Black Friday

I believe that a minimally-regulated markets tend to encourage the most investment, innovation, and growth. I'm leery of tariffs, graduated income taxes, federal subsidies, and other well-intentioned programs that exact a heavy, unintentional price. I'm inclined to trust the incentive of competition and the efforts of personal enterprise and genius to solve economic problems. 

That said, and with the caveat that I'm not a trained economist, I don't believe that 'the market' is the only way of looking at society. Though minimal regulation recommends itself as the best way to avoid providing short-term relief for a specific economic group at the expense of the long-term health of a whole society, a degraded people can wreak havoc with a good economic system, just as a people without virtue can wreck the best of political systems. 

America ripped across its territory in record time and figured out how to produce not only enough for its own people, but a vast surplus for the hungry in other parts of the world. Most of this happened thanks to private or local ingenuity and enterprise. That spirit continues to create innovations and advances at a level unknown in the world for many thousands of years. 

Black Friday is a corruption of that beneficial system. There is a difference between inventing the technology to produce iphones and flat screen TVs and shoving or even trampling someone to get such products at half price. A minimally regulated market has proven itself at surmounting obstacles and benefiting people across the board, but it is only as moral as the people who comprise it. Supply and demand form, in this case, a kind of vicious cycle - when enough stores offer huge discounts and have consumers camping out in their parking lots, it is competitively advantageous for others to join in - and the greed of consumers makes the stores look greedy, and vice-versa. The market responds to demand, and even when demand is trumped-up or superficial, resources still pour into it. 

Black Friday isn't a problem with the free market, it's a problem with people. Unrestrained greed will taint any economic system, and in our society, where marketing relies on invented needs and material goods are status symbols, greed is an important god in our social pantheon. Minimally-regulated markets become sinkholes for the petty desires of unsatisfied consumers, and after the pushing and shoving are over, we have a few new TVs and BluRay players, and we have improved ourselves not a whit. 

Greetings - a fresh start?

I haven't posted anything here for a while, but I really don't wish to let this site die. Even if hardly anyone reads it, forcing myself to put my thoughts into words will, I hope, make me a better thinker and writer. I do welcome dialogue, however, if anyone is still interested in reading my posts, and wishes to comment.

I'm busy with college, so the frequency of my posts may still be limited and erratic, but I want to make an effort to put something or other up here at least once a week. I also want to try out something new, a sort of challenge to myself: if anyone would like to recommend movies, books (or even music) for me to review on here, or introduce a topic on which you'd like me to comment, feel free to do so. I am not well-informed on a great many things, but that means I'll be forced to do my research, and I can see only benefit in that.

Rituals and the Cult of Entertainment

Scripture and history alike teach us that one of man's habitual and distinctive actions is to impose order, security, and dominion on the natural world. However flawed our efforts may be, wherever civilizations have flourished, some control has been gained over the weather, the climate, wild animals, and natural barriers like rivers and canyons. Trade helps to balance deficits in raw materials.

Because humans are complex and social beings, we also like to amplify, celebrate, conceal, or sometimes even deny the very basic realities that we live with and the ways in which we face them. Grand houses amplify the basic need for shelter into the desire for comfort. Harvest festivals celebrate the success of communities banding together to gather food. Private, finely-furnished bathrooms conceal the need to rid ourselves of unpleasant waste. And then there are the deniers, the beauty contests and anti-aging creams that deny death; the brothels and peep shows that deny the need for sexual control; and the elaborate, artificial entertainments that deny the need for hard work, healthy intellects, and broad-minded awareness.

Watching a movie or going to see the Phantom of the Opera are not sins, but certainly the nature of leisure has changed of late - or rather, a different kind of leisure, always practiced by some, has creeped into the lives of more and more people, as we have become more wealthy, and the invention of machines has made hard physical labor less necessary. Leisure used to be associated mainly with religion, or the consummation of some worthy thing, like a harvest, the accession of a new leader, or a marriage. Leisure was rest from the hard work of staving off disaster and imposing human society on the land. Leisure took a step back and celebrated the things that bring people closer together. Now, it seems that much of leisure is not a step back but a leap into a hermetic enclosure. Modern leisure focuses on forgetting real life and real responsibilities. Modern leisure, like the excesses of imperial Rome or the revelries of the Romanovs, erects barriers against reality.

This is the burden of wealthy, technologically advanced, super-urban life. It's possible to scrape by for years without feeling the full force of pain, disaster, or even daily responsibility that those in a smaller and less developed society have to face frequently. This makes us weaker people. When we stop adorning our lives with rituals and escape from them into entertainment, we are surrounding ourselves in colorful fantasies.

Videogame Century

My friend David and I like to keep up on current films. Occasionally, we relay the good news that some new movie is, surprisingly, worthwhile. Most of the time, we wax poetic and amuse each other with the sometimes breathtaking banality, lack of imagination, and artistic sinfulness of would-be blockbusters that seem just as intent on withering one's soul as they are on taking one's money. Many names come to mind, some familiar and some, perhaps, not so: X-Men, Spider-Man, Superman Returns, Underworld, Transformers, Hellboy, The Chronicles of Narnia, Quantum of Solace, the Star Wars prequels. To me, the films mentioned (all of which I have seen, for better or worse) range from modestly watchable to egregious. All these films have come out within the last eleven years, and several within the past three.

There are counterweights to these mostly pathetic films: Master and Commander, the Illusionist, the Prestige, Batman Begins, and Blood Diamond are a few that come to mind. Lately, however, we have been noticing a surprising dearth of movies to be excited about, movies that transcend bland convention and pointless money-grabbing and leave you impressed and thoughtful. None of the films I mentioned were made any more recently than 2006. Other than perhaps the Dark Knight, I can't really think of many films in four and a half years that have impressed me. The forecast for movies in the next few years, from what I know of it, is also bleak: Transformers 3, Spider-Man 4, Bond #23, a sequel to 2012 (didn't they already destroy the world?), and yes, three new X-Men spin-offs and the possibility for another in the main series.

The list of meatier films is thin indeed. Has the second half of the first decade of the twentieth century really been so markedly barren of good movies? I'm asking the question honestly, because I would like to be proven wrong. Are small studios quietly making handfulls of these things under my radar?

One theory I have, if this dropping-off is accurate, is that a lot of the creative talent that might have gone into movies is now going into video games. I see video games as the preferred medium of the mid-21st century, as the combination of action-packed blockbuster material and interactive action takes hold over more than just the teenage and "kidult" demographics. I also suspect that the prejudice against video games as being inferior to movies, and more time-wasting, will fade. Whether this will be a good thing, a bad thing, or an indifferent one remains to be seen. What do you think? Are video games destined to become our defining medium? And will they be equal, greater, or lesser a form of entertainment than film?

Welcome

Good day to you all. Many who read this will already know who I am. For any who don't, my name is Connor Hamilton: I am a Christian, an (as yet unpublished) novelist, and a sophomore at Hillsdale College in southern Michigan. When not at college, I currently live in Oregon. I have kept a blog in the past, but over the last few years I let the custom drop, time constraints not least among my reasons. I value blogs for their ability to serve as a forum for conversation and argument to a wide audience, however, so the Sojourner's Inn is my attempt to restart the practice.

I named this blog the Sojourner's Inn because, as a Christian, I view myself as a sojourner of this world, in it but not of it. It is my hope that this website can serve as a place of rest and conversation for anyone who seeks it, like a cheerful inn on a long and difficult road.

The rules for my blog are simple, and should be easy for anyone to follow. I welcome wholesome debate and spirited disagreement, but harsh profanity, personal attacks, and all unseemly vituperation and lewdness are forbidden. If you disregard these bans, your comment will be summarily deleted, and I will post a warning. Following the third comment of this kind, you will be blocked. It is my hope that I will never have to take such measures, but I don't want it to be said that I was not clear.

Welcome, again, to anyone who visits this blog. I look forward to many conversations and debates to come.