Wednesday, August 17, 2011

What troubles me about a lot of the Catholic blogosphere

What with all this excitement, I almost forgot that I meant to come back to the uneasy feeling about a lot of the Catholic blogosphere that pieces such as the Simcha Fisher piece I was commenting on earlier arouse in me. Part of it is akin to something Mollie Ziegler Hemingway saw in Oprah Winfrey: the "practice of pseudo-confessional but ultimately self-justifying defensiveness". There is an awful lot sitting around validating one another's feelings and slapping ourselves on the back for our "vindications" in an imagined vis a vis with a mainstream culture that doesn't even know we exist.

But it's actually even worse than that. I couldn't quite pin down until I was walking by the river a while ago and a nightmare I'd long suppressed came back. I shuddered right to the core of my being as I suddenly remembered the awful name "Erma Bombeck". That's what that Fisher often reads like: one of those awful Bombeck columns from the 1970s. (If you are too young to remember, trust me, you don't want to know.) What we are seeing here is Bombeckification of Catholic culture. Kierkegaard summed up this stage in cultural degradation as follows:
But the present generation, wearied by its chimerical efforts, relapses into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed.
And that is the condition so much of the Catholic blogosphere has worked itself into. It isn't pseudo-confession as self justification so much as it is pseudo-confessional as a prelude to a witty excuse to stay in bed.

2 comments:

  1. I'm trying to understand exactly what you mean in this series of posts. Here's my attempt: You think that Simcha Fisher's argument "You don't need to be perfect to get married" is at best a platitude ("OK, obviously no one is perfect, but that is hardly something we need to be taught, or to reflect on") and at worst, a sort of excuse to be complacent in this imperfection. She would probably disagree that this is what she meant to express, but this is the spirit (maybe kind of unconscious) that you see at work in her comments. Maybe you'd steal a phrase from the Last Psychiatrist and say, "You're lying to yourself... you are, maybe consciously, maybe unconsciously, self-justifying."

    As for Bombeck I'm lost since I am too young. Maybe you want to give a sentence to explain her since she seems to figure kind of importantly in the post.

    The Kierkegaard, I can kind of understand as a reiteration of what I wrote above (I mean that the Kierkegaard quote also seems to refer to semi-self-aware defensiveness and justification) but I don't understand what kind of contrast you're settin gup in the last line.

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  2. Yes that is it. And while what she says is a platitude I go to your second point in that I think it is an excuse to be complacent.

    What I was trying to get at in the last line is that it isn't quite what Mollie Ziegler Hemingway identified in Oprah. The thing about Oprah was that the confessional attitude tended to produce a sense of self-justification and therefore self righteousness. She and and a lot of her fans could go from confessional attitude to cruel condemnation of others in the blink of an eye. That appalls us but it is sort of good in that it makes Oprahfication a self-limiting virus by generating opposition.

    The sort of attitude I keep seeing in the Catholic blogosphere is more of the make a clever excuse to stay in bed variety. And, as Kierkegaard notes, the witty excuse to stay in bed is not just the attitude of one person but a cultural attitude and as a cultural attitude it is far more damaging to virtue than the Oprahfication because it is more insidious.

    Before letting this go, I should allow that there could be a legitimate but unexpressed concern hiding behind Fisher's piece. Suppose someone I knew were already married and they discovered that there were compatibility problems in their marriage? In that case, the responsible first move would be to reassure them. I'd say something like, "This is tough but not impossible". And if my friend had further read something on the web somewhere that said you should think twice about getting married if X applies in your case, I'd want to say to them, "Yeah, that is going to make things tougher for you but, you know, lots of marriages with X can and do survive."

    I don't know as I am just speculating but perhaps Fisher knows of one or more people in that sort of situation. But if that is the case, she should have written that.

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