The Water Is Wide

The Road To Hell

"It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?"
--Thomas Merton

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

As Wise As Doves

Father Heines once said: "Our adult education programs are empty and so are our heads." Although he was talking about "willful ignorance" of many Catholics about the teachings of their religion, his warning would also apply to much of the public discussion I've been listening to lately about politics and the economy. The other night, I perversely switched between Fox, CNN and MSNBC to review the current state of cable TV "discourse" by pundits on the important issues of our day. Aside form a preoccupation with Tiger Woods' "sex addiction" (a condition that in the old days of my teenage years we referred to as "nefarious ass banditry," but then we didn't realize that certain men have a medical condition that negates the responsibility of free will), I found discussions of political and economic matters to be full of little serious thought but lots of overblown sound bites that added nothing of intellectual substance to the discussion. I even tuned in "World Tonight" on EWTN for what I hoped would be an intelligent discussion of issues from a Catholic perspective, but instead of Michael Novak or even George Weigel, there was the Catholic League's Bill Donohue screaming at an unrelenting 180 decibels about some godless cultural subgroup or another that was persecuting the Catholic Church, to the point where my ears soon felt like I'd been strapped to a jackhammer and left for dead. Bill might have been making good points, but I can't listen to them delivered with the quality of fingernails screeching along a blackboard.

The only person who I found entertaining was Dennis Miller, a libertarian, many of whose views I don't share, but whose obscure and witty references both pop and classical at least make me laugh out loud. The rest of the white noise of cable television makes me despair that anyone, of any political stripe, is interested in educating themselves. Instead, they seem hell bent on simply reinforcing their prejudices.

Christ told us to be as wise as serpents and as simple as doves, not vice versa. If we're to acquire wisdom, I think it will have to be found elsewhere than on cable television.

Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Kyrie Eleison

As the income disparity in the U.S. grows, investors should note that the recession has hammered all consumers -- but it hasn't hit them all to nearly the same degree.

[...]

Wall Street is now betting that the fortunes of expensive luxury retailers may actually look much brighter than that of their more cost-conscious peers.

From A Litany in Time of Plague, by Thomas Nashe:

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Say It, With Music

Broadway star Linda Eder sings, for the first time, a song composed by her husband, Frank Wildhorn, and Jack Murphy, in response to 9/11.

Decomposing Into Bureaucracy

Over sixty years ago, French writer and social critic Georges Bernanos looked at modern democracies and found within them the seeds of their destruction: the increasing power of the state at the expense of personal liberty. From his essay "Why Freedom?" from the book The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos:

As the power of the state increases we must declare with regret—a respectful regret, that’s understood of course, for we are respectful citizens—that this All-Powerful Being does not gain in morality as much as it gains in power. This remark cannot be applied yet to certain prosperous states, but you know the true nature of a man is revealed in poverty. Therefore, it is proper to observe the poor states in order to get an idea of what has become of the state in our time. The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more. It is precisely by this trait that tyrants have always been recognized. People would like to make us believe that the Nazi state was a sort of unforeseen and unforeseeable monster, an absolutely chance phenomenon, something fallen from the moon. But the Hitlerian state did not differ essentially from certain so-called democratic modern states that are in the process of dissolving into the totalitarian form. Whether democratic or not, the modern state has all of the economic rights. When, in certain cases, a state claims a share of some 83 per cent of a citizen’s income, against the promise (which it can always take back) of guaranteeing to him whatever is left over, one certainly has the right to wonder where its claims will end. Anybody who controls property always ends by controlling people. Anyone who gets in the habit of stealing runs the serious risk of becoming a killer…The democracies have been decomposing too, but some decompose more quickly than others. They have been decomposing into bureaucracy, suffering from it as a diabetic does from sugar, at the expense of its own substance. In most cases, this bureaucracy itself decomposes into its most degraded form, police bureaucracy. At the end of this evolution, all that is left of the state is the police—police for the control, surveillance, exploitation and extermination of the citizen.

Given the spin doctoring by both sides in the shouting match of incredible intellectual dishonesty that has engulfed the "debate" about the Obama administration's plans for "health care reform," it's easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. It's always best to focus on the fundamental differences between the opposing views, the non-negotiable self-evident essential truths that each party embraces.

"Anybody who controls property always ends by controlling people. Anyone who gets in the habit of stealing runs the serious risk of becoming a killer."

You accept those propositions or you do not. If you do, you know where you stand, and no amount of lying--whether subtly clever or ham-handed--will alter the positions to which those truths lead you. Nor will false "support" from clueless allies lead you astray, down blind alleys of misdirection.

In the end, I think, even for those with intellectual honesty and goodwill, or perhaps especially for such people, our differences about the way we view the world, our place within it, our relationship to God (if we believe in God), and our relationship to one another, are so profound that on some issues, no compromise is possible. At such a point, people take a stand and slug it out. One side wins, the other loses.

I think that we're engaged in one of those struggles. I wish we had alive today and engaged in this struggle, men and women of the intellectual depth and eloquence possessed by Bernanos. I wish we had them on both sides, so that the differences in core values that are at the bottom of our differences about "health care reform" would be made clear to the greatest number of concerned citizens. We don't, however. At least, I haven't been able to hear them in the cacophony of yelling and screaming that's been saturating the airwaves and main stream press. If they exist, I wish they'd step up, although I wonder, given the apparent short attention span of the average citizen, whether many would take the time to listen and to think.

What Is Truth?

Ever since George Bush left office and Rod Dreher dropped his "Bush Lied, Troops Died" meme, Rod's been readable. That's a good thing, because I genuinely like the guy and what he has to say. Today's opinion piece in The Dallas Morning News was another gem. Although framed as advice to recent graduates on what he wishes he'd heard from a commencement speaker, that subject is only a platform for one of Dreher's customary themes: there exist truth and virtue and the pursuit of both is the goal of a meaningful life. These are laugh-worthy concepts to a relativist, but meat and potatoes to we bipeds whose knuckles still scrape the asphalt when we walk.

An excerpt:

...[U]nless you're an incurable romantic or an American politician, you eventually will learn that life is more tragic than you were led to believe. You will discover your own limits. You will fail at something, even if you succeed by the standards of the world.

That failure may save you; success may destroy you. A friend grew comfortably wealthy in high finance but looked around one day, horrified to see what luxury had done to his colleagues' character. Shaken, he left the firm and embraced his ancestors' Judaism. He eventually quit finance entirely, fearing the inevitable consequences of Wall Street's money-driven collective madness. They all thought they were invincible.

Four months later, the stock market crashed. Every one of his friends was wiped out. What happened to them is tragic, in a way, but not the worst thing. Leon Bloy, the French Catholic novelist, had it right when he ended one of his novels with the following line: "There is but one tragedy, not to be a saint."

In secular terms, this means the only thing that matters is a life of self-sacrificing virtue, whether a prince's or a pauper's. People wonder how to get what they want but rarely think about what they should want. Don't be true to thine own self; be true to the truth. Most of us will never become rich or famous or even be remembered over time. But the capacity for everlasting greatness, as Bloy saw, lies within us all.

You don't fully control your fate, but you do control the formation of your character. That matters in ways we cannot foresee and can only appreciate once we lose the illusion that we are self-created.

To some extent, I think Dreher's like Garrett Morris' character on Saturday Night Live, whose closed captioned translation of the weekly anchor report for the deaf consisted of shouting. No matter what Morris said, the deaf weren't going to get it because they didn't comprehend the medium, much less the message. Dreher's offering his opinions in the opinion section of a daily newspaper. The people he needs to reach aren't reading newspapers much anymore. More importantly, so many of them have been raised in a secular, relativist culture that scoffs at many of the concepts discussed by Dreher, like "virtue" and, certainly, "truth." Dreher's shouting at the deaf.

Dreher's often speculated as to how a culture that doesn't share basic truths will survive. Greatly influenced by philosopher Alasdiar MacIntyre's bleak view of contemporary moral discourse, as set forth in his work After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Dreher's as pessimistic as is MacIntyre about the ability of Westerners (that includes us, folks) to comprehend one another when we discuss the concept of what it is we "ought to do," much less come to any consensus about "virtue" that we can use to bind ourselves together in a coherent body that will survive from generation to generation. Rather, we face the increasingly likely prospect that while we continue to talk past one another, we will become "atomized" (as another political theorist, Francis Fukuyama, put it so well), with few ties that bind us and little strength to those few ties that do. As a consequence, MacIntyre speculates and Dreher asserts, that a "new Benedict" will emerge, a successor to the original St. Benedict, whose monastic order kept alight the flame of intellectual, spiritual and religious virtues of Western civilization during the long, dark period following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

For Dreher, this light will remain shining through the coming dark ages in small communities of like-minded Christians who, like the earliest Christians, will suffer for their beliefs but will not relinquish them nor permit the light to be extinguished. They will be, I assume, as Chesterton (again) so well described those early martyrs to the faith:

And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosporescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable: the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

Once again, at some future point, the civilization we know will fall, as it must from its own lack of common purpose or, severely weakened by its relativist ethos, is overcome by a more robust, less atomized culture, one that rejects "whatever floats your boat" as the measuring stick for civic and personal virtue. Eventually, after the inevitable darkness that will follow, Christianity will prevail, and the small flame will, once again, blaze brightly and beat back the darkness. Dreher seems to be engaged in rallying those with similar views to engage in building these communities of light within a culture that is filled with lengthening shadows. He's said many times that fights like those against homosexual marriage and abortion "rights," while they should be waged, must be waged in a manner that preserves some small "right" to be different in a popular culture that will inevitably overwhelm the conservative Christian principles that have been rejected by a majority of those inhabitants of Western civilization today. In other words, he says the war for the popular culture is lost and we must look to preserve the legal right of minorities to believe and act on cherished principles of virtue in a society that has little, if any, truth left in it, other than to hold Christian values to be false ones.

That seems a bleak prospect, and no matter how much it appeals to my natural, man-given inclination to surrender to the pessimist I was and would be without my faith, I can't get onboard that train. Not only do I not understand how the new Benedict will find mountain redoubts that cannot be breached given modern mass media and technology, from what I've seen of the secular jihadists, they'll never be satisfied until traditional religious belief is extinguished from public life. I'd just as soon go down swinging than take that path, which I don't think will work.

However, before I can effectively engage in swimming against the tide of the deracinated mainstream of popular culture, I need to worry first about my personal circle of influence, which at the moment seems to be limited to me and my loving wife. Only if I succeed in getting out of God's way in my personal life will I have a chance of being saved. Only if I am saved will I be transformed in a positive manner. Only if I am transformed in a positive manner will I have any chance of influencing others in a positive manner. Only if those of us who profess to be believing Christians actually exhibit the transformative power of Christ to make ourselves stewards for the good of others will we have a prayer of transforming the culture.

I'm not surrendering to what Rod believes to be inevitable. On the other hand, until I get my own house in order, I'm not fit to fight this fight.

The Will To Happiness

As an answer to the question "What's wrong with the world," G.K. Chesterton famously replied, "I am." That answer might lead a reader to suppose that Chesterton was both a pessimist and an egotist. Hardly.

Chesterton was great believer in both mankind and in the joy of living life among men and women to the fullest. In a March 2000 essay in First Things, professor David Fagerberg expounds on this theme.

In a letter to his fiancée, Frances, he confesses to being stained with ink from that day’s work (a state of appearance at which Frances would probably not be surprised), and then thinks to add, "I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people. . . . When we call a man ‘manly’ or a woman ‘womanly’ we touch the deepest philosophy." Chesterton was pleased to make the acquaintance of various people, many people, any people. He even once thought it would be pleasing to make the acquaintance of all people:

An Invitation.
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
requests the pleasure
Of humanity’s company
to tea on Dec. 25th 1896.
Humanity Esq., The Earth, Cosmos E.

On every encounter, at every turn, with every person, there is cause for happiness. Both the tree and the lamppost, both the friend and the stranger, are equally delightful, for they are splendid and unexplained. They seem supernatural because there is no explanation as to how we should be graced with them, and they seem natural because they are made just for us. The opportunities for happiness are coterminous with being itself. We have been given a world crammed with a million means to beatitude.

Yet, for Chesterton, there was nothing "natural" about this state of happiness. It was, for him, entirely a matter of will.

Happiness is not bestowed, it is accomplished. It is gleaned. "In everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. . . . The point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement."

[...]

One’s capacity for happiness must be trained, naturally (of course); and it must be trained naturally (in accord with reality). The principle that happiness contains qualifications is a law Chesterton calls "the Doctrine of Conditional Joy," and he explains its corpus juris most lucidly in the chapter in Orthodoxy called "Ethics of Elfland." "According to elfin ethics all virtue is in an ‘if.’ The note of the fairy utterance always is, ‘You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word "cow"’; or ‘You may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion.’ The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden."

Joy is conditional, only the price is not arbitrarily set by fates unseen and gods unknown, as some ancient cosmologies and some lately restored cosmologies would have it. It is not as if human beings could enjoy the world in a rampant, reckless way save that we are not allowed to, though we could be. The doctrine of conditional joy does not describe accidental conditions that must be met before joy will be released by some repressive power (as in, it is necessary to eat vegetables before you will be allowed dessert); the doctrine rather describes the conditions necessary for the experience of joy (e.g., it is necessary to eat in order to live). That a disordered will cannot be happy is not an accidental decree, it is a state impossible by definition. Happiness is contingent upon an ordered will, like seeing is contingent upon having one’s eyes open. The condition in conditional joy is not a fee demanded of us before we are permitted to enjoy the world, it is the capacitation required of us before we can find the world enjoyable. The price for happiness is set by ontological conditions.

[...]

"The test of all happiness is gratitude," Chesterton wrote, and many of us have flunked that test. "Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?" We feel no wonder at ordinary things; it is no wonder that ordinary things disappoint us. Chesterton could be made happy by the sudden yellowness of a dandelion, but we do not find dandelions delightful if we are constantly comparing them to orchids. "It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all." The twin brother of this presumptive attitude is despair, and the two make us sick and tired. "Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless."

Until we are grateful, we will not find the world miraculous; until we find the world miraculous, we will not find it important; until we find the world important, we will not be happy here. The difference between ourselves and Chesterton is that we don’t think our world important because it seems ordinary, while he thinks his world is important because he is ordinary. "I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term; which means the acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them, and the rest of the normal traditions of our race and religion."

This ordinary happiness makes up the essence of Chesterton, and, woven into all his writings, perspicuous on whatever page one opens, it is his gift to those who suffer boredom. A happy saint is just the antidote we need.

Pelosi or Panetta? Cheney or Obama? A tantrum or a sulk?

Me? I'm on to a new life, where those things may matter, but not as a first priority. Frankly, not even as a second or a third.

So little time. So much past time wasted. So much joy yet to be experienced. Like water dripping through a hole in the bottom of a bucket, the finite number of minutes of your earthly existence is being spent. The exercise of your will makes all difference as to the quality of the dwindling remainder. It's never too late to choose until the bucket runs dry.

Choose. Now. Be grateful. Be ordinary. Be happy.

Rob Thomas, Little Wonders

The Lesson Of Our Time

From Francis Beckwith's recent post on the death of porn star Marilyn Chambers:

We live in an age in which we know precisely what recycle bin our newsprint and soda bottles belong. But we have no idea what a human being is, what it’s supposed to do, or who or what it is permissible to sleep with. So, this is the lesson of our time: the “good” man is the one who treats his garbage with greater care than his own soul.

Echoes of Chesterton there, no? Entirely fitting, given the title of the blog.

"Politics" As Usual

NBC refused to air this pro-life ad during the Super Bowl, deeming it "political."

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

H/t First Things

McCain: Set The Palin Record Straight

For me, Sarah Palin's act wore thin about two weeks after her kick-ass speech to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. I don't think that she's stupid, a diva, or even a bad politician. While I initially loved her spunk and think we shared some basic values, I rapidly came to the conclusion that she was not ready for prime time (the real prime time, not "Saturday Night Live," where she was more than ready), and that it was a mistake to place in her in the position of a vice-presidential candidate. She may be ready some day, but that day was not last month, yesterday or today.

That said, I think that the recent "anonymous leaks" from the McCain campaign staff, including innuendos that Palin cost McCain the election, are despicable, cowardly, rabbit punching that you'd not expect from a group that sold their candidate as a man of honor. It turns out that I'm not alone.

In an op-ed piece in today's The Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required), William McGurn lights into these clowns.

The first point to make here is the most obvious: This is the language of losers.

This whole display calls to mind those embarrassing codas to each episode of "The Apprentice," when the losing team would sit before Donald Trump in the boardroom and then start blaming everyone but themselves for their failures. The apparent eagerness of Team McCain to indulge in this kind of fingerpointing is similarly unprofessional, and it raises an interesting question.

We are asked to believe that Mrs. Palin was not ready for a national campaign. On what evidence from any part of this election are we to conclude that anyone on the McCain campaign team was ready for a national campaign?

[...]

In the treatment of Mrs. Palin by some of the McCain staff, there is the clear whiff of condescension. That's something a sitting American governor might understandably find hard to stomach coming from a bunch of young professional Republicans who have never themselves run for office.

Noting that McCain is scheduled to appear tonight on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Mr. McGurn asserts that McCain has an opportunity to set things right by repudiating the bullies in his own camp.

In Mr. McCain's moving concession speech, he wished "godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president." He asked his fellow Americans to join him in helping President-elect Obama bridge our differences and build a better, more hopeful nation.

It will be instructive to see whether Mr. McCain will now extend the same level of graciousness to Mrs. Palin that he has to Mr. Obama, by giving a public slapdown to the very public smears emanating from his own campaign team. We have no idea what Mr. McCain will do when he sits down with Mr. Leno tonight.

But there's no doubt what a man of honor would do.

As ancient and infirm as I am, with one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave, I usually don't make it up for Leno. Tonight I'll make an exception, principally to see if McCain does the right thing.