Robot love

From an article on the changing attitudes toward robots and consequently toward humans:

Children, in turn, play with more and more robotic and electronic toys. Many, like the Tamagotchi digital pets of the 1990s, and the later robotic dog Aibo, require nurturing, which encourages kids to take care of them, and therefore, to care about them. Some kids say they prefer these pets to real dogs and cats that can grow old and die.

"People used to buy pets to teach their children about life and death and loss," Turkle said. We are now teaching kids that real living creatures are risky, while robots are safe.

Also, this:

In her interviews with people of many ages and backgrounds, Turkle has found that many now are coming to fantasize about robots that could serve as friends who would always listen to us, who would never become angry, who would never disappoint.

"What are we talking about when we're talking about robots? We're talking about our fears of each other," she said. "Our disappointments with each other. Our lack of community. Our lack of time."

This is technology as a replacement for character. With sophisticated enough tools, we won't feel the pains of our lack of patience, compassion, love.

It brings to mind a (favorite) C.S. Lewis quote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. [Instead, get a Tamagochi!] Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries [such as robot-"friends"]; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

God willing, when I have kids, they will have real pets that scratch and bite if you hold them wrong; shed fur everywhere; chew through your computer cables if you leave them in the wrong spot; sit on the couch with you and eat from your hand at the dinner table; and don't require batteries. My kids will have paper books, which have weight and texture and can be lent to friends. They will not watch TV every day. They will eat vegetables, and not know what french fries are or what coca-cola tastes like. They will be vulnerable and they will learn real love.

Memory and Gratitude (1)

I've been thinking about the role of memory in daily life and mood for a while, ever since I realized that O. just isn't as naturally inclined as I am to spend time thinking about the past. So I've been pondering what remembering accomplishes, and that's what this post is about. I'm pulling together several ideas:

1. The way you remember (or don't) shapes your time orientation.
2. The way you remember affects your mood, enabling gratitude and happiness.
3. The way you remember can be a virtue; failing to remember can be a moral failure.

1. Remembering shapes your time orientation.
This video introduced me to the idea of people living in "different time zones." Watch it, it's only 10 minutes long but it's really interesting!

Zimbardo in the video lists six "time zones" that people live in:

• Past, Positive and Negative
• Present, Hedonist and Fatalist*
• Future, Immediate and Distant

*He only names the first three of them so I made up my own names for the others, based on his explanations.

People with a Past Positive orientation enjoy remembering the good old days; people with a Past Negative orientation always remember the things they regret. On the other end, people with a Future orientation don't do much remembering, particularly if they have a Distant Future orientation wherein the present and certainly the past don't matter much, because Real Life is going to begin much, much later--in the afterlife or, in a more tech-y twist, when the technological singularity arrives.

Your time orientation has important consequences for how you live your life.  Zimbardo says, for instance, that "most of us are here [at the seminar] because we are [immediate] future-oriented," that future oriented people make plans and progress while present oriented people mostly don't, that a past-positive orientation can make you happy but a past negative orientation is filled with regrets, and that "all addictions are addictions of present hedonism."

O. for a long time was future-oriented in a way that elevated the glorious Future and devalued the flawed Present: i.e., Future Distant, Singularitarian style. This future-orientation hindered him in enjoying the present (because it could always be better) and planning for the immediate future (like getting homework done). In the past several years, O. has been changing time-zones, giving more value to remembering the past.

C.S. Lewis discusses in The Screwtape Letters how enticing a person to focus on the future is the best way to make that person unhappy and cut off from God. A person who thinks of the past may remember a time when God helped him, and turn to God in the present to pray; a person who thinks of the present can experience God's presence first hand; but a person who thinks only of the future can be lost forever in a morass of dreams and fears. I am glad that O. is remembering more, because it means he is turning less toward the future.

2. Remembering enables gratitude.
Generally speaking, grateful people are happy, while ungrateful people are dissatisfied. I'd rather be grateful and happy than ungrateful and unhappy, and I wish the same for my loved ones. Gratitude is largely enabled by memory. If you live exclusively in the present, then in a pleasant present you can be grateful and happy, but when a moment of pain comes, you will be overwhelmed because pain is all you have. On the other hand, if you remember past good things and bring those memories with you into the present, you can be grateful for those past events for years and years. Present suffering can be ameliorated by memories of past pleasures, as in Zimbardo's "Past Positive" orientation. Present despair can be broken by memories of past redemptions, as Lewis says.

Note: Of course there are also things that a person could legitimately need to forget or never think about. e.g. the case of anyone with PTSD.

3. Remembering is a prerequisite to virtue
Morality is connected to intentional behavior, so we don't normally think of forgetting as immoral since it's (typically) not deliberate. Likewise we don't think of remembering as virtuous. But memory isn't not all unintentional or uncontrollable. Consider: how often do you forget that you owe someone money vs. that someone owes you money? (Maybe you remember it more when you owe money because of the potency of guilt or obligation.) We forget selectively; we forget the things we don't want to think about or don't value. Likewise, we remember selectively; if the emotional weight isn't great enough to guarantee remembering, we can choose to write things down (in a calendar or a journal). In that sense, it seems reasonable to hold a person accountable for forgetting something. Memory has a moral dimension.

Having a good memory doesn't necessarily make you a good person, but it does enable you to do good in ways that a person who does not remember simply can't. Virtues like loyalty, gratitude, and keeping promises rely directly on memory. Others, like hope and love, are made a lot easier through memory (it's easier to love a person who is being cruel to you when you remember times in the past when they treated you kindly). For both kinds, remembering is a virtue.

To be responsible, you have to remember your commitments. If you don't, you will let people down. To be truthful, you have to to remember the past accurately. If you don't, you'll misrepresent what happened according to how you felt about it. To keep your promises, you have to remember making them. If you don't remember, you'll hurt and disappoint people. To be loyal, you have to remember your relationships. If you forget, you'll betray people. To live virtuously, you have to remember things. Forgetting makes you hurt people and break promises.

More on the virtue of remembering as seen in the Bible next post.

"Voyage of the Dawn Treader"

My mother requested a blog post about the differences between the recent movie of "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and the original book by C.S. Lewis. I am simultaneously well-equipped to write about this, because Dawn Treader was my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia, and ill-equipped, because it has been years since I read it... I might have to go read it now, actually... But I'll comment now on the biggest differences I noticed (and fact-check after I reread the book).

First, let me note that the reason I loved Dawn Treader the best is that it is one of those voyage/adventure books that feels like it could go on forever. The general structure is of traveling from island to island on the ship the Dawn Treader, sailing the uncharted seas on the outskirts of Narnia. In my recollection of the book, the various island episodes are fairly unconnected. In fact, in the book-on-tape version that I listened to (over and over) as a child, several of the middle islands were simply omitted, to be replaced by the line "And they had many more adventures." So when I eventually read the book for myself and discovered the Dufflepuds and other characters, I was thrilled to find more new story hidden inside this familiar book. This is perhaps the reason that I feel the book could just keep expanding, and why it is so clear to me that the island episodes in the book are relatively independent.

In the movie, however, this is not the case. To closely connect the islands and, I suppose, create a faster pace and more suspence (Heaven forbid there be a movie that actually takes its time in this day and age!), the movie added an overt villain: the Scary, Creepy Mist. At the first set of islands that Caspian and his crew visit, they find that the Mist has been menacing and kidnapping the Narnian inhabitants of these isles. Moreover, the Mist is getting increasingly powerful. The message of "Soon, it may be too late" hangs in the air. This discovery increases the urgency of their quest to find the Seven Lords, because the way to defeat the Mist (rather bizarrely, to my mind) is to lay their Seven Swords on Aslan's Table. They learn this and are commissioned by the sorcerer at the second island that they visit.

So at every island the Dawn Treader visits, and even while the ship is at sea, the Mist keeps tempting its crew. Lucy, Edmund, Caspian and especially Eustace Clarence Scrub are each tested (I won't say who passes and fails). Lucy's test has to do with envy; Edmund and Caspian are tempted by greed and status; and Eustace must outgrow his selfishness. Meanwhile, the themes of courage and self-acceptance keep surfacing. "Love yourself as you are" and "Have courage, take risks for the greater good" come across as the lessons of the movie.

Courage and self-acceptance are both good messages, but they are not the messages of the Dawn Treader that I remember. In refocusing on those two ideas, the movie reshapes many aspects of the book. The order of the islands is changed, two islands are combined into one; the Mist becomes the enemy to defeat; the voyage of the Dawn Treader becomes a quest to save the world, in which the actions of individuals hold great weight; and the power of Aslan is diluted.

That last assertion might seem like a bit of a leap. Let me explain.

Both the book and the movie explore the idea of transformation. The most powerful instance of this is Eustace's transformation, as physically enacted in his turning into a dragon and eventually regaining his humanity. The book and movie treat this episode very differently. In the book, as long as Eustace is a dragon, the whole crew is stuck at the island where he was transformed. He helps them repair their damaged ship during the day, and at night he mourns his plight. After many days (I believe), he is somehow led to a pool, and has an encounter with Aslan. Eustace scratches off his dragon skin, and wriggles out of it. He feels lighter, freer. But when he looks in the pool by the light of the moon, he finds he looks just the same. He is still a hideous dragon. So he peels off another layer. And another, and another. I can't remember how many he has to remove, but each time it feels less pleasant, though he can see himself shrinking and shriveling, getting closer to boy-size, leaving dragon-dom behind.

But at the last, he is still wearing a dragon-skin and he can't bring himself to score it deeply with his claws so that he can finally writhe his way out. In the end, he needs Aslan to lift his heavy paw, and slash this deeply hidden dragon-skin wide open. It hurts, it hurts, but when the skin peels back, finally, Eustace emerges as a human again. Victory has come to him, and victory has made him small and weak and naked. When he returns to life as a human, he lives differently. He has been humbled, and he has had to see that he needs Aslan.

So the lesson of the book's dragon-transformation is surrender and dependence and reliance on Aslan (God). Transformation takes time and pain and the deliverance of a higher power.

But in the movie, Eustace is redeemed from dragonhood only after he saves the ship and its crew from the Mist, by fighting the seamonster/dragon that the Mist makes itself into. Eustace has to demonstrate that he has learned courage and confidence (largely from Reepicheep) before he can be returned to his true form. When he is changed back into his boy's body, the transformation does happen through Aslan's intervention, but the process is full of flashing light, fire, red and gold, and triumphant music, and brilliant daylight. It's not darkness and a hidden moonlit pool, it's not humility and pain and labor. Instead, it's magic. Aslan doesn't even actually touch Eustace; he just makes scratching marks on the sand and suddenly swirls of gold and bright sparks surround the dragon-Eustace and lift him up and spin him around. When the cloud of glory disperses, Eustace has become a boy again. Abracadabra!

In the movie, Eustace earns his humanity by fighting the dragon. Then, like clockwork, Aslan appears in the middle of the sunlit sandbar, draws runes on the sand and bam! Eustace is a boy again. Here, transformation or redemption is not initiated by Aslan/God, but rather by the good deeds of the one to be transformed. Moreover, the process is fast and sparkly, instead of slow and almost tortuous, as though it's just a superficial change in appearance, rather than a deep inward change created by Aslan's redeeming work.

This episode captures the fundamental difference between the book and the movie. In the book, everything depends on Aslan. There will be no fatal consequences if the humans fail in their mission to find the Seven Lords. Aslan is what really matters. In fact, I believe that in the book, a major reason for their quest is the search for Aslan's country. This does not feature at all in the movie as a motivation.

In the movie, you see, human effort is vital and effective, and transformation comes through willpower and courage, and you earn it, and ultimately it depends on you. Saving Narnia from the evil Mist also depends on you. If you fail, it could be the end of everything. Aslan has his table and his country, but he's not doing anything to help you out along the way. You are on your own.

Ok, that last might be an overstatement, but it's not far off. Let me just put this really succinctly: the book is about grace, the movie is about effort. That is the difference, and that is why Voyage of the Dawn Treader is one of my favorite books, but "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is not one of my favorite movies.



p.s. Please comment and correct me if I got facts wrong!

Wow

I just finished reading A Man in Christ. This took several months since I've been digesting it slowly, but it is my new favorite book. It is better than C.S. Lewis. (!!!)

That's all for now! I think I'll be typing up some long chunks of it though for further digestion and general spreading of insight and understanding and amazingness.

Books: recent past, present, and near future

The good way to do this would be to comment on each book and talk about what it said to me, but that would take an eternity. Besides, I'm still digesting content. Ideas from these will be showing up (have been showing up) in my other writing, I'm sure.

• Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. I got pointed to it yesterday when I was trying to find writing about the Christian theology of the body and desire. Besides, I've been meaning to read this book (and all of Lewis's other stuff) for ages. As befits C.S. Lewis, this book is deeply insightful and surprisingly practical--or perhaps "relevant" would be a better word. At any rate, it is shedding light on the emotional ecology, shall I say, of a number of relational environments. . . I'm about half-way through, having just finished the section on Affection.


• Hopefully I'll make some headway in Holy Trinity this break. I've been hiking through this book for, what, 4 years now? If I had realized it was a seminary textbook when I first picked it up, I don't know if I would have bought it...


• Mudhouse Sabbath by Lauren Winner. I read it New Year's Day, en route from St. Louis to JFK. I really liked this book: meditations on living intentionally, on structuring your life and thoughts around God, on living ritual and tradition.


• Hearing God by Dallas Willard. Finally finished it, two nights ago! I started that book in August and I kept reading it in really small increments because it does take a lot of, hm, chewing. Definitely worthwhile. I intend to go back and reread the section on the "still small voice," to properly absorb. (Does that make me a cow, if I chew the literary cud?)


• Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. I finished this around Christmas, and I think I'm going to go back to the beginning of that book, too. (Thanks so much, Finney!)


• A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle. It had been a long time since I read those books, and I am so glad I reread them. I hate describing things in superlatives, so I'm just going to tell you to READ THEM if you haven't already. (And read the middle book too! I just couldn't find it on my bookshelf!) One of the major themes, painted beautifully, is the interconnectedness of all things, from the stars down to the mitochondria. We all need each other, L'Engle says.

As for what I'm reading next, here are 3 from the top of my mental stack:

• Adger's Core Syntax, because sentences are fascinating!


• Kingdom Without Borders from Urbana, about the church around the world. I'm excited to learn about different cultures and how God works in different places.


• A commentary on Hosea, lent to me by the pastor at church, in preparation for Bible study next semester.

There is a lamentable lack of fiction on this list, despite the glorious exception of Madeleine L'Engle. Any suggestions for novels for me to read?

Ethics of Violence

So I was reading Thomas F. Madden's article "Inventing the Crusades" in First Things (June/July 2009, Number 194; pp. 41-44). Curiosity-provoking title, right?

This section on the Christian attitude toward violence intrigued me:

One of the most profound misconceptions about the Crusades is that they represented a perversion of a religion whose founder preached meekness, love of enemies, and nonresistance. Riley-Smith reminds his reader that on the matter of violence Christ was not as clear as pacifists like to think. He praised the faith of the Roman centurion but did not condemn his profession. At the Last Supper he told his disciples, "Let him who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me, And he was reckoned with transgressors."

St. Paul said of secular authorities, "He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer." Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it. As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.

I've been discussing the intrinsic badness of war with a friend lately, so I was particularly interested to see this commentary. Previously, the main reference I had in mind for the topic was from C.S. Lewis's (brilliant) Screwtape Letters, in which the senior demon Screwtape's instruction to the junior Wormwood to

get it quite clear in your own mind that this state of falling in love is not, in itself, necessarily favourable either to us or to the other side. It is simply an occasion which we and the Enemy are both trying to exploit. Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.

The line from Ecclesiastes that there is "a time to kill and a time to heal" also supports this idea. I remember being alarmed when I first read both of those lines. The idea of a "time to kill" particularly shocked me. Killing is bad! How could there be a time for it? I thought. As my father pointed out at the time, though, even a doctor sometimes has to kill. I think he used the example of putting a sick animal down. (Of course, euthanasia of humans is a separate controversy in itself!) Or to take an example from science fiction--say you are Captain Picard, fighting the Borg who have invaded your ship, and you see one of your crew members get caught and begin to transform into one of these evil "cybernetic zombies" (Lily's phrasing in "First Contact"). There is no way to save him, and if you just leave him, he will become, against his will, part of the Borg. It is better to shoot and kill him than to leave him to that destiny. There is "a fate worse than death"!

So this perspective does make sense to me. Though it appears at first to imply that morality is purely contextual and therefore relative--obviously problematic for people who believe that moral absolutes exist--the idea that "violence is ethically neutral" or is "raw material" that has its own "time" does not actually say that violence is ever good, but only that it is sometimes right. In a world full of problems, the choice is rarely if ever between a perfect option and an awful option. Rather, we are confronted with the choice amongst an array of imperfect options, each of which is broken in a different way. We have to find the best option, the right choice, but the right and the best are not guaranteed to be unadulteratedly good. So the fact that violence can be the right choice--and, therefore, the effectively good choice--does not mean that violence would be a part of a perfect, unbroken world. That is, violence and war can be intrinsically fallen without being intrinscially evil.

Addendum: C.S. Lewis's term "spiritual raw material" does not clearly convey these ideas when taken out of context, and speaking of the relative and contextual good/evil of an action gets murky as well. None of those terms are defined! In the future, I'm going to keep in mind Madden's succinct phrasing "ethically neutral" instead, since ethics deals with actions and choices, rather than fuzzy inherent properties.