Stephen Roney's Blog, page 34

The Rage in Our Hearts

 

Asmodeus, the Demon of Wrath

I had been asked to review two short story manuscripts recently. Both had the same odd and disturbing flaw: they had the main character slaughter an animal, gratuitously, and in detail, early in the story. 

This did nothing to further the plot. Either incident could have been removed without affecting it; in fact, they distracted from it. 

If it was meant to establish character, it was bad practice: it alienated the reader from the protagonist. If the reader does not identify with the main character, they are no longer interested in what happens to them, and tune out. Even if you want to tell a sympathetic story of a killer, you start by showing them being nice to a puppy.

And what an odd thing for two random stories to have in common.

I suspect this shows what lurks in the hearts of men currently. When you compose a story, you start by letting your imagination run free. When these two authors did so, this is almost the first thing that came up.

Pent up male rage? That sounds plausible on its face, given how men are repressed currently. Both authors were young men. 

But rage does not work that way. It does not get stronger if not expressed. That’s Freud; Freud has been disproven. If you repress an emotion, it goes away. If you express it, it grows. Over time, it can become a settled vice—or virtue. 

Once it becomes a vice, it becomes part of our programming. When we let our minds go, it will come out, unbidden. Even, eventually, against our interest. It begins to seem to have a will of its own, which is why vices are traditionally imagined as demons. 

This is why, to be a good writer, you need to have nothing to hide; you need to be a fundamentally decent person. Artists are, in my personal experience, always naive innocents in person.

Yes, there are all those stories about bohemian types being libertines. I suspect this is to discredit the enterprise.  And often the writer or artist will play along with it, for cover. Jim Morrison was supposed to be the ultimate womanizer, for example. And yet—no paternity suits. I go with W.B. Yeats, who said you can either live the life of a poet, or be a poet, but you cannot do both. 

I think our society as a whole these days is nursing the demon of anger. It is behind all these claims of victimization and oppression. It is also nursing the demons of lust and pride. There are even parades.

The gravest sin any more is pointing out someone else’s sin.

The next worst sin is not sinning yourself.

And this may explain why the arts are moribund.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Tory Win in St. Paul's

 

I awoke this morning to the shocking news that the Conservatives had won Toronto-St. Paul’s. I had gone to bed thinking the Liberals had it in the bag. This is not good news for the Conservative Party.

They probably did not want to win it. The top Liberals flooded in to the riding to campaign. Pierre Poilievre stayed out, campaigning in Quebec instead. On the day of the vote, top Conservatives were all telling the media they had no chance. They clearly expected to lose; and Poilievre might have stayed away so as not to be personally tarnished by the loss. But this was also likely to depress their vote, making it more probable that they would.

Why woud they want to win in St. Paul’s? Perhaps a morale boost for the troops. But it would not change the power balance in the House. The danger is that it will force Justin Trudeau to resign as Liberal leader. I think the Conservatives are right if they think Trudeau is their biggest asset. Canadians are generally desperate for a chance to vote against him. I know I am. He should not be allowed to retire without a truly humiliating defeat, to discourage future prime ministers from following in his autocratic footsteps.

A new leader is unlikely to help the Liberals electorally. But this is almost a secondary consideration to me, and perhaps also to the Tories. Psychologically and on principle, they want the chance to defeat Justin Trudeau.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Were the Nazis on the Left or on the Right?

 

Notorious right-winger

There is a battle online currently between people asserting that the Nazi Party was left-wing, and people asserting it was right-wing. The latter is, of course, the more conventional position.

The argument that it was left-wing, however, is obvious: the name of the party was the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” They claimed to be socialist. Surely the ball is in the court of those who say they were not.

The response on the left is apparently that they were lying. It was a trick to sucker in the working class.

This shows much disrespect for the working class. It also violates the current leftist principle that we must accept everyone’s self-identification. If an apparent man says they are a woman, we must accept this. If they want to be called indigenous and not Indian, we must accept indigenous as correct.

Marxists object that Nazis were not socialists, because socialism means collective control of the means of production, and the Nazis did not nationalize industries.

But ownership is not control.

What they did was change the legal definition of property, so that, while private individuals might technically own things, they did not control them. Everything was subject to the needs of the state. Control was in the hands of the state, including the ability to set wages, prices, levels of production, and dividends—removing the free market and the profit motive. It was socialism in all but a legalistic, technical sense, and then only if you accept only one of several definitions of socialism.

It is standard practice on the left, of course, to exclude any political tendency that differs from their own from their definition of socialism. Maoists insisted that the USSR was not socialist. The Stalinists insisted that Trotskyites were not true socialists. The Bernsteinists insisted that the Bolsheviks were not true socialists. Especially whenever socialism fails to produce desired results, the claim will always be that it was not true socialism.

Another counter-argument is that the Nazis were on the right because they were “nationalists.” This was not socialism, this was “national socialism.”

But if nationalism makes one right-wing, and internationalism makes one left-wing, then the British Empire was left-wing, while Mahatma Gandhi was a right-winger. The IRA was a right-wing organization; in Canada the NDP is right-wing; Washington and Jefferson were right-wingers, and George the Third was the leftist; and Kim Jong Un is on the far right. This defies the common understanding, and amounts to an idiosycratic use of the terms. Nationalism is perfectly orthodox as a part of some leftist ideology.

The modern North American understanding of the political distinction between “left” and “right,” although somewhat ahistorical, is that “left” means increasing the powers and responsibilities of the state and the collective, while “right” means reducing the size and scope of government in favour of the individual. On this scale, even if considered right-wing in their time and place, when “right” and “left” might have had different meanings, Nazism and Fascism stand on the extreme left in our terms.

Another common way to understand the distinction between left and right is that the right is conservative, that is, primarily concerned with conserving, keeping matters much a they have been. The left wants change. “Hope and change.” You know the thing.

By this standard, again, the Nazis were far left. They did not stand for preserving the Weimar Republic, the then-current sysem of government, nor yet for replacing it with the earlier form, the monarchy, that preceded it. They wanted a radical reimagining of society, of the entire world, of conventional morality, even the development of a new human species. They were “futurists.” “Tomorrow belongs to me.”

But the most telling argument that the Nazis were on the political left is that it is the established wisdom that they were on the far right. Here, as everywhere, the rule of thumb is that anything “everyone knows” is true is probably false.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

To Those in Peril on the Sea

 On that day, as evening drew on, Jesus said to his disciples:
“Let us cross to the other side.”
Leaving the crowd, they took Jesus with them in the boat just as he was.
And other boats were with him.
A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat,
so that it was already filling up.
Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.
They woke him and said to him,
“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
He woke up,
rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet!  Be still!”
The wind ceased and there was great calm.
Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified?
Do you not yet have faith?”
They were filled with great awe and said to one another,
“Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?”

This, the gospel reading at today’s mass, strikes me as uncannily resembling the traditional image of Vishnu asleep on the cosmic ocean. The universe we know is a dream he is having. Once every kalpa, every aeon, he awakens from the dream, and the universe ceases to be. Then after a time he goes back to sleep, and a new cosmos begins. The turbulent waters on which he sleeps are the stream of time, with its changes. 

Is the Bible story a borrowing from Hindu mythology? Possibly; or possibly the other way around.

Or perhaps this is evidence for Jung’s theory of the archetypes. Jung traced certain motifs and images, like this one, across world mythology, including cultures with little or no contact with each other, and then again in the dreams of his patients. He posited these represented structures in the mind, which he called archetypes. Ultimately, for the materialist Jung, these ended up expressing structures in the brain. Evolution has deposited them there somehow.

Jung’s disciple Marie-Louise Von Franz specialized in Jungian interpretations of fairy tales. Someone once challenged her with the question, “How do you know your archetypal psychology and development of the ego through individuation is the real story being expressed obliquely through these stories, and not just one more fairy tale like these others?”

Her answer was unsatisfactory: “It is the fairytale I believe.”

Are we left with no way to choose among fairy tales? Do we just arbitrarily decide to place our faith in Vishnu, or Jesus, or Jung, or Mother Goose?

Suppose, instead, that there is a God. This is not a stretch; it the fundamental premise of the text. As a philosophical proposition, monotheism has been proven seven ways to Sunday.

If there is a God, the repetition of this motif in unrelated texts is a proof of the reliability of those texts. God must have dropped it in there.

God must have created us for some purpose. He would have programmed us with a built-in user’s manual or operating system. He would have embedded in our psyches certain images, concepts and narratives expressing his plans. This, the sleeping God waking to calm time and change, can be assumed to be one of them.

God is God; he can do what he wants. He can implant the images in our consciousnesses, and then act them out in history to demonstrate that he is with us, and to clarify their full meaning. 

We are not to be troubled by the madness all around us. We are not to suppose that God is not in charge. Keep calm and carry on. Soon he will wake—or we will—and all will be as it should be.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

No Particular Place to Go

 

You can't say Chuck Berry is underrated; but his musical talents can lead people to overlook just how good he is as a lyricist.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

She's a Lady

 

John Sebastian is underrated as a songwriter, because his songs are too cheerful. But he is a master lyricist, and his melodies are also good.

This is sheer poetry.

It is also painfully sad.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Spider Sense

 

Friend Xerxes has recently returned from a group tour of Southeast Asia. As one of the exotic experiences the tour company laid on for their charges, they got to see a woman hunt tarantulas, defang them, and let them crawl over their arms. Then she fried the spiders, and the tourists could opt to sample them.

Xerxes was upset that the tarantulas were killed. Aren’t we humans arrogant, he asks, to assume that only we are sentient? 

I wonder if he has ever been to a slaughterhouse.

“Sentient” is not the word he should have used here. Sentient means responsive to the physical senses. Everyone believes that spiders are sentient. 

So why are we any better than spiders? Are we indeed simply being arrogant, or “speciesist”?

Dating back at least to Aristotle, animal and human souls have indeed always been understood in to be fundamentally different. There are different words for them in Greek. Humans have psyche. Animals have anima.

What’s the difference? 

A common answer is “reason,” or “free will,” but that may not be right. Animals can figure out simple puzzles, and this has always been known. See Aesop’s fable of the crow and the pitcher. Dogs can be wilful, and understand when they have been a “bad dog.” 

On the other hand, I read somewhere that when the behaviourists and the linguists teach higher apes to talk using sign language, the one thing they cannot do is answer questions in the conditional. They cannot understand hypotheticals.

Animals, even those most closely related to us, cannot retain narratives in the mind of what is not present. This suggests the faculty that makes us human is the imagination. And this seems to have been understood throughout the ages:

“Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! 
The present only toucheth thee: 
But Och! I backward cast my e’e, 
On prospects drear! 
An’ forward tho’ I canna see, 
I guess an’ fear!” – Burns, “To a Mouse”

Now consider the account of the creation of man in Genesis:

Genesis 1:

“So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.”

Genesis 2: 

“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

God created man “in his own image”; and what does that mean? Not to look like God, for God is a spirit. What is a spiritual image? Literally, or rather, etymologically, “imagination.” God is the great architect of all, the creator: creation is his image. Creation is in his image.

He then created man as a potter forms a pot. That too reveals his image: the human potter, the artist, acts in the image of God. In creation, God breathes his spirit into us—literally, or etymologically, he “inspires” us. 

What is the point of man’s creation? To tend the garden. As with pottery, this is a matter of taking the material God has created for us, and forming it by art. The intended end result, according to the Book of Revelation, is a celestial city, the New Jerusalem, one great work of art, a collaboration between God and man.

“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. 11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. 12 It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. 13 There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. 14 The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

“15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. 16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17 The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubits thick. 18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. 19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.”

For this reason, a human life, and a human soul, is of infinitely greater value than an animal life.

We commonly understand a further distinction between plants and animals. Animals are sentient; plants are not. Plants are not conscious. They do not have the five senses. An animal life is therefore of greater value, their death of greater meaning, than a plant life. So vegetarianism.

There is another traditional distinction. There is the Christian pescetarian tradition: during the Lenten and Friday fasts, you are to eat no meat, but are allowed fish and seafood. Buddhist monastic “vegetarianism” follows similar rules: one is allowed seafood. Why is this where the line is drawn, and not at vegetarianism?

Because cold-blooded creatures lack emotions. They do not feel anger or love or fear. 

How do we know this?

Because they do not nurse their young.  Any creature that does not care for its young apparently has no emotional life. This is no doubt why the Devil himself is represented as reptilian, as a snake or dragon. They operate on sheer self-interest, lacking love or empathy.

Of course, they are really amoral, not immoral; they have no moral sense. Spiders presumably operate like robots, following their programming, their instinct. But there is therefore no moral issue in killing them, any more than in turning off a light.

This is why cannibalism is not cool, but it is cool to swat a mosquito.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Reform UK and Reform Canada

 

Summer is usually slow for news. Not this summer. We have epochal elections underway in both France and the UK. In the UK, many people are pointing to the “Canadian example.” Kind of flattering to get noticed. 

They mean the election of 1993, in which Kim Campbell led the Tories from a majority, 168 seats, to just two seats in total. The suggestion is that something similar could happen to the British Tories in two weeks’ time. In both cases, supposedly, it was because of the emergence of a new party on the right, in both cases named “Reform.” 

(The original “Reform” was actually a US movement, under Ross Perot; but that perhaps takes us too far afield.)

Are the situations really similar?

Campbell in 1993 was actually facing two insurgent parties, Reform and the Bloc Quebecois, a regional separatist party. The BQ actually did better than Reform in that election, and so was a more significant factor. The BQ was formed by former Conservatives, and mostly cut into their vote. In the UK, there is a comparable regional separatist party, the Scottish Nationalists. But they naturally cut into the Labour vote, not the Conservatives. 

Based on this difference, it seems the British Tories have less to fear.

On the other hand, the leader of Canadian Reform at the time, Preston Manning, was not charismatic. Nigel Farage, the UK Reform leader, is uniquely charismatic. 

Based on this difference, it seems the British Tories have much to worry about.

On the other other hand, Canadian Reform was also fuelled by regional resentments, whih gave them a natural base generating seats in Parliament. UK Reform does not have this.

In either case, the reason for the insurgency is the same: no federal party was addressing an issue, or issues, of vital concern to the general public. People felt they were being ignored. In Canada, it was about changing the constitution; although immigration levels were already also a concern. In the UK today it is mass immigration.

More broadly, there is a natural schism in “Conservative” parties. Because the left has gone Marxist since at least the 1930s, perhaps since the “Progressive” era of the 1920s, “conservative” parties have become coalitions of everyone else, of both actual conservatives and classical liberals. 

These philosophies are not compatible. 

In the UK, conservative Conservatives are referred to as “one nation” Conservatives, or sometimes as “wets.” In Canada, they are called Red Tories. They believe in paternalistic, government, as did Disraeli or Burke. Classic liberals want a smaller government and respect for individual rights and freedoms, like Gladstone or Jefferson.

Tension between the two is inevitable. If one faction suppresses the other, you get a revolt. Yet it seems that a coalition of both has been needed to overcome the Marxists.

This may no longer be true. 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Imagine

 

Friend Maximilian sends a video clip of Irish comic Dave Allen. The gag is that Catholics think only Catholics go to heaven. And he point to a comment: “I always thought every religion thinks that way.”

Actually, only some fundamentalist Protestants think this way: that only “born again” members of their own denomination get to heaven. This is a reasonable conclusion from Martin Luther’s doctrine of “salvation by faith alone.” If you are saved by your belief, you must have the correct belief to be saved.

 For the Catholic Church, however, this position is heretical. Yes, non-Catholics can get to heaven.  Google “Feeneyism”; and note the ethnicity of the name. Like Allen, and, indeed, like Maximilian, Feeney was Irish. Due to long contact and subjugation, Irish Catholics have often picked up Protestant heresies. Don’t ask me about my own Irish “Catholic” upbringing.

This does not quite mean that Catholics believe “all good people go to heaven.” Rather, to be clear, all who sincerely seek truth, as well as striving to do what is morally right, get there. Faith is involved. If this search for truth nevertheless does not lead them to Catholicism, so long as they are sincere in their beliefs, they are protected from guilt by what Catholics refer to as “invincible ignorance.” Indeed, so long as anyone seeks truth, they are a follower of Christ: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The same is true for Jews, Hindus, or Buddhists: none of them think you must be formal members of that religion to achieve heaven, or enlightenment, or blessedness. It is only Protestants; and not even all Protestants. Many Anglicans, for example, are “latitudinarians.” Yet the fundamentally Protestant background to English-speaking culture leads many to assume that this is the standard among all religions.

Maximilian objects, “What about the Muslims and the Jews?” He was clearly thinking of the situation in Gaza. 

Being a leftist, he was at the same time taking the “plague on both your houses” position, supposing the Jews were equally responsible for the hostilities. Or rather, to avoid blaming anyone for their actions, religion was. If we could only get rid of religion, we would all live in peace and harmony. 

Hamas started the war, of course, not Israel. 

There is surely an ethnic more than a religious distinction between the two sides. One fifth of the population of Israel is Muslim. Before Hamas took over, the PLO led the fight against Israel; and the PLO was Marxist, not Islamist. George Habash, leader of the more radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was Christian, not Muslim. The conflict pre-existed any religious justification for it. 

So does Islam hold that you must be a Muslim to go to heaven?

Islam, too, believes you do not have to be a formal member of the faith to get to heaven. “Islam” means “submission.” Anyone who submits to the will of the one God is “Muslim.” Muslims will therefore argue that Islam is the world’s oldest faith, and that Jesus and Moses and Abraham and St. Francis of Assisi were all Muslims.

Islam is, however, almost uniquely, a political as well as a religious doctrine. By its standards, the only government that is ever legitimate is an Islamist government, imposing the laws laid out in the Quran and Hadith. 

This does not mean all others must convert: but they must submit to being governed by the shariah law.

This is akin to the demands of liberalism, enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that all governments must recognize certain human rights and democratic principles in order to be legitimate. It is an ideological or political issue, not a religious one. 

In both cases, it is based on an appeal to divine authority. It is because God says so: “endowed by their creator.” “The laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

So, the problem is not religion; it is this annoying concept of human rights.

For the sake of world peace, should human rights be banned? Show of hands?

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Simile

 

Modern textbooks never explain simile properly. The ones I am working with say only that it involves comparing two items using “like” or “as.” This definition is useful only for distinguishing a simile from a metaphor. “Toronto is like Montreal” is not a simile. The texts recognize that this is not a simile, and deduct marks from students who would say it is, but cannot seem to explain why not, leaving the students cruelly confused.

An online source, “literarydevices.net”, is a bit better. They explain that a simile is a comparison expressing similarity “between two things that are different enough from each other such that their comparability appears unlikely.” 

This is still not right. At what point are two things so different that a simile exists? “Toronto is like Gananoque” is still not a simile. Neither is “Toronto is like Peru.” These are straight comparisions. One goes on to explain how the one is like the other.

And even if you accept that this is what a simile is doing, why would you want to do this? It seems at least somewhat contradictory, or as though you are deliberately trying to confuse or trick the reader: asserting that dissimilar things are similar. 

Put simply, a simile conveys a sense of something unseen or difficult to see by comparison with something seen or easy to picture. They are useful, indeed necessary, because what we cannot see we cannot directly communicate. If I say “There is a rose in the garden,” my meaning is obvious to the listener; if there is any confusion, I point to the rose. If I say, “I love you,” the meaning is utterly ambiguous to the listener. I cannot point to the emotion I feel, and make the listener feel it. Hence many heartbreaks and betrayals.

To ever be sure what is meant by an abstract term, a term not describing a sense object, we need what T.S. Eliot called an “objective correlative”: an object to stand in for it, a visual or other physical sensation that conveys the idea or the emotion. Therefore simile, metaphor, and symbol. Therefore, indeed, I suspect, mythology itself. We must a something like “My love is like that red rose in your garden.” Our emotional reaction to a beautiful flower is reasonably evocative of what we feel when we love.

Therefore, simile. “Happiness is like a warm puppy.” “Hope is the thing with wings.” “Free as a bird.”  “Life is like a box of chocolates.” “As clever as a fox.” One cannot directly see cleverness, as one cannot see hope, or freedom, or happiness, or life, but you can watch how a fox behaves, and likely get the gist. 

It’s simple, but in these times we are generally such hopeless materialists that we cannot get it. It is a symptom of being dead inside.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.