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!