Time Quintet, because I promised

 When I picked apart Tolkien and Lewis (i.e. my FAVORITE authors) somebody asked if I was going to do L'Engle next. So I got the one-volume chonker of the entire Time Quintet and read . . . well, most of it. I got a little way into Many Waters and said to myself, well, the kids are never going to be allowed to read this anyway.

Well, I still enjoyed them. Meg and Charles Wallace are great characters and the worlds L'Engle builds are still compelling. I had fewer gripes about the values in the books than about the writing. I wanted to take out a red pen and demand some heavy rewrites, especially in The Wind in the Door. The Wind in the Door appears to have been written in a single sitting, on an acid trip, and never once revised.

I'm not saying I didn't still like it, but . . . well, the editor in me is outraged that it could be so good and yet not be better.

Anyway, let's start with A Wrinkle in Time. It's the most popular and for good reason: it makes sense on its own, it has a nice contained plot that's easy to explain, most of it takes place in a corporeal reality that it's possible for the human mind to understand. So that's nice.

One thing I really like about it, compared to Narnia, is the absence of an actual god-figure. Instead we have some slightly inept ladies (retired stars/possible angels) who don't thoroughly know what they're doing and literally can't help sometimes. When you're writing a religious allegory or religiously-themed story, you can't have God actually in it helping too much or there's no story, but if God is in there, he ends up looking like a jerk because he's not helping. Narnia falls into both those pitfalls, by having Aslan sometimes not helping for no good reason, and other times taking over and fixing things too easily.

Likewise the parents in any children's book are an issue, like what kind of neglectful monsters are they that they don't solve the problems for the kids? In AWIT, Mrs. Murry doesn't know what's going on and Mr. Murry is obviously missing for most of the book, so they're able to escape looking terrible. I don't care for Mr. Murry when he does appear; he seems pretty dense and overly concerned about Respect and Politeness from his son who's, you know, obviously possessed. But he does eventually figure out that Meg knows what she's talking about, so I'm not too mad about it.

I like how the main conflict is Meg learning her worth and knowing she has something to offer even when everyone else in the book is smarter and prettier and better at sports than her. I like that she's encouraged to stay angry, and that the answer in the end is love.

The only part I really deeply hate is the genetic explanations for things. The Murrys don't belong in their small town, because . . . they're genetically superior. Because their parents are two scientists, obviously all the children must be brilliant. Meg is reassured that she actually is brilliant and will be pretty--not, you know, that people have value even if they're neither brilliant nor pretty.

Calvin, honestly, doesn't belong in this story at all in my opinion. It's reasonable that Charles Wallace, being both smarter and more spiritual than Meg, knows how to tesseract right away. It isn't really reasonable that Calvin does. It feels like he exists in the book just to make Meg feel bad about herself, by being effortlessly better than her at everything. And why is he so much better? He'll tell you: it's because he's a "sport." His family is genetically inferior (look at his gross ugly abusive mom!) but he's some kind of genetic throwback and therefore perfect in every way. Like, WHY. I hate that. We could have used this moment to point out that genetics isn't destiny and everyone's individual and Calvin just happens to be good at some things his parents aren't, but nope. L'Engle doesn't believe that.

The whole thing felt, when I was a kid, extremely relatable. I, too, felt weird and inadequate around "normal" people. My family was weird and smart and a little bit autistic. The reassurance that I was going to grow up into someone who was good at something, that the other kids were mean to me because they sensed I was superior, that I didn't have to be as smart as my brother to be worthwhile, that all mattered to me a lot when I was a kid. At the same time . . . I'm not sure it went the right way with any of this. It might feed in, a little bit, to the whole Superior Smart Kid thing a lot of us fell into, as our way of defending our self-worth against bullies.

Okay, so that's A Wrinkle in Time. What about A Wind in the Door?

Well, it's a mess, as I said. It felt like L'Engle was trying to cram too many things into one book. Are we talking about Meg learning to see the good in Mr. Jenkins, the mean principal? Or is this about "school" where the cherub teaches our characters how to . . . um . . . something? Or is it about curing Charles Wallace from mitochondrial disease? Having the bulk of the book take place in a dimension where you can't see or hear anything, but everything is transmitted through telepathy, was . . . a choice. It made it really difficult to relate to what was going on, because you couldn't picture anything.

Personally I would have scratched the "school" concept because it automatically lowers the stakes. Like, any time in a children's book, the children are simply facing a challenge adults have placed in front of them for educational purposes, I know that none of it really matters. It's not a life-and-death struggle, it's homework. Wouldn't it have made more sense to simply say "nobody can save Charles Wallace but you"?

Charles Wallace is getting bullied in this book, and we are told it's his fault for being weird and he needs to learn to act more normal. I hate this lesson with the heat of a thousand suns. He is obviously autistic and some of the adults in the story need to get their acts together to stop the bullying. Why should it be on him to change himself?

However, we do get a few alternative views. Calvin suggests that he'd do better in a city school, with more diversity. (This counters the Murrys' views of cities as horrible places full of crime.) Mr. Jenkins, by the end, seems he'll be CW's ally at school. So maybe it's not all on Charles Wallace to change.

The whole central struggle of the book (insofar as there is one in the tangle of plot) is that the farandolae inside Charles Wallace's mitochondria don't want to settle down, "Deepen," grow up, and do their jobs in the cell. They want to run around being wild, because an evil being is there telling them to do it. So Meg and Calvin have to telepathically convince them it's good for them to be what they were meant to be. That's the theme: be the thing that you are meant to be, be essentially Yourself, except when you have to pretend to be more normal at school, but really that's a service to being your true self . . . It's a little convoluted, but L'Engle does try to explain it all.

And like . . . I get it, some, but I also don't get it. How are you supposed to tell the real thing you are supposed to be from the thing you want to be? The thing you are supposed to be will make you happier, but you can't know that till you do it, and it might look like less fun from the outside. It struck me as the whole vocation nonsense in Regnum Christi, where the thing you are meant to do is always the thing you want least. What is the analog in real life? Growing up? Getting a job? Getting married?

On the whole, it's a heckin confusing book, which had the added bonus of making me think farandolae were real, and then when I found out they weren't, making me think mitochondria weren't real. My kids probably shouldn't read this till they're a little older, just because it makes so little sense.

Next I read A Swiftly Tilting Planet. The plot: Earth is facing nuclear war because this crazy dictator in South America is going to nuke everyone. Teenage Charles Wallace goes back in time to be all the dictator's ancestors and make them make better choices which will avert the nuclear war. Only it's all told from the point of view of grown-up Meg, who is now pretty as promised, who is telepathically linked to Charles Wallace the whole time. I really don't know why she chose to do it that way, instead of actually writing from Charles Wallace's point of view.

Anyway the solution to the story turns out to be making the right people marry each other, so that the South American dictator is descended from the blue-eyed of two prehistorical Welsh/Native American brothers. Blue eyes, you see, is a sign of goodness and the blue-eyed brother or cousin of each generation is the one with a good heart.

We never change the dictator's mind, or give him less traumatic life experiences. We change his genes, so that he's now blue-eyed and good, and doesn't want to shoot missiles anymore.

WHAT THE HECK, MADELINE.

This is worse than all the previous genetic assumptions and just leaps right into genes-are-destiny. Is anybody's actions their fault at all, or is it just that good people are going to be good and bad people are going to be bad?

I do like that the book redeems Calvin's mother, who it turns out is part of this magical Welsh family even though she's forgotten almost everything important about it. But she plays a role by giving Meg and Charles Wallace an important poem.

I don't like that the lesson Charles Wallace takes away is that he should stop trying to direct any of the process or plot, but just go along with wherever the winds take him, land in whatever body he happens to be in, and God (not mentioned, but definitely God) will make everything work out. I like characters with agency, dangit. "Agency is bad" is a bad lesson. But the whole "genetics is destiny" thing is definitely why I'm not giving it to my kids just yet. It's expanded from a little annoying detail to the entire plot and I simply don't believe in it.

I'm not going to go into the last two because I didn't reread them. I will say Many Waters is not intended for children. It's mostly about sexy angels having sex with human women, and then everyone drowns, except one girl who's virginal and chaste but we also talk about her breasts a lot. Like . . . it might not be horribly toxic, but my memory of it is something like "sex is bad, it makes you almost die in childbirth, you can tell the good guys by the fact that they don't have sex." I was 12 or so when I read it, and that was too young for sure.

Who's a Madeline L'Engle stan here? Do you agree with my takes?

Tolkien, because fair's fair

 It is possible that I am a lot readier to pick apart Lewis than I am with writers I like more. Because, while I absolutely adored Lewis when I was about 6-12 years old, it's not meant for adults and I was always going to find something lacking when I went back to them.

So let's talk about Tolkien. I got into Tolkien at maybe 12 years old, because my brother read the first one to me. Then I tried to read the second on my own, but I wasn't ready. Then something happened and I was ready, and I read them all, and The Silmarillion too. I was in love. Few books transport you to another world so thoroughly--a world that extends much farther than the eye can see in every direction, where the ruins are already moss-grown. You feel like a guest there, seeing a tiny shred of all that can be seen. And that's probably why it's such a great place to write fan fiction. There's room for it.

There are plot and style problems, of course, but I won't get into those. The book clearly works even if it's not written the way theoretically books should be. So long as we all understand it's to be enjoyed, not imitated. You couldn't pull off Tom Bombadil. You probably don't even know when to use thee and when to use thou. Tolkien spoke archaic language like a mother tongue. Those of us who don't, shouldn't try.

The books, though, don't just have archaic language. They have archaic concepts which even when he wrote the books were already beginning to be noticed as a problem.

Tolkien was inspired by the Germanic mythos. He felt that the English nation deserved an epic myth like Germany had, in part because he didn't like seeing English people fall in love with Germany's and start calling themselves Aryan. Here's one point to Ravenclaw (you KNOW Tolkien was Ravenclaw) for being anti-Nazi.

However, I feel like he missed the real problem with this. The whole concept of a romanticized ideal of a nation, with a founding mythos and so on, is a counter-Enlightenment concept which has led to fascism more than once, in more than one country. Instead of saying "we love our country because it has a good government and is fair to everyone," these myths teach us to say, "I love my country because I am English and we are special."

For years I puzzled over the idea of creating a founding mythos for America. Elves in America maybe? But in America, we know who was here before us, and it wasn't elves. White Americans know that exactly zero of us are descended from any special prehistoric elf king. We know we don't belong here. Now, the project has been attempted; it's called Mormonism. But Mormonism's mythos is horrible about Native Americans so . . . it fell right in that pitfall.

The fact is, your birth does not in fact make you special. It's actually important for us to recognize this, because obsessing over birth is a common human failing that's resulted in stuff like declining monarchies with increasingly worthless heirs, to say nothing of ethnic cleansing. And "your birth makes you special" is one of the underlying assumptions throughout Tolkien's work.

Consider: Hobbits are like this. Bilbo is a little different from average. Is that because he's chosen to be? Haha nope, it's because he's part Took and Tooks are a special lineage that's maybe a little bit Elf (but probably not). Dwarves, on the other hand, are like that, and all Dwarves without exception are like that. It's really great that Men, Dwarves, Elves, and Hobbits all have their strengths and can appreciate one another for who they are.

Till you get to Orcs and then it's just awkward. Are Orcs born evil? Do they have free will? When we kill Orcs (which we do, without compunction, throughout the book) are we punishing them for something they couldn't help? I kind of think the concept of an evil race is a serious problem that we should never do.

There's also the assumption of feudal and monarchic bonds throughout. A lot of people read Sam's relationship to Frodo as a romantic one, or just deep friendship. And it's neither of those. It's feudal. Sam goes to Mordor with Frodo, not because he loves Frodo (though it's clear he does, especially as the books progress) but because he is Frodo's gardener. That's why he constantly supports and uplifts Frodo, while Frodo . . . doesn't really return that in kind, ever. Sam is proud to be Frodo's servant, and that makes us feel okay about it where we might not if it were compelled--though, to be clear, most servant-master relationships in Tolkien's day were compelled.

Merry has a feudal bond as well with Theoden, and Pippin with Denethor. Both of them seem someone confused about what the expectations are, in a milieu so different from the Shire, but they end up with a similar kind of pride in their lords as Sam has.

Monarchy is assumed, everywhere but the Shire. Aragorn is going to be the king of Gondor, we understand, because he was descended from Isildur. Not because he's good at ruling (though he is). Even if Denethor had been an excellent ruler and Aragorn had been incompetent or oppressive, it's clear that authority is not given Denethor to deny the return of the king. Despite the fact that Denethor and his ancestors have ruled Gondor for centuries, while Aragorn's ancestors have been toodling about in the North doing whatever it is they do. It's Aragorn's bloodline that makes him worthy of courting Arwen, of curing illnesses with athelas, and of ruling Gondor. It's all very convenient, that in this monarchy there's no dispute between good people about who has the better claim. The people of the city are pretty willing to accept whatever their betters decide, and once Faramir's in charge, he's happy to yield to Aragorn.

I'm not exactly complaining; it was a long enough book as it was without a civil war over the rule of Gondor, or a referendum on who the Gondorians thought most worthy. As a fantasy, it's nice. Unfortunately, a lot of people (myself included, for a while) get a very romantic notion of kingship from these books. They think lineal monarchy results in badasses like Aragorn, who are both naturally virtuous and trained to rule, rising to the throne. In reality, they tend to result in secession wars every few generations, and even if you avoid that, you might get this:

You just don't know! It could be a total mess. But people who romanticize Tolkien often contrast our real government, which of course is light-years from perfect, with fictional monarchies and think that what we really need is hereditary monarchy. Let me assure you: that is the last thing we need.

So: Tolkien, consciously or not, romanticizes racial and family determinism, feudal bonds, and monarchy. And that's not great. But I bet you thought I was going to talk about women, so here I go.

There are not enough women in The Lord of the Rings. (The Silmarillion is a little better; The Hobbit a lot worse.) If I were rewriting it, I'd make Merry, Pippin, Gimli, and maybe Aragorn all female and it would be a noticeably better story. (Sure, you could pick different people; that's my set. I especially like the idea that nobody knows Gimli is a girl till the very end, because female Dwarves look the same as the men.)

But honestly, I think the women that do make it in are portrayed better than the women in C. S. Lewis. Lewis's women are only allowed to be certain ways; if they're too girly that's bad (Lasaraleen, Susan) but if they're not girly enough that's also bad ("wars are ugly when women fight," right before sending children into a literal pitched battle and making a little girl be a battle medic, what the heck?). Tolkien's women are, at any rate, unique. Arwen has only a minor role, yet we see she's making huge sacrifices for love and going against what was expected of her. Galadriel is immensely powerful, overshadowing her husband (who seems to be supportive as heck and not at all threatened). Eowyn is the most fleshed-out of all, and she chafes against the restrictions she is expected to live with. She does go to war (which, surprise surprise, is ugly all-around and not just for her) and being female turns out to be an unexpected advantage.

I'm not entirely happy with the way she just quietly stops being a shieldmaiden at the end; it's not entirely clear to me whether it's because she feels there was something wrong with being one before, or just that she no longer feels herself caged the way she did in Rohan. But I love how Faramir woos her: "I do not offer you my pity. For you are a lady high and valiant and have yourself won renown that shall not be forgotten." That's not the kind of random, meaningless chivalry Lewis's men pour out all over the place. It's specifically tailored to her; he is proud of her accomplishments in battle and has no desire to minimize them or gloss them over. We need more supportive dudes like that.

I still think there should be more women in the book. But there's something special about the way the men are supportive of each other, soft, unafraid to cry, deep and lasting friends. I, myself, don't think that would be at all impossible with women around, as some men do and Tolkien might have done. But I'm almost willing to sacrifice having many female characters for this degree of wholesome masculinity. Sam carrying Frodo up the mountain is one of the most beautiful and moving things in all fiction, and it's an example that more men could stand to look to when it comes to supporting their bros. Steal fireworks! Sing in the tub! Cry for your losses! Just so long as, in the end, you carry each other up the mountains you can't climb alone. I like that the emotional-support roles weren't just shoved off onto any available women, if only because there weren't any.

I would give (and have given) these books to my kids to read and love. I don't think they should be the only books kids read, though. I want books where boys and girls team up to beat the baddies, books where evil kings are overthrown and not replaced with nice kings, books where Orcs turn out to be decent family men who hate having to work for dark lords and are happy to be liberated. It's something to keep in mind, if you ever try writing fantasy. 

Why I am not an Aslanite

It's been a while since we've had a religious post, hasn't it? (Or any post. Jackie does not like me using my laptop and not letting her push buttons.)

I've been reading a review series on C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, which, much as I love them, clearly had a lot of flaws I didn't pick up on the time. Some of which I'm quite happy to continue overlooking, because Lewis didn't like complicated worldbuilding and to be honest, I don't really care where the Beavers got their potatoes during their hundred years of winter. The story still works and the intended audience is kids, who rarely notice that stuff.

But other things actually are problematic, like the Dufflepuds being kept as slaves or Caspian white-savioring all the Narnians even though being the male descendant of conquerors doesn't actually make him more worthy of kingship than any other Son of Adam. (And what is with the necessity of Narnian rulers being human anyway? Doesn't it make sense that Animals would be the best rulers of Animals?)

Most vital, though, is the theology. The Narnia books are heavy allegories, from which I got a lot of my subconscious impressions of Christianity. I certainly read them long before I read any of the Bible, and long into adulthood I've had theological disagreements settled with, "It's just like in Narnia! It makes sense in Narnia, doesn't it?" So I thought I would go over a few of the key theological lessons from Narnia and ask whether they hold water as a comparison with the real world.

Aslan's Death and Resurrection

That's the part that gets cited the most. When I was struggling with the doctrine of the redemption in Christianity, I considered and discarded an awful lot of theological theories. (Did you know there are many, and that more than one is considered acceptable to Catholics?) And the Narnia theory is one of the most cited and believed. Clearly humanity owed some kind of debt because of the evil that we did, and God was obliged to sacrifice a life because of it. Rather than sacrificing ours, he sacrificed his son's, and that's why everything is okay now.

Let's look at how it works in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Edmund betrays his family--or at least, he sides with the Witch over Aslan, and that makes him bad even though he doesn't know who the good guys are when he eats the Witch's enchanted food. He pretends to himself that he doesn't actually mean any harm to his family, but secretly he knows they're going to be hurt. 

Because he's done such a horrible, traitorous thing, the Witch insists that she has the right to Edmund's blood. Aslan backs her up, saying that this is a rule written on the throne of the Emperor across the sea and that Narnia will be destroyed if she doesn't get what she wants.

That's where I get hung up. Why does the Emperor have such a horrible thing written on his throne? Did he write it there? Why? Is the Emperor just really brutal, to have declared the death penalty even for children who do bad things they don't full understand, under the influence of magic? Why did he pick Jadis as his hangwoman, knowing of course that Jadis is super evil? Wouldn't it make sense, if you want to exercise justice and punishment within your realm, to pick someone who's actually on your side to enforce it, so that you can temper the punishments with mercy as applicable?

The Emperor, of course, is not all-powerful, or he could indeed scrub the words off his throne and have nothing bad happen. Nor does he seem to be omniscient, to predict the rules would backfire in this way. (Unless this whole thing was his plan, of course, but it's a pretty complicated and painful plan compared to "nobody has to die ever, I the Emperor say so.")

But there's a loophole in this law, which is that Jadis is entitled to one person, not necessarily the person who did the crime, so if we can talk her into a switch, Edmund can get off. Again, this is a really weird rule for the Emperor to have. What is the point of punishing someone who isn't the criminal? Why is Jadis the one who gets to decide if she's okay with the swap or not?

In Mere Christianity, there's a whole bit justifying this, in that Jesus was "the perfect penitent" since he didn't do anything wrong. But he's justly able to apologize for all sins because he's the one sinned against in every sin. Or something like that. I don't really buy it. Wouldn't he have to be the one who had sinned in every sin to be able to apologize for every sin?

It's just really odd that one of our intuitions ("bad people should be punished") is in fact a law so strong it binds even God, but the other one ("the punishment should be applied to the bad person, specifically") is not. Again, where do laws that bind God come from? From logic? Who was supposed to have created logic?

The Stone Table scene is beautiful and moving if you are a Christian, but if you're not, it just seems kind of upsetting. None of it makes any real sense. And I don't think it brings us any closer to a reasonable understanding of what redemption could mean.

Not a Tame Lion

This is a line that appears over and over in the books whenever Aslan does things we don't like. After all, he's not tame. He does what he wants and he comes and goes as he pleases, you can't expect any given thing of him. But you are supposed to trust him. Also he may roar at you at random, and most of his appearances involve him being stern and scary.

I remember Aslan being a snuggly, nice lion, because of the romp scenes with Lucy and Susan in the first and second books. But skimming back through, not every character gets such a positive experience. Most of Aslan's appearances, he's no fun at all, and he's often terrifying. Take Jill's first experience of him:

But although the sight of the water made her feel ten times thirstier than before, she didn’t rush forward and drink. She stood as still as if she had been turned into stone, with her mouth wide open. And she had a very good reason; just on this side of the stream lay the lion.

   It lay with its head raised and its two fore-paws out in front of it, like the lions in Trafalgar Square. She knew at once that it had seen her, for its eyes looked straight into hers for a moment and then turned away—as if it knew her quite well and didn’t think much of her.

This, by the way, is how for years I pictured God looking at me. As if he knew me quite well and didn't think much of me. And no matter how much I told myself he wasn't like that, I couldn't help seeing that version when I closed my eyes. I kinda want to blame Lewis for that.

“If I run away, it’ll be after me in a moment,” thought Jill. “And if I go on, I shall run straight into its mouth.” Anyway, she couldn’t have moved if she had tried, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it. How long this lasted, she could not be sure; it seemed like hours. And the thirst became so bad that she almost felt she would not mind being eaten by the lion if only she could be sure of getting a mouthful of water first.
   “If you’re thirsty, you may drink.”
   [...She] realized that it was the lion speaking. Anyway, she had seen its lips move this time, and the voice was not like a man’s. It was deeper, wilder, and stronger; a sort of heavy, golden voice. It did not make her any less frightened than she had been before, but it made her frightened in rather a different way.
   “Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.
   “I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.
   “Then drink,” said the Lion.
   “May I—could I—would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.
   The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
   The delicious rippling noise of the stream was driving her nearly frantic.
   “Will you promise not to—do anything to me, if I do come?” said Jill.
   “I make no promise,” said the Lion.
   Jill was so thirsty now that, without noticing it, she had come a step nearer.
   “Do you eat girls?” she said.
   “I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms,” said the Lion. It didn’t say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
   “I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.
   “Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
   “Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
   “There is no other stream,” said the Lion.

The poor girl has never heard of Aslan till this morning. She has no reason to know Aslan is good. And Aslan does not seem to care to convince her. He's just . . . I don't know how to describe this but throwing his weight around. Demonstrating to her that she has to trust him because she has no choice.

And I could take this as just happening for plot reasons (though it seems very deliberate to me) if it were not that this is exactly how I've heard being Christian described. Is it horrible a lot of the time? Yeah. Has it historically harmed people? Oh definitely. But you don't have a choice because you will perish if you don't obey.

I'm sorry, that's just a . . . really terrible worldview! One which people believe with complete sincerity. And yet later, we will be told that Puddleglum chooses to believe in Aslan because even if it's false, it's better. It doesn't seem that much better to me! If we can choose to believe in things that are nice, simply because they are nice, I would choose to believe in an Aslan who said, "You poor thing, you must be so traumatized from seeing Eustace topple off a cliff; it wasn't your fault, okay? And I'm sorry about all the terrible bullying you're going through. By the end of this book you won't ever get bullied again."

But Aslan never does what a decent person would do, because he's not "tame." I'm not tame either, but I'm still capable of being compassionate. Having a God who can be predicted to take compassionate actions isn't "taming" God or attempting to "put him in a box." It's predicting his behavior based on his known nature. Why can't we do that?

Of course, for plot reasons it's necessary for Aslan to hold back from pitching in until things are horribly desperate, and to fail to explain things just so we can be kept in suspense. But for theological reasons, it's just as necessary. Because, while there is little we can say about God, we can say with certainty that he doesn't intervene to help when people are in trouble or provide comfort when we're sad, not with any reliable consistency. Just like Aslan.

Puddleglum's Stomp

Next, since I just referred to it, let's talk about that pivotal scene in The Silver Chair, when Puddleglum stomps on the fire and tells the witch that the sun and Aslan are real, and even if not, he'll still believe in them.

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

People cite this scene a lot, as what it's really like to almost become an atheist and then turn back to believing again. Because you can get into a state of mind where you almost don't believe, but you can (and should) always turn back and believe again.

The first issue is that enchantment isn't real, so when you almost don't believe in God, it's probably because of reasons that seem true to your mind. (Or perhaps a deep depression--seeing the visible world as a nasty, gray, underground hole is definitely a sign of depression.) So there's no real reason to assume that the thought that God isn't real is less reliable than the thought you previously had that said he was.

The second is that there are any number of possibilities with different levels of optimism. There are much nicer realities we could choose to believe in than Christianity: we could believe in a completely agreeable deity who saves everyone regardless of what they do, who approves of any conceivable action we might want to take. We could believe that aliens are shortly going to come and take us all to a better place. We could choose to believe in fairies! Puddleglum is choosing between a simple binary: cruddy underground kingdom, or the nice world he half-remembers from outside. We are not.

And the third, at most vital, problem with this is that reality actually matters. You can't navigate the world you live in if you're in denial about what world it is. If Puddleglum thinks the Overland exists when it doesn't and spends his life looking for it in vain, he'll waste any number of opportunities to make the real, underground world better. What if his dream of a sun is an inspiration to create a fusion reactor? Sure, that's not as cool or poetic, but it could improve the lives of everyone down there.

It's really hard for me to argue why it's good to believe the truth, because the truth is what believing is for. Our minds are a tool that's principally good for finding the truth about things and making plans for how to navigate that truth. If you refuse to use it that way, it's kind of like using the good sewing scissors making paper dolls. Sure you can, but it's a terrible waste of something that's good for more than that. And yes, I do think willfully believing false things on purpose will ruin your mind in the long run, just like paper does to sewing scissors.

Things People Secretly Know

In Narnia, it's a very common experience for people to claim, even within their private thoughts, to believe one thing, while actually they secretly know or suspect they're wrong.

Digory knows he's not enchanted into ringing the bell that wakes Jadis, but he pretends he is.

Edmund knows the White Witch will be cruel to his siblings, but he pretends to himself that they'll be treated well.

In Prince Caspian, Susan secretly knows Lucy is telling the truth about having seen Aslan showing the path out of the woods, but ignores that because she's in such a hurry to get out of the woods.

Self-deception is a real thing! I'm not going to pretend (even to myself, haha) that it's not. We sometimes simultaneously believe two things, and keep one uppermost in our mind because it's the one that jives best with our self-image. I get that.

But it's not actually easy to tell which one is real, so the amount of blame characters get for doing this is pretty frustrating. It's not like being confused about which thing you believe is a moral fault. It's more that figuring out the truth is hard. I would blame Susan if she explicitly knew Lucy was telling the truth and lied and said she wasn't (you know, like Edmund does about the wardrobe after his first visit) but in this case, she's not even aware she's deceiving herself till afterwards . . . yet it's still considered a fault.

I also call BS on many of these circumstances, because if these characters really secretly believed in what they claim to, they wouldn't act the way they do. For instance, if Susan secretly knows Lucy saw Aslan showing the path out of the forest, and she's in a tremendous hurry to get out of the forest . . . wouldn't she immediately follow Lucy? Her behavior only makes sense if she really, truly does not believe Lucy.

Compare to a Christian who, on some level, knows God isn't real but pretends to herself she does. (This isn't any of you, this is me immediately pre-deconversion, okay?) If you ask her if she expects a miracle to happen, she might say there's a chance of it. But the true belief is visible in the fact that she never acts like she has the slightest expectation that a miracle will  happen. If people actually believed, strongly believed, in hellfire, they would never even be tempted to commit mortal sins. Why not? Well because nothing could be worse than hellfire, certainly not a missed opportunity to commit some good sins. If people really believed that prayer would have vast positive results in their lives, they wouldn't be lazy about it. I'm not lazy about taking my vitamins, because I know they work well and have experienced this! I got lazy about praying sometimes, as everyone does, because I had tried that approach and had no good effects.

If Edmund really thought that the Witch was going to be horribly cruel to his siblings, he wouldn't rush back to her like that because he would be afraid for his own life. If she's like that to them, she could be like that to him. But he doesn't worry a  bit about it, because in fact he doesn't think of her as a cruel person at all. Not explicitly, and not "secretly" either.

But this is part and parcel of Lewis's belief that atheists secretly know God is real and are just pretending they don't. Or that every bad action that we think isn't willful, truly is on some secret level. He wants us to believe we are all much more responsible for our mistakes than we are. And I think that gave me a lot of shame as a kid, worrying that what I thought were mistakes were really something I could have resisted if I'd tried harder. The Narnian kids are never, ever given any leeway for mistakes. Aslan always knows they're lying, even when they don't. That was a pretty scary thing to believe as a kid.

Liar, Lunatic, or True Narnian

When Lucy first comes back from visiting Narnia, the other kids don't believe her. Which seems reasonable, since she's making extraordinary claims and they checked the back of the wardrobe.

We learn, over the course of the story, that believing Lucy on no proof is virtuous. Always. She is always one hundred percent reliable, and she's usually put in positions where she's the only witness of Aslan so you have no choice to believe her. We know, as the reader, that she's telling the truth, but the other characters don't. They're still supposed to believe, because believing on no evidence is Good. (But not, you know, believing the White Witch or Shift the ape or the Green Lady or the Giants, whom we are supposed to figure out are Bad.) This is part of Lewis's moral lesson he's trying to make about faith.

   "We were afraid it mightn't even be lying," said Susan; "we thought there might be something wrong with Lucy."
   "Madness, you mean?" said the Professor quite coolly. "Oh, you can make your minds easy about that. One has only to look at her and talk to her to see that she is not mad."
   "But then," said Susan, and stopped. She had never dreamed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn't know what to think.
   "Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth."

This is a restatement of Lewis's "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" trilemma about Jesus. If a person isn't known for being a liar, and they aren't obviously insane, they must be telling the truth.

It's wrong in Mere Christianity, and it's wrong here too. There are so many other things that could be going on here. Maybe the mothballs are hallucinogenic and Lucy had a wild dream in the wardrobe. Maybe she's traumatized by the separation from her parents and is turning to her imagination so strongly that she can't tell the difference anymore. Mental illness isn't actually diagnosible by "only looking at" someone, and even people who are mentally healthy may occasionally hallucinate, experience mass hysteria, or be deceived. There are so many reasons why people say things that aren't true besides that they are lying or crazy.

But Lewis doesn't seem to believe so. Everyone who is wrong "secretly knows" that they're wrong, in his books. Nobody sees a swatch of tawny leaves in the woods and hopes so much to see Aslan that they think it might be him. Nobody is scared or doubtful of Aslan unless they're secretly bad. I get that it's a kids' book and things are simplified, but I think Lewis actually believed this to some degree. The Apostles couldn't hope that Jesus is somehow still alive and have some spiritual, nonphysical experiences that got magnified by later writers into physical appearances. Nope. They are con men, lunatics (which they can't be, because they can put sentences together), or Jesus is alive. 

The unpleasant corollary of this is that the prophets of other religions are all liars or lunatics, because we take as given that they're not lords. It also seems that Lewis believes atheists are lying too, at least if we take Edmund and Susan as examples. Each claims, at one point, that Narnia was only just a game, but both clearly know that's not the case. 

I don't know how to prove that atheists do not, in fact, secretly know that God is real. Except, I guess, that there's no real benefit in it. If I knew I was going to burn for eternity for lying about believing in God, I can't think why I'd do it. I want to act ethically--it's my primary motivation most of the time--so failing to use the best information available on how to do that would be pretty dumb of me. Just like it's pretty dumb of Susan or Edmund to pretend Narnia isn't real. What do they get out of it? How is Edmund going to tempt his siblings into Narnia so he can get another hit of magic candy if he pretends it's not there? 

Worshiping Aslan All Along

Time to talk about my least favorite Narnia book, The Last Battle. Mostly I hate it because it ends all of Narnia; I would have preferred not to read it and let Narnia continue on indefinitely in my imagination. Second, I hate it because Lewis did Susan dirty. I don't think he hated Susan particularly; I think he just wanted to make a point about how even people who have truly experienced God can wander away from him. But, like I said, Susan actually does believe and is lying, which makes her a very bad example of an atheist.

But let me talk about a bit people really love, which is where Emeth, a follower of the false god Tash, finds out Aslan is the true God of Narnia.

“Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

I don't entirely hate this. I do think you can worship a better deity than you think you do, if as you pray you imagine something a little different than the texts describe. And there are people who worship a pretty horrific version of the Christian God, as you can tell by what they think that God will do to people they don't like.

But it feels very disrespectful of people's agency to just say, hey, you're one of us now! I like the idea that I could die and pick a deity who best embodied what I sought in my lifetime. I don't like being told by other people that I'm secretly Christian even though I am not. I guess it's because the focus isn't on whether God is acceptable to me, but on whether I will be acceptable to a God I didn't choose. Does that sound horribly egotistical? I just think that people should have the agency to decide for themselves if they really were "worshiping God all along." And maybe that is meant by Emeth falling at Aslan's feet, that Emeth recognizes that Aslan is what he in fact wants. That just isn't the part that people focus on when they cite this verse at me. They think they are reassuring me when they say I might really be one of them. In reality, it feels like they're reassuring themselves--because they believe there is only one right answer, and they want to believe that I'll make it in somehow.

I still like the books, on some level. The scenery is beautiful, the style is charming, and if none of the human characters have that much agency in the plot, I never noticed that while reading them. I've given the books to my kids, and they love them too.

But I don't buy the theological lessons that are in these books. I am not sure I ever could have if I were older and not primed to read them like scripture. Maybe Tolkien was right and allegory is a fool's game. (Want me to write a post nitpicking Tolkien? No, right? I would hate doing it because of course it has flaws, but man, those books were formative.)

Fact-checking The Martian

So, I got The Martian (the book) from the library and am gobbling it up.  I did have some initial resentment because there were few vivid sensory descriptions, no evocative emotions, and little character development in the first few chapters.  I just got a very nice rejection the other day because my novel doesn't have those things in the 50 pages the agent read.  And I was like--but you see, my character is very cold and cerebral, she isn't going to be pouring out evocative descriptions and feelings!  You should be picking up on her personality by the lack of those things!

And Andy Weir, in this book, does exactly the same thing and gets away with it.  Grr.  I'll tell myself it's because my book, too, can get away with it and I just haven't sent it to the right person yet.

Anyway, it does okay for itself, science-wise.  Lots of stuff about Mars and the methods used by the astronauts to set up their visit.  All very plausible.  But there were just a few times that I found myself shouting at the book because it got something wrong, and not just a bit inaccurate, but a huge problem that our main character should notice.

Mark Watney, the main character who is marooned on Mars, is a botanist and an engineer.  I know basically nothing about engineering, but it turns out I know kind of a lot about botany, and specifically about artificial closed ecosystems.  Mainly because they've played a pivotal role in my latest two novels.  It just maddened me that Mark is in a perfect situation to close the loops on the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles, and he mostly does not do that.  When he does try to do it, to some small degree, he doesn't do a very good job or account for the most basic things.

Realizing he doesn't have enough food to last till he's rescued, Mark decides to start growing his own.  This is a great idea.  He only has three sproutable items in his food supply: potatoes, peas, and beans.  He decides potatoes are the best choice because he can get more calories per square foot of garden that way.  He's not worried about any other nutrients, you see, because he has a big ol' bottle of vitamins.

That's where I started getting annoyed.  Calories and vitamins aren't the only things you need to live.  You also need protein.  Most of us don't worry too much because there is plenty of protein in any normal diet.  But if you don't get protein, you'll get protein deficiency or kwashiorkor, which causes muscle wasting and poor healing.  You really have to get some.

One potato is 163 calories and gives you about four grams of protein.  If we assume he eats about nine per day, he'll only get 40g of protein, and he should be getting 56g at a bare minimum.  Does he ever worry about this?  Does mission control?  Does he have trouble carting around heavy weights in a spacesuit?  Nope, never!

If you're ever in this scenario, plant the beans.  Probably the smartest thing is to diversify the indoor garden and do some of each thing.  I'll forgive him for not doing peas, though--odds are good they're split.  Split peas won't sprout.  An extra advantage of both peas and beans is that you can, if you have to, eat the leaves also.  Potato leaves are toxic, so there's all this plant matter that has to be simply thrown away.

The last annoyance here is that Mark freeze-dries his potatoes because if left inside "they will rot."  Has Mark ever owned a kitchen?  As long as it's cool and dry, the potatoes will be fine.

So much for the choice of potatoes.  What about the rest of the farming project?

Well, plants need a few basic things: carbon dioxide, light, water, various minerals (especially potassium and phosophorus), and nitrogen.  Mark, being a botanist, just says they need carbon dioxide, water, soil, and soil bacteria.  There's a great deal of fuss over him having this tiny little bit of bacteria and inoculating the soil and mixing in his own feces for it to decompose, because as we all know (because he told us) plants can't grow without soil bacteria.

And . . . that's simply not right.  They need nitrogen.  Normally at least some nitrogen is provided by soil bacteria (especially if you planted peas or beans) but most gardeners end up introducing their own because the soil on its own isn't as productive and will wear out.  (Mark points out that gardening as heavily as he is will exhaust the soil, but doesn't really explain why, or that this can be prevented with proper inputs.)  All this fuss about bacteria and he doesn't really need it!  He has two other available sources of nitrogen, maybe three.

1.  In order to farm, Mark needs water.  He has plenty of oxygen, but he needs hydrogen to make the water.  He decides to make it by breaking down rocket fuel, hydrazine.  A molecule of hydrazine has two nitrogen atoms and four hydrogen atoms.  It's horribly explosive, which is the focus of this episode, but at the end Mark has hydrogen, plus most of the nitrogen was released as harmless gas.  But he adds, "Chemistry, being the sloppy bitch it is, ensures there'll be some ammonia that doesn't react with the hydrazine, so it'll just stay ammonia.  You like the smell of ammonia?  Well, it'll be prevalent in my increasingly hellish existence."

Mark, being a botanist, somehow hears "ammonia" and thinks "stink."  I am only a home gardener, but when I hear "ammonia" I think "usable nitrogen."  Of course it's only a tiny bit and Mark doesn't even need it because he has soil bacteria, but when later the soil bacteria die, he could very well produce any amount of ammonia out of the hydrazine.

2.  Of course that's really an excessive amount of work given that every single human has a virtually endless supply of ammonia.  Namely urine.  Mark's is handled by the water reclaimer (we are never told what it does with the stuff it filters out) but if he saves his poop to garden with, he absolutely should be saving his urine too.

In its raw form, urine isn't good for much, but given a little time and some urease enzyme, it'll break down into ammonia.  Much of this will evaporate and be lost (that evaporation is why pee stinks) but some will be useable to put on the garden.  Urease enzyme is basically everywhere, including on your skin.  Mark clearly has some in his environment, because when he has to pee in a bucket, it smells "like a truck stop men's room."  Fresh urine doesn't smell bad unless you're ill. That smell comes from ammonia. How does the nitrogen get into your urine? From digesting the protein in your food. It's a neat little cycle!

So, all he's gotta do is age his urine for a few days and carefully apply to the soil.  As a botanist, he'd probably have a good handle of how much to put on; you wouldn't want to overdo it (i.e. don't go out right now and water the garden with your pee, it'll probably get nitrogen burn and die).  No nitrogen-fixing bacteria required!  Again, he initially had the bacteria so I can see why he didn't worry about this method, but later it seems like it would start sounding like a better choice?

3.  The third option is trying to rig something to get the nitrogen out of the air.  That's how artificial fertilizer is made today, but I admit I don't know exactly how it works or whether it would have been possible for Mark.

The next concern I would have for the plants was lighting.  We're never told if the Hab is translucent, but we are told it has plenty of electricity from the solar panels and several chapters into the gardening thing, he mentions in passing that there's plenty of light.  Which is actually surprising--I mean, who bothers to put broad-spectrum, ultrabright grow lights if you just want the astronauts not to be in the dark?  I thought I'd be up for him removing all the lights from other parts of the Hab and rigging up something to get them as close as possible to the plants, but noooope.  Not even mentioned.  His yields suggest the light was adequate though.

Next quibble is with the water cycle: Mark has gotten himself some water, which he pours on the soil as needed.  The water evaporates and makes the air humid, but that's no problem because the water reclaimer condenses any extra humidity.  There's a minor snag because there's a clog in the reclaimer from "soil minerals."  But the soil never goes into the water reclaimer.  The water evaporates, meaning it leaves all minerals behind.  It's distilled.  WHAT A MYSTERY.

That makes the sum of the farming quibbles.  I had one about how Mark thought he could save energy by going without heat (um, food energy is still energy and cold will increase your metabolic rate!) but as he discarded that plan when he found out how cold it was, I'm gonna let it go.

Next, a small chemistry quibble.  When Mark makes the water, he describes the chemical formulas in terms of liters: "50 liters of O2 makes 100 liters of molecules that only have one O each"; "Each molecule of hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it.  So each liter of hydrazine has enough hydrogen for two liters of water."  But . . . that's not how it works.  Volumes aren't used for much in chemistry because different substances vary in density.  You'd need to be measuring in grams, or better yet, moles.

The last and most obvious problem is how Mark recharges the rover with solar panels.  He has to spread them out to soak up sun, so he can't drive while charging.  He starts at dawn, drives until the batteries run out--four hours--and then spreads out the solar panels.  It takes them twelve hours to charge.

How long is the day on Mars?  Isn't Mark going to run out of daylight?

Mars's day is under an hour longer than ours, so on average it gets twelve and a half hours of daylight.  Let's say it's summer.  Mars's axial tilt is a bit more than ours, but not by a lot.  The latitude of Mark's camp is 31 degrees north, about the latitude of Houston.  Houston gets fourteen hours of daylight on the summer solstice.  Even if we give Mark another half hour for the Martian day length, and another half hour for the planet being slightly more tilted, I just don't think he's going to have time to charge up those panels before the sun goes down.  And I'm not sure they'll charge as fast those last few hours, with the sun getting low!

And then Mark takes another rover trip months later. So if the day was over 12.5 hours on the first trip, it's not now.  There's even a day where he drives eight hours, charges his panels, and runs out of daylight when they're only 70% charged. How do they get 70% charged in only 4-6 hours if it takes 12 to charge them fully?

It's especially annoying given that Mark could have just gotten up earlier and driven at night.  Why waste precious sun when your panels aren't up?  (Does the rover have headlights, I wonder?)  Did the author simply not remember that solar panels need sunlight? He gets that dust storms affect them, but seems to assume a day that's any length he wants for the plot.

That's all the errors I caught. If there are engineering problems, I wouldn't catch them.

So did it ruin the book for me? Actually no. I enjoyed nitpicking it. I guess it's the same impulse that makes people love Star Trek while publishing whole books of the errors in it.

I even grew to like Mark Watney. He's not a wildly emotional guy, he's a wisecracker. Which ends up helping him not go off his nut when he's alone on Mars.

So I'd definitely recommend the book. But Andy Weir, if you're planning another book involving farming in space? Call me first.

Review: Anne With an E

I finished watching Anne With an E last night.  I have to admit, I've never been an Anne of Green Gables fan.  Probably I just read the books too late in life; I read the first one as a teenager and three more as an adult.  It's hard at that age not to be put off by children's literature, because it doesn't have the subtlety you're used to.  The other reason I didn't like them is because I've had people telling me I'm "exactly like Anne of Green Gables" since I was about eight.  I read the books and was like -- that's how you see me?  As a girl who constantly says ridiculous things?

The books just seem to idealize what it's like to be an imaginative, talkative, impulsive girl growing up.  How come when Anne calls something "The Lake of Shining Waters" everyone just magically likes her, whereas when I said something fanciful as a kid, people laughed at me and said I was silly?  Why do bosom friends and helpful mentors spring out of the woodwork for her, while when I was her age I was getting bullied and adults mostly felt I was bringing it on myself by being so weird?

I guess I have learned in life to have a very negative feeling toward her type of romanticism, because I learned so thoroughly the lesson that it isn't appropriate and nobody likes it.  But maybe it's my bias that's wrong: maybe I shouldn't feel obligated to write in plain or ironic language for fear of embarrassing myself.  Other people manage to be a little florid or poetic without getting mocked.  I just worry because I've miscalculated in the past and it didn't win me any friends.

But when I heard Anne With an E was supposedly "grim and gritty" I figured I'd want to watch it.  The books are definitely written through rose-colored glasses; the tragedies are described with a bit of distance and euphemism, while the funny bits are played up.  I didn't like the romanticism, but I thought I might like the gritty version.

And I did!  However, it honestly was not that gritty.  It's gritty compared to Lucy Maud Montgomery, but not to anything else on television today.  There was no sex.  The scenes of Anne being beaten by Mr. Hammond or bullied by the orphanage girls weren't graphic or intense.  I wouldn't mind my kids watching it (though I might not actually let them, because Marko takes things to heart that I wouldn't always expect).  Yes, some tense scenes are added that aren't in the original; yes, at least one character dies who doesn't in the book.  Anne's friendly schoolteacher and the kindly preacher's wife don't make an entrance, at least in the first season.  Marilla and Matthew are given tragical pasts, just as Anne would have wanted.  But it's not bleak.  It's not, you know, Call the Midwife.

What the show mostly does is allow you to hear some of the tougher stuff from the book that maybe you didn't notice when you read it.  We all know Anne is an orphan, that she was raised by uncaring people who saw her as a source of free labor and then abandoned her when she was no longer convenient, that she is constantly told she is ugly ... but somehow it's easy for a modern reader to miss or undervalue that stuff.  I actually went back to the book after watching the show, wanting to see just how much the show was inventing, and was surprised to find most of the "dark stuff" was in there after all.  For instance, the following lines show the dark side pretty well:

"For pity's sake hold your tongue, you talk entirely too much for a little girl." -- Marilla
"I'll come back in a few minutes for the candle.  I daren't trust you to put it out yourself.   You'd likely set the place on fire."  -- Marilla
"What a starved, unloved life she had had -- a life of drudgery and neglect."
"Marilla looked at Anne and softened at the sight of the child's pale face with its look of mute misery--the misery of a helpless little creature who finds itself once more caught in the trap from which it had escaped.  Marilla felt an uncomfortable conviction that, if she denied the appeal of that look, it would haunt her to her dying day."
"If you'll take my advice... you'll do that 'talking to' you mention with a fair-sized birch switch."  -- Mrs. Rachel Lynde

The show doesn't always quote lines like this, but it does get across the impression of just how rough it is to be an orphan.  Somehow I never thought of Anne as particularly disadvantaged, but when I realize that she would have been, I feel a lot more friendly to her.  All the "stuff working out perfectly" is meant to be a little surprising, not just Mary Sue-ing.

But the different focus of the show definitely gives a different impression of Anne.  Sometimes, true, she chatters because she is happy.  Other times, like on the ride back to see Miss Spencer, when she thinks the Cuthberts are going to give her up, she says she's "made her mind up firmly" to enjoy herself, and you get the impression that she's being as bright and winsome as she knows how, in the hopes of getting the Cuthberts to keep her.  It seems like maybe some of the relentless chipperness is put on, because she knows that as an orphan she owes it to people to charm them.  I find that a lot more sympathetic, myself.

Anne's first day at school hit me right in the feels, even though (or because) it's nothing like the book.  In the book, Anne gets along well with her peers (except of course for Gilbert), and though she's a little behind in some subjects, it doesn't appear to be a huge deal.  In the show, Anne tries hard to make a good impression but the other girls (apart from Diana) just think she's weird.  And it gets worse, because there are all kinds of unspoken rules (all lunches have to be shared!  don't steal someone else's spot for storing their milk!  don't talk to Gilbert Blythe because Ruby Gillis has a crush on him already!) that she keeps accidentally breaking.  It's equally embarrassing that she's so behind in math and that she's so ahead in literature.  She finally manages to impress them a bit with her superior (but completely inaccurate) knowledge of where babies come from, but she goes on a bit too much, egged on by their interest, and ends up causing a huge scandal.  It's an entirely fabricated episode, but felt very true to life for me.  This was exactly my experience, starting school so much later than everyone else and not knowing the rules.  And maybe I've got Asperger's too much on the brain, but Anne comes across in this part like a textbook case of it.  Talks to herself?  Check.  Sounds like a little professor?  Check.  Unusual intonation when she speaks?  Check.  Has exactly one friend, who tries and fails to shepherd her through her social life? Check.  I wonder if the show's writers were consciously trying to convey that -- it's certainly not something I think is in the book at all.

Anyway, it gives a lot more pathos to Anne's story.  When she hits Gilbert with her slate, gets in trouble with the teacher, and quits school, it no longer looks like she's being overdramatic.  It looks like she has been pushed past her ability to cope and is giving up.  And then when she starts winning people over after all, it's much more of a triumph.  Instead of thinking "Why is everyone falling all over Anne?" I thought, "At last people are giving her a chance."

Overall, I thought it was an improvement on the book.  It took out all the preachiness (except perhaps a bit on women's education, Montgomery was into that and so are the show's writers, apparently) and pumped up the drama, but I wouldn't say it's entirely alien to the book.  Like all good adaptations, it tried to keep the subtext intact (orphan makes good, kindness can win hearts, quirkiness should be celebrated rather than condemned) without being too slavish about the actual plot, because not all events work equally well in print and film.

I won't spoil it any further, but will just say, I recommend the show for both Anne fans and Anne critics like myself.  It's just a good show, whether you've read the books or not, full of historical detail, gorgeous scenery, and interesting characters. And the one season is not long, so it won't be too much to watch if you're busy like I am.

Review: The Better Angels of Our Nature

I heard about Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature some time ago and wanted to read it, but it didn't occur to me to check the library.  Last week I ran into it while looking for something entirely different, and despite my slow pace with books lately, I decided to take a chance on being able to finish it before it was due.  At about 900 pages, that was a big gamble, but I got it done.  Turns out feeling too tired to do any housework jives pretty well with reading books instead.

The basic thesis of the book is this: violence has been going down throughout human history and is now at an all-time low.  Proving that point is pretty easy, though, compared to the other question of why.  What exactly has been changing throughout human history that made people become less violent?  This latter question remains partially unanswered.  Pinker has ideas, but it's very hard to prove that anything caused any other thing, especially when they are both broad trends over centuries.

I found Pinker's evidence that violence is decreasing absolutely convincing, even in areas where I at first felt doubtful.  For instance, I'd always thought that hunter-gatherers were known for being very peaceful, considering they had little to fight over.  But in studying both the skeletons from ancient hunter-gatherer sites and the rate of violent death in hunter-gatherer tribes today, it turns out that is not the case at all.  They were many times more likely to die a violent death than any city-dwelling society -- though, of course, many of these deaths may be at the hands of neighboring agricultural tribes.  There is only so much we can know.  But my mental image of foraging being a life of peace, security, and bliss was not really that accurate.  While they may well have been without internal government or property, each tribe would have had to defend its territory against other tribes, and they may have had disputes within the tribe as well.

Another surprise was that non-war violence has been going down for centuries as well.  For instance, killing of citizens by their government is way down, as I might have known if I'd realized just how extensive the death penalty was in the Middle Ages.  Torture is down, which I did know -- gruesome executions and tortures used to be a frequent public spectacle, while now torture is a rarity and the source of scandal when it's found out.  Domestic violence is down.  Rape is down, though it can be hard to measure beyond this century, since it wasn't always considered a crime before.  Child abuse is down.  Genocide, shockingly, is down.  Civil war is down.  Murder is down.  Pinker scrupulously cites his sources, criticizes them where faulty, and never seems to jump to any conclusions.  But the charts he comes up with from this data are staggering.  This is not a small decline, possibly able to be put down to faulty numbers -- it's huge and unmistakeable.

Pinker admits that most of us aren't going to believe his thesis on first blush.  After all, we are familiar with the violence of today, and less familiar with that of yesterday.  When someone is murdered in our area, we are bound to know about it, while if we are looking at the history of another place and time, we probably only know of major wars.  History is myopic; the closer something is, the more information about it we have.  And so much violent conflict in the past gets glossed over by the writers of the time, because it was common enough not to have been a very big deal.

Still, there's enough information to work with, if you push past your automatic reaction.  For instance, you can look in ancient literature.  The numbers of those killed in battle are probably not trustworthy, but the descriptions of ancient warfare may well be.  When Biblical heroes capture a city and put everyone within to the sword, that is probably an accurate description of how wars were conducted at the time.  When Odysseus throws infants off the tower of Ilium, this isn't considered unusual behavior in a conquerer, and Homer somehow expects us to continue to consider him a hero.  The Romans, of course, were big on torturing people to death, and are responsible for things like gladitorial games and crucifixion.  The Middle Ages weren't really an improvement either -- take the Arthurian tales, which are chock-full of gore and rapine.  Our "parfait knight," Lancelot, "had the custom of never killing a knight who begged for mercy, unless he had sworn beforehand to do so, or unless he could not avoid it."  Still a little much for a modern audience!  And of course Shakespeare is full of similar stuff.  Pinker quotes Henry V:

Why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes.

And Henry V, too, is painted throughout the play as a hero!

So, what happened?  There is no one cause, according to Pinker, so he has to go one step at a time and explain them all.

Pinker points first to the invention of government.  I've always felt a little doubtful of anarchy, because its proponents seem to assume human perfection at the outset.  Pinker basically destroys the whole idea with his proof that the invention of the state coincided with a massive reduction in violent death.  And he also offers an explanation.

Violence, he explains, is not entirely an irrational behavior.  There is a reason why we evolved with violent impulses -- they have sometimes, in our history, been useful or at least made sense on an individual level.  There are three main causes of violence he points to: gain (as when one person or group attacks another to take their territory, possessions, or wives), fear (when one nation makes a preemptive strike against another in order to forestall an attack they expect in the future), and retribution or honor (when one attempts to punish someone else for a past harm, in the hopes of getting a reputation in the future as a person who shouldn't be messed with).  Each of these is pretty rational, especially in a dangerous situation and resource-poor situation where survival is not assured.  Gain may be necessary for survival, and a tribe that is strong and raids its neighbors often will survive better than one that doesn't.  Fear is often justified -- it can be hard to know when an enemy might attack, when they might at any time.  And as for retribution, it seems the only way to keep attacks from others from being constant.  America has participated in conflicts for all of these reasons: the conquest of Indian territories and the Mexican-American War for gain, World War II for retribution, and the invasion of Iraq out of fear.

The trouble is that these reasons interact to encourage a state of constant war.  If war for gain happens often, than war for fear will be waged to prevent it.  And the only alternative to pre-emptive war is to engage in terrifying retribution if you are attacked.  Reputation, something I tend to laugh about today, could be as vital for survival as food.  But what is likely to happen is that one tribe starts a war out of fear, the other overreacts out of vengeance, and they both wind up feeling like the injured party.  Neither sees any way the war could have been avoided, even though they both suffer from it and would both be better off if it could have been avoided.  And it is likely to unleash a cycle of retribution which will be hard to stop.

Government is a mechanism for stopping this kind of thing by punishing anyone who engages in it.  When a person or group thinks of attacking for gain, it will have to weigh the chance of failure plus the punishment in case of success.  When a person desires retribution, they can be reassured that the government will punish, so attacks are disincetivized without a direct conflict.  And with everyone knowing these two kinds of conflicts are increasingly unwise and unlikely, they will be less likely to attack out of fear either.

The correlate of this is that when people do not trust their government -- when it is obviously corrupt, favors some over others, or does not punish aggressors -- violence levels rise again, as if the government were not there.  Pinker points to situations where this has taken place, from failed states to certain American cities.

I can clearly see this play out in my own life: my kids fight incessantly.  Either one is afraid the other will attack, or they have already been attacked and want revenge.  Or, sometimes, it's just a matter of "he won't do what I want."  And while I like the concept of being a libertarian parent and letting them work things out, the fact is that I've tried it both ways and leaving them alone more provokes more fights.  When they are assured of my quick intervention -- no matter what exactly I do to intervene! -- they are much slower to attack one another.  They feel secure that someone else is going to defend them, so they don't have to be constantly on battle alert.

So, that's one big factor, and it reduced violence as humankind transitioned from hunter-gathering to settled cities.  Something similar happened in the Middle Ages as disparate feudal holdings coalesced into modern states -- less raiding, more law.  But obviously it could do nothing about the problem of interstate war -- there is no higher authority to punish aggressive states.  (The Pope tried, of course, but he couldn't enforce much.)

Another massive factor is trade.  This, again, put the smackdown on a cherished theory of mine, this time agrarianism.  My understanding of agrarianism as being preferable and allowing for more independence relied on the ability of the land to easily sustain all the people who live on it.  But that is not the reality for most of history; population always grows but land never does.  A man with seven sons may not be able to divide his farm enough for everyone.  What is the solution?  Raiding and violence.  It is the only way, in an agrarian system, that a person can better his situation.

But medieval Europe had a great deal of prejudice against any other way of improving one's lot.  There were laws against usury, of course, which prevented a modern financial system such as we enjoy.  In addition, guilds had rules against innovation, working longer hours, setting lower prices -- pretty much any form of true competition.  It was frowned on to sell something for more money than you bought it for.  Yet all of these are nonviolent ways of increasing one's wealth -- something that anyone with a growing family finds they have to do.

As these laws and prejudices began to dissolve, commerce became more and more common.  A merchant class arose that didn't rely on farming at all.  Not only did this mean that there was no point in raiding anyone anymore, but it also gave a huge incentive for peace and cooperation.  Enemies became business partners, and business partners are always worth more to you alive than dead.  As trade expanded across national boundaries, there started to be a powerful group within each country that adamantly did not want to go to war with others.   Today, the more a nation trades with others, and the more trade organizations it is a member of, the less likely it is to go to war, especially with its trade partners.

A third set of reasons can be grouped together under "the Enlightenment."  It started with urbanization as a result of increased trade -- life in a city lends itself to examining different perspectives.  The printing press contributed, too; more and more philosophers and thinkers were able to trade ideas quickly and easily and to spread them to a larger audience.  Pinker lists Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Mill as influences on the moral thinking of the day.

Enlightenment humanism was based on a few key principles like the universality of human nature (so another person is necessarily as important as oneself), human rights, and reason as a tool for seeking the truth.  A belief in reason was sufficient to put an end to witch-burning, for instance.  A belief in universal human nature could help people overcome their national, ethnic, or gender prejudices.  It's funny, because I hated the Enlightenment when I first learned about it in high school -- it was dry as toast -- and was explicitly taught to condemn it in college.  Now I am beginning to see it as one of the best things that's ever happened.

Pinker takes some time to argue against the belief that violent ideologies, such as fascism and communism, really sprang from the Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment was based on individual rights, while these other philosophies thought of man mainly in a collective way -- as a race or a class.  They also did not consider men to be equal, or possessed of the same nature, but rather to be valued or not based on membership in certain groups.  The thinkers they draw from can be described as counter-Enlightenment.  However, Pinker does defend one Counter-Enlightenment thinker, Edmund Burke, who argued in favor of culture and custom as well as reason to guide behavior.  Pinker believes that cultural standards, from etiquette to common moral prejudices, can be a civilizing force too.

Out of the Enlightenment we get modern democracy.  Democracy is one of the most powerful forces against warfare that we have.  While it isn't technically true that no two democracies have ever gone to war, it is the case that the more democratic two nations are, the less likely they are to go to war.  There's a lot of fussing with the numbers to explain this, because many countries that call themselves "Democratic" aren't that democratic after all.  Pinker finds papers which rank countries by how democratic they are, does his level best to exclude confounders, and still finds correlations between democracy and peace.

Why don't democracies go to war as much?  Well, one obvious reason is that the people bear more of the costs of a war than the ruler does, so a nation ruled by the people will be more hesitant to go to war.  Another is that democracies generally have already accepted Enlightenment values, so they acknowledge that their rivals possess human rights.

There's a lot of discussion of recent history.  What about the two world wars, don't they prove that things are worse now?  Well, no.  First because, proportionate to the world's population, they aren't actually the worst slaughters in history after all; and second because two data points don't make a trend.  While over time wars have gotten larger, they've also gotten less frequent -- and they've gotten less frequent faster than they've gotten larger.  The peace we've enjoyed since the second world war is unprecedented.  The conflicts that loom large on our consciousness are tiny compared to the wars of the past.

Another issue he addresses is abortion.  Surely the number of abortions, if they are counted as violent deaths, makes our age the bloodiest!  Although Pinker is prochoice, he produces data to show that before abortion was common, infanticide was just as common.  From Carthaginian child sacrifice to Roman infant exposure, through the Middle Ages: "For almost a millenium and a half the Judeo-Christian prohibition against infanticide coexisted with massive infanticide in practice ... In 1527 a French priest wrote that 'the latrines resound with the cries of the children who have been plunged into them.'"  So it's sort of a net zero there, except where birth control has reduced the abortion rate.  In recent years abortion has been falling around the globe, so it's still good news.

There's a heck of a lot more in this book.  There's a discussion of why men are more violent than women, and whether increased participation of women in public life has made war more rare.  There's speculation about reading novels increasing empathy.  There's some stuff on psychology and neurobiology -- too much, in my opinion, because even after you get through the long explanatory sections, there's not much we can learn.  That was disappointing to me, because I think there's a lot we should be able to learn from the human brain.  Does growing up in a stressful environment make a person more aggressive for life?  Perhaps the science just hasn't gotten there yet.

There's also little discussion of the role of parents and parenting customs.  That is especially odd considering he does talk about changing patterns in education.  (For instance, a switch from rote learning to greater abstraction, which may be responsible for an increase in people's ability to abstract and empathize.)  He defends this on the basis of the popular scientific theory that everything can be put down to genes, chance, and peers and nothing at all to parents.  I'm sorry, this theory fails a basic sanity test.  You can't say a teacher or best friend has an influence and your parents have done.  There probably is something funky in there.  My suspicion is that most parents in a given culture raise their kids about the same, more or less, so the differences blend into the differences in the larger environment.  Try a study comparing homeschooled Fundamentalist kids with the children of crunchy hippies and then get back to me.

So, the book isn't perfect.  Some of his theories I find a little nuts (blaming the crime spike of the 1960's-90's on cultural shifts, even though he admits that those shifts have not reversed) and sometimes he doesn't dig further into a theory that interests me, as I mentioned.  But overall it's still a phenomenal book.  He is rigorous about what we can and can't know from the data available, and he always seems to test and double-test his theories.  Sometimes he proposes a theory and then argues against it so thoroughly it's hard to tell which side he actually favors.  I appreciate this kind of objectivity.

And its conclusions are far-ranging.  I find myself staggered, thinking of the education I've received.  I was always taught history as a decline from former greatness to present chaos.  How did the authors of these books not realize how much better things are today?  Or did they simply assume that a less religious age must be worse, regardless of greater peace and prosperity?  I was also taught to demonize the Enlightenment, the destroyer of a far superior Catholic culture, when in reality there is no true contradiction between faith and Enlightenment values -- rather, religions are improved when they adopt them.  (Unless, of course, you think the Catholic Church was better when it allowed torture, slavery, and conversions by the sword.)  I feel as though I was taught my whole life to be against the side of the angels -- government, capitalism, rationalism, urbanization, technology, all things I was taught to view with suspicion which actually have done more good than any of the things I was taught to revere.  I'm a little ticked off about this, to be honest.  This kind of history "education" seems actually prone to make the world a worse place.

Of course there is still one counter-argument left to the traditionalists: the world is less violent today, they may admit, but that doesn't mean it's better.  It used to be more manly, tough, honorable!  People today are weak, without conviction, effeminate, materialistic.  Well, maybe so.  But I think that not having to worry that my children will be slaughtered is just more important to me than the abstract value of "valor" and so on.  And if a person is to argue that the past was better because one was more likely to go to heaven then -- well, the burden of proof is on them.  Is there any merit to being a faithful Catholic when the alternative is to be punished?  Is one more likely to go to heaven as a person who enjoys watching public executions than as a person who does not?  We are seeing an increase in kindness, concern for people different from us, and self-control.  How can that be a bad thing, even from an "only-salvation-matters" perspective?

Anyway, this is one of those life-changing books that I want to force everyone I know to read.  At the same time, at 900 pages, I know the odds aren't good that any of them will.  Hence the review.  I wish there were a shorter, more journalistic version of this book which could serve as an introduction.  I'd pass it out on street corners.  That's how big a deal I think this book is.  If you can get your hands on it, read it.  There's so much more in it that I haven't mentioned that will totally blow your mind or get you thinking.