I continue to listen to this excellent novel. I believe this is the best novel I have ever encountered. It has pathos, wit, wisdom, an engaging story, and much useful advice and commentary.
I just listened to his lecture on good and evil characters, where he points out something I realize now is true: viz., that anyone wanting to improve public morality is better off creating realistic characters, with real flaws, who make real mistakes, who feel the wrong things at the wrong time, give in to the wrong impulses at the wrong times, yet still feel good hearted, likeable and–to use a contemporary word–relatable.
As he says, characters who are perfectly good make ordinary people feel weak and disempowered, because we rightly apprehend no hope of ever attaining those heights. I will say in this regard that it has long been my opinion that saints only become perfect among those who never knew them, and become most saintly long after they are dead. It is very easy to tell stories then. And those stories have tended, in the Western world, to be repurposed in the service of the Church, and intended to add to ITS glory.
Surely it is significant that little was written about Jesus for at least a century after his death, and that much that was written in the first few centuries was suppressed by the Church, which–in speaking for God– also made efforts to achieve on Earth God’s omnipotence in its own body?
There is really no way to know what all was flushed down Byzantine and Roman Memory Holes. How much was written beyond the fragments we found in Nag Hammadi we have no way of even guessing, any more than we really know how much was burned in Alexandria. And I will note that in my understanding the FIRST purge–the first book burning–was done by Christians, who in much of their history have been vastly less tolerant and more violent than the Muslims. That history is not well known by most, although since little history is known to anyone any more, that isn’t surprising.
I will recommend again Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” as one of the more useful historical texts I have read.
And as Fielding says, people with bad traits, disagreeable traits, in seeing them portrayed in characters who are absolutely wicked, despair of ever redeeming themselves. That just confirms people in their worst impulses. It doesn’t reform them.
Nobody is perfectly good or evil. Even the worst of us have occasional good moments–or so I would argue it is useful to assume, even if they are small and fleeting–and the best among us do bone-headed things from time to time.
Jones’ goodness is crooked. That is what makes it perfect. I am very sure that Fielding, if he had encountered the Tao Te Ching, would have kept it closer to him than his Bible.
He says at the beginning his topic is “Human Nature”. And he has been as good as his word. And really, really funny in many moments.
This book is proving useful in my own personal growth, for sure, in many ways.