Read More » If you haven’t read Jennifer Kahn’s lengthy piece about child psychopathy in this past weekend’s NY Times Magazine, “Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?,” it’s eye-opening to say the least. Perhaps not recommended for parents of small children…  Ms. Kahn profiles a few of what are officially classified as the “Callous Unemotional” or “C.U.’s”, children whose anti-social behavior includes both an inability to feel empathy and acute rage of the most calculated kind (which distinguishes them from other volatile children, who are more impulsive). It’s pretty chilling. But as gruesomely fascinating as the details are, more relevant to us are the pastoral implications, that is, how one might comfort such children and their parents. Here are a few excerpts from the piece, followed by a bit more commentary and a response that appeared on Slate:

Others fear that even if such a diagnosis can be made accurately, the social cost of branding a young child a psychopath is simply too high. (The disorder has historically been considered untreatable.) John Edens, a clinical psychologist at Texas A&M University, has cautioned against spending money on research to identify children at risk of psychopathy. “This isn’t like autism, where the child and parents will find support,” Edens observes. “Even if accurate, it’s a ruinous diagnosis. No one is sympathetic to the mother of a psychopath.”

“The thing that’s jumped out at me most is the manipulativeness that these kids are showing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “They’re not like A.D.H.D. kids who just act impulsively. And they’re not like conduct-disorder kids, who are like: ‘Screw you and your game! Whatever you tell me, I’m going to do the opposite.’ The C.U. kids are capable of following the rules very carefully. They just use them to their advantage.”

According to Waschbusch, calculated behavior like L.’s distinguishes so-called “hot-blooded” conduct disorders from more “coldblooded” problems like psychopathy. “Hot-blooded kids tend to act out very impulsively,” he added as we followed the children inside. “One theory is that they’ve got a hyperactive threat-detection system. They’re very fast to recognize anger and fear.” Coldblooded, callous-unemotional children, by contrast, are capable of being impulsive, but their misbehavior more often seems calculated. “Instead of someone who can’t sit still, you get a person who may be hostile when provoked but who also has this ability to be very cold. The attitude is, ‘Let’s see how I can use this situation to my advantage, no matter who gets hurt from that.’ ”

These differences, researchers say, are most likely genetic in origin. One study calculated the heritability of callous-unemotional traits at 80 percent. Donald Lynam, a psychologist at Purdue University who has spent two decades studying “fledgling psychopaths,” says that these differences may eventually solidify to produce the unusual mixture of intelligence and coldness that characterizes adult psychopaths. “The question’s not ‘Why do some people do bad things?’ ” Lynam told me by phone. “It’s ‘Why don’t more people do bad things?’ And the answer is because most of us have things that inhibit us. Like, we worry about hurting others, because we feel empathy. Or we worry about other people not liking us. Or we worry about getting caught. When you start to take away those inhibitors, I think that’s when you end up with psychopathy.”

Since psychopathy is highly heritable, Lynam says, a child who is cold or callous is more likely to have a parent who is the same way. And because parents don’t necessarily bond to children who behave cruelly, those children tend to get punished more and nurtured less, creating what he calls “a self-fulfilling prophecy.” “It reaches a point where the parents just stop trying,” Lynam said. “A lot of the training is about trying to get these kids’ parents to re-engage, because they feel like they’ve tried it all and nothing works.”

Anne admitted to me that this had been her experience. “As horrible as this is to say, as a mom, the truth is that you put up a wall. It’s like being in the army, facing a barrage of fire every day. You have to steel yourself against the outbursts and the hate.”

“I’ve always said that Michael will grow up to be either a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer.” Told that other parents might be shocked to hear her say such a thing, she sighed, then was silent for several seconds. “To them I’d say that they shouldn’t judge until they’ve walked in my shoes,” she said finally. “Because, you know, it takes a toll. There’s not a lot of joy and happiness in raising Michael.”

On Slate, Amanda Marcotte sniffed out the disturbing double-standard at work here. Namely, our cultural sympathy normally extends to those who “aren’t to blame” for their condition — she makes the controversial comparison between the parents of children with autism and parents of these so-called psychopaths. Even though the science seems to be indicating that both diagnoses are neurological in nature, one condition garners sympathy and one does not, revealing some uncomfortable underlying emotional factors (calling Jonathan Haidt!). Not having any grasp of the precise factors at work, I’m not qualified to comment on that specific comparison. However, the notion that sympathy is directly correlated with the inability to control your problems hits a bit closer to home. The idea being that “nurture” is something we can control and “nature” something we can’t, which has always struck me as one of the more superficial assumptions in our culture. Laying aside the obvious objection that no one chooses their parents (or their kids), a cursory understanding of original sin is helpful. Parents are just as susceptible to Adam’s inheritance as their children. They are dealing with just as many reflexive subconscious instincts as anyone else. But that doesn’t make those instincts somehow good or positive ones. It doesn’t exonerate them, regardless of age. Far from it. This is the crucial aspect missing from so much of this literature: the reality that something can be both beyond our ability to control it and subject to judgment. The hope of the Gospel, after all, is that we are forgiven even for those things that we can’t control, which also tend to be the things we most need forgiveness for.

In other words, even if psychopathy were correlated exclusively to “nurture” factors, from a Christian point of view, there would still be both 100% culpability (AKA non-justifying honesty about the depth of trouble here) and 100% compassion (the God who sympathizes–and identifies–with the least sympathetic). Otherwise you get into this cruel game of parsing just how much is a parent’s fault, and how much is in the DNA (as if that doesn’t have to do with the parents…), i.e. how much compassion am I allowed to show this person, etc? It’s not only agonizing, it’s something we by definition will get wrong, since our evidence will always be partial. If original sin puts people on an equal footing of both inherited and inflicted trouble, the Cross unhooks them from the hamster wheel of deserving. Compassion shall be our watchword!

In fact, most social discourse around psychopathy is still demonizing and utterly unsympathetic to the parents, who are often blamed for the condition. It struck me as an interesting logic hole in our cultural narrative around mental illness, since the usual assumption is that sympathy for mental illness is directly correlated with inability to control your problems. Psychopaths give lie to that narrative. Turns out that we sympathize more with austistic people than psychopaths because we feel empathy for the struggles of autism, but psychopaths just make us angry. There’s no logic or rationality in play, just pure emotional reasoning, and the parents of psychopaths are the victims.

Parents of autistic children were upset with me for daring to compare their plight to that of psychopaths, which only makes sense if you see those others as beneath you. Others cast around looking for a “good” reason that we care about autistics but not psychopaths. Others attached themselves to irrelevant details; that the exact brain chemistry is different in psychopaths and autistics should be obvious, but to the larger point, it’s irrelevant. I was just interested in the fact that there’s no relationship between how much we care about those with a mental disorder and how much those with it can help having it. Turns out that a lot of people are willing to expend a lot of effort at defending the greater levels of sympathy we have for autistics and their parents over psychopaths and their parents, even though both groups of people are in similar situations of facing a biological disorder that manifests as a mental illness for which no real cure is available. That there’s better treatment options for autism only makes this cultural calculation more chilling; for parents of psychopaths, there isn’t much hope at all.

One final note: I hate to say it, but completely absent from this discussion is the topic of evil, which is admittedly not a neuroscientific comfort zone (a conclusion explored with some help from Christopher Hitchens here). But it certainly has some implications when it comes to culpability and compassion. Hollywood, of course, seems to be peculiarly obsessed with it these days, especially as it applies to children…

Read More » As you may (or may not) have noticed, we have a few car nuts ’round these parts. Witness here, here and here. Ok, ok, so I wrote all of those posts, but that’s beside the point. Mockingbird has always held, as one of the corollaries to its obsession with the Gospel, that the imputed righteousness of Christ sets us free to love what we actually love, rather than what we ought to love. Hence the occasionally “random” nature of the blog. Dave encourages each of us to write not only on theology, but also to throw in a periodic nod to Axl, or the NBA playoffs, or Jeremy Clarkson.

That being said, I have always sought some solid point of contact between my car fetish and my theological commitments, some justification for my inner child. So imagine my delight when I launched autoblog this morning (from my bed) and found the following article: Salon Columnist Asks “Is it Ethical to Drive Stick?”. Jackpot!! The piece did not disappoint.

In blatantly religious (tongue firmly in cheek) language, David Sirota recounts how his manual-tranny birthright was passed down through the generations, and forged in the fire of fatherly admonishment. “Through the experience,” he writes, “I learned to consider my stick-shifting skill a special talent with transcendent value.”

He also learned to look down on those who did not possess his automotive righteousness, not only for their ineptitude, but also for their wastefulness:

Of course, in the intervening years I’ve had the chance to drive an automatic transmission. But that has always felt a bit like playing a post-Konami Code game of Contra — a bit too easy, a bit too idiot proof, a bit too, shall we say, inauthentic. On top of that, the automatic always seemed like a wasteful luxury because it always was more expensive and less fuel-efficient. That difference consequently added an ascetic populism to the inherent machismo of the engine-revving manual transmission.

Imagine his horror, then, when he discovered that the game had, perhaps, shifted (pun intended), that the law
by which he had been justified, the law of the car guy, had been superseded by a new law, the oft-mentioned (on Mockingbird, at least) law of environmentalism (see here, here, here and here):

In the past, the stick shift was an all-but-guaranteed fuel saver. But not anymore. As AOL Autos notes, computer technology has advanced to the point where “automatics have become so efficient that most of the time their fuel economy is on par with manuals — and in some cases even better.” USA Today notes that such a trend may eventually erase the long-term price differential between manual and automatic transmissions, meaning the manual will lose its frugal-chic appeal. Meanwhile, according to AOL, new technology also boosts automatics’ overall performance (read: speed), meaning many driving aficionados have come to prefer the automatic over the manual.

NOOOOO! Sirota immediately recognizes the ramifications for his left-footed righteousness, which suddenly seems like filthy rags:

Thanks to all this, on the days I don’t bike to work and instead fire up my 11-year-old Saturn and shift it into first gear, I no longer feel so righteous or populist. I feel like part of the problem — not just because I’m driving a fossil fuel-dependent vehicle, but also because the manual transmission seems like a silly relic.

And yet, he can’t deny that he loves what he loves, and thus begins his search for a new form of self-justification, the mental gymnastics of which are breathtaking to behold:

I can’t let go of my love for the stick — or maybe “can’t” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “don’t want to” is more appropriate. If the automobile is still one of the key chronological markers in a typical American’s life (and, unfortunately, it still is), the stick shift is a special symbol of our general heritage, and my specific family traditions.

That’s why I was happy to see that there remains one significant reason to still love the manual transmission — a reason that’s substantive, rather than just aesthetic or experiential. In the age of distracted driving, many believe the stick shift might encourage kids to stay focused on operating their vehicles, rather than operating their smartphones. The idea is that because a manual transmission requires special attention to operate, it doesn’t allow for as much multitasking as an automatic.

While there’s no science (yet) to prove the manual-transmission-as-deterrent-to-distracted-driving hypothesis, the memory of those first harrowing stick-shift lessons — with my dad imploring me to “really focus, goddammit!” — suggests to me that there’s something to the theory.

At least, that’s what I’m going to tell myself to justify my stick-shift fetish — that is, until the automatic fully surpasses the manual in every other way.

What this article makes clear is the slavery we live in so long as we believe that every single one of our decisions, even something as silly as “stick or manual”, requires some justification. There can be no freedom in a self-justifying existence. Thank God that Jesus, as Paul says, has become our justification, so that we no longer have to justify ourselves, as poor David Sirota struggles to do.

So expect lots more car posts from your truly, and maybe even a few stupid gadget posts too, if I can work up the nerve.

So when this Day was ended / I was still not satisfied For I knew ev'rything I touched / Would wither and would die And Love is all that will remain / And grow from all these Seed; Mother Nature's quite a Lady / But you're the one I need Flesh And Blood need Flesh And Blood / And you're the one I need.

I once thought that repentance simply meant that when you do something bad, you mention it, say that you’re sorry, and move on. But a revisiting of the Bible on this subject has moved me to understand that repentance is, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of that deeper pool of evil that lies resident in every one of us and which is ready to explode at any moment.

If you know anything about MacDonald, you know that he knows about glory, failure, and grace. I’m thankful for men and women like him who recognize with clear…

Read More » Gordon’s MacDonald’s thoughts on “Vigorous Repentance”:

I once thought that repentance simply meant that when you do something bad, you mention it, say that you’re sorry, and move on. But a revisiting of the Bible on this subject has moved me to understand that repentance is, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of that deeper pool of evil that lies resident in every one of us and which is ready to explode at any moment.

If you know anything about MacDonald, you know that he knows about glory, failure, and grace. I’m thankful for men and women like him who recognize with clear eyes the “pool of evil” in us. Failure to do so results in an inability to understand oneself and others, and makes Christianity a bizarre and unfruitful exercise in self-improvement. Recognizing our fallenness, however, is step 1 on our way to being undone by the unsurpassable riches of God’s grace in Christ to sinners like you and me.

“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then — for me, anyway — a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren’t yet operational. There been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible. You don’t have to be Christian for the metaphor to make sense, psychologically speaking… Crazy.…

Read More » A few more excerpts from Mary Karr’s wondrously wise Lit: A Memoir, ht JZ:

“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then — for me, anyway — a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren’t yet operational. There been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible. You don’t have to be Christian for the metaphor to make sense, psychologically speaking… Crazy. What I’ve always feared the most — that I’d go cuckoo, like my mother — seems to be happening. I don’t hallucinate. I lack any grandiose Napoleonic fantasy. But every aspect of my existence has canted me deeper in a dark space. The mind I thought would save me from the trailer-park existence I was born to is not — as I’ve been led to believe — my central advantage.”  p. 260

“Vis-a-vis God speaking to me, I don’t mean the voice of Charlton Heston playing Moses booming from on high, but reversals of attitude so contrary to my typical thoughts — so solidly true — as to seem divinely external.” p. 276

“After ten months praying in a cave in Manresa, St. Ignatius received a vision that permitted him to see God in all things – the stated goal of his Spiritual Exercises, which are part of each Jesuit’s novitiate. This doesn’t innately appeal to me. Despite my conversion, I don’t much care to see God in all things. I prefer to find God in circumstances I think up in advance, at home in my spare time — circumstances God will fulfill for me like a gumball machine when I put the penny of my prayer into it. It’s not virtue that leads me to the Exercises but pain. Only a flame-thrower on my ass ever drives me to knock-knock-knock on heaven’s door. Pain, in my case, is the sole stimulus for righteous action.” (pp. 363-364)

Whedon: For me, I love genre because you can talk about things more intimately and specifically than you can in a family drama or a cop show without being didactic. You can absolutely get to the heart of something very weird and very personal because you have that remove…

I guess the thing that I want to say about fandom is that it’s the closest thing…

Read More » Joss “Mr. Avengers” Whedon was interviewed in Wired last week, and as you might expect, made some thought-provoking observations on ‘genre’ filmmaking, the creative process and self-justification as it relates to drama:

Whedon: For me, I love genre because you can talk about things more intimately and specifically than you can in a family drama or a cop show without being didactic. You can absolutely get to the heart of something very weird and very personal because you have that remove…

I guess the thing that I want to say about fandom is that it’s the closest thing to religion there is that isn’t actually religion. The love of something and what it’s trying to accomplish or mean are usually very separate. The people who are like, “Well you can’t do it. That staircase was seven steps, not five.” They totally missed the point of this. When I first met the comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis, we were talking about comics and he told me his favorite letter was, “Daredevil would never say that. Die. Die. Why can’t you just die?”…

Since I was writing stories just for myself in my room when I was 14, I was worried about the politics of them. Of course, the more I worry about the politics, the less I’m writing. If you’re not exploiting the dark side of something, if you’re not saying that the urge to objectify exists, you are not going to make a meaningful piece of work.

The reason I felt like I had an in that most of my classmates didn’t in my feminism classes was, I was a guy, first and last. Male gaze? I was wearing those goggles every day. I was the enemy. I absolutely knew what the enemy was. I had sympathy for the devil. Not in a horrific way, but in a normal way. Sometimes you need to celebrate the darkness.

Wired: In service of story.

Whedon: In service of story and in service of life. In service of story because you want to play on fear and you want to make people afraid, you want conflict, you want to make things sexy. You know, hopefully you want to be equal opportunity. Objectification, as we understand it, is reprehensible. Being attracted to somebody is necessary. And there’s somewhere in between there that’s where we’re going to live.

Wired: Fundamentally, aren’t movies just putting people up on a screen for other people to watch? There’s objectification built into the model.

Whedon: Objectification and identification are at war but they’re at war in the way that people are, that narrative is, that creates art and humanity and life. Like they have to be at war. You have to root for the girl and the monster. It’s something nobody wants to admit. Nobody ever wants to admit that there are two sides to anything. They either want to be right or — no, they just want to be right. Sorry, I don’t know of that many people that want to be wrong. But the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle.

And here’s a clip of Joss explaining his belief system (and the lack thereof). The scene he describes from Angel season 2 really is pretty ingenious. I don’t know many other filmmakers who consciously try to contradict themselves:

Looking to the endless riches of that groundbreaking and world-famed radio luminary This American Life, Richardson examines…

Read More » The wait is over! Ethan Richardson’s This American Gospel: Public Radio Parables and the Grace of God, Mockingbird’s newest book on the market, is available online here. For those lovers of all things public radio, all things Ira Glass, those in love with a good story–all of the above, none of the above–looking for a resource for church, or just looking for a summer read, This American Gospel is an indelibly refreshing look into the Gospel on the ins and outs of human experience.

Looking to the endless riches of that groundbreaking and world-famed radio luminary This American Life, Richardson examines their stories as powerful illustrations for and mimickings of that mysterious, upside-down world of the Christian Gospel. With stories of people hooked, bated, switched, trapped by the strife of human striving–with stories of people flipped, coddled, unbound, and undone by the violence of undeserved forgiveness; This American Gospel looks to the unremitting love of the cross from the honest experience of the American, the human life.

Below you will find an excerpt from the introduction, as well as Ethan’s breakout session at the most recent NYC conference.

This American Life is not a Christian show. Far from it. Ira Glass has always been quite candid about religious belief, clearly expressing his own atheism, not to mention skepticism about Christianity in particular. He said this to the Chicago Tribune in 2000:

I remember, even when I was growing up a little kid, it all seemed, especially the Christian version—arbitrary. That the entire universe would be created, and the system that was set up was: you could actually lead a perfectly good life, and a life organized around good deeds and caring for others, and yet if you simply didn’t accept Jesus himself, the Creator of the Universe would feel so vengeful about it that you’d be condemned to an eternity of torture. It just seemed like a really weird system. Like what difference would it make to the Creator of Everything? The whole thing seemed really arbitrary. Even as a kid, I felt like, “Well, if that’s the system: fine. I accept my damnation. I don’t think it’s a fair system. But fine.” I just don’t believe.

So the question remains: how do we plan to both celebrate the journalistic skill and accomplishment of a radio show whose host explicitly does not believe in God, while at the same time pointing to the message of the Gospel through that radio show, through its host, through his storytelling? Is that not the approach we just criticized? Hijacking a story and making it the story you want to hear? Much of the time this is the case. When a story is taken out of its context and used for an ideological end, it does both the story and its teller a disservice. This book intends to, instead, let the beauty of the stories speak for themselves. If these stories are good stories—and they are—then they will shed light on reality. And reality is evenly distributed. There is no distinction between what’s real for the Christian and what’s real for the non-Christian; the human condition applies across the board. The truth is the truth, regardless of what one believes.

More than anything, though, commenting on This American Life was irresistible—the stories themselves point to Christian understandings of love and mercy and forgiveness and grace in such overt and powerful ways that not writing about them was impossible.

On a different note, it could be said that This American Life episodes function as modern-day parables. Jesus mostly taught by way of story rather than straight-line argument. Stories give life to concepts—they ground meaning in experience, and do so without sacrificing the mystifying complexity of life. By illustrating how an idea has legs in the everyday world, one is suddenly able to see the connection with one’s own life, in a way that would not have been possible with direct, dare I say religious, instruction. This is the power of the parable. Besides being not-boring, a parable tells its own illuminating story, and its points of access are as endless as its listeners. This is why the particularity of the stories in This American Life are not lost on its listeners—their illustrative power connects with people at large, in their own peculiar complexities. They also turn the table on one’s propensity to grab at some kind of all-encompassing religious moral. As Robert Farrar Capon says of Jesus’ parables:

His ‘parables’ comprise far more than the specific utterances that the Gospel writers refer to by that name, and they occur in a surprising variety of forms . . . for all their charm and simplicity, his story-parables are not one bit less baffling. Once again, they set forth comparisons that tend to make mincemeat of people’s religious expectations. Bad people are rewarded . . . good people are scolded . . . God’s response to prayer is likened to a man getting rid of a nuisance . . . and in general, everybody’s idea of who ought to be first or last is liberally doused with cold water.

The hope with This American Gospel is to, with equal playfulness, expound on where these complicated illustrations are pointing. To that end, we have selected some of our favorite moments in This American Life’s tenure and applied them to the paradoxical and no-less-complicated realities of the Christian faith. In these stories we hope to hit upon that “foolish wisdom of God,” to shed some light on the Good News of Jesus Christ itself. It is likened to the one-way love of an adoptive mother and the violently abusive adopted orphan; to the murderer freed by a stand-in; to the ‘wet house’ where the only admission ticket for alcoholics is that they are, well, alcoholics. In these stories the heart of reality, the heart of God, is brought near. And who doesn’t want more stories, more illustrations, to bring us good news, and to bring that good news home?

CLICK TO BUY This American Gospel: Public Radio Parables and the Grace of God

Read More » 1. Why Is This Attractive Woman Breast-Feeding This Giant Child? asks Hannah Rosin over at Slate, in response to Time’s, um, eye-catching cover this past week. You know the one I’m talking about – at least you do if you’ve seen it (below). The story within, bearing the not-so-subtle title of “Are You Mom Enough?”, profiles the controversial world of radical attachment parenting and the man behind it, Dr. Bill Sears. Now I’m as big a proponent of breastfeeding as the next guy (…), so the reason I include the article here has nothing to do with developmental health or women’s rights, as important as those things may be. Instead, it’s relevant to us as a particularly inescapable present-tense example of cultural Law. We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again: if you think leaving church equates to getting out from under the strictures of crushing existential demand, think again. Indeed, as Rosin so accurately pinpoints, these standards of maternal righteousness have begun to take on Sermon-on-the-Mount-like proportions:

Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions. So, it’s not just enough to breast-feed but one has to experience “breast-feeding induced maternal nirvana.” And it’s not enough to snuggle—you have to snuggle enough to achieve a spiritual high… Once women were just expected to tolerate their babies, Betty Draper style, but now they are expected to experience “jouissance,” loosely translated as “orgasm.” And this is what makes the movement truly oppressive.

Lisa Belkin has an irenic response over at the Huffington Post that’s also worth reading.

2. On a related note, no doubt you’ve heard that illustrator and author Maurice Sendak died this past week. The Atlantic summed up part of Sendak’s counter-cultural legacy–his taking issue with contemporary understandings of childhood innocence (which also happen to be thoroughly un-biblical, one might add). He will be missed:

Sendak railed against what he perceived to be an insidiously overprotective parent culture. The evidence does suggest we adults sometimes take our good-natured desire to protect children from unpleasantness to perverse depths. I see it in the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting,” for instance—the misguided attempt to thwart all potential pitfalls through hovering omnipresence. We seek to foil internal darkness, too, by plying young people with antidepressants and anxiety medication. And we’re highly sensitive about showing children any sort of “challenging” material, even in cases when censorship verges on absurd.

But it is this expurgated account of childhood—what he called “the great 19th-century fantasy that paints childhood as an eternally innocent paradise”—that Maurice Sendak fought tooth and claw, horn and beak. He knew that children are unavoidably beset by grief, yearning, anxiety, and rage, the same wild and turbulent emotions that seize adult human beings...When fairy tales flirt with trouble, but avoid real consequences, they really work. And yet the possibility of straying too far—the Lindbergh scenario—haunts Sendak’s work. “Certainly,” Sendak told the Caldecott audience, “we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and intensify anxiety.” The child must return home safely for the story to have ameliorative power; Sendak criticized Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Andersen for veering into unnecessary cruelty. Still, he insisted that children are more complicated, tolerant readers than we think, and that they will surprise us in their ability to respond to difficult literature.

If you’ve never heard Sendak speak about his love for William Blake, it’s worth your time. Plus:

3. Elsewhere, Gawker and Gizmodo picked up an amusing report from the Harvard psychology department about the pleasure of self-disclosure (and implicit narcissism). According to their research, we enjoy talking about ourselves so much that we’re willing to forgo payment in order to do so. From the Gawker piece, ht RT:

Using MRI scans, the psychologists found that the regions of the brain associated with reward [the same area that responds to reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex] lit up like a Christmas tree when people got to talk about themselves.

[Moreover, the researchers] found that people enjoyed themselves more and were willing to give up more money when they thought their answers (either about themselves or others) would be shared with another person than when they were told their responses would be kept absolutely private.

4. NPR ran a fascinating if a bit tentative segment on the psychology of fraud called “Why Good People Do Bad Things.” Turn the title around, and you almost have a Mockingbird breakout (seriously: we have one in the archives from John Zahl called “Why Do Good Things Happen to Bad People?”). Talk about understatement:

Over the past couple of decades, psychologists have documented many different ways that our minds fail to see what is directly in front of us. They’ve come up with a concept called “bounded ethicality”: That’s the notion that cognitively, our ability to behave ethically is seriously limited, because we don’t always see the ethical big picture.

5. If you’ve seen The Avengers–which if box office numbers are to be believed, you probably have–then you saw the trailer for Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus. The NY Times published an article about the man behind Alien and Blade Runner (and… A Good Year), in which some of the film’s subtext emerged, and let’s just say it sounds interesting in a could-be-2001-could-be-Battlefield-Earth kind of way:

In news conferences and in conversation Mr. Scott has evinced sympathy for the notion — popular in some circles, including the Vatican — that it is almost “mathematically impossible” for life on Earth to have gotten to where it is today without help. “It is so enormously irrational that we can do this,” he went on, referring to our conversation — “two specs of atoms on a carbon ball.”

“Who pushed it along?” he asked. Have we been previsited by gods or aliens? “The fact that they’d be at least a billion years ahead of us in technology is daunting, and one might use the word God or gods or engineers of life in space.” And would we want to meet them again? Mr. Scott’s countryman the cosmologist Stephen Hawking has suggested that we should be careful Out There. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” Dr. Hawking said.

Mr. Scott agreed: “Hopefully they won’t visit.” As the movie suggests, however, we might not be able to resist visiting them, whether they like it or not.

6. Speaking of The Avengers, though, three cheers for Joss! Yes, The Hulk stole the show, and yes, Whedon’s dialogue coming out of Robert Downey Jr.’s mouth was a match made in heaven. And it’s a strange day indeed when the weakest character in a Whedon film is the female lead. Rolling Stone put out a pretty laughable ranking of all his projects (Dollhouse Season 2 was incredible! And Serenity behind season one of Buffy?! Puh-leeze. At least they get the top pick right). Thankfully, Joss himself provided a list of his top ten Buffy episodes over on EW. Amidst all the Whedon hype, if you’ve never read Kris Opat’s review of Joss’ ‘space-opera’ Serenity, it touches on a number of the reasons we keep featuring him on here. Actually, come to think of it, if you’ve never seen Serenity, best to do that before anything else.

7. In keeping with a rather bleak column this week, The Times also published an entertaining list of Books People Lie About. Top spot? You guessed it! Substitute the word “Bible” for “Corrections” in the second item and you have a pretty accurate statement as well, at least in my experience.

8. We’ll end on an upbeat note. Texas slugger Josh Hamilton speaks about his faith (and his problems with addiction) with remarkable humility and wisdom on ESPN. He gets going around the 5 minute mark:

P.P.S. We’re sending out our big 5th Anniversary appeal letter next week. To be sure you receive one, simply sign up for our mailing list! We are so grateful for our many supporters.

The Freakonomics crew put out a new podcast on selling souls this week, and boy was it a doozie. They featured a Christian from Oklahoma who boldly offered any atheist/skeptic/taker $50 for ownership of his soul. Sure enough, through the comments board on the Freakonomics webpage, he found a skeptic seller, and the two exchanged the money for an official contract of soul ownership. This set off a half-hour discussion around the following questions: can somebody sell their soul? Is it ethical? Is $50 a good bargain for a soul? What’s the market value for such a thing, and what does…

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The Freakonomics crew put out a new podcast on selling souls this week, and boy was it a doozie. They featured a Christian from Oklahoma who boldly offered any atheist/skeptic/taker $50 for ownership of his soul. Sure enough, through the comments board on the Freakonomics webpage, he found a skeptic seller, and the two exchanged the money for an official contract of soul ownership. This set off a half-hour discussion around the following questions: can somebody sell their soul? Is it ethical? Is $50 a good bargain for a soul? What’s the market value for such a thing, and what does ownership then imply?

Perhaps the best part of the show is the exchange between host Stephen Dubner and guest Michael Sandel, Harvard professor, author, ethics philosopher, and host of the PBS show Justice. The two go back and forth debating the moral implications of selling one’s soul or even understanding the soul as a commodity, and linking those things to the medieval practice of selling indulgences (yes, our man Luther gets a nod!) and the Morman practice of retrospective conversions (also known as the baptism of the dead). Some excerpts from the interview:

DUBNER: Indeed, and when we look back on that period of history now and Martin Luther nailing to the door of the church we think, oh thank goodness this is the kind of transaction [buying and selling souls & salvation] that we no longer are surrounded by. And yet here’s a guy hundreds of years later who on a scale of one at least is trying to reenact it. It’s different. This is a little bit different. There was not the sale of an indulgence to save the soul in the same way here. This was one person transferring his to another person. I’m curious do you have personally, morally, ethically through the lens through which you see the world have a problem with this transaction?

SANDEL: Well there are two possible problems and only one of them is moral. I suspect that most people would regard this commercial exchange either as absurd or as abhorrent, but not both. People will view it as absurd if they think that there is no such thing as a soul or if they think that the soul is the kind of thing that can’t conceivably be bought and sold in the first place. If you believe that about the soul then you’ll regard this as absurd but not as abhorrent. It would just be based on a mistake. If however you believe that there is such a thing as a soul, and if you believe that bartering in the soul, buying and selling it, it’s a kind of violation of a proper regard for the soul, then you will regard this not as absurd but as abhorrent, as transgressive, maybe even as a kind of sin, which brings out part of the general argument that I would make about markets. In order to decide where markets belong and where they don’t we have to sort out the hard underlying questions about the nature of the goods that money would buy. In this case you have to work out your theology. You have to decide what is the status of the soul, and is there any transgression in trying to buy or sell it? That’s why I say it’s either absurd or abhorrent depending on your underlying view of your status of the soul. You see what I mean?

Dubner, who self identifies as Jewish, and Sandel, a professor of ethics, hit so close to home in this back and forth to a gospel truth. To put the gospel in supply/demand terms, it seems that redemption through the blood of Jesus implies that our souls are of infinite value. Even putting aside the logistical question of selling one’s soul– after all, in Christian theology, the soul is first indebted to God’s enemies– the cross says your soul is worth a lot more than $50. If your soul is worth an infinite value, if it is priceless, than it must therefore be bought by something else of infinite value, a suffering servant’s cancellation of debts.

Sandel’s last comment is particularly insightful: where Dubner suggests instituting a reparation or penalty for the Morman Church’s practice of baptizing the dead, Sandel notes that such a deterrent becomes instead the cost of doing business if the demand is high enough. What was originally an obstacle meant to deter one’s demands becomes another hurdle to jump over toward one’s end in the free market. The cross event shows us that even the most serious deterrents to a loving God: sin, death, murder, rebellion, “badness,” flogging, crucifixion, all these things were worth enduring for the sake of our salvation. It’s funny that here too, as Sandel suggests, most people find such a cost to be either absurd or abhorrent.

Dubner, throughout the interview, innocently expresses an incomplete understanding of Christianity.  When the Oklahoma apologist offers $50 for a soul, Dubner expresses surprise that it’s a Christian and not an Atheist making such an offer.  But that’s what Christian God does- he buys souls that, for all accounts, aren’t worth saving, not because supply is low, but because His demand is high.

A piece by Charles Wheelan that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago has been the go-to status update for the collective Class of 2012, many of who find themselves lamenting their impending commencement exercises. With unemployment still above 8 percent and college graduates leaving their alma maters with an average of $25,000 of loans, it seems as though any commencement address has an uphill battle ahead of it. Normally, these 30-minute monologues remind graduates of their duty to make “the world a better place,” or more shamelessly, to remember to give back to the annual…

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A piece by Charles Wheelan that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago has been the go-to status update for the collective Class of 2012, many of who find themselves lamenting their impending commencement exercises. With unemployment still above 8 percent and college graduates leaving their alma maters with an average of $25,000 of loans, it seems as though any commencement address has an uphill battle ahead of it. Normally, these 30-minute monologues remind graduates of their duty to make “the world a better place,” or more shamelessly, to remember to give back to the annual fund. Wheelan takes a different approach: he looks at reality and offers some MBird-esque suggestions. While this enumerated list lacks the same ethos as DFW’s seminal classic “This is Water,” a similar message of humility permeates its simple suggestions. A couple of its highlights are worth a re-post.

Don’t make the world worse. I know that I’m supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I’m going to lower the bar here: Just don’t use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that “changing the world” also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

Both Calvin and Luther would be proud. The propensity to make things worse when acting on our personal, short-sighted behalves is a sad fact of human life, is it not? It doesn’t take much research to see the “good gone bad” in the news. In fact, I’m sure you could set up a Google RSS feed for that. Perhaps lowering the bar from “leave the world better than you found it” to “don’t make things worse” is a healthy antidote to today’s overwhelmingly ‘performancist’ mentality. Does this mean we shouldn’t try to make things better? Certainly not. Instead, maybe we could approach our jobs with the humility of a servant rather than a trailblazer.

Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

Don’t try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn’t, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.

When we try to be great, we take some nebulous Law of Greatness and begin the Sisyphean task of attempting to fulfill it. The end result is all-too-common: despair, shame, and guilt. What a relief to be told that we are not ‘great’! It certainly makes it a little easier to accept the grace of God. It reminds me of Romans 7:4-6, where Paul writes,

So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh,the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

Sometimes we tend to believe the elder brother and “that more insidious character” are one in the same but they are not.  Elder brother religion is simply a different manifestation of the same sin nature that produces profound prodigal waywardness.  From a standpoint of…

Read More » In keeping with the excellent article by Tullian Tchividjian over on the Gospel Coalition site about being self-righteous toward the self-righteous; a song by singer/songwriter Chris Knight came to mind.  The title of this post was chosen in order to bring to mind the parallels between sympathy toward “elder brother”-types and sympathy for a more insidious character.

Sometimes we tend to believe the elder brother and “that more insidious character” are one in the same but they are not.  Elder brother religion is simply a different manifestation of the same sin nature that produces profound prodigal waywardness.  From a standpoint of grace, then, both should elicit compassion.

Chris Knight is on to this.  Most Americana/Country outlaw-type artists define themselves against the “establishment” (i.e. their parents… like the hippies) or Moral Majority/upright-types.  What is produced can devolve into an unsatisfyingly (and, yet, oh-so-satisfying) self-righteous rant against the right-of-center.

Not Knight.  While as friendly to prodigals as anyone, he is also deeply sensitive to the sense of entrapment and limitation that is endemic in the elder brother population.  Why would he write such a song when it much more popular to denigrate them?  Well, I believe Knight has a real heart and a nose for universal suffering.

The song to which I refer is “Enough Rope”.  In it, Knight describes a guy who is sort of “forced” to stay close to home and begin the process of perpetual responsibility (remember Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility from Lake Wobegone?).

Hearing the song brings to mind the actual predicament of the elder brother in Luke 15.  Due to his misconception of the father, he feels compelled to stay at home and “slave” for his father.  Bitterness and resentment creep in until the whole project of love is thwarted.  Some of the same themes can be heard in the song which I believe helps us to connect with the elder brother’s frustrations.  Here are some of the lyrics that connect:

She told me she was pregnant on the day I turned 18.
I did what your supposed to do. I bought her a ring.
He didn’t have to ask us, but he asked us anyway.
We stood up and said, “I do.” what else were we gonna say?
What else were we gonna say?

There’s a tavern down the highway, I go to drink some beers
And wash down all I’m missin’ by hangin’ around here
Then I drive back to the trailer; I’ll make up with my wife
I kiss my sleeping children, and I get on with my life
Yeah I get on with my life

And the payoff in the chorus:

… you can’t hang yourself if you ain’t got enough rope.

The result… at least for me… is more understanding and a little more compassion.  Sympathy, if you will.

Read More » In line with the boomers-stickers speech from Wendell Berry, Christian Smith’s Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood is a sociological look into the hyper-relativist boom-ist mentality of today’s 18-23 year old. His book identifies five of the premier values of emerging adults today (consumption, sexual relativism, binge drinking, political apathy, etc.), all of which point to an infantilized adulthood, an adulthood priding itself on mobile acceptance, a conception of freedom which paradoxically kills it. Smith is a bit heavy on the criticism, to the point that his understanding misses empathy, as well as too much of the belief that a misunderstanding corrected could make the necessary change, but the overall prognoses are powerfully indicative of current (and yet very, very old) cravings. We hang our happiness on the “right to buy,” and that right to buy points you back to “whatever makes you happy.” It is a simultaneously flightless and groundless philosophy, that our consumption liberates, because that liberation hangs us up into a world all our own. More than this, though, there is an unwillingness in the emerging adulthood to make truth claims–that any decision is based on “whatever makes you (the individual) happy”–that that ‘whatever’ could be just about anything. My question: is this just emerging adults?

Again, this isn’t a slant in favor of judgmentalism, but in favor of the assent to objective truth. For Smith, Truth is truth universally but, as his study shows, this is not a popular philosophy of the young adult.

We find a vision for self-improvement, for growth and transcendence beyond the old. But the improvement in this case does not concern self or morals or social justice, but rather material lifestyles and personal consumption. Yet another emerging adult we interviewed reflected a similarly uncritical mentality:

I am the ultimate American when it comes to that, I mean, I got 500 bucks in my pocket one day, and two days later, I’m looking to make my next 500. I spend my money, man I am great for the economy. If I won the lottery I would stimulate the economy on my own. Because I spend my money that I don’t save, unless I set [a savings goal] of what I make, I spend.

…Another set of emerging adults did not talk about helping the economy but rather more individualistically about how shopping and consumerism make them feel good, help them be respected, and build self-confidence. Consider the following representative quote, for example:

It feels good to be able to get the things that you want and you work for the money. If you want something, you go get it. It makes your life more comfortable and i guess it just makes you feel good about yourself as well. You want to get some, you work for it and you can get it. I think it’s a good thing to buy what you want if you work for it, because when you work for something, then you gain that accomplishment, it’s not like you were just given money, I want to get this, you know, I’ll buy that. It’s like you actually work for that thing so you feel that you deserve it, you earned it. You earned that thing you wanted. You weren’t just given it.

…Okay, when I’m having a bad day, a bad week, whatever, there is nothing that makes me feel better about myself more than going and buying myself a whole new wardrobe. I feel like a better person, I feel prettier, I feel more intelligent sometimes, I feel cleaner, it’s just a great feeling. I feel self-sufficient ’cause I bought it on my own.

A third theme among emerging adults on the topic of mass consumerism is the avoidance of making any evaluative judgments of anyone’s consumption habits. It is entirely an individual matter and should be driven by whatever makes people happy. Thinking collectively about these concerns as a society is either inconceivable or illegitimate. It’s up to individual people. Consider, as examples, the following quotes. “I think everyone has what they like,” one young woman declared.

If you have a thousand shoes, that is all you. If you want a thousand shoes, cool, that is all what you want. I personally wouldn’t want a thousand shoes, I love shoes, but I wouldn’t want that many because I don’t value spending my money on that. But I don’t want to judge someone else and say you can’t or shouldn’t have that.

In response to the idea that a person might own 12 mansions and 20 cars, another emerging adult said, “I think it’s kind of silly, but hey, to each their own.” Yet another said to a similar question, “I don’t really have any positive or negative feelings towards the issue. People should get things if it works for them, if that’s what they want.” So is any amount that people buy too much? “No. I don’t feel like that. I think people should do what makes them happy.” She then continued:

I guess I don’t really think about consumerism as far as its effects on society. I think I don’t like to have too much stuff like clutter. I do get rid of stuff a lot. I like to shop. I’ll be honest with you. I am a woman. I like to go shopping. [But] I don’t really think  about long-term effects on society and mass production and mass consumption.

Finally, another only qualified the “happy individual” criteria with her personal problem with rich people who do not also give to those who have material needs:

I’m definitely a consumer. I like to buy things. I like to have things. Yeah, I think it’s great, capitalism and giving consumers choices are all good. I mean, you can have too many cars, too many boats, two planes, which is over the top. People can definitely get excessive in a lot of ways. There is definitely a limit. But it’s whatever makes you happy. If somebody needs all those things, then they need all those things. But if they’re not giving back to people who are more need, then, yeah, I’ve got a problem with that.

Yet even in this example, it’s still ultimately ‘whatever makes you happy.’

Read More » One rainy day last year I decided to do the Internet a favor and digitize Peter Bagge’s brilliant, contrarian essay, “In Defense Of (And Praise For) Mike Love.” Ever since, I’ve been waiting for the right time to post it, and the 50th anniversary of the band seems like as good an opportunity as any. It was originally published in Hate Annual #2 back in 2001, and despite sincere disagreements about some of the points he makes–indeed, about his main point!–it’s still hands-down the best piece of Beach Boys writing I’ve ever come across, capturing much of what makes the band such a bottomless well of fascination (Mbird- or otherwise), i.e. the astounding breadth of their talent and the absurd degree of contradiction (and humanity) at the heart of it all. There’s such a simultaneous abundance of ‘iustus’ and ‘peccator’ in their story, it really boggles the mind. Plus, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the advocacy of someone so universally detested scratches the grace itch. I’ve toned down a few of the obscenities [apologies in advance to those with mental disabilities] but otherwise, this is the entire thing, minus the excursus on the production genius of Carl Wilson. Which means it’s much longer than your average post. But if you’ve ever wanted a crash course in the singular charms of The Beach Boys, look no further! Of course, Mr. Bagge, if you’re out there, just say the word and we’ll take it down:

When I was still just a kid back in the 1960s, The Beach Boys posed something of a dilemma for me. The sound of their music appealed to me, but I was simultaneously turned off by their squeaky clean, fun-in-the-sun image. Even when I was 10 years old I fancied myself an outcast. I resented jocks and cheerleaders and anyone else who seemed well-adjusted and “normal,” and they seemed to be the people that the Beach Boys were making music for.

However, my best friend at the time had a hip, eccentric uncle who took notice of our obsessive passion for pop music, and he encouraged us to forget about all that cars and surfboard stuff and to let the Beach Boys’ music speak for itself. So we did, and by the early ‘70s they had become my favorite group. I liked EVERYTHING they did: Pet Sounds, Holland, Surfin’ USA; ALL of it. Not only did I love their singing, but I was also fascinated by the chameleon-like way they continually reinvented themselves – all the while remaining insanely cheery proponents of whatever it was they were selling at that moment, whether it was Hawaii’s killer waves or TM or practical footwear. I loved their entire shtick.

I also saw them perform live back in 1973, and that concert remains the most amazing musical performance I’ve ever seen in my life. They sounded fantastic, and their distinct personalities were on full display as well, particularly Mike Love’s and Dennis Wilson’s. The latter wasn’t even drumming for the band at the time, so he just wandered about the stage like a drunken ghost, singing a little here, plinking on a piano there, and occasionally admonishing an audience that still and always consisted primarily of jocks and their cheerleader dates to “shut the @$#% up” during the ballads. “Al just did a beautiful job on ‘You Still Believe In Me’ and you idiots weren’t even listening!” he bellowed. Not very professional behavior, even though I wanted them to shut up, too! But such is the nature of live rock music, and Mike Love – the world’s ultimate cheerleader – understands this as well as anyone, as he lead the audience in one big sing-along of their rockin’-est and best loved hits. It was corny as hell, but it was also great. These songs were the main reason – and for many, the only reason – we were all there, and to hear them performed by the band that made them at the height of the musical powers was a thoroughly satisfying experience. He gave people what they wanted, and we were all better off for it!

Being a Beach Boys fan at that time wasn’t an easy task, though, since by that time EVERYONE considered themselves to be a hippie and a “rebel,” and the negative attitude I had towards them at the height of their success was now shared by the entire universe. The Beach Boys were uncool, and it was hard to explain to my peers why they should consider them otherwise. Unlike now, when almost everyone I know seems to have a deep love – or at least a grudging respect – for the Beach Boys’ music. Make that BRIAN WILSON’s music, since some folks seem to have an even harder time of separating their music from their image than I did (they probably resented jocks and cheerleaders even more than I did), so the only way they can justify getting into the Beach Boys at all is by fancying themselves as Brian Wilson fans first, and Beach Boys fans second (if at all). They could never appreciate their music at face value, but could only get into them after they heard about all the VH1 horrors that they went through as children, as well as the psychic price that Brian wound up paying for his own success.

It’s Brian’s story that so many poor, misunderstood, hyper-sensitive idealists can’t get enough of. Not only was Brian the main musical genius behind all those great records, but he’s also that most romantic type of Genius: the Idiot Savant, the Tortured Soul. He’s become the straight male nerd’s Judy Garland. Hey, who DOESN’T love a gifted retard (assuming you don’t have to live or work with one, that is)? This Lovable Eccentric (so the legend now goes) was only interested in expressing himself through his music, ma-an, only people around him couldn’t leave this Goose who Laid the Golden Records alone and nearly killed him because of it. He “just wasn’t MADE for these times,” MA-AN! He’s too GODDAMNED BEAUTIFUL for this world! *Sob!*

It’s a great story, ya gotta admit, and it even has a loud ring of truth to it, assuming you want to believe that selling tons of records wasn’t always a prime interest of Brian’s as well. But like all great legends that feature a hero, victim or martyr, there has to be a Villain. And in the Legend of Brian Wilson, the man who has been case as the villain is his cousin and former band mate, Mike Love.

On the surface Brian Wilson and Mike Love are polar opposites. Mike Love is by all accounts an arrogant, charmless asshole, and I have no reason to doubt that this is true. While Brian spent years rolling around in a sand box stuffed to the gills on LSD and forgetting what day or even what year it was, his cousin is a health nut and control freak who gave up booze and drugs years before it was fashionable to do so. Yet in spite of all this clean livin’ Love also has a violent reputation, and is considered something of an unforgiving bully, while Brian is thought of as some big roly-poly teddy bear who loves everyone to pieces.

And while we’re at it, let’s get some of Mike Love’s many other well-documented “crimes” our of the way: That he’s a shameless egomaniac who never tires of tooting his own horn, in spite of the fact that his voice had the least range of any of the other original Beach Boys, and he never became proficient at playing a single musical instrument while his band mates could all play many; that he’s notoriously litigious, and his need and desire for money seems to be bottomless – thus, whenever a battle is raged over commercial pandering vs. musical experimentation, he argued for the former almost every time (which isn’t always a bad thing necessarily, which I’ll get to later). He also is an active and longtime member of the Republican Party. So if it came down to spending any time with either Mike or Brian, I think most of us would choose Brian hands down.

The thing is this: most of us will never have the opportunity (let alone the desire or intention) to hang out with either of these two fellows, so what they’re like as people is ultimately meaningless to us as far as their musical legacy is concerned. All that matters is what we hear, think and feel when we play their records, and that’s why I’m amazed and appalled so many of these “back door” Beach Boy aficionados, the very ones who used to be unable to separate the band’s music from their All-American image, are now unable to separate Mike Love’s art and contributions to the band from his own reputation as a human being. They claim to like the Beach Boys in SPITE of Mike Love, and in no way BECAUSE of him. This annoys me greatly for two reasons: one is because these “back door” types also tend to be the same people who write reviews and liner notes and post on message boards, so their opinions tend to become ersatz “facts” when left unchecked; and two: not only am I a fan of Mike Love’s music, but I can’t see how anyone who claims to hate him can also be a sincere fan of the Beach Boys. To me the two are inseparable, and that’s because of Love, not in spite of him.

To begin with, Mike’s ambitions and musical sensibilities were never really as “at odds” with his cousins as 40 years of bickering would make it appear to be. The Beach Boys never would have lasted as long as they did otherwise! And for all their differences in personality, Mike Love and Brian Wilson have a LOT in common. For one thing, they’re both completely insane. But it’s the GOOD kind of insane (for an artist type, at least), in that they both feel a mad compulsion to act out on all their mad ideas and whims, in spite of what the average Joe might think of them because of it. They have absolutely no sense of shame whatsoever, and never did.

Brian and Mike also were both extremely fickle, faddish and compulsive. When they got into something they REALLY got into it: they’d write songs about it, create BANDS about it, tell the ENTIRE WORLD about it! Right from the start their music exhibited a very strong obsessiveness, in that their second LP was almost entirely about surfing, while their fourth LP was entirely about CARS (this in spite of the fact that they still called themselves the BEACH boys, a mere technicality that they always managed to ignore). That fickle obsessiveness continued throughout their career, and it particularly exemplifies almost everything that Brian and Mike have written, whether they’re collaborating or not.

To my ears it’s almost impossible to tell Mike and Brian’s lyrics apart. They’re both incredibly CORNY, for one thing. And funny. And gimmicky and sentimental. And they’re almost ALWAYS selling something: school spirit, cool water, yummy carob cookies, etc., etc., etc…. Their songs are always ABOUT something, which is amazing when you consider that so many of the ‘60s peers specialized in poetic vagueness, daring the listener to guess at what the song is really about, whereas when Brian and/or Mike write a song called, say “Add Some Music To Your Day,” you can be pretty sure that that song is going to be about adding some music to your day! Their lyrics are as literal as you can get. No guessing required!

The irony is that when Brian is credited with writing such lyrics they’re considered wacky, imaginative and eccentric, while when Mike gets the credit they’re dismissed as pedestrian and dumb. Even in Brian’s case this type of material is simply considered filler in comparison to what’s generally considered by most critics to be his two masterpieces: 1966’s Pet Sounds LP and 1967’s unfinished Smile LP, the music from which can all be heard on subsequent LPs and CD collections. Not only is the lyrical content of the former much more serious and weightier (and “artier” and experimental on the latter) than anything the Beach Boys have done before or since, but Brian collaborated with lyricists other than Mike Love (for the most part) on both, which would suggest that he was better off NOT working with his cousin. In fact, Love was rather vocal in his disapproval of the lyrics on both of these LPs at the time they were making them, which only adds to his reputation as a philistine and anti-Art – that he’s the Anti-Brian!

Pet Sounds is indeed an artistic masterpiece, although it’s taken most people 25-30 years to agree with that assessment, since with the exception of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Sloop John B” (the latter of which was included at the record company’s insistence) it’s not a very easy record to listen to all the way through. This isn’t a party record. You have to be in the mood for it. You could hardly even categorize most of it as “rock” music, for one thing. It mostly consists of baroque sounding ballads, with complex, convoluted arrangements; and the lyrics are rather pensive and introspective, to the point of being self-obsessive and maudlin. Brian has had his introspective moments going all the way back to 1963’s “In My Room” but with Pet Sounds he decided to make such navel gazing the THEME of an entire LP! This sort of “departure” was unheard of for anybody to attempt, let alone the fun-in-the-sun Beach Boys, and the fact that Mike Love felt that it smacked of career-suicide doesn’t seem like an unreasonable concern. Years after the fact, Love-bashers like to point this out as an example of his lack of vision and foresight, but one thing Love predicted with 100% accuracy was that Pet Sounds would alienate a lot of their current fans and hurt their credibility with radio programmers, which indeed it did.

In classic compulsive Beach Boys fashion, Brian Wilson recruited a TOTAL STRANGER to help him with the lyrics on Pet Sounds. Brian apparently was so moved by the lyrics to a bank commercial (?!?!?) that he saw on TV that he tracked down the guy that wrote them, who turned out to be an ad agency copywriter named Tony Asher. I have no idea what Asher has done before or since Pet Sounds, and he certainly has no reputation as a great writer or creator on his own. What he did possess that the other Beach Boys didn’t, however, was a college education. He knew what words like “ego” and “ennui” and “existentialism” meant, and thus was able to help Brian express the convoluted emotions he was feeling at the time in a more literate fashion than Brian could have done on his own, let alone by collaborating with a former gas station attendant like Mike Love.

So it came as no surprise that Love was agitated when he first heard some of these new songs. Sure, he was threatened by the appearance of yet another rival cutting into his songwriting royalties, but he didn’t exactly relate to this high-falutin’ hoo-hah either. While Love and the rest of the band were out on the road selling Brian’s records and adding to HIS royalty checks night after night, Brian was sitting around doing drugs and gettin’ all philosophical with college-boy Asher. “Hang On To Your Ego”? What the hell does THAT mean?!? Personally, I STILL don’t know what it means, 35 years later! The only “sense” I can make of the original lyrics to that song (which Love re-fashioned into what became “I Know There’s An Answer”) is that like most conscientious egomaniacs, Brian was mortified by the size of his own ego, and thus tried to claim that he had his under control, or denied that he had one altogether. The fact that he allowed Mike to re-write these lyrics at all suggest to me that Love called bullshit on his cousin, which is why Brian gave in.

All of the above happened all over again – and then some – a year later when Brian collaborated with a young oddball composer/arranger named Van Dyke Parks on the bulk of the music for what was to be the Beach Boys’ next LP, Smile. By all accounts, Mike Love REALLY balked when he came back from the road to hear what these two drug addled lunatics had been cooking up in his absence. While much of it was inspired and borderline brilliant, these new “songs” were barely songs at all, but rather were endlessly repetitive snippets that neither Brian or Parks were quite sure how to assemble into a workable whole. It’s for this reason that I’m sure Brian wound up shelving the entire project, since the task of editing it down to something presentable was a daunting one indeed. He managed to do so with when he released “Heroes and Villains” into a functional three-and-a-half minute single, but in doing so he had to throw away a lot of great material from what was originally an 11-minute “Heroes & Villains” “theme.” The thought of wrestling with the other dozen or so musical “themes” that he and Parks came up with must have seemed daunting indeed, especially since Brian most likely could no longer always remember what he had in mind when they started recording some of this self-indulgent nonsense in the first place!

And then there were the lyrics. If Pet Sounds was a “departure” for the Beach Boys, Smile was a 180-degree turn. Carl Wilson once accurately described V.D. Parks’ lyrics as “airy fairy,” and Parks has admitted himself that the lyrics he wrote for Smile don’t mean a goddamned thing. He was just “painting with words” as was the mode of the day back in 1967. But unlike the more talented lyricists of that time, his lyrics usually didn’t even do a good job of creating imagery in the listener’s head. At least to me they don’t. They’re all just a bunch of fancy words cobbled together, and it’s up to the music alone to create a feeling or mood. The lyrics were just along for the ride. And this, to Mike “teen poem” Love, was the very antithesis of was a Beach Boys song – or ANY song, for that matter – is supposed to be about.

Another problem with the material Wilson and Parks came up with together for Smile was that it wasn’t rock music AT ALL. As is the case with Parks’ own solo material, much of the musical stylings and instrumentation harkens back to a much earlier era – as far back as the 1890’s, even – with occasional overly ambitious attempts at Aaron Copeland-like pomposity. Brian himself had always been brilliant at taking unconventional instruments (like he did so famously with a cello and theremin on “Good Vibrations”) and turning them into “rock” instruments, but the same cannot be said for the Smile tracks. Here such cornball, old fashioned sounding instruments such as the clarinet and the xylophone are used as they’ve always been used, which is to make corny, old fashioned sounding music.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, of course, only that wasn’t their intention. Their intent was to be “avant garde” and create something new out of the old for The Youth of Today to get into, and on that score they utterly failed. This was also VERY problematic when you’re writing it for an established act like the Beach Boys, who happen to be a ROCK band. Sure, they never were the most rockin’ band around, but their fan base still consisted almost entirely of restless, easily bored teenagers who not surprisingly want to ROCK OUT when they go to a “rock” concert. Could anyone really expect Mike Love to sing this meaningless, cornball, Victorian music without a word of complaint?!?

To listen to Van Dyke Parks talk now, the answer is yes. How DARE Love criticize our legendary, critically acclaimed music? Of course, it wasn’t critically acclaimed by anyone at the time they were making it (though there was plenty of hype surrounding Smile during its creation). At the time his response to Mike Love’s criticisms was to concede everything and then turn and flee, leaving Brian to fend for himself. Maybe the diminutive Parks thought Love was going to beat him up, which may not have been an unreasonable fear. But now that he’s got three decades’ worth equally wimpy Love-hating music critics backing him up he’s not the least bit afraid to tell Love what he REALLY thinks of him! Through the media, that is, not face to face.

The amazing thing is this: Not only DID Mike Love wind up singing this stuff, but he sang it beautifully. As was the case with Pet Sounds before it, these aren’t simple “Barbara Ann”-like singalong songs we’re talking about. They were and remain among the most ambitious and complex vocal arrangements ever heard on a rock record, involving hours and hours of painstaking rehearsals and retakes. I urge anyone who has access to it to listen to Mike Love’s performance on the long version of “Heroes and Villains”: there he is, Mr. Philistine, not only singing these difficult melodies and harmonies and STUPID, PRETENTIOUS lyrics that run counter to his entire belief system, but singing them with style and gusto. And almost all of it wound up on the cutting room floor! The ENTIRE ALBUM wound up on the cutting room floor as a result of some massive drug-fueled paranoid anxiety attack on Brian’s part. All that labor down the drain, just because Brian the Artist suddenly realized that Smile would never sell nearly as well as Sgt. Pepper (which, in spite of all ITS artistic pretensions, was still a “rock” record). So rather than compete with the Beatles, Brian turned his band into irrelevant non-entities in one fell swoop. Way to go, dude! Far from Love and the others standing in the way of Brian’s creativity, they gave him WAY TOO MUCH leeway, thus giving him enough rope to hang himself and the rest of them with him.

I always wondered why the Beach Boys didn’t break up at this point (or why Mike Love didn’t at least strangle his cousin). Yet in every book or article I ever read about them that possibility never even came up. Well, they were family, but rather than jumping ship once the going got rough they seemed to become tighter than ever during the next few years. Love seemed to have become as whacked-out, creatively and otherwise, as his cousins at this point, in that while their next dozen or so records all were fine artistic endeavors to varying degrees, none of them came close to the commercial success that they enjoyed prior to 1967, and Love seemed as clueless as the rest of them when it came to figuring out how to reclaim their success.

By this point the Beach Boys became a democracy as well, rather than simply Brian Wilson and his Puppets. This gave the rest of them a chance to prove themselves as composers and producers – roles that Mike Love usually came up the shortest in, since as I already pointed out he was the least musically proficient. Still, as was the case with their earlier records, many of the most enjoyable songs during this post heyday era are ones that are co-written or sung by Love. I’ll never forget the time I heard “Cool, Cool Water” (from 1970’s brilliant Sunflower LP) being played on some groovy FM radio station at the time it came out. This re-worked Smile outtake is a very spacey, loosely arranged song full of lush, wistful harmonies, but being a non-rocker it only had half my attention at first – that is, until it came to a break where all the music stopped except for Love’s a cappella voice singing:

In an ocean, or
In a glass;
Cool water is
SUCH a gas!

That was it! I was hooked! I mean, of course I was laughing my head off at those hokey lyrics and Love’s twangy voice, but from that moment on that song had my FULL attention! That was also when I decided that I had to start buying their LPs, figuring there had to be more of such whacked out brilliance like “Cool, Cool Water” on them that was worlds away from “I Get Around.” And I was right.

The first LP I bought by them was 1971’s Surf’s Up, which is one of their best – if not THE best LP the Beach Boys ever made. The entire record has a feel to it that is simultaneously soft yet intense; it’s like “soft rock” that keeps you on the edge of your seat! The one song that breaks this mood, however, is “Student Demonstration Time,” which is basically the old rockin’ blues standard “Riot in Cell Block #9” with new “socially relevant” lyrics provided by Mike Love. This song is often looked upon as a black stain on the Beach Boys’ career by most critics and aficionados for two reasons: One is that the lyrics seem to be a too deliberate and seemingly insincere attempt to “get down with the kids” who were protesting the Vietnam War at the time; and the other is because its jarring, raucous-y production is too abrupt a contrast from the rest of the LPs’ carefully constructed “gentle” sound.

Both of these criticisms are totally valid, but they ignore two very important points: One is that the lyrics are pretty funny, and the other is that it’s a great sounding, well-performed rock tune with a terrific, blistering lead guitar! It was my FAVORITE song on the LP when it first came out for that very reason, since it took us all a while to fully appreciate the “quieter” songs on the record. It was like a combination of hard rock and MAD Magazine. What’s NOT for a 13 year old to like?

By the mid-‘70s, nostalgia for the pre-hippie era was in full swing, and the Beach Boys were unable to resist capitalizing on it. Their early hits were selling in the millions all over again, and they suddenly were very much in demand as a concert attraction as well – although it was mostly drunken frat boys and sorority sisters who just wanted to hear “Fun Fun Fun” that was flocking to see them. Mike Love was more than willing to indulge them anyway, and as a result became the whipping boy of their hard-core fans who blame him for the Beach Boys’ “selling out.” Again, this is totally ridiculous. For one thing, The Beach Boys continued to put out occasional LPs of new material, but ever since the release of 1973’s Holland most of these LPs were pretty mediocre, and this was not entirely Mike Love’s fault. In fact, the most embarrassing record of all was 1977’s The Beach Boys Love You LP, which was almost entirely written by a supposedly rejuvenated Brian Wilson.

Love You is a bizarre and occasionally (though seemingly unintentionally) hilarious LP. It’s also a piece of shit. Its production level is that of a sloppy demo (which indeed is what it was), and the singing and harmonizing on it is atrocious. Thus the two qualities that one could always expect from a Beach Boys record – beautiful singing and flawless production standards – are completely lacking on this thing, which makes me wonder why it was ever released in the first place. The reason it WAS released was mainly to serve as “therapy” for Brian Wilson, sadly. Brian had become a mental and physical wreck by this point, so “drastic measures” were being employed by his family and therapist to get him back in the swing of things. Plus the band hoped that their newfound popularity would fuel Brian’s confidence, and that having him back in the saddle might help them find their old gold record magic all over again. A win-win situation for all concerned! But MAN, they could not have been more wrong.

So once again Mike Love found himself indulging his crazy cousin, pouring his heart into odes to Johnny Carson – JOHNNY CARSON, f’r Godsake! – in the misguided hope that this was all for the best for some reason that doesn’t even make sense anymore. It was Smile all over again, only they weren’t even making GOOD music by anyone’s standards this time! These new lyrics – written mostly by Brian himself – were retarded, as in TOTALLY retarded, like an actual mentally retarded person wrote them: “If Mars has life on it, I might find my wife on it…” And Brian’s own singing in particular sounded horrible. At this point Brian had become ashamed of his formally inimitable choirboy voice, and deliberately ruined it in a horrifically misguided attempt to sound like Randy Newman, of all people. The end result was nothing short of a musical tragedy.

But Love went along with all of it anyway. They all did. Who knows what any of them was thinking at this point. Maybe he even LIKED this new music they were making! I’ve never heard him claim otherwise. Like I said before, they’re all a bunch of obsessive/compulsive crazy people. Once they start heading in a certain direction they don’t seem to be able to stop. What I find so odd, though, is how Love can be saddled with this sell-out/philistine reputation when at the same time he can take a willing part in such hopelessly non-commercial pieces of insanity as The Beach Boys Love You.

Mike Love Haters are also usually the same people who claim to love The Beach Boys Love You, which not surprisingly has become a “cult classic” along the lines of The Shaggs. I’m highly suspicious of people who claim to love this record, though. It’s Brian at his lowest, for one thing. I feel like I’m examining his hemorrhoids when I listen to it. And like I said before, it’s the antithesis of everything that made the best of the Beach Boys’ music so amazing. Even at face value this record is an amusing novelty at best, and in the context of what they were capable of making it’s a travesty. My gut reaction to anyone who claims to love The Beach Boys Love You is that deep down they still hate the Beach Boys.

During more recent days Mike Love has had several episodes that have helped seal his reputation as a butthead: His cringe-inducing tantrum of an acceptance speech at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame (though hearing someone rag on his peers rather than kiss their asses made for an entertaining change of pace); his lawsuit against Brian Wilson over a greater share of past songwriting credits (which may have been a simple act of greed, but his case couldn’t have been entirely groundless since he did in fact win); and the recent and highly rated TV docudrama about the band’s history, which many people feel was “orchestrated” by Love, and thus showed him in a better light than he deserved. He also recently sued Al Jardine – who he’s been estranged from since Carl’s death – for touring under the name “Beach Boys Family and Friends,” since he claims sole right to the Beach Boys name – this in spite of the fact that he’s the only original Beach Boy left in the “official” version of the band. Like I said before, I cannot deny that the guy sounds like a king-sized ass. Yet in classic crazy Beach Boys fashion, Brian joined Love in the suit against Jardine – this in spite of the fact that Brian’s own daughters, Wendy and Carnie, were part of Jardine’s touring troupe (thus constituting the “family” in the “Family and Friends” moniker)! So again I have to wonder how anyone can easily define either of these two as the “good guy” and the “bad guy.” They just sound like a couple of nuts to me!

Mike Love is one of my all time favorite singers. He’s an EXCELLENT singer! To criticize him for not having as much range as his band mates is insanely unfair, since NOBODY had the range that Brian, Carl or even Al Jardine had in their prime (and this criticism often comes from the same people who will praise people like Lou Reed or Bob Dylan or Neil Young to the high heavens, totally ignoring the fact that none of them can barely carry a tune). Yet for all of their range the other Beach Boys’ voices don’t communicate quite as directly as Love’s does. The rest of them sang almost TOO well, in that they oftentimes sounded too angelic and not quite human. Love’s nasally, almost Hank Williams/C&W vocal style added a casual, cozier HUMAN touch to the Beach Boys sound. It provided a perfect contrast to the other member’s lead vocals – the songs where he shares the lead with Brian or Carl are always the most quintessentially “Beach Boys” sounding of the Beach Boys’ recordings – while adding a much needed ballast to their harmonies.

As I said before, Love is also a natural born salesman, and this comes through in his singing delivery as well. He always sounds like he’s standing right next to me, talking right into my ear when I hear him singing. His voice jumps out of the radio or record player and gets RIGHT IN YOUR FACE, but never in some screechy, obnoxious, punk rock way, since that wouldn’t be good salesmanship. Instead he cajoles you into wanting to JOIN him on whatever new fun trip or fad he’s into, and in fact his voice has convinced many to move to California, to take up surfing and/or practice TM – as well as buy millions of Beach Boys records. So it’s no coincidence that most of their biggest and most played hits are sung or co-sung by Mike Love. Even their biggest post-1960s hit, “Kokomo,” was co-written and sung by him, without Brian Wilson being anywhere in sight. And yeah, I know, you hate that song because you’re a smarty-pants hipster and that song is way too square for you, and you still associate it with the Tom Cruise vehicle that it was featured in. But my point is that a lot of people did like it, which goes to show that Love’s voice has as much to do with the Beach Boys’ success as Brian’s musical genius.

I sometimes wonder what the Beach Boys would have been like if it were only the three Wilson Brothers and no one else. After all, they were the guitar/bass/drums nucleus of the group, and their sibling harmonies would certainly have sounded fantastic. Plus Brian, Carl and Dennis are the three members that most hardcore Beach Boys fans idolize and romanticize to an almost absurd degree, since they allegedly were the ones with “soul” and “artistic integrity.” So I’m sure that many of them must have fantasized of this Wilsons-only scenario with heavy “if only” sighs.

I don’t think it would have ever worked, though. For one thing, Brian and Dennis were notorious @$&-ups, and being the youngest I doubt that Carl would have had much luck keeping them in line. Plus Carl and Dennis’ own musical sensibilities tend to be rather unremarkable and pedestrian as witnessed by their own solo records (Beach Boys fans tend to greatly overrate Dennis’ songwriting abilities – he’s had his moments, but most of his compositions were insufferably maudlin, plodding ballads), while Brian could be terribly stubborn and self-indulgent when left to his own devices. They all WANTED fame and fortune, and had the talent to achieve it, but they lacked the focus and discipline that their cousin had. They all knew it too, or they would have kicked Mike Love out of the band ages ago. It was three against one, and Dennis in particular couldn’t stand Mike, though Dennis hardly had the authority to kick out anybody. Yet if Carl was able to kick his own brother BRIAN out of the band (which he actually did at one point) he certainly could have given Love the heave-ho at anytime, but he never came close to doing so. He knew which side his bread was buttered on.

Talent is useless without content and context, and Mike Love always provided Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys with both. For 20 odd years Brian would often hook up with other collaborators (or “new best friends” as author Steven Gaines dubbed them), and produced great work with many of them, but he always would go back to working with his cousin. The concept of the Beach Boys was Brian and Mike’s to begin with, and it provided all these other collaborators with a context to work with and bounce off of. Plus Mike and Brian were the same age, and both grew up in the same grim suburb in the same psychotic, dysfunctional family, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the “purest” Beach Boy songs were always the ones the wrote together.

Love it or hate it, the Beach Boys represent an enduring image. They’re an ICON, and icons are rarely created by accident. Somebody had to both think of it and BELIEVE in it first. Brian gave the band their substance, but Mike was the one with the almost single-minded vision of what the Beach Boys stood for, and continues to keep that image alive in spite of everything. For Brian, the Beach Boys were just a vehicle for his music, but for Mike Love the Beach Boys were – and are – Everything.

Read More » An interesting preview in the Boston Globe of Jonathan Gottschall’s new book, Graphing Jane Austen, which surveys some recent studies looking at the role fiction plays in society, most of which seek to determine why/how stories are ‘good’ for us. Which sounds a bit lame, I know, especially given how much the conclusions depend on what stories are being told (and how). The studies in question don’t tell us anything we don’t already know – storytelling appears to have two primary ‘benefits’: it instills empathy for others and can act as “social glue’ by promoting shared values. The values themselves are telling, e.g. the universally strong response to depictions of ‘poetic justice’ — stories in which the bad guys get punished and the good guys get rewarded. Our inner lawyers/karma chameleons love a good revenge tale, in other words. Or we can recognize virtue when we see/read it.

Obviously this is a somewhat dubious project from the get-go, as if literature is concerned with results or things that can be ‘measured’ (or storytelling can even be spoken of in such broad terms). But as far as harmless rabbit trails go, it’s a pretty fun one. If what the researchers are saying has even a little merit – and it probably does – the two so-called ‘benefits’ of fiction do relate to one another in an interesting way. That is, the empathy that great storytelling (whether it be on the page or the screen) can inspire extends to both heroes and villains, bringing the reader into contact with their similarities to both. It reacquaints a person with the reality of themselves, as opposed to the “lie” mentioned below. One might go so far as to say that true empathy actually deconstructs the good-bad/reward-punishment paradigm, paving the way for grace. It certainly does in the television shows he mentions…  ht DJ:

Until recently, we’ve only been able to guess about the actual psychological effects of fiction on individuals and society. But new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis is finally taking questions about morality out of the realm of speculation.

This research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.

For a long time literary critics and philosophers have argued, along with the novelist George Eliot, that one of fiction’s main jobs is to “enlarge men’s sympathies.” Recent lab work suggests they are right. The psychologists Mar and Keith Oatley tested the idea that entering fiction’s simulated social worlds enhances our ability to connect with actual human beings. They found that heavy fiction readers outperformed heavy nonfiction readers on tests of empathy, even after they controlled for the possibility that people who already had high empathy might naturally gravitate to fiction.

Stories — from modern films to ancient fairy tales — steep us all in the same powerful norms and values. True, antiheroes, from Milton’s Satan to Tony Soprano, captivate us, but bad guys are almost never allowed to live happily ever after. And fiction generally teaches us that it is profitable to be good. Take a study of television viewers by the Austrian psychologist Marcus Appel. Appel points out that, for a society to function properly, people have to believe in justice. They have to believe that there are rewards for doing right and punishments for doing wrong. And, indeed, people generally do believe that life punishes the vicious and rewards the virtuous. But one class of people appear to believe these things in particular: those who consume a lot of fiction.

In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV — as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries — had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly exposing us to the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place.

This is despite the fact, as Appel puts it, “that this is patently not the case.” As people who watch the news know very well, bad things happen to good people all the time, and most crimes go unpunished. In other words, fiction seems to teach us to see the world through rose-colored lenses. And the fact that we see the world that way seems to be an important part of what makes human societies work.

Read More » It was like a switch was thrown. I was at an open gym, shooting baskets with a bunch of guys, talking about the news of the day: the apparent suicide of former NFL great and presumptive Hall of Famer Junior Seau. Many of the guys couldn’t believe that a man who was so famous, so rich, who had so much, could be depressed. What could possibly be so bad about his life that it wasn’t worth living? The tone of the conversation quickly became derisive. Seau must have been weak. Fragile. Pathetic. Then someone suggested that his brain may have been irreparably damaged by the numerous minor head traumas he suffered over the course of his playing career.

It was like a switch was thrown. All of a sudden, no one had a cutting remark. No one was talking about how satisfied they were with so much less than Seau had. We recalled the story of Dave Duerson, another former NFL player who committed suicide, who had shot himself in the chest expressly so that his brain could be studied; he had known his depression was physically sourced (subsequent medical examination of his brain proved him right). The mood in the gym became somber, and the tone, compassionate.

I couldn’t believe how quickly derision became compassion. Then I realized what had really happened: the group had collectively transitioned from seeing Seau as basically “able,” that is, in control of and responsible for his actions and mental state, to basically “disabled,” that is, the victim of forces beyond his control. It is only natural to feel derision for people who are able to control themselves and do not, and just as natural to feel compassion for people who are unable to control themselves.

Here’s the thing: Christians are disabled. Not especially disabled, just as disabled as non-Christians. It is easy for us, especially the preachers and ministers among us, to think of Christians as “able” in a way that they (read: we) are not.

And the result? Derision.

If we see people as fundamentally able to make good choices, possessing the ability to improve, and able to control their minds, our ability to be compassionate toward them will wither and die. This is particularly damaging (as you might imagine) for preachers and pastors, but will damage any relationship.

At one time in my life, a close friend confided in me that he and his girlfriend were having sex. We prayed together, and I assumed that that would be the end of it. But, despite their stated desire not to, they kept doing it! I know: you’re shocked. At the time, though, I was shocked. I couldn’t understand (I was comically blind to my own nature…as, of course, I remain to this day) how someone could continually do something that he didn’t want to do (Romans 7:14-20). As my friend’s confessions to me mounted, my compassion for him withered. Finally, it was replaced by anger: why couldn’t he just stop?

As a pastor, I have come to know that Paul’s words in Romans 7 are not only true, but fundamental to pastoral care for people. Compassion cannot exist where we see people as “able,” because people are inveterate failures. Pastors will either come to hate their people (because they’re not following your good advice) or themselves (because you’re not communicating the advice well enough). In either case, hatred is the end result.

If we are to avoid hating those closest to us (including ourselves!), and are to avoid heaping scorn on those further away, we must begin to see people as the “disabled” creatures that they are. Like Paul, and potentially, Junior Seau, they often “do the very thing they hate.” We can only be there, compassionately, when they cry out for a savior, with the Good News that there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).

Read More » Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me
That not one hour myself I can sustain.
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

For more on John Donne, go here!