Crypto-Catholic Libertine

A post about coming out.

Here's Isabel from Le divorce again:

I gradually came to understand that Edgar was religious, at least officially, believed in God and the Catholic religion, in a not preoccupied but nonetheless sincere way.

At first I was shocked by this. In California, you wouldn't go out with anyone openly religious, because someone who talks about God automatically comes across as a hypocrite. But there was also the French hypocrisy, if that is the word—or inconsistency is a better one—in believing in a religion and conducting this rather unconcerned adultery.

That "inconsistency" can't be proven. It's not a factual claim. There is sufficient variation within any group that you could easily find Americans who perfectly embody the French attitude and vice versa, pun on "vice" very much intended.

We might say that the Frenchy American would count as an outlier in her culture while the Française à l'americaine would likewise be seen as really French and yet different in hers. I don't know if that holds up; it's just an idea I'm trying out.

It's time for a confession: I lied. Not to you so much as to myself. I've done this twice lately. The first time was on Facebook a year or so ago. A cousin of mine put up a picture of me from my early teen years. I'm not sure exactly how old I was in the picture but probably 15 or younger. It caused much comment among my friends because I had a style in that picture that was very far from what I adopted just a few years later at 18 and have kept more or less, with a few short side excursions, ever since. By way of explanation I said that I identified with Keith Richards in those days. I believed what I wrote on Facebook when I wrote it but it wasn't true. That was brought home to me rather bluntly last summer when I found a box of stuff I had collected as a teenager that had come from my parents' house. What was painfully obvious was that I had actually identified with Mick Jagger. To be blunt, my entire personality was based on my understanding of him.

Why did I lie, first to myself and then to the rest of the world? Mostly shame. And by "shame" I mean I was mostly scared to admit it. Telling the whole world the truth about your aspirational self just opens you up to mockery. Anyway, I said in an earlier post that I identify with Isabel but the truth is I identify with Edgar Cosset.

As a rule I would advise against ever revealing your aspirational self—the sort of character you aspire to develop—except to a few very trusted friends who you think might have useful things to say to you about it. Otherwise, don't talk about the person you want to be just be it. I feel safe breaking my own rule in this case because Edgar is only a type and I can cop to the type. Indeed, it's hardly a secret. Twenty-five years ago the art department of a company I worked for showed me the mock up for my business card for my approval. As a joke, the designer had put "poète et bon vivant" where my title should have gone. I have a type and it's not a secret: my entire office was in on it. Except to me who is sometimes ashamed of something that is not even a secret.

Which brings me to the name of this blog. Back when I started I called it "Crypto-Catholic Libertine". I shied away from that mostly out of fear of what we Catholics call "scandal". I was worried that someone might see it and that the implied hypocrisy in that name, which is not erased by the intended irony, might disturb them. So I ditched what was probably the best name the blog ever had.

Why am I going back to it now? Well, here's the continuation of Isabel's thoughts from above:

I brought up this issue in a rather general was with Mrs. Pace, without mentioning Edgar and me.

"Well, their piety is more evolved," said Mrs. Pace. "In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the wordly."

"The genuine?" I wondered.

"I suppose they are all genuine. Bitterness is always genuine. And there is nothing so fervently genuine as as the sense of being right. Smugness, autrement dit. Why not world but genuine?"

That point about all pieties being genuine is a deep one.

In any case, "Crypto-Catholic Libertine" is back.

"... protected from the consequences of their ...."

In discussing the novel, Le Divorce, I am commenting on something very few people have read or will read. And, while I love it, I wouldn't put it forward as something everyone ought to read. It's a novel that speaks to me because the heroine, Isabel Walker, and I have a lot in common but, precisely because it is so well-suited to me, it will not appeal to everyone. It also has a rather silly ending.

I don't think the silliness of the ending is entirely the author's fault. Much like Huckleberry Finn, the novel deals with larger social issues that the author cannot solve by herself just as Twain could not solve the the racist problems that still beset the America he wrote for. There is a huge difference between the two books in terms of moral import as there is no racist hatred underlying the cultural conflict in Le Divorce but there is a cultural conflict.

That conflict exists at two levels. First of all, there is the obvious cognitive dissonance that Isabel stirs up in herself. Like a heroine from a Henry James novel, she is attracted to the very different culture she finds in France. This culture operates on different values. That is not the problem, the problem is that it succeeds by operating on these values. Indeed, it is a very attractive culture to Isabel and she wants to spend some time inside it and that means she has to spend some time living with contradictory value sets.

The particular bit I wanted to discuss in this post concerns a struggle over a painting of Saint Ursula. Isabel's sister Roxy took a painting that meant a lot to her with her when she moved to Paris after he marriage. And now she's getting divorced. The painting is part of the communal property that must be divided between the she and her soon-to-be-ex husband. Further complicating matters, it seems the painting may have considerable financial value.

To further complicate this already complicated and tense situation, Isabel is having an affair with Edgar,  the uncle of her sister's estranged husband. Oh yeah, Isabel's sister has also attempted suicide, a situation she and Isabel are trying to keep secret.

So Isabel can't discuss the situation completely freely with her love, the uncle-of-her-brother-in-law-who-is-divorcing-her-sister. She does, however, feel she can safely discuss it as an abstract moral issue:

I continued to sting and seethe as much or more than Roxy about the total injustice of them taking Saint Ursula. Her enhanced value introduced a new element of cupidity and greed into the normal rancor of divorce. This I could mention to Edgar, though I still had not told him about Roxy slitting her wrists.

Edgar gives an answer that seems both sexist and profound:

"Women are too protected from the consequences of their actions," he said. "It always shocks them when there are consequences."

We are discouraged (assuming we're paying attention) from simply brushing off this answer as sexist by the staggering self-deception in Isabel's response:

He meant, Roxy must have known that by taking a piece of property to France, she was subjecting it to French law. But this doesn't address the total wickedness of he Persands ignoring that it was in our family, that it belongs to more people than just Roxy, that it means a lot to us and nothing to them, and so on.

I love that, "and so on." As I'm sure most readers have already figured out, the staggering thing is that Isabel is busy shielding Roxy from the consequences even as she attempts to analyze the situation: that is, she knows that Edgar is right.

And before anyone gets upset, the charge is that women are "too protected" as in protected by others.

Since the facts are against her, Isabel argues the law:

"You make a moral argument about Bosnia but deny the force of a moral argument in the family."

Edgar makes this response:

"What I say about Bosnia is a pragmatic argument from history," he said. "We are not going to quarrel, you and I, chérie, about Roxanne's canapé and an ugly saint."

A common definition of pragmatism is to take it as the opposite of principles. By that definition, Edgar does whatever works while hypocritically evoking moral principles which is exactly what Isabel meant to accuse him of. But it is not Isabel who introduces pragmatism into the discussion but Edgar. He clearly thinks this, incidentally, very American, notion serves him well. What is this pragmatism? Well, it's not the first dictionary definition I mention above as the a common understanding of the word. Rather, it is the philosophy that says beliefs have consequences and that they should be evaluated in terms of these consequences. Edgar endorses a strong moral stand on Bosnia (the action in Le Divorce takes place in the 1990s) because he believes that failing to stand up against ethnic cleansing will have negative consequences.

He doesn't explain w he does not favor a strong moral stand in family matters but form his answer would take is implicit in what he says; either he does not believe that what is at stake is worth taking a string moral stand or, more likely, he he does not believe that taking a strong moral stand will change anything, that neither the outcome nor the people involved will be improved by insisting on moral principle.

I think Edgar is right but I think there is something more. Beliefs have consequences! And we tend to shelter the people we love from the consequences of their beliefs. It's not that Roxy must have known that taking her painting to France she was subjecting it to French law, as Isabel thinks. The problem is that she never thought about that because she believed that everything was going to work out. It never occurred to her that it would come up. Indeed, Roxanne's beliefs about just about everything are that it will work out. A poet, Roxanne picks her beliefs for aesthetic reasons. "Isn't it pretty to think so."

And Isabel? For narrative reasons, Isabel tends to miss the significance of what is going on. She paints scenes without grasping the implications. She wants experience and she does things, mostly take lovers, because she believes these will give her rich experiences. I operated on that principle from age 19 to 29 myself. The problem here is not that Isabel is shielded from the consequences of her beliefs and subsequent actions (she lets us know there have been unwanted pregnancies and abortions) but that she doesn't seem to learn much from them. 

Two thoughts: 1)Pragmatism! 2) How would Henry James have wrapped this story up? Whatever he might have done, he wouldn't have resorted to the melodramatic mess that this novel ends with.

Yeah, I changed the name again

The old title, "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" wasn't doing it for me anymore.

I cut my alcohol consumption way back twelve months ago. It was affecting my sleep. Only after I stopped did I realize that it also had quite an effect on my spending. A friend of mine in university once said, "The biggest problem with giving up drinking is figuring out what to do with the ten thousand dollars you'll save." He meant that as hyperbole and it is but you really have no idea how much money you spend on somethings until you quit.

My new approach to alcohol is less of better quality.

So much for a blog name that starts with "Rum" then.

I'm still a Catholic but I'm much less inclined to defend "Romanism" than I used to be. The Church thinks of authority as something given to her by God. As a consequence, while popes, bishops and priests usually (but not always) recognize that their exercise of authority is flawed, they can't imagine that they would ever lose that authority. The rest of us live in a world where authority is earned and must continually be re-earned or else it's lost. Given the appalling events of the last year, I am not willing to defend my church's claim to moral authority right now.

That leaves "Rebellion" and that was always ironic. I'm not a rebel by inclination or belief.

So I'm went with "Jules' Search for Virtue" which was the first title I came up with years ago when I started. It wasn't my first choice and I've never been really happy with it. It was the first option that Blogger didn't reject as already taken.

"The populist pundit couldn’t be more wrong"

That's what Timothy Sandefur thinks he is saying in a post at Reason that purports to debunk a recent monologue of Tucker Carlson's.

Sandefur's argument is interesting, and not in a good way. He starts with a lot of gesturing: "If there were any doubt of the direction the Trump-dominated GOP is taking," and "... the speech wasn't original, but it reveals the degree to which Republicans have embraced the populist authoritarianism they once condemned." and "Carlson began with several swipes against "bankers" who exploit the working class to line the pockets of spooky elites." Gesturing, as opposed to making actual arguments, is not necessarily bad. It plays a role a little like small talk; it eases us into the topic. But what Sandefur does isn't neutral. There is a lot of sneering: "Trump-dominated," "populist authoritarianism," and "swipes against 'bankers'." No actual argument has been made in any of this. A reasonable person could ask also sorts of questions that are being ruled out of court by this sneering; for example, is populism necessarily authoritarian?

And note this quote from Carlson and Sandefur's response:

"Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven't so far." This is a time-worn rhetorical technique of freedom's enemies, who sneer at material standards of living in order to elevate abstract social goals over the needs of actual people.

Does Sanderfur even notice that saying, "This is a time-worn rhetorical technique of freedom's enemies," is nasty little ad hominem wrapped in a time-worn rhetorical technique? It seems to me that asking if cheaper iPhones are making us happier is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and it does not make anyone an enemy of freedom to be asking it.

And it gets worse.

Consider "cheap iPhones": nobody can calculate the hours saved thanks to driving-directions features, the lives saved through quick access to 911, or the millions of simple, happy conversations that screentime or text messaging makes possible for families separated by long distances. To deride this as materialism is to scoff at simple, even beautiful human joys. Imagine the consequences of eliminating smartphones (you can't) and you get a sense of the inhumane sentiments that anti-materialistic slogans conceal.

Just a minute Mr. Sandefur, where did Carlson say he wanted to eliminate smartphones?  The answer is easy: he didn't. And accusing Carlson of deriding something in a post that is simply dripping with derision is a bit rich.

Sandefur never actually engages the argument that Carlson makes. He argues against a straw man and, as if that wasn't pathetic enough, he argues poorly against that straw man. If you can't even beat the bogus arguments you put into the mouth of your opponents, it's time to start worrying.

If it were up to me (it isn't), I'd suggest that we start worrying about the assumptions behind the following claims from Sandefur: "Freedom—economic or personal—is not 'created by human beings.' It's the rightful, natural state of all persons. It can unjustly be destroyed, but never transcended." There are a whole rash of questions I'd want to ask.  If freedom is really the rightful, natural state of all persons, then why have so few people had it? Why did the notion and culture of freedom spring up in a certain place at a certain time in history? Why does freedom adapt to certain cultures better than others? Why do so many people lose their freedom not by having it taken away from them by others but as a consequence of their own free choices?

I think those questions all point towards one big question: What exactly is a "liberal education"? Originally, the expression meant the sort of education fitting for a free person. Over time, though, it acquired a different sense, the sense that perhaps certain kinds of education prepare us for liberty, which is a thing to be taken and not simply the natural state of things. That, it seems to me, is the deep meaning of "the freedom to pursue happiness".

The great pocket conspiracy

It's a conspiracy against women:



If you watch this notice how often the video attributes things to "fashion" or "the fashion industry". At other times, the video slides into passive voice such that things happen to women without anyone being responsible for it. At 3.01, "... from there, women's jeans fell victim to fashion over function." It just happened!

The video does allow that putting larger pockets into "skinny" jeans would cause them to "bulge out in ways that are unflattering for many women". Well, that's kind of a problem isn't it. It's a matter of contradictory desires. To have one thing, you have to sacrifice another. And that is kind of women's responsibility isn't it?

There is another wrinkle to this jeans issue and wrinkles have very much to do with it. The tiny pockets do something else too. They make it possibly to make women's jeans fit much closer around the crotch. Anyone think that's an accident?

What makes this aspect of fashion fascinating is that no one admits it's going on. It's esoteric: women seek to send erotic messages but don't admit they are doing it, perhaps not even to themselves. And it is precisely because no one admits that women do this that videos like the one above are possible. The one place where the mask slips is when the French historian Ariane Fennetaux is interviewed. Being both French and serious historian, she speaks of the struggle as between two groups of women, those who favor practicality and those who want to use fashion to make erotic display. That erotic aspect is not openly discussed in the video but it is implicitly acknowledged.

Here is why I think this is a problem. That struggle still goes on. There are women who want to make erotic display and pick jeans that will help them do this and there are others who don't want to do this. And there more than a few women in the second group who would like the first group to stop. They are powerless in this because the first group, while not the majority, are still a large group and they buy a lot of clothes.

And yet we act as if women's choices have nothing to do with this, as if small pockets are something forced on women by an uncaring fashion industry. As a consequence, we drive this erotic aspect of life underground; it becomes truly esoteric.

Virtue signalling

Rod Dreher shares a post today about a father who made his daughter walk to school after she got kicked off the bus a second time for bullying. You can read it here. Dreher praises the father for this action. Then, at the closing of the post, he says this:

(Though I wish he hadn’t shared this on social media.)

Me too. No loving father would subject his daughter to humiliation like this. We now know where she learned how to be a bully.

Those brackets are Dreher's by the way.

A fundamental moral question is this: am I really interested in virtue as a goal worth pursuing or am I really acting for other's consumption? To put it another way, am really I trying to be a better person or am I seeking attention, approval and acceptance from others?

Virtue signalling is not evil. Everyone does it. But virtue signalling is also not a virtue.

"... so convinced that women need wiles and arts ..."

That is from Le Divorce as quoted in my post from last week. There I repeated a claim I make often, that seeking to be loved for yourself is empty and narcissistic. That is the opposite of what is usually claimed. And that usual claim is at least credible. Isn't being loved for who I really am more honest than being loved for what I can do? To which I reply, only if you think what you really are is so darned good that you are entitled to love.

Suppose we flip it around and ask what we should give others. And here we return to the subject of Isabel lying to herself. She sees all these cultural treasures of French womanhood as mere "wiles and arts" as opposed to ways of becoming someone better, someone who can give attention, approval and acceptance to others that those others will think worth having.

And, surely, we wouldn't want to respond by saying something like, "What about the attention, approval and acceptance that I need?"

After this remark, Isabel starts sharing scenes. That is, she tells the story as if it were a series of scenes from a movie. Isabel, of course, could not have been present for some of these scenes. She tells us how she imagines the scene would be presented in film based on what she was told and what she assumes must have been the case, supplemented, perhaps, with a few educated guesses. The very first scene is Isabel's sister Roxy discovering that her husband is leaving her. And the obvious question, one that Isabel doesn't answer directly, is why?

Roxy we are told, is very American, going about dressed in jeans or "those awful flower-child clothes". But it's more than clothing. Roxy is someone who seeks to be loved for herself.

At first glance, we might think that the issue is whether Charles-Henri is leaving Roxy because she wasn't a good enough wife. It seems likely that this is a question that troubles Roxy herself, although she doesn't have the courage to ask it directly. It soon becomes obvious, however, that Charles-Henri has acted in an indefensible manner. He is an empty man, no one we need take seriously. And yet the question remains, did Roxy fail as a woman? (After all, she married him in the first place; why didn't she see his weakness?)

What does this mean? I think we can approach the issue of "wiles and arts" in two ways.  At first glance we might, along with Isabel, assume these wiles and arts only about pursuing a man. But at a second glance they are really about the art of living rather than the art of seduction. And here we have the real theme of the novel: Isabel, faced with French culture, has to treat the art of living as a serious moral issue and she has somehow avoided that before coming to France.