On Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise

I’ve been meaning to write up something on Illinoise, Sufjan Stevens’s second entry into his admittedly incompleteable album-for-every-state project, ever since I bought it from iTunes last December. Since then, though, I’ve been busy with school, and decided that I probably should pick up and examine the earlier Michigan to get a fuller sense of the series of which Illinoise is a member. The reason I’ve wanted to write up Illinoise is that there is something legitimately amazing about what it accomplishes, something that can get lost in the midst of drooling fanboyness about Stevens’s spirituality and ability to play several dozen instruments, and so I think a close study of the album, and Stevens’s music in general, is in order.

What Sufjan Stevens Does Not Do Well

To define what is so phenomenal about Stevens and Illinoise, we first need to point about things that he doesn’t do well. It may be heresy, perhaps, to say that the man has shortcomings, but once one looks, his limitations are actually quite numerous. First, as I imagine anyone who isn’t an overly emo-come-listen-to-my-quiet-noble-pain type (or cares at all for the musical part of popular music) has noticed, Stevens is not a terribly good singer. His pitch is okay (unlike some pop stars), but his voice’s timbre is a gentle whisper that lets out unvocalized air like an air vent. Not only does this restrict him to a range of an octave in the meat of the tenor range most of the time, but, more importantly, it limits his emotional range. His voice can only express melancholic reflection—it is not capable of humor, exuberance, lust, anger, or any of a number of fairly crucial emotions. More importantly than any particular emotive lack, his voice lacks the power to change its mood, and that makes the narrators of his songs emotionally static and, often, a little less than human. He is only saved by the fact that his reflection is a bit guarded and ambiguous, and thus capable of plausibly assuming at least a range of meditative poses that can incorporate veiled joys and desires. As we will see later, this ambiguity powers most of the best tracks on Illinoise.

Additionally—and this will be a more jarring claim—Stevens is not a terrific lyricist. This is not to say that he is not an ambitious lyricist—anyone who titles songs “All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!” or “The Predator Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us” could never be accused of that. Nor do I claim that he is not an interesting or gifted lyricist—certainly the parallels between the absentee father addressing his son and that of God addressing His children that the two verses of “Vito’s Ordination Song” manage to evoke are far more difficult to pull off than either the “Ooh I love you baby”s of most pop or the random assortment of images that power questionably profound late 60s psychedelia. But his lyrics are not the polished poetic masterpieces that most Stevens fans think they are. Too much of Michigan, certainly, is covered in generic pity-me blahness. For example, take the lyric for the opening track, “Flint”:

It’s the same outside
Driving to the river side.
I pretend to cry
Even if I cry alone.
I forgot the start.
Use my hands to use my heart.
Even if I died alone.

Clichés all, and not a single original idea amidst them. To demonstrate how uninspired these lines are (as pure poetry, that is), imagine them screamed by Linkin Park. Fit right in, don’t they? This may seem so intuitively ludicrous, but often Stevens trades in the same stock images, rhymes, and themes as most run-of-the-mill writers of mockable whinefests. Sometimes he can go above and beyond them (often with stunning results) and sometimes he can’t, but he doesn’t always acknowledge the difference. Even in Illinoise’s wannabe-hit-single, “Chicago,” we get this bit of pompous lyrical inanity that, unsaved by any specific surrounding context, also fails the Linkin Park Test:

If I was crying In the van, with my friend It was for freedom From myself and from the land

More tears and big abstractions, used to easily grab unearned sympathy. And this is only one variety of Stevens’s derivative lyrical taste: we have not yet talked about Stevens the generic anti-advertising/mass culture decrier, Stevens the boring born-again, Stevens the spokesman for the hopeless rural poor, etc. And, outside of his wonderful song titles and the occasional blithe postmodern element, his lyrics make no attempt to push the limited emotional range of his voice: his lyrics are typically portentous, self-important, and dour.

What Sufjan Stevens Does Do Well

But how could Stevens be merely a hit-and-miss writer? When so many intelligent people claim such powerful responses to his songs, how could it be that his lyrics are not really profound? Many people, particularly those of the teenager-who-just-got-into-REAL-music variety (that is, like me in tenth grade), have the pre-conception that it is the lyric that defines the song—“Little Red Corvette” is great due to its twisted imagery, “Imagine” for its utopian vision, “Fuck Tha Police” for its political statement. Indeed, many students I taught over a summer course engaged in a project connecting popular songs to the themes of our term, and not a single one attempted to make a connection beyond the text of the lyric. The music, this type of listener thinks, can help dramatize the subject, but its work must be in service of the lyric—the music by itself is just pretty sounds, meaningless because it lacks an easy referent beyond its own noise.

And in some sense, this naïve approach is true. While instrumental music has its own logic, once a lyric or title is added to give it a context, the meaning of any song has to be routed through the lyric. Words signify things in the world, while pure music does not, and thus has interpretive precedence. But certain songwriters, those who recognize that they are better musicians than poets, can use flaccid or boring poetry as a foundation on which to build the real drama with the music. Indeed, most of Romantic opera is built on this theory, particularly with someone who was his own librettist, like Wagner. Wagner actually was a fine poet, but he knew he was more capable of subtlety in music than in language. So he would use his lyrics to verbally set up an idea, but then relate the verbal idea to a musical leitmotif and then complicate the idea by manipulating the leitmotif instead of the language. For example, in Das Rheingold, we hear Alberich singing a powerful Ring, after which we hear the Ring’s leitmotif, a mysterious and halting arpeggiation that descends and then awkwardly ascends again. That leitmotif then develops and modulates for a few moments until the scene changes to Valhalla—and then we hear Valhalla’s glorious theme, which, despite being backed by a firmer chord progression in assertive brass (eminently appropriate for a royal promenade) instead of the Ring’s murky woodwinds, uses nearly the same sequence of notes as the Ring’s. Wagner has set up the parallel with language, but the real art is in the music—the unexpected transition demonstrates that, even if it has a different setting and coloring, great power is at its root the same everywhere, whether good or evil, proud or cowardly, heavenly or earthly. We know now that the key conflict in this opera, and the three following, will be between these paralleled powers, the Ring and Valhalla. Stevens does not quite have Wagner’s compositional prowess (though, of course, Wagner spent about as much time on the Ring cycle as Stevens has yet been alive)—but he similarly uses lyrics that are not terribly remarkable as a springboard to name and develop ideas in musical terms. As we will discover in a moment, Illinoise is loaded with surprising musical moments that leap beyond their trite lyrics.

However, Stevens is not merely skilled at linking melodies to lyrics. Even more potent, to my ears, are his arrangements. Many gush over Stevens’s abilities to play several dozen instruments, but, while this is no mean feat, it’s not particularly unusual in popular music—Stevie Wonder and Prince also play countless instruments on their albums, as does Paul McCartney (though he does not play many that well). All of those men are innovators in their own way, but there’s a little something more expansive about Stevens. Each of the former men have a distinctive sound associated with them—Wonder plays pan-African-American R&B and soul, Prince plays hard rock flavored with 80s dance rhythms, and McCartney plays whimsical pop standards influenced by early American rock. Each, in short, managed to musically incorporate two or more popular genres with wide appeal to a particular culture. Mass cultures, after all, have tended to operate by identifying major characteristics that both can pull their members together (e.g., blues intervals and rhythm for a black American audience of the mid-20th century, catchy but complex jazz-inflected tunes for the sophisticated set of Depression-era America, etc.), but also separate them from other cultures who lack them. This is the double-edged nature of culture, that it simultaneously works to build community and exclude others from it. Thus it is an important feat of cultural work when a musician fuses the key musical elements of two cultures, as it validates and preserves the importance of each community but also demonstrates that the cultures can peacefully co-exist musically, and by implication in everyday life. Indeed, this is why musicians, like the three above, who can do it tend to have such musical success: their prospective audience is twice as large, and they symbolize an optimism—that cultural pride can exist without exclusion—that most people find attractive.

Stevens does not have the same kind of distinctive sound because he is not merely combining two or three related sounds, as the others did, which is an easier task to complete while still maintaining a commercial sensibility. Illinoise seems to want no less than to combine every single musical genre that has existed in the Prairie State (and thus the country) over the past two hundred years. I can’t think of another popular musician who has made this attempt, certainly not since the explosion of popular genres that came in the years after the gramophone. The closest that I can think of is The Band, whose first two albums somehow made the key lyrical and musical elements of folk, rock, country-western, blues, R&B, gospel, and pop work together seamlessly. In their best songs, like “The Weight,” it is impossible to separate the “gospel” or “folk” or “blues” elements from the rest. Indeed, in their concert film the Last Waltz, there never seems a thing out of place during their collaborations with musicians ranging from Muddy Waters to Neil Diamond to Emmylou Harris to Van Morrison to the Staples Singers.

And still, Illinoise—as distinguished from Michigan, which is content to wallow in slow ballads that employ various drones and acoustic guitars, banjos and pianos—actually goes one further: where The Band limited itself to the major popular genres of 1960s America (and their roots), Stevens adds band music, jingles, movie music, world music, traditional classical, Reichean minimalism, and techno, among others. His expanse is mind-boggling. Granted, he does not intertwine them as seamlessly as The Band did—the techno beat to “Chicago” is easily to locate and filter out, as is the rock guitar to “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts.” But other songs make the styles work in combination so well it is hard to remember that they have separate origins—the bass to “They are Night Zombies!!...” sounds lifted from a funk track, but its pulse lines up too well with the electronic drones, which themselves sound a lot like horror movie music…as would the violins, if only they didn’t resemble the folk strains of “Jacksonville.”

With the exception of “Chicago,” in fact, Stevens seems to be deliberately de-emphasizing the more popular genres on Illinoise, which may explain why he lacks the broad appeal of a McCartney or Prince. But it does make a claim that his music knows history—musical and otherwise—beyond the superficialities of pop, and it gives him more authority to speak for the history and populace of a whole state as he tries to do on Illinoise. In the rest of this paper, I will look at Illinoise song-by-song, highlighting what are, to my eyes, the five most important tracks, to examine how Stevens’s eclectic sense of composition and arrangement attempts to interpret and arrange the American experience.

Illinoise: A Close Examination

“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois”

Stevens has always dealt with faith in his music. Normally this is a turn-off for me. Stevens’s treatment of the subject in Michigan makes the album a much weaker experience for a non-believer: that he can catalogue endless desolations and still end the album with such platitudes as the repeated “There’s only one God who can raise the dead” in “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” and the insistent “There is a design” in “Vito’s Ordination Song” is far colder comfort than he intends. Illinoise, however, deals with the subject more honestly, and even though I do not agree with his conclusions, they provoke thought nonetheless and are profound enough to deserve dialogue. As Wayne Booth wrote in The Rhetoric of Fiction about Samuel Becket (a writer he loved despite rejecting point-by-point philosophically), “One of [Becket’s writings’] beauties is that it leads me, at every moment of my continuing encounter, to demand the best I can give. Even when I move to the proud moment of resistance, I know that I am wrestling with a powerful angel indeed” (457).

“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” is a powerful angel with which to start this album. It is the music that leads: the soft opening chords rest in the center of the piano before taking a dramatic leap into the upper register, which is only sustained for a few moments before retreating in pitch and volume. It is an opening that could almost start a teary-eyed pop ballad, except that it’s just a bit too unstable and uncertain. Certainly the fluttering flute that follows helps point it towards weirder territory without leaving the ballad ethos. Already, we see the universality that a musical ethos like Stevens’s can create; it’s an opening that asks us to take a step, just a step, beyond the usual comfort of pop clichés and start asking some real questions. That the real questions will have religious overtones is not something that puts off those of us who are hungering for serious engagement with complexity in our popular music. And they are only overtones, rather than explicitly Christian content: the lyrics discuss a flying saucer, a “mysterious shape” that takes the form of “three stars…delivering signs and dusting from their eyes.” This song does not affirm the existence of a Trinitarian God, or the Second Coming, as the “mystery” is intended seriously. Indeed, I will accept the equivalence of God and a UFO, as both are half-obscured, mythical entities that I have no basis on which to judge—though proof of the existence of either (which is not wholly improbable in either case) are perhaps the only two things that would seriously force a person like me to re-evaluate my (and our) place in the universe. The song’s unsettled setting and lyrical content evoke the rare quiet moments in which I have looked into the sky and briefly let down my guard against questions on subjects like these that, in wiser moments, I know I have no hope of answering. Having already accepted the unsteady pulse of the music as my own in the face of these visions, the sudden swells of other voices on short phrases like “Or what it was,” take me to the brief flashes where I feel like I’ve suddenly understood something, everything, about what’s going on beyond this world…only inevitably to be unable to state it, and lose the idea as the swell retreats. But even if this idea is lost, it does clear “dust from my eyes”; the song asks us to look at the big ideas that we do not, for the sake of our mental peace, visit often. This is also what the album as a whole asks of us as it takes us on a journey through history and geography. That three-note ascending swell will reappear (of course it would be three notes, for our good Christian songwriter), in various forms, throughout the album, to push us toward such cosmic speculation.

“The Black Hawk War…” instrumental follows, though it is not among the album’s most interesting songs. Its title contains about as many words as the lyrics of the previous song, but they’re more glib and accusatory, since Stevens doesn’t have to actually say them; they make the rather unoriginal (thought certainly true) point that there was a certain amount of condescension and brutality in the various American wars on Native Americans. But the strength of the previous song—Stevens’s ability to personalize and universalize Big Ideas—is gone here; the music uses a series of half-Indian, half-minimalist rhythms (though, of course, the latter derives from the former in part, and the connection is moderately interesting) to build up to…nothing in particular. The music “represents” Native Americans only in a broad sense, and thus can’t say much that is original.

“Come On! Feel the Illinoise!”

Stevens solves that problem of connecting the Big Ideas to the personal search for greater understanding much better in the first of the album’s two-part songs. The first part, “The World’s Columbia Exposition,” is, lyrically, full of historical generalities and reference-dropping about the spirit of American Exceptionalism in 1893 Chicago, with its new inventions, high fashion, and artistic movements, with the requisite internal conflict about where all of this is headed—it is similar to the type of broad social-historical analysis in “Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head” from Michigan (though the latter depicted complexity as a component of urban collapse rather than of development), as well as sharing that song’s use of complex rhythms and instrumental breaks to show the variety and bustle of urban life. It’s in the song’s second part, though, that these well-orchestrated clichés pay off. While the song’s two parts are not lyrically connected, the instrumental break from the first part provides the bridge into the second, implicitly connecting their ideas, while transitioning from 5/4 to 4/4 to bring us into a more private realm. Here, the ghost of Carl Sandburg, the poetic soul of Chicago (at least as Stevens sees him, though one hopes that Stevens would have been able to find a deeper thinker if he’d wished), approaches Stevens, who seems caught up in the same conflicts that the narrator of the first part engaged one hundred years previous: the overwhelming rush of Progress and the difficulties of finding oneself within it. The two accept that it is impossible to keep up—“Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated”—and that each man is “writing all alone.” The important thing is Sandburg’s question, “Are you writing from the heart?” It’s not a brilliant or original question, but set against the historical and musical background, it makes bigger connections, because if we listen to the end of “writing all alone” and “writing from the heart,” we hear that three-note ascending pattern again. Despite the totally different temporal and musical setting, this theme of spiritual search comes back, this time in a more artistic, rather than philosophic, perspective (and indeed, what is the difference between the two?).

“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”

This song requires special attention, as it’s perhaps the album’s best song and because it’s very different in both subject and setting from what has come before. Previous songs have made broad attempts to engage the bigger questions of the state’s history, and have required complex arrangements and opaque lyrics. However, this song is simply the story of one man; it’s easier to literally interpret, and its instrumentation is stripped down to a few voices and a guitar (a setting natural to any major genre of American popular music, maintaining the universal appeal). But in the context of the album, it must be read against the deeper yearning for understanding expressed in the first and third tracks. After all, the story of Gacy’s twenty-seven killings does defy explanation; it’s hard to see how his rapes and murders of young boys could possibly fit into any “design” of the kind Vito was assured of at the end of Michigan. To its credit, unlike most serial-killer profiles, this song does not make an attempt to psychologize—the only clues we have is that his father was alcoholic, and that he hit his head on a swingset. So if the song is not trying to work out Freudian motivations, what does it do instead?

As a poem, “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” is interesting, but hardly well-formed. Consider this verse:

Look underneath the house there Find the few living things Rotting fast in their sleep of the dead Twenty-seven people, even more They were boys with their cars, summer jobs Oh my God

If this were a poem, that last line would just be an easy, melodramatic way to get out of a verse, as the idea of his victims’ innocence in the previous line is out of steam (nor is the idea of destroyed innocence a terribly new one). But in a musical setting, Stevens makes it work. First, note how the “Oh my God” opposes the “dead” three lines up (itself an awkward cliché out of musical context), which descends a little bit below Stevens’s effective singing range, suggesting that Gacy’s killings are incomprehensible and musically unfathomable, as the absence of psychological investigation suggests. So far, Stevens has found a way to grapple with the unfathomable on this album through his engagement with his heart and faith, and thus when the lyric “Oh my God” ascends into Stevens’s falsetto, wavers, and falls back, it’s not just expressing shock and disgust as a poetic reading would imply. It’s searching for that greater meaning, for the presence of God, among the senselessness of Gacy’s killings. But, unlike the more hopeful first and third tracks, it finds none. When the third line in the next verse, which also ends in “dead,” surprisingly jumps up into an uneasy falsetto, we see Stevens redoubling his efforts to make such greater sense of the indecipherable serial killing. But Stevens finally admits in the last verse:

And in my best behavior I am really just like him Look beneath the floorboards For the secrets I have hid

This verse abruptly cuts off halfway in, and on its last note, “hid” returns to that lower, almost unsingable, register. The weird depths that cause Gacy’s killings are not part of any higher plan Stevens can find; moreover, they’re part of a misty human nature that he is complicit in and lacks the strength to fully plumb or the endurance to continue after. This is why this song is so haunting—it takes a man who has had success grappling with the big mysteries and breaks him down so far that he not only cannot explain the suffering of others, but he cannot even make sense of himself. This is a Stevens who is seriously questioning God, and not being answered

This is the darkest that the album gets—as dour as “The Seer’s Tower” is, its questions are not as existentially crippling as “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”’s—and it is unfortunate that it happens so early. “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” is followed by “Jacksonville,” an upbeat tale of a blind country boy who seems to be managing his life just fine—as far as he’s concerned, “the Spirit is right and the Spirit doesn’t change.” It’s a fine, catchy character study that does a lot of work on the album’s genre-blending (working together banjo blues with a marching band arrangement and mildly unsettling background strings), but it’s a poor follow-up to the song that precedes it. Perhaps Stevens was aware of this, and brought out those background strings to depict the erratic Mary Todd Lincoln of her later years and therefore suggest that our blind friend’s optimism is ill-placed. But “Decatur” is in a similar boat as “Jacksonville” seemingly a celebration merely of how many English words rhyme with “Decatur,” though its general theme of examining personal crises in the midst of natural beauty is better-done on “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us.” It is not merely that Stevens has not answered the darkness he’s hit, it’s that he seems to be ignoring it entirely. With that, the album’s momentum begins to flag and its concept to weaken. The early placement of this spiritually-crippling ballad is probably the single biggest mistake on the album, far greater than any indulgence in brief instrumental tracks or flippant over-titling. Only the immense variety of Stevens’s gifts, which make even the lesser songs worth listening to on their own merits (at least for the album’s first half), keep it from being fatal.

“Chicago”

As I’ve noted already, “Chicago”—which is rivaled only by “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” as the album’s best-known song—does not have a brilliant lyric. It’s filled with the same lost-on-the-highway clichés that fill many American pop songs; the best of these is Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” which has a clearly-defined story and arcs through hope into confusion by way of oblique images and mundane details. Largely devoid of character and scene (due, again, to that limit in the humanity of Stevens’s voice), “Chicago” does not have “America”’s lyrical strengths. Even its catchy refrain of “All things go/grow/know” was passé by the timeGeorge Harrison released All Things Must Pass in 1971. But its musical setting is a major accomplishment. If it lacks the deftness of composition found in “Concerning the UFO Sighting” and “John Wayne Gacy,” it is conceptually a major contribution to the album. Though the vocal melody and arrangement is similar to that of earlier tracks, the techno pulse to “Chicago” is new, and is the most contemporary element on Illinoise. It combines with, and subsumes, the strings and drones that have been in much of the album’s first half, and in doing so recontextualizes the spiritual yearnings of the album’s eclectic indie sounds for a popular urban audience. After all, where better to sense the confusion and uncertainty of the contemporary world than in a darkened dance club? If the 5/4 brass of “Come on Feel the Illinoise!” represented the pinnacle of urban sophistication and complexity at the 1893 World’s Fair, this relentless unchanging dance beat expresses the unending and unchanging motion of 21st-century life. The fact that it is not as precisely composed as earlier tracks is actually a strength—this song is about a broad sense of loss that continues unbroken from Chicago to New York, among parking lots and vans and apartments, reminiscent of the cultural heat death that Thomas Pynchon first described in “Entropy.”

Speaking of Harrison, “Chicago” serves as a pseudo-Buddhist sermon for the album much in the way “Within You Without You” did for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the midst of stories about individuals struggling to find themselves in a chaotic world, one seeker pops out of the haze and accepts powerlessness; it’s a melancholy resignation, but its cosmic awareness keeps it from being a tragic one. The only difference is that “Within You Without You” is better placed, responding to the conflict of the optimism of “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “Getting Better” with the ensuing existential confusion and weirdness of “Fixing a Hole” and “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” and preparing the escalation of that conflict in the album’s strongest late tracks like “When I’m 64” and “A Day in the Life” (of course, the presence of the especially weak “Good Morning” dislodges this a bit, but not even the Beatles were perfect). Illinoise does things backwards; it starts with the weird and uncomfortable tracks before moving into the more pleasant and weaker ones, which both only half-heartedly relieve the previous doubts and furthermore render “Chicago,” while a strong number and a better track than either of the two preceding ones, a bit purposeless. The song holds on by tying back to the recurring three-note motif: where the motif had ascended in search of the divine in earlier tracks, here it descends with each repeat of “All things go/know/grow.” The descent is stable, like the ascent in “Come on Feel the Illinoise!,” as opposed to the rush of “Concerning the UFO Sighting…”; this is the work of a realist, with an all-too-strong sense of how the forces surrounding him repulse his ability to transcendence beyond the generic fate of all other matter.

The succeeding “Casimir Pulaski Day” also gets caught in this problem of flow. Its restrained instrumentation is quite similar in style and quality to “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” and also deals with humanity’s relationship to God in the face of death. Indeed, as pure poetry it is nicely understated, with the parallel between the unneeded “complications” of the narrator’s romantic relationship to his doomed friend and those of God’s relationship to the world standing out as one of the album’s best lyrical moments. But it cannot stand up to the force of the best early tracks. The fact that the album does not soon draw to a close, but continues on for well over a half an hour, drowns the song even more; the album has been so emotionally exhausting so far that there seems little reason to continue. “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts” is a waste of six minutes except as an excuse to include a harder rock element. If Stevens had used it for humor, as the song’s parallel of Superman and God could have had a postmodern levity yet unexplored in the album, it might have worked, but despite throwing himself into a different musical setting, his voice remains incapable of anything other than a tender and plaintive whisper, and thus the song becomes a silly exposition of ideas that have already been explored instead of an interesting new take on them. “Prairie Fire That Wanders About” works a bit as a late album parallel to “The Blackhawk War,” as their steadily-paced drones both mark a routine but fierce destruction of the landscape, but the album’s focus has stumbled enough by now that it’s difficult to tell what Stevens wants to do with such a parallel beyond making the jokey rhyme of “Peoria” and “Destroyia.” The album is on very unsteady footing by now; luckily, the following song, the album’s last great piece, moves things back on track.

“The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us”

This is the album’s only real response to its bleakest tracks—it is a song that remains defiantly joyful in the face of subject matter that is anything but. It begins softly, with a tonally ambiguous guitar and recorder (the instrument of choice for the young and innocent in America). Its opening lyrics and melody are tender, showing a narrator who is young, hopeful, and on the verge of discovering wonders he had hitherto been completely unaware of:

Thinking outrageously I write in cursive I hide in my bed with the lights on the floor Wearing three layers of coats and leg warmers I see my own breath on the face of the door Oh I am not quite sleeping Oh I am fast in bed There on the wall in the bedroom creeping I see a wasp with her wings outstretched

This is a place where Stevens’s voice shines: its delicate jumps in the second verse show both joy that has one foot in naïve exuberance and the other in sad wisdom. Both are deserved: in the coming verses, we learn that he is writing to his best friend, whom he fell deeply in love with after the two were bitten by the wasp while swimming in the Palisades and who proceeded to shun him and run away. In most songs, this story is a tragedy, but in this one it is the love, rather than the eventual loss, that is celebrated. The song’s middle in an incredibly forceful choral and orchestral crescendo, minimalist in structure but not in volume, as it praises “Oh great sights upon this state! / Wonders bright, and rivers, lake.” The love may be doomed, but the narrator doesn’t care, as he is overwhelmed with the power of love unlocked by nature through the little wasp. And the wonder goes higher than just nature, with “Hallelujahs” interspersed through the huge musical canvas (listen how close the “Hallelujahs” sound to the other lyric “We were in love…). Again, as with the album’s opening track, this is not a blind trust in God—it is justified awe at the world and whatever forces shaped it. As we might expect, as the chorus repeats the word “Palisades” over and over, we hear that three-note motif again, rushing upward as steadily and powerfully as it does anywhere. Even in the final verse, when the friend has departed, the echoes of this melody and orchestral punch hold strong, as the narrator recalls his friend and admits his inability to explain the forces around him—the sting was “terrible,” but it doesn’t matter, because he “loves him each day.” The song decrescendos, of course, into a long feedback drone, because the relationship cannot go on, but it is bittersweet, not sad. In the face of the bleakest songs on this album, this song’s ability to salvage sweetness out of tragedy is the most hopeful sign in the quest to make meaning out of life. Perhaps even this sensibility cannot sort of John Wayne Gacy or even the strikes of cancer, but it can find joy somewhere.

From here on, the songs are largely unexceptional. “They Are Night Zombies!!...” has a solid groove and blends genre impressively, but its history-conscious lyrics are too vague to be taken seriously and not playful enough to be really funny (excepting the wonderful use of exclamation points in the title). “The Seer’s Tower” is as trying as “The Man of Metropolis…,” as a four-minute bit of insipid pseudo-mystical piano-fueled cosmic bleakness is unendurable after nearly an hour’s worth of existentially-taxing songs. “The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders,” is over-long, and while its first half, “The Great Frontier,” analyzes the contradictions of American expansionism similarly to “Come On Feel the Illinoise”’s treatment of American technological progress, its second part does not do as good a job at bringing the consequences of it home in a personal sense as on the earlier two-part song, though its repeated, slow ascents do a fair job of raising some final ideas about the dual “Great Goat Curse” of the Chicago Cubs and Satan, as well as looking to the “Great Ghost” to resolve it (he does not). The final track, “Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind…,” is not particularly exciting either, but its drones and soft piano line, beginning quietly and then building to a respectably intense climax and close, are an appropriately uncertain, forward-looking, and delicate way to walk away from the album’s big questions back into the real world.

Conclusion

But my dismissal of these songs is largely intended in relief to the brilliance of the others; the five I’ve cited are all stunning works, and, song-for-song, the first half of this album can stand up against that of nearly any other concept album for sheer intellectual scope. It uses all of its creator’s varied gifts to come to terms with the history of a specific place as well as the eternity of the universe, and even makes a convincing musical case for joy in the midst of pain (though tempered by melancholy, wisdom, and even fear at our natural physical and moral weaknesses). Such an attempt is all one can ask of an artist.

I’ve noted at various points that I think there’s something about the album’s order that does not work, and indeed, I think this could be a near-perfect album if a few numbers were cut and others were re-ordered. Consider the order below—it cuts two of the album’s weakest tracks and some of its incidental clutter, bringing it closer to an hour in duration, which is a more manageable span. Furthermore, the flow is much better—the jokiness of numbers like “The Black Hawk War” and “They Are Night Zombies!!,” as well as the innocent optimism of “Jacksonville” and “Decatur,” can be better enjoyed without having to bear the weight of the early “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” which is properly ramped up to and out of by the surrounding tracks. It even preserves Stevens’s tempered optimism by climaxing on “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades,” rather than either “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” or “Chicago,”—indeed, this order gives the album a clear climax, period, rather than the general sputtering out that it currently has:

“Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois”
“Come On, Feel the Illinoise!”
“Jacksonville”
“A Short Reprise…”
“The Black Hawk War…”
“They Are Night Zombies!!...”
“In This Temple…”
“Casimir Pulaski Day”
“Decatur”
“Praire Fire That Wanders About”
“Chicago”
“John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”
“The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades”
“The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders”
“Riffs and Variations…”
“Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind…”

But, this aside, the album remains astounding in terms of its musical ambition (and the success rate of its innovations), its compositional prowess, and its . It raises all of the important questions about humanity’s place in the world within a nearly-universal interconnection of American music, and its results, while not making any brilliant philosophic breakthroughs, challenge serious musical thinkers as well as their share of laypeople who take the meditative life seriously, regardless of whether they agree with Stevens’s metaphysics. It may be a less cohesive album than Michigan, but its ideas are far more provocative, and as far as I see, that makes it a far greater contribution to popular music. It provides an apparatus that is magnificently complex without being exclusive on which we can think about our place in the universe.

Religion in America, And Why You Shouldn’t Be Part of It

I suppose I’m at the end of the cycle on this: first, the Republicans increase their appeals to the evangelicals in their successful efforts to win 2000-2004 elections; then a handful of atheist/agnostic academics (note: for this essay, “atheist” will mean “either positively disbelieving in God nor particularly believing in any god” and “agnostic” will refer to the compatible position that we cannot know anything about any world beyond our own reality),write best-selling anti-religion screeds; then major news magazines reflect upon whether this wave of anti-religious sentiment can mean much in a country that is roughly 80% Christian and 85-90% theist, and try to make some ponderous and non-committal statement to look as if they’ve made some wise conclusion; and now I try to take things back another step and reflect on the whole mess.

I’ll be up front with my own convictions: I have no religious beliefs, and have not since the social-control dynamic of religion was pointed out to me in a ninth-grade history class, and I further reflected that a) nothing about my character would change if I stopped believing in God, and b) that I couldn’t justify being amused at the silliness of Hindus and Shintoists for believing in all sorts of bizarre anthropomorphic traits and moral failings when I was part of a religion whose God termed himself “a jealous God” in his First Commandment and who felt someone that sending His Son to Earth to be offed would be a good way to redeem mankind for (what we would term today to be an eminently healthy) thirst for knowledge that had occurred ages previous. Furthermore, for a long time I’ve found it nigh-on inconceivable that any intelligent person could maintain religious beliefs past high school, a feeling that has been doubly frustrating by knowing many undeniably intelligent people who are religious. And while “religious tolerance” is held as a central doctrine of modern liberalism, I feel like I can’t avoid begrudging people their religion because it manages to keep butting into issues that actually are important—issues, indeed, of life and death.

So in this essay, I’d like to go step-by-step through what religion in today’s world is like (using American Christianity as the go-to test case), what the reasons for and against its existence are, and the problems with its continued existence. As I’ve said, I’m in the agnostic minority—at least, I think I am. After all, in 1998 I was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church, only to reject it a year later. Particularly considering that I attended every Sunday for several years more at my mother’s insistence and continue to get the church bulletin mailed to my apartment, I imagine I’m still listed in any relevant census data as part of the 80%. More people might be in this boat with me, but, I’ll assume the polls are more or less accurate, and I will begin by trying to outline their attacks on atheism and justifications of religion. Of course, one merely charges that atheists are simply flat-out wrong, and if they cannot feel the glory of God within themselves or within Creation, then that’s their problem, because everyone else sees it. This line of argument devolves very quickly into a “Uh huh!”-“Uh-uh!” debate over whether God’s presence is evident on its face; the fact that this argument exists suggests that it isn’t, but I’ll address this later.


Religious “Tolerance”

Some people might claim that undertaking such a project is beside the point, because all religions should be accepted charge that atheistic screeds against religion are “intolerant.” After all, one of the biggest complaints non-religious people have had against Christianity is that Christianity’s intolerance toward other religions (of course, you can replace “Christianity” with “Islam” or with any sect or subsect and this would still be true) has led to countless wars and persecutions. It is thus a commonplace that the during the Enlightenment move towards tolerance of religious practice is central to an open, liberal Western society: it is taken as a given that there will be many religions, and mutual respect of worship will be the best way to keep these groups from fighting with each other. In this line of reasoning, atheists who try to convert, denigrate, or express personal offense at religious practitioners are little better than the Spanish Inquisition. Some take this counter-attack further and claim that atheism is a “religion” itself, just one that happens to have no God, and is as much an article of faith as anything else, and thus is in no position to judge other religions.

This last line of attack can only exist because of this word “tolerance,” which has subtly done, with little remark from the popular press, immense harm to the foundations of popular liberalism (as wonderfully depicted in Doonesbury some years ago). While on the one hand it seems to lovingly accept all views into its fold, and thus shuts out no one. But it is often taken to a level of amorality that leaves liberals literally unable to refute anything, because anything that has enough cultural clout becomes a simple “cultural tradition” that must be respected. As an undergrad at Williams, I watched a classroom full of very intelligent African Studies students come to the conclusion that female genital mutilation was an acceptable tribal practice; Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind documents a similar phenomenon with the burning of widows in India. (A more complex case comes with the 1990 Supreme Court ruling that Native American tribes are allowed to use the relatively mild but still quite dangerous hallucinogen peyote in rituals.) While Karl Rove can mobilize an evangelical base by playing on their unrelenting intolerance of homosexuals and by plainly portraying them as “bad” people, liberals cannot draw up a similarly mobilizing ire for foaming-mouth Christians. Why? Because their religious views must be respected and tolerated; to be “intolerant” of “intolerance” is simply hypocritical, as both liberals conservatives try to get away with claiming.

Liberals badly need to redefine what “tolerance” means to avoid such ridiculous logical grounds. Imagine that there grew a religious sect whose principles encouraged casual murder as part of a sort of naturist method of communing with the spiritual through our primal roots. We might say this sect’s members would be quickly arrested, because committing murder would violate the law, but since the law is obviously malleable based on the religious leanings of the people in power regardless of national norms (cf. gay marriage laws in liberal bastions like San Francisco and Massachusetts), this might not be true in a community where its members were dominant. As a society, I believe we could condemn it without qualm, because having random murders going on would completely destabilize the everyday functioning of life as we know it. Furthermore, it would break the axiomatic “self-evident truth” that people have a right to their own lives, which has been central to America since the Constitution. Of course, you could argue that this axiom is not self-evident (and I will discuss why it is later), but in essence the problem with this sect is that its beliefs are just illogical—if you caught someone arguing for that position, you would fight his principles as vigorously as if you caught him trying to knife his neighbor, because there is only a very small step between people honestly believing stupid things and doing stupid things.

Through this extreme case, I think it’s clear that tolerance should never extend to things that don’t make any sense. What many people forget is that there is a difference between relativism and, say, anarchy. Relativism does not say that anything goes—it merely claims that we should examine things in terms of their relationships to each other rather than as strictly interpreted by some arbitrary and rigid system. The problem with the latter is that life tends to be more complex than predicted, and even the best imaginable moral code will lead to some conclusions that do not seem, based on the principles informing that code, to be just. But relativism does not destroy morality—like Godel proved for any logical system, it requires an assumed first principle that cannot be logically proved. From first principles, though, we should be able to deduce the rest of the system. Now, there’s a great deal of disagreement over what does and does not make logical sense against the generally agreed upon first principles of our current America, because they’re somewhat vaguely defined, as they were the product of rhetoric rather than logic—for example, even limiting ourselves to the Declaration of Independence, a liberal argues that restricting abortion is affront on liberty, while a conservative argues that allowing it is an affront to life—but unless anyone wants to dispute that the pro-murder sect describes above has stupid beliefs (pending my reinforcement of the “life” self-evidence), I think we’ve established that there are cases where the logic or illogic of a particular position is clear.

Atheism, of course, is not really a position. Very few atheists will categorically claim that they know that God does not exist, due to the limits of Russell’s Teapot. Most will claim that we do not have believe in other things for which there is no reliable evidence or they will take the agnostic position that the issue of “evidence” becomes too complicated when dealing with religious matters and that nothing can be known about God at all. Atheism, thus, is not a religion; it is a lack of one. It can encompass a great many ethical systems, political perspectives, and aesthetic choices. It mandates absolutely nothing, while most religions mandate quite a few things. Therefore, it makes no sense to compare atheists who look to convert to fundamentalists, because atheism has no fundamentals beyond the lack of proof for the existence of God; it is a wholly logical position. But of course, it is common today for people to decry opponents on any issue as “religious fundamentalists” of some kind, most notably on global warming. This misses the point; if every authority on religion, after studying the matter closely for years, came to a single conclusion which could be supported by data and models, I would gladly convert to their religion. Charges of “fundamentalism” should be limited to those who rely on assumptions that are neither questioned, provable, nor terribly good at describing the world—in an uncharitable mood, I might describe many of the market capitalists who circularly rely Smithian ideas of the “invisible hand” to both explain how the system allows CEOs to make hundreds of millions of dollars when their companies fail and to morally justify such actions as fitting into this group.

“Faith” and “Reason”

Another argument against a study such as this essay is that pursuing a logical justification for religion is beside the point. Many religious people, when asked for the reason that they believe in God, claim that to ask for reasons for faith is silly—faith is that which must carry humanity on when reason inevitably proves inadequate.

This brings out the tricky relationship between “faith” and “reason” in popular discourse, particularly as some religious people argue that “faith” and “reason” are not opposed to each other. And yet whenever one tries to argue that they do not contradict through specific example, it becomes clear that they do: the Bible, for example, has a very specific description of Creation that is not at all the one all scientific evidence tells us, so when Sam Brownback made this argument recently in an Op-Ed in the Times. Of course, many reasonable religious people over the past 500 years have said that the opening of Genesis is primarily symbolic or metaphoric, but even this move should demonstrate the gap between faith and reason—for 1500 years, three quarters of Christianity’s existence, few Christians questioned that this was literally how Creation took place. Certainly nothing in the language of Genesis suggests that this might be anything other than literal truth; one might think that if God was revealing His Word here that he might choose to be less circumspect. This argument seems then only a retroactive attempt to keep Creation relevant while capitulating to things that science demonstrates and that few reasonable people want to reject. But it represents an unqualified defeat of faith by reason—the two disagreed, and, excepting a few Young Earthers, on every point where the two overlap reason seems to have won out. The position of faith has now moved to an unfalsifiable poetic realm, where it is supposed to “represent” something to make a certain narrative point —though no one will pin down what it represents other than a narrative point. Indeed, if God inspired Genesis, He probably could’ve come up with some metaphoric creation that actually used the metaphor to say something profound, but other than noting the primacy of “the Word,” the misordered and woefully incomplete Creation seems to say no more of use than, “things that now exist once had to come into being.”

Every Christian who does not believe in this literal Creation has thus, with no qualification, chosen reason over faith. Presented with something from a trusted source that does not make sense and something from an impartial source that does, they go with the latter without even compromising. And that’s not much of a surprise to anyone; after all, what do we have in this confusing world except our reason? I think that when people talk about the limits of reason, they don’t really understand the implications of what they’re saying. Of course there are things that we don’t know yet, and there are things, such as weather patterns, that are of a complexity far beyond our current understanding; thus, there are things reason can not (yet) do. But there is nothing that can be done without reason. Just about every single thing any human ever does is rational. And you form habits because you go by the theory that things that are repeated in more or less the same way multiple times—whether it be tying your shoes or playing a sport or having sex— will have basically the same results. If you threw out everything you came to by reason you would be literally paralyzed; there would be almost no function you could perform. Indeed, you could not even argue for the primacy of faith without using reason. This gets confusing sometimes because the fact that all of our decision-making is rational does not mean that we are particularly good at it. If a happily married man goes off to have an affair with a co-ed, he is not abandoning reason, but he is making rational decisions that he might regret; that is, he will decide at a given moment that it pains him less to repress the hormone-driven fantasies of a half-naked twenty-year-old in his lap than to contemplate what the future reaction of his wife might be. That when he sees said wife’s reaction his priorities become reversed does not mean that he was not using reason, only that he was using it poorly. After all, the deceptive imagery that certain decisions take place in our “heart” or “stomach,” etc. hides the fact that all of this is going on in the various lobes of the brain, coming together in the cerebrum.

Indeed, many things that people refer to as “faith” are actually the results of rational processes. For example, in the finale of Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, a song called “Have a Little Faith In Me” plays while Matthew Perry and his wife benignly argue over religion and then have a loving reconciliation; the implication is that their “faith” in each other is more important than this minor matter of religion. But what they feel isn’t “faith”—they know that the other person has a track record of doing decent and kind things, and will likely continue to do so. Because of their different metaphysics, they don’t quite understand why, which makes the experience a little mystical, but then there are lots of scientific effects that have been repeatedly observed without being fully explained which are relied upon as if they were (most prominently, gravity). It might make sense to lend money to a friend with a record of prudence and resourcefulness if he asks you to have “faith” in some harebrained idea; it would be foolish to put faith in someone who had a record of borrowing money and not repaying it. Given the incredibly poor predictive power of religion as well as its tendency to be entirely misguided on matters of history, natural science, and ethics, I think it would be eminently unreasonable to put their kind of “faith” in God.

And many people of faith, in fact, do not. When they see a difference between the Bible and reason, they take the reasonable conclusion and find some way to twist the Bible into a position where it metaphorically or ironically leans away from its literal meaning; over a millennium’s worth of Europe’s most brilliant men have been wasted on this project. This tradition goes back at least to someone as pious as Milton, who managed to talk his way around Christ’s clearly-stated prohibition on divorce by stitching together a few other passages that could be construed as placing a priority on a functional marriage, which could be used to argue for the divorce of a bad marriage. Milton was quite straightforward about his sophistry in doing this, noting that the Bible could be used, in such a fashion, to argue anything, and that interpretation needed to be left up to the individual Christian. And yet such a conclusion seems against the entire purpose of religion—if it is up to the individual to decide what parts of a religion are valid and which are not, why have religion at all? Clearly there is some other decision-making mechanism at work that supersedes religion and does not require it, that pushes people to discard the literal meaning of Creation and choose one of Christ’s passages over the other; by Occam’s Razor, why not simply rely on it without also tying religion into the mix? Let me blaspheme for a moment: if John Milton, who, next to Dante, is undoubtedly the greatest Christian poet who ever wrote, lived in an age where anyone but the most shunned heretics openly disavowed God, he would unquestionably have called himself an atheist. Why? Because he believed in the power of a (learned) individual’s reason over that of faith in tradition and text.

Then this comes down to a case of logic—is there a God, or not? We should investigate the standard logical proofs for the existence of God, and if no convincing ones are found, we might be able to make a judgment regarding the logic of believing in any supernatural deities. If there is no logical reason to do so, we can conclude that religion is a waste of time.

“Proofs” of the Existence of God

Since a small minority of religious people claim to have had a personal, direct experience with God, the burden of proof is on those who have religion to make the case to those of us who don’t. As far as I know, there are six major logical arguments for God’s existence. I don’t expect that I’m adding anything terribly new to philosophy, but here they are, along with the best refutations I know for them:

First: Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the idea that, due to the law of cause and effect, every that happens is caused by something else, and since we can’t just keep going back and back infinitely, there must once have been an effect without a cause. This Unmoved Mover, whatever it is, we define as God. Of course, ever since mankind conceived of a negative infinity as well as a positive one, an infinite retreat into the past has not seemed unnatural to the Earth we know. Even if it were, why would such a being need to be a God? Could it not just be some random blip in the space-time continuum on its own, that we might finally begin to understand in a thousand years? Furthermore, a slavish dependence on cause-and-effect doesn’t work in religions where there’s free will (as there is in most of Christianity)—if nothing can happen that has not been caused, then everyone is at the mercy of the forces around them, which, as Ahab noted when nearing his doom, must have been “set in motion a billion years ago.”

Second: ID (Intelligent Design), which I call FI (Failure of Imagination). This is the idea that the world works so fabulously that it couldn’t have come into existence by mere chance; if everything simply happened on its own, the odds that a functioning universe and planet could emerge are minute. It’s better than Unmoved-mover because the being it defines as God seems to be more Godly in nature. Furthermore, the odds it sets are probably right; if the Big Bang had even slightly different properties, the raw materials would have just compressed back into their original form, and even so, the odds that a planet that could support life would magically appear make these odds even smaller. But if you count up the billions of stars in the universe and then the tens of billions of lifeless planets around them, put that in the denominator, and then put our one Earth in the numerator, we’d get a pretty small probability. On the cosmic scale, while we say that the universe is only 14 billion years old, that date is just measured since the Big Bang. Imagine if, before that, there was an infinite expanse of time and space, of which we know nothing. Let’s suppose there’s an even smaller probability of the Big Bang happening that there is of life on Earth, given a Big Bang. But if the probability is non-zero and time is infinite, and each failed Big Bang collapses back to a set of initial conditions that are basically unchanged (or indeed, if there are infinite other sets of materials that could cause a Big Bang), not only is the Big Bang possible, but, according to the Infinite Monkey theorem (one of probability’s most basic) it must happen. There may well have been a billion googolplexs of Big Bangs that didn’t work and collapsed back in on themselves, but so long as there is any probability of our universe arriving from the pre-Big Bang state of being, the universe as we know it had to happen, one of this dodecillion years. And one more point on the perfect design of our universe: if IDers understand this divinely-created universe well enough to claim that its complexity is irreducible and only the work of God, why then did God make so many barren planets? Why not put life-supporting capabilities on all of them? And if Design is divine, what kind of joke was God trying to pull when he made the same organs perform sex acts and elimination?

As a sidenote: this argument generally flows from the “God in the gaps” fallacy, i.e., that since we do not understand something now (and perhaps even lack the basic vocabulary in which to conceive it), that its true nature must exist on a plane entirely beyond comprehension and thus be the result of some higher intelligence. That may well end up being true, but there was also a time when we could not understand earthquakes, tides, and disease, and we rightly look back on the people who thought these were the results of demons and direct Divine intervention as being ignorant and superstitious. We are slowly learning more about the universe around the time of the Big Bang, and I suspect that in one hundred, or one thousand, years we will know so much more that it would be silly to even speculate on it now. The bottom line is that it is the Intelligent Design position that is the close-minded one—we can’t possibly figure this out without the presence of God—and the rationally investigative one that is not—we might figure something else out, but this is what we have now.

Third: the ontological argument. I may mangle this a bit, but I believe the reasoning goes that since we can recognize imperfection, then we must be able to conceive perfection, and if we know what perfection is, we must be able to conceive a perfect being, and if we can recognize a perfect being, we must have gotten that idea from some fixed standards of perfection that can only exist in a non-relativistic universe with a God to provide them. I don’t think anyone uses this these days, because it so clearly collapses when you try to make two people define why something that they agree is imperfect is imperfect. For example, we might say that being uncharitable is an imperfection. But is it imperfect not to give a given beggar change—might that beggar only be acting, or just trying to get beer money? But refusing to give change is just as bad; perhaps the beggar will be near death without it. If we do decide to give change, how much should you give? If we do decide on the “proper” amount, how will know that that was the “right” thing to do—who says so? In short, the fact that we recognize imperfection is because everything is imperfect; we know that perfection is impossible due to our lack of omniscience, and without knowing everything, we can never comment on the presence, or absence, of perfection.

Fourth: Pascal’s wager that, even if we can’t be sure of the existence of God, it’s better to believe in him, and have even odds of eternal heaven and nothingness, than to not believe in him, and have even odds of hell and nothingness. This is one that, happily, goes away as populations diversify; even in the Enlightenment, Diderot noted that the presence of multiple mutually-contradictory religions made this difficult to swallow, because it implied that you should be both a Christian and Muslim. Still, Rick Warren used it in a Newsweek interview with Sam Harris a few months back and got away with it, so clearly it still persuades some people. While I’ll give Pascal credit for realizing that his argument for religion is based more on wishful thinking than reason, the fact is that we are not dealing with 50-50 chances of a Christian universe or a godless one—we are dealing with hundreds of current religious worldviews and, more importantly, infinite conceivable metaphysics, so many that assigning probabilities to them would be ridiculous. John Fowles has it right; Pascal’s wager makes more sense as an argument for atheism. By keeping yourself from committing to a religion, you both get to make the most of life on its Earthly terms, and in the event that you have to answer to St. Peter (or some other gatekeeper), you can honestly say, “I tried to figure it out, dude, honest. You might suggest that the Boss be clearer next time, and not let so many equally-ludicrous religions run around all over the place.” Of course, you still might go to hell, but all of the other sensible people will be there for you to hang out with, and if you ever get bored, you can get together a party to go to Satan and sign up to rebel against the Almighty Tyrant again—what’s he going to do if you lose, send all of you Hell? If we accept Pascal at all, it should make us all Mormon—that’s an awesome afterlife.

Fifth: the argument that man, without ever having a particular reason, naturally believes in the divine and only bothers to come up with reasons after the fact, which indicates that belief in God is a natural state of being, in comparison to the vast creative projects required to imagine a world without God. I only mention this because an author of one of Stanford’s Philosophy pages pulled this silly theory out. There are a lot of things that mankind, across cultures, “naturally” believed in: that sickness was caused by demons, that earthquakes were direct emanations of God’s anger, and all other manner of silly things that we later found natural explanations for. Because it is “natural” does not mean that it is true or even makes any sense; humanity proves many things to be true that had seemed implausible, if not utterly counter-intuitive. Consider how improbable it is that the area under a curve should equal the difference of the antiderivative of its bounds, no matter what the curve on those bounds looks like. That required an immense amount of thought to generate, and practically all modern science—and by implication most of modern life—requires it.

Sixth: the argument from moral impetus. As far as I understand it, this claims that most of us aren’t complete bastards, even when we could get away with being complete bastards for our own personal gain. This suggests that we have some innate sense of responsibility and decency towards others, which, since it repudiates worldly gain, must come from a sense of moral duty, some little spark of the divine that makes us (even us atheists) merciful and kind. Perhaps there is a clean refutation of this floating in philosophical circles, but I haven’t heard it yet, and the last time I got into a theological discussion I couldn’t deflect it. I suppose I’m in good company, as Socrates can’t get around it in The Republic when discussing the Ring of Gyges. The Republic, of course, is honest about its use of religion: the religion is to be a complete lie that is completely believed in by the society so as to give shape and meaning to everyone’s life and keep order, which is inherent in this argument but not usually admitted.

As I formulate the theory now, it seems full of holes. Of course, many people are bastards when they can get away with it (cf. aforementioned CEOs), and this tends to have little to do with their religious affiliation. If we are all divinely-created, why do these people lack this sensibility? Beyond that, let’s assume that some of us do have some sensibility that is not completely self-interested, that does reach beyond our own selves so that we will do some things selflessly, without fear of punishment. I will admit that I feel something like that, or at least I have since I began to emotionally mature around middle school. As with the Unmoved Mover, defining this essence as God does not make sense. Let me formulate a secular version of it: if I am to repudiate all ethics beyond self-interest and fear of punishment, I must tell myself that I am fundamentally different from all of those around me, at least from my own perspective. If I have also repudiated God, this makes me a very lonely person. Now, some solipsistic people can deal with such loneliness, and even be happy because of it (again, said CEOs…). But most people cannot. Most people, especially those who do not have the solace of a God, require the company of others. But to make any kind of connection, we must admit that we have something in common with those around us—from ancient times until this day, one of the primary social activities of mankind has been finding things to have in common with other people. If we do, then we cannot fully separate ourselves. To be Darwinian about it, I would guess that genes (or, indeed, social theories) that promote cooperation and understanding between people would generally be selected for, as teamwork tends to led to better survival rates, except in the case of those who can succeed at tasks nearly single-handedly and need not care about anyone else (again, CEOs). Thus, we only end our loneliness if we empathize with others, and if we empathize with others we would tend to do unto them as they would do unto us. Indeed, I think it makes sense that the Universal Moral Rule need not be derived out of any particular religion or ethics, but comes from the basics of the human condition.

The Logical Angles, in Summary

I believe that these are the major logical justifications for the existence of God, and I hope that this demonstrates that none of them are terribly sound. Many of them still suggest or allow the existence of some God-like being, and in some cases some even say that the existence of God is a simpler and more elegant thesis than getting rid of him (e.g., ID). But whenever this is the case, it is because we find that human thought is not complex enough to understand Life or Creation at its primal stage—for example, the moral impetus argument takes a behavior that we do not understand, and attributes it to the vast unknowability of God. Therefore, the defining feature of these logically-argued Gods is that they operate in areas we know nothing about. How can these Gods be explained by religion if they are utter mysteries? How can we logically justify any religion when the argument for the existence of the supernatural requires God to be incomprehensible?

The logical extension of this is that any religion that identifies particular things about God will almost immediately self-contradict. Let us look at Christianity, which affords so many examples of this that it’s hard to pick just one. I’ll take this one—a famous Christian saying is that God never gives a person more than he or she can bear. I would argue that if God believed the Middle Passage of the slave era to be bearable, particularly in comparison to the burdens of the middle-class West profiting from it, He understands nothing of his creations. The best proof of Christianity’s logical instability comes in the double-sided responses to questions of why certain things happen to certain people. Brother Juniper’s conclusion in The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a fine example, where an identical misfortune happens to people who stretch the moral gamut. The holiest of them is said to be rewarded by being called home, for God is only concerned with heavenly rewards. while the latter is believed to have endured just punishment, indicating instead that God is concerned with meting out earthly punishment for earthly action. This kind of ex post facto reasoning would be laughed out of in any other discipline, but is accepted in Christian discourse, particularly regarding praying for God’s intercession in an Earthly matter. Can a theory like this make any predictions that are consistently true? Christianity has provoked not a single, valid, repeatable insight into our world that can not be derived by secular means. When faced which this, Christians often say, “We cannot understand the ways of the Lord.” I agree—which is why assembling any kind of religion, which through its inevitable moral ethics and stories of creation attempts to explain God’s nature, is ridiculous.

This brings us back to tolerance. Secularists who don’t want to directly attack religion say that religion should be kept between a practitioner and his or her own God or gods, and not enter public life. And it’s this position that really brings out how we should “tolerate” religion; I have no problems with whatever delusions people hold, whether it be the firm conviction that the Brewers will win the World Series this year or that people born in August really are more aggressive and leaderly than those born in March, so long as it has negligible effect on their behavior. When we list the major categories of toleration, religion is lumped together with things like skin color, gender, and sexual orientation. But notice that the logic for tolerating these other three things is that, a) people have little to no control over them, and b) they are entirely superficial and carry no moral weight as part of a person’s character. The fact that we unblinkingly include religion in this category shows that, at least unconsciously, mainstream American society believes religion to be this: a matter of what culture you were born into and something that really doesn’t matter as part of your character, despite the fact that most religions insist that faith is an important and necessary part of a person’s character.

But the biggest problem with religion is that many people (including, usually, the heads of the religion) do see it as an important part of their character, not some superficial category that they happened to fall into, despite the fact that religious divisions, since they cannot be based in any logic, are inherently arbitrary. While I dislike religious liberals for coating religious debate with a vast amorality, religious conservatives, with their random moral standards, are worse. Religion becomes an incredibly damaging distraction in this case. Consider Iraq at the moment. Why is there so much violence right now? Any realpolitik cynic would say that many different political groups, formed by family and cultural ties, are seeking to violently fill the gap in power. But that’s not the reason the people within the various insurgency, militia, and terrorist groups believe they are fighting. They believe (and I believe this is sincere) that they are fighting to defend the proper successors of Muhammed’s caliphate, whether through Abu Bakr or Ali. That is, they are fighting over an event that happened 1300 years ago, on which no living person has been conceivably qualified to comment for a millennium. Now, they take the side they take because that is what they were brought up in, so we can conclude that this is really a serious of regional and familial disputes. But since religion is (at least outwardly) such a central part of many of their lives, there is simply no way to resolve or even address the dispute through its actual socio-political terms. The Middle East is probably looking at a century of religious wars between Shi’a and Sunni resembling those that ran through Europe between Catholics and Protestants from the age of Luther through the 18th-century wars of succession. As then, the difference comes over something completely artificial.

Christianity as Practiced in America

Of course, there is a big difference between religion as theorized and religion as practiced. Many Christian writers, like Terry Eagleton, attack atheist screeds because atheists caricature people of faith by comparing the best atheists against the worst theists, those who believe things that are not believed by anyone who has studied the religion. This is true, though of course people look at their opponents’ exceptions as the norm, while ignoring their own exceptions, in all political debate—gun-rights advocates invoke the good citizens who used concealed weapons to stop holdups while pointing out how inept the law is at controlling contraband arms, while gun-control experts point to accidental deaths of gun owners and the low gun-crime rates in certain countries that have banned guns. Certainly atheists have engaged in the kinds of petty wars that I excoriated among the Sunni and Shi’a. You could reasonably argue that Naziism, at least in its eugenic angle, was only possible in the Age of Darwin, though I would note in that case that at least the dispute was taking place on a clearly-stated logical playing field, and since Nazi logic was so clearly nonsense, WWII is the only war of the century were there is little ambiguity over right and wrong. But it is unfair for theologians to insist that atheists argue against only the principles of the most learned Christians, because the vast majority of Christians, who atheists must encounter every day, have beliefs immensely different from that of Christian theologians.

We hear in polls that over 80% of Americans are Christian. But then the question is how Christian these 80% are. The only definition such polls have is self-identification. But self-identification, as we know, is meaningless: 80% of drivers self-identify as part of the top 30%, and 40% of Americans believe they are, or expect soon to be, in the top 1% of earners. What then, defines a Christian? There are so many different official versions of Christianity it’s hard to pin it down. Even seemingly certain things, like belief in the Ten Commandments, fall under question: if you’re ecumenical, you don’t think that people need to believe in God before all others to be saved; many Catholics, historically, have had no problem praying to idols of saints; King David, an ancestor of Christ himself, had no problem murdering Uriah to sleep with his wife. In the end, perhaps all that ties together all Christians is that they belief Jesus Christ is the fully-human, fully-divine Son of God, whose death redeemed mankind. We will forget the ludicrous logic of why Adam and Eve’s sin has to been passed to their heirs or why God needs to send an avatar of himself to death to redeem man—or why, in fact, an act that essentially amounts to God’s suicide provides any kind of redemption for us other sinful bastards. No sect has ever disputed this, as far as I know, since the minor objections of the Arians in the fourth century over exactly how divine Jesus was. If you do not accept Jesus as divine—if you just think it’s a good idea to love your neighbor and are happy that Jesus pointed this out—you shouldn’t be considered a Christian, because then you are following his word because you think he makes good ethical sense (and indeed, many other ethicists say similar things without being either themselves divine or subscribers of any religion), rather than because you have faith in His Word.

A clear corollary of this litmus test of Christianity is that Christ never committed a sin on Earth. After all, in Christianity sin is a tendency for humanity rather than a law, like entropy; e do not need to sin, but we tend toward it. On the other hand, sin is defined as an infraction against God, and surely God himself cannot commit such a thing. Therefore, to believe that the fully-divine Christ committed a sin—indeed, to even entertain the possibility that he might have—means that you do not have faith in his divinity and thus are not a Christian. After all, the Immaculate Conception of Mary and Christ’s Virgin Birth were created precisely so Christ could be without sin. We should then, without too much trouble in our conscience, be able purge the ranks of self-identified Christians of anyone who fails this test. But in fact, if we were declare anyone who did not believe in Christ’s sinlessness to be un-Christian, we would have evicted SIXTY PER CENT OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANS. By this one rather undemanding stroke, we would cut 150 million people out of Christianity.

The thought boggles the mind. And yet this statistic isn’t that surprising. Most people in this country have a very fluid and vague definition of Christianity, and neither they nor the church seem terribly interested in further defining it. America’s churches act more like our political parties than like intellectual movements: they are more interested in having people sit under their banner than in actually changing their minds or behavior. Much in the way that the Democratic party tried to broaden its platform to include many flatly conservative Southern and Midwestern candidates this past election, under the vague catch-all of cleaning up the corruption and missteps of Washington (though, of course, the methods by which such mistakes were to be cleaned up were never agreed upon or even discussed, leading to voters who wanted to significantly up our Iraq commitment and those who wanted to immediately withdraw voting for the same candidates), many (usually liberal) churches tend to promote a very hazy version of God that will appeal to the most while offending the least. This is God as Father Knows Best (to compete, perhaps, with the current TV view of American dadhood, Homer Simpson), the guy who you go to for advice and to help you out when you’ve stumbled into a situation over your head, the guy who may have a stern word or two but, whatever you’ve done, will laugh it off and forgive you. This nicely dovetails with Freud’s paternal reading of religion, but the big problem with it is that it’s so clearly God-as-imaginary-friend, as a solipsistic projection of whatever you’re feeling at the moment into a universal truth. This is what leads to all of the silly I’d-like-to-thank-God speeches by the victors of award ceremonies and sports, who seem to think that trial-by-combat has proved, say, the 49ers to be, like vanquished knights in medieval times, agents of darkness slain by the Godly Rams. Again, as a personal delusion, it’s simply amusing. But when people think that taking a moment to pray every evening excuses, and in fact spiritually elevates, their livelihood selling cocaine, it should be clear how disorienting this position is.

Good Works Through Faith

One of the frequent justifications of religion is that it has, practically, done a lot of Good Things, whether or not it makes any sense. Many great civil rights leaders were preachers—it would be difficult to imagine King putting together his movement without the aura of Christian mercy behind him—and John Paul II certainly did some fine work to combat the abuses of Soviet power using Christian framework. Atheists are often criticized for ignoring this aspect of faith, and indeed for being close-minded by failing to admit that such things would have been impossible without faith. But—and I will cop to stealing the terms of this argument from a Newsweek letter-to-editor, who may have taken this from Hitchens—certainly religion is not sufficient for people to do these kinds of Good Works. Christianity has a long, bloody history of sanctioning, both on official and popular levels, horrible things, from the Crusades through World War II. Nor is it necessary—the basic conclusions of King and John Paul about individual rights and dignity are also those of secular humanism. Thus, the relationship between religion and Good Works seems feeble.

At the most, we might say that religion can be effective at motivating people into action. But this seems merely to come from its structure of community, from the international sects down to the individual church, rather than from anything inherent in religion itself. Secular humanism has no Sunday gathering where scholars read from Jefferson, expound upon Russell, and lead a congregation in the “Ode to Joy.” Were such a thing to exist, I suspect that it might have an equally mobilizing effect on its populace. Furthermore, if it had its own Sunday School, it could provide some antidote for the brainwashing that Christian children go through, where we are all told that it is wrong for us to lack belief in God despite the lack of evidence for him, thus preparing us to accept a lifetime’s worth of similarly tortured logic from political figures trying to hid their ignorance of how the world really works and how to make it a better place. A Christian might respond again that, if Christianity still can promote morality, and atheism still is used to enable immorality (which it undeniably is), then atheism still has no claim over religion. But again, atheism is a null space, a state of rejecting beliefs rather than developing any particular ones. Many different movements fit under the banner of atheism, and an infinite number of others could be added. The fact that Christianity, as well as all other religions, consistently fails to do what it implicitly promises—produce people of significantly better moral qualities than people who are not religious—seems fairly damning to me.

Ecumenism

Then there are ecumenicals, many of whom I would guess have spent this article noting to themselves that I have failed to address their approach, by which individual religions do not and cannot claim the exclusivity I have ascribed to them, that separate paths of worship are all valid attempts to relate to the supernatural and have faith in a Higher Power. But I have to agree with Stanley Fish on this matter: the entire strength of religion comes from its exclusivity, from its claim that “THIS is right, and THAT is wrong.” Without this, religions are little better than Poor Richard’s Almanac, providing little tips without any bite and giving no imperative to join. There are tracts of scripture in nearly all major religions ascertaining this kind of exclusivity, which most ecumenicals have to dance around to make their claim. If you take away exclusivity and grant that other religions may well be equally close to the Truth, then what is left? A vague set of ceremonies to worship that which you do not quite believe in, and a sense of futile searching after that which has not yet been found and is extremely unlikely to be found.

There is a name for this basic point of ecumenism, that no religion has a monopoly on Truth because humans do not, and in most ways cannot, confidently understand a level of reality beyond our own. It’s called agnosticism. We’d love to have you join us.

This might seem like sophistry, since all I’m doing is trying to rename the position without changing the viewpoint. And indeed, the distinction between having faith in a Higher Power, and even following a particular tradition toward it, and having no such faith is not a minor one. But the open-mindedness of ecumenism, it seems to me, has far more to do with agnosticism than with the more rigid versions of Christianity. And I think this re-naming is vital, because names practically matter much more than principles. After all, political power lies not in the position argued but in affiliation—this country’s views on issues like abortion, homosexuality, and America’s place in the world have not changed much over the past 30 years, despite recent shifts of power back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. To me, it seems that the meaningful distinction to be made on faith is between those who have a religious dogma, who have a conception of the exact nature of God and how we should lives as his Creations, and those who do not, who believe that mankind has not only not yet found God, but likely never will be able to whether or not He exists. And yet right now the distinction is between so-called “Christians” who have a huge variety of positions, most of which are conflicted and unsure and in conflict with official Christian doctrine, on the nature of God and those who are both willing to admit our ignorance and are bold enough to dissociate from the faith of the country.

America is now divided into 80% Christians, 15% non-religious peoples, and 5% people of other faiths. Most commentators look at this and see us as an overwhelmingly Christian country. But if you look any closer, you can see that Christianity in this country is as ready to collapse as Rome was after the capital moved to Constantinople, and that most of the 80% are Christian in name only. Imagine if that 60% who believed that Christ sinned were told that their belief made them un-Christian, and that they needed to choose between what they thought about Christ and the label they gave themselves—how many would obediently revise their thoughts, and how many would decide that it was time to call themselves by their true name? I’m really not sure; after all, social science has shown that people will doggedly defend themselves against any criticism that they see as integral to their personal character, even if they must put themselves in the position of arguing something ridiculous. But I would like to see what would happen if a powerful enough orator could drive that wedge in, so we could see how much of that 80% broke off. And I have even more hopes for a dialogue between agnostics and ecumenicals, because I believe that it would not take long for the two to realize that they have much in common.

And the end of this, I think we would find that this country would then be defined as containing something more like 60% Agnostic/Atheists, 37% Christians, and 3% other religions. And dear Lord, what a difference that would make to everything—not the least our political discourse. I do believe with Sam Harris: there are concentric circles to this kind of thing. By calling themselves by the same name, liberal Christians legitimize conservative ones, who legitimize evangelicals, who legitimize fundamentalists. If people like Pat Robertson could not stand up and claim to speak for a vast majority but rather a significant minority, his comments would need to be more modest if he wanted to be relevant, and politicians would not need to treat him as if he represented hundreds of millions of people. Most importantly, a state of non-belief would become the default in this country, rather than Christianity. Even if you don’t agree with anything I’ve said, I think that it’s fair to say that religious principles, or the lack thereof, are an important thing, which should require long amounts of thought and careful consideration. It’s the kind of thing that you should not commit to until you are mature, able to make decisions on your own, and have seen enough of the world to know what’s out there. Certainly it’s better than it is now, where America is a Christian nation that doesn’t know the first thing about religion.

Spring Awakening and the Economics of Broadway’s Culture of Derivation

Spring Awakening: A Review

Ever since I heard of it two years ago, when it was still in development, I’d been looking forward to seeing Spring Awakening, the new musical based on Franz Wedekind’s 1891 play about German teens coming to terms with their sexuality. It’s less that I’m a fan of turn-of-the-century European theater—though I am— than because the music was being written by Duncan Sheik, the sort-of-alternative singer-songwriter of the “Barely Breathing” and some other good, less poppy songs I’d seen him perform when opening for Ben Folds in 2003 at Williams.

Why was I excited about Duncan Sheik, you ask? After all, I’m not a big fan of his music, and don’t own a single album of his. But the Broadway musical has—I am certainly not the only one to have this opinion—grown quite stale over the last decade, and having a mainstream musical penned by someone who typically plays to a demographic uninterested in Broadway might provide some desperately-needed freshness and get a new crowd going to the theater. In the periodic Playbill interviews I’d read, Sheik and his colleague Stephen Sater were saying all of the right things about the show: they had no reverence for the Broadway warhorses while writing it; they wanted to do something new and contemporary; they were telling their singers to sound less like Brian Stokes Mitchell and more like Thom Yorke.

The question then became one of quality—their hearts were clearly in the right place, but would they execute it well? I had reason to believe, going to the show, that they had. All of the reviews have been glowing. Even a curmudgeon like Charles Isherwood in the The New York Times, who gleefully and righteously swats down glib and pretentious Fringe fare, had nothing but praise for the show. So I went to Spring Awakening on March 8th with anticipation just about as high as I've ever had for any show in my long theater-going life, perhaps even more than seeing Broderick and Lane during the opening weeks of The Producers.

In the face of such expectations, Spring Awakening was one of the most disappointing musical experiences I’ve ever had.

Saying that, I do not want to away from its genuine accomplishments. It takes a fair amount of courage to create a Broadway score that could comfortably live on a college student’s iPod, and a Broadway book that seriously treats issues surrounding teenage sexuality. The Sater-Sheik pair even manages to create the occasional effective couplet –e.g., a love song whose chorus goes “Oh, I’m gonna wound you/ Oh, I’m gonna be your wound” to a vulnerably alt.-rock melody—and set piece, such as the earliest school scenes. There are also some songs that really work—I’m fond of “Don’t Do Sadness,” sung by John Gallagher, who does an excellent mix of off-beat and lovable as Morritz.

But the show as a whole is just this side of a dramatic mess. Those of us musical theater geeks who were excited by the prospect of an alt.-rock Broadway score had tried to forget that most alternative music is, in fact, not terribly good; its self-absorbed, over-emotive, one-size-fits-all intensity can only be pulled off by individuals capable of exceptionally complex lyrics and composition, and Sheik doesn’t have enough of that for a two-hour show. When every song begins with either a one-chord chug on electric rhythm guitar or a minor piano arpeggio with a melodramatic hint of violin, it’s hard to keep taking it seriously. It doesn’t help that the show’s choreography never extends beyond free-form jumping by its red-faced, screaming vocalists.

The biggest problem, though, is tone. To avoiding giving too much away, I’ll simply say that you all know the plot: teens discover their sexual urges without being given any effective way to deal with them by their elders, and both those who resist and those with give in end up having to pay the usual worst-case-scenario prices for it. And there’s nothing wrong with that plot: it’s preachy but resonant, and there are enough variations such that it doesn’t get derivative that fast. But if you’re going to do that plot, then you have to maintain a tricky balance between genuine sympathy for the characters, sound ethical logic, and just enough levity to keep everything from getting too heavy. Losing the sympathy makes the show sadistic, but over-emphasizing makes it manipulative; losing the logic makes the show amoral, but over-emphasizing it makes it pedantic; losing the levity makes the show dour, but over-emphasizing it makes it trivial.

And Spring Awakening can’t keep it all straight. When several of the girls suddenly reveal they’ve been abused, physically and sexually, it seems an excuse to break up the post-rock monotony for some bluesier riffs and vocals rather than to seriously investigate the relationship of their problem to the show’s other themes, particularly considering that nothing develops from the scene. I couldn’t quite understand what Sater and Sheik wanted me to think when the somewhat-unexpected suicide of a major character very quickly devolves into a jokey number that explains what to do when you’re “Totally Fucked.” And I have no idea how to react to the dissonance of seeing one character being funneled through the dangerous world of 19th-century childbirth alternatives while watching, a scene later, a stereotypically Aryan homosexual (played as a cast member of Saturday Night Live would play that set of adjectives) none-too-subtly seducing a friend as part of another subplot that goes no where.

An even bigger problem may lie with Jonathan Groff, who plays the libertine Melchior as the Rebellious Smart Kid from a teen movie. I have no doubt that Groff could play the latter role quite well and inspire 15-year-old girls nationwide to Question Authority; he’s a very charismatic actor. But given several very bad things that Melchior does, Groff’s lack of moral complexity in the role is fatal. It seems that when he bears the consequences of the play’s central actions, he’s being martyred for the corrupt adult world rather than his own misdeeds, which he neither implicitly nor explicitly cops to. This is partially the script’s fault—as is the utter blandness of the female lead, Wendla, though Lea Michele does little to save her—but regardless, it makes the show’s logic very unconvincing. And this is without going into all of the everyday imperfections of the show, ranging from silly seasonal clichés in the final song to numbers that are meant to be cute but aren’t, such as the song “My Junk (Is You).”

And so I was upset leaving the theater, generally feeling let down and as if I’d made poor use of my evening. And yet, isn’t that unfair? After all, I’ve seen movies that have put my time to greater waste and not minded. If nothing else, I got to have the experience of seeing the show that will likely win this year’s Tony, and was treated to it by my mother, no less, so that my bank account was none the worse for it. In general, I subscribe to the theory that I’d rather see something that daringly fails rather than something utterly bland, and so I am willing to submit myself to several bad aesthetic experiences from time to time. And yet the fact that this show, which fails in several demonstrable ways, is being touted as a Major Cultural Event seems to me to be an equally bizarre phenomenon.

And this brings me to the economics of Broadway, and the reason that America’s premier theater district is in very, very unhealthy shape.

The Economics of Broadway: A History

There’s an obvious difference between going to a bad movie and going to a bad Broadway show. Going to a movie in Manhattan will set you back $10. Going to a musical will set you back at least 5-10 times that much for the cheap seats. Why are theaters so expensive? Simple supply-demand curves gives one pretty reasonable explanation (I will admit, I am no economist, but my mother is and has agreed with the principle behind this): there are increasing numbers of rich people who live in or travel through Manhattan who will pay that much to do the classy thing and see a Broadway show—Times Square is littered with limos for rich theater-goers at 10:45 every night. Typically when demand increases steadily, you ratchet up supply to meet it, but while it’s relatively easy to build a movie theater in most places, and easier still to add a screen or two to an existing one, building an entirely new theater anywhere is expensive, and expanding an old one in the middle of midtown Manhattan would, I imagine, be nigh-on-impossible for spatial reasons. So, supply is constant and demand has gone up, causing prices to dramatically rise.

Furthermore, costs of production—from everyday set materials to actor salaries, particularly for “name” actors—have also gone up, and while Hollywood can compensate by distributing its films to more theaters, Broadway, again, has no way to expand its theaters and must raise ticket prices. Indeed, from what I understand, most Broadway shows, other than the biggest hits, never recoup their initial investments, so it’s not even entirely a matter of theatergoers being fleeced by greedy owners. The largest adverse affect of this is not a loss in overall attendance but rather in the type of attendance: if you go to a Broadway show and look around, most of the crowd is either very rich, very old, or very touristy, and thus the musicals are written to cater to that demographic.

Another reason comes from the “blockbuster” phenomenon Broadway experienced in the mid-1980s, similar to what had happened in film ten years before. Broadway producers realized that, given the huge initial investments a musical requires and the high probability of failure, the only reliable way to really maintain profits was to find a way to guarantee a long run for shows; that is, consistently bring in broad swaths of people. Now, Broadway has a harder time generating that huge an audience than film does for a bunch of reasons. First, of course, film can be broadcasted nationwide and seen by millions of people in response to the initial advertising rush (a process which is repeated upon the DVD release), while Broadway show can only get a couple of thousand viewers a night. To put this into perspective, note that the film of Rent was a commercial flop, making less than $30 million in the US from a modest budget of $40 million, and yet was seen by more people in its opening weekend than had seen the play during its entire ten-year sold-out run on Broadway.

But just as importantly, film is a more reliable experience for viewers, because a given film is static: every time you see Star Wars, it’s going to be exactly the same (give or take special-extended-director’s-cut-effects). Not only does theater have night-by-night variability, but a show typically will not keep the same cast and production over the entirety of its run. Thus, to be reliably popular, a show needs to have some attractive attributes beyond its cast. Observe how The Producers, which had been predicted to give Phantom of the Opera a run for its money in longevity when it debuted to glowing reviews and box office in 2000, is now closing because no one was able to recapture the Broderick-Lane chemistry that had made the show such a hit at first.

One hopes that a high-quality score and book would be those reliable attributes. But while there are shows for which they are—Les Miserables is the most prominent of these among the 80s blockbusters —we come to the fact that “quality” has never been a reliable commercial attribute in any medium, even in cases where the quality is accessible to a large audience and can be painstakingly honed by skilled Broadway craftsmen (cf. any number of recent Sondheim shows). And so what producers found worked instead of quality was the extravagant set-piece: Miss Saigon’s helicopter, Phantom’s chandelier, Cats’s stairway, and even Les Mis’s barricade.

And so the economics of Broadway took a strange turn. As Frank Rich suggested at the time, since people were spending such a large sum on their tickets, they wanted to see some expensive flash and dazzle to justify it. The Broadway theatergoer’s mindset became, implicitly, that they were paying to see special effects, not music or drama—much like the shift in film that came with the Spielberg-Lucas films of the late 70s and early 80s that continues to this day, where the most profitable movies are those that would’ve been B-Movies in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Of course, having something that sounded like impressive music helped create the illusion that it was well-crafted, and so we get Andrew Lloyd Webber’s loud, soaring, and dramatically pointless (if not outright damaging—how many competent actors can actually sing his music?) arias.

After a while fatigue set in. Theatergoers gradually came to realize that the helicopter you can barely see and the chandelier that progresses down the theater at the pace of a ski lift are not actually terribly thrilling theatrical devices. In the mid-late 90s, the 80s warhorses began to close, and big-budget musicals like The Civil War failed to succeed on the basis of production values and bombastic scores alone. Broadway producers needed to find some other sure-fire way of hit-making, and found themselves unable to o seize on any theatrical aspect that would make theatergoers take the risks of high ticket prices. The only viable conclusion was leeching off entities that already were self-sustaining, adapting existing films and song catalogues into musicals. Disney had latched onto this idea early, with Beauty and the Beast debuting in 1994, followed by The Lion King in 1998. Its animated films are particularly suited to Broadway—they are already musicals and have a family appeal designed to lure in a middle-class tourist crowd that is particularly fearful of wasting $500 on a show that won’t keep their kids attention.

This results in frighteningly calculated musicals like the recent Mary Poppins, which features claptraps like a Dick van Dyke lookalike dancing upside-down, several gratuitous flying sequences, and an unexplained Jamaican woman who lives in a hidden room of the Banks house to provide token multicultural presence. The show, of course does not have any of the dramatic coherence of the film; this presumably would drag down the proceedings. The film turns on Mr. Banks’s realization of his failures as a father and his inability to feel joy; his final rejection of the bank and decision to fly a kite is an incredibly ecstatic moment and the thing that makes the movie work. In the musical, of course, he must realize all of these things during the first act so they can be gotten out of the way, and for some reason they are muddled together with his blooming and unmotivated social conscience regarding the machinations of high finance. Winifred, whose feminist pluckiness in the film makes her a strong character, spends the musical whining about being unable to deal with the pressures of being a housewife, rather than cheerfully demanding the right to vote. It almost seems like the producers try to rip all of the joy from the film to streamline the show. “Step in Time,” the carefree, energetic high point of the film, is orchestrated so as to be a portentous, pretentious bit of philosophizing that is demonstrating some family-friendly Moral.

Of course, Disney only has so many films to plunder, so the wealth must be spread to films, any films, that can support music. Thus we have Spamalot, Hairspray, The Color Purple, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Wicked, Tarzan, Edward Scissorhands, The Wedding Singer, High Fidelity, and the upcoming The Little Mermaid and Legally Blonde. These range from reasonably entertaining to mind-numbingly dull; none of them are terribly good or original. Spamalot was particularly painful for me, as it transforms the movie’s subversive wit into easy laughs about the pomposity of Andrew Lloyd Webber showstoppers, Lancelot’s latent homosexuality, and the fact that the Broadway community has a large Jewish population.

The other risk-reducing phenomenon is the jukebox musical. It isn’t a coincidence that Broadway began losing its larger cultural clout in the late 1960s. Before then, Broadway, like the pop charts, used to be an outlet for Tin Pan Alley. Particularly in the 1930s-1940s, the country’s top hit-making songwriters would produce catchy songs and then find some way to cobble them together into shows; even as larger dramatic coherence began to be a feature of Rogers and Hammerstein, Burrows and Loesser, and Lerner and Loewe in the 1950s and 1960s, the musical formulas of Tin Pan Alley persisted. When with the arrival of the British Invasion and the maturing of rock and roll, which is marked by a sonic preference for syncopated rhythm and limited melody that had been alien to Broadway music, as well as the growing confluence of “singer” and “songwriter” on the pop charts, Broadway music gradually became divorced from popular music. The national mentality, or at least its manifestation in music, changed, and the Broadway sound no longer expressed adequately.

I’ll mark the divide at 1968. Look the Tony-winners for Best Musical before and after that year: the divide between works that are part of the popular consciousness (Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls, Cabaret) and those that, irrespective of quality, simply are not (Hallelujah, Baby!, A Little Night Music, Applause), is palpable. Of course, there have been periodic attempts to create “rock operas,” but most of these simply take traditional Broadway song structures and transpose the riffs to electric guitar—note how Jesus Christ Superstar’s central riff is stolen, note for note, from the comic “Who’s the Thief?” number from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. There are two major exceptions to this: first, Hair, which in 1969 managed to be the last Broadway show to really make a dent on the pop charts, and Rent, which I’ll address more in a moment.

Broadway did very little about the fact that it was unable to write music in line with post-1964 popular music for a long time, hiding this deficiency through sporadic borrowings like Hair and The Whiz, the occasional lite-pop bombast from adult contemporary writers like Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line, They're Playing Our Song), the postmodern reworkings of Broadway past of Stephen Sondheim, and finally the Lloyd Webber blockbuster. Now that the latter era has run its course, Broadway finds that not only does it have no conception of contemporary music, it has no notion of anything remotely related to it; it regards rock and roll as revolutionary, despite the fact that rock and roll has been dead in pop culture for roughly a decade. Instead of cultivating a new musical tradition or adapting to contemporary ones, it has resorted to taking pop catalogues (only those from the 60s and 70s that would appeal to the sensibilities of the ingrained Broadway audience) and arranging them more or less at random into shows—to be fair, this genre is largely the fault of London’s West End, rather than Broadway, though Broadway has jumped onto the bandwagon as exuberantly.

Thus we have Mamma Mia!, Movin’ Out, Jersey Boys, All Shook Up, Lennon, The Times They Are a-Changing, We Will Rock You, Good Vibrations, Hot Feet, and Ring of Fire. The brilliance of the jukebox musical, of course, is that the audience already knows the music, so at worst they’re going to see a live concert that sticks to the Greatest Hits in a way that most baby boomers wish the actual artists who wrote the songs would do as reliably. And when any effort is put into honing an appropriate show, they succeed immensely; the first three above were major Tony winners and will likely run for years. Yet when that critical mass of effort is not met, and usually it isn’t, these have been unspeakably dreadful. Five of the above closed within three months, despite their sonic pedigrees. Hopefully this will mean the end of the genre, but Broadway may still be more willing to risk a show, even from a tradition of flops, that has some name recognition in its song catalogue over a totally new work.

If we leave out the movie adaptations and jukebox musicals, what does this leave on Broadway? Right now, many revivals: Company, Chicago (which now, from a commercial standpoint, is a film adaptation), Grease, A Chorus Line, and Les Miserables. This is not new nor particularly bad; furthermore, reviving something that once worked is an understandable financial move for a Broadway theater that has no thriving tradition to develop on. Of those remaining: Avenue Q and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are light, postmodern comedies that are very well put-together and even have some smart things to say; I only wish they were sidelines to a healthy musical tradition that did not live on self-consciously cutesy rhymes and simple melodies rather than being at the forefront of quality Broadway. I have not yet seen Grey Gardens: I hear that it is an excellent dramatic work, but as we’ve established, I don’t trust critical acclaim from Broadway critics anymore.

Then we come to two more shows, very much alike in temperament: The Drowsy Chaperone and Curtains. I’ll call them retro-comedies. They come from a tradition that most recently has included Thoroughly Modern Millie and 42nd Street, even though those two also fit under the categories of film adaptation and revival. They’re unabashedly in a Broadway tradition that is not only pre-1968, but pre-WWII—big production numbers, swanky Manhattan settings, screwball humor. Their primary appeal is the hokeyness of their plot conventions, the funny clothes the actors wear, and the innocence which they’re able to get away with when discuss things like sex and love. Again, I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia for an older era, were there a healthy musical culture in place for it to play off. But there simply isn’t. Whether they want to or not, these shows are the face of Broadway today, and as a result Broadway today seems quite content to live in the past. My fear is that, as the jukebox musical runs its course, Broadway is going to need a new cash cow, and the retro-comedy is going to look like the best candidate. Retro-comedies are, by nature, formulaic and thus not difficult to construct dramatically. All they need are some skilled craftspeople in the fields of costuming, set design, one-liners, and melody, as well as a winning actor or two, and they work almost without effort. If Broadway does decide to move in this direction, it’d be a dreadful step backwards.

It has, after all, been a long time since Broadway has had a step forwards. I would put that step at 1996 with the debut of Rent, the last great musical. Now, people who know me will be surprised to hear me make that assertion. I have, ever since I first saw Rent seven years ago, felt that it wasn’t nearly as good as most people thought. I still feel that way—Act II is a ridiculous soap opera that creates melodrama for no apparent reason and giddily slams head-on into every cliché about the central characters’ types that the first Act had deftly avoided. (Also, I still have no response for my aunt’s question of why we should sympathize with Mark and Roger for refusing to pay their rent.) Furthermore, though I have found very few people who have agreed with me on this point, it seems very unfortunate that a show whose simple but not unpersuasive central point is that, in the face of a tragedy like AIDS, the only defense we have is not a method by which to prolong our lives but rather the fullness with which we live and love every individual day we have, the show would end with a character getting to have it both ways: magically having her life not just enriched but also extended by the force of her friends’ love (within a show using a realist ethic, no less). Ending that show with a song called “No Day But Today” when the characters’ have in fact been granted several more days after today for no discernible reason seems particularly odd.

But the fact was that Rent, even if it was piggy-backing off more articulate straight plays about AIDS like Angels in America, used a serious, contemporary problem to dramatize a larger aesthetic issue about human existence and said interesting things about both. Moreover, it was written with a pop ethic that was not just a simple attempt to appropriate pop-rock but was an organic, original hybrid sound based on hooks that could play both on alternative radio and in a theater. It showed that it was possible to create music whose melodies theatrically emoted while still living on anthemic hooks and blues-based rhythms from the post-1964 world, and thus expressed a serious contemporary mindset without abandoning its roots in musical theater.

Since then, there has been no musical that has successfully joined Rent’s efforts in doing that. Even the other good musicals of the past 10 years that made an effort to make original statements in some respects—and indeed, Ragtime, which is far better-crafted than Rent, is the only musical I can think of that I would confidently put in that category—have had to rely on retro stylings, one way or another, to work. Perhaps Jonathan Larson, even if he’d lived, would never again have pulled together a show that worked like Rent, but just having his musical vocabulary in the scene would have been a powerful force against the culture of derivation that currently exists. Perhaps the immense hunger on Broadway for something with the vision of Rent is what leads critics to overpraise Spring Awakening, which has all of the theatrical problems of Rent while lacking the consistent coherence of its music and the wit of its lyrics.

What Can Be Done

If there is to be a real renaissance of American musical theater on Broadway, then one of the few options I see requires an infusion of (relatively) young singer-songwriters who do not come from a musical theater background. There have been a few musicals by pop music titans on Broadway, most notably Elton John’s Aida and Paul Simon’s The Capeman, but both were by songwriters past their Billboard prime, and who, regardless, were writing in an idiom separate from that which gave them dozens of platinum records. Sir Elton allows himself to be Disneyfied for his theater projects, and while we might look at the Latino doo-wop of The Capeman as an extension of Simon’s multicultural experiments on Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, its music was deliberately retro rather than forward-looking.

So not only would I like to see the Sater-Sheik partnership continue to make musicals, in the process addressing the problems with Spring Awakening, I want to see more works surface along these lines. I recall MTV producing Carmen: A Hip-Hopera about six years ago. I wonder what someone like Mos Def, who co-starred in it and who’s been active on Broadway sporadically, most notably in the innovative Top Dog/Underdog by Suzanne Lori-Parks, could do with hip-hop in longer dramatic forms. I don’t know if I’d care for it, but I suspect that if it’s well done it would bring solid audiences in the same theaters that hosted Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam. Most importantly, it’d bring some variety into musical theater, which has too often been the province of nerdy white homosexuals: that has had a limiting effect. For that matter, I wonder what any of a number of our most creative singer-songwriters—Ben Folds, Sufjan Stevens, and Wayne Coyne all have shown talent for expressing character through song as well as constructing longer-form musical pieces (indeed, since I began this essay, I have heard tell of Aaron Sorkin writing the book for a Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots musical)—could do in musical theater.

Of course, they’d have to cut their teeth off-Broadway, or off-off-Broadway, or off-off-off, etc., as Sater and Sheik did. Indeed, perhaps my assessment of Broadway has been a bit too bleak, as I have not been addressing off-Broadway, which is typically the province of most exciting theatrical experimentation. Yet I keep tabs, as best I can from a distance, on that scene, and have rarely been excited by anything I’ve read about. If something works in a small theater, Broadway is usually pretty eager to grab it.

There are other things that Broadway can do right now to help deal with its immense problems. One, if it is at all possible to expand existing Broadway theaters, I would think it could be a huge help. I imagine many owners would be reluctant to do this, particularly those that often see empty seats. By expanding the theaters, though, they could offer cheaper seats without losing much long-term profit. As the Met Opera has found with its $20 Family Circle seats (and from what I understand, American opera is in a situation as dire, if not more so, than American musical theater, though I don’t have the expertise to analyze it at the same length), offering tickets that do not cost the average family a week’s pay, or a college student more than he spends on food in a month, will help foster a younger and broader audience, so that when the current generation of theatergoers begins to die, there will still be theatergoers left. And if the theaters cannot be expanded—well, I would advise chopping those balcony seats in price for the good of the community. Unfortunately, while the Met can take a larger perspective, as it is one of only two major opera companies in the city, I doubt any individual Broadway theater would be willing to make that kind of change.

I have a slightly more ambitious plan: a New York State Musical Theater. It would not have to be state-run or subsidized, though I imagine the latter might be useful. It would be the size of, say, Madison Square Garden, and contain several theatrical spaces of varying sizes. It would have to have incredibly good acoustics, but that would be manageable. People might not be able to see the stage as well, but outdoor theater thrives despite that. The tickets would have a huge range of prices, from front-center tickets as cutthroat as any major theater to $10 nosebleeds. The theater would produce a range of shows that would run a limited time (with an audience 5-10 times that of the typical theater in the biggest space, they could turn profits more quickly while also exhausting the customer base fast), ranging from classy revivals to newer, low-budget, experimental works in the smallest. It could contract some of Hollywood’s bigger names (and medium names, for that matter) to commit to a show every few years, to keep the buzz high—and I would hope that these performers would be as willing to engage in the smaller projects as the bigger ones; while it’s nice to seen the Kevins Kline and Spacey to do another Shakespeare role every other year, I think it would help the theater world much more if they’d appear in new shows from time to time. I know there are enough stars who cut their teeth in the theater to have some stake in it, and most of them are rich enough that they don’t really need the kinds of salaries that weigh down a lot of shows.

That, at least, might be some sign that theater has to be taken seriously again. Right now it is not: I recall the TV Geek on Comedy Central’s Beat the Geeks asking why The Tonys are broadcast nationally, as no one outside New York cared, and basically thinking he was right. It’s a shame. Schopenhauer (and later Wagner) felt that music was the most profound and powerful expression of will; I, being less Teutonic in mindset, would limit to being the most universal way to express personal emotion, particularly when paired with lyrics for context. The musical is an important medium that can, I believe, still be relevant, and if done well might force people who have dismissed it as a genre to re-examine parts of their own personality that reject it that way. But it needs to be reinvented, both in terms of the content of what is on stage and the economic ways of getting the public to the seats.