Bruce Charlton's Notions

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Modern man, me included, has great difficulty conceptualizing evil: what follows is my own attempt, which I have found useful so far.

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Evil is nihilism.

Nihilism is not nothingness, because what is created cannot be destroyed by any except the creator; but it can be ruined.

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If and when evil triumphs, there would not be nothing, nor would Good be utterly destroyed - rather, everything would be ruined (like Mordor) and all Good would be twisted to the service of evil: like the politically correct bureaucrat whose genuine kindness and compassion leads them to create a totalitarian state to crush those whom they perceive to threaten the possibility of universal harmony; like the (virtuous) courage of rapacious and destructive Vikings or other pirates; like the high principles of the young communist who (with his heart breaking) denounced his beloved parents for their ideological transgressions against the Utopian state; like the Nazi concentration camp guards who stayed until the last possible moment, expending their last bullets in killing as many Jews as possible, instead of retreating and defending themselves against the US/ British forces at the gates - this is as far as evil can go: to twist The Good (e.g. kindness, courage, loyalty, idealism) into the service of ruining The Good.

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Nihilism is the ruin, the marring, the twisting of The Good.

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The Good is (roughly) the unity of Truth, Beauty and Virtue.

Therefore evil/ nihilism is the ruin of TBV: it is LSD (lies, spin and disinformation) instead of truth; ugliness, shock and revulsion instead of beauty; and instead of virtue, the subversion, inversion and distortion of natural law and Christian revelation.

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Therefore, evil is quite precise, and (making allowance for human limitations and sinfulness) is objective.

Any form of dishonesty is evil - which means the mass media as a whole is evil (since it is not even trying to be honest), so is politics, so is bureaucracy.

Any marring of beauty is evil - which means 'modernity' in the arts and architecture is evil. A healthy girl's face is beautiful, so fashions like facial piercing and tattooing are evil. Silence, birdsong and (real) music are beautiful - so noise that overwhelms these is evil.

Any attack on natural law (spontaneous morality) and Christian law is evil: which means that the tendency of most modern mainstream public discourse - including many laws and state regulations - is evil.

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In a fallen world, some - many - evils are unavoidable - but unavoidable evil is still evil, and needs to be recognised as such (and repented).

Evil must not, ever, be re-labelled as Good - that act is in itself a triumph of evil.

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I spend a fair bit of time reading volumes of selected and collected letters - another arrived yesterday: the writer Robert Southey, poet laureate in his time but now regarded as one of the minor Lake Poets of whom the greatest were Wordsworth and Coleridge.

(We once spent three holidays renting Southey's house in Keswick, staying in Coleridge's rooms.)

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I heard that Southey's letters were good from reading C.S Lewis's collected letters - three chunky volumes that I have been browsing for the past couple of years. (I also have Lewis's earlier selected letters and the specific sequence of the letters to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves.)

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I began to get interested in reading letters as an extension of biographies - perhaps it was Tolkien's selected letters which opened my eyes to how good this form could be?

When I read through the New England Transcendentalists and their biographies, I naturally read the available letters of Emerson and Thoreau (as well as their journals) - but I particularly enjoyed the letters of Robert Frost, and re-read them several times.

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Some writers just pour out the stuff. The letters of Lewis seem like a life's work in themselves - never mind all the books, essays and scholarship. George Bernard Shaw was even more productive of correspondence.

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But why should it be worth reading correspondence?

The simple answer is that the writer is freer to say what they want; free from the constraints of satisfying editors and promoting sales - yet (unlike diaries and journals) at the same time constrained (and rewarded) by the need to be engaging, the need to interest their correspondent - which curbs extremes of selfishness and maudlin introspection.

When the writer and correspondent are old friends and the letters make a series, a conversation extending perhaps over years, correspondence can be really worthwhile: Jack Lewis's letters to his brother Warnie are, for me, some of the best writing he ever did.

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A major difference between real science (as it was) and scientific research (as it is now) can be stated in the form that real scientists aimed to be as honest as possible, while scientific researchers do not allow their honesty to fall below a minimum level.

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Real scientists were striving to be as honest as possible - constrained by the self-discipline, time and effort; other people's attention; the demands of bosses and referees and so on.

Modern scientific researchers strive to retain a core of essential truth in their communications - but in no sense do they try to be as honest as possible.

The appreciate that the system requires them to be dishonest, within limits, in order to get jobs, promotions, publications, funding (even in order to retain their status in situations where disagreement with the mainstream is regarded as not so much wrong as unethical).

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Naturally, this means that real scientists were more honest that scientific researchers... but did this matter to the scientific process?

Was the difference significant?

Does it make any difference whether the average scientist is nowadays, say, 90 percent truthful when in the past the same person would have been 97 percent truthful?

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Well maybe it does make a difference: maybe it makes all the difference in the world: the difference between science that works and science that does not work.

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Maybe the combination of numerous persons work done with 97 percent honesty  is still mostly honest, whereas the combinations of work done as 90 percent accuracy has dipped below the level at which it is useful - the proportion of noise to signal overwhelms the specific content?

Maybe, too, once humans beings abandon the iron law of truth, and instead of striving to be 100 percent honest, they begin to allow a certain 'minimum' proportion of dishonesty (with respect to 'inessentials' - merely as a means to the end of necessary career or institutional success)

- but maybe, once you begin using dishonesty expediently, there is no reason to stop at any particular point, no reason to keep the dishonesty minimal; and many reasons incrementally to ramp-up the proportion of expedient dishonesty until...

Yes, I think that's how real science works; why scientific research does not work.

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The basis for philosophy is a recognition that there must be that which is eternal and unchanging for there to be knowledge.

If everything changes and nothing lasts, if everything is the world gets different, then there can be no knowledge: all is swept away.

This metaphysical fact was never controversial until modern times, although the specific nature of the eternal and unchanging was subject to great dispute.

But moderns have lost the ability to perceive this basic rational necessity - I certainly did.

The necessity for the eternal and unchanging (E & U) for any kind of knowledge has been psychologized into a pathological - but unnecessary - compulsion to seek or to claim the eternal and unchanging - usually (it is said or implied) in order to control people.

In sum, the perennial recognition of the necessity for the E & U has been made into a psychological disease characteristic of right wing politics.

Modern philosophy has become pseudo-therapeutic: it tries to treat the recognition of the E & U as a symptom of authoritarianism.

And modern philosophers have lost the ability to perceive that the E & U is a pre-requisite for all and any philosophy, or discourse of every type. They simply can't see this any more.

The door is wedged open to infinite error and nonsense - which has duly come rushing-in.

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I have been re-reading Humphrey Carpenter's authorized Tolkien biography, which I have read many times before - but not for quite a while.

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Although more than 30 years old, Carpenter had access to private papers (such as diaries) which has not been granted to anyone else; and the biography therefore remains essential, indeed definitive.

HC also edited Tolkien's letters (with Christopher Tolkien) - an exceptional job of work; and published the definitive study of The Inklings (very enjoyable, but deeply flawed by permeating assertions of the triviality of the group).

In sum, the Tolkien connection launched Humphrey Carpenter on a successful career as a man of letters, and he naturally became regarded as a Tolkien and Inklings expert (which indeed he was) - yet he never seemed comfortable in this role, and he is most memorable for his carping and sniping remarks than his for his insights or enthusiasm.

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Carpenter's greatest achievements in the Tolkien biography are technical: he is completely in command of the information and imposes shape on it, he compresses a lot of facts into a small span, and he does this with an easy and readable style.

And, as it turned out, HC became (more or less) a professional biographer, turning his hand to a wide range of subjects, always producing something factual, well-organized, understandable and readable (and doing so remarkably quickly).

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But there are problems.

The main is that Carpenter was no more than lukewarm about Tolkien's work, and as a person was not on Tolkien's wavelength. Tolkien was a reactionary even among reactionaries - but HC was a very mainstream, flexible, left-liberal intellectual pundit - often to be heard on the radio as a presenter or interviewer, comfortable in  the fashionable world of The Arts.

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Humphrey Carpenter was highly competent and professional, but he didn't really have anything distinctive to say - or rather his own views were simply those of his class and time, hence come across as shallow and predictable.

(For instance HC wrote Secret Gardens a 'group biography' about the authors of children's stories, terribly disappointing, a book which harped on the note that the characteristic feature of children's book authors was that they never grew up...)

The HC Tolkien biography is therefore always at its weakest when it moves away from facts to their interpretations.

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Like many or most modern biographers, Carpenter tries to explain enduring adult traits in terms of childhood events: distinctive childhood events are causally linked with distinctive adult traits.

e.g. HC asserts that the death of Tolkien's mother left JRRT a pessimist. This sounds reasonable, but is nonsense; HC has no way of knowing any such thing, and there is no 'scientific' evidence for a link between maternal death and pessimism and plenty of exceptions (not least CS Lewis).

Then again - due to his being deeply leftist in assumptions - HC tries to explain things which should be assumed.

For instance, Tolkien's delight in all-male company in The Inklings is normal in global and historical terms, and it is the modern tendency for mixed sex groupings at work and in leisure which is a first time experiment.

Mystifyingly, much is made of Tolkien's 'ordinaryness' - and HC tries to excuse this, or explain it. The solution to the mystery is probably that moderns have developed an expectation that 'writers' should have sensational biographies - but it is precisely this 'post-romantic' expectation which is at fault, and there is no reason at all why writers should have vivid lives (and many reasons why they should not).

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These faults in Carpenter stem, ultimately, from his insufficient sympathy and liking for Tolkien.

The mammoth labour of working with difficult primary sources, the years of note taking, the difficulties of collation, the relentless focus on a specific individual - all this will swiftly become a hated drudgery - a job of work - unless sustained by genuine interest and affection; a commission done for money and career is just not the same thing at all.

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The process of writing a full scale, official biography of somebody whom you do not actually love therefore tends to produce in writers a growing resentment against the biographical subject; which leads to petty (or not so petty) acts of revenge - or at least to using the subject as a means to advance the biographers career (by false emphasis and distortions (rather than trying to write the best possible biography).

The most extreme example is Lawrance Thomson's biography of Robert Frost; and Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien and Inklings books are very mild by comparison - but there is animus at work, albeit in the background.

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The Inklings biography has distorted scholarship for decades because it continually asserts that the Inklings were nothing but a group of Lewis's friends who met for a while. This is contrasted with the straw man (apparently derived from a writer called Charles W Moorman III) of a group of homogeneous and selected people self-consciously and strategically engaged on some activity such as Christian evangelism.

Both alternatives are false. Carpenter's Inklings biography is absurd in its self defined task of writing a book about nothing but the ephemeral and trivial; a book trying to prove there is nothing to write a book about!

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Carpenter regards the Inklings primary concerns as either absurd or mistaken, and simply cannot believe that serious people could believe or want what Tolkien, Jack Lewis or Williams believed or wanted - but if he did believe it then he would loathe it.

So HC can therefore only explain-away or excuse or ignore the core features of Tolkien, and of Lewis and the other Inklings.

And after he has done this, there is indeed not much left: just a group of Lewis's friends meeting to entertain each other. Nothing more. Silly to mention it really...

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On the other hand, people such as myself recognize and want to understand what was going on in that last generation of strong and distinctively British Christian spirituality and major literary achievement.

Williams remains enigmatic, but Tolkien and Jack Lewis are towering giants that are for many moderns our main link with a lost world of honesty, beauty and virtue; the world of myth; the world of real Christianity.

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But for Humphrey Carpenter this was not the case. He was a pleasant and likeable personality; a well adjusted member of the intellectual and arts elite; he was clever, hard-working and efficient; but not a man of great insight, nor of heroic stature, nor of great integrity.

And HC was a man whose motivations, life and ideology were essentially hostile to Tolkien and the other Inklings.

So despite his crucial contributions, Carpenter's position among Tolkien scholars is modest: and the real exemplars are deep and non-mainstream writers with a positive personal affinity with Tolkien, enabling them to attain to major interpretations and insight - Christopher Tolkien, TA Shippey and Verlyn Flieger.

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A comment from WmJas stimulated what seems the clarifying insight that the 'solution' to perplexity over free will is to understand the function of free will.

It is what free will does that is vital - not trying to understand what it is, or how it works.

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The essence of free will is that - although it is a natural, spontaneous and common-sensical understanding - free will is a theological concept.

Therefore, if we do not accept common sense, and try to elucidate the nature of free will in an atheist, non-transcendental, secular context - then confusion and error are inevitable.

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Because if we do not know, or deny, the function of free will - we cannot ever grasp what it is.

(How could we understand the eye if we did not know it was for seeing? - or rather, if we denied that vision was a possibility.)

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Aquinas (apparently) said that free will was given to Man by God; free will is not something found in most of the universe but was specifically given by God to Man (plus or minus other creatures, such as angels): free will is a defining feature of what it is to be human. 

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Implicitly, free will was made a property of humans in order that Man *may* become the kind of creature God intends. A creature that may, but is not compelled to, choose salvation.

The fact that the rest of the perceived universe seems to be either determined or random is irrelevant: free will is a divine gift, God makes it work in whatever way it does work.

And however free will does work, it is not the same way that other things work that we we come across in the world.

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But how free will works is not necessary to know - what we need to know is that we have it, and we use it to make choices: but to make the choices rightly we must accept that free will exists and that its use matters.

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The reason we have free will is made clear in any true account of Christian salvation: humans have free will so that we may choose rightly. The right choice must be chosen.

These choices can be dramatic, or they can be (and necessarily are) mundane.

Most people make these choices very frequently and unavoidably: they are the core business of human life - the choices that (could be said to) move us either towards heaven or towards hell, salvation or damnation, The Good or the Anti-Good, truth or lies, beauty or ugliness, virtue or sin. 

These choices are happening: it is a further matter of choice whether we acknowledge the fact. 

Furthermore the choices are obfuscated by all manner of things: our own original sin, our accumulations of previous bad choices, the malign or confused influence of others, denial of the reality of choices, transcendental purposive evil at work in the world...

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In such an account, free will should be, must be, regarded as non-problematic and essential. It is what we do with free will that matters; not definitions, nor descriptions, nor explanations of mechanisms.

But if (as modern man has done) we try to understand free will after subtracting (assuming the falseness or irrelevance) of God, creation, transcendental Goods, purposive evil etc - then it is not surprising that free will seems incoherent.

Instead of making right choices, we obsess over whether choices are real or how the choice mechanism works: a sure-fire recipe for ruin.

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Thus a society in which we obfuscate the central human activity of choice (moral choice of course, but also choices relating to truth and beauty; and to the unity of virtue, truth and beauty) - this would be and is a society intrinsically damned.

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NOTE: I accidentally changed the background colour of the text, and don't yet know how to revert it - sorry!

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Free will - the capacity for choice that is neither determined nor random but a property of personal will - is central to Christianity, it is necessary to Christianity.

A Christian must accept as axiomatic that there is such a thing as free will; he may seek to elucidate the concept, but that there is free will cannot be doubted, nor should empirical or rational justification for its existence be sought, since there cannot be any such justification.

It is a perilous misdirection of motivation to look for a justification which intrinsically cannot be found.

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That humans posses free will is indeed common sense: the knowledge is spontaneous, ineradicable common sense; almost all of our behavior and social life is built on the assumption that free will is real.

The scope of free will, whether it is operative in a specific situation, the ways by which it is influenced by habit or coercion - such matters are legitimate topics for discussion or investigation; but that free will exists cannot coherently be challenged; and for Christians the fundamental operation of free will is a necessary component of the bedrock of reality. 

Free will may therefore be considered an aspect of natural law; an aspect without which other aspects of natural law make no sense.

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To doubt such axioms as free will is not a coherent strategy: all specific doubts must be based on (at least implicit, if not explicit) acceptance of axioms. Universal skepticism is rationally impossible. To doubt free will is simply incoherent. 

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However, precisely because free will is so fundamental a phenomenon, and even though we know what free will does, it is impossible to define with precision what free will is or how it works.

So the mechanism of free will, its inner causality, its strength, physics, psychology, neuroscience... such matters cannot be investigated nor analyzed.

Obviously not.

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Those who have a problem with free will, who are puzzled by it (which puzzlement has more of the nature of a pathology than of a legitimate topic for curiosity) are likely to be misled by the questions they ask.

The framing of specific questions that are intrinsically unanswerable leads, with a strong tendency, to misleading or plain false answers - because when a question is irrelevant the answer must be a non sequitur.

Curiosity based on mistaken formulation of the nature of free will cannot, therefore, legitimately be satisfied: at most curiosity may become distracted or simply exhausted.

Or the failure to satisfy personal curiosity or to allay personal dissatisfaction may be interpreted as some kind of refutation.

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For Christians, free will is one of the essential attributes of Man. Christian salvation entails free will: it is only understandable on the basis that Man is a creature with free will.

Other attributes are necessary for salvation as well as free will; and it is assumed that other creatures than Man may also possess free will - for instance angels.

But Man's free will constrains the whole scheme and system of Christian salvation - without free will the human condition - Man's meaning, purpose and relation with God - is nonsense.

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Therefore one cannot be a Christian and deny the reality of free will.

Of course what people say about free will, what people think they believe about free will, may not be an accurate description of their true beliefs.

But whatever he may say, or imagine, the Christian must truly believe in free will.

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This in itself is not a problem - since there is no genuine alternative.

However confusions over free will may have the effect of blocking Christian conviction: when a person thinks that free will may not be true, or may not be coherent, or may be explained away in terms of (say) social pressure, psychology or neuroscience... then such doubts and worries may also block consideration of Christianity since it is correctly perceived that the Christian model necessarily entails the operation of free will.

Because understanding (even at the most basic level) Christian salvation, entails understanding that free will is intrinsic to Man.

Free will is not an optional extra or added bonus, but intrinsic to humanity and to individual destiny.

Reality only makes sense in terms of free will.  

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Why then does free will strike so many modern people as so vague and elusive and doubtful a concept?

The answer is that this is precisely what happens when humans try to deny the validity of their built-in nature and knowledge; when human challenge, subvert and invert natural law. When humans try to pursue a strategy of skepticism.

What results is not a deeper and more secure understanding - but no understanding at all, mere error and confusion, and if the skepticism is not recognized as a snare then this state of error and confusion may be permanent.

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A culture like ours, which encourages, and indeed enforces, the systematic denial of all forms of natural law, will therefore permanently be unable to perceive or engage with reality.

To challenge, debate and 'investigate' the reality of free will as if it were a mere hypothesis is therefore a one-way door to nihilism: to implicit denial of the reality of the real.

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For most of my life I had a false understanding of the Christian belief in everlasting life: I thought it was about living an eternal life as a spirit. I assumed that the stuff about resurrection in a new body was a primitive superstition, which no sophisticated Christian believed.

But my understanding is very different now. I now assume that the intuition of every childhood, all historical cultures and most of the modern world is correct: that the soul survives death. The question is what happens next, or what state is that surviving soul.

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The human soul is meant to be united with the body, therefore after death of the body there is a degree of maiming.

So death of the body is indeed 'a bad thing', as we naturally suppose, and survival in a spiritual realm does not make up for this.

(Indeed, the 'natural' post-death survival of the soul may itself be most of what people describe as hell - I am impressed by the ancient Jewish idea of Sheol as a realm of witless gibbering ghosts, human souls minus the body may be like that - each ghostly spirit in its own horrible unending isolation.)

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Immortality, popularly conceptualized, is continued life - life as it is now but continued indefinitely.

But this has nothing to do with Christianity, rather it was what Christianity was intended to cure; and indeed continued spirit life solves none of the deep problems of life; neither does reincarnation (leaving-aside the question of whether reincarnation is true in this world).

To imagine that immortality (continued existence) or a system of reincarnations (recycling of the soul through various bodies) solves anything fundamental seems to be simply a misunderstanding - a non sequitur.

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So what is the Christian belief?

Christian salvation involves the soul surviving death, then the saved soul being resurrected in a perfected body to dwell in heaven.

The process of resurrection is not a restoration of the state of humans on earth; we as we are are not reborn again to a continued existence; but there is instead a re-making of an unique human into an unique Son of God - retaining each individual human nature (staying essentially the same person) but enhancing - indeed transforming - this nature.

It's simple enough isn't it? And I had heard this often enough, but somehow it didn't get through to me...

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Over at the Notion Club Papers blog:

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.com/2011/09/tolkien-and-women-word.html

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Although Charles Williams was superficially a highly sociable man, full of energy and apparent optimism; deep down he was far more pessimistic than his freinds C.S Lewis and JRR Tolkien.


This is revealed in the late, great flowering of theology in the last decade of his life, and most of all the essay "What the cross means to me" (published as The Cross in the selected essays entitled The Image of the City edited by Anne Ridler, 1958).


Here are some excerpts, in order but re-paragraphed and re-punctuated:


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The original act of creation can be believed to be good and charitable; it is credible that the Almighty God should deign to create beings to share His Joy.


It is credible that He should deign to increase their Joy by creating them with the power of free will so that their joy should be voluntary.


It is certain that if they have the power of choosing Joy in Him they must have the power of choosing the opposite of Joy in Him. 


But it is not credible that a finite choice ought to result in an infinite distress...


...that the Creator should deliberately maintain and sustain His created universe in a state of infinite distress as a result of the choice.


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This is the law which His will imposed upon His creation. It need not have been.


Our distress then is no doubt our gratuitous choice, but it is also His. 


He could have willed us not to be after the Fall. 


He did not.


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Now the distress of the creation is so vehement and prolonged, so tortuous and torturing, that even naturally it is revolting to our sense of justice, much more supernaturally. 


We are instructed that He contemplates, from His infinite felicity, the agonies of His creation, and deliberately maintains them in it.


The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. 


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Williams conclusion is that at least, alone of all gods, the Christian God subjected himself to the justice which He established. But the sense of outrage is there.


The sense that God 'ought to' have annihilated the souls of those who chose against Him; rather than maintaining them eternally in torment.


(If that is indeed what happens.)


For Williams, the bedrock of human existence was apparently as described above: finite choice leading to infinite distress; mitigated only by a God who suffered along with His creation.


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CS Lewis may have had Williams arguments in mind when he wrote the 'Hell' chapter of The Problem of Pain (1940) - excerpts: 

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In an earlier chapter it was admitted that the pain which alone could rouse the bad man to a knowledge that all was not well, might also lead to a final and unrepented rebellion. And it has been admitted throughout that man has free will and that all gifts to him are therefore two-edged. From these premises it follows directly that the Divine labour to redeem the world cannot be certain of succeeding as regards every individual soul. Some will not be redeemed.

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Was the medieval time merry? - as suggested by Chesterton - or was it miserable as portrayed in popular culture and indeed in popular history.

I am not going to answer that question except to state that it depends on whether or not Christianity is taken into consideration and taken seriously.

Any past era was 'miserable' for most people in the sense that (compared with the past several decades) there was a lot of starvation, disease, warfare, torture, discomfort and dirt.

But in eras of great Christian devoutness - other-worldly eras - these factors carried much, much less weight than they do or would for us.

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An interesting test case is Carmina Burana (songs from the Beuern, a monastery), which is a collection of essentially secular lyrics, a selection from which was set to music in a dramatized cantata by Carl Orff during the paganistic era of National Socialism - in other words a modern and non-Christian angle on medievalism.

Carmina Burana is probably my favourite piece of 20th century music, something I find almost wholly enjoyable.

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To appreciate Orff's Carmina Burana, I think it needs to be seen dramatized, as in the first-rate 1975 TV version conducted by Eichhorn and currently available in segments on YouTube, e.g:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqutsAaQQK4&NR=1

Orff's CB represents just about the 'merriest' version of the medieval era that is possible minus Christianity - and (yet) it is (taken in total) a terrifying vision of life.

(It also notable the the vulgar vigour of this 1975 dramatization - its 'lust for life', a factor which is absolutely necessary to its positive appeal - would be utterly impossible for the PC-ridden world of 2011.) 

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A further example of this is the (excellent) novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. All positive valences attach to modern phenomena (science, philosophy) and the religious aspects are seen as negative, obscurationist, or simply deluded, psychotic, wishful, pitiful.

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My contention is that the evaluation of medieval times (or indeed any past era) is for modern people systematically and severely distorted by our habitual subtraction or trivialization of religion from the world view.

Either we miss Christianity out altogether, regard it as peripheral, or regard it purely negatively. All of these are grossly unhistorical biases.

For example, the popular Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer is solid, engaging and informative so far as it goes - but it contains very little about the Christian life, and completely misses its centrality to the Middle Ages; therefore, ultimately, the book ends by being a travesty of its subject, a massive misrepresentation of the experienced quality of medieval life.

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The deeply-entrenched secularism of the modern age is revealed most strongly in such matters: it seems we simply cannot understand what it is to live with religion at the centre of life; or else we can only imagine this an an unmitigated horror.

The idea of a world in which sweetness, beauty and hope; craft, learning, justice and morality, were Christian phenomena - is simply unimaginable to most people, most of the time - and recent literature, art and history are not helping matters.

So if the medievals were indeed merry, as Chesterton argued, then the fact would be necessarily invisible to the modern secular mind-set. 

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The first Christians wanted to be saved.

Later Christians wanted to be saved and to be happy.

Later still, Christians wanted to be happy, and saved.

Now we want to be happy.

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The fact that slavery was accepted as a given throughout most of the history of Christianity

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/08/christianity-and-slavery.html

may be an important corrective to our understanding of the Christian life.

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I have been reflecting on the recurrent scriptural theme that it is easier for 'the poor' to attain salvation than 'the rich'; and thinking about the symbolic 'pardon' which was given the peasantry in the medieval poem Piers Plowman by William Langland.

Here is the line of reasoning: If salvation is more possible for the poor, and slavery is not contradicted by Christianity, then salvation is certainly possible for slaves; however salvation may in fact be most possible for slaves.

It may be easier to be a good Christian as a slave (or some similar status, such as a serf or servant) than when free.

Contrariwise, it may be very difficult - or unusual - for a slave's master to lead a good Christian life, may be very unlikely that the slave owner will be able (or choose) to attain salvation.

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Charles Williams makes much use of the term coinherence to describe the underlying unity of humankind - we live 'in' each other. Coinherence derives from the incarnation of Christ, which takes up humanity into God and means firstly that we 'dwell' in Christ and he in us, but also that all humans share this. So the unity, or relatedness of all humans is a religious fact.

The primary law is love of God, the second is love of neighbour; and Williams seems to describe the second law as derived from the first by the coinherence of Christ in all; in terms of a web of exchanges and substitutions between people - the dependence of people on each other, trading assistance both physical and spiritual, the one doing what the other cannot.

The web of exchange and substitution therefore ought to be willingly participated-in (as contrasted with the prideful desire to be independent of the web, to be autonomous). It is a secondary aspect of the primary dependence of everything on God as creator and sustainer, and of the necessity for the divine help known as Grace.

The main human task seems to be a humble and loving acceptance of this Grace.

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This, if correct, clarifies the situation of a slave. The slave is, let us assume, a victim of circumstances; very explicitly dependent on his Master's will (or whim) and very unlikely to imagine that he is an autonomous agent, very unlikely to pursue this as an ideal.

By contrast with the slave (or poor man), the ultimate dependence of modern man (the rich man) is much more abstract, and furthermore obscured by all manner incoherent nonsense such as the concepts of 'rights' and 'freedom' and 'democracy' - which create an illusion of individual autonomy as the basis of reality.

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The slave's Christian duty is (as for everyone) to do his best to pursue the Good under the circumstances in which he finds himself. Mostly he will be prevented from this, by his status. But that is not his fault. So long as he does his best, it is enough.

The slave Master, however, is an element in these circumstances - and has the ability to make it harder for the slave to live a Christian life, violating the second law. Doing his best for himself is not enough, if he damages the web of coinherence by constraining others.

Coinherence suggests that if the slave master prevents his slave from attending church, sharing the sacraments, learning scripture, meeting with other Christians, praying (or whatever constitutes proper Christian practice in that context) - then the sin is upon himself. And, of course, the sin comes from and is the attitude: the attitude that the slave's soul does not matter - the denial of shared humanity.

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Modern man is, in innumerable ways, substantially in the position of the slave master; by many means impairing the ability of his neighbours to live the Christian life - consider the power of the journalist, the bureaucrat, the politician, the advertiser to force distractions on others; to distract others from the reality of life, to constrain the practice of the Good.

Indeed, there are no 'poor' in modern societies (almost none) and therefore everyone is in the position of the rich man of the scriptures; and modern society (outside the family) most resembles a web of interference and imposition (laws, regulations, rules, rights, taxes, subsidies) rather than a web of consenting mutual exchanges.

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For Langland, salvation was more likely for a plowman (a serf) than a merchant (a free man).

In sum, if the institution of slavery is not incompatible with Christianity, then the status of a slave (or of something like a slave - a serf, indentured servant, a conscript, a soldier) may be more compatible with the Christian life than is modernity.

The life of a slave is not happier - obviously not - but it may be more compatible with salvation than modernity.

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I have read a large number of autobiographies - but have not re-read many, because most are not much good. As a genre, autobiography is of generally low quality.

Which ones were good?

John Cowper Powys, for one. I have heard this described as the best autobiography ever written. Certainly it must be one of the most eccentric. Powys was a one-off: a ?great novelist and a very strange man indeed. Like all good autobiogs, it is highly selective - Powys does not mention any women!

C.S Lewis's Surprised by Joy is another that I have re-read several times: it is probably the most famous spiritual account of the twentieth century - very frequently quoted in Christian circles. Like Powys, he leaves out almost everything about women - except his mother. Maybe this is significant?...

There are semi-autobiographical accounts of a person's life in a particular place - but short on personal details; such as Thoreau's Walden, or the more recent Ceremonial Time by John Hanson Mitchell - both of which I love. But these hardly count as formal autobiographies.

I was deeply impressed by Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R James - an intoxicating account of his life, cricket - mostly, politics and social analysis by the Anglicized Black Trinidadian Communist.

One autobiography which made a big impact on my work was What mad pursuit, by Francis Crick. From this I learned certain things about how to do theoretical biology which helped make me the scientist I am today (ahem).

A scientific autobiography of clear genius, but which I only read a couple of years ago and haven't yet gone back to, was Erwin Chargaff's Heraclitean Fire: simply as a writer he stands among the best of his era. The book also impressed by its burning, passionate honesty and indignation at what was happening to science.

Other candidates?

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My contrarian position is that I am against eugenics, and against anti-eugenics:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-eugenics-is-bad-and-anti-eugenics.html

and that child mortality differentials were the main driving force in 'recent' human evolution (from 10000 years ago until c1800):

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/05/child-death-and-demographic-change-and.html

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From this I infer that the 'reversal' of selection pressure from c1800 in developed countries, sometimes termed 'dysgenics'

http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/RulingClass.pdf

is a result of differential fertility in societies with ignorably low child mortality rates.

Therefore, the 'dysgenic' trend will continue unless - or rather until - child mortality rates again revert to their historically high levels.

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It is the fact that 'all' children who are born nowadays (from whomever and from wherever and without reference to economic productivity) will very likely survive and reproduce, which has generated the reversal in selection pressure, and which has already grossly overpopulated the planet with more to come. 

The humanitarian imperative, which we all feel, to prevent children suffering and dieing, will therefore - with near certainty, although uncertain timescale, but measurable at most in decades - destroy the high productivity society which enables this humanitarian impulse to be effective.

Inter alia, and by means of which, child suffering and mortality will hit quantitative levels unprecedented in the history of the world - probably measurable in billions.

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Ironic - or something.

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Selah is an untranslated Hebrew word of uncertain meaning found in the Psalms.

My impression is that Selah means something like "Reflect on this" - or more prosaically "Think about it!".

This would fit with the notion that the chanting of the psalm may have been interrupted at this point by a 'harp' stroke.

Any other bright ideas what it means?

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I have quite forgotten.

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When I was a kid, dyed hair was rare: something done by young women trying to attract attention (the bleached 'platinum' blond) and the 'woman of a certain age' unconvincingly pretending to be younger than she was.

Hair dying was primitive, and dyed hair looked unnatural.

But hair is a naturally primary signal of attractiveness, an advertisement of health and youth. A healthy young woman's hair was her glory; a glory that lasted - like her youth - only a few years.

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By my late teens there were also people (women and men, by then) who dyed their hair as a statement of tribal loyalty - punks and the like. The hair was deliberately non-natural, strange colours, striped etc.

But dying technology improved and it became possible to dye hair almost realistically (at a price). Soon every woman had dyed hair - old, middle aged and young.

Sometimes it was a realistic mimic of natural hair, sometimes a statement of loyalty, sometimes it was merely dyed...

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To see natural hair has become a rare event - there is no more glory.

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So, what were the original motivations for dying hair? Oh yes, to attract attention and to pretend to be younger.

What used to be rare motivations are now the norm.

We have shifted from asking: why do you dye your hair? (what are to trying to prove?), to why don't you dye your hair? (what are you trying to prove?). 

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But since young women conceal their glory by hair dye, and since many dyes look merely mousy and do not attract attention, the explanations do not cover the facts.

Universal hair dying is just another example of the susceptibility of women to peer pressure, and the ability of the mass media to simulate peer pressure.

Hence we get the phenomenon of fashion which is intrinsically meaningless in terms of its specific content, but deeply meaningful in terms of revealing of the emptiness - indeed self-loathing - of mainstream modern humans.

Fashion makes people uglify themselves (permanently and grossly in the case of tattoos and piercings), impair function, risk disease, repel those whom they would like to know, and work harder at jobs they hate (in order to pay for the fashions).

What cannot fashion make people do? - especially women.

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So long as a person, a people, are enslaved by fashion - by a thing intrinsically meaningless, intrinsically harmful - then they are indeed slaves and little good can be expected from them.

If you are looking for hope - look to the unfashionable.

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It narrows it, of course!

Or more exactly, travel amplifies existing tendencies to shallowness, distractability and alienation.

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I have always had something of an aversion to travel - except by foot; but this was, for the years of youth, overcome by the craving for novelty and the wish to visit people.

But the ill effects of travel were obvious in myself, and in others who did a lot more of it.

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Travel powerfully provides that distraction which the modern mind craves, perhaps above all else. And it brings intrinsic status - one is allowed, indeed encouraged, to boast about the conspicuous consumption of travel in a way not permitted for other luxuries.

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The problem is often worst for the best holidays - a good holiday in a good place can be an intoxication, a glimpse of how life ought to be, a time when an animistic spell descends and all manner of synchronicities occur.

Yet, somehow, this happens at the expense of ordinary working life, reciprocally with real life.

Too often, life becomes polarised between magical holidays and mundane reality - people live in daydreams of elsewhere, the be rescued by travel. Yet these daydreams are unrealistic, untrue; and the whole process is one of addiction - craving, tolerance, escalating doses...

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Of my favourite authors, several were famous non-travellers.

The most notorious of non-travellers was Thoreau, and it is likely that reading Walden at a formative age was a factor in my ideas, or at least my ideals.

Fr Seraphim (Eugene) Rose seems never to have left California, except once to lecture.

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But The Inklings were the most serious serious non-travellers.

Tolkien, C.S Lewis and Charles Williams stayed in the British Isles their whole lives, by choice.

To be precise, C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien did military service in France in their youth, and Lewis went to Greece for a holiday with his dying wife; while Charles Williams was unfit for the Army and stayed in Britain except when he spent a day lecturing in Paris.

Warnie Lewis, a leading expert on Versailles, never visited Versailles.

Indeed, the Inklings were generally pretty averse even to local travel, in some respects: Lewis thoroughly disliked visiting London (less than two hours from Oxford), Williams profoundly disliked leaving London.

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Contrast this with the frequent, compulsive and wide-ranged globe-trotting of modern day equivalents among high flying academics and editors...

Contrast the quality and scope of the work...

Consider that 'travel writers' are, with no exceptions, shallow and glib poseurs. Yet if travel really did what it pretends to do, the best travel writers would be the best of men.

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What we see with Tolkien, Lewis and Williams is a focused power of active and animistic imagination, a power which is to some extent spontaneous and natural - yet a power which is apparently diverted or dissipated by the distractions of modern life, among which travel is one of the most potent.

Travel is not real life; and travel the most unreal of fantasies.

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For most people travel means holidays.

It is not so much that holidays literally vampirize life; but that the relation of holidays and life is itself a product of a characteristic modern mind-set, an activity whereby the admittedly-unreal (the holiday) is made experiential.

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Travel is a literalized fantasy that - because literalized - sucks from real life.

Travel takes the actual world and makes a fantasy of it; the more convincing the operation, the greater its dangers.

But fantasy - such as Tolkien's and Lewis's - makes another real world.

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Or, fantasy is not so much an escape from the real world as an escape into an un-real world.

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The error is to suppose that the holiday world is real and the fantasy world un-real; the danger is the pretension of travel that we can actually experience another world by moving our bodies. 

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The world is not enough: we know this as datum.

Travel - especially holiday - is a more or less successful denial of the fact that the world is not enough; successful fantasy is an acknowledgment that the world is not enough - a compensation and an en-courage-ment.

The wisest perhaps never travel; although they may sometimes need to move across the world, or visit, or go on pilgrimages.

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