The autism of writers

Life is a hard slog. We deal with it how we can.

I stay Catholic solely because I'm a stubborn SOB . . . and because I can't figure out a better alternative. After Mass today, I was asking my wife whether there wasn't a nice Melkite parish somewhere in town.

Probably not.

What you speak of is why I use a pseudonym in blogging, and even so. . . . Let's just say there are things I'll never write about until more of my family is good and dead.

To do otherwise would be true, but it would also be cruel in some respect.

There's a fine medium for mining the people in your life as fodder for great writing. It's called the great American novel.

Writers are always selling somebody out. - Joan Didion

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people. - Philip Guedalla

Some knowledge ought to be forbidden.

According the Renaissance & the Enlightenment the pursuit of knowledge is always and everywhere at good thing. And anybody who says otherwise is pushing obscurantism, superstition & oppression.
Besides, it's undemocratic that there exist individuals and institutions having the authority to decide what things you and I should know and what things we shouldn't. There's also the unforgivable sin of hypocrisy in this particular case, the Church preaching all high and mighty about morality while covering up the diddling of choir boys.

Yet, as I understand Conservatism, it would argue the other side on every one of the above sentences, which makes it so richer and more interesting to me than the popular reigning philosophy.

This also seems to raise a larger question about the future of journalism and blogging. Two of the main differences between journalism and blogging are time and editing. A good editor would have reflected back to you that the Neuhaus post was too raw, too personal, too soon. But without an editor, the only real check is conscience.

I think about Andrew Sullivan's blogging on Sarah Palin. He was asking important questions, but an editor would have helped restrain him and helped him reflect on what he was writing. Instead, he got on a roll that he couldn't stop.

When people are prepared to toss journalism aside because blogs are the future, they often don't understand that sometimes having more hands in the pot is a useful exercise and that some person cranking out blogs at the Starbucks has no one to really help him/her refiect on what's being written.

You see this a lot on group blogs. As good as the new site Culture 11 is, the blogs are often gneius but often indulgent and cheap. Some of the bloggers, especially the women, are very young with no real experience as writers. They are thinkers, who write what ever comes to their mind without realizing that on the screen it's just drivel.

As bad Bono's piece was, it was likely worse before it got some editing.

Piping up on the Autism comparison: We are not all stuck in our heads.

Take for example the use of metaphor. "Bringing home the bacon" might mean, literally, spending our entire first paycheck on bacon, bringing it home to show our dad because that is what he said. We take things too d-mn literally. And if we know a metaphor is just that, we see it in our heads. "Many ways to skin a cat" brings to the interior visual field the horrifying nature of advanced highschool biology class.

Jody Bottum has responded to Rod Dreher:

http://www.firstthings.com/blog/2009/01/10/obituaries/

I'll say this. The sniping in the closely-knit world of conservatism is fun to watch as a non-conservative. On one hand, it's nice that Bottum is defending his friend's honor. OTOH, it also seems pretty bitchy and snide.

I'm not going to get into a tit for tat with Jody, because this thing has dragged on too long, and I regret my part in that, and besides, Jody has suffered a lot of pain these past few weeks, losing Cdl. Dulles, and now Fr. Neuhaus, and having his own daughter be deathly ill (thank God she recovered). For further reading, here is the Scooter Libby item I wrote that offended Jody, and which he considered an unforgivable breach of friendship. And to give you an idea of the difference in how he and I see the public/private nature of these things, here is a transcript of a Catholic journalists forum we both appeared at in February 2002, after the scandal broke, at which he took me to task for criticizing the Church publicly about its handling of abusive priests.

I read some of the links, especially the parts about speaking ill of the dead, and the whole business seems unfocused to me.

Because I don't know any of the players here personally, I'll pick on my own long-suffering parents, now both long dead. The were both alcohol abusers, and my father died of it. Along with that came all sorts of dysfunctional behavior, to the extent that my brother is still so angry that he will not speak of them or allow me to do so. Nothing, good bad or indifferent, which prohibition says worlds in itself.

Let us suppose, though, that we Christians are correct, and physical death is not the end of existence. I cannot picture my mother, say, in heaven (for she was at bottom a very good woman), worrying her head about all the inevitable inaccuracies and unfairnesses in my stories about her. We seem to have the idea that it is in Rod's power to somehow injure Father Neuhaus, whereas I'm certain that Father Neuhaus has much better things to do right now than read Rod's blog. Who exactly is injured if a bad truth is told about the dead? Or even a bad falsehood?

I think when a lot of you here get older you'll see something of what I mean. My own grown children go around telling all sorts of stories about supposed events from their childhood, when their father and I were, to tell the truth, more than a little wild. This is back from the hippie days. But still, I know some of these stories to be fabrications, not just because I don't remember the "events" in question, but because they contain logical absurdities: they put people together who in fact did not know one another, in places where they could not possibly have been.

I used to worry about this, and try to correct the record, but I think I'm over that now. They can and do have many friends, these children, but they only have one mother, and part of my job is to be a screen upon which they project what they need to see right now. And that's OK with me, because I love them and I want them to be able to work out their issues however best they can, and if that involves talking trash on me at one time or another, well, OK, so what.

If Richard John Neuhaus was as great a guy as everyone is going around saying that he was, I feel confident that his feelings are not hurt by Rod's or anyone else's stories, that like a parent he's hoping that we can all use the raw material of his life, including the fictions, to come closer to God. He's not worried about his "honor," in other words.

Perhaps Rod's piece should have been published later, only to spare the feelings of the living who were close to Fr. Neuhaus, but I would emphatically disagree with the idea that "some knowledge ought to be forbidden."

I am the Truth, said Jesus. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Sigh - the 1:35 comment is mine

Did Mr. Bottom actually say that the offense against him was "unforgivable"? I have a hard time seeing that as likely.

LIkewise I find it hard to believe that Father Neuhaus has written that "there are some things that shouldn't ever be known." Perhaps not known in certain ways or by certain people, but the implication here for those who aren't subscribers and don't have access to the essay itself is that Father Neuhaus is advocating comprehensive secrecy about pedophilia.

The problem is not one of hurting Father Neuhaus's feelings or breaching decorum. The problem is when an opponent of Father Neuhaus decides to speak for him in the public forum (by paraphrasing a conversation and an essay the general readership have not accessed for themselves) at a time when mischaracterizations and misunderstandings can't be corrected.

It seems pretty clear, and only from Mr. Dreher's writing, that he did not "get" Father Neuhaus. To project his misunderstanding, then, into the public square (even if he spends a good amount of time being charitable about how despite his being something of a jerk he often had a point) is a mistake.

I'm glad Mr. Dreher is reflecting on his condition as a writer, but I think maybe he has it wrong. The problem is not when a writer has to write about everything you see in the world, despite the cost. This still makes you a bit of a hero, doesn't it? The problem is when you are so busy writing from your own head you don't step out of it to see the real world at all. I think what he has written here is a eulogy of a man who never existed.

Here is the item from Fr. Neuhaus' column in First Things:

Here’s an interesting statement by Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, who also runs the “Crunchy Con” blog on beliefnet.com. Some years ago he was giving major attention to the sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, and a priest warned him that “I was going to find places darker than I realized existed.” He did, and he left the Catholic Church. “After I converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity,” he writes, “I made a deliberate decision not to investigate the scandals in my own church. And there are scandals there. My family needs me to be spiritually healthy. My family needs to have a church. And there’s nowhere left to go. So I can stand on the sidelines and watch journalists commenting about scandals in the Orthodox Church, and I can cheer them on to see justice done, but I cannot be involved in that. If that makes me less of a journalist, then that’s something I have to live with, but at least now I know my weakness.” He is not less of a journalist, and his decision does not reflect a weakness. He is simply a journalist who has decided that, for compelling personal reasons, his beat is not the Orthodox Church. He and his family need a church and “there’s nowhere left to go.” Many Catholics feel the same way and, for sound reasons, believe Orthodoxy is not a place to go. As with Dreher and Orthodoxy, there are things these Catholics really don’t want to know about their Church. They know that it is a community of sinners—and of sinners forgiven, called to be saints, and usually failing to respond to the call as they should—and that is enough. A while back we were sharply criticized for refusing to accept advertising for a book on the Catholic abuse crisis that, among other things, went into salacious detail about what some bad priests did to young boys. That was not the only reason for rejecting the advertising, but it was a major reason. We thought there were some things people didn’t need to know and didn’t want to know, and for good reasons. As I trust is obvious, that does not prevent this magazine from dealing candidly with continuing patterns of corruption in the Church. So I have considerable sympathy for Rod Dreher’s decision not to try to win journalistic kudos for investigating what’s wrong with Orthodoxy. At the same time, if he had made the same decision for the same reasons some years ago, I suppose he would still be a Catholic.

Thanks for the excerpt. I'm sorry I didn't recognize it from the description as one that had been excerpted earlier.

No, I would never have paraphrased that as him saying "there are some things that shouldn't ever be known" or that some knowledge should be "forbidden". Wow. Not in a million years. Not even ballpark.

Not that I'm making an accusation of deliberate misrepresentation. In fact, it seems clear that this is evidence of what Mr. Dreher has discussed many, many times -- how his perspective on this subject has been dragged, beaten, and contorted by the enormity of the evil. Please let me be clear, I very much appreciate Mr. Dreher's writing, and his ideas. I have made tangible changes in my life and perspective based partly on Mr. Dreher's wisdom, and I'm sure many, many others have. But as has already been acknowledged, maybe this is a time for listening rather than writing, on this subject. That said, I'll bow out and take my own advice.

Well - frankly, I have to say you translating this quoted material from RJN into the conclusion that he was saying "there are some things that shouldn't ever be known" (as you did in your original post) is another example of an exaggeration.

If a newspaper shields the public from the horrifying details of a rape or child pornography ring, that is because people don't need to know each and every last detail of such matters. That is a good thing, isn't it? Those who need to know the details (like the jury, prosecutors or police) are often treated with kid gloves by the judge in such cases, giving them time and even counselling to deal with the horrors.

The public still knows that something horrible happened, but are spared the morbid details. Are you saying that this impulse is wrong? Frankly I think it's exactly proper. Those who have a wish to know such details out of some kind of voyeuristic urge might actually have something wrong with them.

Why do we hold it wrong for jihadi's to post films of the beheading of their victims, and why do we find it scornful that there are actually people who wish to view such things? I would even find it horrifying if someone looked at those snuff films in an effort to demonstrate that jihad is wrong. I don't need to watch someone being beheaded to know that it is wrong, and I would think that I would be diminished as a human being if I did watch such a thing. So yes, I don't need to have the details of exactly how it looked in my brain and I think it is a good thing to be sheltered from that knowledge.

Similarly, I don't need the details of precisely how a child was sexually abused, and to reveal such details is not a laudatory activity. Such details could actually be dangerous to those who might be inclined to find them exciting, and they are superfluous to those who already know that such activity is harmful and horrifying.

Once again - my name was deleted from the 3:07 comment. I'm beginning to feel like the posting system is trying to censor me, as if it thinks there are some things that should never be known to have come from my mind. Hmmmm.

Rod, you have said of Father Neuhaus's recent comment about you — the one you have cited above — as a "criticism" of you that is characterized by "bitterness." Can you explain what you mean? It doesn't seem either critical or bitter to me. In fact, he seems to be going out of his way to be generous and understanding. Am I misreading the comment?

Gosh, I lied again about shutting up.

Here's how a budget meeting works.

Some info comes up and people say, golly, do we really want to put in our paper the face of the guy accused of this crime? It could ruin his life if he's innocent. Or, do we really want to put the bloody car crash photo top of the fold, because kids could see it? Or do we really want to print this allegation one councilman made against another that we don't have confirmation of yet?

And then someone says yes, we do, because the people have a right to know.

Or someone says no, the people don't need to know that. The guy is in a position to continue his crimes if no one recognizes him, or the car crash illustrates how bad this intersection is, or they need to know how mean these politicians are being to each other even if the allegation is not true.

This is the context of his words. "Ever" is not in there, "forbidden" is not in there, and it does not have anything to do with promoting secrecy that served only to protect the bishops from accountability.

It was about an editorial decision not to advertise a book that graphically described child rape. Mr. Dreher has made nearly the same decision by not printing detailed descriptions of the acts on his blog. It is NOT about a personal decision to bully people into keeping silent and not turning in pedophile priests. Couldn't be more different.

And I honestly believe Mr. Dreher just doesn't see that. And I'm not sure what to think of that.

Lee's book Sacrilege was pretty graphic.

Myself, I wouldn't use the word "salacious" in this connection. "Salacious" according to my dictionary has the connotation of "lustful" which to me implies that the reader might be moved to some lust in the reading. (I am hoping that this was no more than an inartful choice of words on Fr. Neuhaus's part.) I read the book, and I think "disgusting" would be a better description.

However, Lee goes to some lengths to justify the inclusion of that detail, along the lines argued by sigaliris, and on the whole I'd have to agree. "Tact" was used to minimize harm and to denigrate the suffering of the victims. Better to tell the truth.

It is indeed distressing to think that priests could behave in such ways, and even more distressing to know that those in superior positions protected and enabled that behavior, for reasons which remain mysterious to me. But nothing worthwhile is gained, I think, by denial.

This is an interesting discussion; sorry I'm late to it.

For me the writer's eye is always trying to absorb details: what did this look like, what did that sound like, why does the way that person move remind me of a sprightly vulture who is hoping some food remains in shreds of rottenness among the bones, why did I think of that cashier as a sad-eyed relic of a long-ago cheerleader--things like that. The more detached I am from the people, the easier it is to think such things; familiarity breeds, not contempt, but kindness, and getting to know a person well creates a bond of loyalty that won't let me fictionalize them, at least not in such a way they'd ever recognize, or be hurt by.

And that means I'm probably always going to be a third-rate perpetrator of attempted fiction. But I hope it makes me a better human being in the long run.

It's too simplistic to see the Scandal as being caused or facilitated by a culture of Catholics with fingers in our ears, humming loudly so as not to hear the naughty lyrics, and bound and determined to believe that "Surely his honor the good Father..." couldn't have done any such thing. My generation was the age of Anything But Clericalism: priests wanted to be called "Father Bob" or "Father Joe," and some of them wanted you to drop the "Father." Many of them didn't look like priests, act like priests, dress like priests, or conduct themselves like priests--and that's not even including the hell-bound scoundrels who raped children. But you know what? My generation was supposed to be okay with all the other stuff. We were supposed to love the new improved grooviness, the lack of emphasis on sin, the notion that Mass was pretty much optional, the Vosko-esque architectural abortions, and the nuns who had given up the habit both literally and figuratively. We were supposed to laugh at prayer, dismiss the rosary as an ancient superstition, move beyond all those "rules" to focus on navel-gazing amateur pop spirituality with a little Dr. Phil-style psychology thrown in for good measure; we were the Church of I'm Okay, and it was all so much better than that old hidebound stuff.

So the first time I heard that a priest had left the priesthood to pursue a gay lifestyle, I had no trouble believing it. The first time I heard of a couple of priests sharing a rectory--and more--one of whom liked to parade around in high heels and stockings and sporting an earring, I had no trouble believing it. And when the news of the Scandal started swirling among the conservative Catholic press several years before the Boston Globe got hold of it all, I had no trouble believing it. The priests in America who take their vows of celibacy seriously have had to put up with these horrors a lot longer than the rest of us; they knew long ago what happened to anybody who went to the bishop with news of clerical misconduct (sent away for "treatment," or drummed out of the priesthood for being too "rigid" and "narrow" in their sexuality, you see--the messenger was always shot, and the perpetrator usually only relocated).

Does this make me angry? Sure--but not wrathful. Vengeance is the Lord's; and He has, in His own time, started to collect these bishops to Himself. It isn't necessary to name names; one need only point out dates, and ages, and see how many will be leaving this earthly existence within a decade or so. I can't imagine being in the shoes of some of these men--if they believe in God at all, they ought to beg the Pope to accept their resignations and devote themselves to the most humble of charities--perhaps helping the Missionaries of Charity bathe lepers in the streets of Calcutta--for their remaining years, as a hopeful alternative to eternal fire.

I pray for them as I pray for every person on this earth; I pray for those who suffered at their hands, because of their lax management, open corruption, or anything in between. But I am a Catholic, and by the grace of God will draw my last breath in communion with His Church; believing it to be His, I see Him suffering with the victims, I see Him betrayed again by evil men, I see Him dying along with their innocence. Do I need to read graphic descriptions of exactly how the little ones were tormented? I can see their suffering on the face of my Savior, and that is enough.

Your Name January 13, 2009 9:00 AM Eric W: Mr. Neuhaus? MR. Neuhaus? What on earth is that supposed to mean? Can you not even mention the man's title as a priest in good standing? At least as a courtesy?

????????

Your Name January 13, 2009 9:06 AM EricW: What do you mean by "Mr. Neuhaus"? MR. Neuhaus? Can you not even give the man his proper title as a priest in good standing?

????????

Who are you?

Erin, as you probably know already, one of the things that makes writing good is the use of clear, specific detail to bring a scene to vivid life, or to make an assertion seem real and therefore irresistible. When you say "my generation," that feels vague to me, the reader, so my brain immediately retreats from the flow of your rhetoric to try to figure out what you mean. That should never happen. But, since it has, I'm still working on it.

You have a 13 year old daughter, and you didn't marry till you were out of college for a couple of years. So, I'm assuming that you probably cannot be younger than 38. (But you really shouldn't force the reader to do math in her head! Unless you're writing science fiction, of course . . . which I assume this is not.)

If--hypothetically--you're 38 now, you turned 18 in 1989. So your teens were spent in the 80s and your young adulthood in the 90s. That, I guess, is what you mean by "my generation." John Paul II became Pope in 1978, so he was your Pope. You spent all your growing-up years in the reign of the most steadfastly conservative Pope in modern history. EWTN, the very conservative Catholic broadcasting network, went on air in 1981, I believe. Ralph Martin's Renewal Ministries, with its New Evangelism emphasis, has been around for 25 years now, Franciscan University of Steubenville renamed itself a university in 1980 and has been carrying out a conservative mandate ever since. The Legionaries of Christ grew in prominence during this period, and the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, and numerous other conservative congregations were founded in response to John Paul II's call.

So it's kind of hard for me to believe that your generation saw nothing but the worst excesses of post-Vatican II spirituality. Vatican II was a long time ago. Particularly this: We were supposed to laugh at prayer, dismiss the rosary as an ancient superstition, move beyond all those "rules" to focus on navel-gazing amateur pop spirituality . . . Er--what?! I was a regular churchgoer in the 80s and 90s, and to me the assertion that anyone was ever told to "laugh at prayer," or not to say the Rosary . .. well, it's ludicrous. Where on earth was your parish?

" was a regular churchgoer in the 80s and 90s, and to me the assertion that anyone was ever told to "laugh at prayer," or not to say the Rosary . .. well, it's ludicrous. Where on earth was your parish?"

Erin has admitted she was traumatized by felt banners, so I think this is part of the PTSD. Like you, I've never seen anything approaching to the silliness the trads babble about when they bemoan Vatican II. Never seen liturgical dance, seen very few felt banners, never saw the rosary dismissed.

Neuhaus was a very pre-Vatican II type, but sadly his Catholicism was learned and not lived. He wanted to silence the laity, while brushing aside ugly allegations if they involved his ideological friends. He was very old school: don't question the hierarchy, we will deal with our own (or not, as was usually the case) and and anyone who questions the church is the enemy.

Very interesting. I'm assuming that Erin, like Rod, is late-30's early-40's, like my older kids. (I have a 41 and a 39. Among others.) I was in college during Vatican II, so I was raised in the pre-Council Church. Very different. 1955 was a long time ago.

However, we have learned in the course of the "Scandal" that not all those closeted meetings the priests had with the altar boys in my class were innocent. A lot of stories have come out of that time, and more probably would have except that so many of the players are no longer with us. Pedophilia in particular has been a (documented) concern for the priesthood since at least the late 300's. There is no reason whatever to assume that this problem finds any of its roots in Vatican II particularly. The sexual misbehavior of these men, and the cover-ups, are from time immemorial, apparently.

So, what happened? The culture became less tolerant of child molestation, for reasons which are unclear to me, and the bishops were late catching up with this cultural change. That's one guess anyway.

I know a lot of Roman Catholic priests, and I know them well enough to know that at best, some of them are celibate some of the time. But of course that's true of everyone. In line with my feeling that everything being equal, truth ought to be preferred to falsehood, perhaps the priesthood should drop the pretense of universal celibacy, but I am well aware that there are good arguments on the other side of that one.

The scandal was able to happen not because of the lavendar menace--the operating theory of Neuhaus and Manning--but because the Catholic hierarchy had long tolerated and enabled violations of celibacy vows (even before the "dreaded" Vatican II) and sexual predators were allowed to remain in the priesthood because sexual predators has been allowed to remain in the priesthood for decades because bishops were rarely in a position to take the moral highground having turned a blind eye to the girlfriends and affairs of priests.

From what I can tell, Daniel's analysis is right on.

So, what happened? The culture became less tolerant of child molestation, for reasons which are unclear to me, and the bishops were late catching up with this cultural change.

Hardly. What happened was media became more pervasive. You now hear of things from across the nation as if they were in your neighborhood. A sexual abuse scandal is an individual thing, a nationwide pattern of sheltering child abusers is quite another. Back in the day a story like Adam Walsh's would have been limited to Florida, but as media exposes us to more and more it became a national story, and launched a father's career as a media star. Ditto Natalee Holloway.

The bishops were late catching up, but only with the effects of media. Just like the cop who shot the kid in an Oakland subway over New Year's was late catching up with the fact that he'd be caught on two cameras, despite the lessons of Rodney King.

The cultural change is in our media.

On another front, I heard the most conservative thing I've heard in a long time on the radio this morning, essentially "The problems we face are new, but human nature is not." Of all the people on earth, that was Hillary Clinton at her Senate confirmation hearing. Knock me over with a feather.

Thanks for sharing about your experience, Erin. I believe you. It's just that I'm not so sure that was universally true. You'll get no argument from me that the Church of the 80s and 90s left much to be desired, but I didn't experience the same things you did as my children were going through religious education during that time. Our pastors all seem to have been fairly conservative--though, in my view, inadequate in other ways.

I was brought up Old School, as you might say- -memorizing the Baltimore Catechism, being marched off to Penance (no nonsense about "Reconciliation") every Saturday, wearing a hat in church, etc. etc. The nuns taught us to say the Rosary, all right. However, my father, who was a very right-wing Catholic, thought the Rosary and other forms of Mariolatry were debased folk-religion--sentimental, womanish, and theologically inferior. The Rosary was for old women. Hence I never said the Rosary until I was approaching middle age. There are lots of different ways of being a Catholic, even a right-wing Catholic.

Daniel, I do think the widespread acceptance of the sin of homosexual activity has had its part in the Scandal. But where does that acceptance come from?

I think it comes, in large part, from priests and the laity who follow them who have decided together that there is nothing sinful about any use of sex, inside or outside of marriage, contraceptive or not, vow-breaking or not--so long as the participants are adults seeking self-actualization and not behaving "selfishly," a concept which is conveniently never defined.

So Father never says anything about the pastor's girlfriend or the congregation's widespread mortally-sinful use of contraception, premarital sex, or other viciousness, and in turn neither the pastor nor the congregation says anything about Father's occasional forays to the gay bar. And when a new priest is assigned who seems to like the company of younger boys than the gay-bar visiting priest whose boyfriends are at least 18--well, the culture of "You ignore my sin, and I'll ignore yours, and we'll all go to Hell merrily together" keeps working as advertised.