It's funny to watch the growing controversy around The Golden Compass. It's a great story -- I read it right through a few summers ago and thoroughly enjoyed it -- until towards the end it got sort of confusing and didactic. It's a slow start, too, and you wonder if it's going to be a kid's book, so you have to stick with it. It's no Harry Potter -- but I think it's much better -- and frankly, I'm the last person in the America who has *not* read a single Harry Potter book and never will.
Oh, I know the secularists and geekie leftoids are out there gloating that the Golden Compass is all about hatred of Christianity and a big dis of the Catholic Church and triumph of the Uploadable Brain and the Singularity and the Sextremist Tao...or something.
But...you might just as well take the Magesterium for, oh, the Lindens and the elitist coding class of Second Life..or something. It could be about any government or big power in whatever setting. And you could say that the shape-shifting daemons attached to the children which are said to be their souls and finally morph into one continual animal spirit are in fact a metaphor for their consciences, which science wants to cut out of human beings -- not merely a sign of the sexual urge which the Church ostensibly wishes to suppress. After all, good and evil are only supposed to be chemical states of the brain, so why not excise whatever organ infuses with a crazy notion of something being "right or wrong"? It's all good, eh?
See, you can read the stories that are classics material in all kinds of way, and get whatever you want out of it. You're supposed to be driven inexorably to a celebration (ah...a feting?) of creativity and craft and Ayn Randian triumphalism in tall marble buildings and such -- and it has all the signs of that creator fascism we know so well in the virtual world -- but you can imagine *that* becoming the next Magesterium-like thing itself. As the Russian peasant said, when first hearing the strange Latinate and foreign word "revolution," and having it explained: "Ah, the pig turns over..."
Of course, external clues tell us that Philip Pullman (erm, is there a Nostradamus prophecy about the Two Philips and the End of Time or something?), the author of His Dark Materials and the other books of the Golden Compass trilogy, actually *does* hate on religion and has a conscious bear out for C.S. Lewis. He's got a weirdly distorted notion of Lewis that definitely comes out of his own ideological baggage and leftoid secularist baggage. The author of Dangerous Idea takes this on deftly.
Of course, no fair, C.S. can't fight back, because not only did he die years ago (on November 22, 1963, the same day as John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Aldous Huxley passed away, too!), he was born in 1898, and his writings are stuck back in the 1940s and 1950s at the latest, so it's easy now to assign to him every sort of modern sin, like racism or sexism or suppression of sex.
So if he writes of the dark Calormene who seem rather sinister and live in the desert, why, that's just racist anti-Arab sentiment, and geez, he has all these blonde heroes, what, is he unfeeling about the Global South or something? Oh, and he's also a misogynist (there's that one infamous passage where Susan is exposed as losing the magic because she's gotten too interested in clothes and boys). Oh! and he loathes sex, right? Of course, reading a book like Surprised by Joy, in part a kind of double entendre about the joy of Christianity and also his wife, Joy, who died of cancer and whom he mourns, you could come to doubt that caricature; perhaps he simply had a more noble and uplifting idea of sex and the union of man and woman than what the modern notion, itself a overmediated commodity and caricature, is all about. Don't let the facts get in the way of a good yarn, however!
Yahoo even had to close their comments discussing this movie, citing numerous violations of their hate speech code -- and no doubt the religion-haters were in high dudgeon. I've been amazed to see how much hate and vitriol comes out of the secularists these days, truly appalling. I can't figure out what is driving them. It's not as if anyone is actually shoving any religion down their throat. They don't *have* to put up a manger on their mantle or even village roundabout, the ACLU has taken care of all that for them. You wonder why all the frenzy, the hysteria -- far more than what you get out of the far-right religious nutters themselves these days. The actual born-agains and Southern Baptists and devoutly family-oriented people I know aren't anywhere near as filled with loathing and venom as the urban hip Twitterers I keep hearing from and see arguing on forums and blogs and spouting rage in bars. What God bug has bit them?! I guess it's the Hound of Heaven!
And just look at all the self-righteous "I told you so" stuff that will go down around this debate, doesn't this remind you of the forums, with some know-it-all trying to set you straight? You backwards God-believer, you, you thought "daemon" was something evil and of Satan, but it's actually a word that only means, er, "sprite".
I always laugh when I hear these crazy caricatures of C.S. Lewis as being didactic or politically incorrect or hateful or stuff -- those who have actually read his Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy with Perelandra know that's preposterous.
I try to understand what it is that gets people's backs up about C.S., such that they anachronistically go looking for non-PC passages or sound bites to fuss over. I think it's likely that he has a great deal about honesty, accountability, faithfulness, loyalty and such in his works, and very moving and dramatic passages about punishment, repentence, paying of debt -- and that simply rankles their Me-ness. Edmund, in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, eating the witch's Turkish delight, and betraying his brothers and sisters to the White Witch and getting Mr. Tumnus frozen. Eustace, in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, greedily going after the gold and himself becoming like a dragon, and then having to have his scales scratched off -- which actually felt pretty good. Ransom in Perelandra, realizing the big flaw of Man is that he wants to have everything *again* -- repeated all the time, it's never enough -- but on this heavenly planet, once is enough (eternally rezzed as in a virtual world...). Those were wonderful passages because they teach children -- and adults -- right from wrong. About owning up when you have done wrong, repenting -- these notions, of course are alien to the fuck-you hedonism of the Second Life gang, where people often pursue a sullen and aggressive -- and maximum-security-compound -- sex life -- and correlary forums life -- based on humiliating and torturing other people.
People simply don't want to say anything is ever wrong or right -- it's supposed to all be relative, and not matter. And yet, they know in their hearts there is such a thing, and in fact, each person has a strong sense of what *he* thinks is right or wrong.
Philip Pullman, of course, through his dark arts, has managed to propel his great yarn to the level of planetary awareness where an awful big chunk of humanity will contemplate the books and the movies or the hearsay about the message, which will basically be about the Church sucking, and people (and one suspects -- information, too!) -- wanting to be free and the Triumph of Human Will and all that.
OK, so what? It's just a story. People will either embrace it, resist it, or ignore it, and if the notions of a giant reversal catches on, an overturn of the basic story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, then whoever rides in to power with these memes will become the new status quo that the next round will have to overthrow to become free -- see what I mean, the Magisterium is merely the Metaverse's coders.
Meanwhile, we'll get to see Nicole Kidman be evil for once -- and that's a good thing, because she was awfully teeth-on-edge goody-two-shoes in Cold Mountain, waiting for Steadman all those years and growing pigs and running off soldiers and such, and never cheating, unless we suspect she was getting it on with Ruby. Really, Steadman was too good for her.
The Golden Compass trailers are really something to see, the armoured Polar Bear seems to be just better done than Aslan, artistically and mechanically, and that's going to win Evil some points it really doesn't deserve, given that Aslan is just the more noble and higher beast.
I have to agree with the Open Critic that the story, which had such promise in the first two books, gets sort of complicated and didactic and not convincing by the last volume. I never quite understood what the issue was with the dust, or why what seemed like an ordinary teenage romance a la Romeo and Juliet was supposed to be so transformative. I seem to recall a lot of fire and violence and boring movie-type stuff in the book's ending that is not very interesting usually -- the battles that C.S. Lewis wrote about were so much more meaningful, somehow.
That Hideous Strength remains my book of choice to explain the Metaverse and all the surrounding muck -- he even predicts the singularity brain-uploader menaces. After I heard our own Philip gabbling about code-as-law and game-gods and Snowcrash-type-stuff a few times, I immediately express-mailed him a copy of That Hideous Strength. A soul is a terrible thing to waste...
And that's just it -- while the other Philip is hatin' on religion, meanwhile his characters with souls are making the case for avatars like they've never been made, as extensions and very refined and special expressions of the human soul that should never be cut off them -- by things like permabans *ahem*.
And guess what, a person's daemon is usually the opposite sex from their person! Go know.
The first time I read about the alethiometer, which was able to tell the future and tell the truth, I made my own version, called The Magic Compass, back when we were all in the Sims Online. I built it out in the Sims with all kinds of neat stuff, and I used it to tell fortunes on various alts.
In Second Life, I laid out the Magic Compass, too, at what is the geographical center of Second Life, which has all kinds of strange magnetic properties, must be seen to be believed, at Pharos Lighthouse in Ross. Call me and ask for your fortune to be told some time!
What, isn't fortune-telling of the devil? Even Buddhists condemn fortune-telling. Well, I don't think you can really see into the future as such. What I do think you can do is pay really close attention to the present and study the past for its springs uncoiling into the future. I think most people don't pay nearly enough attention to what is right there to be seen.
For total Flash wonderfulness, go see the official website of Golden Compass where you get to pick your daemon (mine is the wildcat or ocelot -- BTW that's not something they get to do in the story, where it is given to you by your nature). I look forward to many great debates about this story!
Why, thank you, Prok. Nice to know there's a bit of me reflected in you, even if it is only in daemon form...
Posted by: Untameable Wildcat | 12/10/2007 at 02:04 AM
Prof; read CS's letters with Arthur C Clark - that'll inform you better.
Also, if you want to know more about who is and isn't gloating - it's not secularists who are, or care, but instead fringe Catholics and Christian groups.
(search google for 'wiki Arthur Clark CS Lewis' and 'Golden Compass evil' and you'll find it.)
Just remember to research these things first, pretty please? ^-^;
Posted by: Crissa | 12/10/2007 at 03:19 AM
I'm well aware of the Clarke letters -- and these were among many logical positivists and secular humanist types that C.S. Lewis wrote reams of good rebuttals too.
The cranking about Golden Compass isn't limited to only a few Catholic fringe groups or born-again Focus on Family types -- there are plenty of gloaters out in the blogosphere, and I guess you didn't press on a single link provided here, including the Guardian article quoting Pullman directly. Oh well, don't let the facts stand in your way lol. Aren't you one of those religion-haters showing up on the forums all the time with rants?
I fail to see why I'd have to go scrounging around to read one more secular humanist on C.S. Lewis, even a famous one, to somehow change my views. I won't be changing them, as I've pondered them probably for more years than you've been alive.
Here's another blog:
http://thinklings.org/?post_id=4219
which makes the point that whatever anti-religion agenda Pullman had, it was dumbed down by Hollywood anyway.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 12/10/2007 at 03:31 AM
Here I thought it was all an allegorical Paradise Lost kinda thing.
I read the books and loved them.
Daemon or Demon- we actually had that argument the other day and my only insight was that I thought Daemons were under a geas...
As for the religous entities being upset- I can only hope...I hope they protest it like crazy...maybe thy will burn some books.
It will ensure far more readership.
-wayne
Posted by: Wayne Porter | 12/14/2007 at 05:53 AM