CDXVIII – Treasure and Terms

I was thinking of how to answer the prompt in a recent post about what things we treasure. I tried answering it and I found a good pattern, and thought that might be helpful to some of you.

The prompt was to think about “Non negotiable, unalterable terms”. These are things–treasures–which we resolve to protect with violent force if necessary. These are things offenses against which we will not tolerate in any company. The benefit of thinking about this is that we create a “confidence circle” within which we can operate comfortably and confidently knowing that we are doing a good and right thing, and we will not let anyone or anything disturb our peace about that. If someone disturbs our peace about our non negotiable, unalterable terms, then something is wrong with them and not us.

The rules I set for myself when thinking about this was that I would start from the inside out: What is the biggest treasure and most fundamental term, which supports all other treasures above it, and without which none of those treasures matter, and against which all other treasures must be capable of transgressing. And once the foundation is established, work my way up.

The pattern that developed was something like this.

First Level: God – God is the root of everything, so sensibly ought to be the first and most fundamental. My God, my faith, my Church, my devotions all fall under this category. No offenses against God ought to be tolerated; and nothing else I have matters without God.

Second Level: People – My life, [and] families fall under this level. They are treasures in their own right, but also capable of transgressing against the first level, which is God. We ought to educate ourselves, those people close to us, so that they do not transgress against God; we ought to resolve to protect these people with violent force if they face determined offense; nothing else we have matters if we do not have these people in our lives.

Third Level: Life & Livelihood – These are the things we do in our lives that support and enhance every preceding level. Our jobs, our education, our recreation and hobbies, I also include our possessions and belongings here. I would not accept a job if it required me to sacrifice anything on the preceding levels; I would not engage in a recreation if it offended against any of the preceding levels; I would not purchase a good for my use or my home if it was contrary to the previous levels. Yet, once I have properly aligned my life & livelihood, anything that transgresses against these things I would reject with violent force if necessary. No one may take my possessions or limit my recreations unjustly.

Fourth Level: Beliefs and Ideals – These are the truths we hold dear. You may be surprised it is this far out from the center, but rather than being fundamental, it serves as a protective shield. We don’t hold beliefs that transgress below, neither do we allow higher levels to transgress against our beliefs and ideals. Think of it this way: Once God is foundation, and the people are in place around us, and once the people around us are taken care of, then our beliefs will solidify. The beliefs and ideals serve as the foundation for everything beyond, which is not much.

Fifth Level: Community – These are the friends and relations who are in our lives but not essentially so. They enrich our lives but I would not defend them with the same vigor that I would defend […]. Yet–as my community, I would defend them against anything that sits at a higher level.

Beyond – Anything higher than this fifth level falls under the category of Enemies, Strangers, or Foreigners–which are words I use to signify people we don’t like, people we don’t know, and people we don’t understand, respectively. Each of these three categories can transgress against our community, and we ought to defend and protect our community vigorously, and seek to support them. Enemies we ought to keep at arms length, strangers we ought to employ reasonable suspicion, foreigners we ought to make reasonable pains to make them understood.

Now, in each of these levels there are specific items which are worth listing. My writing endeavors fall under the third level: they are recreations I enjoy which help make me whole, yet which ought not offend against any of the people closest to me, nor God. This is not to say my writing can be offensive against my beliefs and ideals and my community, but rather that if I am compliant with the preceding levels then I will have no difficulty remaining consistent with the succeeding levels.

Maybe this is all very obvious to you already, but it was a helpful exercise to me to think about, and I hope there is something valuable in all this for you, too.

AMDG

CCCLXXIX – The Edible Bits of the Rotten Fruit

Wood over at his excellent blog has been on a roll recently and I wanted to expand on some ideas he has introduced.

Trials and Tribe-ulations

One of these ideas is the idea of “tribe”. He has suggested that one of the things that makes the Catholic Church both special and functional is it’s function as a tribe, united by Christian love. The word “tribe” is evocative to me of early human society, based on family units and where all the members work to the good of the whole. The uniting feature of these ancient tribes was blood relation. The undisputed leader of the tribe was usually a paternal or maternal figure and every member of the tribe had some role to play.

The Church is a tribe, united by the blood of the covenant which is thicker than the water of the womb. It is not uncommon to hear people referred to as “brothers and sisters in Christ”, which is both literal (by adoption) and figurative (by tribe). The Catholic Church today is riddled with many illnesses, and one of them is factionalism. But factionalism within the Church comes down to feuds between brothers over who serves Father best. The important thing is indeed serving Father, and if we were able to put aside our pride it would be a lot easier to do that. Remember–do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is both prescriptive (“I want you to treat me better, so let me show you how to treat me better through my treatment of you”) and aspirational (“I need money so I will be more giving with my own money, so the favor will be returned to me eventually”). This idea is sometimes rendered as the cliché “be the change you want to see in the world”. If you want to heal the Church then begin by healing the church as it exists around you.

A lot of the wounds of the Church are multi generational, so no one alive can really take blame for the problems nor credit for the solutions. We are all just trying to do the best we can with a mixed-bag inheritance. This is my segue into the discussion of what I will call “founding myths”.

Founding Myth Busters

We as human beings are very short sighted to our own lifetimes. We can sometimes directly experience two or three generations of our ancestors and we can sometimes live long enough to directly experience two or three generations of predecessors. And that’s about it–it’s hard for us to fathom anything else. Anything that transcends that timespan is incomprehensible to us and holds a status as something transcendent and mystical. The United States of America, we like to think, has always been the way we experience it now, and the way we experience it now is a modest improvement by the way Grandpappy experienced it, which was already quite good.

I’ll take a digression to talk about major corporations, of all things. I work for a large organization, the employees of which, if gathered into one place, would populate a small town. I remember realizing, slowly, that so much of what makes large organizations persist from one day to the next is sheer willpower. Our recordkeeping systems are fragile, our leaders are flawed, our technology is dated, but everyone keeps showing up for work. My employer, as with every employer, as with every government, as with nearly every institution, only persists because people keep showing up for some reason, and is only one bad day away from complete and utter collapse.

All that to say, if we were to actually look closely at the mystical and transcendent entities that cross our generations–they are much more fragile than we realize. They are also never ever as good as we have been taught.

I remember when I was in 5th grade, on 9/11, I lived close enough to some of the events that kids at my school had parents who could have been at risk. One of my friends mothers came to pick him up from school, but it was lunch time so she came to sit with us at the lunch table. I don’t really know how else to describe her than as a redneck. She was loud, she was unpolished, and she told it like it was. She announced to a table full of 5th graders that “Terrorists blew up the pentagon”. I didn’t believe her–that doesn’t make sense, this is America. That kind of thing isn’t possible here. When I got home from school I got to watch how possible it was on TV, replayed with immodest doom voyeurism for young and impressionable minds like mine to absorb and not understand.

The genius comedian, Norm Macdonald, has a funny quote Hambone shared with me recently: “Hey, it says here in the history books that the good guys won every time! What are the odds of that!”

Our founding myth is the comfortable lie we tell ourselves so we don’t question our base assumptions and can just keep on showing up and keeping the institutions we are a part of moving along from one day to the next. When I recently suggested in an inflammatory thread of my own devising that the American Revolution was an unjust and immoral secession from a legitimate sovereign, it popped some brains who questioned if I was even an American. Hearing this gets some people so utterly flabbergasted–it questions the most fundamental principle of their lives. The sun shines, birds fly, and God Bless America Forever. They look on the world with the same impressionable eyes that I had in 5th grade, and I was immodestly slapping the horse-blinders from their face and expecting them to thank me. Founding Myths are always a lie, because they have to be.

Bastard’s Apple

This is also true in a way of family history. Family Lore is a kind of myth we tell ourselves, to help us feel connected to all the generations we can’t experience. My family happened to make no bones about it’s hubris. My namesake and great grandfather left his wife and started a new family in the Netherlands when my grandfather was very young. It makes our genealogical records somewhat complicated because after a certain point it’s hard to tell where the lineage actually connects. Families and relationships are messy things, and so we smooth over the bad parts and feed our kids the edible bits of the rotten fruit so they get an idealized version of the story, and don’t learn about all the skeletons in the closet. The skeletons aren’t really valuable, but when we go digging and learn about our skeletons, it is always shocking–we have tasted the rest of the rotten fruit, the wormy, moldy bits that don’t sit so well in our stomachs.

My priest told me about this in the context of generational healing. It is possible and important to pray over our family tree. We exist today as the fruit of that tree and any rotten fruit has not fallen far from the tree. Often if we look back far enough we can see repeated variations of the same themes in our family. By praying for healing, we can graft our branch onto the tree of life, and baptize the tree for a while. It takes effort to keep the tree attached, but starting out strong can surely help. In my case, my family was not Catholic when I converted, but I am the only name-bearing male of my generation. Many past Scoot’s have not been Catholic, but every future Scoot of my line will be–at least for a while, God willing. I don’t know how far back I would have to go to find a Catholic member of the Scoot family but I am sure it would take me back to Europe in the 19th century or earlier.

The important thing, then, is not that our past is muddy and rotten and dirty and tarnished. That matters a lot less than the fact that our future can be baptized, healed, and glorified. This is the source of Hope, not just for us, but perhaps for well meaning souls of our ancestors who are waiting in purgatory for someone in their lineage to figure out the right path and pray for them to get over the hump and into heaven.

AMDG

(h) – Why You Have To Clean Your Room Even If Your Dad Is A Drunk

From my previous article:

it is the proper role of a sovereign, of a father, to demand something of the people, of his sons. The demand must be done in justice, but the demand cannot go the other way. A son cannot demand respect from his father, but a father can demand respect from his son.

Things that are true: You have to obey your Dad, your Dad must care for you as he cares for his own body, these two requirements are not codependent.

To clarify, you are not freed from your obligation to your Dad if he does not care for you. Your Dad must care for you even if you don’t listen to him. These obligations are independent.

You have to listen to your Dad because he is your dad and not because of anything that qualifies him as such. Your Dad holds the office, which he earned through the rites and privileges proper to matrimony. His ascent to the office predates your consciousness of it, and his authority to claim the office of Father comes from the office of husband.

You are born into a condition you have no control over. Your Dad might be a Swell Guy, he might be Ivanhoe, he might be Dingus McDougal, and he might be a drunk. But in each of those scenarios, the common element is that he is your Dad. If he tells you to clean your room, you must obey his lawful command. His obligation to care for you and only issue lawful commands is equal and opposite, but again, independent.

So too the Church. QED.

CXLVII – God, Family, Country

From a small point made in a recent article from Edward Feser (here).

Now, it is not merely human beings in the abstract to whom we owe love. The virtue of piety requires that we have a special love for certain others. Aquinas writes:

Man becomes a debtor to other men in various ways, according to their various excellence and the various benefits received from them. On both counts God holds first place, for He is supremely excellent, and is for us the first principle of being and government. On the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country.

This idea of debt is striking. I am an accountant by trade and training, and so perhaps I view debt a little differently than others. For the one in debt, it creates a liability. The root of liability is to bind, to be liable means you are restrained by the terms of the contract to repay what is owed. For one owed the debt, it creates an asset. The root of Asset is the latin ad satis, or to satisfy; thus a persons assets are “enough to satisfy”. In accounting terms, you might describe this as an obligation to or from another.

Excursus: There is another interesting side note in the form of the Lords Prayer. When I was doing my Latin series (I’m sorry for letting that lapse), I realized that the Latin form of the Lord’s Prayer has the word for debt instead of where we say in English “trespasses”. In other words: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those in debt to us”. A debt is very unlike a trespass, and we have the King James Version to thank for this lexical nuance. Keep this in mind.

An image of social hierarchy begins to form when we consider to whom we are bound. Indeed we can consider Authority as a binding of subordinates. Obligation and Liability share a root: ob + ligare, to bind; or ligare + able, able to be bound. We are bound first to God as creator: We are in debt to him for our lives. Likewise to our family: Our parents created us, reared us, and prepared us for adult life. We are thus likewise in debt to them for our lives. We can demonstrate that God has authority over us as a consequence, and so do our parents. Then we are bound to our sovereign, in what some may refer to as accident of birth or life lottery. We were born in our nation, which our sovereign protects, defends, and leads, and therefore we are in debt to our sovereign in exchange for the preservation of our national integrity and concord.

Previously this might have been described to as responsibility. But the difference between a debt and a responsibility is in who is burdened. I owe God a debt, therefore I am burdened with paying it back through worship and reverence. If I am responsible for employees, I owe them a duty of care. The debtee of course has an incentive to care for the debtor until the obligation can be fulfilled, but that relationship is different than a burden of responsibility.

In my Latin exploration, I tried to understand this by treating debt as a stand in for sin. But that’s not exactly it. It describes a binding relationship between people. Like a contract.

…Or a covenant.

AMDG

CXXXII – Excursus on Individualism

The relations of Man I think have been well defined over time: Man and self, Man and Man, Man and Family, Man and Country, Man and God.

One of the consequences of post-enlightenment political thought is the idea of Man as a self contained unit. Catholic political thought conceptualizes the smallest social unit as a family, thereby implicitly considering Individuals as a ‘unitless number’ when contextualized outside of the family. The “liberation” of Man from any other context-giving unit has fueled this perennial question of “What is the meaning of life” or “what is mans purpose”.

A husband and wife are “one flesh” through the sacrament of Matrimony. A king is “one flesh” with his people. Adam is “one flesh” with Eve. This is the root of the consideration. Man’s life is not his own. God is our heavenly King, and we will be united with him (as one flesh) in the hereafter. Our relationship to God is properly ordered as a prodigal son to a loving father, as such. Worship of God is due reverence and obedience. No man can be conceived outside of his relationship with God. The worship of God gives life meaning and purpose at it’s most basic and fundamental. If the answer to “What am I supposed to do with my life” is “Honor and glorify God,” then the logical next question is “How do I do that,”: The question is changed from an existential one to a practical one.

Our Sovereign has a similar relationship. In a frictionless monarchy in a vacuum, the Sovereign is one flesh with his people. He has a duty to his people just as we have a duty to him, and this reciprocity lends itself to stability and purpose for all around. “Civic Duty” is the philosophical descendant of this idea of a filial obligation to ones sovereign. In a democracy such as ours, the relationship is confused. We imagine ourselves as both Sovereign and Subject, so we tend to make increasing demands on our elected officials as the ones who put them into office, and demand a higher obligation as subjects of those officials. It is very difficult to conceive of the relationship; nevertheless Civic Duty gives us some purpose as well: Peace, stability, virtue for our nation. The means to these ends are manifold, and can be selected voluntarily.

In Family units, man has obligations depending on role but all stemming from this concept of one-ness with the whole. As paterfamilias, or as prodigal son, there is a filial obligation proportionate to role and responsibility. Outside of this, Man is at sea without a paddle, lost without a compass.

Relative to his fellow Man, the obligation is looser: Love thy neighbor as yourself, which JMSmith teachs via Orthosphere implies that the neighbor is one who helps you. We have an obligation of indifference, perhaps even benevolence to all people, but our neighbors are those immediately around us who help us in various ways.

Implicit is Mans relationship to self. Indeed, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” makes less sense if we do not first love ourselves. This is also where Individualism is fallacious. If Man turns to Self for meaning and purpose, he cannot find it, he see’s only his reflection staring back at him. If Man turns to Family, Country, and God for meaning and purpose, he will find himself rising to a common purpose.

Individualism pursues its own ends, Catholicism pursues oneness with the whole: Not artificial oneness that the “socialists” prescribe, but actual literal oneness that comes with Unity with God. Until then, we are actually one with our families, whose flesh is our flesh.