Manly Thor's Day Special

Rejection
Men hate rejection. I sure do.

I'll tell you how I got over it. I took a notebook with me to have a coffee. Nowadays you'd probably want to take a laptop. I didn't think I was curing myself of rejection. I was just writing descriptions of people I saw. It was a writing exercise. I was going to write some portraits of people. And they ended up being portraits of women-people because, for some bizarre reason, I find women much more interesting than men.

The thing is I didn't write many because I kept rejecting people. The vast majority of the women who walked into the coffeeshop weren't worth my time to even write a paragraph about. I didn't look at each one and think, 'Well maybe but no'. No, I looked at them and then looked away because, to me at that moment, she wasn't worth the little bit of investment it would have taken to reach a judgment about her. I made those decisions so fast I didn't even notice they were decisions.

That's how women reject us and they have every right in the world to do so.

Now you may say, 'If you'd taken the trouble to try to find something interesting in them, you could have.' Yeah, I could have. But so could you. I mean that is what every pathetic guy with a crush on a woman thinks. He knows she is beautiful and intelligent and wonderful so why should she pay attention to him? Well, the pathetic guy that we all sometimes are thinks, because she should. If she really is as wonderful as she is, then she should be willing to see past all the reasons to reject me and find what is good in me. Why even if I can't see these things for myself she should be able ....

I'll stop there because it should be obvious that is crazy talk.

Women often reject us for trivial reasons and they often reject us for good reasons but here is the point: they don't need to provide reasons. This is how your mother screws you up. She tells you that you can't do something and then she gives a reason. And she is willing to let you argue the point.

You've seen this right? You've sat and been made uncomfortable and everyone else in the room has been made uncomfortable because the child's mother keeps reasoning with him. She keeps explaining and giving more and more reasons. She won't say what needs to be said, 'You can't do it because Mummy said you can't do it.'

That's the thing about rejection. We all do it and we're all allowed to to do it. She doesn't have to give you a reason for why she won't to talk to you, for why she won't let you kiss her, for why she won't let you touch her breasts, for why she won't go out with you, for why she won't keep going out with you. Our mother fell over herself proving that she loved us no matter what happened but (if we are lucky) she is the only woman in our lives who will ever do that and, quite frankly, we'd all be better off if she'd tried less hard than she did.

Other women will reject us for whatever reasons they want and those reasons don't have to have anything to do with us.

'She doesn't care that I exist.'

'That's absolutely right. Do you have a problem with that? Because you shouldn't.'

Marxists, Feminists, Christians and Erotic Love

Crazy Love: My Lenten reading project
How does oppressed people, say women, get into the revolution in the first place? Well, the most likely thing is actually rising expectations. If, for example, women gain some freedoms and hopes that they never had before, they will fight for more. That is the way, historically speaking, feminism actually came about. It is why feminism sprung up in precisely the countries where women already had some freedoms and not in countries such as Iran where it would seem most logical and is certainly most needed.

Marx never saw this. Marx thought that revolutions came out of greater and greater suffering. That was why he liked capitalism. Capitalism, thought Marx, was going to make the workers poorer than they had ever been before and the workers would therefore rise up and revolt. He also thought that capitalism, and this is important, removed all the romance from life. In capitalism, Marx argued, all relationships tended to get reduced to purely economic relationships.

Churches especially irked Marx. He thought they covered up what were really hard economic facts with a lot of incense and ritual. He liked capitalism because he thought it would replace church with something much harsher and cruder. Which it might well do yet. But Marx's bet was that this harsh and crude thing would be so horrible that the oppressed people would be forced to see the problem and rise up.

He was wrong and the entire history of the left ever since has been a struggle with that problem. There has, as a consequence, always been a tendency on the left to trash talk capitalism. Over and over again, our leftist betters keep telling us that we don't really like all the comforts and conveniences that capitalism has given us.

There has always been a similar tendency in feminism. One of the most visible things girls and young women have done with their freedom is to embrace erotic love like never before: there she is, waxed and trussed up in her lingerie, short skirt and low cut top, cheering along as Taylor Swift sings about love. For romantic, erotic love is like the church of sex and marriage and anyone who likes to look at young women can tell you that there are more young women who are true believers in this religion than any other.

Not surprisingly, feminism has always been suspicious of love at best and some feminists have felt the need to trash talk love.  For them, love is the thing that keeps us from seeing these relationships as purely about power and personal gain. For it does them no good to tell women that men often exploit women sexually (which is perfectly true, as is the reverse that women often exploit men sexually) so long as people still believe love is possible. It does no good to tell people that there are lots of bad marriages, that there is often violence and betrayal in marriage so long as people believe that love is possible.

In her memoir about being at the barricades during the heady days of radical feminism, Susan Brownmiller recounts having her bona fides challenged because she lived with man. How could she be a feminist, she was asked, when every night she went home and sucked  ____? More recently, Laura Kipnis has written a book that she describes as a polemic against love. Here is the teaser she gives at her website:

Who would dream of being against love? No one.

Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions.

But is there something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.

Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won’t injure you (well not severely); it’s just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions.

But you know, this is one of those interesting areas where feminism lines up with a certain censorious strain in Christianity. Saint Paul is relatively blameless in this, although he is often recruited to the cause. Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, on the other hand, were right in there.

And let's give them their due. Erotic love is a huge problem for Christianity. For erotic love is a lot like a religious commitment with the added pay off of having sex with it.

And so we have a long, long history of Christian writers from Augustine to CS Lewis trash talking erotic love.

So who speaks for love? Kipnis, above, implies that lots of people do, but actual defenders of love are actually pretty thin on the ground. There are people who speak for sex but they are even keener to diminish erotic love than the feminists and the Christians. And there are people keen to speak of commitment and mutual support but they are rather shy about connecting this to actual, you know, luuuvvvv.

There was an odd little book that came out last year by Cristina Nehring called A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance in the Twenty-First Century. It got a lot of reaction and then disappeared. Her website, for example, is now just a shell. When the book first came out it was full of stuff. It now has the look of something that is just a placeholder.

The reason for this is, in one sense, obvious. There was something embarrassing about the book. It was embarrassing to read, embarrassing to write about and embarrassing to think about.  It's always embarrassing to write about love and that is one of the puzzling things about it. So I'm going to read it for Lent.

My blogging will start Monday. I will assume that few people reading here will actually read the book so the remarks I may will be set out such that they do not need any additional context. OTOH, it's an interesting book. It's not a great book so I can't recommend it as unreservedly as I recommended Brideshead Revisited (which is also a defence of erotic love) but I like it warts and all.

The next entry in this series will be here.

More Christian narcissism

I've mentioned before a story I once was told about GK Chesterton. I was told it by a member of the clergy who thought it embodied important moral truth. This story smacks of urban mythology to me; although it may be true for all I know. For my purposes it doesn't matter because it is the attitude behind the story and not whether it really happened that is interesting.

The story is that a British newspaper asked various leading figures to write on the theme "What is the matter with the world today". And the conclusion to the story is that Chesterton submitted a two word response; "I am".

Now that is about as pure an example of narcissism as you will ever find. For the narcissist the entire world exists only as a theatre for their moral struggles. The narcissist lives in a world where they act and everyone else responds. Only a narcissist could imagine that they were what is wrong with the world today.

Take a deep breath and say the following:

 "I will die. Not maybe but definitely. Some people will miss me but they'll probably get over it and if I have even a shred of decency in me I will hope and pray that they do. Beyond that small circle, my death will hardly be noticed. It will have almost no impact on the world. That is the way it is and, if we believe in God, it is the way it should be."

To put it another way, George Bailey is a narcissist. That is to say, there isn't a better example in our culture of pure, unrestrained narcissism run amok than the movie It's a Wonderful Life.

I know, I know, now I've gone too far. It's one thing to be writing this blog taking shots at the clergy and other fellow Christians but when I start trash-talking holiday classics I've really gone over the edge. Maybe. But before you decide I am watch the movie again. Watch it now, or in May, or in August. Watch it all alone. Watch it away from all the ritual that has grown up around it. See it again for the first time away from whatever preconceptions have taken hold. The movie is about as clear a portrait of a man who has completely lost his grip on reality as you will ever find. Really! Watch it. George Bailey is Charlie Sheen crazy!

George Bailey convinces himself that if he didn't exist the whole universe would reverse to that weird world where Mr. Spock wears a goatee. He's an ordinary little guy doing the best he can but he restores his "sanity" through megalomania pure and simple.

This is not Christ's message. Christ's message is all about how everyone, including Christ himself, is absolutely dependent on God.

By the way

A follow up point from my earlier post:

What we are doing is assuming a simple causal relationship between doing good and a better world. It's as if we believe that if Christians generally, or Catholic Christians specifically, behave the way we are supposed to then all the evil in the world will dissolve.

In clinical psychology there is a name for that kind of thinking: narcissism.

Go back and reread the Joe Carter quote I started with and you'll see the point:

The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work.

It's really all about him. It's a fantasy projection of personal feelings onto the whole world. What looks like morality is really a kind of megalomania. Think about it: we look out the window and see poverty and suddenly that is a sign of something about us? That is megalomania pure and simple.

It's an impulse we are all prone to but we really do need to control it. Dressing up a political morality and calling it Christian morality doesn't help.

Sort of political Monday

Two people making the same mistake from opposite ends of the Catholic political spectrum

Joe Carter put up a piece at First Things about his experiences with poverty and what he feels the poor really need most as a consequence of his having had that experience. The piece is worth reading. But there is a howler in it and it is a howler that is so predictable from Christians. Here it is:

The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work. 

Huh? How exactly do you make that out? And that howler opens the door for the first comment from someone named Brian that comes in like the old joke about the definition of a split second:

Persistent poverty in a society is not a sign of failure of the government, but of failure of the Church, failure of Christians. Amen.

This sort of thing comes up so often that it is pointless to try and correct it. Short version: Jesus isn't stupid and that is why he never told us to deal with poverty or to make it go away. He told us in blunt, direct language that persistent poverty is a fact in this world and that it always will be. The poor will always be with us and Christians are not and never have been charged with doing something about poverty.

As I say, there is little reason arguing with this sort of thing but I do wonder why it keeps happening. As I've said before, when smart people keep making the same stupid mistake over and over again it is worth looking into why they do it. Not to convince them—nothing will ever convince them—but rather so we can better understand how we ourselves are prone to the same sort of mistake.

As luck would have it, the very next day Father Z made a similar mistake from the other end of the Catholic political spectrum. He is quoting Louis Verrecchio but he is in agreement with him. The gist of the thing is that liturgical reforms from the 1960s led to Catholics' increasing disregard for Catholic teachings about sexual morality.

 Before I begin I should say that I am very much looking forward to the improved translation, that I hate it when priests who improvise and cheapen the mass and I crave elevated language. I'm with Father Z completely on that end.

Anyway, the first step in the argument is that when Catholics get the idea that something as important as the liturgy is optional, then they get the idea that everything else is optional too. That's a very good point. But then it gets carried over to the question of sexual morality. Well, maybe but with any argument like this you want to step back first and look for the longer trend.

As it turns out, there is evidence going some ways back that even the most conservative Catholics have been progressively moving further and further away from the church's teachings on sexuality and I can turn to a traditionalist Catholic of impeccable credentials to back me up on this one:

Magister began his piece by stating that a “divergence” has existed between the teachings of the Church and individual Catholic practice long before contraceptives were even on the market. The Vatican analyst then discussed how the book cites a case study involving a model Catholic area in Italy during the first half of the 1900s.

“Rural Veneto was at the time the most Catholic region in Italy, with an extremely solid, grassroots presence of the Church,” Magister explained. “But even in Veneto in the first half of the twentieth century – where almost everyone went to Mass on Sundays and to confession at least once a year – the birth rate was cut in half in the span of one generation.

“It went from 5 children per woman in 1921 to 2.5 children per woman in 1951 because of generalized recourse to contraceptive practices, the most widespread of which was coitus interruptus.”

So much for that.

But why do we keep makings connections where there are none. Why do we think that a commandment to care for the poor widow and orphan in our midst or to show kindness to aliens among us must translate into a socialist agenda? Why do we get onto a good cause, as Father Z has done, and then connect it to everything that seems wrong with the world? What we are doing is assuming a simple causal relationship between doing good and a better world. It's as if we believe that if Christians generally, or Catholic Christians specifically, behave the way we are supposed to then all the evil in the world will dissolve.

There is nothing in the Bible or church teaching or in plain logic or common sense that would justify this naive faith. But I know that I get into moods where I make just that connection and I bet you do too.

American Catholics and Catholic Americans

This post was inspired by a  question in the comments. It will probably be more meandering and vague than even my normal posts are because this is not a subject I have attempted to set out my views on in any ordered way before.

It's also a subject I don't really know the history of terribly well. I know some.

Buckley and Hef

I've been commenting over at The American Catholic. My comment was in response to Paul Zummo posting a post that Mike Potemra had put up at The Corner earlier today. The point of the both posts was that it is odd that both Playboy and National Review went on to have significant cultural impacts. That it is odd both in the sense that no one would have predicted it but also odd in that the two magazines represented opposing forces in American culture.

That was where I disagreed:

What I wonder is whether the two are nearly as contradictory as they seem. I don’t know if William F Buckley ever went to the Playboy mansion in the 1960s but it wouldn’t surprise to learn that he had. The two men had a lot in common.

It took me only four seconds after I'd clicked "submit" to determine that Buckley had indeed visited the Playboy Mansion.

The two men shared a lot. At the risk of offending everyone at one stroke, neither man was terribly deep. They didn't read nearly as much as they liked to let on and what they did read, they didn't read very deeply. As intellectuals, both men were utter frauds. (As long as I'm offending people, this was a quality they shared with a lot of figures of the period such as JFK and Pierre Trudeau. Unlike JFK and Trudeau, both Buckley and Hefner could laugh at themselves and didn't mind lapsing into self-parody.)

They weren't really cosmopolitan sophisticates either although that is closer to the mark. Dare I say that they were playboys? That isn't completely fair to Buckley but it's not completely wrong either.

What Buckley and Hefner had in common was that they recognized that most of us don't want to have to listen to a lot of moralizing prudes. Buckley famously said he'd preferred to be governed by the first hundred names from the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard and Hefner might just as easily have said he'd rather answer to the moral standards of those hundred people than to The League of Decency.

Both those designations are meant to represent larger groups: college-educated liberal intellectuals and culturally conservative Christians respectively. The thing is that both Buckley and Hefner made good bets. Most of us tend to think that those two groups are hungry for cultural and political influence far beyond what their numbers warrant and most of us fear that they may succeed. Both groups still haven't gotten it yet having, as the famous quip about the Bourbons had it, learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

This is probably redundant at this point, but I think both men had more positive impact than negative on our culture.