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I want to be careful not to ruin Seven Pounds for you, because it’s a good film, well worth watching. And part of its strength lies in its slow exposition of what motivates the protagonist on his peculiar and extravagant missions of mercy. The film gives you just enough hints at just the right pace to keep you intrigued as his story unfolds.

Seven Pounds gave me a lot to think about – especially about whether the good deeds of the main character are really good. No doubt he did good to others; no doubt they benefited; no doubt their lives were changed dramatically. But the central motivation of the main character (and here I’m afraid I have to give something away) is his shame and remorse. Let’s just say that the film shows beautifully how even the greatest acts of kindness can be produced by the darkest, most desperate attempts to atone for one’s own sins.

But I’m also pondering how the other characters must have felt – to be chosen for reasons unknown to them to receive incalculable gifts from a stranger. Yes, much to think about.

When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, was assigned reading for me. I’m happy to say that it didn’t turn out to be the drag that much assigned reading turns out to be. Although I’m not currently involved in any work that gives me opportunities to apply their specific recommendations about working with the poor, their principles are thought-provoking and rich enough to invite reflection. They have me musing on how I help others in all sorts of relationships, from work to friends to family. Worth reading.

A few weeks ago I told you that I liked Robert Kagan’s book Of Paradise and Power. I liked it so much I ordered a more recent work of his, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. I again appreciated his clear analysis that seems to me to be realistic without being cynical. I’ll commend the book simply by quoting from his concluding section:

The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas and on the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product. Our political scientists posit theories of modernization, with sequential stages of political and economic development that lead upwards to liberalism. Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of worldviews over centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer. Naturally, many are inclined to believe that the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, as it had to, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage forward in humanity’s march from strife and aggression towards a peaceful and prosperous coexistence.

The illusion is just true enough to be dangerous.

Because of my interest in the Hungarian chemist-economist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, which I picked up through my reading in Leslie Newbigin, I bought myself Polanyi’s heady little book called Meaning. While struggling through the first few chapters I came across this little paragraph, which set my brain juices to bubbling:

… we cannot learn to keep our balance on a bicycle by trying to follow the explicit rule that, to compensate for an imbalance, we must force our bicycle into a curve – away from the direction of the imbalance – whose radius is proportional to the square of the bicycle’s velocity over the angle of the imblance. Such knowledge is totally ineffectual unless it is known tacitly, that is, unless it is known subsidiarily – unless it is simply dwelt in. (more…)