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A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter Miller with Brad Birzer · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:00
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• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Never before had Brother Francis actually seen a pilgrim with girded loins, but that this one was the bona fide article he was convinced as soon as he had recovered from the spine-chilling effect of the pilgrim's advent on the far horizon, as a wiggling iota of black caught in a shimmering haze of heat.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: Legless, but wearing a tiny head, the iota materialized out of the mirror glaze on the broken roadway and seemed more to writhe than to walk into view, causing Brother Francis to clutch the crucifix of his rosary and mutter an ave or two.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: The iota suggested a tiny apparition spawned by the heat demons who tortured the land at high noon.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: When any creature capable of motion on the desert, except the buzzards and a few monastic hermits such as Francis lay motionless in its burrow or hid beneath a rock from the ferocity of the sun.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Only a thing monstrous, a thing preternatural, or a thing with adult wits, would hike purposefully down the trail at noon this way.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: So wrote Walter M.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Miller Jr.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: in opening his post-apocalyptic science fiction classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz, published in 1959.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: The only novel he completed in his lifetime, it became an instant success.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: It has sold over two million copies since and has never been out of print since publication.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Muir Orthodoxy.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: I am Nadia Williams, managing editor at Muir Orthodoxy, and today it is an absolute delight to talk about a Canticle for Labovitz with Dr.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Brad Burzer, who is returning to this podcast, and we're really excited about it.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: He is the author of many books, including most recently The Declaration of Independence, a radical experiment in liberty.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Indeed, Brad was on this podcast recently to talk about the Declaration.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: He is what I would say a true renaissance man.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: He is a professor of history and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: He's the co-founder of the Imaginative Conservative, for which he writes a lot in his ample spare time.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: He has published books and essays on such a broad range of topics that one one can easily wonder: are there two or three Brad Bursers out there?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Surely one man can't do it all.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: His next book, Tolkien and the Inglings, Men of the West, is coming this fall from Encounter Books.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: And also since the last time we talked, he has won the Heritage Foundation Fellowship in recognition of his scholarship.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: But today I'm delighted to talk with him about the canticle for Leipovitz.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: So th thank you for being here again.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Nadia, thank you.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what to say after all that.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: That was so nice.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, there is only one of me.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I I do have a good time.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think you could also you could say something like this Burzer can't keep his attention on any one thing for too long without getting distracted by something shiny along the way.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think there's there's both good and bad in all of this Nadia, but thank you so much.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: That was great.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I love talking to you.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: I you you know that.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um you're just you're a wonderful ally and friend.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is this is wonderful to be able to do this.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that the um the attention span.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and a lot of times in academia, there's the encouragement to like over-specialize in one tiny thing.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's great that uh you and quite a few of us, like more recently, I feel like there's a little bit of a revolution.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like, let's resist the over-specialization.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I definitely believe in liberal education rather than technical education, no doubt about that.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: But it also fits, and I'm sure this is true for you too, Nadia.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: It fits our personality, right?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: This I the idea, and I and it drove me.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how you felt about this, because I really liked my dissertation advisor.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had two of them.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: I I love my dissertation advisors, they were great, but that idea of just narrowing and narrowing and narrowing just drove me crazy, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: I I wanted to explore things, and you know, what a difference from undergrad, where I did have a liberal arts education, and you got to just explore everything and have a blast doing it, versus grad school where you just drill down as deep as you can.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that that did not fit my personality.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: So and here we are.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: And here we are.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to ask you kind of a methodological question, um, which seems appropriate speaking of liberal arts education.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: You're a historian, but you read a lot of fiction, which by the way, also defies stereotypes because um like popular knowledge says men don't read novels.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: And like it's mostly women who read novels.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: So talk to us.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Why should everyone read novels?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: And why do you, as a historian, especially, someone who studies stuff that really happened, uh read fiction so much?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it it really, you and I had talked about this a little bit when we talked about the declaration.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: It really goes back to my mom.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: My mom has just had a huge, huge influence on me.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: And she's the one who really encouraged me to read.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then I have an older brother, I have two older brothers, but one older brother, Todd, who also was just always encouraging me to read.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't have much of a memory before I was actually reading.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: I remember reading as some of my earliest memories.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that it's just, I it's always been a part of me.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I've always loved fiction.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've especially loved science fiction and fantasy.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it's hard for me to even remember a time, even though I know it was there.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard for me to remember a time before Tolkien or Bradbury, uh, certainly.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I was reading just as early as I could and just devouring things.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I used to be able to, and I it's kind of crazy, but I used to be able to go through a Hardy Boys book in about three hours.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I would just have stacks of them, and I would just go one after another.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that didn't really nourish my imagination.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: I had to go into science fiction for that.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but yeah, no, I it's just, and again, I'm I assume this is similar for you, Nadia.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's just, it's always been a part of me.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I do have four daughters and my wife, who also love reading.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so I understand that argument that women read more than men, but in my family at least, that's not the case.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the the boys read just as much as the girls do overall, and we're always kind of competing with one another.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I also I feel this too.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I were to go into the classroom, and I believe as a historian, I think I'm part of the humanities, not the social sciences.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I really think it's incumbent upon me as a professor to invoke the imagination.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I think that's absolutely critical for a professor to do.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not enough to memorize facts.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone can do that.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: But to be able to say, why does fact A mesh with fact B?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Why does fact B mesh with fact D, even though we're missing C, how do we figure those things out?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm always I always feel like imagination matters.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't teach fiction in all of my classes, but I do in the vast majority of them.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: And that makes sense.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: As you mentioned, uh, the Hardy Boys, I was reminded of my son, who's now 11.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: And a couple of summers ago, he went on a Hardy Boys binge where I think he read, I don't know, something like 50 of them at the library.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of amazing how many there are.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: It is amazing.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: And once you get hooked into that world, I had the Hardy Boys, I had their detective manual.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I, you know, as a second grader or third grader, I thought I was a pretty serious detective.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I love it.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: Kept the neighborhood safe.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: So here we are today.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about a novel published in 1959 as a classic.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to start by asking you what makes it a classic in your opinion, and why have so many generations of readers related to it?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's a classic because so many generations of readers have related to it.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's something about it that has a timeless quality.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there are very disturbing parts of it.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a brilliant, hilarious novel, but I also, it's, it's, it's black, it's dark.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are things that I always ask my students when I teach it, and I teach it in Christian humanism.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I do a course where we look at Irving Babbitt and Paul Omer Moore, mostly T.S.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Eliot.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: We spend something like six weeks on T.S.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: Eliot, and then we look at Russell Kirk, but we look at Willie Cather and others.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I always have them to finish the class, I have them read Canical for Leibowitz.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I, in the first half of the semester, I have them read Death Comes for the Archbishop.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I always ask them, and you know, so my students are mixed.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's typical Hillsdale class, so majority Protestant, but significant minority Catholic.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so I always ask them, is this novel either the most anti-Catholic novel you've ever read, or is it the most pro-Catholic novel you've ever read?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you can actually find answers for each.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think, I mean, even to this day, if you were to ask me at Nadia, and say, Brad, I demand that you answer that question, I'm not sure I could.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I really am not sure if Walter Miller is making fun of Catholics or if he just admires them so much that he's being playful.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's an element too.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: But there's another question as well.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: We could also ask, is it brutally anti-Semitic or is it phylosemitic?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because you've got the whole character of Leibowitz, the wandering Jew, Benjamin, and he's a good guy, but he's an odd guy, too.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think Miller is really in a way that, you know, amazingly doesn't fit with our politically correct age.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Miller is really playing around with ethnic and religious stereotypes.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's something about that that appeals to us.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, not that we're bigoted, I don't mean it that way, but I think that we kind of see ourselves as maybe being beyond bigotry.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: That is, that we can embrace the bigotry of the past and get beyond it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, whether it's a Polish joke or an Italian joke, whatever it may be.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's part of the era that Miller is coming out of.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the 1950s, where you had ethnic jokes everywhere.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And those ethnic jokes weren't meant to be cruel.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: They were meant to introduce new peoples into American civilization.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's actually a, I mean, there's a sociological reason that those kinds of jokes emerge when they emerge.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: And they're a way of assimilation of various peoples.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel that that's what Miller is doing as well when he presents this kind of Catholic argument to in the 1950s what would have still been a mainstream Protestant audience.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there's something profound about that.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think the whole question about nuclear warfare, you know, what happens with the nuclear war?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is not something, and you know, Nadia, I know you're Russian originally and I'm a Kansan.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's not something that my kids understand.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: But me being 58, you know, every once in a while, I don't have them that often anymore, but every once in a while, I'll still have a nightmare about nuclear war.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think anybody my age has those.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we grow up, we grew up under the threat of nuclear annihilation all the time.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that radically changed in 1989.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so I think that the consciousness, the idea of, well, are we all going to be blown away?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: No, we're probably not.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: But it's so deeply rooted in my mom's generation, my generation, you know, this idea of nuclear annihilation.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: So when we read Canical and we see that it takes place 600 years after nuclear war, and then 1200 years, and then 1800 years with the nuclear war happening again, there's something about that that says, yeah, this is Cold War culture.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why I think it's a classic.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's a classic because it speaks to so many generations in so many different ways.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: But, and this is what I think is most fundamental about the book, it always asks us, what does it mean to be human?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that to me is if we're thinking about the humanities and we're thinking about what makes great literature, whether it's Brothers Karamatsov or The Lord of the Rings, you know, or the Odyssey, we're always asking that question, what makes us human?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something that Miller does really brilliantly, really brilliantly.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: I was I was thinking about this question myself on this reread.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: Why is it so relatable today when we're not facing the precise um concerns, the precise fears that spurred him originally to write that?
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, Brad, you'll you'll love this, but my dad is a nuclear physicist.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that's great.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also funny to think like Russians, like, of course, what do Russians do?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, right, right.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no stereotype there.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: No stereotype there.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: But uh that was a concern, I think, in Russia as well, that scientific research was essential for national security.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, now moving to the US, living in the US most of my life now, especially like all of my adult life, and realizing there's this mirror image of those same fears in the US.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I think for someone my generation, they're just they're they're baked into our DNA.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and again, I would be shocked, you know, if I got together for in my 40th class reunion is this summer, you know, if I got together with my my high school friends, I'm sure they would all, even though we're past it, they would all have those kind of nightmares and fears as well, lingering somewhere in them.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's striking.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: We're formed by those childhood experiences, those fears that you heard all the time.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'm so glad my kids don't have that.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's that's there are other things that I wish they did have.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, I mean, I grew up with Reagan, and I grew up with John Paul II, and I grew up with Margaret Thatcher.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're growing up with Trump and Putin, and you know, I mean, it's just it's disappointing, you know, in that way.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: But but there are other things that I think they've got better than we did, and I'm glad about that.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk a little bit more about the 1950s.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and one great thing about the 1950s is that this was the like the golden age of sci-fi writing in America.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: We have um not just, of course, this particular novel coming out in 1959, but I'm thinking of all those novels of Isaac Asimov that I loved as a teenager.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: And your favorite, Ray Bradbury, whom I originally read in Russian.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: He was translated into Russian, so like he was read in the Soviet Union.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you've written quite a bit about.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's great, Nadia.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, the 1950s are an amazing age, of course, because it's the age of rocketry.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I know that, especially as Americans, when we look back, we often look to Kennedy in the moonshot.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it's really Eisenhower in the 50s that gets our whole rocket program going.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And those rockets, you know, whether we're talking about the Minuteman or we're talking about the variations of the Minuteman later, the Titan II, you know, all of these missiles were being developed.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so when Sputnik goes up, and kudos to the Soviets for getting their first, you know, when they put the first satellite in orbit in 1957, that's a huge shock to most Americans.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: But people like Ray Bradbury, they've already, they were expecting this.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: They knew this was coming.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they were laughed at for having predicted these kinds of things.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so we enter that space age.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I don't know if you had a chance to see it.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I loved it.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was a great movie, even though I'm more of a DC kid than a Marvel kid.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: But last summer, if you saw The Fantastic Four, you know, that it's a movie I would highly, highly recommend.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was a brilliant science fiction movie dealing with, again, what does it mean to be human?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but in that movie, what they did is they took the aesthetic of the late 1950s and early 1960s and imagined that that would be the future rather than the kind of Stalinist future that we actually got.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so I love that idea.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that again, when we look back to the 1950s and we're thinking about something like Canical for Leibowitz, we can imagine him writing on the edge of the space age and what the space age meant.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And even Nadia, you know, it's fascinating, even the term science fiction really didn't become the term until about 1952 or 1953.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Before that, all through the 19 aughts, teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, there were all kinds of competing terms for what we now call science fiction.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: And about 1952, everybody just agreed this is what we're going to call that genre.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: So even right then, you know, something that we all take for granted, and even the word dystopian.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Before dystopia, the word that people used was coccotopia.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it meant something like an untoward civilization.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't quite have the political meaning.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: It had more of a cultural meaning, like a culture that had gone bad, rather than dystopia where a government has gone bad.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: But that very word dystopia also comes into existence in 1952 and 1953.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, prior to that, you find the word dystopia in the English language maybe once or twice in the previous 300 years.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: But then suddenly in 1952, it catches on, and now we all use that.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's very telling that it's the 1950s that solidifies that language and solidifies that vocabulary for us.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a vocabulary that we use to this day.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't see, you know, maybe you would disagree with me, but I don't see any terms changing anytime soon in the future.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're probably going to keep using science fiction and dystopia for the foreseeable future.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think without question.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: That is fascinating.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: I did not realize that was that that the terms are that recent.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: I had assumed they were earlier.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and they're all part of that space age.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: They're part of the Cold War, they're part of the atomic age, everything that's going on.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you also, you know, we haven't talked about this as well, uh, but you also have comic book culture.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And comic book culture is for smart kids.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Kids.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's not trash.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: It gets seen as trash.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a reaction against it in the mid-1950s by a number of what I would call kind of puritanical psychologists who start blaming child delinquency on comic books.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look at comic books in the 40s and the 50s, they're really intelligent.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: In the early stories of Superman and Batman, they're extremely intelligent.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that they subverted a lot of culture because they were so sci-fi-oriented that a number of elites in America got very uncomfortable with them.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: But what we really, when we're talking about Miller and we're talking about Lewis, when we're talking about Bradbury, you can't separate comic culture from that either.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that that really, yeah, that that makes me think of the really vivid descriptions and just the imagery that Lewis has.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: He's almost painting verbal pictures, for instance, in Paralandra.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, oh, absolutely.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I one thing I like to argue, and I think this is true for science fiction as well as comic books, I really do believe, and please don't take this as anti-Protestant.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's not meant to be.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that in the history of literacy, one of the things that Protestants did very, very well, but there was a downside to it, was they promoted literacy.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: But by promoting literacy, Protestants downplayed the image.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so what you have with Protestantism is this hyper focus on the word, but not a hyperfocus on the image.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the things that science fiction attempted to do, and I think movies do this, I think comic books do this, they try to reintegrate that reformational divide.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And again, please don't get me wrong, I'm not being anti-Protestant.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: I just think it's one of the trends of history.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: But what I think movies and comics and science fiction do is they take the word and they take the image and they pull them back together in some way.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that so both you and I, Nadia, even though I'm much older than you, you and I both have a very our imagination is deeply shaped by visuals.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's not shaped just even though we're both readers, it is shaped by us having those images in a way that say a 17th-century Puritan would not have had.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're surrounded by them.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: For better or worse.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: For better or worse.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to ask a little bit, since you mentioned um, you know, Protestants, Catholics, and a lot of um also there are a lot of atheists in the mix in the sci-fi writing world, like Asimov.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: But um Tell us a little bit about Walter Miller, because he was a complicated character when it comes to his religious convictions, which he does bring into his writing.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: He is so complicated.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he the more I read about him, the less I like him as a person.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I hate to say that because I want to like him, but he he's definitely got problems.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: So he is raised in a nominally Protestant Southern family.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they don't take their faith very seriously.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then he goes on, and this is astounding in and of itself.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: This would this would mess anybody up.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: He went on 45 bombing missions in World War II.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's incredible.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I you you cannot knock his bravery, but it's also insane.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the vast majority of people who go on bombing missions, they'll go on maybe 15 or 20, and that then you max out.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's enough.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're not supposed to go on more than that.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea that he went on 45, you know, either the guy did not fear death, and he was the bravest guy you can ever imagine, or he already had some kind of psychological trauma at that point.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he is the gunner on the bomber that bombs Monte Cassino, which is the very first Western monastery.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: There had already been monasteries in Byzantium, but not in Western Christianity.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so Monte Cassino, a Benedictine monastery, is the very first one built.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he and his bombing crew were ordered to destroy it during World War II.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: He did it, it was his orders.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: And when he got back from World War II, he started reading about what the monks were, what the Benedictines were, what monasteries were about, and he felt just horrible guilt for this.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he became super attracted to Catholicism.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so he converts.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: But this is where it gets really problematic.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to be the case that he converts to Catholicism for only a couple of months.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: His faith just does not stay there.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: He loves Mary, which is very interesting, right?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you remember, even at the very beginning of Canical for Leibowitz, uh, he says that he knows that Mary will understand what he's writing.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's he says to all those whose assistance in various ways contributed to making this book possible.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: The author expresses his appreciation and gratitude, especially, and then he lists a number of names, and finally to Mary for reasons known to her alone.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so even there in the late 1950s, he still has that attraction to Mary, but he loses his faith in Catholicism almost immediately.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: He leaves his wife, uh, who had also converted to Catholicism.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: He has an affair with another science fiction writer, and uh he and she are very open about it.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: They they tell their spouses what they're doing.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's brutal in this affair.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're not even secretive at all about it.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: That falls apart, and then Miller ends up with his original wife.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: They make, they make their peace and they come back together and stay together until the end of their days.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's just a strange, strange relationship.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so Miller is just one of those guys.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we look at someone like C.S.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, he led an exemplary life.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: We look at Ray Bradbury, he led an exemplary life.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: You look at Arthur C.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Clark, he had his quirks, but he was a moral, virtuous guy.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Isaac Asimov, moral, virtuous guy.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: You look at Miller, uh, it's hard to find that in him.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, all the evidence kinds of point kind of points to the other, which is also why I think that when we look at the Catholicism of Canical for Leibowitz, we really do have a legitimate question of saying, is he making fun of us or not?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: Or is there something else going on here?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a legitimate question.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: But Miller then, and this is just tragic, you know, Miller cannot get his sequel to A Canical for Leibowitz written.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: It finally gets published as St.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Leibowitz and the Wild Horsewoman, but it's published after his death, and his death is very unpleasant.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: He calls the police one afternoon and he says, There's a dead man on my front yard.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: He walks out to his front yard with his revolver and he shoots himself in the brain.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And sure enough, the police find him minutes later in his front yard.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: So he doesn't have a happy ending at all.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, just a brutal, absolutely brutal ending.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why Nadia, I think that again, you know, I wouldn't want to have his suicide define his life.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think it's impossible to talk about him without bringing that up as well.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: In the same way, you know, if you look at Conan's creator, Robert Howard, I wouldn't want his suicide to define his life either, but it definitely shapes and makes us question what he was thinking all along.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Complicated doesn't even begin to describe this.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, Audia.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, so this backstory that you just told us explains a lot about this novel because he clearly is wrestling with a lot of questions.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: And to me, excuse me, both times reading, the monks came across as the mostly the heroes of the story.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: So talk to us about this.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like what is going on here?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I'm not sure.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's just say that Miller went through a pro-Catholic phase, which is true.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: We know he did, uh, and his conversion.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yo, and he his family was upset about it.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: This was not this was not a decision lightly taken when he converted.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I don't think it stuck very long, but it was there.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he also, I I didn't mention this earlier.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: He became very enamored with Zen and Buddhism and Eastern religion and flirted with that much more than he did Catholicism in the rest of his life.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a stoic element to what he's doing as well, which helps explain the suicide, because remember, the Stoics were okay with suicide.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that that's a part of it as well.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that there is a real fascination with the church, and I think with the idea, especially that the church, more than any other institution, preserved Western civilization.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: If we go back to one of the great Christian humanists who would have been a huge figure during Walter Miller's time, a guy by the name of Christopher Dawson, who was a friend of Lewis, he was a friend of Tolkien.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he and Tolkien had the same doctor, he and Lewis and Tolkien all had the same doctor.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Dawson is cited all over Tolkien's academic work.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Dawson was really kind of the definitive Christian humanist of his day, an Englishman.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Dawson always said, and I love the way he put this, you could destroy 99 out of a hundred monasteries, but with that one remaining monastery, you could preserve Western civilization.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not an exaggeration.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we know that in those monasteries, they're preserving not only Saint Paul and Saint John, they're not only preserving St.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: Peter and all of the New Testament and the Old Testament, but they're preserving Plato and they're preserving everything that mattered, Horace and so forth.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're preserving Tacitus.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we know that among the monks, they are preserving all of this.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: What Miller does, which is hilarious but dark at the same time, is he have he has the monks preserving all of the elements of modern Western civilization?
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: So they're not preserving Plato, but they're preserving the blueprints of nuclear weaponry.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, they don't have a clue what they're doing, but they're preserving it anyway.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the irony, and that's where you have to ask: is Miller making fun of Catholics, or is he making a serious point here?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it somewhere in between?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is it both mocking as well as a serious point at the same time?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because these monks are very unwittingly preserving the very thing that will destroy them in the end.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you wouldn't say the same thing about the Benedictines preserving scripture, preserving Plato.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there is an irony of that in what they're preserving.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I love Dawson's argument.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Again, that argument that we could wipe out 99 out of a hundred monasteries.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: And with one monastery, you could preserve all of Western civilization.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: And there's truth in that.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And again, you know, Nadia, I'm not in any way trying to be pro-Catholic about this, but you know, every one of us, whatever our religion is today, we all owe those Catholic monks an immense debt of gratitude for preserving all of that literature for centuries when it could have just been so easily wiped out.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because you imagine what those monks are doing.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, think about being a monk, say, in Lindisfarne in England.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's dark, it's damp, you're giving your eyesight over to candlelight, and you've got just humid, moist weather all the time.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're on the North Sea and you're in the middle of this stone work and you're doing everything possible to preserve ancient texts, and you're giving your very eyesight for that.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then you imagine, you know, what are you writing on?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you're writing on vellum, which means somebody had to turn over all of the animals to be killed so that their skins could be turned into parchment.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you just think about all the resources necessary to make one Bible, just one Bible.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's amazing the kinds of sacrifices these medievals made just to preserve those things.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because every time they kill a lamb, that means that there's less milk, there's less wool, there's less whatever, right?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: All of those things.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's always a trade-off.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: And yet they're willing to do it to preserve Western civilization.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think, you know, we, again, whether we're Protestant or Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Jewish or whatever we may be, we owe those monks so much for the kinds of sacrifices they made for well over a thousand years until the printing press is made.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that changes everything, of course, once the printing press is developed.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not until the 1450s.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we've got a thousand years in which men are just illuminating basically dead animals, is what they're doing.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh again, an immense sacrifice that was made.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_02: And these are themes that Miller really picks up on in this book.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: So the whole point of a single monastery will save save Western civilization.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: So when we open, we open in the Colorado Desert, and there's this um incredible monastery.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: And when I first read this book, um I hadn't been to Colorado yet, so it didn't really have any like impact on me.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then a couple summers ago, I visited Colorado for the first time and driving through the desert, it was like, oh this really is the kind of place where you imagine.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is the quintessential sci-fi desert.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: It really looks it.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: And it just made this book come to life realizing, like, you know, Colorado Desert in June.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, oh man, that's what he's talking about.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: It um but the idea that this is where Western civilization is preserved.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: I was wondering also just the concept of preserving Western civilization specifically in America.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that's what he's kind of thinking about?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: That this is where the cradle of Western civilization has moved to in modernity?
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a hint of that?
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there is for Miller.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think absolutely.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a great, I don't know, Nadia.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: Have you looked at the the sequel, St.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Leibowitz?
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: I have not.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let me, I don't know if your your viewers can see this very well, but I will show it because I think it's really important.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: There is a map at the very beginning.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you can see that, there is a map of the central United States, but in in Leibowitz's time.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: And what you find on this map is that New Rome is now St.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: Louis.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: And where Liebowitz's monastery is, is basically where Santa Fe or Taos is.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree the way it's described, it seems like it's in the Colorado desert.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the way the sequel puts it, it's really where Santa Fe is.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, you think about the geography of that area, the desert of New Mexico is very intimately related to the desert of Colorado.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same desert, right?
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: Just separated by political borders.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it makes sense that you would see that.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I think that basically, you know, after a nuclear war, we've lost all contact with Europe.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so if Catholicism is to survive, it would have to survive in North America.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: And interesting that he would put it at St.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: Louis, because for Catholics, St.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Louis is always identified with the Jesuits.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it's pretty clear that these monks that we see for Leibowits are much more like Benedictines.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I find that very interesting that we could say the hierarchy is Jesuit, but the lay, that is, the average person is Benedictine in all of this.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: And remember, of course, you know, the religion is a minority religion.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so even if there are Catholics still around, we see the vast population is not religious at all.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's part of the story as well.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're truly in a dark ages.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, I think Miller has shifted Western civilization to America.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: So here we are in America after a nuclear apocalypse, essentially, as the novel opens.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we're going through kind of rebuilding.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: So the dark ages, but these monks are trying to not only preserve civilization, but uh get something new.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like, for example, reinventing electricity.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's this excitement and discovery.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so what themes do you emphasize when you teach this to undergraduates?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what should we pay attention to, especially?
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I one of the questions that I always bring up, and you see this especially in the conversation between Benjamin and the Dom in the second story, right?
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got old Benjamin, the old Jew, and you've got the head of the monastery when they're talking, you know, they're really talking about the nature of power.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the things I think that there's a deeply, deeply libertarian streak to everything that Liebowitz is about, that is, to what Walter Miller is getting at.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think he's extremely distrustful of power, whether that power is being led by a king or it's being led by a government, especially in the third, right?
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: Where we see the whole the Lucifer and everything that's going on in the third story.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we find, and I think Miller took this very seriously, at least for the brief time he was Catholic.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think he really did believe that every life is sacred.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: And remember, in the first story, we are told that any creature who is born of woman is automatically able to be saved.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so, no matter how much nuclear war has mutated somebody, no matter how much of a monstrosity they may appear to be, if they are born of a woman, they have the possibility of eternal life.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so in that way, Miller is consistent throughout the whole story.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: He sounds very much like John Paul II or Benedict Benedictine uh Benedict XVI, right?
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: He he sounds very much like uh a good Catholic, where he's saying, look, all life is sacred, no matter what.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he he plays with that idea too.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the fact that the fact that we see at the end Brother Francis is killed and he actually is destroyed by the Pope's children.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a cost to that.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Never does Miller suggest that loving human life does not come with a cost.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: It comes with a cost.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Naughty, again, whatever our own religious proclivities are, you know, all we have to do is look at Western civilization.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Socrates, Cicero, Jesus, Perpetua, Felicity, Thomas More, right?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: These are all martyrs.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Christianity has a very, very heavy cost that comes with it.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: And for the first 300 years of the Christian church, you know, if you converted to Christianity, you were signing your death sentence.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the idea that you were going to live to a ripe old age and have a happy family, that's absurd, right?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: It means that you're being thrown to the lions.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's something that Miller resurrects in this post-apocalyptic world.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: We have to recognize that to be Christian is to also die like Christ.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: It is to live like Christ, but it is to die like Christ.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that's Brother Francis.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: And Brother Francis is a great, he's a hero, he's a great man.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh right, he, I mean, we look at him kind of like we look at Sam Gamgee at the beginning of.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of the Lord of the Rings, he looks like a fool, but he turns out to be the wisest person there is.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he turns out to be the ultimate Christian in sacrificing himself.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't want to, but it becomes necessary.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so those are the kinds of themes.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think that with Miller, we're always looking at what is the nature of the human person?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: What is the meaning of sacrifice?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what is the meaning of power?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: And power is the enemy.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Just like it's the enemy for Tolkien and Lewis, it's also the enemy for Miller.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: So here's where, you know, what do we go back 20 minutes in our conversation, Nadia?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Miller's not someone I want to pattern my life after in terms of him being an author.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: But if we look at his story, it's a beautiful Christian story.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a beautifully Christian humanist story, even if it's playful and dark at times.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's also, I was thinking as I was reading, very Herodotan in the sense of cycles.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: That here we start.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I and I suppose that is very biblical as well, the idea that we start right after this nuclear apocalypse, well, not right after.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, uh, what's 60 years and like God's time?
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we end millennia, almost two millennia later, and it's another of the same.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: And the question of like, could this ever have been otherwise?
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: Are we capable of anything else?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: And um it's again very much kind of the Heroditean idea to which Christianity gave the language of original sin or man's sin nature.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: What do we do with this other than get depressed, maybe?
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, part of the I think that's one of the reasons that the story is so funny, too.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's funny in this in the same way that a confederacy of dunces is funny.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's a a kind of there's a there's a dark Catholic humor and a Jewish humor that I don't think you find quite as much in Protestantism because it's so earnest, but you find it in the 50s and 60s, and that takes us all the way back to the beginning of our conversation.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is where we get ethnic jokes as well.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're dark, but they have a purpose.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're not meant to be bigoted, they're meant to kind of bring people into society.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a lot of what Miller's doing.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: He's making fun of Catholics and Jews, but he's doing it in a way that basically says, yeah, I'm hitting you on the shoulder and you're one of us.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's just gonna take a second until we recognize that.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so there is a darkness to it, but I think it's a healthy darkness.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's the kind of darkness that we might see a group of Jews talking over breakfast, over bagels and coffee in a New York neighborhood, right?
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: That the kind of idea that, yeah, we can joke amongst ourselves.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what Miller is really doing here.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I'd also say this if we could step back from it, Nadia, and I love the way you put this, where we're thinking about sin nature.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: One thing I always tell my students is that when we're reading Miller, we are reading an Augustinian wasteland.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: That is, we've got you the whole cycle of Augustine.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: Choose now what you will, either the city of man or the city of God.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: And remember for Augustine, we can never wholly reject the city of man.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to be citizens of it, but we're still marching through it.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: And because God has put us here, marching through the city of man, we are to serve as leavens, to call those in the city of man who have not yet recognized that they are citizens of the city of God.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: It is incumbent upon us to be witnesses to them and to show them what Christianity is.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: So for Augustine, we never forsake the city of man.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: We don't embrace it either.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a lot of what's going on with Miller.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: You've got this Augustinian wasteland, and you have people like Brother Francis who are living out their lives saying, no, this is what we need to do.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, do I look like a fool?
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: In the eyes of the world, I look like the ultimate idiot.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: But in the eyes of God, I am doing exactly what I have been called to do.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: I am living and dying like Jesus did.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what matters.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think the second part of that, the Augustinian wasteland, matters.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: I truly think we're in T.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: S.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: Eliot's wasteland.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: And in the wasteland, you know, think about this, it's a whole group of shattered images.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what we see here.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: We see the shattered image of time, 600 years, 1200 years, 1800 years, and then the whole thing starts over again.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not just the shattering of culture, it's the shattering of time.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if the ending mechanical is a happy ending or a depressing ending.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: All I know is that the cycle is about to be repeated.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it seems that the monks going off to sell Alpha Centauri maybe have something going for them that they will be able to leaven out the cycle, but it's not clear.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I think that's part of what makes this book a classic.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: If Miller were in your face, if this read like the catechism, it would have been a one and done.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: We would have read it and we never would have gone back to it.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact that there are so many questions, is it pro or anti-Catholic?
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: Is it pro or anti-Jewish?
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is it about the human person?
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Is it about the cycles of history?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's again what makes it a classic, because we can keep going back and wrestling with these questions over and over again.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_02: I have one more question to add to the is it one thing or another?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, is it pro or anti-technology?
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think, Brad?
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's anti-technology.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: That that's one thing I would be pretty comfortable saying.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think that Miller, again, remember he went on 45 bombing missions, which is outrageous.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it was his technology that destroyed Monte Cassino.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think that he, like many Christian humanists, Lewis Tolkien, Romano Guardini, Willie Cather, they are all very suspicious of technology.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're also, you think about the 1950s, they're not just suspicious of technology, they're deeply, and we forget this, they are deeply suspicious of conformity and especially cultural conformity.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they saw technology as a way of melding us all into a kind of tapioca, every suburb looking the same, every school looking the same.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: They were really worried about that.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, conservatism is born out of being skeptical of both technology and conformity.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: We forget that because when we think conservatism, we think adherence to tradition.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at Russell Kirk or you look at Robert Nisbet in the 1950s, you know, they are deeply skeptical of technology.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: And why?
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this makes sense.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis makes this blatant in some of his essays.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I'm a farmer, I am still fallen.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's no question about that.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: I can't escape sin, my sin nature, but I'm still living in God's creation.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so I get up with the sun, I go to bed with the sun.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, even as a fallen human being, I live by God's rules.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm an engineer, I make my own rules.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: If I am messing with technology, I live according to my standard.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: So a person who's technologically inclined for Tolkien or Lewis or Miller is automatically thinking about himself and about his ingenuity, not thinking about God's providence.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: So a person who's enamored with technology is not more fallen than a farmer, but he's other directed.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: The farmer is directed towards God's creation.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: The technologist is oriented towards his own ingenuity and away from God's creation.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he's not more fallen, but he's oriented in the wrong direction.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_02: That is a striking thought.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it does seem like for some today, um, technology has become almost the quasi-religion.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no question about that.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, think about, you know, every and I and I love Steve Jobs, and I'm wearing my Apple Watch and I'm talking to you on my MacBook.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yo, I I love Apple, but you think about the the kinds of the deal we make out of every new iPhone that's introduced, right?
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's suddenly the new iPhone replaces the old iPhone.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: The iPhone is obsolete.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how ridiculous that the iPhone I bought 16 months ago or 18 months ago is now obsolete.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's bizarre.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we've made a religion out of this, right?
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes, you know, it's almost a sacrament to go buy your new iPhone.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: There is something quasi-religious about it.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so we we do that all the time.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's very dangerous.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: We do it with music too, um, especially my generation with rock concerts.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, rock concerts are just their religious ceremony in every way.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: And now, of course, especially with certain megachurches, they've adopted what a rock concert is and they've made that their worship service.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a weird confluence of culture and technology and religion right now that I don't think we've seen except in modernity and post-modernity.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_02: That is again striking, the ways in which we are unique or new and not good ways.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: I guess that's what you're making me sound like a curmudgeon here, Nadia.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm a curmudgeon too.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh and I was thinking as you were talking earlier of the farmer.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking, of course, of Wendell Berry, the best one of all of us to uh kind of wear that mantle proudly.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_02: Why I will not buy a computer.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, right.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: We've conceded at least that one.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I I've come down to the point where I think, look, if technology makes us more human, then it's great.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: If it makes us less human, then I'm very uncomfortable with it.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: So that that would be my and and computers are funny things because they can be incredibly liberating.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean you and I have both written books on our computers.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: That means our our books, that means our computers at some level have a sacramental function.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: They are our means, they are our canvas.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that that matters, right?
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't want to dismiss that.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: But if I spend all day on social media, which I have done, you know, then that that's not humanizing at all.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite the opposite.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a good, that's a good test again.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that's one that I think Miller seems to advocate here is what is humanity about?
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_02: What makes us human?
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: So what are some final things?
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: Before we finish.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: I just before we finish, I also want to show this.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is a great book.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, just called Walter M.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: Miller, a reference guide to his fiction and his life.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, if I remember right, it's something like 11 bucks at Amazon.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a really good dictionary dealing with everything that Miller wrote.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we don't have a good biography of the man.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I have a few newspaper interviews that he gave during his lifetime.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if you would like those, Najee, I'd be happy to send those to you.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: But we don't have a lot of information about him.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: He was very private, and partly because I think he was doing things he wasn't supposed to be doing.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but he's very private, and he really did leave it lead a very frustrated life because most of his life was based on writer's block that he just could not overcome.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: But again, if you're interested in Miller, this is a great reference guide, uh, I think for anybody.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think for anyone who's interested in science fiction at all, it's a must-own.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that is very helpful.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'll see if we can add uh links to this in the show notes.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, my final question for you this time is about takeaways.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: What would you advise?
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_02: If we were your students, for instance, sitting in your seminar class at Hillsdale, what would you tell us are the key takeaways from this book?
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I would say they're the key takeaways that we get from all science fiction.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, all science fiction, even left-wing, say Marxist science fiction, is strangely libertarian because all science fiction is an up-ending of all other genres.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's what science fiction is.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: There are no limits to science fiction.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's why Ray Bradbury could say that all future fiction will be science fiction.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we see that.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: It creeps into Tom Clancy spy novels, it creeps into romance novels, right?
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: Science fiction is everywhere because there are no limits on the imagination.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what Miller has done here is he has asked timeless questions within time.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the same kind of things that we talked about, Nadia, when we talked about the Declaration.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: Why is the Declaration so important?
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: It makes certain absolutes true within the relativity of time.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what Miller is doing.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: He is asking fundamental questions about who and what we are, and all good science fiction does that.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter if we're reading That Hideous Strength or The Lord of the Rings or Fahrenheit 451 or The Martian Chronicles or Childhood's End.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: It all asks fundamental questions about the nature of humanity, but within the malleability of time and the relativity of time.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what I think is so important about it.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: And again, even the most ideological science fiction is anti-ideological by the very genre itself.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that I would keep in mind for students, that they should explore as much science fiction as possible and recognize that it is, I think, the most humane of all genres, because it does allow us to be the most imaginative, which I consider our highest faculty.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, not our rationality, not our passions, but our reason, our imagination.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, John 1.9, the light that lighteth up every man, the image put within our soul, or Mary, my soul doth magnify the Lord, right?
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: That to me is what makes us human.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what I love about this.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it means, you know, even though I'm looking at you, Nadia, through a screen, you know, I don't just see a beautiful young woman, I see a person made in the image of God.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's the image.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: I see the image of Christ within you.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I think science fiction does so well.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: It allows us to transcend that.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, or you think about a story where in uh the Martian Chronicles, where the Martians have evolved so that they're blue balls of energy, right?
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the priests all ask this question well, do we need to have Jesus as a blue ball of energy to represent that?
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: I love that idea because again, you know, think about Miller.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you're born of woman, you are made in the image of God and you have the possibility of being eternally saved.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: So those are the kinds of things I think we need to keep thinking about.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_02: That is so beautiful.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_02: Brad, thank you so much.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you're welcome.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: I always love talking to you.