The shift from childhood to adulthood, Or: does growing up mean you've "changed"?

Ever since I came to the unsettling realization that I'm "grown up", I've been fascinated by the subtlety of this process, particularly as it affects one's ways of thinking. How do kids think compared to how adults think?

One thing I've noticed is how easy it becomes once one hits, say about twenty, to start underestimating kids. "Oh, he's only ten, he doesn't understand," one thinks...and then one realizes, with a bit of a start, that one understood X or Y quite well at ten oneself. At some point, the move into the adult world at least mostly complete, one begins to separate the experience of being a child from that of being an adult. Yet this is constantly gainsaid by one's own memories, in which the experiences aren't distinctly divided at any point. More simply, you are still "yourself" in your memories of being ten. Not "a ten year old".

Certainly, thought becomes increasingly capable of nuance and tolerant of incompleteness; one loses a certain amount of one's previous faith in reason to carry through to the bitter end of all inquiry, and then realizes that's not such a bad thing. One becomes increasingly capable of making distinctions (between people and their ideas, between the "good" aspects of certain beliefs and the ones that are less than supportable, etc). But what I can't help finding fascinating is how constant one's basic principles, both intellectual and moral, and even one's interests, remain from about the age of four on. In other words, the aspects of one's identity susceptible to alteration seem to be given their penultimate form fairly early on in life.

Not that one can't change these later; the process of change in adulthood is, however, slow and difficult, working against one's "character".

It might be helpful if I allowed myself a moment to expand on my current ideas about character. "Character" is something that I understand to be a product of free will interacting with surrounding material circumstances which it cannot control. Therefore it is fully "chosen" in the moral/determinative sense, the sense that insofar as one is inclined to certain interests, one chooses freely to pursue them, and, more importantly, insofar as one understands right and wrong one's actions are free and may be judged according to the extent to which, within the constraints of that understanding of right and wrong, one chooses the "good". However, character is also "determined" to an extent by material circumstances (a notion perfectly compatible with Catholic theology if you note that God would have put different individuals in different material circumstances expecting people to react to them accordingly; you can find plenty of support for the notion in St. Paul). One's interests, one's intellectual preoccupations, and even (in a fallen world where natural law may be imperfectly perceived) one's understanding of right and wrong can be largely determined according to material circumstances. This is not to say that "material circumstances determine action"; acts are always to at least some extent the product of free will, unless you're talking about something like sleepwalking.* However, I do see the range of action to be determined by circumstance, which, when you're looking at moral issues, will have certain ramifications when it comes to culpability. What sort of ramifications and to what extent? Ha, well, that's why we've got that little reminder to "judge not lest ye be judged".

In short, I'm basically advocating a view that merges elements of the traditionally contradictory Greek moira and persona understandings of character, and that does so invoking the Christian distinction between absolute morality and individual culpability. That is, action considered purely vs. the state of the soul.

La di da.

To get back to what I was saying about the development of character, however: character can, in my view, develop, but the culmination of material constraints over the years, compounded by the force of habit (another material aspect--repetition--though one driven, at least initially, by choice), ensures that "character" is something quite deeply ingrained in an individual.  It's not simply a "mask" that one can put on and take off as the Greek notion of persona describes it. When you choose, you're choosing in the context of an ever-lengthening series of past actions, accumulated habits, and the material circumstances both totally out of your control and those which you had once chosen but which are now out of your control. Obviously, that's not to say character equates to one's moira either; one isn't "fated" to act a certain way. But unless you have a fairly strong will to change (and a fairly strong reason to do so), who you were and how you thought as a child is likely to stay constant in many important respects as time passes.

Now what got me thinking on this train of thought may serve to demonstrate how constant certain aspects of one's character (in this case mostly interests, which, yes, I do think belong in a consideration of character, and I could and probably will someday go into a long exposition of Elizabeth Bennet's apparently shallow "And of all this I might have been the mistress" reason for warming to Darcy...). Specifically, I was remembering the mass of childhood writing I found while cleaning out my room in early September. I found it rather amusing to see how little some things change. Oh, I really have been interested in X for all that long? Oh, wait, I've been thinking about that since then? For example:

•  The fact that I've been writing so long at all is the most obvious example. Tucked away in the corner of some box I found a tiny notebook in which I had been writing a story around the age of five...the estimate comes from the fact that I was writing it about "baby Jo-jo," who would be my now-seventeen-year-old brother. Who would be mortified, of course, to have such a name recalled now. Good thing he doesn't read blogs. It was basically about the difficulties of taking a baby to the hairdresser for my mom's appointment; I remember starting the story in the salon because the hairdresser had just given me the notebook. This story also had the fantastically idiosyncratic name of "Mer-mee-mook book". I do not remember why, but I suspect it may have had something to do with the fact that I always found rhyming extraordinarily funny. I do remember tucking it in the box soon after coming home with the intention of writing another chapter that never would be written; starting and leaving writing unfinished is another habit I've kept unfortunately intact over the years.
• I also kept a diary from the ages of six to eight, according to the dates. That's not to say that I kept it with any discipline. There's a total of about fifteen entries in there. What one can gather from them, however, is telling. For one, my rather inordinate pride in my family has been around for at least sixteen years! And here I thought it had developed in college. Nope. There's plenty of boasting about how "My sister is learning to read. I am very proud of her." "Jo-Jo is learning X". "William is the best baby." And many more extravagant claims for which I cannot remember the priceless wording. Much of the rest is devoted to talking about how great our animals are and my feelings when they died. Okay, not everything has remained so constant.
• An early entry records what I believe was probably my first "poem" (or so I dubbed it):
• Papa is walking and walking,/While Mama is talking and talking.
• Not altogether unobservant, I suppose. Apparently my interest in writing poetry, despite the stubborn hatred of reading it that lasted until I was in my senior year of high school, goes back a bit. I do remember being highly critical of all attempts, however. They usually ended up in the fire, which is rather a bad thing now, considering how amusing it is to look back on such things.
• I also discovered a "eulogy" I had written for our first cat, who perished in the most traumatic way possible by being hit by a car on my seventh birthday. It didn't make it any better that I was the one to find the body. Ah well. The eulogy was touching. Bearing excellent testimony to the obsession with cats that is still strong in our family, even taken to extremes by my brothers, the younger of whom seem to turn every conversation to the topic of: "Penelope just learned how to jump on our shoulders," etc.
• A list of "life plans" dated August 1997 includes these directives: 
• Write
• Find out how everything works
• Visit Russia (and yes, I am still fascinated by that country, having since hosted [or had my parents host] several Russian exchange students, read tons of Russian history and novels, compiled three full play lists of Russian music [classical, folk, and Orthodox chant], and commenced study of the Russian language)
• Read War and Peace (at that age I only knew that it was a big book and people would be impressed if I read it), the whole Bible, and any other important books I could find
• Learn Irish (this one sadly died off; my interests did grow a bit more practical with time)
• Go to Europe
• Practice the piano every day (if only) 
• Go to Colby College (I did actually apply, but then turned down admission in favor of UD in one of those nearly inexplicable changes of opinion that proves providential in the long run)
• Learn how to cook really well
• Get good at archery (I had gotten a real bow as a birthday present that year; again, not all interests are permanent--partly because of lack of time and opportunity) 
• There were plenty of other "to-do" lists, mostly compiled in cooperation with my siblings. The various lists included directions for how to:
• Stop fighting (haha, that one never worked)
• Train for the Olympics
• Send money to Africa
• Only that last was ever remotely successful. However, the interests in doing all these things have remained to one extent or another. No Olympics, nor any interest in getting to them, but I do at least want to be as good as possible at running.
• Some very elementary musings about what it means to be "good" that I wrote after a long conversation with my mom about Scarlett O'Hara, Bill Clinton, and Rush Limbaugh, in which she essentially introduced me to the idea that one must always distinguish between a person's value as a person, their "potential," as she put it, and their actions. Also that you need to give people the benefit of the doubt regarding their intentions; as I understand it in retrospect, it was basically a simplified version of the culpability vs. morality distinction. Scarlett's infamous "Even if I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again" speech had disturbed me greatly, I recall, and was the catalyst for the conversation. Which we had in the cellar while Mum was doing the laundry. Since then, it's been one of my core ideas (homeschooling works out pretty darn well when your mom is clever enough to put basic philosophical concepts into simple language and make them seem natural to little kids).
• One of my personal favorites out of everything I found, however, was a short essay on how "Knowledge is Power". You can't say that conviction has changed much over the years. It basically defended reading as a form of knowledge (was this an assignment or an argument that my reading time shouldn't be limited? I don't remember) and went on at length to elaborate on the various ways that knowing things will give you an edge in life, both materially and spiritually. As I may have mentioned before, the unbridled optimism of this conviction has been tempered. But the gist remains the same. So very amusing.

*Which I wouldn't actually consider to be an 'action' per se.

In Defense of Suffering

This is one of the best short articles I've read in months. The wealth of references (Dante, Eliot, Dostoevsky...yes please!) appeals to the classically-educated nerd within me, and the point he makes is one I agree with wholeheartedly. Are some of the claims sweeping and not to be fully supported (surely not all depression is merely psychological)? Of course. It's a short article. Should we do as much as we can to alleviate human suffering? Sure. Should we do so in particular as independent actors exercising our own freedom to choose our own and others' good? Yes. Should we manipulate governmental structures so as to minimize the extent to which free human choice (within normal limits) results in suffering, to the extent that we essentially abolish freedom? I think that would show that we have our priorities very, very wrong.

Contraception, Vatican II, and a few comments on Classic Capitalism

I spent a while the other day grousing to my boyfriend about this rather awful article by a self-proclaimed "Catholic." He referred me to an excellent rebuttal of Townsend's position (it predates her article, obviously) in the First Things magazine; I liked it so much I had to repost it. It's fantastic to see the empirical social evidence that supports the Church's position on birth control supported so well, since Catholics like Townsend will not respond to the theological argument. Why would you if you were firmly convinced that the role of religion is social, not spiritual? (Then again, why not just head over to the local Universalist church if you believe that?)

For the record, Malthus and Margaret Sanger, the "parents" of the birth/population control movement, were not particularly Nice People. The idea that humans would "breed" and "spawn" was fairly repulsive to their Victorian sensibilities ("Victorian" used here only as a descriptive adjective; Sanger came at the tail end of the Edwardian Era). People are "...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born"--or so Sanger claims in Pivot of Civilization. Note that the "human weeds" she refers to are not the members of her own white upper middle class; they are. very specifically, poor people, immigrants, and blacks. (Here's an obviously biased website listing some of her choice quotations. Biased or not, the quotations are real, and one can easily find the works to which it refers.)

On a more positive note, here's a link to an amusing article I came across that (jestingly) reads Star Wars as an allegory for Vatican II. It's way over the top, and becomes more so as it goes along, but it does give a pretty good sketch of the situation post-VII. Hard to take oneself seriously quibbling with a blatantly joking article, but I do find the Tusken Raiders=Muslims thing to be kind of offensive and uneducated.

And the capitalism thing! Gah, allow me to get distracted for a moment by my long-standing frustration with the misunderstanding of capitalism that So Many People take for the Gospel Truth. As I have previously argued, both on this blog and countless times in person, Capitalism is not an "evil system." It's very simply a description of how markets work. Really, I begin to think that no one has even read Adam Smith. Or rather, they've read excerpts, which as I've argued plenty of times before regarding such classics as The Education of Henry Adams, is disastrous to one's understanding of the text. How many people realize that Smith's enormous tome The Wealth of Nations actually contains plenty of cautionary advice to governments acknowledging that if the market is left absolutely unrestrained, it'll kind of make for a Horrible Society?

Précisons: sure, self-interest drives the market, according to capitalism, and that's not entirely a bad thing from its perspective. As Smith observes,

 "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other eases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

 Of course, this is only saying that sometimes self-interested pursuit of economic profit results in the best public good, and that direct pursuit of the same end is often disappointing. I admit that this possibility is not in itself sufficient reassurance to those who care about developing a just society. However, this is simply one observation extracted from the entirety of the book. What you're not getting in this paragraph is the fact that Smith is restricting his observations to purely economic interactions. "Self-interest" does not mean Being Greedy and Stomping on the Little Guy, and anyone who does those things claiming to be justified by capitalist principles would most likely be roundly censured by Smith (who, among other things, was also the author of the mostly-forgotten Theory of Moral Sentiments). "Self-interest" as understood here is as simple as Person A. selling a bushel of beans that he's grown spending about $2 on seeds and about $30 worth of labor to Person B. for a profit of $40. Of course, Person B. only enters into the transaction if it serves his interests as well. So he's willing to pay $40 for beans because the cost (opportunity cost, in econ terms) of producing the beans himself would have been higher than the cost of buying them. 


Again, this is only economic interactions we're talking about ("economic interactions" strictly understood, because one can understand everything in economic terms, assuming that a notion of values is agreed upon). It in no way limits a person's ability to step outside of the limitations of economic self-interest and act generously, and as I've observed above, Smith actually finds generosity fairly important if the system isn't going to crumble. And he even encourages the government to put some elementary limitations on the system so that it doesn't become dehumanizing. (Great quote from Noam Chomsky: "People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits."--from Class Warfare)

Of course, it's obvious that greedy people looking to maximize their own gains can find ways to manipulate the system, but it's a bit of a mystery to me why greedy people thus manipulating things discredits the very basic economic principles of capitalism. That's kind of like saying that corrupt politicians discredit American democratic republicanism or that corrupt "charitable" organizations discredit charity. Greed is not defined as "working to promote your own advantage." I'm pretty sure that last time I checked, the Church was fine with people earning money and bettering their social position. The problem is when people obsess about it to the expense of more serious matters (relationship with God and others), or, worse (and this almost always goes hand-in-hand with such obsession; it's a logical progression), do so unjustly. In other words, greed is manipulating a system or structure to promote one's own advantage at the expense of others. The "problem" Catholic writers are seeing with capitalism isn't a systemic problem, it's a moral problem. One that I'd attribute partly to fallen human nature, partly to materialism. Now that latter, that's something one can complain about. But I'm not about to get into a discussion of the effects of materialism on society at this point.

On Friendship

This article, another from the Stanford Enclyclopedia of Philosophy, is worth a read. Friendship is one of those things that Americans seem to have a terrible time understanding. The media portrayal of friendships is weak, to state matters kindly. (I'm about to generalize unabashedly, but here goes.) If friendship is portrayed at all in the movies, you can count on its being: 1.) in a comedy--how many times do close friendships actually matter, if they appear at all, in drama? 2.) of the following varieties:

1. the female "best friend" who either exists only to support the main character (friendship of utility? usually seems so)
2. the female "best friend who suddenly becomes worst enemy"-again, one suspects that the "friendship" the two characters had was only ever a friendship of utility, given how quickly it dissolves and how reluctant each one is to make any compromises that would affect her own self-interest
3. the male "best friend" who is almost universally a bumbling idiot, and who seems to exist only to spur the main character on to ever more extreme acts of bumbling idiocy.
4. the sidekick: sometimes a comedy figure, sometimes an action movie character: occurs in three major types: yes-man, comic relief, or slightly-inferior-to-the-main-character fighter.

 In all four types, whatever sappy message may be stuck on the end of some of the comedies about "the real meaning of friendship", the message of the story (so often different from that sappy closing message, which is probably why that latter seems so very sappy) is that friendship is a combination of Aristotle's friendship-for-pleasure (I have fun with them) and friendship-of-utility (I can use this person to get something for myself). Both are deficient forms of friendship in which the self comes before the other. The difficulty is that in a culture of instant gratification, it's hard to comprehend of an attachment to another that is based upon concern for that other's well being, and their similarly unselfish concern for yours. (The degree to which a more long-term type of "wise" self-interest comes into that sort of friendship is one that philosophers may well debate, but which I am inclined to believe will vary depending of the characters of the people involved.)

Which, then, leads right into the observation that friendship, as well as all other types of human relationships (parent-child, husband-wife, sibling-sibling, etc) are "hot topics" in popular media to the extent that they provide the filmmakers/songwriters/etc to talk about sex. Human sexuality is the very opposite of a bad thing (see Pope John Paul, in case you're one of the very few people reading this blog who might be unaware of the Theology of the Body). But a culture that singles that out as the only real indicator of the value of human relationships is missing not only a huge range of human emotion, but the crux of what makes sexuality itself important.

Sex is something you can "get," as is more than obvious from contemporary slang. And in an obsessively consumerist culture, everything revolves around this notion of "getting"--whether it be things, "likes" on facebook, "views" of profiles, or sex. But that obsession in turn makes it very difficult, if not eventually impossible--and again, this is no matter how many times we've heard the unconvincing platitudes at the ends of movies--to conceive of a relationship based on giving. Look again at that list of "friend-types" above. What do they all have in common? They all get the main character something:  the trusty side-kick who helps the action hero win again (and who makes him look good by virtue of those slightly inferior skills); the comic side-kick, who again, makes the hero look good in comparison--usually for the benefit of the romantic interest; the female best friend is usually "best" insofar as she helps the lead to "get" the guy; the "worst enemy" usually becomes such because the two have become rivals for the same guy. You get the picture.

The ability to direct one's attention outwards, toward others and their interests, is crucial to maintaining friendships, family relationships, and, yes, even marriage--because it doesn't stop at the wedding, whatever the traditional rom-com story arc would make us think. And until you have a culture that recognizes that, it's likely that deep friendship in media will be confined to the margins of Indie films. The disturbing thing is that our culture is to such a large extent formed by the media that even in the most counter-cultural of venues (my undergraduate institution, and others about which I've heard stories) it is perhaps a rarer thing and more vulnerable to the ups and downs of self-interested "drama" than could be hoped.

I do have one last comment that is unrelated to the rest of the post: the discussion of the "Shared activity" criterion for friendship is particularly interesting now, when the internet is making communication over long distances increasingly easy. One wonders about the possibility of sustaining old friendships via email, facebook, even (still) letter writing. What is the sort of "shared activity" that would allow this to be the case? Talking is obviously the primary one, but when looking at the origins of friendships, they tend to come about through a much more concrete shared experience--of going to similar classes or spending free time together, or even sharing a rather unpleasant experience (like, oh, maybe getting stuck without a flight in Barcelona and needing to be in Rome by the next day). And they are strengthened by further experiences like these more than they are by, say, just sitting around and talking. Is the ability share pictures, reminisce, chat, skype, even--via status updates and such--share vicariously in a friend's day, enough to sustain a deep friendship over thousands of miles and several years? Not really sure about that one. Probably depends largely, as so many things do, on individual determination.

Update:  Here's a quote that actually addresses my above question, though it doesn't answer it, of course. It's helpful to include "moral and intellectual activities" in the "shared activities" category. They certainly continue to be valid over a distance, though there's still the question of to what extent the absent friend can continue to be as influential in encouraging these--one of the many, many possible pitfalls of social media's facilitation of the temptation to create a fictional, "better" self.

"Cooper's Aristotle claims that the sort of shared activity characteristic of friendship is essential to one's being able engage in the sort of activities characteristic of living well “continuously” and “with pleasure and interest” (310). Such activities include moral and intellectual activities, activities in which it is often difficult to sustain interest without being tempted to act otherwise. Friendship, and the shared values and shared activities it essentially involves, is needed to reinforce our intellectual and practical understanding of such activities as worthwhile in spite of their difficulty and the ever present possibility that our interest in pursuing them will flag. Consequently, the shared activity of friendship is partly constitutive of human flourishing."

Between Empire and Anarchy: In Current Events

Not part of my original plan for this rather informal series, but I just came across this article from Foreign Policy magazine, and thought it deserved posting. It's disturbing, if not at all unexpected, to see violence against Christians and other non-Islamist minorities on the rise in the Middle East during all the recent turmoil. It's not like it hasn't been happening in Iraq for years. But what's interesting in the article with respect to the question of Empire vs. Anarchy is pretty obvious: Traub gives a bit of overview of the situation's historical background. The line of "progress" since the 1800s has essentially been from  the weakening of the Ottoman Empire to the rise of nationalism, and now to what is essentially anarchy (or at least very disorganized civil war) in much of the Middle East. Nationalism is still strong in the area, as one can see in countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc. But the problem, not the first of its kind in history, but particularly widespread today, is that "nationalism" becomes sectarianism and sects break up into smaller sects and suddenly you have a madhouse with everyone fighting for power.

I'm inclined to think that to some extent this is always a danger with nationalism. People unite into a "nation" and then begin to question whether they all really belong to it or if say, this branch of that ethnic group can really ever "belong". What I'm getting at is the idea that within the nationalist impulse, or rather, the nation-creating impulse (since nationalism in countries that already have a strong sense of national identity is, rather obviously, a different affair), can easily slip into the impulse to keep dividing and dividing along ever-finer political, ethnic, religious, etc lines. And eventually you have anarchy. Which, certainly, is not necessarily violent. But you have only to look at the Middle East (or Africa, or parts of Eastern Europe, or parts of South America, some further back in history than others) to see that violence is far too often both the means and the result of this infinite splintering.

The "Problem" with Men?

This is a rather disturbing article published in The Atlantic which discusses in a bit more detail that social phenomenon that it seems everyone's been talking about lately. Namely, the "disenfranchisement" of men. The facts and figures, and many of the explanations that this article and others present are all pretty valid. What one finds inevitably lacking is any idea of what to do about it. I understand that it's a complex problem and that there are many factors to be considered. But it seems to me that one of the foremost problems is that no one is talking about the real problem. I'm going to look at three of the major issues/effects of this phenomenon, and try to identify at least one aspect of the underlying problem.

Educational styles:

"Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys. Some people think that boys should be able to walk around in class, or take more time on tests, or have tests and books that cater to their interests. In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs. Most of these special accommodations sound very much like the kind of affirmative action proposed for women over the years—which in itself is an alarming flip." 

 The author is right to call the flip "alarming." Such tactics seem to invite a pendulum model of social empowerment (for lack of a better word). First you have women fighting their way into an all-male workforce, then a brief moment of equilibrium, and now men are the ones having to fight for every inch. Once you have a sort of affirmative action singling out men for assistance, you're going to get more and more of them in the workforce as employers hire and then over-hire. And then it's back to square one, with women now facing the problems and men on the brink of being back in exactly the same boat. It's one of the fundamental problems with affirmative action of any sort (other than the fact that it far too often excludes from consideration more highly qualified job candidates and students simply because they happen to be part of the "privileged majority"--never a way to run an efficient, effective society); it may help to fix one social problem, but goes right ahead and creates more in doing so.

Then there's a key historical consideration. Men were always taught this way. By "this way" I mean purely in the mechanical sense: sitting in a classroom, at desks, etc. I respect what education specialists and child psychologists can tell us about how a child learns best, and I do think that's had some positive effect on the classroom since the 1800s. The problem is that, rather as in the affirmative action case, a problem is validly identified and the solution taken way too far. Look back at education in the 1800s, read letters written by the average college-educated Civil War soldier; look back even further to Harvard and Yale back when they were attended by prospective colonial preachers; or even glance over the records of British boarding schools and the American Catholic school (maligned as it is) of the 1940s. Guys sat in classrooms. The discipline forcing them to be quiet and still was much more strict. They had arguably less opportunity for sports, although those that did exist were usually very popular. Now take a look at what they were required to know in the 1860s just to get into Harvard.

My point is that whatever we may understand about male psychology now--that boys need more activity, that they are less naturally inclined to focus on reading than girls--male success has never been historically dependent upon schools pandering to them. A few hours of class, a few hours of homework required discipline, sure, as you can see whenever you have the classic case (literary and historical) of the "wayward son" who flunks out of school and does poorly in everything because of his inability to work hard. But boys were still able to get out, to exercise, to roughhouse. And they usually succeeded, either moderately or brilliantly depending on intellectual capacities, but either way you did not have a similar phenomenon of only the rare, very clever, very quiet bookworm succeeding in academics (I say "only" very provisionally, because well-disciplined boys are another, almost invariable, exception).

I do admit that discipline in the classroom may not entirely solve the problem. There's a job shortage generally, and someone is going to be out of work. Back in the day it's true that higher education was more confined to the upper classes; that is, you could work your way into Harvard if you were a very clever young man from a poorer family, but no one expected that of you. There were always other jobs to take if you weren't inclined academically. Now however, traditionally male blue-collar jobs are increasingly rare, so men who really do need something more active are left with fewer and fewer options.

I have only one comment regarding that, and it's a provisional one. When talking about "class divisions and education," let's recall that for the upper middle class, education wasn't so voluntary. The blue-collar job solution could work, especially in America. But usually that was if you were totally inept in school. In general, if you came from a certain background there was little discrimination based on ability and inclination. You had to go through it and that was that. Even the wilder sort who ended up an officer in the British Army and would be sent to some colonial outpost was at least required to go through a public or private school. And those standards, as evidenced by the Harvard entrance exam previously cited (as well as in literature, letters, etc) were quite a lot higher than our public high school standards.

In short, I'm inclined to see the "men aren't educated" phenomenon as something that should be addressed by teaching young men and boys how to be self-disciplined. Teaching them that there's nothing emasculating about sitting down and controlling their understandable desire to play guns and compete. That by doing so, they'll compete even better in the long term. That later on, by the time they're college graduates, they'll already have achievements of which they can truly be proud, and will be on the road to more. In short, the response is to move away from the culture of instant gratification. We need to stop encouraging kids (both girls and boys, because believe me, the single biggest reason girls do better in school now is that it's not as much of a struggle against their natural inclinations) to go for what they want, when they want, no matter how inappropriate or unhealthy it may be. We need a renewed ability to value some things above others. And even in a totally secular society, surely we can return at least to the conviction that some behaviors really are self-destructive in the long term, while others are constructive?

Marriage and Relationships: 

"Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men. But Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach. “I want that white-picket-fence dream,” one woman told Edin, and the men she knew just didn’t measure up, so she had become her own one-woman mother/father/nurturer/provider. The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare. "

While one knee-jerk response to the phenomenon of more and more men being single because of women being more and more picky is to blame "the feminists,"  just the opposite seems to be the case. Another phenomenon that's turning the heads of journalists and cultural critics in all branches of the media is that of women (yes, the same women taking on increasingly high-paying, high-profile jobs)  are becoming more and more conservative in their outlooks on family life. They usually want families, want monogamous relationships, and want to be able to spend time raising their kids. Moreover, I can tell you from personal experience that the desire to date and marry a man with at least a comparable level of education doesn't stem from academic snobbery. Nearly every college-aged woman I've talked to has the same concerns I did--before meeting my very well-educated, well-mannered, and self-disciplined doctor-to-be boyfriend. Namely, we jolly well don't want to have to dumb down our conversations so that our husbands/boyfriends can understand them! How would that be for equality of the sexes? Thanks a lot, you wonderful old 1970s-era feminists...you made us into the bad guys, put us into the uncomfortable once-male role of occasionally having to settle for a ditz (the male equivalent, of course). It's no wonder that some women are preferring to remain single!


The Male Role Model (Or Lack Thereof):

"American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”"

There's another concern that causes women to "raise the bar too high," as the author puts it. Let's imagine for a moment that the educational gap would not have serious ramifications on any relationship. What are women who want a monogamous relationship and healthy, well-nurtured children going to be looking for? A bum who sits around and plays video games because school is "too boring" or "not cool"? Or what about the "sweet" one, whose inability to be assertive ensures that he'll start out at the bottom and stay at the bottom?

I very much understand that not all men without jobs are "bums," nor just "sweet and unassertive" as I rather harshly put it. But there's an age-based distinction to consider here. On the one hand, you have your unfortunate victims of the economic crisis, the blue-collar worker who is now jobless; usually he wants to support his family, but lacks the means. They tend to be older though. Young people getting into the American blue-collar workforce isn't quite unheard of yet, but the number is small enough to make that group statistically negligible for my purposes.

Guys my age and a little older usually fall into a few very distinct categories. There's the pretty much successful guy, who faces obstacles both in getting into college and in getting a job because of affirmative action, but who realizes that education is key to succeeding in this country at this time, and so gets one. Then gets a job. It may take him longer to get to that point (immaturity resulting from bad examples in school is one primary cause, I think; then also the affirmative action thing); he may or may not have a brilliant transcript. But either way, he either has gotten there or is getting there. Or even if he's forced to live with his parents because of the current economic crisis, he's usually doing something constructive with his life. There were lots of guys like this at my school. But on the whole, you don't meet that sort very often. They're the exceptions now. The ones who have something of a character; as I've said before, "values systems" nowadays are often vague and contradictory, but at least on the practical level of getting you somewhere in life they tend to be similar.

Then there's the type one sees much more often. The type I saw all the time while working at the library. This sort is usually lucky to finish high school. But he doesn't even care much if he doesn't. He's usually characterized by exactly one "skill", which he shows off to his friends ad nauseam (at least from the perspective of the bored librarian who's seen it a million times). The skill might be:

1. knowledge of manga and anime
2. computer gaming
3. skateboarding

(There might be others...I don't think I've encountered one.) He usually focuses on impressing his female friends and fighting with his male friends for dominance if they happen to share a "skill". He usually "hangs out" with a younger girl or three and gets at least one of them pregnant. I have seen exactly one of them not abandon the mother and child.

This sort is the real victim of our anti-masculine culture. What one sees here is very palpably the result of a lack of male role models. The dead giveaway is that these guys are always modeling themselves after someone, usually an action hero, either from comic books or movies. The gamers often go so far as to allow their own identity to be consumed by that of the online character, a character who is "heroic" by some perverted standard, who has the ability to go out and fight battles, and who usually (at least in many role playing games)  actually has an older, male mentor of some sort to guide him. When I say "consumed," I mean it. The violence with which the gamers will defend their right to stay online and keep playing is astonishing; knives have been pulled over this in our library--and I come from a town of 15,000. Even when it doesn't go that far, trying to get the gamer to talk about anything other than his virtual reality is nearly impossible. He will try to impress girls not with anything he's done, but with his feats of virtual heroism.

Of course, mixed in with the gamers, skateboarders, and anime fans (and many other reincarnations of the same basic pattern: skill-focused to fill the gap left by the absent role model) is the sweet-but-helpless guy. This is the one that I really feel for. The more aggressive ones are usually acting out on all of their worst tendencies to in response to their lack. It's understandable, but not at all admirable. The gentler sort of guy nowadays is more sensitive to the way his actions affect other people, which leads him to eschew the same sort of dominance-seeking, "I'm a  Man so I am The Best and can do whatever I want" attitude and behaviors of others. For him, being left without a role model doesn't mean inventing his own adolescent, angst-driven version of what it is to be a man. It means that he sees the aggressiveness and thoughtless behavior of other guys his age and thinks that that's what it means to be masculine. So he avoids it like the plague. He's utterly unassertive, utterly passive. He allows himself to be walked over, and even kind of puts himself in other people's way, seemingly for that very purpose. He never even tries to compete, because competition is what the "bad kids" do.

With this being the case, again, how can one blame women for "setting the bar high"? Not only is the conversation inequality a problem; it's more than a little likely that an enormous percentage of guys who do not have either a good education or a good job (or both) are extremely flawed. They rarely will have the confidence or the genuine humility that it takes to be a good husband and father: the humility that comes of having been taught what one knows, and the confidence that it takes to teach one's children the same.

One good thing that came (obliquely) out of feminism is the recognition that women can't, despite their natural desire to do so, fix a bad character. No one can do that but the person who needs to change, once he has recognized that need. Setting the bar high in terms of what one is willing to accept in marriage is partly an offshoot of that, then. We know that the aggressive adolescent won't change his behavior unless he's had a change of heart; we know that the gentle doormat won't start standing up for himself until he believes it's okay to do so.

Women are increasingly realizing that marital security, children, and a loving husband aren't the nefarious traps of the oppressive bourgeois male that radical feminists had portrayed them as being. The problem is that now, in the wake of political and social changes advocated by feminists and actuated by both men and women of the years between 1960 and 1980, we have a society in moral crisis. Women have escaped some of the worst effects of those years; after all, when marriages broke up, kids usually at least had the mother to look up to as a role model.

But for boys and young men now, the father is all too often absent entirely. And if he's not absent, the particularly radical (and particularly unintelligent)  brand of feminism that has been attacking the schools for decades (without realizing that the pendulum has been swinging the other way for almost 20 years now), does its best to make him absent for the 6 or 7 hours a day the boy is at school. Popular media then does its best to discredit the father with its seductive (and yes, I use the word intentionally) surrogate figures, which make Hollywood et al. rich off the teenage male crowd, but which pervert young boys' understanding of what it is to be masculine. No longer is the father who works hard, stays faithful to his wife, protects and loves his kids a "hero". No, to be a hero you need three things: 1.) abs, 2.) biceps, and 3.) skills. Plus plenty of disposable women.

So to go back to the opening point: what are we to do? Reintroduce values? Extol positive role models who can help boys see that instant gratification is not the way to live life and that heroism requires more than a superficial "skill"? Yes, I think. How one would go about that is beyond me, however. It can be done on a family-by-family basis, but that requires being boldly counter-cultural. And then the parents must hope that once the kid is out on his own, he'll have the strength of character to continue being counter-cultural.

Either way, solutions like "reversed affirmative action," new classroom strategies, or even that of women becoming less "picky" aren't going to solve anything in the long term. Like so many other problems in our society, this one's a moral problem, and it won't ultimately change unless individuals make the right choices.

Scapegoating

 This article by Walter Russell Mead over at the American Interest is quite intriguing. One thing that I've increasingly begun to notice over the past few years (so consistently that I don't think it's a jump to conclusions at all) is that liberals and conservatives in the USA both come off as rather desperate. Read the conventional news sources instead of say, something a little less headline-oriented and more thoughtful (Real Clear Politics, some of the New York Times' better editorials, The American Interest, some of The Atlantic), and you'll get one of two impressions:

1. America is descending into a cesspool of communism, all Christians and libertarians are being catalogued by the nefarious Federal Government, to be actively hunted down and eliminated within the next few decades.
2. America is being taken over by intolerant bigots who want to crucify homosexuals and bring back lynching, which, you know, they must, because all Christians hate anyone who is not white and northern European (so confusing to me, given where Christianity began and the distinctly non-European character of more than one place--Ethiopia, parts of India, the Philippines--where it has remained the strongest for at least several centuries).

Well, you can understand why those are the headlines. News is a business. Which unfortunately means that in a society where pride in the quality of one's work exists basically as a figment of the romantic imagination of company slogans, newspapers and other mass media survives on headlines that sell. And if you hype people up into a state of thinking "we are at war with X", they're going to buy more. That's the way we work. Make us think there's a battle to be fought, and we'll fight hard for a few minutes--reading newspapers and ranting at the coffee shop or on blogs or at work about the evils of the other side. Then our interest will turn to something entirely unrelated and we really don't care (in practice) any more until the next inflammatory headline catches our attention.

Now I'm hardly one to condemn that human impulse to fight, despite the rather anemic character of modern, safe, comfortable Western Civilization's method of attack. After all, what everyone is "fighting for," in their various views is "the truth," "justice", "good", etc. --although oddly enough one side insists that they are not fighting for "truth", because there is no truth (then why the fight? Even if tolerance is your highest goal, really, that at least must be true...another example of what David Brooks was pointing out in the New York Times a few days ago). Anyway, I'm not against the impulse, because it only reveals one of the elementary characteristics that humans have in common: however we misunderstand it and attenuate our search for it, we want truth, we want everyone to have access to the truth, and we are intensely dissatisfied, enraged even, when other people believe what appear to us to be lies.

Of course, that impulse can be catastrophically misdirected, because we're notoriously bad at understanding what is "true". Give people the wrong idea and they'll usually go too far. When an entire society becomes infected with a misdirected idealism, that's precisely when the worst atrocities and injustices of history have been committed. Because an ideal, an "ism" as Chesterton puts it, is the most dangerous of things: a piece of the truth. No one is going to fall for an "ideal" that is entirely contrary to human nature. (At this point I'm not going to attempt to defend the idea that one can talk about "truth" or "human nature", though I know that's the most controversial part of what I'm saying--I'm already getting far more in depth than I'd intended, and anyone interested would be better off reading the Greeks or the Bible anyway.) The problem comes with the bits of falsehood inserted into the truth. Take the cliched-but-useful examples of Nazism and Stalinism. True: Germany shouldn't have been so harshly punished after WWI, and Germans starving in the streets is not good; any oppression of the poor by the rich is bad, and the socio-economic problems of Tsarist Russia were severe. False: Jews are responsible for Germany's misfortune and so they must all be killed; all of the rich are evil and should likewise be killed, and you must unwaveringly support the communist regime or else be eliminated as a co-conspirator with the rich.

Anyway, this is getting away from the original topic, but essentially my points thus far are that 1.) News headlines attract our interest by turning all political issues into matters of moral urgency, whether they admit doing so or not; 2.) people are very susceptible to this because of a laudable common impulse to establish a true, just and good society; 3.) despite the appropriateness of the impulse, misinformation--whether incidental or malicious--perverts the action resulting from the impulse.

Now, I'm not at all intending to equate either side in the current political debate, nor even the extreme versions presented by the media, with something really evil, like my two examples. The cases are similar only in the way that a perversion of a truth is able to appeal to a whole lot of really decent people; the degree of perversion is obviously vastly different (except in the abortion case, but that's another whole article waiting to be written). However, I do think, essentially, that both sides of the media have got things quite wrong, and that we have to be very careful about sifting through claims intelligently, rationally, carefully. That we have to remember that America is not controlled by radical feminist-socialist-pro-abortionites, though that's what you'll see in Hollywood fairly often. And it's certainly not (and I really don't see how anyone with the slimmest contact with actual people in America could think otherwise), a nascent fundamentalist-Christian-lynch-mob state. (Again, really, has anyone been to a Tea Party? Talked with a real Tea Party sympathizer?)

I don't think people are all in some felicitous state of equilibrium either though. For one thing, that's impossible. For another, there are plenty of very obvious problems with American society today. Foremost among these in my opinion is actually the tendency of people to just...not care. About much of anything. (Interestingly enough you could argue that the hype in the media is almost necessary in such a lazy, individualistic society--a gadfly prodding the lazy horse into action sort of thing.) Generally as long as problem X doesn't affect me immediately, I won't care enough to get up and do anything about it. Notice that the only thing that really tends to get certain sectors of the population interested in politics is a mention of limiting welfare programs. Individualism. Self-centerism. Just what Tocqueville predicted, actually. And interestingly enough, what Mead points to in the above article as the "real America" that is obscured by the media hype on both sides.

To avoid misdirecting our efforts towards fighting a communist conspiracy or a nascent lynch mob, I have a suspicion it might be worthwhile to look at simple selfishness as the core of the problem. To realize that Americans are losing the vocabulary of ethics as "I want X" becomes an increasingly acceptable reason for doing anything. That socialist policies are more plausibly the outcome of self-interested lawmakers' desire to give immediate gratification to lazy, greedy constituents. That the more extreme comments coming out of mega-churches in the south stem from the fundamentalist tendency to preach a prosperity gospel and consequently involve themselves inappropriately in political-economic matters--or to appeal to a sector of the population that feels its legitimate moral beliefs to be under attack in today's America, often with suspiciously large fiscal gains for the pastors of said churches.

Which is all a bit of a dark outlook, but it's at least part of the truth. And since when has selfishness been not a problem?

Something Rather Intelligent by Chesterton

Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.

~Why I Am A Catholic; The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton

"I Want to Believe"

One starts by making one concession to popular culture, and it all comes rushing in. Everything is making me think of that really-not-quite-Shakespeare television show, the X-Files lately. Even this quote from Flannery O'Connor: "I think there is no suffering greater than that caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment that is. But I can only see it in myself anyway as the process by which faith is deepened. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket when, of course, it is the cross."

Interestingly enough, that's something that the show kind of gets right. The characters who "want to believe" (remember that rather corny movie title?) aren't exactly drawing comfort from it. The risks run from job loss to the discomfort of knowing that life is rather darker than it seems. But somehow the truth itself is worth knowing. The ultimate non-utilitarian understanding of truth: not the Jamesian definition of truth as "whatever works, but the age-old understanding of truth as that which is real. Aristotle starts his Nicomachean Ethics with the claim that: "All men by nature desire to know." A life run like a well-oiled machine, free from the discomfort of grinding gears and occasional breakdowns may be desirable from a utilitarian perspective. But courageous thinkers from Plato through Aquinas and Maritain find truth an end good in itself. X-Files, as I've complained before, doesn't know what that truth is, and only half hints at times that God might have something to do with it. But in a society where utilitarianism has so much sway on the cultural consciousness, "I Want to Believe" (one might clarify, "even if the truth is uncomfortable") isn't such a terrible place to start.

Another excellent quote

"It seems to me there's so much hubris regarding how much today's Christians worry about saving the world through art. I wish many more of us would brood about how to write a lovely paragraph now and then."
--From the same article as below (Article here) 

On "Christian" Art

This is from an interview with my cousin. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have grown up in a family where ideas like this are emphasized. Really can't imagine my English major self if I'd somehow missed this crucial point.

"I hate to even make the concession it requires to refer to some movies and stories as "Christian." Practically speaking, I'm not sure what it means to be a Christian story. I know what it is to be a beautiful movie, and this has everything to do with excellence of craft and integrity of theme and story. It makes sense to me that anything that is a beautiful movie should also be esteemed by Christians. I do make the distinction that some stories are sacred in that they are relating Biblical or explicitly religious images and history. Using this language, we could say that there have been sacred stories that are unchristian, like The Last Temptation of Christ and Kingdom of Heaven. . .

The greatest "epiphanies of beauty" (JPII, Letter to Artists) in storytelling today are coming from artists who are outside of any real attachment to a faith community. Movies like the 2006 Best Foreign Oscar film, The Lives of Others. Or Jason Reitman's wonderfully and unintentionally pro-life film, Juno. I have never experienced in any Christian film what Aristotle referred to as "tragic wonder," but I have felt it in Precious, and The Hurt Locker and Sophie Scholl and In the Bedroom and Requiem for a Dream. None of those films were made by Christians, but they are much, much more beautiful and consequently Christian than the banal and badly crafted Christian sub-culture products like Facing the Giants, Bella, Therese, and Fireproof. 

In short, if we serve the beautiful and honor the story we have the chance of finding both. If we set out, instead to foment a spirit of triumphalism in the Church, then story and beauty will evade us; and also any really lasting good."

Locke on Secession

It is a truism that the American Founders were heavily influenced by John Locke, the English political philosopher of the past century. While the extent of his influence is constantly debated, here's what he has to say about secession:

"... whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence. ... [Power then] devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and, by the Establishment of a new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society."

--Second Treatise of Civil Government [1690], #222 (Lasslet Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1960)

Referring back to a previous post: is is "Slavery under Arbitrary Power" for a government to, by all due legal means, proclaim that it is unconstitutional to treat human beings as animals?

Auden on Writing

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?"

On Capitalism

Thank you Karl Marx. Or perhaps more properly Friedrich Engels.

Capitalism is one of those words that is by this point in history just inherently frustrating. Like "existentialism" or "conservatism", there are by now so many different shades of meaning in the word that there exists by now practically nothing of the common ground of understanding necessary for rational communication on the subject. I am particularly attuned to a lot of this right now, partly because of my recent reading of Marxist criticism, partly because of conversations with friends, and partly because Georges Bernanos loathed it.

While there doesn't seem to be much controversy in protestant circles over it (at least not in your average, prosperity-gospel supporting church), Catholics tend to be dramatically divided between accepting and detesting it. As for the wild detestation, I have to blame some of that on the liberation theology that infected the Church in the 60s and 70s. But the really interesting thing is that this is something hated not merely by the pseudo-Marxist liberals (many of whom really do have the best of intentions in hating it, I think), but by solid, sincere, orthodox Catholics as well.

Why? Well, I think some of it is necessarily rooted in a certain hysteria that has grown up around the word for the past 50 years. Since I am not an economist, I take my basic definition of capitalism from Wikipedia (not originally, but for this post):

"Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned; supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are determined mainly by private decisions in the free market, rather than by the state through central economic planning or through democratic planning; profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses."

Usually Catholics who object to Capitalism are objecting to a habit in society of rampant acquisitiveness, exercised with little or no attitude of responsibility towards the less fortunate (certainly what Bernanos hated, although he also hated democracy...mostly because he understood it badly too). But is that at all what is being outlined in this very basic definition of the system, which is how I and my family have understood it for as long as I can remember? Let's see: lack of state control of the products of individual labor and entrustment of those products to the individual to dispose of as he or she sees fit. Now several things come to mind when I read that. First is the analogy to the liberty of the person allowed for in all realms of life by the United States Constitution; it's the same principle, just applied less universally to the economic sphere. Second, where is greed the rule of the system? It's basic justice that a person is allowed to keep freely the result of his own expenditure of energy, whether physical, mental, or imaginative. Just as governments exist for the sake of preserving this and other rights, without ever having its own independent right (in my opinion) to determine that the citizens must exercise their rights in these particular ways, "capitalism" has no prerogative to demand that this uncensored exchange of goods be carried out in some Machiavellian power struggle of the strongest to benefit at the expense of the weak. Oppression of the poor is not in any way some inherent cardinal rule of capitalism.

However, continue to read on Wikipedia, and you'll soon realize where the confusion comes in. Because "Capitalism also refers to the process of capital accumulation." Now, read that out logically and you'll see that it would refer to a process of making capital accumulation the central activity of life, even the element which gives it its meaning: an "ism", as Chesterton observes, is a thing that preoccupies and monopolizes a life: Nazism, liberalism, Catholicism (the only thing that can properly do that, of course, is the last, because it happens to be true. How nice).

Now, that, I have no problems with objecting to. Of course that will end up being Machiavellian: if your only goal in life is to make more money than the other man, than of course you'll be offending basic principles of justice, society will be greedy and materialistic, and the poor will be crushed (or at least despised) by the rich.

Yet the interesting thing is that whereas Marxist propaganda, starting right back there with Das Kapital , has inspired us to generally accept without question the absurd equation of a fault that the system may allow for (greed) with the system itself (free market). And add to this the further absurdity that this fault is in fact destructive of that first definition of Capitalism. If the economy becomes nothing more than ruthless suppression of the weak by the strong, that free-market principle is no longer a free market principle except for the tiny oligarchy of those at the top. To take some examples from history: that's precisely what was happening in American society in the 1800s. The railroad magnates, mill owners, etc. all treating their workers with complete lack of regard for their human dignity and destroying any form of capitalism for these workers (they were not, recall, in control of the products of their work). Then in the 1920s: rampant stock market speculation (greed), with the economy by now so far removed from concrete products of labor, sent the entire system crashing down and paved the way for the beginnings of the proto-socialist welfare state.

And now look at what we have. Greed infecting society on all levels, not the prerogative any more of a few clever businessmen, but everyone's right. And what are we getting now? Strengthened capitalism? Are you seeing increasing control of the money you earn (or if you happen to be a farmer, the goods you produce)? Isn't it more the fact that the attitude of greed supposedly inherent in and peculiar to socialism has in point of fact led directly to an all-encompassing state-regulated economy in which more and more of the individual's earnings are put at the disposal of a Big Brother government to ensure that the avarice which has infected modern society ever since we decided that money is the only thing to live for is at least partially sated...so that we have a populace increasingly dependent on the government for its bread and circuses and no means to the financial independence that could allow us to follow our principles and help our neighbor instead of fund the video-game addiction of some down and out punk who never wanted to work anyway?

Fictional Prose Narrative

That's the subject of Lit Trad IV here at UD. For the final, we're being asked to consider (among other things) the question of what FPN is and why it matters. Here's a small and poorly edited portion of my initial thoughts on the matter.

So, Fictional Prose Narrative is a manner of imaginatively engaging reality that examines particular actions of characters as they respond to certain situations and environments. Imaginative engagement with reality in this context indicates that quality proper to the single, unified action of the narrative, that is, of the plot, in fiction is that of being not real (in the sense of being non-actual, non-historical), but rather of being realistic, or probable. Whatever the details of this form of literature—however its episodes are arranged to form a coherent plot, whoever the agents of this action may be, whatever the thought behind the action, and whether a first or third person narration technique presents it—in its essence, fictional prose narrative aims at the pleasure of understanding human action, not in specific historical circumstances, but in terms of suppositions and possibilities that are nonetheless grounded in the ultimate realities of human existence.

To claim for this genre the quality of being “not real but realistic” may seem at first an oxymoron. How can something participate in certain attributes of realism without being actually real itself? It is useful here to draw a distinction between different understandings of “reality,” and this returns us to the distinction between history and fiction implied above. Fiction is not “real” in its particulars. That is, it does not recount a factual account of what actually happened to real people in real time during one era or another of this familiar world. Rather, its realism is found in its accordance with general laws or patterns of the ways that individual humans tend to interact with one another or with their world. To put it in terms of authorial method, one can see every work of fiction as the product of an author's sorting-through of his or her own experience and observation of real human action, and the application of these observations to imaginary circumstances and characters. In more philosophical language, then, what occurs in the creation of fiction to give it its peculiar character of real unreality is the abstraction of universal principals from particulars and reapplication of these universals to new, imaginary, and humanly-created particulars.

That being the case, what is the use of such a manner of imaginatively engaging reality? Certainly, it has very little “utility” in terms of profit and production. Its importance lies, rather, in the Aristotelian notion of catharsis, a concept that can be at least partly explained in terms of the purpose of fiction. The purging of strong emotions described by the term is achieved through the vicarious experience of sorrow, laughter, or joy accessible in literature. The result of an encounter with archetypally familiar situations and characters, engaged in human action that is akin to the human action of one's own experience, can often be an invitation to break out of the paralyzing self-awareness that too often accompanies isolated experience. To vicariously undergo the emotions associated with joy and suffering through intellectual engagement with the actions of characters who are not identical with the reader, but who the reader can identify with is to realize the non-exclusivity of such experience. It is to lose something of the painful preoccupation with the self that results in large part from a sense of the uniqueness of this experience. Most importantly, to read good fiction is to learn what this experience may mean, in the view of not just any currently fashionable author, but of the “wise of all the ages,” whose interpretation of the meaning of human life as revealed in the imaginative worlds of their applications of general principals to individual situations the reader can absorb and make his own, agreeing with them, modifying them, or rejecting them, but always learning something about how to make sense of his own experience in their light.

Romantic Restructuring of the Concept of Faith

So, as most of us know very well, the world was "Turned upside down" over the course of the late 1700s up to the end of the 20th century by more revolutions than the Americans' mild revolt against British consolidation of powers. (If you get the reference to Yorktown, just go with it, if not, see here.) Not least among the cataclysms of the age (at least from the perspective of its contemporaries) was the so-called "crisis of faith" that baffled (particularly protestant) Christendom in the wake of the Scientific revolution.

Looking back on all that now, a sophisticated Catholic of the 20th century--post "Fides et Ratio" and post- the countless other affirmations of the essential compatability of science and faith--may be rather amused by what will strike him or her as a laughable religious naiveté. I mean, really, must one's beliefs actually be shaken to the core by the simple discovery that evolution may have occured, when science so patently would never be able to provide an account of how that evolution began (because we can only work with what we have evidence of in science: please don't bother us with speculations about the beginning of matter because that means reaching back to a prematerial time--if such a thing is even conceivable on scientific terms--for example). I mean, unless your entire faith is based on a fundamentalist literal understanding of the Bible; as "Dei Verbum" reminds Catholics, of course, "fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide". And here's where we see that happening at its finest. People saying: oh, well, the Bible doesn't describe evolution, so if evolution is true, the Bible must be false. Forgetting, of course, that the Bible may be taken as using a mythical genre in certain parts, a historical genre in others, etc, without a whit of its essential truth being taken from it.

I don't want to condemn the age, certainly. Many people did keep their heads, and it's interesting enough that the few scientists of the time who successfully integrated faith and their work were actually Catholic. Catholics having on the whole something of a horror of fundamentalism. Yes, even back then. I'm thinking in particular of Antoine Lavoisier, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie. (Gotta love your French Catholics, even though American Catholics who have some sort of national guilt at not being quite Puritan enough tend to detest them Just for good measure. Can't like those Papists...)

Anyway, all of that is merely a long-winded explanation of the situation the Romantic authors of the early 1800s found themselves in. Instead of trying to genuinely reintegrate religious faith with the new, post-Enlightenment world, the panicked and threw out the faith aspect along with most of the rest of their generation (again, I'm judging these people in very gross generalities). Northrop Frye, in "A Study of English Romanticism", explains the conundrum of these artists very astutely in terms of the scientific discrediting of the age-old mythical stucture of the cosmos. That is, the symbolic notions of the geo-centric world, the heavenly spheres, the notion of Divine Right in law, etc, were knocked to the ground by Copernicus and his descendents. Notice that I said symbolic. Part of the problem here is people falling into suicidal literalism again. The myth isn't part of the Word of God, but it had explained it for so long that people began to forget that a myth is a metaphor. Never a scientific fact. A way, rather, of making sense of the more universal structures that aren't within science's realm at all.

Yet with that model "discredited," the Romantics weren't willing to let go of the belief that something must be more important than 1+1=2 or the law of gravitation. They reclaim the notion of faith, but now limit it strictly to being "poetic" faith, in which the subject-object distinction created between man and nature by both the Christian affirmation of man's divine telos and the rationalist "clockwork universe" model is collaped back into a neo-pagan reidentification of the workings of man's mind with nature itself. Nature mirrors man's mental workings because she is not merely a mediator, a symbol of divine truth (as the Christian worldview would have it), but is in fact the source of the sublime that works on his intellect. Access to the transcendent is thus achieved directly through communion with nature, and the "original sin" myth of Christianity (don't worry that I'm a heretic: I mean "myth" in the sense of universal explanatory structure that may very well be true) is replaced with the "loss of original identity" myth. (I'm drawing on Frye for this bit.) That is to say, man's fallen state is not characterized by propensity to sin, but by a self-consciousness that destroys man's innocent state of communion with the source of sublimity by bringing him to an awareness of the subject-object relation with nature.

Essentially, as Frye observes, the Romantics take the Christian myth, and redefine it so as to have a "faith" that is compatible with the new order, but which still combats pure rationalism. But I am at a loss as to see how this should help them much at all. What are they doing on the most basic level? Well, they take divine transcendence out of the picture and replace it with Nature. Thus the sublime is now at one remove from us instead of at two (even here, you'd have to be pretty heretical in your Christianity in the first place to believe that we only have symbolic access to God such that he would be two removes from us to begin with. After all, Catholics believe that we don't just see Him and talk directly to Him; we eat Him. But that's another story, since we're in protestant, often fashionably liberal, England here). This is patently unhelpful though, since there's still that first leap of faith to get over: why should nature be the source of transcendence any more than God? They respond to the alleged lack of rationality in Christianity by denying that reason has anything at all to do with access to the transcendent. It's all in the "imagination", or the "poetic genius," as Blake likes to call it. Really, that if anything weakens the structural backing of faith. Why in the world should it be a relief to us to say: oh, well, it's not supposed to make rational sense, you're just supposed to get a feeling of sublimity from Nature? This requires as much--in fact, a lot more--blind faith than Christianity at its best does. We'd prefer to say: "Well, here are a ton of fairly compelling reasons why you should believe that this is real. Yes, we can't ultimately prove them, because they have their sources in what cannot be empirically measured, but you know, your scientific empericalism takes a bit of faith (please see David Hume) too, so what are we concerned about there?

Basically, all of this is to say that the Romantics seem to think that Pantheism is the answer to the crisis of faith. If you have problems with religious faith, I can't see that you're going to solve those effectively with pantheism, however. The biggest argument in favor of their approach, in fact, is simply that they get away from the language of religious faith that was then in such disfavor. So they rather got themselves to be taken more seriously than some raving preacher might. (Can you imagine Blake* as a cleric of the Church of England?)

Nonetheless, once you look past the veneer of "we're different from the religious people because we want faith to be individual and sourced in Nature", the Romantics really do have a very weak foundation for their "religion of poetry". At least, if they want it to be a serious contender against the forces of rationalism. So one can see without much difficulty why it collapsed so soon into the darkness of the Victorian poetic crisis of faith. That particular crisis I will be writing a paper on shortly, so more might be posted on it later.

*Of course, Blake in particular (he seems to be the only one to consider the relationship of religious faith and poetic faith very explicitly) does have some very legitimate gripes against the conventionalization of faith via the general political correctness of adopting certain tenets of Anglicanism in 19th century England. His complaints about "right being wrong" and wrong being right are fairly justified. If only he had realized that the Catholics would heartily agree with most of his complaints, he might not have misidentified this conventionalization as a problem intrinsic in Christianity.

Teufelsdröckh

Aha! The most recent Am Civ class has cast a wonderful light upon the Teufelsdröckh chapter whose references to Wagner so mystified me earlier. German Romanticism as it connects to American Transcendentalism! There, my friends, is the key. Henry Adams liked neither one, particularly as the wife who committed suicide during that 20 years of silence was an American (Concord) transcendentalist who followed in her mother's, aunt's, sister's and brother's footsteps in deciding that a clock-work universe with an indifferent God wasn't worth living in.

German Romanticism -> Transcendentalism -> Existentialism?

That's the question. I believe a defensible argument could be made for their essential similarity and, who knows, maybe Henry Adams has already made one. I will continue to read and see.

From Pope Gelasius' Letter to Emperor Anastasius

"There are two orders, O August Emperor, by which this world is principally ruled: the consecrated authority of the pontiffs, and royal power [auctoritas sacrata pontificum, et regalis potestas]. But the burden laid upon the priests in this matter is the heavier, for it is they who are to render an account at the Divine judgment even for the kings of men. Know, O most clement Son, that although you take precedence over the human race in dignity, nonetheless you bend your neck in devout submission to those who preside over things Divine, and look to them for the means of your salvation. In partaking of the heavenly sacraments, when they are properly dispensed, you acknowledge that you ought to be subject to the order of religion rather than ruling it…For if the ministers of religion, acknowledging that your rule, insofar as it pertains to the keeping of public discipline, has been given to you by Divine disposition, obey your laws, lest they seem to obstruct the proper course of worldly affairs: with what good will, I pray, ought you to obey those who have been charged with the dispensation of the holy mysteries?"

"Only through time time is conquered"

Right, so time-lapse photography is possibly one of the coolest things I've ever seen or ever will, in my opinion. And how neat is it that T.S. Eliot had a time-lapse portrait given his fixation with the theme of time, the still point, the Bradleian view of history....

Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen something that quite so niftily illustrates Eliot's conception of history as a "pattern of timeless moments" (see Little Gidding, V). Each moment is an independent reality, yet (paradoxically) dependent on all of history, in the sense that the newness of the moment in some sense consists in its reevaluation and recreation of all that has gone before. It might sound like incredibly sketchy philosophy if you're not familiar with it, but it's really quite sensible; I'm just not expressing it very well. But the basic idea is that all that has gone before forms a new reality when united with the new moment, which must necessarily alter our understanding of what has gone before.

It's a sort of relativism that asserts the relativity of human knowledge while never once doubting the power of faith and God to provide us with the truth. On their own, humans will never be able to discern the "pattern" of the world because the progression of time ensures that the pattern is new in every moment; as he expresses it in East Coker II:

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

Yet the fact that for the Creator of time "all time is eternally present" (Burnt Norton, I) means that for Him, the pattern is eternal, and eternally revolving about the "still point". This very still point is then the reason that humans are (again, paradoxically) able to have knowledge of Reality; because this "still point" is no less than the Incarnate Word, whose entry into the world gives us a sure "point of view" that does not falsify by virtue of its limitation, unlike all fallible human viewpoints. The Church which preserves the Truth of Christ's revelation is then the only path to sure knowledge for a human.

That's the basic philosophical idea behind all of Eliot's poetry, though it's most perfectly developed in the Quartets when he begins to emphasize not merely the necessity of purgation and courage to achieve faith, but more importantly the way of love. Things just become ridiculously beautiful towards the end there.

But here I am with six papers to write and I can't start getting into all of that now. I just really liked this picture when I saw it for a variety of reasons and thought I'd post it. Maybe I'll try to do a more thorough explication of the Bradleian position one of these days, or better still, of the Bergsonian position, which I understand somewhat better because I've actually read a significant amount of Bergson.


Familiar compound ghost?
(Little Gidding II)

Just a thought...

I've noticed: it's not unusual for people to become offended and to rapidly lose all respect for a critic if this critic dares to cross the fence that's been raised between religion and academics in almost every sphere outside UD (and why should a fence be there at all when both have the aim of pursuing truth?). A reading of a poem or novel that finds a significance that resonates to any degree with Christianity is automatically assumed (not even so much by academia as by amateurs who have a blatantly liberal education and an unfortunately close-minded reaction when exposed to anything smacking of tradition) to be that of an ignorant pietist, determined to find validation for his or her faith in the works of every writer of note.

So avoid speaking of imagery of redemption, redemptive suffering, fulfillment in the transcendental. Such subjects are too close to the danger zone. Anthropologists and scholars of religious phenomena would likely have no objection to a person finding such references in the smallest minutiae of cultural production (though these scholars tend to have a rather different explanation for the existence of such ideas than I might, tending in the tradition of their discipline to put the cart before the horse and assuming that the ideas exist because of the ritual, not the rituals because the ideas are true). But to the reactionary, the findings are offensive and untrue because all-too familiar.

Why indeed should we "make everything Christian"? Why be so close-minded as to claim all good art as progeny of our own religion? I answer: we don't have to contort every text to fit within the narrow lens of an archaic and domineering religion. The lens isn't at all narrow! A true work of art, I think everyone will admit without too many qualifications will address some aspect of truth. And certainly it is qualified to address and wrestle with the most fundamental desires of man. However original one may wish to be in defining these fundamental desires, the fact remains that many artists see among them the desires to be forgiven, absolved of guilt, and to find meaning in something outside oneself. Yet when one finds these in art, many are offended because recognizing this desire recognizes an implicit desire for Christianity. For the fulfillment of these desires - in a totally unexpected way - is precisely what Christianity offers.