In Praise of Being “Against Interpretation”

One of the things that usually inspires me to write is reading something that coalesces several ideas I’ve been thinking about into a unified whole. One of the essays that has done that for me recently is Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” The thing is, I used to think of interpretation as something that I did every day, but the reality is much more complex. At the same time, I’m very much against the kind of interpretation that goes on in college literature courses because of how it’s destroying--or by this point has already destroyed--literary theory in universities all over the country, and liberal arts in general. It was Sontag’s essay from 1964 that made me realize how to articulate what the actual difference is. Her essay is preceded, quite appropriately, with an eye-opening quote by Oscar Wilde--whom professor Mark Edmundson says, “is almost never wrong”--that states, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” When I read this I thought immediately of one of the best things a college professor ever told me. He said that there are no hidden meanings in a text. Everything that can be known about a piece of writing is actually in the text itself. The kind of interpretation Sontag is talking about, then, is allegorical interpretation, something that has nothing to do with the work itself.

She begins by going back to Plato and Aristotle, the earliest discussions of what art actually is, a mere representation of reality, mimesis, an imitation of the real world. For Plato, this serves no obvious function, and while Aristotle finds a useful emotional outlet in art, he basically agrees with Plato on its mimetic nature. This is something I wholeheartedly agree with. While Sontag is speaking about art in general, including the visual arts, my area of study is primarily textual arts, including film, which is something of a combination of both. In either case, however, art is always representative of something, whether it is the imitation of the outer world experienced by the senses, or the inner life of the artist’s emotions and feelings represented in tangible form. While some will quibble with examples like abstract art, Sontag sums up my feelings on this as well:

          Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as represent-
          ation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the
          mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a
          picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still
          comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic.
          But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content.

This is actually one of the reasons that I don’t care for science-fiction writing. While the conceit of such stories is that they are about other planets, other sentient beings, and things beyond our ken, the reality is as human beings we are incapable of imagining things that we can’t imagine. Everything that a human can imagine is firmly locked within our human experience, and therefore cannot, by definition, represent something outside of it. While an author may come up with something we haven’t thought of before, it is something we could think of.

Given that fact, Sontag says, presents a problem, because with no intrinsic purpose art must now justify itself, and this need for justification has split art into two separate things: form, which is the mode of transmission (the use of language in writing, shot selection in film, brush strokes and medium in painting) and the content, which is the actual meaning of the work itself (the message or the statement of the work). Because of this, Sontag says, the enjoyment of art for art’s sake has been destroyed in the quest to interpret the meaning of the work, and implicit in this is the belief that art without meaning isn’t really art at all. But Sontag makes the bold statement that it is not art itself that should be in danger of losing its purpose, but interpretation. “[I]t is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.” Sontag takes time out here for a parenthetical statement to clarify that by interpretation she doesn’t mean the theory that all of human existence is interpretation through the senses. She states that in the world of art, interpretation is synonymous with translation, and the reason for this is the scientific revolution that rendered the ancient, mythical texts suddenly meaningless. Unless, of course, they had a sub-textual meaning, an allegorical content that could still make them relevant to a modern generation.

One of the unfortunate occurrences that attended the differentiation between human beings and the other animals is their imaginative brains. It didn’t take long before the human consciousness of their own existence--and primarily their own deaths--needed to be justified by a continued existence beyond the physical plane, which evolved quite naturally into religion. Even as far back as Plato, Sontag notes, human existence presupposed a divine existence, that objects themselves were merely “imitations of transcendent forms” just as humanity was an imitation of god. This presupposition of divinity is faced with a problem when the literal texts become meaningless, a problem that interpretation solves quite neatly. Even before modern science, Romans “allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics,” just as later generations “interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms . . . The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.” But modern interpretation is far more insidious, and far more destructive in what it is actually doing to the texts themselves. “The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.”

Sontag begins with the two most influential examples of this kind of interpretive tyranny, Freudian and Marxist. “According to Marx and Freud . . . events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation.” This, then, becomes the justification for ideas like deconstructionism, where all meaning in works of art must be constructed by the audience, that the work itself actually has no meaning without the audience. But this is merely a dialectic argument along the lines of the tree falling in the forest without anyone to hear it. Of course true communication depends upon two parties, the sender and the receiver, and without the receiver communication cannot be said to exist. That, however, is distinctly different than determining meaning in a work of art. The fact is, the tree that falls in a forest outside of human perception most certainly does make a noise, just as a work of art without an audience contains meaning: the meaning that the creator endowed it with. This is where allegorical interpretation goes awry. If the only meaning of art is what the audience decides it is, then the art has no intrinsic value, and thus the art itself is devoid of meaning until the audience creates that meaning. But art does have intrinsic value, and instead it is the very act of interpretation that is debasing it and making it worthless. “Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.”

The place where this poison is the most deadly is in our colleges, where allegorical interpretation goes by the name of deconstructionism, Lacanianism, feminism, queer theory, and the identity politics of multiculturalism, all of them different ways of taking the thinking out of education. “Real art,” Sontag rightly asserts, “has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.” College, however, as a place of learning, should be anything but intellectually comfortable. In his essay “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” now nearly twenty years old, professor Mark Edmundson says that reading should be more than just communication, it should be a confrontation between the author and the student, “where the stakes matter.”

          [T]his generation of students . . . are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertain-
          ments to be placidly enjoyed or languidly cast down . . . [K]ids don't come to school hot to learn,
          unable to bear their own ignorance. For some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent . . . seems
          to me to be a prerequisite for getting an education that matters. My students, alas, usually lack the
          confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.

But college students don’t become this way in college, they get there already fully formed. In Edmundson’s words, “It’s my generation of parents who sheltered these students, kept them away from the hard knocks of everyday life, making them cautious and overfragile, who demanded that their teachers, from grade school on, flatter them endlessly so that the kids are shocked if their college profs don't reflexively suck up to them.” One of the ways that those college profs manage to “suck up” to students is by allowing their already atrophied intellects to coast along without being challenged, comfortable in the thought that analysis of literature is no more strenuous than tossing out whatever uninformed opinion pops into their heads. The denigration of the written word through interpretation, then, continues to reinforce in our young people the debilitating notion that not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but meaning is as well.

Another former university professor who has written about this same idea is Joseph Epstein. In an anecdote from his essay “Who Killed the Liberal Arts,” he demonstrates the lengths that professors have gone to in destroying the idea that any meaning in art is inherent in the work itself:

          A bright young female graduate student one day came to ask me if I thought David Copperfield
          a sexual criminal. “Why would I think that?” I asked. “Professor X thinks it,” she said. “He claims
          that because of the death in childbirth of David Copperfield’s wife, he, Copperfield, through mak-
          ing her pregnant, committed a crime.” All I could think to reply was, “I guess criticism never sleeps.”

This is no less than the wholesale destruction of intellectual thought, inculcated into generations of young people, and tantamount to making them unable to actually read. For if the literal meaning has no place in comprehending a work of art, then nothing does. Sontag also makes explicit the emphasis that this kind of interpretation has on the written word. “This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else.” From here, however, she then moves into an area of art that has been more resistant to interpretation, at least in her day, and that is the cinema.

Because of the domination of imagery in film over narrative, in movies, “there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret,” and that “films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds.” Unfortunately that is not the case today, and it’s no surprise that many young people apply the same type of facile interpretation to film that they learned in their college literature courses. It’s here that Sontag’s argues for a shift away from content (meaning) and toward form (method). The problem with this wholesale shift toward form is that it seems to denigrate meaning, implying that if meaning denigrates art it should probably be done away with altogether. My contention, though, is that meaning is still important, and it is actually form that gives the audience the way to discover true meaning in a work of art. Rather than an allegorical interpretation that divorces the literal elements of the art--both visual and narrative--from meaning, true analysis actually relies upon the literal as a way into discovering the actual meaning of the work. Though that should not be misunderstood as being the same thing as the artist’s intent, for the work of an artist stands alone. Rather, what I call a valid interpretation rests on the inherent wholeness of the interpreted meaning as one that makes sense in all aspects of the literal.

Sontag seems to agree with this when she talks about the idea of “formal analysis,” which I see as entirely different from allegorical interpretation. “The function of criticism,” she says, “should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” But it’s difficult to know if she and I are talking about the same thing at this point. For in my method of analysis, the purpose of looking at how a work of art is what it is stems from a desire to know what it means. What it means, not what I think it means, and that is a profound difference. For I believe that there are intrinsic meanings in works of art, especially literature. And while that ultimate meaning of a work may not be quite what the author intended, I am quite certain that it’s not what I want it to be. That true meaning is in the work itself, visible, as Oscar Wilde calls it, and it’s not my job to overlay some allegorical interpretation over the top of it, or worse yet, to “dig behind the text,” as Sontag says, and thereby destroying the work in the process. The true meaning is there, in the words, for all to see, and the job of formal analysis is to identify a meaning as accurately as possible that is valid both textually and contextually in order to better understand the literal work itself. Sontag calls this transparence: “experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” But whether we agree or not on the finer points of meaning, we are both clearly in agreement on our stance Against Interpretation.

The Late, Great Planet Earth

Back in high school when I was a Jesus freak there was one author that captivated the imagination of me and my Christian friends, and that was Hal Lindsey. His best-selling book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, was a biblical template for the end times. He had combed through the bible to look for all of the prophecies in both testaments that talked about the return of Christ and the destruction of the earth that would accompany it. What we were most intrigued by is the idea of the rapture, when god would come down and save all of the true believers, taking them to heaven without the necessity of death to transition them. That book was from 1970 but his most recent book at the time, called There’s a New World Coming, was a thorough analysis of the book of revelation. We not only devoured that book but the youth pastor at my church also taught a class on it for teenagers on Wednesday nights. Well, it’s forty years later and Hal Lindsey is still preaching the end of the world, this time on television in The Hal Lindsey Report, in which he continues to espouse dispensationalist doctrine that also includes castigating the Muslim world and calling President Obama the Antichrist. The Earth is still here and so am I, and Christ, like the Christian god, is nowhere to be found. But one aspect of Linsey’s proselytizing is coming true, and that’s the destruction of the Earth, but it isn’t from the hand of god. Instead, the end of life on Earth is going to come at the hands of man himself.

Now, this isn’t anything new. Since 1945 man has had the ability to obliterate life on this planet through the deployment and detonation of nuclear bombs. But this kind of dramatic occurrence is obvious and much of the world has recognized the folly of allowing such a major disaster to occur and have worked toward minimizing the possibility of mutually assured destruction. What hasn’t been typically been understood by the average person, however, are the long-term effects of human presence on the planet and the ways in which the increased population of humans as a species are currently threatening their own survival. In the 1999 film The Matrix, actor Hugo Weaving makes this point through the character of Agent Smith:

          Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding
          environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until
          every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another
          area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know
          what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague . . .

It’s a startling revelation. Humans routinely call cancer cells the stupidest organisms in nature because they kill themselves by killing their host, but that is exactly what is going on now with humanity. What the Wachowskis, who wrote the screenplay for the film, failed to fully explain--or perhaps didn’t quite understand--is that the virus of humanity is not only killing other species by destroying the planet, it is actually killing itself.

Most of the efforts to preserve the planet have been, until recently, exactly that: preservation efforts. Beginning in the seventies in this country--with the realization that we were actually polluting ourselves to death--we began a systematic attempt to reverse the effects of decades of industrial pollution and toxic waste in an effort to reclaim wilderness areas and wildlife itself. All the while, however, industrialization continued to do harm to the environment through deforestation, invisible pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as unchecked pollution elsewhere in the world. Though the problem existed, and scientists were aware of it’s significance long before the year 2006, global climate change didn’t really make front-page news until former Vice-President Al Gore decided to lend his story to a film called An Inconvenient Truth. The film focused on what were called greenhouse gasses, and the results of their emission, which was tabbed global warming. The hotter temperatures, which were a fact around the world, not only caused more heat waves, but increased in number and magnitude events like hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons. Just as important, however, the melting of the polar ice caps slows down the warm ocean currents, causing equally catastrophic cold snaps that have been occurring more recently, plunging most of this country into record lows during the winter, thus prompting a name change to more accurately reflect the results of this kind of pollution: climate change.

While the attempt to save animal species through vehicles like the Endangered Species act in the U.S. and The Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species worldwide is well known, what isn’t typically grasped is the way in which the extinction of those species is like a dead canary in a coalmine: whatever killed those species also has the potential to kill us. One masterful demonstration of this is the film Racing Extinction by Oscar-winning director Louie Psihoyos. While the film begins as a plea to reverse the effects that man is having on the planet in order to save animal species from extinction, in evolves quite naturally into a demonstration of how continuing these destructive practices can lead to the end of our own species through the destruction of the oceans and forests which produce the oxygen necessary to sustain life on Earth. The film discusses the ideas set forth in a book entitled The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert who also appears in the film, which traces the five major extinctions visible in the fossil record of the planet. The fifth event was the asteroid that hit the Earth and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct. The sixth event is man’s presence on the Earth, an era labeled the Anthropocene, an epoch in which the human imprint upon the planet is so large that is able to actually alter the planet itself. Psihoyos believes that we are at the tipping point, where man either has a final opportunity to reverse the devastating effects of his destructive presence on the planet, or that it is already too late to go back.

On the same night I saw this documentary, I also watched an episode of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and was surprised to see two segments on the destruction of the elephant population in Africa, something that the Psihoyos film only touches on. Thirty years ago the elephant population was somewhere around a million and a half, but since then they have been reduced to just four hundred thousand. Their deaths are primarily caused by poaching and big game hunting, and those rates don’t show any inclination of slowing. As long as there is a market for tusks, then poachers will kill as many as they can get their hands on. And, of course, hunters refuse to acknowledge that there even is a problem. The ugliness of human behavior toward all animals in the wild was also part of the story. I’m ashamed to be related to these creatures with whom, in the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I feel a “loathful brotherhood.” And this is the message that seems to come out loud and clear from all of these films, that man simply can’t be bothered. I used to be fascinated at the idea of lemmings, who would follow the rest of the herd right off a cliff to their deaths. How could they do that, I wondered. But then they were just animals, a “lower” form of life. Humans have no such excuse, or at least they shouldn’t. In the area of climate change, however, as in so many other human endeavors, it seems that people are just as stupid as animals. And when looked at from the Wachowski’s point of view, even more so.

One of the other major forces for destruction of the earth is, ironically, food production. Three quarters of the land used for food crops grown in the world is for the raising of livestock, the single most wasteful use of natural resources in world history. Over twenty-five years ago, when I discovered this fact, I stopped eating meat for that very reason. It wasn’t an ethical issue for me, it was one of pure waste that I could prevent simply by stopping my consumption of farm-raised animals. In addition to the waste of land by deforestation needed for meat animals as well as their grain and water consumption, there is also the fact of methane emissions from the animals that is even more destructive than carbon dioxide. All of the major extinction events on Earth prior to this one have been associated with an increase in carbon dioxide but none of them as extreme as what is going on today. The CO2 that is indirectly increasing the temperature of the water in the world’s oceans is also directly being absorbed into the water, creating carbonic acid and raising the acidity of the water, killing fish, shellfish and coral reefs. But the most damaging effect of this ocean destruction is the way in which it is killing plankton. Dr. Boris Worm has done extensive studies on the effects of absorption of carbon dioxide into the oceans. Plankton account for half of all the oxygen produced on the plane, and yet plankton numbers have been reduced by forty percent in just the last fifty years. The end of oxygen production on Earth would certainly wipe out a majority of land-dwelling species, including most human life.

In the movie The American President, written by the great Aaron Sorkin, actress Annette Benning is attempting to get a bill presented to Congress that would mandate lowering emissions levels by twenty percent. In talking to a congressman she finally says in exasperation, “Harry, think like a father for a second. Wouldn’t you like your kids to be able to take a deep breath when they’re 30?” In the context of the film--produced four years before The Matrix--the line is humorous because of its hyperbole. Twenty years later it’s not. The destruction of the plankton in the oceans, combined with deforestation on the land, is going to result in a major decrease in worldwide oxygen production at some point. If it was just that people were ignorant and didn’t care that would be one thing, but the reality is much more insidious. A great portion of the world’s population, deluded by the promises of religion, actually denigrates the world itself as well as all life on it. Both Muslims and Christians believe in a fairy tale of life beyond this one, and their holy books tell them to focus on that and ignore hardships and struggles here. This has led to an unprecedented amount of human death and destructing at the hands of religion, not just the terrorism we’re experiencing today, but terrorism from Christians in the form of the Inquisition, the Crusades, and Witch Trials which have murdered more people than all Muslim terrorist attacks put together.

One of the most powerful lines from An Inconvenient Truth comes early on in the film, something of a thesis statement, really. Al Gore states: “There are good people who are in politics, in both parties, who hold this at arm’s length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes become inescapable.” It’s a great line because it stresses the moral obligation that we have to stop destroying our planet. But morality has been kicked to the curb in recent years, in the cruelest of ironies by those from the right who used to espouse it the most. With the ascension of Donald Trump, however--not to mention scandals too numerous to count--the right has no more moral high ground on which to stand. They are liars who deny climate change in order to line their pockets with money from fossil fuel producers and get elected by a base constituency that is too ignorant to understand what they’re doing. They pander to evangelicals by telling them that science is lying to them, because Christians are not allowed to believe that god is not in full control of nature or it would expose what they’ve childishly believed for the last two thousand years as the giant deception it really is. By killing the planet and everything on it, we are really killing ourselves. It’s that simple. Forget black lives matter, all life matters, not just human life. Because without those other lives on Earth, it may very well mean the end of our own.

Sorry, but Heaven is not for Real

Every once in a while I give myself an analytical exercise. This time it was the film Heaven is for Real. I had heard about it when it came out last year, more because of the mainstream nature of the thing than the actual content. Instead of no-name actors, it features real Hollywood stars like Greg Kinnear and Thomas Haden Church, wrapped up in a beautifully filmed, first-class production. It also had the cache of being based on a “true” story, that of Pastor Todd Burpo from Nebraska, whose son he claims experienced heaven during an operation. In fact, I believe I had even downloaded the sample on my kindle and read a few pages before I deleted it when I realized exactly what it was. This is a propaganda piece of the most blatant variety, and yet considering what passes for intellect today it might as well be the most sophisticated propaganda yet created. Propaganda is best, of course, when it doesn’t look like what it is. If this were a cross-waving movie about how everyone believed in this child’s delusions, then no one would buy it. But that’s not what happens. His visions have to be met with doubt and confusion and even hostility for it to seem genuine to the average viewer, and that’s exactly what the film does.

The film opens by spending a lot of time manufacturing sympathy for the main characters. Greg Kinnear is a rural Nebraska pastor. He has a side business installing garage doors, coaches the high school wrestling team, works as a volunteer fireman, plays on a co-ed softball team and, oh yeah, he also has to find time for his wife and two small children. The family is struggling financially, but the incredibly supportive and sexy Kelly Reilly is there at his side to go through it all with him. Then one Saturday he breaks his leg at a softball game and a week later he collapses at Sunday service from kidney stones. Meanwhile, the bills are piling up with no way to pay them and so Reilly suggests they get away from it all and take a trip to Colorado. When they get back, however, their youngest boy, Connor Corum, gets sick with appendicitis and they don’t realize it until it’s almost too late. They rush him to the hospital and after a lengthy surgery, during which Reilly calls her friends to pray for their son and Kinnear angrily confronts god in the hospital chapel, their son makes it through. The real conflict of the film, however, begins when Corum tells Kinnear about his experience of seeing Jesus and heaven while sedated.

The visual depiction of Heaven as the child talks to his father is the standard one, blue sky and sunlight, with gauzy depictions of angels and Jesus shot from behind as he talks to the child. In order for the film not to be a turn-off at this point, it must sow some doubt in the characters. Reilly tells Kinnear it’s just the child’s imagination, and Kinnear doesn’t really believe it himself. So then comes the requisite moment in the film when Kinnear has to consult with someone outside of the church, preferably outside of religion altogether, and this comes in the form of a university psychology professor, Nancy Sorel. Not only is she not a Christian, but expresses the fact that she’s “not religious,” which is simply code for atheism, and her function in the piece is to stand in for all non-believers. She offers the standard explanations for the son’s “supernatural” experiences, but it’s Kinnear’s argument that cries out for examination. When she has finished concluding the rational explanation that whatever happened to the child simply happened in his mind because of his upbringing and indoctrination, Kinnear asks this question:

          Is it really easier to believe in that, or clairvoyance, or telepathy than it is in life after the physical?

This is huge, because of the implicit, underlying assumption of that question. The implication is that rationalism is the easy way out, that it takes more . . . I don’t know what . . . courage, strength, or stubbornness, to stupidly accept the tenets of religion rather than to look at the truth. After stopping to really analyze this question, it becomes laughable, because the easy way out is to actually believe in the fantasy of religion rather than accept personal responsibility, not just for our actions but for the responsibility of intellectual growth, of philosophical inquiry, for making thoughtful, rational, deliberate decisions about what we believe and why. And more importantly, what we are and why. That takes work, mental exertion, and dogged determination, especially in a society that doesn’t want to think, that doesn’t want to contemplate, that doesn’t want to know who they really are, for fear that they will discover they are actually responsible for their own lives. In that context the easy way out is obviously the panacea of religion. “Turn your life over to god,” actually gives you permission not to think, not to question, and what could be easier than that?

But that’s just the opening salvo. From there it’s time to talk to the church members, starting with one of the deacons, Thomas Hayden Church. In their conversation Kinnear wonders if in asking children to believe in the fantasy world of religion, whether they are actually responsible for their children’s delusions. But he has to ask that question. In an argument it’s called a concession. He has to address the opposition’s viewpoint in order to come back with a rebuttal later in the film. So now Kinnear has to go through a period of doubt, when he questions his own indoctrination, and must put himself at odds with the rest of the church and the community over his unwillingness to dismiss the visions out of hand. Here we have the martyr story, one that goes back to Noah. When a reporter writes about Corum the community members begin making fun of Kinnear, children at school tease his kids, and most importantly the church itself begins to rebel because he won’t stop talking about it on the pulpit. But this aspect of the story has two purposes. The first is the obvious one, to garner sympathy for Kinnear and Corum because of their mistreatment by the community. But the other message is for Christians themselves, in order to shame them out of their country club churchgoing and get them to question their own lack of conviction about what is supposed to be a given tenet in their belief system.

Another moment of concession comes as the deacons of the church gather to tell Kinnear they are going to begin the search for a new pastor. Margo Martindale must express another view from outside, the historical influence of the church in attempting to control people. It’s no accident that the most vociferous supporters of the idea of religion in this country are from the right wing. The rich and powerful have been subjugating the poor for centuries using the religious threat of damnation to maintain that control. From the strong-arm tactics of the Vatican as well as the threat of hell from nearly every denomination, to the Southern control of slaves in the American South, right on up to the Moral Majority and the modern attempt by the church to legislate morality in this country. Martindale says it this way:

          I don’t like how it makes our church a magnet for everyone who wants to take the brain out of
          their head and beat it to death with the bible, and then seem to want to show off how much
          they believe. Heaven and hell have always been concepts that have been used to control and
          frighten people

Again, the irony couldn’t be clearer. The entire idea of religion is to take the brains out of people’s heads. Belief, or faith, is not supposed to be intellectually based. This concession also serves the same two-pronged attack. It placates those outside of the faith by having someone in the church express their very feelings, and at the same time it shames those inside the church for not believing enough, for not having faith enough to know that everything in the bible is literally true.

Finally, it’s time to bring everything home. Corum says he saw Kinnear’s grandfather and identifies him in a photo from when he was young. Then he tells Reilly that he has another sister that died in her tummy, and that Jesus took him to her. At the cemetery Martindale sees Kinnear putting flowers on her son’s grave and the two make up. When another reporter calls, Kinnear tells him he’s going to talk all about it on Sunday and the church is packed. Kinnear then goes into an impassioned speech about what his son saw and how if all of us knew that heaven was real we would act differently. But again, this defies the law of religion itself. Because his son saw it, the proof of its existence is what makes Kinnear finally believe, when it’s supposed be the other way around. Faith is supposed to determine a person’s belief, not evidence. Then Kinnear gives everyone a way out by turning it into a metaphor, saying that he believes god is love, and that we experience a little bit of heaven every day in the acts of kindness all around us but chose not to see them as such. Finally, in the worst moment of the entire film, he looks out into the congregation and sees psychology professor Nancy Sorel in attendance. See, the film seems to crow, even she is convinced and the atheist has been saved. Then, in a co-opting of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, all of the congregation, beginning with his wife, Martindale, and Haden Church, leave their seats to embrace Kinnear and his family.

Heaven is for Real is an incredibly well made movie. It’s also incredibly insidious. And it would have to be the former in order to be the later. Throughout the film the underlying assumption of it all is that Christianity is the natural order of things. There are shots in the opening of all the nice people in the community, and even the firemen praying together. In fact, there is no one who isn’t incredibly nice in the entire picture. Real life is distinctly different from that, and in that sense life as it is shown in the film is a decidedly false one. The fact is that human beings have been worshiping deities for thousands of years, and the presumption it takes to imagine that this two-thousand year old deity is the only true god--which means that everyone who existed before the god of Israel is being tormented in hell as we speak--makes no sense on it’s face. It is time to retire spiritual mythology as an unnecessary holdover from an unenlightened past and begin using our brains for their intended purpose. Films like Heaven is for Real are very clever in their insistence on maintaining a religious status quo but, as hard as they try, under even the most superficial of inquiry they fail to persuade. As if they ever could.

Another Afternoon With Mozart

The Seattle Symphony Orchestra

Yesterday’s performance of the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall was something of a mixed bag, but there was still a lot to enjoy. My attendance, as is usually the case, was motivated by Mozart. The program revolved around the last of his five violin concertos, Violin Concerto No 5 in A major, written when he was nineteen years old and still in Salzburg, and probably first performed publically with Antonio Brunetti at the violin, Mozart’s co-director of the orchestra maintained by their patron, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. The featured performer of this performance was Seattle native Simone Porter, all of eighteen years old herself. Her solo debut came with the Seattle Symphony when she was only ten, and she has since traveled the world and enjoyed a tremendous amount of attention and has been the recipient of numerous awards. The guest conductor for the afternoon program was Russian-American Mikhail Agrest, himself only twenty-six, who began his classical music studies as a violinist and has earned an impressive international reputation of his own.

The opening piece was a tribute to Mozart by Pyotr Tchaikovsky in which he orchestrated several obscure pieces, a couple of solo piano tunes, a choral number, and a variation on a theme by Gluck that Mozart had written, into a cohesive set of movements and titled it “Mozartiana,” Suite No. 4 in G major. Agrest is an active director with an interesting way of moving on the podium, though his baton movements seem a bit too fluid to follow, but the orchestra responded very well. The opening movement is only a couple of minutes long, but briskly melodic. The second movement slows down to a more sweeping minuet. For the slow, third movement, Agrest put down his baton and directed with his hands. This section of the suite was originally transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt and it was this arrangement that Tchaikovsky adapted. The final movement is the real draw, with several sections devoted to solo instruments, Judy Washburn Kriewall on flute, a wonderful performance by Benjamin Lulich on clarinet, and a stunning solo section by the first violinist Alexander Velinzon which makes one wish we could hear more of him.

Unfortunately, the actual piece by Mozart was something of a let down after the opening. Simone Porter is certainly a gifted violinist, but she lacked a gravitas to her playing that even Velinzon in his small moment in the spotlight was clearly able to bring to the instrument. There was a clinical quality to her playing in the first movement that she seemed to warm herself out of about halfway through, though never to the point of comfort. By far her best moments were in the adagio, the slow second movement. Here Porter could take her time and express herself a little more fully. During the final rondo, however, she seemed to tire out, and for all the technical brilliance of the solo section, to my ears there were some moments where she played flat with the ensemble. Things picked up after the intermission, however, with the final performance of the afternoon, excerpts from Sergey Prokofiev’s Cinderella. The cinematic nature of the ballet music was very well rendered with the percussion section making an invaluable contribution to the performance, anchored by one of my favorite of the symphony’s performers, timpanist Michael Crusoe. Though an uneven program overall, the Seattle Symphony never disappoints, and it was still a great afternoon at Benaroya Hall.

Mozart in Seattle

the Seattle Symphony Orchestra

Last night I attended a performance of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and was impressed at the high level of precision and the skill that guest conductor Jonathan Cohen was able to get from his group. The performance consisted of two pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, his overture to the opera The Marriage of Figaro and his Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, as well as the first symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. I find it interesting that my strongest connections with Mozart’s music come from the Milos Forman film Amadeus. I first saw the film about a year after it was released, when a theater in town was showing a series of first-run films after they had already left the first run theaters. The admission was cheap, as they were shown in the small converted theater they had made in the balcony of the main theater, but I was still enthralled. In the film, Mozart’s opera met with a lot of resistance because of the nature of Pierre Beaumarchais’ original play being blamed for the cause of social unrest in France and banned by the Emperor in Vienna, where Mozart’s opera premiered in 1786 at the Burgtheater with Mozart himself conducting.

The overture itself is wonderfully dramatic, playfully soft at the beginning before thundering in response to itself. The melody manages to be both romantically sweeping and march-like at the same time. But the dynamics throughout are what make it such a joy to listen to. Mozart had originally planned a slow middle section with darker themes--which would have been wonderful to hear--but removed it before the premiere and thus the piece runs only a mere four minutes. Nevertheless, it is undeniably distinctive and the Seattle Symphony did a masterful job of rendering it. Jonathan Cohen is an animated conductor and seemingly wills his performers to excel. In the last couple of performances I attended, under principal conductor Ludovic Morlot, the orchestra was not nearly as precise, though it must be admitted that those were performances of much more challenging pieces. Even so, it is fascinating to see what a difference a conductor can make in the overall performance of a group.

As wonderful as the overture was, that was nothing compared to the virtuoso performance of the Mozart piano concerto by the young South African pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat was composed the year before The Marriage of Figaro. In the film, the opening of the third movement is heard when a brief portion of its performance is shown, with Mozart’s piano being carried through the streets of Vienna to an outdoor concert, and with him conducting from the piano. The concerto itself is full of the musical acrobatics that Mozart’s enemies in the film so hated: chromatic runs and scales at lightning speed, alternating with numerous trills and suspenseful single-note slow passages. At the same time the orchestra not only plays call and response with the pianist, but with itself, as Mozart liked to do, with strings and woodwinds alternating in the orchestra, and with completely solo passages by the pianist. Bezuidenhout is absolutely exquisite. He has an incredibly deft touch at the keyboard, seeming to coax Mozart’s ripples of notes from the instrument with ease. The third movement, with its foxhunt like melody, is the most memorable part of the piece for me and was better, to my ears, that the recording on the Amadeus soundtrack.

After the intermission the evening concluded with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major. I have never been a fan of Beethoven because of the pondering slowness and dirge-like renderings of his later works. But I had a feeling that this early symphony would be more influenced by his growing up in the world of Mozart and Haydn than it would be reminiscent of his later works, and I was right. That being said, the work was still unmistakably Beethoven. Though composed only eight years after Mozart’s death, it presages the music to come, looking forward rather than backward, and bearing the distinctive mark of its composer. At times, the piece is wonderfully playful, something quite unexpected from the dour countenance of Beethoven that seems to be his popular image today. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I immediately ordered his complete symphonies and am looking forward to hearing them all, having only been thoroughly familiar with his Fifth Symphony prior to this. Overall, it was a fantastic evening of music and thoroughly enjoyable, and I’m especially looking forward to seeing a couple more Mozart piano concertos that are going to be performed at the end of the season in May.

The Poison that is Political Correctness

In a recent essay in New York Magazine that has, to use political science professor Samuel Goldman’s words, “burned up the Internet this week,” Jonathan Chait does a masterful job of articulating exactly what is wrong with political correctness. One of the most pernicious philosophical creeds in our country today, political correctness is eroding the foundation of what it means to be an American and is having a devastating effect on the very nature of our humanity. In his essay, entitled “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say: How the Language Police are Perverting Liberalism,” Chait defines political correctness this way: “Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.” Of course, it didn’t start out that way. Initially, the idea of political correctness was seen as a way of attempting to be more conscious about our own behavior, especially when it came to unconscious cultural bias, and this is also something that Chait very eloquently explains.

          [L]iberals are correct not only to oppose racism and sexism but to grasp (in a way conservatives
          generally do not) that these biases cast a nefarious and continuing shadow over nearly every
          facet of American life. Since race and gender biases are embedded in our social and familial
          habits, our economic patterns, and even our subconscious minds, they need to be fought with
          some level of consciousness. The mere absence of overt discrimination will not do.

So far, so good. But what became perverted was the nature of political correctness itself, until it gradually mutated into the form it commonly takes today, a cudgel used to punish those who, intentionally or not, have said or done something that a person identifying themselves with some kind of minority chooses to be offended by.

As far back as the ancient world, philosophers understood the problem with this type of thinking. The great Roman thinker and former slave--a discriminated minority if ever there was one--Epictetus wrote that, “People are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen.” In other words there is nothing that is intrinsically offensive, instead it is our choice to be offended. Ultimately, this idea is all about self-responsibility. If I am taking responsibility for my actions, including my feelings, then I have control over my life. If I choose to be offended by the things that other say or do, then I am relinquishing that control and giving it over to the offender. And that’s no way to live. It also makes no logical sense. To go through life expecting others to accommodate you so that you’re not accidentally offended is ludicrous. It’s like walking through a field of land mines and expecting them to move out of your way so that you’re not hurt. Extending the analogy further, choosing to be offended is like getting angry with the mine for blowing you up. As minister Haddon W. Robbinson said in a different context, “What worries you masters you,” and it is clear that many marginalized minorities taking up the cause of political correctness have allowed their worries to master them.

The insidious effect of turning people into victims through the righteous indignation of political correctness is that they never develop a real sense of self-esteem. Even in the face of genuine instances of cultural insensitivity, political correctness fails. Chait cites research done by the Institute of Medicine showing that the best way to overcome culturally biased actions or language “is controlled exposure to it, and experts say avoidance can reinforce suffering. Indeed, one professor at a prestigious university told me that, just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her students’ sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights.” But that’s just the beginning of the problem. What this kind of penchant for seeking out ways to feel insulted brings about in young people is that eventually they become unable to endure criticism of any kind. In his essay, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” university professor Mark Edmunson relates this story of just such an incident. “I remember a student telling me how humiliating it was to be corrected by the teacher, by me. So I asked the logical question: ‘Should I let a major factual error go by so as to save discomfort?’ The student--a good student, smart and earnest--said that was a tough question. He’d need to think about it.” This is a sad indictment of our young people and a chilling look at the future if we do nothing to stop it now.

College used to be a place where students learned--along with their course work--how to be better people. But a shift has taken place in higher education over the last twenty years, from a place where young people were exposed to new and challenging ideas, to one that merely reinforces the immature and infantile self-image of themselves they enter with. In Chait’s essay he says, “At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach ‘trigger warnings’ to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate ‘microaggressions,’ or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.” The result is a shift away from subjective courses of study in which students come face to face with their own inadequacies as human beings, to objective studies like science and technology where right and wrong are completely objective. Author Andrew Delbanco deals with this subject at length in his book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. In his point of view the goal of colleges used to be “what every true teacher, at least since Socrates, has asked every student to do: engage in some serious self-examination.” But today, “college means the anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, underresourced institutions, where little attention is paid to that elusive entity sometimes called the ‘whole person.’” It’s no wonder that with students spending their days rooting out “microaggressions,” they run the other way from the “macroaggression” that is the Socratic Method, what Edmundson calls “the animated, sometimes impolite give-and-take between student and teacher” that now “seems too jagged for current sensibilities.”

And what will these delicate students, with their hyper-sensitivity to anything they decide is “offensive,” be like in the real world? Well, they’re already out there, continuing to be fed the things they want to hear by a willing news media. As Chait writes, “Every media company knows that stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center.” At the same time, these “micro-victims” are trolling the Internet and using their cudgel of oppression to the point where their abuses are justified under the cover of political correctness. Chait quoties a New Republic article by Rebecca Traister saying that, “All over social media, there dwell armies of unpaid but widely read commentators, ready to launch hashtag campaigns and circulate Change.org petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps.” And while the anonymity of social media and the Internet seem fertile ground for faceless attacks on free speech, these abuses are not restricted to cyberspace, as Chait recounts in an incident on a college campus where a professor who clearly broke the law and violated a student’s Constitutional rights, nevertheless cloaked herself in the protection of political correctness to make herself the victim. “By the prevailing standards of the American criminal-justice system, [the professor] had engaged in vandalism, battery, and robbery. By the logic of the p.c. movement, she was the victim of a trigger and had acted in the righteous cause of social justice.”

But where the failure of this kind of thinking makes itself most clear, is in the inability of its supporters to think clearly at all. Living in a world of societal deconstructionism, they lack the basic understanding of logic and they foist their ill-conceived arguments on the public as if they had some kind of actual merit. A case in point is a rebuttal to Chait’s essay written by Amanda Taub called “The Truth About ‘Political Correctness’ is that It Doesn’t Exist.” Her very thesis shows her lack of intelligence. “The term’s in wide use, certainly, but has no actual fixed or specific meaning. What defines it is not what it describes but how it’s used: as a way to dismiss a concern or demand as a frivolous grievance rather than a real issue.” It doesn’t take a logician to see the fatal flaw in her argument. By changing the actual definition of the term from something that is--which is Jonathan Chait’s point--to the way it is used--which is her point--she isn’t even arguing about the same thing anymore, and the rest of her rant is therefore not a rebuttal but an excuse to make her own, separate, argument. Samuel Goldman, in his observations on the argument titled, “Yes, Political Correctness Really Exists,” calls this “a feat of rhetorical jujitsu,” which makes it seem a lot more purposeful than it really is. But let’s look at the point that Taub is making--which has absolutely nothing to do with Chait’s essay. She states,

          [P]olitical correctness . . . is a sort of catch-all term we apply to people who ask for more
          sensitivity to a particular cause than we're willing to give--a way to dismiss issues as frivolous
          in order to justify ignoring them. Worse, the charge of “political correctness” is often used by
          those in a position of privilege to silence debates raised by marginalized people--to say that
          their concerns don't deserve to be voiced, much less addressed.

This is a perfectly valid point, and an absolutely verifiable phenomenon. It just doesn’t have anything to do with political correctness as an entity. Instead, it is about using labels as a way to marginalize or eliminate argument. This is a point that Joseph E. Green makes in his new book, Dissenting Views II. In it he makes the same argument about people who use the words “conspiracy theorist” to dismiss the people espousing those theories as being somehow out of the mainstream of thought, in other words, crazy. “The term ‘conspiracy theorist’ is meant to be dismissive, obviously . . . You call someone a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to put them down or accuse them of being an intellectual outcast without having to think hard about it.” But the concept of labeling goes beyond manufacturing terms in order to dismiss particular groups. It is ubiquitous in our culture and is used in a myriad of ways by ignorant people to avoid thinking at all. In her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee says it this way through her de facto protagonist, lawyer Atticus Finch, as he speaks to his daughter,

          “Scout,” said Atticus, “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don’t mean anything--like
          snot-nose. It’s hard to explain--ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody’s
          favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It’s slipped into usage with some people like
          ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.”

Taub sees the use of the term “political correctness” as being wielded by those in power to marginalize those with less influence. “Arguments that get dismissed as mere ‘p.c.’ nonsense are overwhelmingly likely to be raised by people who are less privileged, and to concern issues that are outside the mainstream,” and that the attitude of those in power is “that marginalized people’s demands for inclusion are just a bunch of annoying whining, and that efforts to address their concerns are unnecessary.” What’s clear in all of this is that Taub utterly fails to understand the way p.c. demands rob people of their guaranteed right to free speech. Chait cites professor Bettina Aptheker in a recent essay stating, “Freedom of speech is a constitutional guarantee, but who gets to exercise it without the chilling restraints of censure depends very much on one’s location in the political and social cartography.” The problem is that while political correctness was an attempt to combat the subconscious abuse of minorities in our society at the hands of those in power, what it has become is an attempt to wrest the power from those in control through an assumption of shared societal shame. The complaint that Taub seems to have, is that many people aren’t buying into that shame and it angers her. At the same time, Chait sees a real danger in continuing to head down a road of righteous victimhood being used as a form of thought control:

          Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain
          our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as
          individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less
          threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life),
          the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed.

The irony in all of this, one that blogger Mitchell J. Freedman pointed out in his MF Blog, is that conservatives have co-opted their own brand of political correctness that centers on patriotism and the bible, and they are every bit as adept at using shame as a weapon to coerce people to their way of thinking as those on the left. “What I find sadly lacking [in the argument] is that the Right and conservatives also have political correctness . . . Political correctness on the Left is about sensitivity to racism, sexism and the like while . . . political correctness on the Right is about sensitivity to religion (one’s own of course), white males, traditional hierarchies and symbols, capitalism and the like.” But this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. If there’s an undemocratic creed to be had, you can be sure that the conservative right has every intention of using it to their advantage.

Fortunately, Jonathan Chait ends his essay on a positive note. “The p.c. style of politics has one serious, possibly fatal drawback: It is exhausting. Claims of victimhood that are useful within the left-wing subculture may alienate much of America.” And he also makes the point that our political system itself still relies on at least the appearance of free speech and thought. “Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal.” Unfortunately, it still takes citizens themselves to participate in that democracy. And while Chait is confident “in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph,” the continued undermining of the ability to reason in our culture, from the adoration and worship of small children by parents, to the demand on teachers in public schools to make classrooms “safe” and unchallenging, to a university system that no longer values self-examination--and the ultimate expression of this societal shift in the idea of political correctness--does not bode well for the future.