The Dangerous Life

The Dangerous Life:

I warn you that this is a long essay on a serious topic.

Ex Nihlio has a review of Serenity. It focuses on 'love, and its twin, belief.'

Everyone in the film (when they find themselves) is driven by love, but the interesting thing is that Serenity (amazingly! fortuitously!) manages to blend that love seamlessly with its twin, belief. In Serenity, there can be no true belief without a love that covers the sins necessary to defend that belief. There can be no love without foundation—without a belief in something, anything. And all of the actors in the tragicomedy are driven by their idealism—personal or political—their loves-cum-beliefs-cum-lives. They are all, to quote the movie, “true believers” by the end. And it is on that level that we connect with them—we are people who, even lacking it, long for true belief. Unconditional. Unequivocal. An excuse to love without care or worry of personal consequence. A belief that moves mountains or armies.

That is right.

Love and belief are twinned in this way. There is a deeper conflict at work, though. The Operative believes in a vision of a world without sin, and loves it so much that it covers his sins of murdering children. He can only be opposed, we are told, by men who believe in something else -- but who also truly believe.

We see that true belief gives a power that can be used for good or evil. In that way, faith is dangerous. It is dangerous in just the way Tolkien described:

’Dangerous?,’ cried Gandalf. ‘And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet. . .And Aragon is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers. . .for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion.’

It is therefore truth that the best thing in the world is to be dangerous. It is also the worst thing. A man should believe, and love, without fear or reservation. I believe this, and have lived this way, sometimes to great joy and sometimes to great pain.

We were talking just yesterday about the true believers who, seeking to obliterate their lives, let their faith move them to terrible things. How can we judge between the kind of faith that heals, and the kind tht poisons?

I doubt it is possible to judge between the religions, and prove that one is right and another wrong. I think, however, that we can examine the ways of belief, and show what a righteous man ought to look like. I will not tell you what to believe, but I will tell you how to believe.

Consider Robert Winston. He asks, "Why do we believe in God?" He tells an interesting tale about snake-handlers and psychologists.

Many years ago, a team of researchers at the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota decided to put [a theory that religion was linked to mental illness] to the test. They studied certain fringe religious groups, such as fundamentalist Baptists, Pentecostalists and the snake-handlers of West Virginia, to see if they showed the particular type of psychopathology associated with mental illness. Members of mainstream Protestant churches from a similar social and financial background provided a good control group for comparison. Some of the wilder fundamentalists prayed with what can only be described as great and transcendental ecstasy, but there was no obvious sign of any particular psychopathology among most of the people studied. After further analysis, however, there appeared a tendency to what can only be described as mental instability in one particular group. The study was blinded, so that most of the research team involved with questionnaires did not have access to the final data. When they were asked which group they thought would show the most disturbed psychopathology, the whole team identified the snake-handlers. But when the data were revealed, the reverse was true: there was more mental illness among the conventional Protestant churchgoers - the "extrinsically" religious - than among the fervently committed.

Snake-handling promotes sanity? Yes, apparently, because it can only be practiced by those who have learned the right way to believe. The answer ought not to be surprising, nor to have needed a study of psychology, because it was so ably explained by Chesterton's Orthodoxy, in "The Maniac."

There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and generally there is a vague association between wreathing laurels in your hair and sticking straws in it. Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like; and if Shakespeare ever really held horses, it was because he was much the safest man to hold them. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

So that is part of the picture. I suggest reading Chesterton in his entirety, as time permits.

Here is another part, again from the Winston essay. It discusses another psychological theory, which happens merely to be a repetition of an old religious truth.

A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport... suggested that there were two types of religious commitment - extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he defined as religious self-centredness. Such a person goes to church or synagogue as a means to an end - for what they can get out of it. They might go to church to be seen, because it is the social norm in their society, conferring respectability or social advancement. Going to church (or synagogue) becomes a social convention.

Allport thought that intrinsic religiosity was different. He identified a group of people who were intrinsically religious, seeing their religion as an end in itself. They tended to be more deeply committed; religion became the organising principle of their lives, a central and personal experience. In support of his research, Allport found that prejudice was more common in those individuals who scored highly for extrinsic religion.

What is this, but an intellectual's restatement of Matthew 6? Yet it tells us a great deal. The suicide bomber is motivated by conditioning: he is being fed a constant line of mythology by the group that wishes to move his heart. He is convinced that they believe him to be a hero, and then told what they expect of a hero. And so he 'does his alms with a trumpet in the street, that may have glory of men.'

We have identified three signs of right faith, then: it is complete, so that the faithful man sheds those things he does not believe, and focuses his heart and his life on what he finds that he does; it is mystical, rooted in imagination and courage rather than logic and conformity; and it is secret, kept within the heart, though some signs of it may shine through even from the most private rooms.

There is another: it is fearless.

To return to Firefly for a moment, there is a scene in "Out of Gas" when River finds Book reading a Bible. "Don't be afraid," she says. He looks at her, and she nods to his Bible. "That's what it says, 'Don't be afraid.'" "Yes," he answers.

Here is the Bhagavad Gita on the subject:

Many there be who come! from fear set free, From anger, from desire; keeping their hearts Fixed upon me - my Faithful - purified By sacred flame of Knowledge. Such as these Mix with my being. Whoso worship me, Them I exalt; but all men everywhere Shall fall into my path; albeit, those souls Which seek reward for works, make sacrifice Now, to the lower gods, I say to thee Here have they their reward.

And here is Chesterton:

Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.

That is the right way to believe. It is, to be certain, dangerous. It will lead you to great pain, and only might lead you to great joy. It has led me to both. It will take you on foolish quests, and lead you to break yourself on high mountains. It will lead you to declare your love and live it out, both when the consequences are good and when they are hard. You may rise again, stronger or weaker or wiser; and then again you may not.

I think you will be the right kind of man, though, while you do live. You will be dangerous, as Gandalf or Aragorn is dangerous, and not as the evil are.

Perhaps there is more. All the faiths proclaim something better in the next world, at least for the righteous. I hope for that, too. But whether that is real or an illusion, and whatever form it may take, at least you will have lived fully and well in this world. That is all I have to promise you, for I am -- as the Havamal counsels -- only 'middle wise.' Of demons and heavens I know nothing, though I have heard much, and believe certain things; but of men and the world of men, perhaps I have learned a thing.

Judge for yourselves.