The National Post has been publishing a series of articles titled “Beyond Belief”. A piece by Charles Lewis or Charlie Lewis (not the Charles Lewis of 60 Minutes and the Center for Public Integrity) titled “The Trouble with Mary”, featured at AL Daily, discussed the psychology and semantics of “belief” and “faith”. Lewis found a psychologist who was said that faith in miracles and faith in the future are equally valid because they are equivalent subjective events. He found some theologians and Churchmen to explain the meaningfulness of belief in miracles. This was good journalism. Religion is a hard topic for the news industry to configure as marketable news. The political and criminal acts of people who belong to a religious group are news but their inner lives, including their beliefs, are beyond description in a news story. The philosophical rationalizations for religious belief are like book reviews – the justifications offered for people’s likes and tastes are usually meaningless outside the circle of people who care about those things.
Spinning the Golden Compass
The Golden Compass has been criticized for its negative presentation of organized religion. Its principal critic its the American Catholic League, a conservative body that speaks for conservative and traditional elements in the Catholic Church in America. The League says that the movie, like the books, promotes atheism, but their grievance appears to me to is that Pullman presents the history and traditions of Catholicism in a negative way. The criticism is a defensive reaction to Pullman’s presentation of the belief system and power structure of the Church as repressive, exploitative, manipulative, cynical, and dishonest. The League’s campaign brings to mind its reaction to Kevin Smith’s Dogma. It is incongruous for parents to take their children to this movie on Saturday, and then make them to Church and Sunday school. If you believe the Church is benevolent, why challenge your child or pay someone to insult your belief?
The shoe was on the other foot when the Christian churches in America were promoting the movie version of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories and defending Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
The challenge for self-professed faithful Christians is whether to deny their kids the experience of consuming the latest must-see fantasy product from the movie industry in the hope of consolidating their belief in the conservative Christian version of reality. It seems to me that parents who think they are insulating their children from secular ideology and popular culture by not taking them to one particular semi-animated fantasy film based on a coming of age novel are a little confused.
Old Age
My parents are getting old, and old age is not pretty.
My mother has had Alzheimer disease or another form of progressive denile dementia for about 5 or 6 years, although it took some time for her physician to learn all the symptoms – my mother thought that it was in her interest to minimize her symptoms. She has been a mistress of denial, and my father was a co-dependent in her efforts to resist interventions.
I visited Winnipeg from October 3 to October 12. My father was tired, my sisters were concerned. Her needs were beyond my father’s capability and have been for some time. My father has tried to enjoy the good moments, and has been concerned that if her demented behavior was admitted, she would have to be monitored closely and sedated and restrained. He has kept home care out and aided her in her efforts to fool the people who might arrange for care – under conditions that he does not think are good enough. His judgments have been loving, but risky.
The week after I returned, my sisters realized that her complaints about some bowel trouble were serious and had her admitted to hospital. She had developed a rectal prolapse. The prolapse itself is apparently inoperable. Over the first few days of November, my father thought another doctor thought that there might be partial blockage of the lower large intestine, which has been causing the straining that causes the prolapse. This presented the possibility of surgery for the blockage and some relief for the prolapse. The idea that she might have surgery has energized my father. He hopes she might come home. He accepted the idea that they might accept some home care though. [Updated – Nov. 10/07. My father misunderstood the medical information. The hospital had ordered a colonoscopy to assess the damage, not to look for blockages. There was no prospect of any relief of the prolapse].
My mother also had pneumonia when she went to hospital. She has had asthma for decades and she has become accustomed to using an inhaler when she is short of breath. She gets short of breath when she is anxious, then used the puffer. This accelerates her heart, which make her anxious, which lead to more use of the puffer – especially since she doesn’t remember she has been using it or realize that she is overdosing. The hospital has tried to restrict her use of the puffer. My father apparently gives it to her when the nurses are not around to relieve her distress.
The prolapse cannot be managed by an Alzheimer patient who doesn’t remember why she is in pain. She has been in hospital, and can’t go home again. She is calm most of the time, but becomes agitated and wants to go home. My father is full of anxiety. Over the last few weeks he has been occupied with worrying about my mother. My sisters and sister in law have been working hard to arrange transportation to the hospital and get meals delivered to him at the hospital, and to take care of him during this stage.
My sisters and brothers are doing their best to help him make the decisions that will let him know that she is getting care, and to let go of the idea that he can protect her independence. We can hope for decency, dignity and respect.
[Updated Sat. Nov. 10/07. On Friday (Nov. 9), my father agreed to sign the forms to admit my mother to a nursing home and to get some home care services for himself, to let him stay at home before his own health deteriorates further].
Catching Up – Templeton and Positive Psychology
Having mentioned Templeton, the mutual fund manager turned patron of the spiritual arts, in passing in my entry Ruse on Evolution, and Seligman’s Positive Psychology movement in my entry Psychology in Recovery and Be Happy, I was interested in “John Templeton’s Universe” in the The Nation. Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the weirdness that happens when inspiration, large sums of money, corporate values, positive thinking, psychology and spirituality intersect.
Unfortunately, it appears that Seligman, who had said some interesting things in his books on positive psychology, has become another corporate inspirational performer, hyping his own line of coaching and positive thinking “products”.
Alternate Nobel Writers
The Alt-Reality Nobel prize for literature, 2007, would have gone to J.K. Rowling?
Ted Gioia’s list is pretty good. He would have given the award to several genre writers. He has a different theory of aesthetics and less impressed with old canons of high art and literary fiction. His Great Books Guide site is informed by the same theories and is pretty good too.
He has some comments about Heinlein, Dick, Rowling, genre fiction and some good reviews.
On related topic, here is an essay about SF Out of this World from the New Humanist, reflecting on why people who take the magic of out real life like fantasy in books and performances.
Last Sunday in September
One of the benefits of my job is that I attend educational conferences from time to time. I am in Ottawa, on what turned out, after a cloudy start, to be warm sunny afternoon. The city was crawling with police – really and literally. The police stage a memorial event on the last Sunday in September. Representatives of almost every Canadian police force march in their full dress uniforms. Some forces have pipe bands – seems the Scots ran the police forces in the old days and their traditions carry on. There were a few officers in kilts in line when I walked by Tim Horton’s this morning, which must have given the staff a start.
I spent the afternoon in a seminar. One of the other participants said that I had worked out what many other people hadn’t. I had moved to Victoria to do a job that I liked with many years before retirement to enjoy.
Wonder Books
From The American Scholar, a review of the style of popular and literary fiction based on healing journeys: Brooklyn Books of Wonder, by Melvin Jules Bukiet. It’s a savage assessment of my least favourite literature, sentimental fiction. It has a good explanation of why this stuff sellsit works: narcissistic empathy. Read it, weep and perceive yourself as a nice, sensitive person.
They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”
Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.
And yes, another hit from AL Daily.
Light Exercise
Link to an excerpt from Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, a new book by Gary Taubes, published in New York Magazine, The Scientist and the Stairmaster.
Taubes says that the idea that light exercise is a way to lose weight has been oversold. He agrees that light exercise is a good idea, but light exercise doesn’t burn enough calories to let us eat and drink as much as most of us, in North America, tend to. He also supports some of the criticisms of the dominance of carbs in diet.
The Sociable Web
Another piece of reportage and ideas served up by AL Daily. Christine Rosen writing in the New Atlantis on Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism.
This proves topical as I have signed up on Facebook, using some of the message and communication resources.
Rosen’s work is pretty good – her essay on cameras, photography and images, The Image Culture, for instance, or her essay on channel surfing and TiVo, The Age of Egocasting.
Amour Propre
In Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, the title character is an American academic, fond of Paris, and prone to using French expressions. In one scene, he dismissively mentions some neighbours as self-satisfied bores, full of amour propre. Ravelstein was founded on Bellow’s friend Allan Bloom. Bloom after having studied and taught in Paris, was a life-long francophile. Amour propre was an idiomatic expression in Western Europe when Bloom taught in Paris. The English term would probably be snob, although dictionaries translate and define amour propre as conceit or excessive pride.
Bloom was a student and teacher of the works of Rousseau. Bloom favoured the cautious liberalism of Montesquieu over the Romantic liberalism of Rousseau, but he admired Rousseau’s passion. Rousseau understood, as Bellow has put it in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, that
The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.”