Thank you, I’m a little better tonight. Not well, but capable of functioning at a minimal level.

The most insidious thing about depression (I know I’ve written about this before) is the false sense of clarity it gives you. “Now, at last,” you feel, “I’ve cast aside the self-delusion and the rose-colored glasses. Now I see the world plainly, as it is, and I understand that it’s all death and corruption and doom.”

Naturalism in art, as generally practiced, I think, is almost a cultural form of depression. The Naturalist artist prides himself on painting (or writing about) decaying corpses and deformed children, congratulating himself that he has pierced the veil of illusion to portray the world as it actually is.

This same artist, however, very likely has a spouse or lover on whom he dotes, and children who delight him. But he will not include those things in his art, except in order to set the the viewer or reader up for some shock. He’s not a hypocrite, but he’s as delusional as the Pollyannas of this world, only from the other side. His view of reality is one-dimensional and consciously selective.

That’s one of the reasons I appreciate the Bible.

You’ll often run into people (especially on the Net, particularly on Facebook) who will delightedly point out all kinds of awful things somebody (usually not they themselves) found in the Bible—atrocities and rapes and injustices—and natter about how the Bible is really pornography and anybody who takes it seriously must be some kind of deviant.

These people are as superficial as the Christian Triumphalists, whose understanding of Scripture is frequently shaped, not by actually reading the Book, but by books of Biblical Principles written by religious celebrities. Or just some celebrity preacher’s TV sermons.

I wrestle with many things I find in the Bible, and I cannot claim to have solved its mysteries (I’ve written about how I deal with those things elsewhere, and won’t address that subject tonight). But when I go to the Bible I come away with the sense that I’ve encountered something entirely true to life. It is not a happy book about bunnies, nor is it a “realistic” novel by Zola. It contains real pain, real tragedy, and real hope.

Some Christians may be glib. The Bible, whatever else you may say about it, is not that.

I may or may not post tomorrow. I plan to be at The Festival of Nations at the River Centre in St. Paul, as has been my wont in recent years. It closes early tomorrow afternoon, so I may get time to post something, if only a scream from the heart of an overtaxed introvert. Or not.

Jonah Lehrer writes:

If nothing is learned, why are students and parents so desperate to get into the best schools? Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book “The Case Against Education,” argues that colleges are more about certifying their students than actually teaching them useful skills. Their primary function is to provide “signals” of intelligence and competency, which is why they put students through a variety of mostly arbitrary and useless academic hoops. “Good students tend to be smart, hardworking and conformist—three crucial traits for almost any job,” writes Dr. Caplan. “When a student excels in school, then, employers correctly infer that he’s likely to be a good worker.”

This is discouraging and challenging. I will likely not have the money to send my children to my alma mater or another suitable school, and I have begun to fear that it would a waste of money to do so. I loved my college experience, but I don’t know that I can offer a similar one to my children.

I’m deeply, profoundly depressed tonight, and not up to thinking up a post.

Instead, a picture of a dragonfly. Because I like them. I thought of doing a butterfly, but I’m in more of a dragonfly mood.



Photo credit: André Karwath

I’m not sure when I’ll do my next book review, as I recently downloaded a huge book on the Vikings in Scotland, The Viking Highlands: The Norse Age in the Highlands, by D. Rognvald Kelday, and it’ll take me a while to plow through it. But I’ll comment on something the author says right now.

Almost at the very beginning the author, who seems to have otherwise done commendable research, makes the following statement:

Norway, the land of the ‘north way’, had witnessed a rapid rise in population in the early part of the seventh century, leading eventually to a lack of land for some and a lack of opportunities for others.

This is certainly a view which may be found, prominently, in many books on the Viking Age. Most authors, though, are content to list overpopulation as one of several possible causes for the increase in Norse raiding. Kelday chooses to state flatly that overpopulation was the sole cause.

The problem with this statement is that it’s entirely false, and known to be false.

As my friend Prof. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger writes in his book, Viking Norway (sadly out of print for now), archaeology has discovered no—that is zero—evidence for the overpopulation theory. Norwegian archaeologists report that iron ore extraction declined significantly in the Viking Age, and that moose and reindeer trapping also declined. These are the opposite of what would be expected in a situation where population was increasing and new sources of foodstuffs required. In fact, it was during the Viking Age that the Medieval Warming Period was getting under way, and there was plenty of food pretty much everywhere in Europe.

So why do historians cling to the overpopulation theory, in the teeth of actual archaeological evidence? Titlestad identifies the reason in Viking Norway:

It is also not insignificant that the overpopulation theory was tailor-made for a materialist/Marxist historical outlook…. (p. 359)

Titlestad reports, reassuringly, that the Marxist view is diminishing in influence in historical circles (something that’s news to me) and that other explanations are beginning to get more serious consideration at last.

Fred Siegel of St. Francis College in Brooklyn argues that the highbrow class has killed culture.

Mencken and Huxley shared an aristocratic ideal based on an idyllic past. They romanticized a time before the age of machinery and mass production, when the lower orders lived in happy subordination and when intellectual eccentricity was encouraged among the elites. In this beautiful world, alienation was as unknown as bearbaiting and cockfighting, “and those who wanted to amuse themselves were,” in Huxley’s words, “compelled, in their humble way, to be artists.”

They considered the egalitarianism of American democracy a degraded form of government which, in Ortega’s words, discouraged “respect or esteem for superior individuals.” Intellectuals, they complained, weren’t given their due by the human detritus of this new world. Huxley, a member of the Eugenics Society, saw mass literacy, mass education, and popular newspapers as having “created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid.” He proposed the British government raise the price of newsprint ten or twentyfold because “the new stupid,” manipulated by newspaper plutocrats, were imposing a soul-crushing conformity on humanity. The masses, so his argument went, needed to be curtailed for their own good and for the greater good of high culture.