The Dragons

by Dean Williams

and…those who do not.

  I just wanted to tell you that I have thought seriously about this aspect of the story, and that although I am not a person of faith, I do believe in belief. The human capacity to trust, to have faith in some principle, (justice, democracy…) or in the existence of something you have never seen but are nevertheless absolutely convinced exists—where would we be without that? When a teacher doesn’t give up on a less-than-stellar young student—what is that but belief, the conviction that this rebellious, self-centered kid is worth not giving up on? For that matter, isn’t the whole concept of education predicated on the notion that there exist forms of knowledge and skills worth conveying; that people are actually capable of both teaching and learning them; and (most unlikely of all) that there will be a future in which the instruction will still be of value? This is just to choose the case of education. I contend that every time you put on your shoes and walk out the door, you are virtually floating in a cloud of assumptions and presumptions, hunches and theories. Life is an act of faith, a brave leap into the dark.

  And organized religion, say what you will about it, is the example par excellence of a reified belief system. It is millennia old and has proved false every prediction of its imminent demise. My entirely unscientific, anecdotal interpretation of this rather remarkable fact is that we humans are hardwired for belief: we need to believe just as we need to feel physically secure and loved by others. Make room, Professor Mazlov!

  Religion is a human construct, and like literature or art or politics, it deserves the same amount of attention, analysis, and thoughtful reflection that we afford these other syntheses of human hopes, fears, and passions. John of Salisbury wrote: “For not without the anguish of the struggle shall the face of truth be seen.” And he also wrote that we might seek to become people “to whom religion is not the mask of desire, but the countenance of that eternity which doeth ever besiege our life.”

  All this is not meant as an apology for the specific belief that there exists an omniscient, omnipotent deity, or for the related doctrine that we are in possession of certain holy texts which comprehensively and accurately describe the universe, and prescribe how one must live in that God-created dominion. Religion has a lot to answer for—historically, for what its followers have done in its name; and culturally/philosophically, for the outsized impact it has had on human civilization.

  Organized religion is inherently, unapologetically insular, recognizing no truth outside of its own officially sanctioned sources, which of course it claims are divine. St. Augustine: “Whatever knowledge man has acquired outside Holy Writ, if it be harmful it is there condemned; if it be wholesome, it is there contained.”

  This is a recipe for being incurious, and also for accepting institutional injustices such as monarchy, aristocracy, and other elements of a class-based system. The heavenly order is to be replicated here on Earth, with people occupying the station God has assigned them. Jesus’s egalitarian, almost socialist message seems to have gotten lost in the translation from Aramaic. And Martin Luther, the revolutionary who set the Protestant Reformation in motion, was anything but progressive in his political and social views.

  But it is the lack of intellectual curiosity encouraged by a strict adherence to the spirit of religion that has been criminally damaging to humanity, and that is so out of sync with a post-Enlightenment world. Progress itself has often seemed to be the enemy of faith.

  “What do a physical life, health, science, literature, and philosophy amount to compared to the salvation of the soul? Why read the poets when the precepts of the Gospel should be pondered? Why make life on Earth agreeable and comfortable when it is but an insignificant prelude to eternal life elsewhere? Why seek to answer questions about natural phenomena when the nature of God and the relation of the human soul to God are yet to be explored and understood? It is but a step to the conclusion that all learning is impious and heretical.”

  This from the mathematician and intellectual historian Morris Kline.

  Here I can only state my belief: the monotheistic faiths must adapt to our present perilous circumstances by expanding their definition of righteousness to include some form of ecological stewardship of the Earth and all its living creatures. This has to be baked in the cake, part of the machine language of modern religion, standard operating procedure. If not, the faithful, as well as the faithless, can kiss goodbye whatever portion of Eden they still think exists. It’s just numbers: the vast majority of people on the planet subscribe to some religion. If the Church changed its position, people would follow. Hardcore environmentalists, perhaps 1% or less of the population, are not going to be enough to save the day. We all have to save the day.

  If it sounds like I’m a bit all over the place regarding faith and organized religion, it’s because I’m a bit all over the place regarding faith and organized religion.

  Forgive the diatribe; this is meant to be a gentle reminder that these things are at least worth thinking about, and that we should all attempt to transcend the limitations of the specific milieu that has shaped our own belief systems. In my own case, after reading a fair amount of the world’s sacred texts, in addition to as much of the classics of literature and philosophy as a late twentieth-century education has made possible, I felt compelled to write a story about miniature dragons, a world revolution, and paganism. Go figure.

  Whew, I do tend to go on.

  I do hope you enjoyed all this. And now a final confession. Believe it or not, I did try to make the whole utopian vision hang together and seem as realistic as I could. How people would live, what they would do with their time once the daily grind and the electronic jungle were taken away: I really attempted to paint a fairly detailed picture of the future.

  Imagine my shock and panic when, in the very last stages of editing, I realized I had completely left out a very important aspect of modern life; indeed, for many people the key to their daily routine and even emotional well-being: pets! In my dragon-haunted, post-technological society, what would become of Fido and Mittens? With everyone working on the farm or discovering their inner Shakespeare, there would be little time or energy left for pet-pampering services, gourmet doggie/kittie food, and the like. Perhaps—horror of horrors!—the evidently vegan dragons would suddenly reveal a taste for small domestic quadrupeds, as part of a sacrifice for access to the Eye!

  But I believe I will stop right there, before I make enemies of yet another influential demographic.

  See you in the Eye!

  The Author

  Odds and Ends Intended for the Afterword which Seemed, Despite Their Considerable Merits, to be Contributing to the Unreasonably Long Nature of Said Afterword

  1.

  Just as I was preparing to put the story online, I came across this passage. It’s from Freeman Dyson’s The Scientist as Rebel. It can be found in the last chapter, “Religion from the Outside”, p. 350, (NYRB edition), which is itself a review of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I thought an entire paragraph was worth quoting:

  Let me state frankly my own philosophical prejudices in opposition to Dennett As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we are born. We have many ways of understanding, of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic, and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated intelligences, but only as members of a working community. Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told one another around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science. Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. To understand religion, it is necessary to explore it from the inside, as William James explored it in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

  I would only add
that Freeman Dyson was a scientist of the first rank, and by no stretch of the imagination an ill-informed crank or purveyor of spiritual mumbo-jumbo.

  2.

  Many books went into the writing of this story. One a bit off the beaten track that I am sure the interested reader would find profitable is Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society.

  3.

  In this age of hyper-specialization, a broad, humanistic education remains the best, indeed the only, antidote to propaganda, hucksterism, and general malicious misuse of language.

  4.

  I scan the news nightly, primarily through the Internet, doing my best to include sources “from the other side”. When I read an article title like, “Obama 100% for the Border Crisis”, or “It’s Official: the GOP is Racist”, I ask myself, “What would my worldview have to be for me to believe that particular statement? What are the moral, political, psychological, and philosophical underpinnings of that specific assertion?” And what I find interesting, and disturbing, is that, in almost all cases, the more extreme the belief, the closer the antecedent beliefs lie to it, and to each other. Imagine a person’s belief system forming a tree. Then someone who only sees one side of various issues would