John C. Wright's Journal

“If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.”

Keep in mind the basics—–

When we die

They cheer

And traitors sneer:

“The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “The Enemy.” They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?”

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Andrea Harris at Spleenville has some interesting observations on the FOX News dhimmi’s forced conversion to Islam. What pricked up my ears was her comment about Ayn Rand, who, despite all flaws, still has a solid moral core that informs her work. Here is the quote:

…. even though long ago the “Randian heat” as Florence King called it has worn off, and I can see the massive faults in it, I still haven’t been able to get rid of my copy of Atlas Shrugged. Sure, the main characters make two dimensions look well-rounded. Sure, it’s as full of long speeches as a Castro breakfast. Sure, Rand’s philosophy is beyond cracked. But when she wasn’t making her ponderous and bizarre points, the writer that was buried deep inside her managed to struggle out occasionally, and allowed her to create a real character with a real, human point of view. Typically, Rand always brought these people to a miserable end. One such is the character of Cheryl Taggart, the hapless wife of mealy-mouthed railroad tycoon Jim Taggart (on a side note, Rand’s evil characters were as cardboard as her good ones). Here is Cheryl coming to a realization of just what was wrong with people around her:

“–it’s as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion–an explosion is someting hard and solid–but destroyed by…by some horrible kind of softening…as if nothing were solid, nothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger through stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and mountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes like clouds–and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo.”

People want, and need, solidity. If we can’t find it in our own culture, we’ll look for it in another. This “solidity,” by the way, is not a material solidity, but a psychic, even spiritual one. The problem is, our increasingly gooey culture can’t give us the ability to discern true solidity from tinsel fakes. In other words, good luck fighting off Muslim fanatics by going to the beach.

Just in case you forgot:
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/video/palestinians-celebrate-911.mov

Here is a comment from Mark Shea at CATHOLIC AND ENJOYING IT. The perfect rightness of his remarks merits that they be reprinted in full:

“We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” – C.S. Lewis

Over at Rod’s blog, there are various discussions going on about the West’s lackadaisical and baffled response to Radical Islam, all having the inadvertent effect of bearing out my point that only a healthy spirituality can cure a diseased one.

Currently the West is trying to confront the inflamed disease of Radical Islam with something called “Western Values”. This means, basically, a tepid commitment to my personal truth of the moment, modified by various fears of theocracy, lack of abortion rights, getting killed, and bad cable access. It also means “unfettered commitment to the needs of my groin” and “a vague sense that I am entitled to something”. Various other things go into the stew as each Imperial Autonomous Self seasons to taste. But what does not go into it is a common creed or even a sense of the common good.

Consequently, Westerners are flummoxed by the hollowness of their own response to Islam and, in particular, by the alacrity with which we are willing to cave into Islam’s threats of forced conversion.

I’m not one to boast “Lord, evenif everyone else were to deny you, I will never deny you!”. I’ve heard that song before and pray “lead us not into temptation” lest I make an idiot of myself. But that said, I have to add that, if I were not a believer, I don’t see what the big deal would be if I pretended to convert to Islam in order to save my skin. If all I’m betraying is Madonna, Planned Parenthood, the Glory of Sodomy, You Deserve A Break Today, and similar Western Values, then I don’t know that some inchoate tribal fealty to them would persuade me to make my wife a widow and my children fatherless. I *hope* that, as a Christian, I would have the stones to take a bullet rather than renounce my Lord, who bought me with his blood. But I don’t know what I’m made of, the heart being desperately wicked and all.

So I’m not particularly appalled by the acts of the FOX News guys, since I have no particular reason to think they were betraying some ultimate trust. They may well have simply been figuring “This will get me home to my family”. If they were Christians or Jews, it’s a different story. But if they weren’t, it seems to me we Christians have to do as Dante would have done and judge pagans by their own standards, not ours. Our culture has labored for 40 years to create a populace in which all reference to the Transcendent has been stamped out of existence. To suddenly be appalled when a man’s vision is no higher than a cow’s is a strange reaction to men who acted exactly as all our Manufacturers of Culture have programmed them to act.

I continue strolling down memory lane rereading Heinlein’s juveniles. This time it is FARMER IN THE SKY, a book that did not stick too prominently in my memory from when I read it first three decades ago, for the reason that it by and large was not very memorable.

This does not mean it was not good; but it does mean that it was not great. The writing is always crisp, clear, smooth, professional, easy-to-read: but in this case there is neither memorable character or plot. As Cymbeline is to Shakespeare, FARMER is to Heinlein.

SPOILER WARNINGS. IF THERE WERE A PLOT TO THIS BOOK, I GIVE IT AWAY.
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Why do we like horror? For that matter, why is pornography obscene in our culture whereas bloodshed on film is not?

If you want to hear a theory about the difference between the obscenity of sex versus violence, I think I can tie it into a theory about the allure of horror.

Call this the ‘Play theory of Plays’. Drama is linked to the behavior of children and young animals when they practice grown-up behaviors. Kitten play at hunting and fighting because they will hunt and fight as cats; children, in a more sophisticated way, play at being what they will be. Little boys as cowboys and soldiers fight mock battles, little girls mother dolls. As if they are trying out a suit of clothing, they put themselves in their imagination in the scene where their emotions ar suited: boys want to know what it feels like to be brave and kill an enemy, girls want to know what it feels like to love a child. (I would not have used such stereotypic examples, except that my own children match this stereotype.)

Likewise with drama. I have been lucky enough never to have been in war or disaster, or in a situation involving real terror, supernatural or otherwise. Plays, books, movies, can show me what it is like, let me put on another man’s clothing for an hour. Everyone is at least a little curious about what it is like to meet a ghost, and most men would like to think they would not be cowards if confronted by an ax-murderer. Go to a movie, try on the clothing, and see.

The play takes on an educational aspect, or if done badly, a preachiness, when it attempts not just to portray, but to instruct. But this instructional aspect cannot be edited out of any but the most shallow of stories. Whether you like it or not, human beings are moralizing creatures, and the audience will carry away a moral to the story. The moral of Casablanca: the troubles of two people do not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but if you don’t do the honorable thing, you will come to hate yourself in time. The moral of Spiderman: with great power comes great responsibility, and so on.

Now, there is a difference between sex and bloodshed and its role in the imagination, and also its role in the morals of stories. Simply put, human nature makes it easy to teach courage and honor when it comes to bloodshed, and hard to teach romance and, well, patience, when it comes to sex.

Some might wish it were not the case, but reality is reality: and the reality is that we men have a natural inclination to lust after bloodshed and slay the enemy in combat, we delight in it. To teach courage is therefore not so difficult a task: the real task is to teach honor, which acts as a check on courage. That’s why movies showing bloodshed are not obscene, provided the bloodstained heroes let the fallen bad guy rise to his feet again, or return his dropped weapon to him.

Sex, on the other hand, is an area where reason and nature are at odds. Reason tells us not to exploit women, and nature inclines us to bed and abandon as many young nymphs as possible. For this reason, bloodshed is (and has always been) a public matter, in duels and in war, and the public display of it is not regarded as obscene: sex, on the other hand, must be mysterious, surrounded by allure and romance, or else it loses its allure, and becomes a cheap commercial product, and sex is no longer the adventure of the honeymoon, but the purchase of harlotry.

The imagination plays into making the honeymoon an adventure. If plays stimulate the imagination with too many exaggerated depictions of sex, the reality seems flat, and romance is robbed of its sacrosanct character. Overexposure dulls the nerve. Violence is the opposite. Movie violence does not prepare the young soldier for the true horror of combat, but if it did, this would be a benefit, not a loss.

That is why porn is obscene, whereas violence is merely tasteless.

Someone asked me what five books changed, not my life, but challenged my way of looking at things. I limit the question this way, because the book that had the profoudest continuing affect on my life has not changed it as much as it should, and I mean the ENCHIRIDION of Epictetus. These are books that opened my eyes, or spun me upside down, so that the stars were underfoot and the trees were dangling from a green sky like monstrous feathery stalactites. If you’ve read a book like this, you know the kind of thing I mean:

1. Last and First Men by Olaf Stabledon
2. Flatland by A. Abbott
3. World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt
4. Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsany
5. Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton

You might raise an eyebrow at this list, since it contains four sf books and one work of Christian apologetics, but, let me justify:
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