Showing posts with label the evil of banality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the evil of banality. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
LOST IN THE COSMO: Bracketing any questions about the actual tv show "Girls," I note that this review basically says, "The great thing about this show is that it treats sex as banal! The bad thing about this show is that the women aren't happy."
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
ARS LONGA, UNIVERSITAS BREVIS: Uh, sorry for the probably-mangled Latin. Anyway, I don't really have much to say about my Gay Catholic Whatnot talk for Carnegie Mellon U's Newman Center. The audience seemed intrigued. I could intrigue audiences on your campus! Why not invite me? If you're not on the DC Metro I'd need you to pay for my transportation plus a nominal speaking fee, and feed and shelter me if I'm expected to stay overnight, but I would be very happy to have dinner w/students, do an extended Q&A, stay after the talk to speak with people privately, or whatever else I can do to reach out to students with questions on all things romoerotic.
The one thing I did want to mention is that one student (not from CMU, I think) described the atmosphere on her campus in a way which made it sound, to me, pretty vulgar. A lot of campus Catholic groups seem to do Bible study, prayer groups, and corporal works of mercy for those already within Mother Church, and focus their evangelization efforts on discussions of controversial issues. I wondered whether they'd do better to give students opportunities to encounter beauty. Why not show Therese (this one), or do posters with poetry from St John of the Cross or Thomas a Kempis's reworking of the Song of Songs as a hymn to Christ crucified?
There's more than one way to be countercultural; and contemporary college culture is so often banal (not only at secular colleges, either) that offering an encounter with sublimity might be the most oppositional thing campus Christians could do.
The one thing I did want to mention is that one student (not from CMU, I think) described the atmosphere on her campus in a way which made it sound, to me, pretty vulgar. A lot of campus Catholic groups seem to do Bible study, prayer groups, and corporal works of mercy for those already within Mother Church, and focus their evangelization efforts on discussions of controversial issues. I wondered whether they'd do better to give students opportunities to encounter beauty. Why not show Therese (this one), or do posters with poetry from St John of the Cross or Thomas a Kempis's reworking of the Song of Songs as a hymn to Christ crucified?
There's more than one way to be countercultural; and contemporary college culture is so often banal (not only at secular colleges, either) that offering an encounter with sublimity might be the most oppositional thing campus Christians could do.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
I WOULD NEVER SAY "I TOLD YOU SO," OH, BUT TONY... I TOLD YOU SO: Some aphorisms of Don Colacho, as I discover a blog. (...For the theological ones, I feel duty-bound to note that Christianity complicates everybody's aphoristic wisdom a.k.a. self-image, so if you want to argue with an aphorism it might be better to sit and let it steep in you and figure out the ways in which it might be true. Or to put it another way, I don't think "Don Colacho's" point is actually that he's right about Jesus.)
#2,966: Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.
#2,964: A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.
#2,956: The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.
Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.
#2,953: Historical events stop being interesting the more accustomed their participants become to judging everything in purely secular categories.
Without the intervention of gods everything becomes boring.
#2,952: If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.
#2,949: Where the law is not customary law, it is easily turned into a mere political weapon.
#2,942: The secret longing of every civilized society is not to abolish inequality, but to educate it.
#2,938: Baroque, preciosity, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.
#2,937: An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.
#2,936: The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.
#2,932: After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.
#2,931: Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes.
[I'm stopping after one page, but this is fantastic stuff. Even the punchlines with which I actively disagree are fierce.]
#2,966: Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.
#2,964: A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.
#2,956: The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.
Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.
#2,953: Historical events stop being interesting the more accustomed their participants become to judging everything in purely secular categories.
Without the intervention of gods everything becomes boring.
#2,952: If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.
#2,949: Where the law is not customary law, it is easily turned into a mere political weapon.
#2,942: The secret longing of every civilized society is not to abolish inequality, but to educate it.
#2,938: Baroque, preciosity, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.
#2,937: An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.
#2,936: The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.
#2,932: After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.
#2,931: Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes.
[I'm stopping after one page, but this is fantastic stuff. Even the punchlines with which I actively disagree are fierce.]
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
SUSIE THEN REMOVED HER MASK/AND CAUSED A MIGHTY STIR: Just so everyone's clear, 1. Here are some of my favorite posts by Helen Rittelmeyer. These posts in no way exhaust her awesomeness; they merely give you what Lady Holliday in The Great Muppet Caper would call "a soupcon--Marie, I don't think we should chew gum!"
"Decadence, Christianity, And Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." My own senior essay changed my life. If mine hadn't, hers might've.
"Toward a Bioethics of Love"
In defense of shame (my post against; but you should read hers first)
A review of three books I read (in part) because she owned them.
All my posts tagged w/her name
2. Apparently Todd Seavey lived twenty-and-some years without ever meeting an agent provocateur until Helen. His naivete, while potentially endearing when played by Joseph Cotten, should in no way impair your reading of her actual work, which is much more Marlene Dietrich than Anne Hathaway.
"Decadence, Christianity, And Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." My own senior essay changed my life. If mine hadn't, hers might've.
"Toward a Bioethics of Love"
In defense of shame (my post against; but you should read hers first)
A review of three books I read (in part) because she owned them.
All my posts tagged w/her name
2. Apparently Todd Seavey lived twenty-and-some years without ever meeting an agent provocateur until Helen. His naivete, while potentially endearing when played by Joseph Cotten, should in no way impair your reading of her actual work, which is much more Marlene Dietrich than Anne Hathaway.
Monday, January 05, 2009
UTILITARIAN UNIVERSALISM: The final paragraph of this article makes me wonder: If we learned that people were more polite, or more conscientious about dental hygiene, after listening to Mozart, would we then say that music exists because it makes us nice and clean?
...I mean, would we say it without feeling gross?
Of course, the particular measurements by which these studies find that "religion" promotes self-control may suggest that we have tamed the lion: I can't imagine Catherine of Siena browsing the Health section of her favorite magazine for tips on nutrition. And I'm thinking the kind of self-control required to wear a seat belt and the kind of devoted submission required to accept martyrdom are different not merely in degree but in kind. For some people they may even be directly opposed.
...I mean, would we say it without feeling gross?
Of course, the particular measurements by which these studies find that "religion" promotes self-control may suggest that we have tamed the lion: I can't imagine Catherine of Siena browsing the Health section of her favorite magazine for tips on nutrition. And I'm thinking the kind of self-control required to wear a seat belt and the kind of devoted submission required to accept martyrdom are different not merely in degree but in kind. For some people they may even be directly opposed.
Friday, August 08, 2008
ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP: PARMENIDES AND HUCKABEE BATTLE THE BLOB!: This very good post by Ryan Anderson is an opportunity for me to finally explain what I meant by saying that all culture rests on religion, “and by religion I mean an understanding of the nature of love”; and culture can't be separated from politics.
It’s pretty easy to jump from that statement to Huckabee’s, “I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do--to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”
I think it’s fairly boring to say, “I don’t want conversion by the sword.” It’s unjustifiable on Christian grounds (sorry, St. Augustine, for the most part I think you’re the squiggly neon shoelaces of the world and I love you to little sparkly bits, but that wasn’t your finest hour) and, really, after JPII and his insistence on the rights of conscience, do we still need to have this discussion? So I will bracket it, because this is my blog, and instead talk about the ways in which Huckabee is right, and Richard Rorty is right, and Alisdair MacIntyre is right--because these are three guys I would far prefer to use as scratching posts, so defending them will be an exercise in humility.
All natural-law talk is virtue-talk at heart. Certainly in the realm of politics this is true. There are some things Reason can’t explain; for everything else, there’s natural law. If you believe anything remotely close to that, you are a virtue-talker.
MacIntyre is right on two counts: First, that virtue-talk is necessary to translate religion (“an understanding of the nature of love”) into politics and culture. Second, that virtue-talk has broken down in our culture, and is merely a threadbare proxy for much more fundamental clashes of worldviews.
These two things are both true because virtues are names. I don’t mean that virtues have names. I mean that virtues, in both the cultural and the political arena, are names. If I say that a certain behavior is “dishonorable,” of course everyone nowadays asks, “By what standard of honor?” So too with “chaste,” so too with “cruel,” so too with “courageous,” so too with everything. Marriage, fidelity, kindness, justice--no noun can stand on the solid ground of universally-acknowledged meaning nowadays.
And therefore our Constitution cannot stand on that ground either. If you think I’m wrong… define “cruel and unusual punishment.” Every word in that phrase except “and” is not merely contested as a matter of political practice, but contested as a matter of basic, irreconcilable philosophical and theological worldview.
In other words: If the Eighth Amendment has meaning, rather than being a fight club of not merely competing but mutually exclusive meanings, then it must have meaning in reference to some underlying Truth which infuses meaning into our words “cruel” and “unusual” and “punishment.”
If the One is not, then nothing is.
Plato’s Parmenides is right that all of Socrates’ vaunted Forms rested on some underlying conception of reality: the One. Without some kind of consensus--however limited--on the One, no Form made sense.
Huckabee is right that without some underlying cultural consensus on basic definitions of justice, mercy, rights, marriage, compassion, cruelty, and even reason itself, whose definition is anything but obvious, we cannot possibly have a coherent national politics. Politics is a conversation punctuated with gunfire. If we don’t even understand the words the other side is speaking, the gunfire will of necessity get more frequent, and the conversation less so.
Rorty is right that there’s a way out, and that way is aesthetic in nature. When the Good and the True have collapsed into a hundred muttering and squabbling goblins; when the One is a longed-for rag of memory no more puissant than Prester John; still the Beautiful and--one hopes even more so--the Sublime call to us.
This is why the ultimate political evil of our age isn't cruelty, and isn’t even selfishness. The ultimate political evil of our age is sentimentality, which leaches the meaning from meaningful things; or, to use its secret name, banality.
It’s pretty easy to jump from that statement to Huckabee’s, “I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do--to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”
I think it’s fairly boring to say, “I don’t want conversion by the sword.” It’s unjustifiable on Christian grounds (sorry, St. Augustine, for the most part I think you’re the squiggly neon shoelaces of the world and I love you to little sparkly bits, but that wasn’t your finest hour) and, really, after JPII and his insistence on the rights of conscience, do we still need to have this discussion? So I will bracket it, because this is my blog, and instead talk about the ways in which Huckabee is right, and Richard Rorty is right, and Alisdair MacIntyre is right--because these are three guys I would far prefer to use as scratching posts, so defending them will be an exercise in humility.
All natural-law talk is virtue-talk at heart. Certainly in the realm of politics this is true. There are some things Reason can’t explain; for everything else, there’s natural law. If you believe anything remotely close to that, you are a virtue-talker.
MacIntyre is right on two counts: First, that virtue-talk is necessary to translate religion (“an understanding of the nature of love”) into politics and culture. Second, that virtue-talk has broken down in our culture, and is merely a threadbare proxy for much more fundamental clashes of worldviews.
These two things are both true because virtues are names. I don’t mean that virtues have names. I mean that virtues, in both the cultural and the political arena, are names. If I say that a certain behavior is “dishonorable,” of course everyone nowadays asks, “By what standard of honor?” So too with “chaste,” so too with “cruel,” so too with “courageous,” so too with everything. Marriage, fidelity, kindness, justice--no noun can stand on the solid ground of universally-acknowledged meaning nowadays.
And therefore our Constitution cannot stand on that ground either. If you think I’m wrong… define “cruel and unusual punishment.” Every word in that phrase except “and” is not merely contested as a matter of political practice, but contested as a matter of basic, irreconcilable philosophical and theological worldview.
In other words: If the Eighth Amendment has meaning, rather than being a fight club of not merely competing but mutually exclusive meanings, then it must have meaning in reference to some underlying Truth which infuses meaning into our words “cruel” and “unusual” and “punishment.”
If the One is not, then nothing is.
Plato’s Parmenides is right that all of Socrates’ vaunted Forms rested on some underlying conception of reality: the One. Without some kind of consensus--however limited--on the One, no Form made sense.
Huckabee is right that without some underlying cultural consensus on basic definitions of justice, mercy, rights, marriage, compassion, cruelty, and even reason itself, whose definition is anything but obvious, we cannot possibly have a coherent national politics. Politics is a conversation punctuated with gunfire. If we don’t even understand the words the other side is speaking, the gunfire will of necessity get more frequent, and the conversation less so.
Rorty is right that there’s a way out, and that way is aesthetic in nature. When the Good and the True have collapsed into a hundred muttering and squabbling goblins; when the One is a longed-for rag of memory no more puissant than Prester John; still the Beautiful and--one hopes even more so--the Sublime call to us.
This is why the ultimate political evil of our age isn't cruelty, and isn’t even selfishness. The ultimate political evil of our age is sentimentality, which leaches the meaning from meaningful things; or, to use its secret name, banality.
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