Showing posts with label Sexual Revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sexual Revolution. Show all posts

Saturday, April 13, 2024

Observations on a murder.

Earlier this week Robert Maher Jr., age 14, was murdered by Dominique Antonio Richard Harris, born in 2008, and Jarreth Joseflee Sabastian Plunkett, born in 2009.  The killing seems to have been planned for several days prior to the assault in the Eastridge Mall that lead to Maher's death.  Plunkett did the actual killing, with Harris slamming Maher to the ground beforehand.  

The technical origin of the fight was that Maher had called Plunkett and Harris "freaks" during Spring Break (something that didn't exist when I was in school) and that enraged the two of them.  He called them that has they went into a porta potty at a local park together, which is odd, but insulting them wasn't very smart.  This raises the specter of the Matthew Shepherd killing, which had elements which never really seemed to be accurately reported.  More likely, however, in the exaggerated juvenile maleness of the rootless and (I'll bet) fatherless mid teenage boy, that was an implied insult that had to be addressed.

Maher never seems to have gotten in a single punch in the assault.  The two assailants, who had stolen their weapons along with Red Bulls and candy that day, acted in such a fashion that, whether Harris intended it or not, gave Plunkett the opportunity to viciously knife him.

There's no reason here, we'd note, to use the classic "alleged" assault language. The two teenage boys killed the third. They're going to be tried as adults. They ought o be put away, forever.

But what else does this event tell us?

Casper's a rough town.

One thing that I saw soon after the murder was a comment by somebody on Facebook noting how they have moved from New Mexico, where their son had been knifed in a fight, to Casper under the belief that this was a quite safe town.

In another context, we've already spoken about immigrants into the state being delusional about it, and this is one such instance. Casper has never been a nice town.

Casper was founded in 1887, and it was violent from day one to some degree.  It was, however, originally a rial stop in cattle company, although it always had its eye on oil.  It was the jumping off spot for the invaders in the Johnson County War, which at least gives it a bit of a footnote in that violent event.  Casper's first murder occured on Saturday, September 20, 1890, when bartender John Conway shot and killed unarmed A. J. Tidwell, an FL Cattle Company cowboy in Lou Polk's dance house, following a round of fisticuffs.  The blood has been flowing ever since.

Casper really took a turn towards the wild side of life starting in World War One.  1917, as we've addressed here before, is when the Great War Oil boom really took off, and with it came a lot of men and a lot of vice. One of the things that created was Casper's infamous Sandbar district, in which prostitution was carried out openly and prohibition flaunted.  Repeated efforts to close it down utterly failed, until finally a 1970s vintage urban renewal project (yikes, the government taking a hand!") destroyed it.

With the booze and the prostitutes came murders (and no doubt disease) but it went on and on.  By and large, however, as odd as it may seem, people just acclimated themselves to it.  You got used to a town having a red-light district, and as there were some legitimate businesses in it, you'd go into it for legitimate reasons.  As a boy, we walked into the Sandbar in the early 70s to go to the War Surplus Store, which nobody seemed to think was a big deal. The America and Rialto movie theaters were just yards from the district, and the district's bars lapped up out of it into downtown Casper, with some of them being places were to walk around, rather than past, if at all possible.

Casper had quasi ethnic gangs when I was young, and at least in the schools that I attended, that was a factor of attending them.  You were careful about it.  It was impossible to get through junior high and high school without having been in a fight.  Most fights were hand to hand, but a teacher was knifed when I was in junior high breaking up a knife fight, so not all of them were.  In high school we all carried pocket knives and none of us were supposed to.  They were for protection.  While I was in high school, one of our classmates, who had been held back more than once, was killed outside a bar in a shooting, the result of a fight he provoked, which resulted in an ethnic riot at the school in which shots were fired.  The father of one of our classmates was killed by our classmate after he turned his molesting attention on her sister, having molested her for years.  Neither of these crimes resulted in prosecution.

The point is, for those who are shocked by the arrival of violence in Casper. . .well, it's been here since 1890.

The abandoned males

I keep waiting to hear the circumstances of the murderers' family lives and have not read any yet.  I'm sure it'll come out as the story advances.  While It's dangerous to speculate, there are reasons to suspect a few things, one being the killers likely had no fathers in the picture.   We're going to hear at some point that they were raised by their mothers, or in irregular homes.  I could of course be wrong, but I'll bet not.

Fatherless males are a major societal problem.  Fatherless males that are raised in an environment of sexual license are an even bigger problem.  Indeed, they're often fatherless for that reason in the first place, and they'll go on to spawn further fatherless children, who grow up in poverty and with little societal direction.  A minority will find that structure in the Old Law, the law before the law, which reaches back to tribalism in the extreme.  It's in the DNA.

The Old Law demanded death for transgressors too, something modern society has moved away from in large measure.  I've already heard it suggested that Harris and Plunkett should receive death, but due to their ages, I think that not very likely.  It'd be ill-advised, no matter what.  But tribalism spawns more tribalism.  The real personalities are lost of both the assailants and the victims.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

What Western European cultures are fascinated by, and what the rest of the world is not.

Terry Mattingly's Get Religion blog, which have linked in here on the side, states something that we've already stated, but in a more in-depth article.

Or maybe it's something we've posed as a question.

Christianity is not a European religion.  Indeed, Europeans, in the form of Romans and Greeks, at first opposed it.

Christianity, and certainly the original form of Christianity, Apostolic Christianity, of which all the Orthodox and Catholics are part, came out of the Middle East and in fact it never left it.  The first Catholics, which is to say the first Christians, were at the very first all in the Roman province of Palestine.  Pretty soon they were in Syria, where they were first called Christians, and Egypt.  In the Apostolic Age Christianity, which again is to say Catholicism, made it all the way to India, and of course it also made it to Rome.  Rome was the early site of the head of the Church, because it was the center of the most powerful secular entity in the world, the Roman Empire, but other localities were major diocesan seats as well.  The last Apostolic Christian church in North Africa prevailed until the 1400s, the same century that the Moors were expelled from Spain, and the same century that the Church was established in Sub Sarah Africa.  Catholicism was so strong in Angola that pre Revolution slave rebellion in the Southern English Colonies of North America saw a Catholic Angolan band rise up and bolt for Catholic Florida.

So why, some of us have asked, is there so much attention on homosexuality in today's Church?

Seem unconnected?  It isn't.

Homosexuality is relatively rare in the world, but it is most common in European cultures.  There are a number of reasons for this.  For one thing, the Western world is rich, and it's used its wealth in pecular ways impacting living arrangements.  Basic aspects of adult life common throughout human history and in every culture have been badly warped in post World War Two, or maybe post World War One, or maybe as part of the Enlightenment, European cultured world.  While consumption of food, working, and the basic reproductive nature of humans is the same at an elemental level for people everywhere, and at all times, in the rich society of post 1945 Western Culture, there's an entertainment element to all of it.  People do these things to be "fulfilled", which in the end often tends to mean that their reproductive organs pretty much play the same role as a Nintendo joystick.  People have completely lost the connective and reproductive aspect to sex itself, which naturally leads to all sorts of bored playing with it.  We have, in this context, all become characters on MXC.

Additionally, as the West developed it got into warehousing of men, and sometimes women, for various reasons.  In the movie version of Pasternak's classic, Dr. Zhivago, the Orthodox Priest, in taking Lara's confession, warned her that sex was strong and that "only marriage can contain it".  As we've built societies that postpone marriage by operation of social pressure and economics, we can't be surprised that premarital sex became common.  Likewise, as we warehoused young men in various fashion. . .all male schools, all male institutions, etc., a certain percentage seek relief where they can find it.  Like most disordered behavior, the initial inclination probably isn't really very strong, but once people find relief in it, that takes over.  People don't take up drinking a quart of Jim Beam all in one setting.

So at this point the rich West has a pretty messed up relationship with sex in general, and for that matter, with nature and life in general.

And it's in a rocketing decline.

So why so much attention to the Fr. James Martin's of the world?  Why does the Papacy address this small demographic rather than, so far, addressing the effective schism of the German church, which has gone even further?

Mattingly notes:

"The Church of Africa is the voice of the poor, the simple and the small," wrote Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, the former head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. "It has the task of announcing the Word of God in front of Western Christians who, because they are rich, equipped with multiple skills in philosophy, theological, biblical and canonical sciences, believe they are evolved, modern and wise in the wisdom of the world."

Mattingly also notes:

Catholic debates over LGBTQ+ issues are crucial, he [ Rev. Chris Ritter] said, "because if you want to spot low-fertility, low-faith cultures in Europe and elsewhere, you look at how and when they legalized and legitimized same-sex marriage. That will give you a good idea of what is happening. … Just look for large numbers of secular old people."

And that gets back to what I noted the other day. The West, in every fashion, is in decline.  By mid-century that will be more obvious than it is now, and that's not long.  In our feebleness, we've become self obsessed and lost a grasp of the existential.

This won't last forever.  Our self extermination by confusing entertainment with living is assuring it will not.  And, by extension, the unique tragedy of homosexuality, and the related plagues that endorsing rather than sympathizing with that tragedy has brought on, won't last long as major issues much longer either.  Society really doesn't need to be wringing its hands so much over this.

For that matter, we can suppose it won't be long until the occupant of St. Peter's Chair was born in Africa once again. . .and that will not be a bad thing.

On being blisteringly dense and contra-natural

I'll have to start this again with a quote I had here the other day from Cardinal Sarah

The dying West.

I'm afraid that the West will die. There are plenty of signs. No more childbearing. You are invaded, still, by other cultures, other peoples, who will progressively dominate you by their numbers and completely change your culture, your convictions, your morality.

Cardinal Sarah

I guess because I'm a big reader, I'll get advertisements for books and also book reviews in email form.  One that I get is the New York Times book reviews, which I've come to barely notice.  A big part of that is because as the Times itself has declined, and it very much has, its book reviews are focused on whiney self-indulgent narcissist who write whiney self-indulgent narcissist memoirs that nobody reads and which are soon forgotten.  Stuff like the struggles of a middle class homosexual 1st generation Pakistani American in the big city whose extended Islamic family doesn't get him. M'eh, get over yourself, dude.

Anyhow, I got more than one email on Molly Roden Winter's new memoir, More on her sexual immorality.  The first time I disregarded it as it was a New York Times review (of course), but the second time I did take brief note of it.

Basically, she and her husband, who do have children, like to f*** other people than their spouses and for some reason their licentiousness is to be shared with others, making them both not only sexually reprehensible, but exhibitionist as well.  They'd define this as being "polyamorous", but that description does violence not only to nature, as we'll see, but to "amour".  Polylicentiousness would be a better description, but licentious would simply do, although they apparently (I haven't read it) keep their affairs down to one person at a time.  Indeed, one item I found she wrote in an op ed was about her sneaking out to her "boyfriend" during COVID and lying about it to her mid teen son, whom she must think is really dense, so she can screw her paramour in his household while his wife, whom he is trying to get pregnant, is out.  

Like all books in this area, this will be read only by people, probably mostly women, who want either 1) a peak into somebody's Fifty Shades of Grey lifestyle or 2) are thinking of cheating on their spouses and want to learn what that's like while being encouraged to do so.  I'm not going to bother with that, but instead make an evolutionary biological and medical observation.

Setting aside morality, this sort of conduct can only occur if you've carpet bombed your system into sterilization and have a platoon of antibiotics ready to come to your rescue.

In other words, while the promoters of this sort of thing like to claim it as sort of natural, it's the opposite.

We've dealt with it elsewhere, but the bargain of our species was that the male in a couple got the female. . .you know. . . that way, for his life, and she got food and protection, which she couldn't provide once she had a child or children.  Slice it anyway you want, but that's the evolutionary basis of monogamy and that's why our species exhibits it.

People will talk about affairs etc. and the degree to which they've been historically common in our species, but they really miss the history of it.  By and large, while they do occur, amongst the masses, which were most people, who lived close to the economic bottom line, or who were aboriginal, or pastoral, or nomadic, the Old Law provided that such offenses were punishable by death, by and large.

People like to claim, "oh that was just for the women", but that's simply not true.  Yes, women adulterers were killed, as we all are well aware.  The underlying logic of it, as brutal as that was, is that a man shouldn't be forced to raise the offspring of some other man, and death put an end to the chance of that occurring, and perhaps to the offspring as well as the offending woman. 

Grim.

But death was the common punishment for men as well, and it was typically directly meted out.  The man discovering the offense very often simply killed the other guy, and that was regarded as okay.

Indeed, as late as 1973, the Texas Penal Code provided:

Homicide is justifiable when committed by the husband upon one taken in the act of adultery with the wife, provided that the killing takes place before the parties to the act have separated. Such circumstance cannot justify a homicide where it appears that there has been, on the part of the husband, any connivance or assent to the adulterous connection.

In other words, if husband came home and found Jim Bob Diddler in bed with his wife, he could kill him.

And we should note that yes, that's completely contrary to Christian morality.  You can't run around killing people, even those in bed with your wife.

But the old, pre-Christian, law allowed for this.

Black Buffalo Woman.

Indeed, a famous example of this is given by the example of Crazy Horse, whose early affections had been towards Black Buffalo Woman.  In spite of his known feelings for her, she married No Water while Crazy Horse was on a raid.  In 1870, he carried her off while No Water was out on a hunting party.  The next day, No Water caught up with him, shot him in the face with a revolver (hitting his nose) and breaking his jaw, his shot being misdirected due to a third party attempting to intervene.  Crazy Horse was laid up due to his injuries for months, but had escaped death.  The blood feud was ended by No Water giving Crazy Horse a horse in compensation for his injures, which must have been galling to No Water knowing that Black Buffalo Woman and Crazy Horse had spent one night together, but which was deemed justified in light of there being questions about Black Buffalo Woman's long term marital intent.  Crazy Horse was stripped, in turn, of his position as a Shirt Wearer.

No Water in later years.

I've known, FWIW, of one killing here which was pretty much under those circumstances and I personally know a fellow, who was an FBI agent, who came home to find a coworker of his in bed with his wife.  In the latter case, he gave the guy one hour to clear out with the stated intent that when he came back in an hour, if they were still there, he was killing him.

His instructions to his spouse were to clear out as well.

They did.

Anyhow, Ms. Winter's behavior is only possible, as noted, due to chemistry. We've used chemistry to defeat our biological functions, but not our psychological and psycho-biological ones, and at least for the time being, we're not close to doing so.  Indeed, if we do, it'll be the end of the species.

Let's go back to Black Buffalo Woman.

Several months after Crazy Horse's attempt at taking her, she gave birth to a light skinned child.  That must have been all the more galling to No Water, as Crazy Horse was light skinned as well.  Indeed, while people aren't supposed to speculate on such things, his light feature and aquiline nose have lead to some speculation that he descended from a French trapper a generation or two prior to his birth, and I'll just go out on a limb and say it's likely so.1   Anyhow, this gives a biological example of why this is so deep in our DNA.  No Water wanted his wife and knew what the relationship between men and women meant.  He already had three children by her.  Her departure with Crazy Horse was a massive act of betrayal as well as resource disaster.  Some nine or ten months later, he likely ended up burdened with the child of another man, but sucked it up and carried on.

And here's a second reason.

Disease.

Whatever the multiple partner of this type has been common in any form, venereal disease has been absolutely rampant.  There's really no exception.  Indeed, that's probably all the more we need to say on that.

Now, on this, a person might wonder for a second about polygamy.  I'm not a defender of polygamy, but polygamy and polygamous behavior aren't the same at all.  The wives of a husband in a polygamous society are his, not for sharing.  Pretty obviously, if they were shared in any fashion, with our without his knowledge, the disease spreading opportunity is really enhanced.

This shows, once again, how prophetic Humanae Vitae really was.

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. 
Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

What was warned of here has now happened on a large-scale, with not only men regarding women as mere instruments of satisfaction, and vice versa, but a modern Western society obsession with our lower regions, even basing entire "lifestyles" on it.

None of which is capable without a complete chemical sterilization of our natural systems in a manner that we'd not tolerate on any other topic.  It's unnatural on an epic level.

Footnotes

1.  One of Crazy Horse's two wives, Helena "Nellie" Larrabee (Larvie), was half French.  


History has strangely not treated Larrabee well, seemingly because she influenced him to basically settle down.  That's really unfair, quite frankly.

Related Threads:




Monday, January 8, 2024

Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.


Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.

For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.

As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for hert to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

So husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

“For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.

In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

St. Paul, Ephesians, Chapter 5.

As the old phrase goes, fools rush in where angles fear to tread, and my commenting here is, I am well aware, completely foolish.

I know next to nothing about domestic law, and even less than that.  I've never experienced any aspect of it myself personally, I don't delve into it regularly at work, but on odd occasion I, like every lawyer, must.

I don't like it when I have to.

When a civil litigator takes a look at domestic law, he often tends to be shocked.  I was that way when I looked into the topic of grandparent's rights some years ago.  The opponent was also shocked when I started treating the case like heavy duty civil litigation.  What the heck?  Well, the case ended up changing that area of the law after years of the domestic practitioners just doing the "well, that's the way we do this".

Not anymore.

Recently I've been looking at divorce law for a tangential reason, and once again I'm shocked and appalled.  

Wyoming uses "no fault" divorce, like most states.

Or maybe it doesn't.  More on that below.

No fault was the biggest insult to the law ever created and a knife to the gut of society.

Illustration of No-Fault Divorce. The petitioner is taking a blade to the gut of a helpless defendant.

The legislative stupidity in this area, however, started some time before that.  As such things often do, the story has a "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" aspect to it.

Let's go way back.

At least during the state's territorial days, court's would occasionally order a cohabitating couple to marry.  This led me to assume that cohabitation of unmarried couples was illegal, and perhaps it was, but I've not found any statutory basis for that.  I haven't researched it in depth, either.  Fornication was a crime in many states, however, and it might have therefore been one in Wyoming.  Additionally, Wyoming imperfectly adopted the Common Law upon statehood, and for that reason court's may have felt they had the authority to address cohabitation, which normally would result in a marriage by fiat (Common Law Marriage).  At least right around the time of statehood there was a statute that addressed this topic in the "statutory rape" context, but the fairly shocking provisions of it were that the ages addressed were 10 years of age for a girl, and 14 for a boy.  I.e., a 14-year-old boy was expressly prohibited by law from having intercourse with a ten-year-old girl, and would be tried for rape if he did.  Apparently the scriveners of the law in the Dakotas, which is where we obtained our first set of statutes, felt differently about very tender ages than we might.  Having said that, the bill in the legislature last year which provided:
20-1-102. Minimum marriageable age; exception; parental consent.

(a) At the time of marriage the parties shall be at least sixteen (16) years of age except as otherwise provided.

(b) All marriages involving a person under sixteen (16) years of age are prohibited and voidable, unless before contracting the marriage a judge of a court of record in Wyoming approves the marriage and authorizes the county clerk to issue a license therefor.

(c) When either party is a minor, no license shall be granted without the verbal consent, if present, and written consent, if absent, of the father, mother, guardian or person having the care and control of the minor. Written consent shall be proved by the testimony of at least one (1) competent witness.
Surprisingly, this bill was met with opposition.  Before that, ages below age 16 were allowed with the Court's consent, and amazingly, there had apparently been a few instances of that occurring over the last decade.

The change, anyhow, was in my view, a good one.  Most people would agree.

Up until 1941, Wyoming had a set of "heart balm" statutes providing for common decency, common sense, protection of the common good, and which were fundamentally grounded in the laws of society and nature.  In that year, just months before the Japanese would cause the balance of human decency to be to exaggerated towards oblivion, the 1941 Wyoming legislature eliminated them, stating:
The remedies heretofore provided by law for the enforcement of actions based upon alleged alienation of affection, criminal conversation, seduction and breach of contract to marry, having been subjected to grave abuses, causing extreme annoyance, embarrassment, humiliation and pecuniary damage to many persons wholly innocent and free of any wrong-doing, who were merely the victims of circumstances, and such remedies having been exercised by unscrupulous persons for their unjust enrichment, and such remedies having furnished vehicles for the commission or attempted commission of crime and in many cases having resulted in the perpetration of frauds, it is hereby declared as the public policy of the State that the best interests of the people of the State will be served by the abolition of such remedies. Consequently, in the public interest, the necessity for the enactment of this article is hereby declared as a matter of legislative determination. 
1941 Wyo. Sess. Laws ch. 36 § 1.

Horse shit.

The thing about the "heart balm" statutes is that they heavily weighted the importance of the male/female relationship in a legal and cautionary way. The causes of action were varied, but all of a similar nature. There was 1) breach of contract to marry (breach of promise), 2) alienation of affection, 3) criminal conservation, and 4) seduction.  This mean that there were real consequences for failing to seriously undertake the relationship from the onset, and in failing to take care of it.  Rarely noticed on this, the penalties fell more often on men, than women, but protected both.

What were these causes of action?

We'll take a closer look.

The proposal.
  • Breach of promise.
Breach of contract to marry, or as it was more often called, "breach of promise", was a unilateral broken engagement. The non-breaching party was entitled to receive damages that included the benefits were that were to be had from the marriage and specific injuries to the plaintiff, including humiliation and psychological injury.

In the view of us moderns, this seems Victorian and quaint, but it was anything but.  Prior to birth control, relationships between men and women were, we might say, deadly serious.  While the social standards, based on Christian concepts and morality, meant that sex before marriage was frowned upon, and while it was also the case that a high percentage of people, particularly women, did not engage in sex before marriage, things began to break down when couples engaged and people knew it.  This does not mean to suggest that people behaved like they do now, as they certainly did not.

Engagement periods seem to have lasted a year or so, although there wasn't any set period.  One period etiquette book provided:
There are exceptions to the rules which govern engagements, as well as other things; but as in other cases, the exception only proves the wisdom and justice of the rule. There have been happy marriages after a few days' or even hours' acquaintance, and there have been divorces and broken lives after engagements which have existed for years. The medium, therefore, may be considered the best plan to pursue; namely, an engagement which is neither too short nor too long, but just sufficient to make a broad and easy stepping-stone between the old life and the new. The result of a very short engagement depends upon the strength and genuineness of character in the individuals, while the haste with which they have consummated so important a step says but little for their wisdom or prudence. A hasty and ill-advised marriage is a bad beginning in life. A very long engagement, on the contrary, is an eternity of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, and it is much harder for the engaged girl than for the engaged young man who is "a laggard in love". She has to wait usually, while he works actively, bringing himself into new relations, obtaining new experiences, and in many ways living a life which she can not share, and which is more than likely to interpose a barrier between their mutual sympathy and confidence, and cause them to drift apart from each other.
Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette, Martha Louise Rayne, Detroit: Tyler & Co., 1881.

There was more to it than that, however.  Close contact of this type was going to lead to something with some people.  Therefore, with a broken engagement, the female participant would be potentially at least slightly tainted in some fashion, either regarded as "ruined" or regarded as an obviously difficult and unmarriageable person.  There was a flip side to this, which we'll address below.

Additionally, in an era in which women had limited career opportunities, getting engaged set a woman on a certain financial course whose sudden end could be devastating economically.  It was assumed, naturally enough, that during the engagement she'd sworn off other suitors, many of whom would have moved on in the meantime.  Indeed, amongst the very old even now you'll frequently read stories of very elderly "first loves" reuniting, showing that whatever went wrong early on had forced them into other paths, even if they obviously retained affection for each other.

  • Seduction

The flipside of breach of promise, this tort sounds obvious, but in practice it was less so.  The tort allowed an unmarried woman's father - or other person employing her services - to sue for the loss of these services when she became pregnant and could no longer perform them.  We recently saw an example of this being played out on the Canadian World War Graphic History blog in an entry concerning Lieutenant Colonel Charles Flick.

As that entry noted, Flick and one Kate O'Sullivan engaged in some sort of sexual act.  What occured isn't clear, but it seems pretty clear that Flick seduced Kate, or perhaps raped her.  In any event, Flick, then an officer in the British Army, was sued by Kate's father. As the blog notes:

In June 1898, London tailor Daniel O’Sullivan sued Lieutenant Charles Leonard Flick of the Honourable Artillery Company “for damages for the seduction of his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Kate,” with whom Flick had had an illegitimate daughter. The above letter was entered into the court record by the plaintiff’s counsel. As a result of pregnancy and alledged assault, Kate O’Sullivan had been unable to assist her father’s tailoring work. The jury found in favour of the plaintiff for £150.

Seem harsh (assuming it wasn't rape)?  Well, it really wasn't.  Kate, at age 25, was reaching the upper limit of her marriageable age at the time, and now she had a daughter to take care of without Flick.  Whether Flick tried to make it right (which was common) by marrying her or not, we don't know They didn't marry, however.   Mr. O'Sullivan was left, therefore, with the financial burden of his daughter, who could now no longer work, and his granddaughter as well.

While this may all sound pretty harsh, it reflected an economic reality that still exists.  Seduction continues to exist as a legal principle, even if we don't recognize it.  It exists in the form of child support laws, which achieve essentially the same thing, but through the partial intervention of the state.  At the time, it was up to people to take care of this on their own, which was not a less just system.

Flick, by the way, went on to a career in the British Army, serving overseas, and ultimately in the Canadian Army.  He was an opponent of Japanese internment in Canada, so no matter what his early story was, he wasn't entirely a terrible person.

  • Alienation of Affection.

This occurred when someone interfered with the marriage, causing a spouse to lose affection, mostly often through seduction, but not always.  Indeed, meddling third parties could be liable for interfering with a marriage, including objecting in laws or even clergymen.  In the Wyoming case of Worth v. Worth, 48 Wyo. 441 (1935) a daughter-in-law suited her in laws on just such a claim, recovering the amount of $35,000 in damages.  The damages in such cases were for emotional distress and mental anguish, shame, humiliation, and economic loss, including financial contributions toward the marriage and potentially punitive damages.

The elimination of this tort created a situation in which unrestrained interference in marriages can and frankly does arise.  Amongst women, it tends to come up in terms of the "support" of female friends, many of whom have broken relationships themselves, or in some instances feel that a friend married beneath herself.  I've seen this happen first hand, with the women who don't have to live the consequences harping on tehir friend to divorce.

The flipside of this is that men do the same thing, but it tends to be over other issues, with those issues often being sexual.  In spite of they hypersexualized era in which we live, or perhaps because of it, it's frequently the case that couples enter a marriage badly damaged in this area and ultimately that impacts the woman much more.  Women with multiple sexual partners before marriage are almost statistically incapable of living out their marriage.  Women who have abused, on the other hand, tend to withdraw from the "marital debt" at some point leaving their husband's stunned.  In that case, the men will tend to get the advice from their fellows that they should dump their wives for a more willing, and often younger, partner, or they'll simply begin to engage in adultery and excuse their conduct.

  • Criminal Conversation

Criminal conversation was similar to Alienation of Affection, but involved sex, so the last item noted here had arisen..  It was the tort of sexual intercourse outside marriage between the spouse and a third party, with each act being a separate tort, and the liable party being the third party.  Damages included emotional harm, mental suffering, loss of support and income, and loss of consortium.

Not surprisingly, this tort changed over time to something radically different, and it then allowed an unmarried woman to sue on the grounds of seduction to obtain damages from her seducer, if her consent to sex was based upon his misrepresentation.

The unifying thread in all of these is that they took marriage, and beyond that, the male female relationship extremely seriously.  For want of a better way to put, they took sex very seriously as well.


One of the things that the Sexual Revolution proved was that people were incredibly naive about sex, but not in the way that the revolutionaries imagined.  In fact, the pre revolutionary condition proved to be the wise one, as it grasped the nature of sex.  While perhaps not the best way to set it out, we'll quote here an item from Quora, which is always a somewhat dubious source of anything, which was on a thread on whether premarital relations should be illegal, which in a few countries they still are.  Some commentator noted:

Sex absolutely, deeply and irreversibly transforms

You

Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.

It transforms abusers and the abused,

It transforms actors in porn,

It transforms friends who do it casually,

It transforms one-night standers,

It transforms johns and the prostitutes,

It transforms gays and lesbians,

It transforms the masturbater,

It transforms viewers of porn,

It transforms people who only do it orally,

It transforms those who use protection,

It tranforms unmarried couples,

It transforms married couples,

Sex is a language of the body.

And it is a langualge that has a definitely fixed meaning.

It communicates an absolute message.

It says I AM YOURS, FREELY, COMPLETELY, FAITHFULLY and FRUITFULLY.

After sex, you will either be made or ruined

Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.

We can think that nothing in us has changed,

But we will never the same as before.

We can tell ourselves that sex is pleasurable and healthy exercise,

And that we will be worse off denying ourselves from the pleasure it gives.

But, we will still have trivialised the message our body has communicated.

When we add meanings to the fixed message of sex,

The message of our mind is not aligned with the fixed message of our body.

We are no longer integrated. We have lied.

Sex in forms that detract from its fixed message is an abuse of the body.

It is cripplingly addictive, simply untruthful, absolutely unfulfilling and very ruinous.

If you have not done it. Don’t begin.

If you have done it, learn from this and do your best to cease.

Be hopeful. Every Saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.

Remember, the purpose of sex can only be properly fulfilled within and after

Marriage.

Written almost like a poem, the writer is absolutely correct.  Psychologically, biologically and chemically, sex changes everything.  It binds the people, whether they wish to be or not.

Indeed, in the area of odds and ends, one of the commentators on Catholic Stuff You Should know once noted this in that he was with a group of friends who wished that he could still see women the way he had, before.  He remembered having done that, but the change was too profound to allow him to do again.  That's likely nearly universally true, at least for men.

On a scarier note, in an interview I heard some time ago from a very orthodox Catholic source, a person who assisted with exorcisms noted that in some cases the possession had come about during intercourse, the metaphysical nature of it being such that license existed due to the marital act for the possession to transfer from one person to another.

Now, people like to wink and note that even amongst members of Apostolic faiths, premarital sex is common. But prior to birth control, it was much less so.  It was not, however, nonexistent.  Part of the breach of promise recognized this.  But part also recognized that once couples head down this road, there's no real coming back, ever.

Ever.

And that, in no small part, is why "no fault" divorce works an irreparable and unconscionable injury to marriage, the married, and men and women in general.

It should not be allowed.

Before we look at that, or rather before we carry on directly, however, we'll take a big diversion. The reason is that we happened, in an unrelated fashion, upon something tagentially related to this topic and started a post on it, but then decided that it would really be better set out here.  

And that involves two videos from The Catholic Gentleman blog.

Normally I'd be very hesitant to post a video of this type, probably out of cowardice as much as anything else, but these are so well done, if not really titled correctly, I'm making an exception.  

They're really insightful.

Having said that, I'll retreat into cowardice a bit.  The mere title, "What women don't understand about men", can raise hackles and eye rolls.  And the fact that it's linked in from something called "The Catholic Gentleman" will immediately provoke cries of "rad trads" and patriarchist, and the like.

Well, actually, this is much more in the nature of informed evolutionary biology.

And, to note it again, they're mistitled.  That's because these two videos could just as easily be "What men don't understand about women, and what women don't understand about men, and why that's the case.

Now, these do take this topic on from a semi religious prospective, but only semi, which is really interesting in that this is from The Catholic Gentleman blog.  They creep right up on, and even cross deeply into, evolutionary biology, again in really insightful ways, and frankly if the religious aspects of these videos were omitted, they'd still be highly valid.  In the first one, in fact, the religious elements are hardly mentioned.

Now, a few warnings about these insightful videos.

About half of the first one is about sex, sort of, but not completely.  Rather, it's more accurately on how men perceives their relationship on a primary basis, which is heavily based on sex, which is part of the reason that they're so insightful.  It also means that they touch on a topic gently, but much more graphically, than has ever been discussed here before.  

Crud?  Yes, but more accurate in some ways than we care to imagine once certain lines are crossed.

But the times call for it.

Put simply, and grossly simplifying it, we're an animal whose evolutionary biology is really odd, and that's not a societal thing.  Of all the mammals, we belong to the group that has the highest degree of sexual dimorphism.  And of every animal in our group, the primate, we're at the top of the scale, indeed, over the scale, on it.  It defines a lot of who and what we are as an animal, and how the two sexes react with each other.

This is not, I'd note, unique to this analysis. The first time I recall reading this was actually a discussion on Homo sapiens evolution in The National Geographic decades ago.  The thesis to explain it is that in one of our homo ancestors, quite a few ancestors ago, the dimorphism began when the species intelligence advanced, resulting in an unusually long period before we're mature adults.  That meant that our mothers, or rather their mothers, had the responsibility of dealing with and taking care of the infant and child human for a long time. . . years in fact.  That caused the dimorphism.  Females evolved accordingly in one direction, and that direction emphasized security and relationships.  Males evolved in another, and those involved a set of things we have otherwise discussed here, but also, and we really haven't discussed hit here, sex.  The National Geographic author's assertion, and it seems well-supported, is that the evolutionary trade-off is that human males became basically ready, if you will, all the time and traded intercourse with human females, who are receptive, unusually, in varying degrees all the time. Females received food and protection.

That is, we'd note, a gross over simplification, somewhat.

As we're a very complicated species, with our big brains, it became more involved than that, but the basic elements remained.  Humans do look for lifetime mates.  Males are highly oriented towards connecting love of their mate, ultimately, with intercourse, and if it's absent, severe problems typically begin to arise.  Women place little importance on that, however, past the initial stage of the formation of the couple, and instead place an enormous focus on relationships and feeling safe. Women really don't understand that for a married couple, or perhaps we should say one in a real union, that for the male, if the physical aspect of it is absent, he'll feel frustrated, insecure, and unloved.  Men really don't get that women can simply omit this to some degree, or even entirely, and not feel the same way at all.  On the other hand, men don't grasp that if a woman feels insecure, it's relationship threatening.

The first video does a really good job of explaining that.  If you want to look into it, and do to my autodidactic nature I did, you can actually find a pile of stuff supporting what they're saying.

The second part of the first installment is on how men yearn for respect and equate love with respect.  Women do not.  Women expect support.  You can find lots of stuff on this as well, although you need to be careful.  One thing that is mentioned barely here, but which showed up in a net search, is that a female insulting a male, well, in a physical fashion in this arena can actually be devastating. There's an entire Reddit thread where a married man mentions this occurring in an argument which seems to have largely resolved on its primary point, but which seemed overwhelmingly likely to result in a divorce, even though the woman had repeatedly apologized.  Even other women were counselling, "dump her".

A couple of notes, before moving on, one that's touched on in the video, and another not.  The video makes a really good point, which has to do with male adolescence and how males develop. The context of it is in regard to transgenderism, and the point is made that the sort of crisis that males go through at a certain age, as things turn on, would be wholly absent for those claiming to be transgendered.  Without that, however, you really aren't male.  And no doubt the reverse would be true for whatever it is that women go through.

Men Did Greater Things When It Was Harder To See Boobs

Amy Otto, from The Federalist.

Not nearly as touched on, but a major problem, is that not only are men highly oriented in this direction, but at the point at which its realized its like flipping a switch that men can't get back from. This is mentioned in the excellent podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know.  Men really can't' get back from where they started off, once they go down this path (and yes, I'm not going to fill it all in).  It's sometime wondered "how" Catholic Priests can endure their celibacy, and it should be noted that St. Paul advised that unless the person had the grace and call to do it, they shouldn't attempt it.  Most Priest who are truly called not only have that calling and grace, but they've likely never gotten to the point where the breaker was switched.  Once it is, enduring the celibacy would be difficult in the extreme, and we note that in fact not all have endured it.



The second video is on three different topics.

The first is how men handle insecurity and stress, which often is very aggressive, or at least some form of aggression.  The other way tends to be through addictive behavior.  


The prior set of statues took the relationship so seriously that it was somewhat difficult to contract in the first place, had very serious implications from day one, and was very difficult to break.  By being difficult to break, it protected first children, but then it protected the married men and women themselves.

This is not to say that all marriages were always rosy, but truth be known, the majority of marriages that break up do so due to transitory matters.  That's why divorce originally required proof of something serious.  Critics of the old statutes claimed that this forced people, and they usually mean "women" by people, to make up lies to obtain a divorce, and lying did indeed occur.  Missed in that is that the fact that lying was occurring mean that what was being claimed, such as mental cruelty, didn't really exist.  It was all just a matter of feelings.

That it is a matter of transitory feelings is borne out by the evidence.  At a bare minimum, it's reported that 27% of women and 32% of men regret their divorces, or are willing to admit that they do.  Given the nature of such reporting, we can probably easily assume that the real percentages approach at least 40%, if not higher.

Taken out of that, of course, are the percentages of those who divorce who simply kill themselves.  Suicide being a risk due to divorce is very well established, although statistics associated with the percentage that take this tragic route are hard to come by, with men being nine times more likely to kill themselves following or during a divorce than women. That last statistic is particularly interesting, as there's something about men that causes them to take that approach at a much higher rate than women, although suicide is an increased risk for men and women due to divorce.  Men, it is well known, tend to lose their social structure upon marrying, and it tends to devolve, over time, down to their wife.  Again, looking back to old wisdom, the Old Testament informs:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

They do indeed, and this does indeed become the case.  It's really easy to find examples of a wife's family essentially becoming the family of her husband, but it's much less common the other way around, in spite of what many people assume.  Men getting divorced tend to lose their entire families as a result, their wife, their children, and their wife's family, with nowhere to go. The failure is so existential, they'd simply rather die.  Women suffer to, but the classic "going back to her parents" is an option for them.  Men don't "go back to their parents". They go back to new dwellings alone.

Suicide is now so common with divorce that its frequently discussed in various divorce related circles, including legal ones.  Interestingly, the tragedy frequently is followed by the comment that if a person is edging towards this during the divorce in an open way, it should basically be disregarded, as that's manipulative. At some level, that's an incredibly self-interested set of views.  Self-slaughter if never the right answer, and from a Christian prospective, it's a mortal sin.  But the people who state "I feel guilty because my spouse killed himself" often really should feel just that. They abandoned their vows and the other person fell into despair, so  yes, you should feel guilty, and moreover, you in particularly should not "move on" into another relationship having helped kill, quite literally, your prior one.

All of this is also why the death rate associated with men is also falsely low.  Some go home and kill themselves sooner or later, but some simply drink themselves to death, or purposely engage in a lifestyle that will shorten their lives.  Some just die, broken-hearted.  Indeed, a bona fide medical condition, takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” occurs in a certain percentage of otherwise healthy people, killing 5% o those who obtain it, and causing long term health effects for 20% of those who aren't killed by it but survive.  In extreme cases, a related psychological condition results in a mental collapse in which a healthy person just gives up the will to live and ceases all efforts to do so, resulting in death coming within the span of a week unless people catch it and intervene.

Oh well, right?  We've moved on to the brave new legal world where the facts are made up and the answers don't matter, and just have to live with it.

No we don't. There are things that can, and should, be done. But what can be done?

  • Be honest about the relationship between men and women.
It's ironic that in the age of freely available information, and great advances in society, that what people have learned is the mechanics of sex, but nothing about its existential nature.  This is a root part of the problem.

And I'm using the term "sex" advisably, not "marriage".

If the defenders of Catholic annulments are to be credited, the reason that so many are granted is that people just don't grasp the nature of what they're getting into.  As noted above, I'm pretty skeptical on that, but there's at least something to that.  Women don't seem to realize that once they become sexually active with a man he can't go back to the status quo ante.  They also, in many instances, don't realize (and again, Reddit is full of this stuff) that once the vows are exchanged and the presents opened, they can't really expect a return to the days of care and cuddling. For that matter, once children are born they're not getting back there either.  They will have achieved exactly what the New Testament provides, literally:
That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.

He's not going to get over the "clinging". 

If the authors of The Catholic Gentlemen are correct, women need to grasp this. But there's a lot that men need to grasp as well.  And before we depart on this topic, we'll note, at least in undamaged women, and a lot are damaged, the psychological union that this creates exists too.

When I was looking up stuff for this post, one of the things I just ran across was a post by a woman who had initiated a divorce. Still convinced that she was correct in doing so, she was baffled by why she was repeatedly thrown into lamenting the divorce and the loss of her husband.  Of course, the Redditors came in with all sorts of "grieving" statement, and in a way they were right. But the reality of it is that she tried to cut something down that was within herself and killed it so it didn't die a natural death.  As that attempt at murder, and indeed it’s a type of self-murder given the nature of marriage, is ineffective, her DNA was telling her what society could not.  Her divorce is false. She wasn't the person she was before she attempted to divorce.

It's here where the videos linked in can do a real service.  Societally, we lie about sex all the time and have damaged people enormously as a result.  What we've essentially done is to encourage people to get on the perversion and decay train, and a lot have boarded it.  Then we're surprised by the result.  To give an odd example, everyone was surprised when "America's Dad" Bill Cosby turned out to be a serial sexual pervert.  But why? We knew that he hung out at the Playboy Mansion and everything associated with Playboy ended in perversion, long term.

This obviously goes beyond marriage, of course, and gets towards being honest about our psychology as a species, which we aren't.  We can pretend that the old standards went away, but the old DNA is still there.

  • What can be done under the current law
Part of the reason, indeed a lot of the reason, things have gotten so bad is that divorce lawyers, have failed to really examine the law much, with rare exceptions.  

They should.

Quite frankly, it'll probably take conventional civil litigators to do it.

But what can be done?

Domestic lawyers really don't look at the law much.  They have just gotten used to "this is how things are done". An example of that is Wyoming's "no fault" divorce statute, which isn't really no fault. The Wyoming Supreme Court required proof on irreconcilability in a case for the first time this past year, which means it took somebody fifty years to wake up to the fact that the law requires the proof, although the case was very unique, however.
  • Going back to the old law
We remind people of this:


People constantly imagine that when a mistake is made, and absolting hte old law here was a mistake, you "can't go back". 

Of course you can go back.

There actually is a movemen in the nation to move away from no fault divorce.  But to get back to the old law society will have to go a bit further back indeed.

It should.

Divorce laws requiring fault should be reestablished, and the "heart balm" statutes brought back. It's those latter causes of action that, as far as I'm aware, which nobody has preposed to restore.

They should.
  • A societal reaction.
Finally, in order to really take this on, there needs to be a societal reaction, and this makes people very uncomfortable.

Very uncomfortable.

Part of the reason that we have so much divorce in our society is that we've allowed the conditions creating it. We've badly damaged the psychological makeup of our society over a seventy year period by losing what we knew about sex and the relationship between men and women. That's hard to come back from, but it needs to occur.  It'll have to start occurring on an individual basis.

Even when I was a college student in the 80's it was still the case that people living together without being married was frowned upon, even if it was no longer really societally prohibited.  Doing that on a non-married basis toys with the programmed in nature of sex and the relationship between the sexes in a  major way.  Indeed, in many societies earlier on, to do that was simply to create a married relationship that the couple was then stuck with.  Even in early Christianity, as is so often forgotten, there was no marriage ceremony early on.  The couple simply agreed to be married and moved in with each other.

Couples that "live together", as its now politely called, are creating a proto marriage whether they wish to or not, at least within themselves.  If this is not going to be frowned upon, it ought to at least be acknowledged for what it really does.

Beyond that, and it would have to start there, the easy separations that have come into being should not be so easily tolerated.  Couples break up and divorce, as we know, but it really doesn't have to be accepted by a party that didn't wish to, and if they didn't wish to, they should stand their ground in their status.  And this is true, in my view, of religions annulments as well.  To go against these, in Catholic terms, is regarded as absolutely shocking and subject the person who does it to attack.  Well, proclaiming that you view the other party as engaging in a fraud won't make a person popular, but standing for what is true often doesn't.1

Footnotes:

While I'm aware that it will be a very unpopular thing to say, another aspect of this would be not to tolerate the divorce industry.

Like almost everything that plagues our society, there's a strong industrial element to all of this.  The corruption of marriage in the first place, by which we mean the corruption of the relationship between men and women, was brought about in no small part due the pornography industry, which is a subset of the sex trade industry.  As it took root, the entertainment industry, the medical industry and the legal industry became highly involved with it.

Law in American society has become an industry, and as noted, it's very tied up in it.  Law, like medicine, was a profession, but the corrupting influence of money has very much corrupted it.  Divorce litigation is its own industry.  There's no reason to respect it, or those involved in it, including lawyers involved in it.

Related Threads:

Thursday, October 26, 2023

Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.

Note:  This post was started a little while ago, so it predates the recent drama in the House of Representatives.  I'm noting that as I don't want to give the impression that this post was inspired by it or the choosing of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.


We've dealt with a bunch of interesting odds and ends in recent months, some of which have popped back up in surprising places.

There is, for instance, a series of threads on the Synod on Synodality and what it is, or is not, about and what it will, or will not take up. The Synod itself was immediately preceded by five cardinals publishing a Dubia, receiving a reply they deemed insufficient, and then following that up with another Dubia to which they did not receive a response. That in turn lead to the first reply being published, which was immediately badly analyzed, including bad analysis in both conservative and liberal Catholic news organs.

What caused all the furor was that Pope Francis, who has a real knack for ambiguity, is the Pope's reply to this question:

2 Dubium about the claim that the widespread practice of the blessing of same-sex unions would be in accord with Revelation and the Magisterium (CCC 2357).

According to Divine Revelation, confirmed in Sacred Scripture, which the Church “at the divine command with the help of the Holy Spirit, … listens to devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully ” (Dei Verbum 10): “In the beginning” God created man in his own image, male and female he created them and blessed them, that they might be fruitful (cf. Gen. 1, 27-28), whereby the Apostle Paul teaches that to deny sexual difference is the consequence of the denial of the Creator (Rom 1, 24-32). It is asked: Can the Church derogate from this “principle,” considering it, contrary to what Veritatis Splendor 103 taught, as a mere ideal, and accepting as a “possible good” objectively sinful situations, such as same-sex unions, without betraying revealed doctrine?

Which was:

Question 2

a) The Church has a very clear conception of marriage: an exclusive, stable and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the begetting of children. Only this union is called “marriage”. Other forms of union are realized only “in a partial and analogous way” (Amoris laetitia 292), which is why they cannot strictly be called “marriage”.2 

b) It is not a mere question of names, but the reality that we call marriage has a unique essential constitution that demands an exclusive name, not applicable to other realities. It is undoubtedly much more than a mere “ideal”.

c) For this reason the Church avoids any kind of rite or sacramental that could contradict this conviction and give the impression that something that is not marriage is recognized as marriage.

d) In dealing with people, however, pastoral charity, which must permeate all our decisions and attitudes, must not be lost. The defense of objective truth is not the only expression of this charity, which is also made up of kindness, patience, understanding, tenderness and encouragement. Therefore, we cannot become judges who only deny, reject, exclude.3 

e) For this reason, pastoral prudence must adequately discern whether there are forms of blessing, requested by one or more persons, that do not transmit a mistaken conception of marriage. Because when a blessing is requested, one is expressing a request for help from God, a plea to be able to Live better, a trust in a Father who can help us to Live better.

f) On the other hand, although there are situations that from the objective point of view are not morally acceptable, pastoral charity itself requires us not to treat as “sinners” other people whose guilt or responsibility may be attenuated by various factors that influence subjective imputability (cf. St. John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 17).

g) Decisions which, in certain circumstances, can form part of pastoral prudence, should not necessarily become a norm. That is to say, it is not appropriate for a Diocese, a Bishops’ Conference or any other ecclesial structure to constantly and in an official way enable procedures or rites for all kinds of matters, since everything “that which is part of a practical discernment in a particular situation cannot be elevated to the category of a norm”, because this “would give rise to an unbearable casuistry” (Amoris laetitia 304). Canon Law should not and cannot cover everything, nor should the Episcopal Conferences claim to do so with their various documents and protocols, because the life of the Church runs through many channels in addition to the normative ones.

Just after that, I listened to a First Things interview of Mary Eberstadt. The interview had actually been in 2019, but I'm that far behind on that podcast, which I'm not universally endorsing.  This interview was very interesting, however, as Eberstadt had just published Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The prolific author has published several more books since then, but this one touched on topics that I wouldn't have thought it did.  Eberstadt is a real intellectual heavyweight and has to be taken seriously.

Eberstadt, speaking from those seemingly long ago pre-COVID-19 days, already was discussing some major issues that were already there, but now are much more there, seemingly having erupted to some degree after Western Society spent months in their hovels contemplating their reproductive organs.  Most interesting, she took examples from the natural world, which caused the episode to be titled There Are No Lone Wolves.  Indeed, there are no lone wolves in nature, that concept being a complete myth, but what Eberstadt did is to apply what I have also applied here, to the same topic I've applied it to. That subject being evolutionary biology.

Eberstand pointed out the degree to which behavior in the natural world, of which we are part, is actually learned.  Wolf puts that grow up in an unnatural environment never learn how to be functioning wild wolves.  Rhesus macaque's, which were subject to an experiment to derive the information, don't learn how to act in the typical manner of their species if raised in isolation, and in fact slip into psychotic behavior.

Eberstadt's point, which she's double downed on since then, is that father's children growing to be freakin' messes as they don't learn how to do anything. She had the data, moreover, to prove it.  Some may feel that she's drawing too much from it, but statistically, she's not only firing with both barrels, but she's loaded up a 10 gauge with Double O.  Anyone feeling that she's at least not 60% correct is fooling themselves.

Eberstadt, and she's not the first to do so, ties all of this to the Sexual Revolution.

What Eberstadt is noting is not only something we've noted here before, but what touches upon our fourth law of human behavior, which provides:

Yeoman's Third Law of Behavior.  I know why the caged tiger paces.

Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth.  He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you."  You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger.  He wants out.  He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.

It's really no different with human beings.  We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time.  Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage.  Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Yeoman's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers.  Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.

That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well.  I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case.  A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly.  Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.

This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women.  Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a  mammal.  Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats.  But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees.  Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.

That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood.  If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one.  Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it.  So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there.  That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that.  It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.

The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them.  Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts.  But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.

This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen.  Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden.  But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become.  We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world.  In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.

Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies".  They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.

A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team.  Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."

The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation.  Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification.  You'll have to read between the lines on that one.

Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur.  It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.

In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptance of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.

We will also note that Pope Francis, timed with the opening of the Synod, issued a new Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum ("Praise God") on the environment.  

Eh", you may be thinking.  I thought this thread was on something else.  One of these is not like the other.

Oh, they very much are.

Laudate Deum is a cri de coeur for the environment, and it's not the first time Pope Francis has spoken on these topics.  He's not the first Apostolic Bishop to speak on it, either.  The head of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity has done so for many years, resulting in his being called The Green Patriarch.  It's interesting, indeed, to note that Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met just the day prior to Laudate Deum being released.

Laudate Deum, it should be noted, stated something that naturally caused some in the US to go all apoplectic.  Of interest, the document stated:

24. Not every increase in power represents progress for humanity. We need only think of the “admirable” technologies that were employed to decimate populations, drop atomic bombs and annihilate ethnic groups. There were historical moments where our admiration at progress blinded us to the horror of its consequences. But that risk is always present, because “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience... We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint”.[17] It is not strange that so great a power in such hands is capable of destroying life, while the mentality proper to the technocratic paradigm blinds us and does not permit us to see this extremely grave problem of present-day humanity

* * *

72. If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries,[44] we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact. As a result, along with indispensable political decisions, we would be making progress along the way to genuine care for one another.

Comments like that, of course, are just the kind of thing that sends a certain Presbyterian Wyoming Senator who is a fallen away Catholic right to the microphone to blurt into Twitter about Joe Biden's "radical green agenda" when they come from Joe Biden.  They are also the kind of things that causes locals to use the rationale, "I make money from the energy sector. . . and I'm a good person. . . so this must be a fib."

We might as well note that there is also a certain Protestant strain of thought, which has crept into everything in the US, which is a Protestant country even if it doesn't recognize it, that this can't be true as our relationship with nature if purely economic and exploitative.  It's the same line of thought that gives us things like the health and wealth gospel.  A major proponent of that view in government was the late James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan.  Watt held the view that Christ was coming very soon, so we should just charge ahead and use everything up, which we were, in his view, Biblically mandated to do anyhow.  That's not most people's view, and it certainly isn't an Apostolic Christian view.  A fair number of Americans have some sort of view like that, however, basically believing that God has promised them a trouble free life irrespective of their own conduct, something that also allows big box type churches to fill up with people who've divorced multiple times but who still feel good about themselves.

Indeed, while I don't know for sure, what little I know about Speaker of the House Johnson causes me to suspect he holds this view.  He's a conservative Evangelical Christian of the young earth variety.  Contrary to what pundits seem to believe, not all Evangelicals are conservative, nor do they hold by any means a uniform set of beliefs, but young earth Evangelicals, and he's a sincere one, tend to have a set of beliefs that link very heavily with resource consumption and suspicion of science.  He's also a climate change denier, which is further evidence that this is the case.

On politics itself, however, the current political crisis in the United States specifically and the West in general seems to reflect this.  People are mad, and to a large extent they're mad at the political order. The political order, over the past 80 to 90 years, has served the interest of liberalism, industrialism, and urbanism, even though often ignorantly, and often with the left and right seemingly being unaware that they were doing it.  At the present time, the sense that something is deeply wrong and has been lost fuels populist rage, even if populist leaders, like Johnson, continue to serve in some ways the very forces that causes this to come about.  Liberals, on the other hand, are baffled that having given people societal sanction to do nothing other than contemplate their genitals all day long and self define as whatever they want, people are unhappy.  It's interesting expressed in the babble of economists, right and left, both of whom are focused on the economy, both loving the corporate capitalist economic system, and seemingly being unable to grasp that people figure that their lives at home and in their communities matter more than getting "good jobs" at Big Cubicle.

So the connection in all of this?

What Pope Francis is noting, in a way, stems from our disconnect with nature. So is what Mary Eberstadt and your truly earlier, with your humble author being an earlier observer of this than Eberstadt.  A critic, for that matter, of Francis's encyclical accidentally sort of sum's up the topic in another way, which I don't think Francis would actually disagree with:

Let us just imagine for a moment that we really do waste too many resources, that we suck on too many plastic straws, and that cow flatulence is really the greatest threat facing humanity since the Black Plague; even if that were all true, the cause of the problem would be sin and apostasy from God.

Kennedy Hall in Crisis

We're having environmental problems, political problems, psychological problems, sexual identify problems and are basically a bunch of unhappy people as we've separated ourselves from nature, and indeed, as Hall would note, or suggest, we've done it in a sinful fashion, which involved lust, greed, avarice, gluttony and denial of reality.

Is there a world view that counters any of this?

The philosophy that's noted that for a long time is Agrarianism.

Agrarianism occurs in different forms in different localities, but Western Agrarianism, broadly defined, which occured in the United States and in some regions of Europe, is soil, nature, localism, distributist, and family oriented by nature.  Indeed, some of these things can turn people off of it, if too narrowly focused. For instance, you can find Agrarian blogs, or at least one, that's Calvinist in nature, or another one that's basically of the Protestant nature described above.  We're talking, however, more of the sort of agrarianism that was present in Quebec up until mid-Century, or in the American Southwest until the mid 20th Century, or in Finland prior to the 1950s, and as written about by Chesterton, and frankly by the Southern Agrarians with the weird racism removed.

People don't like the modern world.  It's depersonalized us, seperated us from the people we love, forced us into work environments on a daily basis which are based only on money, seperated us from nature, and it may, again in the name of money, be setting to damage everything.

We really don't have to do this.  Getting back from this, however, will not be easily.  It would take a purpose driven societal effort.

The template for it is already there, in the agrarian works of the not too distant past.  It would also require, quite frankly, some education of the masses which believe in the home and business economics of the industrial revolution as being part of the human structure, when in fact they are not.  It would also require asking "why?" a lot, particularly of boosters for one thing or another who always proclaim things to be for the public good.

It sounds like a pipe dream, of course, but something is in the air.  It just isn't synthesized.

If it were. . . 

Footnotes.

1. These Bushmen bands are not Christian, but their theology loosely is actualy remarkably close to it.