Jealousy and the Golden Rule

All my life I've handled jealousy the wrong way. As with many things, I've only begun to figure this out in recent years. As is also the case with many things, my problems with jealousy go back to my upbringing.

My mother had many fine qualities but she was prone to jealousy and would, from time to time, challenge me to prove my devotion to her. I, and my siblings, would be accused of liking our friend's families more than our own. Once, as I have discussed before on this blog, my mother tearfully accused me of not sharing any of her values. None of this strikes me as worthy of any condemnation; it was an ordinary human failing on her part and easily forgotten in favour of the many better memories I have of her.

What does seem worth focusing on his my response for I worked out a strategy for dealing with these outbursts of hers as a child that I maintained as an adult. As Robert Glover has taught me, we continue to use these strategies learned in childhood even though they never worked. My strategy was 1) try to assuage feelings of jealousy and, when that inevitably failed, 2) to hide things I was doing that might provoke these jealous feelings. What I never did was to recognize that feelings of jealous are never legitimate. As a consequence, you can't assuage them. As to hiding what you are doing, besides the whole dishonesty issue, there is no point in even trying because you couldn't possibly guess which actions of yours are going to provoke jealousy in another. Jealousy is always a projection of the inadequacy and self-hatred of the jealous person and has nothing to do with the objects of their jealousy; jealousy tells you a whole lot about the state of mind of the person who has it and nothing about reality.

Control not trust

Many years ago I was in a short-lived relationship with a woman who was intensely jealous. I dealt with it according to the strategy I had worked out as a child. I made my life an open book to her while not expecting the same from her. Indeed, I went so far as to assure her that she need not make the same gestures I was. I just wanted her to feel comfortable. It didn't work.

The punchline to the story is that my jealous girlfriend then cheated on me.

What's obvious to me now, and wasn't then, is that jealousy is about control. It's not a trust issue. It's a desire to control other people's lives felt by people who can't control their own feelings. People who can't control their own feelings live in a chaotic world full of threats. Jealousy is a way of forcing others to validate their chaotic feelings. Again, it's a strategy that doesn't work. It doesn't work because it's their feelings that are the problem and not you. By trying to assuage these feelings I was cooperating in feeding a monster that could never be satisfied. In doing so I was implicitly accepting guilt for blameless behaviour and thereby justifying her jealousy and thereby reinforcing it.

The limitations of the Golden Rule

Her affair(s) (there was one for certain and possibly another) should have been all the proof I needed that my strategy didn't work. My initial response to her jealousy—and to every case of jealousy I had to deal with since then up to a few months ago—was to try empathy and then to treat her as I imagined I would want to be treated if I'd been in her shoes. I'd imagine what I thought it was like to be this jealous person and conclude that what they were doing was sending out a call for help, that they didn't feel secure and loved and therefore couldn't trust. I'd pour on the love and make my life an open book hoping to make her feel like she could trust.

But let's approach the problem from the other end: How could someone prone to jealousy cheat? That seems like craziest thing imaginable. How could someone who didn't feel secure in a relationship destroy the trust of a person who has committed to them? Well, if the issue really was trust, as I had always imagined it was, it wouldn't make any sense. But it isn't about trust—it's about control. Seeing me have friendships with other women inspired feelings in her that she couldn't control. Cheating on me didn't.

From her perspective, she could only imagine that someone would cheat if they could.  Although she never connected the dots, the real reason she was worried I would cheat on her was because she "knew" (on some level) that she was capable of cheating on me. She didn't see that because, in her own eyes, she "wasn't that sort of girl". But that sense of herself was not the result of any commitment to real moral standards but because of shame. Her morality was driven by fear of what other people might think and she thought that was what kept everyone in line. By implication, she believed that people would all cheat if they weren't constantly watched. As always happens with shame-driven morality, that turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. All it took to make it happen was a situation where the odds of her getting caught were so small as to seem nonexistent and away she went.

The problem with the Golden Rule is that it assumes the person making the judgment and the person we are making the judgment about are morally reasonable. Treat others as you would have them treat you? Really? Cause I want others to give me special breaks and not punish me for my failings and expect nothing in return. Any real morality requires a real moral standard and not a state of mind (which is all empathy is) to work.

To try and empathize with a jealous person is to try to imagine what it feels like to be deluded. You can, and should sympathize with the person; for who has not been jealous? But the feelings of jealous are crazy feelings. They deserve no respect. These feelings are their problem to solve, not yours.

"Unconditional" love and testing

Earlier I wrote about how the promise of unconditional love from parents is a hollow one. What are the consequences of this?

One of them is that, because the existence of conditions is denied, neither we nor our parents know where the boundaries actually are. This means that your parents, thinking there are no boundaries, only become aware that something is unacceptable long after the boundaries have been crossed.

It's easier to get a grasp on this if you imagine a hypothetical situation. Imagine you are in your backyard and you have beer in an open cooler.  Someone comes in and you offer them a beer. They finish it and help themselves to a second. Your thinking that was a bit rude but you don't say anything. Then they do it again and you let that slide. Somewhere around the sixth bottle you're thinking that's a bit much. Or they leave and go home and then come back for another beer. You now have to establish a boundary but, because you've let things slide so far, you have to tell the person that something you've had no problems with up until now is too much. There is no non-aggressive way to do this.

Think how that feels to a child. They are going along doing things that no one has corrected them for and then they are not just corrected but pushed back aggressively. That is frightening and confusing. Children start thinking there are a set of moral landmines out there.

In the worst cases, a child will grow up to think that everything is a test. You'll find yourself, I certainly did, resenting every request anyone makes of you because you'll see it as a test you haven't been allowed to prepare for; you'll feel like you've been set up to fail.

I was forced to face this more clearly by going back to school. I'm doing this as an adult because I want to do it. And  yet, every time I faced a test—exam or essay—I started to feel a resentment and that led me to procrastinate. I didn't want to prepare and I didn't want to research. I still felt the resentment that came from being asked to perform without being told what all the expectations are. This is comes from being told that you are loved unconditionally only to find nothing of the sort is true.

And what to do about it? It's not a life or death issue. I've just realized that I have this lingering resentment now but it was there through some 17 or so years of schooling and an entire work career after that. I've done alright despite this but I don't think I've ever performed at my full potential until the last little while.

Part of the cure was to do volunteer work at my church. That enabled me to test myself, to set my own conditions for what was good enough. Ironically, those conditions were not only higher than what others would have set for me, they were much higher. But they were known conditions that were clearly set out. It also helped that they were set out by me.

I started applying the same approach to school work. The first step, something I borrowed from Robert Glover, will initially seem perverse. It was to give myself permission to fail. What that does is to wipe away any sense of being set up to fail because others have not set the conditions out clearly. Then I can ask myself what should be achieved (note the caveat below). Then I can ask what I can reasonably hope to accomplish in the time left to me. Related to this, I can ask how I might do this better next time as one of the things that will inevitably become clear is that I could have done better if I'd started earlier.

Caveat: passive aggressive responses

Any time we find ourselves saying something like, "I'll do it on my own terms," or "I'll do it at my own pace," we are lying. That's one great stinking pile of bullshit we are peddling to others and to ourselves. "My own terms" or "my own pace" is just another way pretending to have no boundaries. A boundary is something you can set out and measure whether you've succeeded. I'm going to deadlift four-hundred-and-fifty pounds means I'm going to take a barbell and plates weighing that much and lift it according to a certain procedure. "My own terms" is just a whiny little child resenting others and planning to fail. That's not only a recipe for failure, it's unkind to others. passive aggressive = malicious consent.

The bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal

It's very difficult to judge a marriage from outside. It's not impossible. That we can say things such as, "They seemed so happy" or "I never thought they'd make it" tells us that sometimes we can judge correctly. That may seem odd but admitting you were wrong about something is only possible if you later were able to figure out the truth. "I used to think your house was blue" means that I now know it isn't.

And what of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal? No one I've ever read thinks it was  happy marriage. That's not what's at issue. The question is, how good a wife was Elizabeth Siddal?

Most of us tend to think she was good. DGR himself loved her obsessively. And Siddal worked hard to flourish as an artist and as a person. And her life was tragic. To question her goodness now would be like kicking a puppy. A really cute puppy that everyone loved.

I don't know any different. For years now, I've seen her as an admirable figure. Just this morning though, I was reading a piece called "The bias against Fanny Cornforth" and it got me wondering, could there be an equal bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal?

This is all hypothesis but here's the case.

The whole thing hinges on Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself. He loved her. Could he have been wrong? Could he have been deluded? Unfortunately, just to ask the question is to answer it. DGR was a man given to romanticizing women, exaggerating their beauty, their intelligence and their character. You might argue that DGR's praise of Siddal was exaggerated in a way that harmed her but you can't reasonable suggest it wasn't exaggerated.

Now, there is nothing unusual about this. A lot of men are capable of attributing all sorts of nonsense to a woman they love. And we are capable of maintaining these delusions in the face of incredible evidence to the contrary.

Don't be binary about this. To be honest about Siddal, we do not have to go to the opposite pole and conclude that she was evil. We just need to be willing to acknowledge that we have blinders on the subject, blinders we have inherited from DGR and generations of writers about him, and look around to see what evidence there might be.

Unconditional love?

The single biggest lie parents tell is that the love they have for their children is unconditional. Every child in the history of the world knows it is a lie because parents noticeably withdraw their love when the child disappoints their parents.

And yet parents continue to retail this lie.

The problem is in the language. "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?" The answer is that nothing happens for we are just running words up against one another. In this world, the only test we have of what is "irresistible" is that it has not been resisted so far. And likewise "immovable". Should what has heretofore been an irresistible object run up against what has heretofore been immovable, the end result will be that our understanding of one or the other will change based on what happens.

The universe is not obliged to conform to our reason. It works the other way around.

"Unconditional love" is just another "irresistible" or "unmovable". It stands until it doesn't.

Actually, it's much worse than that. Parents give or withdraw their love as a way of manipulating their children. That sounds horrible but it's just a way of raising children. It only sounds inhumane if you've allowed the impossible standard of "unconditional" to creep in to begin with.  And this love can be, and often is, withdrawn for trivial reasons. A child embarrasses a parent in front of guests and the parent becomes cold and distant.

"But, "perhaps you insist, "the parent still loves the child even though they are unhappy with them." You think the child understands that? For that matter, do you think the parent reasons, "I am unhappy with little Joey but I still love him"? Does that seem even remotely plausible?

As an adult, you have to differentiate yourself from your parents and the question of "love" is a good place to start. This is where we can begin to see the parent as a human being and not the god-like figure they start off being for us.

Trust issues

My father used to tell a story about a psychiatrist who put his own son on top of a mantelpiece and encouraged him to jump into his waiting arms. When the kid duly jumped, the father let him go crashing to the ground. The psychiatrist then explained to horrified onlookers, "That will teach him never to trust anyone."

Whatever the merits of the humour in the story, trust issues almost always go back to our childhood.

The way things should work is this: your parents love you and support you. They teach you morality by (mostly) example that is then reinforced by precept. Starting in your mid teens, they let you develop more and more independence and then let go.

It never works out that way. I once had heated argument with a  Catholic woman who was interfering in her daughter's life. She insisted to me that she had to do so because it was her duty as a mother to make sure her children didn't go to hell. Her daughter was in her late thirties at the time.

Sometimes it isn't anybody's fault. I knew a young woman 40 years ago now whose mother died when she was 16. It was a horrible death and the poor girl was left with a mother-sized hole in her life. I know a guy whose father died a similarly horrible death from cancer years before I was born. Both struggled all their lives to form close human relationships. They see-sawed between being too trusting and too suspicious. The thing is, they both had some understanding that the problems began with them. They could see that their behaviours were destroying their chances to bond with other people but they wouldn't stop.

I say "wouldn't" instead of "couldn't" because there was something willful about it. They felt others should accommodate their special needs. They had trust issues because foundational people in their lives had been taken away from them, this brutal disruption had left them unable to build trusting relationships with others, it wasn't their fault this had happened and. therefore, other people needed to take their trust issues more seriously. Not everyone, you understand, only people who wanted to get close to them.

This is, easy to say, the exact opposite of what should be done. Trust issues are damaging to us not because other people fail to take them seriously but because we take them too seriously. When other people ask, usually with actions and not in with words, to get over ourselves, we quietly scream inside, "Can't you see, this happened to me and now I'm owed!" To which the obvious rejoinder is, "By whom exactly?"

I've done that. Like most people, I've had my heart broken, my trust betrayed and then I felt entitled to special treatment. Yes, I'm probably capable of picking up and carrying on but I deserve some special love. As I say above, I think I learned this pattern of behaviour in childhood from parents who probably learned it in their childhoods.

I've been fixing the problem bit by bit but there is more to do.

Fundamental options

I made one of the most important moral decisions I made in my life at age nine in October of 1968. We were living in Fredericton at the time and it was pretty reliable that we'd get the first snow of the year in October. I remember the first snow that year. I was in a place where I could see a lot of sky and I saw the cloud coming towards me and I could smell the snow. And then I saw it, way off in the distance I could see that the cloud had snow in it and that it was falling. I still remember the devout hope that the cloud would not miss me. It didn't and I, like any self-respecting nine year old was happy as I could be.

Is that right? I might be conflating several years' memories. All that stuff happened. Maybe not all on that same day. It may not even have been the first snowfall of the year but perhaps the second, third or maybe it was the first storm that the snow actually lasted.

What I do remember is that after some early snow I expressed my delight and was greeted by grumpiness from adults. More than that, they tried to convince me that I would eventually come to see things their way, that my enthusiasm was a result of childish immaturity. And I made a sacred vow that I would never be like them.

It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not fulfill it. (Ecclesiastes 5: 5)

I think I was aware of the fact that I was doing something audacious, potentially sacrilegious, even at the time. If I had not kept the vow, I do not think I would have been judged harshly; I was, after all, only a child. But I did keep it. That decision was my path in the yellow wood and it has made all the difference. And much of that difference has not been good for it has caused me pain and I have caused others pain because of it. I keep my vow, however, for I think it was a good thing to do despite the pain caused. In fact, I keep it knowing with near certainty that I will continue to cause pain for others and myself.

That vow is a vow not because of anything the nine-year-old me might or might not have understood when I made it. I didn't speak aloud or pray it interiorly. What makes it so significant all these years later is that 1) I've remembered it and 2) I've done my best to live it. It's become a vow to strive to have a Romantic existence and anyone close to me who has tried to resist that, who has tried to make me give it up in the name of more prosaic values, has run into a wall. And it will continue to be that way. I choose to live in a world that is enchanted. A world where beauty and goodness can be seen and pursued. A world where morality is important but only as a tool to get us to higher ends; a world where we have duties higher than the requirements of ethics.

There is more to say on this subject and I might even say it.

Things I have mixed feelings about

That's a beautiful image. And the idea—the wild Romantic dream—is also beautiful. Romantic Catholicism is beautiful and good. (Although not necessarily in the way that traditionalist Catholics imagine: if you think wearing a mantilla in church is preventing your sexuality from being a distraction to men around you I have some really bad news for you.)

But what exactly is this a rebellion against. Modernity? Presumably not. Modernism? Probably yes but which modernism?

And there is a sense in which this is all quite achievable. You simply decide to be an anachronism and do it.

But consider this: most modernisms are also revolts against the modern world. No modernist was ever happy with what modernity provided. The call to "make it new" was driven by a fear that modern civilization, left to itself, wouldn't get it right. The fear was that all those middle class shopkeepers pursuing comfort and economic security would degrade the culture. And perhaps they have/will.

But who anointed us to fix the problem? If the record of modernists and traditionalists both outside and inside the Church was a glowing example to inspire us all, I'd say jump on board. But that record is actually one of appalling blindness to the worst evils of the 20th century. Catholic traditionalists have one up on modernists in that they, at least, saw the dangers of communism. Their record on fascism, alas, is not so good. And, while far less damaging than horrid evils of fascism and communism, the legacy of Catholic traditionalism in Italy, Ireland and Quebec is not good.

Do I want to revolt against the modern world? Yes, I do. Do I want the Church to have a big influence on the culture and politics of the modern world? There I am not so certain.

The high cost of authenticity

Surface acting is when front line service employees, the ones who interact directly with customers, have to appear cheerful and happy even when they’re not feeling it. This kind of faking is hard work—sociologists call it “emotional labor”—and research shows that it’s often experienced as stressful. It’s psychologically and even physically draining; it can lead to lowered motivation and engagement with work, and ultimately to job burnout. 

Having to act in a way that’s at odds with how one really feels—eight hours a day, five days a week (or longer)—violates the human need for a sense of authenticity. We all want to feel that we’re the same person on the outside as we are on the inside, and when we can’t achieve that congruence, we feel alienated and depersonalized.

Faking it can be hard, depending on what you're faking. Most people can fake an orgasm when they're with someone they love and they don't want to hurt their feelings but just try faking lust for someone who repulses you. 

The explanation given above strikes me as false. I don't think many people have an issue with acting in a way that is at odds with how they really feel. When it is in our interest to conceal our feelings, we have no trouble doing it and everyone has an interest in hiding some of their feelings. It's a skill we all pick up pretty early in life and that no sane person willingly gives up.

If anything, I would argue that a need for authenticity is something people need to be trained to feel. It's only in a society where people are trained to feel entitled to authenticity that it becomes some sort of imposition to expect employees to be cheerful on the job. For anyone over fifty, what is weird about this situation is not that companies are asking employees to be cheerful on the job but that it even has to be said. 

The thing is, you have control over your emotions. They don't just happen to you like bird shit dropping on your head. It's just basic human courtesy to make an effort to be cheerful for others. It's not expected at all times—if you get really bad news, you can let it show—but, otherwise, putting people through your bad moods is what inconsiderate jerks do. And the more casual the relationship you have with a person, the more inconsiderate it is to subject them to your bad mood.

Authenticity isn't a real virtue but the simulacrum of one. The real virtue is moral integrity.

That late-1970s feeling

No, that is not a prediction that Trump will win. I have no idea. In any case, Trump is no Reagan.

I was cheered last week, when walking back from the bus stop I saw two school buses carrying students from Carleton University to a protest march to the effect that university education should be free. I was cheered because Carleton has 28,000 students and the people organizing the protest could only gather two school bus loads to support their cause.

That reminded me of how it felt back in 1979. The protesting few got all the press then as they do now. You felt alone if you didn't agree with the notion that university education should be free. You might meet others who felt this way and it felt good to talk to them but that good feeling would be quickly overwhelmed by all the press and attention to protesters got.

"Protestor" is an odd word to use here. Then, as now, professors and the university administrators were on the students' side. The government wasn't terribly keen on the idea as the cost of existing social programs was already running high and, as we shall see below, the economy wasn't strong but they weren't opposed in principle; if they'd thought even for a second that taxpayers would accept the cost of providing university education for free, they'd have jumped at the opportunity to provide it. You can't really be a protestor if your really just providing cover for the people you claim to be protesting against.

They protested for a lot other stuff too.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. It turned out that the students getting all the press weren't representative of the majority. Most thought that free university would be a good thing the same way they thought that free beer, free cars and being paid to have fun would be good things too. which is to say, they thought it would be nice but was too impractical to work. Most of us were liberal in that unreflected way you tend to be in your early twenties, but, regardless of ideology, we dismissed the idea as an illusion. We were like Mattie Ross who'd said, "You must pay for everything in this world one way and another."And that included "free" education.

That attitude made us very different from the generation that came before us. Even though we couldn't see it ourselves, our professors could. They called us cynical. They accused us of only wanting to make lots of money. The truth is that we had the bad luck to come of age in the middle of a financial crisis. The recession of 1979-1982 was the worst since the depression up until that time. Interest rates were out of control. Some students' parents were paying 17% on their mortgages.

How bad are things now?

The worst of Leonard Cohen

I love Leonard Cohen. I always have from when I was a little boy and I would (rarely) hear Suzanne on the car radio to the present day. But I don't love him uncritically.

I was inspired to write about the subject again, for I often wrote about him on my former blog, by this article by Neil McCormick of the Telegraph that purports to list Cohen's albums from best to worst. The ratings are far from crazy and I suspect that most Cohen fans would agree with some of his choices. No one, to take the most obvious example, seriously disputes the claim that Death of a Ladies Man is Cohen's worst album. And pretty much everyone is going to put his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, and I'm Your Man at or near the top.

Not because it's important, it's as trivial but let's get it out of the way, here is the Telegraph list and mine set side by side. (Note the Telegraph ratings were done before the release of Cohen's fourteenth, and almost certainly last album, You Want it Darker.)

That doesn't matter much. Here's what I think does matter.

Cohen writes in a  tradition that stretches back through Petrarch to Saint Augustine. This tradition is therapeutic—it sees the solution to like's most important problems in self understanding that can only be gained through a combination of philosophic examination and prayer. He is not, contrary to what McCormick and, not to pick on him particularly, and may other critics think, particularly interested in politics or ethics. Leonard is unfailing at his worst when he writes about politics or morality. (The two blots on the otherwise brilliant I'm Your Man are the album's political outings "First We Take Manhattan" and "The Jazz Police".)

The worst, cringe-inducing words that Cohen ever wrote is the following stanza from "Lover Lover Lover".

He said, "I locked you in this body,
I meant it as a kind of trial.
You can use it for a weapon,
or to make some woman smile." 

Even Prince, who specialized in this sort of crap, never wrote anything quite that awful. The lyric is utterly narcissistic and all the worse for Cohen presumes to be speaking for God here.

What Cohen does well, and does very well, is to write liturgy. He writes prayers that accompany rites that can, at their best, make you holy.

"Why can't I have "Hallelujah" at my Catholic wedding?" That's a question we get often. People asking for it can see that it's clearly a religious song. Contrary to what you might think, the lyric about the Holy Dove is not blasphemous. The problem with the song is precisely that it is liturgical and you can't bring non-Catholic liturgy into the Catholic wedding rite.

The root of Cohen's great liturgical lyrics and music (and it's not liturgy if it's just words) is a therapeutic understanding of philosophy and prayer. That is where you find the best of Leonard Cohen. That's why, contra Neil McCormack I group Dear Heather and Ten New Songs with Cohen's best.

Millenials

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”  -Lewis Mumford

This popped up on a page I was reading today.

For those of you who have forgotten or never knew who Jayne Mansfield was, she was a bleach blonde who had a career from the mid 1950s to about 1959 or so. The market for large-breasted suicide blondes crashed around that time. She kept her career going in diminished circumstances until 1967 when she died in a car accident.

The funny thing about Mansfield is how many clones she had in the first decade of the 21st century. The Mansfield formula—platinum sunshine #51 hair combined with push-up bras and very low-cut tops and the inevitable wardrobe "malfunctions" they produced—was very much the norm until very recently.

In other news, Tom Hayden has died. If Jayne Mansfield is the emblem of the most shallow elements of our culture running from the early fifties to the mid sixties, Hayden and his ex-wife Jane Fonda perfectly represent the most shallow elements of the period from 1967 to 1979.

Oddly enough, this gives me a sense of hope.

How church doctrine changes

Traditionalist Catholics have spent a lot of time sneering at Father Tom Rosica for the following:

Will this Pope re-write controversial Church doctrines? No. But that isn't how doctrine changes. Doctrine changes when pastoral contexts shift and new insights emerge such that particularly doctrinal formulations no longer mediate the saving message of God's transforming love. 

See, for example, here, here, or here,.

Yes, there is a spin there. Fr. Rosica can only imagine people changing doctrine for the best of reasons and he is implying that only his side of the argument are brave and honest and loving. This is classic Enlightenment thinking and it leaves us with the quandary of having to decide where it is more charitable to assume he is just dishonest or really blind.

That said, however, he is right about one very important thing: church doctrine can and does change and, if and when it does, the doctrines in question won't have to be rewritten. The Church condemns usury today just as it did hundreds of years ago. But the doctrine on usury has completely changed in meaning. The same could happen, I would argue that it already is happening, with church teaching on sexuality and contraception. The actual phrases setting out the Church's moral teaching have not changed but the doctrine is changing.

David Kasanof wrote a very funny column WoodenBoat magazine for many years. He once commented on the following joke:

How do you get a rat out of the lee scuppers?
Come about.

For those of you who aren't nautical. Scuppers are a gap left open between surfaces to allow water to drain, sort of like the gap inside the walls of your house. The lee scuppers are the ones on the downwind side of the boat. It's a difficult problem for the rat would feel trapped and if you tried to reach down into the scuppers to pull it out you'd be severely bitten. Coming about puts the boat on a different tack so that the downwind, or lee scuppers, are now upwind, or windward scuppers. As Kasanof commented, the rat doesn't move but all the words around him do. A lot of jokes work like that. The joke that life is playing on traditionalist Catholics right now works like that too.

And they have nobody but themselves to blame.

"The Protestant influence on modern ideas about religion has made sincerity and good intentions defining features of good religiosity"

That's from this article on religion in the movies of the Coen brothers.

It's an issue that has interested me ever since my first girlfriend criticized members of her church who had memorized the creed and recited it by rote. She thought it meant nothing unless they read it and thought about the meaning of each phrase as they said it. She was an Anglican girl of a low, or Protestant, bent. She'd been a very pious girl who taught Sunday school but had already begun to drift away when I met her. She had a copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs on her bedside table.

The fact that I know what was on her bedside table is not as incriminating as it might seem. She had very little in the way of parental supervision, her mother had died and she and her father had become somewhat estranged in the aftermath following a very difficult death. But even left alone to socialize in any room of her house, with no one else under the roof, we were shockingly innocent.

We were, however, headed in different directions. She was ion her way to losing her faith and I, a cradle Catholic but not terribly convinced, was on my way to finding mine.

That experience is not, in itself, enough to cast doubt on the value of sincerity in religion. It takes a lot more. That said, I think the evidence is there to do it.

The nice-guy presidency

The thing about nice guys is that they aren't very nice. They are "nice" in the sense that they think that if they follow the rules and don't cause any trouble then things will go well for them. They are, as a consequence, easily manipulated. They were talked into believing that Obama's greatness was woven from magic thread that only non-racists could see. Everyone knows he's been a lousy president but the nice guys (both male and female) don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying it aloud.

Sometimes I think the only thing that will shake them out of this spell would be a really big disaster—if one of the many slowly simmering failures from the Obama years that no one is willing to look at were to boil over. Or maybe we just need to wait until Hillary Clinton is in the Whitehouse because it will then be okay to blame her for everything. Or maybe they'll just keep convincing themselves things are okay until we have a gigantic collapse of some sort.

Philosophical "complexity"

I'm not making this up, the subtitle of the article really is"Is the philosopher’s complexity enough to excuse his overt anti-Semitism?". Because it's oh so much nicer when the person who hates you is complex?

Heidegger strikes me as a pretty simple proposition. His writing is dark and needlessly elaborate but  that is the mark of the simple-minded thug doing philosophy. The complexity lies in his defenders who endlessly tie themselves in knots trying to dress this nasty piece of work such that no one will notice what a crass little whore he was.

Notice, for example, this move from the article under the subtitle noted above:

But with Heidegger, sweetness and light were never part of the package, and that was the key to his power. Being and Time was the first book of philosophy I had read that seemed to understand the human condition in the same way that literature did—less through abstract intellectual concepts than through the lived experience of mood. For Heidegger, existence—in German, Dasein—is grasped first and foremost not by the rational mind, but by the emotions that determine the very shape and texture of the world in which we live. The affects he dwells on are primarily “negative” ones—fear, alienation, anxiety, rather than love or joy—but he argues that these dark and disorienting moods are precisely what disclose the world to us most primally.

Do babies feel fear, alienation and anxiety? We might concede fear, although even that would be a stretch in a newborn. Anxiety and alienation, on the other hand, are not possible for the simple reason that you need a whole lot of language skills and some abstract intellectual concepts that develop along with language skills before you can experience alienation and anxiety. All by yourself in your "throwness" you experience no such thing. Only a language-using, social being can understand such emotions. Heideggerians are stealing several bases when they make this move.

And this initial trick, made so quickly that we barely notice it, has serious long-term consequences.

Being and Time is not an overtly ethical book—it has nothing to say in the traditional vocabulary of Western philosophical moralism, no use for ideas like Plato’s “the Good” or Kant’s categorical imperative. That is largely because Heidegger is not very interested in the central problem of ethics (and of politics), which is how to live with other people. For him, the key experiences and challenges of existence are individual: Alone we suffer, alone we die, and alone we must make meaning out of our fate. The highest value, then, is not goodness but authenticity; above all, authenticity in the face of death. To accept one’s actual condition of mortality and thrownness, not to flee from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions, is for Heidegger the ultimate moral achievement. As he writes, “Authentic Being-towards-death can not evade its ownmost non-relational possibility, or cover up this possibility by fleeing from it, or give a new explanation for it to accord with the common sense of ‘the they.’ ”

Well, yes, once you've cheated by smuggling in concepts like alienation and anxiety without acknowledging that these can only be learned and understood by social beings, then you can pretend that we face all this alone. And what part of not fleeing "from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions" was Heidegger's decision to become a Nazi. (There is, by the way, no evidence that he ever regretted or repented that choice.)

To the very limited extent that it does matter, it is not in the face of death but among the living that authenticity matters.

Bonus Mad Men tie in

"'She won''t get married because she has never been in love'. I think I wrote that; it was used to sell nylons." 

"For a lot of people love isn't just a slogan." 

"Oh, you mean love, you mean big lightning bolt to the heart where you can't eat and you can't work  and you just run off and get married and make babies. The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call 'love' was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." 

"Is that right?" 

 "I'm pretty sure about it. You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget."

That's Don Draper and Rachel Mencken from the first season. We read this dialogue and we know this guy because we've met his type before. Draper isn't telling us something about "being" when he speaks of being born alone and dying alone. It's just a clever excuse for not caring. We see that right away. Why don't we see it in Heidegger? Because of all the complexity!

A rude question

You spent one and half hours watching a debate between two vile human beings who have been constant media presences for the last few decades and about whom there is nothing new we could possibly learn and you want me to take your opinions seriously?

Same old, same old

Some emerging religious leaders like Rev. William Barber or Rev. Osagyefo Sekou offer a new understanding of morality that is intrinsically linked with social justice, which might appeal to religiously unaffiliated people seeking a greater meaning in these troubling times.

I've been hearing variations on this argument all my adult life. To be fair, Kaya Oakes qualifies her remark with a "might". Still, those religious organizations that have invested heavily in social justice have not succeeded in attracting many members. If anything, they are losing members even faster than other, less political groups. The Catholic religious orders that heavily directed themselves towards social justice in the last few decades are all headed for extinction. 

The article Oakes writes is based on a new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and Religion News Service. And if you read that survey first and then her article, I think you will concluded that she has precious little to add. And neither do I.

The mistake she makes, and many have made before her, is that she considered things that she believes young people are interested in and then suggested that religious groups should offer these same things. As others have pointed out before me, if people can already get this stuff outside religion, why would they look to religion for it. Beyond that, I wonder if young people are much committed to social justice? I haven't seen any evidence that there is anything there but a lot of virtue signalling.

The thing religion seems to offer less and less, it seems to me, is a way of life. It's become something you do at certain moments in life. For some only when they are baptized, get married and die. But even for those whop go to church every Sunday (or even every day) religion is something they do separately from the rest of their life. And what would they do if they were being religious all the time?

Is it even a good idea to "be religious"?

Judge Boggs

No idea who he is but I love this. (h/t I found it here.)

re: By the way, apropos targeting metaphors and the like
Danny J Boggs [Sixth Circuit Address]Fri Apr 2 05:42:07 PDT 2010 

I think we could just bring this thread to a conclusion by simply agreeing that:
All of MY SIDE's references and statements are to be taken in the coolest, hip-ironic, culturally aware, benign-metaphorical way possible (see Watts v. United States, and [granting my side the full benefit of the] the conflicting interpretive modes the various judges/justices on the Supreme Court and the Court[s] of Appeals [have approved]),  

AND 

All of YOUR SIDE's references and statements are to be taken in the most mindlessly literal, threatening way possible. 

That should work for almost all of our commentators, of whatever persuasion.
Also, any charge against MY SIDE requires exquisite legally admissible proof of its accuracy, 

WHEREAS 

Any charge against YOUR SIDE must be true if it was asserted by anyone, anywhere.  

People on MY SIDE are responsible only for what they said personally, in full-quotation context. 

BUT 

People on YOUR SIDE are responsible for the inferred implications of anything said by anyone who ever held any idea vaguely similar to what your people think.

OK? 

People you can stop caring about

I mean stop caring about their opinions, not stop caring about them as human beings. (There was a time when such caveats weren't necessary; how I wish we had those days back again.)

You show up with a new pair of glasses for which you've paid a lot of money and someone says, "Those don't suit you." Or perhaps you're in your early twenties and you've purchased a new sports jacket, bringing your total of such jackets up to two, and a family member says, "I worry that you're getting obsessed with clothing." Or you've just read a novel or non-fiction book you loved or are wondering about some new ideas you've discovered or a new genre of music and someone undercuts your enthusiasm with some snide comment.

And it bothers you.

Life would be a lot easier if you could determine whether you need to take this person seriously. "Do I have to rethink my choices in light of this comment?" is really just another way of saying, "Is this a serious person?"

And that is precisely why you must decide whether they are. And you have the right to do this. Even if, as is almost always the case, it's someone who is otherwise important in your life.

There are people in your life who you must respect (a superior at work, your spouse's friend or sibling or parent) or even someone you love (members of your family or a lifelong friend) who aren't willing to be serious or who stop be able or willing to do so. They are so consistently shallow, insensitive, trite, inconsistent, untrustworthy, manipulative or just plain unobservant that you should stop taking them seriously. So stop taking them seriously!

Here's the challenge though: the only way to do this honestly is to tick them off the serious people list without their ever knowing that you have. Because your (or my) wanting them to know that they aren't taken seriously anymore is contradictory. On a psychological level, at least, you still care even if you have intellectually made the move. That's inevitable at the start. You need to change that. This is going to sound circular but the key to stop caring is to stop caring. You don't have to say a single thing to the other person. You just put them on a list (I use a real list that I keep in my wallet). Every time they say something that gets to you, you notice and redirect. You get upset but then redirect: "I don't need to take this person seriously!"

Snake Goddess!

This is a figurine of a snake goddess from the Minoan palace at Knossos. It's roughly 3600 years old. Keep it in mind the next time someone tells you that notions of feminine beauty are contingent things dependent on cultural values.

There is, of course, some variation but those variations are variations within a range.

The same is true of sex roles. There is some variation you can play with but there is a range you can't go beyond and that range isn't just a set of cultural fictions that you can ignore. If you're a man you will be a lot happier if you work at being good at being a man and if you're a woman you will be a lot happier if you work at being good at being a woman. If you don't, you'll be miserable. There are no other options.

What no one seems to notice about Lena Dunham

I think she is worth noticing as a terribly bad example. Remember the episode of Seinfeld where George succeeds by doing the opposite of what he normally does? Well, Lena is sort of George for everyone. You could do well in life by simply doing the opposite of what she would do.

Anyway, her latest gaffe surfaced in an interview with the equally embarrassing Amy Schumer:

I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, "That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog." It wasn't mean — he just seemed confused. 

The vibe was very much like, "Do I want to [have sex with] it? Is it wearing a … yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone." It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, "This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes.”

All sorts of people rained abuse on Lena for this. 

The gist of the criticism was that she had presumed to read this guy's mind. That's wrong. Our minds are not closed spaces. Very often, most of the time, you can tell what people are thinking (including what they are thinking of you) by observing them. Most people don't bother developing the skill but it's easy enough. All you have to do is stop talking and pay attention to others. (Bonus point: doing this will make me a better person too.)

Let's begin by reminding ourselves that the experience she describes is a very common one. You walk into a room, a coffeshop, a bar and someone looks up, sizes you up, and returns to whatever they were previously doing having determined that you aren't worth their paying any more attention to. That has happened to you thousands of times. And you have done it to others thousands of times. It's a normal human interaction and the thoughts of the person who rejects the other in such circumstances are relatively transparent.

And feelings of shame go with this experience. It feels shameful to get summarily rejected. It can also feel shameful to do it. Sometimes. We might think we should be putting more effort into this other human being. We glance up furtively, hoping not to get caught making this summary judgment. But it keeps happening so we all keep doing it and experiencing it.

The moral lesson here is, "Get over yourself and learn to deal with it because this sort of thing is going to be unavoidable for people who live in cities."

If there is one thing we can count on from Lena though, it is that she will never get over herself. The shame she feels comes pouring out. You can see it it in the way she wallows in her rejection. "... I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, 'That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog.'" She calls herself "it". He might have thought those things but she couldn't possibly know based on her own description of his reaction. Their interaction was too short for her to have figured out that much in the (unlikely) case that it were true. He looked at her and then he turned back to Instagram.

What Lena felt in response was a narcissistic injury. It was her sheer unimportance in his eyes that she can't stand. And she'd rather imagine that he judged her negatively in degrading terms than face the fact that he barely even noticed her. He probably has never heard of Lena Dunham. That shame is too horrible to face so she substitutes another kind of shame, quite literally body-shaming herself, because it's easier to deal with that thought than with the possibility that there are people out there for whom Lena Dunham doesn't matter at all.

Behaving that way will produce a very sad life.

Gloom and doom

There is a lot of it about these days. And it isn't completely crazy. As pointed out by Jonah Goldberg and others, there is a neo-fascist spirit abroad in the world and it is conceivable that the day will come again when we see horrors done. It might happen but it probably won't. A more realistic fear is that progressives will bring about a new Victorianism in which we all go to great lengths to protect the tenser sensibilities (often imagined tender sensibilities) of others. And I'm not entirely convinced that would be a horrible thing.

In any case, this is perhaps a good time to remind ourselves of some inspiring words spoken by a sainted man in the first year of my life:

It often happens, as we have learned in the daily exercise of apostolic ministry, that, not without offense to Our ears, the voices of people are brought to Us who, although burning with religious fervour, nevertheless do not think things through with enough discretion. These people see only ruin and calamity in the present conditions of human society. They keep repeating that our times, if compared to past centuries, have been getting worse. And they act as if they have nothing to learn from history, which is the teacher of life, and as if at the time of past Councils everything went favorably and correctly with respect to Christian doctrine, morality, and the Church's proper freedom. We believe We must disagree with these prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster, as if the end of the world were at hand.

That's from John XXIII's introductory remarks to the Vatican Council. I can't speak to the quality of the translation as I have only enough Latin to understand a few basic prayers I know by heart. It matches what other writers I trust have said. In any case, he's right.

We can also, of course, be too optimistic. Here is some more for your consideration:

But at the present time, the spouse of Christ prefers to use the medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of severity; and she thinks she meets today's needs by explaining the validity of her doctrine more fully rather than condemning. Not that there are no false doctrines, opinions and dangers to avoided and dispersed; but all these things so openly conflict with the right norms of honesty and have borne such lethal fruits that today people by themselves seem to condemn them and in particular forms of life which disregard God and his laws, excessive confidence in technological progress, and in a prosperity consisting only in the comforts of life. More and more they are coming to know that the dignity of the human person and his appropriate perfection are a matter of great importance and most difficult to achieve. What is especially important is that they have finally learned from experience that imposing external force on others, the power of weapons, and political domination are not at all sufficient for a happy solution if the most serious problems which trouble them.

That last sentence, read today, seems ludicrously optimistic. It's a bit jarring to consider that John XXIII was speaking in living memory of WW2. He had seen at first hand the brutal suffering that was imposed on others. He knew that some of the men in the audience listening to him had suffered. ANd yet he, along with many others, saw reason for hope.

Often our fears for the world are really just a projection of our fears for our world onto everything else. The professor of Classics who sees declining enrolment in her field, the union boss who sees the waning influence of the union movement, the taxi driver faced with Uber and the journalist seeing that their industry is rapidly shrinking will all have a tendency to imagine that the whole world is going south and not just their corner of it. They will do this because they will fail to see that there comes a point to get off a sinking ship.

To their numbers we should now add some kinds of conservatism including traditionalist Catholics. Yes, there was much good about the movement. Yes, they were unfairly attacked. Yes, much evil was done in the "spirit of Vatican II". But the traditionalist response to the Novus Ordo was always an over-reaction and the fight to establish socially conservative moral values in law and politics was always doomed to fail. That the walls are now crumbling is a good thing.

Reception

Today is the feast day of Saint Bartholomew. To which the vast majority of Catholics are going to answer, "Who is Saint Bartholomew?" In one sense, the answer to that is easy. He was an apostle. In another sense, it is very difficult for no one has the slightest clue as to who he was or what he did. We know only two things about him for certain: his name and his status as apostle.

And yet, of the four tiers of feasts in the Catholic Church—Optional Memorial, Memorial, Feast and Solemnity—Bartholomew rates the second highest. The obvious question is, "Why?" I'm going to ignore that question and wonder more about the issue of reception because it's one that intrigues me lately.

Bartholomew is remembered because he was received by the early church. The only thing that was received for certain is his name which appears in all three Synoptic gospels. That's nothing to sneer at. The gospels are grimly economical texts. Not a word is wasted. Anything that gets mentioned there does so because it was important. We can reasonably question what the role of the apostles was and we can reasonably question whether there really were exactly twelve of them. Questioning that Bartholomew was one of them in the memory of the early church is far tougher.

And, whatever the apostles were, they were very important.

Beyond that, however, the question of reception gets tricky. Further stories and traditions about Bartholomew are very thin on the ground. He may have done heroic things or he may not. Either way, not enough people were interested in passing them along. And not many people came along after the fact to make things up about him either. In any era, the willingness of other people to preserve, polish, embellish and create stories to tell about you is the key to your being received into the culture and that is just as true of the culture of the Church as any other. And Bartholomew has, for the most part, not been received.

Two groups of people have bucked this trend and they have done so largely on the basis of Bartholomew's credentials. If you have an image at all that goes with Saint Bartholomew, it is most likely an image of an Anglican Church or a hospital in England. And the reason for this is that he is in the Bible. The strong Calvinist streak in the Church of England discouraged naming of institutions after saints unless those saints had impeccable scriptural credentials. And poor Bartholomew doesn't have much but he does have that. The second group to preserve his memory have been members of the Catholic hierarchy. They have not done so with any great enthusiasm but they have done it. For Bartholomew has hierarchical credentials in that the Bible doesn't just mention him but also says that he was an apostle.

Beyond that, however, not much reception has taken place. He isn't part of Christian lore. Lore was passed on, and, in some cases, created, but it didn't take root.  That may be a good thing. It could also be a bad thing. It may be that very important truths were lost along with Bartholomew. One of the unquestioned responsibilities of the Church hierarchy is to counter reception. On the other hand, one of the important roles of the laity is to counter potential abuse of power by the hierarchy by being selective about what we choose to receive. Both side are capable of corruption. If the Holy Spirit is not influencing the process, then everything we do as Catholics is in vain.

Finally, spare a thought for Saint Bartholomew today. He was a real man who believed and acted on his beliefs, whatever he did and he was there at the beginning.

Bridal mysticism and Catholicism's man problem

Picking up from last week, one of the possible explanations of the low appeal that Christianity has for men is that it is, or has become, a feminized religion. One issue unique to Catholicism is what is called Nuptial or Bridal Mysticism. It's an idea with deep roots: the old testament talks about God marrying Israel and Paul uses marriage as a metaphor to explain the union between Jesus and the Church.

The thing to remember is that this only is a metaphor, only one metaphor of a number that appear in the scriptures. We also need to be careful about how metaphors are used. It's one thing, as the old testament and Saint Paul do, to speak metaphorically of God marrying a community and another thing altogether to speak of the sought for bond between individual Christians and God as a marriage. If nothing else, the second choice suggests vanity on a very grand scale.

It's also individualistic. Like the beatific vision, bridal mysticism suggests and intense bond between two beings. It doesn't require anyone else. It's weird that we're to spend our lives showing love for Jesus in the way we treat others only to enter into a state where others are irrelevant.

Finally, and most pertinent to the subject at hand, there are all the implications that go along with the word "bridal". It's not just that it suggests that feminine receptivity is the only legitimate spiritual life. Think of boys. Thirteen-year-old girls will sit around and gossip about their imagined wedding day. Boys will not.

If we look at what goes on in the church, I see enough smoke that I begin to think there must be a feminized Catholicism fire somewhere.

Consider the extremes of high Mariology. The major sin that turns Mariology into Mariolatry is when people forget that Mary is a member of the Church and make her representative of the Church. You get a lot of clergy who understand their vows as a commitment to Mary and not Jesus. They always subtle language to create enough nuance to avoid open heresy but you don't have to spend a lot of time with priests and lay people who have strong Marian devotions before you begin to see that a significant subset of them have made her into something she is not.

Consider also the sheer number of gay priests. Rates of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church are about the same as you find in your average school board but there is one huge difference in that the same-sex abuse is far more prevalent in the Church. The very highest estimates for the number of gay men in the overall population run at about 4 percent. The number of gay priests is much higher. What is it about the Catholic priesthood and religious that attracts a disproportionate number of gay men? And there is good reason to suggest that this has long been a problem. In his rule, St. Benedict sets very clear lines for the allotment of beds for young monks. It was already an issue in the sixth century.

Mary Magdalene

I've been away a while on retreat, just returning last weekend, which is why there hasn't been a lot of posting here. One of the things that happened while I was away was the first full feast of Mary Magdalene, which had only been a memorial until now. This created a dilemma for a lot of Catholics. On the one hand, Mary Magdalene is a saint and much beloved one. She plays a significant role in the gospels, much more significant than many apostles whose only role in the gospels is to be name-checked. On the other hand, it causes considerable uneasiness in that the move to raise her day to a full feast raises her status in a way that challenges the way people think about women and their role in the Church.

Some critics raise concerns about what this having taken so long says about the Church's treatment of women, and they are entirely right to do so. That it has taken this long to recognize her special importance is a scandal. It is still a scandal that Saint Martha day is not a feast and that her sister Saint Mary of Bethany has, who also merits a feast, for all intents and purposes, no place in the calendar.

Others resist this, fearing that elevation of Mary Magdalene and other holy women who served Jesus will open the way for female priesthood. The problem with this fear (it hardly deserves to be called an argument) is that it inadvertently undermines their side. For a male priesthood, founded on a notion of separate but equal roles, is undermined if we treat these women as second-class, and therefore not equal. To repeat, remember that all we know about for certain about saints Matthias, Bartholomew, Simon and Jude is their names and they all rate a full feast.

I think, however, there is another fear on the part of those who resist the full recognition of these holy women of the gospels and that is that it could change the way doctrine about Mary, the Mother of God is received. It does not change what is taught and believed about Mary but it could change the way it is received in the prayer and devotion of Catholics.

I'll come clean about this and admit that I think (and I very much emphasize that "I think") this would be a good thing. Mary, as was made clear by the Second Vatican Council, is a member of the church. She does not stand over and above it. Look at the calendar, however, and she has been, until this year, the only woman to rate a feast. All others receive only a memorial. When we think about feminine virtue, Mary is such a large presence as to overwhelm all others. This needs to be corrected.

I could say more and perhaps will some day.

Does Christianity have a nice guy problem?

The good folks at the Art of Manliness have begun a series on a subject near to my heart, Christianity's manhood problem. Christian churches attract more women than men and the men they do attract often seem less that manly. It's not necessarily a new issue and some might argue that it's not even a problem. Since at least the 19th century there have been churches that attracted more women than men and some of these churches were at the forefront of the movement to abolish slavery in the US and the movement to allow women to vote everywhere in the west. You could easily turn the problem around and ask not what is wrong with churches but what is wrong with the men who go to them?

I think the question should be, "Why don't men see anything in Christianity for them?" That's a question that could go either way. We might conclude that something is wrong with men that they cannot accept the message. Alternatively, we might conclude that there is something wrong with the message.

In line with the latter possibility, I wonder if the message of Christianity hasn't become what Dr. Robert A Glover calls a covert contract with life. A covert contract is an imagined deal. It's not a contract at all in that only one party knows about it. Give-to-get is a good example of a covert contract. I do something nice for someone and expect that they will return the favour. I don't actually mention this to them. You can see how that might not work out. A covert contract with life would be to generalize this and to believe that the world is set up such that things will ultimately work out well for nice guys.

A bit of interesting background, Dr. Glover used to be the pastor to a Baptist congregation. He became aware of the nice-guy syndrome when he saw it in himself. Ultimately he left the ministry and practices no faith today. He has occasionally expressed admiration for the new age, sex-and-God views of David Deida. He probably doesn't sound like a good example for any Christian man to follow.

I'd argue, however, that his book No More Mr. Nice Guy is one of the best books about manhood currently available. And much of Christian moral teaching does seem to offer exactly the sort of covert contract that Glover rightly describes as crazy. "Join our community and follow the rules and you'll be happy." For a lot of people this works out pretty well. I've seen people who had chaotic lives benefit from joining a church. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of lonely, miserable young men in Christian churches unable to connect with women. And I've heard a lot of women complain about the mopey weak men who pursue them. Is there something fundamentally wrong with modern Christianity? I think there is.

The big challenge, and something I'll explore in coming posts, is Saint Paul. He often says things that sound like nice-guy thinking: "be all things to all people" and "put others needs before your own".  The way to redeem St. Paul is, in a sense, straightforward: to argue that this isn't a covert contract but a very overt covenant with God.

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And that is right but it's something that is easy to forget. It's particularly easy to forget in the face of the challenges of the community. The community necessarily needs to make rules to accommodate all its members and to help everyone get along when there isn't complete agreement on what is acceptable praxis. It's easy to mix up these rules with the will of God; it's God's will that the community live in love but not necessarily his will that a certain rule about what happens when one person's ox gets gored be applied for all time in all situations.

More to come ...

Back to reality

It might have been better if Obama had been a disastrous failure.

Psychologists have noted that we often have a hard time being honest about people who are really important to us. Thinking about our mothers, for example, we either tend to make them saints or villains. What is really hard to accept is that she was just another sinner like the rest of us. That, of course, makes it impossible for us to forgive her.

You have been loaded with virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too picturesque to be condemned.

Unable to be honest about her faults, we never name them never mind forgive them.

Obama sold himself to us as a saviour, a transformational president who'd change the way politics is done. He wasn't that. The problem is that he wasn't a massive failure either. What he has been is a mediocrity. As a consequence, we have a whole lot of people acting as if Obama has a greatness woven of magical thread that only non-racists can see. No one can bring themselves to say what they know out loud because that would make them feel racist. (The irony, of course, is that it is racist not to evaluate the guy honestly.)

If he'd been an unmitigated disaster, it would be obvious and no one could deny it.

Unfortunately, mediocrity isn't harmless. A lot of important things that should have been done well have been done poorly or not at all. The potential for things to slide from badly managed to right out of control is very real. And neither of the two people nominated by major parties inspires much confidence.

At the Codfish Ball

The random number generator has given me two of the better shows from Mad Men back to back. Last weeks choice, Shut the Door, Have a Seat, was one of the very best episodes they did, possibly the best and certainly in the top three. With this week's choice it's hard to tell whether it was really as good as all that or whether it just stood out in the midst of the desert that was the last four seasons. The show lost its bearings after the third season and, while there were some good episodes like this one, it never regained its sense of purpose.

I looked up what I wrote on my other blog when the show was first broadcast and my reaction was positive. It's different to see it now with the benefit of hindsight. We know that Sally will grow up well. We know that Don will overcome the seemingly crushing barrier he is told of. We know that Pete will triumph. On the other hand, we know that Megan's choice to follow her passion will end with her being a mediocre actress and will destroy her marriage. We know that Peggy and Abe will not make a good couple. We know that Émile and Marie Calvet's marriage will fail. And, I suppose, we know that Roger and Marie will end up together. (I say, "I suppose", because, while they are a compelling couple in the long run, I find their actions in this episode unrealistic.

I think if there is one message to take from the episode it's, "Don't follow your passion". Find your direction in the challenges and opportunities that life deals you and not in silly fantasies. Probably the best part of the episode is that the impractical dreams come from the mouth of a Marxist.

It's an interesting example of hiding the truth in plain sight for most critics didn't see it coming. They only saw that lovely shot of Émile, Marie, Megan, Don and Sally all looking miserable at the end. As I was saying last week, however, Don has an amazing ability to restart that is the basis of his heroism. The important truth that shot really tells us is that Megan is a child, a woman who has never matured, and that Sally is in danger of failing in the same way.

Orientalism

You have been loaded with virtues too refined to be envied, and accused of crimes too picturesque to be condemned.

The "you" in that quote is interesting. Kakuzo Okakura, writing 1906, is telling us that some Japanese have done to western culture what we have done to their culture. This is perspective very different from Edward Said who sees distortion of other cultures as a one way crime that only western nations are guilty of.

I wonder if it's true? My first temptation is to say yes but I have been conditioned to think that way by academics. It strikes me that there are two problems with that. The first is that it tends to make us distrust any history that makes for a good story.

The second, and I think much more important problem, is that the vanity of seeking virtue to refined to be envied and committing crimes to picturesque to be condemned is pretty common. Even the most sordid little affair starts off as some combination of these two.

And that raises a final question: Is seeking these things in the exotic evil? Perhaps it isn't.

Is the freedom to think what you want "in your head" a freedom worth having

At first glance I would think not. Freedom of thought would appear to be of little value if you cannot actually express those thoughts in words and action. And yet, here we have someone insisting on the value of being free to think what you want "in your head".




"The freedom to think or believe what you want in your head. That's the first amendment to the US constitution."

Actually, no. Here is the first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That's very much about stuff outside your head.

It would seem that I can believe whatever I want inside my head and no one need know. I can be polite to someone while thinking they are an idiot for whom I have no respect. For a while, anyway.

And therein lies the problem with this sort of freedom. Keeping it "inside my head" would require constant vigilance. At any moment a gesture or word could give away my real beliefs.

All this talk of freedom of thought is based on a philosophical mistake that takes it that our thoughts are private. I have a complete world of meaning inside my head and I share it with you by analogy. You've experienced pain so you can imagine my pain. In fact, no such thing goes on. Nothing is naturally hidden. We have to make an effort to hide our thoughts. Normally, it's quite easy to read our thoughts from our facial expressions and posture.

We put very little effort into reading people. One of the lessons I've learned in the last decade is that you can read someone else's thoughts quite easily. All you have to do is start trying.

It's quite frightening once you start. And here we can get some idea of the terror that comes when people try to control others' thinking; when simply doing what is hoped of you is no longer enough. But this is a terror we live with all the time. Anyone who has ever worked under someone who is determined to "change the corporate culture" will know how awful it can be.

As can anyone who has been a child. Parents, with the best of intentions, try to shape their children's thinking. And they'll keep doing it well into adulthood if you don't stop them.

That said, freedom is never inside your head.

Femme noir

Here are two quotes that feature the same moral analysis of a woman's behaviour. The two quotes are from separate shows several years apart. In both a man is accusing a woman of mistaking her need to see herself as a good person with what it takes to actually be a good person.

"Because you're good and everyone else in the world is bad. You're so hurt. So brave. With your little white nose in the air and all the time you've been building a life raft." 

"Alicia, here's the thing, you like to think you're a good person, and maybe at one time you were, but we both know, you'll do whatever it takes*."

The first of those quotes is Don Draper to Betty in the last show of the third season of Mad Men. She has been saying she wants to leave him because she is unhappy with him. And she is. But she has also been preparing her exit for a long time. It's not entirely clear to us or to Betty Draper which is the real motivator. The second quote is from the second-last episode of the first season of The Good Wife. Cary is angry at Alicia because she has used her contacts in the spectacularly corrupt Chicago political machine to win a competition between the two of them for a job. Cary is bitter and speaks as a bitter man might but Alicia is also more than a little uncertain that what she did is right.

In both situations the man is in a morally ambiguous position. Don Draper's actions are far from defensible. Cary is letting his bitterness get a hold of him. Both men have also incorrectly assumed that the woman they are accusing has been using sex to get what she wants**. And yet, they both have a point. Both Betty and Alicia have a lot invested in being able to think of themselves as good and neither really is as good as the image she desperately needs to hold of herself. There is a very deep truth about female moral psychology at work here.

I've written elsewhere about film noir and how a lot of the noir classics turn on a particular twist of male moral psychology. We men tend to allow ourselves to get bewitched such that our desires become entitlements. This applies to everything we desire but the place where it is most evident is in sexual desire and neo noir films have exploited this to maximum dramatic effect. The typical male noir hero has made, a Robert Glover puts it, a covert contract with the world that if he follows the rules he should get a trouble free life and that he should get "sex". I put the scare quotes up here because sex symbolizes much else: it symbolizes a certain level of financial success and social status. Even in the unlikely event that he gets a trouble-free life he seeks, it won't be enough. He needs the recognition of being a person of status in the larger world and good lover in the privacy of his own bedroom. He can't supply those, so he needs the world to give it to him. And this desire becomes an entitlement. And that becomes his justification for now breaking the rules. He sees the denial of his entitled status as proof that the system is crooked and concludes that he is no longer morally bound by the rules.

At some point in our lives (and maybe at several points) every man does that trick to himself. And not just to himself, he causes pain to others. I think a majority of affairs are justified by the man on the grounds that, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." Take that basic scenario and complicate it with some serious crime and you've got any one of a dozen classic film noir.

But what about women? The same scenario doesn't work. The male who does what I have described above is wrong but can remain a sympathetic character. You could not do the same thing with a female character. There are women who occasionally decide, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." But they don't garner sympathy. It's unfair, I know, but we judge women by a different standard.

But there is a different sense of entitlement that I think women are prone to and that we tend to understand and thus sympathize with the woman who has it and that is the sense of being entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter what happens. Part of the motivation for this is fear of shame.

I'll return to the male case first to show how shame works there. The man who gets cheated on or cheated out of something worries that this makes him a loser. He knows that life isn't fair and that success in this world depends to a large degree on lucky and that some people succeed by cheating. In reality, he hasn't done anything to earn the things he wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts him helps him believe that he is somehow entitled to, Robert Glover's phrase, "a happy, trouble-free life". When he doesn't get that, he feels personally shamed. People are sneering at me and I've always been a good guy who follows the rules. (Think of the opening scenes of Breaking Bad in which Walter White has been working hard at two jobs to support his wife and son, who hs a disability, and no one respects him.)

With women, the problem is a bit more complex because there is an unfair double standard to begin with: women are held to a ridiculously high but not actually impossible standard of sexual purity that no one expects from men. If it were actually impossible, the problem would disappear but every woman knows that there is a very small number of women who actually achieve what is nearly impossible and a much larger number who fake it successfully. She too knows that life is unfair and that being perceived as good according to the unfair standards that women are judged by is mostly a matter of luck and that lots of people cheat. In reality, she hasn't done anything to earn the good-woman status she wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts her helps her believe that she is somehow entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter how ruthlessly she pursues her selfish needs. And, just as we start off on Walter White's side, we also start off on Alicia Florrick's side. We don't necessarily think that what she subsequently does is right but we understand (tricky word that) her desires and her having been wronged by her husband, whuch she clearly was, seems to give her the moral high ground as the "good wife".

I think that the solution to both is the same: to develop a conscience. That is a much bigger challenge than it might seem forever for there is deadly trap and that is that we might simply internalize shame. If our conscience is just the nagging little voice inside that tells us that we've done wrong then we don't actually have a conscience. All we have is our mothers inside our head tearing us down. We will resent that such that, no matter how hard we try, we will quietly sabotage our attempts to "be good".

Again, both positions are about being rather than doing. The man wants to feel like a winner and the woman wants to feel like a good person. Yes, the goal is ultimately to be a better human being but we become better people by doing good things. Doing good things focuses me on something outside myself, something that can be evaluated in a cool, objective way. It also makes progress possible for each bad thing is a bump in the road instead of a terrifying shame that I meet be no good after all.

*In my all-time favourite movie, Body Heat, Ned Racine makes a similar judgment on Matty Walker; that she could, "Do what is necessary, whatever is necessary." Before we join in condemning this, however, we should remember that Jesus tells us to do what ie necessary, whatever is necessary. This appears to make it look like any means will justify the end but if our character is our destiny, and it is, then actions will make us what we are. We might gain something we want by stealing it but what we will become is a thief. Do do whatever is necessary but do it for the right end. Meanwhile, as the Book of Ruth tells us, sometimes using sex to get what she wants is exactly what a woman should do.

**The only reason that these fictional women haven't been using sex to get what they want  is because the audience would lose all sympathy for them if they did. Because women are held to an unfair standard, we never see fictional women having affairs. In real life, women in these situations would have most likely had affairs. Even at that, the prime motivation for not dong so in fiction is the desire to continue thinking of herself as a good person. It's not that they don't want the or that they give even a moment's though to the issue of betrayal—they don't have the affair so they can maintain a sense that they have the moral high ground.

Shut the door, have a seat

In rewatching Mad Men episodes on a random basis, I had hoped to force myself to rethink the whole series and not simply rewatch the shows I liked the most. My favourite episodes, after all, are the ones most likely to confirm rather than challenge my views. As a consequence, I felt a slight twinge of regret when the random number generator gave me one of my favourite episodes of the entire series for the second show to watch. It's not only great television, it's Don Draper at his best. What we see here is the stuff of heroism. But there's more! We also see the show making a deeply important point about politics and morality.

Because there are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves ... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.

The heart of conservatism is an understanding of loss. Conservatives understand that loss is inevitable and that it changes us and not just the circumstances of our lives. From the outside, conservatism can be seen as trying to retain all of the past but it's never that. That's simple traditionalism. Conservatives recognize that we will suffer loss and we will be changed by it and that understanding that is the key to moving forward. And you see that in the rather cryptic statement that Don makes to Peggy when recruiting her to move to the new agency with him.

It happens during an oddly quiet moment of an otherwise fast-paced episode.

The change of self that goes with loss helps explain Don's comment to Betty that "Mourning is just extended self pity," back in season 1. That sticks in a lot of people's craws. It is an overstatement. A more accurate version would be, "Mourning is often only extended self pity." That's certainly what we saw in the way many characters responded to the Kennedy assassination and to the death of Marylin Monroe. Nowadays, we see horrible displays of narcissism in response to every mass shooting.

It's certainly what's in the air today following the shooting of Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest. We wake up and see that our world has changed and it has changed in ugly ways such that we ourselves have lost something even though we don't know any of the people involved. And the way we saw ourselves ... is gone.

But how do we avoid mere narcissism?

The biggest danger is to feel we are entitled to get back what we lost. That is what drives men in the best neo-noir films. One of the things that makes Don Draper such a good role model (although he is rarely recognized as such) is his willingness to cut his losses. When something is gone, he lets it go. He doesn't come to these recognitions easily. That Betty is a bad wife takes him a long time to face and he can never fully shake the emotions that go with her, although his initial reaction is anger, an anger driven by the feeling that he should be able to control his life, he comes to recognize that he cannot control what happens to him and that she needs to be let go and, much more importantly, he acts on it.

At the same time, he looks to his past for ideals to uphold. Although we call the scenes where Don remembers "flashbacks" they aren't that. They are stories he tells himself, as we all do. The historical accuracy of such stories is less important than the fact that we tell them and keep telling them. It is the retelling of the story that confers value.

The particular story Don tells himself here is important not just for him but for all of us who grew up with distant fathers or with no father at all. Nostalgia is often a feeling for what we never had or only had brief glimpses of rather than for something we had fully and then lost. For many in my generation, that is the relationship we have with our fathers. As boys, we'd watch television shows in which fathers played catch with their sons and wondered what we did wrong because nothing like that ever happened to us. But we loved this distant man anyway and when he was gone we needed some continuity. We couldn't hold on to what we never really had but we needed to find something in him to carry on. Don does that this episode and its beautiful and good.

Okay, now for some disillusionment for those who think the series is historically accurate. Conrad Hilton did not hold the kinds of beliefs that the character with his name does in the series. But that's okay because he acts like a father figure for Don. There is a symmetry between Don finding Conrad and Betty finding Henry. Both are like magical father figures. As typically happens in the series, Don reveals himself to be an adult and Betty reveals herself to be a child. And it is through that interaction that Don evaluates his real father and decides where the continuity and disjunction should be.

You can't live your life reacting to your father. You have to become your own man and you'll nevr do that so long as you are angry at him. Don finds a value in his father that he can treasure. He doesn't become him or even try to.

Television doesn't get any better than this.

Overcoming shame

Shame is a good thing. It's not an unmitigated good thing but it is good. That's worth noting at the start for there is a school of psychology that translates emotions into good and bad and tells us that we should never feel emotions such as shame, resentment, jealousy, envy or hate. These emotions can, the theory goes, only do us harm.

There is some evidence for this view—there is some evidence for most bad theory. Negative emotions really do subject your body to stress and that stress can have negative health effects. But, as evolutionary psychologists remind us, if these emotions didn't also have positive benefits they wouldn't have survived thousands of years of evolution.

Without shame none of us would be able to learn moral behaviour. It is shame in reaction to your parents' disapproval that first taught you that there even is a distinction between right and wrong. Later, it was shame that helped you start developing the ability to make such distinctions and to talk about them with others. Even as adults, fear of shame plays an important role in keeping our behaviour in check.

But it's not all good. We can feel shame when we know we've done nothing wrong. And there are people who try to use shame to control us. Worse, you can internalize shame. Anyone who has ever had their mother say to them, "If you look deep inside yourself you'll realize that what you've done is wrong," will know how powerful internalized shame is.

That motherly argument, by the way, is pure bullshit and it's purely manipulative. Anyone who has a real moral argument to make will make it with factual claims and not by trying to make you feel shame and think that shame is guilt. There is an emotion that goes with guilt but it arises in response to moral claims and not some "looking deep inside". Here, as always, to "look inside" yourself is just a metaphor meaning to think hard about something. You can't actually look inside. You can only look outside at factual claims.

Which brings me to the most important lesson we need to learn if we are going to become mature moral beings: to develop a sense of guilt you have to be a moral realist. You have to believe there are verifiable moral truths that can be checked the same way you can check to see if the plums in the fridge are gone as William Carlos Williams has confessed.

The standards to determine guilt are the same for yourself as they are for anyone else. We can easily imagine that Williams feels no guilt and that his apology is bogus. What would establish his guilt, whether he is willing to feel it or not, is whether he was entitled to eat all the plums or if he should have saved some for his wife. Likewise, we can easily imagine a situation in which he feels guilty even though there is no reason he should not have eaten the plums. Why else would food be in the fridge except to be eaten?

We can't make shame go away. What we can do is train ourselves to feel according to verifiable standards if right and wrong.

Of course, if we live in a culture that increasingly says there are no such standards except in the very limited case where others are hurt, we will not be able to become morally mature. Eventually, there will be some in such a culture who will so deeply resent the feelings of shame that they do have that they will narcissistically insist that others treat their feelings as sacrosanct.

And that is hell we are currently living.

Incidentally, and this is relevant to the Irish experience in North America, there is a kind of pseudo-pride that is really just shame projected outward. Robert Glover describes this strategy that leads to this false pride well in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy,

I call this shame dumping. This unconscious strategy is based on the belief that if the Nice Guy can shift the focus to the other person’s badness, he can slip out of the spotlight. Typical shame dumping techniques include blame, bringing up the past, deflection, and pointing out the other person’s flaws.

This is a pretty common strategy and hardly unique to Irish Catholics descended from famine exiles. But it can, as I say, manifest itself as something that only looks like pride. Pride is often condemned but it is an essential and usually good emotion, however, for it has a tendency to elevate the person feeling it. It is a way of fighting off other people's attempts to shame us. (Those who would have you believe that pride is always bad cover their asses by coming up with different terms, such as "self respect" as if that were something completely different from pride.)

To really understand what is going on here, we need to contrast pseudo-pride with excessive pride. Excessive pride, which can also be called "hubris" or "vanity" tends to lure us into taking chances we should not. We learn that it is unwarranted when we discover we cannot actually perform at the level we convinced ourselves we could. The pseudo-pride that is just shame dumping, however, is the work of someone who does not take chances; it's a defensive strategy driven by shame and fear rather than excessive pride. They believe they will fail and cannot stomach that thought so they bluster. That bluster, however, will crumble at a challenge so they avoid such challenges.

They tend to do this not just to themselves but to others. Some parents, terrified at the thought of failure will undermine their children privately so that they will not try things they might fail at publicly.