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 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.

Gloom and doom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reception

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To cultivate absurd dreams

I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be . . . permanent historical seasons of our lives . . . remaining children for eternity, leaving responsibilities for others, living with the comforting sensation that there is someone who thinks for you . . . and in the meanwhile, you have this limited, time-wasting freedom which permits you only to cultivate absurd dreams. 

Frederico Fellini

The modern world is prone to fascism. As Fellini notes, it grows out of an adolescent worldview and adolescence is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It ought to worry us especially now as we live in a world where adolescence has run wild; the generation that currently obsesses about microaggressions and trigger warnings and that has already embraced a cult of personality in Obama is ripe for fascism.

At the same time, we too easily look outside ourselves for someone or something to blame. Fellini looked to the Catholic Church. He wasn't crazy to do so. There was a lot about the Catholic church, especially in the period of high Mariology that culminated with Pius XII, that lent itself to an adolescent worldview and the sort of immature fantasies that fascism grows out of. But it didn't have to be that way; the people aren't responsible for the culture that they inherit but they are responsible for how they respond to it. You are responsible for the sort of soil you provide for the seed that is sown.

Today, we might just as easily blame the universities and there is no doubt that a lot of appalling nonsense seemingly designed to churn out adolescents who forever put off growing up, who comfort themselves by letting others think for them and wallow in empty freedom where they cultivate absurd dreams. Ultimately, however, they still have the power to embrace responsibility.

If the central character isn't an anti hero then he's a ...?

The answer is that he's a hero. I'm going to argue that Don Draper is a hero and that we cannot understand him or appreciate his appeal if we don't recognize that. My big challenge in convincing anyone of this is going to be that a lot of people believe that he is an anti hero.

Don Draper is the apotheosis of the antihero. He’s a selfish, self-destructive womanizing drunk who stole another man’s identity, but the character’s elegance and eloquence — coupled with Hamm’s sleek good looks and subtle performance — made it all OK, and typically quite interesting to watch.

On the flip side we have Draper's primary creator Matt Weiner who insists he isn't.

If you watch the video of Matt Weiner at that link you'll come away wondering what exactly an anti hero is. The definition that comes up first when you Google "anti hero" is, "a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes". That's not much help for all heroes have flaws and some of them have a whole lot of flaws such that there are lots of heroes who at least start of lacking conventional heroic attributes. If Achilles isn't a hero then no one is and he spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent.

What makes a hero a hero is action. He's the guy you can depend on to act effectively when it really matters. That's what makes Achilles a hero despite all his negative qualities and the same is true of Don Draper. Often times, a story will open with someone who seems deeply unconvincing as a hero but whom we find heroic by the end.

Okay, but what is an anti hero then? I think an anti hero is someone whom we we continue to resist accepting as a hero even after the story is over.

But that isn't helping my case much. Lots of people, starting with Robert Rorke quoted above, resist very strongly the notion that Draper is credible as a hero and advance all sorts of reasons for that. In fact, there are no shortage of people who feel a need to dismiss the character completely. He becomes just a peg to hang social criticism on, and mostly male bashing at that.

What I want you to consider is what Weiner doesn't quite get around to saying: that Don Draper is a hero! That he's a man worth emulating.

This requires an esoteric reading of the series. That is to say, it requires us to see a meaning that is in the series that is not merely hidden, that isn't just a "deeper meaning" but is deliberately hidden by writing that appears to say the opposite while laying clues that make it possible to dig out a different meaning. Not da Vinci Code style with all sorts of mysterious symbols and secret codes. That sort of thing can happen, of course, but most esoteric writing is more mundane than that.

Teddy the Greek

To get a grasp on it, imagine that you meet a child who has a villain—a sports figure, a pop star or fictional character. This child asks you if you too fear and dislike their nemesis. Only a jerk would crush the child's worldview but you actually quite admire the character. So you find something affirming to say. Okay, but let's further complicate the problem. The child has a hot older sibling and you want this hot older sibling to know that you're cool; that you don't have any illusions. You need to find a way to say something that will feel genuine and sincere to the child but will be just enough off that the older sibling that they get it.

It's my contention that Mad Men did this all the time. It fed the childish illusions that many want to believe about who the heroes and villains of the 1960s were while making mistakes that more thoughtful people would notice and begin to wonder about. One of these illusions is central to the way we tend to think about the period and that is that any positive aspects we might see in the 1960s and the 1950s before are obliterated by the racism and sexism of the period. Nostalgia, for modern liberals is an illegitimate and distorting emotion to be resisted. This is especially true of any nostalgia for the period before the sexual revolution, the antiwar and civil rights movement and feminism. A show like Mad Men challenges that simply by exiting.

The show's writers face the problem squarely in the final episode of the first season.

There is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job. I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most idea in advertising is 'new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.  

He also talked about a deeper bond with the product, "nostalgia". It's delicate. But potent. 

Teddy told that , in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain from an old would."

Now, the interesting thing here is that Don reverses the way our era treats these things. For our era, nostalgia is the easy sell. It creates the itch and then you give the people La belle epoque, American Graffiti, Animal House, Happy Days, The Waltons or some other nostalgic entertainment as a sort of calamine lotion and everyone is happy. Everyone except the professor teaching popular culture at the local university. He/she wants you to know that there were problems with that era that should trouble us because she/he doesn't want anyone admiring any of the values of that era. The professor wants you to embrace "new".

And Don Draper represents the past. He never changes. He always embraces a set of old values. They aren't mainstream values of the period to be certain but they are old. They could be loosely described as 'the hobo code". And he creates a nostalgia for a certain kind of man; a man who is secretive, strong and independent; a man who can cut his losses and move on, not without pain but he can and will do it whenever necessary.

That Don represents this challenge is no problem. He can be dismissed. He is easy to hate. The problem is that he is also easy to love and millions did and do.

The hint that there might be something esoteric going on is in the last line where Don gives a definition of nostalgia. It's not just wrong, it's very wrong. "Nostalgia" uses Greek components but it was coined by A German speaker to describe a condition where people were incapacitated by a desire to return home. The Greek words combined to make it literally mean "aching to go home". As conceived by Johannes Hofer, nostalgia means the exact opposite of what Draper says it means: it means a desire to escape a new wound into a safer past.

But this is where it gets interesting. Right from the beginning, nostalgia has been very compelling. Hofer's definition, echoed by the many who criticize it today, makes nostalgia into a childish emotion, an escapist fantasy. Don Draper gives us a more interesting option: that nostalgia isn't about wanting to escape but a way of confronting loss. And the show appears to back this up by giving us to aspects of the man: Don who deals with situations masterfully and Dick who runs. Those who see Don as an anti hero take that "inner Dick" as the real man. Those of us who admire him take the teleological view, that the man Don wants to become is the real man.

If we take this second option, we'll see the way events spin out in the rest of the story different. The common interpretation of the ending of that first season was that Don did such a good job of selling the men from Kodak that he sold himself too and returned home hoping to find the very thing he'd sold others on.

It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone ... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again ... back home again, a place where we know we are loved.

But "a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone" isn't real so much as it is religious. "Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in thee."

Donald Draper did not, as Robert Rorke and many others claim, steal another man's identity. He used his dog tags to get out of the army and he kept up that deception to break ties with his past as Dick Whitman but he does not adapt the identity of the other man. Think of the man who pretends to a famous actor to get sex or who pretends to be someone else so as to apply for a credit card and then leave this other person stuck with the bill. That is what "stealing another man's identity" is. What Donald Draper does is more akin to giving a false name so as not to be arrested.

You may say, "So what, it's still illegal" and that it most certainly is. But it's still important to get a correct grasp on what is happening. Donald Draper is not a assuming another man's identity, he's a man running away from a shameful past. He's running away from "death". We might well say he is running away from sin.

The first man

Why does Adam commit suicide? "Because he finds his brother whom he thought was dead but his brother rejects him." Okay, but why would that dictate suicide? Adam has seen the loss of his mother and his stepfather. He's had to make it on his own and he has managed. Why would he kill himself? It doesn't make sense.

If I'm right, it doesn't make sense because it isn't supposed to make sense.

Adam, at least according to a flashback and I think we should treat these as mythology not history, was named so by his mother "after the first man". If you know your Saint Paul, however, you'll know that there is a second Adam who follows the first Adam and yet existed before him. I'll grant you that's an odd bit of mythology for a Jew such as Matt Weiner to seize upon and yet I think he does just that. Unlike a believer like myself, this mythology is just like any other mythology for Weiner. Adam is important, not as a real character, but for what he represents to Donald Draper, a past he flees but also a loss.

That's all for now.

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.

Violet-le-Duc on restoration

Both the word and the thing are modern. To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to rebuild it; it means to re-establish in a completed state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.

Violet-le-Duc is a controversial figure, a fact that wouldn't bother him at all. What impresses me about that quote is the courage it shows. Courage that the man demonstrated in the work he did.

It seems to me that this attitude applies to more than just restoring buildings. To restore anything at all means to take the risk of creating something new in the process. To think that anything else is possible is delusional and the risk of paralysis is very real.

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.

A call to rebellion

"... because personalism drew upon Catholic social theory, its notion of community drew upon a heritage of corporatist thinking that linked the person to the intermediate collectivities of family, church, and nation. In this way, the individual would be protected from the depredations of the modern state. Significantly, in contrast to Fascism, which also deployed a communitarian, corporatist language, it refused to countenance the swallowing of these "natural" communities by the political state." (The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970, by Michael Gauvreau p 24)

In theory anyway. In practice, the social activists and politicians who grew out of the Quiet Revolution were only too willing to allow the government to swallow up organic communities. The wonderful thing about the Gauvreau book is that he gives us some inkling of why that happened. For the clerical activists pushing Action Catholique groups in Quebec in the first half of the twentieth century encouraged young Catholics to think of their parents' religious beliefs as empty.

Any evaluation of the cultural impact of Catholic Action must therefore take as its starting point the meaning of words such as "solitude," "community," "anxiousness," and "authentic," which recurred over and over again in Quebec between 1931 and the mid-1950s. What was significant that these words represented religious values that were always positively attributed to young people, and always in reference to the negative qualities of conformity, complacency, individualism, hypocrisy, a sterile obsession with moralizing, and bad faith, all of which marked the religious experience of the previous generation. (Gauvreau, p 15)

And I can testify that it didn't stop in the 1950s. These are the values my parents taught me when I was growing up in Quebec in the 1970s. It was also what I was taught in Religion (they stopped calling it "Catechism") classes at the Catholic High School I attended in Quebec in those years. And you can still hear this stuff from the pulpit of many Catholic churches in Quebec today (preached to mostly empty pews).

And the effect this was to have was disastrous for the church. To teach young people that institutions need to be preserved while, at the same time, teaching them that the people currently running these institutions are a bunch of lazy, moralistic hypocrites who have subverted those institutions was a recipe for that disaster.

And note that this was all going on before Vatican 2! There was, within the ranks of priests, monks, friars and nuns serving the church, an active rebellion ready to pick up the ball and run with it long before Vatican 2.

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

That's Raymond Chandler describing a world that, at first glance, seems utterly unlike the Catholic Church, although he is talking about the same period in history, the 1930s to 1950s. And it would be unfair to simply brush off this generation of reformers as deluded and selfish. They grew up with a church that had lost its way and needed to be reformed. On the other hand, it is painfully obvious, with the benefit of hindsight, that there reforms were a disaster. (Well, it should be, Pope Francis seems to think that the solution is to drive off the cliff again only faster this time.)

But what is the solution? There has been a lot of talk of a "hermeneutics of continuity" that is to be preferred over a "hermeneutics of disruption". But that needs content. What should be the basis of the continuity. Talk to some Catholic traditionalists and you will leave with the impression that "continuity" means to not reform at all.

Whatever a worthwhile reform is, it cannot be an abstract exercise and it cannot be a political exercise. It needs to draw on something deeper than that. That is why I favour a Catholic Romanticism. Not Romantic Catholicism because I don't want Romanticism to modify Catholic. I think Romanticism is the right way to approach the past but not any Romanticism. Romanticism needs to be modified and Catholic aims and goals is what it needs. I'm sure all that will seem silly to some. I don't blame them but I think the notion can be given real content.

Emotions, rationality, morality and "Catholic Romanticism"

We easily allow ourselves to be persuaded that our emotions are irrational. When someone tells you that "you're being emotional" they mean that your judgments are unreliable because your emotions are governing you. The implication is that it is immoral to be emotional.

On the other hand, we also recognize that the person incapable of feeling emotions is likely to be, as Jane Austen described Mr. John Dashwood, "cold-hearted, and rather selfish". Here, emotion is a prerequisite for being moral. The Gospel tells us that Jesus was moved with pity.

Robert Solomon argues that emotions are judgments but also dispositions. To be afraid is to be afraid of something, to love is to love someone and so on down the roster of emotions. At the same time, to be angry or jealous or suspicious is often the consequence of a life-time of training ourselves to be that way.

In addition, there are feelings that, unlike full-blown emotions, aren't directed at anything in particular. Anxiety is the feeling that bad things are about to happen—when I am anxious I have no idea where the crap is going to come from but I'm sure it will hit soon. Similarly, Thos. was telling me a while ago that he has patients who suffer from severe stress problems that are triggered by their own body responses to stress—they notice that their heart is running fast and that makes them nervous so their heart starts running even faster so they get more nervous so they break out in a sweat which makes them even more nervous ... lather, rinse, repeat until they have to take you away in an ambulance. I've done something like this on a smaller scale when I've had too much coffee and my own stress level makes me think that something must be wrong even though there is no fact or situation to justify my concern.

This all happens because our emotional responses are unconscious—a right-brain phenomenon. We often become aware of being uneasy without being consciously aware of what in specific is making us uneasy. We can focus on the feeling rather than looking for what caused it. You could say that feelings don't rise to the level of an emotion. I once heard someone say that anxiety is what you feel when you don't have the courage to have an emotion; that's too broad a generalization but it is true some of the time. (It took me a longer time than it should have to become a real adult because I lived in an almost constant state of anxiety because I was scared to have actual emotions towards the people closest to me.)

Cognitive?

We cannot simply dismiss emotions as irrational. The tendency to do so is rooted in a number of things. It is undeniably true that emotions can be wrong, even very wrong. I can be angry at my sister but later discover that she had not done the thing that I did not like. It's also true that emotions are hard to reverse—once I'm worked up into a state of high dudgeon, I can't easily calm down even when shown that my original reasons for being angry are unjustified.

But lots of human activities can sometimes be wrong without being qualified as irrational. Courts occasionally convict innocent people and instruments occasionally give incorrect readings. Our faith in these things is not based on their being infallible but rather on their being correct much more often than not. (A false conviction rate of even one percent would be regarded as ridiculously high.) The same should be true of emotions. We notice when emotions are unjustified because that is a relatively rare phenomenon. We don't notice the many, many times our emotions are correct. And it must be this way: if our emotions were not highly reliable cognitive indicators they would have been evolved out of the human race centuries ago.

Anterior and posterior emotion

When we worry about the rationality of an emotion, we typically do so as a posterior phenomenon. I start to feel anger and stop and ask myself whether the anger is justified. Even if I decide that my anger is justified, I should think carefully about how I react and I might, I often do as a personal matter, do my best to hide my anger even though I I believe that anger to be justified.

We think less often about the anterior rational process. We don't worry so much about the habits and ways of thinking that incline us to have certain emotional responses in the first place. But the first way people jump tells us a lot about them. In The Philadelphia Story, Tracey Samantha Lord rejects George because he suspected her of infidelity on the eve of their wedding. His suspicion is not ungrounded. Tracey was drunk and isn't entirely certain what she did or didn't do. She certainly did something—she flirted with and amorously kissed another man. She did not, however, have sex with him as George suspects and she herself fears. In the end, after she is cleared and George is reassured, she leaves him because she thinks that his initial response should have been to trust her. She would prefer a husband who would instinctively take her side.

That's analogous to the way Catholic moralists talk about conscience. That is the opposite of the way we usually think of conscience. In our culture, we think of conscience as a posterior phenomenon: I do something and then start to question whether I should have done it. Catholic moralists recognize that that is part of conscience but believe and argue that anterior conscience is the more important thing; that it is more important to have a disposition to react in a certain way in the first place rather than to correct mistakes afterward.

Emotions have to be part of this. Empathy is a trained emotion; we have to spend years learning how to be empathetic. This is true of a wide range of emotions, both good and bad. I had a relative who spent her entire life training herself to lose her temper when others failed to respond as she wished. She was highly intelligent and she never changed so it obviously worked for her. People got scared off and didn't challenge her. Of course, they also got scared off and kept their distance so she ended up having very few close friends despite having a very large social network. (She also, and this was probably narcissism, rejected other people's emotions as illegitimate any time they did not line up with her assessments.)

Emotional disposition is a kind of moral fitness. It isn't a matter of making moral choices. That is a cold activity, something like a moral calculus. The relative I mention above also used to exhort others to "be more charitable". What she meant by that was to make more effort to see the good in others. I don't think she realized, however, that she herself was not a good role model in this regard. She grasped the principle perfectly but hadn't done the moral training to make herself better at it. Charity was not an anterior emotion for her.

Moral fitness is hard work because we don't have direct access to the thing we are trying to change. We can't adjust it the way we can move the thermostat or put on a sweater when we want to be warmer. It's more of a long-term project that involves changing our habits and showing constancy much as is the case if we want to get into better physical shape.

Catholic Romanticism

One of the things that a certain kind of romanticism did was to value emotions as rational ways of being human. The Enlightenment emphasized rationality but the rationality it emphasized was a narrowly proscribed rationality. That is to say, Enlightenment thinkers set out to be rational by outlawing a lot of human behaviour as irrational. That produced a counter-reaction. At first the reaction was to reject rationality and embrace feeling (the term at the time was "sensibility") as something separate from and superior to rationality. For many people, this is what Romanticism did. Others argue that it was an attempt to expand what counted as irrational so as to include some emotional responses.

(At the same time, this sort of Romanticism, as Oakeshott argued, would have to expand what counted as irrational. Some kinds of activity that meet the Enlightenment requirements for rationality perfectly should be recognized as irrational and monstrous.)

That sort of Romanticism appeals to me. It is not what everyone means by Romantic. I would, even though many would refuse to do so, recognize Jane Austen as Romantic and even have tendency to see her as the exemplary Romantic.

I would further, however, modify Romanticism with the adjective "Catholic". I would not accept "Romantic Catholicism" even though there are aspects of it that I mind find congenial because I think that when we redeem Romanticism from most of its sins when we modify it with Catholic. This will be, I hope, something of a theme of this blog as I go forward.