. . . is gay, huh? I must admit that 1) it’s not all that shocking, and 2) this doesn’t change anything about the books themselves (especially since this doesn’t feature in the plot). I recommend John Granger’s post that explains why it’s not all that shocking, and why the Harry Potter books are no more an invitation to homosexuality than they are an invitation to the occult, here at hogwartsprofessor.com (be ye warned; it’s long).
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Today I was sitting in a certain fast-food restaurant that may or may not have its roots in the Scottish immigrant community of the United States, and I heard a parting phrase that I had never heard before. One employee of this establishment was leaving at the end of his shift, and another employee, who was still working behind the counter, did not say to him, “Goodbye,” or “Later,” or even “Take it easy, bro” or “Peace out Homey,” but instead said:
“Enjoy your Halo!”
Now, I am “hip” and “with it” enough (even in my late 20s, having been born during the Carter administration) to understand what he meant, even though I’ve only ever played the original Halo. And haven’t found it to be terribly addictive since whenever I’ve played, I’ve usually played with people who are much more experienced at it than I am, and who blow my brains out an average of 20 seconds after beginning. Given this state of affairs, I could spend more time playing Halo and improve my skills. . . but I guess we all make choices in life.
I just thought that it was funny that Halo is such a big part of our culture that people can say something as ridiculous-sounding as “Enjoy your Halo,” and people who don’t know them at all can still know what they are talking about.
Enjoy all of your Halos, everybody!
I was assigned to read C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man this week for class, and enjoyed it immensely. For someone who grew up reading his work (I started as a child with the Chronicles of Narnia, as most did, and in junior high graduated to his Space Trilogy. Shortly after that, I read Mere Christianity, then The Screwtape Letters in college and Miracles for a class three years ago), it was surprising that I had never managed to read this short (60 pages) work.
But it turned out that at this point in my life, it was nothing new. Basically, in the book Lewis argues for natural law over and against logical positivism. He says that all people have an innate conception of right and wrong, and that modern people subjectivize values at their peril. The end point of this subjectivization, Lewis argues, is the “Abolition of Man” — a future in which a small elite with a mastery of psychology rule over the rest of humanity. This elite are ruled only by their own whims, and the ruled have become robot-like.
I say that it’s nothing new because Lewis has included a fictional version of this future society in the final book of the Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Also, I have seen something similar in Walker Percy’s book Lost in the Cosmos (which has been called “The Abolition of Man in late-night comedy format” in a recent book).
All this to say, I think that Lewis is very perceptive in his analysis of mid-20th century culture and where it was headed. Although it does make me wonder: how can all this debunking of morality be stopped? That is, Is this an argument that is likely to deter people from debunking morality and cause them to obey the Tao (Lewis’ word for a universal sense of morality), or might it just make the debunkers aspire to be part of the elite in the distant future?
“Telling us to obey instincts is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence to we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding in its own favor would be rather simple minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than the others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot itself be one of the parties judges: or if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.” (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 48-49)
“The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the ‘basic,’ or ‘fundamental,’ or ‘primal,’ or ‘deepest’ instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgment passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation, and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 49)
“The legitimate reformer endeavors to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody. The direct frontal attack – ‘Why?’ – ‘What good does it do?’ – ‘Who said so?’ is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no values at all can justify themselves on that level. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 60-61)
I have GOT to get used to this whole blogging thing. I’m slipping already.
Anyway, I read this article in the New York Times online the other day, about a Baptist church adapting to the growing multiculturalism of its neighborhood. It’s encouraging to hear of this example, but I wonder how many other churches are dealing with this issue and end up circling the wagons, insisting on staying the same, and making themselves irrelevant (not that “relevance” is the highest virtue in churches. . . but if you’re not reaching out to your community no matter who they are, you’re not living out the gospel AND you’re being irrelevant).
Funny; I never think of Georgia as being that multicultural, but in one week I read this story and also heard on NPR that they’re building one of the biggest Hindu temples of its kind in an Atlanta suburb. Here’s the story.
“The consequences of the shift from agricultural [premodern, traditional] to [modern] industrial societies on social norms were so large that they gave birth to an entirely new academic discipline, sociology, which sought to describe and understand these changes. Virtually all of the great social thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century – including Toennies, Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel – devoted their careers to explicating the nature of this transition.” (Francis Fukuyama)
Elliot Ritzema 