Inner demons

Coming to an end of Stephen Pinker's wonderfully stimulating book The better angels of our nature.
Pinker summarises what he calls our 'inner demons' thus:

'Neither academic psychology nor conventional wisdom is anywhere close to a complete understanding of what makes us tick ... It seems to me that a small number of quirks in our cognitive and emotional makeup give rise to a substantial proportion of avoidable human misery.' (P688). He lists five on this same page.

Below I have contrasted these with the Beatitudes, as taught by Christ, perhaps indicating that if we could truly follow Christ, much of the violence in human society could be lessened (which, as Pinker demonstrates, has happened and is a long trend in the human story)

-- Overconfident of success in a fight, underestimating how bloody it will be
Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers

-- Striving for dominance and likely to get into fights for it, to the loss of all
As above.

-- Seeking revenge by minimizing the hurt we caused and emphasising the hurt our opponents caused; and seeking perfect justice rather than compromise.
Blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness

-- overcoming a distaste for violence and acquiring a taste for it
Blessed are the pure in heart; blessed are the peacemakers,

--publicly supporting a belief even if we harbour private doubts because the rest of the crowd supports it.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are you when all people hate you and revile your name as evil because of me.

Psychopaths, humanity, and the criminal law

According to Stephen Pinker:

Psychopaths make up 1-3 percent of the adult male population [depending on definition] ... [They]  are liars and bullies from the time they are children, show no capacity for sympathy or remorse, make up 20 to 30 percent of violent criminals and commit half the serious crimes. They also perpetrate non-violent crimes ... The regions of the brain that handle social emotions, especially the amygdala and orbital cortex, are relatively shrunken or unresponsive in psychopaths, though they may show no other signs of pathology.' (Pinker, p 615.)

If this is true (and that a diseased brain causes a person to be a psychopath, rather than the other way around and rather than the whole thing being a lot more complicated), what does this mean for the criminal law and justice?

I wonder it means, at least, that our prisons should be humane places. We may have to deprive certain individuals of their liberty, but perhaps that is the extent of society's remit to punish and protect?

'We are living in an extraordinary age'

It's impossible not to be stirred by this conclusion after 578 pages of argument:

'[The chapters so far] have documented the historical decline of violence.  In them we have seen graph after graph that locates the first decade of the new millennium at the bottom of a slope representing the use of force over time. For all the violence that remains in the world, we are living in an extraordinary age. Perhaps it is a snapshot in a progression to an even greater peace. Perhaps it is a bottoming out to a new normal, with the easy reductions all plucked and additional ones harder and harder to reach.Perhaps it is a lucky confluence of good fortune that will soon unravel. But regardless of how the trends extrapolate into the future, something remarkable has brought us into the present.' (P 579)

His best explanation for all this is the spread of information.This is obvious in terms of boosting technological progress; he speculates it may foster 'moral progress' as well.  'Individuals or civilisations that are situated in a vast informational catchment area can compile a moral know-how that is more sustainable and expandable than even the most righteous prophet could devise in isolation' (p577).  (His emphasis)

He cites Martin Luther King as an example:

'King's historic speech to the March on Washington in 1963 was an ingenious recombination of the the intellectual components he had collected during his peripatetic pilgrimage: imagery and language from the Hebrew prophets, the valorisation of suffering from Christianity, the ideal of individual rights from the European Enlightenment, cadences and rhetorical tropes from the African American church, and a strategic plan from an Indian who had been steeped in Jain, Hindu, and British culture.'

This is so helpful. Not much to argue with here, once you forgive Pinker's usual belittling of Christianity (note that prophets provide imagery, not actual revolutionary teaching; King's African American church provides 'rhetorical tropes' rather than, say, an informed passion for justice to flow through the earth, and the life changing effect of Jesus Christ on Gandhi, well documented elsewhere, for example in the books of E Stanley Jones,  is papered over.  Elsewhere Pinker claims that Jesus' teaching was just a wimpy, sloppy 'moralistic affirmation of love'  that needed to be re-shaped into something actually useful by the good ol' pragmatic, can-do, all-American competence of King. Pinker's Jesus is a perennial underachiever.)

The source of the decline in violence - and perhaps a little case of prejudice.

'... A moral way of life often requires a decisive rejection of instinct, culture, religion, and standard practice. In their place is an ethics that is inspired by empathy and reason and stated in the language of rights. We force ourselves into the shoes (or paws) of other sentient beings and consider their interests ....

'This conclusion, of course, is the moral vision of the Enlightenment and the strands of humanism and liberalism that have grown out of it' (Pinker pp 572-573).

This is Stephen Pinker's main thesis -- humanism and rationalism has civilised the world, overriding several things including what he calls 'religion'. It's a grand and impressive argument.

I think, though, that he misses the truly original figure who defined this whole movement: Jesus Christ. Christ scrapped all the Jewish laws, food laws, customs and regulations, junking the lot to replace them with 'love God' and 'love your neighbour' -- the second being the very thing that Stephen Pinker attributes to humanism. Christ abolished the death penalty, and practiced and preached non-violence. It was said of him 'of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end' and Stephen Pinker's wonderful book documents the increase of peace through the centuries, much as predicted.

Pinker is also, uncharacteristically, rubbish on the subject of Christ himself.  'There's no direct evidence for anything Jesus said or did' (p15),  when every other document of antiquity that has come down to us is either a later copy of the original, or less well attested than the NT documents (or both). He doesn't answer the startling question of if Christ didn't say that stuff, what moral genius, operating in the narrow window between ad 30 and the first NT manuscripts a generation later, came up  with it all, and then managed to persuade the primitive Christian community, including people who'd met Jesus, to hang it all on the figure of Cbrist.

Then he gets a bit ridiculous, I'm afraid:  ' ... Jesus was by no means unique. A number of pagan myths told of a saviour who was sired by a god, born of a virgin at the winter solstice,  surrounded by twelve zodiacal disciples, sacrificed as a scapegoat at the spring equinox, sent into the underworld, resurrected amid much rejoicing, and symbolically eaten by his followers to gain salvation and immortality.' (p15)  Quite apart from everything else that's wrong with that sentence, I find my world crowded with followers of these other pagan myths, bumping against the two billion notional followers of Christ in the world. They also, like Christ, conquered the Roman Empire, and inspired law, art, literature, music, science and architecture for two thousand years. I mean it's appalling trying to get planning permission for a church when all these followers of Mithras are building their temples everywhere in the country, and followers of Orpheus in the Underworld are crowding out the market for faith schools, not to mention running all the hospices, recruiting street pastors, and helping the homeless off the streets.

Stop being prejudiced. Who said 'blessed are the peacemakers': Oh, that was Christ, not in an off-moment, not in an unplanned bit of mispeaking, but at the heart of his message and life. How can Stephen Pinker, so brilliant, so good to read, making me see the world differently after reading him, how can he miss this?

Who terrorists are - Pinker

'... What inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Koran or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that they will never live to enjoy ... Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer ... Fraternal, fast-breaking, thrilling, glorious, and cool. '

(Atran S, 2010, Pathways to and from violent extremism, Senate Armed Services Committee statement, Masrch 2010, quoted in Pinker p431)

Jane Austen's Emma and the meaning of life

Here's a talk I gave about Jane Austen's Emma, the meaning of life, and the story behind the story. Bit of autobiography as well.

What novels are for

I'm not so wedded to physical books as this, but it's a lovely quote:
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book Julian Barnes in his pamphlet My life as a biobliophile

Social scientists and religion, not a good brew

Have been enjoying sociologist Rodney Stark's book on the rise of Christianity. Something of a pioneer in his field, he applies social science theory to how the church grew in its first few centuries and it's enlightening stuff, even if you think, as I do, that a display of maths is only as good as its underlying assumptions and often social science's underlying assumptions aren't very good.

But Rodney Stark also has the insight to say about his fellow practitioners what many of us have often thought (or possibly hoped):

... until recently, the social scientific study of religion was nothing of the sort. The field was far more concerned with discrediting religion that with understanding it. This is clear when it is realized that only in the area of religious belief and behavior have social scientists not based their theories on a rational choice premise. Indeed my colleagues and I recently showed that antagonism toward all forms of religion and the conviction that it must soon disappear in an enlightened world were articles of faith among the earliest social scientists, and that today social scientists are far less likely to be religious than are scholars in other areas, especially those in the physical and natural sciences (Stark, Iannaccone, and Finke, 1995).

Why I tell stories to tell the truth

This is a guest post I wrote for the Christian Booksellers Blog

John Polkinghorne on Science and Theology

Just making notes for my own reference.

Polkinghorne is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a priest and theologian, and winner of the Templeton Prize.

Q. How does he compare and contrast physics and theology?
A. He takes a 'critical realist' view of both. So, both disciplines are dealing with truth. (That's the 'realist' bit, and it's a faith stance.)  Both are integrating a way of knowing things: the scientific method is powerful but limited only to that knowledge which can be measured and repeated. Theology deals with a wider range of human inputs and experiences but (I would emphasize, though Polkinhorne doesn't) especially I-thou knowing, relational knowing, which is different kind of knowing from the I-it knowing of science.

Both science and theology posit unobservable things. Physics has confined quarks, never seen but assumed to exist; theology has an invisible God. Each is an invisible keystone in an arch of more accessible knowledge. Postulating the invisible helps us make sense of the visible.

Both science and theology can inform and shape each other, bringing as they do different aspects of the totality of human knowing.

Why I write novels

An article by James A Herrick in Christianity Today got me very excited. It's about how science fiction produces myths that supplant the (true) 'Christian myth.'

An executive summary
'Pop-culture fiction, not academic nonfiction, is now the cutting edge of public discourse on spirituality.'


Juicy bits from the article
'The culture-shaping force of science fiction storytellers may be more significant and more widespread than we imagine. That's because they trade in myth. By myth, I mean a transcendent story that helps us make sense of our place in the cosmos. This common definition makes the Christian gospel, as C. S. Lewis suggested, "God's myth"—not because it is fiction, but because it is a story that gives ultimate meaning. We live in an age in which new myths, born mostly of science-fueled imaginations, are crafted and propagated at an unprecedented rate...

'Ironically, the universe that science stripped of the supernatural is being resupplied with deities and redemptive purposes by science fiction writers and moviemakers. Apparently, we cannot do without myths...

'A discerning student of culture, Lewis answered modern scientific myths with daring retellings of the Christian story that integrated the patterns and language of the new myths. His science fiction trilogy provides an admirable model of storytelling that intelligently and artfully incorporates foundational truths from a Christian worldview...

'Human spiritual well-being, and thus the humaneness of civilization, depends in large measure on which narratives hold sway in our souls.'

Another reason, if I may suggest it, to buy my book. You know it makes sense.

Physics in need of a revolution

It's a staple of the history of physics that:
(a) in around 1895 the subjects seemed almost complete, apart from the Michaelson-Morley experiment (speed of light is constant) and the peculiar phenomena provisionally called X-rays.
(b) The following quarter century was a golden age of fresh discovery: relativity and quantum theory arrived in a glorious rush.

Michael Brooks' book hints at a further explosion-to-come:
(a) We have no idea what 96% of the universe is made of
(b) The two Pioneer spacecraft, launched in 1976 and 1977 are being slowed down and no-one knows why
(c) The constants of physics might not be constant
(d) The universe is fit for life only because a certain constant (called omega) is exactly the size it is, not a thousand billionth more or less.

So we either are, or aren't in for an exciting time in physics, assuming someone has the cranial capacity to think round this stuff.

A further interesting message in light of current debates about faith and science is that science is a little more rickety, and less sure, than the aggressive atheists might totally wish. Great book.

Reading Marilynne Robinson (#1)

'For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God's good world, with God's good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.' Home, p 52.

Shirley, a Victorian novel to avoid

I grew up about a mile from the 'Fieldhead House' of this novel and a mile in another direction from 'Briarmains'. The local council, in a fit of local pride, had called the local council estate 'Shirley', a fact that never struck me as odd until this moment. Equally odd is the truth that Shirley never was a girl's name until this novel.

You can strain out some nourishment. As a social history it reminds us that the past was just like the present, only more extreme (the unwashed Methodists,  holding prayer meetings; the mill owner shooting a rioter dead and then getting the ringleaders sent to Australia, magistrates taking a robust view of law-breaking among the lower classes in those days; the genteel women stitching for the Missionary Basket, designed to raise funds for overseas missions). Proto-feminism stirs: the book includes a discussion over a garden fence between two neighbours about the First Letter of Timothy, Chapter 2, for example.

There ought to be rules, however, that even Victorian novels should follow. Finely chisel your characters as you must, and you must. But don't show off your French. Don't write a chapter when a page will do. Don't have the plotting of a melodrama or a farce. (Gosh, my best friend's companion turns out to be my estranged mother! The male protagonist has a dishy brother! He's staying in the same house as the estranged mother! Now both girls can get married!) And don't, whatever you do, create a heroine whose main problem is that she sits around bored all day. It can give Victorian novels, not to mention housing estates, a bad name.

A Romanian bookshop

Eastern Europeans have a bit more of a reputation for things cerebral than the rest of us, hence families of chess-players like the Polgar sisters and playwrights-turned-president like Vaclav Havel and universities that turn out doctors and engineers rather than graduates in film studies.

Three days ago I visited a Romanian bookshop in the western town of Timosoara, home of the Romanian counter-revolution, and with buildings that still bear the scars from Ceaucescu's tanks back in Christmas 1989.

The first two books I saw were a collection of the writings of Schopenhauer and a box-set of criticisms of Freud. Edging past those with some trepidation, I found a happy sprinkling of the modern stuff modern stuff (Steig Larsson for example), but a larger collection of classics, 19th and 20th century, some in Romanian, some in English. The shop held only perhaps 2000 titles, plus a cafe where you could presumably discuss the absurdity of life and shrug a lot, though sadly not while smoking. Almost every title was worth taking the time to read (though the winter nights in Romania would have to be both very long and very cold for me to pick up the Schopenhauer.) 

Compare with a chain bookstore in  England where you squeeze past a front table piled with 3-for 2  biographies of Colleen Rooney and waspish memoirs by out-of-luck politicians plunging their heads one last time in the feeding trough.   We are victims of publishers' bribery and hype. Romania teaches me that bookshops should filter for greatness. Among our local fare only the great Topping and Co of Ely comes close.

Definitely too many

There are 1.4 million books in print.

Reading one every three days would take you eleven and a half thousand years.

A mostly nice feeling

Have just been holding the first copies of my book Life Lessons: life changing stories for Christian growth. It didn’t take long to find the Great Big Hairy Audacious Mistake that publishers take pride in inserting, either on the cover or the opening page.

(This one? missions spelt mission’s on the back cover. Written, it says subliminally, by a greengrocer who also sells banana’s. Nice.)

Each of the nine contributors, friends and colleagues of mine from the mission agency WEC International, describe lessons that changed their lives for ever.

The idea is that learning from someone else’s mistakes is less painful than learning from your own. I edited this and also wrote a chapter, about what near-death experiences can teach about time management.

You can find it in Christian bookstores, order from any bookshop, or follow the Amazon link.

Published by Christian Focus Publications

ISBN 978-1-84550-555-4

Olaf Stapledon: The Star Maker

This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read.

Philosophy is supposed to be a series of footnotes to Plato. In the same way, the science fiction I have read might be said to be footnotes to this work by Stapledon.

Arthur C Clarke called it 'the most powerful work of imagination ever written.' Doris Lessing (nobel laureate) and Virginia Woolf (uber establishment literata and name-check dream-chick) heaped praise on it.

It isn't really a novel. It's essentially an overview of a person's experience becoming more and more aware of all the life in the universe, and of the Star Maker himself. As such, it works like Russian dolls in reverse: each succeeding vision is larger than the rest. You wonder where the inventiveness comes from. You wonder if he's ever going to stop. You wonder what he was on when he wrote this.

Finally there is an encounter with the Star Maker himself, which, amazingly, doesn't disappoint.
Truly a classic.

At last a 'Christian novel' that I wanted to read

I'm not at all sure about the idea of 'Christian fiction' as a genre. Much better usually to think just of 'fiction'. What Jesus did with parables, novelists who are Christians can do with novels: attack people's hearts, invite people to explore further. And so on.

My Name is Russell Fink by Michael Snyder is perhaps an exception to this rule. It is funny, agreeably dysfunctional, and peopled with entertaining characters. To those who would avoid 'Christian fiction' because (a) it's a peculiar idea to start with and (b) it conjures up books for homemakers in the American Midwest that mention the word 'prairie' a lot, this is a mould-breaker.

You could give it to your non-Christian friends with no embarrassment. Book clubs could read and appreciate it. It is a happy, light novel of a hapless photocopier salesman finding God (and a girl), and solving the puzzle of his poisoned dog. In other words, it is completely unlike, thank goodness, The Shack. I liked it a lot. I see Amazon resellers have it for as little as £1.35; got to be worth a punt.

Reasons to write novels #34

You learn more profoundly if you have to work it out.

Here's St Augustine:

no one disputes that is is much more pleasant to learn lessons presented through imagery, and much more rewarding to discover meanings that are won only with difficulty.
(On Christian Teaching.)

(You could say much more about this quote. For example, Augustine also thought that a 'helpful and healthy obscurity' was a characteristic of the scriptures, and shouldn't be a characteristic of Christian teachers; those questions could be argued; but leave that aside for a moment, or imagine he is just talking about parables.)


Boccaccio in his Life of Dante (1374) made a similar remark about poetry:

It is obvious that everything that is acquired with toil has more sweetness in it than that which comes without trouble. The plain truth, because it is so quickly understood with little effort, delights us, and is forgotten. So, in order that truth acquired by toil should be more pleasing and that it should be better preserved, the poets concealed it under matters that appeared to be wholly contrary to it. They chose fables, rather than any other form of concealment, because their beauty attracts those whom neither philosophic demonstrations nor persuasions could have touched ... [poets] are profoundly intelligent in their methods, as regards the hidden fruit, and of an excellent and beautiful eloquence as regards the bark and visible leaves.

Both these quotations are lifted directly from the discussion on storytelling in Jules Lubbock's art history book, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello.