Have Courage and Be Kind

Branagh's Cinderella (2015) was underrated at the time, and I have not rewatched it yet; but I suspect strongly that it holds up well to a second viewing.  The line I remember most vividly is the advice Cinderella's mother gives her, the line that Cinderella hangs on to through everything that happens afterwards: "Have courage and be kind."

That's a tough pair of commands to grasp, especially both together.  It's especially hard when one is afraid of what may happen next--politically, socially, culturally, medically, religiously ...

Nearly everyone I know who pays attention to current events is afraid right now.  It feels a bit like that scene in the Aeneid where the Trojans and Latins stand facing each other, ready for battle, but no one wants to start--and then some random goddess incites a random act of violence; and here we go.

There's not a whole lot one can do to ensure that such a thing won't happen: that we won't see a Selma, or a Tiananmen Square, or whatever your particular nightmare is.

Nonetheless, it's a bit facile to suggest that you stop having your nightmare (though cognitive behavioral therapy, or what one of my spiritual directors liked to call "spiritual jujitsu," works a lot better than some people give it credit for).

So, because it applies no matter how objectively horrible one thinks the present is and fears the future may be, the phrase I keep returning to is the one from Cinderella: "Have courage and be kind."

That pretty much covers it, from a human perspective.  Add in the divine motivation, and you're good to go.

Let the games begin; throw open the gates to the Coliseum.

Have courage, and be kind.

What If This Were Real (II)

But let me take that up a notch.  I think in a deeper sense, the semi-pros in that Princess Ida production aren't actually doing what they would really do.  The entire premise of musical theater relies on the absurd idea that people break into song and dance at moments of high emotion, or really any emotion at all.  That's not our normal universe--that's a fantasy world.  Fantasy worlds operate by different rules.  In a fantasy world like that, people don't sing awesome music while staring at the audience or nodding casually to each other; when they're choristers, they don't pair or trio up at random as people do at parties.  They are always doing what the music does.

Age quod agis.

Breaking news: it may look to you as if you are living an ordinary life, but if you accept--really accept--the Christian message, you're actually in a fantasy land where every single mote and moment is choreographed by a masterful director.  You can, of course, ignore that, and end up getting moved around like a piece of scenery.  Or you could, you know, act.  You could work with the director.  You could actually pay attention to the music of the spheres.

It's tempting to say, "But I am doing what I would do if this were real--see, I gave up X for Lent, and said a nice thing to Y, and refrained from this habitual temptation."

That's fine, mon frères.  But all that is actually still just level one whispers and nods.  If you were really listening to the music, if you really thought this were real--all those little, isolated instances of reality would actually be connected and coordinated and, yes, choreographed (not be you, but obviously with your cooperation, consent, and input) into something much more tremendous.

In other words, if you really believed in God, you would be a saint.

Also, we'd have far more excellent Gilbert and Sullivan productions with which to educate our children.

What If This Were Real? (I)

One of the things I learned from being in, and watching, merely competent musicals (as opposed to truly excellent ones) is the importance of doing what you would really do.

There's obviously a right way and a wrong way to do this.  For instance, in the (competent) production of Princess Ida here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9GRJESLQe4&t=2860s) there is a fair bit of the usual nodding and whispering among principals and chorus to convey the fact that we are Doing Something even when we don't have lines or notes because we are Real Characters--it is an attempt at doing "what you really would do."

In contrast, the (superb) production of Mikado here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbpUzCFCy_8&t=1813s) there is nodding, gesturing, whispering--but it is highly coordinated, stylized, and choreographed, limited to specific moments and places.

Maybe another way to put this is to say that the professional production is thoroughly blocked--the director(s) had a vision that entailed telling the actors (or more likely, determining with them) what they were to do at every single moment.  That overarching, all-determining vision is just not evident in the (I'm guessing) semi-pro production.

In both cases, the actors have been instructed to do "what you really would do," but in the case of the professional production, what one really would do is ordered to the whole.

It's an obvious metaphor for the spiritual life, no?  The capstone, the thing that takes you to the level of sanctity, is to order your doing to the whole.  The prior thing, the thing that gets you to level one, is to do "what you really would do."  You have to persuade yourself that this is important first, important enough not to just go through the motions--stand there and sing, survive your day--but to act as if this life you are in were real.

Disputed Catholic Questions, I

Here's a fun one.

The evil of usury vs. the permissibility of the death penalty.

Did the Church endorse both of these whole-heartedly?  In the same way?  And has the Church now contradicted or allowed to fall into disuse her former teaching on the matter?

I have some very vague thoughts.  But the first and most interesting one is that these are two issues that seem to split orthodox Catholics down the center.

This Is a Bad Argument, III

I do not endorse the last few paragraphs of this article.  But I think it's worth noting that someone on American Greatness--not a commie liberal site by any stretch of the imagination--recognizes excess coronavirus deaths, sweet memes and Johns Hopkins researchers to the contrary notwithstanding.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/06/yes-total-deaths-in-the-u-s-are-up/

By the way, I'm a bit amused by the whole trend of either side in the corona wars holding up an expert and saying "Look, see, they are so highly credentialed their opinion must be true!"

If someone with three PhDs says "wear masks" and someone with four PhDs says "don't wear masks" nothing is actually proven, is it?  Even if a hundred doctors with multiple doctorates say "wear masks" and ten doctors with multiple doctorates say "don't wear masks" (or the reverse) still, nothing is proven.

Smart people can be wrong too; and when smart people disagree (as they currently seem to do) then obviously, some of them are wrong.

It's all about the arguments, mon freres.

Our Post-Christian Culture is Forgetting the Radical Virtue of Forgiveness

 Every pandemic needs a good stack of self-help books, to keep readers entertained and sane. Fortuitously, this March Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer released such a book, based on their popular podcast. That book, How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books, is dry, entertaining, but (caveat lector) salted with R-rated language. The coauthors sift through the self-help strategies they attempted to follow, praising some and discommending others. Sometimes their meta-advice seems to be the product of a luminous commonsense that makes one wonder what the original “helpful” authors were thinking. Sometimes it is clearly a product of their own backgrounds, experiences, and ideologies — progressive, feminist, secular. Almost always it is entertaining or at worst innocuous.

There’s one spot, however, that gave me pause. It wasn’t one of the many paeons to gender equality, critical theory, etc. It was Greenberg’s and Meinzer’s unwillingness to countenance forgiveness as a self-help strategy. Meinzer, who wrote most of that section, quotes a friend and fellow podcaster, Cameron Drews, saying that “There are a lot of options between unconditional forgiveness and burdened misery” (144). Meinzer then expands on that idea:

We can choose not to wish any happiness upon the people who’ve done us wrong and live happy lives. We can choose not to feel grateful to the people who’ve hurt us and be grateful for the lives we have. And, we can choose to have some anger in our hearts towards those who’ve abused us and still have hearts that overflow with joy.

The world is filled with in-betweens, and I honestly believe life is better when we don’t force ourselves to live on the extreme ends. If you want to, go ahead. But I, for one, don’t want to. And I feel at peace — unforgiving heart and all (144-5).

It might seem initially that Meinzer and Greenberg and Drews are being inconsistent. Left-leaning people tend to value tolerance and being open to other people and experiences, tend to profess live-and-let-live philosophies, tend to value niceness and kindness highly, and tend to condemn anger, rage and violence. These qualities are, to be clear, not exclusive to progressives; and they are values that people across political and ideological divides — especially Christians — can, do and should recognize. But they remain for all that stereotypically progressive values.

Unwillingness to forgive seems to strike at the heart of such a personal philosophy. So when Meinzer admits to still being angry at those who did terrible things to her as a child, it might seem to be incompatible with the philosophy upheld elsewhere in the same book.

I think, however, the incompatibility is superficial ...

Read the rest at the Register.

I Love You, And ... VII

When a child grows up hearing I love you BUT he or she learns tacitly that unpleasant things are opposed to love.  The parent loves him, but the love is constrained, or conditioned, by good behavior.  The parent may even love him very much—but there’s a limit to that love.

Of course, this is never the parent’s intention.  But that’s the message that comes through if the parent—whether empathetic or authoritarian—habitually contrasts love and discipline.

In contrast, the child who grows up hearing I love you AND learns that unpleasant things can sometimes (not always—cf. abuse) be signs of love.

“I love you, and because I love you I want you to grow strong and not get sick.  Broccoli helps you do that, and that’s why I gave you broccoli.”

“I love you, and so I don’t want you to get hurt.  That’s why I took the toaster away—because you could hurt yourself on it.”

“I love you, and so I put your pants on,* because pants are good for you—they keep you warm, and they make sure we don’t get in trouble with strangers.”

“I love you, and so we are going to [fill in the blank] right now, because it helps us [fill in the blank].”

“I love you, and that’s why I am not letting you scream in the family room, because if you learn to do that, it teaches you to be inconsiderate to others, and that will serve you very poorly later in life.”

A lot of the tough parenting calls actually come down to that last idea.  But really—teaching your children to be considerate to others—yes, that certainly includes their parents!—is one of the most loving things a parents can do, if we want them to grow up to be happy adults with good relationships.

And if many parents today have a hard time with this—maybe that’s because their own parents didn’t quite get it.  Maybe the parents of these modern parents were empathetically permissive, or harshly authoritarian, and taught today’s parents, in one way or another, that love and hard stuff are opposites.

Regardless, that’s one lie that we shouldn’t let stand in our own parenting.  Love and hard stuff have to be integrated, if human beings are to have a chance of dying to self, or living happily ever after, or achieving the happiness they pursue, or … whatever your phrase of the day is, n’est-ce pas?

* The canny reader will discern another True Story.

I Love You, And ... VI

I write this with considerable trepidation, but I suspect* that most people who worry about God’s permission of evil—worry to the point of leaving religion—worry because they do not understand the why of the bad things that have happened to them.  Religious people seem to handle the problem of their personal sufferings in two ways.**

The people who see God’s hand in their own troubles, in the sense of seeing how their sufferings have made them better, keep their faith; and they have confidence that God operates the same way in other people’s lives as in their own—that God somehow ensures that tsunamis, too, shall be well.

The people who do not see God’s hand in their own troubles, who fail to see their sufferings making them better, leave or lose their faith—not because they feel personally injured by God (or not necessarily) but because, not seeing his actions in their own lives, they cannot fathom how God could be acting (except in evil or negligence) when he permits something like a tsunami, or a cancer, or an addiction.

Both of these views are incomplete, I daresay (though obviously I favor the first one; it is closer to my own).  But I suspect each view has its roots less in official philosophy than in something that happens very, very early indeed, something that has (superficially) nothing to do with religion: an approach to discipline that occurs early in childhood: I love you BUT versus I love you AND.

 

* Another question worthy of sociological study.

** Again, this is very anecdotal.

I Love You, And ... V

The story of two parenting styles—I love you BUT and I love you AND—is, I suspect* the story behind why many parents are so uncomfortable disciplining their children—so very, very uncomfortable that they keep on using empathetic discipline even when it isn’t working.  Even when it’s making them and their kids unhappy.

Because yes, I’ve seen this.  I’ve seen kids who are made unhappy by empathetic discipline—some of them are my own.  And part of it comes down to the fact that empathy—while precious and critical in the right time and place—can confuse a lot of kids when they hear it more loudly than they hear the “no” which is also critical in its time and place.

But the other reason that empathetic discipline can fail—and I’m convinced this is the problem a lot of the time—is that the parent is, like many an authoritarian parent, mired in the idea that love and discipline are somehow opposites.

We don’t like this in theology, do we?  Isn’t the whole problem of theodicy, at bottom, the problem of understanding how God can let bad stuff happen to me?  How can God love me and discipline me at the same time?  The Old Testament says something about “whom God loves he chastises”; it is one of those lines that tends to make us squirm.

* I have no data to prove this.  This goes into the category of “sociological questions I would like to study someday.”

As Our Nature Requires

"... I understood that in our Lord's intention we are now on his cross with him in our pains, and in our sufferings we are dying, and with his help and his grace we willingly endure on that same cross until the last moment of life.  Suddenly he will change his appearance for us, and we shall be with him in heaven.  Between the one and the other all will be a single era; and then all will be brought into joy.  And this was what he meant in this revelation: 'Where is there now any instant of your pain or of your grief?'  And we shall be full of joy.  And here I saw truly that if he revealed to us now his countenance of joy, there is not pain on earth or anywhere else which could trouble us, but everything would be joy and bliss for us.  But because he shows us his suffering countenance, as he was in this life as he carried his cross, we are therefore in suffering and labour with him as our nature requires."--Julian of Norwich, Showings (long text), ch.21 (p.215 in the Colledge and Walsh trans., Paulist, 1978--quotation marks added).

This Is a Bad Argument, II

  A friend posted this meme on social media recently.  I'm posting my answer here, unedited, because--well, I'm feeling lazy; and it's a neat illustration of how overly simplified arguments don't really answer much of anything.

I don't know that this is quite so ... encouraging? or discouraging! as it first appears.

I think the numbers are coming from here: https://www.prb.org/usdata/indicator/deaths/chart 

The final number, deaths for 2020, I'm less sure of.  CDC keeps a count here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm.  As of today, November 23, they have 2,551,852 deaths from all causes.

If you do the math, use either of the November figures to calculate total deaths for 2020, you'll come to something similar to previous years: 2,837,145 if you use the number and date from the meme; 2,848,397 if you use the number from the CDC's website today.

Here are the two questions though that throw all that up in the air.  First, there's an ongoing upward trend in deaths as the U.S. population ages.  Given that trend, and how old the population was at the beginning of 2020 (compared to previous years), how much should we have expected the death rate to increase in 2020?

Second, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that deaths do not get tabulated right away.  There's a lag time between when a death occurs, when it's recorded, and when it hits the tables for a big organization like PRB or the CDC.  So the number of deaths suggested by projecting from the meme, or the CDC's current numbers, is definitely too low, perhaps a lot too low.

(That's why elsewhere, the CDC does not publish death counts for recent months--because they know they don't have all the data in yet.  E.g., here are counts for 2019 and the first six months of 2020, suggesting that they're not sure how many people died in July-October: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/provisional-tables.htm.)

Tl:dr, we'd need more data than I can find publicly available online to ACTUALLY know if we're seeing more people die than normal, or about the same, or less.

That's what I wrote.  But here's a thought to close with.  We'll be able to tell, eventually, when all sorts of other numbers come in, whether all this was worth it, or not.  We might even be able to project right now whether it is worth it.  Certainly if we end up with death totals that are similar to what we could have anticipated without COVID, there will be some questions about those "excess COVID deaths" that the media likes to talk about.  Probably the reason for a similar death rate to normal--if it does end up similar--will be that we're seeing fewer deaths from regular flus, etc., most likely due to people avoiding each other more.

But all of that is moot to the larger point, which is this.  Whether you're a COVID believer, or a COVID denier, you can't simply pick up numbers that look like they make your point.  You have to think about the context of the numbers, and consider what other relevant numbers are needed to complete the picture of the truth.

That said, I should note that the totals for the first six months of 2020 (see last link above) are not super encouraging.  They suggest about 200,000 more people died in the first half of the year than died in the previous year.  Wildly extrapolating, let's say 400,000 more people die this year than in 2019.  That would mean this:

That's a pretty sharp uptick compared to previous years, and I have trouble imagining that the U.S. population aged *that* much--suggesting that indeed, the extra deaths are due, directly or indirectly, to COVID and the fears and restrictions it entails.  (Of course, we may then see a corresponding downturn in deaths in 2021, since there will be fewer elderly people and people with preconditions alive, proportionally, than before.)

Will it actually turn out this badly, when all the numbers are in in another eight or nine months?  I don't know.  How bad would it have been if we had done nothing?  I doubt we'll ever know.  How much better could we have done if we had done things "perfectly", whatever that means?  There's no way of knowing that.

Tl;dr (again), and with apologies to Mark Twain: "It's easier to convince people with a little evidence that they're already right than to get them to consider all the evidence, especially when it doesn't give them certainty."

I Love You, And ... IV

But that sort of thing is routine—that’s how a parent communicates in cases where a child already knows the rules.  If your child already knows that we clean up before bed, or dinner, or nap—if they already know they need to take a bit of everything on their plate, and eat their vegetables before desert—if they already know not to hit their sibling, or take their toys—they don’t need a lengthy explanation—at most, they might need a reminder.

But of course, there are always new situations.  I mean, little Gianna didn’t know that stuffing Kleenex in the toaster oven* was wrong—she may have suspected that her parents would not be pleased—but she doesn’t know enough about electricity and fire and paper to understand why her actions with the tissue were an issue.

It’s tempting here to roll out “Sweetheart, I love you, but you can’t do that; you see, the toaster gets very hot sometimes, and it could burn the tissues and that would hurt you.”

And that’s fine; explaining in a context like this is fine—a good idea, even.  This is how preschoolers learn science.**  But there’s a major problem with that phrasing.

I love you, BUT …

That’s not right, is it?  Isn’t the correct formulation, I love you, AND …?

 

* As they used to say on Dragnet: “Ladies and gentlemen: the story you have heard is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

** Another true story.

On Not Pursuing Pain

"This vision [of alternating surety and oppression] was shown to teach me to understand that some souls profit by experiencing this, to be comforted at one time, and at another to fail and to be left to themselves.  God wishes us to know that he keeps us safe all the time, in sorrow and in joy; and sometimes a man is left to himself for the profit of his soul, although his sin is not always the cause.  For in this time I committed no sin for which I ought to have been left to myself, for it was so sudden.  Nor did I deserve these feelings of joy, but our Lord gives it freely when he wills, and sometimes he allows us to be in sorrow, and both are one love.  For it is God's will that we do all in our power to preserve our consolation, for bliss lasts forevermore, and pain is passing, and will be reduced to nothing for those who will be saved.  Therefore it is not God's will that when we feel pain we should pursue it in sorrow and mourning for it, but that suddenly we should pass it over, and preserve ourselves in the endless delight which is God."--Julian of Norwich, Showings (long text), ch.15 (p.205 in the Colledge and Walsh trans., Paulist, 1978).

I Love You, And ... III

Now of course, some kids really do need a light touch.  Some kids are very sensitive, and need all the hugs and kisses after being told that they can’t play with the Ming Dynasty vase or pull their sister’s hair.  If that’s your kid—fine.

That’s not any of my children.  At least, not once they passed about a year old.  My children do not listen if I “sweetie pie” them while saying no.

That does not, of course, mean that I yell to communicate my displeasure.  (Not on purpose, anyway.)  The goal is to be brisk, matter-of-fact, no-nonsense.

Mary Poppins, anyone?

“It’s clean up time, spit-spot!”

And then, if they demur, by running away or ignoring or throwing a temper tantrum, they—or the thing causing the mischief—go(es) into time out.

The Pastoralism Lives Loudly in the Dogma

A friend of mine asked what I thought of this piece: https://dwightlongenecker.com/pope-francis-the-dogma-doesnt-live-loudly-in-him/

It's an interesting one, though I don't know enough about the intellectual history of its bones to say whether it's right or wrong on the central point.  I was more interested, indeed, in some assumptions baked into the language of Fr. Longenecker--assumptions that I doubt he intended, since they are so nearly universal--but ones which are for all that, and precisely because of that, worth drawing out and responding to.

Some of the language in the essay lends itself to the idea that the dogmatic and the pastoral are to be balanced with each other, that there's a certain tension between the two.  It's reminiscent of the notion that Catholics are supposed to be neither conservative nor liberal but somehow to inhabit a tension of views between the two, to be a sort of moderate force, if only in virtue of being extremely liberal on certain things, and extremely conservative on others.

All that I think is profoundly wrong.  Dogma, properly understood, IS pastoral.  It exists not to condemn but to save.  If it is sharp, it's sharp like a scalpel, not like an ax--and likewise, pastoral softness can smother a person to death, or it can warm her like a blanket.  There is no tension here, except for those of us who have failed to integrate truth and charity.  But Jesus had both, perfectly integrated.  That's really one of the most fascinating things about the Gospels ...  God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world ...  But also, I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.

(And this goes to the political point too, I think: a really integrated thinker politically is going to realize that people of good will, whether they are conservatives and liberals, agree on a lot of the ends, and the disagreement is one of means.  But that's probably a rabbit hole, and anyway, I'm much less confident that it's accurate.)

I Love You, And ... II

The flaw in many of the usual strategies—whether they are strategies that are more sympathetic, or more authoritative—is that they don’t address the heart of why a parent gives their children the rules that they do.

That flaw is epitomized in the line that I’m tempted to use over and over again: “I love you, but …”

The goal of any parent who says that—whether briefly, as stated, or through the more complex series of words and actions suggested in the previous post—is to communicate affection to the child while disciplining.  But there’s a real problem with this.

In the first place, sometimes, with some children, this can gravely backfire.  I’ve seen it with my own kids: Mama being affectionate while saying “no” can send the message that Mama doesn’t mean what she’s saying.

This is parenting death.

If your child is going to be a functioning adult, words have to mean things.  Words have signification.

Think about our national politics for the last twenty years or so, from “It depends on the meaning of is” to the fights over various tweeters (on both sides of the aisle).

In all seriousness, if you teach your children, even by omission, that your words do not have meaning, you are contributing to the death of the Republic.

No, really, I’m not kidding.

(To be continued, obviously!)

I Don't Think "New Normal" Means What You Think It Means

I hate it when people use the phrase new normal.  It's never a lead in to something nice.

"Teenage pregnancy is the new normal."

"Partisanship is the new normal."

"Hard drugs in college is the new normal."

"Masks and social distancing are the new normal."

Now, I don't mean to suggest that mask-wearing is as horrible a thing as teenagers regularly taking hard drugs.  The thought of my kids potentially getting hooked on cocaine in college is (rightly) far more terrifying than the thought that I might have to wear a mask to the grocery store for the rest of my life.

That doesn't mean the latter thought is agreeable, though.

In fact, every time someone says, vis-a-vis COVID, "Things aren't ever going back to normal"--I want to scream.

They always say it as if it was this epiphany.  Maybe so!  Maybe so.  But if so, it's an epiphany the way "I just discovered that my best friend is a big liar" or "my parents aren't my real parents" or "chickens are cannibals" is an epiphany: not a good one.

It's also, I think, a sign of defeatism.  If, as a society, we can invent the cotton gin and send men to the moon and eradicate polio and clone Dolly the Sheep and build the Empire State Building and create GMO food (whether or not you think these are all good things)--if we can do all that, we can beat a rinky-dink virus.  How?  When?  My guess is that eventually there will be a vaccine for it which, like the flu vaccine, is administered yearly to those who are willing to take it; and that eventually most people will build up immunities to common strains of it through catching mild versions during childhood.  Yes, it will take a while for all of that to come about; yes, some people will die, horribly, in the meantime; yes, some states will be on lockdown for as long as their governors feel they can keep them that way.

But eventually things *will* go back to the old normal.  Or at any rate--things eventually *can* go back to the old normal.  One just has to have the faith to think that human creativity can solve problems, the political will to back candidates who think things can be fixed as opposed to merely managed, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I Love You, And ... I

It's hard as a parent to tell you child no, but every parent knows that sometimes, it has to be done.  No running out in the middle of a crowded street, for instance, is a pretty universal rule, however libertarian or permissive your parenting style may generally be.

These days, though, a lot of parents want to parent more gently and--even though they know that it isn't good for their child to have everything--they want to let him or her down as gently and sympathetically as possible.  Thus strategies like the following:

"I know the street looks fun, Chiara--really, it does, doesn't it?  I can tell how much you want to go there.  But you know, sweetheart, it's a very dangerous place.  Do you remember when you got the booboo on your knee the other day?  Remember how that hurt?  If you run in the street, you could be hurt much worse--or remember when the doctor gave you a shot?  You don't want to have to--Chiara!  Chiara, stop hitting me!  Chiara!!!"

"Moscotti, it's really inventive of you to want to play in the street.  Why don't you come play on the dining room table with your sensory blocks?  That's almost as exciting!!!"

"Acutis, I love you sweetie pie, but--"

Now look, if you're a parent and you've used any of these strategies--please know that I'm laughing with you, not at you.  I've done things along these lines myself.  They all have their place--although parents would do well to notice when a strategy isn't working, either for this kid, or for this kid right now--but I think they're all fatally flawed.

Econ 101.06

Of course, the fact that people oftentimes make bad choices is not a reason not to help them.  Imagine a parent telling their one-year-old, “Theodore, the last time you had dinner you threw your bowl on the floor—and also the previous twenty times.  So no more dinners for you.  From now on, you find your own food.”

Obviously, this is ridiculous—and it’s a little less ridiculous when applied to adults.  But still, one shouldn’t simply say to someone who uses (say) their unemployment benefits to buy (say) the oxytocin* to which they’re addicted, “John Doe, the last time you had these benefits you used them for something which does you no lasting good—and also the previous twenty times.  So no more benefits for you.  From now on, you support yourself.”

But on the other hand, neither does one say to the flailing child, “Theodore, dear, since you keep throwing your food, Mama and Daddy will keep cleaning it up  Lucky you!”  *eyeroll*  No, one takes other measures—for instance, one returns to spoon feeding for a while, or gives the child only a few bites at a time, or waits until they’re really hungry to feed them.  All of these things are more painful and difficult—in the short term—for the parents, but they do keep the floors marginally cleaner and—and this is the really critical point—they teach the child to appreciate his food, and treat it with respect—in other words, they help the child grow up.

Likewise, simply continuing the welfare benefits of someone who routinely uses them for things not in their own best interest is—while sometimes inevitable, and kindly meant—less helpful than determining ways to help people that also help them to become all they can be.

* Come to think of it, I don’t know how feasible that is; but that sort of thing.

Econ 101.05

What is “the main problem” in economics, if it is not one of information?  Hayek implies that it is the social process, or something related to it, and that seems to me to be right.

People will formulate this answer differently, depending on the language they are used to using about human beings; a sociologist will put it differently from an economist who will put it differently from a soi-Aristotelian philosopher.

But here’s one soi-Aristotelian formulation of “the main problem” in economics: because people in general (including the present writer) possess key virtues like temperance and prudence only imperfectly, they are apt to choose things which are attractive in the short term, but which are not ultimately conducive to their long term happiness.

That’s why most forms of social and economic planning, including the (I hasten to add) necessary welfare, oftentimes have bad unintended consequences.

Weekend Muse

 Every now and then I listen to Barber's Serenade for Strings.  And I think ... oh, man, almost.  But more like this:

This Is a Bad Argument

It is time for another attack on one of my favorite fallacies.

Several times over the last week I've encountered the observation that Republicans are only complaining/suing/challenging in states that tipped narrowly blue--as if this proves that the claims of fraud are false.

But those are precisely the states one would expect Republicans to challenge--it is to their advantage to do so.  And merely because something is to someone's advantage does not mean that it is wrong for them to do or false for them to believe.

Frankly, arguments that purport to disprove something by asking cui bono when the bono and the cui are both patently obvious are garbage.  Cui bono is a great way to discredit an opponent rhetorically, for example, when the opponent turns out to be deriving some secret advantage through what he or she has claimed to be merely a good public policy measure.  But the trick works because the opponent has a real advantage, a real good they are (presumably) pursuing, which they have not admitted--which should lead one to reevaluate (though still not necessarily reject) their above-board arguments.  The trick works, in other words, because it is based on the dishonesty of the opponent who has been hiding something which the public should know.

But in these election challenges, no Republican making them hides the fact that they want Trump to win.  There's no secret here.

And even on the merits, setting aside the rhetorical component, the idea that red states should somehow have equal amounts of fraud, as if Wyoming has just as great a chance as flipping blue as Pennsylvania, is absurd.  Everyone knows that Wyoming is deep, deep red--and that's why, if (hypothetically!) you wanted to fraudulently flip a state for Biden, you would not pick Wyoming, but Pennsylvania.  Flipping Pennsylvania only makes Trumpsters suspicious.  Flipping Wyoming would make any person of good sense and good will suspicious--it would be foolish.

It would also be very difficult.  Red states are more likely to have Republican poll workers, who are going to be less likely to overlook the tossing out or adding in of borderline ballots.  No, if you were (hypothetically!) a Biden supporter who wanted to tip things illegally, you'd do it in a swing state.

(Incidentally, there's plenty of fraud in red states too.  In blood-red Missouri (for instance) St. Louis has notoriously posted dubious election results for decades.  But see above for why Republicans won't bother to challenge it--cui bono?--and why it's not enough to flip the state.)

Econ 101.04

“Woah there girl,” some readers will be saying.  “You’re here giving me a libertarian story about economics—at least, that’s what your Hayekian windup suggests—but you’re admitting that people don’t chose rationally?  Doesn’t that sort of undermine your own argument, a bit?”

Yes, and no.  It would kill my argument if I were arguing that the market is to be followed everywhere and always and in every way left free, because it is wiser than ourselves.  But I’m not arguing that.

Actually, I don’t think Hayek argues for that either—nor the much-maligned Adam Smith, for that matter—of which more, perhaps, later.  No, the point of the invisible hand is not that the market solves all problems.  The point is that people can’t really solve any economic problems.  Or, as Hayek puts it in his penultimate paragraph,

“The problem is thus in no way solved if we can show that all the facts, if they were known to a single mind (as we hypothetically assume them to be given to the observing economist), would uniquely determine the solution; instead we must show how a solution is produced by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge. To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world” (VII).

No central planner can know everything, and no one acting within the market can know everything either.  That is why Hayek closes by suggesting that “equilibrium analysis” of economies does not have “direct relevance to the solution of practical problems,” because “it does not deal with the social process at all” and indeed “is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem” (VII).

Hayek ends with a teaser, so I suppose I may as well.

Econ 101.03

“… the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision” (IV).

In other words, Hayek claims that in economics there cannot be meaningful abstraction from particulars to universals.  You can go from looking at a thousand horses to saying something about what it is to be a horse, or from looking at a million lumps of coal to what it means to be a lump of coal, or a billion African violets to making legitimate scientific conclusions about the nature of the African violet.  But you can’t do that in economics.  Hayek thinks it is because economics is too complicated—because resources have all these other “tags,” if you will, affecting their value, besides their intrinsic qualities.  It would be as if you could change the nature of the violet by putting it in a different county, or separating it from other violets, or telling people it was a good substitute for an orchid in a girl’s corsage.  If you could change the nature of a violet—really change it—by doing any of those things, it would be devilishly hard to say what a violet really was (or was worth).

And that example shows what’s really at the bottom of Hayek’s claim that economic knowledge “by its nature cannot enter into statistics.”  The reason economic knowledge cannot by its nature enter into statistics is not because there’s too much information to handle right now for the people and systems we currently have—it’s because economic information is, at bottom, information about human choices—where we take the violet—how many other violets we put out on the shelf with it—how we market the violet—why we buy the violet—what we do with it afterwards—and those choices are not also good or rational choices, because human beings are … not … always … rational … actors.

Econ 101.02

Anyone who has managed to wander their way through the Hayek reading, or who perhaps is already familiar with its basic concepts, may be shaking their heads.  Why did I not assign “I, Pencil,” and have done with it?  And isn’t this by now a quite stale point—that the “market” invisibly assembles all sorts of bits of information and knowledge unavailable to even the most brilliant bureaucratic army, armed with their super-intelligent computers?  Hayek smacks down the idea of a centrally planned economy pretty well.  So what?  When a young American today says she is a socialist, she is not (usually) calling for a planned economy anyway.

Fair, and fair again.  But there are a few points in Hayek’s essay that are (or were) more original, and deserve a closer look.

First, Hayek not only says the market has too much information for a central planning agency to correlate and process.  He says that the market changes too much (section IV).  We are not talking about a mosaic, but a dance.

Secondly, Hayek thinks there is not merely a problem with the amount of knowledge a central bureaucracy would need (in order to properly plan an economy); he also observes that bureaucracies cannot have access to the kind of knowledge they would need.

“… the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision” (IV).

Naps, Naps, Always Naps

I am a nap Nazi.

But truly.  The only reason I am writing these words is because my 1, 2.5, and 4-year-olds are all asleep, napping.

Mind you, I am nice about it.  They can bring stuffed animals, age-appropriate books, and occasionally the small toy to bed.  The younger two fall asleep every time anyway.  The oldest one--sometimes yes and sometimes no.

If he doesn't fall asleep, I let him get up after an hour.  If he starts to get restless half an hour in, I bring him more books.

At this point, he knows that if he yells and wakes up his little sister, he loses a privilege (the book he's reading, the water cup, the decorative sheet ...).  And yes, he's woken her up that way a couple times, which made for a few miserable afternoons and evenings.  But once the system was established ... ah, bliss.

And the fact that he knows he has "quiet time" every day means that when he's sick ... or has a growth spurt ... or when the weather gets colder and the days darker ... when he's learning a lot mentally and emotionally ... when we had a busy morning with friends or errands ... Whatever it is, if he needs the nap, he gets it, because he's already in the right place and circumstances for it.  And that--aside from the parental silence consideration--is why you Never Give Up the Nap.

Right now, he is sick, and it's definitely turning autumnal at last., so he falls asleep even with plenty of books in his bed.  But that cold weather, hat weather--the kids have been loving it, and so have I.  We are all a little more hibernatory this time of year.  I don't think he'd sleep this much, even sick, if it were spring.  But here we are.

More reasons to love fall!

Now, to warm up that cup of coffee again ...

Econ 101.01

A friend wondered in a comment here (back on one of the political posts) whether I would write more about economics, specifically about how conservative vs. liberal economic principles fit into the Catholic worldview.  And lo! it shall be done.

(A caveat, for non-religious readers: there will be Catholic jargon as well as economic jargon forthcoming in this series of posts, but the principles in question are ones about which non-Catholics should care as well.  If a phrase like "preferential option for the poor" tickles your secular fancy, and you don't see how that can be squared with stuff that people with R next to their name tend to say, this is can be your ride too.)

I'd like to start with a reading assignment, Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society."

You can read it here: https://german.yale.edu/sites/default/files/hayek_-_the_use_of_knowledge_in_society.pdf

here: https://archive.org/details/FriedrichHayekTheUseOfKnowledgeInSociety

or here: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hayek-the-use-of-knowledge-in-society-1945

or enjoy a tl;dr here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society#:~:text=%22The%20Use%20of%20Knowledge%20in%20Society%22%20is%20a,Hayek%27s%201948%20compendium%20Individualism%20and%20Economic%20Order%20.

I'll give that one a few days to percolate, and then come back with what I think he's saying, and why I think it's foundational to economic conversations.

Immitatio Humana I

Here is a Chestertonian thought for you.

Perhaps one of the reasons that children like dinosaurs so much is that dinosaurs are, as it were, of the toddler age of the earth.

It was an era (eras? my memory of paleo-science-history is fuzzy) of sharp, bold contrasts, lizard-like giants and dwarfs composed of miniscule cells.  Giant ferns--giant ferns?--occupied a significant portion of the florasphere.  Volcanos were commonly active.  And of course, it all came crashing down in a giant temper-tantrum in the form of a meteor from outer space--that, at least, is one of the bedtime stories we are still told today.

If you are a toddler, is it not relatable?  Or perhaps I mean: if you are a parent, do you see your toddler in this?

Midweek Muse: Judith Triumphans

 I felt like Vivaldi, but not any Vivaldi that I'd heard recently.  And lo, the universe delivered:

There's a little history of the Oratorio here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juditha_triumphans.

If you don't know the original story, give it a read: http://drbo.org/chapter/18001.htm.

And here's the place where the oratorio was originally performed--also, incidentally, the place for whose singers a lot of Vivaldi's music was composed--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ospedale_della_Pietà.  It's actually a rather fascinating glimpse at some historical horrors, and the way that they were turned, mostly, to the good, thanks to the institution of religious Ospedali.

Think It Out, IV

I feel it somewhat incumbent upon me to add, since I had political things to say earlier, that regardless of how things turn out tonight (or later) everything will be alright.

Obviously, if your worst possible fear is defeated tonight, everything will be alright.

And if you are simply poised between two unlikeable alternatives, and the less likeable one wins, there's always 2024.  It may be an unpleasant four years, but there are few things done which can't be undone.  Cf. HHS mandates.

And if you're afraid that the candidate of your party is actually more harmful to your cause than his opponent--well, I understand the concern.  But I decline to believe that either candidate is so utterly deadly for their party as to tar it beyond recognition between now and then.

But what if one of the candidates embodies your worst fears, and that candidate actually wins?

The problem with America isn't the two candidates; it's us.  And we are not going to become that much more civically minded, or that much less, in four years than we would have been had the other man won.  If you want to change America, start not with politics, but with education.

(If either candidate were doing and saying meaningful things about education, I'd be far more interested, invested, and concerned.)

There's your stoic words of comfort for the day.

A Showing

Lately I've been reading Julian of Norwich (ten out of ten would recommend) as opposed to merely quoting her best of lines.  Her private revelations ("showings") are part devotional, part medieval cognitive behavioral therapy, and part pure hilariousness.  Consider, for example, the following showing (her second, I think, although the text is meandering enough that it is a little hard to tell when one vision ends and the next begins).

Julian is shown a imaginative vision of the bottom of the sea, filled with moss and seaweed and peacefully flowing blue-green water.  (I am paraphrasing from memory, but it's a brief literary description to that effect.)  She's enjoying the view, more or less, when she gets her dollop of spiritual insight: that if she were just plunked down here with the sea plants she'd never get into any trouble and be reasonably happy in the contemplation of divine things as a result.

Julian, of course, went on to become an anchoress.

But she's not wrong ...

"I mean, if I were just at the bottom of the sea I'd stay out of trouble, now wouldn't I?"

Me too, Julian; oh, yes, me too.

Then Julian has a doubt: this is such a trivial insight, is it actually a divine revelation?  Did the thoughts come to her from God or from her own mind?

She is told, of course, that it is a real revelation, worth repeating--otherwise it would never have made it into manuscript.  But the doubt too, whatever one thinks of Julian's answer, is remarkably relatable.

Did this good idea that popped into my head come from God?  Naw, it's too trivial ...

Think again, mes frères religieux.

Think It Out, III, or, the Obligatory Election Post

I'll start this post with a large caveat, in the form of an article which (with some reservations) I rather admired (on first reading--see: admission of reservations): https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/holding-your-nose-how-to-vote-like-a-catholic/.  The gist of the article is that Catholics are required to exercise prudence when voting.  Some of the details are a bit more iffy, but the overall message seems to me to be correct.

Having laid that out there, steel yourself for my prudential considerations when I go to vote--for president, for various ballot measures, for local and federal officials from the water board superintendent to the mayor to my senator.

I'm a conservative when I vote (actually, I am a conservative at other times as well).  That word means a great many things these days; here is how I understand it.

Political conservatism (and its polar opposite, progressivism) has at least three planes: the social/cultural, the philosophical/methodological, and the economic. 

(N.B. I am deliberately avoiding the word "liberal," which comes in such a large variety of senses today as to be nearly meaningless.  A recent quiz I took, purporting to helpfully sort Americans into no less than seven tribes, identified me as a "Traditional Liberal," I believe on the strength of the facts that I prefer polite political dialogue and like to think the best of those with whom I disagree.  It also, on the basis of these facts and the subsequent identification, incorrectly predicted the political candidates I supported.  Tl:dr, "liberal" is a broad label.)

On the social and cultural plane, conservatives favor ending abortion (which is, in some cases inarguably, the ending of human life).  Social and cultural conservatives want legal distinctions between so-called traditional families and nontraditional ones.  Social and cultural conservatives want to delay and discourage transgender operations for the young; and they want educational presentations of transgenderism to be formulated in a way that, while they do not stigmatize those experiencing transgender feelings, they also do not encourage those with other atypicalities (e.g., autism) to explain their experience, reductively, through a transgender lens.  Social and cultural conservatives want conscience protections for workers and employers who believe that providing contraception (qua contraception) is morally evil--and the same applies to participating in abortions, etc., etc.

On the philosophical plane, conservatives want diversity of opinion--ideological, religious, and philosophical--to be as important as diversity of ethnicity.  (This is were a conservative is most likely to overlap with a "traditional liberal" or libertarian, btw.)  Subsidiary to this, philosophical conservatives tend to want immigration to be conditioned by assimilation--or, to put it more simply, they think it is critically important for new immigrants to want to stay in this country and to commit to learning the history and language of this country, since these things are prerequisites for having actual conversations about important matters of politics, ideology, religion, and philosophy.  Philosophical conservatives tend to value political methodologies--like the various forms of legal originalism--that prefer to change government and society through the system found in the Constitution, rather than finagling the sense of the Constitution to achieve change.

On the economic plane, conservatives tend to be cautious about the notion that government can keep printing money without ever incurring inflation; they want a welfare state designed to help people out of welfare, and for that reason tend to prefer policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit over policies like raising minimum wage laws.  Economic conservatives also tend to think that a federal-level bureaucracy is a money-loser: rather than streamlining the redistribution of wealth, and making it more efficient, it tends to line the pockets of those who congregate in air-conditioned offices in D.C.   And economic conservatives worry about regulatory capture, and think that many regulations, while they can sometimes protect consumers, are more damaging on balance, as they can encourage monopolies, depress existing small business, and present barriers to entry for people attempting to start their own businesses.

That is actually one of the most terrifying posts I've written in some time.

And that, in and of itself, is a good reason to lay all this out there.

P.S. Thank you to the person who inspired this post.  You know who you are.

Think It Out, II

Another alternative to restricting all healthcare deductibles would be to have a safety net specific to people who find that their deductibles end up being too high.  One can readily imagine how some people would misuse that.  But then again, some people would genuinely need to be helped through it.

I'm reminded of the scene in My Fair Lady where Shaw (a socialist, FWIW), makes Eliza's father Alfred Doolittle categorize himself, truthfully and with some self-awareness, as one of the undeserving poor.  He is, in fact, not particularly worthy of a government handout, but some of the men his his position are, and there's no way for the government to tell which are which.

The liberal response is generally to vote for the government to be liberal, in the sense of generous, towards all the Doolittles, deserving and otherwise--which frequently leads to the government being illiberal to all, lest the Alfreds of the world in their liberty abuse its liberality.  The conservative response is to vote to be generous to none of them.

And the conservative response is, I think, the better, so long as there actually are other ways of helping those who can't actually help their doing little.

This is where prudence comes into government, and charity into life.  Those in government (and to a fair extent, those voting for them based on their platforms) have to discern prudently which sorts of welfare are in fact best administered at the particular level of government at which they serve.  And those who are not in government have to discern charitably how best to help those who are not being helped by government.

Indeed, those who tend to vote against government welfare have, for that reason, a particular burden on them to be charitable with their time, treasure, and talent.  In America, conservatives supposedly give more to charity than liberals (here, for any liberal readers, is an NYT piece on the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/your-money/republicans-democrats-charity-philanthropy.html).  Worldwide, Americans are supposedly more charitable than many other nationalities (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-is-the-most-generous-country-but-americans-say-debt-is-keeping-them-from-giving-more-to-charity-2019-10-18).  This doesn't mean that Americans or conservatives should pat themselves on the back: it simply is an indication of the fact that they are actually doing their duty, to some extent, by attempting to provide personally for those whom they have voted against providing for governmentally.

And of course, one can still argue about which way is better: do things go better when people can decide where to put their money, or when there is a government bureaucracy of experts making those decisions?  (For those who don't know a conservative, be aware that all the folks right of center just sneezed as if they had an allergy at the phrase "government bureaucracy of experts.")  I think that the Alfred Doolittle argument is a strong reason for preferring the former, but there are plenty of other arguments out there ... which is why good, smart people vote both D and R: because there's a lot to be thought out.

Think It Out, I

The following is a (heavily edited) version of a Facebook comment I left on a friend's thread, vis-a-vis the fears that Justice Barret may strike down the ACA, aka Obamacare.

I quite understand the concern of people who may lose their healthcare; and I do feel, as a Catholic, that healthcare for those who can't afford it is one of those things that society has an obligation to provide.  Of course, there are other ways to provide healthcare besides government, and local governments might arguably be better than the federal government at providing it ...

But setting all that aside, my personal experience with Obamacare has been negative. It led to my rates being hiked--of course; for someone has to pay for those who can't afford their own healthcare, and I was young, employed, and healthy when the bill was passed--but, what bothered me more, Obamacare made it more difficult for me to get the sort of high deductible plan I was interested in, as a young healthy person with sufficient savings.

So I suppose what I'd like to see, if indeed the plan were to be struck down, would be something that protected people with lower incomes and those with preexisting conditions but also allowed for more ... consumer discretion?

This, however, is tricky, because there will always be people who do foolish things, like purchasing houses (cf. Fannie/Freddie crisis) and healthcare plans that they can't afford.  I know I could afford high deductibles, but not everyone can, and some people would try to cut corners, and then the taxpayer would end up footing the bill.  (Again, cf. the housing crisis.)  So should I, the prudent person, have my choice of healthcare plans restricted by the government because other people, granted the same freedom, would inevitably be imprudent?

I can understand why some would argue that way, but as a conservative (surprise!) I don't think that's the right solution.

One alternative might be to have some sort of means-tested provision, e.g., if you can check a box claiming that you have more than X amount in savings, or saved more than Y amount every month for the past year, then you are permitted a high deductible plan.  That wouldn't necessarily penalize poor people, the way an income-based means test would, though of course plenty of people would lie about their savings, and there would doubtless be other unforeseen consequences--as there always are, of any regulations, and the less foreseen the more complex the regulations are.  (#reasonsforconservatism)

Children Are Children Are Children

There's a nice craft book by that title, should you be the sort of person who is interested in doing crafts with (grade-school-age) children.  The gist of the title is simply that, whatever the time or place, there are certain commonalities in the way children think.

That is why classic children's books can remain classic: because they really do dig in to the way children think about the world.  The Winnie the Pooh books are an outstanding example (far more than the Disney adaptations, although the older ones of those are fairly innocent and harmless).

For instance ...

There is a pine cone sitting on my desk right now.  It's a little lopsided, and doesn't quite have that autumnal je-ne-sais-quoi  that, say, a William Sonoma centerpiece would have, because small children have picked off some of the knobs from the bottom--very methodically--although more from one side than the other, so that it now leans for support rather than standing properly.  That it should have been the recipient of experimentation by small hands is only right and just, however: it is booty from a walk, and the rightful possession of the little people of the house.  In this case, I borrowed it for the ambiance, not (as so often happens) the other way round.

The children call it "the fir cone."

This, despite my introduction of it as a "pine cone."  (Reader, I promise, it is a pine cone from a pine tree.  I used to know my botany well.)

I was initially disturbed by this until I realized that their avatar for such articles is the collection of fir cones that Winnie the Pooh throws over the bridge, thus inventing the game of Pooh Sticks.  Also, while Pooh sings a song about "a mystery / About a little fir tree," the only evergreens one meets in the books are the Six Pine Trees.

So one can play Pooh sticks with a fir cone from a pine tree in small person land.  That, at least, is the Tao of Pooh, and I for one am not prepared to dispute it on such a fine afternoon as this.

Poor Chris Pratt, Not Really, P.S.

Did you know “One has to go” was a popular Twitter meme?  It was new to me.  And it struck me as a bit strange.

Stories about the illiberal nature of Twitter, Facebook, etc., are a dime a dozen.  Scratch that, stories about the illiberal nature of liberal progressives in America are a dime a dozen.  And of course, there are plenty of conservative voices who nevertheless manage to have a large following (I heard recently that Ben Shapiro trends a lot on social media? Bo).

And there are of course good reasons to sometimes be illiberal; illiberality is the appropriate response, for instance, to someone who attacks one’s family.  One can imagine, therefore, certain political, cultural, or social positions which merit an illiberal response; although of course one’s priors will determine which positions those are.

But the point of an illiberal response is, or should be, to correct the situation.  When someone attacks your family, you respond for the purpose of sustaining and restoring your family’s integrity.  You don’t respond in order to punish—or, at any rate, such actions were deemed, after the advent of Christianity, to be vengeful and wrong in their own right.

That is why the particular illiberality of “One has to go,” by whomever and on whomever it is used, is problematic.  Not because it might be hypocritical, not because its victims are necessarily all innocents, but because it’s designed to punish rather than to cure.  Ostracism does not, ultimately, heal the body politic.  Only conversions will do that.  And “One has to go” is not about earning converts.

Poor Chris Pratt

No, not really.  He’s a Hollywood star with, I am sure, lots of money, plenty of adoring fans, a beautiful family (second wife, I think? if he sticks with #2 we’ll just call it the Hollywood standard, I guess), and no (yet publicized) major personality or drug issues.

So, from a modern human standpoint, he should be pretty happy.

Did I mention he’s also characterized in the news as a committed Christian?  That his church doesn’t support LGBTQ people?  That he once gave away an old cat that he co-owned with his ex-wife (presumably without her knowledge and consent, or it wouldn’t be an issue)?  And that he said he won’t be going to a Biden fundraiser with some of his fellow Marvel stars?

So he’s in trouble again, on Twitter, not for the first time, for the most recent of those offenses (and of course the others are being dredged up as well).  A producer pulled up a picture of Pratt and three other Chris-christened actors, and employed the popular Twitter meme “One has to go,” leading to fans expressing disapproval of Pratt’s non-presence at the virtual Biden fundraiser, as well as his other offenses.

And, adding insult to injury, Pratt had the gall to be defended by some of his fellow stars (e.g., the ever popular, also-not-going-to-be-at-the-fundraiser Robert Downey Jr.) who did not leap to defend female Marvel stars during similar Twitter spats.  So Pratt is an inspiration for an ongoing anti-woman double-standard as well.

That’s the short version of the events of the past few days in the Hollyverse.

And as someone who’s seen maybe half the Marvel movies franchise, who watches maybe five new movies a year (and waits until movies come out on video for less $$—at which point are they even new anymore?), who doesn’t have a Twitter account, who spends less and less time on Facebook, and who is also not voting for Biden … I’m sitting here and shaking my head and laughing.

I don’t have a problem with Twitter censoring conservatives.  It’s not a public library or courthouse or even a newspaper; it’s a privately held company with a distinct ownership and a distinct set of fans.  I think any conservative who hops on Twitter expecting not to be censored is fooling himself or herself.

But, mes frères libéraux, I submit for this incident to be entered as exhibit P in the case of the Shy Conservatives.  If you don’t see anyone expressing conservative views on your platforms, or in your neighborhood, or at your book club, or what have you—and if the only ones you do hear of online seem to be increasingly strident and scary—then it’s probably because all the nice guys and gals got tired a long time ago and went back home, or reopened a personal blog, or took up origami airplane making.

I recommend all three, especially the last if you have small kids.

 

 

 

 

Shouldn’t the Good Guys Be Better than This? (VI)

Aquinas tends to explain human frailty in more intellective terms (lack of attention, grounded in imperfect thought processes); his near-contemporary Scotus thought the problem was more one of will—and that tends to be the modern diagnosis as well.  Certainly there are issues in both faculties.

In any case, whether one puts the source of human error in the intellect or the will, or suspects both equally of frailty, the effect is similar: even good people, and people who know better, fall through frailty.

And grace?  Doesn’t grace repair fallen human nature?  Indeed, the frailty of the best of Christians is rather a scandal, if you think grace is meant to eradicate human frailty.  But I don’t think that’s what St. Paul meant to convey when he talks about Christ’s power being made manifest in weakness, or when Julian of Norwich says that sin is behovable.  Grace builds on nature, it shores nature up, but it seems that God only rarely bestows so much of it as to create a preternatural superstructure entirely ungrounded in its natural foundation.  Or, to put it in English, God helps people slowly, in time, and not in an instant; and in eternity it all comes out in the wash.

That of course raises problems of theodicy for many.  But that’s another problem for another blog series; and this one is not finished yet.

Shouldn’t the Good Guys Be Better than This? (V)

It’s something of an empirical fact that people do things which are not in their own best interest.  Some people—Socrates, libertarians (yes, I know one of these things is not like the others)—seem to feel that this can always be traced back to an information deficit.  If only we truly knew better, we would never eat sugary foods, buy tchotchkes, or stay up too late.

Dear reader, I submit myself as exhibit A in refuting this position.  I know very well that lack of sleep, spending on valueless items, and too sweet foods do not make me happy for more than about half a second.  And the more I can keep those facts of life in mind, the less I am tempted by these particular pitfalls.  But the fact is, for all that I have that knowledge, I don’t always … remember it very well.  Aristotle has some excellent analysis of this paradox, which Aquinas picks up and many a modern psychologist has performed all anew.

It comes down, in modern terms, to willpower.  It’s hard to muster enough will to do the best things for ourselves all the time, because doing the best thing is often harder than doing the immediately sensually or emotionally appealing thing.  Aquinas talks in this context about attention: our minds tend to flit from one thing to another, and we do not always attend to the principles that we know to be true, e.g., this pecan praline crunch will not actually make me feel happy after about more than a tablespoon.

Shouldn’t the Good Guys Be Better than This? (IV)

I think the answer to the question of why so many Catholics sin in obvious contravention to the Gospels, and despite the help of grace, can be boiled down to three parts.

(1)   Free will.

(2)   Original sin.

(3)   Are you so sure?

I’ll talk about each of these parts in an upcoming post, but preview the answers here, since the short phrases may seem absurdly glib, especially as they are hardly original as responses to this problem.

(1)   Free will means that people often resist what they know to be in their best interests, e.g., I resist eating raw vegetables and exercising.

(2)   Original sin means that even when we know our own best interests, we generally know them only partly, and with mixtures of other information, e.g., I know that exercise is good for me but I don’t know all the details of how running helps my heart and mood levels and gee that was a really good episode of the Mandalorian; I wonder if that actor was in the other thing that I saw with the friend whose hair is really too good to be true but how much time does it take to take care of that, and you just have to prioritize some things over others in life, like parents deciding whether to homeschool their kids or not, which is a really dicey topic these days, but it shouldn’t be, unless of course we start turning into France after the election, which would be weird but not entirely far-fetched, given the history of …

(3)   I’m not convinced that Catholics who resort frequently to the sacraments are not, in fact, better at following the Gospels than other people.  I would love to see some actual research on this.  I’m not sure how you’d conduct a double blind study, but I think it might almost be done … and even a less well conducted study would be well worth the reading.

Shouldn’t the Good Guys Be Better than This? (III)

Of course, most Catholics are not following Jesus particularly well (myself included).  And indeed, when people point to vengeful Catholics, or lying Catholics, or greedy Catholics, or what-have-you, it is generally not hard to show that vengeance, lying, greed, etc. are in pretty direct conflict to the words of Jesus in the Gospels, and to the basic teachings of the Church.  (Cf. the Seven Deadly Sins).

Regarding vengeance and related sins of anger in particular, there are, of course, those places in the Gospels that discuss hell.  But in general, Jesus seems to draw a pretty direct line between hell and a lack of charity; so—whatever you make of hell doctrinally—it would be difficult to argue that a reasonable interpretation of Jesus’s remarks on hell could form grounds for our treating each other worse.

(Of course, there have been unreasonable interpretations that did precisely that.  I’m not appealing to the idea that Christians has never gotten anger, etc., wrong; rather, I’m appealing to a reader who doubts my “reasonable interpretation” metric to just go read the source texts and explain to me how taken as a whole, the Gospels support anger, vengeance, and the like.)

But in fact, this seeming defense of Christian doctrine has actually exacerbated the original problem.  For if sins of (say) anger are not only against nature/intuition/enlightened-best-interest but also against the basic tenets of Christianity, then it is even harder to explain—given the doctrine of grace with which this series of posts began—how Christians can so often violate these tenets.  If God says “Be angry, but sin not” and also gives Christians the grace not to sin, why do so many sin anyway?

Shouldn’t the Good Guys Be Better than This? (II)

One cannot, alas, explain away bad Catholics by appealing to the mere fact of good Catholics.  Mother Teresa is wonderful, but she doesn’t answer the problem of President Kennedy.

Evelyn Waugh, to an interlocutor who considered that his status as a mediocre human being reflected bad on the Church, is said to have rejoined something to the effect of, “You can only imagine how terrible I’d be if I weren’t Catholic.”  That is funny, though it hardly addresses the problem of Bad Catholics in general either.

Still, another moment is due to Waugh’s response.  It is after all the response that I am prone to give in my own case.  If I fail, it is not in spite of my membership in the Church—it is certainly not due to my relationship with Jesus Christ, to the time I spend with him in prayer, and to the ways in which I attempt resemble him.  On the contrary: to the extent that I fail, it’s because I am not conforming myself to Christ and the divine element within the Church.

That is only one data point, but it is one which I know intimately—the workings of my own mind—and so it has considerable salience.  And it suggests to me that the starting point, when I ask why there are so many bad Catholics, should be to consider whether most of them are in fact doing what Jesus commanded.

It’s Human Nature to Believe in Human Nature, Even If We’re Wrong About It

This past week the California legislature, ever the harbinger of progress, passed a bill reducing, under certain circumstances, the penalties related to physical intimacy between adults and minors. It involves a reduction in (not elimination of) penalties for adults (18 and up) who engage in certain activities with minors (under 18), provided the age gap is 10 years or less and the minor is 14 or over; the upshot of the bill (if California governor Gavin Newsom signs it) is likely be unfortunate rather than dire.

This is not the bill to be worried about, if you are a social conservative. But it does raise questions, for — like all such bills — it relies on the notion of consent.

Consent is the sine qua non in extra-familial relationships: without it, the term “relationship” is rather meaningless.  But though consent is necessary for a healthy relationship, it is insufficient.

Consider, for example, the analogy of finance, or labor, or sports.  We might obtain verbal “consent” from 10-year-old Rupert to invest his inheritance in mutual funds; but the law generally does not accept that Rupert has the judgment to determine his investments, and so requires that his financial interests be vested in a parent or guardian until he “comes of age.” Again, 12-year-old Evangelina might want desperately to contribute to the family finances; but modern child labor laws frequently presume that her consent to a working arrangement should be overridden for her own good.  And finally, 14-year-old Arthur, when he signs up for the competitive soccer team, signs a waiver about injuries and indemnity — but, critically, his parent signs too, because it is assumed that Arthur, being a tender 14 years of age, is not mature enough to sign away his own ability to sue the living daylights out of the soccer coach, should his malleus, incus, and stapes fracture in an ill-advised headshot.

There are plenty of other things government and society (let alone parents) do not think that children and teens are competent to decide: many medical procedures, whether and what school to attend, the right age for walking to the park or riding the subway alone or watching in a public theater an NC-17 movie (the very restriction is baked into the designation!).  In all these cases the presumption is that a young person’s consent is not sufficient: and the implication is that there is a deep sense in which people do not always know what is good for them. Their consent, we might say, is uninformed — not simply because they lack information intellectually, but because their lack of emotional and life experience makes them necessarily less able to handle decisions that even adults can agonize over.

And yet — and yet — there is one area in modern life in which young people are supposed to be able to consent: the matter of SB-145.  When it comes to intimacy, our culture accepts that a 14- or 15- or 16-year-old has the judgment and maturity to make decisions.

I would not attempt to argue that all teenagers are too immature to determine what constitutes a healthy romantic relationship; but such maturity is rare. In ancient and medieval times the nobility (but not, notably, peasants) were frequently married quite young — to people chosen by their parents. Nobody thought Romeo and Juliet were old enough for informed consent; and Shakespeare hints that they may have been the exception that proves the rule.

The same holds true today: I know of a few people who got together in their teens and are living happily ever after; but most people would agree that their teenage judgment about who constituted a worthwhile partner was atrocious.

So what gives?  Why are we careful to protect teenagers from bad choices about money, work, safety, movies, and drugs, but casual about potential bad choices in the area of romance?

Read the rest at the Register: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/it-s-human-nature-to-believe-in-human-nature-even-if-we-re-wrong-about-it

God Gets the Last Laugh

 Out of the many tragedies of coronavirus days — from lost lives to missed playdates, from broken marriages to unemployment — has been the silencing of music. While it certainly does not deserve to be classed with more major, life-altering events, music is one of those things that makes life worth living. But now Broadway is online; community theaters are shuttered; church choirs are disbanded in favor of cantors or — nothing at all.

Nor is this a trivial alteration, the cancellation of one sort of “entertainment” that can easily be replaced by another, as if knitting parties by Zoom could somehow sate the human spirit’s need for song. Music is unique: its presence in every culture, its uselessness, and its frequent employment in worship suggest that it answers a universal desire to express something deep in human nature, even something transcendent. Its unique role earns it a cameo in The Screwtape Letters, where C.S. Lewis puts the following sentiments in the mouth of the experienced demon instructing a junior tempter:

The whole house and garden [of a certain girl] is one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: ‘the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence.’  Music and silence — how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise — Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile — Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end. But I admit we are not yet loud enough, or anything like it.”

Music and silence are, of course, the two modes that lift the liturgy into the sacred. In the traditional Latin rite the canon is silent or sotto voce; in the Eastern churches it is sung. Even today, the option to chant or speak quietly for the canon is present in the Novus Ordo, and adopted on solemn occasions like Christmas and Easter. (Now, if only more priests could treat every Mass as a solemn occasion!) And of course, congregational participation in hymn singing is a part of the liturgy for most Christian churches in America.

It seemed, therefore, like a particularly cruel joke from an infernal perspective that music got the ax early in coronavirus time. Multiple cases and two deaths resulting from a choir practice in Mount Vernon were followed by videos and expert testimonies about how singing might spread water droplets carrying the virus, infecting far more people than mere conversation. So the singing stopped, even in those places where services were still being held (distanced, with masks, etc., etc., etc.). It wasn’t as if Catholics were ever very good about singing in the first place; now, we might as well all be deaf and mute.

Read the rest at the Register: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/god-gets-the-last-laugh