I made brief comments of my own, but these two links are mostly about What C S Lewis thought of Kipling, and what George Orwell thought of Kipling. Both more than a little surprising.
Scrooge McDuck
Brought over from Assistant Village Idiot. I am bringing over about one out of five this week, more than my usual one out of ten.
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A young friend among my wife’s FB friends posted a meme about blank supermarket shelves, comparing the empty shelves of socialism, which conservatives decry, and “late-stage-capitalism” empty shelves during the TP-and-disposable-wipes crisis of 2020. He did not say that this proved equivalency, merely noting that he had seen the two posted near each other in some way online. He is a polite young man, a middle-school teacher whose wife is homeschooling, and I think he doesn’t want to offend. I have seen other posts that suggest he is very sympathetic to socialism.
His first two commenters, both also young, were thorough opposites. The first noted that under capitalism, the shelves would be restocked tomorrow. I thought that an efficient argument, and am grateful that there are young people who can manage such things on short notice. The other made the comparison that “if you don’t like people hoarding toilet paper, then imagine how much damage it does when an extremely small fraction of the world’s population hoards so much of its wealth.” I am no longer on FB and don’t like to drag my wife into such discussions, so I wrote nothing. I did begin to think about what, exactly, I might theoretically say, reasoning that I might have to answer this in some context sometime. The first young man got in very quickly, while I was looking at the page: “Hoarding. lol”
I thought that similarly efficient. That is the key problem. I should research who that young man is and put his name forward as someone we should elect to something. Except politics would be a waste for him. Perhaps I should sneak over and just let him know I’m impressed. He may need encouragement. There is a sizable group who thinks that the wealthy are in some sense hoarding, a good communist accusation that is thoroughly inaccurate. The mental picture is of Scrooge McDuck.
(embedded gif of Scrooge McDuck diving into a pile of gold coins)
The Far Limit
With an effort, I wrench my attention from contemplating local fall-out from the Wuhan coronavirus, or as an unknown wit called it the ‘Kung Flu’. The grocery stores we favor are pretty well picked over by mid-day, in spite of closing from 8 PM to 8AM to restock, the gym has closed, gatherings of more than ten are strongly advised against, and just about every local market or book festival that we had considered participating in has been cancelled or postponed until summer or even later when, presumably, either the medical wizards will have a handle on the Kung Flu, or people will stop panicking over it.
The Problem With Lewis
Self-Isolation is only a touch different for me. I go to work at the hospital eight days a month, but now have sharply curtailed which units I will go to (I was covering on the phone, keyboard, doorknob, and desk surface of everyone in a department of 30) and do not circulate throughout the building at all. While at home, I pretty much sit at the computer, the reading desk, or stand at some appliance anyway, then go out for a five-mile walk every day. However, there is a slight restriction, and being an irritable sort the boredom annoys me. Thus I have gone looking for AVI posts which I might repost over here. You’ll just have to bear up under the strain. A few more to come.
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I found that They Asked For A Paper is in the public domain. It contains a few essays of CS Lewis I had never read, so I was glad to find it. In particular, I had wanted to read “The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version,” having seen a rare early copy under glass at the Lanier Theological Library outside Houston. I had never heard of it, and it is a subject I am interested in even with a lesser author.
Yet I quickly find I dare not come up with an opinion in the least contradiction to him. He has read everything, and is clearly operating a level I cannot even imagine.
“With the first Protestant translators we get some signs of a changed approach. I would wish to take every precaution against exaggerating it. The history of the English Bible from Tyndale to the Authorised Version should never for long be separated from that European, and by no means exclusively Protestant, movement of which it made part. No one can write that history without skipping to and fro across national and religious boundaries at every moment. He will have to go from the Soncino Hebrew Bible (1488) to Reuchlin’s Hebrew Grammar (1506), then to Alcala for Cardinal Ximenes’ great Polyglot (1514) and north for Erasmus’ New Testament in the same year, and then to Luther for the German New Testament in 1522, and pick up Hebrew again with Munster’s Grammar in 1525, and see Luther worked over by Zwinglius and others for the Zurich Bible of 1529, and glance at the two French versions of ’34 and ’35, and by no means neglect the new Latin translations of Pagninus (’28) and Munster (’34-’35). That is the sort of background against which Tyndale, Coverdale, Geneva, and Rheims must be set. For when we come to compare the versions we shall find that only a very small percentage of variants are made for stylistic or even doctrinal reasons. When men depart from their predecessors it is usually because they claim to be better Hebraists or better Grecians. The international advance of philology carries them on, and those who are divided by the bitterest theological hatreds gladly learn from one another. Tyndale accepts corrections from More: Rheims learns from Geneva: phrases travel through Rheims on their way from Geneva to Authorised. Willy-nilly all Christendom collaborates. The English Bible is the English branch of a European tree.
Yet in spite of this there is something new about Tyndale; for good or ill a great simplification of approach.”(Italics mine)
The Media-Focus Problem
It’s well understood that media entities like to focus on the negative–‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ But there’s also another media behavior problem worth noticing…
Cable TV networks, especially, tend to focus obsessively on whatever the hottest issue is at the moment, and absolutely beat it to death to the exclusion of any attention to *other* important things going on…until one of those other things get so important and so bad that it displaces the previous obsession and the cycle repeats. To borrow a term from the field of computer operating systems, you could think of it is a single-thread way to approach the world. And in the field of combat aviation, there is a phrase, Target Fixation, to describe the situation where a pilot is so focused on his target that he flies into a mountain or does something equally disastrous.