Anyone can be moral (or ethical) but only a passionate person can be virtuous

Thomas Aquinas was premodern but he was premodern in several ways. In some regards, we should be grateful that we have left that world behind. We should be grateful that we no longer live in a world where people believed that original sin was passed on sexually through the male. In other regards, we might feel ambivalent, for example, in that we no longer can easily believe that the world is oriented towards a single, divinely determined end. And there are other differences that we might simply regret.

Here is Thomas discussing "Whether all men have the same last end?" [I-II, Q1, Art. 7] He means by that whether we are aimed at the same last end and not, as our modern reading would imply, whether all humans have the same fate. It's an interesting question for, at first glance, people seem to have different goals in life. Indeed, we take it (correctly) that one of the great things about (real) liberalism is that it allows citizens considerable latitude in determining what the good life is for them. Thomas gives us an answer that may be compatible with that but isn't the usual one.

He begins, being a good medieval theologian, by making a distinction.

We can speak of the last end in two ways: first considering only the aspect of the last end; secondly, considering the thing in which the last end is realized.

I take this to mean that we can thing of the last end simply as something that is aimed at or we can consider it terms of the ways it is realized.

So, then, as to the aspect of last end, all agree in desiring the last end; since all desire the fulfillment of their perfection, and it is precisely in, and it is precisely this fulfillment in which the last end consists.

We might argue that we no longer believe that human beings have a given end which they seek to fulfill but I don't think that will hold. My counter-argument is an empirical one: most people seek to reach some sort of fulfillment of some end to which they feel they were ordained. Think of the notion of gender indeterminacy: the argument is made not in terms that a person can simply randomly pick a gender and go with it. The argument is always that people have some deep, inner sense of what they really are and a desire to become that. Which brings us to:

But as to the thing in which this aspect is realized, all men are not agreed as to their last end; since some desire riches as their consummate good; some, pleasure; others something else.

Gender identity would presumably fit under "something else". Thomas would be shocked, even stunned at the possibility but it's hard to think of a clearer example of people acting towards the end of happiness but seeing the thing through which happiness is achieved differently from others than through gender indeterminacy.

I also find it hard to imagine a project less likely to succeed. In a liberal society, however, we allow people to pick the thing that they believe will bring them happiness. That said, how do we determine what is the right answer, if only for ourselves. Here modern society has nothing to offer. We are sometimes told to look within ourselves as if there can be an answer there. Thomas's premodern answer still seems the right one to me.

Thus to every taste the sweet is pleasant but to some, the sweetness of wine is most pleasant, to others, the sweetness of honey, or of something similar. Yet that sweet is absolutely the best of all pleasant things, in which he who has the best taste takes most pleasure. In like manner that good is most complete which the man with well disposed affections desires for his last end.

We could say a lot about this. For example, "What are well-disposed affections?" In this particular instance, Thomas would likely say they are the ones in accord with natural law and go on to argue that the idea of gender fluidity is contrary to natural law. That is problematic because it involves an inconsistency in the use of natural law. Simply put, Thomas rarely uses the notion of natural law to directly derive norms in this way. Indeed, the only matter in which he (and the Catholic Church follows him in this) makes such derivations seems to be in matters of sexual morality. That sort of inconsistency tends to be self-refuting.

There is much more to Church arguments in this regard than the current culture would allow. It seems to me that if you wanted to make certain you'd be miserable, trying to live a gender identity contrary to your sexual identity is right up there with opioid abuse and divorce as a way to bring it about. But that is a different argument from simply deriving laws from some perceived regularity in nature.

The more interesting aspect of this for me, however, is how it plays out in terms of how we deal with self-mastery.

Mastery, noun
1.comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment.
"she played with some mastery" synonyms: proficiency, ability, capability;
2. control or superiority over someone or something.
"man's mastery over nature" synonyms: control, domination, command, ascendancy, supremacy, preeminence, superiority;  

In the modern world, we tend to think of moral self-mastery entirely in terms of the second. Self-mastery is just an antiquated way of saying "self-control" for us. Thus the notion that we can medically over-rule our chromosomes. Far better, it seems to me, is the first definition that says we can play the roles that are given to us with mastery.

I'll stop there for now.

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?

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.

Exotica and the comforting presence of primitive religion

"No anthropologist, observing a community in which the tenets of religion have taken root, would wish to disabuse his tribe of their sacred rites and stories. It is only those brought up in faith who feel the impulse, on losing it, to ruin the faith of others."

That's Roger Scruton from An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. Casanova made more or less the same argument against Voltaire. He believed, and told Voltaire, that rather than abolishing superstition a proper philosopher would have remained silent on the subject. Wittgenstein made similar aruments.

The opposing view, popular since the Enlightenment, is that it is an act of bravery to shed our sacred rites and stories. This idea has been subject to relatively little scrutiny however. In any case, there are no knock-em-down arguments on either side. The best we can do, as Wittgenstein said, is a sort of propaganda in which both sides seek to remind the other of past weaknesses and failures. In this respect, the Enlightenment view is particularly vulnerable as all past attempts to strip the world clear of the dreams of superstition has tended to produce nightmares much as sterilizing a surface tends to prepare it for new and massive bacterial growth.

So let's put aside conclusive arguments for a while return to the album cover we were looking at yesterday.

Here's what it says about that cover in Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi:

The splendid album cover designed by William George portrayed a couple dancing among "threatening pagan idols."

But are they threatening? A lot would depend on how you looked at it. For millions of Catholics, the image of the crucified Christ is a source of comfort. That's a bit odd when you consider that it shows us a spectacularly cruel form of capital punishment. It's odd to see the torture and brutal murder of the person you place your hope in as comforting. And the Catholic seeing the crucifixion portrayed knows this. They would insist, in fact, that the spectacular cruelty and seeming hopelessness of the situation portrayed is the very point.

Something similar is happening with this cover. It's an altogether more commonplace instance and the deliberate use of the pejorative term "idols" above tells us that this is intentional. (We don't know who originally said or wrote "threatening pagan idols" as Adinolfi doesn't tell us where he gets this from or why he puts it in quotes.)

And we can grasp the real point of both the cover art and the music if we take the trouble to notice that the couple isn't dancing. It shows us something rather ambiguous: a man who wants to kiss a woman and a woman who isn't certain whether to refuse or accept his kiss. That's something like dancing and virtually all dancing is a ritualized encounter meant to recall such situations.

What will the woman be agreeing to if she accepts his kiss? Well, sex for starters. Perhaps not full sex that night but some sort of sexual interaction is being proposed. But what exactly? This could lead to some more kissing, hugging and squeezing and then never again. Or it might lead to sex. Or it might lead to love or even marriage.

And it's ambiguous both ways. She only knows that he wants to kiss her. She doesn't know what he hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what he'll settle for.  She also doesn't know what she really hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what she'll settle for.

Think of how a woman kisses her husband and then think how the same woman, about to begin an affair, kisses the man she will have that affair with for the first time. She might tell herself that the second kiss is "just about sex" but is that ever true? Conversely, she might give her husband a kiss and think to herself, "this is about love and not sex", but is that ever true?

No matter how you cut it, the possibility of a kiss is never the purely rational interaction that Enlightenment thinkers of all eras want us to believe it is. Something more is going on and, if we see things that way, the pagan idols surrounding the couple make perfect sense. They fit the situation not because they bring a threat with them but because they allow us to recognize a threat that exists in the very situation and which threat it is that makes the whole thing so enchanting.

To return to Scruton:

The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.

Scruton, however, is guilty of the very thing he accuses the sexual revolution of doing. We see this in his use of the term "the reproductive process". Is there anything more disenchanting that a process? Imagine the couple above thinking to themselves, "I'm engaged in the reproductive process?" As Wittgenstein once said, the parsons are equal partners with the philosophers in doing the "infinite harm" that Enlightenment disenchantment has caused.

Since I must stop somewhere, I'll simply note that Exotica and Tiki culture were an act of rebellion more profound than the rock and roll that followed. What we see here is a movement not to re-enchant the word, for the world can not be disenchanted. Rather, it's a movement to recognize the primitive enchantment that never goes away. It matters little what the original context those "pagan idols" were taken from, nor does it matter who has an authentic right to invoke them. All that matters is what anyone can see in that picture if they are open to it.

Exotica

The roots of Exotica was something I wondered about, but didn't do much about, on my previous blog. There is a lot of good writing on the subject by Sven A. Kirsten. His works, however, are mostly about the pictures that accompany the writing. There has been one academic work on the subject that I know of, Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi, but it's an intellectually lazy, sloppy work (anytime you see the term "the other" playing a big role in analytic writing, you can be sure the writer has turned his brain off so he can better spout the reassuring clichés that modern academic writing traffics in).

Adinolfi's work does, however, give us a notion of how not to go about looking into Exotica and Tiki. For starters, it's just too broad and sweeping in it's approach. It also places far too much emphasis on Romantic sources for Exotica and gives not nearly enough scrutiny to modernism and, more specifically, to modernist primitivism.

That should be an obvious move given the subtitle on the album cover above. If exotica started anywhere, it began with this 1951 Les Baxter album. "Le Sacre du Sauvage" is a pretty clear homage to Stravinsky. Baxter loved and was much influenced by Stravinsky and Ravel.

He was far from the only twentieth century popular musician to be influenced by modern music turned out by what we sometimes confusingly call "classical" composers. The most influential of whom was, although he gets little credit for it, Paul Whiteman. Through him, everyone from Bix Beiderbecke to Frank Sinatra picked up on a kind of jazz modernism.

The other big jazz influence, and this very much acknowledged by Baxter, was Duke Ellington. Ellington also used some of the harmonic ideas of the European modernists but more importantly for my purposes here, he also trucked in a certain kind of "exotica", by which I mean fantasy stories of western men going to exotic locations and finding love.



Ellington didn't invent this type of song but he certainly trafficked in it and his efforts were called jungle music at the time.

I could go on about that but I prefer to return to a little discussed aspect of Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps and that is that the ballet itself was rarely performed. It received a handful of performances in 1913 but was soon abandoned for audiences simply did not like the ballet. The music, however, was considerably more accepted. It was as program music—stuff you listened to while imagining images "suggested" by the music—that Sacre du printemps had its influence. And that is what influenced Les Baxter.

Primitivism

Ethnography didn't play much of a role in the fantasies that Stravinsky peddled. We can't distinguish the modernist primitivism of the early 20th century on the grounds that it was more authentic or better researched than that of the 1950s. The difference was more a matter of intent; the early modernist primitivism was meant to be disturbing.

The subjects of "civilization" are trapped in an alienating, inauthentic culture, but can escape by cultivating the "primitive" hidden within themselves: grotesque, even terrifying, but authentic in its drives, desires and relationship to the world. Known as primitivism, this diagnosis of cultural failure and its purported cure profoundly influenced modernist artists.

By the end of the 1950s, primitivism was literally the stuff of theme parks, a fun-filled escape. This shift is usually cited to the disadvantage of the 1950s but I think it points to a fundamental failure of the early modernists. The primitive simply isn't grotesque or terrifying. It's fun, familiar and harmless seen with modern western eyes. We fully appreciate that life would be nasty, brutish and short in a genuinely primitive culture but that's not where we live. The post-World-War-2 generation, correctly saw that primitivism is not alienating or threatening but fun.

And how could it be any other way? This stuff is open to anyone and, for that reason, comforting and familiar even if you've never experienced it before. After the horrors of modern technological warfare and the brutal oppression of modern socialism, who wouldn't want to escape to the Quiet Village?

A rum thing

In this we are victims of our own antihistorical bias. The dizzying pace of change in the last hundred years has left us stranded. We somehow think that the way things are is the way they have always been; that the Present is the same as the Natural Order. 

And yet our culture knows better. Buried in the way things are is a long chain of used-to-be's. If we get out the shovels and go below the surface a bit, we find five parallel stories that tell us why X matters.

The X, for which the above was written is rum. The book I quote here is a Short Course in Rum: A Guide to Tasting and Talking About Rum by Lynn Hoffman. His point, however, could applied to a lot of things, not the least of which is Catholicism. Much of what people declare to be the "unchanged teaching of the church going back two thousand years" is really the product of the last few centuries.

Psychological reactance

An excerpt from a NYT article about the appeal of Donald Trump:

Haidt describes reactance as

the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

The theory, first developed in 1966 by Jack W. Brehm in “A Theory of Psychological Reactance,” is directly relevant to the 2016 election, according to Haidt. Here is Brehm’s original language:

Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy. This reaction is especially common when individuals feel obliged to adopt a particular opinion or engage in a specific behavior. Specifically, a perceived diminution in freedom ignites an emotional state, called psychological reactance, that elicits behaviors intended to restore this autonomy.

I thought of something I wrote myself a short while ago:

If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter.

Family does that to you.

I've been rereading Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur Melzer. He lists a number of reasons why someone might engage in esoteric writing. All these are either to avoid evil or to attain some good. On the avoidance end:

• We might write esoterically to protect ourselves from condemnation by the larger society.
• We might write esoterically to protect the larger society from truths it cannot bear.

We might also write esoterically:

• As a form of propaganda aimed at similarly minded people.
• As a way of teaching for the reader will be obliged to figure things out for themselves.

I think psychological reactance raises another possibility: that we might write, indeed live, esoterically in order to gain a private sphere for ourselves. We could get this, of course, simply by locking ourselves in our rooms alone for long periods of time. Indeed, just about every teen does this when puberty comes along and they are suddenly subject to needs and desires that would cause extreme shame if they were not kept private. Ultimately, however, this privacy will be empty. We need a private sphere that includes other people, a world we can share with others, that also excludes people who "try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you".

The word "perceive" carries a lot of weight here. You might simply be wrong in your perception and you can never completely shake the feeling of doubt that comes with that. Combine that with a family member who has authority because they are a parent, or who is self righteous in their anger and is threatening you with exclusion, or, and this is gruelling, is both of those things, and you will crack. Thus the need to carve out a sphere where you can express thoughts esoterically that others might suppress.

The good news is that everyone feels this need and you will find others playing the same game and it, like most games, is more fun to play with others. And, because all games have an implied teleology, that teleology will become the basis of your personal mythology. You will have a notion not of who you are, which is what your family bombards you with, but of who you should be trying to become.

That creates tensions within the family. Seeing you develop independence as a consequence of having this teleology, some family members will try and reign you in. Mothers are particularly prone to this, which is why I advocate that every man and woman intentionally blow up their relationship with their mother at some point. There is another danger, however, and that is enablers: these are family members who set themselves up as the unofficial police for the family mythology. They do this largely because of fears and insecurities of their own but that doesn't mean they won't make you hurt.

Another subject about which there will be more to say.

Why a personal mythology? Because it's liberating!

I think we all already have personal mythologies. And the word "mythology' shouldn't scare us for we know it isn't true in the same way that history is supposed to be true. If anything, the problem is that far too much of what we believe to be our "personal history" is actually mythology.

I've had much occasion to see this while doing family history. History tends to be either a story or a theory about particular people in particular times. The story or theory is constructed by making connections between a collected set of verifiable facts. Ideally, the facts are a limit on the story or theory. If my story or theory includes someone meeting Jane Jacobs last year that story needs to be corrected because Jane Jacobs died in 2006. What I've found doing family history is that it tends to go the other way around. In family history people have a theory about who and what "we" are and they have a series of stories that prop up this theory. When confronted with facts that are in conflict with the theory and stories, so much the worse for the facts.

Another way of putting this is that most family history is really family mythology. It's real purpose is to justify our beliefs about ourselves. Because it's unconscious mythology, it's easy to convince ourselves that it really is history and my advice to anyone doing family history is to not share it with members of your family. You will inevitably puncture a lot of egos if you insist in muddling the mythology up with verifiable facts.

Okay, but why do family history at all if you can't share it? Unless you're famous, no one outside your family will want to read it and now I'm telling you that no one inside your family will want to read it either. I'd recommend doing it because it's liberating. My great discovery was that my family was a much rougher lot than the family mythology made them out to be. It's only because two world wars and the Great Depression created opportunities for social mobility that my family was able to enter the middle class. That's generally true of the Irish in North America. All of our family "history" when I was growing up, was really mythology, consists of projecting the experience of the generation who grew up during the Depression and World War 2 back into history. It has little or nothing to do with what actually happened. The generation now growing up are, in turn, being saddled with a family "history" that is really a mythology that projects the values of a generation that grew up in the 1970s and 80s back into history.

Why is it liberating? Because family mythology creates a role for you and your family will be loath to let you out of that role. You will be told that you are a certain kind of person because you are part of this family and you will be told that continuing to be this sort of person is a moral obligation that is binding on you. Knowing that the story the family tells about itself is just a mythology frees you from that obligation.

It does this in large part because it frees you from the spell. Your family members can only saddle you with this mythology if you are willing to believe it. The mistake is thinking that your family history has anything particular to do with you. These people are just people who lived before you. You are not responsible for their sufferings and you deserve no credit for their achievements. Most importantly, you do not need to feel any shame for what they were and what they did. If, however, you believe that there is a connection, then you are going to find yourself in immediate conflict with others because you will all be fighting for a particular interpretation.

In my family, there have been intense battles over family history. Most of this has been a matter of memory rather than any actual written history. Who did what and when and what it meant? Which uncles were in military service and what action did they or did they not see? What were the challenges that women in the family faced and how did they face them. Most stories that do get repeated do so because they help make a moral point. And it's either a positive one or a negative one. But it's only useful to the degree to which it is family mythology. Each and every story makes one of two binary points: 1) You should be like this. 2) You should not be like that.

Once you know that facts destroy this binary division—that the real stories aren't black and white so much as shades of grey—you can stop arguing with others about it. And that is liberating.

The other thing about family history is that it is necessarily limiting. Even if your family history were glorious through and through, it defines you according to a fixed standard. It tells you what you are supposed to be according to an existing model. There is no teleology, no potential for development. All you have is a series of duties towards the family. That is why the Hobo Code is so liberating for Dick Whitman. It offers potential for development that his father and stepmother deny him.

An unexpected benefit that comes with this is insight into human behaviour. If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter. What's really at work is some bit of unconscious mythology. Being able to let go at a moment like that is tremendously liberating. But you can only do that if you have some alternative set of values of your own. And that is a subject for further development.

"We all wish we were from someplace else"

This is going to be a little abstract.

How different are these two scenarios:

1. A writer has been given your personal information—your name, where and when you were born, which schools you went to, your religious belief or lack of it and so on—and has been asked to create a personal mythology for a character with your name and experiences.
2. You decide to review your life with the intention of coming up with a personal mythology.

At first glance, the difference seems blindingly obvious. The writer can only research the sorts of things a person in your place might remember whereas you know exactly what you do remember. You have a direct and authentic access to your experience that the writer can only guess at.

There is a sense in which that is true. Maybe you went to a high school where most of the kids were fans of hard rock music and wore jeans, T-shirts and workboots but you were a member of a tiny subculture whose members wore tweed jackets, grey flannels and ties and insisted on antiquated spellings such as "grey" and "shew". The writer would almost certainly miss this detail and thereby get everything wrong.

On the other hand, even rejecting the dominant culture of your school, you would have been very much influenced by it. And you have almost certainly forgotten much of what you experienced. What you remember comes in the form of stories that you and others have told over and over again and those stories often (almost always) don't match the verifiable facts of your life. What we wanted, what we felt compelled to say, in response to the two scenarios I posted above was a special and direct access to "the real me". It would seem that the most we can really say is that the person who actually lived the life will have a much better idea where to look for clues and will know of many more such clues than the writer researching their character could ever have.

The final problem is that your experiences might be a barrier to what you want to achieve. You have psychological barriers and self deceptions that stand in the way. The writer might well be more open to possibilities you are currently cutting yourself off from for no good reason.

"Here, you're an honorary"

The quote immediately above and the one in the title of this post are from the unnamed "gentleman of the rails" who visits the Whitman homestead in the first season episode of Mad Men named "The Hobo Code". The theme is freedom. But what is freedom? When we're in captivity, we, like the bird in the cage, can only imagine that freedom is a world without bars. But freedom is not freedom from but freedom for a purpose. Freedom from is empty and unsatisfying.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

This is one of my favourite quotes. Marx, who missed the full significance of his own point, sees that to change yourself is to learn another language. An existing language.  And learning another language is a long and arduous process.

The process begins for Dick Whitman with the flashback in "The Hobo Code" and it begins with a language. In a move that Wittgenstein would have loved, the hobo teaches young Dick only four symbols:

• A pie that symbolizes that the food is good here.
• A set of teeth indicating that a vicious dog lives here.
• A sort of sickle that means a dishonest man lives here.
• A stick woman that means tell a sad story.

As Wittgenstein would say, "Conceive of this as a complete primitive language." That means that understanding this language means knowing how to use and respond to these expressions.

As Wittgenstein would note, we are already functioning at a high level here. To get even this primitive language, we must know a whole lot. Just the literal use of the expressions requires us to know what a "dishonest man" is and why it would matter that he lives here. Young Dick only learns these things in this episode.

We might also think about the metaphorical extension of these expressions. Good food and scary dogs are concepts that a child can readily understand. They can also be extended. Likewise, we can see how an adult might see potential benefits in gaining a  woman's sympathy that a child might not immediately grasp.

A dishonest man lives here, however, is in a different class.

Rejection

The episode, interestingly, begins with Bert Cooper telling Don, "I know what kind you are." He elaborates on that by saying he believes that Don is, "Productive and reasonable and, in the end, completely self-interested" and "unsentimental". Bert is suggesting that Don's personal mythology is much like the views of Ayn Rand. Don rejects that and the rest of the episode shows us why. His personal mythology is that of the Hobo.

All rebellion begins with rejection. Don rejects his mother. He doesn't accept Adam as his brother. He tells the hobo, "Ain't you heard, I'm a whorechild." At least according to the flashbacks, his biological mother was a prostitute who died giving birth to him. There is a huge problem here, though, because no child can have a flashback to his conception and birth. Later, his adoptive mother will become an actual prostitute. His father, who dies, is replaced by "Uncle Mac" who is not his uncle but his adoptive mother's pimp. He remembers Uncle Mac as having been kind to him.

Don's whole life is about a rejection of his mother. Father figures are a bit trickier. That his father is dishonest is clear but so, in different ways, are the replacement father figures—Uncle Mac, the real Don Draper, Bert Cooper and Conrad "Connie" Hilton. The only honest father figure in Don's life is the hobo and he only has a brief brush with him.

To return to the point I make at the top of this post, that encounter need not even be "real" in the ordinary sense of the world.

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement, his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

To embrace one thing is to reject others.

I'll stop here not because this is a complete thought but simply because I must stop somewhere.

This meditation was inspired by the eighth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "The Hobo Code". There will be more such meditations coming.

"More of an idea than a place"

Rachel Menken says that of Israel in the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men.

True story: the wife of a famous, and now deceased, Canadian broadcaster once told me the story of how her English ancestors' business had gone bankrupt. It was a wonderful story and I believed it. I wrote it up into a nice little piece and you might even find it if you're diligent enough about your research. (It's not online and it wasn't published under my name.) This was about 35 years ago now. Later, I discovered the identical story of a family business going bankrupt in a John Galsworthy novel. So how did that happen?

We all have a personal mythology. Over the years I've read a lot of biographies and I've written a few. There is a recurring problem with the narratives we all tell ourselves. They tend to feature turning points and when you look into these turning points there tend to be problems.

1. Sometimes, and this is awkward, the turning point never happened. The writer researching a biography goes looking for external evidence of the turning point and finds out that, it never happened, or it couldn't of happened or that it did happen only to someone else and not the person who told the story about the turning point.
2. Other times it comes way too early to be of any use. The person the writer is researching continued to express the opinions or do the things that this turning point is supposed to have altered forever for years after.
3. Finally, as you've probably already guessed, sometimes the turning point is way too late. The person who claims to have been changed forever by this experience already had the new attitudes or behaviours long before the claimed turning point. 

My friend Jeremiah calls the story we all tell about our lives the emotional narrative. It's a compelling story in which everything connects and everything makes sense. Psychologically, it tends to win out because the only alternative is a small set of data points that don't connect to anything. It's only when some serious researcher goes to work assembling a comprehensive chronology of a life that the emotional narrative falls apart.

I've written quite a few short bios myself and sometimes I find evidence that the story I've been asked to write is at odds with the verifiable chronology. That, as I say, is rather awkward. In a spirit of fair play, this Lent I did the same thing to myself. I assembled a detailed chronology of my own life. I chased down every verifiable detail. And I compared that with what I believed to be the narrative of my life. It was quite crushing. My personal mythology crumbled before my eyes.

I won't share the intimate details here but, suffice to say, some things I was ashamed of in my past turned out to be nothing to be ashamed of for these things either simply did not happen or happened much earlier than I remembered and were, therefore, not embarrassing. Other things that I hadn't bothered to be ashamed of, on the other hand, now trouble me.

Exiles on Main Street

"Babylon" is the first episode of Mad Men to feature a "flashback". I put that in scare quotes because I'm not sure it's true. When we watch a flashback on video or film we have a tendency to believe it's true. We're watching moving pictures and that makes it seem like it must have happened because, otherwise, "How could it be filmed?" This is different from reading or listening to someone tell us a story. Then we're skeptical.

When we watch Don Draper "remembering" his past it seems to me that we should treat these memories as just that. They aren't films of actual events. And the same is true for my memories and your memories. These are constructed things. Everyone, without realizing we have done so, has created a personal mythology.

That scares us. We think that because we created it—made it up—it has no value. But our personal mythology is not simply something that is not true. We lived with this mythology for years. It's part of us. It's not an accurate account of what we lived through but it is part of our experience. It's more of an idea than a place. We may never want to live there or visit there but it's terribly important that it exists.

This meditation was inspired by the sixth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "Babylon". It is the second such meditation I do here and there will be more such meditations coming.

Relational beings with relations

It's always interesting when someone really intelligent makes a basic mistake. Here's an example:

Like Buber he was keen to emphasize the importance of relationality—that dimension of the person which makes him unique and unrepeatable. (Benedict XVI: A guide for the Perplexed by Tracey Rowland.

That's not completely off the point. There is something about relationality, when applied to human beings, that makes you you. But it misses the essential point by a wide mark. To be a relational being is to have being in relationship with others. Are you tall or short? If you are one of those things, you are that in relation to others. Relationality is not something that exists inside you. It is a set of qualities that exist in relation to others. By putting it the way she does, Rowland takes away everything that is special about relationality.

Why she does that I don't know but I think it has something to do with a belief in the metaphysical self. That is the belief that the real me is something apart from all my relations, a special being that exists inside me and is the standpoint from which I can make the really important moral decisions.

This inner being, which is believed to be the real and authentic me, is usually understood as difficult to access. I have to peel away all the outer layers and that calls for self-denial and prayer. But getting to it is taken as the most important moral task.

Bu what if this picture is completely wrong? What if you are your body, as the Catholic Church teaches us and not some inner soul dressed in a body? What if being authentic isn't a matter of looking inside but looking outside at the relationships that make you who you are? I'd put it to you that the key point to take from relationality is not that you are something unique and unrepeatable but that you cannot be anything at all unless you are connected to others.

The Japanese have a saying: "A man is whatever room he is in."

Imagine you are a young person away from home. It's not the first time. You have enough experience at this to have a  grasp of what it's like. You've had failures and successes. This time you are with a group of people and you are doing well. You are establishing a new and exciting identity. This identity is not the person you are so much as it is the person you want to be. You didn't sit down and work out who this better version of yourself is. It's just there because that's the way human beings are, especially adult human beings and you're pulling it off successfully ... so far anyway.

And these people you are with have, without realizing it, given you a tremendous freedom. By accepting you, they are allowing you to work at being this new person. This is exciting and scary. It's a high wire act. Everything these people know about you is what you've told them and what you've shown them. That last element is the most important of the two for that is what makes it authentic. You can tell outrageous lies about who you are but you can't fake performance. And it's scary because you could fail at any moment.

You're at a table in a public space. Perhaps it's a pub or a student lounge. And you look up and, some distance away is a sibling. They are coming towards you because they've recognized you. And you get a sinking feeling that this might ruin everything. You don't dislike this sibling and he or she doesn't dislike you. But you really don't want to see them because, just by showing up, they have taken away your freedom to become the person you want to be.

The problem is not that they know "the person you really are". You could think of it that way and you'd feel a little guilty when you saw them because you'd feel like a fraud. They're going to come over and meet your new friends and start treating you as a different person from the one you've been acting as until now. Maybe you'll be the only one to notice this but it won't matter because you will feel an intense shame at the gap between who you want to be and the person your family takes you to be.

Maybe you've never experienced anything like that. I suspect you have though. It's one of the things that makes up modernity. There have always been people who were able to leave the place they came from and go somewhere else and become someone else but it is only relatively recently that just about everyone could do this. You don't even have to leave town to do this if you already live in a  city. You can hop on a bus and head across town to school or work. You could make the move almost seamlessly. Or you might not. One of the points of tension will be your family.

Let's dramatize this

Let's imagine a dramatic setting that will help us isolate and identify this tension. Most stories are designed to get us over this hump by way of some dramatic intervention. David Balfour's parents have died and then he is kidnapped. Now he is free to become someone. It might not work like that in real life. He might just crumple up and die. Or he might succeed. But it's a terribly helpful scenario in a novel. A different set of relations is the opportunity to become a new person.

But suppose we wanted to dramatize the personal narrative I've been describing above? Then we might have a dramatic break that is in constant danger of failing. You're sitting at a boardroom table. You ran away from home and you've assumed a new identity, complete with a false name. Most of the time you get away with it but you worry about running into one of the people who can connect you with your old identity and thereby drag you back to it. A coworker knocks on the door, excuses herself and hands you a note. It's your nightmare come true. The note is from your little brother Adam Whitman. You haven't seen him for years, not since you first adopted your new identity, but now he's tracked you down and he's at the reception desk waiting to talk to you.

You see what we've done here? We've taken an ordinary human situation—wanting to escape the identity that comes from being in one set of relationships and get into a new environment so you can be someone new—and made it a high stakes game where external consequences, arrest for deserting the army, act as a marker for your internal shame.

Most stories put the risk and high stakes on the side you go to after being kidnapped, have been sprinkled by pixie dust, escaped through the back of the wardrobe or been orphaned. This story reverses that. The new world has its risks but the danger is all about being dragged back to your family.

"You want to be Don Draper? You already are."

For those of you who aren't part of the less than two percent of the population that watched the show, I didn't make up that dramatization. It's from Mad Men. Don Draper is terrified of reverting to the Dick he used to be. That's something fairly new in story telling. I doubt it's completely new, although I don't know of any other story quite like it. As a consequence, most people missed the point.

The quote that is the subheading above is from The Last Psychiatrist. He misses the point too but he comes very, very close to getting it. For you might already be Don Draper. Don Draper, as his creator Matt Weiner insists, is not an anti-hero like Walter White. He's much closer to home than that.

TLP argues that Draper is a narcissist and believes that is the premise of the show. Again, that is very close but he is actually a man raised by a narcissist mother and who keeps making the mistake of marrying women more or less like his mother.

Even in a world that pretends to embrace transgression in art, a character who hates his or her mother is pushing the limits. Weiner moves that very dangerous notion one step away by using the time-honoured trick of making her a stepmother but even that isn't quite enough to defuse the tension. But it's also the appeal—watching this show allows a man to work out tensions they have with their mother.

Resentment: indignant or bitter feelings you cannot act on.

You can't easily express anger at your mother. Even if you could, what would it accomplish? But you do feel it. Not everyone feels it intensely but even a little tends to get bottled up for, "How dare you be angry!"

This meditation was inspired by the fifth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "5G". There will be more such meditations coming.

Pietas

"Pietas" and its obvious English derivative "piety" is a challenging virtue for me.

Originally, virtue meant excellence and it was something worth pursuing as its own reward. For the Greeks and Romans moral law was relatively unimportant. Aristotle acknowledged that you had to have laws but they were of relatively minor importance.

That all had to change with Christianity for it was heir to a whole lot of scripture that said that moral law was very important. So what's the relationship between virtue and the law? For Aquinas, virtue seems to still be its own reward. Later, in the manualist period (17th to early 20th century) moral law became supreme. Virtue was worth pursuing because it made you better at obeying moral laws. Virtue by itself was nothing. And so a virtuous person became not someone who was good at doing something but a person who was good at not doing things. By the early 20th century, the expression "a virtuous woman" came to mean a woman who had not had sex if single and had had sex with only her husband if married. And it was generally taken that the when the married woman had sex she did so out of duty rather than enthusiasm on her part. (Men were held to the same standard in theory but not in practice.)

Sexual "virtue" in women was only the most extreme example. Morality came to mean our duty to follow the law both in Catholic and protestant teaching. Today, the reigning conception of ethics for most liberals remains deontology, that is, a morality of duty. To be sure, liberals have discarded many of the sexual duties as well as filial piety towards parents and state but duty remains the central concept and, as social justice warriors demonstrate daily, woe on the person who failed to recognize the reigning notions of duty and wore a sombrero on the Cinco de Mayo. Not surprisingly, some people rejected, and continue to reject, this sort of morality as duty as something cold and inhuman. Because it is cold and inhuman!

Pietas means many things but it definitely includes duties to other human beings and not just God. In a world where we define virtue not as a quality that a human being has, not as something they are, but as a matter of performance, we are going to tend to see the pious son as the one who always does what his parents want him to do. His virtue doesn't make him anything because he is only valued to the extent that he performs as desired.

HIGH PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value training and development.
• Value competitiveness and materialism.
• View formal feedback as necessary for performance improvement.
• Value what one does more than who one is.
• Expect direct, explicit communication. 

LOW PERFORMANCE ORIENTATION societies have characteristics such as...

• Value societal and family relationships.
• Value harmony with the environment.
• View formal feedback as judgmental and discomfiting.
• Value who one is more than what one does.
• Expect indirect, subtle communication.

Piety towards your parents is going to be a very different thing depending on which sort of environment you are operating in. Presumably, we will all travel between both. That is to say, our job will be a high performance orientation environment and our family and friends less so. It makes sense to fire someone because you think you can find someone who can perform better. It makes sense to value the high-performing employee above the low-performing one. It makes sense to value these people for what they do more than for what they are. In fact, we judge it a vice to hire friends and family over others. In this world, I and others will judge my piety as being indistinguishable from obediently conforming to the expectations my superiors have of me.

Someone might object that conforming seems not to match modern liberal society where rebellion and competition are valued. Yes they are valued but only to the degree that they serve a shared set of values. Our "rebels" all conform to a narrowly proscribed set of values. Try being a  conservative rebel and nonconformist on a university campus and you will be sneered at and maybe even brutally suppressed. You may only rebel according to accepted models.

The limit for liberal deontology is Kant's principle that we never treat others solely as means. So, while you will treat the hired hand—for instance, the barista who makes your coffee this morning—as a means, you will not treat them solely as such. Assuming an opportunity ever comes up for you to think of them as anything else but the means to get a  good cup of coffee but it probably won't. At the other end of the scale are the people who you see primarily as ends in themselves. But only primarily; there could be kinds of performance that would lead you to sever relations with them but there probably won't; most of the time, their performance will not affect your relationship for you value them for who they are (as ends in themselves) rather than what they do (as means).

Now, it may also seem that families will be low performance oriented environments where people are valued for what they are. Well, they should be but they tend not to be. My family certainly wasn't. A standard of performance according to expectations set down by management was very much the reigning morality. One of my mother's frequent admonishments to her children was "If you want to be part of this family." My mother wasn't a horrible person. She just didn't get what a family should be and she didn't because she grew up in a high-performance-orientation society that didn't (and still doesn't) get what a family is supposed to be. Her understanding, like that of many (perhaps most) mothers of her generation of filial piety was always that her children should do what she wanted and share her values. (See Betty Draper as the supreme example this.)

"Name don't blame," as therapists say. It's pointless to blame our parents for this. My mother was as much a victim of this as a perpetrator, which is to say she learned it all from a very ambitious Irish mother who had driven her children to success. (We blame WASPs for this mentality but there is nothing peculiarly white or protestant about the work ethic.)

So what can we do about all this now? The solution our liberal culture pretends to offer us is a rejection of piety but it does this by substituting one kind of piety for another. For example, we used to be puritanical hypocrites about sex and now we are puritanical hypocrites about food and the environment. Besides, I think piety, including filial piety, is a very important virtue that is essential for us to have a happy, healthy state and to pursue happy, healthy lives. "Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you." This is, St. Paul tells us, the first commandment with a promise. If all it means, however, is a requirement that we live up to our parents' expectations it is a cold and inhuman law and no virtue at all.

Privilege

My first instinct is to dismiss the whole notion of privilege as just the latest manipulative trick of fascists social justice warriors. And that is partly correct.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

That's Saul Alinsky's rule #12 and when SJWs accuse people of having privilege that is what they are doing. "Privilege" is just a stick to beat people with for them.

But that doesn't mean there isn't something to the concept.

If we get privilege wrong, it's because we start off thinking it's a boon for the person who has it. It isn't. Being a parent's favourite, about as clear an example of privilege as you're likely to find, is as likely to be a curse as a blessing.

Another reason we misunderstand privilege is that we imagine those who enjoy it have it good:  that, because society judges them to be “good,” they are "loved, get their needs met, and have a problem-free life.” Robert Glover tells us this is the contract that "nice guys" seek to make with life. Much of our belief in "privilege" is based on the assumption that some people get this without earning; that they are just blessed.

Truth be told, people with privilege are just as lonely and frustrated as anyone else. Often, they are worse equipped than the rest of us precisely because their privilege leads them to fail to prepare for life and this will come back to haunt them for most privilege is temporary.

Which leads me to the issue of attractive young women. Although no one acknowledges it—it doesn't suit the purposes of SJWs to say so—attractive young women are the most privileged group in our society. They are valued for what they are and not for what they do. They have easier aspect to entry-level jobs than the rest of us (and those are the only kinds of jobs available to the young). They get little helps and boosts every day. And yet, if my experience is anything to go by, they are no happier than anyone else and often end up very unhappy in the long run.

"You don't share any of my values!"

About a decade ago, a couple I know got a dog. Both the man and woman were of strong feminist views and regarded their relationship as being one between equals and they attempted to share power in all matters equally. They believed that and, as far as they could tell, their friends believed it too. The dog messed everything up. She didn't know anything about ideology or feminism. She decided which of the two was the strong authority figure in her life based on what she observed in their behaviour. She picked the man. 

It was rather awkward. Everyone could see it and, while professing not to care, the woman talked about it a lot.

The woman set about fixing the problem by competing with her husband for their dog's respect. She tried to win that respect by showing the dog that she really understood its needs and wants. That had the reverse of the desired effect. The man, who didn't want a dog in the first place, saw the dog as just another thing in his life that had to be dealt with. The dog loved both of them in that unreserved way dogs do, but she developed a deep respect for and trust in the man that she never had for the woman. That this was so was unmistakeable; the dog's behaviour was very different when the man was not around.

I put it to you that this true story can also serve as a parable about why we fail or succeed in living values and, therefore, whether we pass them along or not.

The quote in the subject heading of this post is something my mother said to me when I was in my early twenties. I was quite taken aback by it for two reasons: 1) she was very upset by it (she was crying when she said it) and 2) because it seemed to me to be patently false. If you had asked me which parent had most influenced me up until the moment my mother tearfully challenged me, I would have unhesitatingly said my mother because, as was typical of my generation, she was the one who spent the most time with me as a child. I was raised by parents who came from a  generation that took it as absolutely normal that the mother raised the children and the father, at most, was an occasional authority figure. But she was absolutely right. I had mostly rejected her values without even realizing that I had.

Oddly enough, that conversation only served to further that rejection. I'd never really thought about it before then. I loved my mother and I didn't like to think about things that made for differences between us. When I was alone, I tried very hard to come up with a list of values that I shared with her but all I could come up with were values that are nearly universal, such as, for instance, the belief that cruelty is wrong. Although my mother obviously played a huge role in my life, for which I am very grateful, her remark was right on the money: I don't share her values.

Where do my values come from then? A good portion came from my father. My Godfather, Clifford Warner, was a huge influence. My first girlfriend, Ellen Broadhead, had an influence you probably couldn't over-state. Two fathers of  later girlfriends—Art Mantell and Ian Webster—were very important in making me who I am (one of the ironies of my life is that both are far more important to me, when seen in retrospect, than their daughters are). Four professors—John Minhinnick. Andrew Lugg and Hilliard Aronovitch, who taught me philosophy, and Linda Sanborn who taught me Romantic poetry—shaped a lot of my values. Add to this some people I never met but whose works I've read obsessively over the years: John Dos Passos, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Benedict XVI.

When I look at that list, the thing that really strikes me is that most people on it had little or no interest in passing their values on to me. Ellen didn't pass on hers so much as she forced me to become responsible for myself in a way that no one else in my life had done. (She was the Joey Potter to my Pacey Witter.) Others either never knew me or didn't think about me as someone to pass anything along to. Most of them rarely, if ever, talked about their values. Benedict XVI, for example, has a lot to say about values but he is actually spectacularly reticent about his own values. He never tells you what they are. He doesn't even set out to show you what they are. You have to dig hard to find them (He is very different from the current pope in this regard.) He passes them along without meaning to. That was true of everyone on that list.

The first rule of values is, you do not talk about your values

The second rule is, you DO NOT talk about your values. The third rules of values is, they are not YOUR values for you cannot own values. (If you try to own your values, they end up owning you.) The fourth rule of values is that values are ways of doing things and NOT ways of becoming a certain kind of person. (Values aren't virtues.)

The last of those is counter-intuitive because it seems to be indisputably true that our values make us. A man's character is his destiny. That seems to open up a direct route. I think I could become the person I want to be (or the person that others would love) by adopting certain values. Someone might also think that raising their children properly is a matter of getting them to accept a set of values and, therefore, spend a lot of time discussing their values with them. As near as I can tell, that is almost universally the strategy that most "good liberal" parents now take. It was certainly a big part of my mother's approach to parenting.

A child who can repeat back value statements about tolerance, love and forgiveness has learned something. But have they learned very much? Is being able to talk this way useful? (In my early twenties, I could describe the values my mother wanted me to have perfectly and, up until she challenged me, I believed that I "had" those values. The reason she challenged me was that she had noticed that I increasingly did not live those values.)

Here's a question that might appear on a psychological test:

"I think it is important to be a tolerant and forgiving person." 

1. strongly agree 
2. somewhat agree 
3. neither agree nor disagree 
4. somewhat disagree 
5. strongly disagree

I put it to you that the most important words in that statement are "to be". I'd further put it that once you recognize that "to be" are the most important words, "neither agree nor disagree" is the only rational choice. Anything else is narcissism.

All of the people who strongly influenced my values were like the man in the dog story I started with. They didn't have passing along their values as a goal. It mattered to me, and mattered a lot, that I agreed with their values but they never asked me to. They didn't tell me or try to show me what their values were. They just lived them. The amount of time I spent with them mattered relatively little. I didn't need to be with them at all for the impact of their values could be felt at second hand (most of what I learned from the fathers of my girlfriends came that way). What mattered was that those values were embodied in their behaviour in ways that led me to respect and trust them.

The unbearable lightness of Maya Angelou's readers

Caveat: This is a post about Angelou's fans and the shallow way we read literature in our time not about Angelou herself. The woman herself said many things that are quite profound, see this, for instance. Further, many "quotes" circulated on the Internet were never said by the person they're attributed to; we can only hope that is the case for the examples I've cited below.

Some time ago, a friend of mine discovered that I was a fan of Matsuo Basho. He, very thoughtfully, got a copy of Narrow Road to a Far Province and began to read it so that he might discuss it with me. But this kind intention went awry for he read it only until he found what he thought was an antiwar statement and then used it to argue about the first Gulf War. As it turned out, he missed the context and the statement he thought antiwar was nothing of the sort. He lost interest in Basho after that and we've never discussed it since.

I mention this because, as my friend Paul pointed out to me many years ago, we now read literature not as literature but as a way to validate our opinions. And the problems don't stop there. The deeper problem is that what gets selected is so often driven by a shallow narcissism that seeks to make a shallow and empty culture look profound. It's not our beliefs that we seek to validate but ourselves.

Here are some quotes that Maya Angelou's fans on the Internet thought worth highlighting:

Try to be the rainbow in someone else's cloud: I think Hallmark would be ashamed to use that. 

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude: This is your Grade 11 English teacher in a particularly self-righteous mood. 

We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated: And people laugh at Yogi Berra. 

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time: Would it be too cruel to point out that this doesn't quite make sense? It's like saying, "The cat shovelled the teapot into calculus." It's a grammatically correct sentence that means nothing.

You are the sum total of everything you've ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot—it's all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive: A truism followed by a non sequitur. 

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you: There are tens of thousands of things that are greater agony, starting with stubbing your toe and building up to being tortured to death. 

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope: Contrast and compare: " Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away." 

Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet: You'd forgive a mother for bragging about her precocious twelve-year-old child having said this provided she didn't ever bring it up again.

Anyone who writes can tell you that cranking out trite platitudes is an unavoidable hazard of the trade. If you were to spend a long time studying Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare and Austen, you might find an equal list of awful quotes. The problem here is not Maya Angelou; the problem is the readers who've selected this crap. The problem is us and the way we have taken a great culture that was handed on to us and reduced it to almost nothing in the space of two generations.

Added: I've spent a little more time looking into this and I'm sorry to report that Angelou did say or write most of the lines quoted above or something very much like them. That said, there are some real gems to be found. Here are a few examples:

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

“I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”

“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”

There are probably more.

Transgression

... we’ve come a long way since the days when Marilyn Manson and Andres Serrano (the artist behind Piss Christ) could make careers out of transgression for transgression’s sake. Breaking taboos for shock value is relativism; breaking taboos as a means rather than an end is not, which gives Lady Gaga and Seth MacFarlane an alibi. 

That's from an essay published 4 years ago. The larger point of the essay was that the era of relativism was over. Leaving that issue aside for a moment, I'd like to focus on the more immediate issue of transgression. I think there's a false dichotomy in the argument  Helen Rittelmeyer gives us here. I don't think that anyone, anywhere ever transgressed for transgression's sake.

A few years ago, a friend of mine something that looked very much like transgression for transgression's sake. One day, when his inlaws were visiting, his mother-in-law, asked what music was playing. Upon being told by her daughter it was Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, she remarked that she thought it was beautiful. At just that moment, my friend got up, abruptly stopped the music and replaced it with Jimi Hendrix and, with that move, ruined everyone's day, including his own.

Did he have a reason for doing this? I don't think he could have given you one if you'd asked him. Both CDs—the Respighi and the Hendrix—were his and I know that he liked the Respighi more than the Hendrix. He didn't dislike his mother-in-law. Not yet. A few years more of such shenanigans and his wife left him and he now feels bitter feelings towards everyone.

The person he didn't like was himself.  He hated himself for what he'd become. He hadn't meant to be. He'd just wanted to live with this woman. He agreed to marriage because that was what she wanted. And then he agreed to lots of other things—a car, a house, children. He'd accustomed himself to the car and the house and he loved his children and, if it had been up to him alone, he'd still be married today. But he hated what he'd become.

He'd wanted to be something else. Somewhere along the line, he'd lost control of that. He still isn't the guy he wanted to be. The divorce didn't give him the freedom to become what he'd wanted to be. It was probably too late. For all he knew, it may never have been possible—the whole thing may have been a crazy dream.

When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him. If you listen, he'll tell you how he got there. How he forgot where he was going. And then he woke up. If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel and dreamt of being perfect. and then he'll smile with wisdom, content that he realized the world isn't perfect. We're flawed because we want so much more.

That's Don Draper in an episode of Mad Men called "The Summer Man". But it could be any man or woman because my friend's story is really everyone's story and thus the brilliance of Don Draper. My friend, however, was not content; he did not smile with wisdom. Instead, he transgressed. He did something stupid that he knew was stupid. And it produced results he did not like.

I suspect that, in the unlikely case we were willing to be honest with ourselves, we'd all admit that we sometimes do what my friend did. Most of us have the good sense not to do it in front of people who will be offended. We go along with being the person we didn't want to become with the people who rely on us to keep being that person. But we make jokes or express opinions when they're not around that we know would hurt their feelings if they only knew. We "act out" our transgression in ways that are safe. We may even do it by proxy, watching Mad Men and joining others in criticizing Don Draper while secretly wishing we had the nerve to do what he does sometimes.

Relativism has nothing to do with it. When you're angry, your anger is as real as the clothes you wear, as real as the car you drive and as real as the ground you walk on. Alright you say, but the standards governing what you do about that anger are objective. Are they really? What objective standard says that Greg is justified in leaving his girlfriend for cheating on him? Tyler forgave his girlfriend for the same thing and they're still happy together ten years later!

You emotions are real. You really have them and you really have to deal with them. A big part of what you do about them will depend on whether you feel they are justified. Greg may decide that the one thing that his girlfriend has done is so big that it alone justifies dumping her.  Tyler didn't look so much at the particular instance that spurred his anger as they will look at the bigger picture and he saw a single, out-of-character failure. Which is more justified?

But, either way, it's not about relativism. It's really about emotivism. That's the view that moral views express emotional attitudes. You may think that amounts to relativism and you'd be in good company. Most philosophy professors would agree with you. And that would matter except that very little moral thinking takes place in philosophy classes. Most moral argument takes place in the real world and the person who bases their moral decisions on what they are feeling is basing it on something very real. They would even say, they base them on something authentic. They're almost certainly wrong about this but the Marianne Dashwoods of the world don't know this. They go on day after day resenting that they cannot say or do what they feel is right. Sometimes this resentment spills out in acts of transgression that can appear pointless to an outsider but they always have a point.

Helen Rittelmeyer's mistake was to think that because some (most?) transgression is more about what it's against than what it is for, that the transgression was an end in itself. It isn't. Even stupid transgression that couldn't cause anything but pointless destruction is undertaken for a reason.

"This is what the truth feels like"

There is a new album out by that name. Says Wikipedia,

Inspired by the end of her marriage and the roller coaster of emotions she experienced during the time, which also included a new romantic relationship, Stefani returned to feel inspired and started writing new and meaningful songs.

You can get the picture. Her marriage broke up, she felt hurt and now she has started a new relationship and she wants to feel vindicated. Well, who hasn't felt that.

I was feeling that myself today. Someone who once caused me pain caused other people pain this morning. When I found out about it, I felt good. It's odd that when you believe that someone is a nasty little shit, they can actually make you feel better by confirming your belief. But would anyone say that feeling is "what truth feels like"?

Only if you thought vindication and truth were identical.

There is no particular feeling that goes with truth.

It says something, and nothing good, about our culture that truth and feeling have become linked.

Daddy's girl and the most subversive moment in children's literature

Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson wrote adventure stories for adolescents. Most famously, she created the character of Nancy Drew. Nancy was later softened up considerably but the original character was quite a break from the usual mode of young heroines; she even carries a gun in the fourth volume of the series. She is rightly seen as a key figure in the development of a new kind of role model for girls, something not quite feminist but definitely liberating.

Benson created not only Nancy Drew but also Penny Parker, Penny Nichols, Connie Carl, Madge Sterling and Ruth Darrow. The girls are all variations on a type. Here, for example, is how Penny Nichols is introduced to us in The Mystery of the Lost Key,

Mr. Nichols had no real hobbies and only two absorbing interests in life—his work and his daughter. Penny had been left motherless at an early age. Because there had been only a slight feminine influence in her life her outlook upon the world was somewhat different from that of the average high school girl. She thought clearly and frankly spoke her mind. Yet if she enjoyed an unusual amount of freedom for one so young, she never abused the trust which her father placed in her.

They all had doting fathers and dead mothers. Madge Sterling and Connie Carl's fathers are also dead at the outset of their adventure stories but both fathers are remembered with love. The mothers? Not so much. They don't even register.

Now, that in itself is not necessarily surprising. One of the most dependable moves in children's literature is to get mom, dad or both parents off stage as quickly as possible. In real life parents are a source of comfort and protection but it is precisely that which makes them a little restricting in fiction so along comes Peter Pan or the kidnappers to whisk us a way to adventure. But Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson is rather single minded about removing mother while keeping a loving and indulging father around.

And you ain't seen nothing until you've read the introduction of Penny Parker in the fourth of the series devoted to her with the wonderful title of Behind the Green Door. These introductions appeared in every volume of series books, just in case a young reader started the series in the middle and had no idea who the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew or Penny Parker was. Benson must have been feeling a little feisty when she wrote this one:

A red-billed cap pulled at a jaunty angle over her blond curls, Penny made a striking figure in the well tailored suit of dark wool. Her eyes sparkled with the joy of youth and it was easy for her to smile. She was an only child, the daughter of Anthony Parker, editor and publisher of the Riverview Star, and her mother had died when she was very young.

Thousands of teenage girls read that and briefly considered how much easier it might be for them also to smile if only mom had died when they were very young.

The "very young" part is important. Get her off stage before you really get to know her; that way you don't have to feel bad because she was someone you never knew. But don't kid yourself, these books were anti-mother in a way that had not been seen before.

The title of this book went on to have a life of its own. It comes back first as a slightly risqué pop song from 1956 and then as a, if you'll pardon the expression, seminal porn movie. Here's the song:

Neutrality is always cruel and never really neutral

Cruel neutrality! I stole that phrase from a blogger named Ann Althouse. I think it's useful because it acknowledges that neutrality is cruel. We pretend otherwise because we think of neutrality as a good thing. And it can be but the same can be said of amputation. It is cruel to have a limb amputated even if it is the best choice. The same is true of neutrality: even when appropriate, it is cruel and when it isn't appropriate, and it usually isn't, it is cruel and damaging.

To understand why neutrality is cruel even when appropriate, think of it from the point of view of the rape victim: she (or he) faces a court that takes a neutral stance about a horrible thing that has happened to her. Ultimately, we think that neutrality is justified because it gives us a better chance of achieving a fair result but we delude ourselves if we think it feels good for people who have been victims of crimes.

And you can arrive at the same conclusion coming at it from the other end. Think about the person falsely accused of rape. He's been wronged but the court will, at most, find him "not guilty" leaving his reputation damaged for life. It's only in really rare cases where a real victim of rape or false accusation gets anything that even vaguely resembles justice. (And neutrality is justified here because that's the best you can hope for.)

It's worth noting that neutrality isn't really neutral either.  This is obviously true in the courts where the system is loaded in favour of the accused. It's also true in real life. To be neutral is to force yourself to take a stance you know isn't true. You know someone is to blame but act as if you didn't. To put it another way, neutrality doesn't just mean refusing to take sides, it means refusing to believe there are sides to be taken.

So what are the consequences of someone applying this sort of standard elsewhere in their life? Neutrality forces others to justify all their claims all the time. Perhaps that sounds like a good idea? Try it sometime.

And neutrality always favours the aggressor. It has to. The aggressor always starts off equal with their victim in the eyes of the person determined to be neutral.

Nowhere are the results more devastating that when a parent tries to be neutral towards their children. There is always an aggressor and you can see it for yourself simply by watching any group of kids in action. The job of the adult in the room is to protect the other kids from the aggressor and the aggressor from themselves. Both need the protection.

The non-aggressors are the most obvious case. If they aren't protected, the message they take is that they aren't worth protecting. For a child that is a devastating position because this is their parent, not another child or some random adult, who isn't protecting them. They cannot conclude that the parent simply doesn't love them. That could, quite literally, mean death. A child cannot survive without their parents. The only option available to is to conclude that they are worthless.

The child who is raised this way is put at a disadvantage all their life. In every relationship she feels that she has to reach out and prove her bona fides. She sells herself out, agreeing to love and career relationships where she always put in more than she gets out. She will always underachieve because she never feels she is worth it.

As awful as that may sound, it's nothing compared to what happens to the aggressive child. She starts life off three-quarters the way to narcissism. She never learns that other people's feelings matter. At the same time, she never receives any real affection but only fear. When she gets outside of the family circle, she has no way of understanding what love is. All she can see is what she understands as respect and that "respect' will never include criticism or dissension. For her a friend is someone who enables her goals, whether they are legitimate or delusional. Confronted with a real friend who occasionally stands up to her, she can only rage because she's never learned how to have an honest discussion. In fact, she will tend to get out of an impasse not by pulling back but by escalating because bringing everything to a screaming climax where everyone hates everyone is something like the "neutrality" she's used to from her parents. Her understanding of "compromise" is other people agreeing to give in to her.

Yes, she's awful to deal with but that is its own punishment. No one wants to deal with her so no one gets close to her. She may succeed in building up a large social network but she will have no one really close to her. Her life will be hell and, this is the worst part, she won't be able to do anything about it because she will never be able to admit that she isn't happy even to herself.

Overly critical maternal superego

Here’s a puzzle: when is it reasonable to treat poor performance on a math exam as a moral failure?

"overly critical maternal superego" which is different than a paternal superego because it yells at you not when you sin but when you fail. This is the mom who doesn't want you to have premarital sex, of course, but a girl like you should be dating the captain of the football team.

Perhaps the relationship is not clear?

On one level, doing well at arithmetic is simply a matter of skills accumulated. You learn to do the mental math, which consists of memorizing addition from 1+1 to 9+9 and multiplication tables from 1x1 to 9x9. Then you learn a series of steps to follow when doing more complex operations in addition and multiplication. At the same time you learn how to do it backwards so you can do subtraction and division.

But it’s also a moral task because learning how to do these things is a matter of self discipline. Assuming you don’t have to deal with special mental challenges, it’s expected that you will “get” arithmetic. That’s a moral expectation and your mother and father will see it as a moral failure if you don’t.

This requires that they make accurate assessments of what it is reasonable to expect from you. At some point, after passing calculus and linear algebra in my case, you’re allowed to stop. No more is expected of you unless you really want to do it. If you decide you want to do more, then it is reasonable to expect that you do it well.

There is classic child-parent encounter on the front of “I can’t do any more”. It starts with a walk in the park perhaps and the three-year-old says, “I can’t go on” and the parent either picks them up and carries them or insist that they keep pushing. The parent has no strict calculus to make this determination. They simply judge the child based on their experience.

And the parent might well fail morally here. She might cruelly drive the child to the point of injury but that is extremely unlikely. The more common occurrence is she will think it easier to just give in and carry the child rather than help them develop self-discipline. And so children grow up to be weaklings.

And what of the failure of the mother in the example above? The problem is not that she criticizes her daughter for failure rather than sin for failure can be a sin. No, what she has done is to establish an unrealistic explanation. She has failed to assess the situation.

The captain of the senior football team gets sex from the girl he dates. Perhaps not at a strict Christian high school but any other high school he does and no sex means you aren’t his girlfriend. To expect a daughter to meet both conditions of no premarital sex and captain of the football team is impossible and the mother who pushes for such a thing is cruel and heartless.

You could put together a whole list of such statements:

“Just stand up to bully, he’ll back down.”

“When I was your age I was slim without ever dieting or exercising.”

“Your cousin Archibald plays the piano beautifully and he never took a lesson.”

A parent who’d say such things does incredible damage to her children.