Book Review: The Princess and the Goblin

Audiobooks open up to me a realm of books I wouldn't usually read, including this children's story by George McDonald, written in 1872.  George McDonald was C.S. Lewis's guide through Heaven in The Great Divorce, the Virgil to his Dante if you will, and C.S. Lewis expresses gratitude to McDonald in his autobiography for his influence on his life.

The fantasy genre has evolved a lot since then and sometimes McDonald's world and story seem naive to people who have read J.R.R. Tolkien or even The Chronicles of Narnia. Though there is a dash of suspense and horror, one always feels invited to laugh at McDonald's goblins in a way one could hardly dream of laughing at the Nazgul. Nevertheless, the book has enough of the magically unexpected, the whimsically mysterious, the intimations of real-life meaning to stay interesting. 

Most interesting of all is the role of belief at several points in the story, and especially at one point, when-- at the risk of spoiling the plot-- a character is rescued from death trapped in a cave, by someone who, knowing nothing of the person's captivity, follows an invisible string first into the cave and to the exact spot, and then out of the cave.  The rescued person is ambivalent at first, then disbelieves in the existence of the invisible string.  Later, however, someone points out that he has no account of how the rescue could have occurred at all, so maybe he ought to believe the story he is told.

I think this parable contains a lesson both for those Joyless Moralist would call "modernists"-- or at least a subset of them, scientific-material atheist evolutionists etc., who dismiss religion; that must not be exactly what JM means since she considers me a modernist, but I suppose scientific materialists are a subset of what she calls modernists-- and for a certain type of conservative/traditionalist Christian inclined to be dismissive of modernity. 

It is a fact that we have all sorts of good things that mankind lacked a few centuries-- reliable food supplies in greatly increased quantity and quality and at far lower prices in labor terms, near-universal literacy, longer lifespans and cures for countless disease, far greater scientific and geographical knowledge, cheaper and more comfortable and abundant clothing, indoor climate control, better communication and transportation that allows us to communicate with distant relatives and tour the world's natural and man-made wonders-- and also that we are spared many horrors of the past-- we (in the West at least) no longer suffer high rates of infant and child mortality, no one lives in slavery or serfdom, there are no Inquisitions and very limited religious persecution, aristocracy and class and caste systems are gone and there is probably less economic inequality, child labor has been nearly eliminated, and war and violence are far less likely to affect most of our lives than in the past.

Why? Somehow, we've been led out of a dark cavern, but how, we don't really know. What we can see is (a) that this burst of progress occurred in the wake of Descartes and the Enlightenment, and (b) that it was primarily the work of a Christian civilization. The Christian civilization existed for centuries without achieving the breakthrough to economic growth and liberal democracy, so anyone who enjoys the benefits of modern civilization (anyone in America, for example) ought to be prepared to give some credit, at least tentatively, to the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment did not play a role, why did the breakthrough to modern economic growth and liberal democracy occur just then? On the other hand, it is precisely and uniquely in the Christian civilization of the West that the breakthrough occurred. The contribution of non-Christian regions of the world has, frankly, been minor (though European Jews contributed a lot) and those regions have had patchy success at best even in mimicking what the West has achieved.  Proper epistemic scruples, then, compel wise "modernists" and Christians each to give the other provisional credit for the amazing prosperity and freedom which a part of mankind has, in the past few generations, suddenly come to enjoy.

Leave it to me to spoil a charming children's story by drawing out lessons for historiosophy and geopolitics.

Comments

[Nato]

I would be inclined to credit Christianity's relative aversion to theocracy because of its Caesar/God dichotomy, except that I think this also applies somewhat to historical Buddhism. Perhaps Buddhism was *too* averse, and unable to provide the counterweight to royal overlords that the Church was.

Whatever the case, I'm inclined to ascribe an unusual amount of collective progress to the avoidance of unitary power, allowing more room for individual (or at least subgroup) conscience and industry.

[Tom]

The credit for Democracy/Republicanism and Capitalism lies with the ancient Greeks and Romans. The power of the Roman empire did not significantly wane until around the time of Constantine, who coincidentally made Christianity the official religion of the state, though one could make a case that the fall of Republicanism and the rise of the Caesar was the first major blow. Republicanism and the necessary enfranchisement of the populace was probably difficult to maintain in light of the expanding boundaries of the Republic due to military conquest. Anyway, the propagation and rediscovery of the ancient philosophical ideals can mostly be credited to the Golden Age of Islam, which probably wouldn't have been possible if not for the invention of paper by the Chinese. From wikipedia:

During the Muslim conquests of the 7th and early 8th centuries, nomadic Arab armies established the Islamic Empire, which was one of the ten largest empires in history. The Islamic Golden Age was soon inaugurated by the middle of the 8th century by the ascension of the Abbasid Caliphate and the transfer of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad. The Abbassids were influenced by the Qur'anic injunctions and hadith such as "The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of martyrs" stressing the value of knowledge. During this period the Muslim world became the unrivaled intellectual center for science, philosophy, medicine and education as the Abbasids championed the cause of knowledge and established a "House of Wisdom" in Baghdad; where both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars sought to translate and gather all the world's knowledge into Arabic. Many classic works of antiquity that would otherwise have been lost were translated into Arabic and later in turn translated into Turkish, Persian, Hebrew and Latin. During this period the Muslim world was a cauldron of cultures which collected, synthesized and significantly advanced the knowledge gained from the ancient Roman, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, North African, Greek and Byzantine civilizations. Rival Muslim dynasties such as the Fatimids of Egypt and the Umayyads of al-Andalus were also major intellectual centers with cities such as Cairo and Córdoba rivaling Baghdad.

A major innovation of this period was paper - originally a secret tightly guarded by the Chinese. The art of papermaking was obtained from prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas (751), resulting in paper mills being built in Samarkand and Baghdad. The Arabs improved upon the Chinese techniques of using mulberry bark by using starch to account for the Muslim preference for pens vs. the Chinese for brushes. By AD 900 there were hundreds of shops employing scribes and binders for books in Baghdad and even public libraries began to become established, including the first lending libraries. From here paper-making spread west to Fez and then to al-Andalus and from there to Europe in the 13th century.

So, I think you give a bit too much credit to Christianity and Western Modernists, and probably not enough credit to the lasting power of superior ideals discovered by more ancient civilizations. If there's a tradition to value here, it would seem that it is the one rediscovered by the Enlightenment and propagated by the Golden Age of Islam, the one that led to the beauty and power of the Roman Republic, the one first strongly held by the ancient Greeks, and the one, that through the study of various scholars of antiquity, eventually came to be the first tradition of American governance.

[Nathan Smith]

re: "The credit for Democracy/Republicanism and Capitalism lies with the ancient Greeks and Romans..."

This is a strange claim, considering that (a) the Greeks and Romans never established anything that really deserves to be called republicanism, or democracy, or capitalism, and (b) even to the extent that there were some intimations of it, they quickly disintegrated, and the Greco-Roman civilization as a whole succumbed to decline in ruin. No doubt the ancient civilizations came up with some good ideas, but it was the Christians that were able to implement them and make them endure. For that matter, the Christian civilizations exploited Chinese gunpowder and Indian "Arabic" numerals far more effectively than did the originators of those ideas. The patterns of cultural diffusion are so... well, diffuse... that if one wishes to trace the origins of the central achievements of Christian civilization to non-Christian sources, there is rarely a lack of plausible stories. But such explanations dodge the central task of explaining why, by the year 1500 AD, a hugely energetic and creative civilization had emerged in Europe whose subsequent success has dwarfed that of all other civilizations past and contemporary.

re: "I'm inclined to ascribe an unusual amount of collective progress to the avoidance of unitary power, allowing more room for individual (or at least subgroup) conscience and industry."

I've heard this argument before, i.e., the argument that the success of Christian civilizaion is its division of powers, "checks and balances," if you will. I understand it, and I don't. To paraphrase this thesis "Only a house divided against itself can stand" does justice to the oddness of the claim. There have been plenty of civilizations in which an inordinately powerful noble class eviscerated central authority, and plenty of civilizations torn apart by civil war. Generally this has been a path to ruin. And yet it does seem to be true in America today that the division of power is beneficial to freedom, and it certainly seems arguable that the diffusion of power in medieval Christian civilization was comparably beneficial. Why? In contemporary America, one reason may be that the power is, in the first place, not so much divided as specialized: the president, Congress, and the judiciary each have certain powers, as do the federal, state, and local governments; the jurisdictional squabbles that provoke journalists to deploy the phrase "checks and balances" reflect that the borderlines of these specialized spheres of power can never be clearly and finally demarcated, and the squabbles are indeed healthy symptoms of the continued functioning of the system; but "checks and balances" is really a rather cynical formulation, which reflects the tyrannophobia of the Founders, a healthy tyrannophobia no doubt, but one that is perhaps slightly misleadnig as a lens through which to describe the American system. It often, perhaps even typically occurs, that the branches of government do not so much check each other as cooperate with each other in the public interest.

So why was the division of power between Church and State in the Middle Ages more productive than, say, the division between Bosnians, Serbs and Croats in Yugoslavia, or the division of power between strong nobles and a weak king that ruined early modern Poland? To answer this you need some answer to the question: What kind of entity was the Church? Might one be well advised to entertain the possibility that the Church "allowed more room for individual (or at least subgroup) conscience and industry," not merely blindly and accidentally because it was a locus of power different from the state, but consciously, purposively, and systematically? Might it be relevant to note that the most casual glance at Christian teachings, as expounded, say, at your friendly neighborhood church, do, among other things, promote conscience and industry deliberately and persistently, as a matter of course? Or that, in fact, Christian churches preserved literacy through the Dark Ages, invented the university, and agitated against the slave trade?

And then, why did the state tolerate this partially independent, partly rival, entity, the church, seeing as the church hardly ever visibly possessed the force to resist takeover or suppression by the state? Two casual if not dismissive answers that might be offered-- (a) the state needed the church for legitimacy, and (b) an attack on the church could provoke popular resistance-- shed some light on what kind of entity this is. It had power, yes, but a different kind of power: *moral* power, a power of moral suasion at the grassroots level, not always but typically and paradigmatically divorced from the use of coercive force, which could be deployed on the state's behalf, or against it, but which was also deployed for ends tangential to the state and its purposes and which gradually worked towards what I might vaguely and somewhat inadequately call "the advance of civilization," to put it in a misleadingly neutral language designed to evoke a universal approbation that is part of the identity of any modern Western liberal yet would be hard to justify philosophically except on Christian grounds. No entity in the ancient world, no entity in China, no entity in the Islamic world, certainly no entity in the pre-Columbian Mexico or Peru, or in sub-Saharan Africa, had, or indeed conceived of, *this* kind of power. And that is the difference.

[Nato]

The avoidance of unitary power has to persist for a while - to be relatively stable - to allow other institutions room to evolve and strengthen. If chaos and unresolved hostilities give extra room for independent actors to grow, they certainly destroy most of them in their infancy. The extended, if wary, dynamic equilibrium between Church and State is unprecedented as far as I know.

[coach wallets]

Summer is the great season for all sports in the open air. People can go swimming and sightseeing. It is time for all things to grow up.

[Inversiones en petroleo]

I think that you should add some images or videos.