When worldviews collide

Just watched the 2009 documentary “Collision,” in which pastor Doug Wilson and pundit Christopher Hitchens duke it out on the question of whether Christianity is good or bad for the world.  The question sets up a sort of public-policy debate, as if some government agency might mandate either Christianity or atheism for all.  Not that this sort of thing hasn’t been attempted, but the focus of religious debates is usually more ontological than pragmatic:  Does God exist?

The existence of God does figure in this debate, but it doesn’t take center stage, and with good reason.  The question of existence doesn’t touch on the most interesting consequences of our belief in the God described by scripture.  Even if God exists, what could this possibly tell us about His nature?  What moral authority, apart from the self-certifying imprimatur of scripture, would He command?  What should be our relation to an omnipotent being, anyway?  Assuming He exists, why does God hide himself?  Why should God care whether we worship or believe in Him?  These are all questions asked in the philosophy of religion, and for many religious people they never get asked.  I had never considered many of them until I took a course in the subject.

The debate within “Collision” struck me as a near miss or at best a grazing blow, not the flush whomp of two conflicting worldviews that have come to understand each other deeply.  The film is worth watching mainly for its illumination of the two combatants.  Wilson comes across as an autodidact country parson, humble in self-portrait but clearly pleased with his range of knowledge.  In a voice-over, he terms the mastery of theology, scripture, and philosophy needed to face the mighty Hitchens “copiousness.”  There is something Victorian about him.  No less smug is Hitchens, who wields a databaseful of lectern-ready prose on his pet topic of why “God is not Great.”  Hitchens is slicker, more academic, better rehearsed.  He, too, possesses the copiousness the battle demands.

I must confess to having a soft spot for Hitchens, despite his retrograde politics, his ironic self-description as a “contrarian,” and his distinctly non-ironic righteousness in the crusade against religion.  I have known and sympathized before with the schoolyard prodigy who could fight his way out of any scrape using words alone.  To be such a person requires unfathomable fortitude and energy due perhaps to equal parts vanity and fear.  But Hitchens at least searches and makes his search public.  His written and spoken record seems a kind of vanity project, but the same could be said of any engaging body of published work.  His bears his stamp.

Unfortunately for the dialectic conveyed in the film, being smarter, better-spoken, and even right do not guarantee Hitchens a slam-dunk.  Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to keep the contest “close” in order to maintain tension or to focus on the amity between Wilson and Hitchens, which appears to be held together by a shared love of Wodehouse.  Maybe the aim was merely to whet the viewer’s appetite for the meat of the debate itself, toward other dramatic ends.  In any event, Hitchens is portrayed as losing some of his decisive edge about two-thirds through the film.

That’s when Wilson seems to draw Hitchens onto his turf by pressing the issue of how one is supposed to ground one’s morality if not by God’s authority.  Wilson hammers away at the assertion that Hitchens has “helped himself” to the Judeo-Christian ethic in order to wage a (self-defeating) war against Christianity.  The Judeo-Christian ethic is not the only source of moral conviction, of course, and to reason from its primacy is both obtuse and circular.  Wilson seems comfortable with the position this leaves him in.  His strikingly postmodern defense is that participants in such a fundamental debate can only ground their arguments on certain axioms, to which they must return again and again.  If one must argue in the round, best to start and end one’s circle with God’s word.

My preferred response at this point would have been for Hitchens to “go Socratic” (not a bad motto generally) and press the Euthyphro question:  Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?  Hitchens eschews this line, perhaps because he himself holds that morality is innate, and, if morality is merely instinctive (or the equivalent for rational beings), it has no independent theoretical foundation that would render the Euthyphro question rhetorical in the desired way.  But by hewing to the Euthyphro line without foundationalism (as I imagine Socrates would have preferred), Hitchens could have held that God’s moral authority can be only as well-founded as morality itself—however well-founded that may be—and that the difficult course of questioning and refining and coming to grips with moral theory is preferable to checking one’s conscience at the chapel doors.  One finds oneself arguing in circles only when one stops trying to improve one’s position.

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Wanting to be bad

It just occurred to me—maybe this shows how dull I am—that the reason crime novels, murder mysteries, serial-killer procedurals, and the like are so popular is not the hazy interest we call “morbid fascination” but something much more specific and easier to understand:  envy.  Simenon had it right:  Suspense should be told from the criminal’s point of view, because she is us, and we are pulling for her.

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Eine kleine Nichtmusik

Why do I own an alto recorder I can’t play? Why do I want to own a ukulele? Why do I wish I had time to read and write fiction whenever I’m reading and writing philosophy, and vice versa? I’ll need therapy before I can answer the last question, but I can say a little bit about the ukulele.

When my brother Tim and I were kids, our favorite kooky relative was Uncle Herb. He did magic tricks for us when we would come to Elkhart, Indiana on visits: the disappearing matchstick, the coin pass, a couple of tricks requiring apparatus, such as the finger-in-the-guillotine, which is really scary every single time, since you know you’re not in the hands of a professional. He never did card tricks—cards were implicated in gambling, which was the devil’s work. Herb would play scratchy 78rpm records of Amos ‘n’ Andy, a comedy act, I would imagine, now reviled for its racism. Uncle Herb had strange theories. He discontinued his longstanding subscription to National Geographic when they dared to publish material suggesting that we humans were “descended from the crocodiles.” He maintained throughout his retirement, after a career as a house painter, that breathing the latex fumes over the years had gotten to him, and he was now sensitive to everything outside his own house. (I’m with him on that one.) Herb had a wood shop downstairs, where he made toys, presumably from his own childhood: helicopter sticks with a propellor mounted on the end and a spiral surface that you could rub to launch the thing in the air; cars with wooden wheels; slingshots—not street legal nowadays, I’m sure.

Uncle Herb also made ukuleles, in different colors and sizes, and he gave Tim and me each one. Tim’s had a white front, I recall. Given my brother’s superior stewardship of important objects, I wouldn’t be surprised if he still had his uke around somewhere. Mine, a smaller brown model with a sort of checkered faux-mother-of-pearl piping around the center hole, is long gone.

I am at the point in life where I realize that playing a ‘major’ instrument other than the trumpet with enough technique to bring me joy is not in the cards. Ah, but the minor instruments: recorder, tablas, bongos, ocarina, penny whistle, harmonica, kazoo, Jew’s harp, zither, autoharp. There might lie redemption. Each satisfies a primal musical urge, be it percussive, melodic, accompanimental. Some are portable: I have dallied with the recorder, ocarina and tin whistle, although as a player of a melodic instrument I long for something that can play chords. Try carrying a zither or an autoharp around everywhere you go (ditto for the small drums, though these would provide the most elemental fix of rhythmic hypnosis). The autoharp is weird. Sort of a musical paint-by-numbers kit. It would be better to carry around a little Celtic harp, except that those require a lot of skill, or so I imagine. I find I just don’t like the sound of the kazoo, which is just distorted humming, or the Jew’s harp (that name is probably as politically incorrect as Amos ‘n’ Andy; sorry, I don’t know the modern term).

A larger instrument well worth toting around with you, and identifiable in its case as a source of bohemian street cred, is the guitar. But there again, the skill problem. And this brings me back to the ukulele. All I want to do is learn a few chords, memorize a few songs, and sing when I’m in the mood. In private, of course. I like the size. I like the soft nylon strings. I like that ukes are made of wood. I like that they’re not trying to be anything they’re not. And I like to think it would have made Uncle Herb, now long gone, proud to know that the trifles he went to such trouble to bestow on his nephews had been noticed.

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