Sick with the flu

The subject header says it all.

Nostalgia and The Wonder years cont'd

Does anything about this paragraph from Slate's reconisderation of The Wonder Years strike you as odd?

For a head trip, consider that Kevin Arnold and Sally Draper are exactly the same age: While Kevin is sheltered in a safe suburban bubble with his nuclear family, not kissing Winnie even when they are parked at Make Out Point, Sally has been exposed to a creepy adult world full of home intruders, adulterous fathers with their pants off, avuncular family friends receiving blow jobs. Sally’s already practiced at contending with drunk, gropey boarding-school boys. It’s hard to imagine Kevin as one of those boys.

The words that should get your bullshit detector flashing are "sheltered" and "bubble".

Factually, it's credible. Kevin did live in a safe suburban neighbourhood and Sally has been exposed to a lot of creepy stuff. So much so that the parents of the girl who plays Sally won't let her watch the show. And I have no trouble at all believing that a child of divorced and dysfunctional parents like Sally Draper would have an unenviable childhood. (Families are never dysfunctional but the people in them sure can be.)

But why take it for granted that Kevin is sheltered in a bubble while Sally is exposed to the real 1960s?

What is at work here might be called the modernist fallacy. Modernists insist that we live in a world that is fragmented, disenchanted and frightening. They keep insisting this even though most of us in the west know no such world. The only way to avoid this indisputable evidence against their favourite fantasy is to insist—over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again—that the comfortable and comforting lives that most of us have lived is a sheltered fantasy only possible in a suburban bubble.

... The Wonder Years insists that the suburbs were a shelter, a place where the intensities of the ’60s barely registered, where the death of a beloved math teacher mattered more than the assassination of world leaders, where free love didn’t make Kevin and Winnie any less nervous about kissing.

That's projection. The show doesn't insist that the suburbs were a shelter. It only insists, because it's true, that the suburbs were actually good places to grow up no matter what intellectuals might insist to the contrary that these things either never happened or they were only possible because the people who lived them were members  of a privileged elite.

Interesting, in that regard, that wealthy Sally Draper is credible as a girl exposed to creepy and scary stuff while Kevin Arnold growing up in a very ordinary middle class setting is equally credible as not being exposed to all that stuff. Isn't shelter from scary stuff usually the sort of thing that comes from wealth and power, which Sally's parents have in abundance?

Nostalgia isn't the escape it's often painted as being. It's an act of rebellion against an intellectual elite who want to rob you of your history and culture.

What is Pope Francis up to?

(The post I promised on The Wonder Years and the meaning of nostalgia will be up tomorrow.)

I don't know. I should admit that upfront. I'm just going to ramble on here.

Here are some things I am pretty sure Pope Francis is NOT

• He isn't humble. He is making a show of humility and that is a very different thing from actually being humble.
• He isn't a throwback to Leo XIII or any of the social policy popes.

 Here is what I think he is:

• I think he is a hard man, as tough as steel.

There is some good stuff in his interview. The best part was when he talked about the church as a field hospital. At first it was kind of ominous because it seemed to smack of the worst of the Catholic socialism of the 1960s and 1970s.

You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds.... And you have to start from the ground up.

The lefty priests who nearly destroyed the church back in the day used to talk like this but they used it as an excuse to ignore , you know, Jesus. Their next move was usually to say we needed to to forget about all this humans are sinners in need of redemption stuff and deal with poverty and hunger first.

Francis doesn't do that. His next move is to deal with sin.

And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all. The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much of a rigorist or too lax. Neither is merciful, because neither of them really takes responsibility for the person. The rigorist washes his hands so that he leaves it to the commandment. The loose minister washes his hands by simply saying, ‘This is not a sin’ or something like that. In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds.

That could have come straight out of Saint Alphonsus Ligouri. It's also a very high stakes move on Francis's part.

It's primarily a swipe at Humanae Vitae Catholics. He makes a bit of an Obama move here in that he seems to be taking a swipe in the other direction too in mentioning the loose minister but that is just for decoration. The real problem with loose ministers is not that they are too lenient in the confessional. The problem is that they don't encourage anyone to go to the confessional in the first place. Francis has said nothing to them here.

What is a Humanae Vitae Catholic? These are Catholics who define themselves primarily around a series of rules about sexual conduct. Humane Vitae produced two strong responses. One just about everyone knows about and another that only  a few do. Everyone knows about the opposition. Less well known was the reaction of millions of Catholics for whom the encyclical became their anchor in the storm. In the 1960s when the church was changing seemingly every week and in the 1970s when it became obvious that those changes had not revitalized the church and had probably made things worse, they sought something solid to cling to and church teaching about birth control became that thing.

You hear a lot about abortion but that is the outward cover. The real issue  for Humane Vitae traditionalists is contraception and, because it is firmly tied to it, the moral purpose of sex. It's one of the odd things about this kind of Catholic thinking that it respects the dignity of all human beings but simply takes for granted that lots of people who have made no vow of celibacy will be celibate.

It's important to state this because it so rarely is stated. The church teaches that gay men, widows, divorced persons, single persons are all to refrain from sex and masturbation. The woman or man whose spouse leaves them , for example, is promised love and compassion from the church but it is taken for granted, at the same time, that they will be expected live the rest of their lives without sex.

Now, the church has been around a long, long time and it would not have been if it had pushed a doctrine so obviously at odds with human nature. Historically, the problem was dealt with through a mixture of cynicism and idealism. The church was cynical about men and idealistic about women. Every Catholic town had its brothel and everyone knew this. At the same time, people went to great lengths to imagine women were something "pure" that women are not. An willfully blind eye was turned towards girls and women. And here the church had a massive cultural impact that is with us 'til this day.

Now some will rush in and point out that Francis was very careful to reaffirm church teaching on sexuality. They will insist that he has not and will not change the rules. And they are absolutely right about this. But he hasn't changed the rules because he couldn't.

But there is more than one way to skin a cat. The town I grew up in had a law against spitting on the sidewalks. Nobody had been arrested for spitting on the sidewalks for decades. More importantly, virtually nobody knew that the law even existed anymore.

That's the strategy I think Francis is pushing. Everyone noticed how he came back the day after the interview was published to reaffirm teaching on abortion. What they didn't notice was how little he has to say about contraception or sex outside marriage. Except the bishops. You can be sure they noticed and they know what is expected of them now.

He's done two things to reinforce this. One, as I've already noted, is that he's told everyone in the church hierarchy that they don't have to talk about sexual teachings anymore. The traddies have made it almost a litmus test for bishops that they jump up and salute every time these issues are run up the flagpole. Francis has given them new cover to avoid these issues.

The second thing, though, is something that has not been widely noted and it is much more significant. I am referring to his comments on the Roman curia:

They are instruments of help. In some cases, however, when they are not functioning well, they run the risk of becoming institutions of censorship. It is amazing to see the denunciations for lack of orthodoxy that come to Rome. I think the cases should be investigated by the local bishops’ conferences, which can get valuable assistance from Rome. 

That sounds reasonable only to someone who isn't aware of what local bishop's conferences are really like. This is a little like the mother who assures her teenaged daughter that she doesn't want to be repressive. "I'll be here for you if you need advice and guidance dear but I trust you to make your own decisions about sex." Anyone even vaguely familiar with the track record of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, to pick one non-random example, knows exactly how this will play out. They will return to their old games of, for example, teaching the exceptions to the rules while forgetting to mention there actually are rules in the first place knowing that the Pope has just taken away the faithful's sole recourse against their excesses.

Within two decades at the very outside, that will have the effect of reducing Humane Vitae to the same level as my home town's anti-spitting laws. To be brutally honest, I can live with that. At the same time, I fear Pope Francis may be disastrous for the liturgy.

 Again, that is in line with what Francis has said elsewhere. The current pope has made it painfully clear that he doesn't thing the liturgy is the way to reach out people in need. He thinks other channels are more fruitful. He's wrong about that. As I said at the top, he isn't humble. There has been some discussion in the Catholic blogosphere about whether the media is playing the pope or he is playing the media. My fear is that he is actually playing himself.

Nostalgia

One of my favourite themes and it comes up in a post by Slate's television critic about The Wonder Years.

... it was always explicitly about nostalgia: a reminiscence of the honeyed, home-movie days of midcentury American adolescence that wanted its audience to miss the past from the very start. And unlike those series, The Wonder Years is hovering influentially over this fall’s new comedies, a batch of family sitcoms riffing on taciturn dads like Jack Arnold and the fantasy that life used to be simpler.

If you read it, you'll notice it's a weird piece in that it doesn't quite identify the problem it wants to talk about.

 I mean, you can guess the problem. It is anger at people who like shows like The Wonder Years for wanting to return to a past that either "can never be regained" or, more harshly, "never existed in the first place". It's a common strategy for reformers. Pope Francis was pushing it the other day.

The defining aspect of this change of epoch is that things are no longer in their place. Our previous ways of explaining the world and relationships, good and bad, no longer appears to work. The way in which we locate ourselves in history has changed. Things we thought would never happen, or that we never thought we would see, we are experiencing now, and we dare not even imagine the future. That which appeared normal to us – family, the Church, society and the world – will probably no longer seem that way. We cannot simply wait for what we are experiencing to pass, under the illusion that things will return to being how they were before. (Father Z's added emphasis retained.)

He doesn't want you to think that he is changing the church. He wants you to think that the world is changing so we have no choice but to change. (And ducking personal responsibility is a big part of this argument: "Don't hold me responsible for this.")

The argument that things have changed so we have to live differently is a powerful one and that is, no doubt, part of why people keep using it.

Two questions though:

1. Isn't this trivial? Or, to put it another way, isn't change constant such that change is a thing that never changes, a thing that every generation in history has dealt with?
2. Does everything change? Or are there aspects of life (really important, even basic aspects of life succh as human nature, for example) that don't change?

And I'll leave it there for now. More in Monday.

Roger Scruton on the C of E

One of the classic clichés is to say of a writer is that he is "always worth reading". Roger Scruton is perhaps the only writer alive today whom I think it actually true to say that of.

A sacramental church, is a place where people come to encounter God, to stand in his presence, and to look with renewed awe on the troubling fact of their own existence, and on the need to be in everyday life what they perforce must be in Church.

Skin-tight and see-through

A woman who went into the bank ahead of me today was wearing skin-tight leggings with see-through panels. I mention this because the combination had an odd effect. You might think that this would be forcefully erotic, if perhaps trashy, but it was not. The two effects produced so much noise that eroticism wasn't possible.

I wonder if this isn't the real point behind the old fashion advice that a woman should highlight her breasts or her legs but never both at the same time?

Seduction!

Responding to the same article by Joyce Maynard that I quoted yesterday, a writer at Legal Insurrection doubts the claim that, "To many, he was a kind of god."

Really? Many? No doubt some; I know there were (and perhaps still are, even though the elusive Salinger himself is now gone and not just secluded) people who felt that way, who revered him in a manner that seemed both excessive and unhealthy, and who considered his self-imposed exile a tease and an invitation to pry into it. But “the human embodiment of purity”—rather than just a really famous guy who wrote a really famous book and who, like Garbo, wanted to be left alone? Surely these worshiping fans were a fringe group of near-lunatics?

Well, actually, I suspect there are very many of them. Catcher sells some 250,000 copies a year.

I remember falling under its spell myself in high school. I found a copy and read it obsessively, dropping all responsibilities, including being social to other human beings, until I finished it.
 As with On the Road, I was enthralled while reading it but really let down by the ending. It doesn't go anywhere. When I'm feeling charitable, I can almost convince myself that Salinger did this on purpose and that the reader is supposed to figure out that Holden Caulfield is the biggest phony in the book.

To not see that, you have to think the way Adam Gopnik does:

The ironies could not have eluded the author, since the one thing that a loner like Holden doesn’t want to be is the voice of a generation—his contemporaries being the very thing he has most contempt for.

Logically, that makes sense. But just as it would be crazy to actually argue solipsism even if you could do so logically, there is something crazy about writing a book like Catcher. Does the solipsist want to reach out to other solipsists? Unless Salinger's point is to show us what is wrong with Caulfield, he can't honestly claim to be dismayed that a lot of readers identify with Caulfield. And if Salinger himself seems as obsessed as his hero is with some sort of personal quest for purity, which he often expresses using religious language, it isn't surprising that a lot of people (many, in fact) came to see Salinger himself as a sort of guru.

The solution to this conundrum, as Mary McCarthy long ago noticed, is that Salinger was a narcissist. The key to understanding what is really happening in his fiction is to grasp that Salinger was morally unaware of other people except as bit players in his story. (You have to pity the poor guy who gets stuck on a date with Franny.) Other people could only be part of Salinger's life until they went too far; meaning they could hang around until their independent identity risked injuring Salinger's sense of who and what he was.

How did Salinger treat obsessive fans who sought him out? Here's Gopnik:

For what it’s worth, the movie suggests that Salinger responded to most of the stalkers with surprising generosity, trying to explain to them that he was a fiction writer, not a guru. It didn’t help him, either. 

We shouldn't deny Gopnik the several thousand grains of salt that he might be hiding in that "for what it's worth". (We might also wonder how one-way this seeking out was as there seems to be considerable evidence that Salinger went looking for these obsessive fans when he got lonely.) For my immediate purposes, however, I can't help but wonder how he treated those obsessive fans who were also teenage girls with hot bodies and the sort of adoring stare that just might lead a man to wonder what she would look like naked, on her knees and performing oral sex on him while looking up at him like that? Or, if you prefer not to be so crude, what if all he did was be a little less careful about this kind of girl and let her hang around a bit rather than sending her on her way and, well, things tended to happen? And he did this not just once but over and over again?

That this is morally blameable is beyond any doubt. But is it more than that? Or, to put it another way, what is Joyce Maynard trying to achieve by bad mouthing her ex?

Gopnik reminds that sometimes obsessive fans  will shoot the person they were obsessed about. We might wonder if some similar sort of bizarre contradictions also exist in the minds of girls who idolize older men. When they obsessive male fan pulls out the gun, his victim has, for all intents and purposes, stopped having any existence independent of killers narcissistic fantasies. The teenaged girls Salinger had sex with also had no independent identity as far as he was concerned but what about going the other way? What does it say that a young woman at Yale drops out of school to go live with a man thirty-five years older than her? Did he have any identity outside of her narcissistic fantasies?