Conversation by Factoid

Much has been written about the way that reading is quickly changing in the internet age. Consider, for example, a fairly standard internet news story: it consists of a paragraph or two of information, with a large, glossy picture. There may be further text stashed away somewhere, but you have to click on a link to find it. Meanwhile, the key points have been summarized for you with bullets. Related stories are linked somewhere in the margin. At the bottom of the screen, perhaps, are unrelated but highly popular stories, usually involving celebrities, nakedness or both. And then there are the omnipresent advertisements. (I would have included a screen shot of such a thing, but you've all probably seen it before; and if you haven't, the Guild Review more or less reproduces the phenomenon, though without the ads or naked celebrities, and somewhat more text.)

Critics point out that this format is changing the way that we read, shortening our attention spans and making it harder for us to follow narratives, arguments or anything more than a paragraph in length. Moreover, it seems the phenomenon is spilling over into spoken conversation as well. Rather than telling stories or laying out a line of reasoning, conversations often consist of factoids, one-line arguments and the briefest of anecdotes. Frequently these come from television programs such as The Daily Show or Mythbusters. All things considered, both programs are fairly intelligent, but the snippets that get cited the following day are frequently the witty lines or the (literally) explosive conclusions, rather than the thoughtful discussions that went with them. Perhaps the most grating form of this phenomenon is conversation which consists wholly of movie quotations. While a certain amount of intellectual power is required to memorize and string together such quotes, the heights which can be reached by such discourse are fairly low and no given topic can hold the collective attention for terribly long. In all of these cases, the result is an intellectually choppy outcome, incapable of moving from A to B to C and on to D, either narratively or philosophically.

Short intellectual attention spans manifest themselves in other ways as well. Even the intelligent and well-educated can be woefully incapable of discussing such things as literature. Interesting comments may be given, but they focus on poignant moments or arresting characters, things which are often emotional and subjective and are usually perceived in a single instant. Much more rare are considerations of an author's world-view or his opinion of virtue. Such rational arguments require the review of multiple episodes within the work, the discovery of common elements between them, and the refutation of episodes which would seem to undermine the argument at hand. Such discussions are by no means impossible today, but much more difficult for those who cannot hold their nose to the grindstone of a single topic for more than a passing moment.

In addition to frustrating college professors, does this phenomenon really have significant consequences? Who cares if our conversations are becoming shorter and choppier? Does it really matter? In point of fact, it does. Financial investing, political decisions and life-long vocations all require more than a moment's consideration. But perhaps most importantly, our ability to consider the Highest Things, the First Principles of the cosmos, is seriously compromised if we cannot think outside a jumble of factoids. Christ' words to Martha seem particularly apt: "Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary..."

Putting the "Beer" back in Root Beer

Ok, so today's subject line is a slight misnomer. The folks over at Art in the Age (of Mechanical Reproduction) are bringing back the alcoholic beverage from which root beer is derived, though it's not actually a beer, but rather, a spirit.



Art in the Age describes Root as having "a lively, burnished rose-gold color,... fairly clean on the palate with strong notes of birch, peppery herbaceousness, spices, citrus and vanilla bean. Very aromatic in the glass and finishes medium dry and exceptionally full-bodied." Intriguing, to be sure... I'll have to try some some day.

Special thanks to the men of Quincy House for bringing this to my attention.

Cultural Eclecticism & Irish Music (Part 2)

Continued from yesterday...

One of the few factors in national life working in favor of traditional music in the late 19th century was the rise of the Irish nationalist movement. In order to foster traditional culture, many nationalist organizations organized musical competitions. One effect of these competitions, though, was to encourage an interest in virtuoso performances of traditional music that could be recognized at a country-wide level—an idea almost completely foreign to the humble village life, where all that was required was someone who could play enough tunes to keep the dance going into the night. If he could play well, that was simply an added bonus. While the nationalist organizations undoubtedly did much to keep traditional music alive, they were not able to keep it alive in the context of village life, from which the music derived most of its vitality. Ultimately, the nationalist interest in music must be seen as a sign of the decline of traditional culture.

By the 1950’s traditional music was nearly dead in Ireland. It took the success of the Clancy Brothers in America to revive some interest in ballad-singing in Ireland. To a large extent, their success was due to the nostalgia of Irish-Americans for a culture they had never really experienced. Their choice of less traditional material sung in English, along with their use of guitars—and their touring with Pete Seeger—also meshed nicely with the folk revival in America, and made them into a commercial success. This spurred a new generation in Ireland to find ways to modernize their own traditional music.

Perhaps the first “modern-traditional” Irish band to arise was Planxty, which released its debut album in 1972. Planxty also featured many of the same ballads that the Clancy Brothers had popularized before them, but with the addition of piper Liam O’Flynn, they also exposed a wider audience to the older dance tunes that were being lost. Then, in 1975, the Bothy Band released its first album. Though they only stayed together for four years, this sextet occupies a special place in the history of Irish music because of their unabashed embrace of the older dance tunes and the Irish language. Their front-line combination of flute, fiddle, and pipes could play both at ferocious speeds and with great delicacy. At the same time, the sibling duo of Micheal O’Domhnaill and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill were unafraid to sing in Irish. What made the band truly modern, though, was their rock ’n’ roll style of accompaniment, combining a strong rhythm guitar, an aggressive bouzouki, and booming bass lines on an electric clavichord. They introduced traditional music to a whole new audience. Thanks to them, it was no longer something for Irish-speaking peasants in the countryside; it was for an urban, non-dancing youth generation. Indeed, with all the musicians’ long hair and hard drinking, traditional music had now become a legitimate form of rebellion for the younger generation.


But what connection did all this have to traditional music as played in the early 1800s? It was still the same music, but the ethos was more eclectic, commercial, and youth-oriented. It often was played at such great speed that it was nearly impossible to dance to. It is an interesting comment on modern Irish culture that when the Bothy Band’s star fiddler, Kevin Burke (born and raised in London by parents from Sligo, incidentally), in the liner notes of his first solo album in 1978, tried to explain his music to Irish youth, he did so by comparing the spirit of his playing to that of “old Negro bluesmen”: Enjoyment and an appreciation of life—whether in the form of joy or sorrow—were his primary goals, not profit. While these are certainly worthy sentiments, what is telling is that his cultural references—and those of the young audience he was attempting to reach—were informed more by a heavily romanticized view of American blues and rock ‘n’ roll than by a deep knowledge of Irish life before the Potato Famine. The Romanticism of Burke’s comments signals that there has been a clear break in cultural continuity. Ireland had entered the modern world.

The history of Irish music over the last two centuries is a good illustration of the growth of an eclectic culture out of the elements of a once integral culture. The economic pressures of the Famine and the self-doubt that came with modernization mostly did away with village life and the old peasant culture. Music lost the connections to the rest of the culture which had given it meaning originally. As a consequence, most Irish gave up interest in their traditional music. Ultimately, though, the music did survive into the 21st century—and even survived Riverdance—but to do so it had to move to the city and assume a modern, rebellious tone. At this point in time, most yearning for the return of the integral culture is bound to appear as just more Romantic nostalgia. The old Ireland is dead. But, perhaps the traditional music can become part of a new integral Irish culture. Time will tell.

Cultural Eclecticism & Irish Music

In his recent post on Caritas in Veritate, Aaron noted Pope Benedict’s call for the integral development of culture as a protection against the dangers of relativism and cultural eclecticism. An integral culture is one that forms a true unity; all the parts of such a culture fit together in a coherent way. The way these individual parts fit together is usually determined by a culture’s ethos, its ordering principles. However, if a culture doubts its own ordering principles, or if outside forces upset a culture’s ordering principles, the culture’s individual parts will be distorted in some way. They either appear too large or too small, anything but their right size, and out of all proportion to the surrounding parts of the culture.

The usual result of the breakdown of an integral culture is eclecticism. Eclecticism essentially dispenses with all ordering principles besides individual preference—which is why throughout history eclecticism has usually been closely linked to relativism in metaphysics, and commercialism in economics. Eclecticism, though, is an unfortunate name for what I mean to discuss. The word “eclecticism,” at least in my mind, usually conjures up images of agnostic elites desperately searching for meaning in the universe by scouring every culture they know for fragments of intelligibility. I think of demoralized Roman senators worshiping the latest fashionable oriental divinity, or 19th-century decadents dabbling in the occult. In the modern world, though, cultural eclecticism has assumed a new, more democratic form. Thanks to the spread of videos, sound recordings, and mere factual knowledge (on the encyclopedia model), a lonely individual can appreciate one aspect of a culture, in abstraction from the rest of the culture. Then, if the enough of the masses share this individual’s taste, the newspapers (or today, the Internet feuilleton) will announce that this particular foreign element has “entered the culture.” But, what the newspapers usually ignore, or do not even know enough to investigate, is how this new development relates to the ordering principles of the culture. All they ever really notice is that someone has become rich and famous in the process. However, the crucial question to ask is: Is this an integral development of culture?

That was all rather abstract, so what is needed is a concrete example. The example I have chosen is traditional Irish music, since it is a hobby of mine (well, more of an obsession). About fifteen years ago, traditional Irish music received a lot of popular attention due to Riverdance, the dance extravaganza starring Michael Flatley. Soon there was a craze for Irish music and dance across America, and parents with Irish surnames—and even those without Irish surnames—were signing up their little girls for dancing lessons (and buying those horrible sequined dresses). This was a major “cultural event.” Yet, after a couple years, the hype died down and Irish music and dancing in America returned to their pre-Riverdance status. At the end of the day, a lot of people had heard some Irish music, seen some amazing dancing, and Michael Flatley was a wealthy man—and people genuinely devoted to Irish music and dance returned to their prior obscurity and their small groups of like-minded individuals. Riverdance, with its incorporation of elements of tap, flamenco, and ballet, marked the victory of modern eclecticism over integral culture. Many people now realize that Riverdance was only based on traditional music and dance, but have no conception of the broader tradition. What was Irish music—and Irish culture—like before Riverdance?

To answer that question, we need to go back to the early 1800s, a time when Irish peasant culture was relatively intact. The Irish have never been a very urban people, and so most of what we think of as traditionally Irish developed in the context of the countryside. At this time, music and dancing were firmly embedded in village social life, which revolved around the farming year and the special events in a community—births, weddings, and funerals—as well as around the Church’s liturgical year. In addition to these grander events, there was the informal practice of visiting neighbors in the countryside, when it was common to tell stories, sing songs, and play a few tunes at home. Music and dance were certainly developed art forms, but they were not art in the way we educated city-dwellers usually think of art. Very few musicians earned a living by their music, though a few wandering musicians did travel from village to village and play for dances, often supplementing their meager income by other work, especially by repairing pots and pans. Moreover, while some musicians were certainly known throughout a region for their skill, they did not think of themselves as virtuosos, and did not define themselves as musicians. Instead, their art and their ego were subordinate to the needs of the community. They simply provided music so that people could dance and celebrate the most important occasions throughout the year. Their celebrations were (at least loosely) bound up with the larger cosmic perspectives of agriculture and salvation history, as well as their own life and death.

At the same time, however, Irish peasant culture was under tremendous pressure from outside. Their English lords had already been persecuting Catholic priests under the Penal Laws for many years. The English language was steadily displacing Irish. The death blow came, though, with the Potato Famine in 1845. From then on, Irish peasants left their homeland in droves, seeking new homes primarily in England and the United States. This mass exodus would last well into the 20th century. If the Irish could resist religious persecution and the loss of their native language, they could not withstand starvation and emigration.

Village life in late 19th-century Ireland was severely disrupted, and the people demoralized. With many children knowing that they were destined to leave their homes once they were old enough to find work on their own, there was understandably little call for celebration. Paradoxically, though, what kept music and dancing alive during this period was the “American wake.” American wakes were farewell parties held for members of the community the night before they left for America, and featured much music and dancing.

Constant emigration, however, eventually took its toll. Many towns and rural areas were so decimated that they did not have enough people for dances. It was at this point that many musicians simply stopped playing. If there were no dances, there was no point in playing. Music and dance were so closely connected that one without the other was barely imaginable. Modern technology in the early 20th century also undermined the foundations of the integral Irish culture. In those places that still had enough people for a dance, the record player brought new, usually American, music to the Irish countryside. People in larger towns usually rejected traditional music as uncouth and un-modern—and so did many peasants in the countryside. Interestingly enough, even recordings of Irish music in some ways had detrimental effects. Many older fiddlers abandoned their instruments when they first heard the likes of New York virtuoso Michael Coleman’s blazing reels and heavily ornamented jigs; they felt they just could not compete with Coleman.

By the first half of the 20th century, traditional Irish music was on life support. The traditional Irish village was no longer a place where most people lived, but simply a place where they were born before they decided to cross the ocean for America. Moreover, with the disappearance of the Irish language from wide parts of the island, a vast store of older sean-nos songs was lost. Finally, the spread of modern technology even to the more backward parts of Ireland discouraged people from playing traditional music.

To be continued tomorrow...

Caritas in veritate: On Cultural Eclecticism

In section 26 of Caritas in veritate, Benedict XVI describes two dangers facing the modern world, modes of thinking which "separat[e] culture from human nature." The second of these is fairly straightforward: "Cultural leveling, [the] indiscriminate acceptance of types of conduct and life-styles." We all see this, probably every day. In a world of cultural leveling, Benedict writes, "one loses sight of the profound significance of the culture of different nations, of the traditions of the various peoples, by which the individual defines himself in relation to life's fundamental questions."

But the second danger against which he warns is more subtle: "cultural eclecticism, [by which] cultures are simply placed alongside one another and viewed as substantially equivalent and interchangeable." I must confess, this is the danger by which I am more tempted. (As you may have noticed, my interests include pow-wowing with Afghans, praising obscure African peoples and observing esoteric regions of post-Soviet republics.)

Following Paul VI's Populorum progressio, one of Benedict's major themes throughout Caritas in veritate is the importance of integral human development: the economic, political, educational, social and spiritual must all go together. Likewise, I think cultures are unitary things as well. The philosophy or world-view of a people does not simply exist alongside their literature and political institutions, but infuses them; moreover, ideas may exist in their most pristine form in treatises and high culture, but they are usually transmitted through earthy rituals and low culture. Though Benedict does not elaborate to this degree, I think one of the potential pitfalls of cultural eclecticism is that cultures are often broken into pieces which are then viewed as interchangeable, when in fact they usually are not. This phenomenon can be seen in the cultured agnostic who attends a high liturgy and is overwhelmed by the ceremony of it all, but misses that which the believer considers most important. Likewise, the same phenomenon is at play when a certain economic model which works well in one culture is exported to another culture, often with disastrous results for families or traditional ways of life.

Benedict warns that cultural eclecticism "easily yields to a relativism that does not serve true intercultural dialogue; on the social plane, cultural relativism has the effect that cultural groups coexist side by side, but remain separate, with no authentic dialogue and therefore no true integration." Superficial cultural dialogue says, "I eat X for breakfast; you eat Y? How interesting..." But more profound cultural dialogue considers the way in which various elements of a culture interact with one another and the functions they fulfill in society. True cultural dialogue must consider cultures as a whole and ask about their end. Put another way, authentic cultural dialogue must look beyond the mere elements of a culture and even beyond culture itself, to that outside culture, the philosophic and theological truths it supports.

But relativism says that there is no truth, or at least that all claims to the truth are equal. Thus, relativism stymies authentic cultural dialogue by preventing any consideration of what cultures really mean or the ends which they truly serve. Coupled with cultural eclecticism, the result of such relativism can be that the bits and bobs of different cultures are generously intermixed, but to no meaningful end.


Many of the pictures used on this blog are uncopyrighted or just too plain boring to credit. But oceanic's Flickr account deserves a shout-out for this great find.

Political Consciousness and Meritocracy Revisited

A little while ago, I wrote two posts on political consciousness and meritocracy, which I would like to revisit in light of a passage I came across just the other day. In the post on political consciousness, I observed that many today consider the attainment of political consciousness as necessary for an individual's maturation. Moreover, these same people often define attainment of political consciousness as the rejection of authority. Rejection of authority, then, becomes an essential condition of growing up. In the second post, I reproduced a quotation from Tocqueville, where he points out that meritocracy makes individuals free to pursue their own happiness without regard for others. While this phenomenon is usually praised for enhancing individual freedom, it does have the negative effect of alienating many individuals from society; in many cases, according to Tocqueville, this alienation ends in suicide or insanity.

It should not surprise anybody, then, that these two ideals of political consciousness and meritocracy together have devastated the family. It also should come as no surprise that all these individuals, once beyond their fathers' control, would devise new institutions to deal with their alienation. And without further ado, here is the passage:

Hierarchical, patriarchal, circumscribed families were being replaced [among Russian Jews and the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s] by egalitarian, fraternal, and open-ended ones. The rest of the world was to follow suit.

All modern societies produce "youth cultures" that mediate between the biological family, which is based on rigidly hierarchical role ascription within the kinship nomenclature, and the professional domain, which consists, at least in aspiration, of equal interchangeable citizens judged by universalistic meritocratic standards. The transition from son to citizen involves a much greater adjustment than the transition from son to father. Whereas in traditional societies one is socialized into the "real world" and proceeds to move, through a succession of rites of passage, from one ascriptive role to another, every modern individual is raised on values inimical to the ones that prevail outside. Whatever the rhetoric within the family and whatever the division of labor between husbands and wives, the parent-child relationship is always asymmetrical, with the meaning of each action determined according to the actor's status. Becoming a modern adult is always a revolution.

There are two common remedies for this predicament. One is nationalism, with the modern state posing as a family complete with founding fathers, patriotism, a motherland, brothers-in-arms, sons of the nation, daughters of the revolution, and so on. The other is membership in a variety of voluntary associations, of which youth groups are probably the most common and effective precisely because they combine the ascription, solidarity, and intense intimacy of the family with the choice, flexibility, and open-endedness of the marketplace.

(Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 142. Princeton University Press, 2004)

Slezkine's main idea here is that many of the most important institutions and ideals of the modern world are all tools invented to deal with the demise of the family. Once we (or at least, the truly modern among us) reject traditional authority, we are free--but we do not know how best to use this freedom. To make up for the loss of our family, the result of our self-emancipation, we form voluntary associations, especially youth groups, where those who have rejected parental authority can unite; or, we conceptualize the "nation" or "people" (in the 19th-century biological/racial sense) as our real family, with a greater claim to our loyalty than our own flesh-and-blood parents.

In the end Slezkine leaves us with a very perturbing question: How much of the modern world is really just our attempt to flee from authority?

Serving Those Who Serve Our Nation

In my scholarly incarnation, one of my primary interests is the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor to the CIA, and in particular its actions in Burma. While reading about Detachment 101's approach towards Myitkyina with Merrills' Marauders, I came across this passage:

Father Stuart heard confessions and held special masses for the GIs. He put aside his weapons to don what vestments he still had and gave spiritual comfort to those men who were soon to die. Two soldiers of the 2nd Battalion brought a buddy who wanted to be received into the Church. His buddies had instructed him in the necessary doctrine. In a midnight service Father Stuart baptized him in the cold waters of the Tanai Hka River, and he was received into the Church Militant. This stood out as a most meaningful service by the gallant priest, for this 2nd Battalion was soon to be cut off and besieged in a small Kachin village for thirteen days. Nearly all of the men involved in that ceremony fell and were buried there.

Tom Moon, The Deadliest Colonel, 197-8.

In other circumstances, I might extol the virtues of the OSS or the Kachin tribesmen who fought alongside it. The praise would be due, but instead I would like to affirm an organization of which most Americans have never heard: the Archdiocese for the Military Services.

In times of war, such as our own, those putting their lives in constant danger deserve the utmost spiritual care. Sadly, military chaplains are too often few and far between. If our armed forces and their spiritual well-being are causes near to your heart, you might want to consider contributing in a financial way to their work. And please keep them in your prayers.

For those of you who are not Catholic, consider supporting the Lutheran Ministry to the Armed Forces, the Episcopalian Military Ministries Office or another denomination's work. For those of you on the far side of the Pond, the Bishopric of the Forces attends to the spiritual needs of Her Majesty's forces.


A US Navy chaplain celebrates mass on the island of Saipan in June 1944, offering the mass for those Marines who died in the initial landing.