Heaven in a Handbasket

Now that it has officially passed, I am finally getting around to saying that I trust you all had a pleasant Holiday season. As for me, as I mentioned briefly in the last issue, I spent Christmas in Winfield, Kansas, where my brother and his wife live. Winfield is a town I might describe as quaint and picturesque on its main streets, though it has its share of side streets with ramshackle apartments bedeviled with disproportionate rental fees. Every town has its skeletons, but to the infrequent visitor of Winfield, these remain reasonably well hidden, particularly at night during the Christmas season when the town is decked in lights, lights, and yet more lights, strung up and down the downtown streets and filling the local park in an impressive display of scenes ranging from Santa and Winnie the Pooh to Noah’s Ark and our Lord’s Nativity. People drive from miles around each year just to see the sight; in fact, I am frankly amazed at how many people know someone who has lived in Winfield. (Let us pray it is not because it once housed a mental institution; no one should have to suffer in ways so little understood by others.)

More than all the lights in Winfield, my folks, one of my cousins and her family, another cousin, and of course my brother and his wife all enjoyed spending time together in the relative calm and quiet of the Kansas countryside. In the beautiful sun room where colorful birds of all varieties flitter outside the window panes and where the Christmas tree and large-screen television reside—nor let us forget the home stereo system, or worse: the easy chairs that lean all the way back—we spent a good deal of our time. As the sun slipped behind the horizon, we dusted off some black-and-white Holiday classics now on DVD and were soon taken back in time even before I, young thing that I am, was born. These included such classics as Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (the book, at least, a long-time family treasure) and my personal favorite, the 1944 Going My Way, starring Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley, a “crooning” Catholic priest as the reviews at Amazon put it. Crosby’s character is always thinking of others first, showing a certain good-natured “hipness” of character that saves him from the pitfalls of prudery. In a word, he is at once both very human and humble in his role as priest and sooner or later he steals the hearts of all who cross his path.

Soon enough, the Holidays were over, and on the way home I fell into conversation with my father about many things: philosophy, literature, art critics, movies—and just life in general. My father is not exactly a youth any more and he has seen something of the world in his years under the sun. Like many who were children during the Great Depression, he believes that Western morality is on the decline and that life is not what it once was even perhaps as little as twenty years ago. Certainly if the black-and-white classics are to be believed, they would suggest that there was once a much different spirit in the air, for there is a level of principled morality featured in them that I find inspiring. Now then, we could make too much of this notion that things have irrevocably changed and gone downhill, for criticism of this sort flows effortlessly from the lips once it starts but does little to change the world in any redemptive way. No doubt we all have felt a little jaded at times when we have listened to tedious tales of Golden Yesteryears or weathered impassioned polemics on how the Western world is headed straight for hell in the proverbial handbasket. (Looking up the etymology of that phrase reveals it once was “going to heaven in a handbasket”; perhaps the times really have changed more than we know—smile.) The truth is, such sentiments probably say more about the longing and loneliness of the person expressing them than they do about the true state of affairs. Yet there is little doubt that the world has changed and is changing: there is, I believe, an innocence that has been lost and is being lost. The loss of innocence is not necessarily bad; the loss of innocence is not always good. Whether for good or ill, the times do change and we with them.

Perhaps it was the effects the World Wars had on the nations, but at least since the days of High Modern period, Hemmingway on its heels, and in general the twentieth century’s emphasis on realism in literature and the arts, movies like the ones we watched are typically dismissed as “sentimental,” a pejorative term that implies artlessness and tastelessness, or at least a lack of so-called refined sensibility. There is some validity in these claims, of course. It is not particularly difficult to hatch a tear-wrenching plot and profit handsomely with little artistic effort expended; there is no great virtue in manipulating emotions just for the sake of manipulating emotions. However, what I saw besides the feel-good, sentimental value of these classics was a certain virtue that made me wish to be more and better than I am, as I believe the best literature has long effected.

Realism can be a powerful medium of expression, delivered with great insight and a view to facing reality squarely so that it might be changed. However, there can be a dark side to realism as well, for if we say that reality is all that matters and proceed to paint it only in monotone shades of black, white, and blood red, there is little there to motivate us to climb higher and to be more than we are. War, crime, poverty, and vice are facts of life. But they are not the only facts. It might be true that little Sharon will starve on the street corner tonight or prostitute herself, but such is not as things have to be: we have within ourselves the power to reach out a hand; it is within our grasp to do more and be more. At its most powerful, realism either implicitly or explicitly suggests, “Things are not as they can be: only by determination and effort will we rise higher and be more.” Realism, at its most powerful, motivates us to say the things it cannot, filling in the conspicuous gaps it highlights in stark relief.

One would probably not always want to watch Bing Crosby; there are many other sides to life. My cousin-in-law brought along a film of a somewhat different sort that some of you may perhaps have seen. Never Cry Wolf has been hailed as a film ahead of its time, blending the documentary film with the narrative elements of drama, resulting in a sort of docudrama. I am no film critic, but I understand that this genre is becoming increasingly popular, at least on the indie circuits (perhaps corresponding to the upswing in so-called reality television), along with the satirical mockumentary. Never Cry Wolf is based on the true story of Farley Mowat and features breathtaking cinematography of the Alaskan wilderness along with some original and evocative world music by Mark Isham, though unfortunately the latter at times masks the dialogue, a fault that likely has more to do with the final production than the original scoring. I was interested to read John Grabowski’s distinction on Amazon: “This is film with sentiment, but it is not sentimental.” He carries his opinion further, “It would never get made today,” followed by the parenthetical comment, “Seems like I say that about most of my favorite films.” It appears that in a few simple lines, Grabowski may have his finger on the very pulse we have been trying to discern. Never Cry Wolf does not manipulate one’s emotions with cheap parlor tricks and paint-by-number plotlines; the effect tends to be a little more cerebral. It does have sentiment, for such is a fundamental and healthy part of being human. (We shall speak more on this idea in a moment.) But it also encourages reflection and a call to reexamine the collective values of our culture rather than mindlessly following the many talking heads who vie endlessly for our attention.

There is a time and a place for all things in life. Certainly it is obvious that Bing Crosby is of a different flavor than Carroll Ballard’s 1983 production we have just glossed. It would probably be naïve to set any one time period or any one genre over and above all others, for we are fundamentally human and built into that awareness is a rich and complex range of emotions, responses, and perceptions. What we can do instead is point to the various strengths and weaknesses of each period of history and the various genres that greet us, our awareness informed by an ever-broadening range of experience and exposure. We have already said that the black-and-white classics possess a certain principled morality that is inspiring. During its own time, it was very likely transparent, but today it is rendered more poignant by the contrast it presents. We can watch such films and learn from them, though I am not certain it is wise to try to re-create the world in their image. Our task is not to recapture some real or imagined Golden Age but rather to make the one in which we live a bit brighter; such will not be effected, I do not believe, with laws or other legislative actions, but with our own conscious choice to be more than we are.

When I set up an e-mail account for the very first time, my inbox was soon flooded with inspirational e-mails and heart-warming stories in all shapes and sizes. Most of you have probably seen them; many of you have probably even passed along a few yourselves. The first several times around, these stories spark wonderful feelings that inspire you to run out and wrap your arms around the world. Yet how many times have you reached the end of one of these notes only to be greeted by, “If you love Jesus, pass this note on. But if you don’t care about other people, feel free to leave it in your inbox like the Godless heretic that you are.” I will admit that I have engaged in slight exaggeration, but if you have ever seen one of these e-mails, you know exactly what I mean. By trying to self-righteously guilt people into servitude, they effectively hurl a bucket of ice water into the reader’s face.

In any case, I noticed in my early Christian days that such reading (minus the annoying commentary at the end) tended to greatly inspire me for five or ten minutes and then the effect faded and I became my usual self: neither particularly good nor particularly bad. By contrast, I also began to develop a penchant for reading scholarly Christian articles that engaged my mind for days and even weeks. When I read them, I was not generally bowled over or touched on some very deep emotional level. The effect these articles had on me was far more subtle and ultimately much more impacting. I have described such reading as having a “slow-burn effect.”

When I say “slow burn,” my imagery is drawn from childhood days spent in the Midwestern countryside where I was privy to many of the events of nature, including the way in which a tree stump will burn deeply into the ground for a period of several days. If you have never witnessed this phenomenon, a stump—particularly one of any real size—will have no flames evident after the surface portion has burned away, yet if it has truly caught afire it will continue to smolder deep in the ground for up to a week until it has burned the entire growth system into cinder, right down to the very root tips. A day or two later, you can detect a low-level heat when you place your hand over the now ash-covered hollow, a tiny wisp of smoke still threading its way to the sky. Of course, if you were to come directly into contact with the embers smoldering deep within the earth, they would burn your fingers. In just the same way, many of the writings that most deeply affect me enter into my mind and do not flame up particularly high or give off much surface heat. Yet these writings, when they are truly compelling, ruminate around silently in the back of my head, slowly burning their way deep into my mind, not only re-orienting my emotions in the process, but re-creating me on the deepest levels of the psyche.

This “slow-burn” analogy may have been prompted by a book I read while still a youth entitled The Knack of Using Your Subconscious Mind. In fact, I offer its most compelling chapter, The Subconscious Knack, online. The author likens the subconscious mind to a ceramic burner that continues to slowly cook food long after the direct heat has been diminished, a bit like a crock pot can be safely left to simmer while the family is away. The central theme of the book is that there is a knack to making use of all our faculties, including the mysterious inner force of the psyche. When faced with a difficult problem, perhaps an ethically or morally off-putting one, we do well to consciously reflect on the problem and turn it around in our minds for a time—and then walk away and forget it as much as that is possible, perhaps engaging in a game of golf or looking for some other diversion. While our conscious mind has thus been diverted, we have started the ceramic cooker and it will continue to boil the problem down until it has distilled the essence, often in counter-intuitive or non-rational ways that are nothing short of brilliant. Such expressions accord very well with Jungian psychology; just this week, Dr. Baumlin has had me scanning in a chapter on individuation for one of his undergraduate classes this semester from Jung’s Man and His Symbols. (Recalling that the recent Color of Emily’s Bedroom glossed Jungian symbolism, it seemed a little ironic.)

Perhaps the reason these scholarly texts impact me more deeply is that I often have to wrestle with them mentally, and once having done so, they stay with me for days, weeks—some even to this very moment—influencing my understanding and perception of the events surrounding me. In addition to these observations, perhaps because a scholarly text often attempts to uncover that enigmatic form of light we call truth, it effects a type of true power, for only light can illuminate the darkness, revealing its hidden secrets. By contrast, darkness reveals nothing and serves to obscure even that which is known. I was heartened to read some time ago in a social psychology textbook that the advertisement campaigns that held the longest lasting effects, were those that communicated directly to people’s minds rather than trying to bypass them in favor of their emotions, at least when the target audience was moderately well educated. Some people—novelists are prime examples—have even learned the art of combining the two, entering both mind and imagination alike. While the imagination is itself neither emotional nor unemotional, because of its visualizing nature, visceral responses are often elicited through its direct influence.

We spoke earlier of sentiment being a fundamental and healthy part of being human; we shall now say more. Recently, I participated in a brief e-mail exchange with an acquaintance of mine, an agnostic who has written a paper that plays off David Hume’s thoughts on miracles. Hume, as many of you may know, was a skeptic and is to large degree the critic C.S. Lewis responds to in Miracles. Hume pointed out a paradox: in order for miracles to be submitted as empirical evidence, they would have to be repeatable; by their very definition, they are unique. Thus, the only way miracles can be submitted as evidence is by the testimony of another, a source Hume believes rather weak. He has other criticisms regarding claims of the miraculous as well, suggesting that some persons make such claims knowing they are dubious in an attempt to inspire faith in another; other, less scrupulous bearers of miraculous tidings do so for the fame and acclaim it will afford them. The paper summarized Hume’s position as essentially that it is a miracle we believe in miracles. However, the paper concluded by acknowledging the author’s own lack of personal experience with the miraculous and a critique that there is a problem in Hume’s analysis, namely that “[w]e are trying to measure a transcendent notion by using an empirical norm” (emphasis in original). The author does not ultimately believe that faith and reason, at least so conceived, are compatible. All in all, the paper was intelligently written and most of the criticisms I harbored were with Hume’s arguments.

My own thoughts are as follows. The author has on several occasions expressed to me that he does not believe that faith and reason are compatible and I think that is probably true, at least to the degree that reason alone will never supply us proof that God exists. For that matter, I do not believe that reason can ever tell us much of anything without having some underlying assumptions we plug in to our logical equations, just as one fills out the variables in an algebraic expression with numbers. As we have spoken of before concerning epistemology, one of the haunting questions for me is “What is truth?” followed closely by “How do we know we know it?” I am inclined to think that in order to hold any beliefs at all, faith is required: we at least have to accept some underlying assumption that cannot itself be proven.

We were born into a world of trees and rocks and people and all the many things that exist around us that we did not create and were here when we arrived. These things become the stuff of common sense, and, as we pointed out in A Bit Life Shelving, common sense appears to be the ore from which all refined knowledge is extracted. We orient ourselves around the things we find in this mysterious universe into which we have been thrust and in which the greatest mystery of all—when we pause long enough to reflect—is the fact of our own existence. Our language is built of these trees and rocks and people and all the many things that exist that we did not create. We observe the apparent connections between them and make inferences and predictions; as we grow older, the more literal meanings of our symbols begin to flex into more metaphoric and imaginative appropriations, a new level of abstraction supplementing the older, more concrete thinking of our youth. Yet in the end, are our lives not entirely experiential? Does not experience comprise all of life? Even when I read my scholarly texts, I am either reading about experiences or reading writing about writing (about writing?) about experiences. Based on our observations of the apparent connections of experiential reality, we can employ logic to great effect, but when we do, we cannot make a god of it, for it can only go so far and do so much. It is really only a tool and life is far more than the mere tools we employ. Sometimes we even conflate logic with reason, but the two are not always the same thing, for while reason makes use of logic, it also goes beyond logic as well to include many diverse elements such as intuitive awareness, emotional perception, and events real (housed in our memory) or imagined (fleshed out by our imagination). What does logic, for example, have to say of love and romance or the deepest desires that we suppress but come out to flirt with us in those quiet moments when no one else is looking?

For me, when I began to develop the side of my humanity that responds to myth and imagination, it began to round out the edges where my previous focus on logic had left many empty spaces. I begin to realize that some of the greatest experiences of being human would not ever be found in logic or systematic analysis. That does not mean, of course, that logic or systematic analysis are not valuable tools or even that these other sides of my humanity contradicted them in any way. It rather suggests that there are areas of life about which logic or systematic reasoning has little to say, at least without first admitting some basic suppositions. And we are filled with suppositions to the brim. We often think that if we could just clear them all away, we could have true knowledge. But that is itself another supposition. What makes us so certain?

The paper, as we mentioned, summarizes Hume’s thoughts by noting, “The miracle is that we believe in miracles,” (emphasis in original). Yet that position is in and of itself an unprovable assumption that rests on the premise that unless something can be systematized, it lacks credibility and thereby the “ring” of truth. It is entirely possible, for example, given the worldwide prevalence of faith in the miraculous, that there is something fundamentally human in such a belief and that to eradicate it from ourselves is not a virtue but rather a loss. On whose authority are we certain that this eradication is wise or warranted? Some of the happiest people cheerfully embrace the miraculous in one form or another; even upon hearing another extol the virtues of ridding oneself of such “superstitions,” they do not seem to think that capturing and corralling such beliefs behind the glass walls of the mental laboratory will profit them anything. Quite the contrary, many who have had the most profound spiritual transformations—from embittered Scrooges to the town’s kindliest patrons—have seen an increase in such belief instead of a decrease. Perhaps they are slobbering idiots. Maybe they are only slightly misguided, suffering from forgivable foibles. But perhaps they have seen beyond to a wisdom that transcends empiricism and the assumption that “infallibly” states that systematic analysis is the only viable kind of evidence for truth. It may be that our tendency to label things sentimental (even when they do not shamelessly manipulate the emotions) is that they remind us of the spiritual and the (apparently) irrational. Or, perhaps even closer to home is that the deep-felt desires of our hearts are so often disappointed by life that cynicism becomes a safe haven to which we flee, untouched and untouchable.

I have spoken of scholarly texts that have slowly burned themselves into my mind far more than I knew; this previous semester in an introductory course I took in political theory, we read an excerpt from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. In fact, a copy that contains much of the same text can be read at Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government, though it has not been carefully proofread and contains formatting errors from its OCR scanning. (I hope, at some point, to either send them a corrected copy or else upload a corrected version of my own: poorly scanned text is a major pet peeve of mine.) In this text, Arendt identifies what an ideology actually is: the logic (-ology) of an idea (ideo-). She suggests that “[i]deologies are never interested in the miracle of being,” but rather find their identity in historical assumptions that once enacted are rarely questioned. These assumptions form a basis from which all else is inferred; they are the faith-based absolutes we mention above, such as the notion that the miraculous is largely superstitious, counterproductive, and is to be treated with great suspicion: “the miracle is that we believe in miracles.” Thus, these assumptions are the basis from which all other premises are deduced, deduction the means by which they operate. Arendt minces no words when she writes that this process “proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality.”

Her reasons for having such an interest in totalitarianism apparently had much to do with the fact that she was the student and short-term lover of Martin Heidegger, arguably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. Arendt was a secular Jew living in Germany and she felt betrayed when Heidegger expressed strong support for Hitler and the Nazi party. She apparently spent years trying to reconcile how such a brilliant mind whom she greatly respected and admired could fall prey to such poor political reasoning. Damon Linker, editor of First Things, has written an excellent and highly recommended article on the subject entitled Philosophy and Tyranny. Linker concludes that Heidegger made such a decision because he was drawn to the raw courage idealized by the Nazi party for sacrificing oneself for one’s country; as Arendt puts it: “It is the monstrous, yet seemingly unanswerable claim of totalitarian rule that, far from being ‘lawless,’ it goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimation, that far from being arbitrary it is more obedient to these suprahuman forces than any government ever was before, and that far from wielding its power in the interest of one man, it is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody’s vital immediate interests to the execution of what it assumes to be the law of History or the law of Nature.” In short, being willing to be an egg broken for the greater omelet carries connotations of nobility, for one’s life cannot be ransomed once sacrificed. Linker suggests that such a draw had much to do with the one commonality Heidegger shared with other intellectuals of his time: a commonality most noticeably effected during the Enlightenment. Rather than seeing wisdom as deriving from the past while informing the present, these men sought “indeterminate liberation from all received views”—they questioned everything previously considered to be good, sacred, sound, or holy. In such a world, the highest good is only what man can effect himself and courage can become a heroic ideal, fitting for a paramount pagan virtue such as Homer might praise in his Iliad or Odyssey.

In any case, it appears we have covered quite a bit of ground today, though more always remains to be said on a given subject. There is little doubt that times have changed, though the course of history would seem to indicate that Heraclitus was on to something when he suggested that we never step in the same river twice, for it is neither the same river nor the same foot. History does, however, reveal a certain pattern to human nature that can effect great good or great ill. We are probably unrealistic if we think we can roll back time through increased legislation. What we can choose to do, however, is to make what positive difference we can in the lives of those around us. Learning to see Christ in others is a great virtue as are the much neglected pair of arts known as silence and long-suffering. Among the ways that we can get a clearer picture of our world is to read widely and receptively, aware that different genres and different periods in history have their strengths and their weaknesses. We never know when a well-placed word or an act of kindness may form its own slow-burn effect in the mind of another, largely invisible to us, but silently at work deep in the heart of the subconscious. There is far more to life than the tools of logic or even what we can reason through, for even reasoning depends on some kind of faith in the form of unquestioned or unproven assumptions. We may be mad or misguided in our pursuit of the miraculous, but then again, we might just be right. Whatever else, we should strive always to be more than we are, particularly through Christ who strengthens us and gives our lives the sweet and mysterious savor of the Spirit who tirelessly works in and through all things as He wills, like the wind coming and going unseen.

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