Sophie's World - A Review

There are a few seminary students that I know that still live in fear of their introduction to philosophy course, and they’ve already graduated.

For some people, philosophy and its history remains a mystery even after they read the books, write the paper, and pass the test. And yet, the history of philosophy is a significant subject of concern for people that want to understand our present culture, because today’s culture is built on yesterday’s ideas.

In trying to educate my children, I have wondered how to provide an introduction to philosophical ideas that would put things at the right level without losing the content to critique or so watering down the concepts as to make them unintelligible. When a friend noted that her homeschool co-op was going to use Sophie’s World as a way of introducing these concepts I was intrigued and ordered a copy.

Sophie’s World is a novel about the history of philosophy. It is also a novel about a young Norwegian girl named Sophie. I can’t give away too much of the structure without spoiling some of the mystery that unfolds over the course of the book, but suffice it to say there are some strange twists to the plot that make the story interesting, if a bit bizarre, and are actually useful in illustrating some of the points of the volume.

I am not a philosopher, but I have studied enough philosophy to recognize when a named philosopher is being described accurately. Within the realm of academia, of course, there are heated debates about what Plato really meant and whether the Cynics were always in earnest. However, this book takes the entry level historical discussions of philosophers and presents their perspectives in a recognizable way. Leave it to the college professor to nuance the understanding, and deepen it with more data, but this is Newtonian physics in a quantum world: pretty close to accurate and simple enough to gain a foothold for later exploration.

As a Christian theologian, the representations of Christian thinkers was the most distorted. The Christians depicted by Gaarder are flat and lifeless. This is probably the way a philosopher views the explanations of some of the different schools of philosophy. It isn’t debilitating, but it is unimpressive. Some students are likely to gain a little of the famous sophomoric skepticism from reading the book, but a rich immersion in theology afterward is likely to help reinforce sound doctrine.

Sophie’s World also has strong preference for the myth of progress. The storyline of philosophy is presented as if each philosopher advanced on the theories of previous philosophers toward some future state when, if Gaarder got his way, everyone would be governed by the United Nations. Considering that this book was originally published by a Norwegian in 1994, that view of things is understandable, but that piece of the story gets a little preachy.

Some parents may have concern about a few elements of the story, as well. Throughout the story, the young teenager Sophie lies to her mother (her estranged father is away at sea) and meets up alone with a middle-aged man who becomes her philosophy tutor. Parts of this read like the lead up to a 20/20 episode, but fortunately it doesn’t result in the tragic end that would have made the air. In the chapter on Sigmund Freud there is a reference to a boy dreaming about balloons that are said to represent a girl’s breasts, which is pretty tame as Freud goes.

The last couple of chapters dip into the absurd. At Sophie’s philosophy themed birthday party the participants behave bizarrely, with one of Sophie’s friend pouncing on a male classmate with kissing implied and apparent sex in the bushes, off camera. The girl declares that she’s pregnant (absurdly) to reinforce just what’s going on. Of course, what the reader gets from some of these references will depend on what the reader knows, so parents are likely to read more into the stories than an innocent child. In any case, none of these concerns are enough to justify avoiding the book. The questionable content is not extreme, nor is it close to what is available in a lot of young adult literature, but it is easier to know in advance as a parent than to find out after your child points it out.

As a vehicle for communicating the history of philosophy, this is an excellent volume. There are points where the text does turn a bit dry and the dialogue does seem more like philosophy notes than conversation, but the novel is a vessel for the content. As a novel, this would not be on my list of top stories, but there is enough story and character to make the drier content more engaging. Taken as a whole, this is a very useful tool for introducing a young student to philosophy in a manageable, reasonably entertaining format.

Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (FSG Classics)

By Jostein Gaarder

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Consumer Debt and the Coming Recession

For those that pay attention to such things, the news is filled with extreme views about the current and future state of the economy. At the same moment in time, there are pundits arguing that most Americans are in abject economic misery, while others argue that life has never been better economically. One group is arguing that imminent economic doom is upon us, another tells us that things are only going up from here.

If most of us are honest, in the decade since the Great Recession, things have generally gotten better for most people. However, in many cases, people do not feel great about the economy and, at the same time, are setting themselves up for problems during the next recession.

The Inevitability of Recessions and Stock Declines

News reports predicting a coming economic recession or a significant stock market decline are correct. They have no idea when those things are going to come, but some sort of economic perturbation is pretty much inevitable.

One of the more interesting aspects of our attention economy is that when the next economic dip happens, its significance will be determined, in large part, by how people respond. For example, if people get skittish and sell during a stock market decline, that will make the stock market decline even worse. If people alter their consumer behaviors radically during a recession, that is likely to make the recession worse.

More significant than whether and when a recession is coming (it is and who knows) is how we are living day to day in anticipation of those events.

A Plea for Simple Living

There is no question that some people are struggling to meet basic necessities already. Due to a medical condition, loss of a job, a very low wage job, or bad debt choices earlier in life, many people are living paycheck to paycheck. If that is you, then feel free to check out. This post is written to the vast majority of us who are in the middle class and have some economic margin.

We once received a gift subscription to a magazine called Real Simple that amounts to an advertisement for a high-end consumeristic minimalist lifestyle. All the pictures were of perfect rooms with “simple” solutions to problems like magazine storage or whatever, but the solutions always cost hundreds of dollars. The result was an aesthetic simplicity, but that’s not how they got there. According to that style magazine, simplicity is a consumer good that is really expensive.

Simple living is less about what stuff you own and more about what activities and services you deem necessary. Simple living at its best is simply asking what aspects of life are necessary and eliminating those that don’t fit that definition. Another definition is that simple living is asking what we do that glorifies God and minimizing the extras.

When we stop asking risk vs. reward questions about our lifestyle choices, we put ourselves into the situation like the couple making $160,000 who were described as living in “modest oppression” because they “couldn’t afford” everything they wanted. Alyssa Quart’s description of the largely self-caused mental and emotional stresses of the middle class in her 2018 book, Squeezed, should serve as a warning to rational minds to make better choices.

As Christians in the American middle class, we really need to begin asking “why” questions if we are going to be effective stewards of our time, treasure, and opportunity. We have the means to get the gospel to the ends of the earth and instead we are spending our money to overflow landfills with useless plastic.

The simple life is about being focused on what adds gospel-value to the world and spending our money on that.

Avoiding Comparisons

Also in Squeezed, Quart writes, “While Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could even dream of, that means nothing when oligarchs live next door, flaunting their luxurious homes.”

The funny thing about comparisons is that we tend to make them with those living above our means. Very few of us look at those who are legitimately struggling financially and go home thankful for our abundance. Instead, largely due to the mystique of television and movies in which everything is always perfect, we continually moan about the inadequacy of our resources.

There is a reason God gave us the 10th Commandment.

Did you have a nice vacation at home? Well, the other guy at work took his kids on a safari adventure. Now that vacation doesn’t look so good.

Does your daughter enjoy soccer? The neighbor down the street does, too, so they’ve invested thousands into clinics, travel teams, physical training, and other goods and services designed to get their child ahead. Suddenly the local rec league isn’t very compelling.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with a big vacation or pursuing excellence in sports, but those are often excesses that we try to have without making sacrifices to compensate.

The result is that many people who are making a whole lot of money are spending all of it and a little bit more.

Rising Debt Loads

One of more frightening statistics, in my opinion, is the rise in household debt to the levels prior to the 2008 recession.

The Great Recession was rough for a lot of people in large part because people were up to their ears in debt when the problem started. For a few years society seemed to learn a lesson, but now it appears that we have forgotten.

I’m not on the “no debt ever” train, for a variety of reasons. However, I do believe that we typically position ourselves better to survive economic downturns if we minimize debt and seek to eliminate it when times are good.

A lot of the debt right now is being driven by a perception that the stock market is going to keep going up and up. In the long run this is probably true, but there may be a point at which half of the money invested in the market will “disappear” just like it did in 2008 and 2009. That is never a great feeling, but it is a really terrible feeling when you know that your pay is likely to stagnate for a while, you may lose your job, and the company bonus you budgeted to pay for your vacation is unlikely to materialize. In other words, when you are up to your ears in debt, the clouds of economic doom look a lot more ominous.

Market expert is not a title I’d claim, but I remember the pain of debt-ridden people who had a high salary but large payments and weren’t seeing the economic growth they were counting on. One way to eliminate that pain is to avoid debt and eradicate it. To do that, we should consider the common causes of debt.

The Cause of Debt

The problem most middle-class Americans have is that they are spending too much on things that they enjoy too little and bring too little glory to God.

Instead of comparing ourselves to our neighbors, we ought to be regularly asking of every expenditure how this glorifies God. We will certainly get things wrong from time to time, but a gospel-focused consumer mind will likely resist the urge to overspend on things that really do little good for anyone.

Once we get above a certain financial level, most debt is driven by buying more car than we need, a nicer house than necessary, services that we only use occasionally, and products that offer little benefit in the long run. Evaluate your household spending for the last year with a critical eye and this will likely become self-evident.

This means that rather than being trapped in system that makes us do bad things, we are in a culture that encourages us to do dumb things and we usually don’t invest the will power to stop.

For most of us, our debt is a problem we have created by being unwilling to limit our consumer choices to that which glorifies God.

We are setting ourselves up for misery in the future with our choices today. Why not begin making simple, better choices that will leave us happier when the next downturn comes?

Back to Virtue - A Review

If I had the opportunity to spend a week with one living scholar, I would probably spend it with Peter Kreeft. There is wisdom and breadth in his writings that would make conversation—better yet, simply listening—an intellectually and spiritually edifying experience.

Kreeft has authored a massive number of works. All of those that I have read have been stimulating, entertaining, and helpful. His work is saturated by a love for God, an appreciation for Lewis and Tolkien, and an intellectual humility that makes journeying along with him a pleasure.

Recently as I re-read his 1986 book, Back to Virtue, which, by its title, is something of a response to Alasdair McIntyre’s book After Virtue. McIntyre is, of course, doing something broad and sweeping and is engaging in diagnosing the problems of a highly relativistic society that has no common moral compass. It is mainly description, with the reader left to develop the solution on his own. Kreeft’s book provides something of a solution. A return to the virtues as they were understood in the medieval Christian tradition. (One of Kreeft’s most significant academic works is editing The Summa of the Summa, thus creating an accessible version of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. He is, thus, deeply familiar with the Thomistic virtue tradition.)

The book is divided into two parts. The first part lays out the case that society is unhealthy because people are generally not virtuous and, more significantly, virtue is not seen as something to be striven for. Published thirty-four years ago, these three chapters are interesting largely because they adequately describe our own day and age. The landscape has obviously changed, with the Cold War and the seeming imminent threat of nuclear war a distant memory, but his diagnosis still appears to be accurate.

In the second part, which is comprised of eleven chapters, Kreeft shifts to discussing virtue. In Chapters Four and Five, he defines and explains the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues respectively. Chapter Six makes the argument that the Beatitudes help confront the seven deadly sins. The Seventh through Thirteen Chapter each have a meditation on one of those sins and how the Beatitudes help counter them: pride, avarice, envy, anger, sloth, lust, and gluttony. Kreeft closes with a brief exposition of the benefits and goodness of virtue.

This book is refreshing. It is not new material, but the combination of a deep trust in the intellectual and spiritual heritage of the Christian tradition with an affirmation in its goodness makes the both pleasing and instructive to read. Kreeft reminds his readers that it’s good to be a good guy but that most people won’t agree. He writes,

“Moral traditionalists, who believe in the wisdom of the past, seem to their opponents like drab, dour doomers and damners. But they are not. They are rebels, for in an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left; and they sing as they fight. They have hope even as they pronounce judgment on our civilization. All the prophets offer hope. The patient is not dead yet.”

This brief passage illustrates the joy of reading Kreeft. He offers critique, but it is a critique with hope. His criticism of culture is not a call to destroy it, or wound those in it who disagree with us. Instead, it is a call to be the sort of person that would make a better society and then to salvage the good of civilization from within. More importantly, he still believed in 1986 it is possible, and his book makes the reader believe that he is correct.

There is no answer to the turbulence of the world around us. No simple solution will resolve the evils of society, cause racism to evaporate, erase the rift between Left and Right, or diminish poverty and all the structural ills of this world. But there is hope in the slow and steady progress toward holiness––through good, old fashioned goodness as it was defined by the saints of yesteryear and through the words of Jesus himself––if we are willing to take up the task.

Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion

By Peter Kreeft

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12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You - A Review

There is a moment of panic when you feel like you’ve lost something vitally important. It can cause a shot of adrenaline as you look around you, feel your pockets, and ask others if they have seen it. Usually after a few seconds your find where you left your phone, sitting on the counter or in the seat beside you. The crisis is averted. No big deal. Except it reveals one of the critical dependencies of our age.

Jacob Shatzer, in his book, Transhumanism and the Image of God, discusses the phone as an extension of humanity. He notes that smartphones and tablets often function as an extension of our minds, holding data, organizing thoughts, and becoming an essential means of retention and communication.

In his 2017 book, 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, Tony Reinke focuses on how smartphones are shaping our minds, our perceptions, and reality. As we seek to understand discipleship in this technological time, this book is a critical resource for parents, pastors, and teachers to see how this often helpful and seemingly innocuous technology is having an enormous impact.

Summary

Given the title, it is not surprising that the body of Reinke’s book consists of twelve chapters, to which he has added an introduction, conclusion, and brief epilogue. The argument is structured as a chiasm, with chapters 1 and 12 forming a pair, so that the whole book centers around two chapters that focus on identity, since identity is a question of perennial significance in the human experience.

Chapter One begins by observing that modern humans are addicted to distraction. This is not up for debate for those of us who find ourselves compelled to look at our phones constantly to see whether we’ve gotten a text, what has happened on social media, or simply because there is a dull spot in the movie we are watching. Chapter Twelve argues that because of this addiction we have lost our sense of time. That is, our present physical reality is absorbed into an ethereal “now” that causes us to neglect the world in our immediate vicinity.

The second chapter notes that our distractedness causes us to ignore the physical world around us. Surrounded by our friends, we find ourselves occupied in digital dialogue. Facing the incredible responsibility of driving a multi-ton machine down the road, we are more concerned with the chimes and chirps of our silicon companion. This is fleshed out in the eleventh chapter where Reinke observes that people are often less kind to others, both in person and online, because we ignore their humanity in the face of their digital avatar. There are real ethical consequences to our digital projection.

https://www.bdcwire.com/the-internet-fell-in-love-with-this-picture-of-the-black-mass-premiere/

Chapter Three argues that smartphones have increased our need for immediate approval. Delayed feedback is devastating. If the likes and shares don’t pile up immediately, then our digital existence is for naught. If we aren’t digitally amazing, then we are not really worth anything. Chapter Ten highlights the connection between this desire for approval and the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) that characterizes so much of online life. We are drawn to envy and deceit as we try to match everyone else’s highly edited digital reality. This is a dangerous condition for the human soul.

In the fourth chapter Reinke highlights the impact that smartphone addictions have had on literacy. When I worked at a Christian liberal arts university, I was surprised to hear faculty discuss the number of our students who admitted they had never read a full book. I was also shocked to hear students argue that they didn’t need to learn (i.e., memorize) anything because they could always use their favored search engine. The always-on tunnel of information that the smartphone enables has made people more ignorant and less literate. This, in turn, leads to a loss of a sense of meaning, which is outlined in the ninth chapter. Stories are one way that humans have captured and transmitted the meaning of life through generations. By cutting ourselves off from the ability to read, listen to, or watch whole narratives, we cut ourselves off from the ways that meaning has been communicated in previous generations. This is tragic.

Chapter Five focuses on the way that smartphones turn us into consumers who objectify the people we watch. This is true with the explosion of internet pornography mediated by smartphone technology, but also in the way that we watch models and celebrities on social media. Chapter Eight then outlines how the objectification of humans can lead us to secret vices like pornography, gossip, and other sins of various depth. It becomes easier to participate in some of these anti-human vices because the pixelated being on the other end seems much less human to us.

Chapter Six reminds us that we are shaped by what we “like” on social media. This is true in at least two ways. First, we become like that which we fixate upon. When we absorb media, it shapes the way we think. Second, to maximize traffic, the algorithms of social media and search engines are designed to feed us what we have already shown an interest in, which only perpetuates the transformation of our informational feasting. Chapter Seven turns this to show that this tendency leads toward isolation as we get narcissistically caught up in a self-shaped reality and turn away from the people around us.

Conclusion

I was expecting Reinke’s book to be much more technophobic. In fact, he recognizes that value, convenience, and, perhaps, the necessity of smartphones in our technological age.

And yet, this book provides a significant warning of the ways that we can and are being transformed by something that has become so ubiquitous that we may be tempted to ignore its impact.

This is an important book for people to read. It is balanced and well-researched. The time-bound nature of the research will tend to limit its direct applicability over time as technologies continue to advance, but the lessons in the book are timeless.

12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You is, like Andy Crouch’s Tech-Wise Family and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, a book that grasps the real challenges of our day and helps us navigate through the seismic shifts in society that cannot be ignored.