A Whimsical Fancy

What if the tastes of the drinking public turned to Thomism? Would beer companies start using the Angelic Doctor as a pitchman? With apologies to my esteemed colleague's brainchild the "BL Smoothman", the following is what I imagine we might see plastered all over the country to encourage plain persons to drink Miller Lite:


Spuds McKenzie, eat your little canine heart out.

Restore the "Pinafore"

“Here’s a How-De-Do!” I have recently come to the unwelcome realization that we may be on the brink of losing one of our great cultural and comedic treasures: the hilarious operas of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Our own generation, it would seem, has been largely deprived of these delightful collaborations, composed in England from the 1870s through the Gay Nineties. I myself have only the most fleeting familiarity with the duo’s work, but “When I Was a Lad”, my parents took me to see “The Mikado”, and I honestly may not have laughed as hard before or since. But “Never Mind the Why and the Wherefore”, it is high time to “let the punishment fit the crime, the punishment fit the crime” that is the forgetfulness of our age. If you are turned off by the word “opera” and dates beginning in a numbers lower than 19, “Behold the Lord High Executioner!” of your modernist prejudices. The centerpiece of the Gilbert & Sullivan genius is the “patter song,” which is sort of like rap music, but with singing, diction and actual words. Check out some of these gems on YouTube, or rent the wonderful 1983 film adaptation of “The Pirates of Penzance” with Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, and I suspect you will rapidly become hooked. You might not know it yet, but your liberal arts education has equipped you well to be “the very model of a modern Major-General.”

The Ennobler Office Pool

We at the Ennobler would like to invite all of our dear readers on Facebook to join our just-for-fun NCAA pool. Sure, Zach Tavlin can give a nice appraisal of the Middle East conflict or an insider's look at the U.S. Congress, but how many of the Sweet 16 can he get right? Can college basketball star Jason Weischedel use his firsthand knowledge of the game to defeat meddlers who dare to sully the sport with statistical inquiry? And how will I decide whether Boston College, Marquette, Xavier, Gonzaga or Villanova should win it all? Just go on Facebook and search for "The Ennobler Office Pool", or just tell me and I'll invite you.

And if anyone wants to fill out an NIT bracket, I'd be happy to score that as well.

Oh Dirtmaier where art thou?

Its been far too long since I've talked to my good (and great) friend. While I may not have anything important to say (since I was born post-Aquinas), a heart-felt discussion on natural law, college basketball, nude modeling, or Tim Root would be much appreciated. If needs be, we could resort to writing telegrams, since using cellphones might make us fall into the deep wilderness of gadgets.

Capacity for generosity

In a recent post, my colleague asked, "Do you know who is actually generous?"

Apparently it's not the philanthropic foundations that are "eschewing the needs of the most vulnerable in our society." I suppose the only appropriate way to give is through the Singer Solution to World Poverty.

Confession and the Reality of Sin

Over the centuries, people have gone to some extraordinary lengths to escape to Sacrament of Reconciliation. Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensées that “The Catholic religion does not bind us to confess our sins indiscriminately to everybody; it allows them to remain hidden from all other men save one…and she binds him to an inviolable secrecy, which makes this knowledge to him as if it were not.” In Pascal’s view, the sacrament is hardly a thing to be feared or avoided: “Can we imagine anything more charitable and pleasant?” he asks rhetorically. “And yet,” he continues, “the corruption of man is such that he finds even this law harsh; and it is one of the main reasons which has caused a great part of Europe to rebel against the Church.” In other words, our fallen human nature includes an aversion to confession strong enough to coalesce into the Protestant Reformation.

Now, there were clearly other factors at work during the great schism of the 16th century—there were, after all, 95 theses, not all of which had to do with confession. And yet, Pascal’s point holds: there was, and remains, a strong reluctance in the human heart to confess one’s sins, even to someone bound by sacred oath not to pass them along. Many believing Catholics take a sudden detour to the metaphorical cafeteria on the confession question, unilaterally declaring it by word or deed an “optional” component of the practice of their faith. People within and outside the Church often prefer to rely on God’s mercy in a very general way for forgiveness, to pin everything on a single and allegedly lasting salvation experience, or to confess their sins “directly” to God through prayer. For almost everyone, going to confession is a mighty struggle, and it seems we try to avoid it through any means we can invent.

Whether caused by this atavistic aversion to the confessional or not, the tendency toward do-it-yourself morality and repentance has culminated in a massive loss of belief in sin itself. In one prevailing scheme, “sin” is dismissed as a quaint concept, an outmoded way to describe things about which we have guilt-inducing hang-ups; in another, the individual culpability implied by sin is shifted to circumstances and institutions, creating a culture of universal victimhood. It often appears that fewer people today believe in the existence of sin than believe in the existence of God. When I glance hastily at the world or into my own heart, the latter proposition seems intuitively like a much tougher sell; it doesn’t take St. Thomas Aquinas to reason back to sin from its effects here below. The modern mood is one of an extraordinary unwillingness to recognize the hitherto unquestionable fact of human sinfulness.

It is true that we are living in a world in which it is extremely difficult to commit a freely willed act. The fragmentation of the soul by modern psychology, the commercial incentives to fevered acquisitiveness and the enslavement of the will by addictions of all kinds have transformed us from actors into patients, in both the etymological and the (rehab) clinical sense. But the dominant tendency is to chalk everything up to unwilled compulsion. Even one of the most obvious and appalling sins cast before our jaded eyes, the rape of children by certain priests, has been largely blamed on the custom of priestly celibacy. The sinners become victims, and the sins of those in the institution who allowed these atrocities to occur and continue become confused and muddled amidst the culpability imputed to the institutional Church itself. The net result is that the culture of victimhood persists, the existence of sin remains unrecognized, and there arises yet another excuse not to go to confession.

I am neither a priest nor a theologian, nor am I any other kind of religious or cultural authority. I have no qualifications whatsoever to write on this topic, except this one: I don’t like to go to confession, either. It is painful to make an examination of conscience, reflecting in detail about my own bad acts. It is nerve-wracking to sit and wait outside the confessional, clutching a list of my transgressions. It is embarrassing to tell the priest what I’ve done wrong. I do not like to go to confession. But a wise priest once told me something I never forgot: “I don’t like going into confession, either,” he said, “but I sure do like walking out.”

When Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton was asked why he joined the Church he replied simply, "To get rid of my sins." Not to suppress them, not to wallow in them, not to work though his hang-ups and guilt on his own, and not to deny their existence, but to get rid of them; to receive absolution from a man who acts in persona Christi—in the person of Christ Himself. One need not follow Chesterton all the way into the Roman Church, however, to come to grips with the omnipresent reality of sin. For those of you who are not Catholic, please remember that sin is a decidedly ecumenical phenomenon, and do not allow yourselves to fall into the pernicious traps of modernity. For my Catholic readers, I urge you to make at least one confession during this season of Lent. Rescue yourself from the ethical and metaphysical pudding of passivity, and admit out loud you do act, you do choose, and that sometimes you choose wrongly by speaking in the active voice: “Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

Generosity Without Capacity

As someone who takes phone calls from angry constituents on a regular basis, I’ve learned that Republicans fall into one of two categories: they’re either ignorant or soulless. Lately, it’s been more of the latter. In Congress, a few of my office’s constituents say, Republicans care more about the “party line” than struggling homeowners or the unemployed. For them, the series of opposition no-votes on the stimulus bill only proved that elected officials routinely fail to return the generosity that the voting public bestowed upon them when they put them into office in the first place.

Most human beings are sensitive, even Republicans. Unfortunately, we too often confuse concern or sensitivity with action. Conservatives like to warn about the dangers of good intentions. On the surface we’re saying that we often don't succeed in doing the good things we intend. But it also means that we often don't succeed in creating the capacity to do the things we should.

Consider the green-conscious liberals who nevertheless don’t have the time or means to participate in the programs the militant, college-dropout Greenpeace volunteers are peddling on street corners. “I would love to help, but I don’t have any money right now,” they’ll say, because they don’t want those dropouts, who are saving our planet and giving backrubs to poor African children, to think their hearts aren’t pure. But why is it that everyone is strapped in the first place? Perhaps if they had been more responsible with their money in the past (assuming they really do care more about the environment than math textbooks and marijuana) they could exhibit some much-needed generosity now. In all seriousness, if there is something worth devoting resources to, but you’ve squandered all you have on other things, good intentions are “about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest.”

I do not think it’s possible to be generous with someone else’s property. It is not generous to steal somebody else’s money and give it to charity. It is not generous to tax someone, no matter what bracket he’s in, and give the resulting revenue to someone who failed to perform due diligence on his mortgage. It is not generous to let your friend cut in line; you must give up your spot entirely or else you’re just screwing everyone standing behind you.

Studies have shown that conservatives give a higher percentage of their income to charity, even if you account for the difference in church-based donations. Conservatives and liberals can both be generous. But when it comes to taxing and spending, generosity is really only relevant when it’s your own money in play. It does not take that good of a conscience to vote for increased healthcare spending when it’s funded by other people’s paychecks (and given the weak revenue projections on our President’s ‘soak-the-top-two-percent’ plan, most likely the paychecks of other people’s children as well).

Do you know who is actually generous? The person who pays off his debts and takes care of his children. Him doing so means that someone else doesn’t have to. The state doesn’t have to mop up his mistakes with other people’s money. Why we praise Democrats (or Republicans) who can’t keep a sustainable budget, diminishing government’s capacity to spend money responsibly without burdening the taxpayer and the economy, and not the people who advocate and practice responsibility and accountability I'll never understand.

Being generous to others is a good thing. And while intentions can be good, intention without capacity is worthless. If you want to be good, be effective. In the meantime, when calling your congressman's office, take it easy on the swears.