After a long absence, I return to complain

  I don't really much blog anymore, but I feel compelled to air my grievances about a show I saw the other night called "A Gifted Man".  The titular "gifted man" is a super-rational, slightly misanthropic neurologist whose wife has died and left behind a clinic.  He works at some sort of sophisticated neurology place (complete with obligatory-goofy-looking-computer-animated-holographic-hand-gesture-reconizing-sciency-deal-that-while-not-serving-any-discernible-purpose-that-couldn't-be-fulfilled-by-a-regular-computer-still-seems-cool-and-futuristic-and-such-and-so-is-obligatory) he built along with volunteering at the poor people's clinic (could these two worlds ever come into conflict and our hero be forced to choose between the oppressed masses and his well-to-do clients? I tremble in anticipation.)  This all complicated by his ability to see and converse with his dead wife which confronts his empiricist worldview as he sees her as a real manifestation of his wife and not a hallucination on his part.  The mechanics of the show don't allow for his wife to be either unambiguously real or a product of his own mind, but if it is only internal, the show is made (slightly) more interesting when one considers his wife's existential crisis (if she actually exists) of being able to observe but having no agency in the world.  Walker Percy talks quite often about people in modern, scientific society wandering around in their bodies like Banquo's ghost at the party - unable to really effect any changes but able increasingly to know everything about the world around them (thanks to science) while not knowing themselves.  This would be interesting if the wife is somehow a sublimated expression of the man's own self cast as his dead wife to engage with dialectically, but if she just a ghost, it's not; I'd think that being ineffectual and ethereal-feeling is pretty much standard operating procedure for ghosts.
   The whole dead wife thing points to the other major conflict in the show - science vs. the "spiritual".  Those scare are there because the "spiritual" in question is New Age-y stuff; in the episode I saw the main character removed the partially absorbed twin from the head of an Indian teenager but was unable to stop the voice said teenager kept hearing in his head.  The voice was finally stopped and removed when a shaman/carpenter performed a ritual to draw the spirit of the voice into a big piece of that rock-crystal candy stuff that's really just sugar and food coloring and not, I would think, inherently magical while he burnt like a fat blunt of  rolled sage in a closed room with some candles in it (seriously).  Oh and the carpenter's last name is Little Creek, so he's an American Indian of some generic, unnamed tribe, likely, which explains his magic, apparently.  And so the plot is  supposed to be this big conflict between these two healers -the neurologist and the shaman - and (BROAD OVER-ARCHING THEME ALERT) faith and science, which the two characters represent.  The problem is that the choice of New Age spiritualism and ground on which they fight - healing- isn't a profitable or interesting intersection between the two.  It is easy to lay them against each other antagonistically  because the battle becomes essentially science vs. pseudo-science.  The shaman is a practitioner in an esoteric field of study, but not, for the writers at least, functionally different than the neurosurgeon; as long as he performs the rituals correctly, the result will come.  The real weakness of empiricism and the scientific method is not its own field, but the many things that fall outside its purview.  The scientific method only approaches truth on an asymptote, its goal is to discover what is not the case.  It doesn't deal with Truth, it approaches facts.  The real problem for it (and thus for scientific societies such as our own) is its inability to describe the actual experience of being human.  Biology, for example, can tell me that I will one day die, but not how to react to or live with that knowledge.  I, for one, don't find science vs. faith nearly as interesting as science as faith and the problems which attend it, but I suppose cliched antagonism is easier to write and make seem superficially compelling.  None of this is to say that there are not real points at which science and faith have conflicts (not Creation as some would assume, but the Resurrection, we know scientifically that you can't come back from the dead- of course I would argue that miracles cannot be studied scientifically- science is only interested in events so far as they are testable, part of class, rather than individual acts that God chooses to perform- but that is the subject for another post which I will likely neglect to ever write), but only that science vs. faith as pseudo-science is one of the least interesting topics imaginable.    

The Best Of What I've Read This Year

It seems everywhere I look, I'm finding year-end lists of the best books different people have read this year.  I'll admit, I might have forgotten that I read some of these this year if I did not keep a list of books read in the back of a notebook (a practice I began this year on a suggestion from Joseph Epstein, who though he did not quite make the list, wrote a thoroughly enjoyable book of essays, In a Cardboard Belt!).
Non-fiction -
Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- I read a single volume abridged version of the intimidating three volume work.  Beyond the amazing circumstances in which it was written (recounted here), it really is a remarkable book.  It's is hard to boil down all that happens in the book into one paragraph, but I really couldn't give it a much higher recommendation.
Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher- I really haven't read any other books on economics, so I really can't compare this to anything.  The book is subtitled "economics as if people mattered" and gave me a lot to think about.  This may be an uninformed assertion (but isn't that what the internet is for after all?), but I would be willing to bet not many other books on economics cite papal bulls in their texts. 
Shelby Foote's Civil War: A Narrative- Only read the first volume so far, but it is a very readable history.  Foote was actually a novelist originally (and a lifelong friend of Walker Percy) and this shows in his writing.  It probably deserves a wider readership than it has received, being too long - at three hefty, 500+ page volumes - for the casual reader and lacking the endless footnotes preferred by professional historians.  This video of Foote from Ken Burns' Civil War documentary most likely will do more to recommend it to you than I can.
The Dyer's Hand by W.H. Auden- I really, really like this book.  I would really, really like to recommend it to you. But, I doubt you would be interested.  It's big, very "literary" for lack of a better term- lots of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Don Giovanni (by way of Kierkegaard), and unavailable at most book stores.  If you have the temperment for it and can find it at a library (I checked it out from LSU's), I would suggest you leave your computer now and go get it.
Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy- a volume of essays.  You need to read The Moviegoer or this.  I'm a big fan of the rest of his work, but these two seem to be good introductions to me.
Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright- I'm not sure if this is a word, but I would describe this book as "epiphanous" for me.  Really opened my eyes to a lot of things, as I've mentioned before on this blog (unfortunately it also kind of ruined bluegrass for me, except maybe for this song, "My Bones Gonna Rise Again".  In other, but not totally unrelated news, I really like this poem by Hopkins

Novels-
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole- Wonderful, very funny novel set in New Orleans.  Apparently it's funny even if you aren't from around New Orleans, because it is pretty well known nationally.  Benny Grunch's "12 Yats of Christmas", probably is not.
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome- Another very funny novel, but one that was written in the nineteenth century.  If you have ever read and enjoyed one of Chesterton's novels, you will probably like this too.  It was one of two novels this year that I purposely slowed my reading of to enjoy longer (Hannah Coulter being the other). There are many wonderful lines I could choose from as way of recommendation but in the spirit of the author, I'll simply cut and paste this one, "I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller- just your typical science fiction novel following an order of Catholic monks over a few thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust.  I actually talked about this book way back in the infancy of this blog- August.  You can find that here.
The Power and the Glory by Grahame Greene- when I first read this, I thought it may have been the best novel I'd ever read.  I still really like it, but it hasn't stuck with me the way, say, Brothers Karamazov has.
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. Just a beautiful novel and really a joy to read.  Very similar in outlook to the economic principles set out by Schumacher- agrarianism, small scale for local markets, appropriate technology, ect., but to call it simply a dramatization of those ideas would be a disservice to what a good novel it really is.
Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone- written by a lasped Catholic turned Communist, and then subsequently turned lasped Communist (because Communism is a sort of religion, with its own eschatology that puts hope in the proletariat) about a Communist in Mussolini's Italy who to must disquise himself as a priest after returning from exile.  He eventually rewrote large portions of the work after becoming disenchanted with communism.  According to The Life You Save Might Be Your Own (a book on Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and of course Flannery O'Connor, that while enjoyable and informative wasn't really excellent and didn't make the list), it was one of Dorothy Day's favorites, which was a good enough recommendation for me. 

District 9 Review- "Who is my neighbor?"

Having nothing better to do in Mandeville, I decided to go to the movies to see District 9 today. Without giving away too much of what happens, the plot follows an official tasked with moving a group of some 1 million aliens who have stalled out over Johannesburg and now are living in a ghetto to a site further away from the city. Given the South African setting and the legacy of apartheid there, the implications are very clear, especially considering some of the interviews were actually real people talking about immigrants who had moved into the country looking for work (this, however is not one of those interviews). The movie on the whole was pretty good, though I can't help but think it may have been better if it had been released at some other time than the summer (less explosions, more plot). It also had this weird sometimes documentary style, sometimes not; plot considerations kind of forced this- a fugitive followed around by a camera crew just wouldn't be realistic- but it still comes off a little strange. Putting the movie in South Africa does make the implications pretty obvious, but as the director was from there originally, they can't really be faulted for that.

Throughout the whole movie, I couldn't help but think about Flannery O'Connor's short story "The Displaced Person". In the story, a Polish family is forced to flee their home and are placed on a farm run by a widow. The father of the refugees is a fairly well-educated, hard worker who is nevertheless looked down on by the other white family working on the farm, who eventually come to regard them as lower than the two black workers on the farm (a serious thing in 1960s rural Georgia). Not wanting to give anything away here either (because if you haven't read O'Connor, you need to get your life right, I'll even loan you my book if you want), the Displaced Person is clearly associated with Christ throughout, with one of the characters derisively remarking to a priest that, "Christ was a displaced person." So then who's are neighbor?
Jesus was of course asked this same question and responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, but if you notice, He doesn't address the question directly. In the end He asks His listeners, "Who was a neighbor to the man that was attacked?" He reframes the question, it shouldn't be "who is my neighbor?" because I am, after all, only responsible to him under the law, but "how do I act like a neighbor to whomever I meet?" So then we are responsible for whomever we can reach and technology and tranportation making that an increasingly wide circle. The hungersite, for instance, allows me to help others across the world just by clicking (if you haven't gone there before, please go now, I promise you don't have to sign up for anything). Various Christian organizations let me sponsor children in other countries for about $30 a month.

These are all great things, and the need is great all over (think about donating a net to help prevent malaria here), but this is not all that we're called to. Neighbors primarily means our actual physical neighbors, you know, people you can actually see and hate (funny G.K. Chesterton quote- "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.") Not to get all nerdy on you here and throw in another literary reference, in a post about a sci-fi movie no less, but in Dostoevksy's Brothers Karamazov a woman comes in to the monastery asking for advice. She notes that the more she claims to love mankind, the less she loves individual men. And lest we forget, the Nazis, the Soviets, and countless other regimes through the years have killed millions of individual men, women, and children in the name of the good of humanity. The Jews were killed by men who loved their country and were concerned with the public good. The love of humanity is too abstract, lets too many things in, after all, "Isn't it better that one man should perish, than the entire nation?" Once you meet someone, they become your neighbor, you are called to love them, because they too are made in the Image. That said I don't know whether or not space aliens are made in the likeness of God, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it.