Getting to the Point: ideology

Showing posts with label ideology. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

A Fair And Reasonable Question

What does the word ‘gender’ mean?

I have been wanting to write a post about this for some time. I realize that the very fact that I have written the above sentence is enough to brand me in some people’s minds as a ‘H8R’, a bigot, who should be jailed if not killed, and at the very least driven from polite society.

I find it interesting that asking a simple question about a definition of a common word yields that reaction. Gender has become the third rail of public discourse today, and to even touch on the subject with anything besides the rote and rather vacuous slogans of the day (‘Love Wins!’) is to take one’s life in one’s hands.

Well, nobody has ever accused me of being timid. So I’m going to jump on the third rail and ride it as far as it will take me here. The architects of critical gender theory, the activists of the LGBTQ movement, do indeed want their concept of gender to be the organizing principle of society, to deconstruct and discard the binary notion of male-female polarity for… well, what, exactly? What does the word ‘gender’ mean, as it is used by these activists? It seems to me that this is a reasonable and fair question, since we are supposed to construct society around their definition.

So let us first establish what gender is not, according to this world view. First, gender is not anatomy. It is not body morphology—men are shaped one way, women are shaped another way. This has nothing to do with the person’s gender—so we are told.

Second, gender is not sexual orientation. There are men who identify as men who are gay, women identifying as women who are lesbian.

Third, gender is not a list of personality traits. This of course was established by second wave feminism. It is sexist, we have been told (and I happen to agree, largely) to say that women are gentle, sweet, empathetic, emotional, while men are logical, aggressive, strong.

Fourth, gender is not defined by the things we are interested in or are good at. Women like flowers, clothes, cooking, babies, while men like cars, sports, guns. I also happen to agree with this, being very much a man while having precisely zero interest in cars and guns and only a slight interest in sports (I’m not much on flowers or clothes, either…)

Fifth, gender is not defined by social roles. Women stay at home and take care of the kids while men go out and earn money for their families.

So… gender is not your body, your personality, your interests, your actions, or who you want to sleep with. Ummm… what is it, then? Please, someone elucidate it for me. I swear I am not being sarcastic or asking the question rhetorically. I want to know what people mean when they say that someone with the body of a man is ‘really’ a woman, even if he (sorry, she) does not choose to have the radical body modifications needed to outwardly resemble a woman in body morphology.

It does seem to me that there is something almost mystical in this deconstructed notion of gender, something so interior and ineffable that it is difficult to put into words beyond the phraseology of ‘I just know it to be so.’ But, my brothers and sisters, massive and complete social reconstruction cannot be done on the basis of such interior and mystical knowledge – it is unreasonable to expect society to reconfigure itself around something ‘you just know.’ I just know that I am a Catholic priest, not as a job or profession but as a mystical configuration of my soul to Christ the head of the Church. But I would never expect a non-Catholic to call me ‘Father’.

For myself, I believe gender is, simply, body morphology, determined by chromosomes. Yes, there are the vanishingly rare instances of babies born inter-sex, and this is a medical and social problem for those very few people—but this is not common enough to justify jettisoning the male-female bi-polarity that has been the basis of every human society since human beings have existed.

And just to completely cook my goose, I wish to say very simply and without any rancor or dislike or indeed anything but great compassion and friendship for all people, that I believe the men who believe they are women and the women who believe they are men are in fact suffering from a mental illness and need psychiatric help, not surgical mutilation and society enabling.

I do find it odd that this is considered by many to be a hateful thing to say. That attitude itself seems to reflect contempt and hatred for people who are mentally ill. As a priest I have many people in my life who suffer from various kinds of mental illness. It is a hard suffering, but it’s not a death sentence and it is not inherently an insult to someone to say “I believe your problem is psychological.”

Anyhow, I don’t intend to write ongoingly about the whole ‘transgender moment’ we are having in our society right now – this is not that kind of blog, obsessing over whatever the controversy of the day is. But I think the question I raise is reasonable and fair. I have given my answer to it, and I would be interested to hear other answers, and other civil responses to it (for anyone who is new to the blog reading this, abusive nasty comments will be deleted without mercy!).

So, what does gender mean?

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Careful The Tale You Tell

Why is the Church so obsessed with abortion? Why does the Church talk incessantly about homosexuality? What is this creepy Catholic obsession with sex, sex, sex all the time? Why can’t the Church be concerned about real issues—poverty, for example—instead of always being all about the pelvic issues? Why, huh, why?

This is more and more the typical attitude of many towards the Church, or towards organized religion in general. And we are solemnly informed that it is for this reason primarily that the millennials are being alienated from organized religion and from Catholicism in particular. It is the fault of the Church and its laser-focussed obsession with sexual purity.

Except… that’s not true. Not remotely. Not at all. This article over at National Review does a great job showing this definitively. The Church, including all the various Christian denominations, gives billions of dollars every year to the alleviation of poverty throughout the world; the budgets for groups combatting the various ‘culture war’ issues is miniscule in comparison.

Meanwhile, I would echo the author of the article’s experience. I have been a Catholic my entire life, and I honestly think I could count on one hand the homilies I’ve heard that have even mentioned abortion, homosexuality, or any other point of sexual morality. I would add that the single source where we can see exactly what ‘the Vatican’ is saying is the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which reports pretty much every speech, every document, every word that comes out of Rome. While I haven’t done a scientific study of the matter, I would have to say that issues of sexual morality wouldn’t crack the top ten, or even the top twenty subjects the Church talks about all the time. My impression is that world peace and world economic justice are actually the two most urgent social issues Rome talks about, and has talked about for decades now.

All of this, while interesting in itself highlights something I have been aware of for some time. And that is the danger ‘the narrative’ poses to ‘the truth’. ‘Everyone knows’ that such and such is the case. But it turns out that it’s not the case. And yet even upon that being pointed out, everyone goes on knowing it, somehow. The Narrative trumps the facts, every time somehow.

We see this all over the place—the question of the Church’s obsession with sex is just one example which happens to matter quite a bit to me. (I do find it fairly odd and—what’s the word—oh yeah, ironic, that a culture saturated in erotic imagery and awash in x-rated material has the effrontery to accuse anyone else of being obsessed with sex).

But the question of narratives is an important one, one which we all need to be vigilant about. For Christians, we have to resist the narrative that the secular culture and those who are of that culture are utterly depraved and vile—the tendency to demonize the ‘other’.

The Sondheim musical Into the Woods, recently made into a so-so movie, has a lyric that goes “Careful the tale you tell; that is the spell.” Stories have a capacity to shape reality for us, a magical ability to both reveal and conceal. Stories, in fact, yield prejudice, and prejudice has a great power to render us blind and deaf to whatever contradicts it. ‘Liberals and stupid and evil… conservatives are stupid and evil… Muslims are all terrorists… Christians are all judgmental hypocrites… atheists are all arrogant jerks… black people are such and such, Mexicans are this and that, Jews are all xyz, Asians are all blah blah blah, white people are all that way’ and so on and so forth. Careful the tale you tell—all of reality shapes itself around that tale.

Meanwhile, life and the world and humanity are so much richer, so much more varied and complex, at once better and worse than the narratives allow for. Simplistic stories with heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators are all well and good for Hollywood or beach fiction, but serve us poorly in actually navigating the world as it is.

Personally, I try to limit the tale I tell to the One Story that I believe is absolutely true, because it is told by God and not men. And that of course is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Paschal Mystery in which everything God is embraces everything man is, in which God so utterly enters the human reality that He dies and goes to Hell, and in which the human reality is so penetrated by Divine life and love that the man Jesus rises from the dead and raises up all men and women who are joined to Him in faith. God becomes everything we are so that we can become, in Him, everything He is.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Everything else is just fairy tales told by an idiot, to be taken with large grains of salt at all times. The saying today is ‘check your privilege’, but I would like to start a new saying: ‘check your narrative’, and be vigilant always, welcome continually the facts that contradict the stories you tell yourself and others. Stories are for children (in light of the Gospel this is no problem, as we are all God’s children). We are adults and should live our life as adults, narrative-free if at all possible.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Root Causes, Root Remedies

In the past decades, we have seen plenty of evidence on the streets and squares of our cities of how pacifism can be perverted into a destructive anarchism or, indeed, into terrorism. The political moralism of the 1970s, the roots of which are far from dead, was a moralism that succeeded in fascinating even young people who were full of ideals.

But it was a moralism that took the wrong direction, since it lacked the serenity born of rationality; in the last analysis, it attached a higher value to the political utopia than to the dignity of the individual, and it showed itself capable of despising man in the name of great objectives.

Joseph Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Reflection – I can’t exactly write my usual Saturday post on ‘this week in Madonna House’ for the simple reason that I was away all week and have no idea what happened around here. So I thought I would do a little throwback to the original blog format, dedicated to exploring the writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. I still firmly believe him to be one of the greatest if not the greatest theologians of the 20^th century, and his writings deserve a wide audience.

Ratzinger lived through the waves of extremist politics and violence that gripped Europe in the late 60s and 70s—the generation of the soixante-huitards were his university students, and he had ample opportunity to study the phenomenon at close quarters.

This is a great question of our time, the perversion of idealism into terrorism, and it is one we all have to grapple with. There have been numerous examples in the media in recent months of ‘good, normal boys’ who have been radicalized and become servants of the violent apocalyptic agenda of ISIS. There is a real need to account for how this group, which to most people seems frankly insane, can attract at least some young men, not even Muslim to begin with, to itself.

There are those who would say, “Who cares? If they’re with the terrorists, let’s kill them!” Others would say, “You see! It proves that religion is inherently dangerous! End religion and the problem goes away.” Others are… well, just perplexed by it all.

I would argue, as Ratzinger does here, that the problem is not religion or high ideals, but religion and ideals not moderated by reason and solid first principles. And this is precisely what we have failed to give our children, dating back to at least my own childhood, but certainly more so in the subsequent decades.

The human person is inherently idealistic, and I would argue that there is no demographic more in need of, and hungry for, real idealism than the young human male. Young men need a vision of life to which they can commit their youthful energy and drive, lest it be directed to destructive and wasteful channels.

We have not given young men this vision of life; we have given them video games and internet filth. And we are then baffled when at least some of the young men who are not satisfied with this diet of distraction and debauchery are easy prey for the violent ideologues of the Middle East.

The solution is not to stamp out the idealism of the human person, but to provide an idealism that both extends to the heights of heaven (and so meets the need for transcendence that is embedded in our souls) and yet is intensely humanistic, intensely committed to the irreducible value of the human person. We need to present a vision of life that is inherently heroic, but that calls forth a heroism that is essentially non-violent, directed at all times towards the care of the individual.

My own firm conviction is that Catholic Christianity does provide ample heroic scope for life, setting forth the essential call to love as Christ loves us, to be servants of the kingdom of love in this world and to lay down one’s life for the sake of that kingdom. At the same time, Catholicism has a rich intellectual tradition that undergirds and supports its heroic visionary core, and a mystical heart—the sacramental life of the Church—that is accessible to all and makes this heroic scope of life possible for everyone, not just for the privileged elite few.

We cannot fight bad religion with no religion, bad ideals with no ideals, radicalism with nihilism. The remedy for the new wave of political and religious terrorism in our times is not to stuff everyone with lots of goodies and diversions, but to present an alternative that is compelling and beautiful.

Come to think of it, that is exactly what happened ‘this week at Madonna House’, and every week at MH for that matter. That’s exactly what our whole mandate and mission is here—to shine forth the radiant vision of life and love that the Gospel of Jesus Christ has given us, and that the Person of Jesus Christ has sustained in us by his grace. That’s what we do here; that’s why MH exists.

So… come one, come all, especially come all you young people seeking to find and deepen and live a vision of life that is worthy of your greatness. There is such a vision, and it flows from the heart of Jesus Christ eternally to the world and to every human being alive in it.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

I Am Not a Turnip

Whether or not the human mind can advance or not is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated. But if we assume, for the sake of argument, that there has been in the past, or will be in the future, such a thing as a growth or improvement of the human mind itself, there still remains a very sharp objection to be raised against the modern version of the improvement.

The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas.

The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut.

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion… he is becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when says that he has outgrown definitions… he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broadminded…

Somebody complain to Matthew Arnold that he was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, “That may be true but you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right; Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong.” The strong humor of the remark ought not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense; no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he things that he is in truth and the other man is n error.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

Reflection – So we come to the end of Heretics, (a sigh of relief is heaved by those readers of mine for whom this has not been nearly as fun as it has been for me). But I for one delight in the bracing common sense of Chesterton, nowhere more on display than in this final chapter.

He goes on to praise the men he has been in fierce debate with—Shaw, Well, Kipling, and so forth—for being strong minded enough to actually have ideas, believe their own ideas to be true and, consequently, that contradictory ideas are false (I realize that’s a logical leap that many in the post-modern world seem incapable of grasping), and having the courage and vigor to put their ideas out in the public square to be debated and furiously championed or repelled.

‘No man ought to write at all, or even speak at all, unless he thinks he is in truth, and the other man is in error.’ That is a wonderful, simple, straightforward expression of the matter. I’m also tempted to put it as the tag line to my blog, but I won’t of course.

Some will argue that this ends any possibility of dialogue. I disagree, strongly. In fact, when people will not advance their own ideas about things, holding them to be true, no dialogue is possible. When people either just nod their heads at whatever is said, or (if something thye hold to be truly vile is said) burst forth into personal abuse and vile insults, then dialogue is truly impossible.

It is only when men and women simply state their views, listening of course to the views of others, and strive to formulate a dogma or doctrine or statement of truth that is strong enough to withstand the objections and contradictions of debate, that a real dialogue is going on.

So, while at heart I am not really a controversialist, and truly don’t spend all my time on this blog discussing contentious matters, I do and will continue to do so from time to time. It is a human thing to do, as GKC observes. I have no desire to be a turnip or a tree, and both have and will give voice to my definite convictions about life.

And I encourage others to do so, in the comments if they will, on my FB page if they wish, or wherever. Incidentally, I know I have been painfully remiss in responding to comments lately – I can only plead for mercy in that my life this past month or so (and for the foreseeable future) has genuinely kicked up into high gear and I generally have just about enough time to write and post the blog each morning, and that’s it.

And so we bid a fond au revoir to Chesterton – not sure where we’re going next, but we’ll see what tomorrow brings… (I really don’t plan this blog much in advance). See you then.