Link about Reading

If you are the type of person who will read something just because it was recommended on a blog, go read this (by way of Alan Jacobs' blog Text Patterns).  It's what I would do.

Neighbors Needed: Why abstract love doesn’t work

               “Unselfish love that is poured out on a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved.  And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied… [his love] has not awakened [the beloved’s] capacity for unselfish love.”

               “Love shares the good with another not by dividing it with him, but identifying itself with him so that his good becomes my own.”   - Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

            In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a woman comes before the elder complaining that she lacks faith.  The elder advises that while nothing can be proven here, one can be convinced, “By the experience of active love.  Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly.  The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.  And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul.  This has been tested.  It is certain.”  To which the woman responds that she does indeed love humanity, to the point where she has dreamed of leaving everything, including her sickly daughter Lise, behind to become a sister of mercy and bind up the wounds and sores of the suffering.  She fears that ingratitude will cause her “active love for humanity” to wilt, an experience which the Elder Zosima corroborates by telling of a doctor he knew who claimed that, “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular that is, individually, as separate persons.”

            “Active love for humanity” such as the woman claims to have, is a contradiction in terms.  To be active, love must be particular; it must be active upon a concrete, individual person.  As Merton said, love rests in the happiness of the beloved.  (I would have perhaps written “good of the beloved”, if only to avoid confusion.  Happiness has been misconstrued as that which is pleasurable – and so could include sinful activities – rather than as the true joy found in the ultimate good, life with God.)   Regardless of the terminology used, it is only in seeking the other’s good or happiness that the lover really goes about the activity of loving.  It is only through sharing life together, “identifying [oneself] with [the beloved] so that his good becomes my own” that we really love actively, something that cannot be done in distraction.   This is perhaps reflected in the curious Gospel phrase, “Jesus looked at them and loved them.”  In His humanity, Jesus could not be in relation at all times with all people and so could not “love them” in any way that would make sense, so it is only upon apprehending them that Jesus begins to love.  When God is said to “so love the world” He is loving all individuals separately rather than abstractly and seeking to draw each into a relationship of reciprocated love, because that is the beloved’s greatest good.  Abstract love, in contrast, is passive.  It does not seek the good of the beloved because it has no relation with it.  In fact it is a form of self-love, because all its benefits rest in the lover rather than the beloved.  The lover of humanity puffs himself up with fine feelings about himself, but affects no good in the perceived objects of his love.  As I’ve written before on this blog, love for humanity can lead to hatred for individuals perceived to be against the common good, from the conviction that it is better for one man to die for the sake of the nation to killing Jews for the sake of Aryan racial purity.  Love for humanity constitutes a kind of tenderness and sentimentality detached from its moorings, and as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.  It ends in forced-labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.” (A Memoir of Mary Ann)  The commandment to love our neighbors is one which has both our neighbor’s good and our own as its end.  Abstract love hopelessly collapses into itself; it is only through sharing in the good with others that we participate in the love of God.          

Great Moments in Southern Literature

(The title is only partially facetious. Imagine it as a recurring segment on your completely inane 24-hour news network of choice. How completely out of character and unexpectedly worthwhile it would be in contrast. You could have passages of Ignatius J. Reilly (bronzed, right) railing against everything while he waits outside the D.H. Holmes in New Orleans interspersed with clips of Lady Gaga’s latest doings or superimposed close-ups of Glenn Beck’s oh so expressive eyes. It would be awesome.)

I’ve really been on a bit of a Southern literature kick lately: Faulkner (a difficult but ultimately worthwhile slog it turns out), a Flannery O’Connor bio, the occasional essay by Walker Percy (Signposts in a Strange Land, the posthumous collection of his essays by his Jesuit biographer Patrick Samway has some wonderful essays on Louisiana and the South in general that should interest most readers along with some of a more philosophical bent dealing with the nature of language, art and faith, among other things, for those, like myself, more nerdy in taste. Here’s a quote from his wonderful “New Orleans, Mon Amour” that I particularly liked, “Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city, and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.”), a Civil War novel by Shelby Foote (the guy you remember from Ken Burns’ PBS series if you saw it), and the two authors I will feature here: George W. Cable and Eudora Welty. (Unfortunately, it seems reading Faulkner has done nothing to help the brevity of my parenthetical remarks.) First off, the wonderful Eudora Welty, a sort of amalgam in my mind of every funny old Southern lady I’ve ever met, to the point where I feel constrained to always refer to her as Miss Eudora Welty, out of respect and familiarity.

Despite that, I actually had never read Miss Eudora before this spring when I read both her wonderful short novel The Optimist’s Daughter and a few of her short stories (and was a little miffed no one had forced me to read her growing up, what are English teachers for after all if not forcing us to read good things against our will, there are better and more enjoyable Southern short stories that could be anthologized than “Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily”, both of which still leave me a bit cold – no pun intended on the mortality, presumed or otherwise, of certain supporting characters in either story). I realize in painting her as the beloved Southern lady who sits in the back of the church and, after you chance to sit by them at a pot-luck meal, reveals herself as one of the nicest and simultaneously cuttingly funny people you’ve ever met - the kind that because they are old and because all they say is wrapped in good manners and propriety (prefacing even the meanest remarks with “bless his heart”) hold together these two opposing poles without so much as soiling their dainty white cotton gloves - I may turn some people off; positing her as a feminine, jokey, Mark Twain knock off trotting out that (formerly) highly prized Southern literary commodity: the amusing backwoods country bumpkin for laughs without much substance beyond that (because amusing and beloved as they are, most old church ladies probably shouldn’t be writing books- though I may be wrong on this point). But her humor in no way distracts or masks any potential deficiencies of her art. Think instead of a Jackson-bred Jane Austen, very funny but also a wonderful author. The following passage comes from Losing Battles, (though in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that The Optimist's Daughter is better) as one Miss Beulah describes to her new sister-in-law Aunt Cleo the one brother who is not present at the ongoing family reunion in comparison to the present brothers, Aunt Cleo’s husband included,

     “Handsome! Handsomer than Dolphus ever was, sunnier than Noah Webster, smarter than Percy, more home-loving than Curtis, more quiet-spoken than Nathan, and could let you have a tune quicker and truer than all the rest put together,” said Miss Beulah.
“He sounds like he’s dead,” said Aunt Cleo.

As it turns out, baby brother Sam Dale is dead. But that sums up nicely part of what is so wonderful about Miss Eudora, natural humor in the flow of the story. *Here’s a short story also by Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.”

Turning to a likewise often neglected (though with better reason than with Welty) Southern author, I present New Orleans’ own George Washington Cable. Cable is an interesting figure; he was a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War who later became an ardent supporter of civil rights for former slaves (which led to his eventual exile from the South). He was also a good friend of Mark Twain who during their joint national book tour (which if you can believe was at the time a highly publicized and culturally significant event, a far cry from the sad and lonely looking authors sitting alone at tables in Barnes and Noble with a pile of unused and unneeded Sharpies and photos) was arguably the headliner and the bigger draw. Twain is still read of course (along with having that ultimate sign of late 90s cultural relevance a movie starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas based on not one, but two of his works, placing him, by extension, on roughly equal footing with Santa Claus in terms of popularity) while Cable is largely forgotten (I only found him available through a small Gretna based publishing house). Cable can be a little bit moralistic at times and has the annoying (to modern readers) habit of writing in dialect, to quote from one of his characters “Mais, fo’ w’y’?” (points for anyone who can figure out how an apostrophe better captures the nuances of a native French-speaker’s pronunciation of “why” than a silent “h”), but he still is of some interest I feel. Cable places the action of all his best works in the society of prewar New Orleans of the 1820s and 30s a time when gens de couleur libres (free men of color) of mixed French and African ancestry and the Freejacks set at liberty for their assistance in the Battle of New Orleans held some rights (even owning slaves in some cases), much more so than in the days of the post-Reconstruction backlash of oppression by the newly empowered Democrats that Cable wrote in. This distance allowed him room to comment on society; much in the way that Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch trials to talk about McCarthyism. With that and Cable’s ardent Christianity in mind, the word’s of his priest Père Jerome in the novella Madame Delphine should be considered, although they seem hardly less applicable today,
“’It is impossible for any finite mind to fix the degree of criminality if any human act or of any human life. The Infinite One alone can know how much of our sin is chargeable to us, and how much to our brothers or our fathers. We all participate in another’s sins. There is a community of responsibility attaching to every misdeed. No human since Adam – nay, nor Adam himself – ever sinned entirely to himself. And so I’m never am called upon to contemplate a crime or a criminal but I feel my conscience pointing at me as one of the accessories.”
Make no mistake, slavery was an American sin, not a peculiarly Southern one (Northern looms were just as hungry for cheaply produced Southern cotton as Southern planters were to produce it, and so jointly profited and sinned). In the same way, the globalized economy expands the circle of our neighbors and we can no longer (if we ever could) claim ignorance about why our Nikes are so cheap. Beyond this our mutual responsibility (an idea found interestingly enough in Dostoevsky’s writings of around the same time, though neither possibly read the other), affects the way I at least interpret the Bible, especially Genesis. But that’s for another post (or two)…
***Before I got around to posting this, I came across this in Terry Teachout’s decent biography of Louis Armstrong, Pops, and this seems as good a place as any to stick it. Here Armstrong discusses his proposal to his future wife Lucille after originally being rebuffed by concerns on the part of Lucille, (the idiosyncratic capitalization is Armstrong’s),
“That’s when I stopped her from Talking by slowly reaching for her Cute little Beautifully Manicured hand And said to her, ‘Can you Cook Red Beans and Rice?’ Which Amused her very much. Then it dawned on her that I was very serious. She – being a Northern girl and Me a Southern Boy from N.O. She could see why I asked her that question. So She said: “I’ve never cooked that kind of food before. But – Just give me a little time and I think that I can fix it for you.” That’s All that I wanted to hear, and right away I said “How about Inviting me to your house for dinner tomorrow night.”
A few nights later Louis went and ate red beans at Lucille’s parents house which he reported to be, “Very much delicious and I Ate Just like a dog,” and repeated his proposal, which was accepted the second time asking.

Multiculturalism and Taste

Pretty exciting title huh? I thought about entitling this post “Why silly liberal college professors should stop pretending to like underground hip-hop, Indian dance, and obscure subtitled movies from Mongolia and Thailand out of a sense of moral superiority and distrusting the rectitude of those who don’t share their enthusiasm and instead try to build up the steam-rolled mainstream American culture that produces drivel like Twilight, Two and a Half Men, and Miley Cyrus today when it used to put forth works like Absalom, Absalom! and Huck Finn, and artists like Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash,” but the present title seemed more succinct somehow, punchier. – You may have noticed that all the cultural products given as positive examples are from the South, while for the moment it is enough to note with pride (assuming you’re Southern) that all the most natural examples of American excellence in these fields happen to be from the South – the only that could perhaps be added would be Moby Dick, Dylan, and Elvis (who was also from the South of course), it is important that the examples are local I think, but more on that later. (Also as much I like, say, Fleet Foxes or Iron & Wine for example, it will be interesting to see how they hold up over time; survival to posterity is broadly a meritocracy although there are always some good things that slip through the cracks.)

 Despite all possible appearances to the contrary, this will not be a takedown of multiple cultures; it will be a takedown of the culture of multiculturalism that values diversity as an end in itself.  Rather being broadly catholic in taste and accepting the products of a given culture on the basis of merit, many seem to value these products of other cultures simply for their exotic nature – proof above all else that the multiculturalist is not a racist.  This comes, I think to the heart of the problem: multiculturalism identifies the physical or intellectual products of a culture so completely with the members of said culture that rejection of the products constitutes a rejection of the culture’s members (e.g. accusations that musical critics who dislike rap are therefore racist).  Thus their support for the products of a minority culture becomes a moral act, lending to them the cachet of an insider finding exotic products to astound their friends with and the moral superiority of being globally conscious and broadly accepting.  The actual members of the culture, the concrete individuals, the images of God, are secondary to their cultural products; they are not valued in themselves for those things which unite the two (producer and, unfortunately, what can only be described as consumer), but rather they are valued simply for their diversity, instead of their excellence.  Excellence is of course diverse in nature, it seems because God has willed it so (in sharp contrast to the popular conception of faceless cherubs sitting on identical clouds strumming non-descriptly on their harps, it is Hell that, as Lewis writes in The Great Divorce is the “grey town”).  In some ways it is the multiculturalist who is more susceptible to a type of racism (or culturalism, if that, despite spell check’s testimony to the contrary, is a word), patronizing others for diversity’s sake regardless of their merit.  It is quite possible to dislike the entire production of a culture while still loving individual members of it.  As a Christian this goes from the realm of possibility to that of a command to “love thy neighbor”, though this does not, I assume, preclude discriminating taste in music.

This multiculturalism is, I think, more a Northern phenomenon than a Southern one.  The North has always had a voracious appetite for other cultures it seems, eating up anything to fill the void within itself.  An example may help say for example you were set up on two blind dates the first girl is described to you as, “your typical Southern belle, from Savanna, Georgia,” the second as, “your typical girl from Branson, Missouri.”  Which one was easier to picture? Which would you feel more comfortable meeting now, knowing what you do?  The upshot is that it is difficult to imagine the stereotypical Northerner.  Would it have made any difference in your picture of the second girl if she was instead from Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon?  Lacking any real sense of a cultural identity, the Yankee has taken to identifying with many cultures, eclecticism being the humanizing aspect as it is all nominally run through the consumer’s taste.  The person thus becomes identified through their stuff, rather than producing culture from their own identity, resulting in turn in superficiality when the consumer tries to turn producer themselves.  It is only it seems the minority, that because of their differences from the prevailing culture can identify themselves, that is capable of producing lasting cultural products.  One can talk for example of the Harlem renascence or that of the South, or praise the Jewish literature of such authors as Chaim Potok or Saul Bellow (the former I have read and heartily recommend, the latter I haven’t, but have heard good things and invite you, dear reader, to go read him and tell me if I’m missing something), but the Great White North has produced no such movements.  The problem with the South is that bright, bustling Atlanta and oil-and-space rich Houston have replaced old seedy New Orleans and the (formerly at least) insane denizens of South Carolina and Charleston as the leading  cities of the New South, more reconciled and lest distinct than the South has ever been in its history.  This creates two possible solutions, manifesting themselves as symptoms of a common disease: one either accepts his places, feels alienated and rootless, and stocks up on cultural products wherever he may find them, or else embraces the relics of Southern culture root and branch, often stressing the parts most controversial and least accepted by the rest of the country as primary to distinguish himself all the more clearly from the rest of the country (e.g. the Rebel flag).  Lying back behind all this is the intuition that the prime days of the South have passed by and that either an anachronistic, sometimes belligerent self-imposed exile to the mythic past or an uneasy acceptance of the shallow present are the only viable options left.

All this said, no culture is monolithic and one must talk of Southern cultures as seen in the earlier example of perhaps the two most outstanding Southern musicians (excluding Delta bluesman like Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters who might also merit a place) Louis Armstrong and Hank Williams who came from quite different contexts but nevertheless can both be considered Southern.  Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles releasing albums of country music or Johnny Cash covering old blues songs serve as good examples of what from the outside appear to be cross-cultural exchanges but to their practitioners seemed natural.  Ideally this would still be true and locality would be the determining factor in culture, but media technology has progressed to the point where this is no longer the case.  In music for instance, the lack of local DJs (in the old sense of people on the radio selecting the music, not folks doing funny things with turntables) and the shriveling local music scene (related to the lack of local radio) mean that individuals are no longer limited in their access to music by location.  Splintered locals, uprooted from any tie to their soil, form virtual communities around their tastes, but it is unclear yet if such communities will be able to produce a coherent style in the same way local ones have in the past (e.g. Dixieland jazz or the 60s and 70s New Orleans funk of Dr. John and the Meters).  Multiculturalism seems to me to be an enemy of this, pursuing eclecticism and globalism at the expense of depth and a local culture.  At its extreme end, diversity becomes an end in itself, not a natural product of excellence in its many forms.  Inter-cultural borrowing is a very natural process, but without a coherent culture of one’s own by which others may be understood, superficiality is the only possible outcome