несколько упоминаний из блогов - 2
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Martin Gardner (1914-2010)
Martin Gardner recently died. His writing is very uneven, but he has some gems. His best book-length work is his novel of ideas, The Flight of Peter Fromm (very under-appreciated); but his strength was in smaller works, where an occasionally Chestertonian wit sparks through. He will be missed; he was that rare creature, the genuinely excellent popularizer.
I can't say I was very influenced by him, but, as I said, I liked The Flight of Peter Fromm, and Gardner happens to be where I first read about Raymond Lull.Posted by Brandon at 7:20 PM
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Friday, July 29, 2011
Megatherium
And for the Roman Church he always retained the same double attitude he had for Chesterton. He could say of both what Robert Browning said about the Catholic Church in his poem Christmas Eve:
I see the error; but above
The scope of error, see the love.
It is a feeling I cannot share. Where Peter finds an inner core of truth, I find only superstition. H. G. Wells, in Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, hit on the perfect metaphor. The Roman Church is like a prehistoric megatherium, a grotesque, gigantic sloth that somehow managed to survive extinction. It crawls clumsily around the world, getting in everybody's way, refusing to die.
Homer Wilson, in Martin Gardner's The Flight of Peter Fromm, Prometheus (Amherst, NY: 1994), pp. 82-83. I've said before that Martin Gardner's novel of ideas is underappreciated, and have no difficulty saying it again: it really should be more widely read. Part of it is that the psychology of the characters is done very well; the narrator of the book, the same Homer Wilson, who says the above, is simultaneously perceptive and flawed, and although Gardner, as far as I am aware, had very little use for the Catholic Church, his attitude to Chesterton was very much closer to Peter's double attitude than Homer's dismissal. Gardner likely expects us to learn something about the limits of the character from the fact that he treats megatherium as automatically an insult on the basis of Wells's work, just as he expects us to learn something from Homer's excessive devotion to Freudian explanations.
The reference to Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island is interesting, and perhaps also suggests something, although I haven't really thought it through and would hesitate to do so without having the book in hand to compare. It's one of H. G. Wells's later (1928), and therefore less known, works, and is fairly difficult to find. The protagonist ends up on an island of cannibals and tries to teach them a rational and progressive view of the world; there are megatheria, too, of course. It's a dystopic allegory about civilization itself (Wells himself called it a caricature of the whole human world), and is often treated as being in the same general class of stories as the more popular The Island of Doctor Moreau, which has a certain amount of plausibility, although it seems to me that it requires some fairly generous principles of classification. There's a certain sort of ambiguity to the lesson, though, in that it turns out both that the protagonist is subject to psychotic delusional episodes and that Europe in the Great War is subject to real horrors quite as bad as delusional ones. There's a lot of subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) religious imagery in the book, but this is true of much of Wells's science fiction, and it is often difficult to pin down exactly what its function is in any given case. In any case, the megatheria of Rampole Island are in the story symbols of what all institutions everywhere always eventually become if they do not die: ominously slow-moving, fantastically long-lasting, oblivious to most of the world, infested with parasites, the objects of strange devotions and taboos.Posted by Brandon at 7:42 PM
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Friday, June 03, 2011
Solipsism and Gratitude
Heather MacDonald has a post at "Secular Right" on what she calls the solipsism of faith:
Still, it is always puzzling to me how believers can attribute their escape from calamity to God’s protection without feeling compelled to explain why God did not extend that protection to other people not clearly less deserving than themselves. If God was capable of working a “miracle” to prevent you from death by tornado in Missouri or Alabama, why didn’t he work that same miracle to save your neighbors? (We will leave aside the added puzzle of why God would allow the natural cataclysm to proceed in the first place and confine himself to piecemeal, after-the-fact efforts to mitigate its effects for a select number of survivors.) The implication of attributing one’s own good fortune amid a wave of misfortune to God is inescapable: God cared for me more than for the deceased victims. Yet only rarely does this implication seem to break through into a believer’s consciousness.
I think this response gets both the implications and the psychology quite wrong. There is no particular a priori reason why God would do exactly the same thing for everybody, and it doesn't follow from thanking God for saving one from calamity either that God did nothing for the unfortunate neighbors or that God cared for the fortunate person more -- indeed, as old-fashioned Baptist preachers are sometimes fond of reminding their congregations, it could very well have been the exact opposite: as one preacher I know put it (I paraphrase), God may have saved you rather than them because you need more time and help to escape from hell than they do. Only the good die young, as the saying goes! MacDonald's 'inescapable implication', far from being inescapable, isn't really even implied without making a number of obviously debatable assumptions. MacDonald's implication, in other words, is really based on her own idea of What God Would Do, and the assumption that everyone else has this idea, too; a problematic assumption given that MacDonald is an atheist with a long history of not exactly having a complete sympathy with theists.
But, more importantly, I think she is clearly misreading the psychology of the situation. It is a natural human response, on having survived a great catastrophe, to feel grateful for it. And it's important to note that this is true regardless of whether one has anyone to whom one can be grateful. Martin Gardner has an excellent and underappreciated philosophical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm, in which this is a secondary theme: gratitude is a very human response, even in situations where there is no human agent responsible; it's a common, although not universal, accompaniment of relief. If you're a theist, you'll feel grateful to God, as the most obvious higher-order agent to whom it could be attributed; if you're an atheist or agnostic (or perhaps a deist who doesn't believe God intervenes, as Gardner was), it might just be a strange sense of gratitude to no one in particular. And it does seem strange to be grateful yet to no one in particular, but there's nothing irrational about it, because gratitude is the human response in which we feel more than merely relieved, and this can be appropriate whether one has anyone to be grateful to or not. The feeling comes first, and sometimes demands expression.
People in general, however religious, tend to be rather agnostic about what they can know about God's purposes; that doesn't change the fact that they feel grateful to have survived, nor does it change the fact that the force of relief can demand that this gratitude be expressed. And the associated feelings don't have any particular connection with each other: you can be grateful for having survived while sad for those who didn't; you can be grateful for emerging unscathed even while bewildered as to why others didn't; you can be grateful for having lived even while anguished that others didn't; you can be grateful and relieved that you got through and feel bad for feeling grateful and relieved. The two sides simply come apart because they have no necessary connection.
Thus there's no particular reason why one should feel compelled to explain the difference -- one might try, in order to satisfy one's curiosity, or in order to relieve one's anguish or guilt, but there's nothing that positively demands that one do so. It's entirely possible just not to know, and even to believe that one can't know; the motivation for expressing a thank-God will still be there, utterly unaffected by one's agnosticism about God's mysterious ways. This is not the solipsism of faith or of anything else; it's simply a case where motivation does not depend on what one knows or what one doesn't, and where (what is more) the rationality of the motivation doesn't depend on what one knows or what one doesn't.Posted by Brandon at 8:21 PM