{"id":325,"date":"2007-12-03T18:39:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T18:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2007\/12\/03\/325\/"},"modified":"2015-05-30T20:29:23","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T01:29:23","slug":"325","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=325","title":{"rendered":"A DUSTY ONTOLOGY"},"content":{"rendered":"

I voluntarily live in a perpetual culture lag; I have no idea what movies, songs, artists, clothes, etc. are going to be talked about 3 months from now. (I once had a girlfriend that made me watch E!<\/a> with her — arg, bad memories.) So, don\u2019t be surprised that I just found out about “The Golden Compass”<\/span>, a movie that is now hitting the screens. Or that I\u2019ve just become aware of the theological controversies behind Philip Pullman\u2019s child fantasy novels, on which Golden Compass is based. <\/p>\n

Oh good, another child-fantasy movie series. Just what we need. As if Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings weren\u2019t enough (then throw in Naria, although I do very much respect C.S. Lewis). I\u2019m glad that I grew up long before this stuff became required-seeing for every kid. Back when I was young, we walked around by rivers and railroad tracks and factories, and we made up our own fantasy adventures using whatever junk we found lying around. Kids today have their lives completely scheduled and controlled by their parents (admittedly, for their own safety \u2013 this is a more perverted world now). Thus, they have to stay indoors and read or watch a movie or DVD about fantasy adventure. Again, I\u2019m glad that I grew up when a kid could still go out by himself after school or on a Saturday and do his own thing. But I digress.<\/p>\n

Back to Philip Pullman and the Golden Compass. There\u2019s a bit of controversy going on over Pullman\u2019s \u201catheistic\u201d message. The big enemy in Pullman\u2019s stories is \u201cThe Magesterium\u201d. I believe that God is eventually killed in some meta-cosmic battle. And we\u2019re all the better for it, according to Pullman. With God gone, we can then be natural \u2013 and that includes allowing teenagers to satiate their burgeoning lusts without delay. You can see why Pullman would be popular with teens, especially with the guys. But without God and the hovering superego, just what in Pullman\u2019s world keeps our beautiful desires from being sullied by cruelty, power-lust, neurosis and all the other bad tendencies that people actually have? Where would the virtues necessary to sustain our social order come from? <\/p>\n

From \u201cDust\u201d. In Pullman\u2019s imagined world, there are invisible particles of goodness all around us. And they tend to cling to us when we\u2019re in our most honest and natural states. By contrast, dust goes away when the Church and the Authorities start preaching to us in the name of God and Country. If only we\u2019d all just let go, Dust would make it OK. But God and The Magesterium won\u2019t let go, so they have to be done away with by Pullman\u2019s protagonists (which appear to include a polar bear and a 12 year old girl).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be the first to admit that I don\u2019t like to be told what to do by established religion and government. Both institutions go overboard too often, limiting freedom when it\u2019s unnecessary and even counter-productive. I still respect the ideas and ideals of liberalism. But as to just throwing the establishment out . . . well, I guess there\u2019s still a bit of Edmund Burke in me.<\/p>\n

But one more queer thing about the Pullman idea. I\u2019ve been listening to some Teaching Company lectures by Daniel N. Robinson<\/a> lately, so I\u2019ve learned a bit about ontology. I.e., \u201cjust what is there\u201d in our universe, just what is the nature of everything. It\u2019s a big question, but that\u2019s the fun of ontology (and philosophy in general). The early Greeks got interested in ontology, and came up with various theories. One Greek idea is called \u201catomism\u201d. Atomism is the idea that at bottom, there is some tiny elementary particle from which everything is made of. That particle is the end of reality; you can\u2019t get any smaller, can\u2019t break it down, can\u2019t change it. You can only combine it in different ways to get different things, e.g. kites and kittens, Caesar salads and Corvettes, neutron stars and nitrogen gas, etc. The trick was to learn about the basic particle; then you\u2019d know the common characteristics of all things.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, this seemed like a good idea. But over the past 2,500 years or so, science has come up with better views. It came up with field theories (e.g. magnetic fields and gravity, seemingly continuous phenomenon), and then had to modify those field concepts with quantum realities (little units almost like the Greek \u201catom\u201d, but which jump around and change randomly). So now reality is composed of a whole lot of interacting quantum perturbations in a series of fields (or maybe one ultimate field, if and when physics achieves the unification of all basic forces). <\/p>\n

Theologians have simultaneously come up with much more sophisticated theories of what God could be like. God, and our own sentience and awareness, are now seen by some theologians in terms of an emergence based upon large volumes of quantum perturbations of some common underlying field. God is not on one end, with us on another. We\u2019re all part of something common, according to the process theologians. We\u2019re all moving towards something. It seems like a good way to think about ontology and metaphysics given what we now know from the physical sciences.<\/p>\n

So, Pullman\u2019s \u201cdust\u201d ontology and theology appears to be a throwback to me. It seems immature. Sure, the Vatican and the many other religious authorities on our planet have a long way to go to catch up with the emerging and sophisticated views that their theologians are proposing. But that\u2019s the way it\u2019s always been; the authorities always need a century or two to adopt a good idea. Pullman doesn\u2019t want to wait; he would imagine doing away with the authorities and going back to a very elementary and immature view of where truth and virtue come from. <\/p>\n

\u201cDust\u201d is something to cough and choke on. Pun intended, even if it\u2019s quite lame. The philosophers and scientists long ago figured out that we ultimately are not dust, and ultimately it is not dust to which we return. And even the more progressive churchmen now emphasize that they are only talking about the body, and not about the soul, when they speak of our dusty mortality. I hope that Golden Compass\u2019 audience of young minds will likewise be able to move away from Pullman\u2019s countervailing but still immature way of thinking about the world and where its truths ultimately lie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I voluntarily live in a perpetual culture lag; I have no idea what movies, songs, artists, clothes, etc. are going to be talked about 3 months from now. (I once had a girlfriend that made me watch E! with her — arg, bad memories.) So, don\u2019t be surprised that I just found out about “The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,10,12,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5454,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions\/5454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}