On Aversion to Crowds

I have been reading the Ochlophobist blog, with great pleasure. An agrarian Orthodox reactionary of Welsh dissent, Appalachian upbringing, the man possesses great and commendable hatred of modern urbanisation, mass culture, TV, &c.

A brief digression on Ivan Karamazov:

while Ivan knew much and gave God a good argument, at the same time he knew nothing. One can only make an argument such as Ivan’s with regard to an abstract loss, not a personal one. When you have lost everything, even your own hope, you do not argue as Ivan does. Ivan argues as a man who still has something – an argument. When you have lost all that matters to you even arguments do not matter.

In the same post, he talks about the legal profession, poverty, being a man:

the [legal] profession is often associated with money hungry meaninglessness, epistemological relativism, and, and least on TV, sex with colleagues when a free moment arises. One can sell drugs and get all of those things, but drug dealing has the added (perceived as) meaningful aspects of danger, armed struggle, gang loyalty, and death.

When I ran a homeless shelter in Maine I was amazed at how the poor I dealt with were addicted to popular culture and believed its myths. We had a homeless man who would not move into a great (state subsidized) apartment with a stunning view of the sea because it did not have cable. I noticed quickly that the poor I dealt with knew (via popular culture) that the bourgeois life was normative and that someone other than them was at fault for the fact that they were not living it.

Even St. Paul, who had seen the third heaven, was a tent maker. A man, whether for good or for ill, in part knows who he is by what he does.

And, after complaining extensively about modern life (and making an interesting point connecting kingship and modern sexualised media), he puts it all into perspective:

Culture and social forms have always been, to varying degree, antichrist. Our current culture and social forms are worse than many others, but it has never been easy for the human person to live a life of integrity in the postlapsarian universe. Sometimes I think people become too infatuated with the relationships between cultural forms and holiness. The holiest persons have always been the fools and the hated.

From a post against urban conformity and his upbringing in Appalachia:

One of the things that makes the suburbs a school of damnation is the fact that they are "safe."...

...when we encountered someone with a French last name we assumed that they were pawns of Satan until we had reason to believe otherwise...

In Appalachia... Your friend's whole face would light up telling you about the 10 point buck they shot. I remember a friend who could not stop praising my mom's homemade apple butter. He talked about it to everyone. It clearly gave him joy. Faces didn't really light up in the suburbs. To express excitement about human joys and struggles there was, I think, considered a profanation of the sacred Nothing which they really worshiped.

I never encountered a suburban Christian youth who seemed to really believe anything. Faith there was a matter of outward posture. In Appalachia... if you claimed to be a Christian of any sort you had better have your reasons in three points, you had better live a moral life, and you had better express love in manifold ways. Appalachians may lie and cheat but they don't bullshit, with them your hand is measured by the cards you put on the table.

When I look at the children of many of the petit-bourgeois Christian families I know now, I am appalled at how boring they are, and how they seem to embody that mimesis of cardboard cutouts of Amy Grant that is American Christianity. ...I have out-sinned St. Paul and remain the worst of sinners, but I will feel that I have greatly failed my kids should any of them turn out to be one of these boring banalacrats pumped out of bourgeois Christian families today.

At every step along the way, despite my commitment to running away from God, He has set the world around me aflame with His glory and always lands me in His mercy.

This post deals with servitude, slave- or near-slave-labour, and also the strange world of American racial politics, a matter too bizarre and labyrinthine for any non-American to say the first thing about. One fantastic reader comment:

As someone who has always worked as a vocational nurse, cook, housekeeper, nanny, etc, I have a permanent dent in my tongue from not laughing at the attempts of my employers to convince me that we were “just girls together”. I got the impression when I did dinner parties for wealthy women that it was de rigeuer to be able to prove to each other that they weren’t snobs by relating girlie conversations they’d had with their cooks and nannies. My friend, who was good at accents, made up different life stories for each employer - for one she was a lesbian, for the next a struggling single mother, for another a refugee from Haiti and so on. She would phone a friend with children and say, “I have to go to Mrs X today… tell me a kid story quick” and once she called me and said, “I have a religious vocation… tell me some stuff about God.” I lived for the day two of the paragons of refined gormlessness would realise they were employing the same cook but it never happened.

Also:

I am certainly not sure of what human life is, but so far as I can tell it has something to do with the collecting of narratives.

- from a fascinating post describing memorable metalshop acquaintances.

And these comments on the Pharisee and the Publican, from an apologia for Orthodoxy:

The Publican is a little icon of the Theotokos. His soul has been pierced by something which, despite whatever flirtations with despair he must have had... has caused him to go to the only place he knows to go and beg God's mercy. Let the Pharisees mock him. God has used the Publican's own sin and rejection to save him. The Publican knows that he has nothing to offer God. Let him stand afar off as Christ was cursed outside the gate. The Orthodox Church is constantly teaching us in the Liturgy that God is diligent to save those who stand in the periphery...

The Pharisee made his statements before God, in satisfied fashion. Having never wrestled with God as did Jacob, the Pharisee need not beg God for anything, not even His Name. The Pharisee's is a soteriology of mechanical economy. Well friends, when God shows up born in the earth, baptized under the water, hung from a tree, and eating fish with friends days after His extermination, all former, current, and future bets are off. We have no terms before God anymore. He has made His final terms clear: "If any man will come after me, let him take up his cross and follow Me" (Matt.16:24). The terms are generous: now when we wrestle with Him we may know His Name, though that, of course, is only a consolation to those who wrestle. It seems that God likes those who will contend with Him, hence the Peters and the Pauls and the like. There's a good rule of thumb when it comes to taking up yours: if you don't want to reject it, and don't (at least think to) plead that God take it away from you, then it isn't a cross. I don't know how one could accept God's current terms without wrestling with Him.

Alas he's shutting down his blog in a month or three and moving to a new one. I wonder if anyone'll archive his stuff.

EDIT: And more! (From comments to this post.)

I used to wax eloquently about the "scandal of particularity" but let's be utterly clear - God does not particularly love the bourgeoisie, if He did, we should ask for the best directions to get to Satan.

And even more!

when you have kids that have red hair all the old ladies wrestle you down and won't let you leave, which is why you have to teach your kids to swear in public because once they drop the F bomb at trapeza [refectory], you get about 15 seconds of folks being in shock in which you can grab your kids and get the hell out of dodge. But as easy as that sounds it is not as easy to coordinate as one might think. Sometimes the kid drops the F bomb in the line to receive and then is a perfect angel when the old ladies are stroking her hair in trapeza. Oh well.

I hope his kids appreciate their father properly, or will when they grow up.

Can a member of the bourgeoisie ever be saved? Probably not, but surely so... But better to concentrate on the fact that a modest class hatred is the natural outgrowth of Christianity, and what results when Christianity enters human affairs and a Christian conscience matures there...

But we have long since passed the point of asking whether a person of status and means can be saved. In America, status and means is a sign of being blessed by God, even in Orthodoxy, and if some folks think my stating that is a stretch no one can dispute that in American Orthodoxy the pursuit of the bourgeois life is not spoken against or treated as shameful... Young people who set up their lives so as to secure a lifetime of bourgeois living are given nothing but encouragement by the Church, generally speaking. This renders the local Church where this occurs a farce – a sick caricature of Christianity of the sort begging for a Kierkegaardian wrath.

[On aristocratic piety, but can apply to a lot of the bourgeoisie too:] Let’s face it – through much of European history that aristocratic style of piety is just another expression of luxurious living. Some monarchs entertained themselves with religion, others entertained themselves with whores and opium. Some did both. They get interesting when they depart from their wealth.

And in the comments here, the Ochlophobist decides to provoke Evangelicals everywhere to murderous violence by dissing a certain hard-drinking Ulster-born Anglican:

Stop reading C.S. Lewis. It is a waste of your time. In his intro to On the Incarnation he virtually ignores St. Athanasius in order to go on his nostalgic bit about old books, a typical rhetorical maneuver among that sort. Lewis got his ass handed to him by G.E.M. Anscombe (and was shown there to be horribly sloppy in his reasoning), he wrote a propaganda series and called it children's literature (I agree with J.R.R. T. on Narnia), he married an obnoxious woman, he was proud about being an orangeman of all things, and he hated the poetry of T.S. Eliot so much he started a group dedicated to hating it and undermining the man. But he liked to drink and smoke and that gets young Evangelicals all wet in the panties. There is nothing meritorious about liking smoke and drink - it is simply one indication that a being might be human. Ware has an excellent article on Lewis from an Orthodox perspective in which he notes that there is no indication that Lewis ever read the fathers outside of what he read that was a part of the curriculum at Oxford when he was a student.

This isn't entirely fair. Lewis excels at describing the way people bullshit themselves when doing what's wrong - the Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce live from clinically dissecting the ways the heart can shut itself off from grace and love, spewing flimsy and self-serving rationalisations every step of the way. To a certain extent this is also present in That Hideous Strength and it provides the climax of Till We Have Faces. So even granting all of the criticisms stated, Lewis still has value for insight into the human propensity for self-deception.