40BFL: 3. The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Men [sic] have always had to choose between their subjection to nature or the subjection of nature to the Self. With the extension of the bourgeois commodity economy, the dark horizon of myth is illumined by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose cold rays the seed of the new barbarism grows to fruition.

This is a book that everyone ought to read at around the age of twenty. The quality of the writing is such that - for those who persist and read the whole - the result is almost certainly going to be conversion. It is the philosophical equivalent of the Christian Union for the lonely undergraduate. Its literary equivalent is nothing short of the Harry Potter series.

And this is a good analogy because its goal is to make you believe the story it is telling - a very convincing story. The story is that the entirety of human history can be read as a escalating series of attempts to gain mastery over the natural world. This begins with myth and primitive religion - attempts at basic natural science and magical appeals to trees, spirits, the weather &c. - before extending through more and more transcendent religions to the joy of science. The ultimate goal presumably is the atomic bomb where we can blow the whole thing to shit if we want. Along the way anything that harks back to our nature has to be suppressed and purged. So today religion harks back to superstition, just as witches used to; women generally with all their ickiness and bodily fluids need to be kept out of the way, anything that we’ve stomped on on our way to the top of the tree (preferably a metal tree house), the mad, the sick, less developed cultures, needs squishing and keeping out of the way.

Essentially it’s the story of someone who’s really insecure doing everything they can repress their primal fears.

These sorts of metanarratives are always charming. People like Freud and Marx of course wrote convincingly and had loads of people follow along behind - the principle of declaring that all history is really just about one thing is bound to make for good reading because it simplifies the world for a minute isolating what’s really important. This sort of thing still happens today, usually with more qualifications, but Charles Taylor and John Milbank attempt the same sort of genealogical historiographies.

You need to read this book when you’re twenty then because you need to see that ideas can change the world - to gain that passion for believing that thinking and writing matter. And this is a great book because it’s a powerful invective against the will to domination. It propels the reader to seek out the underdog, the unwritten history, to question authority and self-certainty: ‘In the general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men [sic] from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’.

The truth is history is more complicated. There is plenty of evidence of how various religions, including present day religions, actually draw people back into their natural embodiment, return people to the mythical ille tempore. Equally science is not purely about the control and subjugation of nature. The Enlightenment itself moved humanity on in leaps and bounds to unmasking the domination humans practice on one another. History is not about one thing, and while sometimes being reductive brings to the foreground something worth fighting - or investigating - it can also mask a whole lot of other stuff.

Like Harry Potter this book is worth falling in love with, but then you have to move on. Otherwise you’ll be left fighting shadows in the dark, paralysed with insecurity, or going on and on about the same old thing, denouncing everybody and everything as ‘right wing’ or ‘imperialist’, bitching that Anne of Green Gables is "like so bourgeois", like a broken record.

40 Books for Lent: 2. Anne of Green Gables

Mrs. Cadbury: Tell me, what you know about yourself.

Anne Shirley: Well, it really isn't worth telling, Mrs. Cadbury... but if you let me tell you what I imagine about myself you'd find it a lot more interesting. 

 As a child, I had three literary heroines. Jo from the Chalet School, Jo March, and Anne Shirley.

All three had ambitions to be writers; they were tomboyish and blunt, they were forever getting into scrapes, they thought boys a waste of time, they wrote plays and let their imaginations run wild and they all had fierce mothers/ big sisters/ adoptive aunts who pushed them to become great women. They were my icons.

Anne, with her 'carroty' hair, temper, and flair for the dramatic, was possibly my favourite (though I still have a hankering to call my first child Josephine).

I was talking to a red-headed 12-year-old girl recently, and she was telling me about how much she likes Nicola Roberts, who made last year's best pop album (fact). She made her feel less isolated.
It was really important to me, as it still is, to have relateable icons whether in print or the media.

Anyway, the Anne books are full of cheesy, homespun wisdom, but they emphasize the importance of family, faith ("Mrs. Hammond told me that God made my hair red on purpose and I've never cared for Him since"), and in doing things for yourself even if you are just a girl, a girl with red hair. When you're being called names in school, it's a good thing to remember that someone has already broken a slate over the boy's head. (I dreamed of being brave enough to do that throughout my schooldays - still do, sometimes.)

It is the books that I read before I was ten that probably have had the greatest impact on me, and I will never depart too far from their philosophy. Remember when you dreamed you could be anything? Well, I had a kindred spirit who taught me it was true.

40 Books for Lent: 1. The Problem of Metaphysics

Ramping and Roaring has given up television. Part of the reasoning was that this would allow R&R more time to read - novels, theology whatever - something more constructive than Cougar Town, Gossip Girl and Dawson’s Creek. I spoke to Roaring earlier though and it seems on this first tv-less night she spent most of her time skipping about the internet. I, on the other hand, picked up Alex Preston’s recent The Revelations. I read a review in the FT while tipsy and immediately purchased it on Amazon along with another book I’ll probably never read. The Revelations though has immediate entertainment value. It looks basically like an amusing take on the Alpha Course with lots of psycho-sexual drama. Rofl.

All this is by the by though. Given this new attention to reading, Ramping and Roaring through Lent is going to bring you its top 40 books-that-have-changed-the-way-we-think. It’s a good chance to think through the ideas that have shaped the way you think and if I can persuade Roaring not just to do twenty different reviews of Gone with the Wind, we might discover some interesting, little known works…

So my first book, my number one book, is Don Mackinnon’s The Problem of Metaphysics. A bit heavy to start with but I really think that more than any book this one resonated with me and changed the way I saw the world. It came out of his Gifford lectures and so is relatively short and readable. I remember hearing an amusing story about him, where his wife went into the bedroom one day to find his trousers lying on the bed. She thought ‘oh hell’ to herself ‘he’s finally lost his marbles and gone out without his trousers on’. Turned out he had just gone out and bought a new pair. For all his reputed skattiness though and despite not actually publishing a huge amount (part of the last generation who weren’t continually harried to publish or perish), reading between the lines, he has influenced the main voices in contemporary theology as much as anyone.

Essentially, The Problem of Metaphysics gives a really convincing account of metaphysics, teasing out the relationship between transcendence and language. What is so splendid is the way he pulls it all together with such a wide array of anecdotes and examples from history, literature and art. He speaks authoritatively on Plato, Aristotle and Kant, as might be expected, but is just as lucid and impressive on Shakespeare, Sophocles and Cezanne. More than anything, it is a work that is convincing at a human level - it is one of the rare works of philosophical theology than genuinely conveys a sense of wisdom. My supervisor once explained that he understood God as a sort of matrix for understanding reality. In these terms this book was incredibly helpful to me in explaining God.

I have never been much interested in the specialist. It is not within me and I would never make it as a footnote precise academic. The people I find interesting then are always polymaths - those who can illuminate an area of life and keep it tied to all sorts of other areas, but most of all retain the ability of speak to everyday life. Mackinnon does this here better than anywhere else I’ve found. His analysis of the Good Samaritan and the Raising of Lazarus are exemplary as homily, philosophy and ethics. His development of parables, tragedy and presence are masterful. It is the only work of theology I’ve read twice cover to cover and it deserves at least this. It is to philosophical theology what Madonna is to pop music, having influenced an entire new generation of theology while yet remaining unique and fascinating in itself. Go buy a copy.

Celebrate Natural Beauty!

Dear Dominic Mohan,

I love youth and freshness.

And if I knew what it was, in a world of photoshop and make-up and very good lighting, I'd probably love Natural Beauty too.

And in a difficult financial climate, where we're all a bit depressed and wondering what it means to be British, an 'innocuous British institution' might be the thing to help us realise we're all in it together.*

So please can we start having pictures of half naked, natural, young, fresh, British men on Page 3 as well? David Beckham might be a good start, although sadly he isn't 16.

That would be delightful.

Warm wishes,

Roaring



* fresh, young, natural, British? Sounds like a locally-sourced yoghurt.

She's sexy and she knows it.

Look at that body... she works out:



Post-nipplegate, Pop has returned to the Superbowl, and Madonna to our hearts.

New song Give Me All Your Luvin' sounds quite good, the inclusion of Nicki Minaj (so hot) and M.I.A. (who has now instigated middle-finger-gate) telling us something about hip hop/R&B's ongoing fascination with Euro pop.* If Madonna's doing it, it's probably nearly jumped the shark.**

Anyway, so much amazing nostalgia! Cee-Lo and Madge doing Like A Prayer at the end is a particular highlight. And the voguing. In fact the whole thing is brilliant. Watch it.


(And if you've never seen a room full of drunk ordinands dancing to Like A Prayer, you've never seen anything.)




* There's loads of William Orbit production on the new album, too.
** Her last album (which is pretty good) used tons of Pharrell Williams, about a hundred years after the Neptunes had been cool.