The permanence of the revolution and the transience of the permanent things

To be a conservative is to question the revolution and assert the permanence of the permanent things, but--to all appearances, at least--today it seems like the only thing permanent is the revolution. No matter how many elections we win, no matter how many judges we appoint, no matter how many times the revolution falls on its face, acts like a tyrant, or eats its own, it progresses on inexorably. It is slowed, but almost never stopped, and never reversed. It as if the center of gravity resides with the left, so that (as O'Sullivan's law has it), any organization that is not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.

It is particularly disheartening to see this operating in the Church. After a quarter century of John Paul II, the election of Ratzinger of all people as his successor, it seemed like we might finally put liberal Catholicism to bed. It had shown itself to be completely played out, sterile, self-hating, aesthetically and intellectually bankrupt, a dead end. Everything vital and new in the Church was clearly conservative. But then Benedict retires, a new guy comes in, he abandons the careful rhetoric of his predecessors for a casual style that generates left-friendly sound bytes and appears to do just about everything he can to reopen the left's pet causes that his predecessors put the lid on for years, and it's as if the last two papacies didn't happen. Despite 30 years of episcopal appointments, papal documents, a new catechism, a massive dying-off of liberal orders and institutions, the center of gravity is with the left--and, in fact, as moved leftward, so we're talking about being welcoming to gays and transgenders instead of just the boring old remarried mom with kids.

Now, it looks to me like the center of gravity among the bishops is still toward tradition and they're going to shut down the move to the left in this case, and, I don't think Pope Francis is actually a consistent or radical liberal. But still, at least to all appearances, the revolution is relentless and is playing the long game, while those standing up for what is ostensibly immutable feel as though there is no room for error--even when we're talking about bishops overwhelmingly chosen by conservative popes in a Church that stakes its very claim to authority on the immutability of its teachings.

It is a marvel. The confidence that the Catholic once had that the Church was unchanging is now felt by the progressive who is confident that progress is an inevitable law of the universe. Like it or not, the progressive shapes the dominant narrative of our society, and we are to some extent captive to it, even if we consciously reject it.

"Conscience"

At some point, conscience changed from the thing that accuses to the thing that lets you off the hook.

"Conscience" is invoked as an excuse for Catholics who find the Church's teaching on sexuality difficult and don't want to follow it--as if what distinguishes these people is a particularly sensitive conscience. "Celibacy, periodic abstinence, or having tons of kids is OK for the weak, and I really want to stop fornicating/contracepting/buggering my boyfriend like the Church asks, but my conscience just won't allow it!"

Yes, conscience can sometimes tell you to disobey the Church, but that's not what's operating here in 999 out of 1,000 cases. What's actually going on is that following the Church's teaching is hard--sometimes really hard--for a lot of people, and maybe for most people at least at certain periods in their life. So, a lot of folks just aren't going to be able to cut it, possibly for long periods of their lives. Failing to follow the Church's teaching has a lot more to do with "doing whatever you want" and "doing what society tell you is good" than with "following my conscience."

Struggling to live up to the Church's teaching is normal, and we should be understanding, merciful, etc., but there's no need to drag in this false idea of conscience to explain this or motivate our mercy and understanding. Doing so flatters people for being average and removes the possibility of an actual conscience that tells you to do things that are hard.

Moreover, it's an insult to those of us who actually seek to form their consciences according to the Church. Implying that, those who conform themselves to the Church's teaching, going against the grain of society at large, often at great personal sacrifice, do so out of some dullness or lack of moral creativity or inability to think for themselves.

Is psychology complete bunk?

There's an article in First Things by a psychiatrist arguing that transgendered people are the way they are because they got stuck in some stage of psychological development and that they need psychotherapy to cure them.

I agree with the author's argument that people who think they're a different sex from what they obviously are by genetics and anatomy clearly suffer from a kind of mental illness--and that it is political correctness that keeps us from recognizing this, not science or logic. However, these kinds of explanations don't sound plausible to me--whether they're applied to this or any other kind of mental or emotional problem. The whole idea of the unconscious mind as something which is, on the one hand, outside of consciousness and free will, and thus operates according to laws that are discoverable by science but not obviously having to do with material bodies, seems unlikely. At best, you're dealing with a very rough proxy for underlying material events, so that the further you get away from "x happened to this part of your brain, so that's why you suffer from y," the shakier ground you are on for showing the kind of clear, reproducible, causation, which could lead to any kind of effective treatment.

It could just be that we're so far away from bridging the gap between the physical brain and the conscious mind and human behavior and that these realities are so complex that postulating "laws" about them at this point is like predicting and controlling the weather--but with only the knowledge and instrumentation of 200 years ago. (And, if human beings are truly possessed of free will, then, even if we figured that out, at some level, their behavior is ultimately only predictable and subject to laws on a broad statistical level.)

In any case, it seems to me that such claims of causation of mental aberrations don't even rise to that level. They're easily refuted by counter-examples. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're complete bunk, but it may mean that they have more in common with the philosophical or religious psychology employed in the tradition of spiritual direction than they have to do with modern medicine.

Stupid laws for stupid things

I was looking at a website dedicated to banning bottled water. My first thought was the standard conservative/libertarian, "What is it with these crusading would-be despots, who feel the need to micromanage my groceries at gunpoint?!"

A more considered reaction though is that I don't actually disagree in principle with their objections to bottled water. I don't really know that the environmental impact is actually significant, but there is something wasteful about paying money for water in a bottle. We used to get by just fine with tap water and drinking fountains--in fact, I recall making fun of idiot rich people who paid for fancy bottled water supposedly from the French Alps. But now the wonder of capitalism found/created the need for it among the masses. That's what capitalism does--incite and manipulate our appetites to create needs. The whole system is set up to wear down our self-control so that we can have constant economic growth. The only effective brake on it is the law, so the natural response of a certain segment of people who want to do something about our gross slavery to stupid appetites to resort to the force of law.

I'm not trying to justify petty laws like this, but it seems like they might be a natural or necessary result of the unleashing of appetite that capitalism is engaged in. Laws against single-serving bottled water just weren't necessary 30 years ago because it more-or-less didn't exist. But someone invented it and sold it to the public, and now the genie is out of the bottle (so to speak). If one were to grant that the harm is significant enough to be of public concern (which is dubious), then--well--we'd need a stupid law to deal with stupid water bottles.

I don't think the harm of bottled water, on its own, is that significant--at least in this country where we have efficient garbage collection systems, and most people are conscientious about using them. But you could argue that it's harmful as a part of the broader unleashing of thoughtless appetite and abandonment of thrift and self-denial.

This may ultimately just be a restatement of Chesterton's observation that "When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws."

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus?

There has been a decided shift toward optimism in regards to the salvation outside the Church in recent years, but I think this actually runs counter to the developments of twentieth-century Catholic theology--at least, the thread that has been most completely absorbed into Church teaching through Vatican II, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

That development has been in the direction of more explicit Christocentrism and toward approaches which remove the arbitrariness in the associations between Christ, his Church, the sacraments, Christian morality, and salvation.

Thus, salvation is not just an arbitrary reward for a good life, carried out with the help of the Church and the sacraments. But (in a sense) salvation is life in Christ--it is life as member of Christ's Body, which is his Church, which is constituted by the sacraments.

This actually makes salvation of the unbaptized (or even non-Catholic Christians) harder to explain than explanations that focus primarily on forgiveness of sins. It is easy to imagine forgiveness of sins occurring outside the normal sacramental economy--even within the sacramental economy, there are various ways that sin is forgiven. But when salvation is seen as being not ultimately distinct from the Christian life--that is, following Christ, living a sacramental life in the Church--then salvation for people who are evidently not living that life is much harder to explain. What would such a salvation even mean?

I guess you fall back on the fact that basically anything good that anyone does is ultimately due to grace. So, whatever is good in anyone's life must be attributed to grace at some level . Thus, grace is available in some form to all, and all have the ability to accept or reject that grace. And, to the extent they accept that grace they actually are living in Christ. Still, you can't take that very far without again reducing the requirements placed on Christians to arbitrariness. If salvation is life in Christ and we have a decent idea what life in Christ looks like, then--while we can certainly withhold judgment on any individual, since judgment belongs to God alone--at least on the face of it, things don't look good for most of humanity--which would be in accord with what Jesus said about the narrow gate.

That doesn't mean we can't hope that the truth is otherwise, but that hope seems to have slid into optimism, which is certainly not warranted--either by scripture or the majority of the tradition and common sense of the Church through the centuries. While the Church heavily qualifies "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" these days, I suspect that, for the most part, when our ancestors said that, they more or less meant it--even if they might admit some exceptions.

I expect that the sense in the Church will eventually shift back toward the historical consensus--though perhaps not quite to the pessimism of some eras. It's possible that the current attitude is an over-correction for a distorted pessimism, and we'll find the reasonable mean, which allows for God's grace to work in unexpected ways, but sees the direness of the evident neglect of the ordinary means which he has publicly revealed.

The current optimism seems to go hand-in-hand with the optimistic cooperation with "men of good will" that comes from John XXIII and Vatican II. It's hard to see this being sustained as the "men of good will" increasingly turn on the Church.