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Few things make me feel like I was born on the wrong planet as much as the blatant denial of the meaning and authority of reality – that is to say, the reality of objective truth. This is truly a malady of modern human reason, and it seems to be rampant – maybe even epidemic. There are days I’m sure I’ve seen everything, then there are days, and I think this is one of those days, when I’m almost afraid to look out the window at the world for fear of the lunacy I might encounter.

I came across a startling statement in a Boston Globe article a couple months ago or so, which I decided at the time to let slide without comment, but the story reappeared last week, and fits too well into a pattern with some other recent stories, suggesting that we have inadequate cultural resources at our disposal, on account of our social penchant for subjectivism, with which to deal seriously with personal fraud.

The statement came from a 71 year-old Massachusetts woman named Misha Defonseca, in an article discussing her ongoing troubles with an American publisher named Jane Daniel, in which Defonseca offered what she must have thought was a serious explanation for fabricating the story behind a book she wrote at Daniel’s urging. Defonseca claimed to have been a young Jewish girl who escaped the Nazis and was raised by wolves in the Ukraine, among other adventures. The book was huge commercially in Europe, and was even made into a film in France, but the story was a complete fabrication. Defonseca isn’t even Jewish, never mind the bit about the wolves.

Defonseca’s troubles with Daniel don’t really interest me – it is a tawdry story without any redeeming characters – but her explanation for the fraud she perpetrated floored me when I read it in the Globe:

“This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” Defonseca said in a statement released by her lawyers.

What on earth is that supposed to mean? Not only did a 71 year-old woman think this statement up, but her lawyers apparently thought it could somehow garner sympathy! What if they’re right?

It’s important to understand that she did not make the story up to publish in a book for profit; she had been telling the story for years to anyone that would listen. She has spent half a lifetime feeding off the attention her “fantasy” has attracted her (not to mention the large sums of money earned over the past decade or so), and yet now that her hoax is revealed, she shamelessly tries to cling to her story by subjectivizing the grounds for judging her actions. As long as she wants the story to be true, she figures she can continue to perpetuate it at some level, denying any culpability, with no concern for the many people she deceived, no sense of genuine repentance, and no apparent understanding that the truth matters. By her own words, her life has become so intertwined in this lie that she cannot extricate herself.

In a world in which the public order has repressed religious authority as being unreasonable and oppressive of individual freedom, we see in this embarrassing episode the worst elements of religious self deception and irrational, delusional pretense coming to expression in the hope-forsaken framework of the psychologized modern mind, with its pathetic appetite for self-esteem and “affirmation,” trapped in a prison of relativistic subjectivity that is incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Reality (that is, the truth) plays such an inconsequential part in her chosen shade of existence that she will likely go to the grave without ever comprehending the evil she has contributed to the world through her shameless dishonesty. But perhaps even sadder is that she has completely lost her own self in the process.

This is, after all, not her story at all, even as she so desperately wants to believe it is. It is the story of someone who never existed, the story of no one at all. It’s the story of nothing – it’s not even a story; it’s a fraud – it’s not real. Her story, indeed, can never be known, because her existence has been emptied out meaninglessly, replaced by a fraud that has no reality, no existence. No one will ever know her, because her story can never be told; eternally lost in the fog of deceit and moral corruption, she doesn’t even know herself.

Truly, the saddest thing about the indulgent “identity” culture of modernity’s narcissistic bent is that identity can never be found in the mirage of self-seeking, only lost:

Thus says the LORD:
What fault did your fathers find in me that they withdrew from me,
Went after empty idols, and became empty themselves?
Jeremiah 2:5 (NAB)

Somewhere, there are those who, as young Jewish girls, did go through the horrors of Nazism, who must feel nothing but shame for this woman, who cannot manage to be ashamed of herself.

Subjective Objectivity is the nonsense name I give to the nonsensical, widespread phenomenon in contemporary society of viewing the world through the narrow lens of one’s own experience, and assuming that such personal experience defines the norm for reality. This view is cut straight from the cloth of what Pope Benedict XVI has famously called a dictatorship of relativism.

Typically, when pressed to defend the personalized opinions that emerge from such self-centered thinking, most believers of the doctrine will retreat into relativism, claiming that such personal experience only represents “my reality,” not reality on the whole. But the end result can only be essentially the same: It is, for all intents and purposes, the belief that I am the center of the universe (or at least “my universe,” whatever that means), and that my experience is the measure by which reality should be measured. The careful thinker will note that this reducing of reality to experience is actually nothing but the repudiation of the very notion of reality, per se.

The most typical form I see this logic take can be captured in the image of a parent rationalizing his acceptance of boorish behavior in his children by telling himself: “I did the same thing, and I turned out OK – therefore it must not be that bad.” Here we see the self declared the measure of morality. There’s no room to admit that there may actually be some objective reality of morality, against which behavior – mine or my children’s – should be measured. And even more importantly, there’s certainly no room for self-criticism. No right, no wrong; only: I’m OK with it, or I’m not OK with it – judgments which are considered in the light of the potential for cognitive dissonance between an aspiring moralism and the platitudes of an ethic of self-esteem run amuck.

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On March 30th, Ty Burr published a piece in the Boston Globe arguing that immorally behaving pop stars can be positive “anti-role models” for children. I thought the piece was so misguided that I decided to write a three-part refutation of it, of which this is the second part.

The first and third parts both deal with what I see as errors in Mr. Burr’s presentation of the nature and character of morality (part one argues that Mr. Burr is mistaking cynical judgmentalism for morality, which it decidedly is not; in part three I will attempt to show that genuine morality must be rooted in virtue – something utterly lacking from the landscape of Mr. Burr’s presentation). This second part presents what I believe is the ethic at the root of his misunderstanding of morality; the facilitating principle that led him down the path to his conclusion: Subjective Objectivism. Below is quoted what I believe to be the key paragraph in understanding the source of Mr. Burr’s moral confusion:

In part, that pit you feel in your stomach is generational business as usual. Mothers and fathers wonder where have all the good examples gone, forgetting that our own parents tore their hair out over the music and movies we loved. I recently gave my 11-year-old daughter grief over the bawdy lyrics to Flo Rida’s “Low” just as Led Zeppelin came on the oldies station promising to “give ya every inch of my love.” Game, set, match.

I barely know where to begin unpacking the naivety in this short paragraph. Game, set, match? The implication there is that, since the father is as guilty as the daughter, which leaves the father without the leverage of a moral high ground, the situation of the daughter must not be so bad after all – because God forbid the father admit the obvious. I guess conspiracy is better than hypocrisy.

Mr. Burr’s moral (and aesthetic) sensibility, it would seem, was forged in the pop culture of recent decades, and he has apparently not moved beyond that woeful inception. So his conscience is, predictably, as dull as that of the culture that shaped it. Vulgar trash is just normal fare, and so when his nascent moral sensibility is startled by a new kind of vulgarity, it can be easily assuaged by associating it with the good ‘old familiar vulgarity that enjoys the privileged status of “normal.”

What is conspicuous by its absence is any sense that Mr. Burr’s parents, in tearing out their hair, may have been right. That possibility just doesn’t seem to be on the table. Generational business a usual, he calls it. But that’s a sham. First of all, this particular generational dynamic has only been around for as long as pop culture has been around, and that’s only a handful of generations. Human civilization goes back a bit further than that.

Secondly, what we are actually seeing as this generational dynamic plays itself out in contemporary history is not simply a repeating pattern, as “generational business as usual” attempts to imply, but a cyclic shift toward ever more debased forms of popular art, combined with quickly retreating resolve to oppose it. More and more so, the parents (even grandparents) are simmering in the same stew as the children, and as is apparently the case in Mr. Burr’s household, they are increasingly unequipped to even attempt to provide a moral alternative to pop vulgarity.

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The end result of this is that we leave our culture’s children in the pernicious stew of degrading entertainment that is pornographic, violent, and dehumanizing in many, many ways. No, it has not “always” been this way, and the fact that today’s parents have been soaked in an earlier version of the same slumgullion not only doesn’t excuse the negligence, it should provide us with a knowing sympathy of just how devastating this trash can be to the growth of a young human person. But we can only understand that if we can get past this idiotic notion that our personal experience is the standard the rest of the world should live up to, and embrace the truth that we need to get over ourselves; to submit ourselves to being open to being transformed by beauty, truth, and goodness.

ΑΩ

“If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.”

The preceding quote from Catherine Aird is always good for raising a laugh, and there’s a certain ring of truth to it. Having read the Bible, I’m well aware of the kind of role horrible warnings can play in human history. But any real estate agent will tell you that location is everything. Translation: context matters – a lot.

Ty Burr wrote an Ideas piece published in the Boston Sunday Globe this past weekend that I found quite disturbing. The basic premise of the piece was that Mr. Burr thinks his two young daughters are learning important life lessons – moral lessons – from watching the travails of celebrity starlets. At the root of this mistaken belief is the evidence that his children watch, with thorough (and probably dramatic) disapproval, the predictable flame-outs of their popular heroines, and are therefore able to stitch together a kind of cause-and-effect moralism that links either certain behaviors, and/or perhaps celebrity itself, with eventual failure – moral and practical.

There are at least three fundamental flaws in this line of reasoning. The first stems from a lack of understanding of the quite central role of “flame-out” in the ongoing spectacle of merchandised gossip, commonly referred to as “news,” that I like to call “Celebrity Psychopath of the Week.”

My term is intended to be understood very broadly, as a sarcastic mockery of the marketing that propels the product (and it is nothing if not a product). It doesn’t require an existing “celebrity,” it can create them, and the almost ritualized debasement of these unfortunate souls takes place through an ordeal that can take considerably less or considerably more than a week. The point is that they are held up before the public eye to be the object of gossip, the object of projected psychological needs for both attention and punishment, and, ultimately, the object of ridicule and contempt. They are, in a nutshell, scapegoats.

Not all celebrities fall into the scapegoat trap, and as I mentioned above, you don’t need to be a celebrity to become a scapegoat (becoming one will grant the celebrity, however fleeting), but it does seem to be a fundamental characteristic of the notion of celebrity in liberal society, and existing celebrities make excellent scapegoats – especially ones that are most successful in attaining the power of “stardom.” Our culture loves to see the successful fail – and fail miserably (especially those whose success is rooted in sensuality, as opposed to, say, hard work).

The truth is, we build them up to tear them down. This thought is by no means original to me, nor can it be seriously challenged. We couldn’t tolerate the failure of all our celebrities – our social fabric would collapse – but let’s be very clear: we require a steady diet of falling out, of failure, of those people, who make us feel insignificant, losing their marbles and getting their comeuppance. Celebrity Psychopath of the Week. I don’t know if OJ Simpson or Michael Jackson had the longest running tenure starring in this ongoing ordeal du jour, but there is always somebody starring. Always.

Why is this not a good moral classroom for Ty Burr’s daughters (or for mine)? If it’s behavior that adult society engages in routinely, shouldn’t it be considered appropriate for girls (OK, that line is a setup for a forthcoming post!)? Even at the level of common sense, the answer to the question should be obvious. I’m dumbfounded to realize that anyone might think that engaging in celebrity gossip can build up the moral fiber of a young woman – or anyone else.

However, I’m willing, for the sake of argument, to provide a brief argument as to why celebrity gossip cannot provide a genuine moral education. In fact, I can state it extremely briefly: gossip is sinful, and sin is immoral, not a means to moral growth. Some may find that explanation overly brief (and too similar to the argument from common sense – let’s call it the argument from common decency), so I will (briefly) extrapolate.

The voyeuristic obsession with celebrity in and of itself is grounds for serious moral criticism, but to focus specifically on the judgmentalism that Mr. Burr seems to think represents a moral victory over the implicit threat that these fallen starlets might by poor example lead his children over the precipice of moral doom, I have to point out that the soap opera of Celebrity Psychopath of the Week is psychologically rewarding because it allows the (paying) audience to satisfy both envy’s lust for vengeance, and pride’s appetite for contempt. It lacks any semblance of charity, and it uses the troubles of other wretched human beings for self-satisfaction.

For as much as it might satisfy certain human desires, and provide what is undoubtedly some kind of a framework for developing moral norms, it must be said that scapegoating is morally repugnant, and spiritually devastating. Cynicism is not morality.

I will follow up on this post, to address the other two major flaws I see in Mr. Burr’s evaluation: the problem of subjective objectivity, and the problem of defining morality without reference to virtue.