Going Postal

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal

Ever read a novel that impressed you as profound even though that didn't seem to be the author's intent at all? To me, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal is one of these.

Unbeknownst to me until three weeks ago, Pratchett has been writing these wry gems about an alternate universe he calls Discworld for many years. I stumbled across the series in the science fiction section of the library and took Going Postal home. I found that it wasn't really sci-fi, and as fantasy it fails to go by any usual rules. It's sort of like Monty Python meets The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets Charles Dickens.

The tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari, snatches one Moist von Lipwig from the gallows just before he plunges through the trapdoor to his death, and gives him another chance: run the Post Office, long defunct.

Moist has been quite happy as a lifelong con man, but he realizes that he cannot run and he cannot hide from the indefatigable golem, Mr. Pump. A golem is a very large humanoid made of ceramic stuff, but each golem was once just an ordinary machine or tool. Some golems are, say, former hammers. Mr. Pump is a former pump.

Golems are unstoppable in carrying out the mission they have been given. Vetinari has made Mr. Pump Moist's parole officer, so Moist for the time being decides to feign interest in his new position.

The Post Office slipped into decay a century ago, Moist learns, but it's can-do spirit lives on in the likes of old Mr. Groat, who along with a young homeless man named Stanley, who loves collecting pins, still lives in the Post Office headquarters. Moist twigs to the fact that the mountains of undelivered letters there, covered now in pigeon guano, are crying out (literally) to be delivered, even now. One thing leads to another, and before you know it Moist has conned himself into being (with the help of Groat, Stanley, and numerous others in the once-proud postal "family") their deliverer.

Meanwhile, the function of the Post Office has been taken over by "the clacks," a network of towers throughout the Discworld that send and receive messages by some sort of semaphore involving lights in the dark of night, and other signaling means, which the reader never quite comprehends, by day.

The clacks (a singular noun) was invented by the now-deceased father of chain-smoking Adora Belle Dearheart, she of the stiletto heels which she uses to impale the feet and other body parts of men who menace her in lowlife bars. Moist suspects the sweetness in her right away. He knows he will fall in love with her, but he cannot imagine that her cynical eye doesn't see right through his facade to the inveterate fraud he really is. Adora wants revenge on Reacher Gilt, the truly evil manipulator of people for personal profit who drove her father out of the clacks business in favor of his own consortium. Gilt is also indirectly responsible for the death of Adora's brother, an honest clacksman (tower operator) of the old style.

So one thing leads to another, and Moist, against his ingrained dishonest instincts, becomes something of a miracle-worker-slash-hero-slash-savior.

Along the way to a final showdown with Gilt he has occasion to retrieve his buried cache of $150,000, the honest proceeds of his dishonest life of crime. Seems Gilt has arranged for the Post Office to catch fire and burn, and the money is needed to rebuild. Moist can't just dig it up from where he has it buried without disillusioning all those who have come to trust him, who do not know about his past. So he fakes being led mystically to to the stash after praying to not one but several of the Ankh-Morpork gods.

Thus, several of the interlocking themes of the book. One, the more Moist ups the ante on being (again, still) the consummate charlatan, the more good he does in his world. Two, he accomplishes most of his fakery with naught but words — words that people want to hear and to believe, words that give them hope. Three, the more good Moist does, the more he thrills to it. It's more thrilling, more addictive, than any con he ever pulled for personal gain.

He knows deep down, much to his own chagrin, that he is not the selfless saint people see him as being. But he also knows confession to them of his own true nature would destroy the illusion, their hope, and all the good he is doing simply because it thrills him to put over the con of his life: arranging for the deliverance of the post, at snidely Reacher Gilt's expense.

His final victory depends on convincing one and all of what has long been rumored: that the souls of all the clacksmen who died doing their dangerous jobs on the towers because Gilt didn't do what was needed to keep them safe (it cost too much money) live on in the "overhead." They are now living messages that shunt eternally through the network unseen, for free. Moist enlists the aid of three outlaw clacksmen, "Mad Al and the boys," to bring one of these supposed hidden messages to light, thereby revealing the truth and incriminating Gilt and his cronies. The world wants to believe that these really were utterances of the disembodied dear departed, and Moist lets them go on believing it.

Toward the conclusion of the book, we get this exchange between Adora and Moist:

A quiet voice from the doorway behind him said: "Mad Al and the boys told me what you did."

"Oh," said Moist, not turning around. She'll be lighting a cigarette, he thought.

"It wasn't a nice thing to do," Adora Belle Dearheart went on, in the same level tone.

"There wasn't a nice thing that would work," said Moist.

"Are you going to tell me that the ghost of my brother put the idea in your head?" she said.

"No, I dreamed it up myself," said Moist.

"Good. If you'd tried that, you'd be limping for the rest of your life, believe me." [She is referring to the damage she could do with her stiletto heels.]

"Thank you," said Moist leadenly. "It was just a lie I knew people wanted to believe. Just a lie. It was a way to keep the Post Office going and get the Grand Trunk [the clacks network] out of Gilt's hands. You'll probably get it back, if you want it. You and all the other people Gilt swindled. I'll help, if I can. But I don't want thanking."

He felt her draw nearer.

"It's not a lie," she said. "It's what ought to have been true. It pleased my parents."

"Do they think it's true?"

"They don't want to think it isn't."

No one does. I can't stand this, Moist thought. "Look, I know what I'm like," he said. "I'm not the person everyone thinks I am. I just wanted to prove to myself I'm not like Gilt. More than a hammer, you understand [in the same way that a golem is now more than his former identity as a mere tool]? But I'm still a fraud by trade. I thought you knew that. I can fake sincerity so well that even I can't tell. I mess with people's heads —"

"You're fooling no one but yourself," said Miss Dearheart, and reached for his hand.

...

He let the golden glow rise. He'd fooled them all, even her. But the good bit was that he could go on doing it, he didn't have to stop. All he had to do was remind himself, every few months, that he could quit anytime. Provided he knew he could, he'd never have to. And there was Miss Dearheart, without a cigarette in her mouth, only a foot away. He leaned forward —

Words that "ought to have been true," words that generate belief and hope, are true, even if they're lies. People that utter such words and back them up with deeds are saviors, even if they're frauds. Impossible things like gods' interventions and souls that live on in the "overhead" are possible, even though they're ridiculous.

To me, who am going through a bit of a dark night of the soul in terms of my religious stance, those profound messages that flip cynicism into faith are immensely cheering.

The Prig in Me

I confessed in Religion, Solidarity, and My Need for Approval that my ulterior motive in being a religious person and in instituting this blog's "search for solidarity" has been (I now realize) a deep-seated need for the approval of others.

That seems to go hand in glove with my being a (closet) prig.

Most prigs are (for those who remember the TV show M*A*S*H) like the character Maj. Frank Burns: self-righteously moralistic, Burns was a nitwit who always came off as thinking himself superior to everyone else.

My type of priggery is cleverer than that. I pretend to be a Hawkeye Pierce or a Trapper John McIntyre or a B.J. Hunnicutt. Most of the time, for my own benefit as well as for that of others, I play the role of a "regular guy."

But deep down inside, I'm Major Burns.


A prig is not precisely a prude, but prudery is definitely part of the profile. Major Burns was always furtively hooking up with Hot Lips Houlihan, with an emphasis on "furtively." So there's a big component of hypocrisy built into the priggery/prudery profile.

I'm not gay, but in many ways I feel I'm like the evangelical leader Ted Haggard, recently exposed as a homosexual. The things that Haggard criticized (as it turned out, hypocritically) about today's culture are things that the prig/prude in me tends to criticize too.


That said, I do not understand the culture today.

Maybe it's because I'm a prig and a prude masquerading as an up-to-date kind of guy that I feel so out of it. I feel like (sorry to keep bringing up characters from ancient TV history) Mork from Ork.

Mork wasn't a prig or a prude, but he was an extraterrestrial who never could quite get the hang of Earth's more peculiar ways.

I can't quite get the hang of a culture in which just about every kind of behavior is defended by somebody — by plenty of somebodies — with possible exceptions being made for forcible rape and child exploitation or abuse. Yet when a male member of the U.S. Senate is caught in a sting operation tapping his foot for sex in a men's room stall, he has to resign. Isn't that hypocrisy on our parts?

Or is it that Senator Craig got crucified not for his true sexual nature but for his hypocrisy in pretending to be Mr. Straight all this time, and the furtiveness in his manner of satisfying his gay urges? Is our war on hypocrisy the thing Mork from Ork most needs to understand about today's culture? If so, perhaps there is only one sin left. It is being what I seem to have become: inauthentic.


If that's anywhere close to being correct, then the keynote of the cultural change that has taken place over the course of my 60-years-and-counting of life would seem to be this war on inauthenticity.

Sure, we've seen many other important trends, including the items on this list:

• the growth of sexual freedom
  
• women's liberation
  
• gay liberation
• the civil-rights revolution
• the opening up of higher education to the masses
• a historically unprecedented high standard of living
• a teen-friendly mass culture
• an atrophied public or civic religiosity
  

The list could go on, with many more items. But maybe they are all trumped by — or allies of — the war on inauthenticity and hypocrisy.


I'd better qualify the last list item. When I say that "public or civic religiosity" has dwindled, I don't mean that most Americans aren't religious. I mean that religion has become strictly a private matter. It's no longer allowed in the "public square," except for occasional glints such as when politicians end speeches with "God bless the United States of America" — and even then, atheists howl.

But notice the irony. What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms, even (or especially) if it's kinky, is OK to talk about on Jerry Springer, but if it's pious and prayerful, we need to hush it up. Would Mork from Ork even begin to have a clue about that?

Religion, Solidarity, and My Need for Approval

I worry about myself sometimes.

As the proprietor of this blog in which my intention has been to explore ways in which we might all come together with regard to religious belief, I am suddenly aware that I have been acting all along with an ulterior motive. I woke up yesterday morning with one of those occasional profound insights I suppose we all are prone to from time to time. In my case, the profound insight was that I have a near-obsessive need to gain the approval of others.

Or is it that I have a near-obsessive need to avoid the disapproval of others?

Either way, my search for "solidarity" could be seen as a stealth technique of disapproval avoidance. After all, if there truly exists a set of religious views that all could agree on — which is highly doubtful — then my seeking it and finding it, and then leading others to it, would be a surefire way to inoculate myself against disapproval.

The strategy could work in multiple ways. It would put me on the same theological page with all my peers, all of us singing from the same hymn book. Ditto, philosophy: we could all agree on the same (God-centered) worldview. Even more important, such a "universal" belief system with God squarely at its center would necessarily (so I hope) be "correct" or "true" and would therefore put me in the best of favor with the Man Upstairs.

Problem is, when my prime motivation is disapproval avoidance, controversy becomes the enemy. Any imagined version of the truth that raises anybody's hackles gets short shrift. And where religion is concerned, every version of the truth raises somebody's hackles.

It seems pretty clear that, whatever you may think is the correct belief about who Jesus of Nazareth was, he was not afraid to raise the hackles of those around him. Ergo, I'm wrong to claim to be a Christian while really, mainly, being an avoider of disapproval.


I must admit to being somewhat astounded to realize just how strong my need to gain approval and avoid disapproval is these days.

It was not always thus. As a youth and young man, I had if anything an overly cavalier attitude toward the opinions of others about yours truly. Let's put it this way. I didn't go out of my way to curry favor, by any means.

Looking back, that all seems to have started changing with my mother's death when I was 38, then my father's three years later. It's as if as long as they were around, my ego aways had a safe harbor to return to if buffeted by high sea winds.

At my mother's passing I reacted by developing what seem to have been psychosomatic symptoms of perennial dizziness and malaise. After struggling along for a couple of years that way, I suddenly "found God." (What a coincidence!) Then Dad died, and my religious commitment just got deeper. Now it seems that I was unconsciously trying to relocate my safe harbor at a super-cosmic level.

Over time that psychological strategy has worn thinner and thinner, and as it has I have grown increasingly desperate to shore it up by "proving" that there really and truly is a God whom we can all believe in ... and that therefore I ought to merit his approval and that of everyone else too.

Of late, these attempts have grown more and more bankrupt, at least from the perspective of my near-obsessive psychic needs. I have now gotten to the point where I feel my judgments about my own ideas are so impaired that any hope of being objective about them is in jeopardy.

So I fall back on an inner recognition that, like Bilbo Baggins after too many years of hoarding the One Ring, my own soul has grown "thin and stretched." What good is being "right" about religion — if I am right — if it doesn't nourish the soul? If my being "right" is a secret way to serve a false God — my own approval needs — then it isn't right at all.

Irony and Experience in Today's World

Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity

Religion scholar Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition is a 2005 book that stands in eloquent riposte to a number of books that have been published recently maligning Christianity and religion in general. Among these is Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I discussed at length in my Science of Religion? series. Another is The End of Faith, Sam Harris' recent book proposing an end to religious faith as an antidote to religious hatreds, which I talked about in my The End of Faith? series.

To Smith, the Great Tradition that was the Christian Church of the first millennium and that thunders down through history to reach us (in diluted form) today is the answer to all such atheists who take a principled stand against religion in general, and who oppose Christian religion in particular.


There are many reasons why today's church pales beside the church of the past. We are the heirs of "new" outlooks that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

• the advent of the controlled experiment, the rise of science, and the adoption of a "scientistic" worldview
  
• the burgeoning of secularism in governance and religious indifference in the ordering of human affairs
• the dominance of technology, innovation, and the "myth of progress"
• the replacement in our philosophical inquiries of the understanding that truth is objective with the insistence on purely subjective standards of truth
• individualism run rampant, aided by the idea that each person can, and ought to, read Holy Scripture without mediation through church teaching
  
• the "cult of narcissism"; the belief that "our wills are sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and the highest endowment we have" (pp. xxiii-xxiv)
  

Coming about as a reaction to all those features of modernity has been religious fundamentalism, Christian and otherwise. Smith takes Christian conservatives to task for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In their insistence on reading the Bible literally, they miss much of its grandeur and, even worse, its meaning.

In their signature intolerance of the viewpoints of others, they also offer atheists like Dennett and Harris a takeoff point for junking all religion.

Smith offers a mild and moderate — yet ultimately radical — return to the understandings that informed the Christian life for a millennium or more after Christ was born, as a valid third way between atheism and fundamentalism ... while avoiding the mistake that has so long been made by modern religious liberals: taking a transcendent, supernatural God out of the picture and replacing him with a touchy-feely sentimentality and endless "rallying cries to be good" (p. xx).


While all the above is true, and most welcome, my one quibble with it is that it is preaching to the choir. Since I am a member of the choir, it is dulcet music to my ears. But I recognize that it will not be music to the ears of Mr. Dennett, Mr. Harris, Mr. Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Richard Dawkins, etc., etc., etc. (See In Search of Comity.)

Nor will it soothe the savage breast of the many vocal fundamentalists who spout in evangelical circles today.

Even worse, it is unlikely to persuade the many basically apathetic young people of today, irreligious but not formally atheistic. I'll call them the "lost sheep" who have simply given up on the search for God as source and guarantor of life's meaning. That is, they have "given up" to the extent that they ever considered committing to such a search in the first place.

There are several reasons why so many young people now have a tin ear when it comes to religion. For some, the very dogmatism of the conservatives is a red flag, a turnoff. For others, the problem is simply that their parents didn't even begin to communicate the "good side" of religion to them.

But let me tell you what I think the most basic problem is. It has to do with the point I made earlier about the "cult of narcissism": each of the "lost sheep" experiences his or her will as sovereign; as "unpremised" (meaning that what it wants doesn't have to square with what anyone thinks it ought to want); and as spontaneously, radically free.


I'd like to focus on the most important word in that tangled mass of verbiage: experience.

What we do depends on what we believe, and what we believe depends on what we experience. Smith himself makes much of this fact in his discussion of the early church:

Religion begins with experience — ritual, belief, and experience, and (to echo the cadence of St. Paul's aphorism ["Now abideth faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love"]) the greatest of these is experience. The experience of things that inspire us gives rise to symbols as the mind tries to think about these invisible, inspiring things. ... eventually the mind introduces thoughts to resolve the ambiguities of symbols and to systematize intuitions ... (p. 97)

And that is where theology — "the mind of the church," initially absent in the original Christians' experience — came from. Theology formalized "faith's focal attention ... on a vision of reality that sets morality in motion, as a byproduct almost." Thus did Christianity come to "include the summons to the upright life" (p. 96).

Yet, however valid the summons, we are already several links in the chain down from the first disciples' pristine, original "experience of living in the presence of someone [Jesus] whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way [they] found divinely mysterious" (p. 96).

Some fifteen to twenty centuries after Christian theology and morality began to be codified, today's "lost sheep" see the church as simply disseminating moral teachings that don't square with their inner situation. In their experience, a sovereign, unpremised, "dark" will is the only thing between them and chaos.


We hear that word, "dark," a lot today. A recent series of "Pearls Before Swine" comic strips by Stephan Pastis, lampooning another well-known strip, "The Family Circus," illustrates what the word means in today's with-it culture (click to enlarge):


"We're so dark and they're so sweet" could stand as Reason Number One why so many young people won't consider joining up with the Christians today. They experience a life in which the only thing that stands between them and the chaos of their "dark" impulses is their idiosyncratic, sovereign will. If they don't do all of the "bad" things defined by Christians as sinful, it's simply because the don't choose to.

That is the ultimate irony of it all. The individual will, decoupled from God's overarching intent for us, can sometimes stand as a buffer against sin. But what it cannot do is open the self-willed up to the "experience of living in the presence of someone whose selfless love, crystalline joy, and preternatural power came together in a way [they might otherwise find] divinely mysterious."


The "lost sheep's" much too sophisticated awareness of how their own "dark" impulses can be self-managed — and their own sense of irony about doing it — means that their experience is unlike that of any earlier generation in history. What Huston Smith fails to do, sadly, is take this into account.

Irony is another "in" word these days, as this recent Doonesbury strip by Garry Trudeau indicates (again, click to enlarge):


We live in an age in which it is not only possible, but necessary for many, to take an ironic stance toward many of the worst evils of our history, not to mention the "dark" impulses within the human soul. As a result, we simply experience the world today in ways that must baffle Huston Smith and stands to impede any well-meaning attempts to turn back the clock to the sensibility of the Great Tradition of the church.

Literal vs. Metaphorical

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell

As I finish reading Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon I find that a prime aspect of religion that he seems blind to is the longstanding dispute between believers who understand their professions of faith in a literal way and those who understand them in a metaphorical, figurative way.

To take a quick example: In the Catholic Church at every Mass we recite the Nicene Creed, which begins, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen ... ." Leaving aside the other clauses, what does "Maker of heaven and earth" mean? Specifically, what does it means to say God "makes" this world, our earth?

If you are one of those who understand this idea literally, you may have a hard time with any explanation of the earth's origins that doesn't square with the most direct possible interpretation of the words in Genesis, chapter 1. Which tends to leave the theory of evolution out in the cold.

If on the other hand you understand this idea of God as the world's maker metaphorically, both Darwin and Genesis could be absolutely right.


In talking about the literal versus the metaphorical, I would like to sidestep any attempt at a rigorous definition of the two terms. I am perfectly willing to substitute terms like "simile" or "analogy" for the noun metaphor, "figurative" or "poetic" for the adjective metaphorical.

In fact, I am willing to stipulate that for me, the name of God is a metonymy — a term-substituting figure of speech, such as a "suit" for a business executive, or the "crown" for the king or queen. In this case, the word "God" stands in for the Great Big Truth we would otherwise have no chance of expressing.

What I am really trying to get at is not what a metaphor or a metonymy is, but rather the way in which the human mind works when it is in "figure-of-speech mode," as contrasted with when it is operating in "literal mode."

Moreover, what I am really trying to say is that some people (among whom I count myself) respond to religious language by automatically adopting a "figure-of-speech stance" towards it, while other people reflexively adopt a "literalist stance." Literalists and figuratives, we might call these two groups.


A figurative religionist such as myself is, I imagine, apt to be more of a "liberal" when it comes to his or her understanding of theology; a literalist will tend to be a religious "conservative." Thus do "liberal" and "literal" effectively become direct antonyms, when the discussion turns to religion.

I'm not just talking about how different people read the Bible, mind you. Bible reading is part of it, but in my Catholic tradition, Bible reading is amplified by how believers interpret all the wide-ranging pronouncements the Church has authored down through history, as summarized in, among other writings, The Catechism of the Catholic Church. How we "hear" the creeds we say in church, along with the homilies, the prayers, and all the other parts of the Order of the Mass, depends crucially on whether we are liberal figuratives or literalist conservatives.


Most of the complaints which Dennett makes about religion seem (at least to this liberal figurative) to convict the literalist conservatives.

It is the literalist conservatives who cannot reconcile Darwin's evolution theory with a belief in God. It is they who mock science's materialistic outlook: nothing not made of matter and its movements and modifications exists. It is they who conflate that philosophical definition of materialism with the everyday one: a bias toward gaining material possessions and away from living a life of the spirit.

Literalist conservatives seem to be increasing their share of Christians in this country, and they are certainly not shy about claiming that liberal figuratives like myself are missing the boat. But I would counter that it is they who have it wrong. Christianity has historically not been literal in its reading of scripture.


Accordingly, I think Dennett himself misses a very big boat by assuming that the "spell" of religion needs "breaking" simply because maximally strident, intransigently radical fundamentalism so menaces the common enterprise of all humanity. Yes, that is a spell that needs breaking, but, no, it is not the same intoxication with the Infinite that typifies Christianity in its "Great Tradition" and informs all the other grand and magnificent World Religions.

Huston Smith's The Soul of Christianity

So says religion scholar Huston Smith in The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. Smith's 2005 book stands as the most eloquent possible riposte to Dennett's, though the latter would only be published the following year.

To Smith, the Great Tradition that was the Christian Church of the first millennium is the answer to all those — whether fundamentalist evangelicals or atheists like Dennett — who would polarize the world into two armed camps, one insistent that Holy Writ must be read literally, the other that it should be read as false.

Smith shows (see p. 17) that there are four levels of biblical exegesis that we must never fail to attend to. At the lowest level is the literal. Next up the line is the ethical: what should believers do or not do. Then comes the allegorical — as with ascribing meanings to Jesus's parables.

Most conservative literalists would not blanch at these three, but the fourth would raise many eyebrows. It is what Smith calls anagogic.

One online dictionary defines an anagogy as "a mystical interpretation of a word, passage, or text, especially scriptural exegesis that detects allusions to heaven or the afterlife." In Smith's view the word encourages a mythical outlook, à la Joseph Campbell; per Reinhold Niebuhr, "Myth is not history, it is truer than history."

The problem for literalists is that anagogic, mythical, mystical modes of biblical exegesis put slavish literalism on the back burner. These modes recognize, first and foremost, that "languages are geared to the worldviews that monitor them" (p. 20).

Recognizing that fact, we moderns accordingly need to transpose the language of the Bible away from the ancient worldviews that informed it, as it was set down, it is quite true ... but over into a mode of understanding that assiduously factors out "the sea change from the traditional to the scientistic worldview that has profoundly affected the way our language works."

Today's biblical literalists — including those who, like Dennett and other vocal nonbelievers, read scripture literally and then dispute it on that basis — don't do that. They are blind to what I think of as metaphorical ways of interpreting religious truth.

In posts soon to come, I intend to expand on the remarks above as I detail my highly positive reactions to Smith's magnificent defense of Christianity in its Great Tradition.