Absence of Mind

Marilynne Robinson is one of the most erudite writers I have ever encountered. She defines what it means to be an original thinker. If you have been bothered, as I have been, by the tone that some writers who write about science and bioethics take, read this book. She identifies a whole range of "parascientific" writers who employ a "hermeneutic of condescension" to bully people into thinking that all religion is quackery. As usual, Robinson's sentences are all gems. This book is worth owning.

The Echo Maker

I cannot think of a fiction writer who writes more effectively about the implications of science and technology than Richard Powers. I finally read his novel The Echo Maker, and while not perfect, it is certainly worth reading. He understands the implications of research by Oliver Sacks and the like: that humanity may be more about our neurons than we would like to believe. But he never reduces the self to neurons; he understands that narratives of the self are complex. The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, the stories we live by: it is not always about whether they are true or not, but how true they ring to us. We are formed by our experiences and how they form and re-form our brains. This is true, and Powers understands that this doesn't necessarily mean that there is no God or no such thing as love.

The Lathe of Heaven

I have just finished Ursula Le Guin's interesting novel, The Lathe of Heaven. It is as curious an exploration of free will that you will ever find--sort of. What if your dreams really could change reality? Would some people try to control your dreams and control the world? Le Guin clearly sees such people as humanity's biggest danger. Le Guin's heroes end up being the non-heroes, the everymen, in this case: George Orr. He represents the either/or of being: we are all either this or that, but don't try to force anything. Just let it be. Life is full of change and miraculous variety, and this comes with suffering and evil. It's a part of the package.

Our Cylons, Ourselves

Click on the link to read my article on the ending of Battlestar Galactica, one of the great TV series in recent years. I'm waiting for the new episodes of "Caprica" to go on hulu...

Idiosyncratic intellectuals

If you are looking for a terrific book that explains how four intellectuals could move from different kinds of idealism to uniquely American pragmatism, read this one by Louis Menand. Menand is a wonderful writer, and this book gave me a sense of how important Holmes, James, Pierce and Dewey were in America.

Even more grace...

I now believe that I can say with certainty that I have never read a fiction writer who understands and depicts grace better than Marilynne Robinson. I already thought that Gilead was an amazing achievement, and then she managed the retell that story, in some ways even more powerfully, in Home. To boil it down, grace is loving people for who they are no matter how difficult or costly it is, believing for the best, even hoping for it, but not rejecting the person when the best is not forthcoming. We can all know that definition, but to tell a beautiful and believable story about it is another thing.

Here's another way to put it: Robinson understands that it was Jesus who told one of the greatest stories ever told: the parable of the prodigal son. Both of these novels expand on this most flexible of parables, interposing different older brothers, fathers, sons, and so on. In Home, the older brother is actually a younger sister, Glory, who learns to love the brother she had only detested. And the father here is Jack's father, Robert Boughton, the declining minister who has spent twenty years waiting for the return of his prodigal son. And he is slipping away, mentally, but has more moments of complete self possession than not, and when Glory says he should be kind to Jack (which he has been throughout), he says:

“’Kinder to him! I thanked God for him every day of his life, no matter how much grief, how much sorrow—and at the end of it all there is only more grief, more sorrow, and his life will go on that way, no help for it now. You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect. And if the child becomes a man who has no respect for himself, it’s just destroyed till you can hardly remember what it was—‘ He said, ‘It’s like watching a child die in your arms.’ He looked at Jack. ‘Which I have done.’” I do not know a single person who has a child who would not weep at these lines, coming when they do in the novel. And that’s where the skill of this novelist lies.

Can it be that I have now read two novels in which the climactic action is the most subtle and understated of all things, the blessing and calling “good” a man who has spent his whole life running from home? Yes. Wow.

Grace is everywhere

Our culture works against anyone having a deep understanding of suffering. We only want to get through it as soon as possible, or else we obsess with the theological problem of how to reconcile the suffering of innocents with the idea of a loving God. As a result of our narrowing our response to suffering to these two choices, we miss out on seeing just how central to our understanding of grace is our ability to experience limitations. Life without limitations--without death and suffering--is life without grace. There is, in short, no way to measure the value of our lives without the experience of them as a temporary gift.

I have been wanting to read The Diary of a Country Priest for years. But I had no idea how beautiful this book was until I finished it. This is one of the most poignant portraits of a limited human being who is beautiful in that limitation, and through it. I wish that reviewers had never used the word "luminous" to describe prose so that I could save it for this description. Passages of this book are luminous. Read it; cherish it.

Persons are more than their properties

I just finished Robert Spaemann's wonderful book: Persons: the difference between someone and something. It is a difficult read, but worth it, as his argument that persons are constituted by their membership in humanity is one of the best answers I can find to the arguments of utilitarians such as Peter Singer. There is a lot at stake here, but my favorite part of the book was the last chapter, when he explained how the severely disabled give more to human society than they require from it. They do this by being an "acid test" for our humanity--they force society to think of persons as more than the sum total of their properties.

“In fact, however, they give more than they get. They receive help at the level of sustaining life. But for the hale and hearty portion of mankind giving this help is of fundamental importance. It brings to light the deepest meaning of a community of persons. Love or recognition directed to a human being is not, as we have seen, directed merely to personal properties, though it is the personal properties that allow us to grasp that a person is there. Friendship and erotic love develop mainly in response to the beloved’s individual personal properties. A disabled person may lack such properties, and it is by lacking them that they constitute the paradigm for a human community of recognizing selves, rather than simply valuing useful or attractive properties. They evoke the best in human beings; they evoke the true ground of human self-respect. So what they give to humanity in this way by the demands they make upon it is more than what they receive.” (244)

Ethics in action

This book is more fluff than serious engagement, but it is high concept. What can be more difficult than being a daughter that you know was brought into existence to be a potential donor/life-saver for your sister? I wish Jodi Picoult was able to frame the ethical questions in more interesting ways, but still, the story is a powerful one, and will get readers to stop and think about seeing life from a utilitarian perspective.

Amazon Black Friday!

I know where I'll be shopping on Friday after Thanksgiving! Forget the mall; amazon is having specials all day. Click the link above to join in!

Love for the future is self-love

It would be difficult to find a writer who more cleanly hits the nail on the head of the truth than Wendell Berry. His essay "Standing by Words" may be one of the best attacks against the excesses of the contemporary love for technological progress that I have ever seen. Berry explains that the disintegration of language and the disintegration of persons and communities go hand in hand. Precision in language forces a kind of responsibility to that which is external to us. Precision in language forces us to go beyond the fantasies inside our mind and into the realm of things.

I'm skipping through a lot here, but what interests me is that Berry illustrates clearly how people who dream about the future and how everything will be fixed by technology are not really loving other people. Love cannot be abstract, but must be for particular people and creatures. So love for the future is self love. Listen to the wisdom here:

“Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else. Love for the future is self-love—love for the present self, projected and magnified into the future, and it is an irremediable loneliness.”

Wendell Berry is one of this country's best essayists. Buy this book and read it all. You will not be sorry.

Brilliant satire

I've been reading George Saunders' collection of short stories called In Persuasion Nation. Wow. Let me just say how grateful I am that a former student of mine introduced me to Saunders by recommending the lead story in this collection, "I Can Speak!" I don't think I've ever read anything quite as original (as far as short stories go) as these stories. Please read them for yourself.

Why? Because it is nearly impossible to simply describe these stories. They combine the critique of Don DeLillo with the moral heart of Andre Dubus. There is one story called "brad carrigan, american" that moves seamlessly from tv simulacra to American life, and ends up critiquing both for their utter soulessness. When a tv show begins to develop a real conscience, it has to be eliminated. Another moving story, "Jon" is set sometime in some possible future, in which certain unwanted children are made into conduits for advertisements; the brilliance of the story is that the children have no language for anything other than that language and those images that have been supplied to them by commericials. The result is a hilarious but utterly moving look at how dehumanizing that can be. I cannot describe these stories. Buy them, read them, enjoy.

The Children of Men

I had the interesting experience of reading P.D. James's novel The Children of Men at the same time as I was reading Peter Singer's book Writings on an Ethical Life. Singer justifes infanticide with breathtaking ease, arguing that infants are "replaceable." I don't want to be unfair to his position; it is not as if he thinks it is simply ok to go around killing babies. But he is clear: if you do not want to care for a Down's syndrome child (because it will take away some of your happiness) it is ok in his ethical view to abort that child or to euthanize him. Then, just go on ahead and have the "normal" child you prefer to have. It is a replacement for the other.
Infants are not replaceable. In James's novel, she puts some pressure on Singer's position by imagining a world in which suddenly, inexplicably, humans are unable to have babies. The year of the last child is named "Omega." 25 years go by; soon humanity gives up hope on life. The novel makes you think again, and not at all sentimentally, about how precious human life really is. We simply take fertility for granted. The protagonist in the novel, Theo, learns to come outside of himself to fight for others. It is this kind of change in our way of thinking about others that will save us. Children are not primarily for our happiness (though certainly they give joy). They are the gift of God because life itself, in all its variety, is the gift of God.

Science fiction at its best

I am Orson Scott Card's newest fan. I don't know why it took me so long to find these amazing novels; but I am glad I did. I just finished the second novel in the Ender Wiggins saga called Speaker for the Dead.

But if you are going to read Card, start with the first: Ender's Game. I could not believe what an interesting and compelling novel this was. Sci-fi is panned by most readers of "serious fiction" because it tends to be scenario driven, rather than character driven. But truly great sci fi does both. It puts compelling characters into scenarios that force them to act in especially revelatory ways. Good sci fi reveals something about how what it means to be human is always going to be pressed against, depending upon the circumstance. And in Ender's Game, the circumstance is the conviction that the world is about to come to an end at the hand of the "buggers" an alien life form that looks like insects but are a lot more advanced than humans. I will say this: if this one line is all that I had heard about the novel, I would have thought that there was no way I could like it. It sounds about as trite as it comes. But then you open to the first page and you realize what a good writer can do with that scenario. He can put a child prodigy into it, a child who is the hope of his race, a child who is as deep emotionally as he is intellectually. Suddenly there's a story--and this one even has a great twist at the end. Read it. It's great.

Personhood

I am very interested in theological accounts of personhood that force us to rethink our individualistic orientation. That is why I picked up McFadyen's book. With the doctrine of the trinity as a foundation, he makes the case for the person as socially constituted, but not determined. “Human being is a relational structure (ontological aspect), and we are defined by the form our relationships, and thereby our individualities, take (ethical aspect)” (40). There is no stable essence to the human person; the person is known in relationship.
In general, I subscribe to this point of view, but McFadyen’s argument showed me some new problems. First, his identifying the person with communication in social relationships (which he defines as information processing of some sort), sounds too much like what N. Katherine Hayles reminds us is the definition of the posthuman—as that which is defined by information patterns. This way of thinking about the person is inherently disembodied, because the body does not really matter, except as it communicates more information. McFadyen would disagree with this, and spends several pages talking about the body, but his argumentation is not overly convincing. He makes a lot of assertions, not solid arguments. Second, if you define a person by communication within relationships, as a gift of society, then what of people who cannot communicate because of disability? This argument may not hold up, because it doesn’t mean that others are not related to the disabled person in a way that forms each of them. “Persons are a manifestation of their relations, formed through though not simply reducible to them” (40). Third, I have significant problems with the following statement: “The lone Adam is not truly human: life becomes human only when he greets and accepts Eve. Humanity is therefore equated with neither lone individuality nor masculinity. Adam and Eve become human only in relation to each other. Humanity is fully in the image of God only where it is a lived dialogical encounter” (32). Obviously, this argumentation borrows from Barth, but he still needs to prove this statement. Adam is not truly human? Just because God said it was not good for Adam to be alone? (as he goes on to suggest). This argument is not strong enough for me, but I don’t quite know how to keep the strong thesis of the relatedness of persons and not go down that path. I think we need to.

Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic world

I picked up Cormac McCarthy's new novel The Road and could not put it down. I can't remember the last time I read a novel in one sitting. It is dark, haunting, and brutal, just like all his fiction, and beautiful, just like all his fiction. When the world is destroyed by nuclear weapons and all is ash, humanity becomes simply a quest for survival. McCarthy has always been good at raw human nature, and so this scenario is ideal for him, and I think it yielded a masterpiece. The message is simple: life, in and of itself, is valuable. Even in an insane scenario, it is worth fighting for. It is the breath of God. The last two paragraphs are pure poetry, and worth the price of the book. But you should earn the right to read them by reading the rest of the novel first.

Nanotechnology must read

If you read only one book on nanotechnology, it should definitely be Drexler's Engines of Creation. It is well written, rational, persuasive, and overwhelmingly interesting. Most people who write about new technologies seem to do so either out of fear or naive utopianism; Drexler walks the line between these positions. He's not afraid of nanotech but he knows that Bill Joy is right: it could render life as we know it extinct if we are not careful. I think all policy makers should read this book.

Why the MLA does not speak for me

I’ve been a member of the MLA (Modern Language Association) for over ten years. It has rarely spoken for me. The only publication I truly look forward to is the annual Profession magazine, which is a collection of essays on the state of the profession. So I was excited to see that there were several essays on the role of the intellectual in the 21st century, including one by Julia Kristeva.

Students of mine know that I take psychoanalytic theory such as that discussed by Lacan and Kristeva seriously. But every now and again I’m reminded that I take them perhaps more seriously than I should. In a piece entitled “Thinking in Dark Times” she writes:

“Contrary to what we’re led to believe, the clash of religions is in fact merely a surface phenomenon. The problem we’re facing at the beginning of this new millennium is not one of religious wars but rather the rift that separates those who want to know that God is unconscious and those who prefer not to, so as to be pleasured by the show that announces he exists” (16).

The rest of the paragraph clearly indicates (though it’s debatable that Kristeva is ever clear) that the only place to be in this dichotomy is with those who “want to know that God is unconscious” and not with those who “prefer not to”. Now, what kind of choice is this, really? What does it mean to want to know that God is unconscious? Best I can make out, it is to believe, contra gut instincts maybe, that God is only a force in our psyches, not external to us, a force we made up that is powerful nonetheless. The second choice is to know this (perhaps in your unconscious) but to prefer not to believe it, to choose an unenlightened state, so as to receive a kind of sexual pleasure from consumer capitalism’s promise of goods “guaranteed by the promise of superior good” in an endless Lacanian god-is-the-phallus-in-the-box deferral. Quite simply, this is ridiculous. I pulled out this paragraph to discuss it with my husband (who is a philosopher), and it reminded me how often I just let this kind of reasoning sneak by me, because of the way people like Kristeva write. The fact that the MLA would publish this without hesitancy is not surprising to me. Nor am I surprised that no one in its upper echelons can see (or care about) how truly contemptuous this kind of thinking is to the “other”---in this case, people with genuine belief. We have been reduced to self-pleasuring infants who never want to grow up. And because we are infantile, it is also our fault that things like 9/11 happen. If the MLA wants to be relevant, it needs to back away from this kind of self-serving contempt.

Science, technology, and the promise of liberation

“Scientific progress can at most be liberation from; it can never constitute or provide the thing that it is a liberation for.”

These memorable words are from Albert Borgmann's insightful book: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Though this quote is about the notion of scientific progress, this book is much more about the way technology changes our lives. Borgmann draws a distinction between science and technology in order to argue how technology is changing the way we deal with the concrete world, which has enormous ramifications. Specifically, technology tends to commodify our lives by transforming things into devices. A violin is a thing; it requires mastery to play it, it is more of a focal point for us; in other words, it is not just about the music it produces. A stereo, on the other hand, is a device that produces only the commodity of the music it plays. While we seem to be getting the "freedom" from the burdens of our lives, Borgmann warns us that the transformation of things into devices can thin the quality of our lives.

Rudolph, Peter Singer, and the question of dignity

Blogs are excellent for completely random thoughts, and here's mine for the day. I was changing my son's diaper this morning, a task that requires constant singing if you don't want him to cry. So for some reason I was singing Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, and I was stuck on the part when Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh tonight. "Then all the reindeer loved him, and they shouted out with glee, 'Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, you'll go down in history.'" And it occurred to me that this little song nicely demonstrates the problem with the rule of technique in society when it comes to others. Rudolph was a misfit, unloved by the others until his nose became useful. Then he was lauded as a hero. The lesson can only be that you will be valued only if what others perceive as freaky proves to be valuable. Forget about inherent dignity in this world. It is a Peter Singer paradise. It's pull a sleigh exceptionally well, or don't expect to participate in our reindeer games, chump.