Forthrightness as a condition of personal freedom

Peace to you all who continue to check up on this blog!  I am happy to resume writing, as things have somewhat returned to 'normal'.  In addition to our construction, we have had to spend time assisting our Br. Augustine, who has been hospitalized for the past 18 days with a variety of ailments.  He will undergo his fourth operation today as a precaution against pneumonia, but there is talk of him being strong enough to leave intensive care this weekend.

Today's reading from the Rule of Saint Benedict urges brothers to come forward when they make a mistake of some kind or otherwise commit a fault.  At first glance, this chapter, as well as the entire 'disciplinary code' of the Rule, has the appearance of strictness, and perhaps strikes us as being overly authoritarian and suspicious of the possibility of monks achieving personal maturity, needing overseers and Correctors for all the details of life.  

If we take it this way, I suggest that this reveals about ourselves an anthropology that is not entirely compatible with that of the Early Church, and possibly with Biblical Christianity as a whole.  As I never tire of pointing out, our anthropology takes its default stance in line with modern thinkers like Rousseau, who believed that children are faultless and it is society that corrupts them.  The ancient anthropology, and I believe the better one, holds that children, while morally not culpable, are in fact very much in need of socialization in order to become mature adults.  Left on their own, children will not develop past self-centeredness and an infantile need to have all desires met.

What this means is that all of us need help from others to discover our faults and weaknesses.  If we do not discover them, we will make decisions based on hidden agendas and undisciplined desires.  Perhaps worse is the common situation where we excuse our faults and assume that others should just put up with them because "that's who we are."  Of course, part of the atmosphere that allows us to confront personal faults is the sense of love and acceptance, that invites us to correction rather than threatens us.  I believe that this is the atmosphere presumed by Saint Benedict to be in the monastery.

Thus the invitation to admit faults, to apologize forthrightly and seek advice for correction, is an invitation to maturity and freedom.  If we excuse our faults on the premise that others should leave us alone, we more or less admit that we are in thralldom to said faults.  On the other hand, frank admission of our failures manifests a desire to be free of the control of our desires and hidden agendas.  When I firmly admit that losing my temper is wrong, I can begin to ask what it is about myself in certain circumstances that brings anger out of me.  Then I can ask whether I want to be that sort of person and, with the help of others who love me even if conversion is slow, or even proves to be ultimately impossible in this life, I can begin to reclaim true freedom to act in accord with reason and charity, and to counteract selfishness and blind passion.

Music and Morality 3: the Passions

I have asserted that music is related to morality by way of the passions, and so some reflection on the nature of the passions and their relation to the moral life is in order.

According to Fr. Jordan Aumann, O.P., "The passions are movements or energies we can use for good or for evil, but in themselves they are neither good nor evil.  When placed at the service of the good, the passions can be of incalculable assistance, even to the point that one could say that it is morally impossible for a soul to arrive at great sanctity without possessing a great energy or passion directed to God.  But when placed at the service of evil, the passions are converted into a destructive force that is truly terrifying ." [Spiritual Theology, p. 184]

The passions are related to what we more normally call 'emotion', which is perhaps the better and more neutral term, derived as it is from the idea of motion or change, in distinction from the word 'passion' which connotes something unwillingly undergone.  In monastic tradition, the word 'passion' usually has this darker connotation, and the goal of the spiritual life for the earliest monastic theorists was in fact 'apatheia', the condition of no longer having to suffer the passions, but instead having control over them by reason.  Th term apatheia is still used in Orthodox moral theology.

St. Augustine contributes to the later Latin moral theology, especially that of Aquinas, with his reflections (perhaps overly grim at times) on concupiscence.*  This is the state in which we find ourselves because of the transgression of Adam: we are not normally able to govern our passions to direct them toward the good; rather, our passions are often out of control and even go so far as to warp our rational abilities.  A person who cannot control his eating is colloquially said to 'think with his stomach', for example.  We lighten the punishment for 'crimes of passion' and distinguish them from crimes committed 'in cold blood', that is, with deliberation.  Of course, I would add to that the deliberation of a cold blooded murderer is usually one in which the passions have been allowed to distort the murderers mind to such an extent that he believes that murder is a good.  Often this happens by the suppression of our consciences when we want something that we know it is not licit to have or when someone stands in the way of our passions' desire.  "Com-passion" would require us to consider the pain we cause our victims and their families, to empathize with the sufferings of others--a good use of emotion, but instead it is possible for us to suppress this natural movement.

This last point is important: we do have some control over our passions.  It is possible to discipline them, so as to eat proper amounts, to make proper use of our sexual energies, to use the energy of anger in order to oppose evil even when such opposition is costly, to feel sorrow with the sorrowing, and so on.  Because of the reality of concupiscence, the disordered present state of our passions, many people today draw the conclusion that we have no control over our emotions: "That's just how I feel!"  Habitually giving in to the passions strengthens their hold on us (we call the eventual stranglehold 'vice'); but the opposite is just as true.  The more we discipline our bodies' energies, the less the passions overrule us.  By consistently choosing the good, we develop the virtues.

One place we have a great deal of choice is in the music to which we listen.  Aside from unpleasant experiences in grocery stores and restaurants, we normally have freedom to decide what type of music we hear, at what volume, and so on.  So if we are willing to admit a connection between music and emotion, then we can help ourselves out, as it were, by choosing to listen to music that strengthens in us appropriate feelings, and we can avoid music that tends to stir up inappropriate feelings.  (I use the words 'appropriate' and 'inappropriate' advisedly, for reasons that I will develop in the next post.)  I have already noted that it is a good for soldiers to hear music that gives them courage and a sense of camaraderie.  If a whole society is listening to this sort of music, however, we might suspect them of being overly bellicose.

I also suggested that much of the popular music of the past 150 years or so tends to generate melancholy feelings, a non-directional sadness of the sort that St. Paul warns against [see 2 Cor 7: 9-11].  Much current popular music can be quite violent.  It should be noted that the phenomenon is not to lead immediately to a dismissal of this music.  Perhaps if we understood better the cultural context of what the performers and listeners to sad or violent music are responding to, we can find a way to redirect the passions appropriately.  For example, as a friend of mine commenting on these posts suggested, gangster rap or contemporary hip hop is in fact often angry at not only perceived injustices in society, but real ones.  That the anger is afterward perhaps misdirected is an obvious social bane, but simply banning violent music will not therefore make us moral people.

Finally, I would add that the passions are often pre-rational indicators of real-life situations.  Most of us have intuitions that tell us when something is wrong before we can identify any tangible danger.  Our initial responses to certain types of persons: attraction, repulsion, warmth, disinterest, are indications of the objective state of our souls and characters.  We must use our reason and conscience to train our feelings to respond lovingly and patiently to all types of people, and the presence of distrust or antipathy can help us to locate the places where we need to grow.  Music can actually help us then in addressing the imbalances of our emotions, used moderately and wisely.

Next: why discernment is necessary in the government of passions and how music is connected to this project.

* The Catechism of the Catholic Church has this to say about concupiscence: "Christian theology has given [concupiscence] a particular meaning: the movement of the sensitive appetite contrary to the operation of the human reason....Concupiscence stems from the disobedience of the first sin.  It unsettles man's moral faculties and, without being in itself an offense, inclines man to commit sins.

Music and Morality, Part 2

When speaking of the moral life, we focus on actions.  The science of morality comprises learning to choose actions that are in accord with human flourishing and training ourselves to accomplish them.

This is another reason that we are often reluctant to make judgments about the goodness of music.  When we speak of artifacts rather than actions, it is not always valid to draw ontological conclusions about their moral implications.  Is a knife a good thing?  For cutting your vegetables yes, for stabbing someone, no.  We often can only make moral statements regarding the use of human artifacts.

On the other hand, some artifacts imply the presence of injustice and so will not be needed in the Kingdom of God.  The fact that in the eschaton we shall pound our swords into plowshares suggests that swords, even as implements of justice, are inherently more problematic than plowshares.  By its nature and the purpose of behind its creation, the sword implies warfare, which is a tremendous evil.  Though swords can be used for good in a just war, something of the violence of war inheres in a sword.  Many Americans today instinctinvely feel this way about guns, hoping that eliminating guns will eliminate the violence that a gun implies and facilitates.  Others, perhaps more traditionally, understand that until the Parousia, guns are a necessary tool for the implementation of justice (and more specifically that the Second Amendment asserts that it is primarily the citizens' task--as opposed to a professional government class's task--to ensure justice).  Many vocal proponents of gun control consider the gun evil, but it is still merely an artifact and not an action.

We should also admit that there are certain human artifacts that require evil behavior is order to be made.  Manipulative advertising strategies and pornography would fall into this category.  So artifacts do retain some moral status because they are the product of human action and decision.

Music is unusual as a human artifact in that it must be reproduced in order to exist.  There is a sense in which Beethoven's Seventh only exists when it is being performed or at least heard.  Like theater, it must be brought into existence by the deliberate actions of the performers and sponsors.

What is more, music, more than any other art, directly impacts the passions, which exert powerful impulses toward certain actions and away from others.  Plato was perhaps the first philosopher to expound on this point.  Certain musical modes (or scales), he claimed, arouse bellicose passions, and these were good for warriors.  Other types of modes were more sensual, and these inclined the hearers toward an unhealthy relaxation--bad for the warrior or guardian class.  His arguments are notoriously difficult to follow, since we don't have much evidence of what these modes sounded like (more proof that music depends on performance for existence--these songs don't exist any more).

The Classical composers, most notably C.P.E Bach, Haydn and Mozart, consciously aimed at musical moderation in order to model the restraint of the passions and build up the good character of citizens as understood by the Enlightenment mindset.  In the Romantic reaction, composers such as Schumann, Wagner and Chopin aimed more consciously at arousing stronger passions, believing that artificial restraint was actually less enobling.  It is perhaps worth noting that the Classical composers were paid by the nobility and ruling class, whereas the Romantics began a move toward more popular patronage (eventually leading to academic funding, which has produced, in my opinion, the worst type of 'serious' music).  In any case, the link between music and the passions, and therefore with morality, persisted in common parlance well into the twentieth century.  Though widely pooh-poohed in academia today, the average listeners among quite naturally feel the link when we examine our response to different kinds of music (the fact that these can be culturally conditioned within limits will be examined in the next post).  When Bobby McFerrin sang "Don't Worry, Be Happy," he used 1) a major mode, usually associated with brighter feelings; 2) a gentle reggae beat; 3) a strophic form, implying simplicity, lack of strain or effort.  It would have been absurd or ironic had he used a minor key, a military beat with dissonant trumpets and intellectually demanding counterpoint in this song.

Now that I mention it, it sounds like fun trying to compose a song with those parameters...

Once we enter into the realm of the passions, we are much nearer to moral reflection.  Passions must be properly governed in order for us to make good moral choices.  Anger must be restrained, confidence and joy cultivated, sadness resisted, etc.  Deliberately arousing baser passions makes moral choice exceedingly difficult.  Music designed and performed in order to arouse baser passions thus inhabits something akin to the moral area of, say, pornography or much advertising today (which almost always uses music to help).

The Mitchell Report: Follow the Money

Bear with me on what might appear to be a tangent from my usual monastic concerns. I promise that I will get to the relevance as quickly as I can. Also bear in mind that I was a sports enthusiast as a young man, to the point where I managed to get a press pass by becoming a sports announcer on a Green Bay radio station.

Yesterday, the "Mitchell Report" on steroid use in baseball was released, naming over 80 players, some superstars. It is a sad story all around and probably will get worse.

In today's Chicago Tribune, most of the reporters responded with outrage, which I understand. However, I think that it is misplaced. I would like to suggest that we as a society are all implicated by this scandal, and here is why.

When faced with the prospect of making 5-25 million dollars a year playing a game versus getting a real job like being an auto mechanic or insurance salesman, is it any surprise that some men would choose to bend the rules in their favor? When a megastar like pitcher Roger Clemens loses a step and is fading into irrelevance, can we really be surprised and outraged when he allegedly decides to rescue and prolong his career by doing what countless other men around him are doing?

I will not comment on the motive of glory and fame for now, and focus simply on the money. Major League Baseball players are automatic millionaires these days. A guy barely good enough to make a roster is almost assured of seven figures. That is a whole lot of money, enough to set a clever investor for a long time. And they make it every year. Who of us wouldn't be enticed?

This raises the question: all this money for what? Where does this money come from? Most of us would bark out the answer, "Ticket prices inflated by those greedy owners," and this answer would be incorrect. The huge revenues actually come largely from television contracts.

But where does television money come from? Here is the link that is almost never talked about in our world. One would think that the omnipresence of television would spawn more intelligent commentary about the meaning of the phenomenon itself. Instead, what passes for intelligent analysis are stories about how many episodes of Gunsmoke are out on DVD and who will win Dancing With the Stars. The very important question, "Why watch television at all?" is almost never asked, except when people encounter monks who dont' have one.

The fact is that millions of people take television for granted. And if the stakes are high for baseball, how much higher are they for television in general. I forget exactly how much money a Super Bowl ad costs these days, but it's not the $18 my old radio station used to charge for a thirty-second spot (and we were FM!).

Advertisers are willing to fork out this money because...advertising works. I must admit that this is one of the single biggest mysteries for me in the modern world. Why we should be swayed by self-interested promoters of products baffles me. The documented effectiveness of advertising suggests that the larger part of Americans are perfectly willing to turn off their God-given faculties of critical judgment, even when their own money is at stake. How many people buy more expensive brand name things simply because they are brand name? I will admit that Pepsi and Coke taste different, but why should the sales of one or the other change because of advertising? Are people's taste preferences really altered by, say, images of women on the beach?

Well, yes, apparently. And here we arrive at the crux of my long-winded argument. Advertising works, it seems to me, because television really does disable our rational ability to discern the movements of our passions (there is the monastic connection). Advertising stokes the fires of our passions (lust, gluttony and vainglory are probably the most typical) in order to override our reason. The subjection of reason to the passions is one of the effects of sin. It is not reasonable to spend our money on products simply because advertisers appeal to our vanity and we feel that we will be 'cool' or 'the first on our block' to own a pet rock. But we do this. If we didn't, then advertisers would not seek out television. Television would have less money to give to baseball owners, and baseball owners less money to dangle in front of players tempted by steroids.

It is possible that revenues might be just as high if sporting events were all pay-per-view. In this case, it would be our worship of sports figures that would be to blame, and indeed this is not absent as a problem in the previous scenario. What all of this suggests to me is that sports fans in some measure and television viewers in some smaller measure, have colluded with major league sports to contribute to the steroids scandal.and that we turn a blind eye to the connections because we like having our passions stoked. If this is the case, then there is a much larger sickness to this whole story, and it implicates a whole culture. Outrage is out of place when it is coming from individuals and aimed at the men who have been tempted beyond their strength--by our money.