Category: Culture

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The Abolition of Man, Part Two

Last weekend, all eyes turned to Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia–“Mr. Jefferson’s university”–where violent right-wingers faced off against violent left-wingers.  A similar clash occurred in Seattle that same day, an event completely overshadowed by the Charlottesville ugliness, and Portland saw more of the same the weekend before.  Shaking my head over the videos of people yelling and swinging at each other, I turn from the computer screen and pick up my copy of The Abolition of Man to read this, the first sentence in the second chapter: “The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.”

Oh.

The Green Book, as you’ll recall (see The Abolition of Man, Part One) was a high school text sent to Lewis for his comment or recommendation.  It got a lot more comment from him than it was looking for.  The purpose of the authors was to teach young people to “see through” sentimentality and dogma and disregard traditional virtues as meaningless.  The authors call for the “subjectivizing” of values—that is, proving that any sentiments judged to be commendable, or worthwhile, for their own sake are “merely” (fatal word!) expressions of the speaker’s own biases.  But there would be no point in debunking suspect values unless you have other values in mind that are not so suspect, right?  Lewis sketches the “correct” approvals and disapprovals as indicated in The Green Book.  Approved: peace, democracy and tolerance.  Disapproved, or at least outgrown: courage, patriotism, and courtesy.

(We have our own lists of approved and disapproved.  One such system is derisively called “Political Correctness.”)

But the authors are fatally blind to the fact that without the latter (i.e., courage, patriotism, and courtesy), the former is impossible.

“It will be seen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street in peace-time, are the ultimate values; [but] those things which can alone produce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked.  [It’s as if] Man lives by bread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker’s van; peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers.”

What they don’t see is that under all lists of Approved and Disapproved is a deeper system, and that’s what Lewis addresses in Part Two of The Abolition of Man: “The Way.”

The Way goes by many names: Hindus refer to it as the Rta, to which even the gods are subject.  In Western tradition it’s known as Natural Law.  For the purpose of his argument, Lewis calls it the Tao: “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”

We all believe this, don’t we?  For all our talk of relativism and finding our own truth, everyone has some sense of absolute right and wrong.  Political discourse these days is nothing if not moral: to one side, the other side is not merely mistaken but nefarious or downright evil.  I have to say, I see this kind of militant morality more on the left than on the right, and could it be because the left (much more than the right) has explicitly rejected Natural Law for a new improved system?

For the rest of “The Way,” Lewis shows how modern attempts to base our preference for peace, democracy, and tolerance on some solid footing other than Natural Law are doomed to fail.  Appeals to utility (the greatest good for the greatest number), community, and common instinct all come up short, as he shows after close examination of each one.   Nothing can perform the service of the Tao except the Tao itself.  When we ditch it, what’s the last resort, our ultimate appeal?

Power.  That’s what the street fights in our cities are all about–who has it, who wants it, who ends up with it.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

In That Hideous Strength, two sets of characters stand in direct opposition to each other.  The little band at St. Anne’s have pledged their loyalty to the Director, who defers to his “Masters.”  The Masters, in their turn, are subject to the highest power, understood as the Lord Himself, originator of Natural Law.

Jane’s conversation with Ransom in chapter 7 underscores this.  “I don’t think I look on marriage quite as you do,” she says, in her best “sensible” mode.  To which he replies, “Child, it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.”  Natural Law is not merciless or unyielding: when Jane’s life is threatened, she is admitted to the circle without her husband’s knowledge or consent.  That is not in defiance of the Law, but rather obedience to another part of the Law—to save her very life.  “Only those who are practicing the Tao can understand it” (AoM, “The Way”), including what parts supersede others.

At Belbury there’s a group of “progressives” dedicated to replacing Natural Law with a set of “new, improved” values.*  Mark is one of them, following the lead of Curry and Busby at the University; others are Steele, Crosser, and all their underlings and bureaucrats.  Their goal is “reconditioning” society to think the way they do.  But they don’t realize that conditioning works on them, too.  Recall Miss Hardcastle in Chapter 5.1 on the subject of newspaper propaganda: “Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do?  He can’t.  He’s been conditioned.”

The progressives think that they’ve replaced outdated values with new ones, but they’ve actually undermined all value.  That’s why, when Filostrato waxes eloquent about sexless reproduction and metal trees (Chapter 8.3), no one at the table can come up with an argument against him.  They’ve scrapped the Tao.  By selecting only the parts of it they like, they’ve weakened all of it and left themselves no firm principles to stand on.

But there’s a third group at Belbury, the “Inner Ring” whose purpose is not reforming humanity but remaking it. ** They are, in ascending order of venality, Filostrato, Straik, Wither, and Frost.  (Feverstone belongs to a group of one, and Hardcastle is a special case.)  To understand them, we should look at Lewis’s conclusion at the end of “The Way”:

[Some will say,] Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘nature’ which has hitherto been called the conscience of man? . . . You say we shall have no values at all if we step outside the Tao.  Very well: we shall probably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them . . . Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that . . . Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

If you say this, says Lewis, you are at least not guilty of self-contradiction, like those who suppose they can replace Natural Law with a better law.  But you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to something far worse, as we’ll see in the third quarter of That Hideous Strength.

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* This is exactly the progressive agenda in the US today: the old values led to slavery, discrimination, and oppression.  Therefore, we must rebuild on new values stressing tolerance for everyone, except everyone who disagrees with us.

**Today we call it  transhumanism.  Lewis did not foresee the rise of Silicon Valley and eager young tech moguls like Sergy Brin and Elon Musk.  Their faith is in technology, not the dark forces of magic, but will they end up in the same place?

 

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That Hideous Strength: Development

If you’re just joining us, you might want to get oriented with the Introduction and Setup.

Almost all the main characters have been introduced and the potential conflicts are in place.  Now development: that phase of a novel that builds tension and raises the stakes.  All the major plot elements will be rounded up and herded in one direction, although the reader should feel that options are still open.  In that sense, a novel is like a conspiracy theory: the unfolding plot looks like the best conclusion from the facts, but the facts have been carefully selected.  Let’s look at how Lewis chooses incident to build tension and invest the reader in the story.  (I thought this post might be shorter than the last one, but oh well . . . .)

CHAPTER FIVE: ELASTICITY

5.1 The Institute’s S.O.P. is to keep underlings off-balance: this is what Wither calls flexibility and Miss Hardcastle calls elasticity.  Her advice to Mark is to get with the program, and understanding will come in time.  This is a brutalization of Jesus’ words in John 7: 17: “If any man seeks to do God’s will he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.”  That is, one must willingly join in order to know.  Jesus has authority to say that, but Miss Hardcastle’s version should be a clue to Mark that the aims of the N.I.C.E. are more expansive than mere social reform.  He doesn’t pick up on it, possibly because, as she cynically observes, “it’s the educated reader who can be gulled . . . He’s been conditioned.”  What do you think? And what does that say about what’s commonly understood as “education”?

The paragraph beginning with, “The confidential tone,” solidifies, perhaps unnecessarily, what we already know about Mark’s main motivation.  In fact, Lewis makes his motivation more explicit than any other character’s.  That’s because it was close to his heart.

In an address called “The Inner Ring” (1944) Lewis expanded on the theme: “I don’t believe that the economic motive and the erotic motive account for everything that goes on in what we moralists call the World.  Even if you add Ambition I think the picture is still incomplete. . .”  He identified this missing factor as “the lust for the esoteric, the longing to be inside . . . [T]his desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action.”  He experienced it, and so have I.  It goes way back: when Eve’s hand finally reached out for the fruit, it was a lust for forbidden knowledge that drove her.  Mark is not precisely aware that the knowledge is forbidden, only that it’s denied to him.  In order to acquire it, he’ll have to stretch his principles, such as they are—and that’s where the real “elasticity” comes in.

5.2 Does he seem like a rat in a maze?  Or a mouse between a cat’s paws?  I almost feel sorry for him, especially when reading Curry’s letter.  Compare Curry’s praise of David Laird with the doubts expressed in 4.7—is Curry prevaricating or has he convinced himself that this mediocre scholar is really the best man for the position?  “He got a third” (Mark’s letter) refers to the lowest-degree university diploma. ~ Feverstone’s “nasty,poor, brutish, and short” is a slightly misquoted description of primitive man from Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan (1651).  Mark is learning he can’t really trust anyone–Feverstone’s easy manner can turn on a dime and Wither is impossible to pin down.

The Pendragon, Arthur’s family crest

5.3 Unlike Mark, Jane is defined more by what she doesn’t want than by what she wants (making her a weaker, i.e. less memorable character, in the opinion of some critics).  What she doesn’t want is to be messed with; she’s defensive about her self-image as an independent modern woman.  (Lewis described himself this way in Surprised by Joy.)  Though Jane is sincerely drawn to the Dennistons, they make her angry . . . and what else? ~ The Sura they mention is probably based on an actual Indian mystic, Sadhu Sundar Singh, who converted to Christianity in 1904 and lived as an itinerant evangelist until his disappearance in Tibet. ~ You may know Pendragon as King Arthur’s family name, but its earliest origin is in Wales, where it means Chief or Head.  According to legend, Merlin bestowed it as a surname on Arthur’s father.

In the paragraph beginning, “You must see it from Mrs. Studdock’s point of view,” notice how Arthur Denniston echoes Miss Hardcastle’s advice in 5.1: Jane must first commit to the organization before she can understand what it’s all about.  (Remember John 7:17).  Matters of cosmic significance can only be understood from the inside.  Do you believe this is true?

CHAPTER SIX: FOG

6.1 In fiction, weather is often a metaphor.  Fog in this chapter is a metaphor for . . . what? ~ Feeling trapped, Mark finds his only recourse is to “do what he’s told” and maybe something will come of it.  Notice how he tries to feel better about it by blaming Jane.  Have you ever done that with your spouse?

6-2 Bracton College is totally out-maneuvered by the N.I.C.E.  The last vestige of grace and tradition that the University is supposed to protect is destroyed, and the question returns: why do they want the wood, even that last little strip?  A growing crisis in Edgetow is clamoring for a response.  It’s not clear that Mark wrote the first newspaper article suggesting something must be done (and isn’t that always the way government is invited to take more control?), but we’re meant to assume that he is. ~ How does Hingest’s funeral contribute to the mood of this chapter?

6-3 The scene in the library represents Mark’s full conversion to the dark side.  His pleasure at being received is so intense it dulls any twinge of conscience about what he’s asked to do.  This is how even decent men are corrupted–step by step. We learn later that Rev. Straik was a much better man than Mark until led astray by bad theology, demonstrated here by his understanding of the resurrection. (Lewis hinted earlier that he was driven to fanaticism by the death of his young daughter.) ~ Ad metam properate, “Hurry on to the finish.” ~ Professor Frost is one of the inner Inner Circle, and alert readers will recognize him from the description as someone we’ve met before.  In the very first chapter–remember?

6-4 Mark’s two editorials are very long (hard to imagine any newspaper that would publish them today). They can be skimmed, but it’s worth noting what audience he’s aiming at in in each and the different means he uses to reach them.  He’s actually a talented writer, as the management perceives.  In some circles, talent is everything, and its main purpose is to advance one’s own ambitions.  Also, recall what Miss Hardcastle said about the educated being most vulnerable to “conditioning.”  Mark has already learned that lesson.

6-5 Jane has another dream and soon after meets a nightmare in real life.  No more question of holding herself aloof; one way or another, someone is going to mess with her, and she’d rather it be people she knows and likes.  Notice the weather again . . .

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE PENDRAGON

7-1 The Fisher-King is a mysterious figure in Arthurian legend, associated with gentle, naïve Sir Percival during the Grail quest.  Percival first meets the Fisher-King as an old fisherman who directs him to the right path.  Later, the knight encounters him as a king with an incurable wound attended by keepers of the Grail itself.  Our “Mr. Fisher-King” is none other than Dr. Ransom, who traveled to Mars and Venus and returned from the latter with an incurable wound in his heel.  Meeting him marks Jane’s conversion: “Her world was unmade” (note the repetition).  Ransom is obviously meant to represent Christ (though, unlike Aslan, he is not Christ in another form).  How many resemblances do you see?

7-2 His conversation with Jane seems to touch on several issues but it’s really only one: love.  That’s what all the talk about equality is about, though expressed more succinctly in Lewis’s essay “Membership” (from The Weight of Glory): “Equality is a quantitative term and therefore love knows nothing of it.”  Equality is about giving everyone a “fair share”; love has no concern with fairness, or even sharing.  Otherwise any couple will fall into the tired routine of blaming each other for their problems, as Mark earlier blamed Jane and now she wants to blame him. ~  I was once shaken to the core by Ransom’s observation that “Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions [i.e., equals].  Those who enjoy or suffer each other are not [emphasis mine].”  Marriage has no place for keeping tabs or trading favors; each is totally in debt to the other.  And (as the mice demonstrate) it’s not meant to be a lifelong burden, but more like a dance. ~ The sensual trance that steals over Jane as he’s talking (“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply) is not explained but we’ll get some idea later of what it means.  I think. ~ Brobdingnag, mentioned at the end of the section, is the land of giants visited by Gulliver.

7-3 Why does Lewis have to examine all of Jane’s feelings in such detail?  Well, he probably doesn’t.  He means to show her divided state of mind, and got carried away.  But “the state of joy” that is Jane’s overarching emotion is central to Lewis’s religious thought (see Surprised by Joy), and soon enough that state will change.

7-4 Lewis may lay it on a little heavy in this section (such things as Rubens might have seen in delirium? Not going there!), but thankfully he curtails the torture scene, like most contemporary writers wouldn’t do.  The segment accomplishes at least three purposes: ramps up the tension, shows the real violence and destruction of the Institute’s “engineered” riot, and provides excellent justification for Jane to flee to St. Anne’s.

CHAPTER EIGHT: MOONLIGHT AT BELBURY

8-1 We’re getting close to the heart of the matter at Belbury—the real Inner Ring.  Readers may guess who “the Head” is, but Lewis is not going to spring it just yet.  The conversation between Wither and Hardcastle hints that Mark was invited to the Institute not for his writing ability but for his wife—certainly the last thing he would have expected, and we should be rather surprised, too.

8-2 Jane’s introduction to the full circle at St. Anne’s.  It’s an “equal” society, in the way discussed in 7-2, but note how Jane’s bland defense of equality to the Director doesn’t extend to her attitude toward Ivy Maggs.  As for Mr. Bultitude—he may seem like comic relief, but he’ll serve a purpose later on. (Mr. Bultitude takes his name from a central character in the classic 1880s school story, Vice Versa).  MacPhee is the “resident skeptic,” a hard-headed agnostic of the sort Lewis seems to have had great affection for (in Surprised by Joy, he describes his beloved tutor W. T. Fitzpatrick in similar terms).  William Hingest, who was bumped off in Chapter 4, is cut from the same cloth.  You can grasp the drift of MacPhee’s conversation without understanding all his references—I certainly don’t.  Most of this section can be skipped as not essential to the plot, though interesting in its ideas.

8/3 Mark’s dinner conversation with Filostrato goes on too long as well, but it’s more directly related to Lewis’s theme.  The “Italian eunuch” finds organic life distasteful: his ideal is the clean, white moon.  Note that he is a physicist rather than a biologist, which doesn’t seem to jibe with his experimental tinkering on animals and plants.  Physics is the science of “elegant” theories and big pictures, such as the non-organic dream that Filostrato is sketching here.  It’s not an appealing dream, but nobody at the table can find a reason to refute him.

Well, we can: he is calling good evil, and evil good (Is. 5:20; cf. Gen. 1:31) ~ The moon, bringer of madness, bears down hard on Belbury.  Filostrato’s discussion of life there sounds like fanatical raving, but we’ll hear more of it.  In fact, we’re hearing of it now, with “CRSPR” gene editing to remove inherited diseases.  A benevolent motivation can easily become a ravenous desire to redesign humanity.  And it will.

Finally, Mark comes close to the secret: compare his approach to the Head with Jane’s introduction to the Head of St. Anne’s in the last chapter.  Remember that they are following parallel courses in radically different settings; though neither realizes it yet, they will be confronted with equally crucial decisions very soon.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Lewis described That Hideous Strength as a novelistic re-working of ideas he set out in the three essays that make up The Abolition of Man.  I’ve also begun a read-along to The Abolition of Man, which dovetails nicely with THS.  Even if you don’t have time to read the book (which is very short, but very dense), it’s interesting to see how the novel is reflected in the meditation, and vice versa.

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The Abolition of Man: Reading Along, Part One

In February of 1943 C. S. Lewis delivered three evening lectures at King’s College in Newcastle.  Later that year the lectures were published in book form under the title of the third: The Abolition of Man.  Over time Lewis came to regard this slender volume as his most significant work.  It’s very short, only 91 pages plus an appendix.  You could read it in an evening–but don’t.  It’s incredibly packed: every sentence could be pondered over or discussed in an evening’s literary circle.

Lewis described the third volume of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, as “a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ that I tried to make in my Abolition of Man.”  The point was that humanity is in danger of becoming inhuman.

The first essay of AoM, “Men without Chests,” raised the alarm about certain educational trends.  He begins with Exhibit A: a literature textbook sent to him by an educational publisher who was probably hoping for an endorsement.  Instead of a favorable blurb, the volume got to go down in history (though anonymously) as the notorious Green Book by “Gaius and Titius,”* educated barbarians who were contributing to the gutting of national character.  G & T had bought into logical positivism, which generally holds that a statement has meaning only if it can empirically proved or objectively demonstrated.  What we today call “values” (and an earlier age called “enduring principles”) are meaningless.

As an example, Gaius and Titius reference Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s story about the waterfall.  There were two visitors besides Coleridge at a certain well-known tourist attraction, one of whom said the waterfall was sublime and the other said it was pretty.  The poet mentally endorsed Tourist A—“sublime” was the proper value given to such a sight, while “pretty” was wholly inadequate.  But G & T informed the young readers that value statements have no objective reality: isn’t one man’s sublime another man’s pretty?  Thus, statements about feelings, metaphysics, or religion are meaningless in the public square, and the sooner English schoolboys and girls learn the difference between fact and value (and disregard the latter) the better off we’ll all be.

Lewis  wasn’t buying it.  As a classical scholar he could marshal the finest minds in Western tradition—and even Eastern tradition—to support his contention that hearts must be educated as well as heads, that emotion has as great a stake in human progress as reason.  While allowing for individual preferences, there are right and wrong ways to feel.  There are qualities that should be encouraged and qualities that should be condemned in no uncertain terms.  If a man’s emotions are not trained along with his intellect, there will be no arbiter between his brain and his gut (the seat of animal appetite).  That’s what the expression “Men without Chests” relates to, along with the much-quoted observation that we’re asking young people to demonstrate those very qualities we’ve educated out of them.  “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

In That Hideous Strength (see my post on The Setup) Mark Studdock, his wife Jane, and his colleagues at Bracton College are all victims of this sort of “progressive” education.  Jane, immersed in quality literature (though she insists on putting her modern interpretations on it) is a little more sensitive to beauty and virtue.  Mark the sociology major is unwittingly swimming with the sharks, for where there’s no objective scale of value—no authoritative word on whether loyalty is preferable to treachery or chastity to unfaithfulness—what’s left is survival of the fittest.  Or the coolest, or the trendiest.  You may have experienced a scale of value of this sort in high school (especially if you were considered the opposite of cool).  If teenagers grow out of this phase it’s relatively harmless in the long run.  But Mark clearly hasn’t.  Because his education has given him no higher star to steer by, his one guiding light is to come out on top of whatever heap he’s in.  He has set aside any real pleasure and enjoyment in things for their own sake; they only get in the way of striving and climbing.  During his visit to Cure Hardy with Crosser he feels the unassuming charm of the place.  It tugs at his better nature, but he pushes aside charm for the sake of “progress.”  Education has almost nibbled his chest away.  We see he still has a bit left, but will it be enough?

After Chapter 4 the action will shift away from the College and its resident Huns, Curry and Busby, but it’s worth taking a last look at these men lacking in the chest department (Chapter Two, “Dinner with the Sub-Warden,” section 1).   They’ve become so involved with the process of education that they’ve lost sight of the content, except as it relates to creating soulless young academics like themselves.  Feverstone–the epitome of cool, by the way–is on to them: “I see.  In order to keep the place going as a learned society, all the best brains in it have to give up doing anything about learning.”  “Exactly!” says Curry, before realizing he’s been had.  Stamping out approved young minds has become the College’s business, and the educated people of Edgetow, as we’ll soon see, are by far the most gullible.

* * * * * * * * * * *

But it appears as though even intellectuals–or many of them–can’t live without honor and virtue for long.  The devaluation of value that lumbered to its feet after the first World War, marched through academia throughout the 20th century and spread its poison through public education, has perhaps met its match in passionate political activism.  The anti-war, anti-discrimination protesters of the 1960s and 70s demanded the right to feel. There was a right and wrong, only . . . they get to decide what it is.  And they get to decide without reference to long-standing tradition, religion, or philosophy.  How does that work out?  Lewis will ponder the question in the next essay, “The Way.”

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*Hereby unmasked (via Wikipedia) as The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, published in 1939 by Alexander (“Alec”) King and Martin Ketley.  Doesn’t that sound exactly like the title of a paper (almost any paper) published by the Modern Language Association today?

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That Hideous Strength Read-along: The Setup

In Chapters 1-4, we situate ourselves in a time and place: modern Britain sometime in the 1950s, with the memory of World War II’s devastation fresh and vivid.

The action takes place at three fictional locations: Edgetow, a university town similar to Cambridge, but smaller; St. Anne’s-on-the-Hill, a nearby village; and Belbury, a village in the opposite direction, currently undergoing a process of modernization.  The plot is immediately tangled in University politics, so it helps to know that the University of Edgetow is composed of four separate colleges, each with its own administration and disciplines .  Bracton College is the one that will concern us, because of the characters associated with it.  In these first chapters Lewis, like any good novelist, is introducing his major characters and moving the conflict elements into place—like setting up a chessboard and marking out a strategy.  The problem for contemporary readers is that he takes an awfully long time to do it and assumes a literary and history background that most Americans don’t have.  So here, with the help of notes obtained from the Lewisiana website, are a few pointers.

CHAPTER ONE: SALE OF COLLEGE PROPERTY

1.1 Jane Tudor Studdock, a thoroughly modern post-war young woman, is at the beginning of a marriage that has already proved disappointing.  The words she recalls in the first paragraph are from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the traditional ringing tones of which contrast sharply with Jane’s “improved” attitudes.  She’s not a believer, but Anglicanism was the state religion (still is) with some authority over civil institutions like marriage.  The clash between tradition and fashion sets Lewis’s theme, and Jane’s disturbing dream puts the plot in motion.  She and her husband Mark will be the contrasting poles between which the action will shift and build.

The title page of Bracton’s book, which fellows of his namesake college would have done well to heed

1.2 Mark Studdock is intent on advancing his academic career.  He’s a sociologist, a relatively new field of study at the time, and Lewis doesn’t seem to think much of it.  Mark’s conversation with Curry shows how the academic world (then and now) is obsessed with position: the whole of point of an academic career is levering oneself into a cushy sinecure where one can collect a handsome salary without doing a lot of work (nothing has changes).  Henry de Bracton (ca. 1250), for whom Mark’s college is named, was the author of a book on common law, in which he argued that secular authority is subject to the law.  This also plays into Lewis’s theme.  If you haven’t read Out of the Silent Planet, it’s important to know that Dick Devine (Lord Feverstone), whom Curry mentions as the one who got Mark his position, is the same Devine who accompanied Drs. Westin and Ransom on their trip to Mars.

1.3 This is a lovely section that you can feel free to skip, because there’s a lot of history and atmosphere that you may not be susceptible to at this point.  Suffice it to say that Bragton Wood, a small enclosure within the college, is redolent with mystery as well as history, because it’s the location of “Merlin’s well.”  Merlin is not just a character in the Arthur legends, but rather the character around whom the legends collected.  The earliest references to him (ca. 800 AD) suggest that he had no father, giving rise to the rumor that he was the devil’s son.  More of this later.  What Lewis suggests in this chapter is that the College, feverishly modernizing, is sitting on a vast reserve of ancient power and knowledge that will not be swept aside.*

1.4 Lewis draws this chapter out so long it’s like you’re sitting in on an actual college meeting!  But it’s worth reading for the clever way in which the “progressive” element maneuvers the fellows into voting to sell Bragdon Wood–a sale they would never have approved on a straightforward vote.  This section also introduces the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E., the collective villain of the piece. (Lewis obviously named the Institute with the acronym in mind, but it’s worth a mention that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, a division of its National Health Service, also takes the acronym NICE.)  Why does the N.I.C.E. want Bragdon Wood?  That’s the question . . .

1.5 Introducing Dr. and Mrs. Cecil Dimble, sympathetic characters who already have a connection with Jane.  They happen to live on Bracton College property, though Dimble teaches at another college.  The couple have recently learned that their lease is not being renewed, no telling why.  Notice how the tension slowly builds as change comes quickly to this sleepy little town, and how the Arthur legend comes up again in the conversation over tea.

*The heedless modernization Lewis saw in the fifties–or actually after the first World War–came into its own during the sixties.  He pictures the change being wrought by an axis of government and academic bureaucracy; he might not have foreseen the wave of radicalism that hit college campuses in the mid-sixties, fueled (in America) by the Civil Rights movement and the VietNam war.  But it was brilliant of him to perceive the corruption of the University as the eventual collapse of civilization.

CHAPTER TWO: DINNER WITH THE SUB-WARDEN

2.1  Non-olet is Latin for “it doesn’t stink,” ascribed to Emperor Vespasian’s reference to tax proceeds from public toilets.  The Sub-warden, remember, is Curry; the college bursar (treasurer) is Busby: these are two Bracton hot-shots who will be edged out of prominence as Lord Feverstone circles like a shark around Mark.  Notice his mention of Dr. Westin, the antagonist of Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.  The “respectable Cambridge don” is Dr. Ransom, hero of those books. Feverstone’s talk of “taking charge of our destiny” is exactly what some contemporary scientists–as well as futuristic entrepreneurs like Elon Musk–mean by taking control of evolution.  The catchword today is “transhumanism.”  The theme is coming clearer now, and Mark will not be able to claim that he wasn’t warned.

2.2 and 2.3  Jane has another dream; her fear grows even as she despises herself for it.  Mark is totally out of his element with her.  We will see them together only one other time (briefly) during the course of the novel, and it’s interesting analyze their relationship here: what are the danger signs you see?  Have you noticed anything similar in couples you know?  Remember that Jane and Mark are the two poles of the narrative: the action will shift back and forth between them, with ever-growing light and ever-increasing darkness.

2.4   Mark motors to Belbury, N.I.C.E. headquarters, with Feverstone: “a big man driving a big car to somewhere where they would find big stuff going on.  And he, Mark, was to be in it all.”  Already we’ve seen Mark’s hunger to be in the inner circle, a lust that goes back to high school for almost everybody—I can certainly sympathize.  Incidentally, Lewis’s description of the sights may go on too long here, but I love his hinting at the ineffable potential of passing scenery: it’s like peeking into lighted windows as you walk by them.  Belbury might have been based on Blewbury, a village south of Oxford that became the site of the first nuclear reactor in Europe.

The picturesque side of Blewbury: doomed by forward-thinking bureaucrats?

CHAPTER THREE: BELBURY AND ST. ANNE’S-ON-THE-HILL

3.1 and 3.2  Out of the frying pan, into the fire, though Mark recognizes only that he must find his way to the real power source here, just as he did at Bracton College.  He is first introduced to John Wither, Deputy Director of N.I.C.E. who can’t seem to direct a cogent thought.  William Hingest, whom Mark knew at Bracton, strikes the first sour note.  Crosser and Steele are the kind of mediocre talents that bureaucracy thrives on, and Professor Filostrato may be one of the inner circle.

3.3  Meanwhile, at St. Anne’s, Jane meets Camilla Denniston (whose husband was mentioned in 1.2 as Mark’s rival for his fellowship), and Grace Ironwood, to whom she forms an immediate dislike.  Why?  What is it in Jane’s character that reacts negatively to Miss Ironwood’s?

3.4  Mark’s introduction to “Fairy” Hardcastle, one of Lewis’s more vivid characters.  She’s chief of the Institute’s police, and why should a government institution need its own law enforcement?  That should raise questions right away, as it does for Dr. Hingest, but Mark falls in with the line that the work is too vital, though controversial, to lack protection.  (By the way, did you know the the U. S. Department of Education has its own swat team?  Would it be amiss to wonder why . . . ?)

3.5  The real trouble begins.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE LIQUIDATION OF ANACHRONISM

The title is a mouthful, referring to modernism’s goal of purging the past, along with its obscure symbolism and burdensome rules.  This is a major theme of The Abolition of Man (see my first post on that a week from today).

4.1 and 4.2  The N.I.C.E. is demonstrating the swagger of Nazi hordes, an all-too-recent memory.  Mrs. Dingle’s description of their mowing down the woods compares to the murder of the trees from Narnia’s Last Battle.  I’m intrigued by her question, “do human beings really like being happy?”  A lot of us certainly enjoy being angry, or feeling put upon (speaking for myself).

4.3  Mark shares a morning stroll with the Reverend John Straik, whose presence at the Institute is a mystery.  Isn’t modern science supposed to root out fire-and-brimstone religious fanatics such as this?  I can’t think of a contemporary parallel to Straik (can you?), but he’s not the only one to mold the image of Christ to his own inclination.  Softer forms of Christianity have played in to hands of power often enough, as the National Church did in Hitler’s time.  Notice Mark’s acute embarrassment “at the name of Jesus”—love it!  The name of Jesus was, is, and will always be offensive: a “stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.”

4.4  Foul play; your suspicions should be raised.  I love the last paragraph!

4.5  All Jane wants is “to be left alone.”  This was Lewis’s own desire, as described in Surprised by Joy.  Is this reasonable?  Is it possible?

4.6  The proposed “liquidation” of Cure Hardy reflects what is going to happen to Bracton Wood.  It goes on a little too long; you can get the sense by skimming.  Some redeeming aspects of Mark’s character emerge here, and a good thing too; major characters need to be somewhat sympathetic.  What are these redeeming features?  Notice how his field (sociology) concentrates on group identity rather than individual, exactly as political correctness does today.

4.7  This scene is just devastating: the colleges progressives have sown the wind and now reap the whirlwind of mindless destruction: the “liquidation of anachronism,” indeed.  Notice how Mark is being maneuvered from afar—the inner circle he craves membership in is advancing him like a chess piece.

Christ College dining hall–might that be the famous East Window, in which Henrietta Maria had cut her name with a diamond?
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That Hideous Strength: An Introduction

“C. S. Lewis?  Love him.  Absolutely L-O-V-E him.  I grew up with one foot in Narnia, you know, and Mere Christianity opened my eyes to the glory of faith.  Till We Have Faces should be on everyone’s reading list.  I’m not as fond of his science fiction, though I liked the first two novels of the Space Trilogy well enough.  But That Hideous Strength?  After the first few pages I had to put it down.  I mean, what the heck . . . .”

In the summer of 1945, George Orwell wrote a review for the Manchester Evening News, beginning, “On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.”  That said, he was ready to give a grudging thumbs-up to C. S. Lewis’s latest work of fiction, which completed the trilogy begun with Out of the Silent Planet and continued in Perelandra.  Orwell summarized the story as “the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world.  A company of mad scientists—or perhaps they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil—are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.”  He describes it as essentially “a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.”

That Hideous Strength could be described as the crime story: the ultimate crime against humanity.  In The Abolition of Man, published two years before THS, Lewis remarked on the rise of scientism (science as ultimate truth) expressed in the idea of “man’s conquest over nature”: “From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”  Every scientific advance comes at a cost, ironically in the same area of its benefit: computer technology increases our knowledge while it curtails our comprehension; embryonic stem cell research promises to enhance life while at the same time commodifying it.  As knowledge grows more specialized and esoteric, fewer and fewer individuals have access to it, and those will be the few who can control the many.

Orwell had thought long and hard about this; at the time of this review, he was probably already working on his masterpiece, which would be published three years later.  1984 addressed the same theme from a materialist point of view—no miracles.  In his view, and we would all probably agree, man has enough cussedness in him to bring about a totalitarian world all by himself, without demonic help.

But Lewis, in the first two volumes of the Space Trilogy, had already grounded the good vs. evil conflict in supernatural terms.  The basic problem goes way back: back to the garden.  The power-grabbing government agency in That Hideous Strength, which takes over a small university town and plots to seize control over human evolution, is an echo of Babel (subject of the late-medieval poem from which the novel takes its title).  Time and time again, human authorities try to seize ultimate power, which always resorts to Orwell’s definition of totalitarianism: “a boot smashing a human face, over and over and over.”  But Orwell could offer no reason why this is wrong.  Why shouldn’t the strong subdue the weak?  It seemed to be the way nature worked.

Lewis could say why this is wrong: It’s because humanity is made in God’s image, a little lower than the angels, the object of a massive, age-old, ultimately successful rescue operation.  A miraculous rescue.  That’s why THS ends positively, while 1984 is a total downer.

Published immediately after a totalitarian attempt that wrecked Europe (World War II), squarely in the center of another one that threatened both Europe and Asia (Communism), both novels seemed painfully relevant at the time.  But they still are.  The steely, gleaming, soulless utopia imagined in 1950s sci-fi hasn’t quite developed as expected, but sales of 1984 hit bestseller status on Amazon for months after Donald Trump’s election.  Alarmists on the left saw the rise of Big Brother.  That was silly, but there’s more than one way to steal human freedom.  Orwell’s dystopia is ruled by government intimidation; Lewis’s near-dystopia is ruled by scientism.  Our own world is apparently up for grabs.  The federal government, by seizing more power for itself, threatens to kill by kindness, i.e., “taking care” of us until we’re drained of initiative.  All of these systems diminish humanity by aggrandizing themselves.

_______________________________________________

The action of That Hideous Strength takes place after the first two volumes of Lewis’s space trilogy, but appears to have absolutely no relation to them (at first).  That’s why you can read it independently, with only a passing acquaintance with what happened earlier.  So here’s a passing acquaintance:

In Out of the Silent Planet, Dr. Elwin Ransom, professor of linguistics, is kidnapped and carried aboard a spacecraft to Mars.  His kidnappers are Dr. Westin, a brilliant physicist, and Richard Devine, scion of nobility and a former classmate of Ransom’s.  Westin’s interest in Mars is humanistic—he’s looking to conquer the planet for the perpetuation of the human race.  Devine is only interested in profit.  They intend Ransom as a human sacrifice to appease the alien life forms, but they’ve misunderstood what the natives want.  On Mars (whose inhabitants know it as Malacandra), Ransom escapes his captors and becomes acquainted with the three societies of intelligent beings.  He also learns Old Solar, the interplanetary language, and recognizes that Malacandrians worship the same deity he knows on earth, only under another name.  The planet is ruled by an eldil (angel), whom he meets at the climax of the novel.  Westin’s plans for conquest fail, and the three men are allowed to make a perilous return to earth.

Malacandra is a much older civilization than Earth, but Perelandra (Venus) is brand new.  In the second volume of the trilogy, Ransom is summoned by the eldila to this new world, where he meets “the green lady,” a being like himself (except for the color), only with an otherworldly beauty and dignity.  This, he recognizes, is what Eve was like before the Fall.  Trouble arrives in the form of Dr. Westin, whose goals have shifted from his simpler chauvinistic designs toward Malacandra.  Ransom can’t quite figure out what Westin is after until a potential Fall narrative develops with Westin playing the role of the snake and Ransom as . . . what?  By the time he realizes that Westin has been possessed by a malevolent power, it’s almost too late to stop him.  But Perelandra is saved by the narrowest of margins and heroic action by an ordinary man who becomes a hero.  Ransom returns to earth triumphantly, but with a wound on his heel (see Gen. 3:15).  (Perelandra had a profound effect on me the second time I read it; I wrote about that experience here.)

Ransom’s space adventures take place sometime during World War II; That Hideous Strength opens a few years after the war (during which corrupt men have moved to consolidate their power), and never ventures beyond our own atmosphere.   No spaceships hidden in barns, no alien creatures or eldila; just a rather commonplace academic couple and a quick, less-than-invigorating plunge into campus politics.  But in the first chapter, the lady has a very disturbing dream . . .

If you’d like to read along, I’ll cover four chapters per week with a commentary on Fridays.  Four chapters may not seem like much, but they’re long—about 80 pages each—broken up into sections.  My commentary will include notes about historical references, novelistic elements, and sections you might want to skip.  Though I’ve been taken to task for recommending skipping, Lewis himself wrote, in Mere Christianity, that it was okay to pass over sections or chapters that had no relevance for you.

The problem with THS for American readers is that he freely indulges his “expository demon” and goes off on long tangents about English history, mythology, and legend that we know nothing about.  It would be like me breaking off my narrative about early Hollywood in I Don’t Know How the Story Ends to get all misty-eyed over ballad-singing in medieval castles—not entirely unrelated, as movies and ballads are both forms of storytelling, but (speaking of stories) you’d really like to get along with the one you were reading.  Those who have never been able to get through Moby Dick will know what I mean.  But underneath the verbiage is Lewis’ most suspenseful, gripping, even cinematic narrative.

If you have any thoughts about the reading, please comment.  I love talking about books.  Also, what strikes me may not affect you the same way.  FadedPage.com has a .pdf version of That Hideous Strength you can download to your tablet for free.  It’s August: traditionally a long hot month, so find yourself a shady tree, get a glass of lemonade or ice tea, and let’s do some reading.

We get started with  That Hideous Strength: The Setup.

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The Church of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg may be feeling a wee bit guilty.  He’s had six months to reflect on how Facebook, his own brainchild, disseminated enough false information to swing an election and betray all the liberal values his heart holds dear.  So he would like to redeem that wrong by making Facebook more of a force for good, to bring people together instead of driving them apart.  Like a church, you know—or a little-league team.

That’s the reason Zuckerberg has been touring the U.S., stopping in every state.  Political observers can’t help observing how much time he’s spent in Iowa, but maybe he likes the corn.  His stated goal is to spread the gospel of community-through-Facebook across the land and eventually the world.  That was the theme of the first-ever Facebook Communities Summit, held in Chicago late last month.  Group administrators were invited to attend free of charge in order to network, share ideas and feedback, and hear from Facebook executives, including Zuckerberg himself, “about new products we’re building to help admins grow and manage their groups.”  The founder elaborated on this vision in the Thursday-night keynote speech: “People are basically good.  Everyone genuinely wants to help other people.” With that principle in mind, Facebook intends to make it easier for good folks to join other good folks for good purposes online.

The church, he said , used to meet that need and supply that sense of purpose.  But with the decline in church participation, as well as in other local organizations like sports leagues, community spirit has taken a hit.  “We started a project to see if we could get better at suggesting groups that will be meaningful to you. We started building artificial intelligence to do this. And it works. In the first 6 months, we helped 50% more people join meaningful communities.”

Good for him. The executive board seems to be grappling with some of the implications of balancing free speech and social responsibility—see the Hard Questions they’ve posed.  I’m going to assume Zuckerberg is completely sincere about these means and ends . . .

But surely he must recognize that the internet, and social media in particular, is one reason local communities began to fall apart in the first place.  Or if not a cause, at least a facilitator.  Where else can you stream a movie, watch a football game without commercials, join a whole platoon of World of Warcraft gamers, and order a comfy couch (with free shipping) to serve as your base of operations?  The internet allows us to live our entire lives inside our four walls if that’s what we want.  It takes effort to pull yourself off the couch and go to church or a little-league game, still more to volunteer to teach Sunday School or coach a team.  With so many family bonds broken already, more and more people see less and less reason to bind themselves.

Here are a few Hard Questions for Mark Zuckerberg:

  • If people are basically good, and everyone genuinely wants to help other people, why is there so much meanness and nastiness on Facebook?
  • If meaningful communities are formed around common interests alone, what’s to keep them from becoming echo chambers where everyone has the same opinion and dissent is not encouraged?
  • Also, if common interest is the glue, what happens when group members lose interest?
  • What is a “meaningful community,” anyway?  Are there any guidelines in place?  Will Facebook reserve the right to disallow any communities it thinks are not meaningful?

Facebook now has over two billion users, and I am one.  I’ve joined a few groups and I’ve found links to interesting articles and I’ve enjoyed seeing pictures of weddings and grandkids.  But I never confused it with community, because true community is not based on convenience, or even interest.  The strongest communities, it turns out, are not voluntary: family, church, military, nation.  You don’t choose them; they choose you.  The glue is shared responsibility, and that can only be face to face.  Not Facebook.

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Where Does Darkness Come From? Creation, Day One

(For the first post in this series, see “In the Beginning“)

When children in Sunday School learn about the six days of creation, they usually don’t ask why the only thing created on Day One was light.  In other creation stories, solid “things” come first: rocks or water or a surging mass of elements, or the back of a very large turtle.  Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Africans, Meso-Americans and indigenous tribes the world over would have been quite puzzled at the idea of speaking light with no obvious light source.  God doesn’t get around to creating the sun until Day Four—is this not an anomaly?  So I asked, when old enough to understand what “anomaly” was.

We’re told that God is light; in him is no darkness at all (I John 1:5). The radiance of God is not something He whistled up to chase away the darkness, but something he is.  So why say Let there be light, when light already exists, in Him?

And (a more perplexing question) where does the darkness come from?  How can there even be darkness, in that blinding dynamo of Father, Son, and Spirit?  Whence the cold, endless blackness that we call outer space?

And darkness was over the face of the deep.  An artist has an idea for a painting.  His idea includes not just the subject and composition and paint medium, but also the physical size.  If he is a hands-on, muscular type, he will stretch his own canvas: purchase the stretcher boards (or make them, mitering the corners at a precise 45 degree angle), cut the fabric, staple one side of it to the center of a bar, and start pulling and stretching and stapling until the painting surface is tight enough to bounce a quarter.

Think of darkness this way: a surface, cut to precise measure and stretched over the four corners of length, width, depth, and time. The darkness is not God, for in Him there is no darkness at all.   The darkness is not the absence of God, for he made it and broods over it in the person of the Holy Spirit.  The darkness God creates is not the absence of light, but rather the canvas which will show light for what it is.

He is not it, but it is inconceivable without him: In his light, we see light (Psalm 36:9).  (Also, He makes both dawn and dark, Amos 4:13).

Light is rich with metaphor, even when thinking about it scientifically.  Isaac Newton, that great conceptual thinker who took apart and reassembled theories as some children tinker with watches, analyzed visible light as a blend of waves traveling at different frequencies.  The “frequencies” are patterns that indicate how many wave crests will travel between two points in a given period of time.  From his experiments with prisms, Newton theorized that six frequencies, from infrared to ultraviolet, determine the range of visible light.

Like scientific thinkers before and since, Newton could describe light but couldn’t explain exactly what it was.  Though his wave theory was an improvement over the earlier “corpuscular” idea (light as tiny packets of glowing particles), it was incomplete.  Waves of what?  Pieces of what?  The questions went unanswered for another 200 years while cutting-edge science was consumed with electricity and magnetism.

Michael Faraday, a self-taught physicist from humble Evangelical stock, proved in the 1850s that the two were related—that, in fact, a changing magnetic field produced electricity.

Soon after, James Clerk Maxwell theorized that vice should be versa: i.e., a changing electric field should produce magnetism.  These two basic forms of energy might actually be manifestations of the same thing: electro-magnetism.  Electromagnetic waves are linked in electromagnetic fields that travel through empty space and provide the energy for all kinds of chemical and physical reactions.  Using known quantities, Maxwell calculated the speed of those hypothetical waves.

The result turned out to be the known speed of light.

So visible light, as nearly as we can determine, is an electromagnetic wave, like X rays and gamma rays and radio waves.  They are all of the same stuff: energy.  And, roughly 300 years after Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein proposed that matter and energy were interchangeable.  It’s not too great a leap to say that what God brought into being on the first day was not just visible light.  Let there be electromagnetism! lacks drama and wouldn’t have meant much to the ancient world.  Still less would this:

(Been there, done that, get the t-shirt)

But that’s the scientific description of what happens when electrical charges convert to magnetism and vice versa: energy!  What happens is not just visibility or radiance, but the stuff of stars, air, rain, wind, soil, cloud, leaf, stone, and living cells.  Einstein said E=mc2 (energy and matter are interchangeable).  God said, Let there be light, and energy flooded the dark void that we would one day call the universe.  It doesn’t come from the sun; it comes from Him.  So there was no need, I can assure my sixth-grade self, to make a sun first.  He would get around to that.  What we get first is what we need first: matter and energy to roll into stars and cool into planets and sweep across the barren surfaces as a fertile wind.

How interesting that science agrees.

In other words, if “light” includes the entire spectrum of electromagnetic energy, Genesis 1:3 can be seen as a scientific statement.  But it’s also a philosophical one: the first requirement of creation is also the first requirement of creativity, and that is vision.  By his light we see light.  Next, he will begin to create things to see.

Day Two – In Which Not Much Happens?

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  1. Spend some time in a very dark room, such as a walk-in closet with the door tightly shut.  Stand or sit without touching anything.  Try to imagine “nothing.”  Is this possible?  Now try to imagine light as a physical phenomenon (which it is), invading the darkness and not just illuminating but creating the objects around you.  When you open the door or flip the switch, do you see things any differently?
  2. Ecclesiastes 11:7: Light is sweet, and it is pleasing for the eyes to see the sun (HCSB).  Does this verse have more relevance after you’ve spent some time in pitch-darkness?
  3. If you could draw light, what would it look like?
  4. “I believe in God as I believe in light: not because I see Him, but by Him I see everything else.”  This is a variant of a famous C. S. Lewis quote.**  What does it mean to you?  Can you write your thoughts in a journal or a poem?

 

*  “A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained,” American Heritage College Dictionary

**  “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen . . .” The last sentence of “Is Theology Poetry?” (1947)

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Here’s to the Patriarchy

Those days are behind us, they say, except when some irritating male trait pops up in the workplace or too many men gather around the hyper-masculine president while he’s signing a bill.  Patriarchy deserves no respect. The new definition is toxic masculinity, two words that tell you all you need to know about the proper way to think about what we used to call a “man’s man” or “all boy.”  It’s not that we’re down on men, just that they need to stop being men, for their own good.  “Toxic masculinity” is killing people, and the toxic males themselves are primary victims.  Studies show it’s a leading cause of suicide among Canadian men, and no doubt elsewhere in the western world.

What is it? The article linked above teases out the following factors: “winning, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, playboy, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuals.”  Telling boys to “man up” is a quick route to tearing them down.

I’m sure some boys are raised to this caricature; I’ve seen it in the movies and read about it in novels and memoirs.  Stereotypical men exist, or there would be no stereotype.  But some key elements are left out of this description, elements that round out the picture:

Solitary. What about comradeship, brothers-at-arms, or just good buddies?

Emotional control. I guess this refers to the “real men don’t cry” cliché.  But anger and fear are also emotions—shouldn’t they be controlled?

Risk-taking. Well, of course–where would we be without that?

Dominance. For most men, a better word might be competition.

Self-reliance.  As opposed to what—welfare reliance?

Power over women. In the past, well-brought-up boys were taught to use their power in defense of women.  And wise women understood their power over men as well.  It’s a subtle power, which is why it’s often overlooked, even squandered, by girls who aren’t taught to recognize it.

Maybe one reason for high suicide rates among men is that simple (non-toxic) masculinity is no longer affirmed or valued in an information-based, sedentary, air-conditioned, risk-averse culture. In fact it’s often mocked and disdained: Men have made a mess of things—it’s time for the women to take over.  Neither sex has a corner on virtue, so I’m not especially optimistic about a culture ruled by women.  Before saying goodbye to the patriarchy, however, here’s a partial list of what we owe to it, with gratitude toward the high-achievers, deep thinkers, bold adventurers, and everyday working stiffs who pulled on their boots every day and went out to do their part in all kinds of weather:

  • Tall buildings (and short ones, too)
  • Roads and railroads
  • Steel and concrete
  • Quarries
  • Universities
  • Philosophy
  • Safe neighborhoods
  • Banks
  • Electrical grids
  • Nations and governments
  • Democracy
  • Western civilization, based on Christianity, which introduced the idea of equality, liberty, and justice for all to the world.

It should go without saying that the patriarchy would have achieved none of this without a matriarchy to stabilize and civilize it.  Disbanding both seems like a wrong move.  Passive, dependent, powerless males may live longer, but I suspect their societies won’t.  Because there will always be men of the opposite type who will storm the gates once they know the virtuous men have been shamed out of their manhood.

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Friday Night Fathers

Since my husband and I married some decades ago, we’ve never owned a television.  That used to be saying something: now not so much because any show can be streamed over any electronic device, and we do have a few of those.  Still, the very idea of owning an entire TV series would have never occurred to me until I fell hard for Friday Night Lights.  I have friends who never tuned in to FNL because they hate football.  But as any fan will tell you, It’s not about football!  The game is the metaphor.  What the show is really about is fatherhood.

Okay, maybe not all about.  But after watching every episode at least three times, I’m struck by the full spectrum of father-son relationships:

  • Billy and Tim Riggins’ father is a deadbeat, forcing Billy to be a substitute dad for Tim—a role he’s
    Behind every successful man is a good woman.

    no way ready for.

  • Matt Saracen’s father has a tough time with relationships, bonding with the U.S. Army instead of his son.
  • Jason Street’s father has a great relationship with his son until tragedy strikes and throws them both into uncharted waters.
  • Landry Clark’s father loves and supports him—almost to a fault.
  • Brian “Smash” Williams’ father met an untimely death, leaving a hole in the heart.
  • J.D. McCoy’s father worships his boy’s talent but can’t accept his weaknesses.
  • Vince Howard’s father is in jail, after planting a tangle of mixed emotions and resentment.
  • Luke Cafferty’s father can’t understand his son’s need to break away .

Some of the girls have complicated relationships with their dads, too, especially Lyla Garrity, and mothers are more of an issue with Becky Sproles and Tyra Collette.  Tami Taylor, school counselor and principal, mothers troubled students relentlessly.  But the show is more about dads, mainly Tami’s husband Eric, the Coach.

Coach Taylor has no sons, only daughters, and his relationship with teenage daughter Julie is a particular challenge for him (to be fair, Julie would be a challenge for anyone).  He’s by no means a perfect father, but at various times he supplies that need for Tim, Matt, Jason, Smash, Vince, Billy, and Luke.  He’s the necessary presence to tell them to suck it up, to be a man, to push harder, to stand up, to stand down, to make it right.  He’s a catalog of traits that in another context might be called Toxic Masculinity.  He’s not one to cry, and when he can’t think of anything to say he says nothing.  But he’ll be there.  Every player on the team knows he can knock on the Coach’s door at any time of the day or night, and the Coach will be there, even if he chews them out first.  If he makes a mistake, he’ll correct it sooner or later, and if trust falters he’ll gain it back.

Riggins learning to man up

Buddy Garrity, one of the most frustrating characters ever to appear on network television, is the big contrast.  As a man with misplaced priorities—for him it really is all about football—Buddy fails at fatherhood spectacularly, first by driving away his wife and then by alienating his favorite daughter.  Buddy is Eric’s foil throughout the series, his opposite in almost every respect: emotional, spiritually weak, untrustworthy, and conniving; more a wayward son than a father.  But even he might be getting a grip on the fatherhood thing when his own son comes home.  Likewise Billy Riggins, a father of three by series’ end, who has screwed up throughout all five seasons but at least picked a good role model in the Coach.

What’s a father?  What can he do that a mother can’t?  Mothers like Tami, Corinna Williams, and Katie McCoy provide emotional support.  They cry and hug and plead.  Every kid needs emotional support, but what the Coach provides is mind and will support.  The keynote event of the first season, and in a way the whole series, is star-quarterback Jason Street’s unfortunate tackle that leaves him a paraplegic for life.  In a single second, a young man’s strength is cut off at the knees, and it could happen to anyone.  It does happen sooner or later—to everyone.  That’s what a good father knows, and at the same time he knows that strength must be exercised.  Not grimly, but joyfully: “There’s a joy to this game,” he tells his rookie team at the beginning of Season 4, just before they go out on the field and take the worst mauling of their lives.

Temperamentally, mothers make the home a place children can always return to, while fathers prepare their children to leave.  Mothers teach security; fathers teach risk.  “Give us all gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile,” the Coach prays after Jason’s accident.  It’s a prayer repeated in the promotional video for the last season:

We are all vulnerable and we will all, at some point in our lives, fall.

We will all fall.

We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special,

that it can be taken from us, and when it is taken from us, we will be tested.

We will be tested to our very souls . . . .

It is these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.

Coach Taylor has plenty of opportunity to look inside himself, and when he faces his own ultimate test (which is not what you think) he doesn’t fail. The decline in American fatherhood is well-documented and probably a big reason why the kids are so sad.   They haven’t learned that strength is for testing, that failure is inevitable, that pain has a purpose, and that there can be joy in it all.  The best person to teach all that is a good father.

 

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Can We Talk? Round and Round on Immigration

Janie and Charlotte, good friends from college who have gone their separate ways politically, try to be reasonable about some hot-button issues.  We’ve talked about religious freedom, the proper role of government, and state-supported health care.  Then . . .

Janie: So here’s what happened: I threw you a short list of topics, and you chose this one.  Thanks a lot!

Seriously, I haven’t said much about this subject because I don’t keep the figures and stats on hand (figures and stats tend to fall out of my head anyway).  But it strikes me that a lot of people who debate this question do so on the grounds of broad principles, not precise numbers, and broad principle is where it starts anyway.  So I can do that.

As you suggested, we may have area of broad agreement here.  So let’s see—as a way of opening the discussion, which of these statements would you agree with?

  1. No nation in the history of the world has been more open to immigration than the United States.
  2. The Statue of Liberty symbolizes the mission of the U.S. to offer a home to the homeless, a new start for the destitute, and a shelter for the oppressed.
  3. Legal immigration is not a problem, but illegal immigration is, and can become an even bigger problem.
  4. Sanctuary cities are in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
  5. The rule of law is a casualty of our incoherent immigration policies.

I realize some of these statements can be interpreted different ways, and some of them can be qualified on a scale of 1 to 10.  Feel free to throw some statements and/or questions my way, too, and we might choose the most contentious as a way to start.

Charlotte: This is what you get for letting me choose the topic. Ha! You are very welcome!

Okay – I’m good with this approach, so here’s my quick response to your five points. Then we can continue the conversation by unpacking the “contentious” ones.

  1. No nation in the history of the world has been more open to immigration than the United States.

This may well be true; the USA has done a remarkable thing. Not exactly a “melting pot;” it’s more like a fascinating “buffet.” However, there is some ugly history that we need to discuss, especially since our entrenched national bigotry continues to affect immigrants today. (see point 5)

  1. The Statue of Liberty symbolizes the mission of the U.S. to offer a home to the homeless, a new start for the destitute, and a shelter for the oppressed.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.

Send them – the homeless, tempest-tossed – to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

I LOVE this! I typed it out without even googling it because the words are fixed within me from the time I sang this song with the passion of a young, idealistic girl. But if this is the “mission” of the US, it is an aspirational one, a high ideal because we both know the Statue of Liberty bears no legal weight.

  1. Legal immigration is not a problem, but illegal immigration is, and can become an even bigger problem.

I think you mean that people who immigrate through the legal process are not a problem. I agree with this. BUT the immigration laws as they currently function in the US are definitely a problem. (see point 5)

Also, many people initially came to the US through legal means but have overstayed their limit. Most of these people are hard working, law abiding, tax paying contributors to our society. (Here is a Pew Research Center article with some interesting charts and graphs about the current situation.)

But yes, there is definitely a practical problem of what to do now. Deport 11 million people? Rip apart loving families, separating mothers from their children and removing the financial and emotional support of fathers/husbands? Find a way to incorporate them and help them become citizens? Yes, I see this as a huge problem that needs practical solutions grounded in compassion. But I’m guessing this kind of problem is not what you are referring to. Help me understand.

  1. Sanctuary cities are in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

This one made me suck my breath in. What on earth are you talking about?!?

Sometimes laws are just flat wrong. Sometimes Supreme Court decisions are wrong. Protesting and resisting unjust laws is the DNA of Americans arising from foundational acts of the Founders of this nation.

  1. The rule of law is a casualty of our incoherent immigration policies.

I don’t know what you mean by this one either, even though I heartily agree we all suffer from incoherent policies in numerous ways – immigration being only one. Actually many of our laws are incoherent as well as our policies and (as laws always have) they can reflect cultural bias and even bigotry.

Consider the plight of African Americans, for example. 12 million human beings were legally imported as slaves, legally defined and generally considered to be not completely human, legally restricted from becoming citizens even though they were born on American soil. Finally, in 1868 the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was passed in order to remedy the “rule of law” that held sway in many states.

I include a link here to a helpful article if you are interested in reading it. One quote:

By the early twenty-first century, the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment served as the basis for a broad range of protections extended to both citizens and immigrants in the United States.

Non-citizens as well as citizens have rights under the US Constitution.

I hear Conservatives talk about “the rule of law” quite often. Please tell me what this means to you.

Janie:  All of my original propositions are debatable, and I’m still thinking through them.  For instance:

1) If the US is not THE most welcoming nation in the history of the world, it’s certainly the largest and most prominent.  You don’t have to remind me about ugly history.  Ugly history is everywhere—all nations have had their blind spots and national sins, as do we.  Some of our vices owe to our virtues—if Americans did not recognize early on that our harbors should be open to later arrivals from other countries, walls would have gone up and ships turned away from the very beginning.  But immigration has been our history from the start, and in its very nature—shifting demographics, gullible foreigners making for easy prey, native fears, evolving law—abuses developed as well as benefits.  To my knowledge, no nation (except Canada, to an extent) ever tried to populate itself with large numbers of immigrants.  The process wasn’t flawless, but taken overall it was an amazing success.

2) Is it the mission of the United States to offer a home for the homeless, etc.?  No.  The mission of any nation is to sustain itself and its citizens.  That said, the US is different from most nations because of its founding on a set of ideals that have a lot to do with benefitting mankind.  The mission expressed by Emma Lazarus is a secondary principle developing from our first principles of liberty and equality, and her words have a strong appeal.  (I don’t have to look them up, either—memorized them in sixth grade back when kids still had to memorize stuff.)  They’re beautiful words.  But not the primary mission of the USA.

3) I think we agree, at least in part, on what “the problem” is: what to do about people who didn’t go through the legal hoops to get here, as well as those who have overstayed their visas.  By and large, they aren’t criminals; they’re good folks who are looking for opportunity and a decent paycheck.  Can’t blame anybody for that.  So there’s a problem of people, but there’s also a problem of policy, and of not being able to talk about immigration reform without one side being accused of mean-spiritedness.  The term “anti-immigration” is a case in point.  Conservatives by and large are not anti-immigration—most of them are descended from immigrants like everybody else and recognize the importance of immigration in our history.  We’re willing to revise the laws as long as the laws are followed (and seem reasonable and safe!).  But a swirling dust storm of inflammatory rhetoric from both sides obscures the issue enough so that nothing can be done about it.  The confusing messages going over the border are not fair to immigrants, either, many of whom risk their lives to get here only to be turned away or put on hold.

4)  Okay, so I looked it up: what, exactly, is a sanctuary city?  My impression was it’s a municipality that declines to come under federal oversight in deporting overstays or identifying criminals.  It’s more complicated than that—in fact, it’s pretty darn unclear exactly what a sanctuary city is.  If it’s a city that refuses to enforce federal law, that strikes me as unconstitutional because immigration is a federal matter.  But that’s one of the many murky areas that need to be clarified.

5) Rule of law: this might be where most of our discussion centers.  It was John Adams, I believe, who coined the phrase, “A nation of laws and not of men,” by which he meant the government should respond to written precept rather than the opinions and ideas of whoever happened to be in power.  I’m sure he was realistic enough to know that the law was occasionally going to be ignored, overstepped, and misinterpreted, but with a solid enough foundation the US could still avoid sliding into monarchy or dictatorship, where whoever held the power made the rules.

Third-world countries often operate like that: their laws sound just and fair but everybody knows the only way to get ahead is by and sucking up to the big boys, whoever they are.  That is rule by men.  Governing by misuse of executive order is also rule by men.  Making law from the bench based on the majority of nine black-robed jurists is also rule by men.

There have been unjust laws and there always will be.  The only way to correct unjust law, though, is by just law—overturning, not overruling.  Legislative remedies are slow but they keep the structure in place; extra-legal remedies eventually break it down.  And sidestepping or ignoring the law altogether, as when immigration laws are not enforced, leads to confusion, suspicion, and cynicism.

That’s what just happened with Trump’s revised executive order: the Fourth Circuit overruled it with, as I understand it, invalid reasoning—reasoning based on what candidate Trump said during the campaign rather than clear constitutional guidelines on what a president has the authority to do.  I’m not a fan of Trump, or of that particular order, but court decisions like that may do more long-term damage to the system than an ill-conceived executive order.

I’ll concede that non-citizens have certain rights—as human beings, of course they do.  But it’s unclear how far they extend.  Should we talk about that next?

Charlotte: Again, thanks for this conversation, Janie. I find I have much to talk about here.

For starters, you say: “The mission of any nation is sustain itself and its citizens.” Maybe. I offer that, in particular, part of the key mission of the United States of America, as stated in our Constitution, is “to establish justice” and “promote the general welfare.” This mandate applies to all persons and not just citizens. (see below)

You say: “By and large, [undocumented immigrants] aren’t criminals; they’re good folks who are looking for opportunity and a decent paycheck.”

I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you say this. You probably know, one of my “jobs” is to follow comments on a large political discussion Facebook page and I confess I grow so weary of the ugliness and hard heartedness of too many Conservative commenters. Many of these folks define “criminal” as any kind of law breaking, and so by virtue of the fact that anyone is living within our borders without proper documentation makes them “criminals” and the only proper response is to deport them. This group insists on nouning these human beings as “illegals.” I’m sorry, but these kinds of comments do feel “mean spirited” to me. So again, thank you for your compassion. I wish I could believe most Conservatives think as you do.

I agree that the “swirling dust storm of inflammatory rhetoric from both sides” complicates our ability to converse. Conservative accusations that all Liberals want open borders are ludicrous and offend me. I can see how Liberal labeling like “anti-immigration” would offend you. As I said at the outset, I really believe this is an issue in which we probably share much agreement. I believe if Liberals and Conservatives would speak gently and listen deeply to one another, we could find some sturdy places from which we can build solutions.

That said, our current president has intentionally basked in the power of inflammatory rhetoric. Suggesting that large groups of people – simply because of their ethnicity or religion – are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists” or “terrorists” is grossly irresponsible. Following his lead, too many elected officials have made outrageous comments about immigrants (and even American citizens!) How are we ever going to pull off immigration reform if so-called public servants refuse to serve the public good and continue to stoke the fires of fear against anyone who is “other?!” These are far and away Republican spokespersons and I hold Republican voters responsible to stand up them and demand civility and bipartisan cooperation.

Secondly, you say about sanctuary cities: “If it’s a city that refuses to enforce federal law, that strikes me as unconstitutional because immigration is a federal matter.” We are on thin ice here because neither one of us is a Constitutional expert. In some ways, this is over our pay grade.

Even so, every citizen should remember that the Founders originally did not write the Constitution to apply to cities and states; the US Constitution is the law of the land, of the nation. And yes, citizenship and immigration are the purview of the federal government. So again, it was the 14th Amendment that extended national citizenship to former slaves and thus states’ laws were overturned (to the ongoing chagrin of too many unrepentant confederate loyalists.) Since then the 14th Amendment has appropriately (in my understanding) addressed numerous areas where states’ laws were not providing “equal protection” for all persons. So now yes, increasingly, states have greater obligation to adhere to the US Constitution.

(Look over this explanation from the Constitution Center to see how Constitutional law has evolved over time. The Constitution doesn’t just mean what it says; it means what the Supreme Court says it means. This is my paraphrase of Justice John Marshall’s famous quote in Marbury v. Madison. I think this topic definitely needs more discussion.)

So where do sanctuary cities fit into all of that? Beats me. We’ll see what the Courts do with this. But, for me, as a Christian, such protection for the vulnerable is a foundational tenet, no matter what civil law says. And for me as an American, I would have been proud to provide sanctuary for the Suffragettes and the Underground Railroaders and the Sitters at the Woolworth counters. Protecting those who protest unjust laws is a good and noble thing in my mind. Sometimes the process for overturning unjust law demands and includes such bold resistance.

You reluctantly concede that non-citizens have basic human rights but question how far those rights extend legally. Here’s a helpful article from Forbes that discusses some of the history of the development of legal rights for non-citizens. It is much broader than many “rule of law,” Constitutional Conservatives think it is. Yes, let’s go there for our next conversation. I’ll begin and get something to you very soon.

Janie: A couple of points, and we can wrap this up.  We often hear that the U. S. is a “nation of immigrants,” and that’s true as far as our ancestry goes.  But a few years ago a conservative writer (I forget who) made what I believe is a necessary correction: we are a nation of citizens.  Assimilation is key.  In the naturalization ceremony, newly-minted American citizens are asked to renounce their former allegiances and promise to support the laws, ideals, and founding documents of the United States.  To the extent that anyone is willing to do this, they are welcome, and most conservatives would agree.  (I might suggest that Facebook is not the best place to evaluate conservative thought.  I certainly don’t go there to figure out what progressives are thinking!)

What some of us fear is allowing in more immigrants, “legal” and not so much, who do not subscribe to American ideas and want to change it to something else.  Or they’re coming for welfare benefits or criminal activity or outright subversion.  These are the minority, I know, but there are significant numbers to cause concern.  Stronger border security and vetting would alleviate some of these fears if we could settle down long enough to stop insulting each other and make some reasonable compromises. I can compromise on amnesty, for example, if we could get a more secure border.

Rule of law, judicial review, Constitutional protections for non-citizens—all sufficiently weighty, wormy, and worthy of discussion.  Have at it!