Hildegarde

I know–no post, or two or three in a day.  What can I say?

Anyway, the main one is Parental Units, but I wanted to make note of the fact that I have seen Shadia Drury’s latest column–if you go to the Free Inquiry website, they still have the old issue up, unfortunately–

Anyway, I’ve seen it, and she maintains her status as a fact-free zone.

This time it’s that all that talk about Lenin and Stalin persecuting religious people was…well, exaggerated. 

No, I’m not kidding.  She really said that.

Along the way, she implied that the Catholic Church has been “undone” by the priest sex abuse scandals.

I’d suggest we not disturb her peace by pointing out that Catholicism is actually growing internationally and remains the world’s largest religious body–but we don’t have to hold back.

She wouldn’t listen to actual facts under any circumstances.

Well, in the middle of all this, I’ve started to read a book–The Servile Mind, by Kenneth Minogue–that speaks to a lot of it, but before I get to the book, I want to get to the parents.

Lymaree said that kids don’t learn the kinds of things I’m talking about in school, they learn them from their parents long before they get to school.

But I’m not too sure that the parents are much of a better bargain.  I watched a Dateline on ID episode a few weeks ago–at least, I think that’s what it was; I watch the ID Channel so much I get the stuff it shows confused after a while–about an episode of cheating in a small town.

The issue was a final project for a high school biology class.   The project was to count for a large proportion of the final course grade, and students had plagarism explained to them beforehand, as they had the punishment for plagarism–failing the paper, period–also explained.

Come time to hand in the projects, the teacher failed something like eight to twelve students for plagarism.

At which point, their parents hit the school, ready to sue.  And under no circumstances would they admit that their children had done anything at all worthy of punishment.  One kid insisted he had not plagarized, because where the source he’d used had put the information into one long sentence, he’d divided that sentence into two shorter ones.

Then the administration–took the side of the parents.  The teacher was forced to resign, and the student grades on the plagarized papers were raised while the proportion those papers counted toward the final grade were lowered.

The one bright spot in this whole mess was that it became national news, and transcripts from that school were suddenly sharply downgraded by colleges when they considered those students for admission.

Of course, that was also the bad news, since everybody–even the students who did not cheat–was tarred with the same brush.

Minogue sees this kind of thing and explains it as part of a larger whole–this idea that there should be no serious consequences to anything, that punishment is always wrong and probably abusive. 

But he points out, and I think he’s right, that this doesn’t actually lead to a society in which individuals have more liberty.  What used to be a bad habit, or criminal behavior, is now a “disorder.”  What used to be punishment is now “treatment.”  But punishment was finite–you go to jail for a determined number of years, you lose your job, you spend all your money and don’t have it for the rent and get tossed out on the street.

“Treatment,” on the other hand, is open-ended, and in more ways than one.  There is no time when you’re “done,” except when your therapist or other authority says you are.  You are therefore subordinate to your therapist in a way that you’re never subordinate to your boss or the guards in your prison. 

A prisoner who just doesn’t want to deal with these people any more can always refuse to apply for parole, fulfill his entire sentence, and walk out the door a free man.  A patient with a disorder has no objective guidelines to tell him when he’s “cured,” and the rules for being cured can change on him every other week without his being able to do a thing about it. 

Of course, if the patient has voluntarily made himself one and gone into treatment under his own steam, he’s free to quit when he wants to quit.

But a person forced into therapy–as part of the “treatment” for his “disorder” required by the school, or by his employer, or by a court–must defer to the judgment of this therapist in everything.  Anything less than total acquicense is “proof” that he still has his “disorder.” 

Forced therapy is the ultimate example of the rule of men and not laws.

What’s more, courts, schools, employers and others are willing to impose “therapy” even when it is demonstrably useless.  Over 95% of everybody who enters drug or alcohol rehab programs goes back to using within a year.  That’s what is usually called “failure” in any other enterprise. 

Still, courts and parole boards confidently demand attendance at “programs” as a condition of release, probation or parole. 

When the system ends up in a situation where the patent uselessness of the “therapy” cannot be denied, the result is both hysteria and a frantic backpedaling on all the sacred cows of the movement.

Practicing pedophiles, it seems, are not curable–that means the condition must be innate.  But an innate sexual preference is a sexual orientation, and we shouldn’t discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.  So–well, so pedophiles are born bad, they’re barely human, they ought to be treated like scum, they should have no civil rights.

Since that doesn’t sound right, we try something else–they themselves were abused as children.

Hmm.  But if they themselves were abused as children, and that explains their pedophilia, then anybody who has been abused as a child is “at risk” to become an abuser himself. 

So, if you admit to the social worker that you were abused as a child, you are automatically under heightened suspicions of abusing your own children, and that admission alone has been used in some states (California, for instance) as a reason in and of itself for putting a child into foster care.

Am I the only one seeing the problem here?

The Minogue is interesting if only in its attempt to investigate whether these kinds of situations are a natural result of an expanding franchise, because–he thinks–the shift to thinking of government as a “provider of services” is itself a natural result of an expanding franchise. 

I’m blithering, and the office is full of people today and not exactly conducive to reflective thought.

But I’ll leave you with that, and with this:

Faith based systems–systems that require us to believe things even when reality contradicts them–always result in higher and higher levels of central control.

It’s the only way to keep the peanut gallery from noticing that the faith is full of…horse manure.

I’m having one of those, you know, moments.

So I’ll just put in a couple of things, and go drink tea.

First, I didn’t say, yesterday, that students are not influenced by what they read.

I said they weren’t being influenced by what they haven’t read.

The rise of modernism in literature may or may not be the cause of all kinds of things, but it isn’t going to cause them in anybody who hasn’t read it.

Yes, Robert is out of date.  The vast majority of college students get through school these days reading no fiction at all.

None.  Zip.  Zero.  Not so much as a single short story or poem.

As for grades 7 to 12, the trend is to go to nonfiction “life stories,” like Into the Void and My Sister’s Keeper, not fiction of any sort, never mind things like Silas Marner or even Catcher in the Rye.

Next time you hear a conflict about something like Catcher, by the way, pay attention to the details–the book was almost always assigned in an “honours” course or “gifted student” program.

Second, yes, I do think that what happens is that what begins in high culture trickles down to more popular forms over time.

But I wasn’t thinking of “stories about depressed women in suburbia” as I was thinking about approaches and techniques.

Stream of consciousness, which was an outrageous inovation when Joyce did it, is now standard throughout popular literature, as is the untrustworthy narrator, which made it from Ford Maddox Ford to Agatha Christie in just about ten years.

Third, yes, it was once the job of universities to introduce young people to ideas–and if you go to Harvard or Duke or Johns Hopkins, that just might happen.

But over two thirds of all college students in the US go to third and fourth tier institutions, and those don’t bother with ideas of any kind if they can help it.

Distribution requirements are thin on the ground, and generally consist of enough “English” courses to make the university feel it’s taught its students how to write, and math through “college algebra,” which is just algebra as we knew it in high school.

There’s no fiction, no philosophy, no political science, very little history–and these colleges don’t usually offer majors in this kind of thing, either.   The “English” courses either offer no fiction and poetry at all, or stick in a single short story and a single poem at the end to teach “the reader response essay.”

These days, the three most likely short stories to be the only ones students read are Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (where the title character kills her lover and sleeps next to his corpse for twenty years), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” and Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.”  The poem tends to be something by Robert Frost.

Fourth, I think you can blame English teachers for a lot and get away with it, but I balk at blaming them for Homer Simpson.

Personally, if I had to blame the “there’s nothing I’d be willing to die for” crowd on something or somebody, I’d lean toward the money.

Because although some of us are richer than others, even the poorest of us live better than the middle classes did fifty years ago.  And what look like the people who do not–the homeless on the streets–turn out, on investigation, to be more complicated cases than you’d think.

Sometimes I wonder if human being evolved to live by strife–not warfare but hardship.  I wonder if we’re wired to contend with hardship, and if, when we have nothing to contend with, something goes wrong in our heads.

But I’ve got harpsichords as well as tea, and I’m out of here.

So, I keep running into weird things that make it hard for me to post, which is interesting in itself.  The latest is a pulled muscle in my top left thigh, which I apparently did while falling off the porch.

Long story.

Really long story.

The thing is that it doesn’t hurt when I’m sitting down, and it doesn’t hurt when I’m standing up, but going from one to the other is a bitch.

Which brings me here–no, really, it does.

I’ve looked at all the comments from the last post, and I’ve got a couple of things to point out.

First, I do get out–I get out a lot.  I probably have a wider field of human contact than the vast majority of people in the country, for a lot of reasons that amount to how complicated I’ve made myown life, added to the accident of being related to just such a range.

And I do know that there are other people out there than the people like those I described the last time.

For one thing, this term I took one “regular” section of Composition to teach, just to see if I’d like it better.

And I do like it, a lot.

The point, though, is that in that class I’ve got (among the eighteen or so students):  two ex-military (both combat vets, one Army and one Marine); one working firefighter; one present member of the National Guard due to be deployed; one girl whose fiance is also due to be deployed; one eighteen year old who goes out on the Internet to argue everything from evolution to a kind of Ayn Randian near-anarchic government model. 

What’s more, of the two ex-military guys, the Marine was an MP and the Army guy joined the cops after he was discharged and spent nine years working at that until he got hit by a car and was rendered physically incapable of going on with it.

The two ex-military guys and the firefighter are all grown up.  They take responsibility for what’s going on around the as a matter of course. 

The other three are all about eighteen or nineteen, but they’re getting there.  The National Guard guy is probably going to get there fastest, but I would have to say none of these three is going to turn into one of the people I was talking about before.

About the rest of the class, I’m not sure–let’s face it, these guys intimidate the hell out of their fellow classmates, and for good reason.  So they do a lot of talking and the rest of the class does less.

They’re an interesting class, the most fun I’ve had in years–and that’s causing its own problems, but that’s a story for another time.

The final research project for this class is to research and then write a policy prescription–legal arguments only–for what the law should say about faith healing and children (that is, whether parents should be allowed to choose faith healing over standard medicine for their children).

When the class gets into discussions of this stuff, we get not just the usual opinion bullshitting but at information from at least two people who have dealt directly with similar cases and with the local agencies charged with handling them.

Last class, though, we got to talking about the entire concept of taking responsibility, about how some people will take it at great (potential) cost to themselves and how others won’t do a thing that might inconvenience them in any way. 

One of these guys–the firefighter–thought that such an orientation to life was inborn–you’re either naturally one of those guys, or you’re not.  Other people disagreed, and I pointed out that if the answer to this particular riddle was innate, then there was no such thing as morality.  Morality requires agency and at least partial freedom of the will.

And then, in the middle of all the talk, something struck me.  I do know what I can see has changed dramatically between, say, WWII and now–even between the early days of my childhood and now. 

It’s not, as Robert wants it to be, that we’ve all decided to teach Ann Beattie and John Updike stories in schools.

I doubt if what  literature is taught in schools has any effect at all on most kids growing up.  They get very little of it–especially these days–they don’t bother to read half of what they’re assigned, and they forget what they do read in no time flat.

If people these days are affected by narrative at all, they’re affected by the narratives they see on television and in the movies–and what do they get from that?  Star Wars.  Harry Potter.  Lord of the Rings.

If the key turning out a nation of guys like my six was narrative, we’d be the most responsible, adult, upright nation in the history of the planet.

Here’s the thing, though:  I think my firefighter was mostly wrong. I think that the ability to take responsibility for the world around you–to have things worth dying for when you don’t want to die–runs on a continuum in human personality.  On one side are people who just can’t develop it at all.  On the other are people who just seem to be born with it.

In the middle, though, I think there are a lot of people who can develop it–but in order to develop it they have to want to, and in order to want to they have to have an incentive.

Being the guy in the room who takes responsibility for the situation is difficult, and it’s often unpleasant.  It may mean that you don’t buy yourself pain medication in order that your children can have new winter jackets.  (That was Bill–when I found out he’d been lying about needing the stuff, I nearly killed him.)

It may mean you put yourself in harm’s way, as a soldier, as a cop, to try to rescue the woman drowning in the lake or to intervene when you see some kids trying to beat the hell out of a homeless man on the street.

For generations, there really was an incentive to go from dependent child who expected to be taken care of by everybody else to responsible adult ready to take care of other people.

We made childhood a very restricted experience.  Children had special clothes that looked “childish.”  They had to wear what their parents and schools told them to wear.  Their coming and going was restricted, too–I wasn’t allowed to date until I was sixteen, and then I had to be back by ten.  My brother, being a boy, got to stay out to twelve.  At my high school, girls could not wear stockings until senior year, and then, when my class got to senior year, they changed that to nobody wearing stockings at all at any time.  Knee socks, or nothing. That was it.

Even college didn’t provide much of an increase in personal freedom.  I’m old enough to remember parietal hours, the four or so hours every week-end when boys were allowed in girls’ dorm rooms–but only with the door open and three feet on the floor.  Forget birth control pills.  The housemother rousted you out of the bushes with a flashlight if you disappeared into the evergreens longer than about a minute and a half.  Curfew was at ten o’clock on weeknights and midnight on weekends.  The library closed in time to make sure everybody could make it back to their rooms.

These days there are almost no restrictions on the behavior of children at all–and what restrictions there are tend to be hysterical, overwrought and arbitrary.  My guy in the National Guard can vote for President and got shot at, but he can’t have a beer in the state of Connecticut.  What?

Then there are the endless complications of laws about “children” and sex that make no sense at all–it is illegal for anybody to have sex under the age of fifteen in CT, and illegal for somebody over eighteen to have sex with somebody under eighteen.  Try working this out in a world in which parents have no say at all about who their teenagers are dating, virtually no power to enforce curfew, and no knowledge of where their kids are going and what they’re doing when they’re there.

It’s no wonder that there are “sex offenders” on the registry who are just nineteen year old guys who had sixteen year old girlfriends who had parents willing to file charges for statutory rape.

If you can make all your own decisions by the time you’re twelve–if you can dress like Madonna whether your mother likes it or not, stay out all night, get your tongue pierced, and all the rest of it.

If you can do all these things, make all your own decisions, without ever having to earn any of it–what incentive do you have ever to cross over to that side where you’re the one taking the responsibility?

I feel like I’m putting this very badly, much more awkwardly than the way I thought it out in my head over the last couple of days.

But this is a start, and maybe I can go from here.

After I run out to Staples and do stuff.

Sigh.

So, for the past couple of days I’ve been reading through G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.  I suppose that partially explains the God post of the day before yesterday, although what it really brings to mind to me is the fact that I like well written prose, period.  I don’t really care what it says.  The music of the prose, if it’s good enough, is enough. 

But the chord the book has really been striking for me is something else.  To explain, I need to go back for a moment to Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, because there always was something about that book that I thought was vastly important and virtually never commented on.

Bloom does, of course, do the usual thing and complain endlessly that there’s no real college education any more and no respect for the classics, but he does something else.  About a third of the way through the book–I could probably find the quote, but I’m not at home at the moment–he complains that even when you do get college students to read the classics, they can’t understand them.  They’ve grown up in a world where sex is available pretty much everywhere.  They come from homes where the parents are likely to be divorced and sometimes more than once.  They therefore have no concept of marriage as an actual commitment.  Life has been fairly easy, even for those who come to college having experienced hardship.  There’s no sense of the tragic inevitability of hardship, or of anything.  Even death is mildly felt to be optional–and if it isn’t optional, then somebody must be oppressing you.

One of the things we do wrong–on this blog and elsewhere–when we discuss literature and the teaching of literature, is to assume that teaching somebody to read well and teaching somebody to read literature well are the same things.

The truth is that someone may read very well indeed, understand not just the newspaper but complicated books about macroeconomics and the relationship between the history of Christianity and the rise of modern warfare, without being able to read literature at all.  The two skills are related only at their very lowest levels.   We tend to think of them as related only because most of the people who are able to do one are also able to do the other.  That isn’t because the skills are the same, but because anybody able to do either of these things is likely to be intelligent, and therefore good at other things intelligence is good for.

What all this is leading up to is this:  if I had to borrow Robert’s Pessimism About Everything for a day, it would not be on the grounds he usually advances for the country and the civilization being doomed, but on the grounds that any civilization is doomed when its people are no longer capable of understanding literature.

I am NOT–note the bold, italicized and capitalized word–saying that civilization is doomed if we don’t put people into classrooms and force them to read a Required Reading List.

I’m saying that a civilization made up of people to whom both Lady McBeth and Medea are incomprehensible, for whom Hector is worse than incomprehensible, is a civilization that is not dying, but already dead.

Right here, I’d quote the lines of a Joni Mitchell song, except that I’m told she only lets you do that if you pay her a great deal of money.  So I’ll just say you should find the lyrics to “The Boho Dance” and read them.

Here’s what I find in common between my students, other people’s students, the people I see on television, the people I meet in the grocery store, and all the rest:

There is no sense, among the vast majority of them, that there is any kind of point to life at all, except to be comfortable, have fun, and collect stuff.

This is as true of most of the people I know who say they are religious as it is of the people who say they are not.  The Humanist and Free Inquiry may print article after article about the wonderful things that will happen to all of us if we just adopt an Epicurian philosophy of life, but the members of the local United Methodist Women have never heard of Epicurus, and they’re in the same ballpark.  In the end, they will do anything, and put up with anything, to stay comfortable in the moment. 

Marriage is not important in itself.  It is only important if it makes you happy.  If it doesn’t make you happy, you ditch it and find somebody else.  What’s more, marriage is about happiness–as is just about everything else in life.  If you’re not happy, what’s the point of what you’re doing?

Most people make an minor exception for deferred gratification–med school and internships may be miserable, but at the end of it you’ll be happier than you would have been if you hadn’t put yourself through it.  If it turns out that you put yourself through it and wind up unhappy as a doctor, you’ve wasted your time and there’s no way to get it back.

The side effect of all this is the insane stress we put, on every level of society and every action possible to every individual, on “safety.”  We must be safe, because all suffering, all failure, all defeat is worse than bad.  It’s pointless and can never be in any way compensated for, by anything.

Probably the silliest idea we’ve ever come up with is that of “safe sex,” which is kind of like saying “non-exploding nitroglycerin.” 

Sex is not safe, and protecting ourselves from syphilis, AIDS and pregnancy won’t make it so.  What’s more, we don’t want it to be.  Am I really the only person on the planet who has noticed that the push for “safe sex” has coincided with an exponential growth of interest in the practices of BDSM? 

Jason and Medea, Antony and Cleopatra, didn’t need BDSM because they weren’t deluded into thinking that sex could ever be made safe, by anything.  They knew that sex is scary and destructive as well as exhilirating.  They did not expect their indulgences to be without consequences, mental and emotional and spiritual as well as physical. 

My students, and most of their teachers, and all the “experts” on all the crime shows on television are different.  They expect sex to be “safe,” and rational to boot.   They think there is something called a “healthy relationship,” and then they’re shocked out of their gourds when a wife kills a husband or a boyfriend beats the hell out of a girlfriend, or the rage of jealously is not cured by couples therapy or a twelve step program.

It’s not just Medea and Antony and Cleopatra who knew better.  My grandmother knew better.  She could “take up” the classics in her forties, having never been to school beyond the fourth grade, and “get” Shakespeare and Sophocles in a way that seems impossible for most modern audiences.  She could “get” them because she lived in the same world they did.   She knew not only that sex was not safe, but that some things are worth the pain.

If there is a common theme in the people I see around me–religious and nonreligious, American and European, young and old–it is the inner conviction that nothing is ever worth the pain.  The point of life is to feel good and have nice things.  Anything we do that would make those difficult to attain, or negate them altogether, is indefensible. 

Along with this comes the conviction that what we want should be available without drawbacks–if we want sex, sex should give us pleasure and no pain, and if it gives us pain then something is “wrong.”  Either we have a disease–a “disorder”–or somebody is doing something to us that they have no right to do. 

Step back and look at the larger picture, and you get somewhat the same thing.  At least on the level of the kind of people I knew in, say, Westport, the problem with being a soldier, a police officer or a fire fighter is not that those kinds of jobs are “low rent,” but that those kinds of jobs are likely to get you hurt–and what’s the point in that?  I’d guess that at least half the “elitist” disdain for those kinds of jobs is not really disdain so much as it is self-protection.  Look too closely at yourself when you’re feeling like that, and you might begin to think you’re a coward.  Or worse.

How are these people to understand “no greater love hath any man than to give his life for his friends”?  Friends?  Really?  Hell, most of  them wouldn’t forbear to hit on their friends’ girlfriends, or their spouses.  They’ll take a sensitive job with a Presidential administration, pocket the six figure salary for three or four years, then resign and take a book deal for seven figures so that they can trash their old bosses in the most public way possible. 

So many of us write about the meaning and meaninglessness of life as if it were a great and terrible question–and it should be a great and terrible question.

But what I see around me are people for whom life “means” never thinking beyond next week, never caring for anything but  personal comfort, never even recognizing the nature of reality, because reality is not safe and never will be.  Reality is not happy.

I think a civilization can survive decadance if it knows that what it is doing is decadent.  I think it can survive social upheavals and the welfare state.  Read Augustine’s Civitas Dei: the Rome that fell around his ears was soft and corrupt and chaotic, but it knew that some things are worth dying for, some things are worth the pain, and nothing about living a human life ever is or will be or can be “safe.”

I think civilization can survive Nero.

I don’t know if it can survive this.

I know, I know.

Second post of the day.

But this site

http://www.readfaster.com/culturalliteracy/

is a lot of fun.

I’ve been walking around this post all morning, not sure how to get it started–and to tell the truth, I still don’t know.  I can’t really think of anything in the way of a lead in that makes sense, and what I can think of feels sort of abrupt.

Let me try this is the most direct possible way.

Over the last several weeks–and on and off over the time I’ve been on the Internet–I have had people say some variation of the following sentence to me:  you’ve already decided that God does not exist.

When this comes from one of those pe0ple on the Internet mostly to debate the existence of God, it often takes the form of:  I have faith that God exists, and you have faith that God does not exist.

Or:  I believe God exists, and you believe God does not exist.

The problem with all this, for me, is that it isn’t true.  I don’t believe that “God does not exist.” 

Unlike many people you’ll meet who are now atheists, I did not reject a religious upbringing, marshall a bunch of arguments and conclude that “all that God stuff” had to be untrue.

I needed to reject nothing and marshall no arguments–God was almost never mentioned in my house growing up, except by me, and then it was only in pursuing the interesting idea that I might have an excuse for one day walking around in a nun’s habit. 

Those were the days when nuns had really impressive habits, and I would have given anything to be allowed to swish around in a long skirt and a wimple and a veil.  It looked romantic as hell.  I was so convinced that all things having to do with wearing a habit had to be good things that, when my mother told me she’s seen a movie with Audrey Hepburn where nuns were required to shave all the hair off their heads, I refused to believe it.  I never did believe it until many years later, when I met actual nuns, who explained the whole thing to me.

I had nuns for teachers in high school, and loved them, and mostly like the nuns I know now.  For that matter, I like most of the priests I know now.  I never did have those lower-level, largely uneducated orders of nuns that resorted to corporal punishment or autocratic high handedness to compensate for their lack of intellectual rigor. 

Then I did a lot of studying in an area of literature that required a solid understanding of Catholic theology, so there was that.

But belief seems to me to be a largely emotional thing–well, okay, let me back up.

The Catholic Church, at least from the time of Aquinas, has defined belief as an act of the will.  You decide that X is true and you hold to it, even though it doesn’t “feel” right, or even if it doesn’t feel real.

The Catholic Church feels the same way about love, which it also defines as an act of will, and that would be an interesting subject for a later date. 

But I can’t get past the “feel” part.  I read the various dogmas of Christian belief, the Virgin Birth, the Star of Bethlehem, even the Crucifixion and Resurrection–and they just don’t ring true in my head.  They sound like stories–and I mean that literally.  The underlying structure seems to me to be narrative in the same sense that The Iliad is narrative.  I sometimes think that narrative corresponds to a particular kind of structure in the brain. 

For better or worse, the Christian stories seem to me like stories.  They always did, maybe because my earliest acquaintance with them were as stories.  I was taught the basics of the Gospel story by people who did not believe that those basics were factually true.

On the other hand, since I never had to reject a religious upbringing, I’m also not antagonistic to those stories, and I’m not antagonistic to all religious thought and tradition. 

There are certainly segments of the larger community of Christians who repel me–the ones who let their children die of meningitis because all secular medicine is really witchcraft, say (and no, I did not make that up)–and segments that leave me exasperated.  I mean, go ahead.  Show me where in the Bible it says that the earth is only 10,000 years old.  And if Augustine could think it was compatible with Christian doctrine for the human body to have been created through a process of evolution, who the Hell are these people to say it’s not?

But unlike a lot of people who have run from specific Christian traditions and therefore think they know all about what Christianity says, I didn’t, so I actually went and found out.  And what I found was that there was a lot in Christian moral theology that I admired, and a lot in the Christian intellectual tradition that I more than admired.  You take John Rawls.  I’ll take Augustine, Aquinas and Abelard any day of the week.

And Hildegarde, too, next to almost anything that’s been composed in the last fifty years, except maybe some stuff by John Williams.

And a lot of jazz.

But along with all this, I’m very aware of something else:  I may not “believe” in God, or in not-God either, but when it comes to choosing up sides, I almost invariably end up with high-intellectual-end Catholicism and not with the secular philosophies of the last century or so.

I most certainly do not end up with what passes for philosophy–especially moral and political philosophy–in organized Humanism and Secular Humanism these days.

I never got around to talking about Sam Harris’s new book in any detail, but in the end what it came down to was this:  he, like everybody else–including a fair number of Christian theologians–tends to want to “prove” the truth of his moral and political ideas, and he starts with the ideas, not the data.

But let’s look at the list now, for a minute:

a) the equality of moral worth of all human beings (and only human beings), whether the person is “conscious” in some abstract sense or not–high-end Catholicism will give it to me.  The present run of secular moral philosophers both deny the moral equality of some human beings (those  in “persistant vegetative states” or who are not “self aware”) and attempt to raise other animals to a position above such rejected human beings.  If you don’t believe me, see Peter Singer.

b) the primacy of the individual over the group as the locus of morality, rights, and justice–high-end Catholicism will give it to me.  The present run of secular moral and political philosophers are nearly manic in their rejection of the idea and their need to assert the primacy of the group in almost every aspect of politics and private life.  To those nuns, I was always just Orania.  To The Humanist I’m “a woman” and “an atheist” and a lot of other things that seem to me to be unuseful as descriptions of anything that hasn’t been mass produced.

c) the imperative of democracy–the right of ordinary, everyday people to make the decisions that structure their lives.  High end Catholicism will give it to me.  The present run of secular political philosophers is enamored of “experts” who just know better than the rest of us because they have professional knowledge we lack.

d) the imperative of liberty over security–that is, when a choice has to be made, we should err in the direction of liberty and not of security.  High-end Catholicism will give me that, too, although, like any other bureaucratic organization, liberty makes the actual Roman Catholic Church a little queasy.  But the present run of secular moral and political philosophers seems to abhor liberty in any meaningful sense.   On the one hand, it insists on absolute license–never mind liberty–on a few very narrow (and in the end, largely trivial) areas,  like sex.  On the other, it wants to expand further and further into private life to control what we eat, what we drink, how much we exercise, how we raise our children, what we do in our churches, even what we are allowed to express of our beliefs and convictions. 

Those are my four biggies, what Robert would probably call my “satisfying personal philosophy.”  What they really are, in all likelihood, is the expression of my temperament, which is what it is. 

But at the end of the day, I’m left with the realization that I may not know whether God exists or not, but I do know what side I’m on.  And I’m not cheering on the expansion of the New Atheism into public life.  Given the things that are most important to me, that would be a personal disaster.

I’m also left asking myself why this is so–why it is that the public face of atheist and Humanism is what it is and not something else.  I certainly know other people who do not believe in God who also believe in the things I do.  There does not seem to be anything inherent in the lack of belief that would inevitably push you in one direction.

Even so, it does seem to push most people in one direction, and I haven’t stopped asking why that is.  That may be the reason why I do, every once in a while, deliberately read books whose purpose is to challenge my lack of belief in God.  I’ve got one on the coffee table now, called The Handbook of Christian Apologetics, which is a book by Peter Kreeft and somebody else whose name I can’t remember meant to be the basis for Catholics who want to contend for the Church in debates.

I don’t really think I’m going to change my mind and suddenly start believing that God exists–or at least, not the God of the Christians, which is a considerably harder sell than the idea of “God” in the abstracting.  The feeling thing does matter to me.

But I really do go out there and delierately read and engage with things that I definitely to not believe in, and even that I actively oppose.

Because let’s face it.

You never know.

COMMENTING ON THE BLOG–don’t forget, if you get “invalid registration status,”  or have other difficulty posting, e-mail and we’ll get you on manually.

Well, I woke up to find Leslie Nielson died–so the day hasn’t started out as well as it could have.

And I’ll just note, re Cheryl’s comment, that I never took up space in my journals trying to figure out the “root causes” of why I was so awful.  I just went on and on about how I was so awful.

I think I don’t do it on the blog because I know most of you would laugh at me.

But this morning I’m a little short for time, and I just want to note one thing.

Yesterday, I finished a book at one of those mental places where I just couldn’t think of what I wanted to read next.  What I did instead was to read an essay called “The Prevention of Literature” by George Orwell that I have in one of those compendium “readers” that contain a few complete essays and lots of excerpts from books.

Compendiums like that are definitely an exception to my compulsive need to finish everything I start.  For one thing, I don’t read abridged versions of anything if I can help it, so I’m not going to read the excerpts from Homage to Catalonia or 1984.  I’ve already read 1984, and if I want to read Homage to Catalonia, I’ll find a copy of the whole thing and read that.

All that being said, “The Prevention of Literature” was what I had expected it to be, a little piece on the sad post-War decline in the quality of English murders was kind of fun, and then I hit the essay on Rudyard Kipling.

This was one of those things I wish was up on the Net so that I could post a link to it.  For one thing, it reminded me that, no matter how useful Orwell has become to anti-Communisits and anti-totalitarians, he always was a writer on the left.  

What makes him more interesting than most writers on the left is the fact that he’s very aware of the kind of intellectual dishonesty this can cause and the way in which “intellectuals” blind themselves.

But the essays is a weird mixture of highbrow leftwing contempt and reluctant admiration, periodically veering into outright condemnation of the people he calls “enlightened”–just like that, with scare quotes–whenever he gets on to them.

And that led me back to my Kipling short story collection, although the essay itself was about Kipling’s poems.

I ended up reading one of the oddest little stories I’ve ever read in my life, called “The House Surgeon,”  and then sort of sitting back, nonplussed.

I’d tell you what it was about, but it’s one of those things–if you know ahead of time what the point is, you’re not going to be nearly as weirded out as if you come to it fresh, and I have a peculiar feeling that getting the reader weirded out is part of the point here.

Or maybe not.  It’s hard to tell.

Let’s just call this my recommendation of the day–no India, no dialogue writing, a straightforward story about rural Britain.

And really, really peculiar.

I’m going to leave that message now for people who hope to send COMMENTS TO THE BLOG, just in case:

When I was in graduate school and going through a period where I couldn’t write anything–I do not go through periods like that often, and they don’t usually last long–I decided to keep a journal.

Keeping a journal is the kind of thing writing teachers are always suggesting you do.  Writing magazines like that kind of advice, too.  I’d done my best to stay away from writing courses throughout my academic career, but I’d managed to pick up this thing about keeping a journal, and I decided I’d try it.

What happened next was either a wild success or a complete disaster, depending on how you’re defining each of them. 

On the plus side, I wrote.  I wrote a lot.  I wrote almost compulsively.  I’d often write as much as ten to fifteen pages a day, while taking a full courseload and working as a TA.

On the minus side, it took about a day and a half of that for all my writing to become distinctly suicidal.

I’m not exaggerating here.  I wasn’t writing about suicide, but I was writing things that were increasingly self-abusive:  I was stupid, I was ugly, I was at base a congenital liar, I was never going to be a writer because I didn’t write and what I wrote was bad anyway.

And on and on and on.

It would be funny, except that the more of this kind of thing I wrote the more depressed I got, not in the modern “oh, I’m depressed” sense, but in the sense of no longer being willing to eat or get out of bed.

So one day, I took the notebooks and tore them to pieces and threw them away.

I tried the experiment again a couple of years later, with the same results.

And that was the end of me and journals.

I’m bringing this up at the moment because I’ve noticed myself doing something similar here.

Oh, I don’t get suicidal, and I don’t get obsessive about writing endlessly every day.  It helps to have a life.

But I have noticed that I get very pessimisstic on certain particular subjects, and that I get that way even when I start a post not intending to write about them. 

This is sort of what happened in my last post, when I was having a perfectly good day, and ended the post on the usual whine about anti-intellectualism and schools.

Except that I am, in fact, really depressed about the situation in schools and in colleges. 

But I wasn’t intending to go there.

If you see what I mean.

Anyway, I’ve done all this in preface because I want to go back to schools for a moment, and this time to elementary and secondary schools.

And I’m aware of the fact that we’re at a disadvantage here because I think I’m the only one who has had any actual contact with elementary and secondary schools in the last ten years.  Lots of you remember your own experiences in that range of education, and what you remember is a world that is dead and gone.  Nobody reads Silas Marner any more.  They only read Catcher in the Rye in honors classes.

So, I want to answer a question that’s been put to me very often and that up to now I think I’ve answered sort of in a round about way.

What should students learn in elementary school?

The purpose of elementary school is to

a) impart basic skills necessary to functioning in the school’s society

            AND

b) give children a rudimentary understanding of their culture in order to recruit them to the defense of it.

What is the purpose of secondary education?

Both of the above, on a higher level of complexity and completeness, plus the foundation for college work for those who want to go on to it.

I think that, if I started there, I could manage to construct a decent curriculum for any particular child.  I could even manage to construct a decent curriculum for a school, although I think that would be harder.

But that’s for another day.

There’s a cycle of America’s Next Top Model I’ve nearly missed entirely, and I’ve got to go see if they’re doing an encore marathon today.

Okay, it’s silly, and it’s not Bach.

But sometimes I get silly, and ANTM is my favorite form of idiocy these days.

So, you know, that was nice.  We still have a ton of food.  That’s nice, too, because it means we don’t cook anything serious for a day or two.

And as most of you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time rereading all the Agatha Christie in existence.  Or that I’m interested in, which might be more to the point–I like Marple and Poirot, but not most of the others.

At the moment, I’m rereading The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which I remembered, for some reason, as thin and badly written.  So far it’s neither.

But it’s the book I just finished a few days ago that has me thinking, and that was Murder on the Orient Express.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll repeat it–if you’re looking for a movie, get the version with Albert Finney and Lauren Bacall, which is true to the book and really marvellously done.  It also has that neat thing where you’ll recognize everybody in the cast–Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Ingrid Bergman–all willing to take relatively small roles because…well, because actors do that sometimes with material they like.

The BBC Masterpiece Mystery thing is a travesty, giving Poirot a sudden serious Catholicism he has nowhere in the books and turning the ending into a prolonged period of moralistic angst that is opposed to the very spirit of Poirot as Christie wrote him. 

But the book of Murder on the Orient Express is interesting for another reason:  it is over two hundred pages of Poirot interviewing suspects.

Just that.

Chapter after chapter, each suspect is called in and questioned.  There are no Big Scenes.  There is no violence.  There is no action.

The book is, very nearly a pure puzzle mystery.  There is characterization, and it matters–but not a single page from the point of view of any of the suspects, no flashbacks, no running around chasing anybody, nothing else.

Suspects.  Interviews.  Puzzle. 

I liked this book the first time I read it, and I’ve liked it every time since, including this last time.

But it occurs to me that it would not be possible to get it published today. 

It’s hard enough to get publishers interested in puzzle mysteries at all, but something like this, without action, without anything cinematic happening (although it made a fine movie, twice–interesting, that), would be incomprehensible to most editors any more than, say, ten years younger than I am now.

I’ve been thinking about Christie’s other breakthrough books–The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for instance–and I think some of these would be easier.  But the likelihood is that Christie would have had to be far better known than she was (I think Ackroyd was something like the third of the fifth book), and to get that way she would have had to have written books very unlike the ones she did.

The other thing I wonder about is Christie’s complete lack of consistancy in the formal aspects of the novels in the early days of the Poirot series–the books are in first person from Hastings’s point of view, or they’re from third person mostly Poirot’s point of view with a couple of glimpses from characters, or they’re in omniscient narrator, or they’re in first person from yet another person’s point of view.

If part of the attraction of a series to readers is its predictability, Christie was not being very predictable when she started. 

I don’t know why any of this should be the case, or why modern readers should be so fundamentally uninterested in puzzles. 

Part of it, I’m sure, is just the difficulty of constructing really interesting puzzles.  There are over thirty books about Hercule Poirot, and in that list I’d guess there might be four or five that are really unique as puzzles. 

But part of me thinks that the disinterest in puzzles connects to the disinterest in all things intellectual, with that word given the broadest possible definition.  People who see nothing wrong with cheating their way to a master’s degree are not likely to be interested in making their minds work to figure out who killed the butler.

Robert said, a few days ago, that it would be interested to find out just what students cheated on–if they cheated more on their “distribution requirements” than they did on the courses they thought were giving them actual information in the field they were interested in working in.

At the time, I forgot that several of the examples in the article about bought term papers I had linked to were of graduate students, who have no distribution requirements and are, at least nominally, dedicated entirely to learning things in their chosen fields.

It also occurs to me, whenever we have that kind of discussion, that in my father’s era, the Required Reading List was even narrower than it is now, that it included nothing at all of the kind of “exciting” book some of you think would get more people to love reading,

These days,  you couldn’t publish Murder on the Orient Express, and if you wanted to publish The Mysterious Affair at Styles, you’d have to cutesy it up with comic great uncles and even more silly housemaids.

And even then,  you’d only sell it to old ladies.

I think I need some caffeine.