No Canada

 

"Canada does not have, did not have, will not have writers as specifically and identifiably Canadian as Whitman and Hemingway are specifically and indentifiably American. Our leap from colony to nation was accomplished without revolution, without a sharp cultural and ideological break from Europe, without the fission and fusion of Civil War." Malcolm Ross

 

 

I think Ross was onto something really important about Canada when he wrote those lines. I'll leave aside, for now, where and why he wrote those lines. The question that intrigues me, though, is what did it take for Canada become a nation? Assuming we ever did and I'm not sure we have quite pulled the trick off. Ross was only pretending to describe Canada. He was actually one of the more important creators of the idea of Canada. And he wrote the above in 1960!

 

I think any honest answer to grasp the Canadian question has to include the possibility of a negative. Traditionally, people ask what sort of nation are we and when did that happen? I think any honest approach has to ask whether we are a nation. The real question is: "Did Canada become a nation?" Contrary to popular Canadian mythology: it didn't happen in 1867; it didn't happen with the last spike; it didn't happen at Vimy Ridge. No amount of pretending otherwise will change that.

Canada declared war for the first time on September 10, 1939, a few days after Britain did. We did not declare war in 1914, the UK did it and we were automatically included. A geographic designation that has no say as to whether it is at war or who it is at war with, is not a nation. We were not yet a nation 1911. The move we took in September 1939 had been made possible by the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931. But both of these were acts of the British Parliament. To really be a nation, Canada had to assert itself as independent. And it never really did.

The declaration of war was meant to be something like an assertion of independence but it was poorly chosen for the job. Why? Because we were going to declare war one way or another. If the only option is "Hell, yes!" then you aren't really acting independently.

That we ultimately separated from the UK was a consequence of the collapse of the British Empire following World War 2 and not of anything Canada had done for itself.

To get back to Malcolm Ross, he managed the trick of being too young to fight in the First World War and well, not actually too old to fight in the Second. Now forgotten Canadian novelist (although born in Scotland)  David Walker was the same age as Ross and he enlisted with the Black Watch in 1931 and served during WW2. Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh were both older than Ross and they enlisted and served. Orwell tried but was declared unfit because of his poor physical  health. Of course, they were British, not Canadian. On the other hand, Marshall McLuhan was born in Canada the same year as Ross and; like Ross, was too busy with his academic career to enlist in 1939. Pierre Berton, not particularly intellectual but definitely a Canadian nationalist, was conscripted rather than enlisted. George Grant, the intellectual whom most Canadians associate with the birth of Canadian nationalism, doesn't seem to have enlisted or served. Most notoriously, Pierre Trudeau opposed the war and went for midnight rides on his motorcycle wearing a German uniform. The big exception is Jack McClelland, the publisher who did more than any other to promote a Canadian national identity, who broke off his studies to enlist and served in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Ross was twenty-eight the year the war broke out in 1939. That's only two years older than the average age of Canadian soldiers. I don't mean any slight by this. If anything, I think we can see something important here. The Canadian intellectuals who created and promoted Canadian nationalism after WW2 weren't on board with the war. In their own way, they, unlike their country exercised their independence.

Do I think that was a good thing? I don't know. In retrospect, WW2 is clearly a war with a good side and bad side but I don't know what it looked like to Canadian men in 1939. After WW1, there was a widespread and understandable resistance to wars. Trudeau clearly came to the point where he felt it was necessary to at least say he regretted not having taken part but there is good reason to doubt that as the man never came clean about his past. There is pretty clear evidence that he had some deplorable views as a young man and it is not clear that he repudiated them entirely.

Canada punched above its weight in WW2 but the men who made that happen weren't Canadian nationalists. The intellectuals who drove the nationalism that springs up in the 1950s weren't driven by or for WW2. And I think that tells us that the story of Canada as a nation doesn't start until after that war. If the British empire hadn't collapsed, it might never have happened.

 

A perfectly good blog ...

And it’s just sitting here. It’s got a good name.

And yet I’m not using it.

I’m not using it because I learned the hard way that having multiple blogs can be a bad idea. Other people do it and do it well but ... I didn’t.

You can have, I think, three kinds of blogs:

1. A blog where you just publish thoughts just ‘cause.
2. A blog built around a personal project.
3. A blog to promote a cause.

My primary blog is the first kind. I have a secret blog of the second type. This one was also of the second type but it had elements of the third too. 

I think what I want to do with this one is turn it into a style blog. Type 3: A blog to promote a style. On my other blogs I’ve tended to be eclectic and attempted to be profound. I think I will turn this one into something more surface oriented. 

As I’ve written on my first blog I’ve come to realize, to my surprise, that I’ve been remarkably consistent. My views haven’t been fixed, they’ve evolved and devolved. But I was worried about something else. I thought they might be ... random. I worried that I had no core. It turns out that is not the case. To my surprise, I have a style and it is something I’ve been remarkably consistent about without realizing I was. (And it’s not just me; people around me think I have a style too.)

Going forward, I’d explore what that style is. At first glance that may look like narcissism. And, fair enough. But here is why I don’t think it is: I don’t think I invented this style. I think I picked it up.

At the same time, it’s not quite some other styles. It’s, for example, preppy. It’s not Ivy League. It’s close to Trad in spirit without quite being that. It has a heavy element of Yacht Rock in it. So, is it anything at all? Well, that’s what I hope to find out.

Parts of this will seem, if not narcissistic, a tad self-involved. Oh well.

A redesign is coming but I want to have some time to think about it. For the time being I’ve applied a theme Blogger calls “Simple.”.

Sources: Where I began

Why did I ever think my great-great grandfather and great grandfather were in the crimping business in the first place? For the simple reason that I found a historian who said they were.

My father used to check the phone book every time he went on a business trip to see if there were any people who might be related to us there. I Google my relatives' names for the same reason. I often come up with something but rarely do I hit a vein as rich as I did with Denis Costigan.

I hit an academic article entitled, "Masters and Friends, Crimps and Abstainers:
Agents of Control in 19th Century Sailortown" by Judith Fingard. As of today it's still available online. I strongly recommend the article for anyone trying to get a sense of what life was like in Saint John's sailortown.

And what does it say of my great-grandfather? Very little but the one thing it does say is very important.

The dissolution of the sailors' homes did not, for example, represent a victory for the boarding house keepers; by the turn of the twentieth century they too were disappearing from sailortown or turning their houses into working class tenements. With the decline of the sailing vessel, most seamen became visitors rather than short-term residents and sailortown, as their predecessors had known it, ceased to exist.

Backing that claim up, is a footnote and, for anyone doing family history of the Costigan and Warner families of Saint John New Brunswick, it's a real game changer.

By 1901-2, the boarding houses of three of the leading keepers of the 1880s had been turned into housing for themselves and various families of onshore workers. See the listing by streets for John Abbott and John Bartlett of Brittain street and Dennis Costigan of Pont street, Saint John City Directory, 1901-2.

There will be a lot to specify here. For now, suffice to say that we have a serious historian who has not just linked Denis Costigan with the crimping trade, she's identified him as a leading figure in that shady business.

It's not a surprise to me that my ancestors were sometimes on the wrong side of the law. My mother was always ashamed of them. In addition, my browsing through microfilm of old Saint John newspapers finds more mentions of family members related to various legal difficulties than you would expect to find for law-abiding types. This, however, is something of another degree.

As I've said before, I find this all very romantic. It's like finding your descended from pirates.

Sources: First man at the fire

Cities used to burn down. The most famous example of this is the Great Chicago Fire but it is far from alone. The Saint John fire of June 1877 was big enough to merit a Wikipedia entry.

A number of books were written about the fire or mention it and at least one, The Story of Firefighting in Canada by Donal M. Baird says that my great-grandfather Denis Costigan was the first witness to the fire.

It was on Wednesday, June 20, 1877, a day that had dawned cloudless and with a promise of more of the exceptional heat that the city had basked in for 6 solid weeks. Not a drop of rain had fallen for a month and temperatures had been 75 to 80 degrees for some days. A gusty wind blew up clouds of dust from the streets as the day progressed. It was very unlike Saint John, its weather normally variegated, with moderate temperatures, cool rain and fogs interspersed with clear days, always affected by the conjunction of warm land air with the cold waters of the Bay of Fundy. The unusual dryness had evidently resulted in some fires in the woods to the north and west, and smoke from them was plain to be seen, delaying the realization by many that a major fire was burning in the city, even after the fire alarms sounded.  

Getting a start on a long buggy trip early in the morning was Thomas Marter, the aging Fire Chief, accompanied by a member of the city fire committee – they were heading upriver to buy several new horses for the fire department. They would not be back until after 6 p.m. As the day got underway, industry came to life with the sound of the caulking hammers from the shipyards in Portland and the whine of the big sawmill of Kirk and Daniel at the very head of the harbor on the west side of the North Slip, where the head of Long Wharf is now.  

In the early afternoon about 2:30, a young coalheaver, Dennis Costigan, looked up from his work and caught a glimpse of a small flame on the roof of Henry Fairweather’s storage shed on the opposite wharf. He told his fellow workers and ran around to the other side of the slip. "The flame was about a foot and a half in width on the roof", he said, "I ran down the alley and got on the roof. I tore up a board and tried to make a hole in the roof to put the fire out. Just then I heard the York Point fire bell ringing. I think I was on the roof for about a quarter of an hour. I stayed until the hose came. I did not get the fire out. It ran up the roof and I got down. The hosecart came and they put the hose inside the barn." 

This is from notes I took once upon a time. Unfortunately, I don't know where I found it. I didn't read the actual book so I must have seen it online. Perhaps at this link.

A couple of things of note. There were not many Costigans in Saint John, fewer than thirty and there was only one Denis Costigan (spellings of Denis, Dennis and Dennie vary in documents of the period). He would have been 32 in 1877. That is not young and certainly was not by 1877 standards. I have no record of him being a coalheaver but his actual profession is a complicated story I will get to later. For now, suffice to say that he declared a number of different jobs over the years so coalheaver is plausible.

Not mentioned in this story is the fact that Dennis Costigan was a member of the fire department. Another book, History of the Great Fire in Saint John, June 20 and 21, 1877 (p. 353) by Russell Herman Conwell tells us that Costigan was one of twelve members of Hose Company 3. Why would Costigan head off to fight the fire alone instead of joining his company? What did he think he was going to do up on that roof with nothing but his bare hands?

Name change

I've changed the name of the blog. The "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" name has been applied to my other blog. This blog now has a name that matches it's URL.

In the future, I will use this blog solely for family history posts, which was it's original purpose. It has a very limited readership, getting only 2-5 page fews per day as opposed to several hundred for my other blog.

Why "A Crimp's Diary" because my great grandfather Denis (Dennie) Costigan and my great-great grandfather James Costigan were crimps.

This is a sensitive issue with some of my relatives. That is not surprising but I think it's far enough in the past that we can get over it now. Besides, it's very romantic and I like romance.

I will move all posts not related to family history over to the other blog and then delete them over the next few days. I may also change the design of this blog.

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.

"Feel your feelings"

That's a bit of advice I keep seeing. It's pretty good advice, to a point. In order for this advice to be any good to you, however , you need to know how to feel them.

Your goal is to extract the greatest experience of flavor from the rum, so don't be in a rush to decide whether you "like" a particular rum or not. Suspend judgment for as long as you can. The minute you decide that you "like" the rum (or not) you stop noticing the rum and start paying attention to your judgment. Your evaluation gets in the way of your perception and tasting is a game of sharpening perception. (from A Short Course in Rum by Lynn Hoffman)

That advice can be applied to a far-wider range of experiences than just tasting rum.

One place that definitely can be applied is to feeling your feelings. Start off by noticing them. Just sit, or stand, there and feel what you are feeling. Suspend judgment as to what these feelings mean, whether they are good or bad and what you have to do about them.

Since reading his book two years ago, I've come to think that Mr. Hoffman is correct in that if you start paying attention to your judgment you lose touch with thing you should be experiencing. He's too polite to say so but the further problem is that your judgment tends to become a performance. You want people to know what you think and you want them to be impressed that you have the sort of fine, discerning tastes that they should respect.

Feelings are no different. When I decide I'm feeling sad, or happy, or vindicated I don't just get stuck on that judgment, I start to behave in accord with it. My "feeling" becomes a performance. It's a way, I suppose, of paying attention to my judgment and it rapidly becomes a way of getting others to pay attention as well. I don't think it's healthy.

Sometimes understanding the lesson is a simple matter of paying close attention to the language used. Compare these two expressions:

1. Feel your feelings
2. Express your feelings

Those are two very different expressions and yet the second is often offered as a replacement for the first. We're often told that we should learn to express our feelings. That is good advice if there is some positive benefit to letting others know how we're feeling. Oftentimes, however, people tell us that expressing our feelings is a way of "getting them out", as if expressing them was a way of letting off steam that might otherwise cause our internal boiler to explode. If little boys, for example, aren't taught to express their feelings they will learn the habit of bottling them up and, boom, male suicide rates will spike.

And male suicide rates have risen so it all seems vindicated.

Except for one tiny problem and that is that male suicide rates have risen. They used to be lower back when men were taught not to express their feelings. That doesn't prove that expressing their feelings has made men more likely to commit suicide. There may be other factors at play. There almost certainly are. It does, however, cast serious doubt on the claim that rising suicide rates are proof that men need to "express" their feelings.

The thing about expressing feelings is that, as Hoffman tells us,  it tends to validate our judgments about them and, therefore, to amplify to replace our actual feelings with a need to validate our judgments. You can prove this for yourself with a simple experiment. Next time you're all alone, think of some past betrayal. Say out loud what happened and then say how angry it made you. Just keep talking about it, expressing your anger. It's a virtual certainty that your voice will rise and your feelings will get stronger and stronger. If you really let it go, you'll work yourself up into an intense rage. If we're honest with ourselves, we will realize that this will work even if our judgment about this past betrayal is wrong, even if we were not actually betrayed.

If you tell yourself you're sad, or angry, or jealous, you will start to feel that way even though, and this is the really important thing, you might be wrong about how you're feeling.

Far better to feel your feelings. Just spend sometime noticing yourself and what you're reactions are instead.

I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing

When I was in Grade 2 I got so sick they thought I would die, my father sat by my bedside and read me The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My father died last week.

It's a great book even if deeply flawed. Like all great children's literature, it achieves a transfiguration of the commonplace by taking a commonplace situation and projecting it into an exotic world. You think you're reading all about a boy and an adult floating down the Mississippi in order that both may escape—the boy from his violent, alcoholic father and the adult from a life of slavery. What you're actually reading is the story of a boy and his father, for that is who Jim really is. The notion that fatherhood is something like being a runaway slave is shocking and, for many, offensive but there it is. Children's literature cheats in this way all the time and this is really no different from the notion that there is a passageway to a magical world through the back of the closet.

Jim's life is a fiction and not a documentary account of slavery. Anyone who read this hoping to get a glimpse into what life was like before emancipation would be seriously misled. This is a book of fiction that doesn't even attempt to get history right. But it gets something right about what a son owes his father. 

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll GO to hell"—and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.

Liberty's liquor

"Bourbon fanciers, who often claim for their tipple the title of "America's spirit," drink one of the most regulated spirits known. To be labelled bourbon, it has to be made with a certain percentage of corn and aged in a certain kind of barrel. But excessive regulation is not the spirit of America. Unrestricted experimentation is. Rum embodies America's laissez-faire attitude. It is whatever it wants to be. There have never been strict guidelines for making it. There's no international oversight board, and its taste and production varies widely, leaving the market to sort out favourites. If sugarcane and its by-products are involved, you can call it rum. Rum is the melting pot of spirits—the only liquor available in clear, amber, or black variations."

And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis

"I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than live in the tents of wickedness"

That's Psalm 84, verse 10 in the NRSV.

The version from the office today (iBreviary version and, I suspect, the Grail translation):

The threshold of the house of God
I prefer to the dwellings of the wicked.

I have no idea which is the better translation (the iBreviary is the more poetic of the two but, as the quip goes, beautiful translations are rarely faithful and faithful ones are rarely beautiful). My temptation is to read it as a reminder that the kingdom of God is both already here and not yet; a reminder that we should reject all those who claim to be able to build a better-than-human society here on earth; a reminder that the the least-worst of options is always the best we can expect from human efforts.

Someone will no doubt say, and they're probably correct, that the author of the psalm could not possibly have meant that. That's fine with me; I'm comfortable with the notion that writing, any writing but especially scripture, says more than those who composed it realized.

Here's the reading from the Office (NRSV translation not the one used in the Office but for no profound reason):

So speak and so act as those who are to be judged according by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment. (Janes 2: 12-13)

The Office, for better or for worse, gives us these quotes out of context. I don't have the whole Bible in my head or anything close to it. Even when the excerpt is from a favourite book, as is the case above, the exact context eludes me.

My first thought was that if the law of liberty (or "freedom's law" in other translations) gives us freedom in anything, it gives us freedom when it comes to applying mercy. A law is a law, it is not freedom to have a law. You can argue, and I would, that freedom may come as a consequence of having a law but the law itself is not freedom. Is this the sense of it: "We are free to be merciful in judgment and those who are not will receive no mercy"?

Okay, let's look at the larger context. Well, that's a surprise: the larger context is a discussion of favouritism! Showing partiality, it would appear, is to lack mercy. No, the text doesn't say that. I'm just trying to make some sense of it. To side with the rich, that is what showing partiality seems to mean.

Would it be any better to side with the poor? I don't think so. The author of James is probably operating on the, generally safe, assumption that siding with the rich is the most likely abuse. He probably didn't foresee a day when privileged university students would use the plight of the disadvantaged as cynical tool with which to beat others.

Final thought: my Bible's footnote for 12-13 says, "Fearing lawlessness, emphasizes God's law of liberty." I can't even begin to imagine how someone got that reading.

Dear diary

I've created a Michel posting option on another blog and will post my general blog posts there. This blog will be used as an online journal in the future.

Least worst options

Sometimes we defend practices such as capitalism, democracy or free speech as the "least worst" option. Something about that defence does not inspire people and that isn't entirely surprising. It's something we need to keep saying even if it doesn't inspire because there are very few lessons more important. This is especially the case now that we have a thoroughly corrupt university system dominated by liberal fascists.

The reason we say "least worst" is that it is too easy to see the harm caused by capitalism, democracy and free speech. Social justice warriors who oppose the last of these three are quite correct when they note that people are hurt by free speech and even that the people most likely to be hurt by free speech are the poor and other marginalized members of our society. On the other hand, SJWs will sometimes argue as if free speech causes actual physical harm as in the case of critics of Milo Yiannopoulos book deal who have claimed it will cause deaths and that is insane hatred passing itself off as anti-hatred.

The answer to these people is to say, "Yes, people suffer under all these practices but it's necessary suffering because all the alternatives are worse. And they're all worse for the same reason: any attempt to establish some authority that gets to replace the market, the ballot box or free speech will inevitably become corrupted and will end up serving the interests of the elite. 

Jealousy and the Golden Rule

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

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

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

Control not trust

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

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

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

The limitations of the Golden Rule

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

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

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

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

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

"Unconditional" love and testing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat: passive aggressive responses

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

The bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal

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

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

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

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

This is all hypothesis but here's the case.

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

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

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

Unconditional love?

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

And yet parents continue to retail this lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fundamental options

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I have mixed feelings about

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

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

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

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

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

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

The high cost of authenticity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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