Fire and Knowledge

I know I already plugged the latest edition of The New Atlantis, but I just finished reading Christine Rosen’s essay “The Image Culture” and I must say it is excellent, as usual. So print the PDF and spend half an hour reading and thinking about our image culture. It will more than repay the time you put in.

Cultivation of beauty as a part of life is a way to counter the ugliness that pervades contemporary secular culture. The concrete slabs, the featureless metal buildings, the sterile high-tech look, and the mass production of impersonal consumer products are all signs of how modern materialism, in turning away from God, has also turned away from what is human.

—Gene Edward Veith, Jr., State of the Arts, p. 34

Aesthetic experience, the perception of beauty, is valuable for its own sake and can also profoundly enrich our lives. Art can open our eyes to the beauties of the created order. A painting or a song or a poem can spark a flash of illumination. Art can even disclose spiritual truths and express them in a penetrating way. It is little wonder that the church has always employed art in one way or another.

—Gene Edward Veith, Jr., State of the Arts, p. 26

Christians, who must be centered on the Word, must be cautious lest they surrender language to the graven images of the mass culture and the neopagan thought forms that they breed. The new graven images must be recognized and understood. This requires knowledge about art and something of the spirit of the iconoclasts.

—Gene Edward Veith, Jr., State of the Arts, p. 24

Another example of the government wasting money on technology: U.S. passports are going to have implanted RFID chips after October 2006. Even though 98.5% of the comments the government received opposed the new technology, they didn’t seem to care:

But in a federal filing, the department said that 98.5 percent of the 2,335 comments it received since it issued proposed rules last spring opposed the program.

Technology experts have said that the data on the chips, which will be read at a short distance by electronic devices in a passport-control booth, could be electronically intercepted and potentially misused.

Some privacy groups also fear that the chips could be a prelude to tracking individuals’ movements.

But hey, it’s hip technology, and they have to figure out a way to spend all those billions of dollars on something next year.

An interesting interview with Harold Bloom (published Oct. 7, 2005). Some excerpts:

I am very unwise, I can asure you. Unwise in all things. I think I am a good teacher of literature, particularly of Shakespeare. At Yale on Wednesdays I give an undergraduate seminar. Of course, I am a one-man department, I divorced the English department back in 1976, I convinced them to reappoint me as a “profesor of absolutely nothing” – I give courses in something called humanities. And on Wednesdays I give a course, year by year, where we read all of Shakespeare together. And on Thursdays I give a course called “The Art of Reading Poetry”. I regard myself as a teacher. I remark in this new book that I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom….

You know, child, my electronic mailbox overflowing with daily mesages from Potterites who still cannot forgive me for the article I published in Wall Street Journal more than a year ago, entitled “Can 35 Million Harry Potter Fans Be Wrong? — Yes!” These people claim that Harry Potter does great things for their children. I think they are deceiving themselves. I read the first book in the Potter series, the one that’s supposed to be the best. I was shocked. Every sentence there is a string of cliches, there are no characters %u2013 any one of them could be anyone else, they speak in each other’s voice, so one gets confused as to who is who.

IL: Yet the defenders of Harry Potter claim that these books get their children to read.

HB: But they don’t! Their eyes simply scan the page. Then they turn to the next page. Their minds are deadened by cliches. Nothing is required of them, absolutely nothing. Nothing happens to them. They are invited to avoid reality, to avoid the world and they are not invited to look inward, into themselves. But of course it is an exercise in futility to try to oppose Harry Potter.

There is a new The New Atlantis online! Be sure to read it–it is one of the best journals on technology & society out there. I’m just waiting for mine to come in the mail… (Shouldn’t subscribers get the print version first?!?)

Christians have become content with institutional ugliness—bland, mass-produced decorations, prefabricated church buildings, tacky knickknacks, artifacts of the dominant mass culture—rather than patronizing the significant creative efforts of their fellow Christians.

—Gene Edward Veith, Jr., State of the Arts, p. 23