slatestarscratchpad:

nostalgebraist:

Much as I hate to mention that word again, the ironic twist on the original concept is just too good not to mention – what word? what twist?  Well, see, I keep running into people who could be described, with some justice, as neotenous traditionalists

People who see old-fashioned upright Christian living, even with the scary bits left in, as a cozy sparkly whimsical thing, the only last place remaining for silly, innocent souls.  John C. Wright is one, of course.  (”He presently works (successfully) as a writer in Virginia, where he lives in fairy-tale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their four children: Pingping, Orville, Wilbur, and Just Wright.”)

But there’s also N. D. Wilson, son of Douglas Wilson (who is all about the “scary bits” of Christian tradition).  NDW’s book “Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World” is, among many other things, written in a voice too cutesy even for me, which is saying something:

What is the world?  A large (compared to most malls), moist, inhabited, spinning ball.  What kind of place is it?  The round kind.  The spinning kind.  The moist kind.  The inhabited kind.  The kind with flamingos (real and artificial).  The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity).  The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off.  The kind with sharks, and nose leeches, and slithery parasitic things (with barbs) that will swim up you like a urinary catheter if only you oblige by peeing in a South American river.  The kind with people who kill and people who love and people who do both.  The kind with people who think water from the Ganges is good for them and people who think eating the heart of their enemy will ward off death, and other who think they can cure their own failing brains if only they harvest enough uncommitted cells from human young.

This world is beautiful but badly broken.  St. Paul said that it groans, but I love it even in its groaning.  I love this round stage where we act out the tragedies and the comedies of history.  I love it with all of its villains and petty liars and self-righteous pompers.  I love the ants and the laughter of wide-eyed children encountering their first butterfly.  I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn’t stuck in one place.  It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story.  I love the world as it is, because I love what it will be.

Suffering is not here – it is far away, and it exists to entertain us, as part of the cool exciting drama we watch from this cozy place, under our warm blankets, our faces locked in expressions of permanent stoned wonder.  We look at thousands of years of history, at billions of years of biology, at everything that has ever captivated or uplifted or eroded or crushed a human soul, and we respond: it’s all sort of … cute, and quirky, isn’t it?  Sooooo random.  I like it.

Do you think Chesterton could have written that last paragraph (”This world is beautiful…”)? Does he strike you as weird in the same way?

It’s funny – I was originally going to write something like “Chesterton seems like the best possible version of this type,” but wasn’t sure if he quite fit, and considering how much JCW models himself on Chesterton it seemed like padding the list in an unfair way.  But he at least is somewhere close to this cluster.

I think Chesterton could have expressed the sentiment of the last paragraph, but he would have done it with much more skill, so that the underlying weirdness of the sentiment would be less naked.  In particular, Chesterton can often get away with saying absurd things by very bluntly noting the counter-intuitiveness of his position without actually overcoming it through argument.  This is one thing his famous paradoxes are doing – by reversing some common idea he makes it clear that he is aware of the common idea, and that he is saying something that goes against what the reader is likely to believe, leaving the reader to feel like they are being inducted into some sort of “higher-order” wisdom rather than simply being fed bad ideas.

So Chesterton might have done something with, I dunno, the idea that if the world were just uniformly great all the time the phrase “I love the world” would be a near-meaningless truism, and that it is really only the great awfulness in the world that allows us to, potentially, love it in a meaningful and nontrivial way?  Or something.  He would have sounded a lot more self-aware, is what I’m saying.

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