Hunger Games

I finished up Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy today. It was some of the most addictive storytelling I’ve read in a while. The series’ final book, Mockingjay, is a dark, violent statement against the nature of war. Its conclusion leaves us with a set of characters who are deeply broken, slowly trying (with limited success) to piece themselves back together.

The book reminds me of a short essay by C.S. Lewis entitled “Talking About Bicycles”. In it Lewis explains that when it comes to most things there are four ages or perceptions, Unenchanted, Enchanted, Disenchanted, and Re-enchanted. War is used as one of his examples:

“Most of our juniors were brought up Unenchanted about war. The  Unenchanted man sees (quite correctly) the waste and cruelty and sees nothing else. The Enchanted man is…thinking of glory and battle-poetry and forlorn hops and last stands and chivalry. Then comes the Disenchanted age…but there is also a fourth stage, though very few people in modern England dare to talk about it. You know quite well what I mean. One is not in the least deceived: we remember the trenches too well. We know how much of the reality the romantic view left out. But we also know that heroism is a real thing, that all the plumes and flags and trumpet of the tradition were not there for nothing. They were an attempt to honour what is truly honourable….”

He goes on to say:

“You read an author in whom love is treated as lust and all war as murder – and so forth. But are you reading a Disenchanted man or only an Unenchanted man? Has the writer been through the Enchantment and come out to the bleak highlands, or is he simply a subman who is free from the love mirage as a dog is free, and free from the heroic mirage as a coward is free? If Disenchanted, he may have something worth hearing to say, though less than a Re-enchanted man. If Unenchanted, into the fire with his book. He is talking of what he doesn’t understand.”

I’m not qualified to determine whether or not Collins is Unenchanted or Disenchanted, but I think it’s a question worth consideration.

I also can’t help but contrast Collins story to Rowling’s Harry Potter. While Hunger Games is far more violent, the basic setup, that of teenagers having been thrown into a war against an evil regime, is quite similar. But Rowling takes more of an Enchanted view. Harry’s victory is celebrated, and, despite heavy losses, “all was well”. While the victory in the Hunger Games is pretty much obscured by the emotional and spiritual damage done to the survivors.

The Lord of the Rings would be a good example of a Re-Enchanted viewpoint. Tolkien was a soldier. He understood the cost of war and that’s reflected in his story. Frodo, for example, is wrecked by his experiences. Yet Tolkien finds an element of honor in war. His Christian hope finds joy in the promise of restoration and in the destruction of evil. Out of the three stories talked about here, it’s clearly the most rounded depiction of war.

A Review of ‘Carriers’

The other night I had a discussion which centered around how we as a country have gone about fighting terrorism. The focus of the conversation was the moral arguments for and against our actions, and, ultimately, whether it is more important to survive or to follow the moral code. Tonight I watched a movie that asked much the same question. “Carriers” follows two brothers and their girlfriends as they travel through a plague-ravaged Southwest. The group has instituted a set of rules for avoiding the disease and staying alive. The rules consist of things such as not touching an object that hasn’t been disinfected, and avoiding interstates and major population centers. The group’s chief rule is to consider the infected as dead, and not attempt to help them.

Apocalypse fiction is (or can be) and interesting genre. It puts its characters in situations that strip away the external controls and comforts of society and lets those characters either dissolve or grow into their true selves. The choices of everyday morality (‘Do I tell that lie or face a discomfort?’) are suddenly magnified (‘Do I let that person die or die myself?’). Ultimately, apocalypse fiction doesn’t bring us to a new place, it just more clearly shows us the place we’ve always been, the people we’ve always been.

But that’s when apocalypse fiction is at it’s best. More often than not it’s merely a gore-fest with no brains expect the ones the zombies are after. “Carrier” is not such an example. With relatively minimal violence, it this is a moral thriller in which the characters consistently choose (and consistently choose wrongly) between, to borrow a quote, “what is right, and what is easy”. As the movie progresses the choices become more and more horrific, with the friends turning their backs on each other in a desperate adherence to the rules. There are no heros here, and the one glimmer of heroic action results in death. But death, the movie seems to conclude, is better than a life that does not hold to a costly love.

The Christian, of course, should be defined by such a costly love. And stories like “Carriers” should cause us to reflect upon how we live. Do we hold to a type of legalism that will save us? Do we care more about ourselves than the people around us? Or do we reflect the love of Christ, holding on to that love for our salvation and showing that love to others despite a rather terrible cost?

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,

As dead as we shall ever be,

Speaks of some total gain or loss,

And you and I are free

-W.H. Auden

An Examination of the Relationship Between Morality and Freedom

This is an essay I wrote for a scholarship competition:

“Which virtues contribute the most toward achieving freedom, and how can the institutions of civil society encourage the exercise of those virtues?”

When you ask a question like the one prompting this essay, you, perhaps unintentionally,  open up the door to a very large rabbit hole. The whole thing becomes a matter of how far down it you are willing to travel, and whether or not you can accept the places to which you are led. I suppose the initial reaction to such a question is to say something along the lines that courage and charity and sacrifice are chief the virtues which support freedom, and indeed they are. But to phrase it like that belies the fact you are already heading towards shaky ground. You have taken virtue and made it into a mere stepping stone. The concern is shifted away from being virtuous to being free, and this presents us with a problem.

Freedom is, in of itself, good, but like most things it is corruptible. What I chiefly mean by this is in regards to the way in which freedom is achieved, and, once being achieved, how it is used. It is easy to use horrible methods to bring about freedom and easy (perhaps easier) to perpetuate such horrors once the objective has been obtained. To look on freedom as a primary goal is foolish. Make it your wife and you will soon find her a cheat. I am not, of course, saying that freedom should not be enjoyed or be disregarded as a paltry gift, but rather it must be viewed in its proper place.

Lewis hit the point square on the nose when he wrote: “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither (Mere Christianity, 2001).” If you want freedom, the thing you must certainly not do is say ‘I will have freedom, and I will have it at whatever the cost.’ And let’s make no mistake about it, that is really where our question is leading us to. We are setting our course to freedom, and virtue is simply the fuel that can get us there. Once we have our feet on dry land we can discard it, or if we find it useful in maintaining our political and social structures, let virtue stay. Do you see what the problem is? Virtue won’t be mocked is such a way. Treat her like that and all will remain of her is a dim shadow, a thinly veiled figure of vice.

The only way to truly follow virtue is to follow and love goodness for itself. And when we follow that path we are not always led to freedom, or at least, not the kind of freedom we may want and are chiefly focused on here. We may very well be called to suffer under tyranny, whether it be political, domestic, educational, etc. We may very well have to throw away our own personal freedom, and, what’s more, throw it away with a smile, without ever looking back. Of course, the opposite could also be true. In our following of virtue it is possible that political freedom may arise. Let us be grateful if it does, but let us not expect it, and let it certainly not be the reason why we follow.

But there is a second part to our question, and that concerns how civil society can go about producing virtuous actions. Let there be no confusion in the fact that I am a Christian, and when you ask a Christian such a thing, you are going to get a Christian response. For my part, I don’t think civil society, or at least the civil society in which we are now living in, can produce such virtues. We have become inundated with the message that all points of view are equal, and that right and wrong are simply matters of personal circumstance. We’re awash in a world of moral relativism, and you can’t neuter a dog and then expect it to breed.

How, for instance, can we say to a person that sacrifice is good if at the same time we say that there is no such thing as absolute good? It is very hard to understand why you should give yourself, or a part of yourself, to save a man if such an action ultimately bears no moral difference to killing him. Is this an extreme example? Certainly. But it shows us that relativism, stripped of its popular sheen, is nothing to be honored. It is an empty, pitiable thing, and we degrade ourselves by giving it our allegiance.

The only solution to the problem is to bring us back around to an objective standard of moral truth. And when you start talking about an objective standard, you’re forced to think about who creates such a standard, and that very quickly leads you to God. This is not a popular idea.

Indeed, we do not like the thought that there is a God from whom the standards of virtue flow. We enjoy our, if I may use the word without being coy, freedom. Why should I do it His way? I like being the captain of my ship, thank you very much.

When you start looking towards God you have to chuck all this sort of thinking. The world stops being about us and what we what, and becomes all about Him and what He wants. You are forced, in essence, to give up yourself. Of course, you will find yourself, your true self, in the end, but that is a topic for another essay.

Again I must mention Lewis, for he trod along this path long before me. In The Abolition of Man he deconstructs this whole notion of moral relativism, following the argument through to its end. The title, if you are curious, gives his destination away. Relativism breaks humanity of its basic understanding of how to live, and leaves us easy prey to those who would form us to their own images. Are concrete examples needed? The previous century, with its awful history of eugenical thinking, is full of them. In our own time we see how this line of thought has resulted in the in the rather common practice of terminating fetuses found to have Down Syndrome. And this is done, it must be quietly pointed out, often in the name of the mother’s and family’s freedom. These are rather physical examples, of course, but they need not always be so. Corruption may influence its victims in a thousand smaller, more silently insidious ways. The point is that without a belief in objective standards we become vulnerable to whatever subjective standards we are presented.

And let us not think for a moment think that our political freedom will somehow protect us against the corrosive effects of the current social climate. I fear it is often believed that, since the United States possesses various freedoms, such as that of speech and press and so on, it must therefore be inherently good, or, at least, inherently safe. But this is a mistake. A place may be free because it is good, but certainly not the other way around. As for safety, let us not assume that our laws are a shield against the attacks of subjectivity. Of moral relativism, Lewis notes: “The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be debunked and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one generation which has learned how to do it (The Abolition of Man, 2001).” Our liberties and politics can not help us, for they themselves are merely the byproducts of our moral understanding, and we are well on our way to having no moral understanding.

What then are we to do? Believe in some abstract higher power, and, in doing so, incur upon ourselves the benefits of virtues? I’m afraid this puts us very much in the same boat that we are already in. We are using our own relative vision of God to support our own relative vision of right and wrong for the primary reason of achieving some outside benefit. The only way to break the cycle is to know the true God and love Him, or rather to be known by Him and loved by Him. Let us not forget that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick (Jer 17:9).” Left to our own hearts we will trample upon all goodness and virtue. We may rage like an inferno or smolder softly for years, but you can be sure when all is done we will have twisted and burned goodness into an unrecognizable form. We need new hearts, and the only place to find those is in the grace of Christ. It is through His love you will find virtues outpouring, and it is in His presence you will find all the freedom you could ever want.

References

Lewis, C.S., “Mere Christianity,” p. 118, HarperCollins, New York, 2001.

Lewis, C.S., “The Abolition of Man”, p.73-74, HarperCollins, New York, 2001.

Jeremiah 17:9, English Standard Version, Crossway Bibles, Wheaton, IL, 2001.

Polygamy in the African Church

Christianity Today recently had an interesting article on their website regarding the issue of polygamy in African churches. The main issues were the way this particular social condition has acted as an impediment in people’s acceptance of the Gospel and how the church has attempted to respond. There’s no simple solution to the problem. Having a new convert send away all but his first wife puts the rejected women (and their children) in a precarious situation both socially and economically, which is clearly unbiblical. Yet at the same time Scripture outlines monogamy as the ideal.

Apparently many African churches have gone about addressing the difficulty by allowing polygamous men to become members, while at the same time withholding various aspects of membership, such as Communion. I’m not terribly sure this is the best answer, yet I can’t come up with a wholly satisfactory one myself. Part of me, though, wants to draw a parallel to Christ’s teaching on divorce. That is, when he told the people that divorce had been allowed due to their hardness of heart, but now a more perfect rule was being instituted. Would it be best to allow polygamy to exist within first generation Christian families, at the same time making clear to the young and unmarried that polygamy should not be continued? I think I tend to lean towards the position that the greater sin would be for a man to divorce his wives and leave that portion of his family high and dry.

Again, no easy solutions pop up here. Your thoughts?

P.S. Incidentally, the largest moral question at play here was left unraised by the Christianity Today article, and that is the selfishness of the polygamous men. I mean, there are some guys in this world without any wives. I say once you get one you back off and give someone else a shot.

My First Blog

So, following my usual trend of being technologically eight years behind everyone else, I’m starting a blog. It’s mostly going to be reviews on books and music and such, plus an assorted collection of random thoughts. Hope you enjoy it.