral law beyond power.  

As Tom Riddle, Voldemort first learns about magic when Dumbledore invites him to attend Hogwarts. For Voldemort, his ability to perform magic is the proof that he is special and not merely the orphan Tom Riddle. He, therefore, wants to be the most special wizard of all. Tom Riddle, named after his Muggle father, could never be special. Instead Riddle fashions the name of Lord Voldemort and even then wants the name to be so feared that wizards would not even call him by any name, but simply "You Know Who." There is no sense that he has been given a special gift that he never deserved and therefore has obligations to those not so generously gifted.  

Because Voldemort needs to be uniquely special, he is incapable of love. To love someone means to believe that they are special. This would take away from Voldemort's own sense of being special. By contrast, Voldemort embraces having underlings. The more Deatheaters he has to venerate him, the more special he becomes. It helps that most of the death eaters are members of the wizarding pureblood aristocracy. If even the wizarding elites bow before Voldemort, that shows his greatness.  

To maintain control over his Deatheaters, Voldemort needs to direct their hatred against, giving them purpose. Since the wizarding pure bloods tend to hate Muggle-borns, people  not born into elite wizarding families, they becomes Voldemort's target. Muggle-borns are people who, on the surface, are just like Voldemort, growing up as Muggles. He refuses to accept the idea that anyone could be given the gift of magic as that would mean that magic does not really make you special. Instead he sees his magic as coming from Salazar Slytherin and seeks out Slytherin's basilisk underneath Hogwarts castle, using his ability as a parselmouth. If he is Slytherin's heir than he deserves his power and has the right to use it against others. Voldemort hopes that being the heir of Slytherin with the power to refashion Hogwarts according to Slytherin's design, with no Muggle-borns, would establish him as a wizard on par with the founders of Hogwarts, forcing everyone to acknowledge his greatness.  

Voldemort is stopped, though, by Dumbledore, a wizard who combines incredible power with a mysterious lack of interest in its pursuit. Because Dumbledore honestly does not want power, he is immune to the young Voldemort's flattery and manipulation. From the beginning, Dumbledore sees Voldemort for what he is, someone with power uncoupled from morality. Long before Voldemort's nose falls away, Dumbledore sees Voldemort not as a young god, but as a monster. Voldemort refuses to even consider why someone like Dumbledore might turn away from power, being content to remain a schoolteacher, or how it could be that Dumbledore could still become so powerful despite rejecting dark magic. Instead, he insists that Dumbledore is a weak fool who allows his sentiments about love to hold him back from the unbridled pursuit of power. 

The problem of a life devoted to becoming the most powerful wizard who ever lived is that, no matter how strong a spell caster you become, there is still death. Instead of accepting death and living his life preparing for a final judgment, Voldemort's solution is to pursue Horcruxes. He splits his soul into different parts and puts the pieces into physical objects. In the Horcrux spell, Voldemort sees a form of magic so powerful as to conquer death. What he misses is the fact that the existence of Horcruxes demonstrate that the soul also exists and that it has a value so beyond conventional magic that one should not be willing to damage it for any amount of power. 

Since Voldemort does not believe in the power of love, he is unprepared for how Regulus Black would turn against him when he decides to leave Kreacher to die as part of setting up the chamber to house the locket Horcrux. This is important because Regulus' defiance against Voldemort is going to prefigure the defiance of Severus Snape and ultimately that of Lily Potter. Why should Regulus care about a mere house-elf like Kreacher? Why should Regulus be willing to sacrifice his life when Voldemort could give him a life of riches and power? Since Voldemort believes in nothing but power, he can never seriously consider such questions.  

If there is anything that should have alerted Voldemort to a higher power it is the existence of prophecy. Snape informs him of Trelawney's prophecy about a child who will come to challenge him. Instead of accepting the limits of his magic, Voldemort attempts to kill baby Harry and falls into the prophecy's trap. In order to satisfy Snape's request to spare Lily, he asks her to step aside and allow him to kill Harry. This allows Lily to sacrifice herself for Harry. Voldemort's Avada Kedavra curse backfires and his body is destroyed. Whatever power lies behind the prophecy is powerful enough to defeat Voldemort with only an unarmed mother and a baby. What Voldemort, though, sees is that his Horcruxes have proven to be more powerful than even death. As such, despite the setback, Voldemort thinks that his pursuit of power has been proven correct. All he needs now to do is wait for his opportunity to get his body back and he will seize control over the wizarding world and kill Harry Potter. From Voldemort's perspective, Harry is not really special at all but the fortunate beneficiary of chance. By killing Harry, everyone will see that it was Voldemort who was always the special one and fear him as the greatest dark lord ever.     

(To be continued ...)

The Moral Implications of Magic: Why Fantasy Needs Good and Evil

 

Essential to the genre of fantasy is the battle between good and evil. This does not mean that fantasy is simplistic in its morality. As Lewis noted in his review of Lord of the Rings, the characters, even Gollum, cannot be reduced to being either wholly good or evil even as good and evil are real forces that people must choose between. The challenge lies precisely in the fact that the characters are mixtures of these forces and the fight is less about defeating Sauron and his orcs, but the evil within.   

Tolkien's surprisingly nuanced understanding of evil is rooted in Tolkien's Augustinian worldview where evil is not an independent power, but a corruption of the good. There are two implications of this. One, the Devil was created good by God only to fall. Two, the Devil is fundamentally uncreative. He can take those things created good by God and corrupt them. Similarly, Sauron was created good before being seduced by Morgoth. Even Sauron's ability to create the rings of power was rooted in that element of good within him. Otherwise, he never would have been able to deceive the elves, who, contrary to the Rings of Power show, could never be accused of being fools.  

This fact that Sauron is fallen good rather than purely evil, creates the fundamental threat of Lord of the Rings. Worse than Sauron taking over Middle Earth is the possibility that someone (whether Frodo, Aragorn, Boromir or even Gandalf) will take up the ring to fight Sauron and become dark lords themselves. If Sauron was simply evil and not fallen, we would never take this threat seriously. To reinforce this danger, we have the character of Saruman the White, who was good for millennia only to fall in the years leading up to the story. If Saruman, Gandalf's superior on the White Council, could fall than even Gandalf is not safe from the ring's corruption. Ultimately, it is not Sauron who is the primary villain, but the ring and, by extension, the very people who are tempted to use it.   

Evil's importance to fantasy is inseparably tied to magic. To accept the existence of magic means to see it through one of two conflicting perspectives. To be evil means to see magic as power that some people can wield to place themselves above others, not just physically, but also morally. To be good means to see that magic indicates the existence of a higher power who created magic and to whom even the magic user must submit to. In the best of fantasy, while the dark lord may be out there to serve as the catalyst for the plot, the real struggle will be within the hero. Characters will fall or be redeemed based on what magic ends up meaning to them.

An example of the evil perspective can be seen in Glaucon's argument about the Ring of Gyges in Plato's Republic. In Glaucon's telling, morality is something that weak people invent. Anyone with power, say a magic ring that could turn them invisible, would quickly cast off all moral restraints and commit adultery and even murder. In the real world it is easy to see how political power can render people empathetically tone deaf. It is not hard to imagine a world with even greater power divides, such as between those with magic and those without, leading to magic users seeing non-magic users as animals to be killed for sport. 

This view can also be seen in the character of Uncle Andrew in Lewis' Magician's Nephew. Andrew tricks Polly into teleporting into another world and then blackmails Digory into going after her to rescue her. In his defense, he declares:

I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subject to do it on. Bless my soul, you'll be telling me next that I ought to have asked the guinea-pigs' permission before I used them! (pg. 23)

Digory has the same facts as his uncle, but sees the moral truth beyond them. He, therefore, responds:

I didn't' believe in Magic till to-day. I see now it's real. Well if it is, I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you're simply  a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories. Well, I've never read a story in which people of that sort weren't paid out in the end, and I bet you will be. And serve you right. (pg. 24) 

The existence of magic baptizes Digory's imagination so that he can no longer accept materialism, but, unlike his uncle, what he sees is not power that he can use to place himself over others. Instead, he comes to know a moral order that is as real as any physical object.  

While Uncle Andrew is a dilatant magician, playing around with things that he does not understand, Digory soon find himself dealing with the far more dangerous Queen Jadis, who destroyed her entire world. She feels no guilt about this. but declares:. "I was the queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will." (pg. 61) 

To be clear, Jadis, at this point, lacks the malice to be truly irredeemably evil. Instead, she comes across as more of a spoiled child. One imagines that she could still be saved if she could only have some sense smacked into her. The point of no return for Jadis is when she eats the apple and attempts to convince Digory to do the same. She is motivated by the desire to gain an even greater level of power for herself, mainly immortality. Digory is tempted by his desire to save his dying mother. What holds Digory back is that, by this point, he has come to know not just an abstract moral law, but the person of Aslan, who has commanded him to not eat the apple. Digory chooses to remain a normal boy, who will grow old and die but still have a relationship with Aslan. Jadis, seeing only power, chooses to become the White Witch. She may be immortal and destined to rule Narnia for a hundred years, making it forever winter and never Christmas, but she is forever beyond redemption.  

Esotericism in the Classroom

 

As someone who works in the American educational system, I find that I need to avoid openly stating my beliefs. Students ask me what I think of Donald Trump and I tell them that I do not discuss politics on school grounds. It may very well be that my students have as low an opinion of Trump as I do. If I agree to talk about the issues where I agree with them then I will be trapped in those situations where I disagree with them. Not talking about politics in school is a matter of principle. I honestly believe that it is not appropriate for adults to use the platform they have been given as teachers to advocate for their own political preferences. Kids deserve the space to be ignorant and not know how to solve the big issues of the day without someone trying to recruit them to some cause. 

The fact is, though, that I have another incentive to keep my politics to myself. Unlike the many teachers who can afford to openly plaster their leftwing politics on their classroom walls, I know that I risk my job if I were to ever openly talk about my politics in front of students. This reality has helped me appreciate the esotericism of Leo Strauss. Central to Strauss' narrative of intellectual history is the idea that pre-modern philosophers hid their views from the masses. One did not want to end up like Socrates, executed for challenging the gods of Athens. Of particular interest to Strauss was Maimonides, who openly admits, in The Guide to the Perplexed, that he contradicts himself in order to conceal things from certain readers.    

Having to be careful about saying my opinions has taught me something else about esotericism, it helps you become a better teacher and thinker. Part of the danger of having strongly held beliefs is that they become a form of identity. You believe less in the idea and more in the community of people who hold them. The idea becomes a password to show that you are a good person. For those who have started reading my dissertation posts, this is an essential feature of the military model with its social ideology. If you cannot simply pontificate your beliefs wherever you want but have to limit yourself to a personal blog, it gives you a space to examine your own ideas. Clearly, your ideas are not obviously true otherwise there would not be people who want to silence you. Are your opponents bad people; maybe, even if you are right, there really is something dangerous about what you believe?

In truth, arguing with students will not win them over to my side. As Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay argue, if your goal is to convince people that they are wrong, perhaps the most counterproductive thing you can do is argue with them. Whatever arguments you make are almost certain to simply demonstrate that you are on a different team and cause your interlocuter to become defensive. They will then respond with their own tribalistic reasoning and all meaningful discussion will break down. 

Recognizing that you are not going to be able to convince people that they are wrong, it is far more productive to let other people simply talk. This has the advantage of developing a relationship with the person as they do not perceive you as a threat. Furthermore, while you may not be able to convince them that they are wrong, there is still one person who can. However resistant people might be to outsiders telling them that they are wrong, they are perfectly capable of converting themselves if given the chance. Most people do not get much opportunity to really listen to themselves talk about what they believe so give them the chance. 

The proper setting for someone to change their own minds is while sitting by themselves reading a book. This was something that Protestants understood very well. It is the Bible that has the power to convince people that they are totally depraved sinners who can rely on Jesus and not anything else, including their own good deeds. After listening to people's arguments, rather than arguing, it is more productive to suggest a book (or a blog) for them to read. 

Being by yourself with a book has the advantage of not having to worry that the author is right. The author very well might live on the other side of the world or even be dead. Furthermore, disagreeing with the author does not break the connection. You can continue to read the book and the arguments might stick around in your head for years until you wake up and realize that you do not have the same opinions as you once did. The more this process is simply going on in your head the better as there will be less social pressure to conform to whatever your group tells you that good people believe. 

As a teacher working in a system in which just about everyone is to the left of me, I have had no choice but to follow the advice of Aaron Burr in the Hamilton musical: "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." 

It turns out that this is good advice and if I did not fear for my job, I would not have the discipline to keep to it. Students should feel free to talk about their beliefs and not worry about whether I think that they are right. As kids, they are most certainly wrong about nearly everything and that is fine. They do not need to hear my slightly less ignorant views. Instead, I can then serve as a librarian to suggest books for them to read. Who knows how they might be affected years down the road by an idea that has been bouncing around in their heads.   

What I wish to give over to my students, above all, is the spirit of skeptical inquiry. This is not a system of belief that I can ever argue them into. To be a skeptic means to be willing to attack your own ideas as vigorously as your opponent's. You become a skeptic by experiencing having your own mind being changed in subtle ways over many years of thinking and reading. Skepticism also has the virtue of helping people become more tolerant. Maybe that person I disagree with is actually right? Let me listen to them. If nothing else, I am honestly curious as to what they actually believe and how they came to their conclusions.

 

All Conquests After 1928 are Illegitimate: A Review of the Internationalists

 

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro is a book I learned a lot from even as I disagree with its premises. The authors consider our current system of international law to be mostly a positive thing, which they attribute to the 1928 Pact of Paris (also known as Kellogg-Briand). The basic idea of this agreement was to outlaw offensive warfare by declaring that countries needed to refer their disputes to arbitration and that all conquests done after 1928 were not to be recognized by the international community. (By declaring that only future conquests were illegitimate, the pact bypassed the issue of the British and French empires, which were created precisely through the sorts of actions that were now supposed to be illegal.) By implication, the pact granted relevance to international opinion. Now all wars involved the international community as other countries needed to decide whether the agreement had been violated and whether they could recognize new realities on the ground.

The practical implications of this agreement could be seen in the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. U. S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson refused to recognize Japan's control over Manchuria or the newly proclaimed State of Manchukuo. This struck the Japanese as rather hypocritical as it was hardly obvious how Japan's behavior in Manchuria was any worse than what European imperialists had been doing as a matter of course. Furthermore, Japan still bore bitter memories of Commodore Matthew Perry's diplomacy at gunpoint. Japan's mistake was that they invaded Manchuria three years too late; now there was a new set of rules. 

To be clear, as the authors note, the Pact of Paris did not stop Japan nor any of the other acts of Fascist aggression leading up to World War II. Furthermore, even the judges at Nuremberg ignored an attempt to use the Pact of Paris as a basis for prosecuting Nazi defendants. The idea was that since the actions of Nazi Germany were illegal according to the Pact of Paris, the defendants had no immunity against prosecution. What the authors want to argue is that, despite spending years as mostly a dead letter, in the post-war world, the logic of the Pact of Paris was taken up and became the basis for modern international law. For example, the pact's rejection of territorial expansion meant that, with the notable exception of Poland, international borders changed remarkably little after World War II, particularly if you compare it to World War I. Since World War II, borders have been rather stable and there have been few wars of territorial conquest. It is no longer worth it to conquer territory if the international community will not recognize it.   

For a book that is supposed to be about twentieth-century legal thought, the authors spend quite a lot of time on early modern history. As a foil to modern international law, they set up the seventeenth-century scholar Hugo Grotius. I have long considered Grotius to be one of those proto-Enlightenment thinkers who have been unfairly ignored by the general public. In reading this book, I found myself agreeing with Grotius and thinking that the world would be a much better place if we rejected modern international law and went back to something more along the lines of early modern international law as embodied by Grotius. 

Grotius' seventeenth-century Europe saw the emergence of states as distinct from Christendom or a personal monarchy, with Grotius' native Dutch Republic taking the lead, even as we are still a long way from secular democracies in the modern sense. For Grotius, the state was its own moral entity, distinct from its leaders or population. As such, while Grotius believed that states needed to justify their decisions to go to war, its leaders, population, and even the international community were exempted and even, in practice forbidden, from considering whether the state's justifications were valid. Soldiers fighting a war still had to obey the laws of war and refrain from committing war crimes as these did nothing to bring the war to a conclusion. That being said, they were not asked to be lawyers and historians qualified to evaluate whether their government was in the right. Furthermore, Grotius' version of international law had no third-party enforcement. States that allowed their soldiers to commit atrocities invited retaliation by the opposing army. Finally, since other countries were not expected to be knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about the morality of any particular foreign war, once a treaty was signed, that was the end of the matter. If a country managed to win a war and forced the defeated country to sign away territory in a peace treaty, the new borders must now be accepted by all.

What Hathaway and Shapiro dislike about Grotius is that his type of international law opened the door for all kinds of wars of expansion, with states coming up with factitious reasons to go to war without any oversight and then holding on to their ill-gotten gains. The authors point to the young Grotius working as a lawyer for the Dutch East India Company and defending the seizure of a Portuguese ship, seeing in this the foundation for his later work on international law. 

One of the examples the authors give of countries fighting according to Grotius' international law was the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. President Polk could declare war against Mexico over claims of unpaid debts that few people took seriously even at the time. American soldiers were required to obey their orders and not consult their consciouses. Similarly, the international community had no mandate to consider whether this was a war of aggression and if they had an obligation to intervene. Finally, the morality of Polk's declaration was forever placed beyond challenge by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the American Southwest to the United States. Whether or not the United States had the right to conquer this territory, it now belonged to the United States and attempting to take it away would violate international law. 

Surprisingly enough, Grotius had a direct influence on Japan and its justifications for imperialism. In the nineteenth century, Japanese scholars started reading Grotius as a blueprint for how to operate in the world. Japan was emerging into a world dominated by European countries who had certain understandings between themselves. If Japan was going to be a great power they needed to know what these rules were. Grotius, as the father of international law, seemed to offer them the key. This seemed to work until they invaded Manchuria and they discovered that the rules had changed.  

For all their criticism of Grotius, Hathaway and Shapiro fail to consider the practical benefit of Grotius' willingness to place the question of whether a state was right to go to war in a kind of moral black box. By not demanding that citizens have the right answer as to the morality of their country's war, we protect those citizens. Their country might be in the wrong, but we are still going to grant rights to the soldiers fighting this immoral war and even the politicians. This facilitates limiting the scope of the war and working toward a peace treaty. Allowing even immoral treaties forced upon a weaker power to stand also helps to support peace. We do not want to be refighting every morally questionable war, whether the Mexican-American War or any other war. 

Considering the amount of knowledge required to settle historically based disagreements between countries, modern international law seems designed to promote a regime of international elites, who are simply going to confirm their prejudices as to which country is right in any given dispute. The use of the International Criminal Court against Israel is a good example of this. Those making the case seem willfully blind to the question of what Israel needs to do in order to avoid another October 7th. The moment we consider military necessity, the whole trial would have to be postponed until after the war when Israeli generals would be free to answer questions about their decisions without compromising ongoing military operations.

Hathaway and Shapiro actually discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of the limits of the Paris Peace Pact. Neither the State of Israel nor Palestine existed in 1928 so the pact is useless for deciding borders. Worse, because the pact does not allow for conquest, it leaves us without a framework for a treaty. Any borders agreed to would be open to future challenges as the product of a forced treaty and, therefore, illegitimate. Having Grotius as our model for international law would allow the Palestinians to say that Israel wronged us but we lost the war and now need to move on and make peace.    

Daniel Boyarin's No-State Non-Solution

 

It is easy to dismiss most anti-Zionist Jewish activists as having little connection to Judaism. If your main involvement in Judaism comes when you say "as a Jew" before launching into a tirade against Israel, I feel perfectly comfortable in ignoring both the "as a Jew" and whatever follows about Israel. A notable exception among the anti-Zionists is Prof. Daniel Boyarin. Boyarin is a significant contemporary Jewish thinker, whose work on the Talmud and the origins of the Jewish-Christian split I take seriously. As such, there is reason not to simply dismiss his anti-Zionism, particularly as his anti-Zionism is clearly connected to his understanding of Judaism as a people that transcends politics. 

In reading Boyarin's No-State Solution, I find it fairly unobjectionable in terms of what it says. I agree with him that it is important for Judaism to transcend crude ethno-nationalism. Jews living outside the land of Israel have an important role to play within Judaism and it is deeply problematic to claim that Judaism can only function within the borders of a political state ruled by Jews. Judaism is not merely a religion in the Protestant sense of a collection of beliefs held by an individual nor is Judaism simply a national group bound by blood. A properly functioning Judaism is one that can deal with the complexity that goes into the various ways that people live out a Jewish identity. 

If I were reading Boyarin in 1924, I would have few disagreements with him. If I had lived back in the 1920s, political Zionism would not have been one of my goals. I would have been trying to strengthen Jewish life wherever Jews lived. Granted, recognizing the value of Israel as a spiritual center as well as a physical refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, I would have had a particular interest in promoting Jewish non-political life in Israel. In pursuit of this aim, I would have been attempting to cooperate with the British and the local Arab population. The deal I would have been trying to make with the Arabs would have been that they should allow mass immigration to Palestine along with some measure of local Jewish autonomy with the assurance that Palestine would eventually become part of a larger Arab federation. (I recommend Oren Kessler's Palestine 1936, which argues that this position was very much part of the mainline of Zionism during this period.) 

My main objection to Boyarin is what is left out in his book. We are not living in 1924 but in 2024. This means that the Holocaust has happened. We know that there are people who wield the power of modern states who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that Judaism is a menace that must be exterminated. Whether Israel should have been established in 1948, the fact is that nearly half of world Jewry currently lives in the State of Israel. This state is surrounded by hostile Arab armies and terrorist groups, who have been influenced by the Protocols and desire to murder Jews. Saying that this is the result of the actions of Zionists does not help as it only makes it easier to believe that our opponents are serious about carrying out the mass murder of Jews. Back in 1924, it was easy to dismiss European anti-Semites as being delusional; what did the Jews ever do to them? If the Nazis could carry out the Holocaust based on pure fantasy, what might Hamas be willing to do if ever given the chance. 

To be fair to Boyarin, his book was written before October 7th. That being said, I have no reason to assume that this past year has caused him to adapt his views. Far more problematic than anything he says is how he completely ignores what should be the primary question regarding the State of Israel as if it does not matter at all. Boyarin's unwillingness to even entertain the question of Jewish safety in the contemporary world, in Israel or anywhere else, collapses his entire argument. Once we begin to consider Jewish safety then one has to consider whether a Jewish willingness to break the limbs of Palestinian children throwing rocks is merely the manifestation of a macho fantasy of Jewish toughness or whether it is a pragmatic solution to save Jewish lives.  

It is almost as if the lives of regular people do not matter to Boyarin. Even Palestinian lives only matter to him in the abstract sense of being victims of Zionism. He gets to live as an academic using trite truths that one should have no need of saying to hide moral monstrosities that no one should have the gall to defend. All this while claiming to care about human lives.  

Three Body Blood Libel Narrative

 

Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem is one of my favorite works of science fiction. I have just started watching the Netflix adaptation so I do not yet have a firm opinion of it. One of the things that I admire about the book is its exploration of the insidious power of propaganda. At the beginning of the novel, we are treated to a mob of Cultural Revolution students calling for the blood of a professor for teaching the "heretical" theory of relativity. This raises the question of how one goes about creating such fanatics. We are given a possible answer later in the story with the Trisolaran video game. 

(Spoiler Alert)

The alien Trisolarans, in order to prepare the way for their invasion of Earth, are recruiting human followers. Their method is through a video game. The game appears innocent at first. What players do not realize until they are well advanced into the game is that they have been learning the history of the Trisolarans and that these Trisolarans are not fiction. Having absorbed Trisolaran propaganda, the human players come to believe that the beauty of the game indicates that the Trisolarans must be virtuous and that it would be a good thing if they took over the Earth. To be clear, what makes the Trisolarans so interesting as villains is that, throughout the series, the reader is repeatably tempted to believe that the Trisolarans actually are good at heart, despite what they do, because of their artistic talent. 

The obsessed game players come to form a society to help the Trisolarans, the Earth Trisolaris Organization (ETO). Having come to completely identify with the Trisolarians, members of the ETO turn into utter fanatics in their desire to betray humanity. They hate humanity and believe that the only way they can redeem themselves and become truly Trisolaran is by destroying the human race. As such, members of the ETO have this schizophrenic view of the Trisolarans. Much like Jewish supporters of the Palestinians, they simultaneously believe that the Trisolarans will bring about a golden age where both species live in peace together and that the Trisolarans will wipe out humanity because humans do not deserve to live.         

Considering this idea that you can create fanatics by surrounding people with a propaganda narrative, I was struck by the Time review of the series. Normally, you would think that a review of a show based on a book written in Chinese nearly twenty years ago would find no need to bring in contemporary Western politics. Instead, we are treated to the following paragraph:     

What resonates most about the series is its ambivalence about the prospect of an alien civilization annihilating humanity. The Oxford Five’s debate on the matter does seem timely, in a world where, in a state with anti-trans policies, a non-binary teen dies a day after being beaten at school; and the massacre of 1,200 people in one country is answered by the killing of 30,000 people and counting next door. Even without extraterrestrial meddling, scientists’ decades of warnings about the climate crisis didn’t prevent 2023 from setting a record for carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

One is struck by the dishonesty of the claims being made. The student in Oklahoma did not die from injuries sustained in a fight that it seems they started so it is absurd to fault State officials (or, for that matter, Chaya Raichik). Israel is not simply killing people out of revenge. They are attempting to go after members of Hamas who carried out the massacre even as the fact that Hamas has embedded itself among Gazan civilians guarantees that many innocent Gazans will die as well. The main reason why carbon emissions continue to rise is that people outside of the West, particularly in China, have been making economic progress and can now afford cars. 

The point of throwing these comments in the middle of a review is to serve a narrative that closely parallels that of the ETO. There are these terrible people, religious Christians and Zionists, who are out to murder trans-kids and Palestinians. They are also responsible for global warming. Clearly, if we do not form mobs and murder these people, the whole Earth is going to be destroyed. As with all good propaganda, the point is not to make arguments as arguments require evidence and can be countered. What you want is a narrative as you cannot argue with a narrative. It is simply what “everyone” already knows to be true  

Paulo Freire's Bank of Motte and Bailey

There is a type of Motte and Bailey argument where you offer a strawman version of the opposition that no serious person believes. Having presented a problem that does not really exist or at least has been greatly exaggerated, you then offer a solution that sounds innocent, mainly not to do the thing that no one is really doing anyway, but really is quite radical. Then, in true Motte and Bailey fashion, when called out as to what is really being argued for, you then retreat into the claim that you are only opposing the thing that no one actually supports anyway.

Paulo Freire is a good example of this. It is clear to me that the education teachers who had me read his work did not really understand him. In all fairness, Freire is not an easy author to understand. Reading a work like Pedagogy of the Oppressed, most readers are only going to come away grasping his opposition to the banking model of education where the teacher is seen as depositing knowledge into the heads of students who are rendered passive figures in this process.

To be clear, I am not saying that Freire is wrong on this issue. On the contrary, the problem with Freire’s position is that he is saying something that just about anyone who has ever taught has agreed with. While it should be acknowledged that teachers presumably have knowledge about material that students do not and that the job of a teacher is to convey some of that knowledge, no one seriously believes that this is all that goes into teaching. There is still the issue of how you convey that information and also the building of a personal relationship with students combined with incentives to offer the circumstances where students are likely to want to learn. This is all the more so in modern education where information is so readily and cheaply available. Every teacher needs to constantly ask themselves the question: what am I giving students that they cannot easily get through Google and YouTube?

Competent teaching is going to be a combination of giving over information as part of the formal hard education and the creation of systems to offer informal soft education. Reasonable people are going to fall along a spectrum. Different students will benefit from different teachers depending on their personalities and a variety of other factors.  

If all Freire was saying was that teachers should not try to simply stuff facts into their students’ heads, his work could be considered trite but innocuous. The problem is that Freire has a deeper agenda hidden in his rather dense prose. For Freire, the true purpose of a teacher is not to teach people practical skills like reading, enabling them to get jobs and function within a capitalist economy. In truth, teachers are not really supposed to teach anything. As Marxist revolutionaries, the teacher is supposed to go among the people and arouse their innate revolutionary spirit. That being said, what teachers are supposed to discover is that the students already possess the revolutionary spirit in contrast to the teacher who is tainted simply by the fact that they went through the capitalist education system. As such, there is a dialectic/contradiction in Freire’s work in which it would seem that the teacher is not even supposed to be teaching the students Marxism, but rather is supposed to be learning from the students, undermining the dichotomy of teachers and students.  

As I mentioned previously, I do not believe that even most education teachers, let alone teachers in training, understand Freire. I assume that a Straussian model is at work. A handful of activists have pushed Freire into the curriculum precisely because they understand his esoteric agenda. Most education professors agree to teach him because they only understand the exoteric mask. The teachers in training end up being corrupted by Freire but it is not because they understand even much of the exoteric material. This would require that they bother to do the assigned reading. They understand enough to recognize that knowledge of their field is not that important so they do not have to read much beyond the textbook. Thus Freire becomes a license for teachers to do what they were already inclined to do mainly to remain ignorant of what they are supposed to be teaching while imagining that they are somehow teaching higher critical thinking skills that transcend their field. 

What one should take away from this is that if you see someone raising a problem that does not really exist or is greatly exaggerated, pay close attention to their solution. You can count on the fact that they have no intention of solving the problem; why would someone bother to solve a non-existent problem? The solution is not going to really be not to do what no decent person is doing anyway but something fundamentally indefensible in the light of clear language.  

Orual's Blindness: Understanding the End of Till We Have Faces

 

Years ago, I did a series of posts on C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, but I never really felt happy with how I explained the ending. Essentially, I tried to keep with the idea that Orual is right and the gods acknowledge this fact by offering her salvation even though she is their enemy. I would like to take another pass at explaining the ending and make the case that the ending is worthy of the rest of the book. 

Till We Have Faces, is, I would argue, Lewis' greatest book. What is so impressive about this work is Lewis' ability to create a spiritual anti-hero in the form of Orual. As I have previously argued, part of the difficulty of writing good religious fiction is that it requires one to be able to seriously imagine going "off the derech" and abandoning the faith. Most religious people remain so precisely because they cannot see themselves as following a different path and they want to read fiction that confirms their belief that there is not another plausible option for them. As with Milton's Satan (See Lewis' Preface to Paradise Lost), Lewis' point in making Orual intellectually attractive (in contrast to her physical ugliness) is to challenge us. What does it say about us if we find ourselves liking Orual and inclined to give her a pass for the terrible thing that she does, mainly forcing Psyche to violate Cupid's commandment and destroying her happiness?  

Admittedly, the problem with Till We Have Faces is the ending. It is easy to understand the majority of the novel, which is Orual's argument against the gods, mainly that they should either leave us alone or reveal themselves; they should not play games with us, leading us to wonder about them. The gods' answer to Orual is not so clear. It seems that Orual's question of why the gods hide themselves is better than the answer that we cannot see them until we have faces. 

Let us begin with Lewis' most important change from the original story that Orual is unable to see Cupid's palace and therefore does not believe Psyche when she claims that she is now married to a god. On the surface, this makes Orual more sympathetic as her motive becomes a perfectly legitimate skepticism as opposed to jealousy. This fact, though, covers Orual's tragic flaw that she is blind. The fact that Orual is blind to spiritual things like Cupid's palace, raises the question of what other spiritual things is Orual blind to. 

There is Orual's treatment of the Fox and Bardia where Orual does not treat them nearly as well as she imagines. As we shall see, this is important but not simply as a matter of arguing that Orual is not such a nice person. The big thing that is in front of Orual (and us the reader) the entire time was that Psyche is a goddess and had been so even before she was taken by Cupid. (This is meant to parallel the ministry of Jesus where the apostles spend years with Jesus without ever understanding who he was and what he was actually here on Earth to accomplish.) Once we accept that Psyche is a goddess taking on human form then the entire story changes and Orual's argument against the gods collapses. 

By becoming human, Psyche choses to suffer in order to elevate the humans around her with her divinity. Psyche's suffering is caused not by a jealous Venus but by humans like Orual, who never appreciate or love her like another god can. What Orual thinks as the gods' demand that Psyche be sacrificed is the gods coming to save Psyche from the torment of having to live with humans. Even here, Psyche's redemption from her life as a human is incomplete. She is unable to look upon Cupid's face because she is still holding on to a human aspect of herself, mainly her love for Orual. It should be understood that Cupid's commandment to not look at his face was never a trap but simply an acknowledgment, as the gods know the future, that Psyche would sacrifice herself for Orual by looking at Cupid's face simply because Orual demanded that she do it.  

Orual, because of her misguided love, fails to leave things as they are and pursues Psyche but she is unable to even see the palace, the lower truth that Psyche is now married to a god, let alone the higher truth that Psyche had always been a goddess even when Orual changed her diapers. Unable to convince Orual of the truth, Psyche undergoes the ultimate sacrifice of giving up the bliss of her unity with Cupid. The only way for Orual to be saved is for Psyche to suffer for her sake and for Orual to come to see that suffering. Only then will Orual be able to see Psyche for who she really is and become unified with that divinity by having Psyche forgive her. 

It should have been enough for Orual to see that the palace was real after Pysche looked at Cupid's face and know that her unbelief cost Psyche everything. The problem is that convincing Orual that the gods are real simply causes her to blame the gods for Psyche's misfortune. What sort of god hands out random commandments with extreme consequences for failing to keep them? If the gods are the ones in the wrong then Orual was right in opposing them even if she was mistaken in not believing in them. In fact, Orual's unbelief is one more thing that can be blamed on the gods. She would have believed in them if they had only shown themselves to her. As such, curing Orual of her spiritual blindness is going to be a process taking many years.   

It is important to realize the source of Orual's blindness. How is it that she could be the person who knows Psyche best and still not realize that she is a goddess? Orual's problem is that she has been intellectually seduced by the Fox. Whether or not the Fox actually believes the gods literally exist, for him, the gods are theoretical abstractions with no relevance to human existence. What makes the Fox's unbelief so plausible is that he is, by human standards, a virtuous person. If the Fox can be virtuous simply because of his Stoic principles and not because he fears that the gods will send him to Hell then he does not need the gods and can simply ignore them. Furthermore, since Orual lacks the framework of a simple faith where of course the gods exist and she needs to get right with them, Orual naturally comes to try to turn the tables on the gods where she judges them to decide if they are worthy of her belief. (See Lewis' "God in the Dock" essay.) Orual's right to judge the gods becomes all the more plausible once she becomes, by human standards, a good queen, who rightfully and fairly stands in judgment over others. 

Here is where Orual's treatment of Bardia and the Fox becomes crucial. The fact that Orual makes them important people at her court does not really improve their lives. This gives Orual reason to question whether she really is, with all of her godlessness, so virtuous. Furthermore, the fact that her problem in treating Bardia and the Fox is that she clings to them out of a selfish human love for them, raises the question of whether she was wrong to cling to Psyche. Once Orual's belief in her own virtue is challenged, her case against the gods becomes vulnerable. The gods are virtuous in ways that we cannot ever be. One needs to believe in the gods in order to be judged by them because even to be condemned by the gods is better than living in the knowledge that, with all of your flaws, you are the closest thing to true virtue in the universe. (Think of the horror of living in a Lovecraftian universe even if you assumed that Cthluhu was not going to rise up during your lifetime.)     

In the end, the only way for Orual to come to know the truth about Psyche is through this roundabout way where she would cause Psyche to lose Cupid, become queen, fail Bardia and the Fox, write a book against the gods, and demand that they stand trial. It is only then that Psyche is revealed for who she was all along. Orual is able to see how she had wronged Psyche and, despite all that, Psyche loved her so much as to sacrifice everything to allow her to see. The gods had never been hiding from Orual. It was she who had been covering her eyes not to see them all along until they finally backed her into a corner where she could no longer refuse to see them. 

From this perspective, Orual, even though she finds redemption in the end, is the villain of the story. For me though, seeing her as a villain only makes for more interesting as a character. She may be an appealing villain but that simply raises the question of what it says about us that we can find such a villain attractive even to think of her as the hero. Are we freethinking individuals with the courage to stand for our principles even against the gods or are we trying to hide from a world in which the gods are real because we do not want to face the consequences.   

 

The Theology of the Romance Novel

I confess that I have a fondness for reading the descriptions of romance novels and I occasionally submit myself to the sadomasochist act of reading the books themselves. What intrigues me about romance novels is that they function essentially as frum novels (fruvels) with a clear theology and theodicy that make them utterly predictable.

Consider some sample texts from books descriptions:

Together, they journey through everything Quinn's been too afraid to face, and along the way, Quinn finds the courage to be honest, to live in the moment, and to fall in love. (Excuse Me While I Ugly Cry by Joya Goffney.)

She's had enough of playing the good wife to a husband who thinks he's doing her a favor keeping her around. Now, she's going to take some time for herself ... she's going to reclaim the carefree girl who spent lazy summers sharing steamy kisses with her first love on Sullivan's Island. Daring to listen to her inner voice, she will realize what she wants ... and find the life of which she's always dreamed. (The Last Original Wife by Dorothea Benton Frank.)

She can only trust her heart…and hope it won't lead her astray. (The Bookstore on the Beach by Brenda Novak.)

If she can dare to let go of the life she thought she wanted, she might discover something even more beautiful waiting for her beneath a painted moon. (The Vineyard at Painted Moon by Susan Mallery.)

Violet is tempted to take the ultimate step to set herself free and seek a life of her own conviction with a man whose cause is as audacious as her own. ... Violet's story of determination and desire unfolds, shedding light on the darkness of her years abroad...and teaching Vivian to reach forward with grace for the ambitious future - and the love - she wants most. (The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams.)

These stories are all framed by a particular worldview. The goal of life is to gain self-fulfillment in the form of romantic love. As Nietzsche understood, in our modern world, God is dead (i.e. irrelevant). This leaves man as the only standard of moral value. Since we can no longer expect to find fulfillment in a relationship with God, the alternative is to find fulfillment in the self.

Romance novels, like much of what comes out mass media, takes this concept and gives it a populist twist. The average person cannot plausibly expect to be able to come into themselves by becoming a great artist, writer, or philosopher. That being said, the average person can imagine having sex with someone and that this will lead to a relationship that will lead to them feeling fulfilled. The fact that the sex may violate traditional communal norms, rooted in religion, helps make the sex an act of self-fulfillment. The protagonist is able to choose themselves over the demands of society, demonstrating that their personal happiness is more important than following the expectations of the community.

At the beginning of the story, the protagonist should be someone living under comfortable circumstances but lacking romantic self-fulfillment. This serves to demonstrate the all-importance of love. You can have everything but your life will still be worthless if you do not have romance. If the protagonist does find themselves in a difficult situation at the beginning of the novel that difficulty should clearly arise out of the fact that they were already living without romantic love. For example, the housewife finding out that her husband has been cheating on her and is going to divorce her, leaving her with nothing, has an economic problem that is really a romance problem.

Our protagonist, having lived their lives by the rules of society and now coming to recognize that this has not worked out for them as well as they might have hoped, is suddenly confronted with someone who presents some sort of challenge in the real world that should reflect the raw sexual desire they awaken in the protagonist. After an obligatory round of saying no (the equivalent of the Campbell hero initially turning down the quest), the sex should happen, leading to a heightening of the conflict, which will clearly be resolved by the protagonist deciding that choosing to "follow their heart" is more important than anything else in the world. At this point, the problem will melt away and a happy ending is to be presumed.

As a work of religious fiction, a romance novel will contain some form of theodicy where the believer confronts some challenge to their faith which they must overcome to emerge as stronger believers. For example, a person prays really hard that God should cure his mother's cancer and it does not work; how could God let this happen? The believer will eventually learn that God had a plan for him all along, allowing him to develop a deeper relationship with God as something more than a genie who grants wishes.

In romance novel theodicy, the protagonist will have been burned before in romance, a teenage romance the did not work out or a divorce. After given up hope of true love, an opportunity comes their way, if they are "bold" enough to "believe" once more and take it. As with conventional religion, the believer has been given real evidence that their faith does not work, yet they are supposed to believe anyway. It takes a truly genuine faith to ignore evidence and believe anyway.

This use of theodicy is really a smokescreen. Like most works of religious fiction, romance novels suffer from a lack of real conflict. The point of a Christian novel is presumably about the protagonist choosing Jesus, which needs to be something simple enough that the reader can expect to be able to imitate. An exception to this rule would someone like John Bunyan. As a Puritan, operating within the salvation through grace tradition, Bunyan wanted to make the opposite point that accepting Jesus was something so difficult that no person could ever hope to succeed through their own efforts without active divine assistance. Good religious fiction requires an author who can truly imagine following a different path and get the reader to take that alternative seriously. This makes for good fiction but is totally counter-productive as religious propaganda.

Similarly, there can be real conflict in a Jane Austen or a Bronte sister novel. An Austen or a Bronte heroine is not free to follow her heart. She has a navigate a world in which she has limited economic opportunities and, if she is cast out by her family and community, death by starvation or tuberculosis is a real possibility. By contrast, the conflict of a conventional romance novel needs to be solved by the protagonist deciding that romance is all they care about. The point of the romance novel is precisely the fantasy that life's problems can be solved so easily. A good romance novel would require readers to seriously grapple with the struggle between duty to society and personal fulfillment without taking it as a given that the latter should take precedence. This would make for a good novel but would fail as propaganda for the religion of self-fulfillment.   

It might be interesting to, following the logic of Pride Prejudice and Zombies, to take a conventional romance novel and make it about accepting Jesus. A highly successful career woman has her life overturned when her godless husband cheats on her and demands a divorce. Moving back home, she runs into the handsome former high school sports team captain that she lost her virginity to as a teenager. Desperate to feel valued, she flings herself at him. The guy confesses that he really wants to sleep with her but he cannot because he has accepted Jesus. The woman is so impressed by the guy's self-control that she decides to go to church to accept Jesus. The night before, the husband returns and apologies. Now we have "drama." Will the woman still accept Jesus and will she dump who no good husband for her "true love?" She tells her husband that she can forgive him because there is someone who died for her sins. The two of them go to church to accept Jesus together and run into the other guy. Will our male hero fight for the woman he loves? No, the two men shake hands as brothers in Christ and the woman drives off with her husband, having turned down the really hot guy.  

 

 

 

 

Harry Potter and the Acceptance of Death

 

Last night, I finally finished Eliezer Yudkowsky's fan fiction series, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It truly is a work of genius that should be recognized alongside the original series. It should be acknowledged that Rowling, for all of her talents with comic dialogue, mystery, and crafting a world you would wish to visit, had a weakness when it came to crafting magic systems and thinking through the implications of a power once written into canon. One can think of Yudkowsky as a satire on the original and an attempt to fashion a smarter version. 

Yudkowsky uses his alternative version of Potter as a means to talk about rationalism. It is to his credit that he is able to write a deeply ideological work of fiction without his message dragging down the entire story. It helps that becoming a rationalist superhero is actually something difficult to accomplish. You cannot snap your fingers and become a rationalist even if Yudkowsky's Harry does do quite a bit of finger snapping. Contrast this with accepting the non-Puritan version of Jesus as your personal savior or deciding to "follow your heart." Such ideologies make for boring fiction because there is no real obstacle that readers should take seriously. All the main character needs to do is get over themselves and do what they, deep down, really wanted to do all along.  

Furthermore, Yudkowsky deserves a lot of credit for his handling of Draco Malfoy and Professor Quirrell. Yudkowsky's Malfoy is not simply a bully but a smart kid, who has been raised by a terrible parent, Lucius Malfoy, and the wider society of Death Eaters to believe that non-purebloods are diluting wizarding magic and risk causing magic to disappear from the world. There is something highly relatable about him as he is introduced by Harry to science as something that forces him to think in ways completely contrary to how he is used to operating. Specifically, Malfoy has to come to terms with the notion that there is an objective reality that will not change no matter the rhetorical arguments or threats he makes. I would not say that Malfoy becomes a good person in the end, merely a less evil one. 

Rowling never bothered to develop Quirrel as a character. His function in the Philosopher's Stone was to be the butler, a character sitting off to the side that the reader does not really pay attention allowing them to become the surprise villain. When I first read the book back in 2000, I had to stop to remember who Quirrel even was. Yudkowsky's Quirrel is a brilliant teacher with a clear dark streak who becomes the primary mentor for Harry. Ultimately this also allows for the development of Lord Voldemort as someone with a plausible appeal. (The revelation, in the end, about Quirrel mostly parallels Rowling.) 

There is a major philosophical difference between Yudkowsky and Rowling that I wish to call attention to. Essential to the Rowling version is an acceptance of death. Already in the Philosopher's Stone, we are introduced to the idea that Nicholas Flamel would allow the stone to be destroyed even though it will lead to his death. This sets up Harry's actions at the end of the series where he overcomes the temptation of the Deathly Hallows and ultimately gives himself up to Voldemort to die. Voldemort, by contrast, is someone who flees death (something hinted at in his name). He made Horcruxes to keep himself alive, has Quirrel drink unicorn blood, and tries to steal the Philosopher's Stone. 

Voldemort only cares about his continued existence and therefore refuses to recognize the possibility that there are principles worth dying for. As such, he is unprepared for Lilly Potter being willing to sacrifice herself even though she had no reason to assume that her death would actually save baby Harry. Ultimately, this sets Voldemort up for being unprepared for people being willing to sacrifice themselves in opposing him even after he has taken over wizarding Britain and resistance is futile.  

Voldemort's pursuit of immortality is connected to his lack of any kind of friendship. Voldemort, even as Tom Riddle, is self-sufficient. He does not need or desire other people. The Death Eaters are servants to be used. He does not care about them nor does he rely on them unless forced by circumstances. If Voldemort is someone who is going to go on forever then there is no reason to attach himself to people who might live on after him. By contrast, Harry is distinctly dependent upon others, mainly Ron and Hermoine. There is no pretense that he could succeed on his own or that he is of ultimate importance. This allowed Rowling to plausibly sell Harry's death in Deathly Hallows. It would not have been inconceivable for Ron and Hermoine, helped by Neville, to finish Voldemort off without Harry.  

It should be noted that Rowling was fairly open-ended when it comes to the afterlife. Not even Dumbledore dares to claim that there really is life after death. Rowling's point was that death should be accepted with courage and part of that courage is not knowing that there is anything to look forward to. Nearly Headless Nick expresses regret for hanging on to the sure thing of life as a ghost instead of accepting what lies beyond, regardless of what that might be. One thinks of the example of Socrates agreeing to drink hemlock rather than violate his philosophical principles while not knowing if there is an afterlife or just an eternal sleep. 

Yudkowsky devotes much of that later part of his work to attacking this view. Harry refuses to believe in souls even when confronted with ghosts. The mark of the fundamental failure of the wizarding world in general and Dumbledore in particular in living up to the standards of reason is that, even with all of their power to violate the laws of physics, they have failed to eliminate death. Essential to Harry's ability to fight dementors (who become exponentially scarier in Yudkowsky's hands) is that Harry recognizes them as death and as a blight on the world that should not exist and that he will one day eliminate. This opposition to death eventually sets the ending with the Philosopher's Stone.  

To respond to Yudkowsky, it should first be acknowledged that it is a positive good to extend the human lifespan through advances in medicine. It is reasonable to imagine that future generations of humans will be able to live hundreds or even thousands of years due to superior technology. This is distinct from immortality though, presumably, longer lifespans will delay the development of a true awareness of death. As a kid, I had a difficult time imagining myself as an adult. Part of becoming an adult is an ability to imagine oneself growing old and then dying. 

I do not wish to dismiss immortality as a good thing. If someone were to offer me some, I certainly would not be able to resist the temptation. It may be possible to imagine a morality for immortals. That being said, our morality rests on the deeply rooted assumption that we are mortal. Being mortal forces us to consider whether life might have a higher meaning that will go on after us. This can be as part of the divine mind or the walls of Uruk. 

This affects how we relate to other people. We are social beings who aspire to be part of institutions that will live on after us. Part of being a parent is the recognition that you will eventually grow old and die. Instead of trying to be the main character of your story, your job is to be an important side character in someone else's story. To truly embrace this perspective, you cannot try to live through your children but, instead, must accept that your children will be different from you. Your job is not to create a clone of yourself but to equip another person, with their own identity, with the tools they need to achieve greatness. Perhaps your job is to read Harry Potter to them and then start printing off chapters of Methods of Rationality and reading them as well. 

Does Reading Make Someone Less Likely to Be Evil?

 

"I know that having a good vocabulary doesn't guarantee that I'm a good person," the boy said. "But it does mean I've read a great deal. And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil." ...

There are, of course, plenty of evil people who have read a great many books, and plenty of very kind people who seem to have found some other method of spending their time. But the Baudelaires knew that there was a kind of truth to the boy's statement, and they had to admit that they preferred to take their chances with a stranger who knew what the word "xenial" meant, ... (Slippery Slope, p. 95-96).

I confess that would I be more willing to trust someone who knew what xenial meant or, for that matter, had read Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. This is because they have something in common with me. As such, it is plausible to imagine that they would be able to better empathize with me, which would make it harder for them to betray me. Of course, this line of thinking can easily be manipulated by con artists, who know that they can trick people into trusting them by convincing them that they have the same taste in art or religion or belong to the same ethnic group.  

Does reading actually help make someone less likely to be evil? If you are a humanities person, whose life and profession center around books, there is much at stake in being able to claim that this is so. Consider the question, are plumbers less likely to be evil? The issue is irrelevant as society requires plumbers in order to function regardless of their moral quality. If studying to become a plumber had the same effect on one's moral development as spending a year on Korriban communing with the force spirits of ancient Sith Lords then so be it. It is not so obvious that society needs history and literature teachers if we cannot assume that they will contribute to the moral development of students. As such, those of us in these professions need to either be able to make a convincing case that we promote morality or confess that what we do is merely a hobby for people of leisure, much the same as gardening or video games.   

This renders book readers vulnerable to moral hazard. People's actual morality is likely to be inversely proportional to their belief in their morality. The more you think that you are a good person, the more likely you are going to be willing to justify doing bad things to your opponents. If they oppose you, they must be bad people who deserve what is coming to them. Why should a few bad people be allowed to stand in the way of all the wonderful things a good person such as yourself can do for the world? How truly dangerous must a person be whose sense of self is wrapped around books and needs to believe that these books have made them better people? 

The moral hazard goes even further. If people who read are morally superior then it makes sense that they should rule over the plumbers as philosopher kings. This goes to the heart of liberal arts. Historically, liberal meant "free." The liberal arts were those things that could be studied by the wealthy leisure class, who did not have to worry about developing a useful trade. To engage with the liberal arts itself was a justification to rule. The aristocrat, freed from the constraints of earning a living and allowed to study things simply to develop their souls, deserved to rule. Since they did not need to worry about money and personal gain, they could act for the "common good," which they learned through the liberal arts. This aristocratic ethos was later embraced by Roussoueauians and eventually Marxists. Neither of these ideologies are really about empowering the people or the working class. They are defenses for rule by intellectuals.    

There is a plausible case to be made that reading helps people expand their circle of empathy. Reading fiction and history allows one to enter the heads of people who are different from ourselves and recognize their humanity. If you can be emotionally moved by space aliens, perhaps you can be moved by the plight of refugees or even your next-door neighbor. This ability to empathize, though, would still require that the reader not believe that their reading is making them more empathetic. Otherwise, we fall back down the moral hazard hole, leaving us merely with someone who knows how to employ the rhetoric of empathy to claim the moral high ground and the right to rule. 

Has reading made me a better person? I enjoy reading as a means of coming to a better understanding of the world around me. My self-education through books has continued even after I failed to earn my doctorate when I could no longer assume that books would lead me to a position of respect and authority. Perhaps, my reading can be defended on the grounds that it has saved me from the sin of worldly ambition. Regardless, I will return to my joyously Sisyphean quest to get through my ever-expanding reading list.    

Walking With Aslan: What Only Art Can Convey

 

In the previous post, I talked about the idea that art is needed to express those things that the artist cannot express in formal words. If the artist really understands what they want to say they should simply come out and say it otherwise what you have is mere propaganda. I wish to further explore this idea. One of the primary things that formal writing cannot express is an emotional connection to an idea. 

Consider the example of Aslan from C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series. On the surface, Aslan is simply a stand-in for Jesus. He is the Son of the Emperor across the sea. He takes on physical form as a lion to come among the animals of Narnia. In the early medieval understanding of the purpose of the passion, Satan had a deal with God where he had the right to all sinners as long as he never took anyone innocent. Jesus came down to Earth and lived a perfect life before being executed. He then tricked Satan into trying to take his soul. By doing this, Satan nullified his agreement with God, allowing Jesus to rescue the souls of all believers from Hell. Similarly, the White Witch has a deal with the Emperor that she has the right to kill all traitors including the human Edmund. Aslan makes a deal that, in exchange for giving up her claim on Edmund, he will take Edmund's place. The Witch kills Aslan. What she does not realize is that killing the innocent Aslan will break the Stone Table upon which her agreement is written and bring Aslan back to life. Aslan is then able to free all the creatures that the Witch had turned into stone. 

If Narnia could be boiled down into Aslan equals Jesus, there would be little point to the books. Lewis could have simply explained the doctrine of atonement in a straightforward child-friendly manner for kids to either accept or reject. What Narnia offers that no lecture on Christian theology could ever possibly convey is that emotional connection to the event. To me, the most profound scene in the entire Chronicles is when Aslan allows Susan and Lucy to accompany him to the Stone Table. There is that moment where Aslan's shoulders slump and asks the girls to put their hands on him. It is as if even the mighty Aslan struggles with the enormity of what he is about to do. The reader then joins the girls in surprise and horror as Aslan allows himself to be captured, humiliated, and murdered. We get to experience their despair, seeing that everything is now lost, followed by their joyous surprise to see Aslan standing alive before them with the Table broken. 

This emotional connection to the drama of the Cross is a central concept for Christian art. One thinks of the example of Michelangelo's Pieta. One of my personal favorites is the hymn Stabat Mater, which contemplates Mary's suffering at the foot of the Cross. 

This is not something that you can argue someone into. The biggest challenge to faith, even above any intellectual arguments, is the simple fact that even children raised within a particular religious tradition are still cut off from its artistic culture. You can give a kid all the Sunday school lectures in the world, but it is not going to help unless they are emershed within Christian art so they could contemplate the living faith that could compel an artist to produce such work. Narnia is not a trick to get kids to read about Jesus and make him look cool. It is an invitation to emersh oneself within a larger Christian artistic tradition where the mourning of Good Friday and the joy of Easter Sunday are not just theoretical concepts to be believed in but tangible realities to be felt.