Hungry Heart

“We lived spitting distance from the Catholic Church, the priests’ rectory, the nuns’ convent, the St. Rose of Lima grammar school—all of it just a football’s toss away, across the field of wild grass.  I literally grew up surrounded by God.  Surrounded by God and—and all my relatives.”

The Hollywood elite has been painfully boring and predictable for decades, and the use of awards ceremonies to deliver political messages is nothing new.  But like everything else in the Age of Trump (with the exception of civility), this behavior has been taken up a notch.

So Robert De Niro’s carefully scripted outburst at the 2018 Tony Awards was surprising only in its predictability.  It was just a matter of time before some aging actor shouted “F-ck Trump!” on live TV.  (And yes, it was always going to be an aging actor, because no matter how easily a young actor’s knee jerks, he still has to think about the rest of his career, and no matter how liberal the Hollywood elite might be, it’s the people in the red flyover states who buy the lion’s share of movie tickets.)  The odds were high, too, that De Niro would be the one to do it, since he’s spent the last several months trying to garner free publicity for a dying career by releasing protest videos attacking Trump and his administration.

That De Niro’s antics did not reflect high-minded concern over the Trump administration’s policies is clear not just because of the vulgar language he used (the use of vulgarity, too, has become painfully boring and predictable, the stock-in-trade of all the politically obsessed today, whether “woke” or “red-pilled”), but because he had one job to do, and it had nothing to do with Trump.  De Niro was tasked with introducing a short performance by Bruce Springsteen, who earlier in the evening had been honored with a special Tony for his sold-out (and frequently extended) show, Springsteen on Broadway.

Since 1984, when someone who clearly had never read the lyrics attempted to appropriate “Born in the U.S.A.” as the theme song for Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign, Springsteen, like De Niro, has not shied away from using his platform to promote his political views.  But, with the exception of his decision to cancel a concert in North Carolina in 2016 as a protest against state legislation regarding restrictions on the use of public restrooms, Springsteen has understood that his job as a performer is not to create a political protest movement but to do what all art should do: tell stories that draw people closer to reality.

And so, even though De Niro, in the rest of his introduction, prodded the “Jersey Boy” to join him in his protest, Springsteen did not.  Instead, he sat down at a piano, picked out a few notes, and started telling a story.

His story was a simple one—a story of faith, and family, and place, in that (proper) order—and if it seems remarkable today, that’s a sign of how far American culture has fallen over the past 50 years.

We had cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, great grandmas, great grandpas—all of us were jammed into five little houses on two adjoining streets. And when the church bells rang, the whole clan would hustle up the street to stand witness to every wedding and every funeral that arrived like a state occasion in our neighborhood.

“F-ck Trump” isn’t a story; it doesn’t even hint at one.  At best, it excites feelings of anger and hatred in our hearts, no matter where we fall politically.  Anger and hatred can and often are part of a story, going all the way back to Genesis (Adam raised a Cain, after all), but the stories that speak to the human heart, that make us want to be what we should be, and not just what we are—those stories speak of love, and understanding, and forgiveness, and mercy, too.  Anger and hatred are part of the reality of fallen human nature, but our fallen nature is not the end—not in the next life, nor even in this one.

We . . . had front-row seats to watch the townsmen in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array of dark wooden boxes, to be slipped into the rear of the Freedman’s funeral home long, black Cadillac, for the short ride to St. Rose cemetery hill on the edge of town. And there all our Catholic neighbors . . . and all the Springsteens who came before—they patiently waited for us.

The longing for the story, the narrative, the imaginative exposition of the good, the true, and the beautiful that calls us back to the reality for which we were created—the reality before the Fall—that longing is part of human nature, too.  The Gospel is not a series of statements of abstract truths, but truly the greatest story ever told—a story that did not stop with the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ but continues to this very day, a story in which Bruce Springsteen, and all of his family, and all of those, Catholic or not, who heard the bells of St. Rose of Lima in Freehold, New Jersey, tolling the Angelus three times a day, every day, have played, and continue to play, a part.

A family is not merely a story, but without stories, repeated often down through the generations, a family won’t long stay a family.  A place that has no stories can never be a home, and people who have no desire to learn those stories will never find themselves at home.  Each house in every town, each stone in every cemetery, has a story to tell, and learning those stories, and making them a part of our story, makes us more human, because they connect us to the reality of burdens borne and sacrifices made and the tender mercies that wipe out our offenses.

There was a place here. You could hear it. You could smell it. A place where people made lives. Where they danced. Enjoyed small pleasures. Where they played baseball. And where they suffered pain, and had their hearts broken. Where they made love, had their kids, where they died, and where they drank themselves drunk on spring nights, and did their very best, the best that they could, to hold off the demons, outside and inside, that sought to destroy them, their homes, their families, their town.

For six and a half minutes, Bruce Springsteen spun a story of the faith that can save us, of families that took care of their own, of life and love and longing in his hometown.  And for six and a half minutes—a very long time in today’s world—the crowd at the Tony Awards sat in rapt attention.  How many of those who listened to Bruce would consider themselves believing Catholics, or Christians of any sort?  How many have chosen family over a shot at fame?  How many have even had the experience, in our world of constant motion, of life in a hometown?

Yet there they sat, and listened, and applauded thunderously at the end, not just for the man who told the story but because of the story he told.  Perhaps in spite of themselves, and certainly in spite of the cultural trends that nearly all of those present have explicitly or implicitly endorsed after finding themselves lost in the flood, they recognized in Bruce’s unremarkable remarkable story the goodness, truth, and beauty that are imprinted on their souls.  Because every one of them, like each one of us, has a hungry heart that longs to be fed with love and with truth.

Here we lived in the shadow of the steeple, crookedly blessed in God’s good mercy, one and all.

Someday, when both Donald Trump and Robert De Niro have gone to their eternal reward (and Bruce Springsteen and all of us, too), De Niro’s words will be at best a footnote in history, and Springsteen’s may be as well.  But the story Bruce Springsteen told will continue, because it was not just an outburst of anger and hatred tied to the passing political scene but the story of all mankind, a story which began in the Garden, culminated in the Cross, and will end at the Second Coming—a story in which we all must play our part.

First published in the August 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Telegraph and the Clothesline

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Communication, in the abstract, is easier today than it has ever been before, largely because of the advance of technology.  From the telegraph to the telephone to the radio to the television to the Internet, the ability to communicate something—anything—to others, and to an ever-greater number of others, has become increasingly trivial, both in labor and in economic cost.  In this sense, the Information Revolution has been a revolution indeed; but whether it has truly been informative, in the sense of providing people with more and more of the information that is actually meaningful, is still an open question.

Indeed, there is reason to believe that much of what each of us could truly benefit from knowing has been lost in the flood of the asynchronous transfer of data—“communication without conversation,” as I called it last month.  Here and there, that realization may creep into our consciousness in unexpected ways.  The average person takes far more photographs today than ever before, yet he has far fewer of those photos preserved in a physical form, with fewer if any pictures of his family hanging on his walls.  He writes more emails to friends and relatives than any previous generation wrote letters; but the historian of the future will have a harder time reconstructing the everyday life of an average American in the first decades of the 21st century than historians today have in fleshing out the picture of the lives of those who fought in Vietnam or even in the Civil War, and not just because few of those emails are likely to be preserved; the content itself is banal at best and usually utterly ephemeral.  National and international news—or rather, those tiny slivers of it that vast media companies decide to present to us—is available to everyone with access to the airwaves or the Internet, but in most of the country, local news has never been harder to come by.  Even the clothesline telegraph—neighbors swapping gossip over the back fence—has fallen victim to the same technological trends that have lulled us into the false sense that we know more about the world around us than ever before.

Thoreau is far from my favorite American writer, and Walden is a book I have little desire to revisit.  But Thoreau, despite all of his second-rate Rousseauism, was on to something with his line about the telegraph.  The further removed any two people are from each other, by distance or affinity, the less likely it is that anything one may have to say to the other will be of any real importance.  As Thoreau continues,

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Asynchronous communication is often a perfectly adequate vehicle for transmitting technical information.  But the kind of information that binds the generations, that perpetuates community, that builds up cultures and civilizations—those stories, sagas, and songs require conversation.  To some extent, that conversation can take place over the phone (audio or video), but the most faithful transmission takes place at sunrise in the local diner, or around the family dinner table on a Sunday afternoon, or on your front porch on a cicada-serenaded summer night.  Intonation, body language, the twinkle in the eye and the furrow in the brow—these may pass along more than the words that they accompany.

Such conversation is always local, even if the ostensible subject is ISIS and the Middle East or the umpteenth rehearsal of how Richard Nixon didn’t deserve his fate.  The message is the medium—the interaction, harsh yet gentle, frustrated yet patient, unyielding yet forgiving, between generations and friends and acquaintances and even the odd drifter passing through.

There is a group of men who sit at the same table at Nick’s Kitchen in downtown Huntington, Indiana, every morning from Monday through Saturday.  They would sit there on Sunday mornings, too, but the owner, JeanAnne Bailey, is a Methodist, and she observes the Lord’s Day.  Some of them have been there every morning for 30 years; others have come and gone, and younger ones have come and stayed.  They talk about everything, and about nothing; the table will fall silent for minutes at a time.  But just as on those still summer afternoons 40 years ago when I sat on the couch and read while Grandma tidied up the kitchen after lunch and Grandpa slept after a morning of working together in the garden and the yard, that silence speaks volumes about the ties that bind.

First published in the July 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Can We Talk?

A few months after we moved to Huntington, Indiana, I was inducted into the Cosmopolitan Club, one of the country’s oldest extant discussion societies.  Chartered on January 18, 1894, the Cosmopolitan Club convenes on the fourth Tuesday of every month from September through May.  The membership is entirely male and capped at 25, and all members are required to attend each meeting, unless they have been excused in advance.

The format of the meetings is simple.  One member prepares and presents a paper on a topic of his choosing, and he selects another member to prepare and present a response.  (All of the papers are archived at the Huntington City-Township Library, and only a few from the end of the 19th century have been lost.)  After the paper and the response, each of the other members provides a short commentary of his own.  There are no refreshments, with two exceptions: Every member receives an apple as he leaves the September meeting; and the May meeting takes the form of a dinner, which wives are invited to attend.

The meetings are hosted at members’ houses, and the location rotates through the entire membership.  The preparation and presentation of papers, too, is on a strict rotation, starting with the most senior member and moving consecutively to the next in line.  When the club membership is at its maximum, a new member like myself may wait two years or more to deliver his first paper (though he may be called on at any time to prepare a response, as I was for the May meeting).  But from his first meeting, each member is a full and active participant, through his required short commentary on the paper and the response.

The membership is as diverse as you can get when drawing from the pool of males in a Midwestern town that is 96 percent white.  From civic leaders to businessmen to academics to blue-collar workers, the members are distinguished only by their seniority.  There are disagreements, but no arguments and no appeals to one’s own authority; meetings are, in millennial parlance, “safe spaces,” or, in the language of an earlier age, civilized conversations.

I have attended every meeting of the Cosmopolitan Club this year, with the exception of the one at which I was voted into membership.  The papers have spanned a variety of topics, but a common theme has emerged: the destruction of conversation in recent years, and the role that technology has played in that decline.

I have found little to disagree with in the musings of my fellow members, all of whom acknowledge the manifold blessings and the even greater curses that technology has visited upon 21st-century America.  The art of conversation is dying; the technology behind the social media that draws us closer, in some sense, to people across the country or around the world is isolating us from our own neighbors.

Of course, it is beyond trite these days to point out that the same was true of television and of radio.  Of the “communications technologies” of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, only the telephone may, on balance, have fostered community more than it destroyed it.  Yet the era of the telephone passed with the advent of the iPhone in 2007.  Since then, phones have been used less and less for voice communications and more and more for the asynchronous transfer of data.

But here we have put our finger on the problem: The “asynchronous transfer of data” is just a clinical way of saying “communication without conversation.”  And while the telephone does allow for conversation, even that conversation is stunted, because body language and the ability to interrupt without talking over your interlocutor are missing from conversations held on the phone.

True conversation is synchronous, a face-to-face dialogue, in a way that electronic communications can never really be.  (Even video calls today suffer from latency that changes the dynamic of a conversation in subtle but important ways.)  So why, even though we all carry around phones in our pockets, do we prefer asynchronous communication, to the point where coworkers are more likely to email or to use a chat program like Slack than to talk to one another face to face?

We can come up with dozens of excuses about the efficiency of asynchronous communications and the benefits of documenting discussions in text form, but the reality, it seems to me, is much simpler: We save conversation for matters of importance, and most of what we spend our time communicating these days is of little to no importance (though, as I will discuss next month, perhaps not for the reasons we might think).  And deep down, we recognize that reality, even as we prattle on about the Information Age and the ease of communications, and how lucky we are to live in a time when we can think of so little to say to our neighbor when we see him across the driveway, yet so much to tell our several thousand “friends” across the country and around the world who aren’t talking to their neighbors, either.

First published in the June 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Alien Nation

When Pope John Paul II would arrive in a new country, his first action was always to drop to his knees and kiss the ground. This gesture of reverence was usually portrayed in the media as a sign of respect and of love for the people of that country—and it was that. But for the Polish-born pontiff, it was more an expression of his deep understanding of patriotism, a recognition that there can be no people without a place, a soil from which that people has sprung.

The idea of a nation (natio) that is rootless—not tied to a particular land (patria)—is an absurdity. It is the flip side of the idea of a “nation of immigrants,” which arose in the late 19th century and took hold on the American imagination between the two world wars. White nationalists who find, say, Texas, Montana, and Northern Virginia equally interchangeable and open-borders “nation of immigrants” dreamers both elevate the centralized state above any actual nation, political citizenship above true familial and cultural ties (much less ties to the land). Neither type of nationalism is compatible with the patriotism of a John Paul II, who noted in his final book, Memory and Identity, that “Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention,” and warned that, therefore, “they cannot be replaced by anything else”:

[T]he nation cannot be replaced by the State, even though the nation tends naturally to establish itself as a State. . . . Still less is it possible to identify the nation with so-called democratic society. . . . Democratic society is closer to the State than is the nation. Yet the nation is the ground on which the State is born. The issue of democracy comes later, in the arena of internal politics.

The replacement of the nation by the state, of the destruction of natural society by some form of nationalism, whether ethnic or civic, is both a product and a cause of political and cultural centralization. Patriotism, on the other hand, tends in the opposite direction. Since a true patriot understands that the nation is an extension of his family, and, like his family, is tied by its very nature to a particular place, he is more likely to keep his horizons limited, to concentrate his imagination and his efforts on the place in which he lives and the people with whom he shares that place in a way that both types of nationalist find not only unacceptable but threatening to their overarching political vision.

Robert Nisbet, as I mentioned last month, believed that centralization—political and economic—is both a cause and a result of the increasing alienation from which modern man suffers. Psychiatrists and psychologists refer to the effects of alienation as “depersonalization” or “loss of identity,” and both phrases are telling. A person, unlike an individual, is defined not with reference to himself but in his relationship to others—family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Just as importantly, he is not defined by his relationship to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, or to the masses of white or black or yellow or red people within the boundaries of the United States or across the globe, because he has no real relationship—or even the possibility of a real relationship—with any of them.

Whether I know my neighbor or not is a matter of greater importance to who I am as a person than whether I voted for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton (or, as I did, wrote in Pat Buchanan). It is more important than physical traits over which I have no control, like my left-handedness or my extreme nearsightedness or my skin color. I may have over a thousand “friends” on Facebook, but if I have no friends in my hometown, with whom I share a common place and experience, then my identity will largely revolve around my alienation from others. I may try to overcome that alienation through online “communities” or the adoption of a political ideology, but those who know me only through the Internet or within the context of political activity can never be adequate substitutes for the family and friends and neighbors and coworkers who anchor one in real life, in a real place.

I moved to Huntington, Indiana, last June; my family joined me a month later. Our new friends and acquaintances here frequently remark that they are surprised by how quickly we have become a part of this community. We eat at local restaurants and shop at local stores. We’ve joined the parish of Saints Peter and Paul; I sing in the choir, and the children belong to the youth group. The older girls have thrown themselves into swimming and track and Academic Super Bowl and the winter musical at the Catholic high school; the younger ones have added to the life of Huntington Catholic, on whose board I now sit. I’m a member of the local council of the Knights of Columbus, and Amy has joined the ladies’ auxiliary. I belong to the board of Junior Achievement and am part of a working group, organized by the mayor and other civic and business leaders, planning Huntington’s Constitution Day celebration in September. Our family knows our neighbors, and we have invited a few dozen of my coworkers over to our house to celebrate Epiphany.

But what was the alternative? Evenings spent surfing Netflix and Facebook? Nonstop viewing of CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News? Endless arguments online about Trump and guns and immigration and trade?

I’ll leave those activities to the nationalists of both stripes. Our 12-year-old daughter, Cordelia, is trying to decide which part of the backyard we should dig up for our garden, and together we’re going to get down on our knees and plant our hands in the soil of our new native land.

First published in the May 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Quest for Community

“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future.  The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs.”

— Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community

The trouble with labels—whether adopted voluntarily or applied by others—is that they are inherently limiting.  Robert Nisbet is often described as a sociologist or a libertarian, and sometimes as a libertarian sociologist, depending on what the person labeling Nisbet desires to emphasize.  It is true that Nisbet was a sociologist by training and profession, but the term sociologist today usually calls to mind a professor in an ivory tower who regards free will as a delusion, at least in a practical sense, because the constraints of political, social, and economic institutions keep men and women (and men who want to become women) trapped in the particular circumstances into which they were born.  Historically, Auguste Comte is regarded as the father of sociology; in practical terms, sociology as practiced in the academy today finds its roots in the opening sentence of Rousseau’s Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

The average libertarian may not care much for the practice of sociology, but he, too (no need for diversity of pronouns here, because libertarians are predominantly male), is a Rousseauian at heart.  A glorious future would await us if only we could throw off the social and political chains of the past, and allow man to embrace fully his nature as Homo economicus.

Nisbet certainly believed that political and economic power have become far too centralized in the modern world, to the detriment of culture and society and personal freedom.  He also believed that such centralization—embraced by nearly all as a sign of progress—has led to social restrictions on acceptable thought: “The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.”

But like Comte, and even more like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, Nisbet did not believe (as both sociologists and libertarians do) that man is too bound by all social and cultural structures.  Rather, he held that increasing alienation from those structures closest to him—his family, his parish, his neighborhood, his community—is both a result and a cause of political and economic centralization.  That centralization has restricted personal freedom in the name of an amorphous hope for a better future.  The best guarantee of personal freedom lies in a return to the social and cultural structures of the past, which kept power diffused, set limits on destructive human desires, and forced men and women to work together for the sake of the good of their families and communities.

Nisbet was no premodern reactionary; he saw value in the modern emphasis on personal freedom, but he understood that such freedom required the preservation of social structures and cultural institutions that recognize the needs and limitations of human nature rather than ignoring or attempting to rise above them:

The liberal values of autonomy and freedom of personal choice are indispensable to a genuinely free society, but we shall achieve and maintain these only by vesting them in the conditions in which liberal democracy will thrive—diversity of culture, plurality of association, and division of authority.

Ah, but there’s the rub: To what extent are “diversity of culture, plurality of association, and division of authority” even possible in a world in which politics has subverted culture, most of our “friends” may be people we’ve never met in real life, the word community is almost always preceded by either the word virtual or another label (e.g., “gay”; “black”), and the 24/7 cable news cycle keeps our eyes—and even more importantly, our imaginations—focused on Washington, D.C., and Hollywood?

The answer may seem surprising to the sociologist or the libertarian, but the possibilities remain because the social and cultural structures of the past, however attenuated, continue to exist.  No one is keeping us from eating dinner with our families, and getting to know our neighbors, and taking an active role in our parishes, and treating Facebook or Twitter and FOX News or MSNBC as sources of information rather than necessary parts of our identities.  No one forces us to obsess about Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi, Harvey Weinstein or Jennifer Lawrence; we freely choose to do so.

And in doing so, we freely choose to give up our freedoms, to cut our ties to the past that still exists in the people and places nearest to us, to place ourselves in the role of the voter and consumer who stands in relation to centralized political and economic power as a slave stands to his master.  We choose the illusions that feed our desires rather than the concrete realities that can be maintained only through effort but which provide the restraints on our impulses that allow us to rise above our fallen human nature.

The quest for community is, at heart, an attempt to return to the Garden, to recover what we lost when our first parents fell.  But so, in its own way, is the desire for political and economic utopia.  The difference is that the former embraces the past and the limitations of our fallen nature, and recognizes that true freedom requires restraint; while the only thing the latter finds desirable in the past is the Tempter’s lie, echoing down through the ages: Ye shall be as gods . . .

First published in the April 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.