A Platypus for Liebowitz: The Platypus Reads Part LXXXV

The next installment in my "books I should have read by now" series is "A Canticle For Leibowitz."  Of the three books in this series ("The Name of the Rose," "Ender's Game," and "A Canticle For Leibowitz"), I find myself most in agreement with the world-picture presented in this book (at least in as far as I understand it in one reading).  Now this presents me with an interesting question: did I like this book best of the three simply because I found myself most in sympathy with its presentation of the world?  Ok, maybe that's a banal question, but the Kantian side of me keeps demanding that it's unvirtuous and the Foucaultian side of me keeps insinuating that it all boils down to self-interest.  Forgive me Father; I ate a lizard.

Rather than engage in therapeutic web confession, however, I think I'll take a stab at describing what I found to like about this book.

Debunking the Myth of Progress: "A Canticle For Leibowitz" reminds us that technological progress does not equal moral progress.  Man is still Man no matter the mode of artificial lighting or the mode of conveyance.  If we've used nuclear weapons once, we will use them again.

Understanding Religion as a Conservative, Not a Reactionary, Force: Ages that have bought into the Myth of Progress often chafe at the constraints of organized religion.  Utopia is always over that next ridge and the Church is holding us back.  "A Canticle For Leibowitz" reminds us that the Church has historically been a preserver and transmitter of knowledge; even a creator of Knowledge (let's remember that the Big Bang Theory was formulated in large part by a Catholic monk).  More importantly, religion has, as often as not, been a restraining voice in favor of humanity.  Progressives in any age always run the risk of being "so wrapped up in whether they could, that they don't bother to think if they should."  The Church is always criticized in each age for not bowing enough to Zeitgeist as well as criticized for being too in conformity with the Zeitgeist of the previous age.  For two thousand years, the Church has been proclaiming its message and going about its business while empires rise and fall and philosophies thunder and fade.  That kind of permanence doesn't come from an institution that simply opposes whatever's new.

History is Cyclical, but it is Not Futile: In as far as the nature of Man is fixed, so he continues to act in certain recurring patterns.  Observing this much leads to Stoic despair.  However, since the rise of monotheism, there has also been a sense that Man is going somewhere.  Merely focusing on the movement, though, has produced utopia-touting tyrannies.  Historic Christianity, however, has always emphasized both: the nature of man has not changed, and that dooms him to the same unending cycle of sin and judgement; God, however, has acted to redeem the kosmos and will bring it to a good end in spite of our collective failure.

Wow.  How's them for fighting words?  In the end, maybe that's what I like most about this book: it's cranky and curmudgeonly, and hopeful in a way that's ambivalent about the traditional fist-fights.  Like the monks of the order of Saint Leibowitz, or the Wandering Jew, it keeps going on about its mission whatever the new/old hubbub and uproar in the world is.  We spend so much time screaming at each other (and yes, side A may do that sometimes, but side B is, as every sensible person knows, always worse!), I wonder how much time we actually spend doing what we think we ought.  The vultures will eat us just the same.