The image I used in A Dream of Light
for the curse of Babel was a rainbow being shattered and its pieces being
scattered across the sky to become stars. There was a fragmentation and
a diminution of language.
I do not think that the New Jerusalem will see an exact reversal of what
happened at Babel. I don't think the diversity in languages will be reversed,
even to restore the language of the Dawn of Creation. I believe that we will
have something deeper -- even more than in Eden an instrument of communion and
not just communication -- something that does not have to pass through the
pipe of the senses. And I believe that the diversity of human languages, past,
present, and future, will be preserved in that fusion. The observation is made
of idiolects, that different people will use language in different ways;
different idiolects can still be part of the same language in which people
understand each other when speaking. In Heaven, I believe I will speak in a
way influenced, foreshadowed by, the languages I have worked with here (with
various degrees of proficiency -- I speak two languages well, and have dabbled
in others), and a way that others will understand.
I wrote about fantasy above. I wish to -- not quite
explain that theme more (I am having difficulty thinking about it clearly
enough to say anything significant) -- but talk about related material.
Fantasy is in our minds associated with another era; this is not because
people invented a forgotten world, a faroff age and invested it with
magic, but because people living in a then-contemporary world saw magic
operating on their world. The fantastic element was not conceived to be
fixed to their time, and the profession of woodcutter in fairy tales was
originally as contemporary and as ordinary as a mechanic in our world.
This is why, when C.S. Lewis wrote fairy tales for grown-ups (That
Hideous Strength), he did not give people occupations from yesteryear;
he set them in the contemporary world. The same is true of Madeleine l'Engle's
Time quartet. The fact that 'fantasy' means 'pseudo-medieval'
is in some sense a matter of historical accident.
When writing A Cord of Seven Strands,
or more properly when thinking before writing it, I was thinking over the
question of whether not to write fantasy. I was sure of a contemporary
setting, and I did not want magic in the story. What I was debating was a
cultural and geographical bifurcation, something that would feel like our
world but be different.
It was a related but different sense of 'fantasy' that I meant
above. When I am trying to express
something, I sometimes see a visual symbol before I can think of words;
the visual symbol I saw was two along rays at a very acute angle. Both rays
come from the same source. One ray ray represents the way things actually
happened, the real world. The other represents the fantasy: it is nearly
the same in orientation, but it is displaced, and the further you go, the
further apart they are. Something similar may be said for Australian,
English Canadian, British, and U.S. culture. They are all bifurcated
(albeit interacting) lines from the same source, in a sense almost parallel.
Complementary to the usual intuition of Britain being on its historical
path and the colonies branching off or doing the same thing, it may also be
said that these four countries represent alternate historical and cultural
developments of the British culture that existed several centuries ago.
To someone with a historical sense who had grown up in one of these four
contemporary cultures and been transported to another, each provides an
answer of "This is how it might have been but is not." The direction of
the angle I see is different -- not a "This is how it might have been but
is not" of historical and cultural development, but of the different feel
brought with intelligence, the part of intelligence that is not connoted
or implied by the popular understanding of the word 'smart'. That isn't
quite it, or perhaps you could say that that is one facet but not all;
at any rate, it is the only one I know how to concretely describe.
I was thinking about the direction of Madeleine l'Engle's fantasy --
breaking off from our world (though she would not view it that way) in the
direction of (some) non-human characters, of kything and under-hearing. I
regard it a valuable question to ask how my fantasy would break off. A part of
it is in the direction of pseudo-fantasy, material that reads like fantasy
while consisting exclusively of events I could believe happened. Other parts I
can't describe.
10/14/00
Recently I found out that a person whom I have been talking with (I won't
mention his name) was looking at an area of thought in a way that was
fundamentally distorted (I won't give the details on that, either). What I
regard as significant is that my reply to him was emotional, only partially
logically coherent, and probably not nearly as persuasive as most of what
I write.
I was thinking about this, in large part because I was disturbed that I
hadn't given him a better answer, a better explanation -- I was aware that I
was explaining things badly as I wrote, but I couldn't do better. It wasn't
because this was an obscure question that I knew little about; anything but.
The reflection I had coming out of this was analogous to aesthetic distance:
if an issue is too far out, then you do not know it well enough to talk about
it effectively, then as it moves closer you can start to talk about it, but if
it comes too close, then the lack of distance prevents effective discussion.
These are some of the things you know best, but you can't start talking about
them.
If this is true, this may mean that on the handful of issues that a thinker
becomes emotional and incoherent in argument, the incoherence is not because he
doesn't know what he is talking about, but because he knows it so intimately
that he cannot discuss it effectively -- it is when he is least persuasive that
he may be voicing something far more important to him than what lets him
be carried away on the wings of eloquence.
10/14/00 and subsequent days
There is a classic Reader's Digest in which a married couple, building their
dream house, tells their decorator that they want an authentic early American
bathroom. The decorator hesitates, and says, "Ok. Exactly how far away from
the house do you want it to be?"
It has occurred to me in thinking about that joke that I have been
ungrateful to my own era. Perhaps I am in an era that doesn't really have a
place for me, but the Middle Ages wouldn't necessarily have had a place for me
either, even if my metacultural perspective is spiritually closer to medieval
than modern or postmodern. So I would like to list twenty things about my
historical-cultural perspective that I appreciate -- partly out of discipline
and contrition, but also to draw others (especially those who feel the
legitimate pull of metaculture and the recognition that other
historical-cultural milieux have legitimate and probably richer spiritual
climates, who see in modern progress an illusion and are appalled by the
literal and figurative 20th century body count) to an appreciation of the good
things our climate uniquely holds. This is a bit like the 100 ways of kything in that I don't
know at the outset what all the entries are:
Things I like about my historical-cultural placement:
Medical technology. I do not approve of worshipping technology,
but it is not worship to note that medical technology has saved my life more
than once, and that if I had lived in another era, then (barring supernatural
healing) the bone infection I had in my ankle in eighth grade would have killed
me, and I wouldn't have produced any of my writings. In a
significant sense, my writings are a ministry; the question is not whether I
would have produced my writings, diminished, in the theological crampedness of
my age, or produced them on the strength of a stronger age; the choice is
between my struggling, fighting uphill, swimming upstream to think clearly and
produce my writings (perhaps even doing a better job because I could not simply
go with the flow), and being dead before I could mature enough to produce any
of them.
The internet. In previous technological environments (hand
copying and then print), the expense and scarcity of writing materials meant
that you had, to share writings, to convince someone with scarce resources that
your writing was worth the allocation of scarce resources -- and, even now,
getting a book printed is more a matter of salesmanship than of writing. (And
I am not an expert salesman.) The internet is the first means in history where
a person like me can concentrate almost wholly on the quality of his writings
and then, almost effortlessly, without any jumping through hoops, make them
available worldwide. There is a kind of sharing and connection, community,
made possible by the internet that wasn't possible before. Many great writers
of the past were discovered posthumously, by accident. The internet provides a
place where writing is far less restricted.
IMSA. The
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, the magnet school where I went
to high school, is a world unto itself. Culturally, and in the way people
think, it is one of a few homes to me; the last time I visited campus,
there was a shared bond and a rate of connection that affected me as one
of those moments that leave you wondering how you could have gotten used
to its absence. IMSA has its many flaws, but even with them -- it is on
the strength of notesfile discussions at IMSA that I learned to write,
and if I was able to later read the Bible repeatedly and perform a mental
housecleaning to expunge myself of worldview/teachings from IMSA (i.e. the
premise that math and science will solve our world's problems), even that
mental housecleaning used discipline acquired at IMSA. But IMSA is not
to me just the place where I learned to think; it is a place where I met
kindred spirits, and (even in its flaws) an Ynes Avalach to me, more of
an alma mater than any of the four colleges and universities I attended.
I am grateful to my era, and to the state of Illinois and its taxpayers,
for letting me have that opportunity.
Computers. Computers do not need to be an object of worship or
another enhancement to corporate abilities to generate wealth. They can also
be seen as a triumph of human culture, and an opportunity for interaction
unlike anything any previous aeon has seen. Where else can you interact with a
being that can do arithmetic and logic flawlessly but has no intelligence, not
even common sense? There is something in interacting with something logical to
show you that you are not logical; programming computers provides a new facet
to a thinking man's self-understanding.
Religious volunteerism. The idea that one belongs to a given
religious affiliation because he chooses to belong is, historically speaking,
far from universal. There are imperfections -- religion as a private choice,
religion as something tamed -- but they are imperfections in carrying out a
great thing.
The concept of tolerance. Most readers will know of hypocrisies
and imperfections in how this is carried out, the equation of "racist = white",
and the problems that have been caused in the name of diversity. I would
recall the words, "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue," and say
that the respect for personhood embodied in diversity concerns is a great
thing.
Breadth/specialization/academia/diversity. In terms of level of
specialization, the present world has quite a few niches that wouldn't exist in
most other societies. (This is a mixed blessing, but a blessing.) My choice
of professions is better now than in most historical-cultural contexts; in a
small village, the selection of available professions (even without any
cultural restrictions) would probably not have allowed me anything as
thought-oriented as I have now.
>
The value given to an individual life. One person's life is held
to be of tremendous value -- not just VIPs, but everyone. This is far from a
cultural universal.
Creature comforts and good thinking environments. Creature
comforts and a special place have a great influence on how well a person
is able to perform abstract thought; creature comforts are nice in themselves,
but they also allow people to ignore the absence of discomfort and sink into
thought.
A native language that is lingua franca throughout the world.
This is something very few people in world history have enjoyed. There are any
number of arguments that have been made about the dark side of American English
steamrolling through half the world's linguistic bases, and I don't mean to
make light of that -- but to speak the language as your native tongue, and
never need to learn another, is a rare privilege.
Cheap books. Before the printing press, books were hard to come
by; a library of sixty books was quite respectable in the Middle Ages. Books
have since then become cheaper and easier to make, which means not only that
books are easier to acquire, but that a broader selection of material is liable
to be printed. True, much of this material is trash, but there is also
material that is not trash.
Roads and Other Transportation. Roads take a heavy and
non-obvious toll; the Amish do not drive cars because it is their considered
judgment that the use of cars tends to degrade the community. That stated,
roads provide access to people, more diverse acquaintances than one would have
in a small village. I consider my job options to be much better than if I had
to choose from positions I could walk to -- in which case I'd probably go
bonkers.
Psychology. Psychology, as all academic disciplines, has its own
special way of being ridiculous. It also has generated an understanding of
human nature with some strengths that many cultures do not have. I would
hesitate to say that academic psychology has surpassed the insights of other
cultures on their own terms, but on its terms psychology has provided us with
some good understandings of human nature.
Hallowe'en. Every age has beautiful holidays; I like Halloween:
not the ghouls and witches and warlocks, but the opportunity to be someone
else, to reveal yourself in a different way.
Role play. This element of cultural wealth is something that has
always been around -- in the form of children's make-believe. I am not aware
of another cultural context that carries this into adulthood.
Recognition of childhood. The non-universal concept of childhood,
whose present disappearance Neil Postman explores and laments in The
Disappearance of Childhood, is of benefit to both children and
adults.
Lex, Rex. The rule of law -- the idea that everyone, even the
highest governing officials, is subject to the law -- is far from common in
time and history. Many people from other nations had trouble understanding
when Nixon was impeached: how could the highest official of the land be on
trial for breaking the law? It struck them as it might strike us to see a
family where the parents were grounded -- grounding is something parents hand
out to children, not something parents are themselves subject to. The rule of
law is imperfectly followed -- as I write, the chaos surrounding the 2000
American presidential election is just beginning to subside -- and the concept
has flaws. Yet, even with an imperfect implementation of imperfect ideas,
attempts to follow the rule of law reduce arbitrariness.
Bureaucracies. Now I know that some readers are probably
wondering why I would put bureaucracies on the list -- 'bureaucracy', like
'mother-in-law', carries strongly negative connotations. Do I like pushing
through red tape? No. But, to an outsider, working with an American
bureaucracy is a positive luxury. One Brazilian student was stunned when he
applied for a scholarship without knowing anyone who could pull strings, and
then received it; a friend at home couldn't believe him when he explained what
had happened. The reason is simple: in Brazil, like most countries across
most of time, you need an inside connection to get anything out
of a bureaucracy. In the US, it doesn't hurt, but you have reasonable chances
of getting a lot of things out of a bureaucracy -- enough so that this can be
taken for granted, and we can ungratefully grumble about how inefficient
bureaucracies are.
The concept of genius. The concept of genius is far from
universal; while there are problematic developments (the "exceptional man"
exposed in Crime and Punishment), the boundary between genius and
normal (or even just gifted and average), like that between children adults,
is one that benefits people on both sides.
Mechanical devices to tinker with. When I made
a fantasy world, one of the races had
tinkering as a national hobby. It's delightful and fascinating to tinker,
to fix things MacGyver style, and to have intriguing gadgets. It's not one
of the greatest things in life -- not up there with faith and friendship --
but Legos and knicknacks (Legos being one of my favorite thinking toys as
a child) are an enjoyable part of local color.