Sentimental tripe passing as biblical exegesis

I wake up this morning to find a guy I know, a nice guy, shared the following.

Jesus told the story of the prodigal son to make a simple point: Never mind what you’ve done, just come home.

This is attributed to Scott Hahn. 

Now that message is not antithetical to the message Jesus meant to convey but it’s not the reason he told the story. 

The story of the prodigal son is framed by two parallel stories. The first story is built on this conflict,

And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.

The second story is built on a very similar conflict,

But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 

But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him.

Here is why he told the story—to convey to us that he came to love and celebrate people that we’d rather not be loved and celebrated by him. The key line is when the elder tells refers to his brother as “this son of yours” when talking to his father. The point is not that Jesus will welcome back repentant sinners, although he will, but that we should welcome back repentant sinners for they are our brothers.

Notice how different this sentiment is from the self-serving sentimental tripe the quote attributed to Scott Hahn above peddles. (I’m holding out hope that Hahn, whom I respect, didn’t actually say this.)

BTW: Facebook, where this quote was originally shared, tends to bring this sort of sentimental tripe out in us. It doesn’t create. It’s our fault but Facebook definitely facilitates it.

“Got this black narcissist off my back ...”

“ ...

She couldn't care less, and I never cared more

So there's no more to say about that

Except hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have

Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman with my past.”

There’s a question lingering here that is near and dear to my heart. Lana Del Rey is a persona created by Elizabeth Woolridge Grant. Does “woman with my past” refer to Lana or Elizabeth? Which past is it? The imagined one dripping in Americana or Elizabeth the recovering alcoholic. I put it to you that you could listen to this album a thousand times, analyze the lyrics for hours and listen to hundreds of interviews looking for clues and still not be entirely certain how to answer that question.

I lost interest in Lana Del Rey fairly early. “Video games” was a revelation but the rest of Born to Die was gimmicky crap. Then there was a brief flurry of hope with the Paradise EP. I loved “Ride” and “Cola”, the latter, alas, she disavowed after the Harvey Weinstein scandal. I mean, I can see why. If anything proved that everyone knew it was that Lana Del Rey was able to write a song in which she imagined what it was like to be one of Weinstein’s willing accomplices 5 years!!! before the scandal broke. Everyone knew and no one did anything about until it seemed like it might be a useful political weapon. Worse, “Cola” reminds us that Weinstein had lots of willing female accomplices and that doesn’t fit the narrative.

But Lana knows when and how to play ball with the Hollywood establishment. Case in point, the American flag. Here is the first sentence of a glowing review of her latest album at a site called Pitchfork:

In 2017, Lana Del Rey stopped performing in front of the American flag. Where the singer-songwriter born Elizabeth Grant had once stood onstage before a wavering projection of stars and stripes, charged by a brash apple-pie and blue-jeans patriotism, she now deemed the flag “inappropriate,” preferring a screen of static instead.

What makes this kind of funny is that the sentence is right underneath an image of the cover of the album they are praising. Blogger won’t let me post graphics using iPad so I can’t show you the album cover but go look it up and you’ll get the joke.

Why, there she is—performing in front of the American flag. Could they really be that stupid? Why, yes, they could. “Screen of static” indeed.

Here’s a couple of verses from the song “Venice Bitch” for your consideration,

You're in the yard, I light the fire

And as the summer fades away

Nothing gold can stay

You write, I tour, we make it work

You're beautiful and I'm insane

We're American-made

Give me Hallmark

One dream, one life, one lover

Paint me happy and blue

Norman Rockwell

No hype under our covers

It's just me and you

I suspect a lot of people comfort themselves with the thought that she is being ironic. But is she?

The only thing we can say for certain is that the reference to the Crosby, Stills and Nash song “Our House”—“I Light a Fire” is genuine. We know that because the album is littered with references to Crosby, Stills and Nash. But even there we find some subtle trickery. In the CSN original it is the man who promises something, “I’ll light the fire” whereas LDR simply declares that she delivers. And that’s important because the man sure isn’t.

Here are the very first words of the very first track on the album. “God Damn, man child.” Later in the same song, she sings, “You act like a kid even though you stand six foot two.”

The second best song on the album is “Mariner’s Apartment Complex”. Here’s a fun little quote (courtesy of Wikipedia about why she wrote it:

The song is about this time I took a walk late at night with a guy I was seeing, and we stopped in front his friend's apartment complex, and he put his hand around my shoulder, and he said "I think we are together because we're both similar, like we're both really messed up" and I thought it was the saddest thing I'd ever heard. And I said, "I'm not sad, I didn't know that's why you thought you were relating to me on that level, I'm actually doing pretty good". And he was upset, and that's when I wrote the song. I thought, I had to do so many times, where you know like I had to sort of step on that role where I was showing the way and I was sort of being the brighter light.

We spend a lot of time wrapped up in our own problems—so much so that it doesn’t occur to us that other people have their own problems. Here’s the surprising thing: the simple act of pulling your head out of your own ass will make you one of the strongest people in the room.

Okay, Lana/Elizabeth. I’m interested again.

What I suspect drives hatred of “populism”

I meet people who tell me they hate “populism”, Trump, Brexit and the like every day. That they really hate is undeniable but their attempts to explain what it is they hate and fear about these things are always incoherent. I’ve long suspected that “populism”, whatever that is supposed to mean, is just a symptom of something else, the passing of a way of life.

A friend of mine shared this on Facebook this morning:

"The purpose of an education is not merely to communicate information, let alone current scientific opinion, nor to train future workers and managers. It is to teach the ability to think, discriminate, speak, and write, and, along with this, the ability to perceive the inner, connecting principles, the intrinsic relations, the LOGOI, of creation, which the ancient Christian Pythagorean tradition (right through the medieval period) understood in terms of number and cosmic harmony." — Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake

Now that might strike you as a little odd. How many people are committed to the “ancient Christian Pythagorean tradition”? Very few, to answer my own question. But what is at risk is the notion of using education as a way of indoctrinating people into a value set, a way of life. Slowly and by degrees, the government has been taking over higher education and, not surprisingly, it has been insisting that it serve its purposes, which are to train future workers and managers. That’s not necessarily an unalloyed good. But education used to be something different. It used to be an elitist institution whereby the young of a privileged class were indoctrinated into it.

A rude question I ask myself

Any time I see an activity or group that, to put it the way an existentialist might express it, proposes itself to me I ask myself, “Do the people engaged in this activity look like life’s winners?” Is that shallow of me? Perhaps. Jesus said he came for sinners—tax collectors and prostitutes.

On the other hand, there is a difference between choosing your religion and choosing your pastimes.

For example, marijuana use has been made legal in Canada. Dispensaries where people can acquire dope had sprung up in town even before it was officially legal. When I walk by those dispensaries I cannot help but notice that they are packed with losers. Losers whom Jesus tells us we should love. But I don’t think love implies being like them or acting in the way they do.

Another example, someone I know takes part on rather elite trivia events, gatherings of people who take this stuff very seriously. As typically happens, people tend to get good at what they take very seriously; these people can answer trivia questions correctly much more often than the rest of us. They are, in a sense, winners. But just to look at their group picture is to see people who are marginal. Deserving love but not emulation. (I know some people would insist that is impossible but I think it is possible.)

Walt Whitman controversy

Sarah Ruden, who has also done a good translation of Augustine’s Confessions has a piece up at National Review “Walt Whitman Isn’t America’s Greatest Poet”. It’s causing great consternation over there and, as near as I can tell, almost nowhere else in the known universe.

I’m not qualified to judge Whitman as a poet. I’m not qualified because I’ve never read much of the guy. I have a beautiful edition of Leaves of Grass on my shelves at home but, despite many attempts, I have never been able to read it. Not because it’s not good, possibly even great, poetry. The problem is that it fails to excite me. I just don’t care enough to keep reading.

And there, I think, is where Ruden strikes home. If we take it that there is a difference between “America’s Greatest Poet” and the “Greatest Poet Who is an American” it becomes possible to say that, whether he is a great poet or not, there is nothing about Whitman that speaks to America.

I’ve made similar points about James Joyce. Joyce may be a great writer but he hasn’t touched anyone outside the academic world. He’s read outside the academic world but only as a duty. Compare Joyce with Proust and we see that, there too, we have a writer revered by the academic world and read out of duty outside it but with a crucial difference: there are readers who dutifully slog  through Proust only to get enraptured by him. I know of no one who reads Joyce or Whitman and has that experience.

Instead, we have a writer who is read because he is “important” and continues to be affirmed as “important” because, damnit, he’s “important”. Most of the rejoinders at NR have that circular quality.

I have nothing against orthodoxy per se. I think there is a difference, however, between people who defend an orthodoxy because they love what we might call the content of that orthodoxy and people who defend it because it gives them a secure sense of identity to be aligned with an orthodoxy. I read Kevin Williamson’s rejoinder to Ruden, for example, and I find the usual good writing and sound argument I’ve come to expect from him. What is missing is any sense of genuine enthusiasm for Whitman.

Years ago, a Quebecois separatist whose name escapes me at the moment caused great outrage among defenders of PierreTrudeau by saying that Trudeau wasn’t an intellectual. When challenged, the separatist said, “Show me a time when Trudeau uses a quote that isn’t in Bartlett and I’ll concede. This stirred up even more outrage. As a teenager, what really struck me was that no one took up the challenge. For it should have been an easy matter, where Trudeau a genuine intellectual, to cite many examples of his having actually read the authors he cited in depth.

Similarly, if Whitman is America’s Greatest Poet, it should be possible to cite poetry that speaks to America. We haven’t seen that. All we have is a bunch of angry gesturing.

Frankfurt School on Religion

This commentary is on an essay by Jurgen Habermas titled "La verbalisation du sacré" from Parcours 2. An English version is also available under the book title of Postmetaphysical Thinking.

The form of the argument

The essay is divided up into sections designated by Roman Numerals. The first two consist largely of stage setting. The real action begins with section III.

The most important part of the stage setting for our purposes is his claim, I would argue correct claim, that a ritual does not depend on an antecedent meaning. You do not need to have a pre-existing mythical narrative in order to explain a rite. (There might be such a mythical narrative; the point is that there doesn't have to be one.) Habermas rejects the dichotomy that myths are representation and rites are performative. Rather there is a sacred compound of meaning and action that exists in the performing of the rite.

Rites seem to do two things for Habermas. They reassure us as to things that we feel vulnerable in the face of such as, "Will the sunshine return after solstice?" "Will there be spring this year?" "Rain?" Secondly, they reassure as to our collective identity.

It is this second purpose, not surprisingly, that most interests Habermas. His hypothesis is that in the genesis of our collective modes of life and associated forms of communication out of an egocentric, or self-referential understanding, ritual fills a blank space. That is to say we are naturally “narcissistic” [see note marked with * below] as it were, we treat our world as something to be manipulated to achieve our ends. Consequently, our understanding of language is self-referential. What is this thing to me? What is needed is a move that gets us from that to a position where I can talk to someone else about something that is not defined as how it figures according to my purposes but rather that has a meaning apart from me that I must recognize. Not just recognize as a definition but recognize in terms that impose standards on me.

Ritual, he will argue, plays a unique role in achieving this transition. It is important, I think, to understand the kind of argument he is making. He does not go so far as to say that, for example, it was logically required to bridge this gap the way that a cosmologist would say that certain highly unstable Helium molecules must exist because that is the only way Carbon could be formed. Nor does he agree that there is or could be empirical evidence such as archeological findings that ritual did play this role as a matter of historical fact. Rather he rather tentatively suggests that it could fill the gap and that there are no alternatives.

I would argue that the argument he does make is comparable to the argument for evolution. Evolution predicts but not in a testable way because there is no non-trivial difference between the survival of the fittest and the survival of the survivors. Why do I believe that evolution is true then? Because there is no alternative explanation that is even remotely credible.

To return to the text

Beginning at section III, Habermas argues, following Durkheim, that a ritual such as a dance or an exchange of gifts does not require an antecedent mythology. We do not have to imagine these behaviours as, for example, appeasing spirits or gods. All the meaning necessary is inherent in the practice. And there exists in these rites the potential for normative standards. This is how you do the dance.

If I might digress, this points to a deep problem in Liberalism. Anyone who has bashed their way through Leviathan will remember the interminable section where Hobbes tries to come up with a rational reason to surrender their weapons and enter into a social contract. I think every child reproduces that step: Two children agree to put down their water ballons. Then one says to the other, “You first!.” On the one hand, it is in boh heir interest not to ge wet. On the other hand, if one child can fool he oher ino puting down their wtare ballon firts hey can soak he oher wih impunity.

Arguing on the base of self-interest, which is Hobbes’s goal, never gets off the ground. In 2011 Habermas presented this paper at Georgetown University and in an aside he made a similar comparison with Rousseau. In order to enter into the Social Contract, Rousseau’s free individuals must renounce themselves.

In line with this, Habermas cites the issue of adopting a new status. He draws on Arnold van Gennep for this as he drew on Durkheim for the previous bit. He gives the example of a child going through a rite of passage boyhood to manliness. Figuratively speaking, the boy must die to one status before adopting the other. There is an odd limbo where he exists in a kind of no-man’s land where he cannot draw on his old identity and where he cannot yet begin to assume the new one. The rite, whatever it, Bar Mitzvah for example, must be gone through. That, and only that, gets the person out of his status-less state and beginning the development of his new life as adult. Habermas gives this a sort of metaphor for the socialization process. There has to be a self-renunciation and, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, that will put the person making any such transition in a very vulnerable position. Then, there needs to be a rite that establishes the new identity, the new status.

That metaphor established, he moves to an extended discussion of primates versus humans. Primates he argues are trapped in a self-referential viewpoint, an egocentric position. To move beyond this human beings need to be able to achieve two types of intentional relations.

The first he classifies as horizontal: two people who reciprocally take the perspective of the other. He doesn’t use this example but we can play a role-playing game with children with dolls. An adult acts out a drama where one doll hides something in a trunk while another doll is out of the room. The second doll is brought back and the child is asked to role play the second doll looking for the hidden object. The doll that was out of the room cannot know that he object is in the trunk and must therefore look around. To have the doll go directly to the trunk and pull it out is to fail the test. The vast majority of five-year olds figure this out and do the role play correctly. They will also pass a battery of similar tests. Neither Washo the signing chimp nor Koko the signing gorilla could do anything like that.

The second intentional relation Habermas classifies as an intentional attitude towards something in the world. The ability to believe that the yogurt I left in the fridge when I left home this morning will still be there barring some unusual circumstance such as someone else eating it before I get home. Again animals cannot do this with any consistency.

The ability to do these two things requires us to make a cognitive leap that is not explainable in terms of simple evolutionary adaptiveness. Human beings have a monopoly on this.

Interestingly, a mastery of language is not necessary to do these things.

At the same time, other requirements are fairly stringent. It wouldn’t be enough, in Habermas’s terms, for us only to figure out how to operate in cooperation based on symbolic mediation. That wouldn’t explain the deontic normativity that grows out of ritual. I can break off a game at relatively little cost. To break off a normative ritual in which the entire community is united is another thing altogether. That sense of duty is what meets the horizontal requirement.

The vertical requirement is met by the nature of ritual as well. If we are all making abeyance to the sacred microphone in the middle of this room it requires our all accepting something about the microphone that cannot be seen, that is its sacredness. But nothing that you can see about the sacred microphone distinguishes it from other microphones. I once saw women at a bachelorette party make reverence towards the plastic phallus. I doubt any of them thought the phallus was sacred. It was a bit of acting out, binding blasphemy. They recognized the importance of something they were transgression against and they implicitly agreed it was a real something even they could not see it. All they could see was a plastic novelty item. No one needed to tell the others not to go home and tell their grandmothers or their boyfriends about this. (You can't be blasphemous unless you recognize sacredness.)

I don’t think, as I note above, that Habermas makes a strong claim of proof. Ritual practice offers itself as a plausible candidate for this normativity and there isn’t any readily available plausible alternative. [I might mention Gadamer in Truth and Method and the connection between word and meaning. The only possible explanation is convention but Gadamer has set the matter up such that he needs something stronger. The meanings cannot be endlessly malleable. ]

There is, of course, a tension in any society between the meaning my momentary self-interest attaches to something and societal cohesion. "Yes, that really is my friend's donut but he’s not here and I’m hungry." I don’t think Habermas is claiming that ritual establishes a fixed set of normative standards that can never change. This is not his terminology but there is a degree of stickiness obtained through shared ritual that mere self-interested cooperation such as game playing could not achieve.

He goes on to say, and this I will conclude on, that in modernity many people live such that they do not make recourse to ritual. As a consequence, religious people have access to a kind of experience that others do not. He doesn’t quite come down and say it is a necessary experience but it is something that secular society simply does not have.

* Habermas does not use the term "narcissistic". That is my choice. He might object to it.

You may laught at Marianne Williamson ...

This inspired by a piece up at The Federalist that, correctly, notes that there are millions of people who think like Marianne Williamson. And that's true enough but consider the quote below. I'd argue that it's every bit as looney as anything she's said.

That love is all and love is everyone
It is knowing, it is knowing

That's John Lennon.