Collapse: The Blog

"I Respect Your Opinion"

This isn't something we have to deal with a lot around here (my dissenting commenters generally being mostly spiteful, ignorant douchebags), but it bugs me nevertheless. Recently, a friend brought up the issue of homosexuality (the context was a revolting photograph she found online which I will not share, but which involved a half-nude gay man at a pride parade embracing an open apostate apologizing for Christianity's treatment of gays) and criticized the Christian take on the issue, on the grounds that it's inconsistent with Christian love. I've previously attacked this is a misrepresentation of caritas and what it means; simply put, love in this sense means not only expecting but demanding the best of the object of that love, which is naturally inconsistent with scandalous and reprehensible sexual behavior. Would you be content with your wife or daughter becoming a prostitute or a drug addict just because it makes her "happy"? No; such would be beneath her. The internal logic of interpersonal love is such that it demands excellence of its object.

Anyway, the discussion was polite and brief and ended with her saying we'd have to agree to disagree but that she respected my opinion. The subject was dropped and we went on talking about less divisive things. But it wasn't the first time I'd heard that formulation as a means of ending a discussion: I respect your opinion.

I respect your opinion! As if the subject of the conversation were whether my "opinion" was worthy of your respect. As if it were about you and me and not the truth. As if I were seeking your approval. It is a trope typical of the mind that can apprehend no truths beyond a conflict of two sovereign wills, moving at random throughout space and carefully agreeing to orchestrate their respective speeds and trajectories so as to avoid collision. At least the muscular and aggressive atheist/liberal/modern is acknowledging the existence of transcendent truth (albeit for no reason, no sound motivation, no good end, and in rank contrast to his own irrational nihilistic prejudices) when he declares, "You're wrong, and a jerk to boot." I might not say the same thing, but I don't pretend that my enemies' opinions are entitled to respect, especially when they're wrong on matters of grave importance and when their "arguments" amount to recycled cliches born of ignorance. There is no right to falsehood and error, after all, which is perhaps the one thing we and our neurotic dumbass enemies can agree on.

(Obviously my friend didn't mean it this way; it's just one of those things people feel the need to say, I guess. It probably dates from that long-ago age when liberalism was actually concerned with niceness instead of mere round-the-clock sodomy-at-any-price. At any rate, I object to the formulation itself, not the motivations of the speaker).

"Our Ruling Elites are Serious About PC"

A real gem from Dr. Charlton, posted in response to Bonald's humorous post about insufferable Catholic sermons relating Old Testament attitudes toward leprosy to "discrimination":

@Kristor – “Just think if AIDS was transmitted that way. Think we’d have AIDS colonies? You betcha we would.”

Actually, we probably wouldn’t, not in Britain anyway. And this is a measure of the pervasive dishonesty of our society. The ruling elites would very probably deny AIDS was contangious, and claim that the people were dying from something else – discrimination probably.

When AIDS arrived in Britain, and the government was running terrifyng TV averts about icebergs of disease, and people very high up were genuinely concerned that there might be a wiping-out of the younger generation – nonetheless clear and vital facts were deliberately concealed from the public.

In particular it was stated again and again that *everyone* was at risk, nobody was safe. Later it emerged that hetero-sexually transmitted AIDS was almost 100 percent confined to a very small group of recent immigrants from certain parts of Africa, almost entirely living in London.

This was a high risk population, the government knew, but the UK public was never allowed this information, and was indeed fed upon lies – presumably some people caught AIDS and some died as a result…

It was an early example of the politically correct airport ‘security’ policy, where anyone *could* be a terrorist (even if such people never have been terrorist so far in the history of the world); so the checks are ‘random’ (yeah…) and include detailed spot searches of young children travelling in families (it happened to us!), 85 year old grandmothers etc. Meanwhile, known and obvious high risk groups waltz-through ‘security’.

Our ruling elites are serious about PC. Societal annihiliation from leprosy would, for them, be a price they were prepared to pay.

Yet it cannot be said that this is acting nobly, stoically, on principle; because they would lie about the reality – lie to themselves and lie to others.

If the elites were to say clearly – leprosy is an incurable and terrible disease which is contagious – nonetheless we should allow lepers to live among us as equals because discrimination is the worst of evils; and the result will probably be that eventually nearly everybody will have leprosy – including you and me and our children; but that we should nonetheless do this because we should act by the highest principles of morality and the highest principle is non-discrimination…

If the PC elite would say something like that, they that would be respect-worthy, so far as it went. To suffer, deliberately, in pursuit of high goals is noble.

Because that would lead to questions of where this specific non-discriminative principle of morality comes from, and why it should be primary; and to this question they have no answer, because there is no answer.

But the ruling elites don’t, they don’t ever state honestly the truth as it is known – not even to themselves in private.

They would say that the threat of leprosy was exaggerated, mistakes in diagnosis were made, it was possible to make transmission unlikely, maybe some people were resistant, that it is actually curable, that the problem with leprosy is exaggerated and most due to prejudice against people who look strange, that it was a disease mostly of the poor and some ethnicities – they would raise up a dust-storm of psuedo-doubts and red herrings until real leprosy had disappeared and been redefined as being an *arbitrary label* imposed due to prejudice.

On Living a Nonmodern Life in the Modern World

Our sometimes-commenter Peter S. remarks over at Bruce Charlton's Miscellany:

This is the key issue: how to find or create a spiritual ‘modus vivendi’ that allows one to be ‘in the modern world but not of it’? This is the terrible spiritual position of the individual embedded in modernity, for, if a normative civilization quite naturally provides supports for the remembrance of God and the spiritual life, the modern world substitutes, in practical fact, these supports with impediments. In effect, instead of swimming with the spiritual current of a normative civilization, the individual must swim against the current of the modern world if he is to escape spiritual ruination.

As Don Colacho – whose aphorisms are available once again – critically observes, “Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him.” [http://don-colacho.blogspot.com/2010/10/2046.html]

There is a twofold effort that is required: intellectual, in that one must see through the errors of the modern conception, and build, for oneself at least, an understanding of things that relates back to the Transcendent and to spiritual realities; operative, in that one should try, in whatever partial and intermittent manner, to orient one’s daily life toward prayer and the remembrance of God. Modern life is inherently centrifugal, scattering one’s attention to the periphery; the task before one is to return, again and again, to the Center, to quite literally ‘re-collect’ oneself before God.

As Frithjof Schuon recommends, “In short, one must live ‘in a little garden of the Holy Virgin,’ without unhealthy curiosity and without ever losing sight of the essential content and goal of life. That is ‘holy poverty’ or ‘holy childlikeness’; it is also, so to speak, ‘holy monotony’.... dominated by the proximity of the sacred, and on the margin from the uproar of this lower world.... This seems obvious, but most believers take no account of it.”

Reflections on the Anime Subculture

Back when I was in college, when I was still basically a liberal (although even then I hated other liberals), I joined my university's Shakespearean acting troupe as a tech guy. There were a few different reasons for this. It got me out of the dorm. It curried favor with the English department (where I ultimately landed for my minor studies). It was worth three very easy 400-level credits a semester. Shakespeare's just cool. I got to learn cool tech stuff -- sound boards, lighting, etc. And so on. But I realized very quickly that I was not like most of the other people "doing the Rudes." For me, it was instrumental: something I enjoyed and which was of material benefit to me. For them, it was like an end in itself. I also noticed that they were generally deviant in other ways. They were screechy, neurotic bisexuals with lip piercings and black clothes. They had sex with each other constantly and went off after practice to have video game parties. One of them would sometimes wear a strange headband with little conical horns attached to them. They wrote anime fanfiction (because apparently animes with romantic subplots always have desperately unsatisfactory endings) and dressed up like anime characters to go to anime conventions. They were anime kids.

I confess to having watched very little anime in the past, most of which I was forced to watch by an anime-loving friend. I've been mixed about what I've seen. Elfenlied was intriguing, Beautiful Dreamer charming and whimsical, Spirited Away weird and incoherent, and Naruto just annoying, with its screechy theatrics and agonizingly long-winded dialogue (my efforts to get into the Pokemon fad when I was in elementary and middle school failed, and for the same reason). I don't get the appeal, perhaps because of my instinctive dislike for the idea of being a grown man sitting around watching cartoons all day. I think what turned me off most was just the casual and unquestioned weirdness of it all. It's not even divergent enough to be surreal, because it takes itself too seriously. People in these shows and movies casually accept the presence of large minorities of vampires, aliens, weird horned half-men half-animal hybrids, people with ESP and other strange powers, and the like. Watching them is like a bad LSD trip.

So I suppose it's a good fit for people who are themselves casually weird, the kind who grow greasy, patchy beards and wear oversized coats with way too many pockets and chains and collars and all that crap. The awkward, out-group dweebs who populate the corner of every college bistro playing Magic: The Gathering. You know the type. (I wonder, does the weirdness of the person derive from their early exposure to the weirdness of anime? Or are they drawn to anime because they're weird people?)

In college, I dated a relatively pretty girl with several friends in this group and every time I stood in their presence, I felt like the brutish jock in a chick flick who steals away the nerdy main character's love interest. Me! At best, I had the build of a second-rate swimmer in college. But their group was so vacuously negative of masculinity that I slid almost by default into the role of alpha horse. I hated being hated by these mewling, oleaginous things.

I feel like I could write a book on this subculture, but I'll content myself for the sake of economy with just a few observations. Their in-group dynamics, such as they are, are disordered almost to the point of psychosis. It seems they can barely even relate to one another in any kind of meaningful fashion; I once saw two anime kids sitting next to each other on a couch, playing the same video game at the same time, but on different consoles attached to different TVs! "Lest you interact with another person?" I thought to myself.

Far from being sexually frustrated, as you might suspect, in my experience they set up these strange sexual covens wherein the women (and certain men; sexual deviancy is not uncommon here) are passed around more than their old pirated copies of Boondock Saints. Strangely, this produces very little drama, like it would in a group of normal people in which one woman slept with multiple men. I have no idea why; maybe an aggressive response is beyond people so totally empty of masculinity, or maybe their stunted souls were never capable of forming meaningful attachments to others in the first place.

I've certainly never had a conversation with an anime kid and thought, afterwards, "Wow, I'm really glad I met that person." Come to think of it, I'm not so sure I've ever had a memorable conversation with one at all. I don't think I've ever seen them read anything that wasn't (a) a comic book or graphic novel, (b) a textbook for class, or (c) some slice of schlocky left-wing cant to make themselves look intelligent, a bookmark always strategically inserted around two-thirds of the way in (because they're so smart!). With few exceptions, dumpiness was the general norm, although I'm not sure if this is just poverty or an intentional snubbing of basic politeness to others. Some things, such as the long, stringy, oily ponytails the men tended to grow, were simply inexcusable; surely they could've borrowed an electric razor from someone, and who would begrudge a grown man the Bruce Willis pate? Pronounced body odor was not the norm but was certainly more evident among them than in the general population.

There are various strata of the subculture that get weirder the deeper you go. At my first school, there was a sub-subculture of people who called themselves furries and who walked around with fake animal tails hanging from their waistband. (All of the furries were anime kids but not all anime kids were furries -- very few were, in fact, and I sort of got the impression that some of the anime kids were "above" the furries and had no social truck with them). I talked with one of them about it, and she evidently believed she had some kind of "animal spirit" dwelling inside her or something and wore her tail as a means of identifying with it. I couldn't help but notice they all identified with foxes, squirrels, and the like. (Of course! Why would your "spirit animal" be a macaque or an alligator or a tapeworm or something? They're gross!)

And, of course, the anime kids were spiritual autists to the last man. The closest thing to religion any of them exhibited was one who was an actual autist and (cafeteria) Catholic; the rest were basically run-of-the-mill atheists possessed of a bitter and irrational hatred of the faith. I gathered from my conversations with several of them that they had all had bad childhoods of some sort which had a vaguely evangelical flavor and which thus soured them forever on the idea of religious. They were pretty much the perfect instantiation of Dr. Charlton's distraction-seeking utilitarian.

Anyway, these anecdotes are just that -- anecdotal -- so I have no idea how well they generalize to other places. That said, I went to school in the mid-Atlantic and my Texas-raised coworker insists my description here matches the anime kids group at each of the three colleges she attended, so I'm inclined to think I'm on to something.

On Cilantro and Picky Eating

Recently, my girlfriend took me to a Vietnamese restaurant. I'd been to one before but never tried what was apparently the staple dish: pho, a soup dish of beef, noodles, and various greens in a thin broth. Her description of it sounded wonderful. But what was placed in front of me was a stinking, fetid bowl of animal waste, reeking to high heaven. Girlfriend loved it and happily devoured hers, but no sooner did I put a slice of beef to my tongue than my eyes began to water. It tasted antiseptic, like meat that had been deep-fried in a vat of hand soap. I promptly swallowed (without so much as chewing) and pushed the bowl away, touching not one more bite.

Growing up, I'd always been a picky eater. I was the kid who would sit at the table for hours, sullenly pushing his food around on the plate because he couldn't stomach one more bite. (Parents were not very understanding in this regard). The worst dish, the one I could tolerate least, was mother's chicken gumbo. I've simmered down a lot as I've grown older, and some things I once couldn't tolerate I now love -- sauerkraut is right up there. But keep the gumbo away from me.

Anyway, girlfriend and I sat and tried to figure out what the problem was with the pho. Our dishes both tasted exactly the same, or at least both tasted the same to each of us -- good for her, nauseous for me. Clearly, I was reacting to something in the recipe that she wasn't.

The offender, it seems, is very likely cilantro:

Cilantro lovers say it has a refreshing, lemony or limelike flavor that complements everything from guacamole to curry. It's a key ingredient in a range of ethnic cuisines, including Mexican, Indian and Chinese.

But few foods elicit such heated negative reactions. Many people say it tastes soapy, rotten or just plain vile. Just a whiff of it is enough to make them push away their plates. ...

Cilantro haters complain that it is showing up in unexpected places. Erin Hollingsworth, a 26-year-old editor at an environmental Web site, says she detected it in a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder she ordered at a New York lunch place.

"I thought to myself: 'No, it couldn't be. Really. Is this a joke? Who puts cilantro in Manhattan clam chowder?'" she wrote in her blog, "I Hate Cilantro: A Look Inside the Life of a Cilantro Hater and Food Lover." Ms. Hollingsworth says she now lies to waiters, telling them she's allergic to cilantro. "People take you seriously that way," she says.

Could also explain why I hate pico de gallo, which tastes the same to me.

More on the FSTDT Crowd

The last day or two I've seen quite a bit of traffic coming from what appears to be a subforum called "Flame and Burn" (judging by the referrer's URL) over at Fundies Say the Darndest Things!, the group with which I tussled a while back after they responded to my something-less-than-unequivocal-hatred of bullying with insinuated threats of violence.

(Threats, ultimately, as hollow as the points of the rounds in the Springfield I carry concealed).

I don't have access to the forum and don't care enough to go register and check it out, but I can guess by the URL that that's where the goblins gather, the earlier Two Minutes' Hate having been insufficient to sate their monstrous appetites. Small wonder they hide it -- the better to disguise their own venomous natures, lest it undermine their preening. No doubt it's brimming with posts expressing rage at my apostasy or high-mindedly venturing to diagnose my illiberalism as a function of my personal deficiencies.

(I guess I can't complain about  that last part, since I do it to them all the time. In fairness to myself, though, my analyses of leftism are born of a studied consideration of human nature and a close reading of relevant philosophical work, not mere vulgarity-laced recycling of Hitchensean cant paired with twitching rage at the merest thought of heterodoxy. My writings also have the advantage of being obviously sincerely held, as I clearly don't expect to win brownie points with the vast majority of people by writing them).

I wonder if any of them would ever stop to consider if things I believe are actually true or that, moreover, this is the reason I believe them. I doubt it, really. The funny thing is, the reactive horror and rage with which they respond to attacks on liberalism is probably pretty much symmetrical with the horror and rage which Christians have historically felt in response to the liberal dismantling of their social order. To some extent, sputtering and instinctive contempt, beyond the reach of articulation or rational examination, is a natural and indeed somewhat sympathetic response, one that is remarkable and even a little admirable in them precisely because it is so illiberal, so very reactionary. There are, it seems, limits to the extent to which liberals will take their radical reductionism, their rebellion against the principle of order, that they will not allow revolution to threaten the revolution. Small comfort, that, but you take what you can get, here in the end times.

But just on the off chance that any of them are reading and are actually interested in critically examining their own beliefs (which is difficult, I know, but ought to be done; it's how I arrived at where I am), here's a few worthwhile reads:

• Jim Kalb's talk "PC: The Cultural Antichrist." Also his conservatism FAQ, religious establishment FAQ and sexual morality FAQ. Pretty much everything on his site is essential.
• Bonald's "The Conservative Vision of Authority," "In Defense of Religion," and "In Defense of Monarchy," just to get started. Nothing there is not worth reading.
• Lawrence Auster's collection of posts on Gnosticism, the "perennial human temptation" underlying most of the modern (liberal) project. I have previously identified this condition as spiritual autism. Friedrich Schelling called it pneumopathology, meaning basically the same thing.
• Alan Roebuck's writings on liberalism, also archived at American Nation.
• Edward Feser's "Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation," for an introduction to premodern, nonutilitarian "natural law" ethics. For some reason, clicking the link forces you to download the HTML file before you can view it.
• While we're on the topic of Edward Feser, check out his blog, which includes many, many refutations of popular atheist arguments against the existence of God (e.g., here and here) and correcting popular misconceptions about theistic arguments (e.g., here).
• Bruce Charlton's "Psychology of an Atheist," written in his typical experiential/existential style, documents his abandonment of leftist atheism, and the reasons why. For a fuller treatment of these reasons, check out his book Thought Prison.

By the way, in case any of my regular readers were wondering just how unhinged and reactive some of these fellows are: Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide recently got a visit from them after he was mistaken... for a Muslim.

Righteous Anger

I'm interested in what my commenters think about the religious (especially Catholic) propriety of righteous anger. To what extent may one entertain such feelings? To what extent may one act on them? What may provoke legitimate anger?

I ask because I find myself getting angry a lot lately, mainly because of other Catholics' ignorance, thoughtlessness, and deliberate participation in evil.

Comment away!

The Name of the Rose

I recently picked up Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in the early 14th century, at the start of the collapse of the medieval social order. The primary character is William of Baskerville (whose novice attendant, Adso of Melk, narrates the book), a sort of House-like metaphysician and heresy examiner, who has long and fascinating conversations on the philosophical and theological developments of the day.

But so far, my favorite aspect of the book is it's sheer quotability. This one leapt out at me from the prologue:

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarves), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path.

Indeed, it is.

On the Spiritual Affinity of Brothers

The end of Bill Valicella at The Maverick Philosopher's post concerning Christopher Hitchens' death struck me:

I am struck once again by the insignificance of blood-relations.  These two brothers in the flesh came to inhabit different planets.  As one of my aphorisms has it, consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity.

A second case in point: the flaming atheist David Stove and his Catholic son.

Indeed. My relationship to my own older brother very much mirrors the relation of Peter and Christopher Hitchens, though we are of course neither as accomplished as they are (were). I am and always have been the quiet one, thoughtful, unwilling to make a fuss, and very studious; I groped my way in darkness to Catholicism, never even so much as knowing my parents had both been raised that way (and how badly do I feel cheated out of a spiritual inheritance!). He, on the other hand, is loud, abrasive, and unstable, today and as a child. And he is a highly belligerent atheist, and this has been a point of friction between us; our last conversation I endured a few vile insults from him regarding my decision to become a Catholic. That was several months ago. And, now, he is dying of cancer: Hodgkin's lymphoma, only just discovered and almost certainly too late to affect remission.

How did it come to this? We were both raised by the same parents, at least to an extent (I'm given to understand my father was a much different man before I was born, and my brother, eight years older than me, certainly experienced this). So many of my parents' generation thought: "Let us not raise the kids too carefully. Let them decide who they'll be." By and large, though, not raising kids properly denies them even the capacity to self-actualize. I am an extraordinarily rare case, and nothing but a truly heroic exertion of grace on the part of God and whatever angels He assigned to watch over me could save me from darkness, ignorance, and sin; even that may not be sufficient. My brother is far more representative of what happens to children without proper moral and social instruction: lazy, impulsive, full of hatred and rage, blinded by unreason, ultimately not even physically healthy.

Brotherhood matters, but I have a hard time seeing that most days. This is yet another case, it seems to me, in which the fullness of one's humanity cannot be expressed in any other way than through Christ; without Him, even brotherhood is less brotherly.

Get With the Program!

We Christian reactionary bloggers are called the orthosphere now, son.

Which makes this an orthoblog and me an orthoblogger. And you, my wonderful orthoreaders, are orthocommenters and orthoparticipants in our great orthodialogue.

Posting has been light lately, and may remain that way for the next few days. Partly, that's just because my work load is picking up and I'm actually quite busy at the office now. Partly, it's because the combination of the cold and the darkness (which seem to pounce on Texas all at once) is kicking my butt and now not even 10.5 hours of sleep a day can seem to restore my energy. And partly because I've been working on a minor project that will be featured on this blog after its completion (in hopefully no more than a week).

So while I hope for at least a post a day, don't get your hopes up and you won't be disappointed.