Books and Growing Up

Today I was thinking about the books that I loved growing up (and still do). I read a lot of different kinds of books-- fantasy books like C.S. Lewis's Narnia books and Brian Jacques's Redwall series were some of my favorites. I loved historical fiction and older children's books like Little House on the Prairie and Heidi. I remember my mom used to limit how many Babysitter's Club novels I could read, at one point banning them completely, because she felt that they were "twaddle" (a word she used to describe books which she felt were the literary equivalent of soap operas). At the time, I was very annoyed by this (mostly because I chafed at anything that remotely restricted my ability to "be my own boss"), but now I can see why she did that. As I grew up, my mom taught me that some books are better than others. Some are well-written, some have important things to say, some make you think, some are boring, some you shouldn't read until you're older, and some are just plain bad. As a child I mostly believed her (although I would still sometimes read Babysitter's Club, just to prove that I was my own boss). Now, I still think that, but from experience. I've found that there are some books that when I finish them, I want to read them again and again, and there are others where I feel like I might as well have done something else.

I don't know if I'm a bookworm by nature or nurture-- probably both. I grew up in a house where books were readily available; now, my mom has enough books to take up nine bookshelves, and she's constantly having to juggle the books to make room for more. My mom is definitely a bookworm; she always read to us, and my siblings and I often saw her reading "grown-up books." Reading was never a chore for me. My parents had to make a rule that I couldn't read anything until I'd finished my schoolwork. I was sneaky, though; I could often get away with reading the dictionary, or reading all the examples in my Writing and Spelling books.

It occurs to me that the best kind of learning we do, doesn't come from books that teach us overtly. The best kind is subliminal. Take honesty, for example; I learned from my parents and from church and from the moralizing sorts of books that I ought to be honest. Well, that's all well and good, but mostly those kinds of lessons meant little to me. I think that the most powerful lessons I learned about honesty, didn't contain that word at all. Most likely, the authors of the books I learned honesty from weren't trying to teach that value at all (and if they were, they were very sneaky about it). I learned to be honest by reading about characters who were honest-- like Martin the Warrior in Brian Jacques Redwall novels that I mentioned earlier. When I read about Martin, I wasn't thinking about how honest and brave and valorous he was. I just liked and admired him, as a character. And as a result, I tried to act more like him-- because he was cool!

A lot has been said about children reading books that are "dark," or too scary for them. Looking back on the books I read, some of them scare me a lot more now than they did when I first read them! I read lots of books where people died, or got hurt or maimed. I read books that included battles, torture, mutilation, manipulation, and all sorts of horrible things. And as a reader, I put myself into the shoes of the characters experiencing these things. Why, then, did I not grow up scarred for life?

I think that, for one thing, the bad things I read about were not (for the most part) overly graphic. A lot of them were very frank, but they didn't focus on the bad things. I think that this develops resilience in people-- the ability to hold on to sanity and optimism when bad things happen. Yes, the bad things happened, and sometimes they couldn't be fixed. But the sun still came up in the morning, and even while the bad things were going on, there was still more to the story than that. Rose might have been killed during the battle between the pirate rats and the escaped slaves, and that was very sad, but things still came out okay.

In short, I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to become acquainted with books, and their myriad delights and frustrations (despite the fact that Martin the Warrior had a happy ending, I never really have stopped feeling sad that Rose died). Literacy is a big cause in the world today, and that's a good thing. But I hope that, along with teaching people to be able to decode letters and words, we'll also be able to help them see that the joy of literacy isn't just being able to decode the symbols-- it's what is inside the words that matters. :)

Objective Morality as a Case for God

Yesterday I finished Mere Christianity, a wonderful book by C.S. Lewis which I had attempted (and failed) to finish several times before. It had never really grabbed my attention (even though, in general, I love C.S. Lewis's writing), but this time I found it absorbing, and could not put it down.

What I particularly found intriguing was his argument for the existence of some kind of supernatural being (i.e., God). He argues that the fact that humans do, in fact, have such a thing as morality indicates that there is a supernatural creative force of some kind. Consider, for instance, a person who has to choose between being honest and suffering for it, or being dishonest for his own benefit. When facing this choice, there are in fact three things in his mind. Two of them are the options he has to choose between (honesty and dishonesty), and the third thing is a something that tells him that he should choose honesty. That third thing is separate from his own wanting something-- he may very well want to choose dishonesty-- and can't really be construed as his own "survival instinct" either. Take, for example, the case of a man who sees another man drowning. Again, he has two choices (to help the drowning man at the risk of his own safety, or not help the drowning man and remain safe himself), and a third thing in his mind which tells him that he should help the drowning man, even at personal risk. That couldn't possibly be "survival instinct," because the thing telling him to make the "right" choice is in fact telling him to risk his own survival.

Lewis argues that "morality" is something that man couldn't have come up with himself, and its universality is an indication of its reality. If you look at the religions and moral codes around the world and throughout history, you find a common thread. Sure, there are lots of deviations and differences, but they all contain certain tenets, such as "don't steal," "don't lie," "don't murder," "don't hurt other people," etc. In fact, instances which argue exceptions actually prove the case of objective morality. When somebody is in violation of the moral law, they don't usually say "well, that's a subjective law so it doesn't matter what I do." Instead, they try to argue that what they are doing doesn't really violate the law, or that they are somehow an exception to the law.

Even in the case of people who do argue for subjective morality, you will find that they will be just as upset as anyone else if you cheat them or lie to them. They will at once be appealing to the very moral law that they previously dismissed; they will try to find some objective reason why you should not lie to or cheat them. Lewis takes this as an indication that everybody, deep down, knows that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that we should live by it.

I had never thought of it in that way before. Of course, we are told by the religious community that morality is something that comes from a source outside of humanity, namely God. I had never considered, though, that the fact that humans even have such a concept as morality-- indeed, that human language contains such words as "should" and "ought"-- is an indication of a supernatural being existing outside of human cognizance. How fascinating.