Wood Faileth

I’ve written a fair amount here regarding my hatred of mid century modernist literature, a casual example of such writers being J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Walker Percy, and Barry Hannah. Even my beloved Faulkner, at his worst, isn’t immune. That an editor at the Bananasphere wrote an essay rehabilitating the odious Holden Caulfield should have been my sandal-shaking epiphany. Morbid fascination with sexual pathology, nascent therapy and abortion culture, far FAR too much self-introspection, that distinctive “golly-gee-whickers” nihilism as Creedence Clearwater Revival jams “Fortunate Son” in the background: these are the hallmarks of cant. Forrest Gump is barely tolerable. What strikes me as interesting on further reflection is how noticeably male the group is, and how many midcentury modern female writers both are seemingly inoculated against the disease and are among my most treasured contemporary artists. The ladies’ works would happily include The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Delta Wedding, Ariel, and The Bluest Eye. Perhaps related to a Girls Just Wanna Have Fun feminism, the women works tend to burst at the seams (and seems), refusing to believe life is meaningless after shucking the purported shackles of patriarchy. They worked too hard burning bras to be welcomed to the club with just a pat on the head and a handful of Prozac. We’re all beats now, and it is interesting how much the epigenetics abide. Today’s young men despair while today’s young women are concerned. Men wake up to find the world they were born into gone, and they go away sad. Women wake up and vote harder. I have more to say about this when we discuss Clarissa. But if all I’m offered from my cultural vapors is pagan secularism I’ll take mine bursting at the seams instead of flocking to franchise.

“Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” – St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 1778

Conscience – each man’s particular conscience – is an authority, morally commanding man’s will. The fallibility or infallibility of man’s conscience has famously interested Catholic theology. (As an aside, how remarkable is Providence in that St John Henry Newman, our newest Doctor of the Church and one who had a somewhat checkered enthusiasm with papal authority, is associating such papal authority with that one of Everyman’s, whose own purported infallibility would also “checker” more than a few theologians.) Perhaps instead of thinking of conscience as fallible or infallible, we would be better served considering an individual conscience as a good authority or an undermined one. Conscience, as an authority, morally compels us; and yet we are not only not required to follow an evil command, we are categorically commanded by the Lord God to resist it. The whirling dynamic and abyss of the soul. It is a horrible, horrible thing to be subject to a wicked authority. And it is a horrible, horrible thing to have authority over a wicked people. This is especially so when both king and peasant are You.

Undermining authority does not mean to destroy authority. The lecherous father still commands curfew. Undermined authority is an authority which is more challenging to morally obey. And since authoritative commands are morally obliging, undermined authority is a horrible situation in which authority’s children may more easily sin. Scandal is so very terrible because it tends to tempt the weakest into evil.

If you’re explaining, you’re losing. It won’t be surprising to anyone familiar with this blog that I find most of the “mass wars” discussion instructive more generally apropos authority. Setting aside the thorny issue of the dogmatic status of the Gregorian Rite’s Canon – I both understand the bigness and sharpness of the thorn while also coming down against the traditionalist side here – I’ll note that a man with authority is not limited by his own positive law. He may be limited by another orb’s positive law, and he categorically is – as we all are – limited by the natural law. Anyone who has found himself in a position of sufficient authority should know that categorical statements – “We will always and everywhere do this thing right here.” – are not pronounced lightly. And the more specific the pronouncement as well as the greater longevity of the throne make fraught such pronouncements. One cannot see into the future, and there may be prudential reasons for the authority to set aside his own “always and everywhere” pronouncement. No matter how prudent the decision backed by the gravity of the particulars, such settings aside tend to undermine authority. This is especially so given the raving nutcases, balancing the books of the insane asylum we call “modern society,” who have already abandoned themselves to heretical anti-authoritarianism.

There is no objective quantity of cash beyond which to have it would place folks in a state of sin. But there is an objective amount of cash beyond which if I have it I would be sinning.

For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

Regarding the statement, “making as much money as possible,” folks tend to direct their moral ire against the “as much” part, while I argue it’s that “as possible” which commands the moral bite. I do not believe there is some objective quantity of dough beyond which one would be in a perpetual state of sin. However making money, like any other non-intrinsically evil human act, has good, just ways to go about it and bad, non-just ones. We are never morally permitted to act unjustly. One reason – there are many – why the love of money is the root of evil is because such love tempts one to act unjustly to acquire or maintain money. Having billions isn’t ipso facto immoral; however being so materially successful in this materialistic society of deranged, debauched morality justly raises suspicion.

Recent posts may indicate I’m above critiquing any institution. That is not the case. “Woke” – some particular manifestation of censorship – isn’t dead. It can’t die. Given America’s liberal political commitments to free speech, politically censorship is considered not possible and any attempt at such censorship is to be severely militated against. This is obviously another “pious” American lie, the consequences of which are societal wreckage. All societies censor – that just is what society does. The only way to end societies’ censoring is to end societies. Because in America such censorship is considered beyond the pale of formal political acts, censorship is largely informal. Informal censorship is certainly just fine, but, again, given American political commitments against censorship and given that liberalism leaks into all even non-political endeavors, American informal censorship becomes increasingly deranged. We censor while pretending – literally – that we are doing anything but. This is why non-political corporation-bureaucracies (and in the liberal Panopticon we’re all bureaucrats now) catechize over “Culture” and “Credo” and “Respect Week” and such so that heretics aren’t considered as censored; rather, they are recognized as being unworthy. And as such catechisms, unmoored from objective good, by their nature cannot keep up with culture the only way to insure – for one cannot ensure – that he will be deemed worthy in perpetuity is for one to be the most milksop, limp-wristed, yes-maam, cunning, designing, colored box avataring, grovelling self-effacing little bitch possible. The hell of contemporary corporate-bureaucratic America is that all their credo’s and core principles and mission statements resolve into two statements, only compatible between themselves with their evil: make as much money as possible and reify Sesame Street.

Lucretius – of world historical importance whose apotheosis was that great diabolist, the Marquis de Sade – is one of my favorite banana-merchants. For Lucretius, and his contemporary true believers, chaos is basic and fundamental. The orderings of Society, art, authority, institution, religion: these are all virtual, being so many pragmatic, highly tenuous, lies useful for particular dispensations but ultimately to be dissolved upon and resolved back into the inevitable crack of chaotic doom. This is stupid and evil. For normal Christians orderings such as authority and society and institution are fundamental. It is chaos which is virtual, the lie behind which the damaged and the debauched hide. And it is this virtuality which will be dissolved, burnt up as dross.

Liturgy is an art, and art is trinitarian: the creator, the work, the love-meaning of creator-to-work. As an aside, it is fascinating to consider the physical-spiritual nature of the sacraments as the means by which we physcial-spiritual men may participate in the Trinity’s Love-Meaning. Regardless, art – and therefore liturgy – implies participation. The traditionalist side of the fine lines separating camps among the Catholic mass wars critiques the Novus Ordo for its interest in participation or encouragement of “greater participation.” This critique, sympathetic as I may be given my near exclusive attendance of the TLM, is misguided, and I’ve seen way, way too many trads, “in their typical insolence,” go off the anti-participation deep end. The issue is not either participation nor its extent. The issue, yet again, is the rightness or wrongness of the participation.