One notes that in fact business hates “conformity and monotony” — if you like it, everyone buys the same thing and doesn’t buy anything else. If you need to be Unique and Individual you always have to buy new things to Express It because last month’s things have been picked up by everyone else who wants to be Unique and Individual.

There is an in-depth New Yorker interview of him called “Far From Narnia” where he is very clear about his opinions. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/26/051226fa_fact?currentPage=1 (can’t figure out links either!)

From the New Yorker article: “…he is one of England’s most outspoken atheists. In the trilogy, a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, becomes enmeshed in an epic struggle against a nefarious Church known as the Magisterium; another character, an ex-nun turned particle physicist named Mary Malone, describes Christianity as “a very powerful and convincing mistake.” Pullman once told an interviewer that “every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him.”

when he writes “He may trust you, he may believe you implicitly, but the story has still buried in his mind a dangerous image of the way the world is,” I think he’s right depending on the child and how advanced a reader he/she is. charlotte doyle certainly didn’t bury in my mind an image of the way the world is. and i loved charlotte doyle.

when he writes that you should read more advanced stuff to your kid, i think that is v good advice, and much more key. if your kid can understand pride and prejudice, she can understand the implicit errors in the worldview of the author of the face on the milk carton. if your kid is three years ahead of what everybody else is reading, you can probably more often have the best of all three worlds, if they’re able to read what “everyone else is reading,” recognize why it fails, and evangelize against it. and teach their friends to be book critics too… maybe.

(sorry for no caps this is pasted from my private blog, where i don’t capitalize)

My son is only one year old, so I’ve got a while before he hits teen lit…of course it’ll probably be sooner than I think…

I very much agree on monitoring closely the entertainment and information that our children take in. It’s just plain common sense. Way too many people are lulled by the culture around them that seems to shout with a thousand different voices: “It’s just a book! It’s just a movie! It’s nothing! Why so prudish? Think for yourself and do what everyone else is. Question authority if you want to question something.”

Like Andrew’s parents, we’ve tended to be somewhat, though not entirely, laissez faire about books and very careful about movies. I see his point, but I worry more about the power of visual images to remain with you forever and stories told that way to mold your mind and imagination without your realizing it, because your defenses are seduced or put to sleep.

I can think of movies I now devoutly wish I’d never seen — the worst one of which (it showed real evil with too much relishing detail) I was taken to by a Baptist minister I knew.

My parents were basically laissez-faire with me about books. Whatever I wanted to read was cool. Movies and games could be censored though. In retrospect, I think that was completely wrong. Books, for those who understand them, are far more powerful than any film or game.

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But as to the actual content of the essay, I found some parts to be remarkably Tocquevillian.

“No one understands them, the people in authority over them least of all.” Americans are naturally abhorrent of non-merit-based authority, especially parentage.

“The good life requires having the things you want” Materialism in America? I’m shocked, shocked!

“Business, if it is thought about at all, is greedy, rapacious, uncaring, and environment-destroying, and produces conformity and monotony.” — The American conflict between Puritanism and Hedonism (albeit in neo-religious environmentalist form)? Yes, please.

“There is no question that can be solved only by rigorous, disciplined thought.”
“God doesn’t exist for any practical purpose.”
“Politics doesn’t exist, history doesn’t exist, high culture doesn’t exist.” Individualism, Pragmatism, and Cultural Poverty? Welcome to the new world!