The Father Gives the Gift of Work to His Son
A single clear idea, well fed, moves like a contagious disease: “Physical work is wrong.” Many people besides [D.H. Lawrence] took up that idea, and in the next generation that split between fathers and sons deepened. A man takes up desk work in an office, becomes a father himself, but has no work to share with his son and cannot explain to the son what he’s doing. Lawrence’s father was able to take his son down in to the mines, just as my own father, who was a farmer, could take me out on the tractor, and show me around. I knew what he was doing all day and in all seasons of the year.
When the office work and the “information revolution” begin to dominate, the father-son bond disintegrates. If the father inhabits the house only for an hour or two in the evenings, then women’s values, marvelous as they are, will be the only values in the house. One could say that the father now loses is son five minutes after birth.
…the son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through all seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son’s psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that his father’s work is evil and that the father is evil.
-Robert Bly, Iron John, p.20
I stole the quote from Carpe Cakem….I struggle incessantly with the feeling that my work (in an office) alienates me from my son. This is the first time I’ve seen it written out.
Flannery O’Connor: “…stifled with all deliberate speed…”
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. …Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing for writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had….I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed. “
Flannery O’Connor: The Nature and Aim of Fiction
Flannery O’Connor: “…too stupid to enter the past…”
“Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning…our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. “
Flannery O’Connor, Total Effect and the Eighth Grade
Bring the toddlers to the Word (Douglas Wilson)
Pastor Wilson speaks for those of us who think that “seeker sensitive” started in “children’s church” and ends in Ipod Church, where every person just downloads their own church service and plays it into their ear buds.
Many years ago we made the decision to disband our children’s church and nursery, and go to a system of parents training their little ones to worship with us. We have cry room, and so on, but the intent is to have our children grow up into the worship of God. We have had many reasons to rejoice in that decision, and we don’t regret it at all.
At the same time, the point of this exhortation is to let you parents know that we know how much work you do, and to encourage you in it. It is good work, work that will bear fruit for many years, over many generations. It is sometimes easy to lose sight of the long view, especially if you have five children under the age of seven, and all of them are squirmy. It is easy to lose sight of that when you haven’t heard more than ten minutes of a sermon at a time in three years, and you wonder if you will ever be able to listen to a sermon again.
But the life of Christ is not best represented by listening to a lecture, undistracted by anything. The life of Christ is pulled in many directions, just like you are being, and you are willing for this to happen so that your children may come to worship the Lord. Laying it down for someone else this way is our glory. It is a sacrifice to bring them to the Word, to the psalms, to the wine and to the bread.
So don’t measure what you get out of these worship services with carnal balances. The weight of glory you are carrying is far beyond the weight of toddlers in your lap.
“Vanished on the altar of therapy” (Victor Davis Hanson)
Works and Days » Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts
The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy.
Two teachers, but in this order.
Villainous Company: To Love, Honor, And Cherish
“It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it doe s not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.”
(Michael Lewis, an art professor, in the WSJ)
Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves To Death
The Typographic Mind: “…the capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally.”
The Peek-A-Boo World: The invention of the telegraph made possible, for the first time, people to get lots of information every day which they need do nothing about. This is Postman’s central, most useful concept, what he calls the “information-action ratio”. The information revolution began in the 1840’s then, because the new medium was suited to breaking up exposition into factoids. Most of his subsequent criticism of our television culture is simply an extension of this observation about a tipping point in a ratio — not in a supposed antinomy between pictures and words, which is what Postman spends the rest of the book embroiled in.
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“Although one would not know it from consulting varous recent proposals on how to mend the educational system, this point – that reading books and watching television differ entirely in what they imply about learning – is the primary educational issue in America today.”
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Three education crises in the history of the world: 5th century BC, when Athens transitioned from oral to written culture (to understand it, read Plato); 16th century AD, when Europe invented the printing press (to understand it, read John Locke); and now, centered in America, and the question of television.
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Postman: Orwell predicted the end of thought through an imposition from an oppressive external power. Thought will die from constraint of truth. Huxley predicted the opposite; thought will die in an environment where truth is not constrianed at all. Postman says Huxley, not Orwell, got it right: Big Brother will not watch us; we will watch him, voluntarily.
Ashcan Christianity
Ashcan authenticity: “The most ugly version of anything is the most authentic one.”
The term “Ashcan” comes from the school of painters, I think. These painters felt they should show the seamy and ugly side of the subject.
Many disciplines have gone through this reactionary stage. As a corrective, a stage on the way, it is not always completely dumb. It can be healthy IF the good, true, the beautiful are not drowned out in the process. Because, after all, any worthwhile discipline was born to love the good, true, or the beautiful, and still exists solely for that first love . When the work of such love becomes lazy and focused on a superficial prettiness it can be good to expose the bone beneath the skin, to infuse new vigor into the school of dilettantes. But the mistake is to extract this one occasional, purgative stage from a dialectic and transfix it on the blackboard as a static and unbalanced definition of reality.
One of the cliched emotions of adoloscence is a rejection of the values of your elders in a defiant embrace of what they consider degenerate. The bitter teenager denies the truth of the elder, and proclaims that the foul is really the truth. This proclamation has all the volume and cleverness of every 16 year old who is discovering his own fascinating mind. It’s the Satan-complex. Intelligent people should be tired of this by now.
But the avant-garde in every discipline is largely comprised of this tired, bourgeois sentimentality, which nurtures a cult of “authenticity”, obsessed that the ugly is the sum of the truth. Goodness is no longer believed, and indeed the very possibility is mocked. It is most obvious in secular art. Hollywood, for example, hates virtue. They want “complex” characters, which means they want a corrupt thread in the heart for every twinge of goodness. Entire movies are dedicated to defending the viewpoint of Milton’s Satan, that goodness is unfair and cruel and fake, except for the good of self-actualization, which trumps all. Think Pleasantville; Eden is sepia, we all need to Fall, into technicolor.
What are the roots of Ashcan Authenticity?
Studeo: eager to study
First Things » Blog Archive » One College That’s Getting It Right
Like many of us reading these pages, I was in the middle of that spring migration known as “bringing the kid home from college for the summer break” (and, we hope, the summer job). My daughter and I were having breakfast at the local diner with seven of her friends (who had helped us schlep her gear to the car–always a good idea to reward cheap labor), and I was asking them about their first year in college. What did they like about it? What didn’t they? What were the big surprises, how were the roommates? All those kinds of questions I’ve learned are fairly innocuous ways to get to know 19-year-olds and to pick up a little local flavor and some entertaining gossip. After a couple of sentences complaining about the food, they were ignoring me and talking between themselves. Talking about Aristotle. And Plato. About the nature of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics and how Verdi captured love of country in “Va pensiero” from Nabucco. (“I’m not Italian, but I cry every time I sing it,” one of the girls said.) And what they were most excited about was coming back in the fall and studying the Bible. And the Gospel of John. In Greek. Like I said, I was stunned.
These kids loved ideas. And they spoke knowingly about them, but without arrogance or a pretended sophistication. They weren’t showing off for the visiting daddy professor; they were just doing at breakfast what they had been doing since September: thinking, and thinking about important things seriously but happily, too. (The importance of “fun” was part of the discussion.) The talk hadn’t been pushed in that direction, it happened naturally. These young men and women were truly college students. Studeo, from the Latin, “to be eager or zealous for.” They were eager for understanding. They had just finished their freshman year at St. John’s College in Annapolis—and they could hardly wait to get back.
Sex and Violence
I think it’s pretty clear that God made us to 1) enjoy our own spouses’ nakedness (but no-one else’s), and 2) be non-violent. The closer we can come to these primal conditions, the better. They are not unconnected, as it first appears, since both fidelity and peace are simply aspects of love. When Jesus changes the heart these expressions of love become more nearly natural to us. Otherwise, like all standards of behavior which do not carry grace, they make us despair.
Yes, sex and violence are connected in the all-embracing law of love but talk about them tends quickly to confusion, so let’s talk about them separately.
Sex: God draws bright lines. Inside marriage there is no restraint on full visual eros, but outside the nuptial bower He gives the gift of modesty, just as full. There is no biblical visual depiction of sex from the spectator’s point of view. (Contrast this with violence: there are many descriptions of violent acts, both just and unjust.) There are one phrase descriptions: “rape”, or “Adam knew his wife”. So sex was not made to be seen, from the outside. At all. (We might add that if you’re only watching, you’re falling short of the glory of God.)
In Orthodox iconography the the profile is the beginning of absence. The icon assumes a personal I-Thou relation between the viewer and the person(s) on the board. Likewise, God made the naked human form for an I-Thou moment. The female form is for the husband to look at. So in God’s visual vocabulary there are agnostic lacunae, and here is one of them. Sex is to be un-picturable. The two lovers look at each other, but no-one else looks at THEM. Why? For the same reason that hearing God’s voice is un-describable: the love is so pure the subject-object distinction breaks down — this is ecstacy — and in the midst of the act the perception of the beloved’s form is no longer distinguishable as a separate complex.
