Leaving it all behind

Several years ago, I came across the story of Chris McCandless, a young man who, after graduating from Emory University in 1990, gave away all his savings, most of his possessions, and set off to wander across the country. As chronicled in Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild and the 2007 Sean Penn movie of the same name, McCandless came from a wealthy family, but clashed frequently with his father and felt generally out of step with American capitalist, consumer culture. As a result, he left it all behind, hitchhiking across the country, pursuing his own direction, eventually ending up in Alaska, living alone in an abandoned bus in a remote area. Unfortunately, the story has a sad ending as McCandless died at the age of 24, only about four months after arriving in Alaska. Though the exact cause of McCandless' death is still debated, it was most likely either starvation or something in his meager diet.

When I first heard the story, it was as if I had heard it before, though with different details and from different times and places. In fact, at the same time when I read Into the Wild and saw the movie, I was teaching a course on Medieval and Renaissance Europe. We had just read about Francis of Assisi, who similarly grew up in a wealthy family, but defied his father by renouncing worldly things for a spiritual life of poverty. (That renunciation scene is dramatized below by the artist Giotto di Bondone, with Francis as the figure looking heavenward.)

Further in the past and across the world in India, the mythic life story of Siddhartha Gautama, who would eventually become the Buddha, is also eerily similar. According to the myth, Siddhartha grew up in the lap of luxury, prince to a king who wanted him to become a world-ruling conqueror. Despite his father's best efforts, though, Siddhartha was too determined to find the solutions to sickness, pain, and death, and renounced his royal heritage to become a wandering ascetic. (Shown below is an artist's interpretation of Siddhartha sneaking out of the palace.)

There are obviously common themes here, though some may cry foul (as certain critics of comparative method often do) that those similarities are only there because I chose three similar examples. Point conceded. Still, the fact remains that these stories are eerily similar, and they come to us from India of ~500 BCE, Italy of 1200 CE, and the United States of the 1990s. Very different times and very different places still produced circumstances that led individuals to rail against the civilizations of their day, choosing to "drop out" rather than go along. All three rejected the conspicuous wealth around them, choosing to own no things as a way to avoid being owned by things. It's also interesting that all three had fraught, contentious relationships with their fathers. In the cases of the Buddha and Francis, where we are dealing with "hagiography" (a narrative form for relating the lives of saints) one wonders if the generational tension was a literary mechanism for communicating the revolutionary nature of their thought. For McCandless, though, according to both Krakauer's work and Chris' sister Carine's book, the tension with his father was all too real.

In the end, I find myself focusing on two issues. First, these three people's stories boil down to the question of radical self-determination. Who am I? What will I be? If the answers to those questions puts me at odds with family and society at large, do I have the strength to go against those forces and be who I am and what I want to be no matter the outside pressure?

Second, though I find each of these stories compelling and I have my own gripes with the cultural values around me, renouncing and living a wandering life is not so much in the cards for me. I love my family too much. Perhaps there's a way, paradoxically, to "renounce in place," to leave it all behind without going anywhere?

One thing's for sure: McCandless' story in particular seems to have struck a nerve: year after year hundreds of people take pilgrimages to the bus where he briefly lived, and died, having left it all behind. (McCandless's famous -- and haunting -- self portrait at the bus is shown below.)

Next time, in honor of the release of Wonder Woman, I rank my favorite superhero movies of all time. Until then, take care.

What is a "World War"?

Besides my credentialed field of "Comparative Religion," I've always loved Literature and History. Within the latter, for some reason, I've continuously been drawn to Military History. Maybe it comes from playing with army toys as a boy or board games like Risk, or growing up in a house with many books containing colorful maps of conflicts throughout history. It's something I've also always felt vaguely guilty about, too. War is horrible. Just look at what's been happening in Syria and Sudan over the last few years. At least as an adult, my interest in the subject now comes back to the historical motivations for war, the personalities involved, and also the bigger philosophical questions: are humans inherently violent? Does the capacity for war and its existence as a human endeavor go back to the farthest reaches of our species' history, as some have claimed?

Within this topic, and similar to my last post, I've been wondering about the logic behind a prevailing academic category, this time for certain kinds of conflicts: the so-called "World War." Sparking my curiosity about the term, April marked the 100th anniversary of the US entry into the European conflict usually called World War I. What differentiates that war from the conflicts of previous millennia to earn the dubious distinction of the first "World" War? Was it really the first? Was World War II really the last? How do we determine a "world" war and what does it say about how we view human history?

The obvious criteria would be global involvement, in terms of both geography and population. Rather than clear things up, this actually muddies the water, as several conflicts before and after World Wars I and II were just as widespread. Some examples:

The Seven Years' War (1756-1763)
Fought between Britain, the American Colonies, Prussia, and the Iroquois Confederacy on one side against France, Sweden, Russia, Austria, and Spain on the other, this war ranged across North America, the Atlantic, and Europe. It's also the war where George Washington cut his teeth as a general. (American history often calls it the "French and Indian War" or, more interestingly, "The War that Made America.") This map (and others, courtesy of Wikipedia) shows the extent of territory involved in the conflict. Green displays France and its allies, while blue represents Britain and its allies.

The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815)
Though mostly confined to Europe, Napoleon's bids for empire also stretched into Egypt and involved naval battles in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and Indian oceans. It involved countries from one end of Europe to the other and, arguably, involved the United States for a few futile years. Green and blue again for the French and British, respectively.

The Cold War (1947-1991)
The ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union never brought about the nuclear devastation that many feared (the "World War III" of popular culture), but that does not mean this was an era of peace. Far from it. Though the two never confronted one another directly, both fought their own wars (in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe, for example) as part of this struggle, as well as funding proxy wars in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Though it was a "Cold" (as opposed to "hot," or "shooting" war, I guess), millions of people still died due to the actions of the powers involved and their surrogates. It also was far more global than either World War I or II. Blue shows the US and its allies, red is for the Soviets. Blue and red "X's" represent insurgencies supported by one or the other side. (China, a bit of a wildcard in the struggle, is yellow.)

It seems that if we use the criteria of "global conflict" (in terms of geography and population), each of these conflicts would easily qualify. So does that mean that, in actuality, we are on World War V or VI (depending on if you count the so-called "War on Terror" a world war, which some have been inclined to do). Why not go even further back? The Greco-Persian wars (499-449 BCE) spanned multiple continents, involved large alliances of peoples (for the time) and were incredibly consequential for human history. The same could be said for the Rome-Carthage Punic Wars. Then there are the more modern wars that never seemed to make it into the news, no matter the millions and millions of deaths. The "Great War of Africa", alternately called the "Second Congo War," is a perfect example. Why are World Wars I and II the only conflicts deemed worthy of the title "World War"?

If we look closer at the two wars, I think we can come up with a few hypotheses. The first is that both (despite the Second's Pacific theater) were both primarily European struggles, showing a Western preference for aggrandizing its own history with ostentatious (or, in this case, "notorious" might be the better word) terms. My other hypothesis is more philosophical and involves looking more deeply into the interconnection of these two wars. Though twenty-one years (1918-1939) supposedly separates World Wars I and II, Europe (and the rest of the world) was not exactly placid during this period. There was the Russian Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War. In other words, between 1914 and 1945 there was almost continuous conflict in Europe, with each war following on the heels of its predecessor, organically linked. With most of the members of the opposing sides remaining static between World War I and II, why is it not referred to as one massive, calamitous war, a Second Thirty Years' War? In fact, going further, since it follows immediately on the heels of Germany's defeat, and Soviet-Western antagonism began during the Second World War, couldn't the Cold War be seen as an extension of World Wars I and II, making the period of 1914-1991 one long train of belligerence?

This is my point: delineating just two conflicts as "World Wars" does not really make sense when the "World War," and war itself, has been a constant throughout history. So, naturally, that's precisely what we have done: set apart just two particular wars from the past as distinct, as the "Really Big and Bad and Scary Ones," perhaps because it makes us feel better about human history to believe we have ascended (or maybe descended) to that level of destruction only twice. This is despite all the evidence to the contrary. Sadly, human history is far bloodier than that, and more consistently so than our labels for World Wars lead us to believe. Unfortunately, that does not seem likely to change in the near future. According to one survey I came across, out of approximately 200 countries in the world, about how many do you think are neither directly nor indirectly, neither internally nor externally, involved in a conflict currently? The answer: eleven. The "World War" is not peculiar to the mid-20th century. It both precedes that period, and persists with perhaps greater intensity. In the more acutely interconnected, globalized world of the 21st century, any and every war might come to be a "World War."

Next time, join me for something a little different, and a little more in line with the stuff I tend to teach about in my classrooms: What do the Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, and Christopher McCandless all have in common? Until then, take care!

Great (Comic) Books

At the outset of this post, I need to do something I neglected thus far: give credit to the person who initially inspired me to take on this endeavor of blogging, which I have been enjoying immensely. That person is my good friend Chad Pulver, who thought this would be a good intellectual outlet. Thanks for planting the idea with me, Chad!

Now, as promised, for this edition I wanted to talk a little more about comics. Specifically, to what extent can we consider comics "literature" or even include them within the hallowed academic category of "Great Books"? To start with a story, a few years ago, while my wife was away at a conference, one of the quiet activities I planned with my sons was to read a Justice League comic series called Tower of Babel we'd picked out from the public library. (The cover is pictured below.) 

Written in 2000 by Mark Waid, the story opens with each member of the Justice League being attacked in ingenious ways by henchmen of the eco-terrorist Ra's al-Ghul. The strikes are devised to either exploit a League member's weakness (such as Martian Manhunter's vulnerability to fire) or brilliantly turn a strength against him or her (for instance, by making Aquaman petrified of water). The League recovers (of course) from these physical assaults, but the emotional wounds prove more difficult to overcome, for the original author of these plans was not Ra's al-Ghul, but a fellow league member: Batman. Over the years, and in complete secrecy, the Dark Knight crafted these stratagems against his teammates as contingency plans in case any should go rogue. Though the League overcomes Ra's al-Ghul's plot, they are incensed by Batman's actions (for which he is unrepentant) and vote to expel him from the League.

My sons were enthralled by the story and immediately set about debating whether the expulsion was justified. We ricocheted from question to question. Did Batman's schemes qualify as betrayal if he was not the one to implement them? Isn't teamwork -- not to mention friendship -- based on trust, and if a person shows he does not completely trust his teammates, should he be part of the team? On the other hand, with beings as strong as Superman and Wonder Woman, wouldn't it be wiser to be prepared for the worst, just in case?

After about twenty-five minutes of such discussion, we moved on to the next points on our busy schedule: a dart gun fight, followed by frozen pizza. When the boys were in bed later, I thought back on our conversation and how similar it had been to discussions with undergraduates. In my teaching career, I've had the great fortune to teach in a Core Curriculum where we dealt with great works of world literature, using them to debate timeless dilemmas and moral issues. Was Aeneas right to leave behind his lover Dido, to choose duty over the heart? Who is the real monster, Dr. Frankenstein or his creation? Like Plato suggests in the "Allegory of the Cave," should we always choose a hard truth over a comfortable lie? When faced with the impossible decision of fighting his family or dishonoring his duty, what should Arjuna do? And of course, there's Machiavelli: Is it better to be feared or loved?

The question that came to mind for me that night, which I broach here with you, dear reader, is whether Batman and his kin belong among such esteemed company. Tower of Babel helps us by putting on display all of the psychological complexity that makes Batman a fascinating character. His genius is obvious in the various schemes he has devised, yet so is his hubris in deeming himself above the judgment of his teammates. Like Oedipus or Macbeth, an otherwise heroic character is laid low by a tragic flaw, which in the Dark Knight's case may be a complete inability to trust.

So is the presence of debatable moral issues and analogy to other literary figures enough to include comic characters and their stories in the list of "Great Books"? Definitions of what makes a "Great Book" are hard to come by. The Association of Core Texts Conference defines them as "world classics" (talk about begging the question) or "texts of major cultural significance": https://www.coretexts.org/actc-history/. St. John's (in Maryland) is one institution famous for its "Great Books" curriculum (https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/seminar/annapolis-undergraduate-readings), but they don't provide a definition for exactly what it takes to get in the club of the "Great Books," just a list of the readings. This list contains the usual suspects: Aristotle, Dante, Locke, Shakespeare, etc. Besides leaving out more modern popular culture, this list (and others like it) seems to suggest that no one in Africa, India, China, South America, or basically any non-European location, ever wrote a "Great Book." The implied definition seems to be "old or ancient texts forming a part of Western heritage." Besides the Euro-centrism, does age necessarily connote relevance? Granted, Superman and Batman have not even been around for a full century yet, and Spiderman and the Hulk for even less, but given the amount of media attention and the variety of works devoted to these characters, couldn't we classify some of their more seminal outings as "texts of major cultural significance"? Or, let me offer another possible definition for "Great Books" that might help alleviate both the Euro-centrism and ageism: "a text that raises or dwells on lasting questions of what it means to be human." From this perspective, we might be able to put Arjuna alongside Achilles, as well as Machiavelli alongside Batman.

By that definition, then, we have to let at least some graphic novels, like perhaps Tower of Babel, into the club. From firsthand teaching experience, I can speak to the rewards for doing so. About a year ago, I taught a course on mythic figures of evil to an uncommonly talented group of undergraduates. We read Paradise Lost, Buddhacarita, The Golem, and The Ramayana, among other texts, and had some great discussions. To show the persistence of the tropes we'd analyzed, the last work we read was Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, an especially thoughtful meditation on the Batman/Joker rivalry. While I'd thought that the conversations to that point had been good, we hit a whole other stratosphere with that book. It was a pleasure to simply watch these accomplished students dissect the symbolism, creatively apply the semester's categories, and debate the notion of "monstrosity," all in relation to a graphic novel. At that moment, the course content seemed the most real to all of us. Talk about "cultural significance"!

For fun, let me know what other specific graphic novels you think might be worthy of "Great Books" status. Whether they are ever widely acknowledged as "Great Books," I think they are certainly fodder for great conversations. I'm sure my students -- not to mention my sons! -- would agree. Next post we might talk about another academic/cultural category I've been considering problematic: the "world war." Let me leave you with a live video for my current favorite song: Coldplay's "Something Just Like This." It's entirely relevant, too, as the first verse seamlessly blends Achilles and Hercules with...Spiderman and Batman. (At least Chris Martin gets it.) Take care!

What if?

I know that I promised to post about graphic novels. That is still to come. After the events of this weekend, however, there were other things I found on my mind with more immediacy. Specifically, due to the school's closure, yesterday marked the last (at least for the foreseeable future) Commencement ceremony at my alma mater and (at least for the next few days) employer, Saint Joseph's College. To say it has been an emotional time for hundreds of students, staff, faculty, and families is to vastly understate the situation and I'm going to avoid heading into too many details. I would inevitably leave someone out or say the wrong thing, and at this point, there's already been too much pain.

One thing, though, that sticks out to me from yesterday is a phrase I heard from a number of people: "What if?" Often this was in regard to the school's situation ("What if [insert solution] had been tried? Would it have turned out differently?"). I also heard it several times from individuals reflecting on paths both taken and rejected in their respective lives. Occasions like commencements have that effect. What if I had done this? What if I had done that instead? What if?

Those questions have been on my mind a great deal lately, and are likely to remain so for some time. Yesterday, due to an award I won, I had the opportunity to introduce the Commencement speaker. Here's a photo of me at the podium (courtesy of the mother of a student):

It was bittersweet because seventeen years ago today (May 7, 2000), I graduated from Saint Joseph's and was able to give the Valedictorian address from that very podium. But what if? I didn't have to go to Saint Joe. I could have gone to the University of Dayton or John Carroll University. Both offered me scholarships, but the draw of staying closer to family was too great. Once at Saint Joseph's I was originally a creative writing major. What if I had stuck with that instead of switching to Philosophy? What about after Saint Joe? When I lived up in Green Bay with my fiance, what if I had pursued that newspaper writing advertisement instead of going to graduate school? Would I still be in Wisconsin? For a time after my Master's I considered going into a different field altogether since my wife had (what seemed like, anyway) a pretty good job in Cincinnati. Would we still be in Ohio? What if I had picked the Arizona State doctoral program instead of Northwestern? What if? What if? What if?

It's a common theme. Studying Buddhist literature, there are several stories from the Theravada countries of Southeast Asia in which the Buddha would read people's past karma and, using his omniscient Buddha perception, tell them what they could or should have done differently. Of course, there's A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge looks back through "Christmas Past" to wonder what might have been, the "Christmas Present" to see the current consequences of his choices, then, the greatest (or worst?) gift of all, the "Christmas Future" of knowing what will happen if he does not alter his destiny.

In the late 1970s to mid-1980s, Marvel comics ran a series called "What If?" (There, I worked some comics in after all.) These books investigated the outcomes of characters making different decisions at momentous moments, or famous battles going another way than they had in the canonical timelines. Some issues were interesting:

Others were just odd:

In many of those comics, the alternate timeline was frequently shown to have tragic or unfortunate consequences. (In the one above, for instance, Cap dies fighting the Red Skull. In the one above that, Susan Storm leaves the group and everybody gets depressed.) The result is that, at least if you were me, by the end you wipe the sweat from your brow and sigh, "Whew! I'm glad they made their original choices. That outcome would have sucked!"

But we never have that comfort in our own lives, do we? Can we ever know for sure if we made the best choices? If only we could look backward to feel secure about past decisions, or ahead to make sure future ones were right. Perhaps we wonder "what if" because we realize (on some level) the sheer quantity of possible outcomes our lives could take. And on that basis, each decision becomes endowed with enormous potential, a multitude of possibilities. This is both terrifying and affirming for me: however lost one might happen to feel when faced with a crossroad, it also means possessing, in that same moment, a staggering power to mold the future. (Here I'm going to sidestep a little philosophical whirlpool called "hard determinism" that would contradict what I'm saying. But, if you feel you must make your head hurt, have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_determinism.)

So that's where we are this Commencement weekend, because "What if" is a close relative of "What now?" For those reading this, whether it's "what if" or "what now" that weighs on your mind, think of yourselves as incredibly powerful. We may not know what comes next, but that just makes us giants of potential.

And next time, I promise, we will talk even more about comics.

Going Forth from Home into Homelessness

No, I am not homeless. (Not literally, anyway.) The title is a rendering of a famous Indian Buddhist phrase used to describe those who left their families, possessions, and social attachments to contemplate the message of the Buddha. (I haven't done any of that, either.) No, this blog post -- my first! -- is about the process of starting a new stage in one's life. In Indian (specifically Hindu) practice, there were four stages to one's life: student, householder, forest-dweller, and then renouncer. In the traditional scheme, only after obligations to school, work, and family have been fulfilled (usually at a ripe old age) can one consider the third and fourth, when the person renounces all material possessions and ties to wander the forest, meditate, and contemplate the meaning of life. The Buddha renounced prior to fulfilling these obligations, however, and encouraged others to do the same, arguing that finding the answers to life's questions should not take second place to anything else.

I have sometimes thought of the concept of "forest-dwelling" (the "going forth into homelessness") as a metaphor for those times whenever we enter new, uncertain stages in life. The old, comfortable, familiar frame of life (the metaphorical "house") is or must be left behind. It is a difficult process, whether one chooses it or not, but the Hindu and Buddhist renouncers demonstrate that it is also an opportunity for self-exploration. Hence, I have started this blog as a way to think out loud through this process, and potentially stay connected with friends and continue conversations that otherwise might be cut off.

This is just the first of hopefully many posts, on about a weekly basis. Upcoming topics include favorites of children's literature, movie reviews, a comparison of the Buddha to St. Francis and Chris McCandless, and, of course, world wars, because we don't want it to be too upbeat. Next time, though, join me for a discussion of graphic novels as "great books."

Hope to see you then.