Nature and Culture 2: The End

“You can try to push back against the troubles of this world, but trouble is like the tide, and it always returns.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events S3 E7, ‘The End’ (2019)

How to generically characterise Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events? Well, I suppose you might call it something like Victorian-gothic-esque absurdist metafiction with strong elements of social satire. Or on the other hand, you might decide that, at its core, it’s really a coming-of-age story. I’m going to work from the Netflix adaptation rather than the books, simply for ease-of-access reasons.¹ Spoilers ahead.

 

Many thanks to Paperguest at newgrounds.com for this very smart depiction of Count Olaf by one of his less-than-subtle aliases.

One day at the beach, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are informed by family friend Mr. Poe that their parents have perished in a terrible fire. Thenceforth they are passed like so many hot potatoes from one (invariably incompetent if not downright villanous) guardian to another, their footsteps always dogged by misery in the form of the most villanous villain of all, Count Olaf, who wants to kill them and steal their fortune before they are old enough to inherit it. Along the way, they discover that their parents, Count Olaf, and many more of the people they encounter belonged to a secret organisation called VFD: the Volunteer Fire Department. Once, VFD was driven by the noble goal of dousing fires both literal and figurative, but then there was a schism, in which one side decided it would rather be setting the fires than putting them out.²

Throughout the series, setting fires basically functions as a metaphor for doing evil things. The Baudelaires start out with very firm notions of good and evil: some people are noble and some are wicked and you have to figure out who sits in which box. But then things get a bit more complicated than that, as is very neatly demonstrated by a courtroom scene in the twelfth story. Count Olaf is on trial; the Baudelaires make their accusations against the defendant. He hit Klaus across the face; he tried to marry Violet; he poisoned Uncle Monty; he threw Aunt Josephine to the leeches; he conspired with Esmé Squalor and Carmelita Spats; he kidnapped the Quagmire triplets from Prufrock Prep; he murdered Jacques Snicket in the Village of Fowl Devotees; he tried to cut off Violet’s head at the Heimlich Hospital; he threw a brave and noble librarian to the lions. They identify him as the cause of all their suffering. They recall that nobody has ever listened to them before when they have tried to communicate who Count Olaf is and what he’s capable of.

They recall it, and, though their testimony is well received, they begin to worry. What if, once again, their word is not enough to get justice done? They decide to take a gamble; they call Count Olaf himself to the stand to attest to his crimes. And he, well, he turns the tables on them. He makes a series of accusations of his own, whose veracity the Baudelaires are unable to deny. They held Esmé Squalor hostage on Mount Fraught (because Count Olaf was holding Sunny hostage and they wanted to get her back, but still). They helped Count Olaf burn down Caligari Carnival (because they had to in order to get a ride to the Mortmain Mountains where VFD Headquarters was, but still). Klaus caused a series of terrible accidents at Lucky Smells Lumber Mill (because he was hypnotised, but still). Violet stole some keys from a blind man to break into the library at Heimlich Hospital (because that was the only way they would be able to check the records for mentions of VFD, but still). Sunny broke her siblings out of jail (because they were going to be burned at the stake for a murder they didn’t commit – so, ahem, yeah, less grey area on that one, I’ll grant you). And then the pièce de resistance of Count Olaf’s case: the Baudelaires technically killed a man – because Count Olaf thrust a harpoon gun into their hands and it fired when they dropped it in surprise, but still. Dewey Denouement is still dead.

The point isn’t that the Baudelaires are actually on a par with Count Olaf in terms of their criminal resume; the point is that they aren’t quite as innocent as they thought they were. The point is that they’ve done more wicked things than a noble person ought to. And indeed, at the end of The Penultimate Peril, there’s a bit of a culmination of that, because they burn down the Hotel Denouement – and this time it’s not on Count Olaf’s initiative, but their own. They have truly become those who set fires rather than those who douse them.

They burn down the hotel and they escape in a boat, with Count Olaf. Subsequently shipwrecked, they wash up on an island whose community of castaways is provided over by a man named Ishmael (“call me Ish”). Everyone on the island seems to be very happy. They hang out in comfy robes keeping coloured sheep and drinking coconut cordial, their motto is ‘forget your troubles’ and apparently, though the right tidal conditions for leaving the island swing round on an annual basis, nobody ever does. Plus, the islanders are the only people the Baudelaires have ever met in all their misadventures, apart from themselves, who are able to see through Count Olaf’s disguises. I’m sure there are lots of ways in which that fact might be construed, but it strikes me as ascribing to the islanders a kind of untaintedness by the conventions and expectations of the world at large – a simplicity of heart, if you will. If we’re talking about nature and culture, the islanders are about as far to the ‘nature’ end of the proceedings as you can get, and it certainly seems to be doing them some favours.

 

Coconut cordial. On which, keep reading...

But it seems to contain some disadvantages too. There’s nothing to eat on the island except unmarinated ceviche – which is literally just bits of raw seafood – and nothing to drink except the coconut cordial, which the Baudelaires find suspicious on account of both its taste and the slightly mind-numbing effect it seems to have on the islanders. Sunny suggests that the fish might be tastier if cooked, but Ishmael counters that fire is the most dangerous thing in the world, and the Baudelaires can hardly disagree with that. Later, Violet offers to try to assemble a water filtration system from the various bits of flotsam and jetsam that have washed up on the island (which is situated such that a heck lot of flotsam and jetsam washes up there, hence all the castaways), so that there would be water to drink and salt to season the food, but Ishmael, again, argues against the proposal: what if the islanders couldn’t tolerate fresh water after so many years on nothing but cordial, or what if they started fighting about what to drink? The island is good because it’s safe, and it’s Ishmael’s job to keep it that way. Violet replies apologetically that it was just an idea. “Yes,” says Ishmael, “but ideas lead to more ideas, which lead to arguments, which lead to schisms. You remember what got you stranded here to begin with – don’t rock the boat.”

As Ishmael’s comments betray, he knows rather more about the mysteries in which the Baudelaires are embroiled than he’s letting on. In fact, he knows rather more than they do. The Baudelaires find their way to the Other Side of the island, where all the ‘dangerous’ stuff that washes up get sent – which is to say, pretty much everything that washes up. There they find a house in a tree, which has a water filtration system, and food cooked with fire, and books – including a book with their mother’s handwriting in it. Ishmael shows up and tells them that their parents once lived there. He knew their parents, because he was the one who recruited them into VFD when they attended the school of which he was principal (Prufrock Prep again). The organisation was his idea, his project. “When a fire breaks out, the Official Fire Department is there to fight it,” he explains. “But figurative fires need fighting too, and my students were interested in so many things – literature, science, music, theatre, animal behaviour, the culinary arts – and I thought, what if a group of curious, capable young people came together to stand against the ignorance and injustice of this world? We could make it a quieter, safer place. And for a time we did, and then, well, it all went up in smoke.”

You see the nature of Ishmael’s project: these things his recruits were interested in, these were all culture things, all development things, technology things. They wanted to learn and build and create and progress – just like Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, who identify themselves respectively as an inventor, a researcher, and a chef. Ishmael had hoped that VFD might make the world a better place through such things, but the project failed, and he gave up on the dream. He compares the troubles of the world to the tide: you can try to resist them but they always come back. And hence the banning of any technological-cultural development on the island, the logic being that if you can’t confront ignorance and injustice with progress, then all you can do is try to stop it ever emerging in the first place. And that’s how he proposes to keep the Baudelaire orphans safe the way he couldn’t keep their parents safe.

But then everyone on the island gets infected with a deadly fungus called the Medusoid Mycelium, the only cure for which is horseradish or another culinary substitute. The Baudelaires run back to the tree-house to see if they can find any, and a scene ensues that really makes anyone who knows the book of Genesis sit up and take notice. The Incredibly Deadly Viper – who we were introduced to in the second instalment of the series, and whose name is a deliberate misnomer (it’s actually harmless) – gives the Baudelaires an apple from the house-tree, which has been specially hybridised to function as a cure for Medusoid Mycelium poisoning. And just to hammer home the illusion further, in the book, Sunny’s comment on the matter is “Gentreefive” – as in Genesis 3:5, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”³ What’s going on here? What’s Mr. Snicket using the Biblical story for? Well, as you’ll have guessed, that’s a question that I’m going to have a stab at answering.

 

This one’s a rattlesnake, apparently, so probably actually is an Incredibly Deadly Viper.

Let’s start with the obvious: it’s some kind of inverted Fall. In Genesis, the fruit brings death; in The End, it brings life. In Genesis, the serpent deceives the woman, pretending to be her friend when he’s actually her enemy; in The End, the serpent is likewise deceptive as far as its name is concerned, but the opposite way round: it’s pretending to be deadly when it’s actually harmless. And what about the moral effect – the you shall know good and evil bit? Well, Adam and Eve were just totally ignorant of good and evil before they ate the fruit. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, on the other hand, knew good and evil already. They knew noble from wicked perfectly well. It was for that reason that they found it so disturbing that they had ended up doing so many wicked things in pursuit of noble ends – that they weren’t quite as innocent as they’d thought they were.

But compare the islanders. They don’t have any moral choices to make, because Ishmael removes anything that might cause a disagreement such as might throw up a moral choice from the side of the island where everybody lives. For these guys, it’s just herding sheep, and ceviche for tea, and that’s what there is. So arguably, the islanders don’t know good and evil. They just don’t have to. And that was Ishmael’s whole idea, really, wasn’t it? He has, in a way, engineered a kind of reverse Fall. And he wants the Baudelaires to forget their troubles and join him in his little pseudo-Eden.

The prospect isn’t without its appeal. A safe place to be, with no Count Olaf, is exactly what the Baudelaires have been looking for all this time. But staying on the island would mean giving up, just like Ishmael did. It would mean giving up on inventing and researching and cooking – on any sort of technological-cultural activity that might rock the boat. It would mean ceasing to dream and learn and build things better, and instead settling down with some ceviche and coconut cordial and accepting that this static existence is just what there is. And it would mean giving up on the moral standards that the orphans have been fighting so hard – and failing so increasingly – to hold themselves to. I should mention here, Ishmael decides, early on in the story, to leave Count Olaf in a cage on the sea wall to drown. If the Baudelaires really want to forget their troubles and become part of the island community, they have to be OK with that.

So this is what their inverted Fall is: a reassertion of their determination to know good and evil. They won’t settle for leading quieter and safer lives without striving to make the world a quieter and safer place overall – even though trouble is like the tide and can’t be held back. Even though inventing and researching and cooking your way out of problems doesn’t actually stop the onslaught of problems. Even though that onslaught inevitably leads to you making at least some choices that seem more wicked than noble, and you realise that you’re not as innocent as you thought you were, and you find yourself setting fires instead of putting them out. At the end of The End, the Baudelaires don’t stay on the island, as happy as they might feasibly have been there. They get on a boat and they go back out into the world.

The world is fallen. And human technological-cultural activity and progress is going to cause as many problems as it solves. But I don’t think that excuses us from trying to solve the problems. If you want to reverse that development, if you want to take us back to the golden age before it all went wrong, well, how far do you take it? Which inventions and innovations do you allow or forbid? Hybridised medicinal apples? Water-filtration systems? Fire? Every coin has two sides, benefit and danger. Humans are naturally creative; I think that’s a little bit of what sets us apart from creatures that are merely flesh. We naturally dream and learn and build things better than they were before. We naturally seek to meet problems with new and creative solutions, and, you know, that’s how technological-cultural development happens. Which problems should we be forbidden to solve because it might cause a schism or something somewhere down the line?

The world is fallen. And one thing that that means is that our efforts to do good are never going to be perfect; sin will dog our footsteps for as long as we’re in the flesh. But another thing that that means is that we know good and evil, which our first ancestors didn’t before they ate the fruit. And that means that we can realise and recognise that sin is dogging our footsteps. That means we can realise that we’re not as innocent as we thought we were; that we are not by nature noble, that we are guilty of starting and feeding figurative fires. And that means we can come to Jesus, who swapped his innocence for our guilt and paid the price for it, for salvation. And once we’re born again of water and the Spirit, even though sin is still with us, our efforts to do good count. Just as God chooses to forget our sins, he chooses to remember the good we do. Or else how could he promise reward for good works?

So try. Even if it’s messy, and every solution or piece of progress seems to throw up other problems, and you’re never going to get it perfect – all the same, try. To humanity generally, I say let us dream and learn and build things better than they were before. And to my brothers and sisters in the Lord, I say let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.⁴

Footnotes

¹ Here it is if you fancy a watch: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80215880?trackId=200257859.

² I wrote about this element of the story in ‘Verifiably False Doctrinists’, under May 2018 in my blog archive.

³ You might want the chapter open: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+3&version=ESVUK.

⁴ That’s from Galatians 6, if you weren’t sure: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+6&version=ESVUK.

Blessed Are the Misfits: An Extremely One-Sided Review

“You know that feeling when God is right there, thisclose, and you can just feel His loving arms around you, and you can literally hear his voice whispering in your ear, telling you how much He loves you?

I don’t.

I never have.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe you can’t. Or maybe, if you’ve gotten the impression you’re too analytical, too logical, too introverted, too just plain weird, or too whatever for God, you’ll let me tell you a quick story.”

Brant Hansen, Blessed Are the Misfits (2017)

I’ll be straight with you: the one solitary goal of this post is to persuade you that you ought to read Blessed Are the Misfits by Brant Hansen. I have a copy if you’d like to borrow it. Otherwise, a copy of your own will be the best eight-pounds-seventy-five you ever spend on Hive.¹

 

This is my copy. It has my name in the inside front cover, so you know you can’t get away with not giving it back.

I first read Blessed Are the Misfits back in June this year, and even then I thought it was the best so-called ‘Christian book’ I’d ever read. This slim little volume was the reassurance I’d been looking for ever since I was a teenager worrying that I wasn’t a real Christian because I’d never really ‘felt’ God’s presence. It was as if pieces of my own brain, my own soul, had fallen out onto the page somehow, and yet here they were being put forward by Mr. Hansen as his – as if they might belong to quite a lot of us, actually. The blurb on the back describes the book as “highly provocative”, but what it said didn’t strike me as provocative at all, just sort of blooming obvious, and yet seemingly never said by anyone else. It both profoundly comforted and unequivocally challenged me.

And so I gave the copy I’d been reading back to the dear friend and sister I’d nicked it from, made use of a book token I had kicking around to buy my own, recommended it to a few people, then stuck it on my bookshelf and left things at that. Until, that is, this weekend just gone, when I was Not In A Particularly Cheery Mood, basically because, by various means, some of which I can identify, I’d the lie creep back in to my internal monologue that how I felt about God had some bearing on how he felt about me. Now, in case you hadn’t noticed, tying God’s view of you – your objective worth – to your own ability to feel certain feelings, or do anything else, actually, is a remarkably reliable way to foster a Sense of General Failure and Worthlessness, so you know, if you’ve ever wanted one of those, you’re welcome for the pro tip. But who am I kidding, you’ve almost certainly already got one kicking around somewhere already, whatever size it might be and whether or not it’s seen much service lately; I’m pretty sure practically everyone has. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

Anyway, rereading Blessed Are the Misfits pretty much demolished my own (admittedly fairly small and brittle) Sense of General Failure and Worthlessness to a basically unbothersome level within a few hours, so I felt strongly encouraged to extend that same opportunity to my lovely readers. I mean, obviously I can’t guarantee that any one of you guys will obtain the same kind of sweet, soothing relief coupled with genuine, stirring encouragement from the book that I did, but the points Mr. Hansen makes are so excellent and so broadly applicable that it’ll be worth your reading it anyway. And if you’re not persuaded merely by my having waxed lyrical about the book’s merits, I’ll now provide a chapter-by-chapter summary of his arguments, followed by some of the quotations from the book that raised the biggest grins from me. I don’t feel as if I’m particularly ‘spoiling’ anything, because it’s the way Mr. Hansen makes these points that makes them so compelling, but if you’re one of those people who’s sort of hypersensitive to having things spoiled for you, you might not want to read any further.

Chapter One: It’s Not Just You

If you feel as if you don’t ‘fit’ in the modern church, as if you don’t experience God’s presence in the way other people seem to, good news: Jesus is for you.

Chapter Two: Together, Yet Apart

The present age is the Church’s betrothal period. We are not supposed to be fully satisfied in our relationship with God yet, because it has yet to be consummated.

Chapter Three: Blessed Are My Fellow People on the Autism Spectrum (and Those Who Can Relate to Us)

Jesus’ approach to stuff is totally different from the world’s, which is pretty fab news for people who don’t really get the world’s approach.

Chapter Four: Blessed Are Those of Us Who Apparently Landed on the Wrong Planet

Humans make no sense, and human cultures make no sense. But God loves humans anyway, and came to live among them anyway. We’re called to do the same.

Chapter Five: Blessed Are the Unfeeling Faithful

Not hearing God’s voice audibly or experiencing his presence emotively is normal, not an indication that something is amiss in the relationship. More remarkable and desirable than either of these things is when he fosters obedience in us.

Chapter Six: Blessed Are the Unfeeling Faithful, Part 2: Real “Fruit”

How we deal with the people around us is a better indication of God’s work in our lives than how we feel.

Chapter Seven: Blessed Are the Introverted Evangelical Failures

Evangelism is not the Christian’s main duty. Building a Church where all its members, with all their various gifts, are united in love, is more important.

Chapter Eight: Blessed Are the People Who Can’t Pray Worth a Darn

Prayers don’t have to be long; the Lord’s Prayer isn’t. Praying briefly and inarticulately is good – way better than not praying. God actually wants us to pester him.

Chapter Nine: Blessed Are the People Who Just Read That Last Chapter but Still Have Some Questions

Prayer is action. God grants our prayers a role in his plans. You can’t really fail at praying except by not praying.

Chapter Ten: Blessed Are the Wounded

God is glorified in making something beautiful out of all the sucky stuff that’s happened to us; in healing us so we can help to heal others.

Chapter Eleven: Blessed Are Those Who Don’t Have Amazing Spiritual Stories

Inspiring testimonies and sermon illustrations do not accurately represent real life. Our stories are not yet resolved, because the resolution is yet to come.

Chapter Twelve: Blessed Are the Impostors

Constantly remind yourself that, however rubbish you might be at doing God stuff, you’re invited to be in his presence.

Chapter Thirteen: Blessed Are the Introverts Who Keep Trying

Dealing with other people is hard. We’re to love them anyway, because God does, and he changes us to make us able.

Chapter Fourteen: Blessed Are the Perpetual Strugglers

It’s easy to settle for the cheap imitation that is sin, because pursuing what’s real requires commitment, and results in struggle. But commitment brings true freedom, and the struggle is proof of God at work in us.

Chapter Fifteen: Blessed Are the People Who Do Church Anyway

Each of us really needs Christian community – to participate in it like family. Other Christians may be hard to deal with, but it’s a glorious thing when the family stays together anyway.

Chapter Sixteen: Blessed Are the Melancholy and the Depressed

It’s possible to be joyful even when depressed, because you can counter what your feelings tell you (often not true) with what God tells you (always true).

Chapter Seventeen: Blessed Are Those Who Don’t Take Themselves So Seriously

We can afford not to take everything so seriously, because we already know how it’s all going to end.

Chapter Eighteen: Blessed Are the Skeptics and Those Who Don’t Know Where Else to Go

Christianity is the most compelling worldview out there not only because it makes the best sense but also because it makes the best offer.

Chapter Nineteen: Blessed Are the Unnoticed

God doesn’t favour the sort of people we think he would; he favours the humble. We need less setting out to change the world and more doing little acts of obedience today.

Chapter Twenty: Blessed Are the Lonely

In the present age, it’s inevitable that we’ll feel more distant from God than we want to. But the wedding is coming, he is with us even now, and he has not forgotten us.

Chapter Twenty-One: Blessed Are the Misfit Royalty

Unlike the world, God elevates, even identifies with, the weak and the poor and the marginalised. We are to do the same. That’s our team. And it’s the winning team.

So there’s a summary for you. You’ve probably got a sense of some of the big recurring themes. Obedience trumps feelings; so does truth. Dissatisfaction and struggle in the present age is only to be expected.² Loving one another is fundamental, all the more because people are hard to deal with. And above all, God loves the misfits. None of this, to my mind, is “highly provocative”; it’s no more than what the scriptures say. But Mr. Hansen manages to show incredibly incisively how modern church culture fails to reflect these principles, all while refraining from turning the thing into an irritated tirade of the sort I’m prone to going off on when the issue of modern church culture comes up in conversation. As I say, the book contains both massive reassurance at being loved and massive exhortation to love – which sounds a lot like the Bible, really, so that kind of tells you why it’s so good. But as a last bit of persuasion, and to give you a sense of the totally charming tone of the thing, here are a few little extracts that I think are particularly nicely put.

I wanted friends. I wanted their excitement about God too. They told me I needed to “plug in” to everything. All of it. I would need to square-dance with strangers, “share” in intimate small small groups, and go up to people I didn’t know on campus and tell them about my faith.

This sounded fantastic to me! … Except for the square dances with strangers, the sharing in intimate small groups, and also the part about going up to people I didn’t know on campus and telling them about my faith.

Imagine if Noah wrote a book: How to Get God to Speak to You Five Times over 950 Years.

In Genesis, we get Abraham going decades without God’s audible voice. Isaac apparently heard it twice in his lifetime. Rebekah? Once.

Maybe God is like one of those Food Network master chefs, on one of those shows where they give cooks some random, odd ingredients and then challenge them to make a gourmet meal out of them. (“Okay, here’s a halibut, a gourd, and a Hostess Ding Dong.³ Go.”)

Maybe this is why Jesus’ stories are metaphors. Maybe you noticed He rarely picked individual people and didn’t name anyone to make his point. He never said, “Let me tell you about that time that Andrew here was really awesome and helped an old lady across the street and…”

I suspect He refrained from doing that because He knows us so well. He knows we’d instantly start missing the point and worshiping The Perfect Andrew and reenacting The Holy Crossing of the Street in yearly festivals.

Jesus takes the idea that we should treat some as more important than others and He burns it down, salts the fields around it, dissolves the whole thing in acid, and then hits it with a hydrogen bomb … and then we decide to do it anyway.

For example: He says we shouldn’t use religious titles (Matt. 23:8-12). I’m but a simple man, so I don’t understand all the theological and cultural complexities. But apparently higher minds than mine have unpacked the nuance behind, “Don’t use religious titles,” and found that He meant, roughly, “Hey, you guys should totally use religious titles!”

Well, I couldn’t really agree with that last one more if I tried, so let’s leave things there – with a thank you to Brant Hansen for writing the book, and an even bigger thank you to God that the conclusions reached in the book are true. To all the misfits out there: welcome to the club. We might be a weird bunch – weird and annoying and incapable, with too many ongoing struggles and no great spiritual achievements under our belts – but I can tell you for certain, our God is truly spectacular.

Footnotes

¹ Eight seventy-five? Bargain and a half. https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Brant-Hansen/Blessed-Are-the-Misfits--Great-News-for-Believers-who-are/21004854

² I blogged to similar effect in ‘Blessed Dissatisfaction’ back in July. I probably owe more of my argument there than I even realised then to having read Blessed Are the Misfits.

³ Apparently a kind of small, round, snack chocolate cake, with a cream filling and a chocolate glaze (I had to look it up).