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.

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

For a variety of reasons, I've been pondering the topic of community recently.

Russian children, 1909.

Indeed, this is one of those threads I've taken up, put down, and it's lingered on.  Looking at my list of draft posts, there are a bunch of related ones that I ought to fold in.  This may reflect that.

Added to that, so much so that a whole string of random community related items have sort of floated by me recently, with it rising to the level that synchronicity is getting hard to ignore.

For anyone who knows me well, that might seem pretty odd.  I'm highly introverted, and posted a recent thread relating to that just the other day. But that might give me an insight into community that others lack.  Indeed, in thinking on this, part of the problem with people who tried to "build the community" in certain groups is that they treat a community like a club.  I think they actually can't see the distinction between clubs and communities, quite frankly.  And because those people are extraverted, I can see why they can't grasp it.

This doesn't mean that extraverted people are shallow or anything. According to at least once source, extroverts are "people people", i.e,. they really really like people.  I do think, however that they don't grasp at all that not everyone wants a giant bear hug and to be compelled to go to parish pizza and bowling night, and that even having a pizza and bowling night doesn't do much for community.

Put another way, there are people who should be part of the community that would be, in an existential manner, if a solid community existed. Building that, however, is tough, and impossible if not done in a fundamentally natural way.

Want to join the man's parish bowling league and Chesteron night?

Crowd of miners in Mogollon, New Mexico.  Note the wide vareity of ages.

No, I don't.

Anyhow, while it sounds weird for an introvert to be saying it, the lack of authentic community is a crisis.

I'm not licensed as a homilist, rather obviously. Shoot, I'm not a cleric.  But something occurred to me the other day when pondering the topic of transgenderism, which has been constantly in the news of late.

Eh?

Bear with me.

The topic is, again, community.

And what occurred to me is the story of the rich young man who approached Jesus, which was addressed in a homily.

Now someone approached him and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”

He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good.* If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “ ‘You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother’; and ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”

Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and said, “Who then can be saved?

Jesus looked at them and said, “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” 

Then Peter said to him in reply, “We have given up everything and followed you. What will there be for us?”

Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you that you who have followed me, in the new age, when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of glory, will yourselves sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.

But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

Matthew, Chapter 19.

Now, the meaning of this seems pretty clear. But for the first time something else struck me.

Students of scripture often note that individual passages can have multiple meanings and that they can all be true.  Here, it's clear enough, that the promise is that the individual's sacrifice for the Lord would result in eternal life.

But note that what was also indicated, in a way, that those sacrificing weren't going to be abandoned.  Yes, they were giving something up, but they were getting something right away, which was membership in the community.

I'll get back to where I started above, but consider this in relation to recent legislation down in Cheyenne.  One legislator, who represents herself as some sort of Christian, made this statement the other day in regard to a bill to extend medicare coverage for recent mothers:

"Arguing that if you’re pro-life you have to be for the expansion of entitlement programs does not follow,” Ward said. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.”

That statement, which we've already addressed, is blisteringly anti-Christian, and coming from the Old Testament, as it does, it also flies in the face of a basic tenement of all three Abrahamic religions.  You are your brother's keeper, or in this case, your sister's.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims all agree on this, even if certain self-declared Christian legislators don't.  But the reason we raise this again here is this, when somebody in the situation these women are in are expected to do something, as we tell them to, it is of course reminding them of their moral obligation as human beings, but it's also the case that those who comply should be part of the community.  Rep. Ward's statement basically would kick them out of the maternity ward and then let us ignore them.  That's not the way thing should be.

Back to the transgenderism item.  

Studies of this tend to show that transgenderism is mostly concentrated in young teenage women, I.e., girls who are young teens, although just the other day I was in the book store and ran into a young man who was attempting to affect, quite unsuccessful, a female appearance.

Well, I was in the bookstore for three days running, but that's another story.

And just before the trip to the bookstore, I became aware that somebody who I've known their entire life now identifies as transgendered, but there's something else, I suspect, going on there that I'll not deal with here.

The teenage girls who exhibit this are pretty much all mildly ADHD and have been pretty much all exposed to pornography.  Basically, what they're doing is reacting to that.  Too young really to even be thinking about sex, they're getting a dose of the weirdest thought of our fallen species right off the bat.  Women doing weird things to men, and vice versa, and saying they want no part.

Indeed, for those who watched the recent documentary on Playboy, a similar thing happened to its early "bunnies" in clubs, who were pretty routinely sodomized, with the reaction that a lot of them came out of the experience heavily traumatized.

The point is this. The young girls live in a society that doesn't protect them at all, and they have no place to turn.  If they turn to their parents, who are mostly white, educated and liberal, the Americans who have no community at all, they'll get "support" by verification, which in reality is no support at all.  Same with the young man at the bookstore or the young man otherwise mentioned above.  The one is definitely a child of a white, liberal, well-educated household and is receiving "support".  My wager would be that the other young man, who was definitely white, could be described the same way.

Set another way, the WASP class that runs the country has completely abandoned any concept of community.  They've abandoned their own community standards in favor of a sort of unthinking soft nihlism. There's no place for distressed people to go.  If they do go somewhere, they'll simply get verification that their "feelings" are okay.

And community is community oriented.  Not individually oriented.

Let's state that again, the community is community oriented.

Kith and Kin, Tribe and Identity.

The thing is, we're a "social animal", as some folks like to note.

But what does that mean?

In our early, early days, when we looked out on a sleepy morning, after the dog got us up early, as dogs are wont to do, we'd see, once we cleared our tipi/lodge/tent/lean to, a group of identical dwellings inhabited by people we all know.  Not only did we know them all, we were likely to be related to all of them, and pretty closely at that.  

Indeed, the inheritance of language even demonstrates that.  The English word "King", comes from "kin", a word that survived in English as sort of a folk word, not too surprisingly, for close relatives.  People who are your "kin" are related to you.  At one time the King was related to you also.  A king was just a tribal chieftain, and a tribe was just a band of cousins, basically.

Over time this obviously changed, but even today, if we stop and think about it, an element of the "nation" in nation states, which the U.S. is not, is that everyone is actually related.  The Swedes, as an ethnic group, all descend from less than 40 people, for example.  The Sámi and Finns, who are routinely regarded as the happiest people on earth, have an ancient, ancient origin and have been living basically where they are since the Bronze Age. They're definitely all related.

Indeed, the Finns provide a good example of what we're trying to get across here.

All Finns are descended from tribal folks who moved into Finland, from Siberia, thousands of years ago, and whose relatives stretched far out into northern Siberal for a very long ways, forming the native and majority people of the region until the Rus moved in.  There are still small populations of Finno Ugeric people in the very far north for a long ways who can really be regarded as left behind Finns.  And as we would suspect, the Finns share a common culture with a common Weltanschauung, a common history, and very significantly for their happy status, a close association with nature in a real sense. 

Sociologist constantly try to figure out what makes the Finns such a happy people, but there you have it to a large degree. They're living their with their kin, in a common culture, and are pretty close to nature for a modern nation. Most people living in that state would be pretty happy too.

Indeed, all would be.

Note that this doesn't say that things can't go badly, they certainly can. But what this does demonstrate is that community, in a real sense, matters, as we're all communal in a way.

Looking outward

But what that also means is that as members of a community, it has expectations and standards that dominate over the individuals.  There are no individualistic communities.

Americans worship a cult of individuality, and over time, we've infected the rest of the western world with it, or at least helped to spread the infection.  We don't like any standards that are inconvenient to us, and have worked to defeat them.

The problem with that is that some standards, indeed a lot of them, exist for a fundamental reason, even if we've forgotten what they were.  At some point, in the advancement of the concept of liberty, we failed to consider Chesterton's Fence.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

That gets us back to our "transgendered" friends.

Conventional culture held that there were two genders, and if you "felt" yourself to be outside of them, you should conform to them, or get help as you might have something else going on.  Modern liberal thought, being libertine in all such matters of personal conduct, has said no, go ahead and take it down.  The results have played out in suicides, increasing definitions of what a person "feels" as the felt change didn't make a person happy, later life regret, and the destruction of social institutions to the determent of the individual and children in particular.

Culture is a library of answers.  Not all of the are right.  But a lot of them are.  The species has been around for a long time, 250,000 to 750,000 years, and a lot of the answers are baked into our genes or were worked out long, long ago.  Telling you to ignore hte culture, and hence the community, is a lot like handing somebody a book and them telling them to interpret the words they way they should feel them to be.

Destroying the community.

The United States has always had a multiplicity of cultures, although nothing like what it currently does, but it also had communities.  The Frontier often really strained this, after the Mexican War, but communities managed to reestablish themselves pretty readily.  

In a large sense, the overall community standards were set originally loosely on Protestant Christianity.  As time went on and the country took in large numbers of Catholics, and then Jews, it changed, in an overall sense, to some degree to accommodate the newer immigrants, but it never really went away.  The newer communities of people, moreover, formed communities within the larger community.  Put another way, Catholics in Wyoming in 1940, let's say, were part of a distinct community and knew it, in the overall larger Protestant, and not terribly religious, Wyoming of that period.

This is not trivial.  Being part of such a community came with a Weltanschauung, a set of expectations, and an expectation of help.  I just ran across such an example of the latter which, in today's' world, would have had a very different ending, but which had a happy one, in context, at the time.  It also had a very Catholic one, and one heavily based on the support of a large close net family spread over three states, but which remained close nonetheless.

After the Second World War there was a sort of super heated concept of the proverbial "melting pot".  Ironically the desire that everyone be an American (and then later a European, in Europe) lead from what was essentially an anti diversity position to a hyper diversity position, to an extreme individualistic position in the society at large.  Whatever it was about the times, and I tend to think it was a reaction to the murderous fanatic nationalism of the Axis powers of World War Two, there was a very distinct "there's no difference between people" and "we're all alike" which didn't celebrate diversity at all, but hugely opposed it.  Indeed, this was evident in the early opposition to the Civil Rights movement which opposed integration partially on the basis that African Americans, one of the oldest demographics in the United States, present since 1619, were "not yet ready" to enjoy full American citizenship. When John Wayne stated in Playboy magazine in 1971 that “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility", he was speaking for a huge percentage of Americans and ironically on the right wing backside of a left wing program of melting everyone and every culture into a single American one.  That goal had been there for decades, but in the post-war economic boom it took on a new, and quite successful, form.

The overall problem with that is that it not only sought to incorporate every element of American society into one, it sought to diminish the differences between individual cultures down to nullities.  The American Civil Religion, never really dominant until that time, came to be, with a sort of loosely Judeo-Christian, Protestantized, pantheism, which held that all religions were basically the same, as long as they more or less were related to Abrahamic faiths.  This isn't true at all, but it became a very dominant line of thought and remains one in the US today, followed by, during the 60s, the same line of thought to include all religions of all types.  All people's cultures, all people's faiths, everything, was all the same.

That logically lead to the point that, if everything was the same, an individual person's view on anything was just as legitimate as anyone else's, no matter informed or ill-informed that opinion might be. Strong cultural elements which operated as brakes towards the dilution of anyone culture, and strong ancient presumptions about certain conducts, were then regarded as being okay to yield to an individual belief, no matter how anemic or poorly thought out it may be.

A rich society can tolerate this for a while, but not indefinitely. As the elastic balloon fo behavior and conduct began to stretch to its limits, weak points in the balloon began to develop.  We're pretty much at the braking point for those now.

Evidence of that is that people who need help, just don't get it.  The mentally ill are simply allowed out on the street under the belief that their life choice is as valid as anyone else's, essentially meaning mental illness doesn't exist.  Prohibitions on drugs that are known to destroy people's lives are removed on the same basis.  And individuals who previously would have been part of tight families that were part of tight communities, are now basically left on their own to try to fit into a world in which options are really massively decreasing, rather than increasing.  When they cry for help, they don't get it.

The anti community

At the same time, the same forces, developed into sort of an anti community.  

The overall WASPish American culture did have a central existential Weltanschauung, that of a combined Christian worldview of Protestant reformers of the Reformation and American religious evangelist of the Awakening movements.  Catholics and Jews were clearly outside those traditions, or even in philosophical opposition to them, but to a surprising degree they adopted some of the core tenants while retaining their own beliefs.

After the Second World War, however, the WASP order began to breakdown, again for reasons that aren't really clear.  The United States remained a majority Protestant country, but the various Protestant faiths, much more than others, began to suffer serious erosion while also abandoning core tenants.  Over time, this has happened to such a degree that Protestant faiths that now retain them are regarded as subcultures, while mainline Protestant Churches careen towards irrelevance.  Catholic intellectuals who like to worry over these topics in the Catholic world should take note that the problem is actually much more expressed in the Protestant world, in which it also saw a universal retreat from orthodoxy toward liberalism.  Some Protestant churches today have so weakened on long-established tenants that they basically only really stand behind the concept that we shouldn't kill each other, and we shouldn't steal, tenants that are easy to adhere to.  Otherwise, they pretty much license going for it, with many members simply going out the door never to return.

There's definitely a lesson in there.

Anyhow, as this occurred mainline Protestant churches that started off with trying to be more accommodating started to simply evolve towards total non judgmentalism, and the members of their now mostly lapsed congregations adopted that world view.  In many cases, highly Protestantized Catholics and Jews did the same.  In the end, the only thing that this class is now willing to be judgmental on is seemingly being judgemental.  A person could literally have all of the vices listed by St. Paul and be accepted as A OK, while a person warning someone not to do those things will be condemned.

That has lead us to where there's no help for those who really need it.

Take again our transgendered example.  Exposed to pornography, as nobody is willing to do anything about it, and raised in a world in which the only thing that really matters is your financial success, grossed out by what they see on the net, and freaked out by the expectation that they have to move away and take jobs as major league accountants, or whatever, they're looking for answers from a community.  If their parents won't provide an answer, and they won't, as they don't want to be judgmental, and if the society at large has been told to shut up, least it be judgmental, at least they have refuge in the intentionally self marginalized.   That'll get attention from somebody, sympathy from somebody, and nobody is going to step in to keep them from falling.

The counter community

At the same time, certain groups that move counter to this direction have done well, often to the surprise of the larger culture, which is telling.

Some years ago, for example, there was a definite trend in Europe in which European women were becoming Muslims.  The number wasn't gigantic, but it was notable. Some even moved to the Middle East.

To the liberalized, no community, Westerner this was astounding.  But by becoming Muslim they were opting for a community which provided support, comfort and answers.  Indeed, the trip to transgenderism, and Islam, isn't really all that much different, although it would shock both groups to hear that.  These women had found a place where their appearance wouldn't be a major factor in their lives, where they weren't going to be expected to act like porn stars, and where they could act according to their long held ingrained DNA based behavior without criticism.

While I'll address orthodoxy more below, in another context, the same forces have seen the move of an appreciable number of main line Protestant Christians into the Orthodox Church.  Faced with coming into churches in which the message was it's nice to be nice to the nice, and we're all nice, and don't be judgmental, they're opting for a Christian religion whose adherence to tradition is open and obvious.  Some Catholics, while I lament it, from liberal dioceses have taken the same path.

Other Protestant have moved from the main line churches or the old "Reformed" churches that have softened, into really hard core Protestant churches.  Indeed, from the outside, it's obvious that the Reformation, which never claimed the majority of Christians, is dying, but in that process the most "reformed" of the Protestant churches and the most lax are simultaneously growing, as the adherents of the center either drop out of attendance all together, comfortable that they are still Christian but okay to do that, or they opt for either a clear message, or ratification that all of their personal vices are completely okay.

It's also worth noting that the LDS have maintained and gained during this period.  Knowledgeable Apostolic Christians have a hard time grasping this, as it's clear to them, with their knowledge of the Apostolic Fathers, that they are the original Christians and there was never a Great Apostasy, but that' probably doesn't have much to do with the attraction to the LDS by those who join it.  It offers a solid community with a clear set of answers, irrespective of whether they are based on truth, and which again provides cover for acting very traditionally.

And they're not alone.

Most Sundays I drive from a well attended Catholic Church, early in the morning, past a well attended Lutheran Church.  I've been to a wedding there.  It's pastor clearly bears the flag of orthodoxy and against the world (so much so that I really wonder why he isn't a Catholic priest).  At the wedding reception, a large group of young people all danced certain dances they'd learned in the church's wider community, of which they're very clearly part.

In contrast, I also drive past an old Presbyterian Church here, which has declined. They proclaim themselves to be reformed out of that church itself. There's never anyone there.

Is this the General Proselytization Thread?

Well, it hadn't started out to be.

Nonetheless, it's worth noting that religions are so much a part of the deposit of knowledge in a culture that if they're centrality to a culture is destroyed, the culture follows.

Indeed, it's interesting to note that some deep lovers of certain cultures who were either agnostic or non-believers so appreciated that, they were nonetheless deeply appreciative of their culture's religion.  Roberto Rosellini, the Italian film director, was not religious himself, but he was enormously attracted to the Catholic Church, its traditions, and ethics, which were central to his world view. Catholic Priest play a heroic role in one of his Rome Trilogy movies, and the centrality of a Catholic world view is obvious in his films.  He lamented the rise of materialism in opposition to Catholicism.  George F. Will, who is agnostic to some degree, is the same way in regard to Christianity in general.  And of course there are many examples of individuals who returned to their faiths, or converted to faith, mid life or even late life, such as C. S. Lewis, William Butler Yeats, and Ernst Jünger.  These individuals stand in stark contrast to "insiders", if you will, who attempt to take their faiths in the opposite direction.

And societies that succeed in ripping religions down often end up reinstating their elements in any event.  The Russian Communists espoused a highly libertine world view as revolutionaries, but by the 1930s Soviet Communists had become as conservative on some matters, particularly on sexual behavior, as any Christian religion ever had been.

It's often noted that religion is nature to human beings, and that very humans actually fail to have one, even people who proclaim they do not.  Even with avowed lapsed or agnostic, the confession of resort to prayer is pretty common.  In theological terms, theologians hold that humans, a creation of God, are built for their creator, and look for him naturally.  The widespread belief in the divine, if not in a universal concept of that divine, is too large to be ignored.

That comes close, of course, to returning to an argument for universalism, which we're not making.  All humans may have some concept of religion, and in reality true atheists are probably so rare as to not exist at all, but not all religions are equal.  Ultimately, there's only one truth on any one thing, religion included.  That's not the point of the thread.

What is the point is that religion is part of culture and is central to it.  No religion, no culture, and no culture, no community.  Wipe that out, and you basically have yourself in the world, and your appetites. And while modern culture may tell you that you are the center of the universe, you aren't.  Your appetites will never be satisfied in that fashion, and you'll always be adrift in that situation.

Indeed, you'll look for a community, and you'll probably find one, make one, or end resort, like so many, to dulling the mind somehow.

The debased community 

Because forming and living in communities is man's natural state, when one community is destroyed, others will spring up in their wake.  Where a community has intentionally been destroyed or suppressed, and it's a natural community, the result is that the community that fills the vacuum will be debased and dangerous, either individually or collectively.

Criminal communities provide an example.  Nearly always formed of the dispossessed and disadvantaged, they offer an income, and community.  Indeed, often made up of strong ethnic ties (kin and kinship) and having strong rituals, they offer a warped substitute of what a stronger more natural and metaphysical community would otherwise offer.  And they stand in stark contrast to the dissolved nice to be nice to the nice ethos that WASPish culture has come to offer.  They're ancient, in a way, recalling tribal bands of the raiding type that existed in the larger European culture before Christianity caused it to fade.

In cultures where religion has been strongly attacked by modernity, and culture accordingly decayed, Communism and radical fascism offer another example.  Communism, it is often noted, was practically as civil religion wherever it took hold, in contrast to its nature when it was revolutionary.  Modern North Korea has actually managed to cross over the line and actually deified Kim Il-sung (김일성), giving him mystical and postmortem divine qualities.  Everywhere it took charge, irrespective of its stand as a revolutionary body, it recreated a structure that was essentially religious in nature in order to create a false community in the place of the one it destroyed, centered on a theoretical universal "working man".

Nazism, in contrast, which is sometimes claimed by some to be a species of Socialism, attacked, but with less success, Christianity in its own land, and then with some more success Christianity in the lands it conquered, and directly proposed to establish, ultimately, a new religion based on the Germanic myths of old. Center to its ethos, however, was the worship of the German Volk, an idealized tribal identity which argued that the Germanic peoples were superior to all others.  Suppressing the Christian culture of Germany, which was already split into two due to the reformation, it sought to supplant it and went a long ways towards creating alternative community expressions through first the party and then the state.

All of this should serve as a warning as to what happen when a culture is torn down.  The German culture had been under attack for decades prior to its fall to the Nazis in 1932, and had not done a very good job of defending itself.  First attacked from the left, and then the right and the left, its experiment with democracy in the 1920s was undertaken at a bad time during which adapting the German culture to democracy was a tall order.  In the end, the Nazi's co-opted the German identity with a shallow cartoon like reflection of it which turned nearly instantly murderous.

Communism worked much the same way.  Coming into power principally where large industrial classes had been marginalized and left out of their cultures, it created a culture based on nothing more than labor which required the murderous suppression of more natural communities based upon anything else.  Communism, however, would not have come about but for the corruption of the culture itself that first occurred in Imperial Russia and which went down in collapse in 1917 due to World War One.

In both instances, the left and the right operated to pervert and destroy the wider culture.

In the US right now, we see ourselves in the same dangerous position. The left has outright gone against the culture from which it sprang, hating the foundation of all the liberties and philosophic thought that made it possible.  A populist right with a very shallow base in the traditional culture seeks to reclaim what it thinks that culture was, but in an extremely shallow manner.  Put another way, a populist right that thinks itself based in Christianity has no more understanding of the culture than the left does, which is all that can allow it to think that it's not its brother's keeper.

Restoring the community.

Well, how do you do that?

I.e, once you've destroyed the community, how do you restore one?

I won't pretend to have the answer to this, but I think there are at least some clues, some of which I noted above.

One thing is to remember Yeoman's Third Law of History, which holds:

Yeoman's Third Law of History.  Culture is plastic, but sticky.

Eh?  What could that mean. Well, just this.  Cultures mold themselves over time, to fit certain circumstances and developments, but they really persevere in ways that we can hardly appreciate.

We like to believe, in the West, that all cultures are the same, but that is very far from true. And we also like to believe that they "modernize," by which we mean that they "westernize."  They can, but their basic roots do not go away, and they don't even really change without the application of pressure and heat.  Cultures, in that sense, are like metamorphic rocks.  It takes a lot of time, heat, and intense pressure to change them, and even then, you can tell what they started off as.

Examples?  Well, when I was a student in school it was often claimed by our teachers that citizens of the USSR liked their government, having known nothing else, and that everything of the old Russian culture was dead.  Man, that couldn't have been further from the truth. When the lid came off the USSR in 1990, all sorts of old cultural attributes of the various old peoples of the Russian Empire came roaring back. Cossacks remembered that they were Cossacks.  Lithuanians remembered they were Lithuanian. The Russian Orthodox Church experienced a spectacular revival.  Even protests in Russia remain uniquely, and strangely, old Russian.  Nothing had actually gone away.

This is true of all cultures. Even here in the US.  The old Puritans may be gone, but much of their views towards our natures and work very much remain.  Even when cultures take big vacations from themselves, they tend to find their way back over time, at that, and will surprisingly reemerge when thought long gone.

People do retain a lot more cultural knowledge than we might suspect, and when things begin to fall apart, they reach back towards it.

One of the interesting examples of this over the years has been the "Traditional Latin Mass" in the Catholic Church.  It never really fully went away, but it was pretty darned hard to find in any form whatsoever after "the Spirit of Vatican II" went to work in the Church.  The altar rails went out, things were moved, and Latin left the premises.

Except it didn't, and when allowed, it tended to come roaring back in.  When Pope Benedict allowed it to be used fairly freely, it exploded.  Pope Francis (dob 1936) had now taken it back out in a controversial and lamented move which is likely a mistake.  At any rate, no matter what the situation with it was, it tended to attract the young in some areas much more than the old.

There's definitely a lesson in that, and in the overall picture.  A post Boomer generation that was largely abandoned, in cultural terms, by the Boomers, tested orthodoxy and found it meaningful, and not just in the way noted.

And that may well be the point we're at now.  The Boomer generation's "if it feels good, do it", mentality yielded into the "greed is good" mentality in the same cohort.  Both are now fighting it out in what is practically a house to house fight, with lots of casualties.  In the meantime, people are reporting to the hospitals of orthodoxy, which is a trip back into conservatism.

The problem is there's no roadmap, lots of blind alleys, and not too many to lead the way.

And yes, that doesn't really offer much in the way of a suggestion on how to proceed.

What I do know, however, pizza and bowling night isn't it.  And orthodoxy looks outwards at a much greater whole, not inside at your own individual self.  In order to get there, you have to accept that you end up giving up a lot, including the illusion of the primacy of yourself.

However, you secure a hundred times more.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXXI. The ⚥ Edition.

We just updated our ongoing thread on the television series, The Secrets of Playboy.  If you haven't read it, you ought to.  It's here:

Secrets of Playboy

 

Why the teenage waitress from a century ago on that thread?  Read it, and it'll become plain.

Anyhow, if you follow the show, you'll learn how Hugh Hefner was totally debased, and how those around him, if male, became debased, and those subject to him who were female, had their lives destroyed.  He treated women like toys and there's good reason to believe he didn't like women, really.  Not as human beings.

Playboy magazine was part of the Sexual Revolution, that culturally failed and destructive movement that we're still suffering from and living with.  Hefner's place in that was something like Goebbles place in the Nazi revolution, if we want to look at the Nazi movement in that fashion, in the Third Reich.  If you take his own claims seriously, which there is some reason to reduce, he had a place akin, perhaps, to Hitler in that movement, or Lenin in the Communist Revolution in Russia.

And yes, the comparison to those evil men is intentional.  He was an evil person, albeit one, who like those earlier evil people, attracted followers.

The record is far to clear to ignore.  The impact of the Sexual Revolution was wholly and entirely destructive, and women in particular, and society in general, have suffered enormously because of it, and they still do.

All of which relates, oddly enough to a series of things in the Zeitgeist in recent days.

Let's start with this headline:

Maren Morris is celebrating the way she shows off "country female sexuality" ahead of her next album release.

What Morris had in mind?  Probably not.

I didn't know until I saw the headline who Maren Morris is, and I still basically don't.  I don't like country music, which is generally bad music and often has not much to do with actual country things.  I learned, however, that Morris appeared topless (at least) in Playboy.

"Country female sexuality"?

Well, given what Playboy is, we could ask if she meant the Frontier brothel variant of female sexuality, as all her photos do is serve to have men check out and her naked boobs and imagine her in bed.

Her photos apparently appeared several years ago, so this revived controversy actually recalls the brothel analogy unfortunately well.  It's been in the news as she revived the story, posting, apparently, one of her topless photos on the net somewhere.

This doesn't advance the cause for women in any sense, and certainly not in the bold independent women fashion.  It's not a strike for, for example, female farmers, of which there are a lot.  No, rather, its a strike for the objectification of women, and through a vehicle associated with their destruction and violence perpetuated upon them.

It can be argued, of course, that that has something to do with "female sexuality", but not in a good way.

We've long held that every time one woman does something like this, it sets things back for all.

Shame.

And then there's a name that's been in the news:

Deporting Alina Kabaeva?

The flag of Switzerland, where Kabaeva resides with her children at least part of the year.

Who?

Alina Kabaeva is a former Uzbek gymnast and Olympian.  By all accounts, she was an excellent one.  She's also the mother of three children.

Well, so what?

There's a campaign going on to deport her from Switzerland to Russia, along with her children.

Why?

Well, it's consistently rumored that one Vladimir Putin is the father of the children of the 38-year-old Kabaeva, who is a resident, currently, of Switzerland, but who is a Russian citizen (although not an ethnic Russian) who has, in the past, gone back and forth.  Indeed, the rumors were so strong that at one time a Russian newspaper reported that they were engaged, which resulted in the newspaper being shut down.

Putin was married to Lyudmila from 1983 to 2014, but they divorced that year.  Not a lot, really, is actually known about Putin's private life.  The parentage of Kabaeva's children is routinely reported to be Putin, but if he is the father, it's certainly knot acknowledged publicly.

Well, again, so what.

Well, for one thing it brings up, maybe, the odd elements of power and hypocrisy.  Part of the reason that Putin claims to have invaded Ukraine has to do with the Orthodox Church.

Now, the largest of the Orthodox Churches is the Russian Orthodox Church.  But it's a fundamental element of every single branch of Christianity, Will Smith's apparent views aside, that extramarital sex is a mortal sin, no exceptions (are you listening to that Will?).  If Putin has, and maybe he hasn't, fathered three children with Kabaeva, he's acting oddly for a man whose has cited Orthodoxy even as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

Which assumes that he has been acting badly in this area, which maybe he hasn't been. Maybe he and Kabaeva, who was a Muslim but who has converted to Christianity, are actually married. We might very well not know, and we do know that while Orthodoxy frowns on divorce, it allows it under some circumstances.

Or maybe Putin is like some monarchs of old who felt that their positions of power gave them some sort of personal pass in this area.  Even Czar Nicholas II, who lived an exemplary married life, and who has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church, had a mistress when he was young.

Or maybe Putin is just as Orthodox as his position as a would be Czar requires him to be.  It is known that his mother was a devout Orthodox Christian.  Putin observes Russian Orthodox Holy Days, so maybe he is an observant member, although former advisor Sergei Pugacheve claims he is not.

At any rate, Kabaeva is a convert, and maybe she's straightened out. Should she be deported from Switzerland?

Well, at first blush that seems silly and cruel.  It's not as if she invaded Ukraine, and her children certainly didn't.

On the other hand, such is the fickle fate of courtesans, if that's what she is, or the spouses of monarchs, if we want to assume a marital union.  Marie Antoinette didn't retire to Paris, after all.

Choices do have implications.

Blows In Defense of Honor?

Speaking of spouses, and ones with a bit of an odd relationship to each other, the news this past week has been filled with the story of Will Smith striking a blow upon Chris Rock, in defense of the honor of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

While everyone now knows the story, in spite of the low level of Oscar ceremony viewing, what occurred is this.  Rock, who has a sort of rough sense of humor, but who is funny, made fun of Mrs. Smith's baldness, which is due to a medical condition.  In this era of intentionally bald women, I don't know that female baldness is the big deal it once was, but it is a medical condition in her case and making fun of somebody's medical condition is rude, no doubt about it.

Having said that, the joke wasn't really all that aggressive, and related her condition to the movie G. I. Jane, which I havne't seen and I'm not going to.  FWIW, that movie featured Demi Moore as a woman going through Navy SEAL training, and she had a shaved head.

Anyhow, Smith laughed, but Mrs. Smith cringed.  Then, in reaction, Will Smith went up and violently struck Rock, who reeled from the blow.  Rock actually recovered his humor, at first, quickly, making a joke of it, but it then ended up in a yelling match between the two, with Rock on the defensive.

Frankly, Smith was lucky. The slap was in the nature of what is sometimes called a "sucker punch", in that it was unexpected.  Lots of men in other situations would have hit back, which Rock did not do, to his credit.

There was actually an ovation for Smith's violence at the time, although some were horrified immediately.  Denzel Washington took Smith aside.  Washington is the son of a Pentecostal minister, and is quite religious, warning Smith that at a person's height is when the Devil comes for them. Smith later, after winning an Oscar, gave a teary speech in which he apologized, but not to Rock (who has been silent on the matter), attributing his actions to having just appeared in The King about the father of the Williams tennis sisters.  Mr. Williams condemned the violence later.  At any rate, he went on about how he had been influenced by the role and felt God was calling him to protect those he loved at this stage in his life.

Well, to be blunt, he ought to get his own icky house in order in that case, assuming that he hasn't.  If he has, given his public declarations on the topic, he ought to clear that situation up.

Smith was raised in a Christian household, but he's actually attended therapy in order to overcome its influences so that marital infidelity, introduced by Jada Pickett Smith to some degree, and in an unapologetic fashion, can flow along in his marriage.  Neither of them has been faithful to the other, and it's an "open" marriage, and publicly so.  Smith felt guilty about that at first, which apparently didn't stop him, but with counselling he was able to overcome a central feature of being married and a central tenant of his Christian faith.

What that means in terms of his current faith, I don't know, but there isn't any monotheistic religion that looks up infidelity kindly.  Apostolic Christianity certainly holds it to be a mortal sin, and the tenants of any other Christian religion does as well, in so far as I know.  Even those few monotheistic religions that allow polygamy don't look on infidelity kindly, and the entire "open marriage" thing is an example of the modern disease of thinking every standard of the past doesn't really apply to us as we're so modern, even though they do, and our transgression in that regard have led to untold misery.

None of which means that you can't defend the honor of somebody who isn't really that honorable in general, but this application of The Old Law is really interesting.  It's the sort of thing that led to fisticuffs and even duels over the honor of women at some times.  An interesting revival of a standard that once was widespread, probably still is, but hasn't been publicly acknowledged for a while.

Of course, the thing about the Old Law is that it brings up the Old Standards.  The Old Standards travel together, not by themselves.

The Reappearance of the Old Order

Speaking of the men, women, and old standards, something interesting has been constantly reported on regarding the war in Ukraine, and with admiration by the press.

And what that is, is the that at the borders, most of the refugees are women and children, as "their men have returned to fight".

And nobody thinks that odd or unusual.

It's a roaring example of our Eleventh Rule of Human Behavior, and it's not the only one.

In the Russo Ukrainian tragedy, the Ukrainian men are fighting, and fighting heroically. Women are being heroic as well, taking their children where they can and fleeing, and suffering enormously. The tragic photograph of the pregnant woman being carried on a structure, whom we know lost her baby and died herself as the result of a Russian strike, will likely go down as the most famous photograph of the war.

The old order roaring back.

Now, some Ukrainian women are bearing arms.  The other day, a young woman (very young, probably a teen) was interviewed in a village where she was serving as a Ukrainian militiaman.  And she isn't the only example.  Be that as it may, however, this is a male fight for the most part.  Some women will fight in it, as wars involving partisan action have always included.

So far nobody has really remarked, however, how remarkable this really is, in our modern world where we pretend the distinction between men and women in relation to combat doesn't really exist.  Not only does it exist, it's very evident here.  Almost everyone in the Ukrainian service, regular and irregular, is male.  All the Russian troops are male.  Almost all of the Ukrainian volunteers are male.  Almost all (but not quite all, I saw a photo of an Italian female pilot the other day) of the foreign volunteers are male, probably well over 90%.

Indeed, that latter fact is telling.  NATO's public press likes to feature photographs of striking braided women in uniform (it's common enough that it can't be a repeated coincidence, and frankly its slightly weird).  Military press photos from the US military seem to omit the secret "look at the cute girl in the beret" feature that NATO photos do, and are genuinely simply more in the nature of a certain type of news photo, which is much more businesslike.

From NATO Twitter feed, typical US non cheesecake photo of a woman soldier, in this case of the Third Infantry Division.

But the concept in the West of women in combat is completely untested and the historical examples grossly exaggerated.  The most commonly cited one is the Soviet example from World War Two, which was actually much more constrained than those who cite it would like to admit.  Indeed, the Soviets apparently didn't regard it as hugely successful, as limited as it was, as after the war, they eliminated that role for their female citizens. The heir to the Red Army, the Russian Army, is pretty much a male deal, just like the Ukrainian Army. The same is true of the Israeli Army, in spite of the occasional citations to it.

Wars are a cultural test of massive proportions, and the old rules and orders tend to come roaring back during them. 

Struggling with the New and Biological Order

Pity poor Judge Blackburn, caught in a confirmation hearing and presented with questions that pit her between the spirit of the age as seen by those who are supporting her and the spirit of the age from those who oppose them, with biology in the middle.

BLACKBURN: I’d love to get your opinion on that, and you can submit that. Do you interpret Justice Ginsburg’s meaning of men and women as male and female?
JACKSON: Again, because I don’t know the case, I do not know how I’d interpret it. I’d need to read the whole thing.
BLACKBURN: Ok. And can you provide a definition for the word “woman”?
JACKSON: Can I provide a definition?
BLACKBURN: Mmhm.
JACKSON: No. I can’t.
BLACKBURN: You can’t?
JACKSON: Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.
BLACKBURN: So, you believe the meaning of the word “woman” is so unclear and controversial that you can’t give me a definition?
JACKSON: Senator, in my work as a judge, what I do is I address disputes. If there’s a dispute about a definition, people make arguments, and I look at the law and I decide.
BLACKBURN: The fact that you can’t give me a straight answer about something as fundamental as what a woman is underscores the dangers of the kind of progressive education that we are hearing about.

Okay, the way she's been quoted, we note, is unfair. She did not say that only a biologist could define what a woman is, but rather she stated, albeit you have to know the context, that the legal definition of a woman in the context of any one case had to be understood from the law of the case.  The way that American law is currently interpreted, her answer is quite correct.

But that raises a larger, indeed, an existential, question.

Earlier this week (at the time that I was posting this) there was something called the International Day of Transgender Visibility.  Anyone day in the year is now designated for something, and indeed typically a lot of somethings.  March 31 was also, for example, Anesthesia Tech Day, Cesar Chavez Day, Dance Marathon Day, Eiffel Tower Day, International Hug a Medievalist Day, National Bunsen Burner Day, National Clams on the Half Shell Day, National Crayon Day, National Farm Workers Day  National Prom Day, National She's Funny That Way, Tater Day,Transfer Day (U.S. Virgin Islands) and World Backup Day.  Some of these are obviously a lot more serious than others.  Transgender Visibility Day, however, got a shout out from the President, who issued a statement recognizing, in essence, their cause and taking a position on bills that have been in this area.

Wyoming was one of the states with such a bill, and like most such efforts in this conservative but not as conservative as people think state, it didn't go anywhere in our legislature.  Our bill concerned transgendered athletes, restricting sport participation to your biologically assigned gender.  Utah had a similar bill which passed, was vetoed by their Governor, and then overridden by their legislature following that so that it has become law.  South Dakota passed one which was signed into law by their right wing controversial governor, Kristi Noem.

Just after all of that occurred, the reason for the entire debate in athletics came into sharp focus as a genetically male swimmer who has undergone medial gender reassignment won a NCAA Division 1 swimming championship in the 500 yard freestyle event.

This does bring into focus the biological nature of the debate, and the peculiar nature of contemporary western liberalism.  The swimmer is genetically a man, and he's built, and frankly looks, like one.  He has a powerful male swimmers build, although if he was competing as a man, he would not have taken the title.  Competing as a woman, which he can only due to surgery and pharmaceuticals, he took the championship, thereby beating out the nearest genetically female swimmer.

In some very odd way, although nobody has noted it, this actually answers the question that the Billy Jean King v. Bobby Riggs match supposed was supposed to years ago.  Taking away the circus like nature of that tennis event, males will in fact beat women at sports every time for the most part, save for sports that women are uniquely biologically adapted to.  There will be exceptions, to be sure, but if sports were not separated by gender, women would be so rare in most sports as to fade to nonexistent, something nobody wants.

That's what not addressing this in some fashion, however, actually argues for.  The unfairness could be eliminated in sports overnight by just not having male and female sports.

Which would operate a larger, and massive, societal unfairness to women.

All of which begs the larger question, which is the one used as a "gotcha" on Judge Jackson.  That is, what is trangenderism.

Nobody really knows, no matter what people may wish to claim.

The basic nature of the problem is that it's based on individual perception.  That is, people who are "transgendered" have a strong feeling that they should be members of the opposite sex in spite of their DNA. That doesn't make them a member of the opposite sex, however, it only makes them desire to be.  They can't achieve that goal without surgery and ongoing pharmaceuticals.

But should surgery and pharmaceuticals be used to defeat our genes?  It's clear in the case of addressing a defect that few people would object.  I.e., if a person can correct something like bad eyesight, or a defective organ, and return to the established obvious baseline, that's one thing. But what about things that go beyond that and fundamentally alter us in some way.

This isn't the only example, but the curious thing about this that, so far, most of the things that fit into this category involve sex in some fashion.  Cosmetic surgery exists to repair all sorts of things, from birth defects to the impact of terrible injuries, but the thing that receives the most attention, and advertising, is expanding the size  of boobs. That's one such example, and it's purely cosmetic, but unquestionably related to one single thing, sex appeal.  Surgery and drugs to defeat natural sex assignment goes far beyond that.

But to what extent should a person do this, or be allowed to do this, on perception alone, and even if they are fully allowed, to what extent does the rest of society have to recognize the medical defeat of nature in this instance?  The following stories in this area don't provide much comfort for the individuals who embark on this path.

Topics Where You Least Expect Them

This entire debate came up  not only the Supreme Court nomination hearings, but also on Twitter in the form of a ban on the Babylon Bee.

For those who aren't familiar with the Babylon Bee, it's a satire site that originally was light Christian satire.  I.e., the authors of the Bee are Christians, but it poked fun at things that come up in Christian circles and debates.

Early on it was quite funny, but there's probably only so much satire you can really do in this area before it becomes truly offensive or just ceases being funny and, at least in my view, the latter is the case for the Bee.  And recently the Bee has crossed over from its original focus into outright satire, something that's actually quite an art to accomplish well (the best online satire entity in my view is The Beaverton, a Canadian focused website).

The Bee was banned on Twitter for its satirical post naming U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Levine as "Man of the Year".  It flew in the face of woke convention by referring to Levine, born in 1957 as Richard and gender reassigned in 2011, at which point changed names to Rachel, as "he".

The Bee's satire was really not very funny, which is perhpas because effective satire is difficult, or perhaps because it was genuinely an attack and was fairly mean spirited, no matter what your view is on this.  It ended up getting the Bee banned from Twitter, which hasn't caused it to back down one bit.  Indeed, they're seeking paying subscribers by noting that they've been attacked by liberals.   And on April 1, April Foods Day, it doubled down by issuing a false apology, which was also quite mean spirited.

Adding to a show on how this is all part of a raging culture war, political figures of the stoke the fires class immediately picked up on it, including such figures as Lauren Boebert, all of which raises a distressing question that was raised without reference to this in another forum, which we'll get to in a moment. 

Before we do, however, we'll note that a similiar, but much less pronounced, Twitter storm broke out on the left due to a statement by former Trump spokesman Kayleigh McEnany, who, of course, is now on Fox News, where they all seem to go. That follows here:

The anecdote (sic, antidote) to darkness is light. And the anecdote (sic, antidote) to a really grim future is filling the world with a lot of Christian babies.

This caused a mini tempest in Cybersphere, predictably, no doubt in part because it came up in such a truly odd venue and way.  But  this also taps into a bunch of stuff in the culture wars.

Right away, some organs on the left went on the extreme opposite. Salon, for example, ran an article that stated "Kayleigh McEnany wants more "Christian babies": It's an overt call-out to racist paranoia".  Salon goes on to claim that McEnany is espousing the "great replacement" theory.

That statement only makes sense, if it makes sense at all, from an American or at least an ethnic European prospective and a left wing one at that.  Indeed, the statement itself is paranoid.  Those familiar with the history of the Church would realize that while Christianity spread extraordinarily rapidly following the Resurrection, one of its claims to truth (it was amazingly fast), the first adherents were of course Jewish and the faith was (and the Apostolic Christians remain) amazingly color-blind, with one of the most important early saints, St. Augustine of Hippo, being a North African of at least half Berber descent (his mother, St. Monica, was a Berber).  In the United States, the "black church" remains one of the most culturally influential Christian denominations.   Therefore, "lots of Christian babies" doesn't mean a "lot of white babies" by any means.  Of course, to those at Salon, chances are that they view a Christian world view as somehow racist, as it isn't an Islamic or Buddhist, or whatever, worldview.  

The interesting thing about this overall, however, is how it shows a change in views over time and context, which is part of what this blog tracks.

Traditionally, large families were regarded as a blessing from God, with this view going back into antiquity.  Efforts to limit family size are in fact quite recently, having really come in during the early 20th Century. An interesting part of that, however, is that it was part of what was openly discussed as part of the "Battle of the Cradle" in cultural terms, with those discussing it not regarding themselves as racist.

This depended upon the person expressing the views, of course.  But in European and European American upper classes it was common to express concern that foreign overseas, non-European, cultures would pose a threat to Europeans due to their perceived high birth rate (which probably wasn't, in reality, much higher at the time, if higher at all, than the European one).  None other than Theodore Roosevelt, who was an advocate of Americanism, noted in correspondence that he "had done his duty" in this regard, by having several children.

Whatever a person thinks of that view, it's also the case that birth control of the Margaret Sanger type originally came in, as people like Sanger had noticed the dropping birth rates in the upper class and worried that higher birthrates among African Americans posed a societal threat.  Part, but not all, of her early birth control efforts were focused on the hope of dropping the African American birthrate based on that obviously very racist reason.

In the over century long time that's passed since then, the same demographic that Roosevelt and Sanger were part of have had their birth rates drop below the replacement level by a fairly substantial margin.  Whether McEnany was expressing a variant of that fear, I don't know, but I doubt it.

I don't know what branch of Christianity she hails from or is a member of.  Looking her up, she went to a Catholic high school, but that is not a reliable indicator of a person's religion really, as many non-Catholics attend those.  She always refers to herself as a "Christian", but not by denomination, which suggests that she's probably a Protestant, as Protestant's are more likely to self identify in that fashion. Catholics usually identify as Catholics, which is a common way members of a minority self identify.  I.e., the US is a Protestant country culturally which is obvious if you are a Catholic, and for that reason Catholics tend to identify themselves as Catholics.

Depending upon the answer to this, there would be different paths which a person might go to dive deeper into her opinion, assuming that needs to be done, or that the opinion has any additional depth to it. Given as we're not really doing that, but looking at other things, as we're inclined to do, we'll keep going down the road a bit. 

One way that people can interpret it is the way the Duggers have.  I.e., they're part of a "quiver full" movement.  I don't know a lot about that other than it emphasizes, apparently, having a lot of children.  The other way, however, is more of the traditional Apostolic Christian way, which really doesn't, even though some Apostolic Christians families do not.  It might be best expressed by the statements of Fr. Hugh Babour, who is a Catholic intellectual and who often has surprisingly nuanced views on topics that a person wouldn't expect.  On this topic, however, Fr. Barbour just always states that the purpose of marriage is to welcome children "and raise them up for the worship of God".

Anyhow, it's interesting how in a century or less we've gone as a culture to a point where the left wing of the culture assumes that making a statement that would have been simply regarded as an expression of faith, that most people probably held, and which the left itself held in a fashion, has gone to being one that's assumed to be racist and can only be stated on the right.

Slow Ride

Okay, onto something else.

Recently, a "trucker's convoy" was in the news, but only briefly.

Their timing was remarkably bad.

The entire concept, of course, came up due to the Canadian "Freedom Convoy" which had its origins in some truck drivers protesting being made to be tested and quarantined if they were unvaccinated and crossed from the US into Canada.  It ballooned into a general Canadian right wing protest over . . . well everything.  Ultimately, it got so bad in Ottawa that the Canadian government had to declare a state of emergency.

This all got a lot of press.

Then somebody got the idea of doing an American variant.

Well, no sooner had they started putting that together than the Biden Administration essentially gave upon mask requirements for most things and all sorts of states, including Democratically run ones did too. There really wasn't anything left to protest, but nonetheless the convoy got rolling.

And then Putin attacked Ukraine.

At that point, nobody was interested in this story anymore.  Indeed, it had become a complete anachronism, and at a point in time in the nation where there's a trucking shortage, and the price of fuel is going up, what the heck?

Well, in Washington D. C. a biker, who may have had enough, got his revenge.

A bicyclist, that is.  

He got in front of the convoy, and in spite of the trucks honking their horns and the like, he just peddled along at a crawl, and they had to crawl too.

A video of his actions was viewed 4,200,000,000,000 times.

Last Prior Edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part XXX. The Russo Ukrainian War Edition.