A call to rebellion

"... because personalism drew upon Catholic social theory, its notion of community drew upon a heritage of corporatist thinking that linked the person to the intermediate collectivities of family, church, and nation. In this way, the individual would be protected from the depredations of the modern state. Significantly, in contrast to Fascism, which also deployed a communitarian, corporatist language, it refused to countenance the swallowing of these "natural" communities by the political state." (The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970, by Michael Gauvreau p 24)

In theory anyway. In practice, the social activists and politicians who grew out of the Quiet Revolution were only too willing to allow the government to swallow up organic communities. The wonderful thing about the Gauvreau book is that he gives us some inkling of why that happened. For the clerical activists pushing Action Catholique groups in Quebec in the first half of the twentieth century encouraged young Catholics to think of their parents' religious beliefs as empty.

Any evaluation of the cultural impact of Catholic Action must therefore take as its starting point the meaning of words such as "solitude," "community," "anxiousness," and "authentic," which recurred over and over again in Quebec between 1931 and the mid-1950s. What was significant that these words represented religious values that were always positively attributed to young people, and always in reference to the negative qualities of conformity, complacency, individualism, hypocrisy, a sterile obsession with moralizing, and bad faith, all of which marked the religious experience of the previous generation. (Gauvreau, p 15)

And I can testify that it didn't stop in the 1950s. These are the values my parents taught me when I was growing up in Quebec in the 1970s. It was also what I was taught in Religion (they stopped calling it "Catechism") classes at the Catholic High School I attended in Quebec in those years. And you can still hear this stuff from the pulpit of many Catholic churches in Quebec today (preached to mostly empty pews).

And the effect this was to have was disastrous for the church. To teach young people that institutions need to be preserved while, at the same time, teaching them that the people currently running these institutions are a bunch of lazy, moralistic hypocrites who have subverted those institutions was a recipe for that disaster.

And note that this was all going on before Vatican 2! There was, within the ranks of priests, monks, friars and nuns serving the church, an active rebellion ready to pick up the ball and run with it long before Vatican 2.

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

That's Raymond Chandler describing a world that, at first glance, seems utterly unlike the Catholic Church, although he is talking about the same period in history, the 1930s to 1950s. And it would be unfair to simply brush off this generation of reformers as deluded and selfish. They grew up with a church that had lost its way and needed to be reformed. On the other hand, it is painfully obvious, with the benefit of hindsight, that their reforms were a disaster. (Well, it should be, Pope Francis seems to think that the solution is to drive off the cliff again only faster this time.)

But what is the solution? There has been a lot of talk of a "hermeneutics of continuity" that is to be preferred over a "hermeneutics of disruption". But that needs content. What should be the basis of the continuity. Talk to some Catholic traditionalists and you will leave with the impression that "continuity" means to not reform at all.

Whatever a worthwhile reform is, it cannot be an abstract exercise and it cannot be a political exercise. It needs to draw on something deeper than that. That is why I favour a Catholic Romanticism. Not Romantic Catholicism because I don't want Romanticism to modify Catholic. I think Romanticism is the right way to approach the past but not any Romanticism. Romanticism needs to be modified and Catholic aims and goals is what it needs. I'm sure all that will seem silly to some. I don't blame them but I think the notion can be given real content.

Constancy

Just a few pages past the quote discussed in my last post, we get a contrast between Elinor and her mother. It's an interesting contrast because both are in agreement about what should be done. The difference is not the outcome of their decision-making but the way the decision lines up, or not, with their feelings.

Mrs. Dashwood has been greatly upset by Fanny who has suggested to her that Elinor may be attempting to win her brother Edward's affection. And there can be little doubt that Elinor could easily wish for such a thing and it is only through considerable restraint that she is keeping what she might wish from becoming a hope. Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters believe that love should be allowed to run its course and, should a man in line to inherit a fortune (or one already in possession of one) fall in love with a girl of only small fortune so be it. Fanny, on the other hand, can only see a girl after a fortune and she seeks to warn Mrs. Dashwood that such a thing will not be allowed.

And here we might, as difficult as this may seem, pause to show a little charity towards Fanny. Her job in life is not to distribute wealth or to promote social equality but to look out for the interests of her family. She would have known, as would have all of Jane Austen's readers, that even great fortunes could be lost. In the modern west, we can be egalitarian because we are relatively well insulated from destitution. We imagine that everyone could give something up and we'd all still be comfortably well off. Fanny is cold and calculating to be sure but being cold and calculating is a matter of degree; we can be certain that Mrs. Dashwood, Marianne and even my beloved Elinor, do not imagine a world in which any of their class might marry a male servant out of love. By the standards of the day, Fanny is no better than she ought to be but she is at least as good as she ought to be.

What all that adds up to is that, much as we might wish her more open-hearted, Fanny's attitude is not so unreasonable as to be simply dismissed. Even today, it is entirely reasonable for a parent (or other relative acting on their behalf) to respond with some suspicion towards someone who seeks their son's or daughter's love. And so, even though we are on her side, we might wonder at the strength of Mrs. Dashwood's reaction to what Fanny has said.

In any case, it is while so stirred up that she receives the offer of a cottage some distance away from Norland and that makes a difference in how she decides.
She needed no time for deliberation or inquiry. Her resolution was formed as she read. The situation of Barton, in a county so far distant from Sussex as Devonshire, which, but a few hours before, would have been a sufficient objection to outweigh every possible advantage belonging to the place, was now its first recommendation. To quit the neighbourhood of Norland was no longer an evil; it was an object of desire; it was a blessing, in comparison of the misery of continuing her daughter-in-law's guest; and to remove for ever from that beloved place would be less painful than to inhabit or visit it while such a woman was its mistress. She instantly wrote Sir John Middleton her acknowledgment of his kindness, and her acceptance of his proposal; and then hastened to shew both letters to her daughters, that she might be secure of their approbation before her answer were sent.
Her decision, as it happens, is a good one. We can see, however, that, in another mood, she might just as easily have made a bad one. Contingency has played a huge role in what she does. And, had her mood inclined her to make a bad decision, she would have made it irrevocably.

Elinor supports the decision but the role her feelings play is very different.

Elinor had always thought it would be more prudent for them to settle at some distance from Norland, than immediately amongst their present acquaintance. On that head, therefore, it was not for her to oppose her mother's intention of removing into Devonshire. The house, too, as described by Sir John, was on so simple a scale, and the rent so uncommonly moderate, as to leave her no right of objection on either point; and, therefore, though it was not a plan which brought any charm to her fancy, though it was a removal from the vicinity of Norland beyond her wishes, she made no attempt to dissuade her mother from sending a letter of acquiescence.

There are a lot of words here but they do not carry equal weight. Notice the emphasis on "that". It was Jane Austen's choice to do so. The point we are to take is that there are other heads on which she might well oppose her mother's decision. And we should be able to figure out what those are for the second most important word in that paragraph is "wishes". Elinor has always thought it prudent for them to settle "at some distance" from Norland but this is rather more distance than her "wishes" would have it.

She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.

Austen is too careful a writer for us to not take her word choice very seriously. It matters a whole lot that Elinor's feelings towards Edward at this point are wishes and not hopes or expectations.  Had she allowed her feelings to proceed so far, she might have stood against her mother's choice.

Another to think about it would be to ask ourselves whose decision is most in line with their feelings. At first glance, we might say Mrs. Dashwood for her decision is in complete harmony with her feelings at the time she made the decision. To put it that way, however, is to see the problem for, at other times, it would not be in line with her feelings. And how strong can your feelings really be if they are there one minute and gone the next? Elinor, on the other hand, recognizes that she has a divided self. She realizes that her feelings are often at war with one another, pulling her in two directions at once. Her feelings, I would argue, are stronger for they don't wax and wane depending on shifting circumstances.

The third most important word in the paragraph describing Elinor's feelings and choices above is "prudent". Prudence is a virtue and we could not deny that Elinor has it. But prudence is a matter of degree as seen by Austen's choice to modify it with the word "more". It is not a foregone conclusion that Elinor will make the more prudent choice; in some cases, she might allow her feelings to overrule prudence. Not because she would abandon sense for sensibility alone (we might say "sola sensibility" here because Austen's theological position vis a vis traditional protestantism is very much to the point here) but because she possesses another virtue, to a degree that her mother does not, that is more important than prudence.

The virtue that Mrs. Dashwood is weak in by contrast to her daughter is called constancy. I don't have time to prove it now but for Jane Austen, constancy is the key virtue, higher even than prudence and that is saying something. A good Christian, Austen would rate faith, hope and love above constancy but she would also regard those as graces, which is to say that they are virtues we can only hope to attain with God's help. Of the virtues we can attain through our own efforts, constancy is the greatest. That Mrs. Dashwood lacks constancy is clear from the above; in a different mood she would have chosen differently. That she, Marianne and Elinor all have strong feelings is counted in their favour—to have strong feelings is a virtue, perhaps even a grace—but virtues don't stand by themselves. Without the other virtues, no one virtue is any good.

That, and I'll finish here, also applies to constancy. Here is a dictionary definition of constancy:

the quality of being unchanging or unwavering, as in purpose, love, or loyalty; firmness of mind; faithfulness.

We can see that other virtues are listed. The definition does not speak of constancy in sloth, hatred or resentment.

Intelligence and morality

Found a great quote from Tucker Carlson:

Intelligence is not a moral category. That’s what I find a lot of people in my life assume. It’s not. God doesn’t care how smart you are, actually.

I've spent a lot of years hanging around people who study morality. Some of them study it directly in philosophy, theology and psychology. Others study it indirectly through subjects such as literature, art or politics. Most of them have interesting and some even have profound things to say about the human condition and how we should respond to it. But, for all that, they're not noticeably better than anyone else.

Morality is not usually a problem-solving exercise. Sometimes it is but only in the sense that lifeguards sometimes have to deal with shark attacks. Most of the time, the central problem of morality is not figuring out what to do. Most of the time the problem is actually doing the right thing. And anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that most of us fail regularly.

Sense?

"She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect."

I've known people like that, men as well as women.

"She" in this case is Elinor Dashwood. There is no character in literature I identify with quite as much as I do with Elinor. Not that I lived up to her standards. It is more of an aspirational thing than a matter of commonality; I think I'm a lot like her but not so much as I should be.

The issue here is exactly what the title of the novel would have us suspect: sense and sensibility. Elinor is a perfect balance of both. That, I believe, is the key to understanding this novel. The key moment of Pride and Prejudice is the one where Elizabeth says, "Till this moment, I never knew myself." I had a moment like that myself this year. But that sort of moment could never happen with Elinor. Elinor already knows herself.

If we have a look at the full quote from Pride and Prejudice, we can see it all clearly.

"How despicably have I acted!'' she cried.—"I, who have prided myself on my discernment! — I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.— Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.''

Elinor would never court prepossession and ignorance and drive reason away. Her sister Marianne, on the other hand, could easily do so. And does.

Exactly how she does so is what we see in the quote at the top. From conjecture to belief, what does that mean? The explanation comes after the dash in three progressive emotions: wish becomes hoping and hoping becomes expectation. But how?

Well, I know how I'd explain it. I'd go with Robert Solomon's argument that each emotion embodies a judgment. There is the judgment that leads to the emotion. Wishing is based on a judgment about facts. We always wish for something. But there is a second judgment that follows. We become aware that feel an emotion and that ought to imply a further judgment.

It won't lead to a further judgment unless we train ourselves to make it. There are natural progressions to emotions and Elinor, for we are surely in her head here, has diagnosed one accurately. I say progressions for they don't inevitably lead the way they do here. I've known people who go from wishing to resignation. The point is that it's an habitual way of proceeding. Elinor knows because she has seen it many times before. Marianne and her mother don't know because they don't have "sense".

"Sense" cannot, and does not, mean rationality here. All three of these women are equally rational.  They are, in fact, equal in both rationality and feeling. Sense is something else. I have some notions of what that might be but I'm withholding judgment for now. That is, after all, what Elinor would do.

"Be, not do"?

That comes from a popular devotional blog for women. A good friend of mine shared a post from it on Facebook yesterday. It caught my attention because I think it's trying to make a good moral point and missing the target by just a tiny bit.

Here is the meme from the top of the post:

I'm on record as a fan of Catholic Romanticism and that image is something very close to it that is sometimes called Romantic Catholicism (it makes a positive difference if our Catholicism defines our Romanticism as opposed to the other way around). And it's almost good solid virtue ethics—as opposed to the rule-driven ethics that has been the curse of Catholic morality, both liberal and traditional. There is a lot to like here. And there's even more to like in the body of the post.

It begins by accurately identifying a real and significant problem with our moral culture.

An incessant to-do list runs in the back of my mind, and I’m constantly finding myself flitting from one task to another. Even pausing to enjoy entertainment is a struggle against the pull to be useful, so typically you’ll find me folding laundry while watching TV or scrubbing dishes as I listen to a podcast. Kill two birds with one stone, right? 

Our culture’s blaring message of BE PRODUCTIVE and TAKE ACTION are constantly nagging me. In and of themselves, they aren’t bad, but when my accomplishments define my value and vocation, that’s when I know something is wrong.

"When my accomplishments define my value and vocation". That's a profound and radical critique of the morality of our age. And notice that it's not a critique of a narcissistic and empty consumer morality. This is a criticism of what morally serious people teach their children. The people who think that our accomplishments define our value and vocation think of themselves as good. That is rather Jesus-like in spirit.

The writer, her name is Sarah Ortiz and you can see her blog here, has bravely challenged some of our moral pieties. And I think she is right on target. The word "duty" appears nowhere in the article but the kind of morality she identifies is one that is built on duty. The tasks she is struggling to perform above—washing dishes and folding laundry—are her duties. But did you notice what is competing with them? The answer is watching TV and listening to podcasts.. Those are harmless enough activities but they are pretty empty. If you're alternating between duties you hate and mere distractions, you have a big problem at both ends of the scale.

The solution she proposes is that we be servants to one another. She does that on the basis of a pretty dodgy interpretation of today's Gospel reading, which you can find at the link.

Magical thinking versus theology

The thing that's missing here is a realization that is we are our actions. They are the only measure of who you are and what you are becoming. Yes, grace is giving you the ability to do but what you do is sine non qua: we are called to be doers of the word and not merely hearers.

I think this is hard because really embracing this requires us to care a whole lot about what we want to be and that can look like selfishness. Indeed, we are surrounded by people and institutions who work non stop to convince us that our most important moral task, growing in the likeness of God, is mere selfishness. To succeed, we have to set aside what our parents wanted us to be, what our bosses want us to be, what the beauty industry wants us to be and what the entertainment industry—including Catholic mommy blogs—wants us to be and think seriously about what we want us to be. Jesus taught us to be servants to be sure but he taught us that was the way to be first, that was the way to be a leader.

The measure that we are on the right track is happiness in the sense of flourishing. We are to aspire to happiness and that begins now. There are limitations to what we can achieve in this life but there is much we can do within those limitations. We are not taught to wait and suffer patiently until that great day when we are magically made whole. If the plot line of salvation you're working on in any way resembles the one where the heroine debases herself in front of others so that one day her fairy godmother will make it possible to go to the ball where a beautiful Prince will fall in love with her then you believe in a silly superstition and not Catholic Christianity.

Our faith is not magic but hard and real and sensible. Here is the meme from above with two slight, but crucial corrections:

Our value is in who we are created to become, not in what our sense of duty tells us we should do.

Emotions, rationality, morality and "Catholic Romanticism"

We easily allow ourselves to be persuaded that our emotions are irrational. When someone tells you that "you're being emotional" they mean that your judgments are unreliable because your emotions are governing you. The implication is that it is immoral to be emotional.

On the other hand, we also recognize that the person incapable of feeling emotions is likely to be, as Jane Austen described Mr. John Dashwood, "cold-hearted, and rather selfish". Here, emotion is a prerequisite for being moral. The Gospel tells us that Jesus was moved with pity.

Robert Solomon argues that emotions are judgments but also dispositions. To be afraid is to be afraid of something, to love is to love someone and so on down the roster of emotions. At the same time, to be angry or jealous or suspicious is often the consequence of a life-time of training ourselves to be that way.

In addition, there are feelings that, unlike full-blown emotions, aren't directed at anything in particular. Anxiety is the feeling that bad things are about to happen—when I am anxious I have no idea where the crap is going to come from but I'm sure it will hit soon. Similarly, Thos. was telling me a while ago that he has patients who suffer from severe stress problems that are triggered by their own body responses to stress—they notice that their heart is running fast and that makes them nervous so their heart starts running even faster so they get more nervous so they break out in a sweat which makes them even more nervous ... lather, rinse, repeat until they have to take you away in an ambulance. I've done something like this on a smaller scale when I've had too much coffee and my own stress level makes me think that something must be wrong even though there is no fact or situation to justify my concern.

This all happens because our emotional responses are unconscious—a right-brain phenomenon. We often become aware of being uneasy without being consciously aware of what in specific is making us uneasy. We can focus on the feeling rather than looking for what caused it. You could say that feelings don't rise to the level of an emotion. I once heard someone say that anxiety is what you feel when you don't have the courage to have an emotion; that's too broad a generalization but it is true some of the time. (It took me a longer time than it should have to become a real adult because I lived in an almost constant state of anxiety because I was scared to have actual emotions towards the people closest to me.)

Cognitive?

We cannot simply dismiss emotions as irrational. The tendency to do so is rooted in a number of things. It is undeniably true that emotions can be wrong, even very wrong. I can be angry at my sister but later discover that she had not done the thing that I did not like. It's also true that emotions are hard to reverse—once I'm worked up into a state of high dudgeon, I can't easily calm down even when shown that my original reasons for being angry are unjustified.

But lots of human activities can sometimes be wrong without being qualified as irrational. Courts occasionally convict innocent people and instruments occasionally give incorrect readings. Our faith in these things is not based on their being infallible but rather on their being correct much more often than not. (A false conviction rate of even one percent would be regarded as ridiculously high.) The same should be true of emotions. We notice when emotions are unjustified because that is a relatively rare phenomenon. We don't notice the many, many times our emotions are correct. And it must be this way: if our emotions were not highly reliable cognitive indicators they would have been evolved out of the human race centuries ago.
Anterior and posterior emotion
When we worry about the rationality of an emotion, we typically do so as a posterior phenomenon. I start to feel anger and stop and ask myself whether the anger is justified. Even if I decide that my anger is justified, I should think carefully about how I react and I might, I often do as a personal matter, do my best to hide my anger even though I I believe that anger to be justified.

We think less often about the anterior rational process. We don't worry so much about the habits and ways of thinking that incline us to have certain emotional responses in the first place. But the first way people jump tells us a lot about them. In The Philadelphia Story, Tracey Samantha Lord rejects George because he suspected her of infidelity on the eve of their wedding. His suspicion is not ungrounded. Tracey was drunk and isn't entirely certain what she did or didn't do. She certainly did something—she flirted with and amorously kissed another man. She did not, however, have sex with him as George suspects and she herself fears. In the end, after she is cleared and George is reassured, she leaves him because she thinks that his initial response should have been to trust her. She would prefer a husband who would instinctively take her side.

That's analogous to the way Catholic moralists talk about conscience. That is the opposite of the way we usually think of conscience. In our culture, we think of conscience as a posterior phenomenon: I do something and then start to question whether I should have done it. Catholic moralists recognize that that is part of conscience but believe and argue that anterior conscience is the more important thing; that it is more important to have a disposition to react in a certain way in the first place rather than to correct mistakes afterward.

Emotions have to be part of this. Empathy is a trained emotion; we have to spend years learning how to be empathetic. This is true of a wide range of emotions, both good and bad. I had a relative who spent her entire life training herself to lose her temper when others failed to respond as she wished. She was highly intelligent and she never changed so it obviously worked for her. People got scared off and didn't challenge her. Of course, they also got scared off and kept their distance so she ended up having very few close friends despite having a very large social network. (She also, and this was probably narcissism, rejected other people's emotions as illegitimate any time they did not line up with her assessments.)

Emotional disposition is a kind of moral fitness. It isn't a matter of making moral choices. That is a cold activity, something like a moral calculus. The relative I mention above also used to exhort others to "be more charitable". What she meant by that was to make more effort to see the good in others. I don't think she realized, however, that she herself was not a good role model in this regard. She grasped the principle perfectly but hadn't done the moral training to make herself better at it. Charity was not an anterior emotion for her.

Moral fitness is hard work because we don't have direct access to the thing we are trying to change. We can't adjust it the way we can move the thermostat or put on a sweater when we want to be warmer. It's more of a long-term project that involves changing our habits and showing constancy much as is the case if we want to get into better physical shape.

Catholic Romanticism

One of the things that a certain kind of romanticism did was to value emotions as rational ways of being human. The Enlightenment emphasized rationality but the rationality it emphasized was a narrowly proscribed rationality. That is to say, Enlightenment thinkers set out to be rational by outlawing a lot of human behaviour as irrational. That produced a counter-reaction. At first the reaction was to reject rationality and embrace feeling (the term at the time was "sensibility") as something separate from and superior to rationality. For many people, this is what Romanticism did. Others argue that it was an attempt to expand what counted as irrational so as to include some emotional responses.

(At the same time, this sort of Romanticism, as Oakeshott argued, would have to expand what counted as irrational. Some kinds of activity that meet the Enlightenment requirements for rationality perfectly should be recognized as irrational and monstrous.)

That sort of Romanticism appeals to me. It is not what everyone means by Romantic. I would, even though many would refuse to do so, recognize Jane Austen as Romantic and even have tendency to see her as the exemplary Romantic.

I would further, however, modify Romanticism with the adjective "Catholic". I would not accept "Romantic Catholicism" even though there are aspects of it that I mind find congenial because I think that when we redeem Romanticism from most of its sins when we modify it with Catholic. This will be, I hope, something of a theme of this blog as I go forward.

Is this the end of Milo Yiannopoulos? Probably yes. Edited

Ann Althouse asked the question first. It didn't even occur to me. I just thought of it as more controversy and controversy is like oxygen for a guy like Milo. But I think this will be different.

Over the years a number of male friends —gay and heterosexual—have told me about having been teens initiated into sex by an adult. Maybe a dozen times I've been told such stories. The incident was typically described as a positive one and the attitude towards the adult responsible (and the bulk of the moral responsibility lies with the adult)* was one of gratitude. I'll be blunt and honest, some of these guys struck me as pretty messed up (others I didn't know well enough to say whether they were messed up or not). Was it the early sex that messed them up? Or were they going to be seriously messed up anyway and the early sex with an adult was just one of what was going to be a long string of bad decisions? I have no idea. But I'm pretty certain the early sex didn't help.

No woman has ever told me a story about being a teen having sex with an adult where the adult came off well. Never!

A woman I once dated told me how she had, at the age of 15, very deliberately set out to lose her virginity on a trip out west. She was utterly mercenary about it, describing her virginity as, "Something I had to get rid of." She met an older man on her trip and decided he was going to be the one and set about making it happen. She was absolutely clear that she enticed him into it, that she lied about her age and described the experience as a positive one that she has never regretted but when I asked her about the guy she angrily hissed that he was a bastard and a creep. And she picked him!

We tend not to talk about these things any more. People used to. One story in Alice Munro's masterpiece, Lives of Girls and Women, includes a series of furtive encounters between a teenage girl and an adult male that the girl deliberately sets out to provoke and yet the guy is still portrayed as a shit.

And times have changed. Lives of Girls and Women was written in 1971. There was a book describing sexual initiation from a boy's perspective called In Praise of Older Women written in 1966. I remember seeing a few arty films on the theme in the 1970s. But when In Praise of Older Women  was made into a movie in 1978 the subject was starting to be deeply controversial. Since then social tolerance for adult-teen sex has vanished.

And rightly so if you ask me. It's a bad, bad idea. Milo correctly makes a distinction between true pedophilia which is sex with pre-pubescent children and sex with sexually developed teens who aren't emotionally mature but that doesn't get him very far. It's still a crime and rightly so; people below the age of consent shouldn't be having sex with anyone! Not even with other teens! I'll cheerfully admit that the lines are hard to draw clearly. What age exactly is too young? How much of a gap in age is too much? We can't say with any certainty. The law draws a line though and everybody has to abide by that**. And, yes, people do really stupid things and get away with it all the time but that doesn't make it okay. It's still a bad, bad idea.

And it's a bad idea that the current culture has no tolerance for. I don't mean that it should have any tolerance for it—I make the distinction because there are other really bad ideas that the current culture does tolerate. So, yes, it's all over for Milo. He handled radioactive material and there is a price for that. I don't think he realizes it yet but his career is over.

* This sentence was edited. The relevant section originally read "the adult responsible for this crime (and it is a crime)". Since then, I realized that many of the incidents weren't a crime in those days, the age of consent being 14 and there being no law governing adults in positions of authority at the time. Both criminal and moral attitudes on the matter have hardened considerably since the days when I was a teen. 

** The law has changed in many jurisdictions. Up until 2008 when it was raised to 16, the age of consent was 14 in Canada. In addition, adults who are in a position of authority towards teens may not have sex with them even if they are over the age of consent (if I remember correctly that has been the case since the late 1980s). There were encounters I knew of in the 1970s and early 1980s, and lots of them, that would be crimes today. In most cases, I think some of the teens involved grew up well-adjusted but the line draw has to err on the side of being too careful.

Disagreeing with my father

This is the first of a series of cross postings from another blog of mine called Rum, Romanism and rebellion. I've decided to use the other one as a place to write a sort of public diary, a place where I will take some selections from my private journal and put them "out there" just because. AT the same time, I will take some posts from there that I have put up over the past three years and share them here.

I love my father but see things differently than he does. This photo, which he shared on Facebook, is a good source to draw out how I disagree.

My father was sharing a post by the Anglican Diocese of Fredericton who were, in turn, sharing it from Michael Baisden Live. I'd never heard of Baisden before but, according to Wikipedia anyway, eight million people listen to his radio show.

The sentiments above, are typical of those who value getting along above truth. As a consequence, arguing with them is not a matter of establishing what is or isn't true. It should be obvious, that while it is true that apologizing requires bravery when you have something to apologize, apologizing for things that aren't their fault is what spineless wimps do. Likewise, while it is sometimes the case that truly strong people can often forgive what moral weaklings continue to resent, weak people show their weakness by forgiving what they should not. And if you forgive what you should not forgive you will never forget but will stew in resentment for decades.

There is, however, little point in trotting out facts in the face of such sentiments for what really matters to the person who says, or posts, such things is avoiding conflict. The strategy at work here, and that is what it is, imagines that the natural state of the world is to be at peace. As a consequence, evil enters the world when people stir things up and peace can be obtained if everyone agrees to just get along.

But the truth is that world is naturally chaotic and order is only maintained because brave, strong people work to keep it that way. When warranted, an apology is a good thing. Strength is always a good thing and, sometimes, forgiving is a sign of strength. Apologizing and forgiving to get along, on the other hand, is neither brave nor strong. It's surrendering in order to get peace. and that is a mistake in many ways.

For starters, it just doesn't work. Apologize to a bully and they will only bully you more. But there is a deeper problem.  It involves what Robert Glover calls a covert contract. Notice the wording, "The first to apologize ...". The first? Shouldn't only the person who has done wrong apologize?

If you challenge the person who pushes the above sentiments, their first line of defence will be to argue that it takes two to tango. And that is where the nihilistic roots of the argument get revealed. Yes, two people can start a fight by both being pigheaded but that is a relatively rare phenomenon. Most conflict starts because one side is being unreasonable. But the person who suggests that you apologize when you are attacked doesn't care about that. They just want peace and they imagine that an apology will buy off the attacker. Why? Because it's a contract: "I'll let you have your way if you stop being aggressive." But it's a covert contract so this never actually gets said. The other person simply hears an apology and assumes, therefore, that you really think it's your fault.

About thirty years ago I figured out that this is a recipe for unhappiness. The truth matters and sometimes you have to stand up for the truth even if it means conflict.

The most subversive moment in teen literature

I suspect I'm repeating myself but I love this:

A red-billed cap pulled at a jaunty angle over her blonde curls. Penny made a striking figure in a well tailored suit of dark wool. Her eyes sparkled with the joy of youth and it was easy for her to smile. She was an only child, the daughter of Anthony Parker, editor and publisher of the Riverview Star, and her mother had died when she was very young. (Behind the Green Door, 1940)

The red-billed cap makes it seem particularly appropriate right now.

That's called esoteric writing. There is lots of plausible deniability. There is a period and lots of parenthetical statements between "it was easy for her to smile" and "her mother had died".  There is even a plausible counter reading that she was very young when her mother had died and therefore being without a mother is not a barrier to Penny's finding it easy to smile. And that was probably enough to fool the mothers of readers of the Penny Parker books. They might have been briefly troubled by that paragraph had they read it but would have reassured themselves that it was just an accident of an accidental juxtaposition of ideas and that it didn't mean what it appeared to mean.  That won't hold if you think about it though: the text implies that it was easy for her to smile because her mother was dead and not despite her being so.

I suspect that very few of the girls who read the Penny Parker books missed the point. They eagerly grasped the chance to imagine what it would be like not to have a mother and they did so because it's liberating to think that*. And healthy. Blowing up your relationship with your mother is an essential part of growing up for both girls and boys. If you didn't do it as a teenager, do it now. (And also with any other members of your family determined to carry on in your mother's spirit.)

The Penny Parker books were the work of Mildred Wirt Benson, more famously known as the creator of the Nancy Drew series. She wrote the first four books of that series and quit when the women controlling the syndicate decided they wanted to make Nancy Drew more lady-like and obedient. You'll notice that Nancy's mother was also deceased. Wirt Benson created four heroines whose mothers were dead. That's a bit too many to be a coincidence.


* I should add that only a girl whose mother was still alive would think that. This is fantasy—actually having your mother die when you are young is nothing fun. But the fantasy is very appealing and the proof of this can be found in any one of hundreds of teen adventure stories where the hero is an orphan.

Conflict avoidance is not peacemaking

I've tended not to spend a lot of time thinking about the Beatitudes, other than wondering exactly what "poor in spirit" is supposed to mean. I was put off them by meeting too many Catholics who put more emphasis on the Beatitudes so they wouldn't have to pay attention to other moral teachings such as, say, the ten commandments. Trust me, I'm the furthest thing from a morally rigid legalist but I can smell bullshit when it's being offered around as wisdom.

Recently, I got to witness some conflict avoidance in action though and saw just how little it has to do with peacemaking. And that got me thinking

The Greek original for "peacemaker" is also a compound word and one of the words means "to make". To make peace requires action. Avoidance is not action. The other half of the Greek word does indeed mean "peace" but it means peace in the sense of "to make whole". Again, avoidance tactics will not, because they cannot, make anyone or anything whole.

For several generations now, going back at least to the 1950s, a lot of Christians have tended to read "peacemaker" as a person who avoids conflict. The word has come to mean a person who is peaceable rather than anyone you'd rely on in any kind of conflict. These are harmless sorts of people—nice guys—but they are useless to themselves or anyone else.

That was obvious in the painful interchange I observed. The conflict avoider was so desperate to not be in a fight that he sold himself out at the first sign of conflict. And I thought, a man who won't stand up for himself, wouldn't stand up for anyone else either. But it gets worse. The person he caved to read his conflict avoidance as weakness and immediately upped the level of aggression attacking him again and even more severely. It got really pathetic after that.

A peacemaker has to stand for something and, odd as this may seem, they have to fight for that something.

Donald Trump and the Sharon Statement

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the Sharon Statement? You'll want to read it first. You can find it here.

No, really, go and read it. It's brilliant and it will take you only five minutes. You're more likely to have heard of the Port Huron statement. Try reading it. I dare you.

Much as I admire the Sharon Statement, I would argue that one line in it is outdated. This line:

THAT the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties

Well, not outdated as the writers had the good sense to add the line "at present". But we should take them on good faith and ask ourselves whether the "forces of international Communism" really are such a threat any more. I don't think they are.

And that raises another question: Is it time for the right to break with Wilsonian foreign policy? Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy. He had only limited success during his presidency with this notion and it was rapidly dropped after he was defeated. But it became a central part of the foreign policy of western liberal democracies after the second world war and has stuck since then.

I'm not entirely certain it ever made complete sense to promote democracy abroad. The experience of George W. Bush in Iraq tends to support skepticism. What did make sense was to unite with other nations to fight against Naziism and Communism because they were spectacularly evil ideologies that threatened all of humanity. They're both dead letters right now. There are still communists about and there are even a few Nazis out there but neither group constitutes the threat they once did.

The world is still full of bad guys. Putin is a nasty piece and Islamic terrorism is also a threat. But neither is a threat to liberty in the way Naziism and communism were.

I have serious reservations about Trump but I was humbled by his victory. I think we can learn a few lessons from him and I think one thing he grasped is that the sort of foreign policy that both the left and the right embraced from the second world war on is now no longer worth pursuing. It will be worth resuming if another evil along the lines of Naziism or communism arises but, until then, I think it's time to back to non-interventionism