CCCXL – Suspension of Disbelief

I’m not very fun at parties. By reading this blog you may have figured that out already, but there are certain things that once you learn, you cannot unlearn, and so can no longer relate to your social peers. This is part of the concept of the “red pill”, that once you have “taken” the red pill, you are in the world but no longer of it.

My musings on voting, for example, have taken me to a place where political dialogue is just meaningless. I overheard a conversation the other day that once upon a time I might have been interested in–about protecting children and schools and the rest–but I don’t look at schools the same way any more, and so cannot relate to the discussion about reforming schools.

Likewise with movies. Over the last few years I have severely curtailed my consumption of entertainment, and a consequence is that I don’t look at movies the same way. It’s hard for me to not see the actors as actors, their background as a green screen, or their struggle as fake. I didn’t really try to cultivate this perspective, but it happened.

And it’s Movies that serve as the fulcrum around which I will lever this post. The idea of Suspension of Disbelief comes from the idea that when you are consuming entertainment, your brain, in recognition of this fact, turns off the discerning and truth-seeking parts and allows you to experience the entertainment qua entertainment. You go into the movie as a perfectly rational human being, sit down and watch a man in a funny suit leap over buildings and shoot lasers out of his eyes, you cheer, you laugh, you cry, and then you leave the theater as a perfectly rational human being again.

The triggering thing for this suspension of disbelief is spectacle. You can suspend disbelief when watching a horrific tragedy happen–an extreme form of this might be shock. When I watched 9/11 happen on TV, as a 5th grader, I was disconnected from the events, I didn’t understand what was happening–I had suspended disbelief. It wasn’t until 2 years later that I was old enough to grasp what had happened and it became personal and human (and so tragic and horrifying).

This can also happen when you are part of a sufficiently large crowd: The mob instinct takes over and you suspend disbelief and become part of an entity larger than yourself. Afterwards, perhaps being interviewed by the police, you might say “I don’t know what came over me.”

Nothing happens in isolation, though. I forget what the triggered this thought about suspension of disbelief, because it’s been swimming around my brain for a few weeks now. The thought is this: What if, when you go into a movie as a perfectly rational human being, you sit down and watch a man in a funny suit leap over buildings and shoot lasers out of his eyes, and then you leave the theater as a changed person. You have not yet resumed disbelief.

If that is possible, it means the next thing you watch on TV, or sensational news you read, you will be primed to accept it, because you are still in the movie. You have not re-grounded yourself.

That would explain the phenomena of super-hero action movies. If every three months you go to a belief suspension chamber and you leave and go make rational decisions in the world and consume information, that information and those decisions will be colored by your suspension of disbelief. Then three months pass and you go back and re-up your suspension of disbelief.

Psychotropic recreational drugs accomplish the same thing, but with a different vehicle for suspension of disbelief.

I didn’t realize my suspension of disbelief was broken until a non-trivial amount of time had passed between my last entertainment and my next entertainment. I was able to enjoy the entertainment as an activity but again I couldn’t help but see the actors as people.

This is why it is important to be discerning about what foods you feed your mind. You need to feed your mind, but it is also healthy to fast before you feast. Silent prayer helps us to make sure we are grounded, make sure we can inventory the thoughts and movements in our minds.

AMDG

PS- For the first time in this blogs history, I have published an article at least once a day for seven straight days. I’m still going to read and comment but for the next week I’m going to give my brain a vacation. I’ll be back the following week. God bless you all!

(s) – I Don’t want “Freedom of Religion”

…I want to require everyone to be Catholic. That way, if people behave badly, they are behaving contrary to some discrete set of values. Modernity tends to excuse bad behavior as a unique and individual “lived experience”, and most justice is effectuated by appealing to some pantheon of higher ideals like being on the right side of history or something something FREEDOM.

When I am a hypocrite, it means I am behaving in a way that hurts me, hurts society, and hurts God. When your average modern is a hypocrite, it necessarily means that they are behaving in a way that is beneficial to society, since their core values are unmoored by considerations of good or God.

AMDG

(Zippy made a comment somewhere like this, I haven’t been able to find it. If you can, please let me know and I will give him proper credit for inspiring this line of thought.)

CCCI – Ethnicity vs. Nationality

I had a conversation with a colleague about something and some subjects related to it. My colleague is from Afghanistan, and is the same age as me, and lived there when America invaded and has offered some interesting insights into the situation there now.

My colleague shared that there is a part of Pakistan–Balochistan–that historically and ethnically has been a part of Afghanistan. Due to the Durand Line established by the British colonial Empire, the region and people were separated. Now Afghanistan has a long standing historical claim on the territory and their ethnic kinsmen, but the people have been there long enough to now identify with Pakistan as their nation.

Both Ethnicity and Nationality represent “family” on some level. I have written a lot about the Sovereign as a paternal influence, being one flesh with his people. This is kind of like Nationality. Ethnicity is a deeper level of kinship, being structured around a personal commonality to another person and even to a sovereign, whereas mere nationality represents a geographic commonality to another person. The first nations were Ethno-nations, and with very good reason: If someone looks like me, talks like me, worships like me, they probably think like me, and I can trust them to support me the way I support them. Mere nations are more common since the colonial era, as political boundaries have been drawn around territory without any real regard for ethnicity. This is why Africa is such a conflict prone continent, and why Balochistan is alienated from Afghanistan and remains a source of tension in Afghan-Pakistan relations.

Where Ethnicity and Nationality overlap–or spill over each other–there is conflict. Ukraine (for example) is Ethnically Slavic but has a distinct national identity. Russia views itself as the father of all slavic peoples, so seeks on the one hand Ethnic unity at the expense of national identity. Ukraine seeks to preserve it’s national identity at the expense of ethnic unity. There will always be conflict on these grounds.

This is part of why America has some cultural instability. There is no ethno-nation upon which the supra-nation was built. All the ethno-nations that compose America must actively choose to accept their national identity and make it a priority. America doesn’t have a unifying culture. There are some cultural elements that are competing to be dominant but nothing central, nothing unifying.

These forces can be in tension in a positive way. The Philippines is composed of many sub-ethnic divisions but there is a common culture to all of the constituent ethnicities, enough to make their National identity strong and prevent ethnic conflict. As I understand it one of the main sources of internal conflict is where that common culture is different–namely, between the Catholic majority and Muslim minority. The Philippines have successfully harnessed their diverse ethnicities and created a national identity from it.

Any kind of nation–be it Ethno- or not–can be stable. But there must be some unifying element to give it stability. Ethnicity is the unifying element. Culture can be the unifying element, It could even be religion. But stability must be intentionally cultivated from the ground up, from the top down. Without an intentional effort at stability, there will be internal conflict which destabilizes the nation until either the various nations split apart from each other or one totally dominates the other.

AMDG

CCXCVIII – Presented Without Comment (No. 18)

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Ilya Repin, 1891

Ok, one comment: This is a candidate for my favorite painting of all time.

CCLXXIX – Vanishing Act

Commenter Buckyinky, in an article at his own space, talked about the phenomenon of Choirs socially distancing during performances. In a comment in reply, I realized that teams and organizations are cultures in microcosm, and that “There must be a desire to disappear into the culture, not a desire to stand apart from it.”

In response, Buckyinky made the innovative connection to the Litany of Humility: “Interesting how this goes hand in hand with many Saints’ spiritual writings on the virtue of humility. As in Cardinal del Val’s Litany of Humility, ‘From the desire of being esteemed…loved…extolled..honored…etc…deliver us’ “

These two thoughts differ only in scale. The word assimilate means to make similar, and when things are very similar they are indistinguishable. To assimilate into a culture then means to appear as if one never needed to assimilate in the first place–you can go to the grocery store, celebrate on holidays, and drive your kids to school just like all the locals. When in Rome, you do as the Romans do, and learn to think of yourself as Roman too. Individualism is deleterious to culture because it encourages people to stand out, and celebrates people for the mere fact of being different.

There are three words which describe how someone might approach this idea: Conformity, Assimilation, and Humility. Conformity means “to make agreeable”–literally, “to form together”. The colloquial connotation is that conformity means blindly following some herd. Certainly, that is very agreeable to the herd to blindly follow them, but it is not utilizing your talents or capabilities to the fullest. Colloquially then, conformity means to survive by being least objectionable to the herd, your focus is on the herd and not on anything else. You are actively trying not to think about your actions, but trying to follow the path of least resistance. Agreeable, but this kind of conformity never formed anyone into a higher being. Paths of least resistance lead down.

Assimilation, you might argue, has the same effect. The key difference is that you arrive at it differently. Assimilation is a deliberate effort to adopt customs and habits. The focus with Assimilation is less the crowd and more on yourself–you are trying to improve yourself to the point that you attain some advantage in your local culture.

Humility is wholly different. Humility is the practice of making onesself increasingly private, keeping ones interactions with the local culture agreeable because you are demonstrating restraint and not because you are a welcome-mat. This restraint does not change ones practices to be more agreeable to the local culture, but keeps prying local eyes out of ones private affairs.

Buckyinky’s connection to the Litany of Humility is striking because the examples he picks out are examples of one asking Jesus to give us the desire to not be superlative. Humility doesn’t seek esteem because esteem involves people in ones private affairs, it means people know about a thing you did and like that thing.

Which Saint can we turn to for a demonstration in this practice of Humility which disappears from view? None other than St. Joseph–his presence in the Gospels is brief but effective, and when his turn is done he is noted no further, not even to note his passing from this life. St. Joseph literally vanishes into the Gospels.

Lord, help me to disappear from view. Help me to seek no recognition for my good deeds; help me to commit no deeds which dishonor You. Lord, may I grow in the virtue and practice of humility, for your honor and glory. St. Joseph, pray for us!

AMDG

CCLXIX – On NEOM

One of the more interesting projects I learned about in the last few years is the NEOM project in Saudi Arabia. I was immediately intrigued by it and have been following it for several years. The concept is to create a district in Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea and build from the ground up a city of the future, with modern values, modern technology, and modern methods. The marketing is spectacular, the videos are beautiful and the imagination is nothing short of incredible. One pundit I followed believed it was the beginning of modernization of Saudi Arabia and Islam, because it would bring a multicultural hub to the country and familiarize the country with things like authoritative working women and western criminal justice.

The only thing is that this whole project appears aspirational. There appears to be no ground broken in the actual NEOM region, but there is a LOT of money flowing and a lot of really great marketing. With that much money flowing I would be surprised if they do nothing but a part of me thinks reality will be somewhat underwhelming compared to the marketing material.

How can it be anything but? NEOM is a product of modernity. Yes it aims to modernize Saudi Arabia, but that is as much in the philosophical sense as it is in any given practical sense. Their marketing material literally headlines “progressive laws!” as a selling point.

This is not a critique of Saudi Arabia or Islam but is instead a critique of modernity. A point I made in a previous article was that profit motive does not automatically create the public good. People are rational economic beings but it is not a given that they are moral economic beings. Rational economic beings will make decisions that make them money. I heard an anecdote from someone about their nephew who quit their job driving for doordash to collect unemployment benefits when they realized the unemployment benefit was greater than the doordash income. That is a rational economic calculus–given certain constraints, that decision made sense. People like to jump on Trump for his numerous bankruptcies when he was leveraging the system as it was designed to pursue profit motive: he was behaving as a rational economic being. Saudi Arabia, with the mere idea of NEOM, is behaving as a rational economic being. I can’t judge whether they are operating in good faith or not–it would be the finest fraud in human history if not–but they are selling a modernist utopia and raking in cash just by the suggestion.

What it is, is a land without excuses: Oh, if only we didn’t have this or that historical baggage! If only previous generations hadn’t ruined us with this or that decision! If only we could have designed this city around such and such technology! How about an inhospitable desert? How about a region with no pre-existing population or economic activity? How about a region literally designed from the dirt up?

The idea of the city really appeals to my imagination. But once I think about the reality of it…

Well, let me just say the last city that I know of that was built from the ground up out of a desert was Las Vegas, and that’s definitely not the paragon of virtue but it is certainly modern and progressive.

AMDG

CCL – The Enemy Knows Our Name (But Not Who We Are)

I want to connect a few dots I’ve seen recently.

1. The Addams Family animated movie (2019)
   • A major theme of the movie is individualism, cinematically juxtaposed against “tradition”. Tradition, according to the movie, is the way our ancestors did things, and doesn’t make us happy because it doesn’t allow us to do things our own way.
2. Klaus animated movie (also 2019)
   • A major theme of the movie is that tradition is bad, illustrated by the longstanding feud between the Krums and Ellingboes. They don’t know why they fight, they do because of tradition. This tradition has kept their town poor and angry and resentful; only when the tradition is cast off can the town be illuminated with kindness and fellowship.
3. A roadsign by a gas station in Britain which is famous for Humorous quips
   • The sign said “Tradition is peer pressure from dead people”. It’s framed as a negative: Don’t let dead people bully you into doing something you don’t want to do.

What stuck out to me about these three data points is that Tradition is called out by name. The enemy is attacking Tradition, generally. But they don’t know which tradition or any specific things about the tradition which will save the world–the Christian tradition.

So that made me realize that the Enemy knows our name insofar as they know something about Tradition is worthy of their big-budget condemnation; they don’t know who we are insofar as they don’t know which tradition to condemn or what about it they don’t like.

CCXLIV – Christian Civilization

Western Civilization is held up by some as the fortress which must be defended from infiltrators and adversaries. Western Civilization has come to mean anything good that has come out of Europe. Sometimes, thanks to the association with Rome, Christianity gets lumped in with the rest as a fruit of Western Civilization.

Looking at “Western Civilization” right now, it feels like the fruit is rotten, and morally depraved. Westernizing a nation usually means ruining their moral character and plundering their resources. The West and Christianity used to be aligned, but they are not anymore. As I put it in an offhand comment recently, the West has ceased to be Christian and Christianity has ceased to be confined to the West. The good things about the West really come from Christianity, so it really ought to be called Christian Civilization.

The great thing about Christian Civilization as a concept is that it frees the idea from Eurocentrism. There are Catholics around the world who share more in common with me than your average millennial European. Africa of all places is a sanctuary of traditionalism. So there’s no reason why the West necessarily needs to be the last bastion of Christendom. In fact, it is probably Christianity which will save the west rather than the other way around.

Christianity is the great unifier. No matter how different two people are, a common worship of God–properly understood–can build more bridges than simply being steeped in the culture of the West can.

CCXXXIV – The Law of the Gaps

It’s time to formalize a point I have made over and over again in articles not explicitly about this topic. The idea is that the Law lags behind society.

There are a few principles which I’ve settled on for this idea. Let’s work backwards through them.

---

Principle #4 – The importance of Law increases proportionally with Population Density. This makes intuitive sense: if there is a 1% chance that you will have a disagreeable encounter with any given person, in densely populous areas you will have more disagreeable encounters than in a loosely populous area. In densely populous areas, there is a requirement for more law enforcement because of this, and so the Sovereign Peace is monitored more closely. One of the functions of law is to resolve conflicts, so citizens of cities can rest easy knowing that if they get into conflicts, the party on the side of law will be the party protected. Conversely, on the frontier, law enforcement has a light presence because there are fewer people and fewer disagreeable encounters. Most people on the frontiers learn to resolve disputes inter-personally, because the Law is not near at hand. The Law matters less to people on the frontier because there is less need to invoke the Law to resolve disputes; the Law matters more to people in cities because there is more need to invoke the Law to resolve disputes.

Principle #3 – Government makes Laws to clarify gaps in what Society agrees is important. Lets approach this in a roundabout way: Laws can be written either to expressly state only those things which are permitted (lets call this positive law), or they can be written to expressly state only those things which are not permitted (lets call this negative law). The scope of possible positive laws is infinite, so are typically not the way Laws are written. Most laws–at least the Laws in the United States–are varieties of negative law. Negative Laws take the form of prohibitions on certain behaviors. Which behaviors are prohibited are determined by what Society thinks is important enough to prohibit. The gaps that need clarifying are where there are nuances or disagreements within society about how or what needs to be prohibited. Where Society agrees universally on something, there is no necessity of a law to codify it unless there is a risk of rogue citizens violating that law.

Principle #2 – Social Mores are antecedent to Law. This is implicit in the discussion of #3 above: Society must have some set of values to serve as the basis of law, and law follows that. When the law is written, it applies equally to all citizens, but can only be enforced where law enforcement is present. So law is less prevalent on the frontier and more prevalent in cities, Social Mores govern every human interaction and do not depend on the presence of law enforcement. Social mores keep the peace where law enforcement does not or cannot. Laws serve to strengthen or clarify these mores where necessary.

Principle #1 – Politeness is the true Law of the Land. Politeness is defined as the agreed upon customs of courtesy defined by society: It is the specific set of social mores which govern behavior. Citizens of cities tend to be rude–that is because the law is readily available to enforce the peace. Citizens of frontiers tend to be polite–that is because the law is not readily available to enforce the peace. What people consider polite will do more to preserve the Sovereign Peace than what people consider legal.

More to come on this topic–this opens the doors to a lot of areas and it is worth giving these ideas their due attention.

AMDG

CCXXXII – On The Modern Frontier

Recently there was a discussion about the virtues and vices of cities. On the one side are the ruritans who believe that cities are dens of evil and all bad things emerge from cities, and so when cities are laid low, so will the evil that comes from them, and the Pax Campos will be restored. On the other side are the metropoloi who believe that cities are the only civilized parts of the world and if the countryside hicks would only set aside their provincial ways then the Pax Urbana will be restored.

For the part of the metropoloi, there is something to the belief that “cities are the only civilized parts of the world”–not in the way they think, though. Cities are where civilization began; the first recorded civilizations we know of are from their urbane remains.

For the part of the ruritans, there is something to the belief that “cities are dens of evil”. There are two reasons this is true. First is the simple reason that if, of any given population, x% of people will be given to vice, cities have more people and so even if the proportion is still x% they are more densely packed and so more noticeable. Vice is not the exclusive domain of cities, but the density makes them stick out. The second reason this is true is a function of democracy. Any sufficiently large population which governs itself democratically will iteratively move towards the basest instincts of that population, because in order for elected officers to have “mass appeal” they must lower their ideals such that more and more people accept them. The fallacy of democracy is that the best ideas win–that is true in theory, but in practice it is the ideas which ask the least of us which win. The man with the plan to restore the city with hard work and austerity will lose to the man who says he will ask nothing of you, and do nothing in return.

Given that both the metropoloi and the ruritans have a point, why do both ideas sound wrong when stated simply as I stated them in my first graf? I believe the reason lies in how the conversation has been framed to begin with. Urban and Rural environs are connected, not separate, so thinking of them as distinct entities isn’t entirely valid. The far flung rural communities could not exist without the cities, nor could cities exist without their far flung counterparts. There are virtues and vices to both. So we must think in terms which account for this connection and for the flaws and features which we observe.

I argue that the dichotomy is not between urban and rural, but between what I will call the heartland and the frontier. Think of human society as spreading outward from cities. The cities are the beating heart of society, and on the leading edge of society, beyond which lies an alien wilderness, is the frontier. In American history, when there was an actual frontier, this was easier to think about. Gold rush homesteads became, over time, city centers and town squares, and there is no more alien wilderness for us to settle and civilize. The cities caught up to the frontiers, and cities arose where the frontiersmen stopped running.

This dichotomy allows for cities to be both centers of civilization and hearts of darkness for the reasons stated above. The reason frontiersmen prefer the frontier is because the frontier is per se away from the civilized aspects of the city–the density, the laws, the neighbors–as well as the vices of the city. Frontiers are likewise per se lawless, and calling them “provincial” is another way of saying they are governed by local custom–by politeness, in other words–and not by regulation. Metropoloi can be rude personally because they behave legally; ruritans must be polite personally because the law is not omnipresent for them. The rugged individualism of the frontier also makes frontiersmen hardy and virtuous in ways that their urban counterparts are not; and the opposite is true as well that the metropoloi are hardy and virtuous in ways that their ruritan counterparts are not.

To bring it all home, there is a specific point that Wood made in his article that I want to look at:

I love passionately my particular Big City – it happens to be the biggest of the big – and I do not ascribe to it the fantastical properties that I read here. My Big City parish has more offerings of confession in a day than my former country mouse diocese offered in a month.

I was thinking about this over the weekend as I visited a big city myself. For context, I have talked about how I live in the surrounds of Washington DC, on the Virginia side, which is very metropolitan but nevertheless when you are amid Northern Virginia you would recognize that it is populous yet not call it a city. So I visited a city which is indeed a city. I went to Mass at a Franciscan parish tucked away between two ramshackle buildings, across the street from a liquor store and the grafitti-ridden facades of other urban shops. Mass here was lightly attended–and this is even accounting for the crowd that was visiting to witness the baptism which happened to be on schedule for the day. But the Church itself was beautiful. The art, the music, the space, the sound–everything about it called the mind to God. The contrast was striking between the lonely priest, in an ancient and magnificent monument to the glory of God, with only a few faithful in attendance. It is here that I began to think about this idea of the Frontier vs. the Heartland.

My home diocese is vibrant and healthy–is populous, is well supported, has much in the way of sacraments. My home parish is not built to glorify God in the same way this Franciscan parish in the heart of the city was. My home parish looks like a bingo hall with a crucifix in the front.

The connection between these two observations is that there are multiple overlapping environments. This lonely Franciscan in an empty Church in the middle of a city is a frontier parish: he is in mission territory. He doesn’t have the resources or abundance which my home parish has, but what he does have is a will to live and a desire to make his living in the alien wilderness that is the heart of this city center. My home parish is a heartland parish: it has abundance of every variety, but many parishioners have a rude irreverence to the object of their worship. Wood’s observation in the quote above seems to me to be that he loves the ingenuity of his frontier church nestled in the heart of his city; while his interlocutors may prefer their perch on the frontier of civilization, regardless of the health of their local manifestation of the Church.

Nevertheless: It is the frontier which informs the rural virtues which are disdained by the metropoloi; it is the city which informs the urban virtues which are disdained by the ruritans; it is these mutually exclusive preferences which drive individuals to live in the places where they live. You cannot have one without the other, and both are here to stay.

AMDG