Some words to ponder

The fact of the matter is that Roman Catholic Christianity (also Orthodox Christianity, and some forms of Protestantism) cannot be reconciled with the expressive individualism that is the hallmark of late modern civilization. 

The one common element of most of the writing about Pope Benedict since he announced his abdication has been that the writer has projected their thoughts on to the situation. That is also true of Rod Dreher above. I doubt Benedict XVI worried about this more than ten minutes in his entire life but Dreher thinks about it a whole lot.

 He is not alone in this I'm sure. But is he right?

Of course not. He's trying to hedge his bets a bit by saying "expressive individualism" instead of simply saying individualism. This is hardly an individualist age after all. But "expressive individualism" hardly saves him either. You are, after all, only allowed to express your "individualism" in approved ways, which is another way of saying it isn't individualism.

Words

"Hip" and "cool" are words first. They have histories.

What they don't tend to have are clear meanings. Both tend to end up being used to praise qualities that the speaker admires but those qualities can, and do, change from generation to generation. In the case "cool" it is possible to find people using the word in a non-ironic fashion to mean something that is the exact opposite of what it used to mean. Beginning in the 1980s, kids started saying "cool" to mean something that was very up-to-date, very in right now, which is to say, they said "cool" when they meant "hot".

No one knows for sure where they came from originally. An awful lot of brain cells have been wasted in fruitless attempts to trace the word "hip" and the concept of "cool" back to African roots. Most of this work has not only been a failure but is, quite frankly, embarrassingly shoddy and naive. It tells us more about the bizarre (and deeply racist) desire of college-educated whites to connect with a black culture they believe to be more authentic than their own than anything about these words.

If you look at usage patterns, both words show up being used by whites first and then get picked up by black jazz musicians. "Hip" makes the move in the 1930s and "cool" comes across in the 1940s. We can be pretty certain about this because a number of hep talk dictionaries were written at the beginning of the 1940s (the most famous being Cab Calloway's) and none of these feature the word "cool".

The introduction of the word "cool" into jazz slang is pretty much the work of one man, Lester Young. And the interesting thing about his use of the word was that he didn't just get the word from whites, he used to describe a style of playing music he saw in white musicians he admired. Most of all, he used the word to describe the playing style of Frankie Trumbauer AKA "Tram". You can hear it in this video. Tram's solo begins at .08 and goes until 1.04.



I'm not sure how much explaining that needs. It's a little like explaining "green". You point at something green and say, "This is green". Well, "That's cool".

So what we have are two words and related concepts that come from white America and go into the black jazz culture and, without changing their fundamental meaning, come back out through that filter in a way that was deeply congenial to whites.

That's where I'll be going the next few days with this. For now, I'd like to drop a hint about timing. Both words and the associated attitudes are drawn back into white culture because they offer attractive personas to adopt for rebels but during very different kinds of rebellion. Hip and hipness really start to matter in the late 1930s as the world is headed back into world war for the second time and after years of economic depression. Cool, on the other hand, really takes off in the early 1950s, a period when war is over and the economy (on this side of the Atlantic anyway) is booming. That matters a whole lot.

All those poor women who can't find a mature man to marry

Emotivism is an ethical philosophy that says that all moral judgments are nothing more than saying, I approve of this. Thus, our ethical arguments are really nothing more than saying, I think this is good and think you should too.

One of the consequences of emotivism is that, if you believe it (and many millions of people do), then all distinction between moral argument and moral manipulation disapear.

Okay, I've said this before but it's one of those points worth repeating. Also worth repeating is how this transfers into advice to women about finding a marriage partner. Over and over again, women are advised to manipulate men into marriage. For example, Ryan Duffy (H/T Instapundit) has written a piece called: Training Men to be Better: Rewards and Punishments. It's about how to get a man to marry you!

He opens with what he calls "behaviorism".

Anyone who has taken an introductory psychology class has been exposed to the theory of behaviorism. In a nutshell, behaviorists believe that the reason human beings feel, think, and behave the way they do is a result of rewards and punishments. If a seven year old child gets ice cream when she gets an A on a test, she will keep wanting to try and get an A. If an adult in a romantic relationship gets scolded every time he leaves the toilet seat up, he will eventually stop doing it.  It’s a very basic principle, but is also one that dominated the field of psychology for decades.

Actually, behaviourism has been a dead letter in the field of psychology for decades. That perhaps doesn't matter as Duff clearly has no clue what the word means. In any case. forget that and notice how casually manipulative his attitude here is. You push the stimulus you want to get the result you want; the needs, desires and beliefs of the person you are manipulating aren't even on the radar screen.

By the way, this sort of simplistic behavioural programming doesn't work. If your kid isn't very good at getting As, the only consequence of feeding her ice cream will be childhood obesity. And if you scold your man for leaving the toilet seat up, he might reform but he might also leave you for a younger, hotter woman. The software (what a person knows and wants) is just as important as the hardware (inputs and outputs).

Okay, back to Duffy. Here is the problem as he, and others, diagnose it. He begins by pointing out that while men are just as enthusiastic about long term relationships as women are, they have an even stronger preference for what he calls "short-term relationships". Given this set up, he tells us the following sad story of perverse incentives that has gotten us where we are today:

But over time as women have become more sexually liberated and standards of waiting until marriage for sex having basically gone by the way side for both genders, an unfortunate consequence has resulted: women have been feeding the beast of men’s desire for short-term relationships. Being able to spend most of the day playing video games and getting drunk while also still reaping the reward of short-term relationships is hard for men to turn down.

Note the language here. I particularly like,  "while also still reaping the reward of short-term relationships". What he mans by that is that you can be an immature jerk and still get lots of sex. But the key transition is between both sexes being "sexually liberated" and the consequence of this being "women have been feeding the beast of men’s desire for short-term relationships".  That's interesting because the very next paragraph begins with the claim that "women have been the unfortunate victims of this cultural phenomenon". And the question I want to ask is, are women to blame for this or are they the victims?

Or to put it another way, if women really don't want"short-term relationships" why do they enter into them? Duffy's implied answer is that they do it for the sex. Think that through though. If women who go through serial monogamy between the ages of 19 and 27 don't really value those short term relationships much, if all they were doing was getting the sexual adventures that new sexual freedoms entitle them to, then they were just using those guys weren't they?

Duffy doesn't dwell on that because he wants to move on to his proposed solution. Before we get to that, however, we should note that his language here is contradictory. When women pursue the freedoms available to them that is just fine. When men do likewise, that is bad.

There are unspoken assumptions at work in Duffy's argument. One of them is that the real point of relationships is to produce children. The other is that women deserve to get a supportive, long-term partner to help them raise their children.

That's not crazy although it is incomplete. Another reason for long term relationships is to live with someone who loves and supports you in various ways and you can love and support them in various ways. What is crazy is the manipulative language used at every turn.

But should we also look to women to play a role in this process? In his book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Steve Harvey talks about men like animals and the importance of rewards and punishments. Harvey actively acknowledges his suggestions might not work so well with feminists, but makes suggestions likely waiting ninety days before having sex with men to ensure he is truly in it for the right reasons.

This is the same tired old games that always get proposed. And notice the problem. What he proposes is a social solution. It will only work if most other people buy into it and that means changing the whole culture.

If most people don't buy in, the results are predictable. Twenty-one year old Rachel has no desire to get married just now. She plans to think about it later, so she isn't going to wait any ninety days. Twenty-seven year old Carrie now wants marriage, so she is being more selective. Thirty year old Joe meets them both this month. Tell me why it's his fault if he chooses Rachel?

In any case, "chooses" is probably too strong a word for what he does. He meets and likes both women. Perhaps he even prefers Carrie in some ways but Rachel offers him sex now, so he has sex with her. That doesn't get him a long term relationship of any sort but he is happy because he got to have sex with a hot twenty-one year old and a thirty year old man who isn't rich or famous knows he isn't going to have many more such opportunities. Rachel only wanted sex in the first place so she has nothing to complain about. That said, if she changes her mind because of her experiences with Joe and decides she wants to marry him, her chances of convincing him are probably better than Duffy allows for, she is twenty-one after all. (This may seem unlikely but it happens with some regularity and I've seen a lot more happy married Rachels than Carries in my life.) You can see how Carrie will be demoralized because the life she wanted and hoped for is no longer available to her.

But the temptation, when Carrie comes complaining, is to say, "So what?" Life has always been tough and it has actually been tougher at most other times in history. Why should the rest of us care that a bunch of women coming to the end of their prime reproductive years are having a hard time finding husbands? And why does this justify women being manipulative towards men?

The solution to the problem, by the way, should be obvious. If women really want to get married and have children as a life goal then they have to get about it much sooner and in a much more single-minded fashion. If they are your desires, then it's up to you to make them happen.

Hip and cool as virtues

Timidity — bravery — recklessness

Whenever people talked about virtues in the past they used three words. One word meant that you had not enough of the quality in question, a second meant just the right amount and the third meant you had too much. Virtue meant having a good balance.

Now we tend to talk about virtues in purely binary terms. You are either chaste or you are not. As a consequence, chastity (which actually means being controlled and disciplined about sex and how many people you have it with) has, for most people, come to mean not having sex at all. Bravery has come to mean complete disregard of danger. Prudence has come to mean being, well, it has come to mean being a "prude".

We've tended to do that for two reasons. The first was modernism. Modernists saw morality as a matter of law. First you used your reasoning to figure out what the moral law was then you obeyed it.

And that is where the second part came in. That second part is pietism and puritanism. Pietism, which was a huge influence on Kant, emphasized a kind of extreme vigour in the living of life. It ignored the realities of human nature and said everyone should strive to live up to an extreme level of performance in everything. Puritanism did likewise. Once you had rationally determined what the law is, then it was your duty to follow the law. And it was your duty to obey the law even if, odd as this may sound, even if it was completely contrary to what the beings it was applied to tend to be like. If silence was a virtue then dogs were to never bark even though barking is something dogs tend to like doing.

This set up a sort of odd competition between the various Christian religions of the time. The praise of restraint transmogrified into an insistence on complete abstinence. The most damning effect of this was on sexual morality. There had always been people (Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine for example) who pushed the notion that virginity was the ideal we should all aspire to, but the thing hit ridiculous depths with the beginning of modernism.

And if we are honest, we can still see traces of it today. Even the defenders of sexual "freedoms" are heavily influenced by it as they tend to instinctively go to the opposite extreme recommending not that people should feel free to enjoy controlled sex lives but rather pushing promiscuity and sexual recklessness on everyone. The mirror image of any vice is just another vice.

Okay, but what has all this to do with being "hip" or "cool"? Well, the problem is that binary thing. We tend to think of people as being either hip or unhip or cool or uncool. And that is odd because we tend to admire not the hippest person or the coolest person but the one who shows balance and restraint. I'm no fan of Jay Z, for example, but if you compare him with other rappers, it's pretty obvious that the near universal admiration thrown at the guy is a reflection of his balanced life. He is edgy but not a criminal. he has credibility as a lover but he is married, he is a rebel but a successful businessman and so forth.

If we are going to get to the point where we can talk about hipsters in anything resembling a sane fashion, we have to think of it the way the ancients thought of virtues.

And it is a virtue by the way. You may sneer at me for taking a minor virtue so seriously, and go right ahead with my blessing, but it is a virtue.

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.

Moral privacy

Sartre talks in one place of a man in an empty hotel corridor who gets down and peeks through a keyhole. He does so because he knows that an attractive woman is in this hotel room and he has the good luck to see her getting undressed. They could do that once upon a time—you can't see anything through a modern keyhole.

Sartre's point is that so long as the person is utterly unaware of themselves they feel no shame. All this not-so-hypothetical guy is aware of is what he is looking at. But then he hears a sound and looks up to realize that another man is in the hallway and has seen what he is doing. Now he is ashamed. Until that moment, he had no awareness of himself as a subject of moral assessment.

(It never seems to have occurred to Sartre to wonder what the woman might be thinking and feeling but you can do similar things with her. You can imagine, for example, her being aware that someone is watching her and secretly enjoying it because she thinks of him as an anonymous stranger. He doesn't have any existence outside his role of fulfilling her fantasy. That would all change the second she became aware of him as some specific guy she knew. Then the purely private sexual thrill would get replaced by social shame.)

Notice the assumptions that are work here. Sartre, without saying it, is assuming that everyone knows what he is talking about from personal experience. And we do, don't we? You can't peek through keyholes anymore but you can find pictures of naked people or people having sex easily enough. And so long as it's just you and your computer in some private space, no one is evaluating you. Especially not you yourself.

If there is any thought that dominates modern morality, it is the notion that doing that is not just something we have all done but it is something we have an absolute right to do.We insist that there be a moral sphere where we are free to choose as we want because it is private. Or is it a sphere where we are free from morality period? Is it a sphere where I can do things without having to think about their moral status.

Ironically, we sometimes think of this moral privacy as a place where I can just be myself even though the self I tend to be in that place is someone I would be embarrassed to have you find out about. Million dollar question: When are we lying? In public or in private?

We're hypocrites about it, of course. Let the sex habits of some celebrity become public and everyone mocks.

Actually, never mind sex, let it become known that a former president likes painting but does so as a private activity that he only shares with a  few close friends and everyone else peers shamelessly and some will mock and hate him for not being good enough at it.

There is a funny tension between our desire to have a private sphere where no one judges us and our willingness to constantly invade the moral spheres of others. Back to the million dollar question: Don't automatically condemn the hypocrisy as the real problem. That is, don't assume that the same morality we apply in public must be applied in private.

Nowhere is the tension weirder than when it comes to style. Some people are flamboyant. They damn well mean to be a dandy, or a prep, or formal, or just like everyone else and they work at it and they damn well don't care who hates them for being what they are.

But most people aren't like that. Most people want to pursue a style the way like a keyhole peeper in an empty hallway. They want to constantly evaluate the style choices of others but never be subject to moral criticism themselves.

So which side of that divide do successful hipster chicks land on? Well, it depends who you think of doesn't it? Think of some person who irritates or threatens you and you will see them in the second category. But think of that girl back in high school who seemed to refuse to play the game and dressed with a sense of conscious playing at style and you couldn't help admire her even though you never had the courage to talk to her or to be her friend. And maybe you later wished you had.

How we evaluate a style is less a function of its success than whether we really believe the person adopting it can pull it off.

[Bonus question: When you think of God, how do you imagine him? He can see everything. When he looks at you does he see cause for shame or cause to love you? Are you a nasty, dirty piece of work who must be brutally shamed into being a better person? Or are you like a child who has failings but whom God loves and wants the best for? It's a lot easier to believe that God exists than it is to believe he loves you as a good father would.]

Prayer day

Given this morning's awful news I will be praying rather than posting today.

It is mildly comforting, however, to know that the writers and editors at the New York Times are still stupid:

When he took office, Pope Benedict’s well-known stands included the assertion that Catholicism is “true” and other religions are “deficient;”

As opposed to all those other popes who believed ...