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I’ve listened to a couple more volumes in the Modern Scholar series over the past month. The first was A History of Ancient Rome, by Utah State University professor Frances Titchener. This set of lectures was not among the best of those I’ve listened to in this series, though I’ve also heard worse. Covering 1,500 or so years of complex history in 14 half-hour lectures is not an easy task, and she certainly deserves some freedom to present it as she sees fit, but I found the presentation overly idiosyncratic, nonetheless. Professor Titchener displayed an annoying habit of talking down to her students by means of occasional glib and sassy interludes that could perhaps best be described as reducing events to comic book dialog. Perhaps it makes her seem hip and approachable to younger students, but I doubt most of the audience for this Recorded Books venture has a lot of interest in such intellectual shortcuts. Of course, I could be wrong.

Despite being quite interested in the subject matter, and in need of this kind of survey to help me piece together my limited knowledge of it, I was pretty tired of Professor Titchenor by the time the final lecture came along, the one covering the period from Constantine until the fall of Rome in 476. Then she dropped some doozies.

Taking her cue, as she acknowledges, from Gibbon, the last lecture is dedicated essentially to explaining the various ways that Christianity was responsible for the destruction of the Roman Empire. Some of this is familiar ground to anyone aware of Gibbon’s thinking on the subject, but this was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone suggest that, unlike in the Western Empire, where the pope and the emperor would create vulnerability to the marauding barbarians by the slowing down of the apparatus of state decision-making on account of their quarreling over the best approach to solve problems(!), strength was maintained in the East, at least in part, because decisions were made “rapidly, firmly, and finally,” since “the Patriarch of Constantinople was also the Roman Emperor.” I’m not making this up – I went back and double-checked the recording to make sure I had heard correctly. She claims that the offices of Patriarch and Emperor were filled by one and the same man.

I might have been inclined to give her a mulligan for the factual faux pas, even if it does display an ignorance of the relationship between the Church and the empire that is remarkable for an historian of the period, but I then had to suffer through a series of tired, Gibbon-esque arguments that tried to show how Christianity’s rejection of statist idolatry amounted to a mass renunciation of civic responsibility, which served as an open invitation for barbarian invasion. It’s hard to understand how anybody can take this theory seriously, given how poorly it understands historical Christianity, and how it completely fails to account for either how the equally-Christian eastern half of the empire survived as an empire – and at times thrived – for another millennium, or how the Arian Christianity of the invading barbarians did nothing to dull their own martial fortitude.

Titchener ended the lectures with an academic fantasia on how the Roman state had fathered Christianity, and how this patriarchal culture had ultimately been destroyed by its son. References to the son’s desire to usurp the affections of the mother were blessedly absent, but that’s about the only good thing I can say about the way this lecture set ended.

On the other hand we have Religions of the East: Paths to Enlightenment, from Boston University’s Stephen Prothero. I don’t think it was the most insightful presentation of the various surveyed belief systems in and of themselves, but Prothero does a nice job of showing the historic movement of Eastern religious thought, beginning in the Vedic period. The strength of his approach is in the clear demonstration of the continuity and relatedness of the various religious strands. The parallels with the Western world’s movement toward Romanticism and democracy are striking, though Prothero doesn’t try to draw it out, except for a couple brief references made to protestantizing tendencies. Of the groups discussed, only the Sikhs are presented in a way that doesn’t really seem to contextualize them historically very well. I do think he could have skipped the final lecture, on Buddhism in pop culture, as it is rather brief and thin, and doesn’t add much to the survey. This one is worth the time to listen to, though, if you’re looking for some general clarification on the various belief systems of the Orient.

I was rather taken aback by the explanations put forth by recently retired Saint Paul & Minneapolis Archbishop Harry J. Flynn, as conveyed in this article in last week’s Boston Pilot, as to why he was putting an end to the practice in his diocese of lay preachers delivering homilies during Mass.

In the interest of full disclosure from the outset, I have no intention of agitating for permission for laity to preach during the Mass, and if I ever sink to suggesting that anyone somehow possess a “right” to such a role, please shoot me before I say something even sillier. I am well aware of the catastrophic consequences of similar practices in Europe 500 years ago or so, and do not want to see the Church go down that path again (though that situation was facilitated by the poor theological training of ordained clergy, a problem that has long since been rectified).

Aside from such practical concerns, I think there are also very good liturgical reasons for preferring to have the ordained perform the role of interpreting and applying the liturgical readings within the context of the Mass – and then there is the small matter of Redemptionis Sacramentum identifying the preaching by non-ordained following the Gospel reading as a liturgical abuse . But I am astounded at what apparently came out of the mouth of Archbishop Flynn, as he was preparing for his retirement.

My astonishment begins with the archbishop’s decision to set his retirement date (May 2nd) as the date when parishes were supposed to get on board with the ban. He was archbishop of the diocese for 13 years, and the lay preaching was going on for 25 years… could he not have dealt with the anticipated fallout on his own watch? I can only assume that his immediate successor, Coadjutor Archbishop John C. Nienstedt, was completely on board with the timing…

Questions of timing aside, his reasoning, at least as presented in this article, is what I find most disturbing:

The education, formation and ordination of priests and deacons make them uniquely suited to preach during Mass, he said.

“There has to be that kind of training and theological background that even a person with a master’s degree in theology would not have,” he said. “The church does not want people just standing up there and giving opinions or even things they’ve read in books.”

Rather, he said, the homily addresses “what is the clear teaching about this mystery of our faith?”

To allow a nonordained person to preach would also interrupt the action of the Mass, he said. The Scriptures make it clear that it was the role of the presbyters to preach, he added.

“To preach the Gospel is an extremely important part of the mission of any priest — I cannot overemphasize its importance,” Archbishop Flynn said. “I would feel deprived, because this is my vocation to preach the Gospel.

Without getting into a lengthy criticism of each of these statements, let me just say that I think none of them worthy of a prince of the Church. They range from ad hominem accusations of the general theological incompetence of anyone lacking Holy Orders, to a pathetic plea to feeling personally “deprived” of an opportunity to preach when a lay person usurps that role. I concur completely that the archbishop has a vocation to preach the Gospel, one that is shared by his priests, but am I really supposed to care about His Eminence’s feelings? How does he survive concelebrated Masses? Should we institute round-robin homilies in such cases to avoid having any priestly feelings hurt?

But what of the ludicrousness of suggesting that only Holy Orders can equip a disciple of Christ to engage in “clear teaching about this mystery of our faith,”‘ or in any witness more substantial than “giving opinions”? The Church calls all the faithful to encounter and, through public witness, to help others encounter the eternal truths of the Catholic faith. The Church, from top to bottom, has been called to what the Holy Father called the New Evangelization – and if that doesn’t mean preaching the Gospel, then I don’t know what it means. I appreciate the distinction between witnessing to the world and guiding the Church, but I have to wonder if the archbishop was willing to allow these same ill-informed, book-reading, opinionated usurpers to function as catechists in his diocese?

Messages like this one from Archbishop Flynn are confusing, embarrassing, discouraging, and debilitating. The liturgical celebration of the Mass should demonstrate the integrity of the Liturgy of the Word with the Liturgy of the Eucharist, as the encounter of Christ with His gathered people. The ordained should be the ones breaking open the Word during the homily at Mass because of the priestly role they play within the community, not because of their putative superior theological training. Priests certainly should obtain, and benefit from, such training in order to competently discharge their office, but it is absurd to think either that the training qualifies them for the liturgical role, or, conversely, that their ordination effectuates in them the wisdom to articulate the mysteries of the faith in clear teaching. There are good preachers, and there are certainly not-so-good preachers – but that’s OK.

It seems to me that what’s really needed from the Church at this time, at least in the secularized West, is a new spirit of partnership between the clergy and the laity. Not like the tired, secularizing program launched over the past 40-some years that wants to make the Church over in the model of a modern consumerist democracy, but one that is strongly centered on the Eucharistic character of the Church, but is also committed to nurturing and using the gifts of the laity for the re-evangelization of the West – beginning with the rescue of marriage and the family from the trash bin of our cultural history.

This strikes me as a fundamental imperative of the Church in our cultural context, a task that cannot be accomplished with the laity on the sidelines, and a message that cannot be effectively conveyed by “giving opinions.” We need better leadership from our bishops than the insults recently offered by Archbishop Flynn. We need priests like him to rally the troops, not to leave dedicated people thinking they have no part to play in the struggle, comparable to their abilities.

It comes quickly, and it goes like lightning. Life is truly over in a heartbeat. I wrote once, long ago – was it really more than yesterday? – about my need for a “certain urgency,” about my need to realize that the pressure is on before I can motivate myself to do what needs to be done. What it has taken me far too long to figure out is that life itself – or rather, death – provides that certain urgency to me, and to all, all the time. It is over before we have a chance to act, unless we act at every opportunity, rather than waiting for the “right” opportunity. The kids are grown and gone before they can be taught many of life’s serious lessons. And I can only marvel at how life has passed me by.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written several posts related to the challenge of introducing growing children to the ubiquitous pop culture while minimizing the negative effects of the encounter on their moral and spiritual well-being. Given that ubiquitousness of pop culture, and that my primary responsibility toward my children is for their moral and spiritual formation, this is a big deal to me. I suspect this is also a big deal to many others, even to many who think that the moral and spiritual formation of their children is a secondary responsibility after that of their material well-being.

This stream of thought began when I learned that my daughter Abby wanted an iPod for her 10th birthday (which passed a couple weeks ago, with no iPod). I was reluctant to go along with the idea, because I was concerned that giving it to her would quickly become tantamount to throwing her into the pop music cesspool, without having first taught her to swim (and hold her nose), so to speak.

In the last couple posts in this stream, I’ve tried to show that everything we encounter in the world, including pop music, is imbued with embedded ideas, for better or for worse. This is simply to say that everything has an agenda.

Primarily, this agenda is driven by the ideas or messages intended by the authors (or other, behind-the-scenes, producers of the “product”). These messages can be both direct, and/or read between the lines. Although not something I addressed previously, I would add here that these messages are not only lyrical, but also take many other aesthetic forms – the type of clothing the artists wear, for example, often being an important factor in the message sent to young pop consumers about the meaning of the artists’ product, or brand; part of the statement of “what we’re about,” into which the acts (and their corporate puppeteers) try to lure the children.

The embracing of a pop brand (forgive me if I resort occasionally to calling it a shtick), a process which we usually refer to as becoming a fan, entails some degree of identification of the fan with the brand. The “what I’m about” of the artist/brand becomes part of the fan’s “what I’m about,” or even “who I am.” When the degree of identification goes radical (fanatical), we say that the fan has become obsessive, and we get concerned, as we should. But it’s important to understand that the very same process of identification, involving what’s essentially the establishment of an imaginary relationship between the fan and the artist/brand, goes on in lesser degrees the rest of the time. This is simply how pop culture works. It is part of consumer society, and works just like it – except that pop art has more moral baggage than perfume, or multivitamins, or mid-sized cars.

This identification with the brand by the fan is what I call the interiorizing of the product. That sounds like just an overblown way of referring to being influenced by the product, but I think the psychic consequences of pop interiorization goes deeper than influence, in that influencing seems to me to refer to a constructive or additive process, whereas becoming a “fan” of a pop brand strikes me as something that only diminishes the true personality of the afflicted individual. The artist/brand is used as a kind of flag to be waved by the fan/consumer, saying – at least to herself, if not to the world – “this is (part of) what I’m about.” Although always a bit pathetic, this can be a fairly harmless way of making a statement about yourself in simple circumstances, but much of pop culture is not nearly as simple as it might appear.

When young girls embrace tawdry pop stars because they admire the prettiness, or popularity, or alleged “grown-up-ness” of the stars, they end up with the rest of the package as well. They embrace the brand, they identify with the brand, and if there are undesirable elements of that brand, well, they are just part of the package, and they will be interiorized. They may eventually be rejected, but they are packaged compellingly as part of the desirable brand – and I think we can be sure that if the young consumer were inclined to reject those undesirable elements from the outset, they would never have become a fan in the first place. In saying that, I’m not suggesting that these negatives are necessarily positively embraced by the young fan. Rather, they will be largely unnoticed and unexamined, bubbling to the surface only later on.

Consuming music -and other media- through the senses is not very different from consuming items through the digestive system. Some things are good, some things are bad (e.g. poison), and some things qualify as junk. I think there is some good music that falls under the pop umbrella (at least broadly understood); I think much of it is junk, and some of it downright poison. That being said, it’s hard for me to know how to really classify junk beyond saying it’s not good, and leaving it at that. Maybe, if I were honest with myself, I’d have to admit that there is music with one foot planted in the good, and the other in junk, and that I sometimes enjoy listening to it.

Nonetheless, pop music does form an ubiquitous presence in our culture, and our kids will almost certainly end up swimming in it sooner or later. I’ve mentioned previously that I think it is important for parents to both understand why and how certain messages are unhealthy for their kids, and to be able to find a way to convey that knowledge to them. It can be hard enough for a parent to understand the significance of complicated messages or ideas well enough to be able to articulate them, but to be able to translate that into something that can be comprehended by a youngster is doubly difficult. If kids begin listening to music that carries unhealthy messages at an age when they are not yet old enough to understand criticism of those messages, they will simply interiorize those offensive attitudes, like someone learning bigotry on his mother’s knee.

It’s clear that a critical attitude toward pop culture is an essential element in anybody’s toolbox, but it’s also clear that pop culture works very hard to resist criticality, to marginalize it, to suffocate it with the banality of seductive appeasement. It also goes without saying that critical thinking is not a native characteristic of childhood. So, in the light of all I’ve considered so far, it seems to me the next question to consider is the very practical one: How do I keep my daughter from embracing unhealthy messages in her music listening?

BlogCatalog.com is organizing a campaign today, May 15th, to encourage bloggers around the world to help raise awareness of human rights issues by blogging about them. I think it’s a terrific idea, and was more than happy to sign up to join the campaign.

Human rights is a concept that speaks to the need for each of us to acknowledge the common humanity we share with the rest of the race, and to recognize the duties that we all inherently and inalienably have toward each other in the light of the particular dignity we each possess as human beings. Simply put, we are all brothers and sisters with a responsibility to have each other’s backs.

This is a fine sounding concept, but historically, societies have had an awful lot of difficulty living up to such a vision, even those societies that would embrace it conceptually. Someone always ends up getting the short end of the stick- or worse. We witness the injustice that society’s true prophets have always railed against – and it can take diverse forms, from economic exploitation, to limiting access to society’s goods, to slavery, to some even truly grotesque perversions.

In thinking about what kind of post I would write for this campaign, I thought it would be appropriate to look, not in some far-flung gulag halfway around the world, but in my own backyard; at my own society. I decided that I should write about the most grotesque form of injustice and offense against human rights being practiced right in my own hometown.

As I see it, there are basically two ways of subjectively understanding one’s own participation in the commission of human rights violations. The first would be to know it to be criminal. In this scenario, the culprit is entirely cognizant of the unjust nature of the violation he is inflicting upon his victim(s). He knows that what he is doing is wrong, but he does it anyway, because he has a disordered desire of some sort or another that trumps the weak voice of conscience. This may be, and in all likelihood is, a recurring pattern, but the point is that the violator has a bad conscience: true criminality involves a bad conscience, a guilty conscience, the knowledge of wrongdoing (even if the criminal is indifferent about it).

The other understanding is one that I struggle to come up with a good name for. Our criminal justice system calls it insanity – which may be accurate, but if it is, then I fear the world might be full of mostly insane people. It is the stance that calls injustice by the name of righteousness. It’s the approach that permits people to do terrible things to other human beings with a perfectly clear conscience, or at least with a repressed conscience. It involves a denial of the unjust nature of the offense, which is almost always – and perhaps absolutely always – facilitated by dehumanizing the victims. The violator sees the victim as some lesser kind of creature, as something sub-human. This conscience-evading self-delusion is essentially voluntary insanity.

Voluntary insanity can only thrive in a culture of complicity, because most people cannot hang onto insanity for long in the face of reality. Without a network of co-denial supporting a mutual self-delusion, most people are forced into either a (self-acknowledged) criminal choice for evil, or acceptance of the moral good – however reluctantly accepted. The conscience eventually confronts the will, and either it fails or succeeds to compel a moral response. Either way, there is basically full acknowledgement of responsibility on the part of the individual as a moral agent. People just aren’t usually that stupid, except as part of a mob.

Without meaning to downplay the brutality of criminality, it seems to me that the great violations of human rights are generally of the second order – they are carried out in a culture (or sub-culture) of insanity – if that’s the right word, and I’m not sure it is. There is a dehumanizing of the subjected class, who are then seen as means to the ends of the perpetrators. We end up with second-class citizens, with slave classes, with social groups selected for extermination, with classes of human beings whose very humanity is denied. And at the very, very bottom of human degradation, you end up with abortion. If "Human Rights" means anything at all, it has to begin with the right to be human.

There are many reasons abortion is the greatest social evil and violation of human rights in our day, and even a nominally educated hack like me could go on and on in explicating them, but I just want to make what I think is the very obvious point that abortion is such a great human rights crisis in our age precisely because it is so often not recognized as a human rights violation at all.

Now, that fact usually strikes pro-lifers as entirely bizarre. But that is because pro-lifers recognize that children – human beings – are intentionally killed when abortions are performed. If a pro-lifer were to be materially complicit in an abortion, it would be a criminal act (not, of course, according to current criminal law in the US, which happens to be insane, but according to the subjective distinctions I made above between criminality vs. insanity).

But like any great violation of human rights, the abortion machine is driven primarily by insanity, not by a rational criminality. It is utterly dependent for its perpetuation upon widespread complicity in the self-delusional denial of the simple truth that mothers really do go into abortion clinics to have their children killed (and of course that, in most cases, fathers are either materially complicit, or couldn’t care less – and in other cases are coercively responsible for the killing).

They may come to their senses later – many do, in great grief – but the vast majority of people involved in abortions – either directly or through political support – are engaged in the age-old practice of dehumanizing their victims in order to avoid confronting the reality of the evil they are committing. They are insane, if that’s the right word. Despite the rather obvious reality that each one of them was at one time a fetus, they deny with all their might that a fetus is in the same way one of them, one of us; that a human fetus is a human being.

I’m sure there’s a better word for this than insanity, and I wish I could put my finger on it. Hannah Arendt famously called it banality, but she, whatever her intentions, ended up exploring evil more at its roots – exposing how ordinary people can make horrific moral choices without batting an eyelash – whereas I’m simply trying to show how such a mechanism works in our current historical and social context. Nonetheless, Eichmann in Jerusalem just might be the best background reading available for understanding the moral underpinnings of the modern abortion debacle. I should probably mention that Arendt would likely protest my use of the word insanity in this context. I understand that; it is voluntary,I maintain, though that may not convince her of the word’s usefulness here.

I think this insanity factor is not often grasped by pro-lifers. Hence, they tend to project criminal intent (in my usage of the term) where it doesn’t really exist. They find it unfathomable that people involved in abortion don’t know perfectly well what they are doing. That is understandable, and at a certain level they are right (I do not propose that what I call voluntary insanity mitigates moral culpability), but I think they fail to perceive the power of human self-deception. I recall an adage that goes something like: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. Here’s a case in point I came across very recently.

Out at UCLA, there is a quarterly called The Advocate published by a small group of student pro-life activists that has put considerable effort into exposing the ugly face of the abortion industry. In particular, they have collected some very damaging information on Planned Parenthood locations in various parts of the country.

They are alleging racism on the part of Planned Parenthood, based on undercover operations that repeatedly demonstrated that the organization was more than willing to take donations from individuals who were expressly requesting their contributions be used to kill black babies, because, they complained, there are too many black babies in the world. There are transcripts and actual audio tapes of phone calls available as links from the site – but they are very creepy; not for the faint of heart.

As much as I admire the spunk of these young defenders of the defenseless, I think they are overstating the case against Planned Parenthood – damning audio tapes notwithstanding. What these kids are not grasping is the insanity factor. Those folks at PP are not accepting donations because they are specifically targeted to kill black children (that would be criminal), they just couldn’t care less, because they don’t acknowledge what is going on in their clinics (that is insanity). These workers might be made temporarily uncomfortable by the wacky telephone caller, but they really just want to collect more money to do what they consider their good work, and it doesn’t dawn on them to honestly consider the morality of how they are going about accomplishing the "social improvements" that give their professional lives meaning. Freedom is a powerful elixir, even when it’s sham facade for violence – just ask the French, who remain the standard bearers of the need to discriminate between liberty and lunacy. The bottom line is that these workers have too much at stake in keeping the moral blinders on, and focusing on the dreadful "benefits." Voluntary insanity.

This, then, is the true face of human rights violators. For every sadistic monster who fills our imaginations with righteous indignation, there is a platoon of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmanns: unremarkable folk living respectable work-a-day lives while wallowing in moral infantilism, oblivious of the evil they perpetrate in the name of social convention- a study in banality and cluelessness. Evil is most insidious when it dons the mantle of righteousness.

The Easter season is over, and the Church moves back into Ordinary time. I feel a little reluctant to let it go, though I’m not sure why. But as I said the final “alleluias” of Night Prayer last night, I felt a little twinge of sadness.

I suppose I am, as usual, resisting the passage of time because of a sense of disconnect between what I’ve accomplished, and what I’d hoped to have accomplished. I need to learn to be more satisfied with my effort, and perhaps to not set expectations so high, either – although it would also help if I could waste less time, and become more productive!

At any rate, it is Ordinary Time now. One of the great things about the seasons of the liturgical cycle is that there are so many times each year when something is starting over. During the first half of the year, you don’t go more than a couple months before it’s time for a new season: Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, then back to Ordinary Time. And then there are the built-in periods of even more intense focus: the octaves of Christmas and Easter, the Easter Triduum, the “novena” between Ascension and Pentecost.

But now we start a long, stable period that will carry on through the entire second half of the year without interlude – right up until Advent. It’s time to settle in to a steady working routine, time to get comfortable in the familiar four-week cycle of readings from Morning and Evening Prayer. The Sunday Gospel readings will return again to Matthew’s narrative, relaying Jesus’ Galilean mission: the healings, miracles, and parables. It’s a time to focus a bit less on the great events of salvation, and more on the person of Jesus Christ, the man who is God. It’s time to focus on what it means to the human race for him to have walked those dusty roads long ago – a simple man, without so much as a place to lay his head. It’s a great time to be alive.

My last post ended up focusing on the need to understand the nature of the problem of pornography, but what I’m really trying to get at is seeing how people are shaped by the ideas they encounter and absorb, how this is particularly true of children, and how this generality might be applied to the concrete situations parents find themselves in when confronted with the need to make decisions regarding their children’s involvement in pop culture, with its attendant mores.

I take it for granted that everything we encounter in life, including everything we encounter in pop culture – from the pornography I mentioned, to music, movies, news product, sporting spectacles, etc. – is pregnant with ideas. That’s really not saying much more than that everything has meaning (a radical enough idea these days). I suppose I am pointing to that which is beyond the competence of empiricism to grasp; to what the poet would see in something, even if the scientist were oblivious to it.

Since I’m concerning myself primarily with pop culture, I will use an illustration drawn from it: Almost 35 years ago, the Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco) rock band Jefferson Starship published a song called Ride the Tiger which included the following verse, near the end:

It’s like a tear in the hand of a Western man,
he’ll tell you about salt covered in water.
But a tear, to an Oriental man,
he’ll tell you about sadness and sorrow,
or the love of a man and a woman.

Have a listen:

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Had this verse come from an Oriental man, I suppose it should have been taken as an insult. But coming from Westerners, it’s just another example of the self-loathing that afflicts liberal society. Either way, it’s a rather silly sentiment: overblown, and lacking any indication of meaningful interaction with either of these cultures. All the same, as clumsy as it is, it makes an important point – and one that is readily discernible.

No, it has nothing intelligent to say about Western and Oriental cultures, but it does say something important about different ways of approaching understanding, reiterating what I said above regarding the limits of empiricism. The dichotomy it posits could actually be pretty reasonably (if much less lyrically) restated as one between modern secularism and traditional society, but if the band had peered within traditional Western culture looking for the deeper meaning beyond the sterile, clinical superficiality of chemical analysis, they would have encountered historical Christianity, which would have forcefully challenged many of the assumptions of their own superficial antitraditionalism – it’s so much less demanding to get romantic over a past that has no claim on you…

So, even in this brief illustration, we can see how several layers of meaning emerge from the encounter with this song – and we’re only scratching the surface of it: examining a short lyrical excerpt, while completely ignoring the aesthetic elements of harmony, melody, and rhythm. Still, its meaning can be usefully analyzed.

Primarily, there is the meaning intended by the lyricist – which has both explicit and implicit levels. Implicitly, we are being told that things (e.g. tears) carry within themselves meaning that point far beyond themselves, through representation of and association with other things (the details of which we don’t need to delve into). This is profoundly true, and is the important phenomenon called transcendence, which is very much the point I’m trying to make in this post – though I am more interested in showing how it is true of things like songs than of things like tears.

Explicitly, we are being told that Western man is shallow, and incapable of seeing the transcendent meanings embedded in things, but that Oriental man can see them. This claim is not true, although it must be admitted that Western man has been intellectually pursuing this very reductionism, which denies (and hence is oblivious to) the transcendent. Nonetheless, that project, while very popular in the academy, has not (yet) overwhelmed the West. Meanwhile, the Oriental societies that have modernized are at least as bad off as the West in this regard.

Beyond the meaning intended by the lyricist, we can also understand quite a bit about the lyricist himself: by understanding what was intended to be said, what was implied, what was assumed, and how much resemblance any of this bears to reality – as well as how it fits into its historical context. This understanding is contingent upon our ability – and willingness – to think critically about what is being conveyed.

This leads us to the subjective element in the encounter. Regardless of how well we may or may not grasp the author’s intent, we will bring to it our own set of understandings of associations and representations. We will encounter it within the context of our own experiences, and the piece may end up taking on it’s own quite personal transcendent meaning in our lives, depending on how it shapes new associations for us.

My immediate reaction to this particular verse, at this point in my life, is to roll my eyes at the romanticism of it, because I have become sensitive, in my own search for truth, to a much deeper and more complex core to Western culture than is suggested in this caricature. I’m also aware that the tendency toward empirical reductionism, to the extent that it is an influence in Western culture, is driven, in part, by a progressivist worldview that both delights in frivolous novelty, and disparages traditional values (and traditionalism per se). But this progressivism, which produces such culpably sterile empiricism, is also very much at the heart of the rock music culture from which this band seeks to express its criticism of it.

This is why they think they find wisdom in their romanticized view of Oriental culture, and are so enamored of it. It possesses progressivism’s requisite novelty, and allows them to embrace a premodern or traditional perspective without acknowledging it as part of a heritage having an ancestral claim on them – it allows them to embrace it from the position of a consumer, who buys it because he likes it. If, instead, they had plumbed the depth of their own cultural heritage, and seen that their fathers were ready to bequeath them a similar, and even superior, wisdom, their self-righteous rebellious adolescent routine would have come apart at the seams rather quickly.

However, I first encountered this song as probably a 14 year-old, in 1974, not as a grown man experienced (at least peripherally) in the contemporary battles of the culture wars. I was, first of all, quite captivated by the rollicking buoyancy of the music, the infectious backbeat, the crisp work of a guitarist I’d never heard before… I was more than willing to put up with almost any level of lyrical banality. I was certainly not prepared to think critically about the kinds of ideas being transmitted – it was just a cool song.

I can’t really say how much influence the verse in question had on the formation of my early understanding of the nature and character of Western culture. It probably somewhat reinforced pre-existing prejudices against traditional wisdom, but I can’t say for sure. I do know that I was never swayed to the opinion that Oriental culture held some kind of existentially superior position to the West, through a sort of quasi-mystical access to a deeper meaning or state of being, access that had been bureaucratized out of the grasp of entrenched Westerners – and that was not an unpopular opinion, most notably in the form of the Transcendental Meditation fobbed off on young hippie “mystics” by the soon-to-be-billionaire Hindu Yogi who used the Beatles as his shill.

But I was only skeptical, not wise. I might have fallen for it, had I sensed something in it for me. One thing I can say for sure: the image of the tear that can be intellectually reduced to chemistry, or allowed to witness poetically to certain truths about the unfolding of human history, has stuck with me for all these years. It is a resource I can call upon, warts and all, to help explain the transcendent value of ordinary things. It turns out it was more than just a cool song: it was, for better or worse, a tortured worldview seeking souls to abide in. We simply can’t consume without, in some way, becoming.

We always begin our encounter with a piece of music – and its encounter with us – with the objective presentation of the artist. Even when music is intentionally presented so as to have no explicit meaning, it retains implicit meaning from its creator, and before any digestion can begin to take place on our part, it is that objective meaning that we consume (assuming we can tolerate it to begin with!).

Needless to say, it is not all of equal worth, and a lack of discrimination on our part will surely lead to consuming some foul fare. It’s too simplistic to say that all that matters is what we do with it once we’ve consumed it; what “it” is, is determinative for what we can do with it. We are what we eat.

It seems to me there is little more critical for a parent than to work to understand exactly why and how things – and the ideas they convey – are dangerous for our children, so that we can make decisions and set guidelines that are based on sound principles, so they can be applied consistently, and eventually understood rationally by the children, which will allow them to likewise make principled decisions based on a sound understanding of the nature of the threats the world presents to them.