Dumbed-down dystopia

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had wanted to read this book for a long time, ever since my dad told me about it when I was young. Bradbury has a very interesting writing style that really focuses on the inner life of the main character, Guy Montag, a “fireman” of the future whose job is to burn books. Writing in 1950, Bradbury anticipates the demands for political correctness, the inanity of much television content (including news-entertainment), the dumbing-down of education, and the breakdown of the family that late 20th and early 21st century people are familiar with.

There are quite a lot of the more common curse words and uses of “God” and “Jesus” as exclamations that will grate on some readers. They did on me.

Overall, this is a brilliantly written book with a compelling story.

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A powerful narrative of redemption

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful book that explores so much: conversion, repentance, adoption, family and church life, and living by faith.

Carl Trueman did a really nice review of it here.

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I finally read “Of Mice and Men”

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(Vague spoiler alert if you don’t know the story)

Wright on Romans, part 2

Paul for Everyone Romans: Part Two Chapters 9-16 by N.T. Wright

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed Wright’s second volume for the same reasons I enjoyed the first: he consistently places each section of the text in the context of redemptive history. I’d like to read more of this series in the future.

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State patronage and private charity in Athens

Some notes from Paul Millett’s essay referred to here:

• The tyrant Pisistratus offered monetary support to farmers “so that,” in Aristotle’s words, “they should continue to maintain themselves by farming.” Millett comments that “The effect of this would presumably be to reduce peasants’ dependence on local, wealthy landowners, and transfer allegiance to the tyrant, thereby centralising patronage and buttressing the tyranny.” Millet thinks that this was funded by a tax on crops (23).
• “The survival of the Athenian system of democracy depended on the participation of the demos, which in turn relied on preserving their independence of the wealthy.” This meant that ”public pay” to the poor was a way to achieve their equality in the political system by keeping them out of patron-client relations whereby the rich could control the poor. They were not meant to level out wealth: “The solution to the problem of economic independence seems to lie, not with the distribution of property, but with the redistribution of income.” Millet believes that Isocrates and Plato criticized the system of public pay because it empowered the poor to participate in politics (37-38).
• There were many types of public pay, including pay earned for officeholding, jury service, going to the assembly, and serving as a naval oarsman. There were also “the occasional handouts known as theorika.“ The payments didn’t usually seem to be enough to pay a full day’s wage, but even small amounts seem to have been welcome. The money for this seems to have come from the spoils of the Athenian empire, built in the 5th century BC.
• Aid from philoi (“relatives, neighbors, and friends”) was “a secondary redistributive mechanism, serving to focus funds where they were most desperately needed,” such as sickness. Philoi‘s “obligations extend from borrowing [does he mean lending?] household goods (Theophrastus, Characters 10. 13) to the lending or giving of large sums of money (Demosthenes 53, 4-13).” This was not a state program, but a cultural expectation (41-42).

Reclaiming a wide definition of “art”

Following the thought of Eric Gill, Peter Leithart traces the history of the term “art.” For a long time, it did not refer to the fine arts, even if the Greeks made a distinction between the superior arts that produced intellectual products, rather than physical products. He quotes Gill’s descriptions: art was “human skill in making” or “the well making of what needs making.” Abbe Bateux’s conceptualization of the fine arts and the mechanical arts combined with mass production enabled by the Industrial Revolution mean that fine arts dominate the category of art.

The last three paragraphs are interesting:

As a result of these shifts in the way work works, “the word art is now almost exclusively associated, at least on fashionable literary circles, with the fine arts.” Painters and poets have “no ordinary job of work to do,” and come to “use the word art to mean, not human skill in making things, but the ability of certain special people, specially trained or specially gifted, to exhibit in paint or stone, or word or sound, their special sensibilities and fine feelings.” Art is linked with “aesthetics,” which Gill defines as “beauty mongering.” I think Gill is wrong to restrict this definition of art to “fashionable circles.” Working class people think of the fine arts in a similar way, and mock the elite artistes. The category of “fine arts” damages artists by encouraging them to think of themselves as prophets; it damages others because it discourages them from thinking of their own making as artistic.

The proper response to this situation is not to jettison the industrial system, impossible in any case.  The key is to reinvest what we think of as “non-artistic” work with the values associated with art. That involves looking for creative ways to give laborers more responsibility for their products. It means finding fresh ways to enhance the creative potential of all labor, so that it becomes drudgery divine. It also means recognizing the artfulness, and the beauty, that is always already there in any field of human endeavor. There is music in a humming engine; there’s a choreography to a well-orchestrated factory floor; the janitor can take aesthetic satisfaction from the cleanliness and order he leaves behind; mothers in the home are sculpting children; there’s beauty in skillful manipulation of a backhoe.

As Gill says, all men, because they are made in the image of God, are called to “collaborate with God in creating, to make all things good, that is to say beautiful, that is to say holy.” All men, not only the “artist,” are called to be and make the art of God. In Christ, the Father’s inspired Poem, Christians discover this artistic vocation.

That’s more like it

The Middle East in Modern World History by Ernest Tucker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the best textbook on the Middle East that I have seen so far. It recounts the important events but also touches on a lot of the important themes that can get lost in a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. It’s a bit dry, but still quite good. Even the brief early chapters on the Middle East before roughly 1700 have a good amount of detail.

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