By Charles F. McElwee https://www.city-journal.org/technology-devices-children December 26, 2018 (Getty Images) Earlier this month, 60 Minutesreportedon the effects of “screen time” on American children. The unsettling segment concerned a groundbreaking study by the National Institutes of Health that confirms how screens affect brain development. The study’s initial data, involving 4,500 participants, detected significant differences in the brains of children using screens, like tablets or smartphones, for more than seven hours a day. Early findings cannot determine if these differences indicate harmful or beneficial effects, but the NIH study does show a link between children’s screen time and lower scores on cognitive tests. The report raises troubling questions about immersive use of technology devices in the young. As Jean Twenge, a prominent psychologist, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, smartphones “should be a tool that you use. Not a tool that uses you.” No tool epitomizes screen technology’s impact like the iPhone. Since its release in 2007, the device has distorted reality and disrupted daily routines for adults; for children, it is becoming a cognitive appendage. According to nonprofit Common Sense Media, 98 percent of homes with children have mobile devices, and 42 percent of young children now have their own tablets (up from 1 percent in 2011). Rather than resisting this influence, school systems are welcoming it. For young students, and even preschoolers, screens have become a portal for understanding the world. Educators embrace technology’s supremacy, believing that screen time will prepare their students for the working world. Code.org, a nonprofit backed by companies like Google and Facebook, spreads the tech gospel. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, theorganization has enjoyed“remarkable success in advancing its agenda by offering free programs for schools and through a social-media-savvy marketing campaign and lobbying.” The efforts have paid off; as the Inquirer reported, 25 percent of all U.S. students have Code.org accounts; 800,000 teachers use the site for class lessons. Is the fusion of education and technology helping children? InThe Atlantic, Rob Watersexploredthe effect of classroom technology on academic outcomes. Waters cites an Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development report, released in 2015, that found technology “is of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students.” He visited the learning lab of a charter school that serves low-income students in San Jose, California, where one concerned teacher told him, “I’m not anti-technology but I’m definitely for minimizing it. . . . Is the tech in my classroom going to preserve or enhance human connection?” This question lies at the heart of an ironic new class division: between Silicon Valley parents, who understand all too well the dangers of gadgets for young children, and the heartland’s middle- and working-class families, whose children are increasingly saturated in screen time. In October, the New York Timesprofiledhow “play-based preschools” now thrive in prosperous neighborhoods, ensuring that children play with traditional toys, develop interaction skills, and avoid the glow of tablet screens. But screen-based preschools continue to expand, too, often with federal grant funding, in states like Idaho and Wyoming. As the Times reported, a state-funded preschool, offered exclusively online, now serves approximately 10,000 children in Utah. Despite intensifying concerns about technology’s effect on childhood development, “Apple and Google compete ferociously to get products into schools and target students at an early age, when brand loyalty begins to form.” As the NIH study progresses, Americans will learn more about how screens harm children’s brains, but we already know that tablet screens compromise attentiveness, induce agitation, distort perspective, and hinder interaction. Speaking on 60 Minutes, pediatrician Dimitri Christakis confirmed screens’ effect on babies, noting that skills learned on iPads, such as “stacking” virtual blocks, don’t translate into physical skills. “They don’t transfer the knowledge from two dimensions to three,” Christakis told Cooper. Can parents insulate children, at their most malleable stages of development, from Big Tech? Students increasingly require technology for academic work and long-term advancement (Pew Research Centerreportedin October that many teenagers cannot finish their homework because of limited broadband access). But by embracing tablets as learning tools, parents are ceding their children’s intellectual growth to technology. Armed with smartphones, lost in apps, distracted by games, children join their parents in becoming ravenous digital consumers. Throughout 2018, Big Tech’s privacy breaches—from Facebook’s data exploitation to social media’s ecosystem for foreign-funded misinformation—made news. Perhaps the most overlooked story, though, addressed on60 Minutes, is how Silicon Valley, through educational marketing, has hooked a new generation on its products. As Athena Chavarria, who works for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative,told the Times: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.” As a result, more and more children face futures deprived of natural wonder—a high enough price to pay, but one likely to rise as we learn more about technology’s cognitive effects on young brains. Charles F. McElwee is a writer based in northeastern Pennsylvania. He’s written for The American Conservative, The Atlantic, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, among others.
It never seems to occur to the Democrats, currently bellyaching about the largely phantom “government shutdown,” that the last people Donald Trump cares about offending are the army of Democrat-voting bureaucrats who will be the only folks inconvenienced by Senator Charles Schumer’s latest temper tantrum.
As far as the rest of America is concerned, the shutdown of “nonessential” government services can bloody well continue indefinitely, as the president has promised, in order to get funding for his wall along the Mexican border. It’s the best Christmas present ever.
The furloughed federal employees in question are the Beltway parasites who feed off the taxpayers in real America, and provide next to nothing in exchange for their three square meals a day and fancy digs in what has become, for all practical purposes, a one-party deep state that now consists of eastern Maryland, the District of Columbia, and northern Virginia—and thus the rest of America. Bureaucrats are happy to munch on the hands that feed them, with slovenly, indifferent “service” in useless, invented sinecures, but would never think of barking at the guys who actually throw them the bones, and thus keep them ensconced in petty power over their fellow citizens.
Which is why Trump has brought the nation to this happy pass: not simply for the wall, or to punish some of his most dedicated political enemies, but also for real Americans to see how thoroughly corrupted by the Left the Democrat Party has become.
The president has forced Schumer and his House sidekick,Maerose Prizzi, to make a choice between protecting their bureaucrat-class base or protecting the American people from the often feral and predatory consequences of the failed state just to our south. The collapse of Spanish-introduced Christianity in Mexico, it seems, has released the innerNative American spirit of much of the population, with the horrific results we see daily in Mexico–Aztlan. That similar levels of savage violence should cross the border with some of the “migrants” should surprise no one.
The Democrats, of course, no longer care about the current American population—they have their eyes on the replacements, which is why they will fight to their political end in order to keep the border open; in order for their mouthpiece media to hype everysick child and kiddie deathwhile in neo-Nazi American “custody” and thus further their longstanding Marxist narrative that the United States is fundamentally illegitimate; and in order eventually to wear down the larger culture until, out of sheer exhaustion, it capitulates and commits cultural suicide to atone for its imagined sins.
On the Left, the unattainably perfect (which is what Marxism is, in both its economic and cultural manifestations) must always be the mortal enemy of the good, and especially the good enough. The Left makes no allowances for human fallibility or imperfections; it attributes every failure to willful malfeasance, animated by “racism” or some other malevolence. Via Critical Theory, and implemented according to Alinsky’sRule No. 4 courtesy of theCloward-Piven strategy, it seeks in the guise of beneficence to destroy human institutions and, by way of abortion and birth control,humanity itself. Note this recent discussion of the relative value of humanity in the New York Times:
There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction. This should not be surprising, given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change. In reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory but is an important aspect of it. Would human extinction be a tragedy?
To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. (In these pages, Samuel Scheffler has given us an important reason to think that it would be.) I am also not asking whether human beings as a species deserve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Those questions, and others like them, need to be addressed if we are to come to a full moral assessment of the prospect of our demise. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.
A good thing for thee, maybe, but not for me—and not forWestern Civilization, which is the only thing standing between us and barbarism. Which brings us back to the “shutdown.”
The greatest enemy of American democracy is not Donald Trump, nor even Chuck Schumer, who is as ideal a cartoon villain as it possible to imagine. Neither is it the Democrat Party, although its disappearance is a thing devoutly to be wished; the criminal organization masquerading as a political party (Aaron Burr, come on down) should have been outlawed and disbanded in April 1865, but something happened that month . . . oh yes, the first Republican president was assassinated by a Southern Democrat and was succeeded in office by . . . a Southern Democrat, who essentially served out Lincoln’s entire second term and set back the cause of civil rights for African-Americans for a full century.
No, the greatest threats to the republic are the bureaucrats who, with the dispassion of any National Socialist Beamter, calmly carry out the duties of their offices long past the time those offices should have been abolished. For them, no mission is ever accomplished until it has achieved 100 percent effectiveness, and if that meansthe abolition of man, so much the better. The only morality they can adhere to in an increasingly secular—which is to say, militant atheist—country is one that cripples, punishes, and eliminates their enemies—and they will achieve perfection if it kills you.
So let the shutdown roll on, indefinitely—all the way to 2020 if need be. Trump has nothing to lose, certainly not a single vote, from keeping the pencil-pushers confined to quarters in Arlington and Silver Spring. Instead, he can turn it into a series of object lessons that even the media won’t be able to ignore: that bogus moralism will not be allowed to supersede the president’s duty to keep the nation intact and secure from illegal invasion, by any means necessary; that the Democrats, whose previous sham opposition to illegal “immigration” is visible on YouTube for all to see, now stand fully revealed as the party of radical socialism, their longstanding cultural Marxism now morphing back inexorably to economic Marxism under the media-fueled “leadership” of their latter-day Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom they are grooming as the female Barack Obama for 2024.
Most important, is that in an era of record tax revenue; we still have ever-greater record deficits and debt. Trump is unlikely to go anywhere near Social Security and Medicare, but he’ll be damned if he buys the Bernie Sanders head fake to turn Medicaid (a welfare program for the indigent) into Obamacare on steroids as “Medicare for all,” which would bankrupt the country.
Then again, bankruptcy is the entire point of the Cloward-Piven strategy, the Marxist Last Trump before the Second Coming, and in more ways than one. So let the first Trump put a stake through its heart. He’ll never have a better chance to get his wall, right the economy, break the bureaucracy, and pants the Democrats. What’s not to like?
It was only last July 29 that Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, a young American couple who had spent the previous year bicycling across much of Africa, Europe, and southern Asia, were murdered by ISIS members in Tajikistan. The story made international headlines. What added to the widespread interest in their fate was the fact that they had kept a blog of their journey, complete with photos and philosophical reflections. Repeatedly they denied the reality of evil and expressed the view that people are basically good. Reader comments on a New York Times article about the couple that appeared after their deaths celebrated them as “heroic,” “authentic,” “idealistic,” “inspiring,” “a Beautiful example of Purity and Light,” and so on. I disagreed. “Their naivete,” I noted in a piece I wrote about them, “is nothing less than breathtaking.”
Now comes the story of Maren Ueland and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, which captured the interest of people in Norway and Denmark all last week. Ueland (28) was Norwegian; Jespersen (24) was Danish. They were students together at the campus of the University of South-Eastern Norway in Bø, a small Telemark mountain town (pop. 6,000) that happens to be in my own neck of the woods. Both Ueland and Jespersen were majoring in something calledfriluftsliv og kultur- og naturveiledning, a combination of words that defines precise translation; suffice it to say that the subject is designed for students who want to work in the outdoors, to lead guided tours in the woods, and to point out items of cultural interest to hikers – that sort of thing.
No field of study could be more archetypically Norwegian. Until recently, the official state religion of Norway was Lutheranism, but the country’s real religion is nature – specifically, going for a walk in the mountains: fresh air, quiet, serenity, a sense of being in touch with the eternal and divine. This activity even has its own standard set of rituals, among them the practice of taking along a couple of oranges, a Kvikk Lunsj (that’s a brand name) chocolate bar, a Thermos of hot chocolate and another Thermos containing boiled hot dogs. A common expression here is “Ut på tur, aldri sur” – take a walk in the wood and you’ll always feel good!
Given their choice of majors, it seems a safe bet that the hills filled Ueland’s and Jespersen’s hearts with the sound of music. No, Jespersen wasn’t Norwegian, but for three summers in a row, according to an article in Dagbladet, the “adventuresome” girl worked for a firm that offers holidays involving extreme sports, such as white-water rafting. One imagines that both young women did a good deal of walking in the steep, wild countryside around Bø. And a Norwegian-style reverence for the mountains would certainly explain the trip they planned for their Christmas vacation this year: namely, a hiking tour of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
Alas, the tour did not go as planned. On Monday morning, December 17, Ueland and Jespersen were found dead in an “isolated area” in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Specifically, they were found “near Imlil, on the way to Toubkal, north Africa’s highest peak and a popular hiking destination.”
As the week wore on, the news media offered updates on the case. Although neither Ueland nor Jespersen had ever been in Morocco and were not familiar with the territory, they had been backpacking alone. On the last evening of their life, they pitched a tent in which to spend the night. The next morning, a French couple, also tourists, found them dead – one of them in the tent, the other just outside. Both had been subjected to “brutal rape” and then “hacked to death.” One or both of them (sources differ) had been beheaded. The killings have been described as “slaughter” and as having been performed “ISIS style.”
An ID card found in the tent led local police to track down and arrest one suspect in Marrakesh. By late Tuesday, three others had been apprehended in that city. Soon authorities in Morocco and Denmark were suggesting that the culprits were connected to ISIS; by the end of the week their membership in that organization had been established. On Friday afternoon came news that nine more alleged members of the same ISIS cell had been arrested in Marrakesh, Tangier, and other cities. The murders are being treated, at least by Morocco and Denmark, as an act of terrorism – a conclusion supported by a videotape of the atrocity that has been circulating on Moroccan social media and that has been certified as authentic by Danish intelligence. In the video, a man says in French: “This is for Syria, here are the heads of your gods.”
One of our local Telemark newspapers, Varden,reported that Jespersen’s parents hadn’t approved of her vacation plans. “We advised her not to go,” said Jespersen’s mother, Helle. Ueland’s mother, Irene, appears to have been less worried: in the quote from her that has appeared in several newspapers, she expresses surprise at the young women’s fate because, after all, they had “taken all precautions” before going. Of course, the best precaution would have been not going. Another article quoted Thor Arne Hauer, an athletic-looking Norwegian who has worked as a guide in the Atlas Mountains. He said that even after 35 years of experience in Morocco, he always arranges to be accompanied by an authorized native guide when he ventures into the Atlas Mountains. Nobody, he emphasized, should head out into that terrain alone.
This information doesn’t seem terribly surprising. Why, then, were those two young women so unaware of the dangers they were courting? They seem to have set out on their adventure thinking that the mountains of Morocco were no less menacing than the mountains of Telemark. How can this be? They were in their mid to late twenties, no longer children. They had lived through 9/11 and all the major jihadist acts that have occurred in Western Europe in the years since then. Surely they had heard of ISIS. Surely they knew that Morocco is an Islamic country (although a supposedly “moderate” one). And yet they both decided that it was a good idea for them to spend their Christmas holiday hiking, unescorted, in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and sleeping, just the two of them, unarmed, in a tent, in the middle of nowhere.
To say that these poor young women were ignorant is not to criticize them but to point a finger at the people who shaped their image of the Muslim world. Both of them grew up in countries where, in the wake of every deadly act of jihadist terrorism, news reporters and politicians were quick to avoid, or deny, the connection of those atrocities to Islam. Throughout their formative years, the TV channels available to them were full of upbeat programs, and the newspapers and popular magazines on sale at their grocery-story checkouts full of cheery profiles, celebrating the wonderful contributions made to their societies by Muslim immigrants.
All that brainwashing plainly had an impact. In 2015, Ueland posted on her Facebook page a video showing a bearded, Arabic-looking man walking along a city sidewalk and carrying a large, suspicious-looking bag. Nearby, a police car screeches to a halt and a bunch of cops race toward him. But they run right by him and nab a clean-cut young white guy in a business suit, in whose briefcase they find a stash of narcotics. Meanwhile the Arab has met up with his wife and two small children, and pulled from his bag a folding kick scooter, which he presents to his smiling little girl. He then picks up his little boy to carry him on his shoulders, and the family continues on its way. All of this is observed by a bystander, a white woman, who, accompanied by her own little girl, has been worryingly eyeing the Arab and his bag only to realize, in the end, that her suspicions were entirely misplaced and rooted in ugly bigotry. “Think for yourself,” reads the concluding message on the screen, the point being that fear of Islam is based on unfounded Islamophobic propaganda. Of course, the video itself is sheer propaganda, dishonestly suggesting that there is no good reason for concern about Islam. Clearly, this sort of agitprop helped shape Ueland's thinking – and thereby contributed to her violent death.
It is also worth noting that neither of the young women grew up in or near a major city where they might have been exposed more fully than they apparently were to the harsh reality of Islam: Ueland lived in Bryne (pop. 11,000) on Norway’s rugged west coast; Jespersen hailed from Ikast (pop. 15,000) on the mostly rural peninsula of Jutland. No, these were two young women who grew up seeing relatively little of Islam in real life and being regularly fed the soothing reassurances of politicians such as Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who, in her official comments on the double murder, called it “meaningless.” No, it wasn’t meaningless: it was an act of war by Muslims dedicated to the conquest and eradication of infidels.
As it happens, on December 20, the same day Solberg made her statement, the Italian Senate observed a minute of silence in the memory of Ueland and Jespersen, who were described explicitly as victims of “Islamic terrorism.” But Solberg avoided such language. Even though, by the time of her statement about the murders, a video of the four perpetrators pledging loyalty to ISIS had surfaced online, and Moroccan and Danish authorities had declared the killings an act of terror, Solberg, whose priority in such circumstances is invariably to protect the good name of Islam, refused to do so. Meanwhile, as of Christmas Eve, none of the six major Norwegian party leaders with active Twitter or Facebook accounts had so much as mentioned the murders on their feeds, even though several of them had taken the time to congratulate Norwegian soccer player Ole Gunnar Solskjær for being named manager of Manchester United. Evidently, they're determined to ride this one out in silence. Let that reprehensible fact sink in for a moment.
Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” and "The Victims' Revolution." His novel "The Alhambra" has just been published.
The Grotto in the Church of the Holy Nativity, Bethlehem, marking the spot where tradition says Jesus was born.(Darko Tepert)
An editor friend sent me an advance copy of The Thirty Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction Of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, by the Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi. It will be out from Harvard University Press in April 2019. Here’s what I know about the Turkish genocide of the Armenians: that it happened in 1915-16, a million or more Armenians were killed, and that the Turks vehemently deny it to this day. Beyond that, not much.
Morris and Ze’evi write that the Armenian genocide was part (the greatest part) of a three-decade cleansing by the Turks of their country’s Christian minority. It happened in three spasm’s: a series of state-sponsored, anti-Armenian pogroms from 1894-96, under Abdulhamid II, one of the last Ottoman sultans; the systematic massacres and exiles of Armenians in 1915-16; and the bloody destruction of Greek and Assyrian Christian communities from 1919-24. As the authors write:
In the course of three campaigns beginning in 1894, the Turks turned variously to tools of steady oppression, mass murder, attrition, expulsion, and forced conversion. By 1924 they had cleansed Asia Minor of its four million–odd Christians.
The authors set out to document and to understand what happened to the Armenians, but found that the 1915-16 Armenian genocide was part of a wider and older story.
I hadn’t planned to start the book until after Christmas, but curiosity got the best of me last night, and I opened it at bedtime. I finally put it down just shy of two a.m.; I had read the entire first section, about the 1894-96 phase of the genocide. I plan to write more about the book when we get closer to publication date. For now, though, here is a characteristic passage from that first section, about a pogrom in Urfa in late December, 1895:
According to [British diplomat G.H.] Fitzmaurice’s investigation, Nazif was seen “motioning the crowd on,” the mob guided by troops who had familiarized themselves with the quarter during the siege. A “body of wood-cutters,” armed with axes, led the way, breaking down doors. Soldiers then rushed inside and shot the men. “A certain sheik,” Fitzmaurice wrote, “ordered his followers to bring as many stalwart young Armenians as they could find. To the number of about 100 they were thrown on their backs and held down by their hands and feet, while the sheik, with a combination of fanaticism and cruelty, proceeded, while re- citing verses of the Koran, to cut their throats after the Mecca rite of sacrificing sheep.” Those hiding were dragged out and butchered—stoned, shot, and set on fire with “matting saturated with petroleum.” Women were cut down shielding their husbands and fathers. More Armenians were shot as they scampered along rooftops trying to escape. When the killing subsided, the houses were looted and torched. As sunset approached, the trumpet sounded again, calling the troops and the mob to withdraw. Soldiers specifically forbade the mob to “touch” Shattuck’s house, “the residence of a foreigner.” The missionary, who witnessed a portion of the massacre from her window, reported that “Syrians and Catholics were also spared.”
The atrocities resumed the following day, December 29, with a trumpet sound at dawn. The largest number were killed at the Armenian cathedral, where thousands had gathered for sanctuary. The attackers first fired through windows into the church, then smashed in the doors and killed the men clustered on the ground floor. Fitzmaurice relates that, as the mob plundered the church, they “mockingly call[ed] on Christ . . . to prove himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.” The Turks then shot at the “shrieking and terrified mass of women, children and some men” in the second-floor gallery. But gunning the Armenians down one-by-one was “too tedious,” so the mob brought in more petroleum-soaked bedding and set fire to the woodwork and the staircases leading up to the galleries. For several hours “the sickening odour of roasting flesh pervaded the town.” Writing the following March, Fitzmaurice noted, “Even today, the smell of putrescent and charred remains in the church is unbearable.” Shattuck described the horror as “a grand holocaust” and for days afterward watched “men lugging sacks filled with bones, ashes” from the cathedral.
Here’s the thing: this was not a one-off event in that period. This kind of thing happened to Armenians in villages and small cities all over Turkey. Around 100,000 Armenians were murdered in that period, and as many are believed to have died from wounds, sickness, and starvation resulting from those events. An important note: not only did Turkish troops commit these atrocities, but also Kurdish clans, empowered by the Ottomans to act on their behalf.
Armenian Christians follow the Julian calendar, which means they were only days away from celebrating Christmas (January 6) when the Islamic mobs set upon them. As you prepare for your Christmas celebration this year, spare a thought for those martyred Armenian Christians.
I went back to my favorite part of Andrei Rublev — a scene called “Andrei’s penance” on the DVD. It’s about halfway through, in the aftermath of the Tatars sacking the cathedral of Vladimir — an atrocity that took place (in the film’s narrative) with the complicity of a Russian prince, who sold out his own people to seek revenge on his brother. The scene opens with Andrei standing shocked in the ruins of the cathedral. His icons have been mostly destroyed, the holy books burned. The bodies of the townspeople massacred by the Tatars lay all around. The only other survivor — the young woman Durochka, a “holy fool” (mentally ill person — or someone pretending to be mentally ill — believed in Russian culture to be particularly beloved by God) — crouches over the body of a dead woman, braiding her long hair. It’s a powerful image of the instinctive human desire to bring order and beauty out of chaotic destruction.
Suddenly, Andrei sees the shade of Theophanes, the cranky, cynical Greek painter whose apprentice he once was. Theophanes has returned from the dead. The last time we saw him, he was arguing with Andrei about human nature, telling Andrei that people are vile, and that he works only for God.
Now, as they meet in this cathedral all but destroyed by human passion, Andrei confesses to his late master, “I’ve spent half my life in blindness. I worked for people day and night. But they aren’t people, are they? What you said was true.”
“So what if I said it then?” replied Theophanes. “You are wrong now. I was wrong then.”
Andrei meditates angrily on human depravity. How could men who are supposed to be brothers do this to each other? How could they murder and destroy for the sheer demonic pleasure of it? Theophanes listens to this, and says it’s time for him to go. Andrei begs him to stay so he can tell him more.
“But I already know everything,” says Theophanes, who, recall, has died and entered into eternity.
Says Andrei, “Then you know I’ll never paint again.”
“Why so?”
“Because it’s of no use to anyone.”
“So your iconostasis was burned. Do you know how many of mine they burned? In Pskov, Novgorod? You are committing a grave sin.”
“I haven’t told you the worst. I killed a man. A fellow Russian. When I saw him carrying her off. (He looks at the holy fool) Look at her. Just look at her! I don’t remember how it happened. I caught up with him and I couldn’t help it.”
Says Theophanes:
“Through our sins, evil has assumed a human form. Encroaching evil means encroaching humanity. God will forgive you; don’t forgive yourself. Live between divine forgiveness and your own torment. As for your sins, what do your Scriptures say? ‘Learn to do good: seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless , plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’ See, I haven’t forgotten: that may comfort you.”
Andrei replies, “I know, God is merciful and will pardon me. I shall offer the Lord a vow of silence. I have nothing more to say to people. Is this a good idea?”
“I have no right to advise you,” says Theophanes.
“Didn’t you go to heaven?”
“Lord! I can only say it is not as you imagine it on earth.”
Andrei asks Theophanes how long Russia’s suffering will go on.
“I don’t know. Forever, most likely,” he says, then turns to an icon of the Mother of God on the wall. It has escaped the torches of the Tatars.
“Yet how beautiful all this is!” Theophanes says, awe filling his voice.
The two men look around the ruins of the cathedral, beholding the beauty still present there amid the death and destruction. Snow begins to fall inside the cathedral, whose ceiling has been breached by the raiders. The faintly falling snowflakes come to rest on the holy fools, who is now sleeping next to the dead woman whose hair she braided.
“It is snowing,” said Andrei. “Nothing is more terrible than snow falling in a temple”
The camera lingers on Durochka, her cheek bloodied, sleeping soundly among the dead. Fade to black.
In this scene, God speaks, in a way, through the holy fool. She maintains her innocence, despite the horror around her. By instinct, she makes beauty, almost in defiance of the blood-soaked ugliness around her. She is a sign to Andrei of what he must do. Remember, he has killed a man to protect her innocence (that is, to keep her from being raped). Now he must care for her; he’s all she has.
Theophanes, wiser now with the eyes of eternity than he was in this life, instructs Andrei not to lose sight of the presence of beauty, despite everything. Andrei wants to know what’s going to happen next, but Theophanes tells him eternity is not like that. It is a mystery. There is no rhyme or reason to these things. All we can do is to obey God by loving others (“Learn to do good, seek justice,” etc.), and not lose sight of beauty, which is a sign of His presence.
Theophanes tells Andrei that he is “committing a grave sin” if he refuses to paint. It’s the sin of despair, and of refusing responsibility for his gift as an artist. One doesn’t make art because it is “useful.” Theophanes used to believe as Andrei does now: that humanity is hopeless. Now, though, from eternity, Theophanes comes back with a message of hope. Evil is a sign of our fallen humanity — Andrei’s humanity too. We are guilty, and are nothing without God’s mercy. To be human is to endure other humans, and indeed to endure ourselves (e.g., Andrei’s guilt over having killed a man, even though he did it for a good reason).
“God will forgive you; don’t forgive yourself. Live between divine forgiveness and your own torment.” The Greek is telling him that he should trust in God’s mercy, but also never forget his own capacity for sin. To live faithfully is to exist within that tension.
Above all, Theophanes seems to say, do not lose sight of beauty, despite everything. And you, Andrei, you have been given a gift of bringing beauty into the world, as a sign to the people of God’s presence, and of a world beyond the brutality of this one. It would be a sin to turn your back on that. (Andrei Tarkovsky, the director, once said, “Art would be useless if the world were perfect.”)
Andrei’s final line in this scene: “Nothing is more terrible than snow falling in a temple.” Here’s what I think he means: if snow falls in a temple, it means that the barrier protecting what is holy from the natural world has been breached. To see snow falling in a temple is a sign of grave disorder and destruction. But as we see here, snow is beautiful, is light, is graceful. What makes snow falling in a temple so terrible is not only that it means something holy has been profaned and destroyed, but also that grace and beauty can emerge from that destruction.
Durochka, the holy fool, is a snowflake falling in the temple. So is the holy icon left untouched by the raiders. And so is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Andrei’s path through life is to bear witness, as an artist, to that terrible saving truth.
And the Armenian people? How do you redeem the suffering? I know what the Christian answer is — Andrei Rublev gives it — but how do you manage to hold on to that terrible saving truth when everything around you has been shattered? What witness do the survivors give to the living? I think simply surviving, and producing new generations, is a witness of some sort. But one wants more.
Ross Douthat’s Christmas column today is about remaining a faithful Catholic despite the moral collapse within the Church. You might be offended by comparing what’s happening in the Catholic Church now to a genocide. Jesus Christ said (Luke 12:4-5) that one should fear losing the soul more than one fears losing the body. Every week on this blog, somebody in a comments thread writes about the mass falling away from the Catholic faith that they’re seeing in their family or community. At the very beginning of the scandal, my wife and I were in the Netherlands, one of Europe’s most secular countries, and met a family at mass. They were the only others there besides us who didn’t have grey heads. We introduced ourselves, and found ourselves invited to dinner.
Turns out the father of the family was one of 11 kids in his family — and the only one left still practicing the Catholic faith in which they were raised. Can you imagine that? The Catholic faith had been handed down through that family’s line over many centuries, but in a single generation, it died (except for our host and his wife and kids). Those siblings and their children still live, but they are lost to the faith — and depending on God’s mercy, perhaps lost to eternity.
Anyway, in his column, Douthat talks about the messy, scandalous family background through which Jesus of Nazareth came into this world. Excerpt:
Crucially, in claiming the divine is entering the world through this line of “murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars,” Matthew isn’t offering some particularly Christian innovation within the larger biblical story. He’s simply picking up what his own people, the Jewish people, already said about themselves: We’re the chosen people of the one true God, and to prove it to you here’s a long story about how awful and promiscuous and murderous and fallible we are, how terrible our leaders often turned out to be, and how we deserved every exile and punishment we received.
If you don’t find that message credible, well, I understand. But if you find it strangely compelling, then you’re close to the case for remaining Catholic at a time when the corruption of the church is driving a number of very public defections from the faith.
More:
The idea that biblical religion has always proposed is emphatically not that you can tell whether a people is chosen by the virtue of their leaders. It’s that the divine chooses to act constantly amid not just ordinary fallibility but real depravity — that strong temptations as well as great sanctity are concentrated where God wants to work — and that the graces that define a chosen people are improbable resilience and unlooked-for renewal, with saints and prophets and reformers carrying things forward despite corruptions that seem like they should extinguish the whole thing.
The case for remaining Catholic in this moment, then, is basically that all this has happened before and will happen again …
What is the snow falling in the Catholic temple this Christmas? That is, what are the signs of grace floating down from heaven through the traumatized church?
What is the snow falling in your own personal temple this Christmas?
Normally the narrative of Easter fits stories like the genocide of the Christians of Turkey, the Tatar massacre and temple-sacking dramatized in Andrei Rublev, and the other form of temple-sacking and spiritual massacre taking place in the Catholic Church today (and, indeed, in most churches struggling in our post-Christian era). You know what I mean: suffering, death, resurrection, all in one long weekend.
But I think the Christmas story also gives us reason to hope in the face of catastrophe. As Douthat points out, the Son of God was born under dodgy genealogical circumstances. You don’t expect the Messiah to come from such a messy lineage (but then, if we were God, we wouldn’t have chosen such a messy people as the tribes of Israel to bear witness to God in history, and to produce the Messiah; salvation came to the world through the Jews). We all know the story about Jesus’s scandalous conception, and his lowly birth in a cave in Bethlehem. We know too about the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt, escaping Herod, who ordered the slaughter of all male children under the age of two in the area of Bethlehem.
For thirty years, the seed that the Holy Spirit planted in Mary’s womb, and that Mary lay in the manger after His birth, grew quietly in Nazareth. And then He changed the world forever. Today in my Orthodox church’s liturgy, my priest preached on Jesus’s genealogy, and warned us that God’s ways are not our own.
None of us know what is being born, even today. For Christians, though, we know Who is being born, and the terrible saving truth that the baby reveals. That little boy was born to die, so that humankind might live. His mother gave him birth, but she knew even in her moment of joy that her heart would be pierced with sorrow. We cannot separate them. I love David Bentley Hart’s idiosyncratic translation of the beginning verses of the Gospel of John, from his version of the New Testament, published this year:
The word “cosmos” makes all the difference, I think. Typically it is translated into English as “world,” but cosmos is so much richer. It connotes ordered reality. In other words, Christians believe that Jesus was the form of God’s rational activity in Creation. Creation, in the Christian vision, is not random, but ordered and purposeful. The incarnation and birth of the Logos makes explicit the meaning of it all, and indeed establishes once and for all that it has meaning.
It is worth asking ourselves what this tableau, viewed from the vantage of pagan antiquity, would have meant. A man of noble birth, representing the power of Rome, endowed with authority over life and death, confronted by a barbarous colonial of no name or estate, a slave of the empire, beaten, robed in purple, crowned with thorns, insanely invoking an otherworldly kingdom and some esoteric truth, unaware of either his absurdity or his judge’s eminence. Who could have doubted where, between these two, the truth of things was to be found? But the Gospel is written in the light of the resurrection, which reverses the meaning of this scene entirely. If God’s truth is in fact to be found where Christ stands, the mockery visited on him redounds instead upon the emperor, all of whose regal finery, when set beside the majesty of the servile shape in which God reveals Himself, shows itself to be just so many rags and briars.
This slave is the Father’s eternal Word, whom God has vindicated, and so ten thousand immemorial certainties are unveiled as lies: the first become last, the mighty are put down from their seats and the lowly exalted, the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent empty away. Nietzsche was quite right to be appalled. Almost as striking, for me, is the tale of Peter, at the cock’s crow, going apart to weep. Nowhere in the literature of pagan antiquity, I assure you, had the tears of a rustic been regarded as worthy of anything but ridicule; to treat them with reverence, as meaningful expressions of real human sorrow, would have seemed grotesque from the perspective of all the classical canons of good taste. Those wretchedly subversive tears, and the dangerous philistinism of a narrator so incorrigibly vulgar as to treat them with anything but contempt, were most definitely signs of a slave revolt in morality, if not quite the one against which Nietzsche inveighed—a revolt, moreover, that all the ancient powers proved impotent to resist.
This is the snow falling in the temple: a baby born in a cave, whose fate was to suffer like us, and to die on a cross, and to rise from the dead. Suffering will go on until the end of time, but it will not have the last word, nor will the throat-slashers, the cathedral-sackers, the child molesters, the hatemongers, the profaners of all creation. Their time is short. They cannot steal redemption.
How beautiful is that baby in the manger, and the face of his mother. Keep that memory of them alive. Strive to see them present today. These images are like snow falling in a temple. A blessed Christmas to you all, especially those most in need of God’s mercy.
“There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article.” Thus wrote, or confessed, G. K. Chesterton in an essay entitled “Christmas that is Coming”, published in the Illustrated London News in 1906. Now, on the eleventy-first anniversary of Chesterton having indulged the “dangerous or disgusting habit”, I am following his ignoble example.
To be fair to myself, and to Chesterton, I don’t really think that getting into the Christmas spirit in the days and weeks before the Feast is exactly synonymous with celebrating the Feast itself. Isn’t such a spirit part of the necessary preparation? Aren’t we supposed to have a childlike glow as we do the Christmas shopping? Shouldn’t there be a Dickensian decorum to our preparation? Aren’t we meant to be full of the expectant joy of Bob Cratchit or Tiny Tim or Mr. Fezziwig? Isn’t a failure to get into the spirit in preparedness for the joyful Season a sign of Scroogish tendencies?
Having defended myself, and Chesterton, from any pharisaical guardians of the Feast, I’m going to risk the ire of lovers of Christmas by confessing that I prefer good old Father Christmas to that new-fangled Santa Claus fellow, the latter of whom strikes me as something of an interloper. Chesterton never wrote about Santa Claus, nor, for that matter, did Tolkien or C. S. Lewis; they wrote about Father Christmas. Nor is this a question of mere semantics. There is a real difference between Santa Claus and Father Christmas which should not be overlooked, even if they have been melded in our modern minds into something or someone akin to a synonym.
For one thing, Father Christmas is English whereas Santa Claus is American – and heaven forbid that anyone should suggest that Englishmen and Americans are in any way synonymous!
Father Christmas has his roots in the personification of the Spirit of Christmas in the Merrie England of mediaeval times, though he really came of age in the seventeenth century as a spirit of resistance to the efforts of the Puritans to ban Christmas after their victory in the English Civil War. Believe it or not, the Puritan-controlled English government actually legislated to abolish Christmas, considering, reasonably enough, that the celebration of “Christ-Mass” was papist. Since the celebration of the Mass had been outlawed, it was natural that the celebration of “Christ-Mass” should be outlawed also. Traditional Christmas customs were banned and the Purityrannical rulers of England declared, in league with a certain White Witch, that it would be always winter but never Christmas.
As resistance to the tyranny grew, Old Father Christmas became the symbol of “the good old days”, a personification of Merrie England, with its feasting and good cheer, and its celebration of the liturgical year.
It is this Father Christmas that is celebrated with appropriate rumbustiousness by Chesterton, Tolkien and Lewis.
In a wonderful short story, “The Shop of Ghosts,” Chesterton writes of a mysterious toyshop and its equally mysterious proprietor, who was “very old and broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half his face, hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial”. Refusing to take any money for some wooden soldiers, he explains that he never has taken money. “I’ve always given presents,” he explains. “I’m too old to stop.”
“Good heavens!” his would-be customer exclaims. “What can you mean? Why, you might be Father Christmas.”
“I am Father Christmas,” the man responds apologetically.
Father Christmas then says that he is dying and offers an explanation for his imminent demise: “All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seem to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds, these scientific men, and these innovators…. I don’t understand. But I understand one thing well enough. These modern people are living and I am dead.”
“You may be dead,” his interlocutor replies. “You ought to know. But as for what they are doing – do not call it living.”
This would have been a good place for the story to end, the somewhat sullen point having been made, but such a lacklustre defeatist conclusion, all whimper and no whimsy, is hardly satisfactory from a Chestertonian perspective. As such, we are not surprised that the best is yet to come. The silence is broken by the entry of several ghosts from Christmases Past: Charles Dickens, Sir Richard Steele, Ben Jonson, and finally Robin Hood. All of these ghosts remark that Father Christmas looks much the same now as he had looked in their day. As for Robin Hood, he doesn’t understand how Father Christmas could still be alive because he had seen him dying seven hundred years earlier.
“I have felt like this a long time,” Father Christmas concedes.
“Since when?” asks the ghost of Dickens. “Since you were born?”
“Yes,” the old man says, sinking into a chair. “I have been always dying.”
“I understand it now,” Dickens cries, “you will never die.”
The paradox is that each generation believes that Father Christmas is dying, but he never dies. It is each generation that dies while Father Christmas lives on. And since Father Christmas is a personification of Christmas itself, Chesterton is reminding us that this unchristian and anti-Christian generation will pass away – indeed it is dying – but that Christmas will live forever, as the One who was born on Christmas Day will live forever.
“Christianity has died many times and risen again,” Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man, “for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top.”
Father Christmas will never die because Christ has risen from the dead. He is immortal because he personifies the spirit of the birth of the Everlasting Man. And as for the rest of us, we can rejoice, in the words of a popular song, that man will live forever more because of Christmas Day.
