Bureaucratic nutritional proposals

Our society is not just spiritually sick, but physically sick, and it seems obvious that this is largely driven by the foods we eat. Heart disease, obesity, and diabetes are the most obvious nutrition-related diseases; but also Crohn’s and the various gut problems, celiac, and perhaps allergies.

The favoured solution of government bureaucrats and food companies like appears to be “education.” That is, teach people what nutrients they need, what they should avoid too much of (e.g. sugar, sodium), how many calories they need in a day, how to read food labels, etc. The pitch is that if people know about nutrition and have nutritional information presented to them on food labels, they will be able to choose healthy foods and therefore eat a healthy diet.

Fine and dandy, but there is one little problem with the mathematical equation: this is nothing like how people naturally behave with food. People are not built to spend minutes or hours sorting and picking and choosing among possible foods, adding up and weighing various factors, and so on. People eat what they like and what they are used to, and they eat when they are hungry. Since the nutrient-checking behaviour is not natural to us, either we don’t do it—and continue getting sick from our food—or we do it and it becomes a compulsive neurosis. It seems today that many people are afflicted with scruples and legalism about food, to the point even of superstition.

Even if people do adopt the latter course, it is doubtful that the nickel-and-diming approach is going to make much difference.

If we want better nutrition what we need is to adopt a practice that fits easily into natural human habits with food, not an artificial one created by a bureaucracy. I propose that the simplest answer is to simply stop eating packaged foods and instead eat whole foods that you cook yourself. The key is that it is a very simple and quick to apply practice, which requires no label-reading or internal calculations, and that it fits into the normal habit of most human beings everywhere before the last century. It allows you to treat food the way humans naturally do: not with scruples and legalism about nutrients, but simply, “this is what we eat, and this is what I like, so we shall eat this.”

The films of Judd Apatow: medicine for modern libertines

I’m sure we all have met Judd Apatow in some way: whether through the films he’s directed (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, This Is Forty) or his television shows (Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared). He’s had his hand in many other projects as well; and a number of actors to whom he gave a start have become famous and productive in their own right: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, and probably others.

Judd Apatow is no saint and, as far as I know, no Christian. But his movies are medicine for modern libertines.

When I was growing up we had a dog. Sometimes she got sick and we had to give her medicine in pill form. She would not take them on their own. But if we hid them in her dog food, she would eat them contentedly.

Modern libertines (though I try not to be one, I include myself here) are profoundly ill—sick in spirit—but do not want to take the medicine that can help them. We spit it out if we taste it. We prefer dog food, and increasingly dog food is the only taste we want. To people in such a state, our medicine has to come hidden in dog food.

Well, the modern unabashed sex-comedy is one brand of dog food, which Judd Apatow specializes in making. But inside, medicine is resident.

Take The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Although I enjoy this film immensely, I do not think I could recommend it anymore. It is full of foul language and inflammatory sexual scenes. This is the dog food: the crude jokes, the world of judgment-free license that most of the characters inhabit—who unashamedly view pornography, masturbate, smoke dope, sleep around, speak in the crudest terms about women, have affairs (okay a little shame there), and so on.

But then look at what the movie is really about. Steve Carell’s character Andy is forty years old and a virgin. Most of the action of the movie is based on his friends’ thinking that this is a tragic misfortune and that the best thing they can do for him is help him to lose his virginity. Meanwhile it becomes clear that Andy is a much better person than any of his friends, not only in moral behaviour but also in maturity. (He also does not curse, which in film and television is one of the marks of specially virtuous people.) His sole failing appears to be shyness and lack of ambition, and once he overcomes this he succeeds brilliantly to the point that he surpasses his friends in his success at work and in his romantic relationships. He also appears happier than any of them (with the sole possibly exception of Seth Rogen’s character who is not so much happy as contentedly detached). The other two friends are unhappy and insecure, creating messes of their relationships. In the end, though Andy could have had sex at several points, including with his serious girlfriend, he chooses to remain a virgin until he marries her. And when they finally get married, the sex scene does not conform to the expectation of his friends (and the common stereotype in our culture) that because he is a virgin the sex will be terrible, embarassing, and unsatisfying. He and his wife are thoroughly happy, and the movie ends, of all things, with a joyful dance scene. And all this without being the slightest bit preachy or hamfisted.

The movie shows that remaining a virgin until marriage can be a good thing; the marital sex can still be satisfying right from the start; and waiting might actually contribute to having a better relationship and to being a better, more whole, more happy person.

In sum, the movie’s heart is utterly un-politically correct. You can test it for yourself: take the line above, and imagine using it to pitch a movie to a Hollywood film studio. Imagine using it to advertise the film. Do you think it would have made many millions? Wouldn’t it more likely be mocked and dismissed as a ‘religious’ film?

And therein lies the genius of Apatow. The foul language, sexual content, crude jokes, and judgment-free world are the dog food that we all love. If the movie was just the pill, we couldn’t take it—we’d spit it out. But we mow down on the dog food and get the medicine, too.

Catholics talk sometimes about the importance of evangelizing through beauty. It’s profoundly true. Through this movie, the audience sees a glimpse of the beauty of virginity and of a moral life. And because the movie is not preachy or moralistic, just a crude sex comedy, they see it with their guard down and are open to receiving it. In fact, I think part of their success comes because Judd Apatow is not a Christian and is not trying to transmit a wholesome message. I suspect that he is just making the films he feels like making, and that he happens to be attracted to virtue—for which God be praised.

The Forty-Year-Old Virgin is not Judd Apatow’s only creation, of course, but it is probably the most medicinal of them all. Knocked Up is similar to The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, but with a smaller element of evangelism through beauty. I have not seen the later movies, but I suspect that the proportion of dog food is increasing with time and the medicine content becoming less. The television shows exhibit this trend. Undeclared, the more recent show, is nothing I would specially praise—it’s a bit raunchy, though tame by today’s standards, and a bit more virtuous than most television, but nothing remarkable. Freaks and Geeks, however, is a work of genius and I would even call it Thoroughly Good; I expect I will have more to say about it another time.

My last word on Judd Apatow is this. His films are not such that I can wholeheartedly recommend them because of their sexual content and their foul language, both of which my conscience resists bringing into my home. Nevertheless I am happy that they exist. Apatow in his raunchiness does something that Christians maybe cannot do today. He makes Trojan Horses: the raunchiness conceals within the soldiers of Good. His films show the beauty of virtue to people who would reject it otherwise. They are medicine for modern libertines.

Pater Noster

Is the defining feature of modernity the destruction of the Church?

Few of us realize how much of the Church has been destroyed—not just lost or abandoned, but deliberately destroyed—in the last five centuries.

In the year 1500 there were thousands of monasteries peppering the landscape of Europe, in every country, from Scotland to Sicily, from Portugal to Russia. Monasteries actually owned a significant proportion of the land in some places (most of which they rented to tenants) and were some of the most important economic bodies in Europe. Imagine a place where the normal large-scale economic unit is not a corporation, but a community of monks, and you have an idea of it. Well, the fact that we have to imagine it (and that it is difficult to imagine) is evidence in itself of how completely that world has vanished. But it did not gradually fall apart, nor did it die of natural causes.

I study medieval manuscripts. In my studies, I’ve been aware for a long time that the largest manuscript collections are mostly owned by governments and housed in large public libraries: the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France are the two most prominent ones. (A significant exception is the Vatican Library.) It only lately occurred to me to ask how the manuscripts got into these government libraries. After all, most of them were created by monks, owned by churches, and housed in monastery libraries. Yet a vast number of them are now in the hands of these government institutions. How came they there?

The short answer is that these governments attacked the monasteries, drove out the monks, and looted their possessions.

In England, this was the first step of the Reformation. Henry VIII dissolved, by Act of Parliament, all the major monasteries of England and confiscated their property. This amounted to perhaps a quarter or a third of the land of England—most of which, within a generation, had passed out of the Crown and into the hands of the aristocracy. In one stroke, the government of England maimed the Church forever.

In France it was the Revolution. Cluny, for centuries the largest monastery in the world, was wrecked and looted. The Revolutionary government, like the English two centuries earlier, dissolved many of the monasteries and confiscated their property. France, at one time the heart of Christendom, likewise maimed the Church forever.

The religious orders are the muscles of the Church. Without them, the Church is like a body with bones, blood vessels, and skin, but no muscle. It lives, but it can accomplish nothing that requires exertion. It has no strength and no mass. It cannot defend itself.

And then I began to see that the whole progress of the modern world in the last five centuries has been united in one thing: the destruction of the religious orders. At every important stage in modern civilization they have been wrecked in one way or another. Let’s just run through the examples that come easily to mind:

1) The Reformation. The Reformers attack the Church in the name of Christianity. In England Henry VIII destroys the religious orders; in other places they are broken up more piecemeal. France and the other former Roman provinces (except England) hold out.

2) The French Revolution. The Revolution attacks the Church in the name of democracy. The Revolutionaries sack many of the monasteries and do their best to destroy the Church. Napoleon takes the Pope captive and confiscates much of the papal library.

3) The unification of Germany. Bismarck attacks the Church in the name of German nationalism in the kulturkampf.

4) The unification of Italy. The Italian government attacks the Church in the name of Italian nationalism and seizes the papal states. The Pope considers himself a prisoner in the Vatican until 1929.

5) The First and Second World Wars. These of course were more a case of Europe attacking itself than specifically the Church, and everyone shared in the devastation. But mark that this was one more stage when monasteries were broken and their property was destroyed or passed into government hands.

6) The Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks attack the Church in the name of communism.

7) Likewise the Spanish Civil War.

8) The Sixties and after. The left attacks the Church in the name of relativism. The remaining religious orders in the West begin to evaporate like smoke.

            Looking at this sketch of history, I am tempted to say that the defining feature of modernity is the destruction of the Church. It seems that every important stage in the last five centuries of Western history has been accompanied by the further destruction of the Church. First the Church as an economic body—then as a political body—finally as a spiritual body, which is the attack we are still enduring. Moreover the various modern ‘ideologies’ are incompatible with each other and generally hate each other. Protestant Christianity, liberal democracy, scientific rationalism, communism, relativism, nihilism—what do these have in common except that they all have made it their mission to attack the Church?

            From this perspective, any attempt from within the Church to ‘modernize’ appears as the Church choosing to contribute to its own destruction. Look at what has happened since the Second Vatican Council, the great council about ‘the Church in the Modern World.’ The religious orders have been corrupted or been reduced to shreds. Simply put, Catholics have joined in the attack on the Church as an economic and political body, and in many cases as a spiritual body. The Church has become modern; that is, the Church has become suicidal.

Is the Bible the foundation of Christianity?

I’d like to come back to the question about how much of the Bible could be debunked before I would stop believing. Lots of Christians have perpetuated the error that the Bible is the indispensable foundation of the Christian faith—i.e. no Bible, no Christianity.

The foundation of the Christian faith is not the Bible, but Christ. That is why I did not answer “if you showed that the Bible was wrong about X, I would stop being a Christian.” The Bible *witnesses* to Christ, and tell us things *about* Christ; but if we lost the Bible, or if it had never existed, we would still have Christ. And we know about Christ from the Church.

The accounts of Christ’s life in the Gospels were written down several decades after his death, for people who *had already come to believe*. The Gospels were not meant to be the founding texts of the Church, like the Constitution is for the United States. They were written down *by* the Church which already existed, for the benefit of the Church, composed of people who already believed, having known Christ or heard the preaching of the Apostles. The Gospels were written down so that when the Apostles who personally knew Christ had died, the Church would not lose their memories of His life.

The earliest historical documents are not the Gospels but St Paul’s letters. Even very skeptical atheist scholars accept that most of these are genuine and were written in the decade after A.D. 50. Jesus died in about A.D. 30—in other words, Paul’s letters stand in relation to Jesus as we stand in relation to the Little Mermaid movie, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and Metallica’s album And Justice For All.

In Paul’s letters we find the foundations of the Church already present: Christ’s death on the cross, the Resurrection, the Redemption from sin, the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper (that is, the Mass), heaven and hell, and Christ’s Second Coming.

It’s the Church who witnesses to Christ, not only the Bible. It was not the Bible who told me about Christ; it was my friend A., while we were making pizzas in the back of a pizzeria. Even if you don’t believe in the Bible at all, you can still see the Christian vision: God saw man’s sorry state, and became one of us and entered human history—not as a mythical figure, but in Roman Palestine in the time of Caesar Augustus—and died on a cross to save us from our sins, and rose from the dead, and left us the Church to bring that Redemption to us. What does that mean if it’s true?