A Burning Ship Bound for Hell

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

I am not quite finished with Moby Dick. That might disappoint some of you, but so be it. This book is a classic. It really does repay attention.

Ishmael, the narrator of the novel, pointed out that when a whale is boiled it delivers an awful sight and an even worse smell. Wood is only needed to ignite the flames under the huge pots called “try-works.” “Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.”

But like I said the smell of the burning whale was worse. “…for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funeral pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.” Again he suggests that this religious quest is not a holy one. We must remember as well that the whale in the novel stands in for God.  So in a sense, the whalers have killed god.

 

The work was done at night when the “wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.” It was indeed the ship for a captain driven by revenge lust. It was the ship in hell.

 

The “pagan harpooneers” use huge, pronged poles to pitch hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.”

Men stood around watching,

“looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads.  Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on , and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then rushing Pequod freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire ship on the sea. Wrapped for that interval, in darkness, myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul.”

 

Have you ever read a more profound description of hell than that? Do you want to? Can there be any doubt that this was a quest for hell not heaven? Yet the ship finds both heaven and hell. “Whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.”

Yet though Ishmael says in the light of day, the only true light, “those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in the far other, at least gentler relief; the glorious golden sun, the only true lamp—others but liars.”

Maybe this hell at night on the dark sea is only an illusion. Maybe heaven will be found in the morning. Or is heaven an illusion? And in a way it was found. The heaven of Tahiti! I will explain more about this later.

What India and Alberta have in common–lousy governments.

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

India has been in the news a lot lately about its horrific problems dealing with Covid-19. This is what Sumit Ganguly said about it in the Winnipeg Free Press:

“India’s coronavirus crisis is stunning to behold. In northern India, bodies are being cremated in public parks because crematoriums have exceeded their capacity. Elsewhere, officials have suggested that families bury in their backyards relatives who succumbed to COVID-19. Despite being the world’s largest producer of vaccines, India has fully vaccinated less than two per cent of its 1.3 billion people.”

Shortages of the antiviral drug remdesivir have people begging friends and relatives on social media to locate supplies. Family members drive each other to multiple hospitals in the hope of finding a bed. Recently, 22 COVID-19 patients in a hospital died when its oxygen-generating facility sprang a leak. The daily rate of infections has reached more than 300,000, and epidemiologists believe the country will peak around mid-May with more than 5,000 daily deaths.

For a while India managed to hold the effects of the pandemic in check despite the fact that it has serious health infrastructure problems that are well known. Harsh lockdown measures worked very well.  Then, with rash over confidence,

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government abandoned its caution and, in a series of stunningly reckless decisions, invited the second wave that is now crushing the country. This colossal failure of policy-making has many forebears: general callousness, crass electoral considerations and sheer ineptitude. For a government that first assumed office in 2014 with a promise of sound technocratic governance and an end to political paralysis, the second surge represents an astonishing abdication.”

 

After seeming to put the virus in its place, Modi charged into a full political campaign attending rallies without a chance of social distancing and in situations where few of his faithful followers wore masks. Does that sound anything like what happened to our neighbour south of us during its recent elections?

The Prime Minister also allowed a massive Hindu religious festival to be held that usually attracts more than a million pilgrims. It can last for 3 months. It was easy to see why he did that. He wanted deep Hindu support in the election. Obviously, it did not take much for this to turn into a super spreader event.

There was another stunning series of events around the vaccines produced in India. India is one of the largest vaccine producers in the world, if not the largest.  It also has valuable experience with vaccination drives. Yet India went on another campaign of vaccine diplomacy in which it offered vaccines to its neighbouring countries and countries in Africa. That may have been laudable, but it prepared Modi’s own country for disaster. India began to run out of vaccines.

The results as Ganguly reported were pretty ugly:

“Now that public parks are becoming temporary crematoria, patients are lying on the sidewalks outside hospitals, and ambulances (when available) lack oxygen, Modi’s associates have resorted to more drastic, albeit familiar, tactics: they argue that the government’s critics are merely seeking to sow nationwide discord. Delhi is now pressuring social media outlets such as Facebook and Instagram to take down posts that are critical of its handling of the crisis.”

 

I won’t criticize Modi for his generosity to other countries, but I do criticize him for his over confidence and desire to gain international approbation at the risk of the lives of his citizens. Unsurprisingly Modi is running into a lot of criticism from his countrymen.

In Canada we are proud of our country. Many of us think it is the best place in the world to live. This view is being challenged however in one of our richest provinces—Alberta. Why is that?

Recently Alberta has been swamped by new Covid-19 cases. The numbers don’t sound as high as Alberta, but that is because India has a much larger population. If you closely the comparative numbers they are interesting.  The Winnipeg Free Press reported this way:

“According to Health Canada, that brings Alberta to 289 active cases per 100,000 people this week, which is the highest in the country. The next worst off is Ontario. Alberta’s rate is 70 per cent higher.

It’s a third wave unrivalled in Canada, and propelled by what experts argue is a miasma of lacklustre policy, political unwillingness to alienate the province’s libertarian fringes, and dependency on a flagging oil industry that was struggling even before the pandemic”.

 

According to Cornell University, “on Wednesday the prairie province saw a higher one-day increase in cases relative to population than anywhere in the United States, save Michigan, a state currently battling a major surge.” As if it is not bad enough being worse than 49 of the American states, it seems Alberta is even worse than India!

“On Thursday, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi pointed out the rate in his city — 500 per 100,000 people — is higher than that in India, where a fresh wave has largely overwhelmed the health-care system and depleted hospitals of critical supplies, such as oxygen.”

 

The Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney seems reluctant to offend his right-wing base. As a result, retail, churches and patio dining remain open I Alberta, with some capacity restrictions, as Alberta resists the sort of harsher lockdowns being imposed in Ontario with lower per capita rates of Covid-19. This may sound familiar to Manitobans.

Alberta, like Manitoba, has had to faced litigation from churches and other parties similarly demanding lifting not increasing restrictions. Both provinces have Conservative leaders who appear reluctant to challenge churches while those churches in turn think the rules are too strict. It is not easy being a Conservative Premier in Canada during a pandemic. Can Manitoba be far behind?

 

Battle in the Bible Belt

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

Recently the mayor of Morden, Brandon Burley, was barbecuing burgers for himself and his son in his back yard, when a number of cars all blasting their horns, pulled up onto his driveway outside his family home. The drivers were upset. Very upset. They hurled insults and even threats at the Mayor.

What upset them? Covid restrictions and the Mayor’s support of those restrictions that had been imposed not by him but by the provincial government.

As Malak Abas of the Winnipeg Free Press reported,

“It was the final straw for the 39-year-old father of four who, for months had watched the crusade create a divide in the city he represents. He said, he “saw red” and lashed out at the group, something he is not proud of. But he’d had enough.

 

The deniers had a tough time convincing the Mayor that Covid-19 is not real. In part this was because Mayor Burley had contracted Covid-19 and knew whereof he spoke. He knew first-hand that Covid-19 is real. Last November he tested positive for the virus. Today, he is still dealing with its ‘miserable’ effects. It took over a month before he was able to climb a flight of stairs without having to stop to catch his breath. He still can’t run a block without getting winded, and much of the food he once enjoyed now has a sulphuric odour and taste.”

Morden and Winkler, twin cities of the Bible Belt of southern Manitoba,  have now taken over from Steinbach as the hotbed of “freedom rallies.” Some of the events there have attracted more than 100 supporters. As Abas reported,

 

Demonstrators with signs reading, ‘Away with Masks,’ and ‘Stop the lockdown’ have become common sights in the region. The demonstrators oppose pandemic-related restrictions and lockdowns, arguing they are more harmful than Covid-19. Some deny the virus exists. Others assert restrictions are violation of their freedom and human rights.

Mayor Burley believes a rise in Trumpism as a political ideology in southern Manitoba, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are behind the protests.

What interests me, is that there is growing evidence that in Canada, as well as the United States there seems to be a merging  of the forces of white supremacy, right wing ideology, anti-vaxxer doctrines, and Trumpism. These forces seem to be growing in strength and militancy. They seem to have a holy cause—freedom from government interference with their liberty to do as they please, no matter who is harmed in the process. To me it seems that this is there commonality.

As Abas reported, “Anti-lockdown protests have become a threatening presence, he said, noting public spaces, including big-box stores have become battlegrounds between weary employees and anti-lockdown protesters.”

Martin Harder, the Mayor of the other twin city, Winkler, said he has been trying to get to a middle ground with these opposing groups since the pandemic began. As Abas reported, “My focus, is how in the world do we live with each other when this is over?  Martin Harder said. “It’s tearing families apart, it’s tearing businesses apart, it’s tearing communities apart.”

Randy Smart, Senior Pastor of Bergthaler Mennonite Church in the region, which has been following government restrictions, though not entirely with enthusiasm, says,

“He believes Covid-19 skepticism exists in the community, in part, because people who settled in Winkler faced unjust governments in other parts of the world. ‘I think one element that is probably unspoken, not in Bethel, but in the community is this lack of trust in government,’ he said, describing Winkler residents as ‘hard-working and generous.’  ‘So people who’ve had exposure and awareness of government tyranny in other places, they’ll come here and they say, ‘Oh, no…now the government is going to tell us when the church can open and when the church can’t open.’ “

 

I think Pastor Smart makes a good point. Distrust of government and an automatic suggestion that if the government wants us to do something it must be bad, are creating havoc with attempts by the government to impose health restrictions “for the good of Manitobans.” We have experienced decades of distrust in government here in Canada just as they have in the United States. They are a much more violent country then we are, so it is understandable if our levels of violence here have not been as great. But the ill-will towards government is strong here too. That is very unfortunate, particularly in a time of pandemic when trust in government is needed to achieve public goals.

Trust in God or Science During a Pandemic

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

I come from a very religious community. At least a lot of people profess to be religious. Vaccine hesitancy has been occurring in a number of communities and some of them are also purportedly very religious. I might even say many of them.

I really cannot understand what religion has to do with vaccines.  Just like I cannot understand why it is a political issue either.  In my view, we should decide whether to take vaccines based on the best science available, even though that science is imperfect. I think it is the best tool we have when making such decisions.

Recently, a woman near Winkler, another religious community told CBC news, why she was not going to take the vaccine. The woman replied, “I trust in God. I trust he’ll get us through this.”  I wonder if she takes the same attitude when she drives a car. If she needs spectacles to drive safely, would she leave them at home when she drives because she trusts in God? Does she lock her door when she leaves the house or does she trust God to keep the burglars away? Does it show a lack of trust to lock the door?

What does God have to do with it? I would say nothing.

Meet-up with an Anarchist

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

Recently, I went on a birding walk with 2 friends in Bunn’s Creek park in Winnipeg. This is one of my favorite trails. It is right inside Winnipeg and follows a meandering creek. Bunn’s Creek of course.

Two young people smiled at us as they walked by and one of us made some comment about being old rebels.  This attracted the attention of the two young people who came over to chat.

Very soon it became clear that these were two young rebels.  In fact, the young man said he was an anarchist. He said, “I am young and healthy and have zero per cent chance of catching Covid-19 so I am not going to take the vaccine. I would rather take my chances with the coronavirus than the vaccine. The vaccine was developed in such a hurry and I am not sure it is safe.”

I expressed an opinion that he had more than zero percent chance of catching the virus. Just that morning a 13-year-old child died in Ontario from the virus. I have to admit though  that so far, the chances of young people catching a serious illness are very low. But not zero. And the rates are rising with the new variants.

He said the long-term effects of the vaccines are not yet known because they have not been around long enough. So those of us who take the vaccines are agreeing to be laboratory rats for the vaccine trials. I admitted this argument has some merit.

He added that he thought the elites might be using the vaccine to gain social control over people so that eventually they could enslave the people. Or the elites might be using the vaccine to reduce the population by 80% so that they could enjoy a better world with those that are left. I didn’t say anything about such a hideous conspiracy theory, but I did tell him couple of things. First, I said I doubted that the elites wanted to reduce the population because they needed these people to buy their products and do their dirty work. They likely would want more peons not less. I also said  that I resented people like him not taking the vaccine because it reduced the chances of our society achieving herd immunity, which could mean that we are stuck with this disease for a very long time. That would mean that we might not for a long time be able to do things we loved doing, like going to concerts. I also could have suggested that it was because of people like him that the coronavirus is getting a chance to evolve and mutate into more serious and deadly strains of the virus, that might even be able to get around the vaccines, putting many people at risk of serious harm.

We did not argue vehemently, but respectfully. Eventually, we agreed to disagree and left it at that. I know that if you want to convince people you have to talk respectfully. But actually, I thought his idea that elites wanted to reduce the population by 80% was nonsensical. Anyone disagree?

Pip’s Strange Quest

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

As I said earlier, many members of the Pequod crew were on religious quests. One of those was Pip. An astonishing incident occurred to a little negro boy, Pip, “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew.” After all he was a mere boy and a black one at that. Except that Pip was very bright, we are told.

When one of the men who was scheduled to go  the small whaling boats pursuing  a whale that had  harpooned, sprained his hand little Pip was put in the boat to temporarily replace him. Ordinarily he would have stayed with the mother ship.  He was really too young and small. When the boat approach the harpooned the tail of the whale whipped at the small boat and it came right under Pip’s boat  and he veritably leaped out of the small boat and then was dragged by the whale as it fled. The men had to cut Pip free,  but that meant losing the whale. The first time it happened he got a stern lecture from Stubb, one of the mates. He was reminded that “a whale would sell for 30 times what he would sell for.”  Being a black boy in slavery he was worth a lot less than the whale and next time he would not be saved. Stubb told him men loved money more than their fellow men.

Well, sure enough it happened again and this time Stubb was true to his word and the boat in hot pursuit of the whale did not stop to pick up Pip when he was cut loose, although Stubb thought the next whaling boat would pick him up. There were two behind him. After all the ocean was dead calm that day. Unfortunately, the next two boats did not pick him up.  Alas poor Pip was lost at sea. Eventually the mother ship found and rescued Pip, but by then he had suffered such terrible loneliness in the ocean the experience  damaged his mind. In an astonishing but mysterious passage As Ishmael described it this way:

“from that day the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

 

What is God doing with his foot on the treadle of a loom?  What is miser-merman wisdom? This abandonment of Pip presaged another abandonment later—that of Ishmael himself.  We will talk about that later. When one feels abandoned by fellows or God, or worse both, one believes one’s God is “indifferent” and madness is apt to follow. I think frequently slaves felt that God had abandoned them. Can you really blame them?  If he did not abandon them, where was he? He was supposed to be omni-present.

A Kinder Gentler Quest

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In Moby Dick we come to realize Captain Ahab is mad in his monomaniacal quest.  “He was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end.” Yet there was an amazing chance for him to change course. A chance to turn the quest from the malign to the benign.

 

An amazing encounter is experienced in the Pacific Ocean when the Pequod, of Nantucket,  captained by a madman meets the Samuel Enderby, of London. The captain of that English ship could not have been more different than Captain Ahab. The English captain lost an arm and leg to Moby Dick. He should have been twice as enraged as Ahab. But he saw the whale as noble. It had a tale “like a marble steeple” he said. The English ship and crew escaped with their lives, but had no thought of revenge. Unlike Ahab the captain of the English ship knew resentment was a poison. He thought Moby Dick doesn’t bite as much as he swallows, and he was lucky to have escaped. At sea, he crossed the white whale twice again but gave him a wide birth. He decided not to fight nature. The opposite of Ahab. The English captain said whales could not really eat humans and told Ahab “what you took for the White Whales malice was only awkwardness.”

 

So, the English ship returned home filled with all she needed. The captain and crew were content. They saw no need for a mad quest. “He’s best left alone, don’t you think” he asked Ahab. Ahab had a surprising admission. “He is, but he will still be hunted for all that. What is best left alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet.” Sometimes the mad quest attracts.

The English mate gave Ahab a wide birth when he walked around him. He could tell that Ahab’s blood “was at the boiling point!—his pulse makes these planks beat!” So it is with the Ahabs of the world. They are cursed by their quests. The quests drive them mad.

The Monomaniac Quest for God

Classic Books, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

In the novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab persuaded the crew of the ship to join him in the “quenchless feud” seeking revenge against the whale. The whale was “a Sperm whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity” according to Ahab, though there is absolutely no reason to believe that. All the whale had done was to try to defend himself from attack by Ahab and his crew and in the process chewed off one of Ahab’s legs. Yet Ahab convinced the men that there was “great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster attacked.”He persuaded them that  the whale was “so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.” Ahab believed the whale had “intelligent malignity” which he showed over and over again in his assaults. And remember the whale is god! What kind of a god is that?

The narrator, Ishmael described the white whale this way:

“…such seemed the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

Judge then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on as if at a birth or a bridal.”

 

Ahab was consumed by a mad desire for revenge. As Ishmael described it Ahab was taken over by a unholy hatred:

“…ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness, he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;–Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst  his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

 

No wonder Ishmael called Ahab’s condition “monomania.” That is precisely what it was. And that made the quest monomaniacal too. After that initial encounter with Moby Dick that left Ahab with an ivory leg, sailing for home with “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so infusing, made him mad.” That is where the thirst for vengeance leads—to madness. And this a major theme of the book. Ahab “was intent on an audacious, unmitigable, and supernatural revenge.” As Ishmael described Ahab,

“Gnawed within and scorched without, with the fixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of brutes.”

 

What he sought was “monomaniac revenge.” The whale was in his eyes “the gliding great demon of the seas of life.” What turned a religious quest into a religious evil quest was Ahab’s monomania. By ignoring everything else the quest became evil. And that is true of all quests. If they are pursued with monomaniacal passion, the quest becomes evil, whether it is a pursuit of money, love, prestige, golf, causes such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, a life without taxes, or, even, God. Any quest can become evil. Such causes can drag the innocent and the guilty to their doom.

If a person refuses to believe a cop no matter how credible his claims that he is innocent, or if a person follows his leader to Capitol Hill to rampage Congress to protest a claim that an election has been stolen no matter how much evidence to the contrary, the beliefs have gone beyond all reason and are maniacal.

The mania makes it evil. When the quest goes beyond all reason it has turned to evil. That is what we learn from Moby Dick and why it is still relevant 150 years after it was written. We learn from Moby Dick that one can lose one’s soul by pursuing God.

That was what Ahab’s religious quest was all about: it was “monomaniac,” and that made it evil.