Who Cares About Torture?

And here I thought I was done writing about C.S. Lewis and politics.

Barack Obama ran for president on a platform of principled opposition to the Bush administration's gross abuses of executive power: its secrecy, torture, extraordinary rendition, ill-conceived wars. His conduct on these fronts as President have been a grim disappointment: Guantanamo is to remain open indefinitely, Khalid Sheik Mohammad will be tried by military tribunal, Bradley Manning is receiving inhumane treatment without even having been convicted, and we are now involved in a third war in the Muslim world (fourth, if one counts the drone strikes we've been carrying out in Yemen).

For the sake of argument, let's grant that Obama's hands are tied by Congress and other political considerations (except when it comes to Libya, in which such an argument is absurd on its face). The defense is actually damning in its tacit admission that civil liberties are not important. I don't simply mean unimportant to the electorate, which is generally not much interested in politics anyway, but also to Obama's defenders.

It's true that for liberals, Obama is on balance better than the Republicans on whatever pet issues one cares to rattle off: health care, gay rights, education. But not all issues are created equal. The abuses of executive power radically upset the checks and balances system, and the torture issue in particular, moral considerations aside, undermines the very notion of a state built on the rule of law. By not prosecuting the architects of the Bush torture policy, Obama has reduced it to just another policy preference.

These are fundamental issues, and it is frankly disturbing to read and hear people all but say, "Well, yeah, starting military conflicts without even asking Congress and forcing a prisoner to strip for his guards is wrong, but other than that..."

This is where Lewis comes in. From The Screwtape Letters:

...Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity, or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest of merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

The denunciations of George Bush and "enhanced interrogation" were vociferous and unequivocal, while the response to Obama's complicity in the whole ugly mess is an excuse, half-muttered, that he's not as bad as the Republicans. At least they're honest about their blood thirst.

All of this is not to say one should not vote for Obama next year. Politics is the art of the possible, a particularly narrow category in America's two-party system. But let's not pretend Obama is blameless. His is a profound failure of moral leadership on a critical issue. For most of us, that's not a deal-breaker. But if that isn't, then what, if anything, should be? And if not, why not?

No Good Moves

“These are strange times to be a Jew.”

This remark, a frequent refrain in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is both an understatement and something of a banality. For yes, the times of the book’s proceeding’s are most unusual: 60 years after the Israelis were pushed into the sea by the surrounding Arab nations, the Jewish people are about to lose the corner of Alaska granted them by the U.S. government.

Strange times indeed, but when have they not been so? The Jewish story is one of perennial strangerdom and besiege, and this particular story, in spite if not because of its alternate history, reflects a certain weariness with the question of the “Jewish question.” (spoilers follow)

The story runs a through line of duress. Its world is premised on a catastrophe—the second expulsion from Israel—whose consolation, the establishment of Sitka, Alaska, is a stopgap measure at best. That the Reversion is to happen on a pre-arranged schedule is cold comfort; at the story’s outset, the Jews will be once more a homeless people.

Amid this backdrop of defeat, our story’s anti-hero, Meyer Landsman, is, appropriately, also following a string of disasters—his job, his sister’s death, his marriage—by living in borrowed digs, spending his alcoholic daze in a room at the Hotel Zamenhof. So too does the "yid" whose death in his own room Landsman spends the length of the book investigating.

The yid in question is Menachem Mendel Shpilman, a Gordian knot of contradiction. The son of the rebbe of Sitka’s Hasidic Verbover clan, as well as a closeted homosexual. A heroin addict, believed to have been the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the Messiah, born once a generation. And, a Chess prodigy. His dilemma is quintessentially Jewish, a stranger in his own home. The strain of so many competing identities eventually proves too much to bear: his murder, we learn, was a murder-suicide. A hopeless Chess game provides a moving (in more ways than one) analogy:

”He showed me that damned problem of his, the mate in two,” Hertz says. “He said he got it off some Russian. He said if I solved it, then I would understand how he felt.”
“Zugzwang,” Bina says.
“What’s that?” Ester-Malke says.
“It’s when you have no good moves,” Bina says. “But you still have to move.”

Perhaps the gloomiest aspect of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s alternate universe is how familiar much of it is. This passage, describing the pushback the new Jewish population receives from the Native American Alaskans, is a story oft told but with different names:

The construction of a prayer house at St. Cyril by the splinter from a splinter of a sect from Lisianski was the final outrage for many Natives. It was met with demonstrations, rallies, lawyers, and dark rumblings from Congress over yet another affront to peace and parity by the overweening Jews of the north. Two days before its consecration, somebody—no one ever came forward or was charged—threw a double Molotov through a window, burning the prayer house to its concrete pad. The congregants and their supporters swarmed into the town of St. Cyril, smashing crab traps, breaking the windows of the Alaska Native Brotherhood half, and setting spectacular fire to a shedful of Roman Candles and cherry bombs…. The Synagogue Riots remain the lowest moment in the bitter and inglorious history of Tlingit-Jewish relations.

That the two sides fighting it out are both displaced peoples passes without comment, not that much is needed. By book’s ending, though, the violence has moved (back) to Palestine, with the Dome of the Rock destroyed by radical Hasids. To end the book in this manner seems an admission of resignation by Chabon: even with a radically altered history, the Jewish story be one of land wars that eventually circle back to bloodshed in the Holy Land.

This is a dour outlook, but it is not entirely so. If there is little redemption to be found in the world at large there remains hope on an individual level. For Landsman eventually pulls himself out of his funk and achieves a spiritual regeneration, entirely thanks to the dead messiah Shpilman. Investigating the case to its bitter conclusion leads Landsman to quit drinking, uncover the truth about his sister’s death, and reunite with his wife. Shpilman cannot save himself, much less the whole of Jewry, yet in this failure he offers others some chance of rebirth.

Thriving in spite of disaster is, of course, another way of reading the long history of Jewish persecution. Even after expulsion, blood libel, pogroms, and the Holocaust, Judaism and Jews continue to leave their stamp on civilization, be it through the bagel, the Coen Brothers, or Larry Summers. The anti-semitic trope of a Jewish world conspiracy has always been a barb-wired backhanded compliment, a mad jealousy at the fact of Jewish success. Such Jew hatred has shaped Jewish history as much as Jews themselves, to the result of constant uncertainty and removal. One gets the sense from The Yiddish Policemen's Union that Michael Chabon wishes everyone could just move on.

Coming Soon

The Yiddish Policeman's Union writeup is going to be a bit longer than I expected, and so is my workweek, so no dice for tonight. Instead I'll mention that I've started Aristotle's Ethics both for a book club and to hopefully generate some material here. C.S. Lewis offered a lot of food for thought, and I can approach a work of philosophy from a lot more angles than fiction.

Further down the pike I plan to get ahold of a copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, after two people, independently of one another, suggested I read it. Reading Orwell's takedown of Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare and King Lear is a good way to whet one's appetite.

Technical Difficulties

Circumstances in the real world plus a haphazard internet connection prevented me from posting anything yesterday, and I won't have time to write today. Tomorrow evening is more like it. Until then, here is what Sean Paul's "Temperature"'s lyrics sound like:

Big Bad Woolf

How does one describe Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to the uninitiated? Synopsis does no good: a middle-aged married couple invites a younger couple over for some very late drinks and proceeds to use them as foils in their marital power struggle. That's what the play "about," I suppose, but does little to explain its power, its appeal, success, and endurance.

It's the words.

George: You take the trouble to construct a civilization, to build a society based on the principles of... of principle. You make government and art and realize that they are, must be, both the same. You bring things to the saddest of all points, to the point where there is something to lose. Then, all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the Dies Irae. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours.

Virginia Woolf's story is practically secondary, what with the many long dialogues, stories and digressions. It could hit its marks in half the 3+ hour running time, but only to the play's great impoverishment. As another Edward Albee character once said, "Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly."

For there is a point to be taken from the speechifying in this behemoth, something about the lies we tell ourselves and each other, including on the goodness of people. Convention holds that the protagonists of a book/movie/play, the mirror held up to nature, must be likable and/or sympathetic. Balls to that. Some people, many people, are, to quote the same character again, "mean, stupid, unwashed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag[s] of garbage." All the drama asks is that they clutch our morbid attent, vigorously and without relent.

George: Yes, Martha? Can I get you something?
Martha: Ah… well, sure! You can, um, light my cigarette, if you're of a mind to.
George: No. There are limits. I mean, a man can put up with only so much without he descends a rung or two on the, uh, old evolutionary ladder, which is up your [Nick's] line. Now, I will, uh, hold your hand when it's dark and you're afraid of the boogeyman, and I will tote your gin bottles out after midnight so no one can see, but I will not light your cigarette. And that, as they say, is that.

One can parse the text for such a meaning--the above is but a first try--but that's to miss enjoying the words. And this isn't to say they exist for their own sake: far be it. The witty, pedantic repartee is a facade to hide the desperation unmasked at play's end, which gets back to the lies being told. There is no better way to expose illusion than a smokescreen.

Carter Burwell Mix

My brain has been scrambled throughout this long day, so how about some music selections to change things up? I've just downloaded (for $5.99!) Carter Burwell's score for True Grit, and I feel like putting up some my favorite pieces to come out of his many contributions to the Coen Brothers' films.





The themes for Miller's Crossing and Fargo are endlessly listenable, and yet such odd pieces: quite stirring--lyrical?--and moving, they sound like they'd go well in the trailer for an uplifting Oscar-bait film, when the actual movies they belong to are decidedly off-beat and quite dark and nasty. There's undercurrents of that darkness in both pieces, which creates a juxtaposition that makes them so interesting.



"Wie Glauben" is one of the few originals contributed to the soundtrack for The Big Lebowski. It serves as the music for the German Nihilists when they've torched The Dude's car, and it is "by" them as well, belonging as they do to a Kraftwerk-styled electronica group, Autobahn and blasting the piece from their boombox in the parking lot. I know it's kind of a parody of such music, but I find it strangely compelling all the same.



The opening theme for Burn After Reading is even goofier, for, like the film it serves, it's making a lot of noise for what really is nothing at all. Music that is in itself funny--not a funny song with funny lyrics, but where the music itself elicits laughter--is hard to find, and maybe without the movie to provide context the humor of this is lost. But in any case, its over-the-top 'action-y' quality makes me smile.



The score for True Grit is based off a number of 19th century Protestant hymnals, and for this reason the Academy disqualified it from being nominated for an Oscar. Their loss. It's lovely work, and the religious inspiration meshes well with the film's redemption of Rooster Cogburn. "Little Blackie" is short and simple, a good example from a terrific score.

Ho Hum

I don't have anything terribly important to say, but in the Unofficial Month of Blogging I'm rather obliged, aren't I? I ended up being wrong wrong wrong about today's weather, as it was not only sunny but the hottest day DC has had this year, at a freakishly summer-like high of 85 degrees.

I'm also nearly done with The Yiddish Policeman's Union and ought to have my big-picture say of it soon enough. I will say that, as a reader, seeing all the little plot threads resolve themselves into a complete narrative tapestry, as is happening now, is a great pleasure. There's a twin effect of making the world of the story seem somehow smaller, because everything is connected, yet also blowing things open to reveal that there was even more going on than originally suggested. It reminds me of how I felt reading that Indira Gandhi really had it in for Saleem in Midnight's Children, eliciting as it does that same gobsmacked, "Oh shit!" reaction and wanting to know how it's all going to go down.

Anyway. As you were.

The Cherry Blossoms

After several days of cold and wet weather, today presented a good opportunity to get out and see the cherry blossoms. Most of them haven't peaked yet, but after a season of grey and and murk, the white blossoms are a welcome sight anyway.

They make the Washington and Jefferson monuments more picturesque than they already are.



Along the way I stopped to check out the George Mason monument, which I had missed when I did my tour in September.



It had one of the few fully pink trees in the Tidal Basin.


The trip home provided a few surprises. Outside the Mall entrance to the Smithsonian Metro was a Scientology booth.


This particular entrance was closed, and the one a block away was swamped with tourists. I decided to skip it and head over to the next nearest stop, L'Enfant Plaza.

I'm not familiar with the area, however, and before I managed to find the station I ended up in the plaza proper, off of L'Enfant Pomenade. It was disorienting; just a couple blocks from the crowd-packed open air of the National Mall was this conglomeration of concrete rigid buildings that was almost completely empty and conspicuously quiet. And the architecture!


Just brutal.



It was a few hours well spent. I'm quite glad I did it today; the weather right now is not so promising.

Meep Meep

I've always wanted to use this metaphor, but Michael Chabon beat me to it:

"In every marriage, there are things," she begins. She shakes her head once, and the veil trembles. "One of my grandsons was at my house today, before the funeral. Nine years old. I put the television for him in the sewing room, you're not supposed to, but what does it matter, the little shkotz was bored. I sat with him ten minutes, watching. It was that cartoon program, the wolf that chases the blue rooster."

Landsman says that he knows it.

"Then you know," she says, "how that wolf can run in the middle of the air. He knows how to fly, but only so long as he still thinks he's touching the ground. As soon as he looks down, and sees where he is, and understands what's going on, then he falls and smashes into the ground."

"I've seen that bit," Landsman says.

"That's how it is in a successful marriage," says the rabbi's wife. "I have spent the last fifty years running in the middle of the air. Not looking down. Outside of what God requires, I never talk to my husband. Or vice versa."

Instead of marriage, however, I consider cartoon physics to be a style of argument. Several years ago I had a protracted email discussion with a creationist, a very intelligent girl whom I thought I could convince of the error of her position by rebutting whatever criticisms of the theory of evolution she had.

So naive was I, so, so, naive.

What ended up happening is she would take a position--several, usually; these were very long emails--and I would go through and point out the flaws in her reasoning. She would respond by moving on to a new set of objections without ever really acknowledging that the old ones had been disproved (or, to be generous, challenged). Thus, cartoon physics debating: if you've gone over a rhetorical cliff, as long as you don't look down and realize you've done so, you can continue indefinitely.

It's nice to know the escapades of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner are so thematically universal.

Putting Out

Fellow Golden Horder Andy is inviting others to join him in an Unofficial Month of Blogging, in which the participants post at least once a day. I've gotten back up to a decent output in recent days, but it can always be improved. To that end I'll be tossing something up here daily, even if it is just a little note or video....Or an FYI informing my readership of such.

Pungent Prose

The hard-boiled detective story comes with an expectation of clipped, world-weary narration, and Michael Chabon doesn't disappoint:

The knot of his gold-and-green rep necktie presses its thumb against his larynx like a scruple pressing against a guilty conscience, a reminder that he is alive.

Another example, shortly thereafter:

The Sitka Saturday afternoon lies dead as a failed messiah in its winding rag of snow.

More important than cynical posturing, however, is the liveliness of the prose. Good writing, really good writing, is invention, combining words and phrases in new ways. It's a safe assumption that the words "dead as a failed messiah" have never before been so arranged.

The Genesis of Books

Even 150 pages in, it's obvious The Yiddish Policeman's Union is a mighty feat in world-building. Essentially a Jewish murder mystery, it takes place in an alternate universe where the Arabs actually did drive the Israelis into the sea in 1948, and the Jewish refugees were given a godforsaken stretch of coastal Alaska to live in for 60 years. It's a great historical what-if, and that's just the background.

But background is ever so important. Alan Moore's Writing for Comics, written in the 80s before Watchmen became the gold standard of comic books, described world creation as the first element of a story, before plot and character, for the environment would lay down the rules and devices from which everything would follow. This is sound advice for writing fiction in any medium. Michael Chabon understands this (and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay proved he knows a thing or two about comics to boot) and he must have had a merry time dropping the Jews into Alaska and seeing how their society and broader history would develop.

Take the ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews. Something of a marginal group in our world (this much I gathered from a production of The Chosen I recently saw), in Chabon's Sitka, Alaska they comprise a robust criminal underworld. Our anti-hero, Detective Meyer Landsman, and his partner Berko need to speak with a Hasidic crime boss, and to get to him they go to the most powerful non-Hasid Jew in the Hasid territory of Verbov Island--Zimbalist the boundary maven, powerful for his mastery of intricacies of the Hasidic dogma of the eruv:

Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker. It has something to do with pretending that telephone poles are doorposts, and that the wires are lintels. You can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend ont he Sabbath that this eruv you've drawn--in the case of Zimbalist and his crew, it's pretty much the whole District--is your house. That way you can get around the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place, and walk to shul with a couple of Alka-Seltzers in your pocket, and it isn't a sin. Given enough string and enough poles, and with a little creative use of existing walls, fences, cliffs, and rivers, you could tie a circle around pretty much any place and call it an eruv.

This isn't a heavy-handed plot device, but an element that arises naturally from the rich environment Chabon has created. We can conveniently gauge its being organic to the reality of the story by looking at a real-world example that ties in (oh ho!) nicely with this discussion:

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The key to this kind of scene-setting is not to take it too far. For a whole world cannot be shown in one book, only the relevant sections. Chabon, though, as I wrote awhile back, is great at only supplying the reader with just enough information. He plays a balancing act of informing while acting as if it's all common knowledge anyway, leading to some great deadpan exposition:

In the corner by the door stands the famous Verbover Clock, a survivor of the old home back in Ukraine. Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed.

If anything the creation of an alternate history is more difficult than that of a whole new world, for its plausibility will always be weighed against that which actually happened. And this is just the setup on which a narrative will stand! I'm eager to see how it plays out.

Programming Note

I'm in danger of flogging a dead horse on the God issue, so I'm going to back off of C.S. Lewis and Christian apologetics for the time being. My latest read, already over a hundred pages in, is Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, a decidedly different animal. I'm sure I'll have plenty to say on it.

Wayward Christian Soldier

I've been coming down pretty hard on C.S. Lewis the past couple weeks, so in this last entry I'd like to come back to what it was I found so attractive about his writing in the first place. This takes me mostly back to The Screwtape Letters, for in flipping between Screwtape abd Miracles, I find that Lewis, like many a great thinker, is at his best posing questions rather than answering them.

Miracles is a prescriptive document, and a narrow one at that. It is brilliantly argued, which is both its greatest strength and fatal weakness. The excerpts I've posted are part of a largely, internally, consistent and original way of thinking about a subject as old as thought itself.

But as Lewis's ideas are so particular, they brook absolutely no compromise or alternative, leading to a gross lack of self-awareness that makes them endlessly frustrating to an outsider. Lewis devotes a whole chapter, "Christianity and 'Religion'" to separating his idea of Christianity from the rest of the "Pantheistic" belief systems. He uses the testimony and martyrdom of the early Christians as proof of Jesus's historicity and divinity, while not bothering at all to bring up the similar convictions of the original Mormons. He dismisses other purported miracles while saying that "we seldom find the Christian miracles denied except by those who have abandoned some part of the Christian doctrine." It takes considerable audacity to remove Christianity from the realm of religion, and then to feign humility by calling it "mere."

Yet even this intolerance has its upside. For Lewis is almost as contemptuous of popular Christianity as materialism, leading him to write something like this:

Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.

That allowance of possibility, as opposed to a clearly and logically articulated single path, is most appealing, and while not ultimately a large part of Lewis's thought, it greatly informs The Screwtape Letters, if only because it is not making a positive argument but, through its sharp irony, identifying the undesirable.

The book is filled with countless barbs that sting because they are so true.

In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face.

All mortals end to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

The safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

The relationship itself between Screwtape and his "dear" Wormwood provokes an especial revulsion, with its airs of tenderness masking a wholly power-driven and literally consumptive parasitism:

My dear, my very dear, Wormwood, my poppet, my pigsnie,

How mistakenly now that all is lost you come whimpering to ask me whether the terms of affection in which I address you meant nothing from the beginning. Far from it! Rest assured, my love for you and your love for me are as like as two peas. I have always desired you, as you (pitiful fool) desired me. The difference is that I am the stronger. I think they will give you to me now; or a bit of you. Love you? Why, yes. As dainty a morsel as ever I grew fat on....

....Your increasingly and ravenously affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

These are resonant because they are easily recognizable in one's everyday affairs. The shudder one feels--should feel!--when reading it is a call for vigilance in one's own life, lest one should find oneself falling into such an arid, often unconscious, mode of thought.

This is a more useful, more universal, application of Lewis's dire warnings at the end of Miracles, and doubtless one Lewis would disagree with vehemently. But I daresay no thinker or philosophy should ever be accepted wholesale, and Lewis is no different--to his credit. I find C.S. Lewis inscrutable, reactionary, and often wrong, but he is also eminently well-written and capable of great insight. This much can be said about Christianity, too, which Lewis would likely agree is the highest praise I could offer.

A Hazy Grace

Up to this point, C.S. Lewis has been ostensibly building an argument in favor of miracles, but at book's end he seems to have given up trying. Having made the case (or tried) for such events, Miracles's final chapters deal with the particular miracles of the Christian faith: the Virgin Birth, the various acts of Christ, and the Resurrection and Ascension. They are less justifications than elaborations, symbolic exegeses on their relevance to the Christian doctrine as a whole. Thus they are a philosophical Rorschach test: the Christian-minded will likely find the writing transcendent; the rest of us, a curiosity.

To the materialist, for instance, asking "whether Christ was able to do these things only because He was God or also because He was perfect man" is so much angels dancing on pinheads. One may as well ask if Jesus is terrific or awesome.

This isn't to say these chapters are entirely without insight. At one point Lewis appears to hold similar opinions on the magic world of imagination as Salman Rushdie:

If we are in fact spirits, not Nature's offspring, then there must be some point (probably the brain) at which created spirit even now can produce effects on matter not by manipulation or technics but simply by the wish to do so. If that is what you mean by Magic then Magic is a reality manifested every time you move your hand or think a thought.

Except Rushdie didn't need to resort to spirits and hokum to make his point.

The problem, as always, are his premises. Lewis has made plenty of assumptions throughout the book, but the ones here at the end are truly staggering. At one point (page 208) he makes an offhand remark about clothes being a result of The Fall, which assumes there was a "first family" of Adam and Eve who lived in a primordial garden and were tempted to eat a bad apple by a talking serpent. Lewis has not yet made quarrel with evolution and cosmology, and yet he here gives credence to an obviously fantastical creation myth. Is it real, or isn't it? How is "Human death, according to the Christians... a result of human sin" when every single organism that has ever lived has died? Did The Fall really happen, or not?

Factuality is in fact of little priority to Lewis, except when it isn't. At one point he leans on Jesus's quasi-historicity:

From a certain point of view Christ is 'the same sort of thing' as Adonis or Osiris (always, of course, waiving the fact that they lived nobody knows where or when, while He was executed by a Roman magistrate we know in a year which can be roughly dated).

Later on he waves away such concerns, arguing Christianity's explanatory power makes it right:

Whether the thing really happened is a historical question. But when you turn to history, you will not demand for it that kind and degree of evidence which you would rightly demand for something intrinsically improbable; only that kind and degree which you demand for something which, if accepted, illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if it is rejected.

This premium of all-encompassing explanatory power over actuality is not so surprising. The book all along has been a sustained argument against Naturalism and, implicitly, empiricism and inductive reasoning. Lewis says as much in an Epilogue that is positively rife with paranoia:

And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves. Naturalistic assumptions, beggings of the question such as that which I noted on the first page of this book, will meet you on every side--even from the pens of clergymen....

In using the books of such people you must therefore be continually on guard. You must develop a nose like a bloodhound for those steps in the argument which depend not on historical and linguistic knowledge but on the concealed assumption that miracles are impossible, improbable, or improper. And this means that you must really re-educate yourself: must work hard and consistently to eradicate from your mind the whole type of thought in which we have all been brought up. It is the type of thought which, under various disguises, has been our adversary throughout this book.

I'm sure my own biases keep me from noticing Richard Dawkins's or Christopher Hitchens's less subtle blots of self-righteousness, but there is something deeply troubling about someone who so ferociously insists on eradicating a particular mode of thinking, particularly that--observation--which really is the basis of how we make sense of the world. The idea that the world and our senses and judgment are not to be trusted has all the hallmarks of a cult mindset.

It's a rather nasty ending to a book which up until then was calm and measured, if not convincing, though I suppose the faithful will find it a passionate defense of faith and piety. That's relativism, which Lewis abhors, but it's the best he'll get from me. I'll have some closing thoughts on Lewis in my next post.