Five Quick Takes

I.

I've been gradually starting to deal with the sin of anger (and its countless manifestations -- impatience, outbursts, punitive withdrawal, hurtful sarcasm) over the last year or so. Hitherto, my anger had been so thoroughly repressed that it almost never manifested itself in any form at all, except for gigantic outbursts of frustrated wrath separated literally by years.

Like this, but without the advantage of the stylish indigo pants.

Anger is extremely scary for me. It's horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember. I hate it because it almost always has the feeling, and very frequently the real-world result, of distorting my perspective, and if there's anything I value, it is fidelity to the truth -- which is inseparable from a fair-minded perspective. However, as the ancient saying goes, that which Christ does not assume, He cannot redeem; hiding things from Him, whether by also hiding them from ourselves or not, does not unite us to Him but rather creates distance. Not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the manhood into God: the maxim that governs the Incarnation of the Deity also, and for that reason, governs the deification of our humanity.

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II.

I have, after some guilty months of neglect, picked up my copy of Melinda Selmys' Slave of Two Masters, a Catholic treatment of the God-and-Mammon problem. I can't believe I put it off. It brought out one element of economics that had completely escaped me before, which I'd therefore like to quote here:

Once Eve was cursed to have Adam "lord it over her," which aspects of the human endeavor did he choose for himself? It is usually assumed that Adam took the better portion and left the dregs to Eve ... 

But what is it that women produce? Men, arrogantly desiring to claim all of the credit for human achievement, have habitually missed the glaring and inescapable fact that women produce men. Society economics, science, culture, knowledge, politics, and production are all just things that serve human interests; only human persons are ends in themselves. ... 

This has dire consequences for a society in which not only men but also women have rejected women's work in favor of economic accomplishment. John Paul II, in Mulieris Dignitatem, suggests that the increased participation of women in social, economic, and cultural life could serve to positively transform those areas in the light of "women's genius." Yet this can be accomplished only if women's genius itself is preserved -- and that genius is intimately connected to motherhood. 

The economics of motherhood is governed by very different principles than the economics of the marketplace. In domestic life, the stronger do not triumph, or even seek to triumph, over the weak. ... John Paul II expressed a hope that it would be possible to reform economics so that it could be fueled by such an engine of love and affection, rather than being governed solely by self-interest. 

-- Slave of Two Masters, pp. 6-8

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III.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel by Pietro Novelli. 1641. The saints depicted below, from left to right, are:

Saint Teresa of Avila; Saint Mary Magdalene de Pazzi; Saint Angelus of Jerusalem; Saint Simon Stock.

Yesterday was the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. As I believe I've said before, she and the Carmelite Order are and have been very important to me: the poetry of Saint John of the Cross was one of my first exposures to Catholicism, and Saint Teresa, judging from what I have read of her writings, must have been looking after me for some time. She drives me nuts, mostly by being right.

One oddly persistent trend that I've noticed about the Carmelites is their propensity to attract Jewish converts. Saint Teresa (foundress of the Discalced or reformed branch of the Order), Saint John of the Cross (who helped her found the Discalced), Saint John of Avila (her spiritual director), Saint Angelus of Jerusalem, Venerable Augustine Mary, and Saint Edith Stein, to name just six, were all Hebrew Catholics -- to employ a phrase coined by another Hebrew Catholic who was also a Carmelite, Elias Friedman.

I rather like this trend. I have a drop of Jewish blood myself, though it's well over a century old, and, coming through my father, doesn't count anyway -- but I have always had a sort of irrational fondness for the Jewish people, so that the discovery of a personal connection (however tenuous) was extremely pleasing, and it was a weird and happy coincidence that the Carmelites should seem to forge another link. Why Carmel should have such a draw, I'm not sure, though I have a hunch that it has something to do with the profound theology of suffering and darkness that is a mark of their spirituality. The Jews being no strangers to suffering, I could understand how it would be more naturally sympathetic than some other Catholic traditions. But that's definitely a guess.

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IV.

Cole Webb Harter, author of the Andalusian Peafowl, an Eastern Catholic (I think he's Byzantine? I don't know my Eastern Churches that well) pop culture critic and thinker, recently did a piece on the Anarcho-Monarchist politics that he and Tolkien (and I) largely sympathize with, as exampled on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

Fluttershy is the best pegasus ever and I will not be gainsaid. No matter how

cool this dubstep version of Rainbow Dash doing the Sonic Rainboom is.

He has since gone on to a piece on the implicitly Distributist economic system that prevails in Equestria, something that tends to go hand-in-hand with Anarcho-Monarchism. I was planning to plug his post anyway -- Catholic Anarchist bronies, being few, ought to stick together -- and the delightful tour de force of his continued analysis of My Little Pony from these perspectives, at once whimsical and really fairly convincing, is a further reason to do so. The fact that Anarchy is grossly misunderstood by most Americans, and that Distributism has sadly made so little impact in this country (despite being the sole economic theory with a serious claim to be endorsed by the Church), is a third reason for me to say: tolle lege, tolle lege.

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V.

If you all who are the praying sort would pray for my roommate, I'd be very grateful. He is in his sixties and is planning to go in for hip replacement surgery, which had to be postponed on account of a bout of laryngitis. The surgery hasn't yet been rescheduled, though he did receive Unction this past Sunday. I'll be away over the weekend, so if you would pray for his health and spirits, and for a safe, soon-effected surgery and a swift recovery, I'd be grateful.

Christianity and Anarchism, Part III: The Collapse of the American Experiment

I'm advancing a rather more controversial theory in this piece than usual, so I'd like, correspondingly, to take more trouble to emphasize that I do so as an amateur. I learn rather slowly, but I am open to learning, and I ask readers and commenters to have both facts in mind.

Now then, on to offending people.

That oughta do it.

The Pledge of Allegiance, the Constitution, and the high school civics class that none of us paid attention to, set forth for our belief that our country is a democratic republic. Our essential concept of governance is self-governance; our mode of governance, rather than direct democracy, is through elected representatives. We thus combine liberty with order and individuality with stability. This was really the whole point of the Founding Fathers' endeavor in declaring us an independent nation: to create, for perhaps the first time in history, a country that really ruled itself.

It was a noble experiment. I posit that that experiment has ended, and that it has ended in failure.

It would be easy, if time consuming, to run through the petty, face-saving dishonesty of literally everything that every politician and press agent says; it would be even easier to merely list the number of unelected and unwanted governmental agencies, even without going into the ways they meddle incessantly with our daily lives and, for some people, make them effectively unlivable; easiest of all, maybe, to point out the current hypocrisy and destructive self-regard of both the White House and Congress* in refusing to arrive at any type of compromise, while collecting the paychecks they have very effectively blocked others from receiving, because they are too stubborn to concede anything at all, even provisionally and for the sake of the American people -- especially those who depend upon the government for their livelihoods and even their health. But I don't really have the expertise to treat that in detail; and besides, it is the special vice of the state to make corruption and incompetence dull as well as destructive. At least other kinds of evil make a bit of a bang with it.

The point doesn't lie in any one instance of corruption or stupidity, though. It doesn't even lie in the trend. Many anarchists espouse anarchism because of the actual corruption of governments, without stopping to consider that states are made of people, and behave that way -- a stateless society would not solve the problem of the human heart.

No: the problem lies in what we consider the state to be. It's a problem of Us versus Them. Them should be Us, but they're not. Take it from an extremely, a seemingly inordinately personal perspective for a moment. Do you actually know the President? How about your Senators? Your Representatives? The members who represent you in your state's own government? Local government? Do you even know their names?**

Self-government means self-government. When it starts meaning something else, when it starts meaning "This person I don't know can have free rein to handle my affairs," self-government has ceased to exist. This has not only happened in America, it has happened so totally as to be, in all likelihood, irrevocable. When once it has become not only acceptable, but natural and even expected, that a minority of voters shall actually vote, and that an even smaller proportion shall dictate the outcome of an election (regardless of office), self-government is dead. The mass of people have handed over their crowns, to be watched by the public guardsmen while they slumber. (Who put them to sleep is a different question, which need not for the moment detain us.)

The experiment of classical Liberalism has failed; we do not govern ourselves any more than our seventeenth-century ancestors did. One difference is that our ancestors knew quite clearly that they didn't govern themselves, and could tell you who did govern them; another is that their governors, amid all their own corruption and incompetence, at least had style.

A statist and a womanizer, but damn the man had class.

There are, at this juncture, two directions we can go in. 

One, which is the direction I think Liberalism logically leads into, is the Anarchist approach properly so-called. Unlike the other schools of thought (such as Communism) that formed largely in response to the French Revolution and its consequents, Anarchy puts no more trust in a supposedly revolutionary state than in its monarchic or republican*** predecessor. Well, let us suppose that, whether by violence or through a massive withdrawal of obedience on the part of the people -- non-violent civil resistance, which Gandhi practiced to such great effect in India -- the state has ceased to exist. What then replaces it? Strictly speaking, nothing. Actual communities -- not arbitrarily created districts, but organic communities -- govern themselves, according to their own needs and choices.

Okay, maybe "needs" was a strong word.

The difficulties with such a scheme are many, and I intend to deal with them at greater length in my next. The only difficulty I will cite here is that nobody will do this. Everybody will say, "Oh, wouldn't that be nice," and then dismiss it as completely impracticable. To that particular critique, Emma Goldman made a very intelligent reply:

"What, then are the objections? First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. ... A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The true criterion of the practical, therefore, is not whether the latter can keep intact the wrong or foolish; rather it is whether the scheme has vitality enough to leave the stagnant waters of the old, and build, as well as sustain, new life." -- Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, p. 49

That is not in itself an argument for Anarchy, as opposed to either Despotism or (ostensible) Democracy. But it is, in my opinion, a proper framing of what the argument is about.

The alternative to Anarchy, in the aftermath of the American experiment, is Monarchy. And that is what we will almost certainly adopt. Over and over again, and without necessarily losing their enthusiasm for individual liberty as a way of life, human societies return to one form or another of Monarchy. (Most likely, as post-Republican Rome did in the years leading into the Empire, we shall do so with a full facade of continuing institutions whose real powers and purposes change completely -- as, some would argue, all the major branches of our government already have done.)

Dozens of reasons could be cited for this perennial monarchic tendency: revisiting Oscar Wilde, who said that the trouble with Socialism was that it left you with no free evenings, the same comment could be made about all forms of self-government, whether direct or indirect. Monarchy allows ordinary people to get on with their ordinary lives, rather than bothering about the fiddly needs of the commonwealth -- and that is a good thing as well as a bad thing. Monarchy, as I have touched on, characteristically displays patronage of the arts and sciences, and is in general a more beautiful and romantic thing than unmodified republican government, allowing loyalty and courtesy to flourish in a way democracies rarely manage. Monarchy, contrary to popular American belief, does not actually display itself to be reliably worse than any other form of government. Indeed, G. K. Chesterton pointed out in What's Wrong With the World that Monarchism is very democratic in sentiment, at least where it has not been infected with the notion of Divine Right: Democracy is the notion that every man can rule, he says, while Monarchy is the notion that any man can rule.

But even from a strictly revolutionary -- nay, from an entirely Anarchist -- point of view, the Monarchist state has one decided advantage over the state run by an elected committee. A committee is harder to catch than a king.

*I decline categorically to play the blame game as to the Democratic Party and the GOP. I consider both bodies equally reprehensible in this matter; and in any case, my approach to them is to wish a pox on both their houses.

**To those of you who have your hands up, put them down. First of all, you are filthy liars, and second, local government is marginally less important to daily life than the return policy at the supermarket.

***Republican, not in the sense of resembling the GOP in some way, but in the sense of operating on principles of representation, election, and official power, in contrast to the principles of suzerainty, inheritance, and personal power that may be loosely said to characterize monarchies and aristocracies.