The lives of ... others?

In the 1970's Vaclav Havel wrote an essay called "The Power of the Powerless". In it he describes a shopowner who hangs a sign in his shop window with some banal party slogan. Havel describes how the shopkeeper may not agree with the slogan, but more likely doesn't give it any thought at all. He displays the sign because every other shop does as well, and it is expected. It is the norm.

The true loss doesn't come when a government imposes a surveillance state. It doesn't come when a few urban professionals abandon poetic courtship for hookups via texting. The loss comes when most people consider the change normal, and no longer give it any thought.

I've just read Rod's post for the fifth time and it still makes absolutely no sense to me at all. I would say that it is something like adding apples and oranges, but that does not explain it, perhaps something like adding apples and pineapples or something like that.

I know Rod is trying to make a connection in there somewhere but I fear my life has become far to decadent for me to make hide nor hair of it.

Rod,

I’ve been reading Derek Jeffreys of University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. His book, Defending Human Dignity: John Paul II and Political Realism, speaks to this question you raise:

“What will save those lost people in the Brooks column? Will they have eyes to see, and ears to hear, such epiphanies as are granted to them? Only if they have enough moral imagination in them to respond to the gifts of art, faith, hope and love.”

Before I get to Jeffreys, an observation of my own. When Chambers comes to the epiphany, awakening to the reality of God by contemplating the wonder of his daughter, he was intimating the reality of the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, as taught by Augustine, reflected through the dynamic of his own life and love. The radical and profound self-donation of spouses in lovemaking, which generates new life, comes from the integrated nature of human sex as created by God; namely that it has both a unitive and a procreative dimension.

In discussing this issue of self-donation and John Paul II’s insights, Derek Jeffreys:

p.53
For John Paul II…People must make love a “force that joins and unites, of its very nature inimical to division and isolation”. They must create and sustain it by cultivating reciprocity, a mutual desire that another become a cocreator of love. This reciprocity can culminate in self-giving love, the “most uncompromising form of love,” which “consists precisely in self-giving, in making one’s inalienable and non-transferable ‘I’ the property of another”. Originating neither by accident nor through mere sentiment, it constitutes a “special crystallization of the whole human ‘I,’ determined because of its love to dispose of itself in this particular way.” Unless the person giving the gift orients his will effectively, love degenerates into egotistical attraction or desire, often clothed in the language of love.

p.54
The capacity to become a gift enables persons to develop a unique form of community in which love becomes an “authentic commitment of the free will of one person (the subject), resulting from the truth about another person (the object). Self-giving love “forcibly detaches the person, so to speak,” from his “natural inviolability and inalienability”. Paradoxically, it makes him want to surrender himself to another, and by doing so, he enlarges rather than diminishes his being. By becoming available to another, he comes to understand that he is, “someone willed by the Creator for his or her own sake. The person is unique and unrepeatable, someone chosen by eternal love”. The result is a communio personarum, community characterized by the interior act on the part of two or more persons towards self-donation, “the acceptance of the other as a gift”. Through it, John Paul II maintains, persons discover the true center of their humanity. By giving and accepting another, they determine their personhood.
God creates us with a natural urge to move beyond ourselves, but we retain the capacity to alter our orientation toward higher values. Moreover, unless we move toward them, we can never develop the highest forms of love. Love reaches culmination only when we give ourselves fully to another. This capacity to enter into a communion of persons constitutes for John Paul II the true mark of human dignity and value.

Jeffreys and JP II offer a way out for those lost souls in Brooks’ article.

Peace

There have always been people who treated sex as nothing more than a transaction for pleasure, dovoid of love or romance. They are known as "prostitutes" and their clinetele.

People once lived within a pattern of being

Well, that or they just raped someone. Or used their position in the office to compel sex, which amounts to the same. Yeah, it was definitely better in the past, Brooks.

In light of Rod's excellent post, It should come as know surprise that President Obama -- who supports partial birth abortion but opposes protection for infants born-alive during failed abortions -- is refusing to help commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago.

He is "too busy" to go to Germany to help hundreds of millions of people celebrate their liberation from godless tyranny back into their God-given dignity as full human beings.

But he is not too busy to go to Norway to help the Nobel Prize Committee to celebrate himself.

One wonders if he is simply "too busy" to give life-support to infants born-alive during failed abortions.

One wonders if he is simply "too busy" to prevent partially-born children from having scissors stabbed into their skulls in order to kill them.

One wonders that, but then one remembers how much golf the President plays and then one has the answer.

And to bring things full circle, it's well-known how much the President is fond of his Blackberry.

More fond apparently than he is fond of hundreds of millions of liberated Central and Eastern Europeans.

More fond apparently than he is fond of more than a billion murder children and more and more every day.

Balance Lives of Others with Good Bye Lenin. It got me to half-way understand why anybody would have preferred to live in East Germany than the West. They had freedom, although not the kind we're used to. They had freedom from the rat race, freedom from wanting ever more and more stuff, freedom from the dictatorship of the latest style and trend, freedom from worrying about your and your family's future. Freedom from the whole damn consumerist binge and hang-over. Dare I label this crunchy-com?

Now I'm condemned to be an American and am too accustomed to shooting my mouth off to sign on to that deal, but it does have its appeal.

They had freedom, although not the kind we're used to. They had freedom from the rat race, freedom from wanting ever more and more stuff, freedom from the dictatorship of the latest style and trend, freedom from worrying about your and your family's future. Freedom from the whole damn consumerist binge and hang-over.

You can have that now - just 'drop out' of the rat-race and simplify your life.

--but to a sensate person, the idea that someone would see God by looking at the evolved auditory organ of an infant or would interpret his children's responses to art as "reverence and awe for life and the world," when the child may simply have had an involuntary shiver due to a temperature change is not comprehensible.

It is, in fact, comprehensible.

Just because a person comes to a different conclusion doesn't mean that a person can't understand how another person might come to a different conclusion.

And it is also worth noting that people who doubt or disbelieve in the existence of God are also capable of having reverence and awe for life and the world.

Beautiful film, one of my favorites. What a wonderful last scene and last line - "es ist für mich.” Great performance as the Stasi surveillance expert by Ulrich Muehe, who died too young at the age of 54 in 2007.

As to Brooks’s thoughtful essay, unfortunately, we live in a world of increasing objectification of others. The problem goes far beyond dating and hook ups. I think this only is going to increase, especially as fewer people read books. Other than actually travelling and meeting different types of people, nothing opens the mind to the variety of human experience and creates sensitization to the basic humanity of people different than one than reading. Unfortunately, at the same time as surveys show that fewer and fewer Americans read books, they’re increasingly surrounded by forces that reward objectification more than understanding and insight.

The most corrosive forces are political, which advocates of both parties being equally responsible for taking the easy way out and painting the other side in cartoonish terms. This encourages the reaching for comforting blankets of sameness and indulging in the “othering” of fellow citizens to help assuage one’s anxieties and concerns. Trying to understand our fellow Americans rarely is rewarded. I can think of few influential radio or tv talk shows or Internet forums which remind us that we’all all Americans together, regardless of how we vote, that most of us genuinely love our country, and that we’re all God’s children. There are far more models for othering and blame shifting and demonization than finding common ground or seeking to understand each other.

Can we be surprised that young people have developed a sense of detachment from each other? Although once associated with The National Review, I doubt Whittaker Chambers, with his tortured, searching writing, would fit in among the smug, self congratulatory, essayists at NRO’s The Corner. Rarely do you see any of them write compassionately about the American people as a whole the way David Brooks sometimes does.

The intellectually lazy demonization of people unlike oneself does have an effect over time in countless ways beyond the social scene. I live in a city on one of the two Coasts in an environment which often is mocked by Republicans and conservatives for political effect. Yet I’m an Independent, a buffet voter, not an easily identifiable cartoon. I’ve gotten used to hearing people make broad assumptions about me and dismiss me as not being a real American based simply on where I live and work. But that comes with a cost. When I hear of natural disasters in the heartland, I don’t immediately think, oh, that’s where the people live who make fun of my neighborhood and profession. Why bother to open up my checkbook and contribute to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army when I know some of those people hate me for nothing more than where I live and work? But objectification of me for where I live does create challenges that I didn’t feel years ago. I have to forgive a lot more than I once did.

I think David Brooks and the New York magazine are being too credulous. The people who would write an online sex diaries are already at the fringe of behavior. They're a self selected group who might not be above embellishing the tales of their behavior for bragging rights. Why should we believe them, given them an audience, or even care?

I know Rod wrote this late at night, but I agree with Charles it reads like a non sequitur.

Whittaker Chambers: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view)."

To presume scientific findings can only be true if they are politically convenient is grotesque cowardice.

Chambers is famous for denouncing Ayn Rand, but his quote above is intellectually equivalent to Rand's proclamations that since it is good that man tamed fire, smoking cannot possibly cause cancer, all such suggestions to that end being Communist propaganda too.

I'm familiar with New York Magazine and the weekly columns Brooks writes about in today's column. In essence, he's drawing conclusions about an entire generation by reading a more mainstream equivalent of the Penthouse Forum. It's titillating, but it's also a series of exaggerations and outright lies. The 20somethings he's fretting about are getting married and starting families as they always have.

As a regular reader and commenter here, I like Rod's writing, but if he has one main flaw, it's that he looks for any sign of the imminent collapse of American civilization as we know it, whether by culture, economy or environment. We had a major shock to the system a little more than a year ago, and it turns out that there's still food in the shops, the financial markets (generally) work and, not to be glib, most people have jobs.

If the financial crisis didn't send us running to the hills, the widespread adoption of text messaging won't turn us into depraved sex fiends.

Yeah, Rod does take the extreme outliers and generalizes to the broader culture.

Anyone remember Transactional Analysis? This one is "Ain't it awful?"

The Stupid Chris is right on, though, with this:

Rod's got his finger on something here, which is that "everyone does it" is an excuse used by those who know what they're living is a lie. This is true in a police state, it's true in a "free" world that uses sexual intimacy to avoid real intimacy.

I agree that it is easier to establish and live in a commune in a free society than to live as a free man in a purely socialist one. That said, it actually is easier in a free society to try out aspects of communal living on the left end of the spectrum than it is to test out the same level of individualism on the right end of the spectrum. The 1960s and 1970s saw the establishment of hippie and other types of communes. People can learn something from how they worked and how the experiments played out. There is no way to test out anti-government individualism for which some voters seem to yearn.

There are no communities or states where people reject all reliance on federally funded programs and enterprises (Medicare, Veterans Administration hospitals, farm subsidies, food safety programs, consumer protection guidelines and regulations, OSHA regulation, support for transportation and infrastructure projects). And draw only on private enterprise and on their own financial resources and interpretations of what constitutes safe and proper practices. People in red states can’t opt out of payment of taxes for certain programs and be held to a pledge of not accepting federal assistance in anything but military defense of the nation. And even if I were a social scientist (I’m not) who wanted to study how reliance on private interprise and nearly pure individualism would work out, I couldn’t earmark my tax dollars to support blue states only and withhold them from red state projects so anti-government, anti-tax voters could get a fair shot at trying out what it would be like to live without drawing on federal revenues.

And it's so wonderful that the sexual revolution has abolished rape and the compulsion of sex by authority. Oh, wait...

You're not actually denying that the scale of those problems is smaller than it was in ye olden days for which Brooks pines, are you? Or that larger such problems in the past might suggest that behavior across total sexual behavior then was more problematic then the behavior across the same today?

Like many aging white males...

Racist.

Polichinello:
If you are going to take the time to quote and then attack just 5 words, as you did at 12:17 on November 3rd, would you please also take the time to name the author, and the time it was said, so the context can be located. Thank you.

Dear peeved and presumably pallid polichinello, I had no idea that the demonstrably plausible notion that inveighing against the sexual mores of Today's Youth seemed disproportionately popular among Caucasian columnists of a certain age and gender would be so offensive to you. Why not prove me wrong? If you have evidence for a large body of censure on this topic penned by young and/or female columnists of color, why not bring it on, that I may be liberated from my unwarranted assumptions? I guess it's easier to type your favorite five letter word, but it does seem the lazy person's way to react. Have a pale, pretty day! ; )

I guess it's easier to type your favorite five letter word...

Ummm... (counts, reaches first finger of second hand) I think it had six.

Indy: There have been some right-wing communes in the US -- some of them are now Orthodox churches, which is an interesting story in and of itself. There's also Hillsdale College, which refuses all federal money.

Richard

Are you saying it's SWPL?

'Cos if you don't, I will.

And you'd be wrong. It's a cardinal sin for SWPL's to take offense on behalf of other white people. Only minorities count when it comes to offending a SWPL.

Dear peeved and presumably pallid polichinello, I had no idea that the demonstrably plausible notion that inveighing against the sexual mores of Today's Youth seemed disproportionately popular among Caucasian columnists of a certain age and gender would be so offensive to you.

Not nearly as offensive as your syntax, but nonetheless, you still made a baldly racist statement. Try to weasel out of it all you want, sigs, but there it is in all its SWPLy glory.

Wait . . . what? Racism is stuff white people like, now? Conservatives are so confusing . . . .

John E - Agn Stoic: Thanks for the tip. I have a short fuse for some things, and am in fact far behind most people in figuring these things out. So thanks again...

"Although once associated with The National Review, I doubt Whittaker Chambers, with his tortured, searching writing, would fit in among the smug, self congratulatory, essayists at NRO’s The Corner."

THANK YOU, INDY. Well said.

BobN, it is the 'mostly' part that is the problem, unfortunately.

Many thanks, Cecelia and Major Wotton, much appreciated.

Thank you again, Rod, for writing about The Lives of Others. I don’t know how many people have seen it but it is well worth seeing. I got out my DVD and watched it once again this evening.

The Brooks part of your essay got the most attention. No interesting musings from readers about the type of people who deserve to have “eine Sonate Vom Guten Menschen” (A Sonata About a Good Man) written about them.

There are so few models for moral courage these days, especially in the political world which provides a setting for demonstrating human fragility more frequently than strength. And seems to grow more coarse and weak in some areas by the year. Too many people equate courage with standing up for people who fit in comfortably with their own group and not for others. Rarely can I pick out an author or a poster on a blog which deals with politics who I think might have done what Wiesler did. Indeed, I look at the things that U.S. political leaders of both parties and all ideologies sometimes say and find myself thinking of that line from Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons, “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales? I think there are a lot of people out there (some religious, some secular) who want something better than what we have. We can’t control what others do, we can control our own actions and choices.

That a new German film would teach Americans about human faith at a time when acclaimed movies like Borat lack faith. A multi-layered and surprisingly touching dramatic thriller.