Religious beliefs

I think my favourite book in the Bible is Proverbs.  There’s a line in it “Upon the hoary head [frosty with grey hair] is placed the Crown of Wisdom.” (Though people like Ronald Reagan show that older folk can be as foolish as their juniors…) I also like the line “The spider takes hold with her hands, and is found in kings’ palaces!” And I like the line in the Gospel, “As you have done it for the least of you, you have done it for me.” Some years back they canonized Father Damien—now that’s a saint I can believe in!  He did it for the least of the people around him…

I’m not the religious type.  I’m a half-assed agnostic, not even ready for the cold comfort of atheism.  In the Gospel Jesus walked on the sea and invited St. Peter to join him, but Peter was afraid to, and Jesus said “Oh, ye of little faith!” I can understand how Peter felt:  he must have wondered, “What if my faith makes no difference and I drown?” then “What if my faith isn’t STRONG enough to make the difference and I drown?” When St. Paul visited Athens he noticed a temple with the dedication “To the Unknown God.” To me that’s really profound! (On my Tweeter profile I wrote the line in the original Greek: To^hi Agnosto^hi Theo^hi.)

On a more intellectual level, considers Occam’s Razor:  the principle that other things being equal, the simpler explanation is preferable.  Atheism is simpler than theism, and other things are essentially equal.  Someone invented a scale for religious belief where 1 is “I’m a certain theist,” 4 is “I’m agnostic,” 5 is “I think there’s probably no God,” and 7 is “I’m a certain atheist.” On that scale, I guess I’m 4.5:  the odds seem to be against theism, but I’m not really an oddsmaker on this…

I can say that I believe in the Devil, because I believe that the Devil is within us.  And I can also say that I believe in hell, because I believe that Ronald Reagan is there. (I like to think that he and Ayatollah Khomeini are cellmates there…) Atheists often emphasize that they don’t believe in the negative aspects of religious faith like the Devil and hell, yet in those aspects my belief is actually stronger!

Someone asked non-believer H.L. Mencken, “When you face the Great Throne of God, what will you say then?” Mencken answered that he’d say “I’m sorry, gentlemen.  I was wrong.” Something very disarming about that.  Non-believer Stephen Fry said he’d say to God, “Why do you give children bone cancer?” I was thinking that I’d say, “You’re one sick fuck, you know that?  Like the time you told Abraham to tie up his son and execute him, and at the last moment said ‘Just kidding.’ Do you think Isaac ever trusted his father again?  Who do you think you are, God?”

Blaise Pascal came up with the honestly cynical Pascalian Wager:  if God exists you’d better get on his good side,   and if He doesn’t believing will do no harm.  But does God really care what you believe?  Really, “If you don’t believe you’ll go to hell!” isn’t an argument for believing, it’s an argument against doubting.  Would God really send people to hell for not believing in Him?  Only a petty god would do that.  If you’re God you’re the elephant in the living room, and it shouldn’t matter whether people believe in you or not.  What it’s really about, of course, is that the existence of non-believers often has the effect of reminding believers that they don’t feel completely secure in their own faith, and insecurity breeds intolerance.  Does God exist to justify the people who believe in Him?  That would be solipsistic. (My big word for the day!)

The Greek philosopher Epicurus asked whether God is able and willing to intervene in the world to make things better. “If He’s able and willing, why is there still evil and suffering in the world?  If He’s able but not willing, he’s malicious.  If He’s willing but not able, he’s impotent.  And if he isn’t able or willing, what’s the use of gods?” I suppose that God gave us free will, then let us stew in our own juice.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the only love in the universe is the love that we sentient beings often make.  Wouldn’t that make our love more important?  I suppose you can look at love as an act of rebellion against the dog-eat-dog universe!

If you say you believe in God, I really don’t know any better than you.  I suppose that the advent of Christianity and Islam and other religions has all been part of the process that’s led to creating a world where people have freedom to think.  And religious differences are actually necessary for us to evolve intellectually.  I think of the story of the Tower of Babel where God made everyone speak different languages so they’d stop being obsessed with building an infinitely high tower and seeing nothing else. (In a way, when Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward he was building his own Tower of Babel.) Does the story apply to religions as well as languages?

One of the many controversial points of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is in the chapter “You Can’t Pray a Lie.” In a moment of crisis Huck decides that his friendship with runaway slave Jim is more important to him than the religion he’s been taught, in which helping a slave escape is as bad as running off someone’s cattle, and he says “All right, I’ll go to hell then!” Some grownups didn’t want children reading this because they relied on fear of hell as a control mechanism. (For his part, Mark Twain pointed out that parts of the Bible were unfit for children!) For me, it’s a startling, brilliant moment:  it’s about making your own moral judgements, taking responsibility, growing up.  It’s downright existential!

There’s a line in one of the non-Paul Epistles, “If someone says ‘I love God!’ but he hates his brother, he’s lying.  Because how can you love something you’ve never seen when you hate what’s right next to you?”  How do people love what they’ve never seen?  I suppose most people love the idea of God.  Which is to say, God is an idea.  On Tweeter the other day someone asked “Where is this God I keep hearing about?” and I answered “Everywhere and nowhere…”

Granted that religion fills the emotional needs of many people.  But so can atheism:  I imagine that for some people atheism is a way of taking responsibility.  In the neo-noir The Usual Suspects one of the characters admits that he no longer believes in God, but still fears Him! (As Machiavelli pointed out, love may come and go, but fear stays there.) I guess that’s the modern dilemma, or one not so modern…

For the last word, Mahatma Gandhi said something I like. “When I was young, I was taught that God was Truth.  But now I realize that Truth is God!”

Regrets

Goodfellas is a great gangster movie with a great ending.  Ray Liotta ignored warnings to stay out of the drug trade and got caught red-handed, so he escapes prison by ratting out his murderous friends, who go to jail forever.  Liotta enters Witness Protection and now he has to live like normal law-abiding people.  In the morning he goes out and picks up the newspaper and remembers Joe Pesci shooting people.  The soundtrack plays “My Way,” with Sid Vicious singing “Regrets, I have a few, but then again too few to mention…” 

Of all celebrity deaths, I think Sid Vicious was the one that disturbed me the most. (Someone said that “My Way” only works when the singer is less smart than the song, and that the Sid Vicious version is the only good one.  Personally, I like the Elvis version too.) But I digress.

What things have I done or not done that I regret?  I try not to second-guess my younger self with “I should have done that instead of this.” (The soldier in the Civil War novel Cold Mountain muses that regret is the eighth sin.) Looking back, I remember in college when people were friendly with me, and in hindsight I wish I’d reciprocated, but I just wasn’t ready!  I also wish that I’d developed my singing and acting talents at an earlier age—I finally started doing that in middle age, joining an opera group.

But I thought of a specific regret just the other week.  It goes back to 1996, when I was writing my Ph.D. thesis. My supervisor and I did not have good chemistry.  I found him inflexible and became defensive, and the thesis suffered. I kept writing things or saying things to him because I just couldn’t think of anything else to say, and in the end I was lucky to pass.  For his part, he thought I wasn’t taking it seriously. (I know this because he later admitted it to me!) The only reason I didn’t ask for a new supervisor was because there was nobody else.  Maybe I should have gone to the University of Toronto, with its bigger faculty, instead of York University.  But that isn’t the regret I had in mind.

In the spring of 1996, after a long period getting my research notes in order, I finally started writing the thesis.  I’d handed in the first chapter and prepared to write the second:  I was moving on not because I saw the first chapter as “finished” but because I didn’t want to waste time.  But the catch was, I’d have to write the second chapter very soon, while the material was still fresh in my mind.

My supervisor was going to spend the summer in Hong Kong, and in our second-last meeting before his departure came an unexpected development:  he wanted me to add an “overview” to the first chapter.  And he wanted me to spend the next two weeks working on it and give it to him at our last meeting so he could look at it in Hong Kong and send me his feedback.  But for me this was unfeasible because I needed to start the second chapter soon, and it couldn’t wait two weeks. (In addition, I wanted to get his feedback before he left.)

When the Nazis attacked at the start of the Battle of the Bulge, General Eisenhower told his subordinates, “This is an opportunity!” I decided to look at it as an opportunity to improve the thesis.  I’d write the overview as quickly as possible and send it to him so he could give me feedback before leaving, then turn to writing the second chapter.  Of course, it showed that I’d written it in such a hurry. (I made the no-brainer mistake of confusing the Treaty of Nanjing with the Treaty of Tianjin!)

I actually missed my last meeting with him when we would have talked about the overview, because I got the time wrong. (Was I unconsciously missing it deliberately because I feared his reaction?  It wasn’t conscious anyway.) When I finally got his written comments, it wasn’t pretty.  He called the overview “vague, simplistic and often mistaken” and said that it reflected “basic weaknesses.” I gave an opinion in one place because I couldn’t just recite facts, and his comment began with a “No!” exclamation.  (I later figured out that it was one specific sentence he objected to.) I tried to find another member of my committee to talk to about the overview, but none of them was available and I got sent to (I kid you not) a professor of Japanese history!  That didn’t do much good…

I understand that from his perspective I was doing a slapdash, half-assed job.  But from my perspective, I was trying to play ball with him and make the thesis better, and he was being like one of those teachers who make you regret that you even tried!  After he came back I sent him another draft where I tried to meet him halfway and address his points.  But it still had the sentence he objected to, and he saw only that, and none of the changes I’d tried to make.  In his response he repeated the same thing he’d said before, ignoring the changes.  He left out the “No!” exclamation, of course, but otherwise it was exactly the same, as if he’d forgotten writing it earlier.  I can’t work with someone like that, where you try to make changes to please him but he just acts like you’ve made no changes at all.  After that I gave up on trying to please him.  Since I couldn’t work with him, I had to fight him, and I ultimately wrote ten drafts. (After the seventh he declared the thesis “unexaminable,” and I had to demand an examination anyway.) On more than one occasion, you won’t be surprised to hear, I came close to quitting the whole thing.

What do I wish I’d done?  I wish I’d said to him, “Sorry, the overview will have to wait till you come back from Hong Kong.  I’m ready to write the second chapter and can’t afford any delay in doing so.” If I’d known he was going to ask for the overview and had time to think, maybe that’s what I’d have done.  But it came on me as a surprise, and I had to make an immediate decision on what to tell him.  And I was afraid he’d say “You can’t write the second chapter until you’ve improved the first!” and I would have had to ignore him and write the second chapter first anyway.  Which wouldn’t have improved our relationship.  When the eager to please meets the hard to please, feelings get hurt.

In the end, I did pass, but I felt like a burnout.  I remember thinking when I started out, “I don’t really care about the degree.  I just want the experience of writing a doctoral thesis!” By the time I was finished, it felt like a century since back then. (The hardest part is waiting months for feedback, worrying that the latest draft won’t get you any closer to finishing, and being proved right.) It was like in the movie Easy Rider, when the two of them finally make their fortune from a drug score and Dennis Hopper says “We did it!” but Peter Fonda says “We blew it.”

But that’s all in the past, of course.  I don’t expect to be in a situation like that again, so there isn’t much I can learn from it.  I guess I could tell today’s doctoral students about it, and they could learn something useful.

The circus

Back in the 1970s, I saw an issue of Time magazine with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin on the cover with the headline “The wild man of Africa.” Something about that headline bothered me.  In hindsight, I realize that it sounds like an attraction in a circus sideshow!

I’m in an opera group, and it involves some acting as well as singing.  One year we were having an evening of acting exercises and one of them was to pretend to be freaks in a sideshow.  So I pretended to be the Wild Man of Africa!

The Toronto District School Board has some good night school courses.  I’ve taken their acting courses several times.  They have some interesting challenges:  once I had to do a pantomime with an invisible prop, so I pretended to jump on a pogo stick!  Another time I was in a group of three where we had to put together a pantomime so that the audience would guess the setting, so we pretended to be in a circus!  I was a lion tamer, someone else was a tightrope walker, but I don’t remember what the third one was.  At the end of our turn, we’d each take a deep bow with a theatrical flourish!

Ever see the movie Freaks?  It’s a controversial 1930s thriller directed by Tod Browning, set in a community of sideshow freaks.  There was a report that a pregnant woman in the audience got so freaked out that she miscarried, but maybe that was a publicist’s invention.  What makes it especially disturbing is the real-life freaks in the cast. (Apparently they had a good time making the movie.) It might have become a box-office hit, but MGM chickened out and removed it from circulation.  They put a statement at the beginning that was supposed to reassure the audience but today rather adds to the disturbing effect: with the advances in eugenics, they promise, “freaks” will become a thing of the past. (Some dwarfs would be murdered in the Nazi Holocaust!) On the contrary, today there are more freaks than ever because fewer of them are dying young!  And the more freaks there are of each type, the less freakish they seem…

There’s one scene in it where a conventional Hollywood beauty marries a dwarf in the group, and the other freaks give her a party and chant “Gaba-gaba, one of us!” (Later she tries to poison him and grab his inheritance, so the freaks disfigure her, and we see her head on a chicken’s body!) I’ve mentioned that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I’ve joined a Facebook group for Aspies.  One newcomer to the group posted that he’d just been diagnosed with Aspergers, so I posted “Gaba-gaba, one of us!”

Our parents mostly kept us away from disturbing comic books. (No Conan the Barbarian for us!) But there was one that sneaked through.  It was in the Classics Illustrated series of book adaptations, which they did approve of.  This issue adapted Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs.  Hugo wrote it during his Second Empire exile on the Channel Islands, when he had nothing but good things to say about the United Kingdom in his letters, but in this book he casts a rather critical eye on English society.

  

It’s about a young man in England around 1700 whose face in childhood was deliberately disfigured to give him a grotesque look, including a permanent “smile.” He gets adopted by a mountebank and becomes a star on the medicine-show circuit, viewing his disfigurement as good fortune because it’s given him a way to escape the poverty all around him.  But then it turns out he’s the long-lost heir to an aristocratic title, and it turns into what Hollywood calls a “fish out of water” story.  The climax has him making his first speech in the House of Lords where he states his big ideals, a bit like Charlie Chaplin at the end of The Great Dictator, but the other lords take it as uproarious comedy! 

I’ve read the book, and it’s rather top-heavy with symbolism. (Hugo had that tendency.) It’s the sort of thing where his mountebank mentor is named Ursus (Latin for bear), he has a pet wolf called Homo (Latin for wolf), and he’s also raising a blind girl called Dea (Latin for goddess). I re-read the comic book a few years ago, and it’s still rather disturbing.  Paradoxically, Norman Nodell’s illustration gets to me because it’s a bit artless and blunt rather than stylish. (I think someone said that it’s the artless bluntness of the movie Night of the Living Dead that makes it so terrifying!) The cover shows people gawking at the title character, and it’s like they’re the real freaks!  Paul Leni also made a silent movie of it, and Conrad Veidt’s portrayal of him inspired Bob Kane to create Batman’s sardonic enemy The Joker!

Freak shows aside, have I ever been to the circus?  I remember going to the Canadian National Exhibition back in 1975, and they put on a circus show in the Ontario Place Forum. (They had stuff like a fire twirler and a unicyclist on a tightrope.) Did you know that that famous circus march music was originally March of the Gladiators, by a Czech composer called Julius Fucik?

Joy

In the 1990s there was a TV cartoon show Ren and Stimpy, about a dog and cat who’d go around unleashing mayhem and chaos everywhere, with the catchphrase “Happy happy joy joy!”

There isn’t a huge amount of joy in my life.  I’ve never had a wife or girlfriend.  Never had a child.  Never had a pet.  I’m not the religious sort:  I’m a half-assed agnostic, not even ready for the cold comfort of atheism.  And I’m not a sports fan, ready to celebrate when my team wins the championship!  (Of course, if I were a Toronto Maple Leafs fan I wouldn’t get to do much celebrating anyway…) I earned a Ph.D., but by time I passed the final examination I felt like a burnout.  I suppose I’m like my parents, who I never saw kiss each other.  After your parents pass on, you may notice how similar you are to them.

There’s a psychological condition called “anhedonia,” where you can’t feel joy.  It’s one of those neuroses that’s associated with Jewish people. (Maybe it’s just that Jews are more likely to get their neuroses diagnosed.) Jewish comedian Woody Allen’s original title for Annie Hall was Anhedonia!

On the other hand, my life hasn’t had much sorrow either.  My parents are no longer with us, but they lived to their nineties, like Elizabeth II, and you can’t ask to survive much longer than that.  I’ve had four brothers and sisters, and they’re all still here.  Since I’ve never had a pet, I’ve never had to experience losing one.  And I’ve never experienced the death of a particularly close friend.  I was hospitalized for ulcers twice in my youth, but since then I’ve stayed out.  I’ve never been in jail.  I didn’t have to quit college and work in a factory because I ran out of tuition money.  I’ve never had to fight in a war.  I’ve never been exiled or fired or gone bankrupt or lost my home or been a slave or a fugitive or a refugee.

I suppose I find some joy in learning.  In The Once and Future King, Merlin told young Arthur, “Whenever you feel down about life, learn something new.  That always helps!” And I find joy in friendship too.  If you asked me “What’s the biggest achievement in your life?” I’d probably say “Making friends.” That means a lot to me because I didn’t make many friends in my youth.  I just don’t experience joy in that overwhelming way that makes you traipse in the fields and act silly, and I guess most people don’t, at least not here in Canada. (Sicilians might be different…)

The Nazi Storm Troopers’ motto was “Strength through joy.” I’ve been thinking about what that meant.  If you take up a single idea like fascism and make yourself blind to everything else, I guess that can give you joy, and even some strength in the short term.  But keeping yourself blind is hard work for most people…

The subject of joy brings to mind the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  Which brings to mind the movie Immortal Beloved.  It’s a 1990s biopic built around a real-life mystery:  Beethoven wrote a surviving letter to a woman he called his “immortal beloved,” but who was she?  In some ways the movie’s pretty crass:  it has the sort of script where Ludwig Van is going to meet his sweetheart at an inn, but she’s late and eventually he has to leave before she arrives, so he writes her a note and trusts the maid to deliver it to her.  The woman arrives, but instead of telling her of the note the maid just tucks it into her breakfast plate and trusts her to notice it, but the woman feels sick and doesn’t touch her breakfast so the note goes unread, and her failure to read it is central to the whole story!  So you have a plot that depends on one maid’s carelessness…. In addition, there’s a scene where one of the women gets assaulted by soldiers that seems to have been thrown in for gangsta appeal!  And I didn’t have a hard time guessing which of the women would turn out to be the IB.

But it is a pretty handsome production.  Bernard Rose is a talented, flamboyant director with a nice visual touch. (My sister loved Ivan XTC, his movie of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilich that moves the setting to today’s Los Angeles.)  Gary Oldman rather overplays the role of Beethoven, but he’s an actor who’s fun to watch even when he overacts. Especially when he overacts, to tell the truth. (Watch him chew the scenery as the crooked drug cop in the tasteless but enjoyable movie The Professional!) And there’s a great moment near the end when Ludwig Van is putting on his Ninth Symphony and remembering his childhood when his father beat him and he fled into the night and swam in a lake and felt at one with the universe as the Ode to Joy plays and it all somehow comes together.  I guess you had to be there.

Libraries

Can't think of much to say about libraries that I haven't said already.  I was reading that in ancient times people always read aloud, and it was only when the Greeks and Roman introduced reading rooms with several people reading at once that they started reading quietly.  When people move their lips as they read, I guess that's drawing on ancient times.

I was also reading that Christopher Columbus had a son who amassed a huge book collection in his time, when printed books were still fairly new.  Only about a quarter of his books have survived, but they recently found a catalogue he made of the collection, so we know how much he had!  He was a greater man than his psychopathic father.

I remember reading in a Classics Illustrated comic book about Benjamin Franklin how he created Anglo-America's first lending library in Philadelphia. (He also founded things like a fire department and a paid police force.)

The University of Toronto's Robarts library is a great library in an ugly building!  I was doing some research there once, on the fifth floor or so, when there was a tremor.  I didn't recognize it as such, but I recall that I felt uncomfortable for some reason and had to stop my work for a minute.

Work

I tried to read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther once, but I couldn’t get into it.  Whining young people tax my patience. (Another example was Winona Ryder in the movie Reality Bites.) In one of his letters Werther talks about watching the peasants at work, and I couldn’t help thinking, “There are those who work, and there are those who watch them work.”

You’ll often hear people of a certain age saying, “Young people today don’t take work seriously.” Well, every older generation has been saying that for the last couple of centuries.  We aren’t born with the work-friendly mindset but have to develop it over the years.

My heroes are people who get the work done.  Soldiers come to mind.  So do nurses, who don’t get as much attention as doctors but save a lot of lives.  And of course parents do a lot of work as a matter of course.

I haven’t done much work in my life.  True, earning a Ph.D. involved a certain amount of work, but it didn’t seem like such because I’d wanted to do it. (Real work is the stuff you got stuck with doing!) I survive because of other people’s work, not just my parents but everyone who works enough to pay the taxes that finance the disability support I receive.  I’m not proud of it.

So this weekend is Labour Day.  I think back to the 19th century, when radical socialists made May Day a time for the working class to assert themselves.  Around the turn of the century they created Labour Day as an alternative day for workers, shorn of leftist politics.  I’m glad that back then the ruling elite was sufficiently afraid of the power of workers that they had to palliate them through such devices.  In the last century, especially in North America, many in the working class have stopped identifying as such and want to see themselves as middle-class, and it’s made them easier for conservatives to manipulate. (It shows in their hatred of “welfare bums.”)

In recent decades, the “establishment” has stopped fearing the workers and it shows in the increasingly shameless exploitation of the neoliberal era. (Thank you, Ronald Reagan.) I want them to feel that fear again.  May workers come together and return to general strikes and syndicalism! “Workers of the world unite.”

What do I miss most about the 1980s?

Certainly, there's a lot about the 1980s that I don't miss.  The crass yuppie marketing.  Movies like the original Top Gun, where you know the Tom Cruise character is a "maverick" because his nickname is Maverick!  The political culture where Ronald Reagan's war crimes were exposed, and the mainstream press responded by making the big issue the inadequacy of the Democratic candidates to succeed him! (Such weasels can be relied on to attack the safer target.) I remember a background report on the ABC news show This Week that said "Ronald Reagan can bask in the praise..." Is that reporting or worshipping?

But there are some things that I do miss.  I miss the video rental stores that appeared then.  You can get as much online today, but it was thrilling to go into the shop and see all the possibilities together!

I miss Phil Donahue's talk show.  He covered a lot of serious subjects and introduced me to interesting people like Christopher Hitchens and Vladimir Pozner, a Russian reporter who defended the Soviet system. (Years later, his show got cancelled despite having MSNBC's highest ratings, because he kept warning against invading Iraq.)

I also miss the TV show Miami Vice.  It wasn't just fancy visuals and music; it had a certain intelligent, downbeat sensibility, at least in the first season. (Someone said that in the later seasons the show ended up embodying the yuppie mindset it had formerly been criticizing...)

I also miss Spy magazine.  That was a snarky magazine that could be relied on to make fun of the celebrities and institutions of the time. (They famously called Donald Trump a "short-fingered vulgarian"!) Goings-on at The New York Times gave them enough material for a regular column.  They quoted the rapper Ice-T saying "That's the dopest shit I ever saw!" Every issue they'd have The Spy List, a list of living, dead and fictional people who all had something embarrassing in common, and they didn't say what.  It would turn out to be stuff like they'd all entered sham marriages or thrown up in public.

The 1980s was the golden age of the music video.  The industry reduced it to formula before long, of course, but some of the earlier videos were pretty imaginative.  I remember one for the Ultravox song "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes." It's about a city that's about to be destroyed in a nuclear accident and a couple spending their last moments together.  At the end we see an old home movie of them, and it melts away.  It meant a lot to me at the time.