Some Aphorisms

Massachusetts politics from the beginning has drunk deep of the belief that an objective moral law exists and that Massachusetts voters, perhaps only Massachusetts voters, can be trusted consistently to know what it is. It is only the contents of that moral law that, to the minds of the state’s body politic, have changed.

The problem with the open society is that you can’t get dirt on anybody.

If there’s one thing that I know boomers love, it’s free ziti.

Traditionalism is to tradition what a decapitated body is to a star athlete.

One should love God’s moral law in the way that one loves one’s most boring relative.

Just as the sun sets in the west, so the moral sets into the political.

In languages that have no gnomic aspect one cannot understand religion.

While I’m not sure whether or not I’m willing to fully subscribe to it, there is a robust public health and consumer safety argument for suplexing TikTok and similar algorithmed-to-hell-and-back short-form-video-oriented platforms into the fires of Orodruin whence they came, an argument that has nothing to do with what foreign dictatorships they do or don’t have servers in.

The Victorians were the last civilization to understand that human life is not actually very secure as a matter of course, which covers a multitude of their many other sins.

The modern tendency is to stress marriage’s exclusivity more than, and sometimes over against, its permanence. It is socially destabilizing and still morally imperfect, but not necessarily morally worse. What were once abuse victims’ (mostly women’s) problems become the community’s problems. Strong arguments can be made for that.

Moreover any situation that one is “allowed” to leave is going to look similar to this.

At least on the level of cultivating personal virtue, casual sex might actually be less immoral than plenty of what passes for normal heterosexual relationship behavior in the secular world. Casual sex is, whatever else can be said about it, at least a straightforward way of addressing a very common type of physical desire and frustration to which most (not all, but most) people can relate. With practices like hanging on in vague situationships with people one neither likes nor respects because of the perceived social censure that comes with singleness, or rebuilding one’s entire social circle from scratch every time one starts or ends a romantic relationship, other areas of life are implicated and it becomes very difficult to avoid the conclusion that an idol is being made of sexual practice itself, as long as that practice is dully heterosexual in character—and yet irreligious heterosexual people are at least as likely to behave this way as religious ones, to the point that I have known people who have left their childhood religions for the sectors of secular society that behave in this way! Received-wisdom heterosexual relationship behavior takes an axe to almost all the virtues, not despite but because of how socially normative it is.

The thing about Jesus the “moral philosopher” (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?) is that he’s really not unique and he’s certainly not uniquely admirable. The “historical Jesus” is a self-aggrandizing and occasionally even violent apocalypticist who swings back and forth between preaching what was actually within the mainstream of Pharisee moral theology at the time and demanding that people abandon their families and economic obligations to follow him around listening to more of this. The “Christ of faith” is the only Jesus Who’s still a convincing moral exemplar once you dispense with the presupposition that you have to like the guy.

Even the southwestern tip of Connecticut really is New England at heart—its deep history, landscape, and lieux de memoire are all pure New England. It has not so much sold its birthright as had that birthright bought out by rich people who have thrown up tacky mansions all along the shoreline and raise their children to root for New York sports teams. One need only visit an old burying ground in Greenwich or Darien to understand this.

The American right from Reagan onwards, arguably from Goldwater onwards, has had one important point of similarity with fascism wisely expounded: it is not so much any form of “conservatism” as a Revolutionary Right ideology, which seeks not to preserve an existing or even restore a former social structure but to create a new type of society entirely. This society keeps nothing of substance from the past and owes nothing to the past other than as a wellspring and storehouse for its aesthetic imaginary. In the recent vicissitudes of the American right under its Tea Party, alt-right, and MAGA guises, we see this in the promiscuous cribbing of aesthetic signposts that in the past pointed to very different and often mutually hostile sectors of American society, not all of them reactionary at the time: Southern Redeemers and Neo-Confederates, “Main Street” small businessmen in the Northeast and Midwest, anti-authoritarian frontiersmen, many-relationed immigrant Catholics and religious Jews, blue-collar tough guys whose fathers or even whose younger selves were the “Resistance libs” of the Reagan years. The resulting historiography, or fantasia on themes from American historiography, is starkly nationalistic, but eclectic enough to have a certain crossover appeal to people disillusioned by or unwelcome in previous American nationalist spasms.

In the end, all non-absolute moral theories are the friend-enemy distinction in drag.

Added November 19, 2023: When one is parched beyond belief in a bone-dry airplane cabin and the drinks cart is ever-so-slowly inching closer, closer, closer—this too is a manifestation of the unsatisfactoriness of things. I have heard that in previous days it was not like this—but, then, almost nobody could afford it back then.

One Thesis on a Morality of Art

A principle that occurs to me when it comes to “separating art from the artist,” a concept and verbal formula that I think is stupid, misleading, and mendacious to begin with, is that on top of everything else it frankly depends upon the quality of the art. If we are going to use flippant aesthetic terminology in order to have half-baked discussions of morals, it ought to be used in reference to aesthetic and moral ideas that are themselves at least vaguely proportional in terms of scale.

Let’s take music as an example. Claudio Monteverdi was a favorite of the hilariously corrupt Pope Paul V, but this relationship gave the world some of the best religious music ever composed. Richard Wagner was so obviously antisemitic that not even the Bayreuth Festival people bother any longer to deny it, but he gave us the drone note at the beginning of Das Rheingold. Artie Shaw physically abused Ava Gardner for reading Forever Amber, then divorced her and married the author of Forever Amber, but his clarinet work has yet to be surpassed and he gave us one of the most influential recordings of the sublime “Begin the Beguine.” Roger Waters is a godawful tankie, but “Wish You Were Here” is almost as sublime as “Begin the Beguine.” Billy Corgan did…something to Emilie Autumn while they were dating in the early 2000s that is not my place to speculate about, but he gave us “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Compare all that to someone like, say, the insufferable edgelord nepo baby Matty Healy, who has been in the entertainment news a lot of late. Part of why we ought to be less tolerant of Matty Healy than of Roger Waters is that Healy, simply, does not produce anything whose aesthetic qualities come as close to offsetting his moral problems as “Wish You Were Here” comes to offsetting Waters’s. Healy has the personal habits and worldview of an edgy bro with a crappy boy band, and the music that that crappy boy band produces reflects this, whereas much of Pink Floyd’s output sounds “as if” it could have been written and performed by someone who does not engage in Putin apologia or “blood and soil but woke” anti-Zionism.

Speaking more generally, aesthetic qualities as a rule cannot offset lack of moral qualities because morality is more important than aesthetics. Almost everything that people value artistically, or politically or interpersonally for that matter, can, should, and must be sacrificed if that is what needs to be done to avoid serious moral lapses. On that note it is also much easier to read or look at or listen to older art without enabling these people by giving them one’s money. Monteverdi, Wagner, and Shaw are all long-dead; Pink Floyd and the Smashing Pumpkins both have discographies that are very easy to find on CD or vinyl in secondhand stores (younger people might have to buy CD players or turntables on which to play these hard copies, but that is not too difficult a task for anyone who is not an insufferably presentist, Whiggery-addled ghoul). I’m sure Matty Healy’s oeuvre is remarkably easy to pirate, and I wish his fans joy of it. But after a certain point aesthetic judgments do need to be made in order for moral questions to be approached in a way that feels truthful and compelling.

Unkillable Grief Monsters

Of late I have been getting very into the television show Yellowjackets, and also into the Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have been into the books for a while and have only recently discovered the program, but that I am currently getting similar things out of them. Both of these are series that assess grief very openly and in great emotional and narrative detail. The overtly fantastical setting of The Locked Tomb is built, cosmologically, on grief (for loved ones, for the natural world, for human societies), and in the superficially more normal but still demon-haunted world of Yellowjackets grief is the only thing that gives the relationships between some of the characters their longevity and meaning.

I’ve long been partial to what I call “unkillable grief monster” characters in art and literature. It could be argued that in the West this sort of character goes all the way back to Achilles, if we interpret the μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος that the Iliad depicts as a form of grief. Key touchstones in non-Western, or at least non-Greco-Roman-derived, literary traditions might include the voice of the 137th Psalm (“by the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept and remembered Zion”), and even Prince Kaoru from Genji monogatari, who has what Dostoyevsky called “civic grief” rather than grief for a particular person or place. Miss Havisham’s permanent, moratorial state of jiltedness in Great Expectations is not quite the same thing, but it is similar; she too inhabits a permanent snapshot of a past blow to her heart. Dickens is not especially generous to Miss Havisham, but this has not, traditionally, prevented readers from finding her situation touching.

Fundamentally this is a type of character who is a tomb for someone or something else. The Locked Tomb and Yellowjackets both dramatize this in an unusually externalized way since both narratives contain cannibalism; think of Achilles eating Patroclus’ corpse in his μῆνιν or Prince Kaoru attempting to physically ingest the Japanese body politic and you will start to understand some of these more recent works’ themes even if you have not read or watched either of them yourself. The bodies of some characters in these narratives physically become permanent mortuary sites for loved ones whom they simply cannot or will not put to rest.

All of this is horrifying to most people, including most people who have felt grief that intense in the past, but I think there is also an element of wish fulfillment to it. Entering a permanent state of grieving, becoming grief oneself in this very body, can be a power fantasy of sorts. These characters are people who try to eternalize their loss as a way of expressing its importance against the idea that they ought to “get over it” or “move on.” People who were not “over” the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 within an arbitrary two-week timetable were pathologized as depressed; one of my least favorite public figures in the world, the notoriously abusive Russian figure skating coach Eteri Tutberdize, was in Oklahoma City for an ice show at the time of the bombing, and ever since I learned this about her it has been difficult not to surmise that she was treated with the coldness then with which she treats others now. Even the more generous and humane mourning period of Victorian Britain’s middle class tapered off after a year or two. The Locked Tomb has characters in it who have been in mourning for ten thousand years; Yellowjackets has characters who might very well end up being in mourning into eternity. This grief impels them to do horrible things, but another way of putting this might be that the grief allows them to do horrible things. In these narratives, people who have undergone tremendous loss and heartbreak are not made to conform to other people’s standards, are not made to settle for less sorrow.

“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed

So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.

            A great deal about Mansfield Park makes it immediately obvious why it is currently unfashionable. It is a didactic, relatively unfunny novel, whose passive and extremely introverted heroine, Fanny Price, comes across quite frankly as a personality-free drip to current sensibilities. Fanny drifts from one abusive situation (with her parents and siblings; her sisters sleep with knives in hand on account of her father’s drunk and handsy Royal Navy friends) to another (with her rich slaver uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, who is absent for much of the novel and whose wife and children treat her as a glorified domestic servant). She falls in with the witty and urbane Crawford siblings, Mary and Henry, then breaks from them after getting relentlessly hammered for chapter after chapter to compromise her strict Protestant morals for the sake of their social circles. Finally, she marries her cousin Edmund, an aspiring Church of England priest who is the only character to consistently treat her like a person (albeit still not one whom he seems to like very much). The book’s treatment of where the Bertram family’s wealth comes from is mostly off-page, with one exception: Fanny asks her uncle to his face at dinner what he thinks of the slave trade, only to be met with “dead silence” that she takes as her cousins being bored of discussing politics. Edward Said infamously interpreted the novel as tacitly pro-slavery due to the extremely limited explicit treatment of the subject; although, as I will argue, the novel is swarming with implicit condemnation of slavery, not spelling it out in extremely clear terms goes against current tastes in political art.

            All of this being the case, I actually liked Mansfield Park very much and am glad I read it. The lurking implications and intimations of deep evil within the novel attracted me to its moral imagination despite its over-the-top sermonizing about less serious subjects like live theatre. Indeed the way the book relegates deeper moral and social pathologies to subtext strikes me as a level of irony more characteristic of Austen than most of today’s readers seem to think. Sense and Sensibility does the same thing, has a resolution to its marriage plot that is at least as unsettling as Fanny’s marriage to Edmund, and probably only escapes being excoriated for the same reasons as Mansfield Park because it is funnier.

            It is my belief that the book becomes much harder to understand if one refuses to situate it biographically. I’m not particularly interested in set phrases like “separating art from the artist” or “death of the author.” I think it’s common sense that at least some aspects of an artist’s personality will show up in her art, at least some aspects of a work of art will reflect the artist’s or artists’ personal circumstances, and the pertinent questions are what aspects and how the reader or viewer or listener feels about them (“deciding to ignore them” is a perfectly valid answer to this). With Mansfield Park a great deal is going on that reminds one of Jane Austen’s own life and family; she was a Tory who admired anti-slavery Tory thinkers like Burke and Johnson, she had intimate family connections both to right-wing politics and to the Royal Navy, and some of these family connections would themselves eventually become anti-slavery in nature. Admiral Sir Francis Austen would, decades after his younger sister’s death, spend four years responsible for the Navy’s efforts to intercept slave ships as Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies Station.

            This odd dynamic of “Toryism” (in the broadest sense) opposing itself to something far worse than Toryism is, as I keep saying, currently unfashionable. It is, however, familiar to me, both from other British literature and from the heavily Austen-influenced Japanese novel Sasameyuki. The World War II-era ultranationalist regime in Japan interdicted Sasameyuki’s publication due to the book’s antiwar and antifascist content, yet this antiwar and antifascist content takes the form mostly of depicting militarism as a modern aberration distracting the Japanese people from their real traditions, such as midsummer firefly hunts and collecting very specific types of dolls. Similarly, much of Mansfield Park’s moral criticism of the wealthy slavers in Fanny’s life takes the form of intimating that they are un-English: Mary Crawford plays the harp (seen at the time as a very Continental instrument); the theatricals are an affront to English Protestant moral piety; characters make constant reference to Mansfield’s park’s “air,” and the Earl of Mansfield’s anti-slavery opinion in the 1772 King’s Bench case Somerset v Stewart had used “English air” as a metonym for freedom.

            Mary Crawford brings us to the subject of sexuality in the book. (In fact the heroine’s name brings us to this subject, but part of what makes the name “Fanny Price” so funny is that nobody in the book remarks upon it, so I’m not going to remark upon it at any great length either.) I tend to resist reading same-sex desire into books like Mansfield Park, not because I have a bias against such readings but because I have a bias towards them and have a habit of overcorrecting for this bias when doing serious analysis of this type of novel. With Mansfield Park, however, I genuinely think that much of the deviant or proscribed sexuality hinted at in the book is being hinted at on purpose. Mary Crawford, raised in a circle of perverted admirals, makes what is either an anal sex joke or a BDSM joke in mixed company in Chapter VI; Fanny overtly says that she is physically attracted to Mary in Chapter VII (almost immediately before the narration describes Edmund’s own interest in Mary as “a line of admiration of Miss Crawford, which might lead him where Fanny could not follow”—wording that has hints of apophasis) and muses on her fascination with her in Chapter XXIII:

Fanny went to her every two or three days: it seemed a kind of fascination: she could not be easy without going, and yet it was without loving her, without ever thinking like her, without any sense of obligation for being sought after now when nobody else was to be had; and deriving no higher pleasure from her conversation than occasional amusement, and that often at the expense of her judgment, when it was raised by pleasantry on people or subjects which she wished to be respected. She went, however….

Attempts to analyze and address this attraction between Fanny and Mary in adaptations and fanfiction usually present the more brazen and transgressive Mary as the sexual or romantic pursuer, but this isn’t what we see in Mansfield Park itself. Instead it’s the pious killjoy Fanny who seems to respond to Mary in a way that she does not to anyone else in the book, including her eventual husband Edmund. Austen disposes of Fanny and Edmund’s wedding in an oddly perfunctory and unenthusiastic way, vaguely referring to it as “a hopeful undertaking” and “quite natural.” In a novel advocating values as conservative as those advocated in this one, this is not the clear damnation with faint praise that it would be in a romance novel written today, but it still raises the question of how appealing exactly this marriage actually is to Fanny, or to Edmund for that matter.

            With a book that is didactic in the very strange and archaic way that Mansfield Park is—slavery is bad, adultery is bad, flirting is bad, live theatre is bad, and all four things are the province of the same basic types of hedonistic rich people—one cannot really claim anything related to sex as “representation” in a positive or affirming sense. In terms of what’s depicted in the novel, though, whether Austen approves of it or not, the way these characters relate to and experience sexuality treats very little as beyond the pale. Here is my reading of the sexual aspects of the story, all of which I am able to cite from the text, with a focus on Mary Crawford and her problems:

            Fanny and Mary are both raised in deeply dangerous circles of depraved Navy men. Both are traumatized in ways that the reader isn’t wholly privy to, Mary probably worse than Fanny. Fanny reacts by becoming withdrawn, submissive, and morally irreproachable; Mary reacts by becoming a charismatic social butterfly who thinks life is about taking other people for the proverbial ride at all costs. They meet and get along at first; Fanny especially is taken with Mary, who sparks confusing feelings in her. Mary makes sex jokes in public and wholeheartedly embraces the Bertram family’s raunchy (for 1814) lifestyle; Fanny, pressured relentlessly to compromise her puritanical values by just about every other character, hangs on until her slaver uncle (himself probably up to no good) comes home and has a My Immortal-esque “what the hell are you doing, you motherfuckers?” reaction that takes the heat off her. When Maria Rushworth cheats on her husband with Mary’s brother later on, Mary’s antinomian reaction alienates Edmund and burns all remaining bridges with Fanny, who, Mansfield Park after all being a deeply conservative novel, drifts into a path-of-least-resistance marriage to the only male character who is as moralistic as she is. Mary, meanwhile, implicitly shakes off the psychic influence of the perverted admirals eventually, but not for a long time.

            This was the only Austen novel that Vladimir Nabokov held in high regard, and it isn’t difficult to see why once one looks at it through the “sex is tyranny is sex is tyranny is sex” lens that Nabokov perfected in Lolita. Mansfield Park might not be as interested in slavery in particular as critics like Edward Said have wished it to be, but it is very interested in abuse of power in general. The “air” references are, in this reading, part of a semantic field that also includes repeated use of lemmas like “oppress” (which occurs seven times by my count, mostly with Fanny as the person being oppressed), “tyrant” (which occurs three times, two of them referring to the slaver Sir Thomas and his family), “abuse” or “ill-use” (four times), “cruel” (twelve times), and “wicked” (four times). The book uses its vision of human evil as a hammer rather than a scalpel, and although it’s still funny and often even sweet it is not difficult to see why people who find Pride and Prejudice and Emma comforting and consoling reads might disfavor it.

            Mansfield Park’s vision of evil and tyranny is, like it or not—and I don’t like it very much myself—inseparable from its preachy Protestant piousness, something that I think derails many modern readers and makes them less able to notice or realize that the book does contain social critique. Protestantism is unlike Catholicism, the Destiel of religions, partly in that it tends to be either epicurean or censorious; even the Social Gospel progressives of the early twentieth century had tendencies towards the no-fun positions on attempted social reforms like Prohibition and, more regrettably, eugenics. The antislavery movement in Britain had strong Methodist and Evangelical contingents and included figures who were, as mentioned above, staunchly conservative even for the time on other issues. It thus should not surprise the theologically knowledgeable reader that the Austen heroine who attempts to grill her uncle about the slave trade at dinner is also the one who stubbornly insists that it is immoral to act in a play alongside her own extended family.

            People should read Mansfield Park. People who have already read Mansfield Park and disliked what they thought it had to say should read it again. The book has a fundamental stance and vision that seems alien at first but has a bracing moral clarity to it once one digs into the depths of the text. It is good and salutary to subject oneself to unfashionable classics; indeed, I would say that doing so is at least as good and salutary as is reading fashionable classics. Certainly Fanny Price herself would think so, and she would know; she is a bootlicking scold.

Repent at Leisure

With neither joy nor penitence

In these lethargic times, the one

And only laugh that still makes sense

Comes from a grinning skeleton.

—Paul Verlaine, translated by Norman R. Shapiro

❦

Taylor Swift released an album last month, Midnights, her tenth (not counting the two rerecorded versions of earlier albums that she has made as part of an intellectual property battle). Taylor Swift album releases are major events in popular culture and have become major events in my own life as well, since I’m only liking her work more and more as she, like me, slowly passes out of early adulthood. The 2020 Folklore/Evermore diptych solidified me as a superfan for life—which can’t be said for everyone who loved those albums, because they hadn’t necessarily liked her earlier albums too, whereas I had—and I was excited about Midnights because I heard it was going to be in a confessional register and confession, penitence, regret, and admission are concepts that I think about a great deal. Sure enough, the album is packed full of lyrics dealing in shockingly overt terms with things Swift, or Swift’s narratorial voice, has done wrong in her life, ranging from emotionally manipulating her listening public, to infidelity in an intimate relationship, to liking money. (Strict theology would reverse the order of the first two in an ascending ranking of severity, although all three would be very bad.) Much of the album’s sound exists mostly as a distracting smokescreen to disguise the jaw-dropping candidness of what she is actually saying, as do some of the specific lyrical flourishes; at one point she cops to what I suspect is a dead-serious Baudelairean conviction that she is going to hell when she dies, but she frames it as part of a tongue-in-cheek du Maurier-esque narrative about an imaginary inheritance dispute.

This brief essay isn’t intended as an essay about Taylor Swift, although I could write about her for several pages at a time if I wanted to—as, I suspect, could most competent living writers who follow popular music. It’s intended as an essay about the public aspect of penitence, the part of a process of making amends where we actually tell other people what we did wrong. Sometimes this isn’t necessary—nobody needs to know about that one time you masturbated to dodgy early-2000s hentai, other than arguably a confessor or spiritual director, and even then the details are probably a bit too much. Oftentimes, however, a public and communal dimension to penitence should or even must exist, either because the immoral acts harmed a community or because the penitent needs some kind of green light from other people before accepting that the moral crisis that she precipitated has been resolved. I’ve often thought that the medieval Church’s transition from Mediterranean-style large public airings of grievances to Celtic-style private confessions was at best a mixed blessing. Part of the reason for this is probably cultural (as a product of a mixed Italian-American and American Jewish family background myself, I recognize my extended family very readily in Seinfeld’s famous Festivus episode), but I think there is a serious sociological and theological argument to be made for confession as a more public and collective act as well. God judges nations as well as people; surely the intermediate formations of human life—the parish, the town, the diocese, the county—should have some means of putting wrongs aright as well.

Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to know the difference between publicly admitting wrongdoing and oversharing about things in which nobody is interested. This can be true even when it comes to wrongdoing that did hurt other people in obvious and publicly noticeable ways. As an example I’ll share something about myself that does not make me look very good, just as “scheming….to make them love me” does not make Taylor Swift very good and running a company that “stinks” because he is someone who “couldn’t smooth a silk sheet if [he] had a hot date with a babe” did not make George Costanza’s boss look very good. I, in my teens and into my early twenties, had an exceptionally poor understanding of conversational boundaries, especially around subjects like sexual desire. While this at no point went beyond words, my struggles with verbal boundaries and understanding when I was testing them cost me several close friendships over the years. I finally realized and amended my behavior when this had happened enough unrelated times that it was no longer reasonable to deny that I was the person at fault. (“I’m the problem! It’s me!” Swift sings in one of the songs on the new album.) The reason I’m bringing this up is, again, by way of example—it’s been several years, thankfully, since this problem arose in my life, and I’ve either managed to repair or accepted the loss of my relationships with the friends with whom I had it in the past. That being the case, is my bringing it up out of nowhere in an essay like this an admirable spontaneous admission of wrongdoing and desire to reform, or is it unsettling oversharing and dredging up old news to fish for sympathy and attention? At least in my mind it’s clearly the former, which is why I am writing about it, but the reader does not have access to my innermost thoughts and thus can only take my word for that.

A higher-stakes public example might be the French Catholic prelate Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who earlier this month came forward as a sexual abuser without anybody having publicly accused him. Did Ricard have a genuine case of conscience, or was he trying to position himself as having a perverse sort of moral authority? Not even all of Ricard’s colleagues within the Catholic hierarchy seem confident that they can tell the difference, and Catholic bishops are not generally credited with a habit of second-guessing other Catholic bishops’ morals. At the very least Ricard’s approach leaves a somewhat better taste in my mouth than the retired Bishop of Albany Howard Hubbard asking to be laicized as a general application of a rule despite vociferously denying the allegations against him, even though Hubbard is probably setting a better precedent for the Catholic Church. Then again, might this itself be because I used to admire Hubbard very much and thus feel more betrayed and disillusioned by the strong possibility that he’s a sex criminal? It often happens that our motives for how we receive an attempt to atone for wrongdoing are as mysterious to ourselves as our motives for attempting to atone in the first place are to our fellows.

I don’t think that going back to collectively and communally “acknowledging and bewailing our manifold sins and wickednesses,” in the words of Thomas Cranmer, himself someone who did many horrible things in his life and had many horrible things done to him in turn, would actually solve those mysteries. It might diffuse them somewhat and make them easier to bear, in the same way that I am able to think about Cardinal Ricard and Bishop Hubbard more or less at my leisure but would feel much more call to dwell on and perseverate on equivalent conversations if people were having them with me in private. Even so, taking the process of working through wrongdoing and making it the public’s or the community’s business is not something to do or to advocate lightly. For long years rural areas in several Western European countries had a custom called rough music or charivari, in which people guilty of crimes against social and familial order, such as adultery or domestic violence, were shamed in loud public processions rather than being turned over to the courts. (The title of this essay comes from a proverb about bad marriages.) Even though the aesthetic of this practice appeals to me and even though there is a lot to recommend public shaming over against (say) sending people to prison for years, rough music was a form of lynch law at its core.

Yet not every public confession of wrongdoing or public airing of grievances must involve as stark and extreme an intervention in someone’s life as charivari. If a society does make penitence and atonement everybody’s business, it provides paths to actual reintegration in a web of moral actors that simply letting guilt gnaw at individuals in private does not. It is worth applying a renewed emphasis to this at least in liturgical penitential contexts, and I would argue in secular contexts as well. For that renewed emphasis to be workable in secular settings the practice of whipping up ideologized online hate mobs would probably need to have a stake driven through its heart first, but that is itself what people used to call a win-win.

This is where I would like to, by way of a pithy and topical envoi, say “if you’ve never told anyone to commit suicide for disagreeing with you about what fictional characters should have sex with each other, you’ve nothing to fear.” Unfortunately, this isn’t true—there is always a great deal to fear in this world, and especially a great deal to fear when it comes to confiding and being vulnerable around other people in their multitudes. I would submit, however, that letting that fear rule us, letting it induce constant defensiveness to the point of privatization of sin, has led us places that are even worse by far.

Patriots in Control

A specter is haunting the American left, the specter of “America Bad” thinking—not “America Bad” in the sense that America is flawed and most Americans are not willing enough to recognize those flaws, but “America Bad” in the sense that we are both the villain and the main character of current world history, a sort of Walter White or Patrick Bateman of the international arena. This is the tendency that Jeane Kirkpatrick attributed to the “blame America first crowd”—unhelpfully, because Jeane Kirkpatrick did not actually know who was and wasn’t in the “blame America first crowd,” or, if she did, she pretended not to for the sake of the cheap seats.

The “blame America first crowd” that actually exists makes two basic mistakes. The first is in thinking in the first place that the United States is a uniquely malign influence in the world. It isn’t; indeed, America is an unusually benign global hegemon in most ways, although given the direly low bar set by previous hegemons, this is not much of an accomplishment. Ideally the recent practices of some of America’s so-called near peers like China’s treatment of its religious minorities or Russia’s high-on-its-own-supply ideology-poisoned unprovoked invasion of Ukraine would have disabused people of the idea that America is a uniquely abusive world power, and in many cases it has, but unfortunately, there are still plenty of people on the left who have had exactly the opposite reaction. One’s modus potens is another’s modus tollens, and some people are in fact so committed to “America Bad” thinking that they conclude that anything bad-seeming that America’s rivals are doing must be either misreported or not actually bad at all. One can sometimes see Pope Francis obviously and publicly struggling to suppress this line of thinking when he comments on the plight of Ukraine; “NATO is barking at Russia’s door” is an assumption about the situation that it is understandable for a Latin American Catholic prelate to make, given that region’s own history, and in the grand scheme of things the Pope is probably to be commended for resisting the temptation to go all the way down that rabbit hole. I can’t say the same for figures who are American, like Noam Chomsky and the ever-embarrassing Glenn Greenwald, suddenly adopting a naïve pacifism about Russia or even, as Chomsky did at one point, claiming that Donald Trump is “the one Western statesman” who actually wants peace. These people have completely reversed axiom and application, going from “my country is violating its own declared principles” to “violating one’s own declared principles is that which my country does, and if a country opposed to mine appears to be doing that, it must actually not be.”

The second mistake of the anti-American American left is to assume that a country—one’s own country—is reducible to the worst instincts of its political classes and the most broken aspects of its political institutions. American imperialism doesn’t make America bad for the same reason that your cousin from the poor side of town getting busted for drug dealing doesn’t make her bad; people aren’t reducible to the worst decision they’ve ever made and countries aren’t reducible to the worst features of their political cultures or military histories. Some might respond to this by pointing out that the United States’ domestic culture has obvious and universally known pathologies as well—the consumerism, the horrible diets, the hyperdivisive sociocultural politics, the obsession with large and terrifying cars and the built environment that caters to them, the increasing relegation of serious interest in religion and the divine to certain right-wing subcultures that most other Americans reasonably despise. Again, however, if most of us saw a family member or friend mishandling their household affairs in analogous ways, our natural reaction would be to pity them, not to hate them. (I say “our natural reaction,” not necessarily the reaction that we think is in keeping with our political commitments; plenty of American leftists today do also have a problem with jumping awfully quickly to interpersonal shunning of those with messy lives or bad ideas.)

A country is just its people, as a group of individuals and as a collective; this includes the abstractions that emerge out of any mass of people, such as social emotions and cultural practices. America is me, my family, and most (but not all) of my close friends; it is Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and the lion’s share of the people who love and hate them most; it is art forms like jazz and comic strips, holiday traditions like unedifying political arguments on Thanksgiving and presents (or Chinese food) on Christmas, and time-honored aspects of workingmen’s and workingwomen’s culture like filling out March Madness brackets at random, stealing small items from one’s workplace, and dying of black lung around the age of sixty. For a leftist to hate America yet claim to fight for the liberation of humanity is for a priest to love God and hate his parishioners, or for a “male feminist ally” to exploit and berate his own mother.

It is imperative, then, that a left-wing patriotism reemerge in the United States, both as a civic value—those who control American public life will always either be or make others perceive them to be those who love America best—and as a moral value—exaggerated contempt for something that is flawed, but is ours, is a flaw of character and virtue on our own part. Left-wing American patriotism should honor—but not revere; reverence for mere mortal men is something that American patriotism in general absolutely does have in excess—left-wing partisan or sectional figures such as Jones, Debs, and Guthrie. Perhaps in our more trollish, bullet-biting, or yes-chad moments we might even add in more ambivalent characters like Jimmy Hoffa. At the same time we should not abandon ecumenical American patriotic figures like Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. Rather than rocketing back and forth between denigrating our national heroes as the lowest of the low and unduly praising them to the stars, we should seek to interpret their lives and actions in ways as compatible as possible both with our political and moral values and with historical facts. Whether or not the country deserves our love is not the issue. We deserve to let, or make, ourselves love it.

Trahison des Mémoires

In my master’s thesis, which was written in late 2016 into early 2017 and was in the field of theology, I coined an expression called trahison des mémoires, “treason of memories.” It was a snowclone of trahison des clercs, the concept of disloyalty to the principles of serious thought by a society’s intellectual or cultured classes. With trahison des mémoires, my idea is that memory, especially publicly-held memory like the institutional memory of a country or a religion, can be twisted and weaponized in ways that do great harm to the people holding onto the memory. I was not so much interested in political or sociological harm—looking at cultural memory through that framework is old hat—as in emotional and interpersonal harm. In the thesis I introduced this concept as part of a discussion of (and I am both dating myself and outing myself as an irremediable dweeb here) the 2001 anime Noir, one of whose main characters is trying to piece together the circumstances of her parents’ murders.  When she finally does remember—or, in point of fact, when she finally is provided with other people’s memories concerning—the killings, she wishes she hadn’t.

            I was interested in looking at how early, or transgenerational, memories of cultural and religious practices can lead to mental states about as bad as those associated with watching one’s parents get whacked. I’m not convinced in retrospect that I had a ton to say about this; my thesis ended up much less systematic, more meandering, and frankly more postmodern than I went into it hoping it would. Even so, that is what I used the term to mean and, if I am allowed to toot my own horn on this, I do think that “treason of memories” captures certain things about this experience that more common terms like generational trauma or cultural baggage do not. It often really does feel very much like being betrayed, stabbed in the back, attacked in the dark, by something about one’s family or one’s culture that ought to be a font of strength and comfort.

            My family came to North America in the first decade or two of the twentieth century, mostly from either the Italian Mezzogiorno or an area of Eastern Europe that has variously been under Lithuanian, Polish, Austrian, Russian, or Nazi German sovereignty over its long and violent history. Some of the Eastern Europeans were Jews, others Gentiles; the exact genealogical admixture has never struck me as particularly important, mostly since it’s no longer possible to reconstruct. Neither, for that matter, has the question of whether the Gentiles were ethnically Polish or Lithuanian or Russian or Belarusian or whatever else; there is an anecdote from a pre-World War I British diplomat related in Bini Adamczak’s Relational Revolutions in which the diplomat, speaking to ordinary inhabitants of the part of Europe in question, runs through several wordings of a question about ethnic and national identity before finally being told that “all governments are a plague on the earth and it would be for the best if the Christian peasantry were left to attend to their affairs in peace.” Remove the word “Christian,” or add the phrase “or Jewish” after it, and you get the attitude towards nationalism that I’ve long assumed almost all of my ancestors on that side of my family held.

            Looking at my family history this way insulates me from the current treason of memories happening on an operatic scale in Ukraine and Russia. There are other treasons, however, with which it helps much less. There is a story that I often tell about my great-grandfather, a story that I heard myself from my elderly aunt. My great-grandfather’s name was either Paweł Turówski, Павел Туровский, פאולוס טוראָווסקי‎, or Paul Turowsky, depending on your thoughts on various Eastern European nationalisms. He spent most of his life in the Springfield, Massachusetts area following a short stint in the Canadian nickel mines after his flight from Europe. Pogroms had been involved, probably, given the timeline, those that followed the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. When my aunts, who are much older than my mother, were growing up just after World War II, they would visit their grandfather each Sunday after Mass and he would give them a nickel and a cup of chicken soup apiece—but he would always answer the door with a butcher knife in hand, before seeing to his satisfaction that it was just his granddaughters, and not the Cossacks come for him again.

            That butcher knife feels aimed through the dark at my own back whenever I try to take a sympathetic look at the sufferings of the Cossacks themselves, and, for that matter, whenever I try to think with compassion about the antisemitic views that my grandfather developed over the course of his own life. It is possible that these views were developed in opposition to his father, but also that his father instructed him in them himself as part of some twisted ploy at assimilating. In any case it made it easier for him to marry my grandmother, the descendant of long lines of Campanian peasantry and guttersnipes who passed down curiously bright copper-colored hair, difficulty moderating food intake, and a strong tendency to develop serious neuralgias in early adulthood. Once or twice I’ve pictured my grandfather and great-grandfather going at each other like Arthur and Mordred in the Rackham illustration of the Battle of Camlann, but then, there can’t have been too much resentment at the time of that wedding, because there were several bridesmaids from my grandfather’s side, that is the Eastern European side, of the family.

            I have a friend with whom I once had a serious fight over her observation that my grandfather “betrayed the Jewish people” by marrying my grandmother. I know enough about American Judaism and the difficulties it has had withstanding intermarriage and assimilation that I was not surprised by this opinion of hers, but I still objected to her saying it. I did not only object for the obvious moral reason that one simply does not say that sort of thing about a friend’s dead grandfather, but also for the factual reason that in reality the betrayal of the Jewish people had happened at least a generation earlier, maybe longer.

            (Lots of people seem to think that Judaism and Christianity, or even specifically Judaism and Catholicism, are either naturally allied and sister religions, or naturally inimical and opposed. People argue over which is true. Both are silly and wrong. The fact that many antisemitic ideas are theological nonsense even in very conservative Christian thought has not stopped them from influencing countless Christians, even Popes, even otherwise good Popes. Neither has persecution of Judaism by Christian governments always and in all places stopped Christians from being good neighbors to Jews, and learning from them. There would have been ways for my grandparents to have built a life together that did not involve this self-enmity and self-rejection on my grandfather’s part, and yet those paths were not taken.)

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Some of the most detailed stories I’ve ever heard about these people came in a specific conversation with my aunts and uncle three or four years ago when my mother and I visited them on Cape Cod. It was the most freewheeling conversation either I or my mother had ever had with some of the other people involved, in particular with my mother’s oldest sister. I learned that evening as the sun set pinkly behind Follins Pond about everything from the dubious paternity of my grandfather’s oldest sister— Paweł/ Павел/ פאולוס /Paul’s wife having, most likely, abruptly married him after being abandoned by the man who got her pregnant—to the crime family that used to and possibly still does control the Town of Agawam.

            What’s remarkable, looking back on this conversation, is that no point in it did I think holy shit, why is she telling us this? or anything of the kind. These conversations happen sometimes; people open up. It does not always feel like getting stabbed. There are similar reminiscing conversations that I have had with members of my family that did feel like getting stabbed; one such example is a conversation that I had with my mother years after the fact about a visit to a Buddhist temple on a trip to Japan in 2013. It was a visit that made a profound impression on me and that I have been meaning to write something cogent, insightful, and vital about ever since; my previous attempts to do so embarrassed me and I am not going to try to rectify that now in service to this particular point. (The very first thing I wrote about it, a long, typed-up diary entry headed “The Distance between the Devoted and the Devout,” has the advantages of freshness and of a title of which I’m still very proud.)

            The temple is Bōdai-ji, on top of a mountain whose name my best friend loosely translates Mount Doom, and the festival, which happens in the high summer, is called the Inako Taisai. At this festival blind spirit mediums or necromancers called itako set up booths in front of the temple in which they, actually or purportedly, contact the souls of the recently deceased, including miscarried or aborted fetuses. The practice is in probably-terminal decline due to diminished need for and interest in this sort of specialized life path for the blind. Supposedly the decline is also in part due to skepticism both from the Buddhist religious establishment—which of course has its own set of funerary practices, including, again, after miscarriage or abortion—and from secular Japanese people, but in 2013 it still seemed pretty packed.

            My reminiscing with my mother involved, among other things, her reminding me that our visit to the Inako Taisai, which I remember positively for a lot of reasons, also involved me getting overwhelmed by the crowds, or the summer heat, or both, and running off and irritating someone my mother was talking to, someone who had been looking forward to going to an Inako Taisai all her life. Me being who I am, I reacted to this conversation with a sense of deep shame, embarrassment, and even guilt—had I ruined something that this other woman had been looking forward to for decades? Probably not, especially since most older Japanese people tend to expect Westerners to behave in bizarre and jarring ways to begin with. Even so, it was apparently enough to give my mother herself mixed feelings about the excursion, which made my own very positive memories feel a little inappropriate, selfish, misguided. That sort of perseveration is elevated and exacerbated, I think, by the fact that the Inako Taisai is a well-known—in some circles—and well-attended event. Feeling as if I may have somehow damaged, in however minor a way, an established corpus of social, cultural, and religious memory, gives me the feeling of being betrayer as well as betrayed.

            Something feels melodramatic about looking at these kinds of memories as if they are knives in the dark, so let’s put them to bed as something more moderate, calmer, more contained. Homeopathic dilutions, maybe, of the kinds of violent memories that my grandparents and great-grandparents contended over with themselves and with one another. These memories have an undertone of violence to them only because they affected members of my family about whom I care deeply, or else because for an autistic person there is always an undertone of violence to any faux pas that one might conceivably be punished socially for having made. Add to that the guilt, for any morally reasonable person, of thinking of oneself as a victim in a low-stakes situation, and the Inako Taisai memory falls into place and becomes understandable at least to myself.

            So much for the 2013 Inako Taisai, which in spite of this qualm I do still think very well of as a ceremony and as a moment in my life. So much also for the family that ran my relatives’ childhood liquor store—note the wording—and latterly the Agawam School Board. What about working on these memories in a reparative way the way one can do a reparative reading of an old and, as they say, “problematic” book? I have already touched on this idea and want to make a more extended case for it.

            There are particular events in my childhood that I and other relatives remember different versions of, like the Agawam stories and the Inako Taisai story, but also remember in uniformly benign or positive ways, unlike the Inako Taisai story, of which memories are mixed, and the Agawam stories, which all concerned are just glad to have survived in more or less one piece. For example, I remember going to see the Lord of the Rings movies as a child with my mother and in one case my aunt when they were coming out; I remember the same about the Harry Potter movies. Both sets of memories are excellent; in my very early childhood I disliked both movie theaters and fantasy stories, but after a few years of the 2000s fantasy-action-adventure-blockbuster milieu I loved both. (The monocultural MCU juggernaut has ruined a lot of this sort of thing for me now, of course—another knife, another dark night, another spot on my back.) My mother also remembers both sets of movies very positively. Yet her Harry Potter-related memories are more salient and vivid for her than are her Lord of the Rings-related memories, whereas for me it’s the other way around. Part of the difference might be that several of the Harry Potter movies were released in theaters around her birthday, in late November.

            Remembering the salience of these movie watches differently from how my mother does is, of course, no kind of betrayal at all. I bring it up more to point out that the reparative potential in “misremembering” isn’t entirely disconnected from the way reminiscing already works for most people anyway. Who among us has not had many rounds of good-natured banter with friends and family about things like this? “No, no, it really happened like this.” Then someone else says “No, it happened like that; remember?” Then a third person says “Well that isn’t how I remember it.” These kinds of arguments actually reinforce our memories and reinforce our relationships. Just recently, in connection with getting my mother’s permission to write about the Inako Taisai episode, I had a conversation much like this with her. We agreed on the point I made above, that nobody going to something like this after wanting to for many years is going to let their time at it be ruined by an autistic foreign stranger having a meltdown because it’s hot out. So clearly the reparative quality of reminiscence can take the sting even out of the Dickinsonian “goblin bee” of trahison des mémoires. This actually does happen in Noir; the character I coined the term to describe is never happy about the fact that her parents were whacked, but she is able to engage in some sort of repair and atonement through having it out with the scumbag who ordered the hits and the brainwashed victim-perpetrator who executed them.

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Another memory of a debate over memories with my older relatives—a memory that might eventually come back and stab me itself, for all I know!—also comes to mind here. This is another utterly benign one, even benevolent in the sense that I look back on both the debate itself and the memory about which we had it fondly. My aunt and uncle and I discussed my very earliest memory, in which my uncle picks me up in his arms in his living room in a midcentury ranch house in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and spins me around while an old record player plays a big band tune. For some reason we all agreed that it was one of those record players that only plays one prerecorded song or program of music, and yet none of us agreed on what the song in the memory actually was. I remember it as “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Benny Goodman piece that is probably a plurality of people’s first point of reference for big band music. My aunt remembers it as “Begin the Beguine,” a Cole Porter song, probably, in this kind of anecdote, being played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My uncle remembers it as “the Russian boat song,” by which he means a wartime Glenn Miller arrangement of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”

            Other memories like this might be relatively easy to resolve, but in this case my aunt, my uncle, and I all have good reason to have remembered best what song it was! My uncle owned the record player; my aunt, who is a little younger than my uncle, has the clearest memories of that period of time, 1995 or so, in general; I have the strongest emotions about the memory, since it is my earliest.

            Because we all had occasion to remember this memory the best, and yet all remembered it differently, the conversation actually shored up the bonds between us and reinforced, I believe, our importance to one another. In this way trahison des mémoires can be reversed so that the memory that is seemingly betraying one can in fact be a deep cover agent on one’s behalf. A public memory involving a national or intergenerational harm, like my great-grandfather’s memories of the pogroms, might be more difficult, or even impossible, to reverse in this way, and yet even in those cases I think that future generations can look back on their—on our—ancestors with a view to resolving and redeeming their experiences. Sometimes the best way to deal with betrayal is to meet it with a refusal to betray. “Trust, but verify,” as Ronald Reagan said, quoting, allegedly, a Russian proverb. Verifying, by implication, should not damage the trust overmuch. We can see that we have been stabbed and yet meet that violence with a decision to accept our memories and the purity of our feelings about them nonetheless. A knife that enters one’s back and stabs one through the heart can also, in different hands, be a tool that keeps a whole family or a whole society fed, safe, and warm.

Postscript

A few other, very specific knives thrown at my back in recent days, all of which had, in some way, a medicinal and consoling function: Florence and the Machine’s new album Dance Fever, which is named after early modern “dancing plagues,” which are in turn written about in similar terms to the nerve disease of which most of my female-line ancestors died. The too-pale lights of this year’s fireflies in unmowed grass in mid-June dusk. The Memory Alpha page for John Masefield. A whole cache of old yearbooks dredged up in my closet, showing the most 2000s fashion and graphic design choices imaginable, people I have not thought about in decades, and high school crushes of whom, in some cases, I still think as beautiful. A photograph of me as a child, in a Baltimore Orioles cap, draping myself over a railing with a smile on my face and the skyline of Manhattan in the near distance, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center jutting out over it all; the photograph is dated June 30, 2000.