"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
this morning, one which mocked Catholic "doctrine" as being entirely nonsensical. I just didn't want to get into it, especially with someone who I doubt has the slightest notion of what Catholic doctrine is and how it differs from dogma or a pop cultural dog's lunch of Chick Publications' nonsense, for that matter. I think he thought it was going to upset me but, as he generally does, he missed.
As things progressed through a busy day I thought it was kind of funny because "Catholic doctrine" isn't what the Church is most importantly about, even for most Catholics, it's how we live that matters. I say that as I mention that that "Catholic doctrine" includes the social-justice doctrine that it's clear Pope Leo XIV has signaled will be a major focus of his papacy. If I had to choose between any secular doctrines, everything from market economics to a mixed system to the many socialisms that aren't absolutely wedded to a transcendent conception of human and other life I would say anyone who doesn't choose that "doctrine" is a fool.
I am always cheered by anything that advances people over other concerns.
It was when Good Pope Francis did that he got the right wingers, the Burke's the Sarahs, the Muellers, the Stricklands, Viganòs, and the EWTN, National Catholic Register (not to be confused with the generally excellent National Catholic Reporter) and the rest of the billionaire-millionaire financed "trad-cath" astro-turf LARP cult in a swivet. It got not a few of the Cardinal Electors in a swivet too, even some of them made it clear they didn't want someone who would carry on the work of Francis. Even some of those those who Francis showed his charity, such as the scandal plagued Cardinal Pell, turned on him because he cared more about People than abstract notions of purity in doctrine and dogma. Charity comes well down the list of concerns for such guys, even though it was the central teaching of Jesus. I would point out that one of the greatest ironies of the would-be "trad-Catholics" is that they're even more willing to overturn even the longest standing of those, like the U.S. Supreme Court in the hands of the American right, there is little apart from scolding other People over their sex lives that such are willing to overturn in service of their often blatantly corrupt ends. And when you mix in such stuff as American legal credentialing by the most elite of our secular universities, the trad-caths go full raving fascist loony.
The social media and other activity of the well-financed liars of the trad-cath right in the period between the papacy of Good Pope Francis and Pope Leo has been fully as bad as the worst of the Republican-fascist attacks on President Biden and then Kamala Harris, joined in by the commercial, secular media. I was glad to see that like Francis, Pope Leo has some familiarity with social media, he must be familiar with the worst of it. Which I don't think it will be possible to ignore. I hope, unlike Francis, that he is more willing to crack down hard on the lying cardinals, bishops, priests, etc. whose mother tongue isn't Church Latin but false witness. Such as Strickland and Viganò should have been shut down a lot sooner than they were. While I hope that such cases are handled with more justice than JPII and Benedict XVI often dealt with their critics, I hope Pope Leo understands the danger that they pose, not just to the Church but to secular politics in places where the cults that they sway exist. Doing justice is always a narrow path between caring about the rights of the individual and the danger they pose to the wider community or an innocent individual. I think, though Francis did, in the end, take means to protect the innocent, sometimes he should have acted faster.
WHILE POPE LEO has said things in the past that LGBTQ+ People like me wouldn't much like - and who knows how much he may have grown since he said them - the indications from his social media activity are really encouraging. Here's from a piece about that from the National Catholic Reporter:
There is only so much we can learn about Pope Leo XIV from his X account, an account in which he mostly retweeted others. But if we read between the lines, we can see a common thread of deep concern for the marginalized and the poor, and an emphasis on the role of government in ensuring the welfare of its citizens. For those who hoped for continuity with Francis' pontificate, Prevost's X feed is a reassuring, and downright hopeful, scroll.
Whether it's posting a Spanish language video interview condemning the death penalty with compassion and nuance, or resharing a stern rebuke of those who offer "thoughts and prayers" without policy changes in the face of mass shootings, our new pontiff has not minced words about the sweeping implications of nonviolence.
During the tumultuous year of 2020, he postedmultiplecalls for racial justice and promoted COVID-19 vaccinations as a means of caring for the vulnerable. (He was also seen wearing a face mask as late as 2022.)
It only takes one brief glance at Prevost's X profile to see that immigrants are particularly close to his heart. His last post before becoming pope, shared on April 14, was a retweet drawing attention to the suffering of the deported — and calling out President Donald Trump specifically for a lack of compassion. But this wasn't new for Prevost; he's been challenging Trump's position on immigration since before Trump even won the 2016 election.
But immigration isn't the only issue that compelled Prevost to speak out against Trump. In 2017 he shared a post by the Laudato Si' Movement pushing for the president to read Francis' climate justice encyclical, Laudato Si', and another by Catholic News Service Rome expressing concern about the environmental impact of Trump's policies.
Perhaps the biggest difference between our current American political leaders and our new American-born pope can best be summed up by a 2021 post that appears to bear an original caption from Prevost himself. Linking to a commentary on a homily on the Beatitudes delivered by Francis, Prevost wrote: "These beatitudes also highlight the temptations faced by bishops, like that of seeking power and a comfortable lifestyle."
I was kind of hoping he'd adopt the immediate shock-effect of Francis coming out in a plain white cassock as a means of reinforcing a rejection of "power and a comfortable lifestyle" but maybe he figures that point has already been made and he is saving his action for more serious fights.
People have been commenting on the widespread non-Catholic enthusiasm for the idea that WE have a Pope, some have said that even a lot of atheists and non-Christians have been enthusiastic about this choice as they soon became encouraged by Good Pope Francis. I don't think the a "trad-Catholic" choice would have had that effect, especially from the hard-core legalists - a canon lawyer would have been even more of a disaster than another academic theologian. I think the reason for that is that modern secular culture, modernism (in that sense) is as unfulfilling and unhelpful as reactionary "traditionalism." Reactionary traditionalism, as voiced by the like of J.D. Vance, other recent right-wing converts and the wealth-generated "trad-catholics" is ultimately as useless. Like the 18th century style of "liberalism" that sought to free the rich to enjoy their wealth as they rode roughshod over workers and others, as opposed to the original American form of liberalism that was based in the egalitarian economics of the scripture, the sterile, would-be scientific "modernism" that is what most people concentrate on is more a matter of wealth hoarding with permissiveness to those with that wealth than anything else. The long list of the icons of modernism who were enthusiasts for dictators, both of the right and the would-be left should make everyone's use of that term more careful about what they mean.
I hope that Pope Leo turns out to be another pastoral Pope who has the same orientation as Francis for the hunger, homing and material as well as spiritual welfare for least among us, for the environment, for those who are marginalized, for those who are in the worst parts of their lives. As I said, I hope he makes a radical decision to change the priesthood that will admit that the Holy Ghost hasn't seen eye-to-eye with Church tradition on an exclusively unmarried-male priesthood, turning back the Benedict-era policy of shrinking the church so as to make it more to the liking of those who yearn for a return to before Vatican II. I will say that noting that if you read even the reactionaries among past Popes after Leo XIII, pretty much all of them supported and reinforced the Catholic social teaching of that Leo, at least in their official documents. If you want to put their economic policy in terms of secular politics, it tends to radical equality BECAUSE IT FOLLOWS THE GOSPEL AND THE LAW. There are no egalitarian economics and, so, politics more radical than the Gospel of Jesus. It is an expansion of the already radical economics and politics of The Law of Moses. That might not be what the billionaire-millonaire astro-turf-high-visibility "trad-Catholic" cult wants but it is the heart of Christianity and the best of the Catholic tradition. The real one, not the one that lends itself to live-action-role-playing as seen in the movies and on TV.
POPE LEO XIII is universally acknowledged to be the initiator of modern Catholic Social Teaching. In one of the articles I read anticipating what names the new Pope might choose the author speculated that if "Leo" was the name of choice it would be a way for him to indicate that was what he intended to focus on.
In other articles, most of which said that it was a very long shot that an American might be chosen, Robert Provost was said to be someone known to be dedicated to continuing the process of reform and change that Good Pope Francis, now Saint Francis Bergoglio began.
I said something of what I hoped the new Pope would do, including complete equality for Women in the Catholic Church. I also said that I didn't expect that to happen. I'm hoping that he will open up ordination to married Catholic men, John Paul II opened the door by allowing disaffected Anglican priests who are married to become Catholic priests. Who knows if even that partial reform will happen?
But that's only some of the less important change that needs to be made. His many years working in Peru will give him a lot better idea of that than I'll ever have.
I'm provisionally optimistic but that makes me nervous. I'd been afraid of them electing someone who I knew would be mediocre to bad, though I was pretty sure the real disasters put forward as likely candidates would never be elected by two thirds. I expect that the integralist-fascist nutters are going to be splitting. After this I think it's pretty unlikely that things will go back to JPII-Benedict XVI.
I DON'T FOLLOW THAT FRAUD and, no, I wasn't aware he'd written a book allegedly about the Bible. I don't look at his stuff much because no matter what he's allegedly writing about, it turns out that it's really about his pathological view of sex. And even for a psych-guy, his is pathological. From what I gather, that's what his view of the Bible (really two books and a quarter of one from the Old Testament) is about.
Looking around and reading the reviews by some of those who are not a fraud in any way, such as the estimable Rowan Williams, it appears those who did the reading of it so I don't have to are not favorably impressed. I'll lean heavily on his review from the Guardian:
Two points to begin with. One is that Peterson remains ambiguous about what many would consider a fairly crucial issue: when we talk about God, do we mean that there actually is a source of agency and of love independent of the universe we can map and measure? Faith is “identity with a certain spirit of conceptualization, apprehension, and forward movement”, he writes in relation to Noah; it amounts to “a willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul”. Echoes here not only of Jung, who figures as a key source of inspiration, but of the radical 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who proposed redefining God as whatever is the focus of our “ultimate concern”. Some passages imply that God is identical to the highest human aspirations – which is not quite what traditional language about the “image of God” in humanity means. Peterson seems to haver [never read anyone use that verb before, I'm impressed] as to whether we are actually encountering a real “Other” in the religious journey.
The second point is connected. Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals – single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.
The effect is somewhat one-note; the actual way in which the stories develop, speak to one another, correct one another, handle internal tensions and debates is muted at best. This is the sort of thing that classical rabbinical exegesis in fact relishes, and that some more modern Jewish discussion – by Emil Fackenheim, Jonathan Sacks, Nathan Lopes Cardozo and others – models very powerfully. Peterson is rightly hostile to antisemitism, and this might have led him to engage a bit more with the rich world of Jewish interpretation. Instead, he relies a lot on rather dated Christian commentaries (and seems to have a limited acquaintance with Hebrew, a drawback for a project like this).
My guess is that Peterson knows crap all about Hebrew or Biblical Greek or about much of any Biblical commentary.
In fairness, he does pick out some distinct trajectories within the stories, for example, in the narratives about Moses. But the expositions constantly shade into meandering polemic about a range of modern issues, especially gender, on which Peterson has made his position pretty clear elsewhere. Eve’s yielding to the serpent’s temptation, for instance, is viewed as the characteristically female error of sentimental, pseudo-compassionate acceptance of the unacceptable that you see in bad parents, especially mothers, who “cripple their children so that they can make a public show of their martyrdom and compassionate virtue”.
This does tempt me to go to a library to look at the book to see if he works in the natural history of lobsters somewhere, something which has figured heavily in his prescriptions for the behavior of men and Women in the past.
Well, there is certainly a discussion to be had about toxicity in parenting, but finding it in the second chapter of Genesis requires impressive single-mindedness (and it is worth noting that Jewish exegetical tradition, unlike Christian, has never been that interested in Eve). Peterson claims that analysis of the patriarchal subtext of the biblical stories is a ridiculous distraction, observing that Genesis depicts both men and women negatively. What he does not seem to acknowledge is that discussing patriarchy is about recognising patterns of social power embedded in the stories, rather than whether specific men are painted in favourable or unfavourable lights. This makes it impossible for him to grant that such discussions can help us avoid some of the spectacularly destructive exploitation of biblical material that has reinforced the demeaning of women throughout Christian history.
Predictably (for those familiar with his online battles), he sees any qualification of the simple binary of gender identity as equivalent to denying the difference between good and evil, a refusal of the basic polarities of reality. But most serious discussions of gender fluidity do not deny evolutionary biology or sexual differentiation as such; they are asking for a more painstaking attention both to the social construction of roles and to the specifics of dysphoria. They deserve a better level of engagement.
I will break in here to say that I think everything Jordan Peterson does is to try to regain his place in bro-kulcha, the manosphere that he held in the 2010s, with his adoring online incel-boy followers and the wealth that having written a bogus best seller got for him. I will stipulate that Rowan Williams is a nicer guy than I am. Peterson is to Women as Jerry Falwell was to Black People, using misogyny the same way that Falwell used white supremacy to build an empire, though, clearly, Falwell was better at that than the Psych prof from the U. of Toronto has been. Maybe he realizes the potential to have a pseudo-religious movement behind such an effort, which would explain why, in his senescence, he is trying to take that marketing opportunity.
I do think the possibility of a Jordan Peterson holding down an alleged scientific professorship at a major English language university, albeit in an alleged science, should count as much in the discrediting of his field as the presence of such as Kevin MacDonald in an allied pseudo-science, "evolutionary psychology" should have served to discredit the scientific status of that ocean of bilge.
And so on, with other issues as well (most bizarrely, the conclusion of the Book of Jonah is made the occasion for a tirade about valuing the “natural” world over human life, which seems to have something to do with Peterson’s hostility to some kinds of environmental ethics; not really what the text is about). These rabbit holes do no great service to the broader challenges Peterson wants to draw attention to. There really are corrosive manifestations of hedonism, relativism and infantilism in our culture; there really is a mentality that deludes us into thinking that we can be whatever we want to be, and that any notion of short-term sacrifice for a more durable and fully shareable good is unimaginable.
I suspect that Peterson has put a lot of his money into the extraction industries - he is from the Texas of Canada, Alberta. I'd like to know just where his investments lie because I think that's where we will find the whole of his treasure does.
But the insistent contempt for nuance and disagreement (“idiotic”, “addled”, “egregious”), and the reduction of any alternative perspective to its most shallow or trivial form, does not encourage the serious engagement Peterson presumably wants. This is an odd book, whose effect is to make the resonant stories it discusses curiously abstract. “Matter and impertinency mixed”, in Shakespeare’s phrase.
I'll note that Peterson apparently wants his book to be taken seriously as a scholarly work by a university professor, I don't have such a purpose, all I am is a political blogger though when I do get more serious I use different language. That's my excuse. I don't think it would have occurred to me to make this last criticism that Williams does, though I think it's a fair one for him to make.
I looked at several things and listened to one. I'll leave you with this highly entertaining Youtube review which contains what I think is one of the most salient of uninvestigated questions about Peterson and his cult of manhood, WHY THOSE WHO WANT TO BE MANLY MEN HAVE INVESTED SO MUCH IN THE TOTAL, WHINY-WIMP THAT JORDAN PETERSON IS?
I think it's a good question? Why isn't the squeaky (one of the higher tenor voices before the public, these days) whoosie, psych-prof, dangerous-fad-diet endorsing (has he got money in his daughter's scam, too?), clothes-horse getting into fist fights? It reminds me of Bertrand Russell's comment on Nietzsche's advocacy of beating Women in Zarathustra, Nietzsche knew that if he ever tried to whip a woman, she'd get it from him and whip him with it. I understand Peterson is big on Jung. Probably a safe bet for a fraudster and scammer. As if anyone knows what he was talking about.
One of the comments puts it well, "Jordan Peterson is to religion what Jordan Peterson is to philosophy."
CONSIDERING HOW SOON we will likely have the answer to who the next Pope will be, it is really stupid how many stories making or pretending to be making predictions of that have been in the media. If there is one thing that isn't known, it is what the inclinations of most of the 133 or so Cardinal Electors going into the conclave is and even less so what happens within that closed system might change any minds from what they are today. Even some of the more level-headed people who know something about some of the Cardinal Electors and have some idea of the process are making predictions, such as that this is likely to be a short conclave lasting at most four days. Well, that may well be the case but given the inability of anyone to make predictions like that in the past, who could possibly know that well enough to make a confident prediction?
I would like it to be a law that media outlets that issue predictions have to follow up to see if those predictions came true or not. But that's not going to happen.
It's interesting how many non-Catholics seem to be getting into the act. It reminds me of one of my favorite examples of this kind of thing, Americans who go four years without ever watching a figure-skating spectacle immediately becoming self-appointed experts of the Winter Olympics figure-skating finals and having a totally convinced and righteous opinion as to who should win. Though in that case the silly phenomenon is harmless.
I won't make a prediction about the conclave but I will predict that if the new Pope doesn't open up ordination to married People, rather fast, it will be ever more a moot question because Catholicism is a sacramental religion and for those sacraments that ordination is required for, the most basic actions of being a Catholic will grow ever rarer for ever more of those who were baptized into the Church. I wouldn't expect the next Pope to do the right thing and open ordination to Women, and married People but if they don't do something rather dramatic to get more priests into the parishes, the Church will shrink very fast. It was one of the worst things about Benedict XVI that he was more than OK with that, he wanted to drive those who didn't agree with him out of the church - it should be a law that an academic theologian isn't electable as the pastor of the Church. JPII didn't do much to improve things, either. His scandal filled papacy during which the child abuse scandal broke drove a number of those Catholics I knew away from the church even before Benedict made that his policy.
I sometimes watch the mass from the Cathedral in Montreal. I wasn't surprised to see how few there were at weekday masses but seeing how few there were at mass at the Cathedral there yesterday really shocked me. It's not in the Bible Belt or some college town in the North East of the US, it's a major church in a province which was once synonymous with Catholicism. I don't know if having a larger number of priests, some of whom are married and, perhaps, often are more in touch with real life than so many of the unmarried me of the Church are but they've been praying for those vocations that have been drying up for decades, this month is dedicated to praying for that. While the Cardinal Electors are trying to discern what the Holy Ghost is telling them about a Pope they should understand the message of those prayers having been unanswered so definitively. Maybe they will, I was hoping Good Pope Francis would but he left that problem unsettled. I wouldn't begin to predict what's going to happen on that question.
THAT INTERESTS me about as much as someone bringing out an LP of Anita Bryant's greatest hits. I have no interest in what that LGBTQ+ slandering racist and misogynist would be poet laureate of the bro-kulcha manosphere has to say about anything.
Actually, I might be more interested in an Anita Bryant Greatest Hits album and I'm not interested in that at all. At least hers comes in at generally less than four minutes instead of wasting about two hours.