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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Secularization of Mercy12/11/2006 22:52:02Now, another in the ongoing flirtation with science fiction. On the way there and back from Denver, I read Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, the first of several sequels to Ender's Game, which I discussed in a previous article. In it, Ender the child soldier has fully transmogrified into "quasi-religious" prophet, who (among a growing group of self-appointed successors) travels from planet to planet at back and call to "Speak" for those who have died; in essence, to research and tell a truthful autobiography from the standpoint of love. This discourse is implicit (with lovely reference to Aristotelian metaphysics): "When you really know somebody, you can't hate them." "Or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them." "Is that a circular paradox? Dom Cristao says that most truth can only be expressed in circular paradoxes." "I don't think it has anything to do with truth, Olhado. It's just cause and effect. We never can sort them out. Science refuses to admit any cause except the first cause - knock down one domino, the one next to it also falls. But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart." (p. 402) This passage reminds me first of all of Philip Reiff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic, in which he describes the process by which modern people have replaced actual culture, and all its binding demands on behavior and duties, with therapy, which exuses all in the pursuit of the better life. The ontological state of sin is thereby dissected by psychological science to the extent that it disappears, perhaps becoming only a metaphor we use in language for the true new ontology, which is illness or personal disorder of some sort. The person who kills is not a murderer, a sinner, but a damaged person in need of medical rehabilitation. This aspect of Speaker for the Dead brings out a more positive reading of psychological culture. Rather than psychology as being forever an excuse, it takes on a positive,"quasi" theological purpose. The beginning of the whole idea comes from Ender's guilt at having (in the previous book) destroyed a whole alien race. The first story that he Speaks is of that race. He carries a terrible guilt. In this book, he is called to the planet in question to speak for a brutal father who everyone hated. The explanation, then, is the method of expiation and forgiveness. After he Speaks, the truths are hard for people to absorb but they are ultimately salvific. As Weber exhorts in "Science as a Vocation": the job of the teacher is to bring facts to light, particularly those that call into question accepted values. Doing so may be hard, but ultimately there is nothing more important than doing this. There seems to me little coincidence that Card juxtaposes this quasi-religion of the Speaker with a planet that happens to be a Catholic colony. Catholicism has a long and precarious connection with knowledge, which errs as much on the side of theologically dangerous pursuit of arts and scholarship as it does with repression. And of course the Church, beginning with the Gospels, and from Augustine through all the saints to Newman, has found relevatory material in the holy biography. Though the bishop at first brands the Speaker a devil, by the end there is virtually no vestige of disagreement between them. At the same time, the passage described above follows closely on the logic of Augustine's, and then Anselm's "Fides Quaerens Intellectum": I believe in order to understand, which stands in reverse (and I believe in harmony also) with the common sense, which dictates that we should understand something before we believe in it. Belief in a God who is love and the love (and forgiveness) of another person can here be taken interchangeably. What this says is: our knowledge might all actually be completely wound up in our love. One cannot go without the other, for they are founded in each other. I keep thinking this is also a statement about science as a whole. |
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