Meat-Eating Vegans

I think one thing people generally agree with is that people should be consistent to their own values. Even in a world where The Good has been deconstructed and the only common standard people are given is to pursue maximal private personal fulfillment (as long as you don't hurt anyone else)...I think people still have this sort of existentialist meta-value that (by the very nature of what "values" are) people should live by their own.

This is true even if we disagree with people's values. For example, I think even a pro-choicer would think it monstrous for a pro-life person who did believe the unborn were human persons...to participate in an abortion. The pro-choicer may not believe this himself, and may think absolutely speaking abortion is fine, but I think they'd still find it evil seeming for someone who believed otherwise to nevertheless participate in one.

We might also use the example of a vegan who believes animals are persons. I am not a vegan and eat meat myself just fine. But if someone who claimed to be a vegan or big animal rights person was caught eating meat, I would think subjectively that they were morally as bad as a murderer, because by their own stated values they should conclude that what they did was participate in murder.

However, some people in these situations use tricky mental gymnastics to justify themselves. For example, I could imagine this meat-eating vegan making an argument something along the lines of: "I personally value animal life as equivalent to human life. However, other people in our pluralistic society do not. As such, I cannot call them murderers for eating meat. But if they aren't murderers for eating meat...that must mean that meat-eating is not intrinsically murder, and if it's not intrinsically murder then ultimately I can do it too!!"

Of course, the hypocrisy and self-justifying delusion here is incredible, and this vegan would rightly be held in contempt by both other vegans who did try to live up to their own standards, but also by meat-eaters who saw the attempt to "have the cake" (of whatever mental or emotional utility claiming to value animal life gives) but also "eat it too" (by also getting the enjoyment of eating meat without the guilt of "murder" by using the non-culpability of meat-eaters based on their values as and excuse for the violation of his own.)

I bring up this hypothetical, because I think this is the form that many moral arguments in pluralism end up taking. Pluralism claims to allow for multiple notions of the good, but in the end by this sort of logic everything gets reduced to lowest common denominators, because most people still instinctively understand that morality really does have to be conceived of as universal, at least objectively, to be considered binding at all.

We might take the example of different sorts of people commit objective sins. The first person, following their natural good instincts, buys into the standard of private self-fulfillment which is the only sort of common unitary standard of the good that our society offers (as I discussed in my last post, the common standard is the lack of a common standard). This person then follows their private maximalization of desire-fulfillment to some sort of objective sin. While misguided, I am not terribly "worried" about this person spiritually, because the "conclusion" they reach is ultimately founded on a fundamentally good orientation. They are doing what they think The Good is, because modern society has "confused" them (and many others) into thinking that The Good = the [private] good, and so in pursuing this thing as a private good, they think they are pursuing The Good, which is at least a good intent, and so subjectively they are probably not culpable.

As a second type, you might have a Marxist or Existentialist academic who understands that The Good and the good are different, and that when our society suggests the private good in place of The Good, when it replaces a standard with the very lack of a standard, when the only rule is "there are no rules" (at least as long as you're not limiting anyone else), it is really only offering a void. This radical academic, however, thinks this is a good thing. They think that The Good was long used to oppress the individual and self-fulfillment and actualization tyrannically, caused alienation or whatever, and therefore embraces the void, embraces the deconstruction of The Good in favor of private goods, and so promotes or pursues things that would be sins according to the standard of The Good on these very grounds. The state of this person's soul worries me more by the fact of their philosophy being subversive and "revolutionary" in a self-aware way, but nevertheless by thinking deconstruction of "The Good" (which they are likely to believe was not objective or natural, anyway, but just an illusion that the powers-that-be created) is a good thing, they are (perhaps ironically) appealing to a meta-value (of Freedom or whatever) that still betrays the basic human instinct to uphold some type of transcendent Good in that form.

However, there is a third type of person who knows that the ideas of the transcendent unitary Good, on the one hand, and the void which only advocates the non-standard of individual private good, on the other, are different...and who, in fact, claims to love The Good (even if in our society it is only possible to do so privately as one good on the idea-market among others)...but who then uses the same sort of logic as our meat-eating vegan from above to justify not living up to that standard. Who says, "Yes, The Good means that I value Reason and meaning and virtue. However, The Good has been reduced to simply one possibility among many in our society, as the only common standard our society offers is the void of having no common standard, the good is now privatized and individualistic. Therefore all those people acting against The Good that I hold cannot be said to be actually sinning, because by the standard of their private good, which they think is the Good...they aren't. However, if this thing isn't a sin for them for that reason, then that means it can't be said to be intrinsically a sin, and if it isn't intrinsically a sin, then it can't really be one for me either, and so therefore I can love The Good while living against it."

Of course, this involves a huge self-justifying leap in the form of assuming that the fact that other people, living consistently within their own value systems, cannot be held culpable for a type of action (because it doesn't contradict those value systems) means that no one can be held culpable for that type of action (even when it is a contradiction by the logic of your own value system). As if the fact that people's own (wrong or misguided) values makes them subjectively unculpable means that we cannot judge the type of action objectively according to our own values. As if pluralism means we can't hold that our Truth is the real one, just because it happens to currently be just one idea among many in a marketplace full of false "truths."

In truth, there is a moral "double standard," inasmuch as even a Relativism that allows a variety of value systems, and thus won't condemn any action absolutely, still is supposed to condemn acting out of accord with the logical implications of ones own value system. Saying that "Society is relativistic, therefore these things can't be condemned absolutely, therefore I can't be condemned at all" is to misunderstand that notion of even just private values. Even a private and relativistic notion of "values" assumes that the person who holds them is supposed to follow them consistently (even if that person doesn't have to hold those particular values).

This leads us to the "lowest common denominator" of consensus in pluralist societies, however, as the law, for example, will only criminalize things that everyone agrees are bad. In a Muslim country pork might be illegal, and the very illegality would help uphold the value system of opposing it. In a pluralist country, however, the idea is that the Muslim might personally oppose pork, but can't impose this value on people who don't, so pork won't be illegal. However, someone who bought into the philosophical implications of pluralism, who understood that under pluralism Islam is only one notion of the good among many, would then see that the fact that pork was not condemned for everyone (ie, those who had different value systems or notions of the good), but only relative to Islam as a value system (but an ultimately "optional" value system)...implies that it is not absolutely or intrinsically wrong.

And the implication of that is that it isn't "really" wrong at all, because most people, even operating in this relativist/pluralist framework, instinctively have an absolute notion of the Good, and so if they are exposed to the attitude that something is only wrong relative to one system of values (but a system of values that is optional in the sense of being one among many possibilities, since society offers no unifying value other than this diversity itself)...soon enough they'll come to conclude that it isn't even wrong relative to that system of values either because, heck, how can something be truly wrong if it isn't absolutely or intrinsically wrong (ie, for everyone)? But without a unitary notion of The Good that one does believe applies "to everyone," very few things will be considered wrong for everyone, and because many people can't make the objective/subjective distinction, soon enough very few things will be considered wrong for anyone.

The Good: A Paradox

There have been some related ideas floating around in my thoughts and conversations lately.

Some of it was spurred by this Vox Nova post on the Natural Law and common "externalistic" misunderstandings of it. I tried to clarify in that thread that the natural law is actually about what we can know about the nature of The Good and ordering our wills towards it without Revelation.

However, as I eventually discussed in the comments of that thread, one of the issues that we face in a world of Secular Pluralism is that there is a different paradigm now about the very nature of the good and human fulfillment in general, let alone just disagreements about what individual things constitute part of genuine human fulfillment.

So I can demonstrate with masterful rationality that certain things are not in accordance with the Good, but such arguments are perhaps largely irrelevant (except when "preaching to the choir") in a world where "The Good" is no long even accepted, where it has been replaced by "the good." Perhaps I have for too long been just assuming that I was appealing to common values with people, when in reality our basic paradigms were different (the real problem with "apologetics" these days).

This article (which I may reply to in its own post later) lays out the problem well:

the 'nature' and the 'reason' considered by secular people, on the one hand, and religious people, on the other, are not likely to coincide. Christians are likely to frame the debate [...] in terms of the true human good, the proper goals that human beings should aim for. Secular people, on the other hand, are likely to reject the idea that such goals can be objectively shared in common, and to frame the debate in terms of rights and private utility.

Today, most people do not understand The Good as something transcendent and unitary, do not think there is one Meaning of Life for human beings which, in our manifold states of life, we can all fulfill by following Reason. Rather, The Good is conceived of as something private and individual; desire is arbitrary, a product of evolution and circumstances, and "happiness" is simply its maximal fulfillment as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else (hence the paradigm of "rights" being so important now.) Rather than a notion that The Good is something external and absolute that is the last end of all desire, where The Good comes first and is what informs desire...instead "the good" is conceived of simply as the construct of the various desires people have arbitrarily, desire comes first and the good is derived from that.

There are many reasons for this. Some are philosophical; one cannot but see the influence of Marx or Nietzsche in this Killing of God (killing in the sense of deconstructing any idea of a transcendent and unitary Good, a single Meaning of Life). Darwinism certainly opened up the possibility of thinking that the universe and life are ultimately accidental, that various desires may just be vestigial biological glitches that ultimately cannot necessarily be reconciled with each other, that might be incoherent and require compromise, or admit of different interpretations. And Existentialism has provided a way for people to "rescue" the idea of meaning or value of the good from all this, from the threat of nihilism, by demonstrating that human choice and agency, subjectivity itself, is what confers values on whatever individualistic "project" of the good an individual person wants to pursue in life.

Of course (to use ones of Marx's own insights) many of these philosophical turns were likely just responses to socio-economic and political changes in the world. Industrialism and capitalism (at least in the usurious, materialistic, consumerist forms they've taken; though these forms may have been a necessary "stage" of "progress") seemingly "require" the privatization of the good, and the notion of common pursuit being deconstructed.

This however, leaves Christians with quite a conundrum or paradox, in which Faith or orthodoxy today cannot be the same phenomenon as it was in, say, the Catholic Middle Ages. Don't get me wrong, I believe true faith is a supernatural gift that is not merely some sociological phenomenon, and as such the cultural context wouldn't have to matter for the individual for whom God chooses to give it. But on the experiential level, on the level of that sociology...it is going to be a very different thing today, the means of the grace of faith are going to be very different (and necessarily probably not as widespread).

The paradox is this. Even though people today can (like me or other orthodox Catholics) choose to pursue the transcendent and unitary Good, and hold that concept of it...nevertheless, this choice or outlook is essentially still private and individual! Without the organic process of the community socializing a common notion of the Good...we can no longer hold a notion of a transcendent Good in the same way. We can hold it, but only in the context or form of being, ironically, a private individual conception of the good. That the private individual notion of the good held by some individuals happens to correspond to the traditional transcendent and unitary Good...is almost just accidental under this system. That conception of the Good as common is rendered not a counter-point contradicting the notion of relativism and pluralism and the private good...but is simply rendered one more private notion of the good among many private notions of the good.

The irony or paradox works in the reverse too, of course. People who pursue other private notions of the good, who happen to have and pursue other desires in the quest of individual self-fulfillment...are actually, in the broad or general sense, pursuing this conception of the Good (or good) exactly because it is the one society at large has promoted! Because pluralism has become the new "common" notion of the good (or Good.) It isn't exactly transcendent or unitary (except perhaps in the form of a "void") but "be yourself!" is nevertheless a common narrative, even if a narrative of individualism and potentially competing or conflicting interests.

This leaves the Church in quite a pickle. If there is no communally socialized common Good (except the private good) and if the transcendent Good has been reduced to just one private account of the good among many...it becomes rather more unrealistic to just expect everyone to "coincidentally" embrace nevertheless that account of the good as their own privately. The whole point of the transcendent Good was that it was to be pursued "instead of" private individual desire. Therefore, expecting everyone to internalize it as their own private individual desire...is rather naive, to say the least!

Perhaps "instead of" I should say, rather, the transcendent Good was to organize and prioritize them all in the same way. But if the decision regarding the "organizing" meta-value itself of a common Meaning has been transferred to the internal individual as well, if the "externally imposed" standard has been gotten rid of in favor of a narrative of Freedom or Liberty, then expecting everyone to coincidentally adopt the same internal standard...is rather counter-intuitive and sort of misses the whole point of what the standard being internal means or is supposed to accomplish; it's sort of like saying "Freedom's great!...as long as you all use your freedom to choose the same thing..."

In fact, I think we should probably be giving the benefit of the doubt to most people out there who are pursuing their own private accounts of the good, even when they are not the account which we know should be the external standard...because in doing so they are, in fact, pursuing the current external standard (which is the very lack of one; I'm reminded of a line in Brave New World where Mustapha Mond says that God now "manifests himself as an absence") and thus in some very real sense these people are not reprobates filled with pride and hubris, but are truly following the proper "instinct" regarding where to get their notions of the Good (the community or society itself, which currently answers them only with the void). In that sense these people are victims, having been deprived of the external standard that human nature craves, in favor of a sort of anti-standard.

What this means for the Church in our pastoral approach or evangelization is a very tricky question, and one the current approach clearly does not adequately address. Yes, for the individual as a private individual, the only advice I personally can give is to embrace orthodoxy...but I can only do so as one idea competing in a market of other ideas. As such, one can only do so by convincing people that the unitary transcendent Good is actually equivalent to the maximal fulfillment of their own private values or desires, that it in fact concides with their private good...and so involves basically "convincing people that they are miserable without it" or, even, trying to make them feel miserable without it. This is, of course, very troubling.

However, I find equally bizarre the approach of certain liberal or heterodox Catholics who try to argue that various things (usually its unchastity) that people pursue are actually part of The Good. To me this is silly, because the people doing these things usually never claim that their actions are part of "The Good," because their very paradigm is the good as private and individualistic. As far as I can tell, there's no reason to think these people (if they truly understood the philosophical distinction) would even want their goods artificially boxed into The Good (which is fitting a square peg into a round hole anyway), so trying to "save the appearances" by making such arguments for loosening our moral code strikes me as absurd.

Yes, liberals will get offended by the teaching that such-and-such is a sin, but if they really understood what "Sin" was in the internal logic of the Catholic understanding (an offense against The Good)...I'm pretty sure most would not care, or even would celebrate that fact, as The Good is already no longer their standard, they already do not share that paradigm. At best The Good (and what violates it) is irrelevant to them, at worst it is something oppressive and tyrannical that has been used throughout history to stifle individual "self expression and actualization" and all that. Trying to entice them back into accepting The Good through a laxism that would admit that many of their private goods were actually part of The Good...is an accomodationism that misses the point that the underlying phenomenon is that The Good itself has been deconstructed. Trying to loosen it up so as to make it more appealing to their private goods is a category error similar to people trying to make obedient Christianity "cool" through Rock music, when the whole coolness of Rock consists in rebellion in the first place.

Different societies throughout history, of course, have gotten The Good wrong. Aquinas lists many ends that various people have identified as the Good: wealth, honor, fame and glory, power, health of the body, pleasure, knowledge and virtue, other created goods. We might be tempted to say "Yes, virtue is the correct answer," but even it is not. If virtue doesn't point to God in the Catholic conception, even it is not truly fulfilling. And the Church has indeed evangelized various societies and gotten them to impose the correct understanding of the Good. However, the approach when a given community already has some notion of a unitary Good that is merely incorrect is one thing, but what do we do when the very notion of the Good as something common, transcendent, or unitary...has been deconstructed. When we are faced with the void which is antichrist?

As laid out above, clearly trying to get each individual (or even just a certain "critical mass" of individuals) to individually embrace the correct notion of the Good as their own good by coercive pressure until it can be re-established externally as something more than just individual...is likely naive, especially today. However, trying to convince people that they are miserable without it, or make them miserable without it, is just as unworthy an approach because it actually attacks a basic instinct in these people which really is good (the instinct to conform to the external social standard of the good; even if in our society the standard is the absence of one). So what do we do?

I don't know exactly. The Church obviously shouldn't abandon orthodoxy as its own internal communal standard, and individuals who are able to make their own private good and this transcendent notion of the good coincide...certainly should do so and will be held culpable if they don't. But when it comes to the culture at large, fundamentalism or antagonizing those who are merely trying to fulfill the account of the good they've been given (the individualistic private one) are clearly bad approaches, wrong approaches. Condemning people all to Hell is a pretty poor way to save them from Hell! But then what do we do? What stance can we take in a world where God has been taken away as a social reality and, at best, can exist only in the individual heart as a private good, or at most a small community of freely associated people of like-mind on the matter?

I don't know. It is very troubling to me. However, this recent Vox Nova post shed some light on perhaps the proper response for me. The idea was that, taking the post-exile Jews as our model, the proper stance can only be one of Penance for each individual for whom God does still exist, for whom the transcendent Good is still alive in their heart (even if, under the current system, only in the form of their private good):

The question remains, however, how can a Church whose credibility has been destroyed through its own most grievous faults possibly hope to bear witness to the city of God? How can its being a “people set apart” be seen as anything but hypocrisy? If Pope Benedict’s claim is true, that “History shows that, when the Church becomes less worldly, her missionary witness shines more brightly… [and she] can reach out more effectively and in a truly Christian way to the whole world,” then how might this becoming less worldly witness to anything more than a sort of triumphalism in which you are either with us or against us, on the ark or drowning? Here, the key is found not in Jonah’s expression of the mission of the Jews to the world, but in that of Isaiah’s suffering servant. After all, nearly the entire history of Israel as the chosen people of God is told in a penitential key, a key which, according to William Cavanaugh, is vital for the proper life of the church. “The recognition of our sinfulness becomes not recognition of our tragic fate but a humble acknowledgment that we are not in charge of making history come out right by violent means…The city of God is not the shape of our triumph, but of our repentance.”

Within the life of the Church, this is most frequently and powerfully expressed in the liturgy, as it was for those suffering under Seleucid terror. For example, in Daniel’s prayer of penitence, he confesses sins to God and begs for mercy and deliverance (Daniel 9:4-19). Smith-Christopher shows that such acknowledgment of shame in penitential prayers, like the one in Daniel, serves as a “break with the past, to be an alternative people of God…To remind oneself constantly of the failure of power (in the ancestors and kings), to advocate an alternative mode of living.” Accordingly, by placing the blame for the exile and persecution at their own feet, that is, as a result of their sin, the Jews who prayed Daniel’s prayer stripped Antiochus’ claim to be in control and re-situated him as an implement of punishment used by God, who remains in control.

Similarly, in order to be an effective witness as a people set apart, the Church must acknowledge her own past sins and be a reminder to the world of humanity’s utter dependence on God’s mercy. “What the church makes visible to the world is the whole dynamic drama of sin and salvation, no only the end result of humanity purified and unified." Of course, this repentance mustn’t be a utilitarian strategy but a cry to God, a cry motivated by the experience of sin and a simultaneous witness to the world that even now God has not abandoned his people. “It is in this repentance that the church may make Christ and the drama of sin and redemption possible," and fulfill its role as the universal sacrament of salvation.

This approach seems correct to me. We can't make war against "them" as if "they" are the ones who killed God by pursuing some private good other than Him. They're only doing so because "they know not what they do," because they are (as is human nature) following the only standard society has given them (which in this case is the void). No, if God is "manifesting Himself as an absence" it is our fault. If He has withdrawn, it is the fault of the sinfulness of those of us who do keep God alive in our hearts and yet nevertheless betray Him by our own selfishness and sin.

We killed Him, we nailed Him to the Cross (Christianity, in this way, anticipated Nietzsche by 1900 years), and the proper response can only be weeping and mourning on our part, each individually. There are things the Church could do to facilitate this penitential stance. Certainly, the Church itself needs to provide more genuine community in order to support the individual (because bearing the weight of God privately in contradiction to the surrounding culture can be exhausting for many, and can sour into bitterness inside them), but ultimately there may be no large-scale "fix" at this stage if we are at "that point" in the macrocosm of history playing out the microcosm (of the individual spiritual life, or the life of Christ, etc).

So will this ever "restore" the external standard of a transcendent Good? I don't know; the emergence of Antichrist is itself implicit in the Christ event, and our own narrative has always known that, has always predicted things unfolding this way (so it's not like we should have been blindsided). But, certainly, for the individual, if God is in the tomb, if the soul of Christ is sojourning in Hell, if that's what our Modernity or Postmodernity has become, then we can only mourn, do penance, and keep Him alive in our own hearts, witness Him with love (not fear) to others, and await the Easter morn we know will come.

The Truth and Happiness

This is just a small thought I had.

I have sometimes encountered in conversations I've had the attitude that, basically, the Truth (about religion, philosophy, the meaning of life, etc) might be somehow in conflict with happiness.

Of course, there are those who prefer delusion to despair. But, on the whole, I think asking yourself "is this making me happy?" can be a pretty good evaluation of the truth of a matter. What good is it to believe something or to make some choice or to worry over some issue if it isn't making you happy? Some people might appeal to some value like "the Truth," but I say, "The Truth is what works, the Truth is whatever gets you through the day."

Again, people who see some potential conflict in values between the Truth and happiness might find this to be advocating delusion or false consciousness. But this notion only makes sense in a universe where there is ultimately no unified coherent form of The Good, where the ends of desire are finally manifold, fragmented, disparate, and disintegrated.

But we believe, of course, in a Good which is transcendent, and in the existence of a single Last End for all human kind and all of Being. And in this case, there can never be any real conflict between the Truth and true happiness (properly understood; we can't just mean a subjective emotional buzz in the present). In an ordered universe, there is nothing delusional or cynically pragmatic about saying "The Truth is what works" because what works is, in fact, the Truth!

The Boiling Frog

Hell sneaks up on you. That's what I've come to realize.

Salvation, now that can be the subject of dramatic instantaneous conversions, last minute turnabouts, death-bed repentance, and eleventh hour deus ex machina heroism. But damnation...probably not so. Compared to the surprising spontaneity of grace, our free will on its own is simply tediously boring.

It's a well known fact that a frog (or cold-blooded animals in general) will jump away from boiling water just as we would. However, if you put them in lukewarm water, and then slowly raise the heat, they will sit there, adjusting their body temperature to the surroundings, until they are finally boiled to death. At no point do they notice that it has gotten "too" hot.

This is how we are damned. It isn't through monumental acts of evil; those are rare, and those who commit them are often times not entirely sane anyway, which raises questions of culpability. These people are "monsters," but can a monster really sin? And besides, no one sane randomly commits monstrous uncharacteristic acts (once again: grace surprises, evil never does). If someone gets to that point, it's as the climax of a long descent into evil in which they surely crossed Hell's thresh-hold long before.

No, Hell creeps. The lost soul who is fortunate enough to catch himself asks, "How did I get here? How did my life get to this point?" and looking back there are only a thousand little selfish choices, "Oh, I'll indulge this urge, I'll accept this satisfaction, I'll play with this heart, I'll use this person a little bit, I'll tell just a small lie, I'll entertain this doubt" and ten thousand cowardly sins of omission, "Oh, I'll put that off till tomorrow, I'll postpone doing what needs to be done, I won't control my own thoughts, I'll procrastinate on improving myself, on getting help, on saving my soul."

And suddenly you wake up one morning and realize that so many venial sins have become mortal. So many drinks, and you're an alcoholic. So many little things saved, and you're a hoarder. So many days spent putting off facing the music, that you're the grasshopper begging at the door of the ant. Suddenly you wake up, and you're life is a mess, in disarray, but it all happened so gradually! Maybe finally all the evil that has been accumulating slowly under the surface comes home to roost, maybe the consequences you were avoiding come to a head in some explicit crisis, and make you realize that you have, at an imperceptible glacial pace, become a horrible person, become a reprobate.

This is why space agencies have to be so precise: at a million miles out, a tiny fraction of an angle difference upon launch...becomes a huge difference in trajectory. The frog doesn't notice it's being boiled, and the souls in Hell, alive and dead, probably don't notice either.

A Promising and Enlightening Little Chant Conversation

There was a little exchange during a break at my schola practice last weekend that I found promising.

I don't know much about liturgical music, though I am coming to understand more and more just how integral the chant is to the liturgy, even given my own past reservations about it and personal preference for other styles (I'm certainly not listening to chant during my free time!)

But, this is perhaps why I do have such an aversion to anything but chant in liturgy (especially things like orchestral Masses, etc) and why the Church only ever really allowed varied settings for the Ordinary, not the Propers: the music is not something just added to the text, as if Low Mass came first and Sung Mass was just jazzing it up. No, the music is really the life behind the text, and just as much a part of the experience of the "tradition" of the liturgy as the words. When people pass down a song, the melody is integral to that experience! It's not as if they're passing down merely a text and the melody is just an accidental vehicle. And the whole liturgy is song.

So, the director of my choir and several of the members seem to be quite knowledgeable about the scholarship regarding chant, the manuscript traditions, the various evolutions of pieces in different traditions (say, of different religious orders); from what I can glean from them talking, it almost seems to happen in Darwinian fashion, with little mutations and minor variations accruing in different pieces over time in different localities or traditions, with some cross-pollination, etc.

Another interesting fact: the chant books are probably the one place where newer is better, liturgically. Even if you use the pieces in the context of the old rite textual cycle, the music itself is probably a better restoration now (thanks to improved scholarship with the manuscripts and all that) than if you were to simplistically insist on sticking to mid-20th-century Graduales, etc.

Anyway, last weekend they started discussing the Tract, because of how the First Sunday of Lent has the longest (took us about 15 minute) piece in the whole Gregorian repertoire, really. The theory is that this may be a preserved "full" (or almost full) Tract.

In the liturgy of Late Antiquity and the Dark Ages, things were a lot less "vestigial" than they are under the Tridentine regime. Indeed, I've argued for restoring fuller forms on this blog before. For example, it is well-known that the Introit, the Offertory, and the Communion were actually used as antiphons between verses of psalms during the corresponding liturgical processions; our choir uses the Offertory verses found restored in the Offertoriale, and verses for the Communion too (though we've never yet had occasion to use additional Introit verses, though they are available in the same volume with the Communion verses).

This concept is general straight-forward enough, though the liturgy preserves a few idiosyncrasies suggesting that at some places there may have been variant practices. For example, at Requiems the Communion is in the format of a Responsory (otherwise confined to the Office in the Roman Liturgy; though my choir often sings a Matins/Prolix Responsory after the Communion to fill more time). This is taken by some scholars to suggest that at some locale in the early Middle Ages (a given cathedral, monastery, etc) whence the Requiem Propers (or at least the Requiem Communion) descended to us, all Communions may have been Responsories instead of a psalm/antiphon format at that locale.

The Alleluia has a bit more complicated a history, but it may have been used during something like a Gospel Procession at one point (it also seems that Sequences evolved from drawing out the melisma of the "jubilus" of the Alleluia, in a manner somewhat similar to how the Kyrie used to be "troped" as well.)

However, the Gradual (and the Tracts) were known to not have been used in processions. The Gradual was essentially like the modern "Responsorial Psalm," and was sung for it's own sake after every lesson before the Epistle, with the ministers having nothing else to do but sit and listen as with readings, with a soloist cantor (or, perhaps later, even a group of cantors or choir) alternating verses with the congregation singing the antiphonal refrain. As now preserved, the Gradual in the books has a first section that is essentially an "R" (though the R is not always included), and then a section marked "V" probably indicating the original antiphon and the first verse sung with it.

The Tract, on the other hand, sung after the Epistle, was always a Psalm sung by a soloist or group of cantors or choir straight-through, not in a call-and-response format like the Gradual (in fact, it is suggested that this is what the name "Tract" means: sung straight through). As Tracts are preserved today, this is why they are marked at every verse with "V" indicating verses of a Psalm, but don't have any "R" or equivalent. It used to be a whole psalm, but what we have preserved are abridged verses except a few days a year. Probably, at one point, they were all as lengthy as the First Sunday of Lent.

Additionally, there used to always be a Tract even when there was an Alleluia also; the principle of a Psalm after every reading originally held even when the Alleluia started being proclaimed before the Gospel or during the Gospel Procession. Eventually, the Tract came to drop out on days the Alleluia was used (some days, especially in Lent, Eastertide, and on Ember Days still have strange combinations of Gradual, Tract, and Alleluia, or one "missing" where it might be expected, for historical reasons).

Anyway, learning all this helped me understand the liturgy better. It also made me question my own "restorationist" urges a bit, as I'm not sure how possible it actually would be to, say, restore full Tracts for all the days of the year. I'm not sure the manuscripts exist to do that, for example (as, by the High Middle Ages, must of the abridgement we're familiar with had already taken place). And there is something neat about having these vestigial "remnants" whose origins are sort of a mystery, whose ancient use we can speculate on, still preserved even if in an abridged form.

However, the most promising part of this conversation came at the end. Someone was talking about the cantor soloists for the psalms, and someone brought up how at this stage, everywhere was still improvising their liturgy, both in text but probably especially in music. There was an ancient (even Apostolic) structure to the liturgy, but in terms of the actual cycle of texts it was all still organically evolving, and different in many different locales, and not fixed by force of legislation or anything like that.

And then I was very glad to hear a lot of support expressed among the choir members (traditionalist Catholics mind you, including some seminarians and religious) for the old organic growth and local diversity. A real regret was expressed for the Carolingian standardization of the Liturgy and Trent further quashing local diversity and ossifying the liturgy as if in amber.

Of course, as one rather more reactionary member said, "Well, that's all well and good when the whole world is Catholic, you can trust people to improvise in a thoroughly Catholic way. With the rise of Protestantism, can we really trust people to?" And, of course, he has a point; I certainly don't want priests today making up their own liturgy, it would almost certainly be dreadful and often heretical, or at least tinged with Protestant aesthetics, not thoroughly Catholic (or Catholic in an inappropriately private devotional as opposed to liturgical sort of way). I even then pointed out that the Novus Ordo basically was what happened when you let moderns start making liturgy again.

And yet still, the choir director himself then said, "Yeah, it's tragic though, because you can't go on defining yourself as against things forever. That becomes just reactionary. When the Church really is something in itself, then the liturgy can bloom." Coming from a traditionalist choir, I thought hearing positions like that (rather than unnuanced support for the Tridentine rubricism and ossification and top-down standardization of liturgy)...was very promising.

Religious Freedom and Misleading Numbers

I've discussed how statistics can both create a more honest objective look at a situation, but also be misused if they are taken out of context.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about dissent on contraception among Catholics related to the recent Obama administration ruling regarding requiring employers to cover it on their health-care plans, and the subsequent "accommodation" (how gracious of the government to humor us with one! ::rollseyes::) requiring the insurance companies to provide it directly to plan-holding employees who want it.

The accommodation, of course, allegedly takes the employer out of it by requiring insurance companies to directly provide contraception for "free" to any employees already holding a plan. Except the problem I (and the bishops) see with this, is that this notion of the insurance company dealing "directly" with plan-holders and saying that takes the employer out of the equation is mere sleight-of-hand; if only plan-holding employees get the "free" contraception from the insurer, and if the employer paid for that plan in the first place, then (wherever the funds come from; I tend to believe "segregated funds" in general is a rather silly concept) the employer giving them a plan is still like giving them a virtual entitlement to contraception. It's just facetious and a linguistic game to claim "You pay for the ribs, the salad bar is free," in a restaurant unless the salad bar is free for anyone in the world, even those who don't buy anything, not merely those who buy an entree.

For example, I'd certainly feel uncomfortable and like my conscience was violated if I had to give employees a gift-certificate to Planned Parenthood, even if it could be argued "They might not use it on an abortion, they might just get a pap smear!" Even if it was billed specifically as a "certificate for a pap smear" only, if I was being forced to distribute them during some sort of promotion where Planned Parenthood was giving out a free abortion with every pap smear, I obviously would not feel comfortable giving out certificates for the pap smears, exactly because of the "bonus" they would, in the context of that situation, imply and to which they would create an entitlement; in that case, the certificate for a pap smear is equivalent to a certificate for an abortion. I mean, similarly, is the government going to start accepting the argument that prostitutes give the sex for free and that you're only paying them to leave afterwards?!

No, the fact is, unlike money that can buy anything, and which furthermore creates no specific right to be sold any particular product if no one wants to sell it to you, this accommodation still requires employers to provide employees with something that creates an entitlement to something they find objectionable. The accommodation really does seem, then, like an accounting trick. The only way for it to work would be if insurance companies were required to provide the free contraception to anyone, whether they held a plan or not.

Now, when it comes to statistics about dissent, for some reason, the liberals seem to think that if a large number of one's co-religionists support something, that makes it okay to force those who don't to be complicit in it. I guess that means that if most members of a church support or allow for war, we can say that the conscientious objection of a pacifist among them isn't valid?? This notion of the State getting to determine what does and doesn't violate our conscience is very dangerous.

It's true that the Catholics providing insurance to employees in this system (as they already do in several States) might only constitute remote material cooperation and, especially under duress, not be a sin. But it's not for the government to make that analysis. If we say we're against a policy, we don't need to provide any "explanation." I mean, what if a religion centered around an oracle who said things were wrong or right in an entirely arbitrary manner? They'd still have a right to their religious freedom; it is very dangerous to act like conscience-claims need to be justified to the State or like there has to be some sort of proof of internal consistency.

Religious freedom should be sacrosanct as long as no one else's rights are violated (and I think claiming a positive right to have someone else pay so that you can get your jollies is just absurd, and certainly it shouldn't trump conscience claims). This isn't "about" contraception, then. I think there must be a general conscience clause allowing employers (whether their business is religion-related or not) to not provide for things they to which they object, whether this is Jehovah's Witnesses objecting to blood transfusions, or Christian Scientists objecting to medical care period. Frankly, I already think the notion is odd of speaking in terms of positive rights to be provided anything other than ones due wages by an employer when one doesn't even have a "right" to be hired in the first place! Why not have people buy their own insurance with their wages?

However, liberals seem to think that a religious position being unpopular means that popular demand for meaningless sex can trump the objections of those who don't want to provide the means for it. Even though this should have nothing to do with the religious liberty question, I have seen many times in the past month the statistic that 98% of sexually active Catholic women have used contraception (as if that somehow trumps the conscience rights of the 2% who haven't?)

But, more immediately, I want to know where the hell this 98% number is coming from for contraception. Saying 98% of sexually active Catholic women have used it could be wildly misleading. First, that doesn't take into account that more Catholic women may not be sexually active. It says nothing one way or another about the pool of Catholic women who have either embraced a life of celibacy, or who are waiting chastely until marriage. Secondly, it doesn't divide between married women and non-married. Of course people who are already fornicating are going to use it! But it's not like they're good examples of Catholic morality anyway.

Furthermore I would add that just because you've done something, doesn't mean you think it's okay. I'd bet that 99.9% of Catholic men have masturbated...that doesn't mean we all agree with the morality of it. No one claimed holding a moral teaching as an ideal means living up to it perfectly (and is it really that hard for people to mention one more thing in confession??)

And actually, when it comes to theoretical agreement on orthodoxy, I think one finds the numbers are much less dire, though still troubling. This article from a few years ago indeed suggests that 88% (still less than 98%) of all self-identified Catholics disagree on contraception, but among weekly churchgoers (the group who might be seen as "otherwise good Catholics," and who still represent 44% of the total sample of Catholics, though this proportion can be misleading itself) a full 45% support the Church's traditional teaching. And I think that's the group who really matters; if you're not even following the Precepts of the Church...well, there are bigger fish to fry than whether you are orthodox about contraception, homosexuality, or women priests!

Of course, only 45% orthodoxy among even practicing Catholics isn't great, but it's certainly not so wildly dismal as the liberal agitators want you to believe with their extremely misleading 98%-dissent-on-contraception idea. "Everyone else is doing it" or "everybody else thinks so" is already a stupid reason for doing something or believing in something; appeal to popularity is not a valid argument. But when furthermore you have to lie about the actual popularity in order to convince yourself of the already faulty appeal...that's just laughably self-justifying.

Update! This article explains the ridiculously narrow criteria used for getting that "98%" figure:

The figure comes from an April 2011 Guttmacher Institute report based on the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth. Twenty-five percent of the respondents to the survey self-identified as Catholics, but 40 percent of those said they never attended Mass or attended less frequently than once a month.

The survey looked at women between the ages of 15 and 44 and asked about contraceptive use only among those who had had sex in the three months prior to the survey and were not pregnant, postpartum or trying to get pregnant. Ninety percent of those women -- and 98 percent of the Catholic respondents -- said they had used some form of contraception at least once in their lives.

The survey did not ask the women about their current contraceptive usage.

So of the already biased crowd of women of fertile age having sex but not pregnant or trying to get pregnant, 98% of the "Catholics" (even though 40 percent were not practicing) had used contraception at least once in their lives, but said nothing about whether they currently did or whether they currently thought it was moral (another point: I'm pretty sure many people get more conservative about sexual morality once they get married or hit menopause themselves; it's easier to look at the theoretical questions objectively when they are no longer "personal" and past experience can be dismissed as youthful indiscretions.) So...big deal. This really proves nothing, and certainly doesn't form some sort of justification for the insurance mandate.

Fame

This is sort of a follow-up to another post.

It is interesting to reflect on fame in the Internet Age, the concept of the "internet celebrity," who can be a niche interest or unknown to the mainstream media.

Just last night, for example, I discovered the cult of Spieling Peter (not his real name; some people say he is the actor Andrew Ducote...others say that is blasphemy, that it is best left a mystery, that he is only Peter Pan!)

From his article in Neverpedia, the Peter Pan Wiki (yes, that exists, and, yes, he apparently warrants his own article):

Around the holidays of 2009/2010, a "cast member" playing Peter Pan at Disneyland became something of an internet celebrity, due to his mischievous smile and his delightful on-the-job antics. The tights probably help too. He interacts playfully – in character – with guests and with other cast members (especially Wendy Darling, Captain Hook, Alice, and other Wonderland characters) at the park. He is actually just one of several young men who portray Peter at Disneyland and the other Disney resorts. He apparently worked there as far back as 2007, originally working as Terrence, one of the Tinkerbell fairies.

Videos and photos of him have been posted to video and photo sharing sites, and he became the obsession du jour of many adolescent girls, some guys, and probably quite a few others. He is also known as "Ginger Dude" (for his probably-dyed hair color) and "Spieling Peter" (apparently a nickname given by a Disney employee to differentiate him from the other "Peter"s). He has been perhaps most obsessively stalked at:

http://fyeahspielingpeter.tumblr.com/
http://goshyeahspielingpeter.tumblr.com/

The first tumblr has over 61 pages of photos and videos people have submitted from their trips during the period he worked there! And it is still being updated with new content, as recently as yesterday!!

You can find plenty of videos on Youtube as well:

When High School Girls Fight

It can get naaaaaaasty:

Claims of a bizarre plot to assassinate Pope Benedict XVI are reverberating through Italy in what observers say signals the latest twist in an increasingly cutthroat internal Vatican power dispute.

The Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano published the sensational "mordkomplott" letter detailing an alleged plot against the pope on its front page on Friday. Despite a Vatican spokesman's claiming it was "nonsense not to be taken seriously", the content of the anonymous warning letter, dated 30 December 2011, was reported widely in Italian and German media.

The letter was delivered in early January to the Vatican secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, and the pope's private secretary, Georg Gänswein, by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos of Colombia, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. The paper suggested it had been written in German to avoid attracting the attention of certain Vatican officials while communicating clearly and directly with close advisers to the pope, who is German.

Labelled "strictly confidential for the Holy Father", the detailed letter reports several conversations that Cardinal Paolo Romeo, the archbishop of Palermo, allegedly had with Italian businessmen in Beijing on a trip last November during which he predicted the pope would die within 12 months and suggested his replacement would be Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan.

"This seems something so far from reality and not serious that I don't want to even comment," the Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, said when asked for comment by the paper.

But Castrillón Hoyos felt the threat was serious enough that he suggested the Vatican open an inquiry into exactly what was said during the mysterious China trip, which, if it happened, was not widely reported publicly. Hoyos is older than the 73-year-old Romeo, and part of the more traditionalist wing of the church.

According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, these latest revelations are further proof that a messy internal power dispute is unfolding inside the Vatican. Earlier this month, four clerics publicly defended their management of the sovereign, 108-acre Vatican City, in the heart of Rome, after a former deputy governor levelled harsh criticisms of corruption over how bids and contracts were managed.

I'm sure we'll hear more about this. If it were true, it would be rather scary, the stuff of a Dan Brown novel even. As it is, it seems like some sort of poison pen type intrigue. I can just imagine some Cardinal doing his nails and watching an Italian soap opera while dictating it to his minion...

Omerta

I don't know if anyone saw this yet. I've really stopped reporting on every little thing that comes out of the abuse crisis because, well, it looked like the clergy's strategy ended up working: hit us with so much bad news that we just get accustomed to it and stop being as outraged as we should.

However, I thought these comments were interesting:

Hiding behind a culture of "omerta" -- the Italian word for the Mafia's code of silence -- would be deadly for the Catholic Church, the Vatican's top official for dealing with sexual abuse of minors by clergy said Wednesday.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna made the unusually forthright comment in his speech to a landmark symposium in Rome on the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Church in the past decade.

"The teaching ... that truth is at the basis of justice explains why a deadly culture of silence, or 'omerta,' is in itself wrong and unjust," Scicluna said in his address to the four-day symposium which brings together some 200 people including bishops, leaders of religious orders, victims of abuse, and psychologists.

Rarely, if ever, has a Vatican official used the word "omerta" - a serious accusation in Italian -- to compare the reluctance of some in the Church to come clean on the abuse scandal with the Mafia's code of silence.

"Other enemies of the truth are the deliberate denial of known facts and the misplaced concern that the good name of the institution should somehow enjoy absolute priority to the detriment of disclosure," Scicluna said.

Victims groups have for years accused some bishops in the Church of preferring silence and cover-up to coming clean on the scandal, which has sullied the image of the Church around the world, particularly in the United States.

"No strategy for the prevention of child abuse will ever work without commitment and accountability," Scicluna told the symposium at the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University, called "Towards Healing and Renewal."

Scicluna, a Maltese whose formal title is "justice promoter" in the Vatican's doctrinal department, is the Vatican's point man for dealing with cases of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy.

The symposium's participants are discussing how the Church can become more aware of the problem, make a commitment to listen to victims and prevent future cases of abuse.

Groups representing abuse victims say the Church must do much more to own up to the past, when known pedophile priests were shuttled from parish to parish instead of being defrocked or turned over to authorities.

It must also make greater efforts to prevent future cases, they say, accusing the Church and the Vatican of a cover-up.

Extraterrestrial "Intelligence"

One story that gets dug up every so often on a slow news day is that some priest or official at the Vatican Observatory have said something (positive, usually) about extraterrestrial life and its compatibility with Faith (usually the headline is sensationalistic and misleading...)

In itself, I see no real problem there, but think speculation is useless. We'd really have to see what "they" were like before we reached any conclusions. If there are myriads of bodiless spirits in the angels (and demons), why couldn't their be other material creatures with immortal souls? We would then have to re-examine our definition of man as a "rational animal" and see whether these other races, not descended from Adam presumably, had fallen themselves, whether they had been given some other Revelation or other "dispensation" of salvation from us, etc.

If the angels can exist as a separate spiritual "race" with a somewhat different dispensation, I see no reason why aliens with bodies couldn't also exist. Tolkein, as a "sub-creator" in fiction, imagined a possible world with many races on earth with different dispensations from God, and Aquinas even seems to hold out the possibility that God could have incarnated more than once, or in a Person other than the Son (or even two or three of the persons taking on the same created nature; see questions 5, 6, and 7 especially.)

So, really, who knows. Likely they'd be so far away that barring something like the invention of a real hyperdrive, we'd never actually meet before Judgement Day (and, if they're out there, won't we all be so surprised, to find out we were not alone after all, to meet our brothers after all those vast eons!) Though, surely, if it did happen, First Contact would be the most important event in [secular] history if it happened, and would probably constitute a massive paradigm shift and revolution in consciousness for many people (in a way that might threaten religion and have other massively unexpected results, so we should prepare).

However, lately I've been thinking that I'm not even sure it is meaningful to expect "intelligent" life to be found out there in the cosmos. Not for scientific reasons (most scientists seem to expect the universe to be teeming with civilizations), but for metaphysical reasons.

A friend recently pointed out to me this salient quote from Solaris by Stanisław Lem:

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.

I've only seen the movie, but it raises the spectre of alien "intelligence" that is totally, well, unintelligible to us. Whether because it is so far "above" our own, or because it is simply different.

I am not sure there is any reason to expect that we will find life that will be mutually intelligible with us in the cosmos. Because our notion of intelligence is conditioned by our categories, which are mental, and another sort of creature may well have incomprehensible categories.

What I mean is based on some other things I've been thinking about lately related to Idealism (the philosophical school) and the knowability of God from natural reason. Like, is "number" really a feature of the external universe? Or is it just a category in how human brains organize/construct reality in a way that another species may not have? Same/different, more/less, good/bad, etc...who is to say that these dualities of human thought would be any part of the syntax of the "programming language" of extraterrestrial brains? And yet, of course, such categories, such Forms, are what render the universe intelligible to us. We simply can't think outside the limits imposed by the box of our own system of thought.

When people speak of finding extraterrestrial intelligent life, they seem to be imagining ultimately human brains just put in weird looking bodies on weird planets, but assuming that the Forms will be constant and in the end "translate" across all intelligences. For those who believe there is a God, there is some more basis for believing this, at least; it is much less clear to me why atheist scientists would make this assumption (by analogy: try to input Java code into a C++ engine.) It can be difficult even for two human cultures to be entirely mutually intelligible to one another, so why should we expect any sort of empathy or communication or mutual understanding would be possible with aliens?

So, yes, I think people are looking for Man out there. And I see no reason to expect that we will find him. We may well find life, very complex life even, and life that creates highly advanced [inorganic] "technology" (as do chimps, and bees, and termites, and human beings). But I am not sure it makes sense to expect these creatures whose brains evolved totally separate from ours will be meaningfully intelligent in the human sense we would recognize (perhaps they don't even have a concept of intelligence! Or of living vs. dead!)

I think 2001: A Space Odyssey makes this point wonderfully and hauntingly: HAL, the Artificial Intelligence, bore man's image, because it was created by man. It has super-human computing capacity, of course, but ultimately it is programmed on the model of human thought, human intelligence, human categories (and so fittingly expresses very human flaws). On the other hand, what we assume is alien life in the last act...is simply wholly Other. There is something totally sublime as it blows our mind. It's "intelligence" cannot even really meaningfully be called that, as it is not comprehensible to us.

And why should we expect it to be?