Tears For the Methodist Church

I’ve struggled in recent days to comprehend recent decisions in the United Methodist Church. I grew up a Methodist, and though I’ve attended mostly Lutheran for the last twenty years (with brief diversions into Episcopal and AME), my entire family remains Methodist, and the denomination retains a place in my heart. Yet I cannot help recalling something I only learned in 2017: the entire denomination’s history stems from division.

Despite the history of Methodism in America back to pre-Revolutionary times, the United Methodist Church has only existed since 1968. It formed from a merger of the Methodist Church (USA) and the Evangelical United Brethren. The Methodist Church was primarily English in heritage, while the much smaller EUB was mainly German, but both were Wesleyan traditions. The reason they merged, however, was pretty horrific.

The Methodist Church came into being in 1939, from a merger of the Methodist Episcopal Church and its lost child, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. These denominations had split in 1844 because the Southerners refused to renounce slavery, while the denomination overall had abolitionist teachings. John Wesley himself had published tracts on abolitionism, besides vocally advocating against oppressing Indians and other colonized peoples.

The two Methodist Episcopal traditions were almost identical in doctrine and teaching, and the South denomination was suffering massive losses of people and resources, so there was little to lose from the merger, while the Southerners in particular had plenty to gain. However, while slavery had ended in the interim, racial bigotry had not. The Southerners made a stipulation to the merger: the reunified Church absolutely needed to maintain segregated congregations.

Among many tragedies in American history, one looms large: progressive Whites advocated the abolition of slavery, but once slavery ended, they lost interest in racial issues. As Dr. Ibram X. Kendi writes, the Republican Party was founded on abolitionist principles, but demonstrated no interest in civil rights issues after the passage of the Enforcement Act of 1870. The pattern was widespread. To their widespread disgrace, the Northern Methodists acquiesced.

As a digression, whenever I visit my second home of Lawrence, Kansas, I’ve lately attended the local African Methodist Episcopal church. This group, informally called the AME, split from the original Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 because the original MEC refused to ordain Black ministers. This despite John Wesley’s stated opposition to slavery and racism; Wesley was a personal friend of leading British abolitionist MP William Wilberforce.

So to recap: in 1939, Southern Methodists wanted a Christianity stratified by race, and Northern Methodists didn’t care enough to fight. The old Methodist Church therefore had racist inclinations written into its foundation. But by 1968, Methodist leadership found this embarrassing, and wanted to revoke this stipulation. That’s where the Evangelical United Brethren come in: their tradition was doctrinally anti-racist. Many EUB leaders also served as Civil Rights volunteers.

It’s sad to think, but Methodist leaders understood it would be easier to create an entirely new tradition, and institute an entirely new charter, than amend the one they already had. The Methodists were numerous, and relatively secure; they didn’t need the EUB merger to reinforce themselves. The Methodists wanted the merger for only one reason: they knew that, without it, heel-dragging traditionalists would keep segregation written into their charter forever.

Which returns us to what happened in Chicago this week. Given the opportunity to widen their organizational reach, Methodists instead opted to cross their arms and deepen their opposition to LGBT+ inclusion. Just as their previous leaders once predicted, changing existing doctrine is exceedingly difficult, even when the status quo apparently puts select populations outside the welcome of God’s love. How, I wonder, does this serve any Christian interest?

Throughout history, many individual Christians have done the world great good. Christians have taken lead on abolitionism, Civil Rights, anti-colonialism, and other flashpoint issues. But whenever sufficiently large numbers of Christians come together that they need to created a hierarchy and doctrinal statement, that good becomes diminished. Christians are often leaders in overdue social changes. Churches, however, tend to impede change as often as enable it.

The UMC has struggled with this issue for decades. I still attended Methodist when the Church defrocked Reverend Jimmy Creech for officiating covenant services (not, please note, “marriages”) between two same-sex couples. I was more conservative back then, admittedly. But even then, I struggled to explain why declaring certain expressions of love was any better than saying mixed groups couldn’t sit in the pews. Clearly, twenty years later, nothing has gotten better.

Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 4

This essay follows from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

Three U.S. states require abortion providers to conduct a transvaginal ultrasound on women seeking abortion, and require the woman to look at the resulting image. Eleven other states require providers to conduct the ultrasound and make the image available on a voluntary basis. All fourteen states which demand such requirements lean heavily conservative in the ballot box. This according to the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank specializing in reproductive issues.

It’s always risky to interpret another person’s intentions. We’re all circumscribed by our limits; I cannot know, from within my skull, what happens inside your skull. But I think these laws assume women have a natural, essential desire to become mothers, a desire squelched by modernity’s economic and social pressures, resulting in them wanting an abortion. If they simply witness the fetus’s picture, this reasoning says, their motherhood instincts will kick in.

Let’s pinch a term from undergraduate philosophy and call this “gender essentialism.” Because it means that genders are defined by certain essential traits, certain gender roles so fundamental to existence that they cannot be eliminated, only shushed. Having a uterus necessarily means having motherhood instincts, which aren’t learned or acquired, only innate. Any woman who doesn’t yearn for motherhood has obviously muffled her own intrinsic female nature.

This form of essentialism creates problems. For one, the people who most vigorously defend gender essentialism also most often get angry when people suggest they have some natural discrepancy between their gender essence and the genitals biology assigned them. It also fails to explain why some women see themselves as women, and embrace most womanly roles, without any particular desire to procreate. So yeah, gender essentialism is a land mine.

Nevertheless, transvaginal ultrasound laws and other regulations designed to make abortion unappealing involve appeals to essentialism. They insist that a natural human nature exists, and that people have a second, gender-specific nature besides the one shared across genders. To be a woman, in this figuration, means having a specifically female soul. That’s where I, as a Christian, have serious problems.

Well, okay, I had problems way before that. Gender essentialism kicks them to a whole new level.

If one question plagues White Protestantism in my lifetime, it’s the question of gender. (Questions of race and poverty are more overweening, but avoided in polite company.) What role do women serve in Christianity? Are women and men equal, and if not, how do we differ? Well-meaning Christians muster Bible citations for either position, proving the adage that true believers can make the Bible say whatever they need.

Some people like quoting 1 Corinthians 11:13—“The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” Or 1 Timothy 2:12—“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” They love considering these verses authoritative for all people everywhere throughout time. Capital-T Truth, to them, is never contingent.

Me, I’m a big believer in Galatians 3:28—“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Not just because it supports my beliefs, but because, if men and women have different kinds of souls, than Christ couldn’t die once for everybody. God would’ve needed to send a second, female Messiah to deliver half the human population.

Christian Anthropology, a discipline very different from scientific anthropology, asks the important question: what makes humans distinct? Different theologians have mustered distinct answers through the ages. I propose, in overly simplified terms, that humanity means having a soul created in God’s image. The brain might be conditioned by humans being finite creatures living in one place and time. But, as a category, the soul isn’t delineated by race, nationality, or gender.

The entire appeal of gender essentialism, the belief that women will embrace motherhood as a stipulation of womanhood, insists that women have different souls than men. History has demonstrated amply that we cannot categorize some people as “different” or “separate” without, at least implicitly, also categorizing them as “lesser.” If our anthropology makes genders different by essence, then we’ve put somebody, probably women, outside the redemption experience.

We Christians have a history of creating regrettable categories. Our support of abortion legislation based on interpretations that are unbiblical makes one such category enforceable by law. Just as history judges our ancestors for segregating their congregations, our descendents will judge us for this.

Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 3

This essay follows from Part 1 and Part 2

The Fundamental Attribution Error is a concept from informal logic (and psychology) which says we incorrectly credit other people's behavior entirely to choices. Our own behavior, especially behavior we admit it morally squishy, we attribute to circumstances beyond our control, but others’ actions we blame on personality and character. Especially actions we regard as immoral or blameworthy.

American journalist Jack Hitt quotes an abortion doctor claiming that women who protest abortions are no less likely to actually have an abortion, than the general public. This means women who don’t just ideologically oppose abortion, but actually stand outside clinics, waving placards and chanting slogans. Hitt’s evidence is anecdotal, but nevertheless tellin. Because women who have abortions, generally have reasons why they consider it necessary.

When women have abortions, they perceive themselves as individuals, as unique beings who travel in a world of constant pressures and uncontrollable circumstances. In my life I’ve had five women openly discuss with me the reasons why they opted for abortion, and three others discuss why they contemplated an abortion, but ultimately chose against it or didn’t need it. Chances are, I’ve known other women who had abortions, but didn’t discuss it.

These women all had extenuating circumstances. A woman might believe herself too young or too poor to responsibly raise a child. She might have suffered violence. One couldn’t bear the responsibility of raising her chronic abuser’s child. As noted in Part One, one woman had a procedure that legally qualified as late-term abortion, and therefore is often the subject of virulent protest, though calling it “abortion” is specious, because the fetus was already dead.

Of these eight women who’ve openly discussed their abortion procedures or options with me, three consider themselves anti-abortion. One said that people who cannot take responsibility for prophylactic birth control shouldn’t be having sex anyway, so she favored harsh abortion restrictions. This after admitting she’d already had an abortion. I didn’t say anything, but she must’ve read my face, because she spread her hands and said, “I was fifteen!”

Like that explains anything.

Referring back to Part One, the two women I considered in some detail there forced me to accept that rules are made for people as categories, and not for individuals. When my church taught me that abortion was wrong because it kills a living human, this prescriptive category overlooked that we don’t always consider killing wrong. What about self-defense? What about war? We always consider killing in the context where it takes place.

Except, somehow, with abortion. Perhaps abortion carries the added stigma of sex, and certain segments of Christianity use sex to delineate “us” and “them” in this world. Abortion, homosexuality, and promiscuity generally put people outside the fold, at least among lay Protestants in conservative traditions. Weirdly enough, this doesn’t seemingly apply to chronic infidelity or divorce, which are apparently forgivable sins.

(That last sentence, if you missed it, was sarcasm.)

I don’t know where this attitude originated. I don’t recall any minister in any congregation I’ve attended addressing abortion from the pulpit, though I’ve had two ministers get so agitated by divorce that they’ve sprayed spittle from the lectern. Yet Protestant culture sees divorce, which is directly addressed in the Bible, as minor and circumstantial, while regarding abortion, which, as I demonstrated in Part Two, is completely non-Biblical, as beyond the realm of forgiveness.

Essentially, abortion fills the same cultural role in White Protestantism that became vacant when Christians nominally abandoned segregation. It provides an entire category of people we can consider morally unclean, without muddying our consciences. Because honestly, people like us do get divorced. We do stray from our marriage vows. If we cracked down on these behaviors, we’d have to face ourselves squarely. And we can’t bear that scrutiny.

Rules provide security through categorical thinking. Those people, abortionists or homosexuals or whores, are outside righteousness, which provides me the security of knowing my sins are comparatively acceptable. Even if, occasionally, I indulge those exact sins. I commit the Fundamental Attribution Error of assuming others do bad things because they’re bad people, while I’m subject to life’s context.

But Christianity shouldn’t, fundamentally, be a rulebook. When confronted with categorical rules, I always revert to John 13:35—“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” It’s impossible to love somebody without knowing them, as individuals, not categories. All rules must pass this test: am I showing the person love? If not, then the rule is wrong.

TO BE CONCLUDED in Part 4

Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 2

This essay follows from Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 1

Even at the peak of my anti-abortion sentiment in my early twenties, I never identified as “pro-life.” This term made me slightly queasy, because it subtly accused anyone who disagreed with me of being “pro-death,” which I doubt anybody but comic-book villains actually is. I refused to participate in such backhanded name-calling, because I considered the issue too important to muddy. We needed to address the important issue: preserving human life.

I didn’t realize then, as youths often don’t, that I had stacked assumptions, and my truisms concealed that I didn’t know something very important. What is human life? If your Christian upbringing was anything like mine, you probably heard the much-repeated slogan, “life begins at conception.” But the longer I considered that principle, the less credible I’ve found it. And I’ve discovered I’m not alone.

First, this principle isn’t Biblical. Christian leaders have read that into a portmanteau of Biblical citations, including most importantly Psalm 139:13, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” and Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” (All quotes are NIV.)

But seeing here a statement that one’s human soul exists when gametes combine is a gloss; it isn’t in the text. The only Biblical statement on the status of an unborn fetus comes in Exodus 21:22, which states that if a man causes a woman to miscarry, “but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows.”

Seriously. Killing a fetus, according to the Law of Moses, carries a cash fine. Because it’s a property crime, like killing another citizen’s livestock. In the Levitical Law, killing an unborn fetus is literally no worse than negligently breaking somebody’s crockery. The Bible takes no position on when life begins. The Jewish Talmud does say life begins when the lungs inflate, because Adam became alive when God breathed into his lungs.

So the belief that life begins at conception is entirely modern and exclusively Christian. Even the Supreme Court’s holding that abortion must stop when a fetus becomes hypothetically viable outside the womb represents a reach beyond what classical religious scholars would accept. Argument from antiquity is a logical fallacy, certainly; but treating a modern gloss as Biblically sacrosanct is also wrong. The “life begins at conception” argument is unsupported.

I cannot accept this argument either, though. Historically, early Christianity spread throughout Rome because Christians took firm positions on life. When plagues ravaged towns, pagan priests fled, while Christians nursed the dying. Early Christians baptized women, foreigners, and other “irreligious” people as equals. And, while Roman law permitted infanticide through age two, Christians vigorously advocated that defenseless children had souls and deserved to live.

Yes, the Christian precept that “life begins at birth” was initially unpopular in Rome. Yet Christians’ suggestion that firstborn daughters, unwanted twins, and other spare children should have the same opportunities as desirable, virile sons, now seems so obvious that, if you read histories of Iron Age childrearing practices, they can seem downright appalling. Christians, by insisting that human life matters, changed European values forever.

So I’m left with one inescapable conclusion: modern Christianity has no textual foundation for any agreed-upon definition of human life. We can cherry-pick whatever citations we like to create the gloss that serves our political ends, but tracking our beliefs to their origins, we discover that the foundations are arbitrary. We must surrender the illusion of God-given certainty, and evaluate the conundrum as it actually exists.

Thrown off the false promise of consulting the Bible for absolute truth, I’m forced, as so often, to consult the Greatest Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:27-39) How do I accomplish this in light of abortion?

In practice, I must accept that one-size-fits-all solutions don’t apply. Women have abortions for unique and varied reasons, and my response must be unique and varied. I must understand her as she is, not as I want her to be. And I must open my heart to whatever pain causes her to see abortion as the best solution. Any law which dictates any woman’s options, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot count as pro-life.

TO BE CONTINUED in Part 3 and Part 4

Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 1

Like most White conservative Protestants of my generation in America, I grew up believing abortion was unquestionably wrong. In the immediate wake of Roe v. Wade (1973), Christians could, and frequently did, disagree considerately about abortion. But by 1985, the year I turned 11, that debate had ended. Dr. King and Dorothy Day were dead, and public Protestantism had fallen into the hands of Reverend Jerry Falwell.

So anti-abortion sentiment became my spiritual inheritance. I wasn’t doctrinaire about it, certainly; I made exceptions. I believed, then as now, that rape survivors should have special consideration. A man forced that woman to have sex; the state shouldn’t compound that violation by forcing her into motherhood. Good teenage libertarian thinking, that. And I had a few other exceptions. But overall, I believed abortion morally wrong.

My view on abortion shifted because my view on other nominally Christian suppositions also shifted. When I realized laissez-faire capitalism wasn’t inevitable, and therefore wasn’t innately Christian, I began questioning what other supposedly spiritual precepts I’d mistakenly swallowed without testing them against Scripture. I came to believe the accepted conservative Protestant definition of life isn’t Biblical, and some abortion is therefore acceptable (more on that in Part Two).

Further, I had two important personal experiences. One woman I know, a devout Christian, suffered a rape, followed by a pregnancy scare. I realized I couldn’t possibly make reproductive decisions for her without contributing further to the trauma she’d already survived, and I couldn’t condone politicians doing likewise. This decision needed to be between her and God. I could support her, but her conscience alone made the decision.

Before this, a co-worker entered the hospital with complications regarding her late-term pregnancy. After long and difficult struggles with both their health, she and her husband were joyously expecting their first child. Sadly, this woman didn’t realize her fetus, eight months along, had been dead inside her for nearly two weeks, until she began experiencing symptoms of sepsis in her uterus. Yes, sepsis. She came perilously close to dying.

Because of her dangerous and grotesque symptoms, and the inarguable presence of a dead fetus decaying inside her uterus, the hospital life-flighted her to Denver, the nearest hospital capable of removing the dead fetus. Later, she learned, if she had waited until the morning to visit her doctor, as originally planned, she probably would’ve needed a radical hysterectomy, because the infection was spreading into vital tissues near her fallopian tubes.

Even without that tragic consequence, she still needed a procedure that, by today’s standards, counts as late-term abortion. She later learned a hospital nearer than Denver could’ve performed life-saving surgery on her (though it was too late for her fetus). They refused to do so, however, because the procedure was legally an abortion, even though there was no question of life in utero, and that violated the hospital’s Catholic principles.

I say all that to say this. Last month, New York State ratified the most sweeping abortion rights law in America. I thought little of it, until Governor Andrew Cuomo decreed a statewide celebration by lighting several public landmarks, including the mast of One World Trade Center, bright pink. A celebration! As though sweeping abortion protections were an accomplishment, rather than an acknowledgement of deep systemic problems.

Neither woman in this analogy contemplated abortion for flippant purposes. I’ve spoken to other women who’ve had abortions, though in less detail than these two. They had reasons: I was too young to give healthy birth. I couldn’t do right by any child if having that child meant curtailing my education and career. I couldn’t face birthing my abuser’s child. No woman I’ve known has accessed abortion unless they believed their situation irretrievably extreme.

When abortion shifts from something that’s right because it’s sometimes necessary, to something we celebrate as an end in its own right, I’m pushed in the opposite direction I once traveled. Seventeen years ago, I became pro-choice because I believed my Christian tradition had excluded women in trauma from God’s love. Now, I fear the secular component of pro-choice tradition has come into conflict with my spiritual journey.

Let me say now, I have no answers, only a more-refined order of questions. Caught between two camps, I no longer have recourse to simple talking points, because both the conservative and progressive traditions have failed me. If you’ve read this far, you probably feel likewise. Let’s start making new answers together. Let’s begin by asking this vital question: when does life begin?

TO BE CONTINUED in Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4

The Myth of the Fair Society

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 97
Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

What would a reasonable person consider a just and fair distribution of life’s goods and services? This isn’t an idle question. When Americans talk about “justice” nowadays, we often limit ourselves to dispensing payback for criminals, but that’s only one narrow aspect of justice. Throughout history, philosophers have struggled to identify the fairest, most honest distribution of life’s qualities. After five millennia of Western Civilization, we still have no answer.

Michael J. Sandel, Harvard University professor of philosophy, provides a concise overview of that ongoing debate. He doesn’t attempt to provide a comprehensive history; rather, he considers the most influential philosophers and philosophies, as measured by their relevance to modern technological democracies. He also, mercifully, favors real-world examples over high-minded thought experiments. The outcome is supremely useful for helping mold thoughtful, engaged citizens.

Sandel focuses on five broad philosophies: the Utilitarian and Libertarian schools, and the philosophies deriving from Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, and Aristotle. In that order. He pairs Utilitarians with Libertarians, and Kant with Rawls, because they have overlapping but not entirely compatible goals. All four have differing ideas of freedom, which has become the rallying cry of modernism, but define freedom in very different ways, demonstrating that words matter.

Utilitarians believe society’s entire purpose is to maximize happiness. Whatever makes people happy is necessarily good; whatever impedes happiness, follow the pattern. But as Sandel demonstrates, “happiness” proves a malleable criterion when pushed. Libertarians respond by using wealth as their yardstick, and owning one’s own output as freedom. Even this, though, encounters serious limits when Sandel tests Libertarianism’s precepts against real-world market outcomes.

Michael J. Sandel

(In discussing Utilitarianism, Sandel mostly quotes the school’s founder, Jeremy Bentham, with clarifications from his successor John Stuart Mill. Followers of political science will appreciate that, for Libertarianism, Sandel entirely cites Robert Nozick, a serious philosopher. That classic bomb-thrower, Ayn Rand, doesn’t merit a mention. Rand may energize the masses, but only Nozick translates his philosophy into useful, quantifiable applications.)

Where these two schools reward individuals, Kant and Rawls place much greater consideration on social ends and common good. Kant creates a series of moral precepts, which strive to remain morally neutral and irrespective of individuals or titles. Society should encourage freedom, but unlike Libertarians, Kant believes we don’t own ourselves. Humans are moral ends in themselves, and therefore cannot morally be exploited without undermining justice and liberty itself.

Rawls, by contrast, supports the idea of common good being founded on a social contract, then, unlike prior philosophers, attempts to reconstruct the conditions under which humans first signed this contract. What would we consider a fair society, Rawls asks, if we didn’t know beforehand where we stood in society? Rawls thus creates a social fabric that assumes everybody’s liberty to the extent that their liberty doesn’t undercut the common good.

All four of these philosophies make sense in their own terms, but all have come under scrutiny for what they omit. And the common omission, apparently, is that they assume humans are completely rational, choosing beings. Sandel tests all four principles against real-world examples. When is it okay for shipwrecked sailors to eat the dying cabin boy? If free-market contracts cover parental rights for surrogate mothers, have we established a market value for humans?

Ultimately, Sandel finds much to admire in all four philosophies, but deems each ultimately unsatisfying because humans are neither rational nor morally neutral. Here he finds recourse to Aristotle, whose ideal of justice involves concrete moral judgements on what comprises a “good life.” Admittedly, Aristotle considered a good life to resemble a refined version of Athenian life, so even that requires some adjustment to make it useful for modern Western audiences.

In his final chapters, Sandel focuses on more recent philosophers who imagine justice precepts which place moral weight on humans as players in society, a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the collective. Philosophers like Alasdair Macintyre, Richard John Neuhaus, or Sandel himself. Clearly, in this telling, the definition of the just society remains unresolved; this book solves little, but it invites us to informed participation in the continuing debate.

Philosophers will insist that their field isn’t about answering every possible question, but about asking the best questions possible. By testing his various philosophers’ precepts against real-world conundrums, Sandel ensures we’ve asked the correct questions, and even if all answers remain contingent, at least we’ve examined the answers thoroughly. This book doesn’t purpose to conclude the justice debate. It only wants to ensure we have the most informed debate available.

New Music, Old People

Miley Cyrus

The headline screamed with typical internet subtlety: Average Person Stops Seeking Out New Music By Age 28: Survey. Wow, that early? Last time I saw something similar, the suggested age was 32. Either way, people essentially surrender to the march of time and start repeating the favored stimuli of their youth when they still have decades of life remaining. What’s going on?

Besides its clickbait wording, I have multiple problems with this story. It has a self-selecting core sample comprised of users on Deezer, a startup music streaming app that needs publicity to compete with Pandora and Spotify. These apps flourish primarily by serving customers what they already know they’ll like, not what challenges their preconceived tastes. Seems like a recipe to reach the conclusion you already expected to reach.

And I question, given what we know about today’s music business, how much “new” music people listen to anyway. Charles Duhigg dedicates an entire chapter to the premise that, given the opportunity, most people listen to music which resembles what they already know and like anyway. Music labels today utilize this tendency to push music that resembles everything that came before, to the point of maintaining elaborate algorithms to ensure similarity.

I’ve written about this before. When room-temperature porridge like the Chainsmokers’ “Closer” spends twelve weeks at Number One, becoming one of the most successful chart songs ever, we should seriously question whether the charts mean anything artistically. Streaming services sell people “new” music that essentially resembles what they just listened to, and radio, desperate to remain relevant, does the same.

Tom Waits

The music charts from 1963 to 1970 perhaps confuse the question, making critics think the Hot 100 has its finger on the pulse of American society. The rapid evolution of English-language rock and pop music during those years resembles nothing before or since, and reflects market changes forced by the Baby Boom, the largest buying cohort ever, reaching young adulthood. The music chart in those years really meant something.

But that doesn’t say anything today. A brief listen to top-40 music today (and remember, working at the factory, I got more than a brief listen) reveals that music changes very, very slowly. The rising ability of more artists to create music hasn’t resulted in more diverse music getting played on today’s radio; not only does every song resemble every previous song, but the radio would often play the same individual song as many as ten times in an eight-hour shift.

I’m describing top-40 radio here, the music genre specifically targeted at customers in their teens and early twenties with ample disposable income, the very market which the Deezer survey claims still seeks new music. I suggest that, while they may seek new titles, the music they embrace is profoundly risk-averse and similar. And the people who manufacture music encourage this artistic timidity to maximize profit.

It’s impossible to separate the Beatles, whose chart success revolutionized music in the key years I already mentioned, from George Martin, the producer who foresaw something in their audition. Martin liked what he heard, got the band in the studio, and encouraged them to push beyond their current sound into something new. He got them to listen to new music and learn new instruments. Martin, if anybody, was the Fifth Beatle.

Martin didn’t have algorithms, software, and digital marketing. He had to splice tape with a razor blade, and guess which songs would make marketable singles. Thus he took risks, and encouraged the market to do likewise. By contrast, reading Charles Duhigg’s story of how Outkast’s “Hey Ya” became a hit, it’s clear that not only did the data-driven manufacturers favor the song for its essential blandness, they manipulated the market to agree with them.

John Fogerty

I understand I mustn’t mistake my personal experience for everybody else’s. The fact that I remain curious about music doesn’t mean everybody else is. (In just the last month I’ve newly discovered Lake Street Dive and Sharon Van Etten, so yeah, I’m still seeking new music.) And I realize that, because I don’t have children, I have more time available to seek new music. My experience is uniquely mine.

But that goes both ways. Don’t mistake young people finding new songs for seeking new music. Today’s media-saturated, cash-poor youth cannot afford the mental space necessary to really find something new; they’re seeking tunes they can listen to with half an ear while studying, commuting, or changing a diaper. Ours is the era of “novelty” that all sounds the same.

You Can't Revisit the Magic Land of Childhood

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 96
Lev Grossman, The Magicians

Quentin Coldwater is accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room. Adept at higher mathematics, he's also a talented stage illusionist. He's so good at everything, in fact, that everything now bores him. He's an outcast and third wheel among the genius set, the Ron Weasley of Brooklyn savants. Until one day he gets his chance: the entrance exam to North America's only certified university of legitimate wizardry.

Lev Grossman worked as Time magazine's in-house book critic while writing this, his third novel and first breakout success. Perhaps that explains why this reads as both a novel and a critique of its genre. Grossman's characters directly comment on how their story alternately resembles and differs from Harry Potter. Experienced readers will also recognize nods to L. Frank Baum, C.S. Lewis, Ursula le Guin, Susannah Clements, and others.

This novel's first half details Quentin's education. Though maybe “details” isn't the word: at Brakebills Academy, as with muggle college, schooling is mostly tedium. Quentin struggles with skillz drillz, homework, and social status, like undergrads everywhere. No trolls in the dungeon here. Well, one; but even that proves less adventurous, more an object lesson that all the knowledge on Earth means squat compared to preparation.

No, Quentin’s Brakebills education is characterized by hard work, discipline, and tedium. Magic here is a regimen. But it also features self-discovery, including the realities of adult relationships and sex. (These characters are college-aged, so the idea of sex feels less squicky than Hogwarts’ actual children.) Quentin spends four years transitioning to adulthood, where just like mundane college, the program is camouflage for school’s real lessons.

Throughout, Quentin dwells halfway in Fillory, the magical land from a series of mid-20th-Century British children’s novels. Though without faith himself, he appreciates the story’s Christian allegory, and believes his life would improve if he could travel to that land’s enchanted moral certitude. He loves how the story resolves, unlike life, which drags interminably. He knows it’s just a novel, but he spends hours wishing himself into Fillory.

Lev Grossman

Then, in the second half, the tone changes abruptly. One suspects the second half is the novel Grossman really wanted to write, because he invests such energy and detail. Out of college, Quentin and his friends are so powerful and wealthy that nothing matters. They drift through a rigamarole of dinner parties, alcohol, and meaningless sex. Until a classmate reappears with an artifact that promises to transport them where they’ve always wanted to go.

Fillory.

Yep, apparently everyone’s favorite portal fantasy really exists. The magic land of talking animals and moral allegory gives the protagonists something to live for. Which, sadly, forces Quentin to accept his profligacy and infidelity. Bequeathed all the power on Earth, he’s used it to think with his willie; why should some place as morally secure as Fillory welcome him? Still, he can’t abandon his childhood dream, so off he goes.

Except the parallel world Quentin discovers isn’t as ethically watertight as he remembers. Factions feud over scraps, while the creator-beasts which once guaranteed rectitude are strangely absent. The heroes commence a quest to recover Truth and Beauty, only to discover the one remaining loose end from their childhood novels has become monstrous and antiheroic. Turns out, you can only remain innocent and childlike forever, by destroying your innocence.

On one level, this forms a criticism of what happens when we reread childhood classics as adults. Nobody raised on Narnia, Oz, or other classic portal fantasies can return as grown-ups without having the experience somehow changed. (Grossman uses the word “portal” so often it becomes pointed.) And encountering works like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson as adults, we have our own distinct experiences, colored by our own lives.

At another level, Grossman undercuts even that reading. Confronted by the realization that moral certainty is phony, Quentin’s friends respond with cheap atheism that sounds like freshman philosophy major dribble. The opposite of theism, Grossman suggests, isn’t atheism, because both purport to know the Truth, which is ephemeral. Lacking pat answers, the characters lapse into bleak, lingering nihilism… which Grossman, mercifully, doesn’t resolve.

Grossman suggests throughout that humans need purpose, need moral framework, for life to have any meaning. Then he admits we cannot look outside ourselves for such purpose, because everyone else has the same limitations we do. Grossman does for agnosticism what Rowling did for Christianity: giving it a milieu that is simultaneously contemporary and mythical. This book isn’t easy. But it does suggest what it means to be human.