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Wednesday
You’re getting a lot on Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy this week because, after years of waiting for the final installment, I was finally about to finish the series and am still vibrating. Tomorrow I will be posting an essay on the author’s connection with high Romanticism, a knowledge of which helps us appreciate the depth of his project.
For today, however, I want to apply an insight from The Rose Field to the white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups that are attempting to take over America and the Muslim clerics that, in Iran, have long held sway. Both are characterized by an intolerance for anyone who looks, thinks, or worships differently than they do, so much so that they are willing to brutalize, imprison, and kill anyone who fails to buckle under. It has been much, much worse in Iran than here, of course, but we can see in Iran’s history where our own rightwing would like to take us.
A similar madness has seized the world in which Lyra operates so that an autocratic church—a blend of intolerant Calvinism and Opus Dei Catholicism—wishes to shut down portals to other worlds. In doing so, it makes common cause with “the Men from the Mountains,” who are Islamic terrorists characterizing themselves as “the clean wind of God.” While nominally at odds with Christianity, they share the church’s suspicion of the portals. If these reactionary forces have their way, they will create closed systems, the ultimate goal of ideological purists.
Lyra invokes a mathematical principle to expose the flaw in their vision:
“In any system, there are things you know are true, but you can’t prove that they are if you only use arguments from inside the system…”
“Gödel’s theorem. How does that fit in?”
“Well, if that’s true, then that means If you find a system that seems perfect and complete, where you can prove everything—then you’re wrong. You’re not looking properly.”
A healthy system, she goes on to say, requires gaps:
We need the holes where one world opens up to another. A system isn’t complete unless there’s a hole in it. We need the things we can’t explain, things we can’t prove, or else we die of suffocation.
Other worlds, she continues
are necessary, and so are all the windows and doors and openings, to let the wind blow through all the world…That’s why all the authorities want to block up the openings, and that’s why we must fight to the death to stop them.
Immigration, multiculturalism, liberal engagement with the world—these are all ways of opening ourselves to that wind. It’s that or suffocate.
