A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind by Michael D. O’Brien. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 1998. 261 pages.
Years ago, I started my blogging career on my other, now happily defunct, website for the sole reason that a book had annoyed me. I wanted to create a site dedicated to refuting that book, but because I am paradoxically contrary by nature yet also conflict-averse (as well as scatterbrained), I never did much to accomplish that task. I want to turn to it now: I am going to discuss the book that started me on my blogging journey and then, I hope, have done with it for good.
The book in question is A Landscape with Dragons by Michael D. O’Brien, a little-known Catholic novelist who writes dense, religiously themed, and very niche works. He is a well-read and intelligent individual. A monk of my acquaintance, who knew him personally, once called him a living saint. In his nonfiction, however, O’Brien comes across as plum crazy, and it was his apparent craziness that irritated me.
But O’Brien, I have found, is a Cassandra: He has told the truth and made accurate predictions, yet he has done it so unconvincingly, and has made such poor arguments, that he is easy to ignore, dismiss, or mock.
So I am here to say: Mea culpa, Michael O’Brien. You were right about everything.
Introduction
A Landscape with Dragons, published in 1998, is O’Brien’s attempt to criticize the current state of children’s literature and entertainment. He writes in the same crabbed, perpetually surly, and rigoristic vein as that of the Evangelicals who once made a cottage industry of fretting over Dungeons & Dragons and later made a cottage industry of attacking the Harry Potter books. Like those Evangelicals’, O’Brien’s grasp of facts is tenuous and his reasoning specious—but, just like theirs, correct in the final analysis.
I have come to the conclusion that these people, these religious alarmists who try their hand at moral criticism and do it badly, have excellent instincts but lousy arguments. I suspect their arguments are bad exactly because their instincts are good: They realize something is wrong, but they aren’t sure what, so they invent ad hoc explanations for their misgivings in order to condemn books and films that look innocent to the rest of us. In the end, it turns out they are right and we are wrong not because their reasoning is good but because, unlike theirs, our senses are dull.
Now that we have witnessed an entire generation so single-mindedly obsessed with Harry Potter that it has no other cultural touchstones, we can see that those books, though they might have been harmless to a culture in full health, did incalculable damage just as their critics predicted. So even though their arguments were terrible, the Evangelical alarmists have been vindicated: Harry Potter, or at least Harry Potter mania, was bad for kids.
Indeed, it now looks likely that, even during the so-called “Satanic Panic,” many of the Evangelicals’ allegations were not as unhinged as they appeared at the time. Although their fear of Dungeons & Dragons was probably misplaced, some of their other accusations were correct: Many of our elites really are involved in weird rituals and a lot of rich and powerful people indulge in sex trafficking, as even mainstream publications blithely acknowledged until just recently, when it became politically expedient to pretend that was just a right-wing conspiracy.
Like the Evangelicals, Michael O’Brien, who vents most of his spleen at Walt Disney, is able to detect a rot that, back in the Nineties, was invisible to the rest of us. Now that Disney has announced that its primary goal is to initiate small children into what is best described as a sex cult, O’Brien, like his Evangelical counterparts, has been vindicated in his accusations. His arguments are still poor, he gets a lot of facts wrong, and he shares the Evangelicals’ tendency to make the banalities of evil sound dark, mysterious, and sexy. But his instincts are on point.
Bad Dragons
O’Brien has a primary thesis that informs much of his thought, and which he lays out at the beginning of this book. His thesis can be stated simply as this: The dragon is a symbol for the devil.
That in itself is hardly surprising since a “dragon” appears in the biblical Book of Revelation as an unambiguous representation of the devil. But O’Brien takes it further: He insists that this symbolism is not arbitrary but is in some way linked to metaphysical reality, and he insists that it encompasses not only mythological or fantastical dragons but the whole of Class Reptilia. In other words, an author or artist is obligated to portray any and all reptiles, fictional or real, as symbols of the deepest evil.
Children and Dinosaurs
His basis for this thesis is the dragon of Revelation and the serpent of Genesis 3. That’s a small foundation on which to build such a far-reaching and unbending ethical obligation, so he reinforces it with some etiological myth-making. In this book’s first chapter, he describes a visit to a natural history museum where his son, less than two years old, became frightened by the toothy jaws of a Tyrannosaurus. O’Brien informs us that he had never previously exposed his son to frightening imagery, so he leaps to the conclusion that dinosaurs are symbols of Satan and that small children have an instinctive revulsion for them.
Of course, the critical reader will immediately think of other, equally likely explanations. My daughter, who is about the same age O’Brien’s son was at the time, has a fear of barking dogs and trucks revving their engines. If these are examples of “instinctive” fear, it is probably fear of predators rather than some kind of spiritual sensitivity. Of course, both of these explanations are etiological myths, “just-so” stories. It is impossible to fully understand a young child’s mind (or, for that matter, any mind), so all we can do is make up tales we find convincing. O’Brien, who sees the devil under every rock and in every corner, thinks children recognize Tyrannosaurs as the devil. I, on the other hand, think children recognize Tyrannosaurs as flesh-eating predators. Neither of us can prove his case.
But we might further note that, despite the reaction of O’Brien’s toddler, many young boys are absolutely crazy about dinosaurs. If dinosaurs are physical manifestations of the darkest evil, and if children instinctively shrink from evil, then their instincts aren’t working very well.
Why and Wherefore
O’Brien follows up this anecdote with other incidents he thinks convincing: A five-year-old son has nightmares about dragons, and O’Brien himself has a nightmare that sounds as if it involved sleep paralysis (“The presence of evil was so palpable,” he writes, “that I knew even in my dream that it was more than a dream”). He follows this up with yet another exercise in etiological myth-making: His daughter, at age eight, asks him why God created dinosaurs, and O’Brien answers:
“Elizabeth, I don’t really know for sure, but maybe he wanted to make a creature that looked like something we can’t see. Maybe somewhere in the universe there’s an invisible dinosaur on the loose, and it hates people.”
The critical reader may now think, I believe we’ve discovered why his children have nightmares about reptiles. And someone who cares about theological precision might note that describing a fallen angel as an “invisible dinosaur” is dubious, to say the least.
But the skeptic could go further. He might point out that, if God created dinosaurs to warn us about the devil, then God did a lousy job of it because dinosaurs went undiscovered until 1824, when people were prepared to give them entirely naturalistic explanations. And indeed, even in the writings of short-earth Creationists, O’Brien’s moralistic interpretation of these creatures’ existence is strangely absent. If reminding people of Satan were God’s intention in creating dinosaurs, nobody appears to have realized it except O’Brien himself.
A Modest Rebuttal
O’Brien’s explanation to his daughter is an example of the mixture of wisdom and rank stupidity that characterizes his book as a whole. On the one hand, he correctly interprets her question: If a materialist had heard her ask this, he would have talked about dinosaurs’ evolutionary history or anatomical makeup; that is, he would have thought she was asking about material or efficient causes. O’Brien, more spiritually minded, understood that she was asking about final causes: “What purpose do dinosaurs serve?”
On the other hand, the correct and honest answer is, I don’t know. O’Brien really doesn’t know, and neither do I, and neither do you. He hints that he thinks his answer to his daughter was divinely inspired, but he can’t prove that, and the skeptic’s rebuttal, already given, inclines us to think he’s mistaken. It would be more honest to simply admit a lack of knowledge.
My own speculative answer, which is no more demonstrable than his, is that the dinosaurs make up part of the matrix of this planet, and of this universe, that were necessary preparations for our existence. It apparently takes an enormous universe to generate one habitable planet with viable organisms on it. It also takes a long, painful, violence-filled process of development to produce a sapient species. And it takes a sapient species long millennia of savagery and murder to produce a handful of imperfect civilizations that have achieved some brief, fragile modicum of decency and nobility. Dinosaurs make up some of the puzzle pieces that come together in humanity and humanity’s achievements.
Now, I can’t prove that anything we see in astronomy or natural history is in any way necessary, but he can’t prove that it isn’t, so we are at an impasse. Both his explanation and mine are mere storytelling, not reasoning. But it is for that reason that we cannot derive moral absolutes from our speculations: We cannot claim there is an imperative never to write a story containing either a sympathetic dragon or a lizard that is just a lizard.
An Alternative Theory
After first discovering O’Brien’s book, I embarked on a mission to disprove its central thesis by compiling pre-modern portrayals of snakes or dragons that were neither evil nor symbols of Satan. A book particularly helpful in this endeavor was James H. Charlesworth’s Good and Evil Serpent, which attempts to be an exhaustive study of snake imagery in the biblical world (but includes some embarrassing inaccuracies). What I actually found through my studies is that, in one aspect of his theory, O’Brien is basically correct: In the Western tradition, snakes and dragons are almost always malevolent. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are so few as to be almost not worth mentioning; the only notable one is the snake entwining the rod of Asclepius, the god of medicine.
As I now see it, the problem with O’Brien’s theory is simply that it is too rigid. In different contexts, a snake or dragon may legitimately have different meanings: A dragon in an explicitly Christian text almost certainly represents the devil, but the dragon in the legend of Sigurd does not (though it’s hardly friendly). A snake in a paraphrase of Genesis 3 is obviously a force of evil, but a snake described in a herpetological textbook is just a snake with no symbolic meaning at all. Symbolism, in other words, is dependent on context and intent. St. Thomas Aquinas tacitly suggests something similar whenever he discusses allegorical interpretations of biblical passages: He typically lays alternative allegorical interpretations side by side without expressing preference for one over the others. His method indicates that we are not bound to a single, rigidly imposed allegorical interpretation of any literary work, even when that work is holy writ.
Although I still think O’Brien’s thesis is wrong, my attitude toward it has softened over the years. I first grew more sympathetic to his ideas when I discovered a book of dragon artwork by a man called Ciruelo. Ciruelo believes that all depictions of dragons as malevolent derive from Christian bigotry, and I later discovered that this opinion is common among Wiccans and so-called neo-pagans. Ciruelo’s claim is both historically false and plainly absurd—because evil dragons exist in pagan legends and because one cannot, obviously, have bigotry against a fantasy character.
My misgivings were later strengthened when novelist John C. Wright, husband of my editor, mentioned that he knows people who have only ever read stories of friendly dragons and have never encountered stories of evil ones. That is a tragic cultural ignorance on par with only having ever read Harry Potter novels.
I have come around to the opinion that O’Brien’s thesis is false in theory but correct in practice. Contrary to what he claims, it is not actually immoral to write a book like The Reluctant Dragon, but it is nonetheless vital to ensure that children are familiar with stories of wicked dragons that need to be slain—including dragons that symbolize the devil. This is important because those stories are part of our shared cultural heritage and symbolic language, which we should not allow to be lost.
Bad Movie Reviews
Throughout much of his book, O’Brien delivers critiques of books and movies, especially Disney movies, that he considers immoral. He claims that Disney corrupts the stories it adapts, which is undeniably true (e.g., Bambi, The Jungle Book, and The Little Mermaid are irrefutable examples). However, his knowledge of the original stories is often tenuous, which hampers his ability to critique the Disney versions. There is no reason to discuss all of his reviews; one will suffice.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
O’Brien’s discussion of Disney’s version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is probably his greatest offense against good criticism. He blames Disney for distorting the themes of Victor Hugo’s famous novel—but quickly reveals that he is not, in fact, familiar with the novel. He complains that the villain in the film appears to be a churchman (whom O’Brien calls a “moralist”) and insists that Hugo would never have written an evil churchman into one of his books. We know this, claims O’Brien, because Hugo wrote the famous scene in Les Misérables in which a bishop graciously allows Jean Valjean to rob him in order to save his soul.
One wonders what Dinsey studios would do with Hugo’s Les Miserables (published in 1862), an expressly Christian story in which two central characters, the bishop and Jean Valjean, are heroic Catholics fighting for truth, mercy, and justice in the face of the icy malice of the selcurar humanists, against the background of the French Revolution.
I suppose that’s one way to look at it. O’Brien probably failed to notice that the Church placed Les Misérables on the Index of Forbidden Books. Its contemporaries clearly did not consider it to be “an expressly Christian story.” In fact, critics accused it of justifying violent riots.
Had O’Brien done his research, he might have discovered that Victor Hugo’s relationship with religion was a rocky and complex one. Hugo waffled back and forth between Catholicism and atheism, eventually settling on the latter. Furthermore, it is simply a fact that the most villainous character in Hunchback, Claude Frollo, is in fact a churchman: Specifically, he is an archdeacon who practices alchemy and lusts after a teenage gypsy girl. Disney changes Frollo into a judge and thereby actually mutes the villain’s association with the Church rather than emphasizing it.
O’Brien apparently assumes that Hugo could not have written both a good bishop and an evil archdeacon because O’Brien himself could not. Just as most “Woke” authors could not bring themselves to write a good priest, O’Brien could not bring himself to write a bad one, at least not without carefully delineating the character as a corrupt modernist or the like. Victor Hugo, however, was neither “Woke” nor rigorously pious, and he wrote what the muse, not his scruples, dictated.
But this is not to say that Hugo had no traditional values that he was expressing—it’s just that those values were not the ones that preoccupy O’Brien. As the novel’s dense (and boring) fourth chapter demonstrates, Hugo’s main concern in writing Hunchback was to make his fellow Frenchmen aware of the importance of preserving Gothic architecture, especially the titular cathedral, a subject on which Hugo had previously produced a polemical essay.
Like many of Disney’s “adaptations,” The Hunchback of Notre Dame is indeed an abomination, deviating considerably from its source material and adding out-of-place cartoonish elements, even mocking the original author by naming talking gargoyles after him. Like King Louie from The Jungle Book or most everything in Bambi, Disney’s Hunchback adds silly and frivolous accretions while avoiding the frank, difficult, or violent content of the original material. Hugo’s novel is a tale of irony and tragedy, in which well-meaning people die horribly because of misunderstandings, good women are punished, and bad men go free—except, notably, for Claude Frollo, who is too much a cartoon villain not to get his comeuppance.
Michael O’Brien will never read this essay, but on the off chance he does, I recommend he pick up a good translation of Notre-Dame de Paris. He may be surprised, will likely be offended, and will probably learn something.
The Book List
Now that the wickedness of corporations and entertainment franchises is out in the open and obvious to anyone paying attention, O’Brien’s central premises have been proven true, so there is no longer any reason to pay attention to his hit-or-miss criticisms or his arguments. There is, however, one good reason to obtain a copy of his book: In the back is an extensive children’s reading list that could occupy even the most avid young reader for many years.
It is a genuinely good reading list, divided by age-appropriateness. Since homeschooling is no longer just a commendable option but a moral necessity, a parent could make good use of this list as a guide to his own collection. If you combined it with a list of the Great Books and a list of works in the standard English canon, you could create a complete home library (albeit a prohibitively expensive one). A child who read all or most of the books on this list would be better educated, better rounded, and better read than almost all of his peers.
To give an impression of the list’s quality, I will give examples of its titles: Hans Christian Andersen, Alice in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol, Amelia Bedelia, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, The Incredible Journey, Hans Brinker, My Side of the Mountain, Rifles for Watie, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Two Years Before the Mast, Little House in the Big Woods, Jane Eyre, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Last of the Mohicans, King Solomon’s Mines, Captains Courageous, and The Chosen.
If you’ve only ever read Harry Potter and The Handmaid’s Tale, the significance of such a list will be closed to you. But if you know, you know.
Conclusion
O’Brien claims that too few stories these days show a clear difference between good and evil. I would like to propose that he has made an understandable mistake—but it is still a mistake.
It was common among Christian culture warriors of the 1980s and 1990s to express concern about moral relativism, which they viewed as the greatest threat of the age. That is apparently O’Brien’s concern as well, though his point is obscured because he confuses relativism with “paganism,” a term he uses loosely.
I say this concern was a mistake because relativism is merely an excuse; no one is ever really a relativist: If anyone listens to Postmoderns or progressives long enough, it becomes clear that they have always been moral absolutists about almost everything. They have only ever appealed to moral relativism on one particular subject—sex. Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, easily figured out why: Because that is the only way they could live with themselves. But now that their views of sex are mainstream instead of countercultural, they have ceased appealing to relativism to justify their behavior.
Now that the progressives have transformed into the “Woke” and taken over every significant institution, they have dropped all pretense of relativism and made their absolutism plain: Agree with us or you’re a Nazi; agree with us or you have no place in society; agree with us or you can die. I have even seen a few of them toss around the term “ontologically evil” to describe their enemies. They clearly don’t understand what ontologically means (they’ve never read any books except Harry Potter, remember), but this fumbling attempt to use a real philosophical term is a sign of a sea change in progressivist thought. The “Woke” now agree with O’Brien and the Fundamentalists that all stories must have clearly delineated good guys and bad guys with no nuance, admixture, or gray areas; the only difference is that they disagree on what good and bad really mean.
I will concede to O’Brien that it is nice sometimes, and probably even good, to have cartoon heroes and cartoon villains. But the real world is considerably messier than that. Take World War II, the only historical event the “Woke” are aware of: Yes, the Nazis and other Axis powers needed to be defeated, but that does not excuse such acts as the bombing of Dresden or the bombing of Hiroshima. And the Nazis came into power in the first place largely because of the harsh and unjust sanctions that followed the first World War, and because of the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic.
Other historical events and people are similarly complicated: For example, Gandhi’s push for Indian independence led directly to the mass slaughter of Partition, and Gandhi himself was a sexual pervert who forced women, including close relatives, to sleep with him. Robert E. Lee was by all accounts a gentleman, a scholar, and a noble soul, but he fought on behalf of slave states. It is right that both men are lionized for their respective accomplishments and qualities, and they deserve statues built in their honor, but that does not mean we should blind ourselves to their faults. Real people and real events are messy. Oftentimes, probably most times, there are neither pure good guys nor pure bad guys.
And it is a disservice to ourselves, and to our children, to pretend otherwise. History is one damn thing after another; it is a chronicle of human folly and will be until the end of time. Every attempt to break free from this cycle of folly and “wake up from history” only produces mounds of corpses. Utopia is not an option, as even Plato came to realize—which is why he wrote the Laws after The Republic. The line between good and evil runs through the human heart, and it is our lot to be both devils and angels until the curtain finally drops on all of us.
O’Brien is certainly correct that we need to retain or rediscover the symbols that are part of our heritage. However, treating those symbols as if they are dogmas is obvious folly. But he is right that we have a duty to protect children from perversity, a duty that is especially urgent at the moment.
He is also right that we need stories of good and evil—but that is not all we need. We also need stories like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, in which everybody loses and nothing turns out right because stupidity, tragedy, and skullduggery are all parts of the human condition. We also need to study real history and read it honestly.
We need all kinds of stories, not just simple good-vs-evil stories. But we do need stories of devilish dragons. I must humbly grant him that.
