Friendship is Magic
Welcome to the Weekend Digest. In these brief Saturday posts, I’ll give you:
One Opinion to Consider
One Thing to Read
One Comment That Got Me Thinking
One Song, Poem, or Picture to Remember
One Opinion to Consider
My wife and I have been rewatching the Harry Potter movies and dipping back into the books. I may be alone in thinking that the movies more or less do justice to the books; even if they fall short the way cinematic adaptations must, there’s a consistency in tone and execution that befits Rowling’s masterpiece.
The Potter series is clearly about friendship, maybe even moreso than about good and evil. I’m not the only one to observe that three central characters—Harry, Voldemort, and Snape—are wounded people whose arcs are defined by friendship or the lack thereof. This, I think, explains more than anything the historic reception these books received in the first decade of the 2000s. In the world that has developed in the last half century, friendship, the kind that can last beyond high school and endure career and mobility, is almost magical itself.
Perhaps no cultural artifact has had a bigger wake than the HP novels. The Free Press’s superb podcast series The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling dives into the books’ vast Internet fan community, including the way that such online spaces eventually became a kind of testing ground for sexualized fan fiction—one of the earliest incarnations of what would become the transgender movement. Of course, the podcast is more interested in Rowling’s ongoing conflicts with elite media regarding this issue. But there’s enough here that suggests something more high-level: that the Potter books were given to the world at a time when many factors, including technology, were contributing to growing isolation and loneliness.
Against this backdrop, the thick relationships at the center of the HP stories feel like a painful Millennial nostalgia for a time we perhaps never really knew. The Potter novels charm so many because they are an unembarrassed celebration of life centered around friends. That is perhaps one reason why an aggressively self-determining, self-authenticating Western audience somehow feels at home in a fantasy that clearly hearkens to a religiously shaped experience of life.
A question that haunts the post-Christian West is: Can friendship happen in a world where the only thing people have in common is their freedom? Or is the life of friendship itself a magical artifact, one that you can only find by looking in places where something bigger than the self exists?
Two Things to Read
Cheating this week by giving you two things. First up is Brad Littlejohn, with a definitive essay in The American Compass on technology’s power over society.
Living in a world with limits means living in a world of friction, as we bump up against these boundaries, and it means accepting the limits of our own ability to overcome this friction. Conservatism, accordingly, teaches us to expect things to take time, and to put up with suffering in the interim. Patience comes from the Latin meaning “to suffer:” suffering the imperfection of the world, the consequences of our own choices, and the frustrated longing for a quick fix. It preaches an unpopular creed of incrementalism and waiting.
But if time past has no hold on us in the digital realm, we will not allow time future to, either. Each new hardware or software upgrade sells itself on its ability to reduce waiting time. Instant gratification has become almost the only kind of gratification we can imagine, and the suffering of patience the most unbearable form of suffering. Ironically, though, this instant gratification never gratifies, nor can it. As my colleague Clare Morell has emphasized, the chemical activated by digital experience, dopamine, generates a perpetual sense of anticipation, “a constant craving for more and more and more” that never comes to rest. But the breakneck pace of digital life has reshaped our expectations of the analog world, where app-mediated mobile orders obviate the need to stand in line, where telehealth provides painkillers on demand, and where anything slower than Prime’s two-day delivery warrants a refund.
Second, Brad East has some helpful words for writers:
A writer is not an influencer. To the extent that participating in any of these dynamics is necessary for a writer to get started or to get published, then by definition it can’t be avoided. But if it is necessary, we should see it as a necessary evil. Evil in the sense that it is a threat to the very thing one is seeking to serve, to indwell, celebrate, and dilate: the life of the mind, the reading life, the life of putting words on the page that are apt to reality and true to human nature and beautiful in their form and honoring to God. Exhaustively maintaining an online platform inhibits and enervates the attention, the focus, the literacy, the patience, the quietness, and the prayers that make the Christian writing life not only possible, but good.
In a word: If writing without a platform is impossible, then treat it like Wittgenstein’s ladder. Use it to get where you’re going, then kick it over once it’s done the job.
One Comment That Got Me Thinking
From williamharris, on “Impulses Are Not Identities.”
When it comes to identity, I would think it less a matter of impulse than that of a network of affections, and particularly the desire to be loved or at the least, to be otherwise seen for who one is. The space is dynamic, and as such in turn forms its rites and rituals, the external way of being together. A liturgy. This would seem to be the location for that identity formation. Further, identities of all sorts provide warrant for actions, actions which then reinforce the shape of one's identity. Think how "Dad jokes" or prosaic actions reinforce the idea of being a Dad; or how your church sets up a table in the park to provide food, or how it might hand out back-to-school backpacks. Actions confirm, strengthen the identity. it is not impulse that sets the ball rolling but affection and the desired to be loved.
There was a lot of response to my piece on impulse and identity. I was honeslty a little surprised at how controversial it turned out to be. I might address this in a future post. For now, I thought williamharris articulated an important nuance.
I agree that we should think in terms of “network of affections” (great phrase!). But I also think these networks are constantly in motion, and, like the human body, are fighting off invaders continually. The impulses we have might arise fundamentally from our network of affections, but this doesn’t decisively explain what that network is like, any more than a person whose body has a proclivity to a certain kind of disease should never expect to be healthy.
One Song, Poem, or Picture to Remember
“Supper at Emmaus,” by Carvaggio.
As someone whose university friendships are now over half a century old, I could not agree more about the wonderful gift of friendship - very much for me part of God's Common Grace in my life.