Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part IV

For the past few weeks I’ve been writing posts on ways that I see Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy interacting with Plato’s Republic. I’m sure that next time I watch the films I will see even more connections, but for now I’m ready to move on to other topics. To cap off this series, here are three closing thoughts—or rather, as it turned out, three more posts combined together. 

First, although earlier I had written about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, oddly enough I didn’t think much at all about the literal caves Bruce falls into, first in Batman Begins (the cave that becomes the Bat-Cave) and then in The Dark Knight Rises (the prison pit into which he is cast by Bane). Yet these also fit the allegory. 

The scene where young Bruce falls into the well on his family’s estate, and his father descends by a rope to pull him out, supports my suggestion that Thomas Wayne is the closest thing Gotham City has to a philosopher-king. In pulling his son out of the well, he resembles how the prisoner-turned-philosopher returns to the cave to free others of their ignorance. After all, he tells Bruce in that moment, “Don’t be afraid,” and fear is the result of ignorance. To quote Ducard again, “Men fear most what they cannot see.” 

Speaking of Ducard, this scene of Thomas and Bruce in the cave underlines the fundamental differences between Thomas and Ducard, his foil. Ducard, with his corrupted understanding of justice, cannot really lead anyone out of the cave, and while Thomas dispels fear, Ducard instead preys upon it. When Bruce is in the prison pit in The Dark Knight Rises, he learns that Ducard once descended into that cave to exact vengeance on those who killed his wife. Just as when he attacked Gotham in Batman Begins, he did not descend into the cave to liberate captives but to slaughter them. If Thomas represents the aristocratic soul, Ducard represents the tyrannical one.

As Timothy Lawrence and I discussed in a FilmFisher dialogue some years ago, the tension between Bruce and his alter-ego Batman corresponds to how Bruce is caught between these two mentors. The choice he faces is whether to become more like his father or more like Ducard. I see now that this conflict can be rephrased in Platonic terms: Will Bruce, having a timocratic soul driven by a love of honor, evolve into a wisdom-lover or devolve into someone who is ruled by his appetites? 

I think Bruce does become more like his father, and more like a philosopher, in the end. In Rises, he defies his fear in order to climb out of the prison pit; he liberates Gotham from the League of Shadows (again, “Shadows” suggests the shadows of the Plato’s cave); and finally, he passes the mantle of Gotham’s protector to Blake. Significantly, as I pointed out in that FilmFisher dialogue, well before I ever read Plato, “The first scene of the first film has Bruce falling into the cave, and the last shot of the last film has Blake rising on a platform in the cave.” If Thomas descended into the cave to lift out Bruce, Bruce descends into the cave to lift out Blake. Republic envisions a process by which the philosopher-kings would raise up and train their successors, and that succession is reflected in the beginning and end of the trilogy.

Second, for all the similarities between the films and Plato’s Republic, Nolan seems to refute the idea of using myths and useful falsehoods to govern the kallipolis. 

As Plato’s Socrates lays out a theoretical blueprint for the ideal republic, on two occasions Socrates devises a myth that would be used to convince the next generation to abide by the republic’s laws and prefer justice to injustice: The Myth of the Metals in Book III, and the Myth of Er in Book X. The Dark Knight ends and The Dark Knight Rises opens with a myth or useful falsehood invented by Batman. He convinces Jim Gordon to lie about the fate of Harvey Dent, in order to keep the city from being demoralized by Dent’s corruption. The lie does motivate the city to stamp out organized crime, but once the truth is revealed, the results are reversed, and the city is plunged into a worse chaos than before.

In contrast, The Dark Knight Rises concludes with Gotham receiving a true myth to inspire the citizens to justice. The city watches Batman fly the bomb away from the city. Although the audience knows that Bruce somehow escaped the detonation, this doesn’t drain the action of its meaning or nobility. He really did save the city. Blake thinks it unfair that people don’t know it was Bruce Wayne who saved them, but Gordon is right: “They know who it was; it was the Batman.” Earlier in the film, in two different scenes, Bruce/Batman had told Blake and then Gordon that the point of Batman’s secret identity is that “A hero can be anyone.” That is why a statue of Batman—a symbol of justice that can be embodied by anyone—is dedicated at the end of the film, not a statue of Bruce Wayne. This statue represents a better, truer Myth of the Metals or Myth of Er.

Third, I return to the way Plato treats the state of the just/unjust city as analogous to the state of the just/unjust soul. If Bruce becomes more just in the end, does Gotham? 

As I’ve already touched on above, Bruce can be said to become more just because of how he grows to resemble his father, and as I said in the first post, because of how he persists in pursuing justice even when no one rewards him for it. Indeed, when Bruce fakes his own death, for all Gotham City knows, he died a very unjust man. In the Republic, justice is a combination of moderation, courage, and wisdom, but any citizen would be forgiven for thinking Bruce was immoderate (“Look how he wasted his inheritance on pleasures!”) and cowardly (“Look how he ran for cover when the Joker attacked his home!”) and foolish (“Look how poorly he managed his company!”). In reality, the case could be made that Bruce is (or becomes) moderate, courageous, and wise. Moderate, he is never corrupted by the profligate playboy persona he plays before the public. Courageous, he overcomes his fears and holds to his conviction against killing even when he is sorely tempted to abandon it. Wise, he continues to seek after true justice and will not settle for the false alternatives propounded by Ducard (like Polemarchus, that justice involves doing harm to enemies), Falcone (like Thrasymachus, that justice is whatever benefits the strong), the Joker (embracing the view that Glaucon summarizes, that being just isn’t worth the effort), or Dent (that only chance is just).

But what about the city? In the previous post, I closed with the troubling suggestion that, because of its slide from aristocracy to tyranny over the course of three films, “Gotham City would seem to worse off at the end of the trilogy than at the beginning.” And so I find myself in arriving at the same answer as I did at the end of the dialogue I wrote with Tim: it doesn’t seem like Gotham is capable of becoming a just city. Bruce would seem to have failed to make it more just. Maybe Alfred is right and Bruce went about it all wrong, misdirecting his energies to be a guardian of the city as Batman and not doing enough to be a philosopher-king like his father.

However, this may be the result of asking the wrong question, the result of assessing Bruce by the wrong objective. In his own words, Bruce’s objective was never to make the city more just but to give it a vision of justice. He tells Alfred in Batman Begins, before returning to Gotham, that “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I'm flesh and blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed; but as a symbol—as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.” And if that was the goal, he would seem to have succeeded in the end. Gotham does not become a just city, but with the example and symbol of Batman as its inspiration, it could become one yet.

Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part III

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.]

Third, is Gotham City’s descent from order to chaos over the course of the three films a reflection of Socrates’ theory of how the ideal kallipolis can devolve into a tyranny? 

In Republic Book VIII, Socrates says there are five kinds of cities. His ideal, healthy city is the kallipolis ruled by an aristocracy of one or more wisdom-loving philosopher-kings. The other four are each “diseased cities,” diseased because they are ruled by leaders who love or live for something other than wisdom (p. 214 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation). They are the timocracy, in which the leaders love honor most of all; the oligarchy, in which the leaders love money and how it satisfies their necessary appetites; the democracy, in which the people use their liberty to follow their unnecessary appetites; and the tyranny, in which the city is terrorized by someone who is himself tyrannized by his own lawless appetites. Plato puts the five cities in this order because, as his Socrates sees it, the kallipolis—kind of like the nuclear bomb in The Dark Knight Rises—“must decay” sooner or later (216). The kallipolis will fall, not to external enemies, but to “civil war breaking out within the ruling group itself” (215). It will corrode from within. First, it will regress to a timocracy, which will then turn into an oligarchy, and so on.

I think that Gotham City reflects all five types of cities at different points in The Dark Knight Trilogy, and in this same order.

First, in the flashbacks of Batman Begins, Gotham is like the wisdom-loving aristocracy—or at least, it’s trying to be. Although he isn’t the mayor, the aristocratic Thomas Wayne is the spiritual leader of the city. He uses his billions to better the city and—like the philosopher-king compelled to go back down into the cave—he doesn’t sit idly by enjoying his privileges in his mansion on a hilltop outside the city, but works as a doctor in the city. That’s appropriate given how Plato portrays cities as either sick or healthy, and good rulers as good physicians. Thomas Wayne is seeking to find a way to cure Gotham’s citizens, both physically as individuals and economically as a whole, and he seems to be having some success—until he is killed by one of the very people he is trying to help. Then, just as the aristocrat’s son can become a timocrat if he sees how the love of wisdom seemed to fail his father, Bruce grows up to be someone more likely to jump into a fight to defend his honor than engage in philosophical inquiry. He drops out of college and tries to avenge his father.

Following Thomas Wayne’s death, the Gotham City of Batman Begins is a timocracy in that it is caught in a constant tug-of-war between two groups of people who are governed by codes of honor: the police and the Falcone crime family. On the one side, Commissioner Loeb hates Batman because, as a vigilante, he makes him look bad—that is, causes him to lose honor. Batman succeeding where the police have failed shows them to be too corrupt or inept to be the guardians of the city. On the other side, Falcone says to Bruce, “Yeah, you got spirit, kid. I'll give you that. More than your old man, anyway.” It is the people who are led by the spirited element of the tripartite soul who are most concerned with honor. 

Then, in The Dark Knight, Gotham City is more like an oligarchy. In the iconic bank heist opening, the banker allied with the mob tells the robbers that “criminals in this town used to believe in things. Honor. Respect.” Instead, as the Joker puts it to a mobster later in the film, “All you care about is money.” Indeed, much of the film is about money. Batman, Jim Gordon, and Harvey Dent are trying to cut off the mob’s sources of funding and put its leaders in prison on charges of racketeering. The mob hires the Joker to help them get their money back. A police officer’s debts drive her to betray Dent and Rachel.

The oligarchy continues into The Dark Knight Rises, although under a different guise. The money-laundering mob has been defeated, but now the great conflict in Gotham is between the haves and have-nots, which finally boils over into an open war. Bane deposes the oligarchy French Revolution-style—recall that the ending of the film quotes from A Tale of Two Cities—and he tells the downtrodden masses, “we give it back to you, the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please.” This sounds a lot like what Socrates says of citizens in the democracy: “each of them will arrange his own life in whatever manner pleases him” (227).

But, as Batman and his allies know, Bane’s Gotham isn’t really free. It is under the sway of whoever is holding the trigger to the nuclear bomb that is carted around the city. That person turns out to be the daughter of Henri Ducard, Batman’s nemesis in the first film, and all her actions are controlled by the all-consuming desire to finish his mission of destroying the city. Gotham is under her tyranny, and she herself is a slave to her own wrath and warped understanding of “true justice.” 

If this reading is correct, Gotham City would seem to worse off at the end of the trilogy than at the beginning. Ominously, Plato only portrays how a kallipolis can be lost, not how it can be gained, as if there were no way back from the brink of tyranny’s destruction. I’m going to think on that problem a bit more and return later with a fourth and final post in this series.

Plato's Republic and Nolan's Gotham, Part II

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.]

Second, are the actions of the League of Shadows in Batman Begins a parody of the Allegory of the Cave?

In Republic Book VII Socrates illustrates how the future rulers of the just city must be educated for public service by likening them to people who have lived all their lives chained in a cave, backs turned to the entrance. All these prisoners can see are shadows cast by a fire behind them. Consequently, “the prisoners … believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows” (p. 187 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation). When a prisoner is freed, he learns—with painful difficulty at first as his eyes adjust to the light—that the two-dimensional shadows were cast by three-dimensional objects that are quite different from what he thought them to be, and that—what is even more startling and disorienting—there is a whole world outside the cave, illuminated by a gigantic sun, of which the fire in the cave was but a pale imitation. In the same way, the future ruler must be led away from ignorance and mistaking opinions for knowledge. Then, after being taught how to rightly perceive “the visible realm” (inside the cave) with his senses, he must be taught how to rightly perceive “the intelligible realm” (outside the cave) by the “the form of the good” (the sun) (189). Finally, after the “founders [of the city] … compel the best natures … to make the ascent and see the good,” those fortunate few must be compelled “to go down again to the prisoners in the cave” and lead them by the wisdom they’ve received (191).

At the beginning of Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is likewise held in a prison, where he is found by the League of Shadows’ spokesperson, Henri Ducard. Bruce wound up in prison because he was seeking to understand the nature of justice by practicing injustice, but Ducard tells him this method has caused him to lose his way. Instead, Ducard tells him he should “devote [him]self to an ideal”—that is, he needs to seek the form of the good, the form of justice. Bruce is released from the darkness of his cell and journeys upward into the mountains to be trained by Ducard in the (mostly martial) arts needed to pursue what is advertised to him as “true justice.” Then, at the completion of his training, he learns that the League wants to send him back to Gotham. He was selected for this task, they say, because he is “Gotham’s favored son.” Like one of the select cave-dwellers, he was freed of his chains and brought into knowledge so that he would return to the people he left behind in the state of ignorance. However, the League’s charge to Bruce is that he help them destroy Gotham, not save it.

Not surprisingly, the League of Shadows’ definition of “true justice” is much narrower than what Socrates and his interlocutors determine in the Republic. In Book IV, justice is a balance of moderation, courage, and wisdom. Ducard also says, “Justice is balance,” but only of the retributive, eye-for-an-eye variety. (“You burned my house and left me for dead. Consider us even.”) But even on that front the League’s conception of justice is actually imbalanced. If according to Socrates justice is each one doing his own duty and each one’s rights being maintained, then the League presuming to have a prerogative to destroy a whole city, both the guilty and the guiltless together, is unjust. So although the League gave Bruce the impression that they could lead him all the way out of the cave and into the sunlight to behold the form of justice, they’ve only led him to where the fire is—or worse, to just another dead end inside the cave—trying to pass off their malformed understanding of justice as the real thing. Realizing their error and the threat they pose to the justice they claim to champion, Bruce’s right response is to use their own fire against them—literally. Their mountaintop castle explodes.

At the end of the film, Ducard and the League of Shadows reappear to carry out the mission Bruce refused—and their planned method for destroying the city again recalls the allegory. They use a device called a microwave emitter to release a fear toxin into the air that causes people to have waking nightmares and attack one another. Microwaves are along the same electromagnetic spectrum as visible light. So, the League of Shadows uses light to cast figures on the cave wall that would terrify the cave’s prisoners into self-destruction. Instead of descending into the cave to free the prisoners and show them that the shadows are not the reality, they descend into the cave to torture them by taking advantage of how, as Ducard puts it, “Men fear most what they cannot see.” 

Bruce, by contrast, takes Ducard’s original advice to pursue an indestructible ideal, which he does by creating Batman, an indestructible symbol to represent the ideal of justice. With that symbol he seeks to draw the eyes of Gotham out of the darkness of the cave and into the light. Fittingly, Gordon’s bat-symbol beacon is a moonlike mix of light and shadow in the night sky.

Plato’s Republic and Nolan’s Gotham, Part I

[I have a theory that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy is influenced to some degree by Plato’s Republic. At the least, the two texts would make for good conversation partners. Plato draws correspondences between the just or unjust city and the just or unjust soul, and the films are as much about the struggle for justice in Gotham City as they are about Bruce Wayne’s struggle to become a just man. In this series of posts, I point out some potential links between the book and the films that occurred to me while re-reading Republic recently.] 

First, is Lucius Fox’s sonar device in The Dark Knight a response to the myth of the Ring of Gyges? 

In Republic Book II Glaucon tells Socrates the story of Gyges to illustrate the commonplace belief “that one is never just willingly but only when compelled to be.” Gyges found a ring that made him invisible and used it to “do injustice with impunity.” Glaucon’s point is that, because “every man believes that injustice is far more profitable to himself than justice,” no one would use the ring any other way if he could get away with it  (p. 36 in the 1992 Grube & Reeves translation).

In The Dark Knight, the Joker believes something similar, that Gotham’s best citizens only act virtuously when it is socially reinforced: “You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these, these civilized people, they'll eat each other.” 

But unbeknownst to the Joker, Bruce has access to a sonar device, courtesy of Lucius Fox, that works almost the same as the Ring of Gyges: it allows him to see anything happening anywhere in Gotham while not being seen. Bruce intends to use it only to find and catch the Joker, but because he recognizes its potential corrupting power, he has Lucius operate it instead, then destroy it—which he does. That Lucius can wield the power of the sonar device without abusing it, then freely let it go once it has served its one justifiable purpose, shows that the Joker is wrong. Even when the chips are down, there are people who will stick to their moral code. Or, to use Glaucon’s terms, there are people who will be just willingly and without compulsion, because they believe that injustice is ruinous in and of itself, even if no one punishes it, and that justice is profitable in and of itself, even if no one rewards it. Certainly, no one ever rewards Bruce and Lucius for their self-denying restraint, because no one else knows the sonar device ever existed. 

This last point reminds me of Blake’s complaint to Gordon in the next film, that no one in Gotham will ever know that it was Bruce Wayne who saved them. But that anonymity is precisely what shows that Bruce is a just man in the end.

New Article: Reading with the Jedi

I have a new article, titled “The Dead Speak!: Reading with the Jedi,” that was published today over at the Mere Orthodoxy blog. It combines several of my favorite things: Star Wars, reading and reading ethics, and quoting from C. S. Lewis and Alan Jacobs. I am grateful to Tim Lawrence for his feedback on the early drafts, and to Jake Meador for publishing the article.

Emphatic Evangelicalism

One of the books I have most benefitted from reading this year is Fred Sanders’ The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway, 2010). I had picked up the book for the obvious reason of wanting to grow in my understanding of the Trinity, but what struck me about the book from its first pages on is that it is also a defense of the neglected resources available in evangelical theology.

Sanders admits that “evangelicals are not currently famous for their Trinitarian theology” and that “the evangelical movement is bedeviled by a theological and spiritual shallowness” (11). This causes some to develop what I’ll call an “Evangelical Inferiority Complex.” “Many evangelicals,” Sanders writes, “seem haunted by a sense of not being about anything except the moment of conversion. When they stop to ask themselves where they are taking their converts, they fear that when they get there, there will be no there there. … When serious-minded evangelical Christians feel the desire to go deeper into doctrine or spirituality, they typically turn to any resources except for their own properly evangelical resources” (12).

If the primary goal of the book is to show how “the gospel is Trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel” (10), the second goal is to show that this thesis is and always has been entirely at home in evangelical thought: in fact, Sanders argues “evangelical Christians have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church” (9). This in turn serves a third goal: “to reintroduce evangelical Protestants to what is best in our own tradition” (13). To borrow the title of another, more recent Crossway book, The Deep Things of God is a work of “theological retrieval for evangelicals.” 

But how did evangelicals get into this situation of being “radically Trinitarian without knowing it” (12)? How did we drift from our historical depths into “theological and spiritual shallowness” (11)? Sanders’ answer to these questions is what has reverberated in my mind ever since I read the book’s Introduction in January, and my reason for writing this post: evangelicalism is “emphatic”—that is, “It has made strategic choices about what should be emphasized when presenting the fullness of the faith” (14). In particular, evangelicals major on “Bible, cross, conversion, heaven”—and, Sanders stresses, “These are the right things to emphasize” (15, italics added). It isn’t wrong that we are so emphatic about these doctrines. The problem, though, is that in our enthusiasm for them we can tend to forget that “Bible, cross, conversion, heaven” only make sense, only have weight and meaning, in the context of a host of other doctrines. “When a message is all emphasis,” Sanders explains, “everything is equally important and you are always shouting” (17). If I wrote this whole post in italics, the italics wouldn’t mean anything. If everything is a nail, what is there left to nail down? After a certain point, emphatic evangelicalism can become “anemic,” “reductionist,” and open to the charge of “anti-intellectualism” (16-17).

But a healthy, robust evangelicalism does have things to say about the doctrines that surround and support our major emphases. “What is needed,” Sanders argues, “is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background” (19). And this “restoration of the background” can be had by learning from many of our evangelical forebears.

Homesteading and Homecoming

In my previous post about homeworlds in Star Wars, I noted how the final episode of The Mandalorian Season 3 ends with Mando and Grogu getting “a homestead” (from what I recall, that is exactly what the show calls it), and with the Mandalorians reclaiming their homeworld of Mandalore. This reminded me of the following passages from Edward S. Casey’s book, Getting Back into Place (Indiana UP, 2nd edition, 2009). I thought of citing Casey then, but the post was already far too long.

“Ends of journeys fall into two extreme exemplars: homesteading and homecoming. In homesteading, I journey to a new place that will become my future home-place. The homesteading place is typically unknown to me . . . . But I am determined to settle down for the long term in this novel place. . . . I commit myself to remaining in the new place for a stretch of time sufficient for building a significant future life there” (290). 

“In homecoming, the duration of this alliance is no longer of major importance. What matters most now is the fact of return to the same place. . . . [T]he issue is that of returning not to the identical spot in space but to a place that may itself have changed in the meanwhile. . . . [I]t is . . . everyone’s destiny who has returned home only to discover striking differences” (290). 

That last point is one major reason why so few people—both in the Star Wars galaxy and in our own—return to an old home for more than a brief visit. 

Big Idea: A Cautionary Tale

In Fall 2013, when I was a undergrad at Biola University, Phil Vischer—the founder of Big Idea, creator of VeggieTales, and voice of Bob the Tomato and a host of other characters—gave a talk to a packed gymnasium of people who had grown up watching his videos. I was one of them, and what Vischer had to say that night played a significant part in the long story of how and why I decided to quit filmmaking. That is a long story for another time, but I share that autobiographical detail here to suggest how much Big Idea has been to me a paradigmatic example—a cautionary tale, really—of the challenges facing Christian individuals and institutions engaged in culture-making and cultural engagement. This summer, I finally read Vischer’s memoir, Me, Myself & Bob (Nelson, 2006). Here are some takeaways from the passages dealing with how Vischer lost control of the company in the early 2000’s. 

One: An organization needs to be led by both a Head and a Heart. 

Among the problems that led to Big Idea’s bankruptcy was that Vischer was a dreamer surrounded by yes-men and took increasingly expensive risks. Yet if at the other extreme the company had been led by someone concerned only with the financial bottom-line, that would have stifled creative experimentation. So Vischer concludes that “The balance between creative inspiration and good stewardship of resources is vital to any successful enterprise” (211). He cites the example of Walt Disney’s life-long collaboration with his older brother Roy: “The key to the partnership of Walt and Roy was mutual submission, based in genuine love for each other. … In hindsight, perhaps the simplest explanation for the failure of Big Idea Productions is this: I never found my Roy” (213). The administratively-gifted Head and the visionary Heart need to work together to accomplish anything worthwhile long-term.

Two: Enough with the obsession with growth. 

Big Idea grew at an unsustainable rate, and it would have been able to do more good over the long-haul if it had stayed smaller. Vischer argues that “Real impact today comes from building great relationships, not huge organizations. More overhead equals less flexibility to pursue unexpected opportunities” (219). As the saying goes, “More money, more problems”—but also, more people, more problems; more projects, more problems. Big Idea’s meltdown is a warning for churches, Christian schools, and other parachurch organizations that think that numerical growth means they must be doing something right.

Three: Be explicit and consistent about the organization’s theological commitments, and make sure all employees at least know what those are and can respect them.

This is closely related to the second takeaway. For Big Idea to scale up to the size Vischer over-ambitiously envisioned for it, it was almost inevitably going to have to attract more non-Christian talent (not to mention non-Christian investors). Vischer confesses that, “the more we hired, the less Christian Big Idea became” (125). He goes on to say that “I shared my passion for Christian ministry through creative media with everyone but my own staff, because, frankly, I wasn’t sure many of the folks at Big Idea would buy into it” (126–27). This is an almost-guaranteed recipe for mission drift and internal divisions: “My vagueness about Big Idea’s true mission and values led to a profoundly confused, dysfunctional workplace. By the time I had figured out the problem, it was too late to do much about it” (223).

Vischer advises leaders to “Build a team that rows in the same direction” (222). However, he adds the qualification that, “This doesn’t mean everyone needs to think the same, look the same, or talk the same—that sort of conformity leads to groupthink and failure. Diversity is a wonderful thing, as long as the diversity isn’t around the purpose and values of the group itself. … I hired some Christians who didn’t fit and some non-Christians who did. The key was that each employee—from the receptionist to the president—was excited about Big Idea’s mission and the Christian values we promoted” (222). I’m not sure about that last part. There are some “Christian values” that only a Christian could be “excited about,” and while maybe the “receptionist” doesn’t have to a Christian, the “president” and everyone making the defining creative and financial decisions should be. But I do take Vischer’s point that not everyone has to be theologically aligned on every single issue for a non-church, non-denominational Christian organization to be able to accomplish its goals.

The Problem with Highways

From Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (InterVarsity, 2008):

“What does [the interstate highway] assume about the way the world should be? The world should be smoother and faster, and the world should be safer—its corners, hills and valleys literally rounded off in the interests of efficiency. Rivers and mountains should be scenery, not obstacles. The perceived distance from one place to the next should shrink—the mile should seem like a short distance rather than a long one. Consistency from place to place is more valuable than the particulars of each place—uniform in signage and road markings, fixed radii for curves and angles for exit ramps, and identical rules of the road should make local knowledge unnecessary. We should be able to go anywhere and feel more or less at home. Goods from far away should become more economically competitive with goods from nearby; goods nearby should have new markets in places far away” (33).

And from John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin, 2017):

“These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders. No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing” (89-90).

“Localness is not gone but it is going. … [N]o region can hold out for long against the highway, the high-tension line, and the national television. What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless” (107).

The Problem with Maps

From John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin, 2017):

“For weeks I had studied maps, large-scale and small, but maps are not reality at all—they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails” (23).

“There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. … Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains” (70).

And from Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Vintage, 2000):

“In setting out, however, the traveler immediately confronts the problem of the map, an organization of the land according to a certain sense of space and an evaluation of what is important. I traveled everywhere with maps, no one of which was entirely accurate. They were the projection of a wish that the space could be this well organized. You cannot blame the maps, of course; nor can you travel without them. I was glad to pull them out of a pack or a back pocket and find clarification. … I knew that mixture of satisfaction and desire—to know exactly how one is situated in the vastness; and the wish to fully comprehend the space a map renders and sets borders to. But I would try to be wary. Even a good map, one with the lines and symbols of a handwritten geography on it, where [Yi-Fu] Tuan’s ‘spaces’ have been turned into ‘places,’ masquerades as an authority. What we hold are but approximations of what is out there. Neatly folded simulacra” (279-280).

That last phrase, “Neatly folded simulacra,” recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s one-paragraph short story, “On Exactitude in Science.” 

P.S. September 4: When I put these quotations by Steinbeck and Lopez together, I had no idea that Lopez was a Steinbeck fan and had once met him when attending summer camp with Steinbeck’s sons. 

"The People Who Change Nature"

“A Yup’ik hunter on Saint Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power, and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city. Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, ‘the people who change nature’” (39).

“What every culture must eventually decide, actively debate and decide, is what of all that surrounds it, tangible and intangible, it will dismantle and turn into material wealth. And what of its cultural wealth, from the tradition of finding peace in the vision of an undisturbed hillside to a knowledge of how to finance a corporate merger, it will fight to preserve” (313).

From Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (Vintage, 2000).

Reading Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

I don’t like cold. I don’t like winter. I like the look of fresh snow—from inside a cozy home. So it surprised me that one of the books I have most enjoyed reading this year is Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986), a sprawling, 400-page tome on a part of the world I would never visit. It’s even more surprising given that I don’t read much related to the sciences and I probably haven’t watched a nature documentary since March of the Penguins. The later chapters of the book—on maps and geography, on the thrilling and often tragic history of arctic exploration, and on the plight of the present-day Arctic, complete with Wendell Berry-esque indictments of industrial hubris—were more my kind of thing, but I was already hooked by the early chapters on Arctic animals: muskoxen (of all things), polar bears, narwhals, migration patterns. These early chapters were assigned for a spring seminar on creative writing about place, but this summer I read the rest for myself.

Three takeaways from the experience of reading this: First, as William Zinsser says in On Writing Well, any topic can make for good, engrossing nonfiction writing if the writer is passionate about his or her topic and a gifted writer who can deftly balance substance and style. Second, we should from time to time be willing to explore, with a gifted writer as our guide, topics entirely foreign to us—and stick with it even if the going is rough or boring at first. It will take some effort to learn to appreciate the kinds of details the writer values, details we wouldn’t have noticed ourselves. The length of Lopez’s book is valuable for this: learning to see, and growing to love what the writer loves, takes time. Third, practicing patient attentiveness in one area can help us be more attentive in others. Slowing down to read what Lopez has to say about icebergs and light phenomena for almost fifty pages can make us more aware of the wonders around us. 

Maybe You Should Give That Film/Book/Album a Second Chance

How many times have I been underwhelmed or upset by a first viewing of a film, or a first reading of a book, or a first listening of an album, only to be glad I gave it a second, third, fourth chance later on? 

For the past few years I have found this to be a helpful rule of thumb: so often, the first viewing/reading/listening is for finding out what the film/book/album is not. It isn’t until the second viewing/reading/listening that I can begin to appreciate what the film/book/album actually is. 

This rule of thumb is especially true if I come to the work with definite expectations. My disappointment with it will be directly proportional to how much it deviates from what I wanted it to be. But if I can get over how it doesn’t meet my terms and try to understand the work on its own terms, then a funny thing can happen: I become glad that it isn’t what I wanted it to be, because what it turns out to be is so much better.

Really, wouldn’t it be boring and dispiriting if my favorite band’s latest album, or my favorite film franchise’s latest sequel, or the book that multiple friends recommended I read, turned out to be exactly what I pictured in my head? The dissonance between expectation and reality can be a very good thing. I won’t gain or learn much of anything from familiarity and predictability.

This is not to say I should give everything that’s ever disappointed me a second chance. There are many works that, after a first viewing/reading/listening, I can fairly confidently predict will not be worth a second appraisal. But if a trusted friend or critic makes a compelling, plausible argument praising the work for something I didn’t notice in it, or if I suspect there’s more going on under the surface than I could comprehend at first, then I am willing to give it another try. More often than not, I’m thankful I did.

P.S. August 27, 2024: See Tim Lawrence’s elaboration on the above.

P.P.S. June 30, 2025: I wrote a sequel to this post.