No, you are not beautiful; get over it

I once overheard a bunch of average-looking women all agreeing that it was an insult for a man to have referred to one of their number while on a date as "cute" and "pretty". (The second seems to have been his attempt to smooth things over when she took visible offense at the first.) They all agreed that she was right to be offended at this. I think of those women every time I read an article celebrating the fact that Robyn Lawley is a lingerie model. Stuff like this:

While the high-fashion industry might consider the gorgeous model Robyn Lawley to be plus-size, we view the 6'2" beauty more as a catalyst of a healthier-looking future for cat-walkers.

Meaning, the writer hopes Lawley will create a fashion for larger women. Well, probably not.

In any case, I don't think the oft-expressed concern about what is and what is not healthy looking is the real point here. Thousands of women (and men) die because of health problems caused by obesity for every one who dies because of being too thin. On top of which, anorexia seems to be caused by psychological problems and not by an attempt to look like fashion models.

"Beautiful" is an ambiguous word; it means different things in different contexts. A man tells his wife that she is beautiful and he really means that she is beautiful. Later that day, he might say that Robyn Lawley is beautiful, because she is, and really mean that too. But he doesn't mean the same thing when he uses the word in both cases.

A while ago, a beautiful (in the second sense of the word) fitness trainer named Maria Kang posted a picture of herself on Facebook with her children and the caption, "What's your excuse." This got her all sorts of hatred. One commenter wrote:

People like you who post pictures like this make me cry because without surgery I will never look like you.

That statement should be framed as a sort of koan for our times.

Here is the thing, even with plastic surgery, she couldn't look like Maria Kang. Most likely, she couldn't even get close to looking good enough that a dispassionate observer would even put her in the broader category of being not-so-hot-but-kinda-close-enough-that-they-might-evoke-Maria-Kang-by-way-of-comparison. I wonder, will that make her cry too?

She couldn't look like Robyn Lawley either. Nine hundred and ninety-four women out of a thousand couldn't look half as good as Robyn Lawley no matter how hard they tried. Robyn Lawley would be just as unhealthy a role model for most women as Kate Moss is.

The issue here is not physical health but mental health. There is a stage in every one's life when we look at pictures of stars and imagine that we could somehow become like that person; that we could somehow become beautiful in that sense. If you're mentally healthy, you'll grow out of it somewhere between the ages of 15 and 17.

Beautiful in the first sense from above is a reasonable goal. Meaning, you can, with serious effort, hope to be cute, pretty and sexually attractive to the world at large and beautiful to those who love you. If that isn't enough for you ...

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/10/23/4571683/hot-facebook-mom-after-week-of.html#storylink=cpy

Virtue: missing the bus

The Lemon Girl and I have lost track of how long we have been living without a car now. It is seven or eight years I think. Doing so has reintroduced me to experiences that I had long ago and now get to experience again. One of these is missing the bus.

And I get to see others miss the bus too. You see them come running towards the stop as the bus you are on is pulling away. Or running as it approaches the stop. Sometimes the bus driver sees them and is willing to stop and other times not. It's not hard to imagine what they are going through. It's a big effort they are making and something is always riding on it, if you'll pardon the expression.

Last week, we had a rental car because there were errands that needed to get done. I got into old habits of taking things a bit easier and, when the car was returned,  found myself missing a few buses. And there I'd be, looking at my phone to see the time and when the next bus was due and realizing I might not or would not be on time for my appointment.

Putting it like that makes it dispassionate and that is very different from how I actually reacted. What really happened was a combination of anger and helplessness. The moral question is: How am I going to take it? Because I cannot simply master myself at that moment. It is long-established habit that determines how I react. If I routinely allow myself to get angry at frustrations such as missing the bus, I lose the ability to control myself in such situations. (The words "ethics" and "morals" both originally meant "habits".)

Moral question? Yeah! It seems like too much to expect that anyone would get morally wrapped up in such a minor thing. Who cares? And why should anyone care? And yet it is bad for me to let my emotions run over when I miss the bus.

I know, it seems so harmless to just let myself vent a bit. After all, I did miss the bus and this is an inconvenience, why shouldn't I be allowed my little temper tantrum. But why did I expect that I should catch the bus? I expected it because that is the mindset the temper tantrum creates. We convince ourselves that we are having the temper tantrum because something we hoped for didn't work out. In fact, the temper tantrum creates a sense of entitlement in me that wasn't there before I lost my temper. A moment before I was a guy working to achieve some end and now I am standing at the stop swearing at a receding bus as if it was to blame. Worse, I'm making it a habit to lose self control rather than build it up. And, just in general terms, there is lots of evidence that losing my temper is bad for my physical health.

That divine power of his has freely bestowed on us everything necessary for a life of genuine piety, through knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and power. By virtue of them he has bestowed on us the great and precious things he promised, so that through these you who have fled a world corrupted by lust might become sharers of the divine nature.

That's from the second letter of Peter and it's in the Office of Readings for today. What could be more full of lust than me screaming with self righteous indignation at a bus that I somehow have come to believe I was entitled to catch. I didn't think that as I was getting ready that morning. I kept looking at the clock as I got dressed to go. I was making efforts to catch the bus. And yet, in the short run up the sidewalk to the stop, I somehow threw all that effort away and replaced it with an anger that drove me to a sense that I deserved to catch that bus and that it was the fault of not me but something outside me that I was missing it.

Peter continues:

This is reason enough for you to make every effort to undergird your virtue with faith, your discernment with virtue, and your self-control with discernment; this self-control, in turn, should lead to perseverance, and perseverance to piety, and piety to care for your brother, and care for your brother, to love.

Qualities like these, made increasingly your own, are by no means ineffectual; they bear fruit in true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Any man who lacks these qualities is shortsighted to the point of blindness. He forgets the cleansing of his long-past sins.

I'd humbly suggested that there is no more easily accessibly accessible image of what that sort of blindness looks like than the person who gets angry when they miss the bus.

The Latin Mass: Modern vs. modernism

One of the themes I keep circling around here is what is really modern.

You might tell a story like this. Once upon a time, some people decided that they lived in a "modern" world because they lived in a world that had broken radically with the past. To live in this new world, they decided to make everything new, to create a new art and culture that was better suited to this new way of life than the old ways were.

Now comes the punchline: If you are interested in this new, modern culture they created, you can learn more about it by visiting a museum.

Something went deeply wrong. And the problem at every turn is, what is the measure of "modern" art?

It's weird that this even is a problem. Some modern but not "modern" art is incredibly popular. The Impressionists, for example. Also the Pre-Raphaelites. But if you pay close attention to people who argue about what should or should be considered "modern", they have serious misgiving about both groups. They are perfectly willing to admit the Impressionists but only as a phase that was passed through on the way to modernism. The millions of people who buy Impressionist calendars, placemats and other knick-knacks or who visit the Impressionist shrine at Giverny don't see it as the first step to something else. They see it as an end in itself. The Pre-Raphaelites, OTOH, the modernists don't even want to admit are modern. That art is seen as some weird throwback that, while pretty enough, has nothing to do with what it means to be really modern. Except for the millions upon millions of modern people who love this art.

Why this need to exclude so much of what is modern from "modernism"? What is really at work here?

I found an interesting example yesterday in The New Republic by a guy named Jed Perl who has the about as impeccable modernist credentials as you can imagine. He teaches at The New School and they write him up as follows:

Jed Perl, visiting professor of liberal studies, is the art critic for The New Republic. A former contributing editor at Vogue, Perl has written on contemporary art for a variety of publications, including Salmagundi, The New Criterion, The Partisan Review, The Threepenny Review, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, and Modern Painters, where he serves on the board of directors. Specializing in the history and development of post-1945 American art, he is also the author of Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis (2000), Gallery Going: Four Seasons in the Art World (1991), Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I (1988), and the forthcoming New Art City: The Painters and Sculptors of Manhattan, 1950-1965. In addition, he teaches art history at Pratt Institute, the Philadelphia College of Art, and Parsons School of Design.

Now Mr. Perl is angry. He is angry that a pop artist like Art Spiegelman wants recognition from the art world and he is even angrier that he has gotten it. [Link fixed] But notice this, the paragraph below opens with "nobody is more obsessed with their high culture cred than pop culture mavens". Think about that and go read the above again. Wouldn't you say that Mr. Perl has amassed a fair amount of "high culture cred"? Too much, perhaps, for us to believe that this happened by accident?

Nobody is more obsessed with their high culture cred than the pop culture mavens. Art Spiegelman would seem to have achieved everything a media guy dreams of: a Pulitzer Prize; a show at the Museum of Modern Art; a retrospective that has traveled to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; a more-or-less open invitation at The New Yorker. And yet in the catalogue of “Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix,” the retrospective now at the Jewish Museum in New York, Robert Storr, who used to be a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, is quite cranky about curators who won’t embrace comics with sufficient enthusiasm, and predicts that “someday soon the citadels of culture will be forced to open their gates and let ‘the barbarians’ in.”

You might think, reading that, that modernists like Perl want to keep the barbarians out but modernism has been all too keen to let the barbarians in.  They are just particular about which barbarians they want.

Perl gives us a powerful hint of who the good barbarians are:

The very first wall text at the Jewish Museum informs you that Spiegelman “has torn down the barriers that until recently separated high culture from low.” What on earth is a legitimate museum doing promoting such a ridiculous claim? Hasn’t anybody at the Jewish Museum noticed that those barriers were shaken if not torn down more or less a century ago, by Picasso, Braque, Léger, Schwitters, Picabia, and Duchamp?

We can see that Perl himself is the one being ridiculous if we ask what "low culture" is supposed to mean here? Have you seen any graffiti homages to Braques? How many Leger posters do you see on university dorm-room walls? Leaving aside Picasso, where, outside of high culture, and very high high culture at that, do you hear of anyone else on that list?

The answer is that what he means by "low" is Picasso painting his mistress with a penis imprinted on her head, or Duchamp painting a mustache on The Mona Lisa and making a crude pun as the title of this "new work". Which is to say, Perl is willing to admit what is crass, vulgar and ugly into Art, provided, of course, that this crass, vulgar and ugly is the work of the right sort of people. What he isn't willing to admit is anything that is trying to be genuinely popular.

That is an extreme example, but it is something that characterizes all "modernism". The way the new liturgy was introduced is a good example of this. One option for introducing it would have been to simply make the Novus Ordo available alongside the existing Latin Mass. If proponents had been correct in their assertion that the new liturgy better served the real needs of the modern world better than the old, then people would have experimented with the new stuff, decided they liked it better and switched. But it didn't happen that way.

Which isn't to say that it might not have worked out that way if people had been given the chance. But they were never given the chance. The efforts that were made to suppress not just the old mass but a whole lot of "old Catholicism" were staggering. And I don't say this to condemn the rather vulgar way the people who did this behaved, although that condemnation is richly deserved, but rather to point out something else. The problem is that they weren't sure the Novus Ordo would sell. They didn't trust the people to make the right choice, so they forced it on them. They mistrusted popular opinion every bit as much Jed Perl doesn't trust it.

The Latin Mass: and the latest modern crisis!

We get news this morning that former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey warns that the Church of England faces extinction withing a generation. Well, no, probably not. What the Church of England is facing—along with the liberal wing of Catholicism, Church of Christ, United Church of Canada, and the Mainline Protestant churches—is the possibility of being one generation away from becoming utterly irrelevant to the larger culture.

By way of analogy, think of unicyclists. There aren't many but there are some and every generation sees new unicyclists. The unicycle is not in danger of extinction. That said, the cultural significance of the bicycle is an important issue, the unicycle not so much. The Church of England is one generation away from having the same cultural stature as a club for unicyclists.

That is the source of the crisis that spurred Rev. Carey to speak out.

That is also why the demographic problem that so many others have worried about for decades now never concerned Rev. Carey in the past. He's never really cared about issues of survival; what matters to him is cultural status. If anything, Church leaders like Carey used to argue that concerns about demographics of the C of E were driven by scaremongers.

Okay, it would be easy to cynically suggest that Carey is only scared now because he thinks journalists are going to erase his name and number from their list of contacts. But that's not fair. Carey is far from stupid and neither is he any more vain than the rest of us. In any case, he is not going to survive even one more generation so he can hardly be said to have a personal material interest in the matter.

Let me suggest another explanation. And it begins with an often forgotten aspect of modernism and that is that modernism was always an elitist and anti-populist movement. Modernists were people who rejected huge swaths of modern culture. They hated what they regarded as sentimental art and religion. They could see that one of the unexpected legacies of Romanticism was to establish a giant market for sentimental art and religion but they hated that stuff.

That is why, despite the obvious popularity of sentimental art and religion, they went to war against it. They argued that the modern world had no place for sentiment. In their view, the thing that made "modern" really modern was that it was cut off from the past. They emphasized a discontinuity. They screamed of a crisis that called for immediate action.

And it is important to grasp that. Too often, the debate is seen as one between reformers and the the status quo but there are really no people in the status quo camp. Anyone who has followed the Latin Mass movement within the Catholic Church, for example, will know that there has been far more reform there than in the larger church. These reforms were all made in the interest of restoring the Latin mass to what was hoped to be a "purer" form but they were reforms nevertheless,.

In fact, if you look to people in the Carey camp, they will cheerfully admit bore you to death with their tales of having been unable to make any reforms in recent decades.

The Most Reverend John Sentamu told the Synod – where leaders will debate how to persuade traditionalists to accept women bishops – that they spent too long 'arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair'. 

The lie here is in the second part. The people are not floundering. They are singularly unaware of any crisis. In fact, if there is one thing that characterizes modern life it is the rather stunning lack of crisis. Stunning because they are constantly being told that really bad things are happening out there and yet ... yawn.

Rev. Carey is actually playing the same tune he has always played here. He is a charter member of the Church of the Modernist Crisis. Crisis is the card he always plays. He's never particularly cared about poverty unless it's part of a poverty crisis. He's never cared about female clergy or feminism unless that too can be linked to a crisis. He never cared about declining population of the Church of England until he could make a crisis out of it.

Whatever it is going to take to get people back into churches, assuming such a thing is desirable, for there are bad churches as well as good ones, it isn't yet another retired church leader hectoring a numb and bored population about the latest crisis.

Rare political comment: Ford and Obama

We have two politicians flaming out this month. Rob Ford is a guy most people had never heard of until he messed up so spectacularly. Obama was famous even before he screwed up.

The Ford mess strikes me as pure entertainment. So far anyway; there are hints of a dark side to the story that I won't mention here that, if they turn out to be true, will make this a very worrying story indeed. What we have seen on the surface, though, is pure comedy and very humbling for Toronto which, while I have many good friends living there, is long overdue.

The political consequences of it strike me as minimal. I don't think the outer-ring vote is going to turn around from this and all agree that they need to submit to whatever those hipsters in the core want in the future. If anything, I would think the opposite will happen.

The Obama mess is harder to judge. Obamacare may survive and then it may not. My guess is that the insiders know the mess is even bigger than has been reported so far; Obama, in particular, acts like a man who knows that a major charge against him is pending and is hoping for a miracle reprieve that he doesn't really believe is coming. Either way, it's out of our hands.

And that, I think, is the central lesson to learn here. One of the illusions journalism tends to foster is that being better informed helps us control our fate. It doesn't. No one even gets to vote on any of these things for a year, if you get to vote at all. Meanwhile, these two guys either go down in flames or they don't. I think you can get all the news about them that you need by checking up on them once a week. At most.

The Latin Mass: versus the sometimes painful weeniness of the new liturgy

Like the mass, the Liturgy of the Hours is part of the liturgical prayer of the church. It is both less important and less well known but it matters. A lot of people, including priests and those in the consecrated life, make a vow to say it every day. A lot of others, including me, simply choose to say it.
Like the mass, the Liturgy of the Hours (LOH) was substantially revised under Pope Paul VI. As with the mass, most of what was done is justifiable. I would argue even that the revisions were required and are an improvement, although I know a lot of people who disagree with me.

That said, however good the general sweep of the thing, the devil is in the details. And yesterday (Wednesday of week IV) had one of those details. There are intercessionary prayers included with morning and evening prayer. These were written by God-knows-who and, Deo Gratias, are optional. Yesterday evening featured this gem:

Remember, Lord, that you sent your Son into the world to be its savior, not its judge,
— let his glorious death bring us salvation.

I'm sure that can be finessed if we could somehow compel the editors to appear before some sort of tribunal. Perhaps, something along the lines of, "We meant the first time!" But you can see the problem I hope. If not, let me remind you of something that appears in both creeds. First the Nicene Creed:

He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

Now the Apostle's Creed:

From there he will come to judge
the living and the dead.

Now, as I say, maybe this can all be finessed by saying that Jesus came to save the first time and will judge after his second coming. But it shouldn't have to be finessed. It's especially galling that the intercession begins by reminding God of his intentions. Yes, I know, the real point is to remind us and not God of his purposes but that just makes it worse for what could be more important than to remind us that Jesus will come again to judge. This weenie intention doesn't just forget to convey that crucial truth, it actively works to suppress it.

I read stuff like this and I wonder, do the people who make these things up really believe the creed? Do they, in fact, really believe anything at all?

A few weeks ago, I heard a homily following the gospel in which Jesus says that he who is trustworthy with small things will be trusted with great things. Do you know what Father gave as an example of a small thing we can do? That we should recycle instead of throwing things in the garbage, thereby, "showing our respect for Mother Earth". Again, if you had to, you could finesse the point but we shouldn't have to finesse the point. This is was a homily!

It's not the core of the new liturgy, which remains redeemable by good execution and some judicious pruning but it is a major problem. Contrary to what some reformers seem to believe, it is a blessing that we might have to explain things in the liturgy because they are obscure or because they are hard teachings. If, however, we have to stop and justify stuff that is just plain weenie, that is a giant problem.

The Latin Mass: Teaching the heart to love

This is part of something I wrote in the comments this morning that I wanted to repeat (with some additions and corrections) here:

As to the participation issue, it seems to me that the big question is not whether the people should feel that our participation is somehow required (which is pretty vain) but what special efforts can and should we make when participating? Should we prepare ourselves by, just for example, 

• reading the collect of the day, which the priest still says for us, ahead of time and making sure that we believe and want what that prayer asks for so it really is our prayer,
• reading the antiphons and readings and thinking deeply about what they mean ahead of time,
• thinking about and making a specific intention for this mass,
• fasting.

One thing about the TLM is that it has specific rules for that sort of thing. Nowadays we tend to argue that what comes from the heart is better than following rules by rote. The problem is that, while that sounds good, it tends to become a matter of doing nothing. We think that our heart wants to love but it has to be trained to love.

ADDED: That is one  thing we do when we go to mass; we train our heart to love. It is also, we hope and pray, being granted grace by God and that grace is, by far, the more important part. But there is a tendency to forget that we should act differently because of that grace because I don't really believe in that grace if I don't act differently. One of the specific functions of the liturgy is to train our hearts to love. On that measure the Novus Ordo, at least the way it is celebrated in most churches, is seriously lacking. The restored TLM, because it requires more effort, does that job better.

ALSO ADDED: Yes, I know all about the pious lady who said her rosary right through the mass, stopping only to bow her head when a bell rang and to shuffle forward to receive communion. But my point here is to discuss the restored Latin Mass. Whether they meant to or not, and this is going to be my argument going forward, the fans of the TLM have made it into something modern and even modernist (in the cultural sense of modernism and not the religious heresy). Thinking this over in the shower just now, I've decided that is a bad way to put it. Words mean what they mean in conventional use and I can't over-rule the use of "modernist" by insisting on some special meaning of my own. A better way to put it is that the TLM enthusiasts have, without meaning to, created something that is modern without being modernist.

STILL ADDING: Think of it this way, a Catholic going to the TLM or returning to it, has to make a huge effort just to participate and that makes us actually earn our participation rather than treat it like a right; we have far more in common, when going to the Novus Ordo,  with that pious woman of yesteryear than we do with the seriously devoted fans of the TLM of today. It also forces us to think about the past and our relationship with the dead than the new mass does, really being modern means basing ourselves in the past rather than obliterating it.

I should add that I am not necessarily advocating a return to the TLM, although I think it should always be available where numbers wanting it warrant it. I do think, however, that we would celebrate the Novus Ordo in a way that was much more genuine and meaningful if we emphasized its continuity with the TLM rather than its discontinuity.