Old World Swine

"Famished Nature Will Be Avenged"

The name of this post comes from C.S. Lewis' book, The Abolition of Man, which you really should read. Really. It's short and pithy. Go and read it right now... I'll wait.

Okay. Now that you've read the book, the phrase I highlight is taken from a longer paragraph, wherein Lewis, speaking on modern education, rejects the program which says that all values and sentiments are subjective and therefore meaningless;

The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.

It is the reality of "famished nature" that I have been thinking about, lately, the idea that we were created by our Maker for a life of experience and relationship and freedom, and all the risk that entails. We were made to comprehend beauty, to drink it in, to acknowledge it and give thanks. We were made to find out things, to thirst for knowledge and truth.

As G.K. Chesterton put it in his beautiful book Orthodoxy;

The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired. If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.

It strikes me that the culture we have created for ourselves, by accident or design, has become un-poetic to a degree that is positively anti-human, effectively satisfying our animal appetites, but denying our deepest longings.

We are very concerned with having plenty of everything, and to spare, but we have also grown averse to hard physical work or discomfort, and so in making nearly every kind of thing we now opt for the easiest, most efficient and soul-less method of production possible; that is, the factory. As a result, we have individually forgotten how to do and make a myriad of simple things that virtually all our ancestors did and made. We instead pay slaves to make things for us, and if you think that is an overstatement, you might want to find out a bit more about production methods and labor practices in China.

In addition, we have become so obsessed with safety as a social value that we now hover around our children with antiseptic wipes and prohibit home-made snacks for classroom parties (got to bring everything in a factory-sealed cellophane pouch!). We have worried the old, fun tradition of Trick-or-Treat practically out of existence, on the mythical ground that it is dangerous.

We all crave Life, Truth, Beauty and Unity, but we are apparently willing enough to trade in all of those intangibles, if we can have certain guarantees in return.

We long for meaning and beauty, and yet we design our common culture to be soul-crushingly drab and prosaic, predictable and safe and inoffensive in every respect. That's what we now pay our leaders (political and otherwise) to do for us, and we get mad when they don't deliver. Hang the intangibles... we want everything now, and we want it cheap, we want it safe, and we want plenty of it so we don't have to worry about running out, even if we are a bit careless and wasteful with it.

But "famished nature will be avenged".

Sarah Silverman Stole My Idea

Much as I hate to give this any more publicity than it deserves, which is none, I want to comment on Sarah Silverman's recent suggestion that the Catholic Church "sell the Vatican" to stop world hunger.

Where to begin? First, I want to point out that I said the very same thing when I was a dimwitted adolescent. It was an old trope then. Original and daring it ain't. The difference between me and Miz Silverman is that I grew up at some point. She didn't really steal it from me. She stole it from every grumbling crank since Nero.

But then, being a foul-mouthed comic isn't exactly the definition of "going against the flow". By falling right into line with the fashionable atheism of her social set, Miz Silverman reveals a timid and unimaginative conformism.

Then there is the irony of the kind of statement wherein one demonstrates one's deep concern for the poor by demanding that someone else do something to help them. I wonder if she texted the suggestion to the Vatican from her limo; "I would help the poor myself, but I have an appointment for a pedicure. Give 'til it hurts, Catholics!".

There is also the underlying philosophical problem of such a statement, which goes right along with the Spirit of the Age, which is materialism. By her remark, Miz Silverman sees no value in beauty or art or other intangibles (not to mention faith). For her, apparently, every symbol is an empty symbol. But then, I notice she didn't suggest we sell our national monuments... Mount Rushmore, the White House, the Capital Mall, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial.

Which brings us to her transparent anti-Catholicism, which - let's be honest - is what the remark is all about. Sarah Silverman doesn't lay awake nights worrying over the poor. She does think a lot about publicity, though, and trashing the Vatican is always good for a few days of tabloid chatter. One can't rely on jokes about rape or abortion or masturbation all the time. Trashing Christians is a very handy alternative, because it requires no courage at all, but you will be applauded for it as if you had done something significant. You will also get invited to all the right parties and cast in all the right parts.

There are two kinds of comics at work today; first, there are those of the "I-can't-believe-they-went-there" variety, who stimulate a Pavlovian response by attacking things that ordinary, normal people find important. Miz Silverman is one of these, and they are as common as dirt. This is where most of what passes for stand-up comedy comes from nowadays. Lacking a sense of humor, these performers rely on the mere shock of words. This is why we have "retard" jokes again. It's transgressive and edgy to make fun of the handicapped, see. What a fifth grader would rightly be ashamed of, these people get paid to do.

Then, there are the genuine humorists, who are more rare: Brian Regan, John Pinnette, Jeff Foxworthy, Jim Gaffigan... these may cross a line now and again, but in the main their humor is about being human, and most of the jokes are, in one way or another, on all of us. It's not even a question of bad language. There are some comics I really appreciate who swear a good bit. The words "humor" and "human" are both related to the root word "humus" ("earth"), after all. The difference is, they aren't trying to be offensive. There are times when another kind of word won't quite do.

It's odd how wide a gulf there is between being earthy and just being dirty.

Craig Ferguson - The Deification of Youth

Who said comedy had to be dumb?

Hat tip to the guys at What's Wrong With The World?

Sorry about the formatting of the video. I don't know how to correct it, and, well... I'm just too lazy to find out. By the way, if you have time, check out the linked video "Craig Ferguson Speaks From The Heart"... guy's a class act.

That's It... I'm Moving to Spain

I listen to NPR (National Public Radio) quite a lot when I drive. I disagree almost entirely with their editorial slant, but one must admit that what they do, they do very well. If I could start my own Catholic radio empire, I would pattern it after NPR's Morning Edition, rather than after any talk-radio format.

The other morning I was delighted to hear a story by Jerome Socolovsky called In Spain, It Takes A Village To Babysit. It's only a couple of minutes long, and worth a listen. The story paints a verbal picture of a typical Spanish village after sundown... once the heat of the summer day begins to dissipate, people emerge from their houses and shops and make their way to the village square, which is blocked to traffic. They greet their neighbors, eat, talk and laugh over wine or beer. Children are everywhere, shouting, running and playing hide and seek under tables. Everyone watches out for everyone else's children, and even strangers treat them as if they were their own. This goes on until late into the night.

The scene reminded me very much of this post I put together on my recollections of last year's Chesterton Conference. We seem to have lost the knack for this kind of thing here in the modern West. One commenter on the NPR story described the silence of American suburbs as "sepulchral", and I think that is pretty much correct. The people of the villages of Spain are closer to the Chestertonian ideal of a civilized and contented peasantry... not especially impressed with the technological or cultural marvels of the age, and consequently still in possession of nine-tenths of their common sense. Who would not want to live as they do... and why don't we?

I was also gratified to hear NPR movie critic John Horn announce that the stupidly cruel (and already stale) ambush "humor" of the movie Bruno had flopped like an undercooked omelet. An unmitigated box-office disaster. I found it fascinating that the movie's demise was partly due to modern communication technologies like Facebook and Twitter;

"Even if they had a turkey, [studios] would know that they could maybe get two weeks of business before the stink really caught up to the film," he says. "Now they have 12 hours."

Sacha Baron Cohen's newest film Bruno is one such example. The film was marketed well, and audiences who were familiar with Cohen's previous film, Borat, gave Bruno big opening-night ticket sales. By Saturday, however, Bruno's box office numbers had fallen by 40 percent — an unheard of number, according to Horn.

"So what that says is that people came out of that movie and told their friends not to go see it," says Horn. "When movies are not recommended by their friends, they fall faster then they've ever fallen."

Horn says this phenomenon puts pressure on studios to make better movies, especially when ticket sales can go south within a matter of hours:

"People will come out of the theater so quickly, and share their opinion so fast, and that word will spread so virally, that if a movie is bad, the audience will know it by Friday night and the movie will be dead by Saturday."

Now, see? This internet thing has its redeeming qualities.

Deep Fried Southern Culture

Reader Adam writes;

Maybe McDonalds is homogenizing and dumbing down food, but that's not their biggest evil, if you buy the general message of the film "Super Size Me"

I don't know that I can really blame McDonald's for making people fat. Anyone ought to have enough sense to know that you can't eat cheeseburgers, fries and shakes every day... and McD's is offering more healthy alternatives, now.

My dad was very unhealthy toward the end of his life. He smoked, was overweight, didn't exercise and sat in his La-Z-Boy a lot. People applauded the regulation of big tobacco. McDonald's and other restaurant chains are being sued now... should we go after La-Z-Boy next, for making unhealthy and addictive furniture?

I can't stand the thought of restaurants being regulated by the government or penalized for offering rich food that people like. We had some pretty rich food at my Mom's house, yesterday, I can tell you. Burgers and brats. We are planning a trip to Memphis, this summer, that includes a stop at Dyers restaurant on Beale Street (this is exactly the kind of local culture that I have learned to love so much) where the hamburgers are deep fried, in (reputedly) the same grease they have used since 1912. There used to be a sign on the wall, apparently, that said "We dip 'em, and McDonald's don't".

The Best of Bread

As a continuation of our discussion of art, bread, cheese, mass production, etc... I will present part of a further comment from The Masked Chicken and respond to it. Why? Because my response will begin to get too lengthy for the combox, and also because this stuff is what this blog is all about and, feeling as strongly as I do, I don't think it's possible to have too many posts on the subject.

The Masked Chicken comments, in part;

Art is, supposedly, a unique expression, not only of the indivdual, but of things that are common to man. The process of making things is unique to man and som personalized bread-baking falls into that, but the bread expresses a preference of the individual moreso than music, which has to go beyond itself, ideally.

Thus, bread, by its very nature, can survive being mass-produced in a way that art cannot.

I'm still probably not clear enough. Feel free to criticize so I can clarify, further. We do not substantially disagree. I just think that the art of bread-baking, while an art, is not an art-form and has less stringent conditions for cultural adaptation than the visual or performing arts.

I doubt that we really do disagree at the bottom of things, but putting these foggy concepts into words is a dicey and imprecise business, especially the way I go about it. I use language the way Jackson Pollock used paint.

I think it is clear that bread will always be a commodity in a way that art is not, because when it comes to it, people eat bread not generally in order to have a culinary experience, but because they are hungry. The expressive and cultural aspects of bread are incidental (except in France, maybe). People buy and eat bread mainly because it is a practical, versatile and reliable staple food, and other considerations are secondary, unlike art or music, which carries no quantifiable, practical benefit... no survival value.

So in that sense, I think you're correct.

Brewing one's own beer at one time did carry practical benefits. It was more nutritious than modern mass-market brews ("liquid bread") and because of the alcohol content it was safe to drink when water often was not. Even children drank beer.

In our time, however, there is no real practical or economic benefit in making one's own beer (or bread). These things can always be bought somewhere more cheaply than they can be made at home, and if you consider the time and trouble, the motivations for making these things by hand must come from other considerations... poetic, expressive or even spiritual. That is why, in modern Western culture, I look at baking bread and brewing beer as being similar to making art. Both endeavors are, in a material sense, wholly unnecessary.

However, I don't think it is merely a subjective matter to observe that home-baked bread is "better" than the spongy white sandwich fluff we buy at the store, any more than it is only a matter of opinion that a Mozart symphony is "better" than a commercial jingle. Quantifying that judgment may be impossible, but it is more than simply a matter of taste.

In theory, of course, a bread recipe could be mass produced with more or less exactly the same result as the first time it was baked in your mom's kitchen. In practice, though, things almost never happen this way. Once a product makes it to the assembly line, there begins a process of adaptation - driven by profit concerns, competition and marketing - that invariably pulls quality in a downward direction. It takes active and positive resistance even to maintain a steady position against that constant downward pressure.

I worked in product design for a long time, and what happens is that, in the beginning, the manufacturing process seems to be constructed around the product. Over time, however, the product becomes more and more built to accommodate the process. When big numbers are involved, cutting this or that corner can result in hefty increases in profits. Whereas factory methods are supposed to make it easier to manufacture things, it becomes more a matter of making the things easier to manufacture.

It's a rare business owner who will say, "Yes, I know we could make more money if we tweaked this recipe, used cheaper ingredients and quickened the process, but I'd prefer to continue making a decent, modest profit and keep the quality just as it is.". If one generation manages to hold the line, the next will likely move it gladly enough.

Then there are marketing factors. Making and selling a lot of one thing is always more profitable than making smaller amounts of different things, so there is always the pressure to make one product as broadly appealing as possible and sell the hell out of it. In many cases, this means making a product as inoffensive as possible. Because people have such widely varying tastes, though, the easiest way to make sure they aren't offended at the flavor of your product is to make it with as little flavor as you can get away with... case(s) in point: white bread and light beer. These may not make anyone swoon in ecstasy, but if you bring them to a picnic, at least no one could very well be offended or make a face.

Serve a robust, multi-grain sourdough bread, or a creamy stout beer and you run the risk of a certain number of people just hating it. It will happen. Little Billy will gag on the sandwich you give him (burying his face in her skirts "Mommy, I want chicken nuggets"), and Uncle Ted will grimace and maybe swear at the brew and say acidly, "I don't know what the @!%&+# this is... can I have a beer now?".

I don't know if it is the actual flavors and textures themselves that offend, or if it is simply the rude and un-looked-for shock of particularity to which modern man is unaccustomed. The tang of articulated character becomes like a kind of assault.

So, whereas bread and beer will always - in theory - be more amenable to mass production, in fact the result is nearly always that the process removes from these things even the incidental expressive and cultural characteristics they once carried. The aim may be to mass produce a certain loaf of bread - say, Mom's Homemade Bread -  but in the end, the loaf of mass produced bread is not the one we had in mind in the beginning. We have not succeeded in mass producing the loaf of Mom's Bread, as we supposed. We have in fact invented a new thing... the Production Loaf, if you will, which is like Mom's bread almost only by analogy.

Incidentally, Chicken, it does not surprise me at all that you have distributist leanings. I remarked at first that it was with great trepidation that I disagreed with you in print, because I have, through my interaction with you over at Jimmy Akin's blog, come to have the highest regard for your opinions. At bottom, as I say, I doubt we would really disagree about much.

Of Chalk and Cheese

Highly esteemed reader The Masked Chicken has a quibble with this post and I find myself (with great trepidation) forced to disagree.

He writes;

Dear Tim J.,

You wrote:

The point, if there is one, is that there is really no single reason (and no logical reason at all) for anyone to brew their own beer, or to bake their own bread, or to raise their own vegetables or livestock. It can all be done more efficently in the factory, or the factory farm.

There is also no logical reason to paint pictures or write poetry or make music.

The first point does not imply the second. Bread and beer are material objects; poetry, music and painting are modes of expression. No one has yet figured out how to mass produce a singular thing, which is what expression is - it is singular to an individual.

Bread and beer are not singular to individuals. One man may grow vegetables as well as the next man and so, they may be mass produced, but no two men can express the same thing in the same way.

First, I would have to disagree somewhat with the statement "No one has yet figured out how to mass produce a singular thing". It may be true that there is no way to exactly reproduce a singular work of art in every detail, but there are certainly modes of mass production that come close enough for the tastes of the masses. Part of the competition faced by working fine artists includes mass produced "original" paintings from places like China, and mass produced art reproductions (like those of Thomas Kinkade). Both of these are analogous (I would submit) to the mass production of something like American cheese... yes, it may technically be cheese, but the realities of mass production and mass marketing drain it of character.

But more than that, I would have to take exception to the assertion that "Bread and beer are not singular to individuals". Clearly if this were so, I would have no incentive at all to brew my own beer, nor would anyone. Part of my purpose in brewing my own beer is to (eventually) make it a mode of individual expression. The same is true of bread. There is an old recipe that my Dad worked up that I remember very fondly from my youth. I want to resurrect his recipe and will no doubt end up making it a little differently than he did. It is this glorious concept of The Old Family Recipe that has been largely lost in modern life.

The whole craft beer movement is founded on the idea that one beer is not like another, and should not be like another. I beg you to read this short essay on cheese by G.K. Chesterton to get an idea of what I have feebly been trying to express, but I will reproduce a bit here;

But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song. Once in endeavouring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey across England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in four different counties. In each inn they had nothing but bread and cheese; nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it. In each inn the cheese was good; and in each inn it was different. There was a noble Wensleydale cheese in Yorkshire, a Cheshire cheese in Cheshire, and so on. Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that paltry and mechanical civilization that holds us all in bondage...

...By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese. Being really universal it varies from valley to valley... I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese (he is not worthy), but if he does it is probably a local cheese, having some real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches, tinned foods, patent medicines are sent all over the world; but they are not produced all over the world. Therefore there is in them a mere dead identity, never that soft play of variation which exists in things produced everywhere out of the soil, in the milk of the kine, or the fruits of the orchard. You can get a whisky and soda at every outpost of the Empire: that is why so many Empire builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the cider of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You are not approaching Nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese.

From a strictly material perspective, certainly beer and cheese and bread (and art) may be mass produced, but it is an awful shame that they are, for this robs them of the possibility of becoming more than just commodities by becoming also particular expressions of an individual, a region and a culture. If Budweiser is at all a cultural expression, it is the expression of a civilization that has elected to have no culture. A beer that tastes as much like nothing as beer can.

Indeed, we have over the last century or so increasingly become consumers of centralized, mass produced and manufactured culture as well as food and goods. The local character of goods that had once been produced at the level of the family, the town or the region has been diminished and swamped in a glut of generic, homogenized culture.

The craft beer movement has been one indication of a reaction against this state of things, with micro-breweries popping up by the hundreds or thousands. I just hope to see the spirit behind the craft beer movement continue to expand into other areas... food, art, clothing, household goods, etc... I would love to see our resources and technology used less for the mass production of "end-user" goods (cookies and coffee mugs), and used more to make smaller, local production easier and better.

I hope, at some point, that more people will see the real virtue in (for instance) owning a half dozen hand-thrown coffee cups rather than two dozen cheaper, mass produced (and pretty much disposable) cups from a mass market retailer.

There are, of course, some things that are much better mass produced - chalk and gasoline and light bulbs - so I am not making some blanket condemnation of mass production or manufacturing per se. I'm just saying that there are some things, perhaps many things, that are much better not mass produced.

An Open Letter to President Obama

Dear Mr. President -

Congratulations on your inauguration as President of the United States.

I am gratified to see that you have begun your time in office by invoking the memories of both Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., two courageous proponents of human rights for all human beings.

I am also glad to take note of a new attitude of optimism and civic spirit that has been inspired by your election. Your presidency comes at a time of incredible importance in our history, a time of unprecedented potential.

All these realities in combination mean that you, in an absolutely unique way, have the opportunity to do more to advance human rights than any other president or public figure in our nation's history... by the simple and revolutionary act of changing your mind - making the decision to open your ears and your heart to the cry of unborn children.

You need do nothing else... you need sign no law, or enact any order. By simply leading by your example and by expressing for the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society the compassion and concern that you already rightly show for the poor and oppressed, you - personally - can turn the tide of abortion and bring not only our country but others toward a much greater respect for human life and all human rights.

In this way, you would be a transforming figure, I believe, remembered for all time alongside such heroes as Lincoln, Dr. King, Gandhi and all the founders of our own nation, "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal".

Such a public change of heart would have an immediate effect of allowing many others - people who love, admire and respect you - to look again at the heartbreaking reality of now two generations of Americans having lost a full fifth of their brothers and sisters to the holocaust of abortion. What could be more important than these lost lives? What have we traded in exchange for them?

This touches not at all on legal questions. Those changes will come in time, but your example of respect for all human life can transform our culture in a way that no one else can possibly achieve at this moment in time.

Only you can do this. Do, please, pray deeply about it, and think deeply about it. Don't shut out these most innocent and deserving of your protection. Hear their voices.

You Can Sell Your Virginity...

... but you can't buy it back.

GET THE STORY

(Fox News)

What's sad and pitiful is that this has made her an instant celebrity, which, as every American knows, is the Most Important Thing There Is. Look for her reality show soon at a cable channel near you.

"A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold."
Proverbs 22:1

A Healthy Amount of Sleaze and Debauchery

According to guardian.co.uk, civic leaders in Amsterdam have been driven to regulate the city's infamous red light district where the prostitutes have a union and smoking in bars is illegal... unless it's pot. Well, pot is technically illegal, too, but to say it is "tolerated" would be an understatement comparable to saying that gaming is tolerated in Las Vegas.

'Money laundering, extortion and human trafficking are things you do not see, but they are hurting people and the city. The new reality will be more in line with our image as a tolerant and crazy place, rather than a free zone for criminals,' said Alderman Lodewijk Asscher, one of the main proponents of the plan. 'We can still have sex and drugs, but in a way that shows the city is in control.

This is what happens when you try to cobble together a moral code with no center, no organizing principle and no transcendent, objective truth. On what basis do you begin to formulate the idea that this much prostitution is just grand and should be promoted as a tourist attraction, but that much crosses the line into indecency? The people visiting the prostitutes are bound to have a different perspective. By what moral authority are you right and they wrong?