John Kekes on a roll

From a lecture to academics in 2004:


"I now ask you to consider the stifling of opinions on our campuses. When did you last hear of anyone defending fundamentalist Christianity or the superiority of Western civilization? Who has been allowed to express the opinion on our campuses that homosexuality is a perversion, that there exist racial differences in intelligence, that women’s place is in the home, that the Holocaust is a fiction, or that America is a force for the good in a corrupt world?

You may say that such opinions are justly stifled because their expression harms others. But if you thought that, you would be well-advised to think again. For if by harm you mean, narrowly, serious injury, such as murder, torture, or battery, then neither the opinions nor their expression harms others. And if by harm you mean, broadly, injury to the interest of the people affected, then you would have to be opposed to all laws and regulations which prohibit people from doing what they want or place burden on them that they do not wish to bear. You would, then, be committed to the absurdity of having to oppose laws about taxation, social security, immigration, and health care, since they injure the interests of those who are forced to pay for them. The truth of the matter is that the opinions stifled on our campuses run counter to a prevailing orthodoxy that abuses its power and prevents the expression of opinions it opposes.

This coercive stifling of opinion permeates daily life, not just our campuses. It is very hard to think of an area of life that is free of the exhortation of intrusive moralizing (bolding mine). We are told what food is right or wrong to eat; how we should treat our pets; what clothing to wear; how we should spend our after-tax income; how precisely we should phrase invitations for sex; what kind of bags we should carry our groceries in; when and where we are permitted to pray or smoke; what jokes we are allowed to tell; who should pick the fruit we buy at the supermarket; how we should invest our money; what chemicals we should use in our gardens; by what method of transportation we should go to work; how we should sort our garbage; what we ought to think about cross dressing, sex change operations, teenage sex, and pot smoking; we are forbidden to inquire after the age, marital status, drug use, or alcoholism of job applicants; we are liable to be accused of sexual abuse if we spank our children or hug our neighbor's; our 19 and 20-year olds are permitted to fight our wars, but they are not permitted to buy a beer; we are not supposed to say that people are crippled, stupid, mentally defective, fat, or ignorant; and we must not use words like "mankind," "statesman," or "He" when referring to God.

What makes this coercive moralizing even worse is the hypocritical double-talk by which it is presented. For the stifling of opinions is said to be required by toleration. Its defenders advocate toleration of discrimination in favor of minorities and women (but not against them); of obscenity that offends religious believers and patriots (but not African-Americans and Jews); of unions' spending large sums in support of political causes (but not corporations' doing the same); of pot smoking (but not cigarette smoking); of abortion (but not capital punishment); of the public lies of Clinton (but not of Nixon); of hate speech against fundamentalists (but not homosexuals); of sex education in elementary schools (but not prayer); of jobs open only to union members (but not private clubs open only to males); of lies about American imperialism (but not the Holocaust); of sacrilegious of language (but not of language that uses "he" to refer to all human beings); of scientific research into just about anything (except racial differences in intelligence); and so on and on.

We are awash in this ocean of hypocrisy, lies, and falsifications."

Puppies of the Lord

This piece of drivel from the new Master of the Dominican Order.

Agitations and reports of civil unrest have made the news in recent months and continue to do so in several countries of the world.  In one place, it is the determination to be freed from oppressive, authoritarian regimes. In another, there are groups who are questioning those systems, particularly economic systems, that seem to want to manage the world in spite of the inequality they establish between men and the serious anxieties they create, especially for the young. Here and there, often forgotten voices are making themselves heard, reminding us that the human being wants to be an actor in his own history, and aspires to freedom and justice.  They are opening new horizons of hope for a habitable and sustainable world for all.

Same old "justice and peace" rhetoric, a thin baptizing of the leftEuro statist worldview, one of the worst effects of the 1960's Vatican Council. In typical pontifical fashion, he names no names but we all know what he means. He takes the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements to indicate some kind of abstract desire for agency, freedom and justice versus capitalism.  The Arab Spring brings totalitarian Islam to power in place of generic Arab tyrants, and as for OWS, what a pathetic mess. The final insult: "They are opening new horizons of hope for a habitable and sustainable world for all." Oh, yeah. OWS is all about habitability in their dirty, dangerous, parasitical groups of tent-hovels, and the Arab Islamic tide is all about sustainability.

One of Karl Barth's worst pieces of advice was to tell preachers to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.

Since I am an exOP, I can say, "Get your head out of your ass, Father Master."

Here it is in the original Frenchman's French, where, being in French, it sounds even more like the pompous BS it is:

Indignations et soulèvements populaires ont fait ces derniers mois et font encore l’actualité dans plusieurs pays du monde. Ici, c’est la détermination de s’affranchir de régimes autoritaires qui s’affirme. Là, ce sont des groupes qui mettent en cause certaines logiques, en particulier économiques, qui semblent vouloir gouverner le monde en dépit des écarts qu’elles creusent entre les hommes et des graves inquiétudes qu’elles engendrent, en particulier pour les plus jeunes. Ici et là, ce sont des voix trop souvent oubliées qui se font entendre, rappelant que l’être humain veut être acteur de sa propre histoire, et aspire à la liberté et à la justice. S’ouvrent ainsi de nouveaux horizons d’espérance pour un monde habitable et soutenable par tous.

Merde.

PS. This reminds me of an incident when I was in the Order. After enduring a couple of hours at a large conference of French-speaking friars arguing over the merits of different living arrangements, I suggested that we might try an experiment: set up a community on the lines discussed and then in three or four years, evaluate the experience. There was a kind of embarrassed silence and then the discussion continued. I wondered if my French were worse than I thought.

As the meeting finally adjourned --without a decision, btw-- one of the friars turned and said to me, "C'est charmant, le pragmatisme anglo-saxon."  "Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, how charming."

Anyone who thinks that Americans are culturally arrogant has never met a European. I learned that day that for Frenchmen whose Order's motto was Veritas (Truth), Veritas had little to do with Realitas. And as the Master's note indicates, as we say en francais, "Ca continue."

PPS. I expressed my unhappiness at the blog of an OP with a conservative politics. His response:

The Master is no doubt speaking out of his own "'68 Experience." He's very much part and parcel of his generation of justice/peace Euro-Catholics, though I think he's probably more sensible than most. I haven't read the piece but keep in mind that the euro-media paints the Tea Party/GOP as only barely more tolerable than Nazis. So, he's likely springing off what most euros believe to be accurate portrayals of the OWS movement. I've found that even the most sensible euro OP's can't get their heads around anything other than left of center social democracy. American-style republican democracy with a healthy does of capitalism is beyond them.

Anyway, most younger friars read the Order's justice/peace stuff and then promptly ignore it...most of the J/P types in the Order studiously avoid pro-life issues so we generally think that their rallying cries for bottled water and recycling are hollow.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

...hating Hitler is the only moral judgment not stigmatized by modern moral relativists. The only absolute moral standard we are allowed is the evil of Hitler, and all other evils are judged by their proximity to Hitler — which ultimately means that all white people are evil due to our kinship to Hitler.

Lotta truth in that.

Old flame still warming

It's getting close to forty year ago today when I first knew what it was like to make love. As always, I am grateful that my first experience was with someone I cared about and who cared about me. It was not only about physical passion but about friendship. That first experience was one of such rightness that it had the force of a transformative revelation. It has made a huge difference for me. I truly was never the same again.

But it came after years of inner confusion and then, when the homo-sexual shape of my eros became clear to me  --in Rome, ironically :) --, of panic and fear. Life in the closet: dark, lonely and confined. So I would not deny that, on a subconscious level, I have likely absorbed some of the condemnation of same-sexuality from my culture and religion. After I had that wonderful experience of what I was so afraid of, on a waking level such self-doubt is blessedly hard to find. I have excellent reasons to accuse myself of faults and failings and sins, but I cannot get myself to believe that loving other men is one of them.

Although this blog gives frequent voice to my dissatisfaction at what gay culture and its pre-packaged identity has turned out to be, I should say very clearly and thankfully that were it not for the defiant refusal of contemporary homosexuals to accept the ancient curse, to let me know that I was not the only one and that I was not profoundly damaged and wrong, I would very likely be carrying inside me still that life-distorting weight of corrosive fear and self-hatred.

If I have also had experiences of pain and grief, wrongness and regret in my connections with other men --and I have, as readers of this blog may remember-- they seem to be really no different from "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" when it comes to Eros, regardless of what sex your partner is. My sexual mistakes and sins come not because I am a male with males, but because I am a human with humans.

When I later read Michael Tolliver's letter to his family and he declared that recognizing and accepting himself "brought me into the family of man", I knew exactly what he meant.

Love...will keep us together

sang The Carpenters. They were wrong.

What keeps groups together through time?

A recent ad by the government of Israel, inviting American Jews to avoid assimilation by coming home, caused quite a ruckus. Which is an ancient Yiddish word for mischegas. But the facts are plain: Jews in America are disappearing because of the combination of low birth rate and huge levels of intermarriage with Gentiles, as well as indifference to or avoidance of the practice of Jewish religion. The one place on earth, prior to Israel in 1948, where Jews could be safe and free has become the place where they tend to evaporate. On their own.

That leads to wonder why Jews in the past did not dwindle much, despite the often challenging conditions in which they found themselves. My amateur sociologist's theory? It was precisely the challenging conditions --along with pre-emancipation Halakic law-- which kept them alive. With the exception of the Nazi extermination program, which had an unprecedented killing rate, the various strictures and sporadic outbreaks of violence, all expressions of their Gentile neighbors' dislike, created an ironic version of what the early rabbis called "building a fence around the Torah."  While Jewish law created obstacles against assimilation from within, Gentile suspicion made its own wall against it from without. Once tradition-free Judaism met a relatively fence-free America and the Pill...

The two places where the Jewish birthrate is high are among very traditional Halakha-observant Orthodox groups, wherever they live, and in Israel, surrounded by a sea of Arabs who loathe Jews.

Continuing on my sociological way, it leads me to ask what forces actually keep groups intact. Sometimes, maybe always, you don't know the answer to that question until the groups begin to fray or diminish. I don't know anything about the internal Jewish discussion when Reform Judaism decided to make life easier for recently emancipated 19th century German Jews by adapting to the surrounding culture. I am sure some sectors predicted disaster. (Conservatives always do.) But who could have thought that an updated and ethically-based American Judaism would prove so unable to resist the allure of an extraordinarily welcoming Gentile nation? A classic case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Another aspect seems to be the creation of a publicly tolerated or respectable secular identity. After the French revolution, it became increasingly common and ok not to be associated with any religious group at all. So Jews could escape the burdens and isolation of history not by betraying their ancestors through conversion but by ignoring them through secular transcendence.

My friends the Anglicans come to mind. What held them together, such as they were, for most of 400 years was not only their State-sponsored status, ethnic/racial self-confidence, and clear episcopal governing structure, but their 1662 Book of Common Prayer. When they decided to allow a plethora of different local liturgies at the very same time that being White became a crime, their compulsive embrace of liberal modernity and post-modernity has proved to be their unravelling and perhaps their undoing. 

The sociology of religion contains a paradigm --I forget by whom-- that differentiates religious groups as cults, sects, denominations or churches based on the level of tension with and difference from the surrounding culture. Too much and you remain a tiny isolated cult, too little and you become so mainstream that there's no feeling of loss if you leave it behind. You don't seem to value what costs you nothing. And who has mirrored the values of liberal America --created them, actually-- more than Reform Jews and mainstream Protestants?

I think of America, of course. We have been a Union precisely because we have always been trying to hold together our divisions. You only call something United which needs to be united because its natural momentum is toward separation. So I don't overestimate American harmony at all. From the very start we have had regional, racial and class tensions. And then there was 1861 and its awful aftermath. It feels to me now that we are in a Civil Cold War where two sides of the country are no longer opponents but enemies. Am I wrong to think that a significant portion of the country hates its own Republican countrymen more than it really hates Al Qaeda? If my neighborhood and city is any indication, it does. The election of 1800, were it to be replicated now, would be considered not a triumph of our Constitution --which it was, even by the skin of its teeth-- but its utter delegitimation. So what forces held us together, fractiously of course, in the past --especially things we took for granted-- which seem to be evaporating now?

A first

For the first time that I can recall, a comment of mine was rejected (twice) at a conservative web site, obviously because I am gay. It was without explanation but also without the namecalling and death-wishing I sometimes have gotten from liberal gay sites.

So here's the deathless prose of which they deprived their readers.

Although a "gay" man, I am of pretty conservative political attitudes and a knowledegable appreciation for, but distinct distance from, Catholicism & Orthodoxy. I am also not a fan of gay marriage.

My reasons are three: first, since marriage is a bedrock institution and is already under severe stress (from, among other things, a combination of no-fault divorce and feminism), a natural conservative reaction is to avoid fiddling with it anymore. Intentions never control consequences.

Second, even if, on a logical plane, there may be no necessary connection between arguments for same-sex marriage and for polygamy, it seems to me that in our political and cultural world, once you make the gender of spouses irrelevant, how can you argue in principle against a number different from two? Same-sex marriage is a brand new idea; polygamy, like it or not, is an ancient human tradition. I can see the pictures one day of weeping Muslim women, asking why their culture and religion's different idea of love should be banned --making their children illegitimate--when the law allows two men to wear wedding rings? And anything that comforts Islam in the West, for a man such as myself, is very bad news.

Third, and here your readers will likely find it hard to take, I do not think that matrimony does justice to the kind of love and attachment that two men can have with each other. To put it bluntly, taking the very gender-specific connection that makes some men comrades-lovers-kin and trying to fit it into the marriage box is just putting on straight drag. Until the last five minutes, marriage has always assumed the male-female polarity and, at least in principle, the creation of a family, offspring. Consequently, it is not made to institutionalize (or dare I say it, sacramentalize) the union of two male souls and bodies and lives.

To me, the push for gay marriage is part of liberalism's compulsive egalitarianism, with marriage really being a marker of social standing and one more battle against society's "exclusions". The triumph of mere power over imagination.

A man cannot be a mother, nor a woman a father. And if marriage requires both one bride and one groom, one wife and one husband, --at least--then in a gay "marriage" someone is standing in a spot not meant for them. I know that you consider such a same-sex union immoral. But from my standpoint, I consider that gay marriage does not properly honor the specificity of such a union.

The closest natural or archetypal structure men have made for themselves when they wish to ritualize a unique bond is blood-brotherhood.

(http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Brotherhood-Other-Rites-Male-Alliance/dp/0578030705)

In some cultures, this bond was considered even more sacred than marriage. I am not at all asserting that most of these rites were covert marriages. Very unlikely. I merely wish to say that when men are left to their own natural devices to create institutions honoring their deep attachments to each other, something like this, almost totally unique to males, is what they do. Were gay men more self-aware and less fixed on playing the role of the righteous victim, something like this, indigenous to male souls, would be the starting point, not matrimony.

The site, Touchstone, included the Thomas Merton piece I recently posted on. And it had an article on closed Communion by a Baptist minister, explaining why his church limits access to Communion to those who are baptized by immersion; baptism by pouring or sprinkling he considers invalid. Funnily enough, he is a Southern Baptist, whose tee-totalling denomination replaces the wine of the Lord's Supper with...grape juice.

Provocative Perry

Maybe because I am a therapist I tend to listen twice and more closely to things that provoke people to instant reactivity. So I am of the opinion that while it may not help his candidacy, Rick Perry's provocative juxtaposition does point out a truth about the wider implications of the culture wars.

It is indeed strange when the government mandates the open service in the military of a tiny minority of people whose sexuality, until ten minutes ago, historically speaking, was almost universally condemned while at the very same time continues to marginalize or erase some of the most traditional symbols of American culture, especially when it comes to the Christian religion, the religion of the vast majority of Americans.

And it is generally the same groups of people who are behind both moves.

One of the moments in my conversion to conservatism was when I realized that liberalism is not about widening opportunity and freedom (as it advertises itself to be) but simply about replacing successful and therefore dominant majorities with dominance by grievance-based minorities.

That’s no way to run…anything,

On old flame flickering

I used to be a great fan of Thomas Merton, certainly the most famous monk of the 20th century in Catholic circles. Especially in times when community life in my religious order felt chaotic --and for many years after the Council it was-- I would calm my desire for order by reading Merton. In his later years, he paradoxically combined a move to a hermitage on the monastery grounds with an increased public presence. It eventually led to him travelling to a Christian-Buddhist monastic conference in Bangkok, where he stepped on a bad wire in his room and was electrocuted. That was 1968.

In my transmogriphying from being a liberal with classical sympathies to an outright conservative with personal paradoxes, I found a lot of his later writings, especially on race and war, tedious and moralizing. The other day I found a brief memoir by one of his former monk-students, now an Orthodox priest, who combined high praise for Merton with a recognition of his human flaws. He also noted that for a man of intense curiosity, when it came to social issues, he swallowed all the liberal assumptions, without ever seeming to question any of them.

Elsewhere, I found an atheist criticizing the Church of England for breaking from its traditional concern with faith and redemption, substituting another equally non-rational faith in  "collective social responsibility combined with sentimental humanism."

There's a lot of that going around.

Out of the mouths of bishops

New social justice loving Episcopal bishopette of Washington DC plans to grow and revitalize the dying denomination by focusing on....immigration reform.

She says, "We’re the most inclusive church in the world that’s the tiniest church in Christendom."

New Episcopal bishopess in drag*

How's that workin out for ya? Any possible cause and effect there, Your Grace?

Even I am not so thick as to believe that merely being liberal is a sufficient reason to explain a church's decline. But apparently it doesn't help.

*The vestments of the Catholic priesthood --which Anglicans rejected for 300 years before donning again-- are clothes for men, ever worn only by men. Just because they are flowing does not make them female clothes, even if females put them on. 

Mysteries unveiled

Do you recognize these two old guys?

The answer further down the page...