Andrew Klavan’s The Kingdom of Cain: How Can Murder Inspire Great Art?

Andrew Klavan is one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking cultural critics working today. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also an excellent mystery writer. His Cameron Winter series of novels has given me hours of great enjoyment, and he’s just getting started with it.

Besides mysteries, Klavan also writes nonfiction, including the bestselling The Truth and Beauty, where he discusses how nineteenth century romantic poetry reflects eternal Truths. His latest book, The Kingdom of Cain, is subtitled Finding God in the Literature of Darkness, and he isn’t kidding when he says Literature of Darkness! He focuses on three horrific and infamous crimes, and then he describes how each one led to extraordinarily beautiful and inspirational works of art. So how can the terrible crime of murder lead to great art? As he puts it in the Introduction,

The opposite of murder is creation – creation, which is the telos of love. And because art, true art, is an act of creation, it always transforms its subject into itself, even if the subject is murder. An act of darkness is not the same thing as a work of art about an act of darkness. The murders in Shakespeare’s Macbeth are horrific, but they are a beautiful part of the play. (p. 17)

The first murder Klavan chronicles is one committed in nineteenth century Paris by Pierre Francois Lacenaire and Victor Avril. They suspected another criminal, the blackmailer and con man Jean-Francois Chardon, of hoarding a large amount of money in his apartment. They strangled and stabbed him, then they stabbed Chardon’s bedridden mother to death. It turned out there was almost no money in the apartment.

Even though it was a terrible crime, Lacenaire captured the imagination of Parisian elites – “He was handsome, sophisticated, literate. A journalist, a published poet.” (p. 29). He justified his actions by saying he was rebelling against an unjust system. (Any resemblance to the swooning reaction of many people to the murderer Luigi Mangione is purely coincidental!)

Lacenaire’s crime was so well known that the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, based one of his greatest novels on it, Crime and Punishment. In that tale, a poor student, Rodion Raskolnikov, decides to kill an old woman for the money he supposes she is hiding. When he kills her with an axe, her developmentally delayed sister runs into the room, and he kills her as well. Instead of feeling that his crime was justified, however, Raskolnikov is wracked by guilt. He comes to realize that there is a moral order that he has violated, and no amount of rationalization can assuage his anguish.

The next crime Klavan delves into is the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder. These two young men read the works of Nietszche and decided they were the ubermensch Nietszche predicted must rise up in the aftermath of the death of God. They planned what they thought was the perfect crime, and they kidnapped and brutally killed a young boy, Bobby Franks. However, while they were disposing of the body, Leopold left his glasses in the woods. The police were able to trace them to Leopold, who confessed and implicated Loeb.

Their trial was a media sensation, and through the brilliant efforts of their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, they were able to avoid capital punishment. This murder inspired the hit British play, Rope, which was adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1948.

Klavan makes the case that beginning with the Marquis de Sade, continuing with Nietszche, and culminating with Michel Foucault in the twentieth century, a denial of God and the resulting denial of any moral order inevitably leads to murder and other atrocities:

But Foucault understood – what Nietszche understood, what the Marquis de Sade understood – that without belief in God, a loving God, and essentially Christian God who appeared in the world as the least among us, moral systems, all human systems, are based on the will to power, which is the will to survival, pleasure, and life. In order to overcome Christianity’s false moral constructs and find true life, authentic life, even in some sense a truly moral life, all social constructs had to be destroyed. (p. 75)

The third crime Klavan documents are the serial murders in 1950s rural Wisconsin of Ed Gein. He was discovered to have kidnapped, tortured, and killed many women. He made furniture out of their body parts, and wore their skins as a suit. Obviously, his horrible crimes led to movies like Hitchcock’s Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Klavan makes an interesting point here: in Psycho, a psychoanalyst is used to provide a rational explanation for Norman Bates’ behavior. By the time The Silence of the Lambs is filmed, the psychoanalyst himself is the murderer!

Klavan then devotes a chapter to the archetypical murder: when Cain killed Abel. He explores five themes that this story incorporates:

1. The Knowledge of Good and Evil
2. Sex and Sin
3. The Battle of Brothers
4. Murder as Suicide
5. Sacrifice

In his discussion of the knowledge of good and evil, Klavan makes a beautiful observation:

Eternity is not a long time, it is all time, and it is impossible for mortal man to imagine. In eternity, for instance, you may not be reconnected to your lost loved ones, you may find you never lost them at all. In eternity, you may not find that God makes good out of evil, you may find that it was always good, you simply did not see it complete.

Because of this, the knowledge of good and evil is a curse to man, not a gift, because he sees it in time where it makes no sense. in his ignorance, all he knows is the injustice of the moment. His only possible response is anger and bitterness and despair, and, finally, murder. (p. 140)

The last part of of the book involves Klavan’s philosophy of The Practice of Creation – what is necessary to bring forth truly great art. The final chapter is a marvelous tour of the history of Western art, beginning with the ancient Greek statuary of the Acropolis, continuing through Byzantine and Renaissance depictions of Madonna and child, to the Cubist deconstruction of the human form by Picasso, and ending with a wonderful tribute to, in Klavan’s words, “the most beautiful object that a man has ever made with his mind and hands”, Michelangelo’s Madonna Della Pieta.

The Kingdom of Cain is a unique and well thought out argument for the importance of art that reflects a higher moral order. No matter how gruesome the crime, it only serves to illustrate how lost we are without it.

Jay Wellons’ All That Moves Us: Joy and Grief in Pediatric Neurosurgery

A new year, and an opportunity to begin a new batch of books! I was given several titles for Christmas, and the first one I dove into was All That Moves Us.

Dr. Jay Wellons is a pediatric neurosurgeon at Vanderbilt’s Monroe Carrell Jr. Children’s Hospital here in Nashville, TN. His memoir, All That Moves Us, is one of the most moving books I’ve ever read. It consists of 23 short chapters, each one chronicling an important episode in Wellons’ life. He doesn’t pull any punches, either. In the prologue, he explains his efforts to separate two conjoined twins that resulted in both of their deaths.

Other chapters deal with triumphs such as two-year-old Allie:

Her brain MRI showed a large bleed in her brainstem, the pons specifically. The normal brain was compressed from the inside out, the pontine brain tissue now only a thin rim displaced by the blood clot, most likely from a hemorrhagic cavernous malformation. It was gigantic considering the small space. At that point in my career, I had never seen a hemorrhage quite that large in that part of the brain with the patient still alive. (page 103)

Miraculously, Wellons is able to save Allie, and seven years later, she continues to recover. He admires her indomitable will to survive and thrive.

Throughout the book, Wellons provides interesting autobiographical details: why he went into medicine, the enormous influence his father had on him, his own battle with a tumor in his leg, the joy he receives from his own children. It doesn’t hurt that he is an extraordinarily fine writer. As a matter of fact he was an English major as an undergraduate in college. I found that I couldn’t read more than two or three chapters at a time, they are that emotionally powerful.

I also got a glimpse into the life of a surgeon, and the various trials they face. While the gratitude from parents whose children he has saved is nice, Wellons tells of the time when he couldn’t save a middle-aged woman, and her family came at him in the hallway ready to physically attack him. A surgeon has to be sensitive to the feelings of the families of his patients, while always being truthful and informative.

Doctors are always on call, even when they aren’t anywhere near a hospital. In the chapter, Last Place, Wellons is on the interstate driving to a triathlon when he comes upon a terrible car accident. He immediately stops and does triage on the family in the car that was hit. If he hadn’t been there, the mother and father would have died. This experience gives him new respect for the incredibly difficult job first responders have.

Another chapter, Shock Wave, is particularly hard-hitting. It is about a teenaged girl who shot herself in the head, driven to such despair by social media bullying that death seemed preferable to the pain she was suffering. She survived the gunshot, but the bullet destroyed her optic nerves, permanently blinding her. However, she has chosen to use her condition to try to prevent others from making the same choice she did.

Alyssa will forever live with the profound effects of that day. Both she and her parents wanted her story told so that people might understand that social bullying is real. Her mom aske me to make sure that Alyssa has worked hard since that day to be a good young woman living out her faith. For all that she has endured, Alyssa loves the idea of being able to help others, and that is how she understands her purpose now. She does not remember much of her life before her injury. But she makes a point to say that sometimes we can inflict pain on one another without much thought. It can be awful. And then she says she knows we can do better. (page 189)

All That Moves Us is an incredibly powerful read. In every chapter, Wellons’ sincere care and compassion for his patients and their families is apparent. He also weaves his love and admiration for his Mississippi Air National Guard father throughout the book. His father passed away from ALS, and Wellons was able to spend time with him and properly express his gratitude for all he did for him. As for me, I am thankful that our medical system is able to produce amazing caregivers like Jay Wellons.

Rod Dreher: Living In Wonder

Book number 54 of 2024

I have enjoyed Rod Dreher’s writing since the bygone days of his Crunchy Cons book, published in 2006. He followed that with The Benedict Option – which a lot of people mistook as a call for a complete withdrawal from society to preserve civilization – and then Live Not By Lies, which he wrote after coming into contact with brave resisters of Communist oppression in Hungary. Live Not By Lies is a stirring call to simply tell the truth, even when it can cost one everything.

Dreher has been open about his personal search for meaning. It has entailed countercultural lifestyles and some personal cul de sacs. He has been an Orthodox Christian since 2006, and he lives in Budapest, Hungary. I was sad to learn in the first few pages of Living In Wonder that he has gone through a divorce. It was obviously a traumatic event, and he appears to have come out of it stronger, but still seeking.

The thesis of Living In Wonder can be summed up with its first sentence, “The world is not what we think it is.” In the West, we have become so used to the scientific/materialist way of looking at the universe that we literally cannot see the world around us in the same way other cultures do. For most Westerners (or those of us who are WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) if we can’t measure something, it doesn’t exist. Even believing Christians, by and large, look at the practice of their religion as following a moral code exemplified by Jesus, and not as a way to perceive a higher, spiritual reality.

Early on, Dreher explains how we need to use both sides of our brains to fully comprehend the world:

It’s an exaggeration to say that the left brain is analytical and the right brain emotional. Nevertheless, it is true that the most important difference between the sides of the brain is how they attend to the world. The left brain picks things apart to analyze them, and the right brain puts them together again. Both cerebral hemispheres are necessary for the healthy functioning of the brain – but the left must never dominate the right, because the left brain makes a good servant but a poor master. This is in part because the left hemisphere is domineering by nature and doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. The left brain is intelligent, but it is not wise.

In the modern world – that is, during the past five hundred years – we in the West have privileged the left-brain way of knowing. (page 44)

Our desire to control nature has left us unable to resonate with it.

According to Dreher, the problem with a societal loss of enchantment is that people will not become atheist, but rather seek re-enchantment in any way they can. Unfortunately, some choose to do so via spiritually harmful ways. Chapter 5, The Dark Enchantment of the Occult is truly disturbing. In it, Dreher interviews several people who have experienced the demonic, whether through overtly occult practices, use of psychedelic drugs, or a combination of both. Dreher warns that there is a spiritual battle going on, and Western churches are woefully unprepared to fight it. As one priest Dreher spoke with put it,

The devil frightens me. I mean, he’s a fallen angel. I’m not going gung ho and stupid about these things. I know he’s ultimately only allowed to operate within the boundaries the Lord has set, but as a human being, I’m frightened of this supernatural intelligence far beyond our capacities.” (page 106)

In the next chapter, Aliens and the Sacred Machine, Dreher discusses the phenomena of UFOs as a modern manifestation of demonic forces that have been bedeviling humanity for millennia. According to many experts, UFOs are not visitors from another planet, but rather beings who have come from a different dimension.

Dreher also writes about the desires of many tech gurus to achieve “transhumanism” – the merging of humans with machines. AI is a rapidly developing technology that we really don’t know what will do to our spiritual health. There are already signs of people succumbing to the temptation to make an “idol” of AI, preferring virtual relationships to real ones. We are living in an age of “liquid modernity”, as coined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, which is characterized by a rate of technological change that is so fast we cannot properly evaluate it.

Could technology really hasten the end of orthodox religion?

In the digital era, we face an enormous religious temptation. “Digital technology is spiritual technology,” says philosopher Anton Barba-Kay. Why? Because “the digital era thus marks the point at which our concern will be mainly the control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we attend to it.” The temptation is to believe that we can extend control over human nature by merging ourselves with our own machines. (page 128-129)

At this point, I have to say that Dreher is making a pretty good case, but then he quotes Martin Heidegger, whom he describes as “arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century”. I know next to nothing about philosophy, but I do know Heidegger was a member of the German Nazi party, and they used his philosophy to justify their policies. Why Dreher thought it was appropriate to quote this man out of so many other tech-sceptic thinkers is inexplicable and undermines his argument.

After spending the first six chapters describing and diagnosing the problem of disenchantment, Dreher offers the cure in the final five. in chapter 7, he explains how important it is to cultivate attention to the ways God is communicating His presence. This is a difficult process of emptying oneself of distractions, being still, and waiting. Dreher recounts how he struggled with this, but through perseverance and practice slowly got better. He suffered from a stress-related chronic illness, and his priest assigned him a rule of prayer that healed him. It took him months, but he managed to successfully “get out of his own head”.

The prayer he prayed is one that Christians have prayed for centuries – the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Chapter 8 is Learning To See. If we can learn to properly perceive and appreciate true beauty, we are drawn closer to God.

How, then, will beauty save the world? By piercing the hard hearts and closed minds of men with the truth that delivers them from despair and calls them out of themselves. (page 168)

Chapter 9, Signs and Wonders, is a recounting of several modern-day miracles. They have happened to people from all walks of life, and were usually completely unexpected. One common thread is that they occurred during a personal struggle or crisis. It’s as if the recipient has to see how far they could fall before he or she could discern that a true miracle is happening.

Chapter 10, Three Prophets of the Real, is just that: portraits of three people who could be considered prophets. All of them are Orthodox Christians, but they did not start out that way. Martin Shaw is an English writer and scholar of myths and the truths they reveal. At a particularly difficult period of his life, he was granted a vision one evening that changed him forever. He now spends his time warning Western Christians that they must brace themselves for a struggle. In his theory of myth, there are three stages: red, black, and white. Red represents youth and passion. Black is failure and suffering, while white is the wisdom gained from the black stage: elderhood. He says Christianity is about to enter a “black” phase.

The second prophet is the English novelist Paul Kingsnorth, who lives in Ireland. His passion is reconnecting Christians with their patristic heritage that celebrated God’s creation.

His writing comes across as apocalyptic, which Kingsnorth readily concedes. But we are living through an apocalypse, from the Greek word meaning “unveiling”. What is being unveiled? that we are using our advanced technology to build new new life-fors to become our gods – and, in so doing, we are destroying our humanity and the good earth. …

Kingsnorth calls the emerging enemy of God and man “the Machine.” It’s a metaphor for the technological society manifesting around us, seizing control of our lives and rendering us all as little more than data. (pages 224 – 225)

The third prophet is Jonathan Pageau, who carves icons out of wood, and hosts a site called The Symbolic World.

“Materialism has played itself out,” Pageau tells me [Dreher]. “After World War II, the philosophical materialists and reductionists claimed they could explain everything in terms of purely material reasons. But you can’t do that with consciousness. People have begun to see that there is a necessary patterning to reality, a patterning that seems to have something to do with our capacity to perceive reality and to participate in it consciously.” (page 232-233)

The concluding chapter is The Urgency of the Mystical, in which Dreher relates several personal experiences that helped him survive some personal crises. He uses them to urge the reader to be open to miracles, and to resist the disenchantment that is accelerating in the West.

Living In Wonder  is a challenging book – not in the way it’s written; Dreher is very readable and engaging, but in his call to the West to wake up and not accept every technological advance as beneficial for the human race. Rather, he urges us to channel the longing for enchantment into healthy and time-honored practices, and avoid the darkness of the occult. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception his book receives.

Christine Rosen -The Extinction of Experience

Book number 52 of 2024

This book makes a good trilogy with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy. Like them, it documents the alarming effects social media and other technologies have on our society. As Rosen writes in the introduction,

Our understanding of experience has become disordered, in ways large and small. More and more people mistrust their own experiences. More and more people create their own realities rather than live in the world around them. We can no longer assume that reality is a matter of consensus. (p.2)

Like the late Neil Postman, author of Technopoly, who foresaw many of the problems technology would bring us, Rosen calls us to be aware of the biases each and every technology includes. Technology can provide wonderful benefits, but they always come at a cost.

Chapter 1, You Had To Be There, takes its title from the old cliché people used when lamely trying to recount some funny or dramatic experience. According to Google Ngram, the use of that phrase steadily rose in popularity from the 1960s to 2012, when it dropped precipitously. 2012 is also the year smartphone ownership saw its largest growth. Thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, et al., you don’t have to be there – vicariously watching a video is a good enough substitute, apparently.

Every day our experiences are guided by what we say and do online. Anyone with an Internet connection can see more vicarious experiences in one day than previous generations witnessed in a lifetime, and on a scale far greater than television or film provided. Is it any surprise that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t, both online and IRL [In Real Life]? For an increasing number of us many of our memories are now of experiences that occurred online. (page 24)

Chapter 2 is titled Facing One Another. In it, Rosen argues for the importance of face-to-face communication. Humans have evolved into incredibly sensitive readers of small visual clues. If person-to-person communication is mediated by a technology, we lose those clues. For people who might be motivated to deceive others, that can be an advantage! For the rest of us, interacting with someone virtually makes it hard to measure the trustworthiness of him or her.

However, there seems to be a growing trend of people preferring less human contact. From self-checkout at the grocery store (I’m guilty of preferring this) to ordering from iPads at a restaurant to computerized hospital discharging, more and more tasks are being automated.

The flip side of this is the fact that companies are realizing that incidental in-person interaction is both cost-saving and productive. The exchange of ideas during a casual conversation can not be replicated in a videoconference.

Chapter 3, Hand To Mouse, is about the importance of authentic handwriting.

But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills (as we will see), and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead. (page 58-59)

Interestingly, young children who learn and master handwriting become better readers. Once students are older, handwriting notes leads to better retention of content than typing them. As adults lose the ability to write in cursive, they may lose valuable cognitive skills.

Likewise, working with your hands is important.

The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. (page 69)

I agree with this from personal experience. I have been designing and putting together stained glass windows for almost thirty years now, and when I get into “the flow” of a project, times passes without my having any sense of it.

Chapter 4 is How We Wait, and it is about how impatient we have become when faced with a line or a wait. Companies measure how long it takes their websites to load, down to the millisecond, because an extra three or four milliseconds mean lost sales and customers.

Rosen posits that filling every waking moment with distraction and entertainment via our devices robs us of valuable downtime that used to lead to daydreaming and free association.

Coping with boredom involves self-regulation. We must decide what to do with the feeling, so we counter desultory everyday experiences by reaching for technologies with assiduous abilities to distract us – so many distractions, each one a siren’s island where attention might founder. In effect, our devices eliminate boredom not by teaching us how to cope with it but by outsourcing our attention so we don’t have to cope with it. (page 95)

I found this chapter relatable – whenever I am in a situation where I am asked to wait, such as a doctor’s waiting area, I resist the temptation to pull out my phone. Instead, I use the time to collect my thoughts, focus on my surroundings and the people around me, and just relax. I am usually the only person not looking at a screen.

Chapter 5 is The Sixth Sense. This refers to our perception of our own and others’ emotions. In other words, our empathy. Unfortunately, most social media platforms amplify negative emotions like anger and hate, because they garner the most engagement. Meanwhile, researchers are developing ways of monitoring our emotional states, so that we can be more productive employees or more easily manipulated consumers.

What kind of world will this be once we have outsourced the job of emotional reflection? Pentland [MIT researcher] says this will be a “sensible” society where “everything is arranged for your convenience.” No need for inefficiencies or embarrassments of a bad second date. One day soon, perhaps, with sensors embedded on our bodies or phones, they will signal us within moments whether our affection is likely to be returned or not, and we can move on. As a representative from Google told a reporter, “We like to say a phone has eyes, ears, skin, and a sense of location…It’s always with you in your pocket or purse. It’s next to you when you’re sleeping. We really want to leverage that.” Eventually the sensors will take on the work of emotional awareness for us, if we let them. (page 131)

What is looming on the horizon are apps that can “read” your emotional state, as well as the state of the person you’re interacting with. Do we want to know if someone doesn’t like talking to us, while we’re talking with them? Do we want others to know our true feelings for them, 24/7?

Chapter 6 is Mediated Pleasures. First, the pleasure of travel is being transformed by technology. Instead of leaving home behind for a new, albeit temporary, adventure, we stay connected to our family and friends, sharing every stage of the journey. Travel is now tourism, which is very different. People are so busy trying to document their trips that they never truly experience them.

According to Rosen, other pleasures that technology has disrupted/corrupted include viewing fine art, sex (of course), games, and even food. In our enjoyment of all these things, the mediation of technology robs us of the visceral sensations we experience when we partake of them in real life. People take more pictures than ever of their experiences, yet they remember less and less of them. I know that one of the most annoying things about going to a concert these days are all the audience members who insist on recording the entire show on their phones. They can’t possibly be enjoying the actual performance, and I can’t imagine them taking the time to watch the concert again on a small screen.

The seventh and final chapter is Place, Space, and Serendipity. In it, Rosen is careful to distinguish between place and space. A place is somewhere people can gather and socialize face-to-face – where serendipitous encounters can take place, like in a neighborhood pub or restaurant. A space is an engineered area that can be real or virtual, but it is not conducive to relaxed and spontaneous interaction.

We are in the process of trading the spatial and social cues that once defined a particular place – a public square, for example, or a local meeting spot – for a more seamless and less physically bounded experience of space engineered by technology companies. The promise is a more efficient delivery of “engineered serendipity”, but the reality may end up being a more predictable homogeneity. (page 186)

I wish that I could say Rosen has suggestions for how to counter the deleterious effects of al this technological mediation, but she really doesn’t, other than going Amish and eschewing technology altogether. Her book is an important one, in that it is a clear-eyed warning of the path down which our society is headed. I’m nearing retirement age; the near future won’t affect me that much. I do worry about the world people under the age of 25 will have to navigate, though.