Notes from the Reading Table: Northern Lights

I originally wrote this in a comments section elsewhere on the internets (John C. Wright's blog) a long time ago. The discussion was on Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials books, which someone described as having "a general love/respect for science and the scientific method." Now, I'd only read the first of these - The Northern Lights (also known as The Golden Compass); and this description does not fit it, at all. Possibly the next two books remedy this - I don't know, as I never read them; lots of people have complained that they go downhill after the first. (Such was John C. Wright's judgement, and also the opinion of my father, who further complained that Pullman was like too many other atheists who sneer at religion - they have nothing substantive to say that wasn't said already, and said far better, by Dostoyevski.)

My response (expanded somewhat) is below.

--

I haven't read books 2 & 3 and know little about them beyond what Mr. Wright wrote when whomping so gleefully on them, so my picture is incomplete. The first book, however, I have read; and having heard of it in the context of Pullman's controversy with Christianity, I read it fully expecting (and bracing myself for) criticism of religion, praise of science, and the portrayal of religion and science as implacably opposed. I was thus seriously surprised to find instead that Mr. Pullman seemed to be aiming as much venom at science as at religion - so much so that one of the major complaints against religion turns out to be its role as both enabler and exploiter of science. The heroine's parents are the Bad Guys because they both perform horrific experiments on children For Science! (The most evil - and religious - of the two, Lyra's mother, attempts to teach her particle physics. Lyra is about 12 years old.) The whole intercision thing is an attempt at achieving human perfectability through a scientific procedure (with some waffle about Original Sin on top, raising interesting questions about just what kind of doctrine of Original Sin the Magisterium has) and raises horror of science and the butchery it can commit to a fever pitch. (Love the way the scientists give the technical specification that it's a "titanium-manganese alloy" they use. Why should an Mn-Ti alloy have an effect on daemons? Doesn't matter - its purpose is to sound technical and scientific.)

(Intercision itself also struck me as a powerful metaphor for the separation of faith and reason, mind and spirit, curiosity and wonder, that materialist reductionism effects. It also evokes the horror of science + mysticism that makes the Nazis such good villains for urban fantasy/horror novels: industrial trappings, efficiency, weird mysticism, techno-utopian hopes of building the perfect Aryan/Socialist/Original-Sin-Free Man, horrific scientific experiments on innocent people to try to get there...)

The villainous polar bear's crimes, on the other hand, include wanting to build... universities. Now, from college names like "St. Barnabas, Chymist", Pullman's Oxford University seems (just like our world's) to have also been set up with heavy participation from the Church. Thus, university-building appears as a common characteristic of the Bad Guys: the Magisterium do it, and seek to corrupt their ursine lackeys into following suit. In the battles that occur over the university building/intercision controversy, it may also be noted that the villains are the ones with a higher technology level - like submachine guns. I forget whether the good guys had any kind of projectile weaponry. The plot thus becomes another exemplar of a quite familiar story: Gaia-raping, university-building, soulless western hi-tech white man (together with white woman - and, I guess, white bear) goes up against nature & those who live in harmony with it (gypsies, witches, those polar bears who aren't sold on the value of literacy), and gets his butt handed him on a plate in spite of all his fancy learning and anbaric lamps. (Although the witches fight on both sides, so it's not quite as clear-cut as, say, Stormtroopers vs. Ewoks.) The usurper Iofar's desire to become civilised, build universities and receive baptism looks to me like a clear (and sneering) reference to the Christianisation of the germanic barbarians, whose chieftains were interested in being more like the civilised Romans and whose kingdoms benefitted from the literacy and learning brought by Christian monks.

Also worth mentioning is the bit in the opening chapters where Pullman's feisty little heroine sneers at Oxford academics, and particularly at the ageing, pathetic female ones. I'm not sure whether this was supposed to be an insult at women in science, but it came across that way and really grated, and put me on alert for the relentless science-hatred that's the subtext of the rest of the book. Not that you need to be alert to notice it.

And just in case the reader hasn't gotten the message yet, when the witch lady is giving Lyra an infodump on Dust &c (I realise Pullman claims his characters aren't just being his mouthpieces when they slag off religion, but when it fits his overarching theme so well I think we can ignore him), she criticises the Church for its futile analytical interest in what Dust is & how it works. That's right - religion, and by "religion" I mean "Pullman's stand-in for the Catholic Church," is bad and wrong for curiously over-analysing things that were better left mysterious.

(Then Pullman seems to realise what he's doing and hurriedly has Asriel talk about the Church excommunicating some mathematicians for their heretical theories, just so he can cover all the bases. At this point, however, it's near the end and he's been doing the SCIENCE IS EVIL schtick for almost the entire book.)

So, in sum: the villains are scientists; a particularly villainous villain tries teaching the heroine particle physics; the human villains have higher tech levels than their enemies; the polar bear villain wants scientific learning and polar bear universities; the villains' most evil atrocities are the pure science-horror of intercision; Pullman has his heroine sneer at female academics; Pullman has a witch give an infodump in which the Church is criticised for being too curious and analytical about the mysterious Dust. (The villains and their heinous university-building schemes are, thankfully, thwarted by Lyra, her unexplained gizmo, and the rightful king of the polar bears. Technology and universities vs. mysterious magical macguffins and the divine right of kings... as a superstitious theist I side with the former, but apparently Mr. Pullman and his fans are more rational than I am.)

The subtext of unease at science, technology and (arguably) materialism is so strong, and IMO so much the driving force of the book, that I have to wonder what on earth Pullman thought he was playing at. This isn't atheism vs. irrationality at all; this is far more primal - paganism vs. the excessive systematisers, the worshippers of local gods going up against the universalising literates who want everything understood, everything put in little neat boxes. This is the old undertow of slumbering pre-Christian wildness that haunts a lot of British fantasy (especially the stuff we read as children) going up against the Newtons and the Aquinases who won't give it any breathing-room, who think you can reduce everything to a couple of simple equations and syllogisms until you can peel back the universe and the human heart, layer by layer, like a sandwich. This is Rock Beats Laser, Science is Bad with the dial up to 11, Ludd Was Right and a more primal version of Romanticism vs. Enlightenment.

(What's the deal with the Magisterium thinking you can cure Original Sin with a procedure like intercision, anyway? This was for me the most intriguing thing in the book: such an understanding of Original Sin is deeply bizarre, so much so I don't think such a heresy even has a name - maybe "techno-pelagianism"? Regardless, it made me curious what kind of theological scheme the Magisterium has, because for all its Christian trappings it's clearly got some very unusual theological innards.)

--

All this doesn't even touch on the fact that no-one subjects the alethiometer to any kind of rigorous testing at all, nor apparently thinks to do so in the next two books - something Mr. Wright complained of:

Yes, I know, the alethiometer is actually just a symbol or a metaphor for the Power of Reason, or the Power of Matter, or the Power of Believing in Yourself or whatever power it is that Mr. Pullman thinks is the touchstone to determine true from false. His faith in the power of whatever-it-is is touching. We skeptics are more skeptical. We skeptics reason that reason, like all things possessed of qualities and properties, has utilities it can perform and those it cannot. No one does a syllogism to deduce whether a woman is beautiful, for example. No one can reason in the absence of evidence, for another example.

We skeptics would have had someone give the old pocketwatch-of-materialism a few simple James Randi style tests to make sure it was working. Matter suffers entropy, you know. Sad if Lyra found out in some later scene that a slipped disk or a lose cog made the symbol arm overshoot by twelve degrees each time the dust-o-meter was measuring the truth of things. Hate to get all my positive and negative signs reversed, you know, and have it turn out the God was Good and the Fallen Angels were lying about all that stuff.