Ecclesiastes and the Romance of Lost Causes

Every once in a while, I get in a blue funk for which the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is a good antidote.  This might seem strange, since it is by no means a cheerful book.  Consider, for example, Ecclesiastes 2:9-11:

So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and this was my portion of all my labour. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

But the blue mood I referred to has less to do with any real suffering -- compared with a great many, probably the great majority both in history and today, I have no really valid complaints -- and more to do with the suspicion that I have stupidly lost opportunities that could have made me truly happy.  If only I had had the nerve to ask this girl out, or if my courtship of that other girl had been successful; if only I had chosen a different major in college, or had chosen a different career path after getting my degrees; if only I had taken a different job within my current career path; if only!  Then I would surely feel less vexation of spirit.  King Solomon answers me, "Don't worry about that, kid.  I had all the women, all the wealth, all the power, all the success, all the acclaim -- all the things that men strive for -- and it all turned to ashes in my mouth."  

This life is, as the Salve Regina reminds us, the Valley of Tears, neither Eden nor Heaven, and these worldly goals cannot change that.  It's not that different choices and outcomes are without consequence -- they do matter somewhat -- but they are not the One Thing Needful.

This year, it is easy to see people making the same mistake on a larger scale -- but hardly for the first time.  For ages Europeans have lamented, "If only the Roman Empire had not fallen!"  Over the years, this has been echoed in such cries as, "If only the Arabs had been crushed when they first burst out!"  "If only the Crusader states had lasted!"  "If only Constantinople had not fallen!"  As we come closer to the present age, the laments become more controversial.  "If only Europeans had not discovered the Americas!" "If only the Spanish Armada had succeeded!" "If only James II had remained in power!" "If only the French Revolution had not taken place!"  Closer to home:  "If only Stonewall Jackson had not doubled back and been shot by his own men!"  "If only Lincoln had survived to the end of his term!"  "If only America had joined the League of Nations!" And, of course, "If only Kennedy had not been assassinated, Camelot would have lasted, and JFK would have ushered America and the world into a utopia of peace and justice and love and joy and wisdom!"  Feel free to add your own; we all do.

Each of these examples were important to history.  Each of them caused at least some people to suffer.  Some of them, like the Kennedy assassination, were sudden and unforeseen, and could have been avoided by trivial circumstances; others, like the fall of Constantinople or the Crusader states, were long foreseen and could not have easily been prevented.  The point remains that whatever good may have come from changing these events would be a good subject to decay.

For example, there is a trope in science fiction about going back in time and killing Adolf Hitler before he came to power.  "If only he could have been removed from history, how much suffering could have been avoided!"  Maybe, but we will never know.  Hitler scarcely invented antisemitism, nor did he create the dissatisfaction with the end of the First World War, so the Nazi Party would still have come into existence, maybe under the leadership of Hermann Göring.  The alternative leader might have been more cautious, proceeding more slowly than Hitler did -- slowly enough, perhaps, to avoid alarming the public in the USA and UK, slowly enough to allow Germany and Italy to properly prepare for war, slowly enough for Germany to develop ballistic missiles (like the V-2 rocket) and jet fighters before the war even began, maybe even slowly enough for Germany to develop the atomic bomb.  What happened in real history was bad enough, but it could have been even worse.

Like Tantalus, we are tormented by seeming goods that we cannot actually attain.  Maybe this is part of our punishment; at any rate, it seems to be part of being human.  In the final analysis, though, all we really need to mourn are our sins, and we must remember that

all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

EDIT:  Reading this again, I see I switched back and forth between two different ideas.  The first is that worldly success is not enough to make us truly happy, even while we have it; the second is that worldly success is both incomplete and transient.  Ecclesiastes also makes the same two points, and although they are different (like the soul and the body) I think they are related (like the soul and the body).

EDIT 2:  Perhaps it really is "part of being human", since even Jesus engaged in it.  "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" -- Matthew 23:37

EDIT 3:  Don't misunderstand my previous edit.  OF COURSE Jesus understands history better than we do, and He properly values historical events.  Jerusalem allowing God to gather her children together would not have been merely worldly, and it is PRECISELY what was needed to make them truly happy.  He does perfectly what we do poorly; but regretting what might have been still seems to be part of being human.

Life Sentences

In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis called for the abolition of life sentences, as he had earlier called for the abolition of the death penalty.

• Each appeal was made not on the basis of the fear of God, nor on Christian charity, nor was either made on the basis of the justice, but rather on the "new appreciation" for human dignity.  Take away the title of pope, and no one would give such a lame argument a second look.  Human dignity comes only and entirely from our relationship with God -- our creation in His image (meaning we are more than merely material, being moral and spiritual as well), the Incarnation of God the Son in which He became man, and His sacrifice for us poor sinners.  Absent this relationship to God, human dignity is no more outstanding than chimpanzee dignity.
• As a Church teaching, none of these suggestions are proclamations of infallible doctrines.  Their staying power, then, will depend on how well they integrate into actually indispensable and trustworthy teachings, or at least into compelling logic.  So far, this does not look good.
• The practical effect of saying that even men like Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson should have been eventually freed is that fewer people will take his stance against the death penalty seriously.  It becomes very hard to accept that the Pope actually believes that justice is a real, spiritual good towards which we should work, softening it through forgiveness rather than laxity.  It becomes hard to believe he really accepts, "But I say to you, that whosoever is angry with his brother, shall be in danger of the judgment. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council. And whosoever shall say, Thou Fool, shall be in danger of hell fire," when he also seems to believe, "But whosoever shall rape a boy, and murder him, and cannibalize him, shall be subject to 10 years, tops, in a prison that treats him well and respects his dignity."  Finally, it becomes clear that the safety of the law-abiding public is a very low priority for Pope Francis. 
  

It takes more than the bare minimum.

On September 19, 2020, Andrew McCarthy wrote in "Replacing Justice Ginsburg: Politics, Not Precedent" at National Review Online the following.

It is ridiculous for leading senators, administration officials, influential partisans, and pundits to enunciate the high-minded principles and precedents that supposedly control the propriety and timing of a nomination.

In reality, there are only two rules, both set forth in the Constitution: A president, for as long as he or she is president, has the power to nominate a person to fill a Supreme Court seat; and that nominee can fill the seat only with the advice and consent of the Senate. That’s it. Everything else is posturing. Everything else is politics.

Of course, it is true that the Constitution does not require the president, or anyone else for that matter, to be courteous.  Nor does it require him to be persuasive, or industrious, or wise, or even well-intentioned.  Then again, the Constitution does not guarantee that the president's term will be successful or good for the country, nor that Republic will endure, nor that the endurance of the Republic would be a good thing that ought to be desired.  The Founding Fathers knew that it takes more than a bare minimum to give civilization, let alone democracy, a chance of success, but they also knew it was hopeless to enumerate in detail all that is necessary:  there is too much to say, for one thing, and it is unnecessary except for fools and scoundrels, who would at any rate dismiss it -- for instance, by saying it is mere posturing.

This is not about the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg; I very much hope Judge Barrett is confirmed.  But for at least my whole life, presidents, along with "leading senators, administration officials, influential partisans, and pundits" have done their Machiavellian best to cast off all restraints to their power, ignoring law, tradition, ethics, and the Constitution when they could, and giving perverse interpretations to them when they could not completely ignore the restraints.  In the long run, the attitude expressed by Andrew McCarthy is a more serious problem than any one seat on the Supreme Court.

Why I Can No Longer Call Myself "Conservative", Updated

Suppose a self-appointed Conservative "leader" consistently labeled homosexual activity, and the whole subculture as wrong, but always with a "wink, wink; nudge, nudge; say no more" attitude that reassures his readers that he is not one of those nasty people who actually believe it is really wrong, but that he is obliged by his position to sorta kinda condemn it a little.  Suppose that this same "leader" has been unsparing in his criticism of Trump, but would have us believe that Biden is a well-meaning old man who could not be blamed for the actions his administration and party would likely take were he to be elected, to say nothing of his record in office over the past several decades.  Likewise, this "Conservative leader" wants us to know what a fine, praiseworthy woman Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, consequences for the unborn be damned.

You might then reasonably conclude that the word "Conservative" did not mean much to this person, except perhaps a meal ticket.

Now step back and consider:  although I have one particular person in mind, you could really put the names of all the prominent "Conservatives" over the past three decades into a hat, draw one name at random, and there is a good chance the description above applies to the owner of that name, too.

Seven years ago I said that I could not call myself a Conservative because that label carries too many connotations.  That remains true.  It is interesting, though, that the same label also carries too little meaning.

The Eyes of Others

This is a response to a posting on Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative, which begins as follows.

If you could live out one of these alter egos for two weeks, experiencing the world through their eyes, which do you think would bring you the most useful new understanding of the world:

1. the opposite sex
2. a different race
3. someone from a non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) country [or, for my readers who live in a non-WEIRD country, a WEIRD one]?

This post illustrates an error that is disturbingly common today, even among people who should know better:  the error that our bodies are superficial "shells" that are as external to our being and as interchangeable as clothes.  This is not the Christian teaching, which is that the body is on integral part of any human being -- which is why we do not become angels after we die, we await (hopefully in Heaven!) the General Resurrection which will reunite our souls with our bodies.  This also is also important to understand the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Jesus:  He did not take on human nature for a mere thirty-something years, but forevermore.  No, this is the sort of thing one would expect from a Gnostic, a Buddhist, or a Hindu.

We can imagine being all manner of things that we are not and cannot become, like a different race or sex, as Dreher suggests; but we cannot actually become those other things, and therefore we cannot genuinely see things from their perspectives.  It is not enough to experience the same circumstances.  A person's perspective also comes from his or her strengths and weaknesses, his or her world view and philosophical framework, his or her body of previous experiences, and it is not ultimately possible to share all these without actually being that other person; but we cannot be that person without ceasing to be ourselves.  

Meanwhile, it is dangerous to treat our imaginations as though they were actual data.  Seriously, think back to how you imagined some major change in your life would be -- going off to college, a developing romance, a move to a new city, a new job, etc.  Now think how different the actual experiences were from what you had imagined.  If you have such difficulty imagining yourself in slightly different circumstances, how much should you trust your imagination of being a different person?

Sadly, this is par for the course with Dreher and The American Conservative.

EDIT:  A valid objection would be that all Dreher is asking for is imagination, and one of the purposes of imagination is to consider what we cannot directly experience.  For example, we can start with the assumption that there is a largest prime number and show that that assumption leads to a contradiction.  It is hard to see how such reasoning could be applied to a man imagining he is a woman, though; contradiction would only tell him that he is not a woman, which he hopefully already knew.  In fact, it is only the reasoning after the assumption of a largest prime number that makes the assumption useful.  Dreher's suggestion, though, is really imagination for the sake of imagination, not imagination for the sake of reason.  In the middle of Weirdmageddon, when most of the world is trapped in Mabel's wish-fulfillment prison, what we really need is more reason, not more imagination.  

EDIT 2:  I mean, come on!  This is clearly Portland in 2020.

Hope

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

1 Corinthians 13:13 refers of course to the theological virtues, but the hope I want to talk about here is not the theological virtue, but what I might call its shadow on the secular plane.  This hope is not the same thing as optimism.  Suppose, for example, a man sees a plane crash.  Pessimism might keep him from running to the crash site, because it would make him assume the worst; pessimism is the projection of the vice of despair on the secular plane.  Optimism might also keep him from running to the crash site, because it would make him assume everybody is OK; optimism is the projection of the vice of presumption on the secular plane.  Hope sends a man running to crash site knowing that it might be bad, but hoping it is not so bad as to be beyond all help.  Hope is not ignorance nor a refusal to face reality; it is the determination to do one's best even though it may take circumstances beyond our knowledge or control to achieve the desired result.

Hope has sent countless immigrants to America, each wanting a better future for himself and his children.  Hope sent settlers to the west, knowing that the farm or ranch  would never achieve its full potential in their lifetimes but that with enough time and effort, it might support many generations in the future.  Hope sent men in debt or in trouble with the law to the frontier where the sought to escape their past mistakes and re-invent themselves.

Democracy is bound up in hope -- the hope that the best solutions for problems will emerge and be accepted by the majority of the population if free and open debate is allowed, the hope that the majority of citizens will put the common good above their narrow, personal interests, the hope that the divisions of the past do not condemn us to endless conflict against each other.

The USA is so closely tied to the virtue of hope that it is arguably the special vocation of America to exemplify hope; yet today America has given up on hope.  We no longer believe in free speech or democracy.  We no longer love the prospective children of our prospective children enough to sacrifice for them.  Sin increases not because we are more strongly tempted than previous generations, but because we no longer hope to resist sin.  We still feel guilty, of course, which is why we are so anxious to slander all our ancestors; it is the only way left to feel we have accomplished something, or at least that no one remains who has the right to disapprove of our choices.

The USA was never held together by a common ethnicity or a common religion; it was only held together by this common vocation.  Now that that has been definitively rejected, the USA as we have known it is in its death throes.  Oh, the names and titles may be recycled, but they will no longer mean the same things.

Religion in General

For a long time I have been seriously annoyed by people who think religious believers should defend religion in general, or religion in the abstract.  Often this is initiated by atheists, and from their perspective this makes sense, both because they believe all religion is false and because it works as a tactic to make their debate opponents defend absurd positions.  It is much less excusable, though, for believers to internalize this way of thinking.  It is much less excusable, yet it is commonly encountered.

In most areas of life, this kind of confusion is not tolerated.  We do not, for instance, expect the makers of a serious anti-cancer drug to defend "cancer treatments" in general -- and by "in general", I mean everything marketed as a cancer treatment on the Internet.  If you think major drug companies are (at least sort of) honest, this can be because the Internet is full not only of "treatments" that are useless, but of "treatments" that are directly harmful; if you think they are not even marginally honest, this can be because they have no incentive to defend their competitors; but either way, no one expects pharmaceutical companies to defend every purported treatment.  Nor should we expect those who claim to have the cure for spiritual sickness to defend every purported spiritual cure.

And yet we do.  Why?

Certainly one reason is the Scandal of Particularity.  Our culture and our time is particularly offended by this scandal.  The cultural impact comes largely from developments in science.  Copernicus (and his immediate successors) showed that the solar system can be greatly simplified if we consider the sun its center rather than the earth.  (Note:  In the ancient and medieval interpretation, the earth was better described as being at the BOTTOM of the universe than at its CENTER, so its unique status was not exactly a compliment.)  Darwin argued convincingly that there is no sharp BIOLOGICAL distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.  Einstein authored a compelling theory that nature does not favor any one frame of reference.  All these ideas -- which are supported by reams of observational and experimental data -- seemed to reinforce the idea that no place or species is really better or more important than any other (but it is extremely important to understand that that is reading a deeper meaning into the science than science itself can bear).  History seems to back this up, as it becomes clear that there never really was a golden age, our childhood heroes were more flawed than we had imagined them, and people just like us have committed shocking atrocities.  Consequently, a rejection of the particular in favor of the general is an inescapable part of the Zeitgeist.

But then, the Zeitgeist is by definition a feature von unserer Zeit -- of our time.  It is also largely confined to what has usually been called Western civilization.  There is a degree of irony in passionately asserting that we live in a very special time and place, otherwise we would not realize there is no such thing as a special time or place.  Even setting that aside, the Scandal of Particularity is an example of a logical fallacy:  the rash generalization.

And the fact is, we need particularity.  What is real is a particular case of what might have been, and, contrary to what the Walt Disney Corporation would have us believe, reality is better than fantasy.  The West is dying because it has rejected this truth.

Monuments

We have known for millennia that there is power even in a mere list of names.  There are, after all, lessons to be learned from the genealogies of the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Matthew and the third chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke.  Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon are all prominent for their virtues -- and for their flaws.  Even King Manasseh, who is probably best known as the idolater who (likely) had the Prophet Isaiah sawed in two, converted after he was carried off to Babylon, and a penitential prayer attributed to him is a part of the Church's liturgy to this day.  What is more, even Queen Jezebel, about whom little good can be said, was in the ancestry of Jesus, since her daughter Athaliah married King Jehoram of Judah and was the mother of King Ahaziah.  One moral of all these stories is, perhaps, that there is some good and some bad in each of our histories; this is the condition of the human race that Christ came to save.  This lesson only exists, though, because so many names and stories have been remembered, rather than being conveniently hidden and forgotten.

More recently, lists of names have been used to commemorate the victims of crimes and tragedies.  It is easy to find readings of the names of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, in the 9/11 terror attacks, in the Vegas shooting spree, in the Boston Marathon bombing, in the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, in the Dayton mass shooting, in the Charleston church shooting, etc.  Perhaps the most famous such list of names is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, its name not withstanding, primarily honors those who died in that controversial and divisive war, not those who returned to live as veterans.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not literally a gravestone, but it is something similar to the Cenotaph World War I memorial in London -- something like a tombstone much farther than normal six feet from the actual mortal remains.  And it still seems to be understood -- or at least it was understood not long ago -- that only a real creep desecrates graves; thus when Jewish graves were vandalized in 2017 in Philadelphia and St. Louis, it was rightly expected that everyone would be outraged -- whether or not one agrees with their religion or shares their ethnicity.  If we owe the benefit of the doubt to those who are still alive and able to defend their reputations, we all the more owe it to the dead.

It is within this context that you should be able to understand my reaction to the decision of the current administration of the University of Alabama to remove the monuments shown below.

A university is a kind of family, so this is something like seeing that your first cousin's son, whom you barely know, has kicked over your grandmother's tombstone to win the approval of his bratty friends, that he has posted a video of it online, and that the video shows him doing it in a smug, self-righteous, and self-congratulatory way.  The familial relationship remains, but it makes the offense all the greater.  No matter what happens afterwards, the offense will be remembered, and there will be AT LEAST a scar remaining on the relationship.  At the bare minimum, you would not be cheering the kid on at his upcoming football games.  That grave marker he made such a show of kicking over would mean more to you than all his sports trophies put together.