Mousing around

Well-fed cats are better mousers than starving cats. If getting mice out of somewhere, say a barn, really matters to you, you'll feed your barn cats well. It's one of those odd things that, like the nails that Thoreau used to build the cabin at Walden Pond,  doesn't necessarily strike you as important. If you think about it a bit, though, an unsettling thought will hit you. Not necessarily morally unsettling, although it will be for some, but something that will shake up some basic assumptions you might have about the way nature works for cats, and lots of other predators, don't kill only, or even primarily, out of need. Or, to put it another way, laws of nature and natural law are clear different things.

I thought about that reading an interview with Esther Perel. Perel is a therapist who works with people who have had affairs. In the interview, she notes that the majority of people who do so are happy with their marriage. Lot of research backs her up in this. It's an unsettling proposition because it unsettles the old familiar notion that people cheat because they are living in a love- or sex-starved relationship or marriage. (In my experience, the person who is being starved of sex or love is usually the one being cheated on and not the cheater.)

We don't have to take everything Perel says as gospel, therapy is more of an art than a science, but I think she has some interesting stuff to say. Stuff that might unsettle us in a good way.

... the vast majority of people we come into contact with in our offices are content in their marriages. They are longtime monogamists who one day cross a line into a place they never thought they would go. They remain monogamous in their beliefs, but they experience a chasm between their behavior and their beliefs.

I wrote about this myself three years ago:

Infidelity is also an equal-opportunity affliction. And not just on the receiving end. People of all types cheat on their partners. Even women who find cheating repugnant and who speak scathingly of others who have done this will surprise us and themselves by having affairs.

So it seems to me that the first thing anyone, woman or man, would want to do when thinking about love and commitment is to acknowledge that they are capable of cheating. Actually, that doesn't go nearly far enough. What you need to do is admit that if it ever felt easy and safe enough to get away with, you probably would. I say this because I've lived long enough that I've seen women—quite a few women—seriously mess up because they didn't worry enough about the possibility that they would cheat. They worried plenty about their partner cheating on them but it never occurred them that they could ever do such a thing themselves until they did.

And then they go to see someone like Perel.

If they see Perel in particular, she will tell them that they shouldn't feel so guilty about it. That may strike you as typical therapeutic dismissal of moral and character issues, and that is almost certainly partly the case, but I think she has something right here.

Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.

...

That’s the one word I hear, worldwide—alive! That’s why an affair is such an erotic experience. It’s not about sex, it’s about desire, about attention, about reconnecting with parts of oneself you lost or you never knew existed. It’s about longing and loss. But the American discourse is framed entirely around betrayal and trauma.

It's about "longing and loss". Long time readers might remember my suggesting that that is what Brideshead Revisisted is really about. I think all genuine religious feeling comes out of longing and loss. Waugh was onto something very important when he has Charles Ryder and Julia Mottram find and refind God, respectively, through affairs.

And it's not just Waugh who uses this sort of motive to drive a story of redemption.

The woman said to him,“Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

That, as many will already know, comes from the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.  It's sometimes said that Jesus didn't say much about sexual morality so we should assume he didn't think it that important. But he did say something about it.

Before getting to that, a bit of cultural background. In the antique world women went to the well in groups in the morning. To go alone later in the day when there was a man at the well was a deeply improper act. It's sort of like twerking in a flesh-coloured bikini is now; it sends a message about the woman doing it. The Samaritan woman was looking for sexual attention and the audience John wrote his Gospel for would fully have understood what this woman was going to the well for. They would not have been surprised that Jesus answers the question above by raising questions of sexual morality:

Jesus said to her,
 “Go call your husband and come back.”
The woman answered and said to him,
“I do not have a husband.”
Jesus answered her,
“You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’
For you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”

There is some numerology at work here. Seven is the number of completeness. We shouldn't necessarily think that this woman literally had five husbands and one lover before she met Jesus. The point is that she'd had a lot and the Evangelist makes the number symbolically significant in that her final lover, Jesus, is the seventh and therefore the completion of her desire. No, Jesus was not her sexual lover, although, as we shall see, what he does with her does cause scandal. Rather, Jesus offers her something that will fulfill her deeper need which like the cat pursuing mice or the married person pursuing affairs, is not simply a matter of physical need.

Let's go back to what Perel says again:

We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become. 

Isn't that what the woman at the well really wanted too?

Of course, Jesus didn't literally mean that the woman would never be physically thirsty again nor did he mean that she'd never be horny again. She had to drink water the rest of her life and she had sexual needs for the rest of her life too.  I doubt very much that she became celibate after Jesus had left.

Do you feel "really alive" or are you leading a life of quiet desperation?  I ask because if you don't feel really alive you won't be the only one who suffers as a consequence and that will be true whether you actually get around to cheating or not.

Eventually, Perel's non-judgmental attitude towards people having affairs got to be too much for the Hanna Rosin who was interviewing her at Slate and who is, not incidentally, married. Rosin bluntly asked Perel if she recommended having an affair:

No more than I would recommend cancer and yet a lot of people finally understand the value of life when they get sick.

Jesus' disciples were also taken aback at his seeming acceptance of a dubious sexual morality:

At that moment his disciples returned,
and were amazed that he was talking with a woman,
but still no one said, “What are you looking for?”
or “Why are you talking with her?”

The reason they didn't ask those questions is because they thought already knew and they were "amazed". "Shocked" or "scandalized" would be better words.

There is a kind of morality that, particularly when applied to sex, tells us to hate the desire itself. To always regard wanting as a sign that there is something wrong with us. I think Jesus is much closer to Perel and Waugh here than he is to your typical Christian moralist.

From now on, I'll be Socrates

A friend of mine encouraged all her Facebook friends to do one of those dumb Buzzfeed quizzes. This one was to determine which philosopher you are.

Okay, waste of time.

But it turned out to be useful in an unexpected way. I answered the questions by picking the options I thought a good person would (meaning the person I thought I should want to be) the first time through and got told I was most like Kant. Words cannot say how little I want to be like Kant. So I did it again and decided to answer the questions as I would if I didn't care about anyone or anything. My answers are below. They are provided without context because the context in this case is meaningless (but if you must know, click here and do the quiz for yourself first).

1. I decided chastity was the most over-rated virtue because getting rid of it would be very convenient. 
2. I picked Bree Van Der Kamp as desperate housewife because her facial expression in the photograph the quiz provides makes me want to hate her so I figured she deserved to be desperate. 
3. I picked “vegetarians are annoying to be around” because they are. 
4. I picked mayonnaise as my favourite condiment as a way of doubling down on those irritating scolds who tell me what I should or shouldn’t eat. 
5. I picked "I’m never bad" because I don’t [suppressed gerund] care what you think of me. 
6. I picked Gossip Girl because I wish more women were like Serena and I damn well don’t care if that makes anyone feel threatened. 
7. I picked cooking for Saturday activity because it’s true. 
8. I picked Barcelona because I thought the girls there looked hotter than any other European city. 
9. I chose to make an excuse to not see my grandmother. 
10. And I picked “feeling cheeky” for reasons that shouldn’t need any explaining. 

And for that, the quiz tells me that I am most like Socrates. It says,

If you don’t understand something, you’re not afraid to ask questions about it. You try your hardest to be a moral person and don’t value material possessions very highly.

And it got me thinking, why not approach all life's challenges like this? If it has so little effect on the results, why not just do the things and express the opinions I would if I didn't care what anyone thought of me? You know, I think I've just decided what to give up for Lent.

I kid you not.

A little heavy culture: beauty, truth and goodness

I was having tea with Eliot Girl the other day and we briefly discussed Brideshead Revisited. She disagrees with my interpretation of the book but has not said what she thinks I get wrong, probably out of a desire to avoid a long argument when she'd rather be enjoying her tea. She did say, however, that she thinks I am projecting my own views onto Brideshead.

I don't doubt that a bit. I think it is one of the marks of a truly great novel, and I think Brideshead is the truly great novel of the twentieth century, is that it inspires you to project your deepest beliefs onto it. That is what great novels do—they are a place for us to exercise our moral imagination. The best ones allow us to return to them again and again, learning a bit more from each visit.

Here is someone else doing just that, projecting things onto the novel, and more power to him. That said, he gets a couple of crucial points wrong and he gets them wrong, I think, because he misunderstands the role of beauty in Brideshead.



Let's start with facts as they are clear. Father Barron, a brilliant man, makes what may seem a small mistake but is actually huge. Here is how he describes the chapel at Brideshead (beginning about 1:25 of the video):

At the centre of it is a chapel that is a riot of Baroque decoration the presence of the Eucharist in the chapel meant nothing to Charles when he first came in, he was an agnostic, but he loved the beauty of the place.

Well, actually, no*. One of the big problems for Charles right from the beginning is that he finds the chapel quite ugly and cheap compared to Brideshead. And one of the big reasons he finds it ugly is that it was done over in an arts and crafts style that came off poorly compared to the Baroque splendour of the rest of the house. Here is how it is described in the novel.

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts and crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give the peculiar quality of being moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.

The line where Charles attacks the artist responsible for taking a noble material like oak and carving it, "so as to give the peculiar quality of being moulded in Plasticine,"  shows us how much he disdains what he sees.

By the way, note that the last decade of the 19th century is as close to the figures of the novel as the 1970s is to us. To get an idea of how Charles felt, imagine you are visiting a beautiful Victorian home and find that the living room has been done over in 1970s style.

And it doesn't stop there. Everywhere Charles looks at Catholicism he sees drab ugliness. Nowhere is this more the case than in the morality of the Catholics he encounters. Again, Father Barron gets this backwards.

He meets Sebastian's mother, Lady Marchmain, who is a very devout Catholic, a very morally serious person, and from her he picks up, for the very first time, the moral demand of Catholicism, especially as it pertains to Sebastian's drinking.

Actually, he meets Lady Marchmain and discovers that she is a very manipulative woman. And he meets Bridey and discovers that he is a stiff prig incapable of human connection and Cordelia and discovers that she is a child who prays Novenas for her pet pig. None of these people, despite a whole lot of trying, manage to show Charles the logic behind the moral demand of Catholicism. It is Julia who shows him that in the last third of the novel just as Sebastian shows him the beauty in the first third.

Let's talk Evangelization

Now all this matters because Father Barron has a point to make about Evangelization

The best way to evangelize is to move to the beautiful, then to the good and then to the true.

And he goes on to say that the Catholic church is particularly well placed to do this.

The Catholic church, our genius is that we have embraced the beautiful.

That is well-meaning nonsense from a man who wants to see the good..If only it were true and wouldn't it be nice to think so. Waugh, with his gimlet eye, knew full well that the Catholic church of the 20th century had, in fact, embraced ugliness. She has been responsible for building some of the ugliest churches on the planet. The whole point of evoking the baroque was to recall a past in which the church had been very much invested in beauty.

Waugh also knew that if there was any church that was well placed to evangelize through beauty it was the Anglican church, whose buildings and liturgy were models of restraint and good taste. Waugh's central point was to ask what beauty really is and he found a remnant of it in Catholicism that was so beautiful, so true and so good that it couldn't be trampled by the ugliness of the well-intentioned fools in whose hands the church was left. The light would shine no matter how ugly the actual fixture the light is placed in and no matter how dowdy the people who worship beneath it. A point that is made on the last page of the novel.

"Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been built but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning new among the old stones."

The starting point is not just beauty for lots of things can seem beautiful. Violence is beautiful from certain perspectives.

Beauty, goodness and truth (to put them in the order they are usually presented) play a really important role in Catholic theology. They are the transcendentals; they are the things that we all desire and it is the pursuit of these desires that we can become perfect, "as your Father in heaven is perfect". Ultimately they are a unit (to pursue one is always to pursue the others as well whether we think we intend to or not) but which is the best starting point? What is the best way to draw people into the church?

I think Father Barron is absolutely right that beauty is the place to begin in our age. We live in an ugly age and, as a consequence, we all crave beauty. Despite its many ugly buildings and the appallingly slipshod way the liturgy is presented in many places, the Catholic church is, or could be with a little effort of the right sort, well-placed to evangelize through beauty. But only by turning back and rediscovering the beauties of its past. Father Barron instinctively understands this as all the examples he cites of beauty from within Catholicism are from centuries ago.

Where I think he makes his mistake is with the second move to goodness. In the novel, beauty goes not to goodness but to truth first and that is the way we should go in evangelization. The triumvirate of Lady Marchmain, Bridey and young Cordelia are well chosen for they well-represent the worst traits of modern Catholic moralizing: not a moral but a moralistic approach to life presented through manipulation, smug triumphalism and infantilism.

The last of these is the most dangerous as you can, as an older and wiser Cordelia notes, hate Lady Marchmain. You can also laugh at Bridey but the earnest, seemingly well-meaning but narcissistic morality we see in young Cordelia is much harder to see for the evil it is.

The right way to go is well presented in an old saw: Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. That is to say the law of prayer, then the law of belief and only then the law of living. The three transcendentals are all bound together but we can approach them individually for that very reason. Beauty begins with worship or prayer.

This, by the way, is one of Saint Paul's big points. You can't earn your way into heaven by good conduct. Attempts to become holy by becoming good will always result in evil. Only God's grace can redeem you. And where do you find God's grace? By observing the beauty that surrounds you. Once you become aware of that, you can become aware of the truth about God. The truth of God is not his existence. That's the easy part. Even the most hardened atheist grasps the existence, much as they deny it. They believe he exists and they hate him. The truth of God that is so hard to grasp is that he loves you and he wants you. He wants you more than you want anything. Only once you know that can you work at becoming good because how else could you possible respond to God who loves you so?


* Part of the reason he gets it wrong is clear right from the video itself. As Father Barron is speaking, we see images from Castle Howard. These are the same images used in the TV series and it misrepresents the chapel. The actual chapel that Waugh had in mind was the one at Madresfield Court and it is something else altogether, as you can see at the this site.

Mad Men vs Breaking Bad: How sin gets started

When we don't want to understand sin, we inflate it. My church has a flyer up right now advertizing a "documentary" about the porn industry. It promises revelations about a huge and organized group of exploiters who crush the women who do porn. It's not unlike the various exposés we see from time to time of "the white slave trade".

Now the first thing to understand is that these things do happen. There are a few women working in porn and prostitution who have been manipulated into the job by vicious uncaring bastards (of both sexes). But those cases are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority of women who go into porn and prostitution do so with their eyes wide open. Prostitution exists everywhere on the earth and has existed everywhere in history. That doesn't happen with activities that people don't do naturally. There is nature—human nature—at work here.

Prostitution and porn (and porn is really just a kind of prostitution) are just like games, families, tribal groups, leadership hierarchies and private property. Anywhere and everywhere you have human society, these things tend to follow.

And that is why it is so damaging to imagine that the porn industry must be this giant conspiracy to undermine civilization. Yes, exploitation of human beings finds porn the way flies find garbage but it never starts that way.

The other problem with this sort of inflation of sin is that it tends to put men in the drivers seat of the great bus to prostitution and porn and treats women as helpless passengers. In economic terms, it explains these things entirely in terms of the demand side. But it always takes two to tango and there are always women keen to supply these things.

All of which is a rather roundabout way of getting to what's wrong with Breaking Bad. The set up is completely artificial. Even fans of the show grasp this on some level for they will acknowledge that the the whole meth lab thing is too far over the top to be credible. And that is true but there is a much deeper problem and that is that it is also psychologically incredible.

Anyone old enough to remember the early days of the abortion will remember this argument:

Think of the poor woman with six children she can't afford to feed who finds herself pregnant with a seventh.

That's a close relative to the story to that of Walter White. A good person in a very tough place is faced with a a seemingly impossible new consequence chooses to do a bad thing. There are lots of others like them.

Here's the thing though, abortion has been legal a long time and we know quite a bit about who gets abortions and, guess what, it's not women who already have six children. By an overwhelming margin, the majority of women who get abortions are single women with jobs. No matter whether you believe abortion should be legal or not, you cannot seriously pretend that abortion is typically a choice made by women in desperate circumstances. The numbers alone tell us this: there are hundreds of thousands of abortions every single year.

To go back to the hypothetical woman who cannot afford to feed the six children she has: women in her place almost never choose abortion. Seeking an abortion is not in character of someone who has already had six. The same problem applies to Walter White. Yes, he is feeling trapped, helpless and (most importantly) unmanned but his whole life speaks against his making the choices he makes in the show. If he's put up with the humiliation he has put up with so far, he'll put up with more.

All of this is important because we don't sin the way Walter White sins. How do we actually sin? Well detraction is a good example. I call up a friend and suggest we meet for coffee. Over coffee I tell him about a third friend. "I'm really worried about Karen," I say. "she's having an affair with someone she met at work. I'm sure this is all very exciting about her but she's put her marriage and children at risk."

It all sounds soooooo concerned but it's absolutely vicious. Why am I talking about this? Or, rather, Why the ____ am I talking about this? That's the nature of sin. It's not someone in a situation so desperate that what would normally seem like an insane choice starts to feel reasonable. Sin always starts with someone in a very comfortable situation making a choice that is so easy that they can just do it, like snapping their fingers. David sees Bathsheba and thinks, "I could have her." Bathsheba thinks, "Wow, the king called for me and my husband is away at battle." The choice to sin is so easy, it feels like an idle choice.

Next week, if Breaking Bad isn't about sin, what is it about?

Mad Men: The sin of detraction and other honour-related issues

The post on the moral stance towards male agency in Mad Men and Breaking Bad that I promised yesterday will have to wait until tomorrow.


Meanwhile, some thoughts about Joan and the difficulty she faces. I noted yesterday that people are very harsh in their moral assessment of Don but tend to be forgiving of every else on the show for moral faults that are every bit as significant as his. We all do this, we explain away as "understandable" the moral failings of people while hating the failings of those we want to dishonour. The bottom line lesson is this: The fact that some moral failing is true of X is never good enough reason to publicly denigrate them nor is it good enough reason to judge them privately (judge not lest ...).

Here is an interesting example from a site that produces some of the best, and quite possibly the very best, Mad Men commentary out there:

At the same time, she’s dealing with a pissed-off Harry who, being Harry, can’t express a thought without offending someone; usually a woman. Again, this will be debated wildly, but we think Harry had a point about everything except how Joan got her partnership.

That is very, very close to right but not quite. Harry definitely should not have said it. He should, in fact, have said nothing at all. But Harry is absolutely correct about how Joan got her partnership. You could argue, and you would be right to do so, that Joan had more than earned her partnership in other ways but she actually got it by whoring herself out.

By analogy, image that Lisa owns a highly valued harpsichord and she has two nieces. There is Christina who wants the harpsichord because she wants the status that comes with having an instrument that famous musicians like to borrow to perform on. She doesn't play the instrument herself nor has done a thing to help her aunt care for it. Meanwhile, Lucy loves the instrument itself and played it regularly and oversaw the care of the instrument for the last thirty years while her Aunt Lisa was unable to adequately do so because of her old age. Lucy has even covered a lot of the maintenance and insurance costs out of her own pocket. By all rights, the harpsichord should go to Lucy.

Aunt Lisa, however, has made no provision in her will for passing on the harpsichord. Lucy realizing this and foreseeing a bitter fight with Lucy over it, takes advantage of her Aunt Lisa in her dotage and has her write up a codicil specifying that Lucy get the harpsichord. It's perfectly true that Lucy deserves the harpsichord but she still obtains it in a  way that is both immoral and illegal. The same is true of Joan's partnership.

Harry's moral failure was not in that what he said but the fact that he did say it. And this is wrong even if it is true. In Catholic terms, Harry commits the sin of detraction. Detraction is saying something true about someone that will hurt their reputation. It's a sin.

It's a sin that a lot of people find hard to grasp. Suppose I see Michael shoplifting. If I confront him directly and privately, tell him I know what he has done and insist that he fix the situation, that is no sin. If I alert the store detective that is no sin either for the store has a legitimate interest in stopping shoplifting and so do I as a consumer. If, however, I tell a bunch of people about it over drinks it is a sin. It makes no nevermind  if I do it to lower Michael's status and raise my own in their eyes or I if do it just because it's fun to gossip. It's a sin. A serious, mortal sin.

And that is where Harry goes wrong. Actually, it's where he goes really wrong. He was already going seriously wrong just by barging into the meeting and blurting out his frustration. He should have had a quiet meeting with Roger, Don or Bert in which he expressed his hopes and frustrations without mentioning Joan at all.

We've seen this before in Mad Men. For example, it is detraction when Peggy's sister goes to a priest and, under the guise of confessing her "concern", tries to lower Peggy in the priest's eyes by telling him about Peggy's pregnancy. Everything she says is true but that doesn't reduce the sin one tiny bit.

It's worth noting that moral self righteousness is always a component of detraction. To commit this sin is to believe in our own moral rightness.

There is a flip side to it all, by the way, and that is that there is a positive requirement as well as a negative prohibition when it comes to honour. I'm morally obliged to protect my own and other people's honour unless there is a very good reason not to. Honour means "high respect" and my caring about the honour of people I don't like is a way of loving them. And I am obliged to love people I don't like. It's not an option.

It applies, as I say, to my own honour and it is worth noting that Joan fails herself badly here. Tom and Lorenzo, whom I quoted above, bring this out nicely in their analysis of Joan's character. They note that Joan is, in many ways, an unpleasant person but that she has always had good sense about preserving her own honour. And that makes her even accepting the Jaguar deal very much out of character.

This, by the way, was why we had such a hard time believing last season that Joan would sleep with a client to get a partnership; not because she was morally opposed to it, but because everyone in the office would know and she’d be exposed in a way she never had before. Remember, people at SCDP still gossip about whether or not she and Roger had an affair, 14 years after it started; 2 years after it produced a baby. She’s good about keeping her cards close to her chest.

I'd add to that that it is also very unlike Joan to be a whore for money. We saw in her dalliance with Roger that Joan had no trouble being a secret whore for the sheer pleasure of being a secret whore. (Note to women: this is what most men want their partner to be: a woman who is willing to let herself go entirely for sexual pleasure without moral qualms when she is with him while being absolutely proper in the self she presents to the rest of the world. Most men don't have a Madonna-whore complex because they want both-and and not either-or as Freud worried.) Roger doesn't get over Joan because she was the perfect example of both-and right up until the Jaguar moment. That is what amde Joan morally superior to Jane Sterling and Megan Calvet, both of who use their sexual connections for personal gain.

(And notice how Roger seems less interested since then. If these two are going to get together, they both have something big to forgive the other for.)

This is where our modern concern about hypocrisy gets things deeply wrong and where the morality of people like Don, Roger and Joan is superior to that  of the 1960s. Everyone has things they do in the dark, as Harry distinguishes things. But it is precisely for that reason that it is less of a sin. That's just human weakness. The sin comes from not having the sense to allow what happens in Vegas to remain in Vegas.

Mad Men: Let's change the conversation

The commentary on Mad Men is often more fruitful for analysis than the show itself.

Notice for example, how Hanna Rosin saw the exact same show that I reported seeing yesterday:

The broader theme (and it’s a little Phyllis Schlafly for my tastes) is that free love isn’t really free. If you dive into the late 1960s sex scene, then you either come out with a huge hangover (like Joan’s friend Kate) or you’re a total lascivious buffoon (like Megan’s swinger bosses). In the meantime, Don’s brand of adultery is so old-timey it’s biblical, freighted with crucifixes and prayer and long meaningful looks. In fact Don is the peeping Tom of the episode, spying on Peggy, spying on Megan, a spectator to the action going on around him but not really able to participate.

The difference between us is moral. I like the moral point here and she doesn't. Aesthetically speaking, however, we are on the same page.

Two preliminary points, the first of which is going to seem a little pedantic: there are no crucifixes in the Bible. (To be even more pedantic, Sylvia is wearing a cross not a crucifix.) There were, in fact, no crucifixes anywhere until at least the tenth century. It's not Biblical but medieval. And that is tremendously important. The theme here is renunciation. Don says, "I want to stop doing this." (But not yet as Augustine would finish it.)

The second point is the notion of freedom inherent in Rosin's view. She doesn't just want people, especially women, to be free to make their own choices in sexual matters, she wants them to be able to make these choices and have good consequences follow from them. She and I agree that Megan's swinging boss come off looking like idiots. The difference is that Rosin seems to think that is some sort of manipulative twist by the show's producers; she thinks there is a possible dramatization that would be equally, if not more credible, in which these characters come across as fun-loving, well-adjusted people.

The problem, as anyone who ever had the bad luck to interact with them can tell you, is that swingers are lascivious buffoons. This isn't some sort of distortion of reality. It's dramatically credible because that is what people who drain sex of all the things that make it human are like.

The medieval sex that Don engages in is not without its moral pitfalls of course and he certainly isn't without moral failings but it's miles more interesting than anything the swinging sixties had to offer. And it is that because it is human.

Choose your character and then become him or her

The other thing that strikes me as interesting about Rosin's commentary is the narrative arc she wants to see. The show tends to tell the same stories over and over again only with slight variations so you don't actually get anything that looks like the sort of narrative arc you'd get in a novel. Notice, for example, that we already had this Don goes to an exotic land seeking peace in Season 2 and in Season 4. He even walks into the ocean seeking to be made clean at the end of Season 2. That's the way it tends to be in television when the show drags on for season after season and then suddenly stops.

And before you condemn that, ask yourself what is more like real life: the arc with a sense of an ending you find in a novel or the repetition with variations you find in television?

Anyway, what is the narrative arc that Hanna Rosin looks for amongst all this debris? Not surprisingly, it concerns a woman trying to change her life. The woman is Megan:

It struck me that by acting, Peggy allows herself to feel a little less, which is precisely what Megan does in her love scene. That play within a play unfolded beautifully. The first shot showed Megan dressed up in her maid’s uniform lounging on a couch, and because we’d never seen her on set, it wasn’t clear if this was “Zou Bisou Bisou,” Downstairs edition, or what exactly was going on. Then pretty soon Megan (as the maid) was on her back on the bed, with “Rafe” all over her. Her acting dilemma is a real one for the era. I recently  saw the movie Hitchcock, which is about the making of Psycho. It takes place a few years earlier than this episode, but one of its main themes is Hitchcock’s rage about his leading ladies always betraying him because their husbands insisted they quit, or lay off on the love scenes, or button up their shirts. That doesn’t excuse Don’s despicable behavior, of course. But it does create the interesting dynamic that Megan, the youngest of all the adults and the best placed to let loose in the late ‘60s, is practically the only character on this show whose moral compass seems to point true north.

I quote this lengthy bit because I want you to see how much Rosin is on Megan's side.  And why not?

That acknowledged, I think Rosin is missing some serious problems with Megan's moral compass. For Rosin misses the point completely here. The drama is indeed telling us to recall scenes from last year but not the ones that made Rosin feel good.

I apologize for the horrible image quality but Apple won't let you take screen captures in iTunes anymore. You can see enough, however, to catch that the connection the shwo makes is not with the Zou Bisou Bisou moment at the opening of last season but with the fantasy she ad Megan shoots at the end:

I'm pretty sure that is the same sound stage that they shot last years final episode on. It's vertainly the same set up: girl with unrealistic dreams in a bedroom with a fairytale bed.

And do you remember how Megan got there? Not by earning it but by asking her husband to get her the job and, not incidentally, betraying a friend in the process. And then the camera pans back to reveal Don watching just as he watched the set up for the shoot of the shoe commercial. 

The similarity doesn't end there. In last year's finale, a woman walks up and asks Don a question and that signals pretty clearly that he is now bored with Megan. Her childish routine has reduced her in his eyes. This year, a woman Don hates, a woman who represents the kind of sexuality he hates, walks up and whispers, "You like watch, do you?" It may be that, more than anything else that puts him off.

Don likes to do sexual things in the dark by subterfuge and seduction and not by mutual consent that has been carefully negotiated in the light of day. That shouldn't be a surprise, my bet is that Hanna Rosin much prefers the same thing no matter what she might say or even think differently.  In any case, I'm pretty sure Don got some pleasure out of watching in the dark until that damn woman came along and ruined it with her pandering.

Either way, Megan has lost something by trading a business partnership with her husband to pursue fantasy dreams. And that matters because ... continued tomorrow.

Moral privacy and Catholicism

With the Pope resigning and speculation about his successor rife, a lot of talk about sexuality and Catholicism is floating about.

And that ties to the issue of moral privacy in an interesting way, in a sexual way because sex is often a matter of moral privacy for practical reasons.

One of our more naive assumptions is that an adversarial system, whatever its other strengths and weaknesses, will always expose lies. We assume that both sides have an interest in exposing the lies of their opponents; even if I have a tendency to exaggerate my own claims, you can count on my opponent to cut me down to size.

But that only works most of the time. Sometimes both sides of an adversarial system have a share interest in maintaining the same lie. For example, we had a government here in Canada some thirty years ago now that promised to cut the size of the public sector. The government, once elected, duly made (false) claims about jobs cut. But the opposition didn't expose these lies because they knew that their most vocal supporters wanted to hate the government for making "deep, unconscionable cuts". The opposition, in fact, argued that the government was actually making even deeper cuts than the ones it was only lying about making in the first place.

A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to debates about sexual morality and the teachings of the Catholic church.

Liberal Catholics have long argued that traditional Catholic sexual teaching needs to change because you can no longer expect people to follow Catholic sexual teachings in the modern world and that, therefore, traditional teachings are driving people out. They argue that allowing some slack, allowing for a region of moral privacy where people can allow their consciences to over-ride the teachings of the church, will put more bums on pews every Sunday.

Conservative Catholics counter not by denying that things are, in their terms, "getting worse" but by arguing that the situation is even more extreme than liberals believe. They argue that not just the church but the entire world is at risk because of changing moral standards regarding sexuality.

The lie that both sides endorse is that things have changed significantly from what they used to be. For the most part they haven't. There never was a time when large numbers of Christians did not privately practice a sexual morality of their own devising. Never. (Paul complains about it when writing to the Corinthians written within a couple of decades after the crucifixion of Jesus.)

As Philip Larkin slyly observes, oral sex was not invented sometime in 1963. And the same is true of all sorts of other ways of privately circumventing the public consequences of private sexual activity. Feminists would argue, and argue correctly, that the available methods or circumvention were heavily loaded in men's favour and that they were especially heavily loaded against any woman who wanted to have social status. It's also true that literacy played a factor—the more literate you were, the more likely you were to disregard Catholic sexual teaching. (Casanova was a devout Catholic all his life!) To pretend that people suddenly started disregarding Catholic sexual teachings in the last few decades is pure nonsense.

Large numbers of Catholics have always ignored Catholic sexual teachings. You can take that as cause for shame or you can take it as proof that there is something unreasonable about these teachings as you will. What you cannot do is claim that we live in a time of crisis where we must act one way or another or else the walls will fall in on us. It's always been this way.

John's letters

My Brideshead Revisited blogging was Catholic culture everyday. Now that is over, Catholic culture will be less frequent but still here some days and today is one of those days. Of all the aspects of Catholic culture, one of the most interesting is moral theology.  Catholic moral theology is one of those things that people claim to hate but keep finding uses for. Anyway, here is bit of Catholic culture regarding moral theology and what better place to start talking about Catholic culture than an anecdote about an event that took place in the basement of an Anglican church.

A few years ago now, I was in a discussion group at an Anglican church. As the visiting Catholic, I tried to be a sympathetic listener rather than contribute a lot to the discussion. The discussion grew out of one of the Alpha courses so it was very much at the evangelical, or low church, end of the scale: much talk of scripture and preaching and very little ceremony, long flowing robes or romantic choral tradition.

Anyway, John's letters came up. This was not the wish of the group leader. She was a big fan of people reading the Bible, in theory anyway, but in practice she spoke almost exclusively of the letters of Paul. She cited bits of the gospels–especially Matthew and Luke—but didn't seem much interested in the larger context. The Old Testament for her was the selected bits from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and the prophets. The other stuff not so much. She knew the other stuff but she didn't base any interpretation on it.

Anyway, there was this very protestant woman in the group. She was a good person and always trying to be the servant of all. This woman had once visited a friend of mine and the friend left her alone for a moment and came back to find her cleaning the bathroom.

This one session, she was very nervous. She'd been reading John and she'd come across this:

If you see your brother or sister committing what is not a mortal sin, you will ask, and God will give life to such a one—to those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin that is mortal; I do not say that you should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not mortal. (First letter from John, Chapter 5, verses 16-17)

This poor woman was shaking as she read that out to us. She was shaking because whatever protestant tradition she'd been brought up in she had been taught that Catholic teaching about venial and mortal sin was unscriptural and a lie. It sounded, to her, like this passage contradicted what she had been taught.

John is like that in his letters; he suddenly throws out things that shake you up. He more or less has to because his style is to tear off about seemingly comforting notions about love and God with great enthusiasm and then he has to pull back and qualify and explain* because he realizes he has gone too far. It is one of the many things the letters have in common with the gospel that is attributed to John. He gushes a bit and then he gets going to the point he has to pull back.

His first letter starts off saying that everyone sins and that if we deny that we sin, we are liars. That sounds good but he ends up saying, "No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him." Those two statements simply cannot be true at the same time, so John has to make an adjustment about sins and categories of sin, as he does in the bit above. Everyone sins but some kinds of sin do not necessarily imply that we are separated from Jesus, that we do not abide in him.

Incidentally, I have never seen any Catholic moral theologian cite this passage to justify the distinction between venial and mortal sin. They always argue on straight logical grounds. In Catholic thinking the two types of sin is flow out of natural law. In a sense, of course, you might say that John arrives at his conclusion the same way, albeit with considerably less logical rigor. As Lady Marchmain might say, the distinction between the two types of sin is in the logic of the thing.

By the way, "venial" derives from a Latin word meaning forgiveness because these are forgivable sins. All sins are forgivable, of course, but some require full penance and absolution whereas venial sins are forgivable sins do not require that we make full penance or even that we be aware of a specific sin being a sin. Anyway, the point I ant to make is that "venial"  does not derive  from Venus referring to matters of sexual love. That said, it seems to me that many, many sexual sins, probably the vast majority of sexual sins, are necessarily venial. This quite contrary to what a lot of Catholics argue.

Which brings to mind a funny thing about Casanova, whom I love. Casanova requested and received the last rites on his deathbed. As a consequence, a lot of people, including not a few scholars, have written that Casanova had a last minute change of heart. But he didn't: Casanova was devout Catholic his entire life. Really.

It's one of the incredible ironies that when the first edition of Casanova appeared in France it was heavily censored not because of the sexual stuff but because of his pro-Catholic and pro ancien regime sentiments. People like Casanova, Walter Pater, and Evelyn Waugh always cause scandal for some kinds of thinkers precisely because they refuse to be as evil as their critics want them to be. TS Eliot, for example, despised Pater to such a degree that he couldn't write rationally about the man.

Okay, back to work with me. I'll be writing about male bashing in sex advice columns tomorrow.

*This is the opposite of Paul who starts off by saying things that shake us up but, if we read to the end, he ends up qualifying them down in ways that don't shake us up so much.

The moral claim

Tyler Cowen also claims that stories make us unhappy. Because stories lead us to imagine our lives in certain ways, they also try to lead lives that are appropriate to these stories. But, Cowen asks, are our lives really like that?

When asked to describe what their life was like, Cowen tells us that most people defined in terms of stories. The most common example of the stories people saw their lives in terms of a journey (51%), a battle (11%), the seasons (10%), novel (8%), a race (5%), a live performance like a play (5%), or a carousel (4%). There are a few undecideds and "other" as well.

Very few people, Cowen points out, see their lives as a mess. And yet a mess is, he insists, what it probably is. He goes on to ensure us that this could be a good thing; that we would be happier* if we just accepted that our lives are messes. That's the moral claim. We just make ourselves miserable pretending that our lives are journey's when they are actually messes and we should stop doing that.



* I can't help but notice that the specifically moral argument he uses is more akin to Aristotle than typical modern morality. Modern moral arguments tend to be about making the right choices. But when people just talk about what really matters to them, happiness always looms large just as it does for Cowen here.