The Moose wants our children

One of my old teachers, Dr. Michael Waldstein, recently gave a terrific speech in Mexico City at the 6th World Meeting of Families. Since it is so anti-Moose, I have posted it below:

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In his letter to the World Meeting of Families in Valencia, Pope Benedict wrote, "Today more than ever, the Christian family has a very noble mission that it cannot shirk: the transmission of the faith, which involves the gift of self to Jesus Christ who died and rose, and insertion into the Ecclesial Community. Parents are the first evangelizers of children, a precious gift from the Creator (cf. Gaudium et spes, n. 50), and begin by teaching them to say their first prayers. In this way a moral universe is built up, rooted in the will of God, where the child grows in the human and Christian values that give life its full meaning."

The vision of this statement is clear and strong. Do families in the United States and Canada live up to it? Do they introduce their children to the sincere gift of self to Christ? Do they help them become mature members of the Ecclesial Community? The positive side needs to be mentioned first. Many families do follow their mission with admirable strength and devotion.

At the same time one must admit that many families fall short of their mission. The United States and Canada built up extensive systems of Catholic schools. Catholic parents have traditionally delegated much of their responsibility as educators to these schools and they are still delegating it. The schools, however, have changed. Like all academic institutions, they have become increasingly secularized, which severely compromises the transmission of the faith.

Strong efforts are being made in some places to strengthen the identity and effectiveness of Catholic schools. A few weeks ago, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC, published a pastoral letter that is spearheading a renewal of the Catholic school system in his diocese. He sees the urgency of the situation and is calling for broad cooperation in the renewal. Yet this is only one diocese among many.

A more fundamental problem, however, arises from the strong reliance of most parents on the schools. Children spend much time at school and relatively little time with their parents. Only during vacations is the situation different. Since the life they share with their parents is often reduced to a minimum when school is in session, it is not easy to build up such a life during vacations. Parents and children often do not know what to do with each other during vacations.

There is another major force that is taking much of education out of the hands of the family, namely, the global youth culture. It is important to realize that this youth culture is a new phenomenon. It only began after the Second World War.

Two forces are perhaps the most formative in this youth culture. One of them is the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution is a child of the dominant utilitarian and consumerist adult culture after the Second World War. Utilitarianism and consumerism inevitably destroy the link between sex and love, between sex and procreation by reducing the other person in erotic experience to a means for pleasure. In the formation of the teenager, the piercing sexual passions of adolescent children were suddenly released into destructive premature relationships. Instead of being introduced into a culture of love, children were and are abandoned to a culture of the use of each other for pleasure or, to use their own preferred word, fun.

The second major force, intimately connected with the first, is the rise of a new music produced specifically for adolescent children. It is a music tailor-made for the absence of deeper personal formation of sexual passion by authentic love. This music and its cultural trappings could not have achieved the power it achieved without a large economic muscle behind it. American and European adolescents after the Second World War were perhaps the first generation of children who constituted a strong market by themselves in distinction from the adult world, because they got large amounts of discretionary money from their parents. The parents were happy enough to let the children do what they wanted while they themselves pursued their professional lives. The removal of women from the home and their induction into the work force increased the cultural vacuum in which children lived. It also increased the economic power of this vacuum. The entertainment industry exploded, aided by technological progress, especially by the invention of the radio and the television. Music turned out to be the single most important article of trade in this exploding market. It is a music that consistently conquers market share by preying on the most intense and most immature passions of adolescents, above all on erotic passion and on anger. The hearts of children were simply abandoned to the formative power of this music.

What should we do in this difficult situation? Many parents feel completely helpless. They see their children taken out of their hands and increasingly formed by another culture. Sociologists call this phenomenon the "generation gap." History as a whole shows that the generation gap is not a normal developmental phase. The normal situation is for children to grow in the culture of their parents and their society. The generation gap is without precedent. Children in Jewish communities grew up Jewish; in Catholic communities they grew up Catholic; in Buddhist communities they grew up Buddhist. Now Jewish, Catholic and Buddhist children grow to be one and the same thing: they become copies of their peers in the global youth culture.

We parents must wake up and take action! We must recall that it is our inalienable duty and therefore also our inalienable right to educate our children. In his encyclical Divini illius magistri of 1929 Pius XI writes, "The family ... holds directly from the Creator the mission (munus) and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to a strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the state, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth" (Divini illius magistri, 59, DS 3690). Following Vatican II, John Paul II insists on the same point. "The task of giving education is rooted in the primary vocation of married couples to participate in God's creative activity: by begetting in love and for love a new person who has within himself or herself the vocation to growth and development, parents by that very fact take on the task of helping that person effectively to live a fully human life. As the Second Vatican Council recalled, 'since parents have conferred life on their children, they have a most solemn obligation to educate their offspring. Hence, parents must be acknowledged as the first and foremost educators of their children. Their role as educators is so decisive that scarcely anything can compensate for their failure in it. For it devolves on parents to create a family atmosphere so animated with love and reverence for God and others that a well-rounded personal and social development will be fostered among the children.'... (Vatican II, Gravissimum educationis, 3). The right and duty of parents to give education is [1-] essential since it is connected with the transmission of human life; [2-] it is original and primary with regard to the educational role of others, on account of the uniqueness of the loving relationship between parents and children; [3-] and it is irreplaceable and inalienable, and therefore incapable of being entirely delegated to others or usurped by others" (John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, 36).
The first and most important step is for us parents to embrace our duty and our right. We must defend this right as indeed inalienable. The second most important step is to spend time with our children, to build up a shared life. Only in a loving shared life can we transmit to our children what is dearest to us. The third most important step is to become involved in the education of our children. Archbishop Wuerl is calling on parents in his diocese to become involved in helping to renew the Catholic school system. For the majority of Catholic parents, such involvement in the children's schooling is the form this third most important step will take.

In describing the situation of the United States and Canada, however, I must also point to a more radical way in which parents are becoming involved in the education of their children, namely, homeschooling. According to recent credible estimates, there are about two million families in the United States that educate their children at home. My wife and I have eight children. We have been and are educating them from first grade all the way up to the end of high school. Four of them have already entered universities. The main reason why we began home schooling was the report we heard from close friends about the effect of home schooling on their family. The children, they said, became more friends with each other, because they shared the same experience of schooling in the home. The parents also became more friends with their children, because they shared more of their life. Like many other homeschoolers, we have seen that the global youth culture is not an irresistible force. It is possible to pass on our own Christian culture. The generation gap is not inevitable.

Last thought on the power of language

Just a nugget that didn’t fit into the last post. I mentioned that the goal of language is the creation of society; I also described how the individual’s life as a rational creature is brought into being by language. To say it again: the individual’s good comes into being as a step towards the creation of society.

I think this would make a wonderful starting point for a lecture on the common good and the individual good.

The Power of Babel revisited

Not long ago I wrote in praise of John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel. He demonstrates that language of itself changes constantly, like the random mutations of living creatures according to the theory of evolution—hence the subtitle of the book, A Natural History of Language.

After a great many examples illustrating his fundamental premises, McWhorter concludes:

One thing that follows simply and ineluctably from this is that, despite the almost irresistible pull of the sociologically based evaluations that attach to dialects, there is no such thing as human being speaking ‘bad grammar.’ There are no dialects in any way analyzable as ‘decayed’ versions of the standard or of anything else.

Any theory that just so happens to promote what Obama has called “the virtue of tolerance” prompts my eyebrows to seek a spot just a bit further from sea level. I will point out just two problems with McWhorter’s thesis, but I invite you to sound off in the combox.

First, McWhorter contrasts merely “sociologically based evaluations” with an objective view of language as good or bad. But keep in mind that language has a natural purpose, namely to cause communication between people; in other words, the creation and maintenance of society is what language is about. Language itself is sociological. To evaluate grammar based on where it places one in society is perfectly in accord with the nature of the thing.

Second, we have to recall that language exists first of all within the individual speaker: before the spoken word comes the imagined word. Although language is made for communication between people, before it can do that it must transform the interior life of each person. It operates right at the juncture between immaterial and material, between intellect and imagination, and it organizes the imagination in such a way that reason can effectively operate; kids who never learn language never become fully rational. Now it is hard to see why one would say that any old language creates the interior life of the human person as well as any other. Given that language organizes the imagination, it seems clear right away that the imagination can be organized better and worse, and that some tools for organizing it will do better than others. In other words, language is not just sets of sounds, but has a real nature—and yes, some languages are better and some are decayed.

Thing brings us back to McWhorter’s comparison of language development with evolution. From the fact that animals change from one species into another by a large number of tiny and random changes evolutionists commonly conclude that one species is pretty much the same as another, just happening to fit a different ecological niche; as McWhorter paraphrases it, “Bacteria, toads, wallabies, and orangutans do not fall on a cline of increasing closeness to God; all four are equally well suited to leading the lives they lead.” In the same way, he argues, language changes are not geared toward improvement: “Instead, languages change like the lava clump in a lava lamp: always different but at no point differentiable in any qualitative sense from the earlier stage.”

For you Aristotle buffs, let me put the issue succinctly. Modern scientists deny purpose and nature in things, admitting only material and efficient causality; McWhorter denies purpose and nature in language, admitting only arrangements of sounds (babel/babble) and forces of change. But things like humans do have purpose and nature, and so consequently does human language. Orangutans are closer to God than bacteria, and some humans do speak bad grammar.

Moose mouth muffled

After so much negotiating about the non-negotiables, this was music to my ears:

The Congregation [for the Doctrine of the Faith] said that Father Haight, a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, should be barred from teaching Catholic theology.

Note that the Jesuit in question is a former president of the CTSA--which is about all I have to say about the CTSA. It's also nice to see that at least a few American Catholic theologians agree with the Vatican:

At a 1999 discussion of Haight’s book organized by the Catholic Theological Society of America, for example, William Loewe of the Catholic University of America suggested that by treating the second and third persons of the Trinity as “symbols,” Haight ends up with “a Unitarian God and a merely human Jesus.” Notre Dame theologian John Cavadini, a consulter to the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, wrote in Commonweal in the same year that “there is a difference between rendering Christian faith intelligible to a culture, and reducing its central theological claim to a statement that even an atheist can affirm.” Haight’s fellow Jesuit Fr. Gerald O’Collins, widely considered among the church’s most eminent Christologists, told NCR in 2005, “I wouldn’t give my life for Roger Haight’s Jesus. It’s a triumph of relevance over orthodoxy.”

If you can't recall what Roger Haight thinks, just listen to Barack Obama for a while: one is the Moose and the other is the mouth.

Final random thought: what an odd last name for a man who promotes tolerance!

The Power of Babel

All of my readers, or perhaps I should say both of my readers, would enjoy John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. McWhorter presents a compelling picture of why and how languages change over time, but all three hundred pages of his argument are contained in five principles:

1. Sound Change. Everyone everywhere tends to pronounce accented syllables more clearly and unaccented syllables less clearly. If the first generation brings the unaccented syllable in a word from a clarity of level ten to a clarity of level eight, then eight is now the new standard of clarity for the second generation; the second generation then brings it from eight to six, and six is now the standard of clarity for the third generation; eventually, the sound just drops off, as did all the case endings of Latin on the way to the formation of the Romance languages. McWhorter convincingly compares this to the erosion of soft rocks in the mountains.

2. Extension. A rule that applies only to a particular grammatical situation is eventually applied everywhere, as people find it easier to use one rule all the time. For example, the English genitive in apostrophe plus “s” was once only one of several possible genitive endings, but was extended to cover every case of possession.

3. The expressiveness cycle. We’re all familiar with this one; C.S. Lewis describes it in his essay, “The Death of Words”. A new phrase or word is introduced as an especially forceful description; the new phrase is so good that it is used again and again; eventually, it looses its force by long use and joins the ranks of “dead words”. “Awesome” originally spoke to an experience of the numinous, of the divine; it was applied to terrestrial things as an expression of extreme force, was used again and again, and now describes the taste of a cheeseburger.

4. Rebracketing. McWhorter tells about his mother’s experience as a girl at church. She was convinced that the congregation sang a song about a bear with an ocular misalignment: the story of “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.” She put “cross-eyed” together from the originally separate “cross I’d”, and created a new title entirely. Another example is the word “nickname”: it began as “an eke-name” (literally “an also-name”), but the “n” moved over so that now we have “a nickname”.

5. Semantic change. This is a kind of catch-all category for the general fact that words change meaning over time. McWhorter gives the example of “silly”, which originally meant “blessed”. Blessedness implies innocence, the innocent are deserving of compassion, those who deserve compassion are generally weak, and the weak are often foolish—and behold, “silly” has gone from “blessed” to “foolish”! This sort of “drift” happens to words all the time as people apply words creatively to new situations.

The important point to note about all five of these principles is that they are independent of changes in culture, location, or government. While a particular language change may relate to a particular event in history, the general phenomenon of language change is independent of any general force in history: language changes constantly by its very nature. McWhorter compares it to a lava lamp, or to cloud formations, always changing but not necessarily changing towards anything in particular: just changing. And in fact, his conclusion seems born out by history.

If this is true, then I can say several other geeky things:

1) Despite what some say, Hebrew was not the language spoken in Eden. Even on a young-earth theory, several thousand years elapsed between the death of the early generations and the first recorded words of Scripture, and so necessarily language had changed dramatically in the meantime.

2) If Adam had not sinned and so death had not entered the world, the original language and its speakers would have continued forever. Aside from the “expressiveness cycle”, each of the five principles of language change seems to depend to some degree on the fact that one generation gives way to another, but this would not have been the case. Once might argue that the expressiveness cycle itself would have been mitigated, because man’s unfallen imagination would not have needed the aid of ever-new linguistic explosions to maintain a vividness of perception. So the intriguing possibility is introduced that the splintering of language is a result of the fall and of death—a fact surely related to the interpretation of the story of Babel, whence McWhorter’s book takes its name. The only factor I can think to the contrary is geographical separation of speakers.

3) It’s fun to apply all of this to The Lord of the Rings, in which men and hobbits die but Elves do not. Hooray for Elvish!