On Belief

This post might seem a bit controversial on first reading, but controversy is not always a bad thing.  (Just as how war is often a horrible, misguided practice, it can also affirm to us that there are ideals worth fighting and dying for.)  And it's my blog, so I can write whatever I want!  (No one reads it anyway; and the ones who do read it I hope are open-minded, and that they embrace the idea of ideas.)

I recently upgraded my iPod touch's OS to OS 4.0.  It allows my iPod to perform a whole bunch of cool new functions, such as grouping applications into folders, and allowing my iPod to receive push notifications while in Sleep mode.  All welcome things.

It also allows me to access Apple's new eBook reader, and to download content from their online book store.  One pleasant surprise about their book store is that they offer hundreds upon hundreds of public domain works entirely for free!  This pleases me, because I would never imagine buying a new novel to read on my iPod.  The screen is just too tiny (though that doesn't make the text tiny.  The text is scalable in size to suit your eye.)  However, I'm more than happy to download free classic books that are pretty much impossible to find at your local bookstore.

If you like, you can download the entire works of Edgar Allen Poe, or Rudyard Kipling, or Dante's Inferno...there is so much public domain content out there to explore.

It is pretty much for this reason alone that I would love to get an iPad, so I could read these books on a more comfortably sized screen.  (Are these public domain books also available on the Kindle?  The Kindle is so much cheaper...)

One of the authors I've been downloading a lot of work by is Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who I've mentioned here and there on this blog before.  He is another writer I've discovered on what I call "The Chain."

What is the Chain?  It is when one writer leads you to another.  When I was younger, I learned about the writing of Neil Gaiman, which I consumed with such rapidity and ferocity it was as if his writing were relieving me of a starvation that I didn't know I previously possessed.  It is no exaggeration to say that his writing changed my life forever.

From Neil Gaiman I learned about the writer Gene Wolfe, and so I moved on to his writing.  I think I've now read most of what Gene Wolfe has written, and once again, he's changed my life forever.

Now through Gene Wolfe (and also Neil Gaiman) I've moved on to G. K. Chesterton, a writer who was so prolific in his time, it would be hard to beat today.  He wrote mostly from the turn of the 20th century, up until the 1930s, when he died.

He wrote some wonderful, often hilariously satirical fantastic fiction, but also wrote on a wide range of controversial topics of his day and age.

(Perhaps one of his most famous quotes, a quote worth living a life by, is this: "Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist; but they tell us that dragons can be beaten.")

He wrote a lot about Theology and Morality (and how the two are NOT the same), and criticized a lot of what he saw as the great failures of his society.

And always he used logical argument as his primary tool.

Anyway, I was up late last night reading on my little iPod his book "Heretics".  This was a book primarily meant to explore a serious problem he saw with the modernity of turn of the century Europe.  (He followed this book with one called "Orthodoxy", which is where he offers a number of solutions to this problem.)

As I was reading, I found myself in agreement with him, and could see that many of the problems he spoke about over a hundred years ago are still relevant today.

He argues that in the modern society, people act as if a person's philosophy about the universe does not matter, when it is in fact the most important thing about a person to consider.  To explain how this is so, he uses the example of the heretic and the orthodox.

Back when people were burned or tortured as being heretics, the heretic could not imagine describing him or herself as being heretical.  To the heretic, it was the rest of the world that had become heretical.  If the heretic could stand by anything, it was that they stood for orthodoxy.  The heretic did not rebel against his society, it was his society that rebelled against him.  Even the anarchist planting a bomb to kill innocents would feel that, if anything, he is standing up for truth and orthodox.  After all, a person does not fight with the whole force of his being to support what he believes to be a lie.

But nowadays, people take pride in being labeled a heretic, as if to be a heretic is to mean being right, and to be orthodox is to mean being wrong.  Chesterton argues that the only explanation for this is that people no longer care about whether they are philosophically right.  That none of it even matters.

There is a quote that I love.  It reads:

"It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe.  That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object.  But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy.  This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter..."

This is a dangerous way of thinking for a society to build itself on, and I think we can see the results all around us.  Without serious argument and discussion about what the role of the human is in this universe, we effectively leave ourselves blind to what ultimate goal we should be pursuing.  We embrace the idea of being efficient, but with no understanding of what we need to be efficient for.  We leave ourselves with a very clear definition of what is hell, but no dream of the heaven we need to rise to.  As Chesterton says, "What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man?"

He uses the clever example of Oscar Wilde to show how ridiculous a society without a driven desire to differentiate what is right and what is wrong can become.

"In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then we broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out.  It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous.  The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practising."

So philosophy matters.  Arguing about what is right and wrong matters.  We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that it is all just a question of subjectivity.

A similar problem I see in our world today is what I guess could be characterized as "the oneness of religion." There is a widespread conviction that somehow all religions are really not that different from each other.

But to say this, I think, dismisses the importance of religion.  It delegates it to the same level of importance as a person's hobby.

To say that all religions are pretty much the same is to simply shirk from discussion on the matter.  It is saying "this discussion is far too difficult, so let's not bother having it."

Even the atheist who rallies against religion, claiming it to be as awful as any criminal act, and that all traces of it must be wiped clean from the Earth, at least does not make the mistake in thinking that what a man thinks about the meaning of the universe doesn't matter.

And we don't have the discussion not because we are reaching for some great good, but because we wish to avoid the evils and dangers that come with the discussion.  But does that make the discussion not worth having?  Should the only good we do on this Earth be out of our fear of the consequences of evil? Or should the good that we do instead be for the pursuit of an idealistic perfection?  Which of the two is the more wholesome way to live?

But in order to live that wholesome way, we must have serious discussion about what the idealistic perfection is.

I think there is a problem with our world today where we are afraid to tell anyone else that what they may think or believe is wrong.  It can be very dangerous to think that our existence in this world is a purely subjective experience, where we may believe what we wish, without fear of criticism.  That can lead a person to believe that there is no such thing as consequences.  What people think or believe MATTERS.  To discuss these things, and to tell someone that they are wrong, does not mean you view that person, or their beliefs with derision or hatred, it means you are interested in discovering truth.

To simply say that a person may believe what he believes, and I have no right to criticize it, means that you believe truth to be a trivial thing of no importance.

An islamic extremist may commit great evil by setting off a suicide bomb and killing innocent people, but at least he doesn't make the mistake of thinking that his philosophy doesn't matter.  In fact, to continue viewing the world in a purely materialistic sense, without giving any serious thought as to what it means to be right, we only ensure that such violent acts continue to happen.  The extremist will continue believing in a grievous lie, because no one has bothered to discover the truth, and then tell him about it.

I myself have fallen into this trap on many occasions.  I myself am often afraid of debate and argument.  I myself am afraid of being proven wrong, or of being asked to defend, with logic, what I believe.

But I am trying to get better.  I am trying to define my life by the light, not by the dark.

There is a wonderful parable that Chesterton writes at the end of the first chapter of Heretics, where he states that it is his intention to go back to the beginning and discuss the fundamentals a society should build itself upon.  He writes:

"Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down.   A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first consider, my brethren, the value of Light.  If Light be in itself good-" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down.  All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality.  But as things go on they do not work out so easily.  Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil.  Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something.  And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes.  So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light.  Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark."

Quite Interesting....

I'm reading a couple of cool books.

1.  DROOD

This is a book that Dan Simmons released last year, and which just came out in paperback last month.  I picked it up when I saw it, because the hardcover was too big, and also because I've really enjoyed Dan Simmons's books in the past.  

This novel seems to be in a similar style to his previous novel The Terror, which is fiction, but is based on the facts of the true story of the Franklin Expedition.  In Drood, we are given a fiction based on the facts of Charles Dickens's final five years alive.  In 1865 Charles Dickens survived a horrible train crash while returning to London from France.  After the crash, Dickens got pretty weird, apparently, becoming obsessed with corpses and traveling around to dark and dangerous places in London in the middle of the night.  In the novel, he is obsessed with finding a man named Drood, who Dickens meets under mysterious circumstances in the aftermath of the train crash.

I'm not terribly far into the novel at this point.  I'm just shy of 200 pages in, and it is a near 800 page novel...but I'm finding it very addictive so far.  It is written from the perspective of Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Dickens's.  

I have a feeling after finishing this novel, I'll want to read a lot of Dickens.  I've never read anything by him before, but I've bought my mother a few of his novels in the past, so I will read those.

Dickens's final novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  He never finished it.  Is there anything more fascinating than a mystery left unsolved?

2.  THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE

The Book of General Ignorance comes from the people who are behind the wonderful British Panel Show: Q.I.

Q.I. is hosted by Stephen Fry, and basically it is a quiz show where comedians on a panel are asked to provide answers to little known trivia.  The comedians are given points not so much for giving the correct answer, but for giving the most interesting answer.  The person with the most points at the end of the show wins.  What do they win?  They win the show.

You are penalized points if you give an answer to a question that "everyone knows is right", but is in fact WRONG.  The show does a great job of dispelling common myths, like that baseball was invented in Cooperstown, USA (WRONG!  It was invented by the English in the 1700s).  Or that glass is not actually a solid, but a very slow moving liquid (WRONG!  Glass is a SOLID.  To be specific, an AMORPHOUS SOLID.)  

The book contains all sorts of interesting bits of knowledge along these lines.  For instance: America was NOT named after the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, which is what everyone KNOWS is the right answer...

In fact, America is named after Richard Ameryk, a Welshman, and wealthy merchant of Bristol.  He was John Cabot's chief financier for his second transatlantic expedition in 1497 and 1498.

In way of evidence, the book states the following:

Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland.  As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him.  There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year [1497]: '...on St John the Baptist's day [24 June], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristow called the Mathew [Cabot's ship]', that clearly suggests this is what happened.

Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents.  This is the first use of the term 'America' to refer to the new continent.

The book then goes on to explain that the misconception that America was named after Amerigo Vespucci came from a French cartographer in 1507, who had seen the name America to describe the new continent on other maps, but who was not certain as to the name's origin.  He had assumed it was a latinized version of Amerigo Vespucci's first name, who had discovered and mapped South America from 1500 to 1502.

But Vespucci never used the term "America" to describe his discoveries.  This is because it was unfounded for anyone to name a discovery after their FIRST name.  It was always the LAST name that was used.  If America had been named after Vespucci, it would have been something like "Vespucciland."

The book has a whole host of other interesting facts...like that the largest living organism in the world is a honey fungus mushroom patch in Oregon, whose root system covers 2,200 acres, and is approximately between 2,000 and 8,000 years old.  It is all one connected root system.

The book also says the the colour of the universe is Beige.

I also just read that the capital of Thailand is not called Bangkok, but is actually called "Grung Tape".  Bangkok is a name that apparently only ignorant foreigners use.  The Thai haven't called the city by that name in over 200 years.  Bangkok was the name of the fishing village that existed in that location before the king Rama I moved the capital there and renamed the city in 1782.

Grung Tape is actually just the first part of the city's name.  The actual name is 152 thai characters long, consisting of 64 syllables.

The full name translates in English to:

Great City of Angels, the supreme repository of divine jewels, the great land unconquerable, the grand and prominent realm, the royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems, the highest royal dwelling and grand palace, the divine shelter and living place of the reincarnated spirits.

This book is indeed Quite Interesting

***

This blog entry has taken a while to do, which has distracted me from my task for this afternoon, which is to do some preliminary research into the Crusades.  It's for a movie idea I had a long while back, but something just clicked into place in my head yesterday about it, so I want to start doing some research and planning to see if the idea starts growing in my head even more.

So until next time!!!

"It's been a strange life"

After a moment the small man came in carrying his bag, and Forlesen's son placed a chair close to the coffin for him and went into the bedroom.  "Well, what's it going to be," the small man asked, "or is it going to be nothing?"


"I don't know," Forlesen said.  He was looking at the weave of the small man's suit, the intertwining of the innumerable threads, and realizing that they constituted the universe in themselves, that they were serpents and worms and roots, the black tracks of forgotten rockets across a dark sky, the sine waves of the radiation of the cosmos.  "I wish I could talk to my wife."


"Your wife is dead," the small man said "The kid didn't want to tell you.  We got her laid out in the next room.  What'll it be?  Doctor, priest, philosopher, theologian, actor, warlock, National Hero, aged loremaster, or novelist?"


"I don't know," Forlesen said again.  "I want to feel, you know, that this box is a bed - and yet a ship, a ship that will set me free.  And yet ... it's been a strange life."


"You may have been oppressed by demons," the small man said.  "Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century.  Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain."


"Those are the explanations?" Forlesen asked.


"Those are some of them."


"I want to know if it's meant anything," Forlesen said.  "If what I suffered - if it's been worth it."


"No," the little man said.  "Yes.  No.  Yes.  Yes.  No.  Yes.  Yes.  Maybe."


Today I finished reading "Forlesen", a short story by Gene Wolfe, which I read in his collection: The Best of Gene Wolfe

It's a heartbreaking story about the modern working man.  As in most works by Gene Wolfe, identity is a mixed up, irresolute concept: easily interchangeable and in flux.  

A man wakes up in his house knowing absolutely nothing about himself or how to live life.  Everything he learns is from pamphlets left for him in his house, and from his wife (who also has woken up knowing nothing).

He is instructed to go to his job in a management and supervisory position at Model Pattern Products, a company that does not seem to do anything of significance, and where the positions of every worker seem to flip flop regularly.  It is a workplace where you find yourself in meetings discussing non-sensical concepts, and where you are plopped down at your desk with a list of incredibly vague responsibilities, and told to make yourself useful.

It is sadly far too similar to how the working life these days actually is like.

It ends with the paragraphs I posted at the start of the entry.

In Gene Wolfe's afterward on the story, he writes:

There are men - I have known a good many - who work all their lives for the same Fortune 500 company.  They have families to support, and no skills that will permit them to leave and support their families by other means in another place.  Their work is of little value, because few, if any, assignments of value come to them.  They spend an amazing amount of time trying to find something useful to do.  And, failing that, just try to look busy.


In time their lives end, as all lives do.  As this world recons things they have spent eight thousand days, perhaps, at work; but in a clearer air it has all been the same day.


The story you have just read was my tribute to them.


Chilling.

I wonder which of his stories I will read next.  I definitely still need to read "The Death of Doctor Island", but that is a longer novella.  I might want to read his shorter stuff first.

It is impossible for me to overstate how much Gene Wolfe's writing means to me, and how much it has affected my life.  I seriously recommend giving his work a try.  It can be intimidating yes, because he requires every ounce of your concentration, and his books usually demand second or third readings before the finer details and mysteries become apparent.  But once you read the beauty of his writing, it is impossible to go back.

He is the greatest writer alive today, bar none, and you have never heard of him.  And that's not just my opinion.  Neil Gaiman agrees, as does Michael Swanwick, Patrick O'Leary, and many others who know what they are talking about far better than me.

Thursday: The Man

Syme sprang to his feet, shaking from head to foot.  'I see everything,' he cried, 'everything that there is.  Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing?  Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself?  Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe?  Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe?  For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of Days.  So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist.  So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.  So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, "You lie!"  No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, "We also have suffered."


That is a paragraph near the end of G.K. Chesterton's masterpiece, "The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare", which I finished reading this morning.  It's a fascinating little book from 1908, a time when there were a great deal of anarchy movements throughout Europe (Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassins had ties to an anarchy group.)  Though I think it is just as relevant today.  Each generation must feel that it is on the precipice of collapse into chaos and anarchy.  Are the problems we face today any more or less severe than those that faced the generation witnessing the complete destruction of Europe in 1914, and again in 1939?  Are our problems today any worse than those that faced the Romans as the Huns sacked and pillaged their city?  The world is always on the brink of collapse, and it would easily plunge into anarchy but for the actions of those small few who would see the world not collapse.

I bought the book many many years ago, having heard Neil Gaiman talk about it on a few occasions, but I delayed in reading it up until now.  It will take me a good while, and probably another reading, to really wrap my head around all of the things going on in it.  It's not terribly long, clocking in at under 150 pages, but there's a lot of subtle, complicated ideas at play.

A man named Syme gets into an argument one evening with a man named Gregory.  Gregory, an impassioned anarchist and poet, says that only anarchy can give birth to true art, and only in anarchy can the spirit of man be truly fulfilled.  Syme disagrees with him, seeing the greatest art in the world being based in order.  He sees far greater beauty in a timely subway schedule than in the dazzling spectacle and ferocious power of a detonating stick of dynamite.  Whereas Gregory says mankind is full of sadness and lament for knowing that the subway will come on time, Syme argues the sheer magnificence and wonder that of all things that could happen in the universe, the train actually makes it to the station it intends, at the time that we expect it to arrive.

"Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad.  But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria."


Syme eventually questions how serious of an anarchist Gregory is, which entices Gregory to prove his seriousness to Syme.  He decides to lead Syme somewhere significant, but first he first makes Syme promise not to tell anyone about what he may see that night.  Syme agrees, and Gregory reveals to him that he is part of a secret anarchist group; he also takes Syme to his branch's secret meeting room beneath a tavern, where his compatriots will soon meet to elect a new representative to the High Anarchist European Council.  Syme, astounded by what he sees, and just moments before the meeting is to take place, asks Gregory to return to him the promise that he himself has made, asking Gregory not to tell anyone what Syme might choose to reveal to him.  Gregory reluctantly agrees, and Syme then tells Gregory that he is actually an undercover detective, assigned the task of rooting out secret anarchist groups!

With both men bound by an oath to not reveal their true identities to anyone, Syme, through certain machinations, manages to get himself elected to the High Anarchist European Council, taking on the code name "Thursday."  (There are 7 members of the Council, all named after days of the week.)  It is then that Syme meets the leader of the group, Sunday, a man who seems to be as powerful, and as large, as a god might be.

The book ends up being quite funny and farcical.  But it also raises some very interesting theological questions about our relationship with God.  As I said, it will take me quite some time to wrap my head around all of what's going on in the book.  I will probably need to do some further research on the book to truly grasp what the point of it was.  But I'm guessing the bulk of the purpose of the book rests in the paragraph I posted above.  That the man who governs and fights for order suffers just as greatly for the cause as does the revolutionist.  And perhaps God is the one who suffers the most.  "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?"

I have another Chesterton book, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", that I will have to read one day.  I also downloaded a bunch of audio recordings of his short stories "The Tales of Father Brown", which are a bunch of mystery stories with a Catholic Priest as the protagonist.  I'm very much looking forward to hearing those.  Chesterton also has a number of theological essays that I would like to read one day, if I can find a copy anywhere.

(For those who have read The Sandman, Chesterton makes a number of appearances in those comics, with the character of Gilbert being based on him.)

I'm not quite sure what I will read next.  I think I will try to tackle a few more Gene Wolfe short stories: specifically, "The Hero as Werwolf,"  and "The Death of Doctor Island."  Gene Wolfe is my go-to author.  Whenever I am not sure what I want to read next, I invariably end up reading something by him.  I never tire of him.

Incidentally, Gene Wolfe has a new book coming out in March, called "The Sorceror's House."  I love how he is well into his 80s, but still manages to release a new novel practically every year.  I wish I will one day be as productive as he is.

Now I must away myself from Blogger, to begin drafting a treatment of a short film idea I had a few weeks ago.  It's called "Coyote."