Fundamental options

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I have mixed feelings about

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

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

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

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

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

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

The high cost of authenticity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That late-1970s feeling

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

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

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

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

They protested for a lot other stuff too.

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

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

How bad are things now?

The worst of Leonard Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Millenials

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

This popped up on a page I was reading today.

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

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

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

Oddly enough, this gives me a sense of hope.

How church doctrine changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they have nobody but themselves to blame.