Greek manners and Gothic morals

The last time I said that Nehring's polemic turns to Christianity next but that is an overstatement. What it turns to is CC Lewis. I grew up in a household where CS Lewis pretty much defined Christianity and I sometimes forget.

Anyway, the real battle here is with CS Lewis and Lewis has a tendency to complicate things and so my big challenge is not to introduce too many of his complications. I do want to complicate them more than Nehring does.

Anytime you want to pick an argument with someone you have two choices. You can attack their argument at its weakest point or at its strongest point. If all you want to do is knock down their castle so you can move on to what really matters to you, you'll go for the weakest point. Most of us go after the weakest point as a matter of instinct. But if we really want to learn someting, we'll go after the strongest thing.

So, where is the weakest point in CS Lewis's argument? It's in his claim that a new emotion was created. When we talk about love, we can talk in cultural or psychological terms but we cannot really talk about both. Human nature doesn't change. So, while it is reasonable to say that a whole new culture grew up around love in the courts of what is now southern France, it isn't reasonable to say that a new kind of sentiment, feeling or emotion was created there. Unfortunately, that is exactly what CS Lewis does claim in The Allegory of Love.

Every one has heard of courtly love, and everyone knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in the Languedoc.

That might seem defensible, as I say, if all he means by that is that a new kind of cultural practice. But he means much more than that.

The new thing itself, I do not pretend to explain. Real changes in human sentiment are very rare - there are perhaps three or four on record - but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them.

The very wording there tells us that Lewis realizes he is on shaky ground. Unfortunately, he didn't stop to think it through or, if he did stop and think it through, there was something he found in his own character that scared him so badly he didn't want to go there. Yes that is quite a thing to say of poor Lewis but say it I must for it is true.

 Lewis is unfailingly stupid about erotic love and remained so until he had a wild love affair of his own years after writing The Allegory of Love. Not stupid the way most of us are stupid, which is to by becoming irrational and immature. No, Lewis never does that. (Not in print anyway.) No he becomes stupid the way mad scientists and computers do in science fiction. He becomes super rational in ways that are a little scary while, at the same point, arouse pity because he never seems to really see the point.

 And you can see this in his own efforts at fiction and autobiography. There is absolutely no sense of real eroticism in Lewis. At the same time, to try and meet him on the issue in his critical writing is to find yourself dealing with the mad scientist whose rationality is so rigid it ceases to feel human and you begin to wonder what the man is capable of in the name of rationality.

 And yet there is something here that is really good and that will require more attention that Nehring gives it. And that will begin (and possibly conclude) tomorrow).

This series begins here.
The next post will be here.

Sort of political Monday

Jesus and Machiavelli
Walter Russell Mead has a great long post about Machiavelli up. It's one of those pieces that I wish everyone would read so if your choice is between reading the rest of this and going there, by all means go there.

But, good as it is, there was one point that had me wondering.

Dealing with the tensions between Christianity and Macciavelli, Mead writes:

The relationship of what might be called the pragmatic virtues of the civic republican tradition can never be totally reconciled with the otherworldly and transcendent teachings of Christ, and each person and each society must negotiate that tricky terrain as best they can.

Christ's teachings were otherworldly and transcendent? The parable of the talents, for example? His clever comeback when challenged with the potentially fatal question about whether it is okay to pay taxes to the emperor? Christianity, I'll grant you, often teaches a morality that is impractical and otherworldly but not Christ. He drove the moneychangers from the temple.

Christ is not a Machiavellian but neither, as Mead notes, was Machiavelli.

And we might note that while Jesus encounters both Herod and Pilate, the brunt of his moral criticism was directed at the religious leaders of his time not the political ones. Of course, to admit that would be also to admit that he might well have the same criticisms of the current political "ideals" of Christian leaders as he had of Pharisees and Sanhedrin.

Objectively beautiful

I saw a picture of her that my girlfriend Heather had taken in the early 1980s. Heather had been walking past a New York hotel when this woman came out and gave her a  big smile and Heather, who never went anywhere without her Nikon F asked if she could take a picture and the woman agreed. And I was shown the photograph and the woman was beautiful. She was old and quite overweight at the time but she was beautiful.

Happy Laetere Sunday everyone

I feel like I win when I lose
Sometime really soon, someone is going to come up to you and complain about the ways young women dress today. And if you try to tell them—as I always do—that there is nothing unusual about sexual exhibitionism in young women, that it is, in fact, quite normal and most likely healthy behaviour, they will turn around and tell you that what is happening today is unprecedented.

Anyway, when it happens, show them this video of Abba from 1975. And you know, at the time Abba had a reputation as the "wholesome pop group". And yes, you saw ordinary girls doing stuff like this too. (By the way, this is a great song, crank it! And the line "I feel like I win when I lose" shows more genuine insight into sexuality than everything Joni Mitchell wrote put together.)

Womanly virtues Friday

A lot of pixels have been spilled over the years about the relationship between feminism and cultural conservatism. There have been

• those who think the two movements are natural enemies.
• those who see a natural affinity between the two and found this worrying.
• (just lately) those who see a natural affinity between the two movements and see this as promising.

I'm not sure I know or care about any of those possibilities. What does strike me, however, is that the both movements share one common problem and that both need to shake it off. Let me tell you about something I saw the other day and you see if you can see it.

Manly Thor's Day Special

The second-best case against Don Draper in which I rant
A while ago in the comments, Gaius put me onto a fascinating site called The Last Psychiatrist. It strikes me as a little like this site but only with even less restraint. He cuts loose and says stuff that you might think but would think better than to actually say. And he has devoted two long, rambling posts to trashing Don Draper.
That's odd—meaning unusual—because most people who think so little of something wouldn't bother arguing the point. They'd consider it beneath their dignity to waste all that time on a mere fictional character that only a small segment of the population watches. The longer someone spends trying to diminish something, the more they succeed in making it appear significant.


Anyway, he has come up with the second-best argument against Don Draper and I think that is worth some comment. Now he would insist that he has made a case against wanting to be like Don Draper but that is redundant. Draper is a hero and the whole (only) point of a hero is to inspire emulation.

Greek manners and Gothic morals

A deep respect for obstacles
To recap: Stendhal says love is projected onto the loved one by the lover. It is, therefore, the passion that aggrandizes the lover and not the loved person. Therefore, the way to keep love alive is to throw up obstacles. The woman (and with Stendhal the real lover is always the man) who would keep her lover's passion alive will find ways to deny her lover her presence. In fact, Stendhal insists that a woman cheapens herself any time she grants sexual favour to her lover.

Now I think that perverse vision has something in common with Romantic love and that thing in common is a respect for obstacles. Romantic lovers do not take obstacles as some sort of inconvenience or tragedy but as an essential part of any real erotic love.

The opposite of romantic love is found in ancient heroes such as Achilles and Aeneas. Achilles loves Briseus whom he has taken in war and is little more than a concubine and flies into a rage when Agamemnon takes her a way from him. He cuts Troilus's head off when the youth denies him sex. He turns into a vicious killing machine when his lover Patroclus is killed. Aeneus falls in love with Dido but, when reminded that his destiny is to found Rome, he cruelly abandons her. Love is a strong passion for these men but it is not a quest, it is not part of their heroic identity but merely something they do.

During the late middle ages, as the idea of courtly romantic love came into full flower, Achilles's victims were celebrated as the real heroes. Their quests, to find love, became the real heroism and the destroyers and founders of cities were devalued.

And there we have a literary explanation for the obstacles that always seem to crop up in Romantic love. It wouldn't be a heroic thing if it were easy. But romantic love is not the story but what two people actually are for one another. And here lies a danger but I'll get back to that.

There are a whole series of complementary reasons that might also play a role:

• As mentioned above, there is the sense that love is a heroic quest and cannot be easy.
• There is the sense that love is a sacred and holy thing and, like all sacred things, must be surrounded by respectful ritual and sacrifice.
• There is an epicurean instinct that says the pleasure will be highlighted and enhanced if we discipline and deny ourselves. Better to have a single glass of the fine port in front of the fire later than to guzzle away whatever is at hand now.
• There is a sense that love is powerful, irrational force that might lead us to destruction and that is often at odds with social priorities.
• Related to the previous but I think slightly different, there is the sense that love is like starting a fire and that there are aspects in the early stages that we can and should control when possible.
• Finally, there is a sense that real love will survive denial and the fact that two people deny themselves sexual satisfaction now will test the mettle of their love. If it is real, this denial will only strengthen it and if it is not real, better to have done without the sex that would debase real love.

Which is true? They all are.

And that, I think, is what distinguishes romantic love from what Stendhal and Proust go on about. For if we get focused on the story rather than the people, something can and probably will go wrong. Then the obstacles can become the whole point and it is the passion not the person that matters.

There is also the Disney version wherein the grand stories are told with all the heroes replaced with animated cartoons. Here the actual love becomes a gauzy, ill defined thing summed up by the phrase "happily ever after". Worse, romantic love becomes something that only princes and princesses and movie stars can have and not the residents of 5135 and 5133 Kensington Avenue or over there in the suburbs.

The odd thing about the Disney version is that it feeds narcissism in that it encourages us to think like children and think that we are somehow elevated above everyone else by our love. Again, the humble residents of Kensington Avenue get pushed aside because having to relocate because your father has a job in another city  somehow suggests that, well, this happens to ordinary people all the time. Worse, it suggests that once you move into a new suburb, you might meet someone else and fall in love with them.

Cristina Nehring doesn't ignore the important role obstacles play in the story. She couldn't. But she doesn't think much about any role they might play other than being part of the passion.

The next front of the polemic is with Christianity. It will come as a surprise to those who have been paying attention to find that there is a tradition within Christianity of attacking romantic love as unhealthy and disordered. After all, if anything saving yourself for your spouse, the sanctity of marriage and the theology of the body ought to sit well with Romantic love. What is more, Romantic love came into full flower in a Christian culture and it is hard to imagine how it could have happened anywhere else.

But that is for next week.

This series begins here.

The next post will be here.