Relocating To Elfland

Here is the December 1, 2009, debate between Daniel Pipes and Wafa Sultan at the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. An illuminating exchange.

Listening to Wafa Sultan, I was reminded of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (see www.khaledhosseini.com), one of the more moving works I have ever read.

Ever since I was a young child, I have had an unwilling fascination with torture and execution. I wish I had money for every hour I have lain awake in the night, trying to comprehend the brutality of human beings toward one of their own, and the humiliation, helplessness, agony, and forsakenness of the victim. What is it like to be utterly alone before the power of those who enjoy your screams of pain? (Those too dull of imagination to appreciate the question should view one particular scene in the 2007 film Rendition.) What is it like when the trap door falls, the piano wire snaps taut, and there is only curiosity and delight among those watching you die? And many other and darker questions might be asked.

I think I keep returning to these morbid problems for several reasons. First, I simply can’t fathom how humans become so insensate as to enjoy the spectacle of suffering. Is such cauterization of sympathy possible? I’m not talking about rejoicing in justice – there is something in every one of us that wants to see retribution on those we perceive as wicked, and for good reason. I’m talking about enjoying someone else’s pain so as to make it an end in itself: opening the door to cruelty toward one’s enemies, and worse still, toward defenseless innocents. How do we keep prattling on about the moral progress of man? We have not taken a single step forward since Cain.

Second, I am a Christian, and I have a lot of forefathers who died under torture. I want to enter into their sacrifice so as to honor it; and I want to prepare myself for the possibility that I may be called on one day to imitate their example. Could I do it, I ask myself? Could I die with dignity in the midst of public humiliation and mockery? Could I keep my head up and honor my Lord in the face of my fear, against the terror of pain and of utter aloneness?

An image comes to me of Aslan padding slowly toward the Stone Table. The metaphor, moving as it is, cannot match the reality: the Son of God bound, bloodied, the friendless plaything of the Praetorium guard, hanging by nails, hated by men and devils and even (may we dare utter such things?) of God Himself. There is no tenderness for Him, no comfort, no vinegar to dull His agonies. But – and this is where Christianity subverts the wholesale evil I have been describing – “herein is love.” This is God entering our estate, knowing our suffering and absorbing it, bearing in Himself our pain and death so that for us one day “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore.” This is what gave courage to the martyrs of old (and gives it still to the martyrs of the present), and it is what I pray would give me courage were I to face the cruelties of man on account of my faith.

But there is more. The death and resurrection of Christ is the beginning of the new creation, the terminus whereof is a final day in which the Creator who made us to image His Triune love will come to judge the living and the dead. And in that day, by the standard of His own perfection of goodness, He will right all wrongs that have been committed under the sun. He will expunge the atrocities of men, their crimes and cruelties, their violence and victimization, so that it will be visible to all (and acknowledged by all) that righteousness has triumphed in full, that evil has not had the final word in anything perpetuated on the earth. Not one tear of Ivan Karamazov’s little girl will go unavenged, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her. There is One above the jeering crowd who knows all, in whose heart there is no pleasure in our pain, and who will bring every deed into judgment. Here is the courage of the martyr, and here is the hope of every victim in this blighted world.

Reading the latest development in the health care debate made me wonder if the establishment is really trying to lose, come November. I can’t confirm  whether this is an oft-used procedure, as Pelosi claims, but it may rank as the political gaffe of the decade to pull it out right now, on this issue. Way to reassure the voting public.

In this same section, Bavinck makes the following point:

“A religion that fails to furnish comfort and satisfaction to the moral needs of people is certainly false. Conversely, not every religion in which people look for comfort or satisfaction is true.” (p. 1.552)

Many evangelicals today hold to Christianity because they think it meets their felt needs (e.g., comfort and satisfaction). But the fundamental question is not whether Christianity meets my felt needs (and thus accords with my value judgments), but rather whether it is true.

A Christianity that simply affords pleasing experiences, that merely supplies  me with things I personal value, is a Christianity that is ultimately nothing more than a competitor to psychotropic drugs. I really don’t need a Christian praise-band to give me the emotions that attend music. I don’t need a Christian counselor to hold my hand and affirm my self-esteem. I don’t need to go to church to get a latte. I can find other religions (and for that matter non-religious groups) that teach kindness and respect toward one’s neighbor. I can even find other ideologies that offer comfort on my deathbed. And I can get all this without a pastor telling me I am a sinner who can be saved from everlasting ruin only through the blood-letting of the Son of God. All the good stuff is available elsewhere.

“Value judgments either depend on factual judgments or are illusory.” (Bavinck, p. 1.548)

Hence, for example, the impossibility of distinguishing the “historical Jesus” from the Christ of faith, as liberal theology attempts to do.

Hence also the impossibility of constructing human ethics (what ought to be) without a warranted theory of reality (what is). Value judgments, constantly made everywhere by theists and anti-theists alike, must themselves be grounded in something else. It is not enough to say, “I (or we) believe this is good,” or, “That is how things ought to be,” without a defensible basis outside the value judgment itself. This may seem obvious, but it is remarkable how many people think that because they hold to a certain structure of values, and make judgments based on those values, that should be the end of all discussion.

“In Praise of Solid People”
by C. S. Lewis

Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.

Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing in each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.

Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.

Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,
With work-day virtues surely staid,
Theirs is the sane and humble mind,
And dull affections undismayed.

O happy people! I have seen
No verse yet written in your praise,
And, truth to tell, the time has been
I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now thro’ weariness and strife
I learn your worthiness indeed,
The world is better for such life
As stout, suburban people lead.

Too often have I sat alone
When the wet night falls heavily,
And fretting winds around me moan,
And homeless longing vexes me

For lore that I shall never know,
And visions none can hope to see,
Till brooding works upon me so
A childish fear steals over me.

I look around the empty room,
The clock still ticking in its place,
And all else silent as the tomb,
Till suddenly, I think, a face

Grows from the darkness just beside.
I turn, and lo! it fades away,
And soon another phantom tide
Of shifting dreams begins to play,

And dusky galleys past me sail,
Full freighted on a faerie sea;
I hear the silken merchants hail
Across the ringing waves to me

—Then suddenly, again, the room,
Familiar books about me piled,
And I alone amid the gloom,
By one more mocking dream beguiled.

And still no nearer to the Light,
And still no further from myself,
Alone and lost in clinging night
—(The clock’s still ticking on the shelf).

Then do I envy solid folk
Who sit of evenings by the fire,
After their work and doze and smoke,
And are not fretted by desire.

(from Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics)

A recent ABC article reporting on the work of Satoshi Kanazawa has me a tad worked up. The reason, you will shortly discover, is that I am evolutionarily challenged and (understandably) defensive about it.

Bottom line, says Kanazawa, smart people tend to become liberals and atheists (rejecting religious values); and smart men tend to value relational fidelity (adopting family values), while this isn’t necessarily true for smart women (who have always had strong family values, and still do).

Dimwits like me, by contrast, tend to remain stuck in religious values; the males among us also remain “mildly polygamous,” while our females continue to value fidelity as they always have, and as their brighter female counterparts still do.

The data supporting all this is pretty thin, when you get right down to it. About 20,000 kids are interviewed in their teens, and again in their 20s, and lo! the smart ones have become more liberal, more atheistic, and . . . well, things are a bit fuzzier in their family values, because the smart guys are starting to value faithfulness, while the smart girls aren’t appreciably different from the dumb ones – they all want relationships that last. Hmmmm. . . . “The participants were all in their twenties, and ‘the findings from them [says Kanazawa] may or may not generalize to all Americans across generations.” You think??? I wonder what IQ it took to figure that one out.

Something else I don’t get (nota bene: I am not one of the bright ones): all of this is supposedly thrilling in view of evolution. Bright people, i.e., the evolutionarily advanced ones, have this cool capacity for things “evolutionarily novel.” For example, it’s so weird that smart kids eventually become liberals – they actually start to care about other people – because ordinarily in evolution it’s survival of the fitter. Those who remain stuck in uncaring conservatism, now, they make sense; they are evolutionarily predictable.

But (if I may) doesn’t this really change the rules in evolution? I mean, the whole idea of natural selection assumes certain adaptational patterns, most notably that features which make for higher survival and reproduction will gradually prevail over those that don’t. (I didn’t make this up; I got it from Jerry Coyne, who should know.) So is it really evidence of being “smarter” or “better” or “more advanced” that one takes care of other people at great cost to oneself? Couldn’t this be construed as evolutionary regress, or at best an anomaly (read: weird)?

Never mind, though. What really kills me about Kanazawa’s findings is that they are so atrociously sexist (perhaps that needn’t trouble him, being a man of science and all). “Higher intelligence,” we are told, “had no effect on the women’s [family] values.” So what happened here? How come the smart girls don’t have the capacity for evolutionary novelty in their family values? How come they haven’t been able to get beyond predictably faithful to “mildly polygamous,” while their male counterparts are moving from “mildly polygamous” to faithful? If girls are so evolutionarily predictable on this point, doesn’t that mean they are less evolutionarily advanced than the guys? (It can’t be an IQ problem, because we know they are smarter than the dumb girls.) But . . . bear with me here . . . wouldn’t that sort of undermine the whole point of Kanazawa’s findings? Wouldn’t that mean that evolutionary novelty and predictability have precisely nothing to do with one’s IQ?

I’m not bright enough to figure out if I should be insulted by this research. I am definitely bright enough to figure out how insulted I would be if I were a bright girl.

“In greeting creatures in an attitude of admiration and delight, and in seeing them in the light of the incarnate Son who is the direct manifestation of the Father’s beauty, one comes to taste of the Father’s delight in giving expression to his beauty in his eternal Word and in the Spirit’s articulation of all the words that the divine Word comprises.” (David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 308)

“Footnote to All Prayers”
by C. S. Lewis

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense.  Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

The power that gave me sight, the existence of my vision, and the clarity or unclarity of my vision, are not what I am to be looking at. Our Calvinistic doctrine of varying responses to God’s Word, and of the divine reasons for this variance in response, has led us (through our own carelessness) to turn from the Word to fruitless investigation of whether we have responded to it.