Month: May 2020

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Emerging on a New World, Part Three: Magical Dysfunction

I review a lot of children’s books for a website called Redeemed Reader. A common theme in children’s fantasy is “magic” as a lost element in a disenchanted world. The protagonist is born with some supernatural gift or sensitivity that no one appreciates, but once presented with a problem he (or she) forges fearfully ahead and discovers calling, power, and purpose. The plot unfolds against a background of skepticism or outright hostility. In the Harry Potter series, muggles provide the contrast to magic, who are often irritating but generally harmless.

In Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, the Magisterium, a cartoony stand-in for organized religion, play the villains. I just read a delightful children’s fantasy that followed the Pullman plotline closely (but less dogmatically), complete with a monk-like order of naysayers intent on stomping out all witchery and wizardry.

I’m also seeing a lot of magical realism, where supernatural events occur in a real time and place, among characters with quirky names and personalities. The magic in these stories doesn’t have a source; it’s just there, or it’s somehow passed down through families, coming to rest upon an unassuming protagonist. A common element in all these books is the need to believe—in yourself, in your abilities, and especially in the “magic.”

I’m not sure what the increase in fantasy and magical realism for middle-schoolers tells us, except perhaps that when God goes out the door, magic creeps down the chimney. We have our supernatural yearnings, and need our supernatural fix.

Magic is one thing in literature; another thing in public policy. Some of the most ideological politicians like to claim science as their guide, as though “science” were a magic word. And in a way, it is. “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man: “one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse”—that being, to control nature and bend reality.

That Hideous Strength, Lewis’ fictional exposition of The Abolition of Man, pictures Science going full circle and merging with Magic in order to remake humanity. In his 1945 review of the novel, George Orwell approved the premise of THS, but “On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.”

Still . . . when God goes out the door, the supernatural creeps down the chimney. In the secular public square, life can’t be seen as a gift, because gifts imply givers. Life is therefore more of a problem, or series of problems, to be solved with facts and stats repeated like incantations. Capital-S Science becomes a religion–even a Magisterium–and imagination retreats into fantasy, e.g., children’s literature and the Marvel universe, offering hope that the world really is a fantastic place and there’s a little magic in all of us.

And you know what? It’s true. “Organized religion,” in the form of Christian doctrine, tells us that the world is fantastic, and humans are spiritual beings as well as physical. But since public policy can’t acknowledge that in any meaningful way, suppressed spirituality comes out in magical thinking via “science,” all the more as it drifts away from traditional forms of religion. In That Hideous Strength, every nation has its own spiritual genius—its “magic,” you might say, that defines its place in the world and calls it back to its truest self. Our truest self combines initiative and altruism in a dynamic that self-corrects as it progresses: at its best, something like the abolitionist movement. At its worst, Karenism.

That’s why, in the United States, I can’t see us either buying in to a massive socialist restructuring, or going back to small-government federalism. We keep drifting leftward while our peculiar American genius pulls us back, so that we’re stuck mid-stream. The pressure of the current will keep tugging our freedoms away, but even as that happens, our resistance may grow deeper roots.

No political solution will work very well. We’re seeing that already, with a patchwork of openings and closings, conflicting data, escalating anger, and a looming election that looks more like a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, I doubt anyone will be happy. This state of affairs will not be fixable by science or magic. But if we can’t fix it, I think there’s a way to navigate it, by a combination of practical thinking and spiritual muscle. And that’s a topic for next week.

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Emerging on a New World, Part Two: Nobody Knows Nothin’

When I was a budding novelist, I quickly learned that the publishing world didn’t care about my aspirational goals. I had to conform to the publisher, not vice versa. As many positive thoughts I lavished on my first novel, it never saw print because it wasn’t very good.

Eventually I learned, over the 20-year process of writing three more unpublished novels, how to write fiction. It’s true that I probably wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t believed in raw talent worth developing. Positive thinking, while it bridged no gaps, at least provided a landing platform. But between the dream and the realization was a long stretch of hard work.

For some time now, I’ve had the feeling that our political class is marked, not by positive thinking, but by magical thinking. Psychologically, “Magical thinking” is defined as the belief that one’s personal thoughts, fears, and goals influence the outside world. Young children indulge in magical thinking all the time: a child who prays every night that his parents will stop fighting, for example, could feel he’s to blame when Mom and Dad stop the fights by splitting up. It’s normal for kids, but a grownup who indulges in such fantasies is called a schizophrenic. Or a politician.

You remember when Barak Obama, after winning the Democrat presidential nomination, inspired his followers with rhetoric about the day the oceans stopped rising. Or Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention: “I alone can fix.” Trump at least had actually built things with steel and concrete, while Obama had built nothing but his own persona. But both were overpromising based on a magical (or at least inflated) view of themselves in the world.

During the Democratic debates Elizabeth Warren brought the hammer down on mild suggestions that there was no need to overhaul the entire health care system. You gotta Dream Big! If she ever got the chance to enact her Day-One agenda, “Big” would have included cancelling the constitution as Step One, since much of what she wanted to do was clearly outside its parameters. Elaborate promises are nothing new in political campaigns, but the size and scope of this year’s Democrat vision is breathtaking. Bernie Sanders, likewise, seemed to think he could materialize his socialist dream by yelling about it.

DreamBig: the Next Generation is even farther out in the galaxy. Got Climate Change? Let’s just re-structure our entire civilization. We won WWII, didn’t we?

“If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” said everybody from Mohammed Ali to your kindergarten teacher. They never add that somewhere between Believe and Achieve is a lot of stuff: planning, coordinating, hard work, setbacks, tedium, failures, and thousands of details. Since we don’t dream in details, the gaps between here and there are too readily filled with know-nothing thought. And that leads to last-minute sloppiness and long-term incompetence, like the Obamacare website rollout and Iowa Caucus 2020.

A habit of magical thinking is extremely dangerous when a real crisis spills out like an escaped virus from a lab. Too much of the political class (I’m naming no names) has outsourced its brain to chosen experts and crossed its fingers and wished upon a vaccine that “the Economy” (whose breadth and complexity they never came close to grasping) will somehow survive long enough to a) snap back to its former glory, or b) surrender to a total makeover. It’s not likely that either of those things will happen. More likely is a dysfunctional hybrid. What can we do with that? I’m still thinking.

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Emerging on a New World, Part One: Doomsday Is Imminent (again)

My husband was raising the alarm early in the 1990s. Even wrote a booklet about it, which he distributed to friends and family. Our government was overspending—there was a hockey-stick graph that showed the federal budget shooting up in the stratosphere (a billion-dollar deficit!!), with certain consequences for the near future. We were in our forties at the time, and did not expect to collect our Social Security. Black Monday, when the Dow dropped by 22% in one day (10/22/87) was just the beginning: once the bond market collapsed, we’d be plunged into another Great Depression. We would have to start saving now: even stock up on commodities like paper products and imperishable food staples. So we built columns of toilet paper until we ran out of room and lost interest. Because nothing happened.

Around 1997, rumors about Y2K began. This would be an unprecedented catastrophe—payback for the hubris of linking the whole world in a network of 1’s and 0’s. Once every electronic clock in the world rolled over to 2-0-0-0 our mainframes would lose their collective minds and crash into incoherence, with planes falling out of the sky and money frozen in cyberspace, life-support machines malfunctioning and millions starving. It sounds crazy now, but I knew dozens of computer-savvy people who took it very seriously, to the point of moving to the country and storing up flour and ammo (like we did). Needless to say, the clock rolled over and nothing happened.

But the damage was done; everybody was hooked up to the internet now, and Doomsday predictions popped out blatting alarms with the regularity of wooden figures on a cuckoo clock. On the left it was Mother Earth crying for help as she was alternatively parched and flooded. On the right it was deep state, Illuminati, global currency reset causing massive social upheaval, stolen elections, martial law. Depending on which newsletter you subscribed to, the powers-that-be would make their big move THIS MONTH or BY THE END OF THE YEAR or SOON. And then, brothers and sisters, hang on, because it’s going to be a rough ride.

So . . . you think maybe it finally happened? Not with a bang, but a whimper?

As good as the postwar modern age has been to us westerners, with its abundant food and comforts and diversions, we seem addicted to unease. It’s almost as though we’re worried about having it too good. Not that there weren’t reasons for alarm. When I was a kid, the US and USSR apparently came very close to a nuclear showdown over Cuba. When I was in high school and college, two major assassinations and colleges literally on fire. In the 70s, a huge presidential scandal, double-digit inflation, an oil embargo, a general sense of “malaise.” That’s about when Paul Simon wrote

I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered; I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.

I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees . . .

In the 1980s, I was old enough to grouse about Kids These Days, but that was a pretty sunny decade except for media scares about nuclear holocaust and the ozone layer. Then came the 90s, when broadband access pulled us deep into the conspiracy weeds.

To my knowledge, though, nobody in the Alex-Jones fever swamp or the Greta-Thunberg eco-horror show predicted that a virus—mere scraps of DNA—would cut us off at the knees. Now I’m wondering if the collapse I always half expected has finally arrived. Time to head for the country, plant a garden, start sourcing a supply of meat from stock-raising neighbors?

Has dystopia finally come for us?

Probably not. And yet, there are some disquieting features about this crisis that I’ll have to work through in the next post.

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Mother’s Day: No Laughing Matter

I realized something for the first time when my kids were of an age for sleepovers and birthday parties: dads are funnier than moms.

I might have noticed it in my own house if it wasn’t right under my nose.  My husband was the one to get on the floor and wrestle, start sock fights, and make jokes when it was time to get serious.  That’s not to say I could never be found on the floor with kids crawling all over me, but there’s something different about mommy wrestling as opposed daddy wrestling–a certain lack of abandon and goofiness.  My daughter would come home from a party or church event with stories about how Cheri’s dad had made them laugh while driving them to the skating rink, or how Leslie’s dad had played a stupid trick that backfired.  It was never the moms.  Mothers could certainly be fun (I’d like to think I was. Maybe. Sometimes.), but seldom funny.

Several years ago, the late comedian Jerry Lewis made a controversial statement when asked about his favorite female comics .  His answer: None, because women aren’t funny. That raised a stink among women, many of whom seriously protested that they were funny—which kind of proved his point, in a way.  I would say that women aren’t funny in the same way.  They can be witty (as my mother was), clever, sharp, catty, artless, or charming, but there’s a reason male standup comics far outnumber females, and it doesn’t have much if anything to do with discrimination.  Of those few successful female comedians (as opposed to comic actors), most of them are known for the mordant kind of humor: the biting, even bitter kind.  It’s because women, more than men, have a tragic view of life.  And that’s because of one thing: women have babies.

I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children. (Genesis 3:16)

The Pain

Of course, there are mothers . . .

The most common and obvious interpretation of this verse limits the pain to labor and delivery.  But the pain of bearing a child lasts a lifetime, and it’s a particular pain that fathers do not share.  We’re not supposed to mention it these days, but the peculiar pain of motherhood owes to some essential differences between moms and dads:

  • Fatherhood is by choice; motherhood by necessity.
  • Fatherhood is dogmatic; motherhood is organic.
  • Fatherhood is straightforward; motherhood is serpentine and multi-faceted.
  • Fatherhood is tangential; motherhood is central.
  • Fathers are distinct; mothers are intimate.

At the back of a mother’s mind lurks a gigantic fear that something could happen to her baby, even if her baby is 45 years old.  The world yawns wide for our children: busy streets and nefarious strangers, fast cars and bad company, drunk drivers, sexual predators, drug dealers, gang leaders.  A good father will experience these same fears, but probably not until there’s some pretext for them (no what-if speculations for Dad), and not in the same gut-wrenching way if they occur. 

. . . and there are mothers.

Also, from the day our babies are born we have to start letting go of them, and sometimes it’s hard to know when. And how.  It isn’t just a matter of teaching them to crawl, walk, run, and drive; it’s teaching ourselves to stop identifying with them.  They were us; how can they stop being us?  When does their behavior stop being our responsibility?  When do their choices no longer reflect on our child-raising skills?

The Gain

And yet, a great irony: The more a mother clings to her child, the smaller motherhood becomes.  The true joy of mothering increases with every step your child takes away from you.  Conceiving, carrying, bearing, and delivering a baby into this world is the beginning of the pain, but also of the gain: a mature human being with his or her own personality, gifts, and vision.  That’s the goal, and I challenge anyone to name me a better one.  No six-figure income or tabloid-worthy career even comes close.  Motherhood is a double investment in life: the opportunity to grow up again by experiencing its primary discoveries through the eyes of a child and the understanding of a grownup, and the chance to pay it forward with a human being who will make the world a slightly better place. 

If your grown child causes you more grief than joy (and a lot of them do), first check your expectations to make sure you’re not looking for Mini-me: someone who thinks and acts as you do and agrees with 95% of your political and theological positions.  (If you actually ended up with a kid like that, you’re either very exceptional or your son or daughter got swapped for a robot somewhere down the line.)

But say your expectations were reasonable and your child-raising skills were at least adequate.  What went wrong?  Maybe nothing; maybe it’s time to let disappointing children become themselves, and answer for themselves. Trust God with them.  They are still human beings with immortal souls.  Yours will always be the first warm touch they felt, the first loving voice they heard. You pushed them out and raised them up—this is the great human enterprise, and mothers are right in the middle of it.

That’s not funny.  But it’s phenomenal.