Reality TV Has Victimized Conrad Black

The conservative movement in North America is going through a strange mental breakdown, though frankly it's a long time coming. It's manifested perfectly in Rebel Media's embrace of thinly veiled white supremacist rhetoric, the kind that uses "cuck" and "SJW" as an insult with a straight face. It is principally moved by whatever irks liberals the most, and nobody on the right is immune anymore. Certainly not Conrad Black. 

For a trained and knowledgeable historian, Conrad Black doesn't seem aware of the history of which he's a part. His stubborn biases cast doubt over whether he is really paying attention at all. For example: he retweets Trump calling Chuck Schumer a hypocrite, quite unaware that having coffee with Putin at an event isn't the problem; it was the blatant, stupid lying about meeting with Russians from Trump's camp that's causing the stir.

Black's National Post columns go hand in hand with the tweets he likes and shares, each reflective of an ego trying to salvage his support of what's appearing to be a totally incompetent presidency. His commentary paints a unified picture of a stupid, blinkered fool who fell for Trump's big-league charisma and stuttered ad-libs. He pens verbose, embarrassing fellatios to try and convince anyone who still cares about Black that Trump support can be an intellectually-sounding pursuit. Black can support Trump and then write, without a hint of irony, a column entitled, "From TV drama to the news media, the prime-time programming of Western decline." Square the following passage with Trump, the man:

From time to time I have gone all the way through the available channels, about a thousand of them, and apart from old movies, some of these elaborate special series like Homeland and Breaking Bad, a few documentaries, and some music on straight sound channels, it is the most unutterable rubbish imaginable, with an average of program quality inferior to what we had with an antenna on the roof and six channels at the time the three of us had first met.

This process of dumbing down has afflicted education very severely also. We are all scandalized at how ignorant of almost everything most secondary school graduates and many holders of undergraduate degrees are.

Despite the money, column space, and thesaurus-like vocabulary, Conrad Black can't hide what he's become. He's not an in-touch-yet-ornery commentator, but a negationist historian who shrouds his cheerleading for the elite with a disregard for the elite. Lipstick on a pig, etc. 

Black has devoted many columns to the defense of Donald Trump. Donald Trump, the host of The Apprentice, a man who accuses his predecessor of tapping his office and then gloats about the failure of Arnold Schwarzenegger. A man who is either using "bigly" or "big-league" for every other adjective. Black's dressing down of our culture is woefully incomplete without a little introspection that would take into account his recent defense of the ultimate celebrity politician, but I doubt introspection is a strong suit for Black.

It doesn't take a rigorous diagnosis to see why Black believes what he does: he loves Donald Trump, a man who made Stephen Baldwin and Piers Morgan sell street hot dogs on prime-time television, because Trump is a wealthy person getting away with running roughshod over politics. Black’s columns are a sneering rundown of events surrounding Trump, peppered with laughable assertions that seem to run counter to what's happening inside the White House. Black claims to be disgusted by the Washington elite, and this disgust leads him to write things like “[c]ontrary to the wails of apprehension from the universal alarmist consensus, the transition process has been handled very smoothly and has produced widely admired candidates to fill the great offices of the United States government.” These capital-T Truths are hard to scrape out because they're surrounded by Black’s insufferable prose, but they’re there, with no evidence to back them up other than Black’s total trust in his fellow elite. 

Black brushes asides criticism of Trump with sentences like “all the bunk and hype about Trump being a sexist and racist and possibly a madman.” Lines like this, so dismissive of what Trump actually says, should come with annotation: “Fortunately, Trump is not at all xenophobic (“He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico. The answer is, he is giving us very unfair rulings – rulings that people can’t even believe.”), fascistic (“In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate."), racist (“Who the f*** knows? I mean, really, who knows how much the Japs will pay for Manhattan property these days?”) or sexist ("You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her... wherever.")." It doesn't matter that Trump campaigned for the Central Park Five's execution long after they were proven not guilty - Black's the kind of man who needs a person to put on a Klan outfit and use the n-word with a hard r before even thinking about running sentences through a racial filter. I'd accuse him of sticking his fingers in his ears and humming, but even that would be more intellectually honest than his dismissiveness. 

None of it matters, and nothing Trump will do will matter. To Black, the whole circus is worth it because Trump “has capitalized brilliantly, before and since the election, on the fact that about two-thirds of Americans don’t trust the media, and he has used social media and his powerful supporters in the talk-radio industry to counter, confront and overwhelm the sniggering, gibbering claque of the leftist Washington-New York-Los Angeles media and entertainment communities." Black's gone from conservative intellectual to a right-wing ideological anarchist: any position is great as long as it bugs those smug liberals. Who cares if he lied, consistently, about even the smallest things, to get to the presidency? The media needs to be taken down a peg, presumably because they didn't sympathize when Black was put in jail. 

Donald Trump is the result of the thing Black decries, and Black is ignorant about his own decline, too. Trump's victory was paved with the dumbing down of Western culture, and he used the very medium Conrad Black so loathes. Donald Trump used hyperkinetic reality TV and trashy tabloids to control the narrative about himself. Black's been played, and yet he blames the "ignorant" secondary school graduates. He can't even take personal responsibility. How conservative.

Because of who Donald is, a moneyed elite, Black can't help but root for him.He sees what he wants to - a man with no regard for the Washington elite, who tapped into "forgotten" America's anger - and ignores everything else - literally everything else about Trump.  He's that person who defends watching every iteration of the Real Housewives - "it's a great look at personal relationships and I love the drama!" - except his guilty pleasure has actual, horrific ramifications.

But Black is also a historian, and as such knows the power of being able to write history. He's stumbled upon a golden opportunity to write negationist history as it unfolds, before the leftists can get their hands on it. This scramble to control the narrative reflects Trump, too, and the lies and propaganda he and his underlings try to sell. It reflects a lot of insecure elites, who know their facade is quickly eroding and need to salvage what they can. In a way, it's sort of sad (not Sad!). Black, a man with a reputation as a clear-eyed historian, can write passages like this, never acknowledging that Trump lost the popular vote:

Donald Trump is right to call his narrow and numerically minority victory a “landslide.” He ran against all the Republicans and all the Democrats, the hackneyed Bush-McCain-Romney also-rans, the Cruz loopy-right, the Clinton-Obama incumbency, and the Sanders left, almost all the Washington media and almost all the polls, and the entire pay-to-play casino of lobbyists in the great Washington sleaze factory.”

This sort of reimagining of the narrative is exactly what conservatives claim "negationist" historians like Howard Zinn do. But it doesn't matter. Moneyed elite won Washington on November 8, 2016. To Black, it's about time they, and by extension he, got their due.

Rationalia is bad for atheists

Neil deGrasse Tyson has finally made his political ambitions known. A few hours ago, he tweeted out the hashtag #Rationalia, the name of an ideal "virtual country" where there's only one line to the Constitution: "All policy shall be based on the weight of the evidence." 

Given Tyson's predilections, I suppose it was inevitable he end up here. He has spent most of his celebrity fetishizing science-based reason, so it makes sense that one day he'd advocate governing a collection of people based on it. Superficially, it's a noble venture, like how Dawkins' "lifting of the burka of ignorance" is noble: it's high-minded, ambitious, and not in any way rational. 

It's irrational in at least two places. First: you can't expect every society to toss away their religiosity or spirituality. History tells us the extremes to which people will cling to their philosophies, and why they exist (history doesn't seem to bother Tyson though). Second: there's no particular definition of "the rational." When it comes to how we should live, Tyson consistently provides answers that are barely even scientific. This is a problem with a lot of the New Atheists - their calls to action are far too broad and uninterested in moving an actual point forward. 

There's a religious aspect to it, sure, in that Tyson uses vague language the way religious leaders often do. Look at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Now I personally don't buy what Jesus is selling, or else I'd be heading back to church this Sunday. Just because he said it, doesn't mean it's true, or that every Christian has defined "Truth" the same way. But replace "way", "truth", and "life" with "evidence", "reason", and "rationality." Tyson 14:6: "I have the evidence, the reason, and the rationality. No one gets to make policy except through me." Just because you're smart and have a definition that works for you, doesn't mean everyone's going to buy into it, or agree on what it means. We know certain scientific theories very well, like evolution and climate change, and should teach that these are facts based on scientific evidence. But can we all agree on what to do about them? What about the Second Amendment? What about freedom of speech? What about political science, or economics, or philosophy? 

At least theologians have pushed forward what the "Truth" is, and how it influences their worldview. There are many competing interpretations, but at least they're there. It's not found in the philosophy of the Four Horsemen. The Reason Rally people have made the drive to prove why religion isn't true, but atheists don't need these answers anymore. It's manifest to us why religion isn't true. #Rationalia, or any coherent movement of the secular, needs to make the case for why this is important for many different issues. Simply stating "evidence" isn't the answer to everything. Make an effort to say why it's unique, or accept that atheism is just a facet of something else, that it brings you to answers at which others can arrive through different means. Because the only thing that's changed is that now we're ignoring the differences. Libertarianism and Ayn Rand is at one end, Communism and Joseph Stalin at the other, and both are using atheism to push their broad extremist social philosophies. Something amorphous resides in the middle, attending the Reason Rally with Penn Jillette and Lewis Black. 

What's worse is that it's hard to find what's what in the "main" atheist texts. Hitchens devotes the final chapter of God Is Not Great, a scant seven pages, to “The Need for a New Enlightenment”, which “will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and women.” Dawkins wants science to continue opening up our “burka of ignorance," which is to make people more aware of scientific processes. What we do after - eh. To Sam Harris, everyone should live by a scientism-based spiritualism, which sounds ludicrous to my secular ears. Society needs to do something - “If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits us all,” says Harris – but there are no concrete answers, no alternative rooted in something like secular compassion. Much of it is based on using ridicule as a tactic.

Religion and superstition aren't the only things keeping humans from being rational. Science even tells us this. As Aristotle put it, "our senses can be trusted but they can easily be fooled." Even if you break down society to a purely secular state, with no basis in a higher power, your sensory inputs will still be taken for a ride. Tyson, Dawkins, et al know all about the tricks our organic parts can play on our beliefs. Memories can be doctored, massaged by time, or even created wholesale. Our eyes can see what isn't there, our ears hear what isn't making noise. The evolutionary processes that led to us have also made us paranoid, susceptible to the foreign, and gullible. 

Which makes one wonder: who is providing the evidence that will be the basis of the policy in #Rationalia? Evidence can look sound, unbiased, and reasonable until history tells you it isn't. But by then you've invaded a country, turned an entire region upside-down, and helped create the conditions for a genocidal monster. 

Maybe not, though. Maybe everyone in the Middle East will leave the ideas and beliefs they have nurtured and clung to for 1400 years, and decide on a definition of reason that coincides with Neil deGrasse Tyson's. 

Maybe everyone will join #Rationalia. That's reasonable, right? 

Book review: Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

What is one supposed to do with doomsday scenarios?

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind charts our species' decline farther back than any big history book in recent memory. Our prolonged doom didn't begin in 1945, with the advent of earth-killing weapons technology. Homo sapiens, the wise person, was mastered by the simple grain 12,000 years ago, and we've been paying for it in disease, back-breaking labour, and inequality ever since.

It's a dire interpretation of something that eventually brought us medicine, religion, and every social revolution we can think of. And it's a sympathetic viewpoint: despite what humans have earned in the 70,000 years since the Cognitive Revolution, none of what we have now changes what it took for us to get here. Tell a dead, 19th-century child with a lung full of coal dust that his distant relatives would go to school instead of being forced to work in a mine. Harari doesn't stop there, though. The future has the potential for far worse scenarios, and this could include our extinction to the god-like beings we will become.

Harari has a very clinical imagination, following very scientific lines of thought in interpretation and prediction. It's an interesting display of the imagination Harari believes made us the dominant species. Homo sapiens has excelled because we have the ability to use our imaginations to create large systems of cooperation. From agrarian settlements to empires to religion to capitalism, all are collectives that rely on us to believe they exist.

Harari's thoughts make for a thrilling if bewildering read, and whether or not he is correct in all areas covered - not just anthropology, his specialty, but economics, sociology, science, and psychology - is for the reader to investigate. If anything, it's a book that motivates us to try and find the truth ourselves. It's a starting point, the beginning of a social conversation he wants us to have. We can't go back and alter our history, but maybe we can adjust it going forward.

Harari doesn't have faith in this, really. We advertently and inadvertently killed off every one of the species related to us - Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, homo hiedelbergensis, etc., etc. - so it's only fitting we end up killing ourselves. The advances we've made in science and medicine will only create more inequality between the classes, but it might also give us a better human. This better human will be our next step, a species created by our intelligent design.

Sapiens might leave the reader with more questions than answers. That's probably the point of Harari's doomsaying about the past and future. As he says, there is no justice in history. We might be able to stave off this aphorism for our future selves; it'll just kill the Sapiens in the process.

Confronting the Ahistoricism of New Atheism

New Atheist culture is becoming very hard to defend. It's not the anti-theism, though that can be overbearing; it's the rhetorical depths the authors will go to in order to find historical anti-theism, as if it's needed as a defence.

Case in point: The God Delusion is a book with some good points to be made on the nature of religion, but it's smothered in so much secular sanctimony it's hard to take the book all that seriously. It's easy to see why the book is such a favourite for Internet atheists, what with every sentence written as if meant to be slapped on a picture of the universe, but Richard Dawkins' book is hardly a classic.

And The God Delusion does something far more egregious than simply being smug, something which proves that Dawkins, when forced to talk about something outside his purview, couldn't do more than a cursory Internet research. He relays a bunch of Founding Father quotes - from Ben Franklin, James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson - to show that they weren't pious, God-fearing people, but rather reasonable deists who mistrusted religion.

Bill Maher did the same thing in Religulous, and a quick glance at Reddit's Atheism subreddit makes it clear that these quotes have gained traction. They are also almost 100% inaccurate. Dawkins' quotes come from page 43 of The God Delusion:

• John Adams: “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." Here it is in context: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, “this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!! But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion in this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell." Huh, looks like he meant, you know, the opposite. 
• Benjamin Franklin: “Lighthouses are more useful than churches.” Possibly intended to paraphrase a story he relayed to his wife about a dangerous night at sea, but not actually said by him. 
• Thomas Jefferson: "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." Close, but not as damning. Jefferson, to Joseph Priestly: "...those who live by mystery & charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy, the most sublime & benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man, endeavored to crush your well earnt, & well deserved fame."
• James Madison: “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” This one's accurate; it comes from a speech given to the Virginia General Assembly in 1785. Madison's religious life is up for interpretation, and was probably close to that of Jefferson's deism, but the speech from which this quote comes from does attack the mingling of religion and government, not an attack on religion itself. 

With this, and after Cosmos' reinterpretation of the story of Giordano Bruno, atheists, skeptics, and freethinkers are quickly going to gain a reputation as people who don't care about accurate history. I understand why they regurgitate these quotes. The "other side" uses this manipulative tactic, and uses it well. The Founding Fathers have a special place in American Christian mythology, where they are regarded as earthly saints who enshrined Judeo-Christian principles in the character of their country. David Barton, Mike Huckabee, Southern school boards, and other culture warriors seem to be making inroads with the appeal to past religiosity tactic. If you can find "atheism" in the fundamental character of America, you can counter the theocratic historians and keep religion and government separate.

So sure, it's understandable. But it's not condonable. For people hung up on reason and skepticism, Maher, Dawkins, and their acolytes sure swallowed these quotes without any vetting process. Whatever their actual religious beliefs, which are far more nuanced than either side's interpretation, the Founding Fathers didn't make it a "Christian" nation, what with Article VI, no mention of God, Jesus or the Bible in the Constitution, etc. Some were men of devout faith, some were not, and they came together to make a nation that would, one day anyway, welcome people of all beliefs under the rule of law, because they knew that religious freedom was important. This should be enough, and we don't need to wrangle enough secular-humanist quotes to fight fire with fire. Real history is on the side of those fighting for church-and-state separation.

And while looking to the thoughts and conjectures of Madison, Jefferson, and all the others is good, it's not the final say on anything, be you Christian or atheist. Appeals to tradition are the weakest sorts of defences. Atheists shouldn't leave one cult of a fictitious personality, only to set up cults of real ones. The label "freethinker" should mean we aren't obliged to follow anyone; we should be able to argue against laws based on religion without appeals to men who also thought slavery wasn't a sin.

If we must, though, fine. Here's a letter from TJ to Virginian lawyer and author Samuel Kercheval:

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

There! Now we've been given the right, by the divine authority of the Author of the Declaration of Independence, to change the way we think about laws and freedom. Now we can blaze our own trail. So many people have left religion so that they wouldn't have to be beholden to the thoughts of past lives. Why are so many now insistent on doing just that?

Best Movies Of The Year in a Few Words

Best movies of the year, little analysis:

10. Tangerine
Shot on iPhones, so raw, but also funny, tense, moving.

9. Brooklyn
Quiet tension as big/important as any violent thriller.

8. Bridge of Spies
See previous entry, and Spielberg DOES IT AGAIN!

7. The Revenant
The hard work is on the screen.

6. It Follows
A serene horror film, eerily beautiful.

5. Spy
Rose Byrne in everything, now.

4. Ex Machina
Frankenstein for Apple era.

3. Spotlight
Great journalism, movie.

2. The Hateful 8
Excruciatingly amazing.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road
C'mon.


Other stuff:

Outside of critical reflection:
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
I can't really put Star Wars on any list. I can see its flaws and holes and whatever else makes it not very unique. Whatever. I was predisposed to get all giddy at hearing the theme and stuff like "Chewy, we're home." I'm going to watch it more often than any other movie on the previous list (save maybe Mad Max).

Best surprise:
The Peanuts Movie
If you got all up-in-arms about the uses and abuses of Charles Schultz's timeless characters, as I did when I saw the first trailer, don't worry. This is a movie that succeeds in using the good-natured humour and philosophy of Peanuts in a way that celebrates Charlie Brown and the gang, with absolutely no Madagascar-esque pop-culture B.S. for the "in-the-know" parents. Even if it gets some of the basic facts wrong - I get why they put Linus and Lucy in the same class, but come on - it's not enough to sink it.

Biggest disappointments:
Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man
These movies stank. I eat this Marvel Cinematic Universe garbage up with a spoon, but Ant-Man wasn't very funny or all that original, as I was hoping with this different type of hero. And Age of Ultron just rehashed everything from the first Avengers. You could almost see Joss Whedon getting super tired of all this stuff half-way through. No longer will I get my hopes up for all-CGI action hero blockbusters.

Most looking forward to for 2017: 
Captain America: Civil War
It looks really cool.

Reel History 15: Oil and the Wrath of God: There Will Be Blood

Oil and the Wrath of God: There Will Be Blood

"I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed."

Daniel Plainview

"What is the chief end of man?--to get rich. In what way?--dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must."

Mark Twain, 1871

"Whoever loves money never has enough;

whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.  

This too is meaningless."

Ecclesiastes 5:10

There Will Be Blood is a deeply religious epic. It does not comment on metaphysics, and though our pastor antagonist is made to proclaim that God is a superstition, the movie doesn't care to make an argument for or against this statement. What it is is a commentary on the advancement of America's religious society, and what happens when greed bludgeons God to death with a bowling pin. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

The pantomime currently playing out on America's right is the movie's lessons in action. Candidates are racing to humble themselves unto the voting consumer, hoping to be seen as the most authentic Christian free marketeer. The former label is losing its power this electoral season, and not because of any secular conspiracy to sand-blast God off every public monument. Those who are offering themselves as God's preferred candidate are being left behind in a cloud of acceptable bigotries and faux-history, the very things they helped popularize. Ted Cruz says that "any president who doesn't begin his days on his knees isn't fit to be president," his wife adding that "the God of Christianity is the God of freedom, of individual liberty, of choice and of consequence." Meanwhile, Donald Trump is winning primary after primary, mumbling out some form of religiosity as much to protect his personal brand from his own past as to get the Christian vote. He doesn't really need to, though, because he's covered nicely by playing to the base's inherent hatred for Muslims and Mexicans. Trump and Cruz and the rest of them perpetuate the fiction that individuality and enterprise are Christian principles, while the collective is still in need of protection from the secular and un-Biblical, which are deemed "un-American." Trump just doesn't feel the need to humble himself to any god that isn't himself, the Christianity of America making it easy for this billionaire to get away with it. Regardless of its outcome, these candidates continue a century's old political game, and There Will Be Blood is a fable about this game's beginning. 

The movie is about the rise and fall of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a silver prospector turned oil magnate whose ambition is only matched by his nemesis, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano). Sunday runs the church on his family's property, a property that sits on an "ocean of oil." The competition between the two, and their many attempts to control the other, form the dramatic basis of the movie. But does the movie's writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, say it's about?

"The politics of power, amassing power, amassing wealth," he told Marc Maron on the WTF podcast. "What's the difference between survival and ambition? They are born with something above and beyond. You feel there was never going to be enough. The agreement between the godless and the faithful, struck a bargain, but always suspicious. [It's] the birth of American industry, and the hustle is a part of that."

This hustle, this agreement between the godless and the faithful, can trace its beginning to two men who gained wealth and power despite their religion, not because of it. California was the place for new religious movements in the early 20th Century, as mass migration gave many a preacher and snake oil salesman new audiences. But it wasn't so much the migrants moving into California that gave modern American Protestantism the resources it needed to thrive and spread, rather the wealth that was in the ground. Currently, the state is third in American oil production, behind Texas and North Dakota, but in 1903, it was the leading state. The late 1800s saw a boom in oil production and a scramble for land, and by 1920, seven years before TWBB's conclusion, production had reached 77 million barrels. Oil was, and is, big business in California.

This big business was behind a major series of essays published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, authored by some of the leading Protestant theologians of the time. These were a stirring defence of conservative Christianity in the face of a number of ungodly movements: modernism, historical criticism, evolution, etc. Three million books were distributed, for free, to church leaders around the county, setting the course for the militancy of American Christian fundamentalism and the acceptable opinions of the future. "These books were a public symbol of the coherence and continuity of the interdenominational movement known as conservative Protestant evangelicalism," says the institute, now known as Biola University, of their crowning achievement, The Fundamentals. They provided the intellectual basis for a movement that would find a larger audience with the First Red Scare, when people clung to religion and free enterprise as antidotes to godless Bolshevism.  

Supporting Biola University and The Fundamentals were two brothers, Lyman and Milton Stewart. They had made their money in the Union Oil Company of California, and they meant to use it for God. Out of their influence came a new generation of theologians who opposed modernism and supported Christian governance. Attempting to spread their very conservative evangelicalism, Milton funded missionary work in China; it was Lyman who had the most impact on the United States. In addition to The Fundamentals, he published and distributed William Eugene Blackstone's Jesus is Coming, a book that helped popularize a Biblically literal, Zionist millennialism. Millennialism is the belief that Christ will come back and literally rule a Messianic kingdom on earth for a thousand years, and without this belief, "there could not possibly be a Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, PTL Club, Jerry Falwell, and Moral Majority, or any of a myriad of similar personages and movements," says Gary Wills in his book Head and Heart: A History of Christianity in America. Without the Stewarts, there could not possibly have been millennialism.

It's into this history that There Will Be Blood digs deep. The director is sort of obtuse about the philosophy behind TWBB, but if it has a political motivation, I would interpret it as saying that the brothers Stewart have failed and were always doomed to fail. To combine wealth and power with the inherent humility of Christianity is a flawed plan, one that only helps the wealthy. Two scenes betray this message, and they are connected thematically by the force of the Third Movement of Brahms' Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 77. 

The first begins with Eli asking Daniel his permission to bless the newly erected oil well; Daniel agrees to mollify Eli and his church, but at the last minute usurps his prayer dedication, instead taking the time to make a pointed reference to Eli's abusive father. This is the first instance of direct conflict between Daniel and the church, and the back and forth becomes increasingly desperate as they try and get what they need from the other. Daniel even agrees to be baptized in order to obtain a crucial parcel of land owned by one of the congregation's most devout members. It's a scene that not only shows Daniel's deviousness, but also the movie's sense of humour, which I don't think gets enough credit. 

The second scene I'm referring to ends the movie: Eli, who has been out of Daniel's life for many years on "mission work," returns to the secluded millionaire a penitent sinner, grovelling for a deal that would give him the money he needs to continue his work. Instead of money, Daniel gives him a cold truth: he "drank his milkshake", sucking the oil right from under Eli's land. He then bludgeons the snivelling Eli to death with a bowling pin, the pastor simply an annoyance to him now. "I'm finished," he tells his butler in weary triumph, the final words of the movie moving right into Brahms. It's a powerhouse finale. 

Warning: this one's a teensy bit brutal. 

It's a finale that resonates today. The Protestant elite of the Seventies and Eighties, those ancestors of The Fundamentals, believed that by controlling the political discourse, they could make the sin of greed a virtue. TWBB dismisses all this as foolhardy and evil. American Christian culture has paved the way for someone like Donald Trump, who only has to fake his way through a baptism to get that much-coveted land. The recent scuffle between Trump and His Holiness Pope Francis, promptly followed by Trump winning the Evangelical vote in South Carolina, highlights what makes American Christianity a different take on religion altogether. It believes that wealth can be subjugated and turned into a useful tool to spread the good news.

After all, America is the land of prosperity gospels, Joel Osteen and John Maxwell, a place where the camel can go through the eye of a needle and come out a superior person. The poor are unemployed because "benefits keep people from going and finding jobs," says indicted Congressman and noted scumbag Tom DeLay. We have "rewarded laziness and called it welfare," prays one minister before the Kansas legislature, never mind that Jesus asked his followers to sell all they owned and give the money to the poor. Most Republicans believe that poor people are poor because of "a lack of effort on his or her part," while the wealthy are wealthy because of "hard work." They have neglected the most humble teachings of Jesus in order to accept the most bravado parts of the American myth as Truth.

And that's because the godless and the faithful are not so different when it comes to power. Comparing Daniel and Eli, we see two fixed entities, the stasis of their characters revealing so much. Their ambitions, goals, and ideas never change, even after they've succeeded in taking what's theirs. What changes is circumstance, the alienation that comes with constantly going after more. After casting off his adopted son, H.W., who he accuses of being a competitor after H.W. decides to go off on his own, Daniel is alone. Eli is alone, too, bankrupt and scheming, struggling to make it as a preacher who wants nothing more than to feed his ego with money. Money to buy the church, money to attract the congregants, money to be the charismatic preacher of the faith.

In the end, it consumes him, much as it's consuming America today.



Sources:

Head and Heart: A History of Christianity in America by Garry Wills 

https://philosophynow.org/issues/74/There_Will_Be_Blood

http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18911017.2.61

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/bill-moyers-and-ross-dout_b_1441744.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals

http://now.biola.edu/news/article/2013/feb/25/biolas-fundamentals-still-relevant-today/

https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/torrey_ra/fundamentals/71.cfm 

The Awful Magic of Paring Down Your Book Collection

I am not a wealthy man.

This means, among other money-related things, that I do not live in a big house with a massive library, with books that can only be reached by sliding ladders and big comfy chairs in which to read them. I am a man with limited space, and it was high time I did something about reclaiming some of it from myself. After all, regaining land is in my blood; just ask the North Sea how the Dutch go at taking what's theirs.

Now, this comes right after Christmas, my birthday, and a sort-of kind-of book-buying binge late in December, so my work is cut out for me. I need motivation. The infamous Marie Kondo seems to know the score. Kondo is about as ruthless as they come, a professional tidier and author who claims to own only 30 books, some of which probably aren't even her own (her most famous is The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, currently cluttering up more than 2 million bookshelves around the world). Reading interviews with her and reviews of her book, you get the sense Marie Kondo isn't so much a professional with a unorthodox job as she is the leader of a cult. To her, clutter is an affliction, and she professes to be something akin to the cure. She is the Bane to my bookshelves' Gotham.

"Surrounded by the things I love." "Putting my life in order by putting my things in order." Kondo's messages seem pretty good, and I think I can aspire to them. Stuff is just stuff, right? You're conned by market forces and societal pressure into thinking you need a certain amount to fit in with the Western lifestyle, so you place attachments on things. And if tidying up by losing these attachments is a magical art, then it's something I am born with. If Harry Potter has taught me anything, it's that a book in and of itself can't teach you magic. You are born with or without it, you're a wizard or a Muggle. I need to find out which one I am, because Lord knows a half-giant in a motorcycle isn't coming to cart me off to the Hogwarts School of Getting Rid of Shit.

If you look at my collection, you'll notice it isn't exactly huge. I'm sure many reading this have far larger collections, and given the one-upmanship common in nerds, will cast aspersions on mine not being big ENOUGH, let alone something that needs cutting down. But I am a man who lives in an apartment where the ceiling fan is a constant threat to my brain function. I'll have to move this July, and books are heavy.

A collage of books (note: that is not Nazi propaganda in the middle picture)

A book collection is harder to scale down because of what the book means. The book is, to many people, a fetishized object. Not just certain books, like a good book you enjoyed, but the book in general. A collection of words put on pages and bound together. Neil Gaiman believes books have genders and that books are sacred. Makes sense: they have their own personalities, their own ideas - they are, at the very least, the most valuable by-product of other people's minds. 

I'm inclined towards Gaiman's position, because I love books, but only inclined, which makes me susceptible to other reasoning. And so comes to the process of tidying. I'll need to discover that magic within me, and so to make the process easier, I broke down potential goners into four categories:

1. Books I don't need
2. Books I won't ever read again / won't ever get to
3. Books in garbage condition
4. Books I don't like 

The first category could take care of everything. If I can mercilessly send everything I don't need to the book gulag, then who cares about the rest of the categories?

So then: what constitutes need? I assume I only really need what Abraham Maslow tells me I need in his neat little pyramid; I'm not smart enough to break into some high-minded original idea of what need is. If books don't fit somewhere in the hierarchy of needs, then out they go.

The powerful grain storage building of needs

Breaking it down: books don't constitute a physiological need, because they are very low in essential vitamins and minerals; they might not meet my safety needs, except for maybe a large, heavy one for protection; they don't really increase my feeling of love and belonging, even though many do feel a bit like family. On the face of it, that seems stupid.

Esteem works; I do take some pride in my book collection, and the knowledge therein helps me feel free and self-confident. I like discussing books with fellow book lovers, and yes, there's some showing off, can't deny really that. And owning certain books does help me feel self-actualized, in that being a book person forms part of my identity! So there is an establishment of need: I don't need books to live or survive, but I do need them to thrive and be the kind of person I want to be.

So I won't be tossing out all my books. Relieving. But this ruthless thing won't be very easy.

But do they need to be physical? Maybe I don't need books, but what's in the books. I own a lot of the classics, only some of which I have read more than once. The thing with classics is, all of these books one could get at a local library or for a buck at a used bookstore, pretty much whenever one wanted, whenever one has the urge to reread them. And many of them are now in the public domain. I could just go ahead and store all the classics I would like to read later in life on a digital reader and save myself some shelf space. Out goes Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and I've got some more shelf space!

To answer the previous paragraph's introductory question: yes. I made a short-sighted Kindle purchase a year or two ago, and I still have never completed a novel on it. This means there's another need involved, in that I need a physical copy of the book in my hands to actually read. I like the book as an object. I like seeing the progress physically, not represented as a percentage. I also like lugging them around, and the feeling of accomplishment when you've read an extra-super long one. It's like a trophy - Captain Ahab may never have reined in Moby-Dick, but it's like I've got him stuffed and sitting in my living room. Besides, I love the covers. I have a real weakness for Penguin editions. Look at them, they're beautiful!

A fuzzy photo of some of them

And though there's no real need to keep the ubiquitous classics, it'll be strange to want to read Jane Eyre again and then have to go out of my way to get a hold of a copy. Having them around makes me more inclined to reread them, too, and these are books that demand more than one go. 

And so Moby-Dick et al stay. Even if I won't reread them any time soon, it's almost guaranteed I will in the future.

This brings us to the second category: books I won't ever read again, or books I won't ever read in the first place. This one could also take care of things neatly. "Look at your bookshelves, Kondo decrees in her most emotionally fraught chapter, and accept that all those books you haven't read yet are books you will never read," says Laura Miller in her Slate review of Kondo's book. Having a penchant for lists that will lay unfinished as soon as my brain moves on to something else, I have a list of books in order of what I'll be reading for the next year. This could be a good way to see what to save. But if a book is not on that list, and I've read it before, and I can truly, deeply be cruel and admit I won't read it ever, well, what's the real point in keeping it?

And do I really need a 900 page biography of George Washington? A complete history of English-speaking peoples by Winston Churchill? A 1100-page book about New York City? C'mon. Put together, I've read maybe 20 pages of all of these. These will only impede my goal of becoming calm and living a simple life. My failure to read these books will only clutter up my life. Marie Kondo would toss them in a heartbeat.

Let's be honest: buying books is a disease. It's almost pathological. You can rationalize every purchase ten different ways in your mind, even more when you're low on funds. The feeling associated with buying a book is almost as great as the feeling of finishing a book. You see the same excuses used by record collectors, too, so maybe there's a beauty in holding onto something that is competing with technology and ultimately losing. Problem is, records are only a tiny fraction as thick as books.

So yes, I hoard books, but most of what I hoard is nonfiction, which have a definite edge on fiction as a kind of book to keep. It's not like you can actually store every bit of information found within thick nonfiction books in your head. With fiction, you just remember the gist of the storyline, themes that resonated with you, passages you liked, your favourite characters, simple things. Take down some notes if you don't want to write in the margins, and you're good to go. Reading a book about World War II means you've got to remember a hundred different dates, battles, and generals, in order to make sense of this world-defining event in history. So keeping the book about WWII makes more sense, because it can serve as reference. And who knows where I'll be at? Gigantic biographies take time to soak in; you can't just dash off 900 pages of Thomas Jefferson's life in an afternoon. Get real. 

Besides, Roger Ebert said it best: books do furnish a life. "You just never know. One day I may -- need is the word I use -- to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed." It's possible, and best to hold out for the future. 

So I've decided to keep Washington and Churchill et al. What's next?

Moby-Dick, we've decided is staying, but it deserves a spot for more than just that I like to hold on to it as a trophy. Apart from a cracked spine, it is in immaculate condition. I read it every day after work for a while, so it probably never left my home. And then there's my copy of East of Eden. It's battered from being carried around in my backpack, every time I open it another piece of the cover falls off, it's not really all that special - no super special cover, I didn't receive it as a gift, it's not signed by Steinbeck himself. I actually bought it at Value Village. It's about as common an edition of the book as one could find.

I could get rid of the ratty books now, and when the urge to read them again struck me, I could pick up a new, slick-looking edition! Saves me space in the meantime, and I'll be building a new and improved library when I've got a larger pad.

It's a nice idea, but here's where Gaiman's ideas start making sense. This admittedly crappy-looking book is the edition I read. East of Eden is my favourite book of all time. It's sprawling, gorgeously written, and dives deep into faith, class, and meaning in religion at a time when I was doing the same. It was a novel I needed. I could never part with the copy that revealed to me so much wisdom.

And that's why I want to continue owning books, and what makes paring down the library so difficult. I don't agree with Neil Gaiman about the book being a sacred object, though the degree to which I disagree makes the disagreement pointless. I don't think all books are sacred; I think my books are sacred. Books become something special once you've released the story. The act of reading, and what it can do for you, is the special part. A book is a book until you've read it. Then it becomes a part of you. Or, if you hate it, it's just another book, but it still fills you with some sort of understanding. A local chain bookstore could burn down, and it would be awful, but I'd still be less broken up about it than if my childhood collection of beat-up Calvin and Hobbes books was destroyed.

So East of Eden, and all like it, stay.

So I've determined to keep books I actually like. Bully for me. What about books I hate? I read a lot within certain parameters, so I did or will enjoy most of what I own (something I might want to work on). But two books I recently read stand out as rather unpleasant experiences: The Martian by Andy Weir and Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee. The former was unexpectedly disliked: it's hyped as one of the best science fiction books in recent memory, touted as funny and interesting and did I mention it's funny? I mostly hated it, the method of storytelling only undercutting the tension, and it was not nearly as hilarious as it's said to be. The less said about ...Watchman the better. So should they stay?

Should a personal library be uniformly books you enjoyed or would enjoy? Probably not. Mark Twain hated Jane Austen, but when he starts the famous quote with, "Whenever I take up Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility..."* you know he's still reading them, probably from his own collection. 

But Mark Twain was super wealthy. He had the space to keep all those wretched Jane Austen novels! Maybe in the future, when space in not a limited commodity, I can indeed hold on to books I actively disliked. But for now, The Martian and those similar to it can go. Given how well-liked the book is, it might find a great home.  

Twain's personal library (via ShortList)

So in the end, I could only bear to part with things I already have no positive connection to. While that's progress, I don't think it's much in the way of decluttering. I'm sorry, Marie, I'm just a Muggle. Reading your lessons through cursory Internet research did not convince me to be as ruthless as you are said to be. I am still a sad sack who fills his inanimate objects with meaning. I could never be as cruel as you.

I don't think you'd mind, really. I have failed, but my house "won't blow up." You'd think me silly, but you'd forgive my insolence.

Let's hope my back will forgive me come July.





* Full quote: 

Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along. ...

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.