Media & Culture

The Heart of the Matter (part 2)

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

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 understanding 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’ve 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:

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 and boorish 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 underneath their own superficial anti-traditionalism – 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, while 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 had 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 derived 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.

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Media & Culture

The Heart of the Matter (part 1)

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Expanding only slightly on the maxim that you are what you eat, I would propose that you are what you consume. People argue over whether or not violent movies or video games promote violence in society, whether pornography has similar effects, etc. I think it is a silly argument, and see no need for anyone to have to empirically prove what is readily discernible by common sense.

You are what you consume, and if this were not true in some meaningful way, there would be no propaganda, no advertising, no equal air time demands, and certainly nobody concerned about the deleterious effects of such childhood trauma as prayer in school. We rightly concern ourselves over the ideas our children are exposed to, because we intuitively understand that they will be, in some manner, formed by what they are exposed to (and I think “ideas” is the proper term to use in this context, rather than focusing on “things”).

Of course, there comes a time when we no longer censor the ideas our children are exposed to, but if we have any clue at all as parents, we will have used the period when we did practice censorship to help our children understand the existence of healthy and unhealthy ideas, and will have guided them to make decisions of their own that reflect the values we believe are most important for them to protect.

Although common practice often belies this, the point in raising a child is not to keep them away from deleterious ideas until they reach some magic threshold age, when it somehow becomes OK to adopt such ideas. The point, rather, is to keep error away from them while they are tender enough to be vulnerable to it, and to make sure they become wise enough to not be vulnerable to it, as it becomes more difficult to shield them from it over time. This, I’m afraid, is easier said than done, but it is unquestionably the goal of responsible parenting.

Certainly, it is true that not all parents have such a clue, at least not all the time. Very often, what’s obvious on the one hand is for some reason ambiguous on the other. I don’t know if this is because some parents fail to consistently apprehend dangers across all genuinely dangerous circumstances, or if they fail to adequately discern the danger out of a lack of understanding the actual nature of the danger, or if they simply lack the fortitude to confront certain dangers (perhaps especially those for which they have their own proclivities). It’s probably a combination of all these things.

I don’t point this out to be uncharitable toward my neighbors (nor do I fancy myself immune imprudence), but there is simply no mistaking that too many children in our society are exposed to too much harmful trash. Nor can we help but come to the conclusion that parents are failing their children in this respect.

Let’s take pornography as an example. No parents in their right minds would permit their primary school-aged children to be exposed to porn. Anyone that did permit it would be judged by the other 99% of parents to be grossly irresponsible, and quite possibly a pervert. Everyone agrees that exposing seven year-old children to porn is bad for seven year-old children. We believe that there are ideas conveyed in pornography about the human person, about human life, that would be damaging in some way to the children exposed to it. However, I think unanimity of opinion would not proceed much further.

The first reason opinion would soon divide is because there would be no agreement on what constitutes pornography. This is essentially the question that always gets publicly contested about pornography: what really constitutes porn? In the context of discussing what is healthy vs. unhealthy for seven year-olds, this question is pretty well exposed for the sham that it is – who really has the patience for such pharisaic hairsplitting, when the answer clearly points to whatever it is that a parent feels the need to protect his or her children from? – but an honest assessment of the prevailing situation reveals that even when it comes to first or second graders, there really is no common understanding regarding what level of commodified sexualization crosses the line into inappropriateness.

Many kids that age are routinely immersed in messages that treat human sexuality in ways that some of us would identify as soft-core porn. Modesty – especially sexual modesty – has fallen so far off our cultural radar that I fear it will return as a vice (perhaps it already has, as in our popular denigration of Muslim traditionalism).

But the question of what constitutes pornography is really a secondary question, which is the biggest reason it is such a waste of time to focus public discussion on it. More important is to understand why porn is bad; how it does its damage.

Again, everyone agrees that exposing seven year-old children to porn is bad for seven year-old children, but does anyone know why? Our answer to this question will establish the grounds for our judgment on related matters in many other circumstances – as well as answering for us the question of what constitutes porn.

If our answer is that a seven year-old is too young to learn anything about sex or sexual behavior, we’re saying absolutely nothing about pornography.

If our answer is that pornography cheapens human sexuality by making it a public spectacle, devours its intimacy, divorces it from its humanizing context of marital love, mocks its creative glory with violent lust, objectifies its actors as means to others’ impure ends, corrupts its viewers with myriad disordered passions, etc., well… we haven’t said much about seven year-olds – which may be astute (i.e. there’s little doubt in my mind that porn is at least as damaging to 17 year-olds, or 47 year-olds for that matter, than it is to seven year-olds – even if so in different ways), but it still needs to be translated into practical parenting decisions.

Again, if you are opposed to pornography because it is a form of brutal and oppressive subjugation of women by men, where does that leave you vis-a-vis the porn being produced by self-proclaimed emancipated feminists? Would you show that to your seven year-old? Or are you opposed to porn because, like prostitution, it commercializes sex? OK, would you show your seven year-old free porn? It’s not that either of these reasons are not good reasons to despise porn, they’re just not enough – they don’t get to the heart of the matter.

And what is it about introducing a young child into the equation that can seem to make possibly ambiguous moral questions suddenly so clear? Is it a parental instinct to protect the young that rises to the occasion? A fear of having to explain the uncomfortable? A little of both? Or, God forbid, is it nothing more than a yucky feeling? A false nostalgia for a romantic idea of innocence? Such groundless sentiments can be easily subverted, as is witnessed to by the clothing and entertainment successfully marketed to so many adolescents and even prepubescents (girls, in particular).

It seems to me there is little more critical for a parent to do than to work to understand exactly why and how things – and the ideas they convey – are dangerous for our children, so that decisions can be made and guidelines set 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 their own principled decisions based on a sound understanding of the nature of the threats the world presents to them.

Part of the difficulty is that principled decisions often come across as severe or scrupulous. In that light, it’s true that you have to choose your battles, but there’s little that’s more important for a parent to do, it seems to me, than teaching his children – by example – how to get to the heart of the matter.

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Church

Athanasius the Great

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Today, May 2nd, is the feast day of Saint Athanasius the Great. Athanasius was, in a sense, the Saint Paul of the Constantinian era – maligned, persecuted, exiled, all for defending the triune faith against scholarly innovators, false brethren, and over-reaching politicians. It’s unrealistic to say that he defeated Arianism, since it continued to flourish as a rampant heresy long after his death, but he certainly deserves the lion’s share of the credit for repudiating it doctrinally, and it was his theological genius that gave us Trinitarian orthodoxy.

That’s some pretty heavy credentials. I find it hard to understand why he is not better known in the West. It was said of him: “Athanasius against the world,” because of the almost solitary figure he cut withstanding the fierce storm of 4th century Arianism. While it is true that the Roman Pope supported him, Rome was by then well on its way to political irrelevance in the Roman Empire, and with the new-found acceptance of Christianity by the emperors in Constantinople, the Church was suddenly a thread in the fabric of imperial policy across the empire. The man the Copts call Pope Athanasius I of Alexandria had to stand down, not only a wildly popular Christological theory that helped people make sense of what was otherwise a scandalous view of divine activity which seemed to defy logic, but also the august champions of the world’s mightiest empire, determined as they were to see an end to theological controversy and religious unrest.

So while the Church has an obvious debt to this great saint – chronologically the first Doctor of the Church – I have a personal debt, as well. It is common practice in these parts for confirmandi to take the name of a saint when being confirmed, and I took the name of Athanasius when I was confirmed shortly before my 31st birthday. I have to admit that I didn’t know too much about him at the time, but I have developed a deep love and appreciation for him, and feel quite certain that he has taken an interest in praying for me.

While I have no illusions about being able to stand in his shoes, my life over the past 17 years has been one of steady movement toward orthodoxy as orthodoxy – including some ways that probably would have surprised me back then. I used to see myself as a bit of a rebel, and certainly a “free spirit.” But I’ve come to see the foolishness of trying to invent or manipulate reality as if it were something subject to a creative art. I’ve come to see the beauty of faithful submission to that which is beyond me, and beyond my ability to understand. And I’ve come to see how such openness to the unknown, in fact, unfolds it before my eyes. This draws me into a freedom that is very different from what is practiced in the radical individualism of the “free spirit,” which turns out to be nothing more than a practical slavery to whatever manages to push your buttons.

Most importantly, I’ve come to understand that Trinitarianism is the key to everything. Athanasius understood that absolutely everything hinges on it. The doctrine, per se, is not articulated in Scripture, but if the doctrine is not true, then the New Testament – indeed, Christianity itself – sinks into a Jewish-flavored pagan mystery religion.

I think I owe much of this growth to the great Athanasius. That’s why I took the day off today to honor him.

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Media & Culture

My 10-Year Old Wants an iPod…

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My Abby wants an iPod for her 10th birthday next week. I guess they’re all the rage within 4th grade. But I’m just not comfortable with it. I feel a collision coming, and it’s not unexpected. The collision will be between my sensibilities and the cultural norms (dare I say: fads) which shape the environment my young children are discovering as they grow up.

Having the girls attend a parochial school, a decision which was primarily based on the desire to provide them a learning environment with at least one foot solidly planted in Catholic values, could only delay the inevitable collision. My fear now is that I have done poorly in preparing for this conflict.

I don’t have a problem with iPods – I own one myself, and use it frequently. Even within the house, my CD player was replaced by an MP3 player 5 or 6 years ago. One of the very few features I required when I recently went shopping for a new car was an auxiliary jack for the audio system, so I could plug in my iPod. My problem is not with the technology, but in the potential for it to be utilized in ways that are destructive, in my lack of confidence in Abby’s readiness to properly discern appropriate from inappropriate uses of the device, and, given Abby’s vulnerability, in my complete lack of control over how it would shape Abby’s attitudes toward the world once it was in her hands.

The problem has two heads, but I think one is a shadow of the other. Some parents complain that iPods, like many other similar and not-so-similar devices, become means of withdrawal and seclusion for their children – that children use them to isolate themselves from the rest of the family, disrupting communication and hardening relationships. This is no doubt the case, but I suspect the devices themselves contribute only in fairly small ways to the developing of the attitude that seeks isolation and disintegration, whereas the content borne by the devices can and will have decisive influence on the minds and hearts of the children who encounter it.

For the most part, the content delivered by these devices carries a message of disintegration, turning their hearts away from the good. It doesn’t need to be that way, and the world has much of real worth to offer – in terms of music, or other art forms that have come to be dominated by commercial self-interest and shallow trendiness.

The challenge is in differentiating – a challenge not always easy for an adult, and pretty much impossible for a 10-year old. What is crucial, from my vantage point, is to be able to communicate to my children what good music is, what music is for, how it can be perverted for bad ends… But how does one convey this to a 10-year old? And what would it mean to send the girl out into the consumer music jungle without any adequate guide? That just strikes me as irresponsible.

This is not going to be easy to think through.

[Note: the string of follow-up posts to this can be found under the Interiorizing Culture tag]

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Religion & Society

Benedict’s Challenge to American Anti-Authoritarianism

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Pope Benedict XVI’s Yankee Stadium homily last Sunday was quite a celebration of American Catholicism, but the pontiff never strayed far from his theme of the unchanging need for faithful Christians, as a community rooted in the apostolic heritage, to be a sign of the gospel’s hope for mankind in the face of sin and death, through bearing witness to the unity of the truth found in the Word of God, revealed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

This rootedness is not something Benedict sees simply in the hierarchical form of the Church (even if he makes a point of the necessary visibility of the Church’s apostolic unity), but also in the faithful handing down of the gospel from generation to generation, and in the public presence of the fruits of our life in the Spirit, as manifested in various works of mercy and charity. He praised the “successive waves of immigrants” for the ways they have enriched American society, and called upon their descendants to faithfully follow in their footsteps, so as to “hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom in this land.”

In a society, not unlike the one he himself hails from, that suffers from distorted understandings of freedom, it was important that he speak of what freedom truly means. For too many Americans (and other Westerners), freedom is what excuses one from being subject to authority, or bound to obedience. Even in our families, the idea that parents have, by nature, an authority over their children is coming into conflict with the sensibilities of the age. The notion that children owe their parents obedience is being eroded by the new sensibility, which maintains that parents should reason with children, of any age – that parents owe their children explanations for every decision. Furthermore, it’s a cultural expectation that children will rebel – indeed, must rebel – against their parents, in order to “come into their own.” The public schools are a mess with rampant disrespect. And in the spheres of religion or morality, the idea of the legitimacy of authority has become almost laughable.

The concept of authority is in disrepute, indeed.

In all relationships that are not governed by either the power of actual or implied violence, or the hierarchy of economic dependency in employment, authority is generally viewed as an unwanted relic of a now-overturned, oppressive order from a pre-critical age. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Authority can no more be put aside than air could be put aside – it can be polluted, but it cannot be “replaced” by freedom.

Indeed, what we see happening in Western culture is not at all the disappearance of authority into a new order of egalitarian bliss, but instead the movement of the locus of authority from relationships based on community order, to relationships based on the exercise of dominative power. Authority is being reduced to having the power to exercise one’s will: do this, or I will hurt you, jail you, fine you; this is legal because we have the votes, or we have the money. In short, might makes right. This is the predictable offspring of ideology. In fact, isn’t power the whole point of ideology?

But as the Catholic Church rightfully understands authority, it is not reducible to power. Indeed, power is itself subject to authority, because authority comes from God. Authority is ultimately nothing but the truth. Authority is that which is authoritative. It is reality. It is what is, and reflects Him who said “I am who am” (Exod 3.14).

When human exercise of authority is not in conformance with the revelation of the Author, it ceases to be genuinely reflective of the good, becomes socially dysfunctional, and leads to idolatry. But this is not a valid reason to reject authority itself; it is reason to work to ensure that authority is exercised in conformance with the truth – meaning not as a function of opinion and ideology. The rejection of authority itself is the rejection of the order established by God – it is, in other words, a rejection of reality, and every bit as much a descent into idolatry as any kind of impious authority worship.

This is why freedom cannot be coherently understood as existence outside of, or beyond, authority. Such an existence is an existence in falsehood. Any attempt to be one’s own authority, to make up, or “discover,” one’s own morality – or “reality” – is an attempt to take the place of the Author. And this is not freedom, but rebellion – which leaves one enslaved to sin, as it manipulates the passions.

Freedom, on the other hand, – true freedom – can exist only when it is aligned with reality, when it is grounded in the truth that Christ promised would make us free (Jn 8.32). Freedom must be subject to truth, or it is false. The Holy Father put this quite well in his homily:

The Gospel teaches us that true freedom, the freedom of the children of God, is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love. Only by losing ourselves, the Lord tells us, do we truly find ourselves (cf. Lk 17:33). True freedom blossoms when we turn away from the burden of sin, which clouds our perceptions and weakens our resolve, and find the source of our ultimate happiness in him who is infinite love, infinite freedom, infinite life. “In his will is our peace”.

In this, Benedict’s penultimate address during his apostolic visit to America, he left no doubt that he thinks it is time for the Church in America to pick itself up from its recent troubles, seek the unity of faith found in the freedom of a lived fidelity to the living apostolic witness, and go about the task of bearing our own witness to the liberating truth of the gospel – in particular the truth of the Divinely defined dignity of the human person, a truth so often obscured in our day by ideologies – and religions – that would reduce the human person to a means to an end.

Hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom in this land, and bear witness with the authority of the apostolic faith, and so honor our fathers and mothers.

ΑΩ
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Church

Recovering from the Papal Mass

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As evidenced by my last post, I tried very hard to get myself pumped up for yesterday’s occasion of attending the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium. The Mass was very nicely done, and it was wonderful to hear a stadium full of people thunder “Amen” and the other responses, but it was still a massive crowd attending an orchestrated “event,” and both these factors, unsurprisingly, wore on me greatly.

I think it probably would have been a categorical pleasure for me had the organizers of the event chosen to focus solely on the pope’s coming to celebrate the Sunday liturgy with the assembled throng of faithful – including, of course, his application of the readings of the day in his homiletic address. As it worked out – and forgive me if this seems cynical – the papal appearance came across to me more as the headlining act in an afternoon of far-flung entertainment. Not that I think the Holy Father intended any such thing, but the three hours (or whatever it was) of nonstop entertainment preceding the Mass was simply not a fitting or effective way to prepare to celebrate the sacred mysteries, as far as I’m concerned. I realize many people thoroughly enjoyed it, but I felt like I was at a spectacle, not a Mass.

I got off on the wrong foot as soon as I got to the stadium, as I had to stand in a line (the word being used here quite loosely) outside of Gate 4, unwillingly listening to the distorted bellowing of a bullhorn-type speaker, which sounded as if it must have had a frayed cone (or whatever the technology involves), blasting out at an obnoxious volume the music that was beginning to be played inside. Through the amplified cacophony, I surmised it must have been organ music (which seemed sensible enough). Later, having in my possession a program to help me interpret what was going on, I realized that there were several marching bands that were supposed to be part of the show, but which I never saw. I could barely believe it…

The cacophony blaring incessantly out of that dilapidated speaker outside Gate 4 had not been organ music at all, it was marching bands! It sounded so bad, I couldn’t tell the difference! My senses felt absolutely assaulted, and while the instrumentation was at least discernible once inside the bowl of the stadium, it was often still too loud to hear clearly. But the bigger question seems to be this: What do marching bands and the lounge-sound shtick of court jesters like Harry Connick Jr. have to do with preparing for the arrival of the Bishop of Rome to celebrate the sacred liturgy of the 5th Sunday of Easter?

How does expression move from entertainment to liturgy, from performance to prayer? This strikes me as the central problem of yesterday’s experience. The worst of it is that there didn’t even seem to be an implied discontinuity: the spectacle segued into the sacrosanct as smoothly as any other made-for-TV production. The “opening acts” climaxed just before the pontiff’s arrival in one of those ridiculous, choreographed “presentations,” complete with men in white leotards running around the stadium carrying huge paper ducks on sticks (Joyce insists they were supposed to be doves – they looked like ducks to me). It was indistinguishable from the schmaltz that a “big event” organizer would use for something like the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games.

What does it mean to bring the Holy Father into that kind of context? What are we saying by that? And context always speaks volumes about meaning – the Incarnation and sacramental economy stand firmly in witness to that premise.

The music got a lot better once he arrived, and Benedict carries the insignia of his office with such humble dignity that it almost made it possible to forget the tribulations which waiting for him had entailed, but by the time he opened the Mass, I was worn out, frazzled, and thoroughly uncollected. I needed some quiet time, and I sure wasn’t going to get it in Yankee Stadium.

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Ruminations

Hitting the Road to Worship with Pope Hope

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In less than 36 hours, Joyce and I will be in New York, for the papal Mass at Yankee Stadium. I’m very much looking forward to the experience, even if it means getting on a bus at 6:00am, and spending four hours traveling each way, just to sit high in the upper deck of the stadium.

As much as anything else, I’m looking forward to the community. I expect celebrating the Mass with 50,000 Christians, or whatever it works out to be, will be exhilarating. I get energized on Holy Days when several hundred people crowd the church where I typically celebrate daily Mass with 30 or 40 folks (maybe twice that during Lent). The presence of the Pope should raise the amperage for everyone as well, giving such visible and concrete form to the unity of the Church through his person there among us. If there is ever to be a time I feel what I already know to be true: how, in the liturgy, we each pray together with the entire believing Church, this should be the moment. I hope I am able to hold on even more deeply to that realization as I move through my life in the days to come.

Even the bus trip should be edifying. It will be a charter bus full of about 50 worshipers from surrounding towns, all traveling together with a single purpose. Of course, it’s always possible that I may end up surrounded by people who just won’t shut up – either on the bus, or even in the stadium. If that turns out to be the case, it will just be that much more of a challenge for me to take away from all this a wonderfully illuminating and ennobling experience.

Of course, I am looking forward to hearing the Holy Father address us as well, though in all honesty I do not expect to be able to understand him very well – between his accent, my general struggles hearing speech, and the geography of the encounter. I will understand him better when I can read the published homily, which I will certainly do. Still, I will use the opportunity of physical proximity to personalize my listening, to really treat his words as addressed to me: to be personally encouraged by his encouragement, and to be personally challenged by his challenge to us. Of course, when he addresses the Church – or the world – he always addresses me as a member, but I hope I can be forgiven the conceit of wanting to use the opportunity to interpret this address as being somehow more directly for me, in order to intensify the personal depth of my encounter with it, and motivate me all the more to take ownership of the message. Being there, after all, should make some sort of difference.

I don’t quite know what to expect to hear from him at this point. I’ve been too tired this week to follow much of the visit on TV (not to mention doing more strenuous things like feeding the blog), but from what I’ve seen in the papers and such, he appears to have covered everything on the agenda already. The newspaper coverage has been, for the most part, pitiful – fixated on the media darling abuse crisis (unsurprisingly, given that I’ve mostly been looking at the local scandal rags: The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald). But I saw one thing in a blog entry by Boston Globe staffer Michael Paulson on the day of the White House lawn welcoming ceremony that made me smile. As he was describing the crowd of the faithful gathered in hopes of seeing the Holy Father, he wrote: “I did see some cute little girls with handmade signs reading ‘We love you Pope Hope!’ ”

Pope Hope. I love it.

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Media & Culture

Celebrity Gossip and Moral Reasoning (part 2)

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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.

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Scripture

Ransomed From Your Empty Way of Life

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There is a strand of thought in Christianity which supposes that each person, to be saved, is obliged to believe in Jesus as the Christ, wherein they will be judged righteous by God, with no reference to the lives they have led (i.e. their works). I think this is an oversimplification, failing to grasp either the defining significance of our lived lives, or the complex character of a believing faith. I also think the second reading in today’s liturgy, 1Pet 1.17-21, is awfully difficult to reconcile with such a soteriology.

3rd Sunday of Easter, Year A

Now if you invoke as Father him who judges impartially according to each one’s works, conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your sojourning, realizing that you were ransomed from your futile conduct, handed on by your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ as of a spotless unblemished lamb.

He was known before the foundation of the world but revealed in the final time for you, who through him believe in God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.
1 Pet 1.17-21 (NAB)

Peter doesn’t seem to have any question in his mind that God has called us, in Christ, to live holy lives – in the verse (1Pet 1.16) just preceding this reading, he quotes Lev 19.2 saying “Be holy because I am holy” – and he treats as common knowledge in v.17 the assumption that God indeed judges, impartially, according to one’s works.

What he goes on to say next is as boldly empowering as anything a health & wealth gospel preacher on TV will come up with:

For you know that you were redeemed from your empty way of life inherited from the fathers
1 Pet 1.18 (HCSB)

The “empty way of life” (the Holman translation here echoing the anguished words of Jeremiah: “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?“ Jer 2:5 (NAB)) is the heritage of godless paganism, the “desires of your former ignorance (v.14)” that was the natural patrimony of these new gentile Christians. When Peter called them to be “holy in every aspect of your conduct (v.15), he did so with the knowledge that their supernatural Father had ransomed them from their empty, unholy desires – by the blood of Christ.

Peter does not merely tell us that we are ransomed from the consequences of our natural patrimony of sin, but that we are ransomed from the futile conduct itself, that is sin and idolatry – ransomed for the sake of holiness, that we might become living stones in God’s spiritual house, a holy priesthood (1Pet 2.5). This is an extraordinarily powerful statement that Peter makes about the meaning of a faith in Christ, intended to open the eyes of our minds to the depth of the wonder that God desires to see come to a full flowering in our lives – right now.

Why does God ransom us from sin and idolatry to live in the holiness of Christ, if in the blink of an eye, we will be rescued from the world to possess our eternal inheritance?

Because our part in the drama is to live those holy lives, through our “works” of every kind, so that the light of Christ might be made manifest in the world. Peter tell us (v.21) that Christ was revealed to us “who through him believe in God… so that [our] faith and hope are in God.” In other words, our faith itself comes from the revelation of God in Christ, and the faith of others can only come about through the continuation of that revelation, the proclamation of which is entrusted to the believing community (the Church) through the sharing of Word and Sacrament, but also through witness – through works. In short, it’s not about me; it’s about others – it’s about you.

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Belief itself comes through Christ, as Peter says in v.21. It is a gift of his own perfected humanity. The faith that saves is the faith that reveals God – the faith of Christ. That is why James tells us that faith without works is dead (Jas 2.26). And that is also why the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says that Christ is “the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5.9).

Much like forgiveness is impossible to possess selfishly, salvation is not something one obtains for oneself, but rather something we are invited to participate in for the sake of others. It is a life we are called into, not some kind of eschatological get out of jail free card.

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Learning

Adler on Liberal Education

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I wanted to write a follow-up tonight to my last post, refuting the silly (if a bit scary) notion of celebrity gossip as a legitimate form of moral discourse, but I strained my neck last night, and have been unable to spend enough time in front of the computer. I’ll have to come back for that. Instead, I’ve been trying to get through a Mortimer J Adler book I started in late February but wasn’t able to do much with in March.

I’m not prepared to get into too much detail about it yet, as I’ve only just begun part four of the book, but it is really a fascinating read. Adler, whom I consider one of the great American minds, was always concerned with promoting liberal education, and that is the simple purpose of A Guidebook to Learning. He begins by poking some fun at what he calls alphabetiasis – the modern tendency to order our knowledge alphabetically – which makes for easy lookup for reference purposes, but provides a learner no context for understanding the relationships between ideas or bodies of knowledge, let alone any (gasp!) hierarchy of value that might exist among them.

He wrote this book more than twenty years ago – before the ubiquity of personal computing – and I wonder where he would have gone with digital media’s potential for multiple layering of content relationship paths, coupled with it’s almost inherent difficulty in imposing such order.

Anyway, he spends probably half the book surveying ways in which the cataloging of knowledge has changed from the topically-ordered and hierarchically-structured understanding of the ancients, through the scientific revolution, to the egalitarian but uninstructive contemporary models. He sees in modernity, as many people do, a great leap in information, and even knowledge, but he observes that nobody is ever heard calling our age an age of increase in understanding – let alone wisdom. He also rightly notes that there is a hierarchy of importance in these various goods of the mind, moving upwards from information to knowledge to understanding, and finally, to wisdom. Adler would have us consider that perhaps the “information age” has created a kind of mental imbalance in our cultural measure of learning that over-emphasizes the trivial at the expense of what is of real value.

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One neat idea he identifies in the book is a distinction made in medieval thought between the use of the mind in the first intention and the second intention, where the first intention refers to the knowledge and understanding of reality, and the second intention refers to knowledge and understanding of the branches of knowledge by which reality is known. In modern, techno-parlance, we could almost say that second intention knowledge is meta knowledge through which we are able to comprehend the knowledge of particulars in first intention thought. In other words, the knowledge of mathematics and mathematic principles provides the framework through which we understand the reality of time in an intelligible way. Inversely, first intention knowledge would continually flesh out second intention knowledge.

I think this model does a pretty good job of explaining the nature of creativity or ingenuity, where the human mind is capable of taking knowledge learned from experience in one particular situation, and applying it to other situations where it can be employed. This extrapolation is admittedly a long way from Adler’s attempt to explain the challenges of categorizing all the fields of human knowledge, but I think it’s interesting to consider how creativity might be dependent on the robust health of, not only generalized knowledge, but generalized knowledge about knowledge. Even if this weren’t an era of hyper-specialization in which the arts have largely been reduced to a banal pop kitsch, I think Adler would agree with me.

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