A Harsh Word Out of the Larger Context

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For Men Only: A Straightforward Guide to the Inner Lives of WomenFor Men Only: A Straightforward Guide to the Inner Lives of Women by Shaunti Feldhahn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I reread this book recently, as a kind of refresher for myself. The first time I read it, I had just started dating the woman who is now my wife, almost four years ago. At the time, I had also read “For Women Only,” the counterpart to this book, in an effort to offer notes and comments on it for my then-girlfriend’s benefit.

Now, I am somewhat distanced from that companion reading, and I can see some flaws in this book as a stand-alone product.

Let me start off with the positives: It is an excellent book. It addresses an important need, and it offers research and statistics to do it. (Not being a researcher, I can’t speak to the reliability of their research, but from what I do know, it’s not so weak as to be discounted out of hand.) There are few other books in this same vein, although there are many which attempt to show men how women think; I have read even fewer which succeed even remotely.

This book manages to accomplish that, because it’s not afraid to quote from the horse’s mouth, as they say. Instead of philosophizing, psychologizing, or otherwise intellectualizing, the Feldhahns work with real women with real opinions saying things that – for some reason – they can’t just say to their husbands/boyfriends.

That being the case, though, this book has some shortcomings. Almost all of these shortcomings fade, however, when this book is read in conjunction with its counterpart. When read alone, “For Men Only” is a pretty harsh condemnation of male behavior. Granted, some male behavior needs to change, but not all of it can be.

For example, when discussing the female multi-tasking, multi-thinking mind, the Feldhahns spend a great deal of time discussing feminine emotions. At several points, male emotions come into play – but these are discarded as ignorant, irrelevant, or unimportant. In short, from the perspective of this book alone, men must cater to and coddle the emotions of their wives, but if they ever have an emotional response to something, it should be dropped like a hot potato.

This sort of heavy-handed blame-game lurks throughout the book, and makes it upsetting, offensive, even unbearable to man forced to read it by itself. Only when you read both this book and its counterpart (which is pretty heavy-handed against women for their flaws) does everything fall into place as a mutual effort to improve the marriage and each other.

So, a note to any women who want their man to read this book: don’t take the titles literally, and make sure he reads the one for you, too. It’s important context.

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Respect in Apologetics

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The Catholic ControversyThe Catholic Controversy by Saint Francis De Sales
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was not an easy read, though not on account of the text. Francis de Sales’ work requires a certain philosophical mindset, but it is excellently written and addresses each topic specifically for the layman. Rather, this was difficult to read because in many places, it has opposed my own beliefs; even so, I will strive not to address matters of faith except insofar as they relate to this review.

Let me start with the negative points. This book is originally a collection of letters, with numerous author’s notes, ideas, and self-editing appended. As such, it does not always flow naturally. Some of the chapters seem to follow from the last, while others seem arbitrary, and occasionally, the editor will include an author’s note about wanting to add such-and-such a chapter where none is included. Also, the end of the book lacks any sense of finality; there is no summation, no conclusion. In the context of a series of letters, such a conclusion would make little sense, but in the context of an argumentative book, its absence leaves the reader wishing for closure.

The only other negative quibble I can pointedly offer is an editing issue: there are easily half a dozen typographical errors throughout the book. This may seem minor, but when addressing a matter as vital to the human person as religious faith, there is no room for mistakes, no allowance for deviation. A number of grammatical errors make it easy for the opponent to avoid the tough questions of the argument and attack the weakness of the arguer. Fallacious and ridiculous it may be, but still, it’s important.

Now for my praise. The book is very well written. Its argumentation is succinct, effective, reasonable, and based in Scripture. One of the shortcomings of modern debates is the disagreement on qualifications for evidence; atheists demand materialism, Protestants deny tradition and praise emotional experience, and Catholics require objective reasoning… yet when atheists, Protestants, and Catholics disagree, atheists speak entirely in materialistic terms, Protestants speak entirely in spiritual terms, and Catholics speak entirely in terms of tradition. Under this model, no one accomplishes anything.

Francis, on the other hand, acknowledges the belief structure of his audience and meets them where they are; he is “all things to all men,” so that he might save some (1 Corinthians 9). He knows that he is writing to Calvinists, so he takes the Calvinists’ bases of faith: Scripture, tradition only up to a point, predestination, and so on. Using that structure, even so, he efficiently and powerfully argues in favor of the Roman Catholic Church. As someone who followed Calvinism for a time, I found that Francis’ argumentation left Calvin without a leg to stand on.

There were a few specific moments that I found peculiarly prophetic, given that Francis was writing very early on during the Reformation. Here I sit now, looking back on five hundred years of Protestant history, and I find these expectations more apt than ever. In discussing the notion of valid interpretation of the Scriptures, Francis writes,

“Who knows not how many passages the Arian brought forward? What was there to be said against him except that he understood them wrongly? But he is quite right to believe that it is you who interpret wrongly, not he, you that are mistaken, not he; that his appeal to the analogy of the Faith is more sound than yours, so long as they are but private individuals who oppose his novelties. Yes, if one deprive the Councils of supreme authority in decision and declarations necessary for the understanding of the Holy Word, this Holy Word will be as much profaned as texts of Aristotle, and our articles of religion will be subject to never-ending revision, and from being safe and steady Christians we shall become wretched academics.” (pp164-65)

As a part-time academic, I found this especially apt. Academics, particularly in the realm of literary and philosophical study, are obsessed with novelty. New is always better – and if you can tie it into some modern philosophy, some notion of feminism or liberation theology or the emergent church, all the greater is your triumph. Day to day, the “accepted” understanding of Scripture or history or philosophy is morphed into something totally unrecognizable by its progenitors. Academia is subject to the whims of cultural phenomena, and by placing Scriptural interpretation within that realm, orthodoxy becomes moot and faith becomes relative. It not only will happen, it does happen; spend a few years in the religion department of nearly any university to see it in action.

Not long after, Francis writes on the subject of accepting the Councils’ authority (or, more generally, the authority of any tradition),

“We are not hesitating as to whether we should receive a doctrine at haphazard or should test it by the application of God’s Word. But what we say is that when a Council has applied this test, our brains have not now to revise but to believe. Once let the canons of Councils be submitted to the test of private individuals, as many persons, so many tastes, so many opinions.” (p167)

Here, too, we see a realty now enacted. Even within the Roman Catholic Church, which struggles so particularly with divergent liturgies and lapses among the faithful – there are even religious orders which oppose the Papacy, the Councils, and God Himself. It is the cultural milieu to allow personal opinions to influence one’s understanding of religious truths, as if one’s opinions could never be skewed by the sin nature which runs rampant within us. And we see among Protestants this phenomenon especially; where once there were the followers of Luther, then there were the followers of Luther and of Calvin and of Zwingli and of King Henry VIII; where once there were only these, now there are hundreds, even thousands of denominations, from Lutherans to Presbyterians to American Baptists to Southern Baptists to United Methodists to “apostle” churches to mega-churches to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Latter-Day Saints. It is the modus operandi to split from one’s church when it diverges from your personal opinion, and – to summarize this mathematically – as time T approaches infinity, the ratio R of persons to denominations approaches one. Eventually, if this trend continues, there will be no churches, no denominations, no religions – only people with opinions.

I will expound on one final quote: When discussing the primacy and authority of the Papacy, Francis goes into great detail explaining the difference between infallibility in cathedra (literally “in the chair,” i.e., the chair of Peter, referring to the belief that Peter was given authority to speak on issues of morality and faith) and infallibility extra cathedra (literally “outside the chair,” an infallibility which no one claims the Pope possesses). During this discussion, he addresses an issue which I have found to plague the writings of Protestants and Catholics alike in the centuries since the divide: ad hominem attacks. Francis writes,

“You read the writings of Calvin, of Zwingle [sic], of Luther. Take out of these, I beg you, the railings, calumnies, insults, detraction, ridicule, and buffoonery which they contain against the Pope and the Holy See of Rome, and you will find that nothing will remain. You listen to your ministers; impose silence upon them as regards railings, detraction, calumnies against the Holy See and you will have your sermons half their length. They utter a thousand calumnies on this point; this is the general rendezvous of all your ministers.” (p229)

In absence of good argumentation, debaters fall immediately to this option: defame your opponent, and you delegitimize his argument. Catholics, too, are guilty of this (I recently wrote a review addressing this very issue in the writings of a modern Catholic apologist and motivational speaker). Instead of addressing their opponents where they are, with reasons they will understand (as Francis does so well in this book), they simply decry their opponents as foul men. It is tantamount to a child being presented with a cogent argument and replying, “Yeah, well, you’re just a meanie!” (Except that Luther’s tongue is far more wicked in its verbiage.)

I do not include these things to proselytize, but to expound upon this detail: Francis was a very successful apologist for the Roman Catholic Church in his day, in no small part because he (1) knew his opponents, (2) applied reason and reasonable extrapolation to their arguments, and (3) avoided the fallacies that have plagued argumentation since the beginning of time.

In short, this is an excellent book, and a must-read for anyone trying to understand Roman Catholics and where they stand.

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The Romantic Prince

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Prince OttoPrince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After reading Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Prince Otto is a startling change of pace. From adventure and pirates and sailing and treasure in the Caribbean–to political intrigue and romance in Germany.

The book, as I understand it, was not well-received in its time, and to be fair, I can see why. It did not fit the culture of the age, with its romantic optimism and vague opposition to monarchy, but it is still an enjoyable read–provided you like dialogue and romance. It was certainly far more pleasant than other romances I have perused lately.

The characters are written well and consistently, although it seemed Stevenson was adding a new name or title to some characters every chapter. (It helped once I realized that some titles were simply the German counterparts to titles he had already used in English.) The romance between Otto and Seraphina is… complicated, to be trite, but not unbelievable. Otto, apart from a brief (and destructive) moment of monarchic ire, is dedicated entirely to serving and pleasing the wife he always knew he had disappointed. Seraphina, meanwhile, is so focused on ruling the princedom that she sacrifices her personal life in frustration with Otto’s political shortcomings; yet in the end, she realizes whither her manipulations brought her and remembers her love for Otto.

I was delighted to read allusions to Scripture several times in each chapter. They were often poignant and effective, especially if you know the context, and they spiced up a book which would otherwise have been rather dreary.

The book does have a happy ending, so if you’re opposed to that, I suspect you should avoid it. If, on the other hand, a romance is only good when it all works out in the end, this is a fine choice. Not Stevenson’s best work, of course, but thoroughly pleasant.

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Work, Money, and Financial Distribution

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[pb_vidembed title=”” caption=”” url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM” type=”yt” w=”480″ h=”385″]

The above video focuses on one point: there is an unequal distribution of wealth in these United States of America. Now, granted, it disguises that point as three separate graphs (the ideal, the perceived, and the actual distributions of wealth), but the primary point is to spread awareness about the situation.

I will grant a few important concessions to the above video: First, it tries very hard to remain politically neutral. It emphasizes that Republicans and Democrats alike think that the ideal distribution of wealth would spread the dollars a little more evenly than they are now. It does not use terms like “unfair,” which immediately smack of entitlement issues. It admits the economic shortcomings of socialism. It does not push a particular legislation, example, or ideology as the solution to this issue, but merely highlights the issue’s existence.

But there are a few shortcomings in this video, too. Even in its attempts to remain neutral, biases still slide through. There are quotation marks around “dreaded” in describing socialism; this disassociation with the original quote (supposing there were one) implies disagreement with the original speaker, suggesting a left-leaning political view. A right-leaning political view would have left the quotation marks out, implying agreement with the sentiment that socialism is “dreaded.” A truly neutral view would have left the adjective out altogether.

Furthermore, there is a certain amount of emphasis on the term “Republican,” by both word order and verbal accent, that suggests the maker of the video found it important to emphasize Republican agreement with the ideal distribution; this tends to happen when the maker of a video knows s/he is opposed to a group that s/he must convince, and this awareness drives a wedge even as it attempts to build a bridge. A truly neutral view would have said, “Remember: 92% of people agreed with this ideal distribution, regardless of their political perspective.” At least, that’s about as neutral as you can get while making a video about wealth distribution.

There is a hint of agreement with the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the video discusses the enormous wealth of the 1%, and that, too, will drive a wedge between the video’s message and its intended audience. The people who don’t already agree with wealth redistribution also don’t like the Occupy Wall Street movement, and associating yourself with it – even tangentially – is not going to do you any favors. Democrats, in general, support higher taxation and higher entitlements, which is precisely what the Occupiers sought, whereas Republicans tend to oppose that sort of budget, and thereby oppose the Occupiers. If you start suggesting that the Occupiers were right, you’re going to lose most of your audience right there. Better not to mention them at all.

Now, let’s move on to the meat of this issue: the fairness of current wealth distribution. The above video acknowledges that some of the top 20% work harder, and therefore earn more, than lower brackets, but questions whether the CEO works over 300 times as hard as his/her average employee. This highlights precisely why so many Americans are uncomfortable with the current distribution of wealth in these United States: there is an extremely common belief that there is a direct relationship between hard work and money.

Why is that? Well, in the industrial era, it was completely true. The harder you worked, the more you earned, and the more people noticed you, so the more you got promoted. When you got promoted, you got more work and more money. Plus, it’s part of the standard “American dream.” You show up, you work hard, maybe 60-80+ hours of work each week, and sooner or later, you’re going to get rewarded with a cush, highly paid position, like the CEO or the Chairman of the Board. Classic movies and TV shows and books talk constantly about how the wealthy worked hard to get where they are, and you’ve got to work hard, too. (Although, really, we should have seen through that one, because that’s always indicated to be at least a little false through the course of the story – even as far back as Dickens’ Hard Times, in which Josiah Bounderby is shown a fraud for all his claims of being a self-made man.)

Whatever the source, this notion runs rampant among the working class. Perhaps it was an invention of the ruling class to keep the working class working and the ruling class ruling – but I suspect it was less devious than that. It’s not exactly a false notion, after all – if you work harder, you tend to get paid more and get more promotions. But even if you’re the hardest worker in your company, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll become CEO – and even if you become CEO, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll be in the top 10%, much less the top 1%, of American earners and owners. Why? Because work does not equal wealth.

Somewhere along the line, somebody figured out that economic principles can be manipulated. It’s not illegal, despite the connotations of the word “manipulate,” and it’s debatably not even wrong. Instead of working hard, as they say, some people started working smart. They know economics, and they use economics to get money into their own pockets instead of someone else’s. This is where trading on the stock market, managing hedge funds, and controlling investment portfolios becomes far more important than “working hard.” By using economic principles to predict where money will be, you can get your hand into that cookie jar before the cookies even show up; that’s an overly simplistic expression of it, but it’s effectively accurate.

The above video made an important point on this topic, but I’m not sure they realized it: the bottom 50% of Americans own less than 0.5% of all investments, which means that they’re not investing. The reason the top 1% owns 50% of the investments? They’re investing. They did that “hard work makes money” thing for a while, and when they had a little capital saved up, they invested it, and they invested it well. That made them more money, which they invested some more, until suddenly, they own everything and they look like jerks for not giving it away for free.

There’s another reason the rich are rich and the poor are not. Why do you suppose the poor and middle classes are “working hard” but not making money? Is it because the rich are evil? Those dastardly villains, twirling their handlebar mustaches ‘neath their top hats while they smack street urchins with diamond-topped canes! Right?

Wrong. The poor and middle classes are not making money because they’re spending the vast majority of their money paying off debts. Credit card debt, new car debt, new house debt, student loan debt – you name the debt, they’ve got it. Because there’s one other thing that the rich do with their money: they offer it to people who don’t have any. Now, consider for a moment that rich people are rich, so they know how to make money, and they generally don’t do things that don’t provide any return on investment. Loans always make more money in the long run. Not sometimes, not only if you make minimum payments, but always. And poor and middle class people are borrowing for everything from a new lawnmower to a new car to a house they couldn’t afford if they worked for the next eighty years, much less only twenty or thirty. And they’re paying through the nose to keep it that way.

Most folks, by the time they finish a car payment, decide to upgrade to a new car, so they get a new car payment. They finish paying off their house, so they do a little remodeling and put in a room over the garage. And I would comment about what they do when they finish paying off their credit cards if any of them ever did that.

“But– but– but!” you will say, “Everyone knows you need to have good credit!” Maybe. Maybe you need to have good credit. But you can have good credit for a lot less than $10,000 of credit card debt earning interest every month.

But at the end of the day, when you get a loan, you lose money. Loans are for when you need money today to set up something that will be worth more tomorrow, like an education or a house in a good community. A car loses value; certainly other, smaller products do, too. It never makes sense to borrow money to lose it. And yet the poor and middle classes do that every day.

And then they complain that the people they’re losing money to have their money.

The distribution of wealth in America is very unequal. Inequitable. But unfair? Hardly. People are poor because of the choices they make; by making different choices, by saving and spending rather than borrowing and losing, they could develop the capital they need to start investing. And by investing well, they can redistribute the wealth in America legally, equitably–and fairly.

To Be Meta, or Not to Be Meta

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In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book entitled Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, popularizing the term “meta” in its most common modern usage, i.e., self-referential. People, on television and in high schools and colleges everywhere, often talk about “being meta” or “going meta.”

To “go meta” is to take an argument, discussion, conversation, or debate to a deeper (i.e., self-referential) level, such as, “This ‘blog post is such a bore.” To “be meta” is to approach all aspects of life with a view to stepping back and examining them as integral parts in a larger whole. One might enjoy a particular episode of a particular television series, for example, but if one were being meta, one would then examine that episode as merely one small piece of the much larger whole, that is, the entire series.

Going meta is largely irrelevant to me. I want to discuss being meta, because it is an increasingly popular mental style in today’s American culture. People enjoy having their minds twisted in knots at the pleasure of the twister. The film “Inception” is the perfect example of this. In fairness, it’s not a new activity – see the original “Total Recall,” for example – and it’s not worthless. It is, in fact, quite fun to take a mental joyride through someone else’s playground.

But the question is, is “being meta” as philosophical and transcendent as many people make it seem? Does it improve the human condition? Are we better off for it?

Let’s face it: what does being meta actually accomplish? At the end of the day, being meta is simply looking at a complex system and declaring it to be complex. And I’ll grant that it’s a relatively uncommon position in the history of philosophy – most fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, psychology, medicine, invention, and industry seek to simplify the system, so that they can provide solutions to particular problems. It’s a side effect of the scientific method – ceteris paribus, Latin for “with other things being equal.” You have to control and eliminate as many variables as possible, so that you can test, analyze, and correct single variables at a time. And so that approach has been applied to any activity which endeavors to describe the human condition and to indicate a preferential method of surviving it.

So being meta takes a step back from the idea of ceteris paribus, and wants us to recognize and remember that the other things are not equal, and may in fact never have been so. Every single variable is part of an equation so large that it cannot be simplified. Being meta, in short, (and to reference a brief discussion I had earlier on this blog) directly opposes the hypothesis of Asimov’s Foundation series. That is, Hari Seldon (the champion of psychohistory) creates a simpler model which approximates the behavior of human civilization; in Prelude to Foundation, he wonders whether this is even possible, because it might be that the universe, or even just human civilization, cannot be simplified any further than it already is. While, for the sake of science fiction, Asimov embraced the “what if?” of success, being meta declares that human civilization/the universe/the human condition cannot be so simplified.

And in general, I’m inclined to agree. I don’t think psychohistory could be possible, even with the best psychological and mathematical minds from all time working on the problem. The universe already is the simplest model for its own behavior.

At the same time, there are strong benefits from addressing particular problems individually. The holistic medicines of the far east have some measures of success, but when it comes to efficiency and reliability at eliminating an infection, it’s hard to beat broad-spectrum antibiotics. Considering the human condition as a whole, especially in light of our sinful plight and God’s divine intervention, can be extremely useful – but describing the habitual differences between effective, wise, happy, successful people and their ineffective, foolish, sad, failure-ridden counterparts can help someone with self-control and motivation to become more effective, wise, happy, and successful.

That’s not to say that Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People will take someone from the pits of depression to the contented plateau of healthy joy. But neither will pointing out, say, that the pits of depression are simply a small part of the human condition, or that one’s presence in them is due primarily to a misunderstanding of the complexity of the system. In fact, I’d argue that being meta to depressed persons is more likely to make them more depressed than it is to heal whatever darkens their souls.

Let me be clear: I enjoy when things are self-referential. I enjoy intertextualism. I enjoy “Easter eggs” and references to the fourth wall. I do not, however, enjoy when an author takes a wrecking ball to the fourth wall, then picks up the pieces and beats the audience over the head with them. That’s simply a case of an author believing himself to be so superior to his readership that he must berate them into acquiescence. It doesn’t help him or his case, and it certainly does not help his readers.

It has been suggested that there are two kinds of books – those designed to divert, and those designed to support. Entertainment and “self-help.” Books, apparently, attempt to provide escapism, either in the form of a story (true or not) or in the form of suggested behavior. I would argue vehemently that this is a very short-sighted view of books in general, but I’ll come back to that. More importantly, some suggest that the solution is to be meta – that is, to step back and realize the situation, the desired escapism, and the cause of it all, and to address the system in its complexity, instead of trying to simplify it.

And with that, I disagree.

In part, it’s because I think there is more to books than mere escapism. There is Truth in books (or at least, in some books). They address the human condition, not by pointing out how complex it is (because everyone who has lived already knows that), but by showing us who we are and how we act, and questioning whether we should act the way we do. All without being “meta.”

Really, I think I object to this because being meta is no different. If your mindset/belief system is that all books are escapism of some sort, some kind of diversion or entertainment, then so is being meta. Stepping back and examining the complexity of the system does not, in and of itself, make it more feasible to operate within the system. It simply diverts your attention from the hardship of your situation by letting you say, “Look how complex this whole system is! No wonder I have so much trouble.” Given enough time, it will fail as completely as any other diversion, any entertainment, any behavioral pattern, in an attempt to better yourself.

People tend to enjoy being meta because they think it expands their minds. They think it makes them wise to acknowledge how small they are. They think that acting like Socrates is somehow original or productive. They watch a movie like “Inception” and they walk out thinking that they’re smarter than they were going into it, that they gained something by being confused, tricked, and manipulated.

There is an inherent assumption that looking at the universe reveals the face of God. That may or may not be true. But looking at the “big picture” is not the only way to look at the universe. There is at least as much to be learned by examining a single cog as by examining the whole clock – and verily, I doubt that examining the clock would serve you at all to understand it if you knew nothing of its cogs.

Is it possible to look at a complex system and address it as such? Yes. Is it helpful to step back and examine it as a whole, instead of cutting out variables that aren’t really staying equal? Yes. Is there a deeper solution to the human condition than a set of behavioral patterns and delightful diversions? Yes.

Does doing those things, and then saying that you’ve done them, make you superior to those who do them implicitly, subtly, and without comment? No.

I don’t like being meta because people who are meta tend to spend all their time focusing on being meta without providing any actual solutions to actual problems. So, paraphrasing Jeff Winger, “Stop taking everything we do and shoving it up its own ass.” Sometimes, attempting to improve the human condition is more important than pointing out that the human condition is in a bad way.