( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh)
In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age.
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Nov 07, 2009 02:26 PM
One of the most memorable book pans of the last several years was Anne Applebaums review of Nicholson Bakers Human Smoke, that coy Wikipedia entry that attempted to explain the narcissism of the tiny difference between the Allied and Axis powers in World War II. Bakers method was to assemble a collection of anecdotes and qutotations from both sides, divorce them from context and any sense of proportion, and timestamp them as if with gnostic certitude in the law of moral equivalence. Narrative didnt enter into it, and so two juxtaposed parlor comments would have the credulous reader coming away thinking that Franklin Roosevelt was little more than a chair-bound Adolph Eichmann. By way of offering her own context for the sorry cultural atmosphere that could produce such a flimsy, ahistorical work of history, Applebaum opened with a remark once made by my former employer:
“The ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.
“And it’s 100 words long.
“200 max.
“Any good idea can be expressed at that length.”
As someone once tasked with explaining the veracity of the peak oil idea and the controversy over Chris Andersons "long tail" thesis of online consumption in 200 words of fewer, I can attest that that is indeed the ideal Gawker item. But as to whether all good ideas can be reduced to feuilletons and drive-by observations, or whether every bit of conventional wisdom deserves to be turned on its head, Im not so sure. Theres probably a symposium about this modern problem somewhere on YouTube, if you can bother to sit through the whole thing.
Ben Macintyre has a nice essay in the London Times about how technology--from blogs to PDAs--has spelt the end of long-form narrative, most depressingly that oldest form of human entertainment, storytelling:
Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.
Macintyre goes on to explain that theres actually a budding industry in Japan for bite-sized, cyberspoken fiction tailored to such shrinking attention spans and delivered to handheld device single pages at a time. So while the Internet, clearinghouse for fact-checks and personality disorders that it is, may be able to stop the next Marx in his tracks by an "epic fail" tweet or a withering status update, how long before Tolstoy begins to look like this?
Levin: :) hello hello :)
Kitty: um, hi
Kitty: heeeeyy!!!!!
Vronsky: User has signed off and did not receive your Gchat.
Vronsky: ;-)
Anna: <3
Karenin: you there?
Anna: sorry, busy.
Levin: long time...
Kitty: hi!!! :)
Vronsky: ?
Anna: :-/
Vronsky: ugh
Anna: later
Nov 05, 2009 06:05 PM
by James Bowman
In Laurent Cantet’s great film, La Classe, which came out in America last spring, the hapless inner-city school teacher played by François Bégaudeau — who also wrote the book on which the film was based — attempted to ingratiate himself with a class of naughty teenagers, who are contemptuous of his authority, by admitting that no one but a snob would ever use the subjunctive mood nowadays. Whereupon, the kids pretend not to know what a "snob" is! It’s a reminder of the extent to which grammar, manners, authority and social cohesion go together but also of the impoverishment of intellectual life that results when, for the sake of egalitarianism, we dumb down the usable language and so voluntarily deprive ourselves of the means of thinking, or understanding, a whole mood’s worth of thoughts.
Take that wonderfully and hilariously nonsensical bumper sticker, "God bless the whole world — no exceptions." Grammatically and historically, the "God bless" formula is an example of the "optative," a sub-class of the subjunctive. What it really means is "May God bless. . ." and, therefore, "I hope that God blesses. . ." It is a polite way of expressing a wish that someone — or, in this case, Someone — will do something. Today in French you would use the conditional. But without the knowledge of the English optative, the bumper-sticker’s writer supposes it to be an imperative. The speaker is not humbly supplicating God but imperiously ordering Him, which is ridiculous. For the writer, this is probably a matter of no great moment. Like the rest of the culture, he will long since have grown used to the idea that God, if He exists at all, is only there to be bullied by his creatures and told what he can and cannot do with His world. But that is itself both cause and consequence of the death of the optative.
There are other consequences. Writing in The Times of London last week, Melanie Reid simply assumed the "right to die" and thought it a great shame that the assisted suicide clinic, Dignitas, is beginning to be an embarrassment to the Swiss government because of its attraction of "death tourists" from other European countries seeking to end their own lives. "The people we should really feel sorry for," writes Ms Reid, "are those for whom the Dignitas clinic offers comfort."
The restrictions, or closure, will impact most of all on those struggling with constant pain or a decreasing loss of motor skills, who in the long wastes of the night take comfort from the fact that Switzerland is only a flight away. They are the people who know that if things become too unbearable next week they can act. For them, knowing that there is a way out, even if they don’t take it, brings relief. And what black irony it is, in a world where one can buy a thousand brands of fridge, or order a zillion differing specifications on a new car, that any organised choice about how to end our lives is being removed from us? Just the most important consumer decision of the lot, the ultimate act of autonomy, denied to us, that’s all.
It appears that the language of "rights" and "consumer choice" is all that we have left with which to speak even of matters of life and death, which may be yet another of the pernicious legacies of the "pro-choice" movement. But this language is as hopelessly inappropriate for the purpose as ordering God to bless people.
Not coincidentally, both linguistic faux pas involve a fundamental failure to understand the divine economy and how its workings are different from the human one. To Ms Reid, it is unthinkable that anyone should be deprived of "the ultimate act of autonomy," whereas those from whom we have inherited our understanding of the relationship between God and man knew that such autonomy is incompatible with the very concept of the Will of God, which Christians are enjoined to pray, in another subjunctive-optative construction, might be done. Prayer itself is a function of the optative, and a recognition that man proposes but God disposes. Without this very basic cultural knowledge, we are led into a wilderness of absurdity from which a right understanding of our own language and its potentialities, if not of religious truth itself, might have saved us.
November 05, 2009 01:05 PM
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
My sunny thoughts about the once-again great states of New Jersey (welcome, Governor Christie!) and Virginia (ditto, Governor McDonnell!) are not displaced by the (to me) disappointing and (to everyone) surprising news that Doug Hoffman lost to Bill Owens in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. There has been a great deal of hand wringing and pundit-izing [...]
Nov 05, 2009 10:44 AM
The editors would like to inform you of several exciting events that we are hosting in the coming months. These events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted. If you are interested in attending any of the following, please let me know by emailing me at siskel [at] newcriterion.com. And remember to check out our events page for all New Criterion programs.
November 05, 2009 Talk by James Panero "The Lessons of William F. Buckley, Jr.": A talk by Managing Editor, James Panero. 8:00 PM, Miami University, 501 East High Street, McGuffey 322, Oxford, Ohio. November 09, 2009* Tour of an important contemporary art collection Two important collectors of contemporary art will open their Tribeca loft for a special evening of the Young Friends of The New Criterion, with a unique tour of their private collection. 6:00-8:00. Email for details. *This event is for the Young Friends of the New Criterion (see www.newcriterion.com/friends) November 24, 2009 Reading by dance critic Laura Jacobs Laura Jacobs will read from her novel "The Bird Catcher" (St. Martins Press), a follow up to her wildly successful "Women About Town." Jacobs will also discuss the birds of Gramercy Park and her official studies there for the Linnaean Society. Hosted by Managing Editor James Panero. 15 Gramercy Park South. 8pm. December 02, 2009 The Swallow Anthology Reading* An evening of poetry that will celebrate the publication of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets edited by New Criterion Executive Editor David Yezzi, with readings by Ben Downing, Ernest Hilbert, Adam Kirsch, Rachel Wetzsteon and David Yezzi. 6-8 PM. Email for details. *This event is for the Friends of the New Criterion (see www.newcriterion.com/friends) December 17, 2009 New Criterion Holiday Party Friends and contributors holiday celebration. Hosted by the Editors of The New Criterion. 6-8 PM. Email for details.
Nov 04, 2009 03:30 PM
by James Panero
In the appreciation of art, they say the eye is like a muscle. It needs training and regular workouts. Unfortunately, you could pass through an entire academic study of art history and never have the chance to look at great work up close. No wonder academia is besotted with art theory. With only slides and reproductions, the eye becomes weak and the head takes over.
The artist and friend of The New Criterion Tom Goldenberg is someone who has overcome this deficiency. He has developed his own art through a close study of drawings through history. Now he is offering a course to bring this study to others. It is my pleasure to endorse it and bring it to the attention of all. And I would be remiss if I did not, because I join the course whenever possible and have taken a great deal away from it already.
Professor Tom builds his class through a little known resource in New York: He reserves the private study rooms in New Yorks major museums and hand selects drawings from the collections, which are brought out on a table for the class to see. Tom encourages his class to look at the work, without glass, long and close, and then discuss it. The course meets once a week in the afternoons and is open to everyone. With no theoretical jargon to get in the way, the course also requires no prior experience. Everyone benefits from the discipline of close looking.
Here is the curriculum:
The Morgan Library, Drawing Study Center - Thursday, November 12th, 2009 2:00PM-4:15 PM
Discussion of the Renaissance and mans role in the world. Development of technology and commerce. Viewing and discussing drawings by: Luca Signorelli (1441-1523) Four Demons, Fra Bartolomeo (1472-1517) Monastery Church and Well, Jocopo Pontormo (1475-1564) Standing Male Nude, Tobias Stimmer (1539-1569) The Crucifixion, Pieter Bruegel the elder (1525-1569) Mountain Landscape, Abraham Bloemaert (1564-1651) St. Roch, Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) Eroded Riverbank with Trees and Roots, Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) Landscape with Flock and Trees , Anthony Van Dyke (1599-1641) View of Rye from the Northeast, and others.
The Metropolitan Museum, Drawing Study Center Wednesday, November 18th
Discussion of absolute vertical and horizontal axis in drawing as well as darkest dark and lightest light in developing structure and composition. View drawings and discussion of works by: Unknown Artist, Tuscan Drawing 14th Century, Two Monks looking Up at a Dragon, Fra Bartolomeo Landscape with Monastery Buildings, Wooded Approach to a Town, Raphael Madonna and Child with Infant St. John, Titian Trees, Landscape with Goat, Veronese (Paolo Caliari) Allegory of Redemption of the World, Bruegel Pieter the Elder Seated man Precariously Seated Playing the Bagpipes, Bruegel the Younger Temple of Venus and Diana on the Bay of Baia, Cezanne Landscape and Bathers by A Bridge, Rembrant House by the Water, Corot Le Martinet, among others.
The Museum of Modern Art, Drawing Study Center, Wednesday, November 25th, 2:00 PM- 4:15 PM Discussion of 20th Century Drawing. View drawings and discussion of works by: Matisse Reclining Nude, Branch of a Judas Tree, Cezanne, Bridge at Gardonne, Bathers, Degas Two Dancers, Giacometti An Interior, Man Reading a Book, Jules Pascin Reclining Nude, Balthus Young Girl, Nude with Cat, Bonnard View of Vence, Max Beckman The Letter, Gorky Study for Summation, Portrait of Vartoosh, Picasso Sleeping Peasants, Modigliani Seated Nude, and others.
Jill Newhouse Gallery, Wednesday, December 2nd, 2:00PM-4:15 PM Specializing in Drawings from the Renaissance to the 20th Century. Bonnard, Harpignies, Corot, Rousseau, etc.
Private Collection, Wednesday, December 9th, 2:00PM- 4:15 PM Renaissance to the 20th Century. (Location will be announced.)
Drawing Auctions, Wednesday, December 16th, to be announced
Viewing Drawings at auction at Sothebys and Christies
Class will meet six times. Wednesdays from 2:00- 4:00 PM. $500.00 First Session Thursday.
Anyone interested in enrolling in the course--and why wouldnt you be--should contact Tom Goldenberg at tom.goldenberg [at] gmail.com
Oct 29, 2009 03:23 PM
The Editors are proud to present:
“The Berlin Wall: 20 years after”
A Symposium in The New Criterion, November 2009
with contributions from Henry A. Kissinger, Roger Kimball, Donald Kagan, Jonathan Brent, and Anthony Daniels
In our November 2009 issue, The New Criterion will mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—November 9, 1989—with a set of essays that explore the past and the present of the Cold War and the ultimate triumph of liberty over tyranny. Mr. Brent, Mr. Kagan, and Mr. Kimball will be available for radio and television interviews to comment on the historic occasion. Live links to the complete articles are available below:
A foreword by Henry A. Kissinger
“The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War, of Europe’s division, and of the Communist challenge to human freedom.” Secretary Kissinger discusses the unique situation created by the postwar Allied settlement that made Berlin so pivotal in the wider conflict between the West and the Soviet bloc.
Tyranny set in stone by Roger Kimball
Do we remember the Wall? “The passage of time tends to soften outlines, confuse oppositions, and swallow fundamental distinctions in a patois of complication. . . . Although fragments of the Berlin Wall are distributed like talismans of freedom across the globe, its awful significance seems muted, even lost in the cacophony of historical second-guessing, the distorting glaze of nostalgia.” Roger Kimball recounts the crucial events and political fortitude that led to the fall.
Weak will, high wall by Donald Kagan
“The memory of the great days when the Wall came down should not lead us to forget the grimmer days when it was erected, the policies that brought it about, or the dangerous consequences that followed its construction. . . . There is every reason to believe that Kennedy’s lack of nerve in the Berlin Wall crisis played a critical part in convincing Khrushchev to bring about the most serious risk of nuclear war the world has yet seen.”
Russia before the mirror by Jonathan Brent
“On November 9, 1989, the political fortunes of the Soviet Union were poised on a knife edge; by December 1991, they had fallen off the edge. But history does not have knife edges, and often that which appears to be a turning point can be seen as part of a much longer trajectory from the perspective of fifty or a hundred years later. From the standpoint of Russian history, the demise of the Berlin Wall was just such a phenomenon.”
The costs of abstraction by Anthony Daniels
“One of the most extraordinary episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century is the moral and sometimes material support given by much of the western intelligentsia to the Soviet tyranny. Men who found the slightest circumscription of their own freedom intolerable raised hosannas to the most systematic and concerted abrogation of personal liberty yet attempted; many were those who strained at gnats to swallow a camel.”
To schedule a radio or television appearance with Mr. Kimball, Mr. Kagan, or Mr. Brent, contact Callie Siskel at (212)247-6980.
Oct 25, 2009 04:22 PM
by James Bowman
The following was a talk delivered by me at the fall regional meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Indianapolis on October 24, 2009.
You might not know it to look at me, but I used to be pretty smart. In fact, if it doesn’t sound too immodest, I could even say that I was known for being smart, which is better than actually being smart. Everybody seemed to know how smart I was. People I had never met before somehow knew it on saying hello. My reputation for braininess had preceded me, I know not how. I remember once I went for a job interview where, out of the blue, I was asked if I had ever met anyone more intelligent than I. Stunned by such a stupid question, I actually tried to answer it. That’s how smart I was. In other words, not very. But if, today, I would know better than to try to answer a question like that, it is nevertheless true that I was in other ways quite a lot brighter then than I am now. Now, I can almost feel my brainpower diminishing by the day. People no longer greet me with that slightly intimidated look that is the reward — if you can call it a reward — of those with a reputation, however undeserved, for intelligence.
The powers of reasoning that remain to me are just about sufficient to enable me to understand that this decline may be owing to natural causes. The late Mitch Hedberg had a joke about how not-smart it was to say, "This is a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger, dummy! So, to say that I am not so young as I was is similarly tautologous, though no less an understated truth for that. Brain cells diminish with age and hard wear, so perhaps I should expect to be stupider than I was in my 20s and 30s. But my deep suspicion is that this stupidity is also owing to the way in which I use my brain these days, which is by sitting in front of a computer screen for 12 or 15 hours a day, clicking between websites and writing or copying based on what I read there.
Back when I was smart, I didn’t do that. I was almost 40 when I bought my first computer and then, for the next ten or so years it was more a substitute for a typewriter than the all-consuming time-Hoovering device it has since become. I was past 50 by the time I largely gave up the printed versions of newspapers and periodicals for their on-line versions. Most of my life and pretty much all of the smart part has been spent with the printed word, not a cathode-ray tube or LCD. Is this a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc? — which my colleague, Professor Kopff, can confirm if I’m no longer smart enough to remember it means after this, therefore because of this. In other words, the fact that I am dumber than I was before I took up the computer doesn’t mean that the computer has made me dumb, though I want to believe that it has. Those who dismiss that belief always cite the bit in Plato’s Phaedrus where Socrates says that the invention of writing will wreck people’s ability to remember. To them I say, well, hasn’t it? When Milman Parry visited the Balkans in the 1920s and 1930s, he found that among the illiterate, the oral tradition of the Homeric epics had survived and that Bosnian bards could reel off volumes of their own and others’ verse from memory. Because they were illiterate.
But "science," the god of smart people, tells us that the Internet is not making us dumber. A study by Dr Gary Small and others published in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry tells us that surfing the web is better for the brains of middle-aged and older people than reading books. Professor Small, of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at University of California, told the London Daily Telegraph that "Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function." Just the other day, Professor Small and his colleague, UCLA researcher Teena D. Moody were back in the news with another study of the same tendency. "We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function," said the Professor. "The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults," said the researcher. In the current issue of the Wilson Quarterly the economist Tyler Cowen points to what’s called the Flynn effect — that is, the tendency throughout the developed world for IQs to rise, generation by generation — as evidence that in the age of the Internet, most people, unlike me, are not getting dumber.
Intuitively, however, I feel that my time spent online has robbed me of at least some of my powers of concentration, and I believe that a very significant component, if not the principal one, of intelligence is the power of concentration. Or, to put it the other way around, stupidity is the inability to focus, and my ability to focus has become severely compromised. Professor Cowan pooh poohs another research finding that "periodically checking your e-mail lowers your cognitive performance level to that of a drunk. If such claims were broadly correct," he writes, "multitasking would pretty rapidly disappear simply because people would find that it didn’t make sense to do it." Well, it doesn’t make sense to get drunk either, but people haven’t stopped doing that, so far as I can tell.
Indeed, the experience of the Internet seems to be like that of a drug in other ways, most notably in being addictive. I am happy noodling away on my computer, but, as with all drugs, the happiness is a product of what that artificial focus doesn’t allow you to attend to — which are the kinds of experience that the focus has taken you away from. All attention is choice, but the easy choices of the online world rob you of the ability to make harder ones, producing a different kind of knowing — for example, the kind that comes from the time it takes to plow through a Victorian novel and learn about its multitude of characters and absorb the dense texture of its prose as well as the little incidental facts about Victorian life that you might know if someone extracted them from the novel for you and put them up on the Internet as bullet points — if you ever happened to stumble on the site.
This is the way in which focus and intelligence are one, since focus is what is required to produce the depth of knowledge that it takes to understand a different culture and set of assumptions about the world than your own. And it is just that which seems to me to be lacking among those who have been educated by or with the Internet. It is the difference between information and knowledge, and a difference which few people are any longer well-equipped to comprehend. That the distinction is increasingly an arcane one, however, is not the fault of the Internet. Or not primarily, anyway. Our education system, especially education in the arts and humanities, has been doing its level best to obscure it for a generation now. For it, too, has no interest in understanding other cultures, or even our own up until 40 years or so ago. That may seem a paradoxical thing to say in the era of multiculturalism, but the level of engagement with other cultures which the multiculturalists want to take us to is pretty superficial, and they tend to ignore or minimize differences, for instance those of primitive honor cultures, that are not politically correct.
Actually, it’s not the Internet itself but the culture of the Internet that is to blame. I hate to keep picking on Tyler Cowen, because I am a fan of his economic thought, but I can’t resist citing his use of the example of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He acknowledges that the opera "represents a great achievement of the Western canon" — gee, thanks, says Mozart — but he points to the fact that it takes three or four hours to watch and listen to in its entirety, even though this is still a lot less time than it takes to read a novel by Dickens. And it is in Italian. And good seats are expensive. But never mind all that. Just look at what the Internet can give you in return for not making the effort to see and appreciate Mozart’s opera. This is what he writes:
Instead of experiencing the emotional range of Don Giovanni in one long, expensive sitting, on the Web we pick the moods we want from disparate sources and assemble them ourselves. We take a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from iTunes, and some images — perhaps or own digital photos — capturing the sublime beauty of the Grand Canyon. Even if no single bit looks very impressive to an outsider, to the creator of this assemblage it is a rich and varied inner experience. The new wonders we create are simply harder for outsiders to see than, say, the fantastic cathedrals of Old Europe.
Can it really be that he is comparing these bits and bobs of electronic effluvia to Chartres cathedral because, to someone who has never seen Chartres cathedral, or Don Giovanni, the "inner experience" they give him is as "rich and varied" as that of a great work of art is to someone who is equipped to appreciate it? I’m afraid he is. And he is very far from being alone. University English courses today routinely treat Shakespeare’s plays and Batman comics as being on the same plane and not meaningfully different from each other.
"It’s not so much about having information as it is about knowing how to get it," writes Professor Cowen. But if you don’t already know the difference between King Lear and Batman, or between Chartres cathedral and a computer image of the Grand Canyon — or the Grand Canyon itself, for that matter — all the information in the world is going to be useless to you. Or, if not quite useless, useful only in trivial ways. As a professional critic, I notice that criticism itself is changing. I’m old enough to have been trained up to the job in the days when it was still thought by most if not all people that the object of criticism was, to use the title of our conference this weekend, the pursuit of truth.
Not definitive truth, not conclusive truth, not truth that left no room for other truths, but still truth — truth, perhaps, even as beauty, as Keats saw it, which I disagree with Peter Wood, who spoke this morning, in thinking not a lie but a poetic truth. In any case, truth certainly as something distinguishable from error. Now that a generation has grown up believing that that kind of truth is invidious, or "privileged" or authoritarian or hierarchical or, God help us, "patriarchal," and that everybody has a right to his or her own truth, what we have instead of truth as the purpose of criticism— where it is not simply Marxist political analysis — is "intertextuality." That is, we harvest as many points of connection as we can think of between King Lear and Batman and between both of them and the universe of texts awaiting us out there on the Internet — and then we put in the links between them.
It’s a highly idiosyncratic exercise, since there are an infinite number of texts and an infinite number of possible connections. That’s how you end up with that grab-bag as outlined by Professor Cowen, "a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from iTunes," and so forth. The only real connection between them is in the fancy of the critic, who thus steps forward as the real hero of the critical enterprise whose only aim is to enhance his own "rich and varied inner experience." We go to the Internet to find reflections of ourselves, not to acquire knowledge of others — and in particular the others who impressed previous generations as being among the greatest of those who had preceded them in the pursuit of truth. If we have stopped valuing their accomplishments, which is what it means to value them as equivalent to a joke on YouTube, we have already reached a middle stage on the road to forgetting them entirely, which is why — I think — so many of the formerly smart are having trouble remembering how to read.
Oct 22, 2009 02:26 PM
by James Bowman
Behind the Vatican’s stunning démarche towards the Anglican communion, at least according to Damian Thompson in today’s Daily Telegraph,there are some interesting internal Catholic politics. Mr Thompson points us towards the fact that the step was taken by Pope Benedict in the absence of any consultation with the English Catholic bishops. Why? Because they tend to be as liberal as their Anglican counterparts, if not more so.
At a conservative estimate, about 1,000 of the Church of Englands 12,000 serving priests have seriously contemplated conversion to Rome. (Many years ago, before he was ordained, [Archbishop of Canterbury] Rowan Williams flirted with the idea himself.) When you ask them why they have not taken the plunge, the most common response is: "The English Catholic bishops are more wishy-washy and liberal than our lot." If they become "Romans," they have reasoned, they will no longer be able to worship God with the solemnity He deserves. On the south coast of England, in particular, Catholic bishops treat their own traditionalists with snooty disdain, and an influx of ex-Anglicans with similar tastes is the last thing they want. Which is why Pope Benedict has effectively cut his bishops out of the picture. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he made friends with High Church Anglicans; he is the first Pope in history to understand their concerns.
Not surprisingly, liberal Catholics in America are similarly sour about the prospects for more traditionalists in the church. As Ruth Gledhill of The Times writes, "a writer for the Jesuit magazine America expressed fears that some newcomers would be ‘nostalgists, anti-feminists and anti-gay bigots’" — just like those other conservative Catholics they’d like to get rid of. Some such feeling was presumably also behind The New York Times’s characterization of the Pope’s invitation as "an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse."
It was unclear why the Vatican made the announcement now. But it seemed a rare opportunity, audaciously executed, to capitalize on deep divisions within the Anglican Church to attract new members at a time when the Catholic Church has been trying to reinvigorate itself in Europe.
Oh, those cunning Catholics! Trying to reinvigorate themselves, are they? And with those who "spurn the idea of female and gay priests," yet. Not, one suspects, if The New York Times has anything to say about it.
Among those who might find themselves attracted by the "lure" is the Rev. Ed Tomlinson, vicar of St Barnabas’s Church in Tunbridge Wells — a place which is a common journalistic synecdoche for traditionalism in Britain. Father Ed’s protest against being expected to officiate "at cremations where Tina Turner is played as the bodies of people with no hope of resurrection are ‘popped in the oven’" appeared by coincidence in the same day’s papers. Even in Tunbridge Wells, it seems, few people anymore want distinctively Christian funerals, even if they want a vicar presiding, and this one "wondered why he bothered as mourners listen to ear-splitting songs and bad poetry during cremations." In the next day’s Telegraph, Liz Hunt begged to differ, saying she had once felt as the Rev. Tomlinson did but was converted by going to a service for a friend who had died prematurely and being more impressed by the playing of Louis Armstrong’s "We Have All the Time in the World," and "What a Wonderful World" than by the hymns.
If someone had warned me beforehand. I’d have dismissed it as a corny and sentimental denouement to a life. I found the reality very different; the words and music, which Tim, an artist and musician, had loved, were a poignant reminder of his warmth, humour, and passion for life. The last song in particular was blessedly comforting to his wife, daughter and son, conveying the message that his life, although cut short, had been a good one.
Could the difference between her previous feelings and the new ones, I wonder, really be one of the difference between public and private? The examples of pop music at funerals that she didn’t like were the U2 number played at the funeral of two murdered girls much in the news and Elton John’s "Candle in the Wind" at the funeral of Princess Diana, which suggests that it is the presence of strangers at a funeral which heightens the need for the dignity and distance of public music. Popular music is essentially private and intimate because it deals with private and intimate feelings. The liturgy that we tradition-minded "nostalgists" value was designed precisely to make a public and universal response to a private and intense feeling, namely that of grief. In a way, it is a symbol to the survivors of the resurrection, when God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. The real nostalgists are those who shun the liturgy for the warm feelings associated with "What a Wonderful World."
October 20, 2009 11:55 PM
by Roger Kimball, from Roger’s Rules
Just in case your survey of the world scene has left you with a residue of cheerfulness, here is a video of a talk given by Lord Christopher Monckton at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota last week that should complete your gloom. The ostensible subject was the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Treaty, scheduled to take [...]
Oct 19, 2009 04:21 PM
by James Bowman
You just knew that it was all about fame, as soon as that poor little boy — already saddled by his parents with the ridiculous name, "Falcon" — said to his father on national television, "You guys said we did this for the show." Sure enough, Robert Thomas, a former collaborator of the boy’s father, Richard Heene on a proposal for a TV "reality" show, soon told Gawker.com that the man was "obsessed with becoming famous." Mr Heene and his wife, Mayumi, had already appeared on the reality TV show "Wife Swap," and he was said to have had in development with Mr Thomas a new show that he thought of as being "MythBusters-meets-mad scientist — except that he was no kind of scientist, mad or otherwise." The idea was to test scientific theories for the cameras, but Mr Heene, whose education stopped at high school, appears to have no scientific qualifications.
Still, he wanted to be famous and, heck, who doesn’t these days? A recent survey in Britain confirms an informal and unscientific one that I took there over 20 years ago when I was a school-teacher. How many of you, I asked a class of 16- and 17-year olds, think you will one day be famous? All but two or three hands went up. The celebrity culture even at that early date seems to have taught young people that their lives are failures if they’re not talked about and pointed out in the street by strangers. The Polanski case has recently reminded us of one of the more dire social consequences of celebrity worship, which is the creation of a class of people who think, and who have persuaded others to think, that they are not bound by the ordinary rules governing humanity. Maybe some such idea as that was in the back of Mr Heene’s mind. In any case, we now learn that you have to be very young indeed to have escaped the contagion.
The British survey, according to India Knight of The Sunday Times, showed that
there has been a "seismic shift" in children’s ambitions over the space of a single generation. Becoming a sports star. . . is in top spot, becoming a pop star is at number two and the third slot is occupied by being a famous actor (teaching, finance and medicine held the top three slots 25 years ago). Regarding the last two, the combination of reality television talent shows and the abundance of drama or other "performing arts" courses means everyone thinks they can have a go. This is basically insane — a mathematical impossibility. There are many, many more drama students and actor wannabes than there are acting jobs in the entire western hemisphere.
Oddly, however, Ms. Knight finds that the fault lies in having an optimistic outlook on life. Citing Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, she joins her in giving
both barrels to, among others, evangelical churches that preach that you have only to ask for something to get it because God wants to "prosper you"; and academia, which includes departments of "positive psychology" and examinations of "the science of happiness". She suggests the whole fixed-grin, everything-is-going-to- be-fine approach is also behind the current financial crisis, which she sees as fuelled by the refusal even to entertain the possibility of negative outcomes, such as mortgage defaults.
Even leaving aside the dubiousness of Ms Ehrenreich’s argument, there is a certain illogic in applying it to kids with the wrong values. If they still wanted to be nurses or teachers but retained their sunny outlook and confidence of success, would that also be wrong? Or right? The confidence is not the problem; the problem is the unrealistic nature of the ambition to start with. Confidence is only wrong when it is misplaced. And I doubt that even the Joel Osteens of the world are promising their parishioners that if they ask God to be rock stars they will be rock stars. Besides, the kids are not wrong to think that you can become a celebrity without anything much in the way of brains or guts or talent. They merely overestimate the odds of their doing so — I think because they have never been taught that there is anything better than fame or wealth, or that good is more important than being a star. And now a child is to have his life torn apart. I wonder what comfort it will be to him to know that, at least, he is famous?
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