Complexity and Stimulation: An Interesting Thought from Bruce Charlton

I mentioned the conservative academic Bruce Charlton yesterday. He kindly makes his book available online, and today I was browsing his book Addicted to Distraction: Psychological Consequences of the Mass Media.

He suggests that our constant interaction with the hyper-stimulating mass media (by which he also means social media) is actually making us more simple-minded, and supports this with some very interesting claims:

It is primarily when our brains are ‘offline’, including asleep, that complexity is generated – in other words complexity of ideas does not come from the external environment but from inside the head – from the internal workings of the mind.

(See “The Sleep Elaboration–Awake Pruning (SEAP) theory of memory”, by Bruce G. Charlton and Peter Andras; published in the journal Medical Hypotheses; 2009; Volume 73: pages 1-4.)

This is not the whole story, of course, since such relationships are reciprocal, and our minds certainly need input – but the usual idea is wrong that human ideas ‘come into the brain’ from the environment, and complex thoughts therefore derive from a complex environment. By this account old-time rural dwellers necessarily had simple thoughts since they lived in simple environments; while modern city dwellers have complex thoughts to reflect their complex environment.

If complexity of cognition is something put-into the mind from outside; then the extravert, the sociable, the widely read, the culture vulture, the traveller – one who draws stimulus from his environment is therefore the paradigm of complex thinking.

Yet I suggest that in reality almost the opposite is the case – so long as we compare like-with-like (that is, compare people with similar psychological characteristics, but in different environments).

It makes more sense to see complexity as coming from within, and this complexity being typically constrained by the environment.

So a complex, information-rich, and highly-stimulating environment actually causes the mind to simplify, by the environment ‘culling’ more innately-generated complexity. Thus those most engaged with other people and with the Mass Media would be expected to have simpler cognitive processes than they would-have; if they had been more solitary, detached, autonomous individuals.

This tallies with something I've often noticed before. It's a strange paradox, but very extroverted people are very often the people with the least amount of interesting things to say, and with the most banal conversation-- or so it often appears to me. I'd often wondered why people who converse the most would have the worst conversation. Perhaps this explains it?

(Of course, this is not true of all very extroverted people.)

Political Correctness is Not a Sect or a Minority

A comment somebody left under another post set me thinking about political correctness today. Particularly, the commenter wondered if people with a "snowflake" mentality might never have been treated as precious snowflakes in their childhood, and thus seek to be so treated in adulthood.

Now, this comment was a very reasonable suggestion in the context, and pertained particularly to 'snowflakes' and not PC in general. But it got me thinking.

I've often encountered the theory that political correctness is rooted in somebody's personality, circumstances, or life experience. Usually the theory is put forward in an unflattering way, and the implication is that the PC brigade are a minority, even a tiny minority.

I don't believe this. I believe most people are politically correct. And if it's not an outright majority (as the very narrow victory of Brexit, as well as the comment box reaction to many internet articles, makes me hope), it's a very large and powerful minority. I think it's in the very air we breathe.

I don't think PC is a response to some kind of personal failure or neurosis. I think 'the PC brigade' are happy and sad, successful and less successful, balanced and unbalanced, gregarious and misanthropic, religious and secular, and most every other mix you could think of.

I think the PC virus is a virus that infects healthy hosts just as easily as unhealthy hosts. Maybe more easily.

Bruce Charlton, in his book Thought Prison, puts it very starkly. He might be exaggerating, but only slightly:

Political correctness obviously dominates its core territory of politics, public administration (the civil service), law, education and (especially!) the mass media. But PC also substantially shapes everything else: foreign policy, the military, policing, the economy, health services, and personal life: the mating game, friendships and even family life.

Therefore political correctness is objectively totalitarian.

Just as with the cruder totalitarianism of the mid-twentieth century, PC has created a population that lives in fear: fear of being denounced and losing everything – fear of committing (or indeed merely being accused-of) a thought crime or uttering a hate fact for which there is no defence; fear of the sanctions which range from social ostracism, through loss of job, financial penalties, up to directed mob violence and imprisonment.

Consequently the mass of people, especially those of status - with power and influence – have learned and internalized the constraints of political correctness, so that it is now something inside us, as well as pressing upon us. The lies, shabbiness and wickedness of PC now permeate our very thought processes.

Charlton didn't explicitly mention religion in that excerpt, but it's certainly no exception. In fact, I think the Catholic Church is now engulfed in something like a civil war because political correctness has penetrated it so deeply. That's how seriously I think PC needs to be taken.

The entire book can be read for free online, and is worth reading.

I realise that many of my readers, possibly most of my readers, will think I am exaggerating, perhaps even smile indulgently: "There goes Mal again, what a character! I wonder what got him so riled up." I honestly believe I'm not exaggerating.

This talk from the Irish journalist John Waters (which I attended) treats the situation with the gravity I think it deserves. Of course, it's from an Irish perspective. When he says: "In Ireland, we don't have a media. We have something else", I think he's quite right.

(Coincidentally, I've just checked Bruce Charlton's blog and, this very day, he's announced he's suspending blogging after seven years of blogging daily, and may stop permanently. Padraig Ó Fiannachta, the incredibly prolific and energetic Irish priest, who pushed through the full translation of an Irish language Bible which had languished for decades, died at the age of 89 last year-- just as I was reading his biography. Rick Parfitt of Status Quo died mere weeks ago, one day after I'd watched the movie Bula Quo. I'm beginning to think I'm a curse.) 

I Love This Quotation

Two things have constantly pulled at cross-purposes in me: one a deep homing instinct, a desire beyond all words to be at home always, with the same beloved faces, the same familiar shapes and sounds about me; the other an impulse to seek hard things to do, to go on quests and fight lost causes. And neither thing, neither the quiet home life nor the perilous adventure, has ever brought me any content.

Those are the words of Patrick Pearse, the famous Irish nationalist, poet, educationalist, insurrectionist, and all-round idealist. I had his poem "The Fool" off by heart in my teens, and it expressed my rampantly idealistic view of the world perfectly.

Today, I have much more ambiguous feelings about the 1916 Rising, and the loss of civilian life it caused. But I remain fascinated by Pearse, and wholeheartedly admire his cultural nationalism.

I went to the Pearse museum, housed in the building where he ran an experimental school, only a few weeks ago, and saw the manuscript in which those words are written.

I love the quotation itself, quite aside from its connection to Pearse. It expresses my own feelings.

Nothing seems more delicious to me, in one mood, than friendship and companionship, easy and good-humoured conversation,  playfulness, peace, shelter, safety from unpleasantness and acrimony, even the sensation of being hidden away. From at least my teens I've had a recurring fantasy of just staying in bed all the time and never having to see anybody except people I like. I would be ashamed to admit how elaborately I've spun this fantasy, and similar fantasies, over the years. The song "Mull of Kintyre" expresses this feeling for me very powerfully.

But there's another side of my personality that-- to be frank-- really wants a fight. As long as it's a battle of ideas, of ideals, rather than a clash of personalities. And this part of me only feels really alive when I'm in the thick of it, in some way. (This is why I was so crushed not to get to speak on that TV programme about political correctness.)

The thought came to me because I've just been commenting on a liberal Catholic blog. I get really absorbed in something like that, and then I think: "Why did I do that? I'm going to get lots of grief now. I won't look at it again, I don't want to see the bitching." And sometimes I don't look again, but other times I do. I've often sent strident and politically incorrect letters to the newspaper and then, waking up in the morning, found myself thinking: "God, I hope they didn't publish it". But I'm over that by my first cup of tea.

I remember, when I was a boy, my mother bought me a packet of plastic soldiers when I was sick. Then, the next day (I was still sick), she bought me another packet "so they can have enemies to fight against". I thought this was very motherly and sensible.

Speaking of getting up in the morning, here is a poem by A.E. Housman that expresses how I feel every single time I have to get up earlier than I want to:

Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.

Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what's to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I've done my best
And all's to do again.

I wonder how common the fantasy of simply staying asleep indefinitely is? It often strikes me. In my early twenties I read a Clive Barker novel called Sacrament in which a photographer is mawled by a polar bear, and a good chunk of the novel is flashbacks of his early life while he's comatose. I found that deliciously cosy. In my almost-publishable novel The Bard's Apprentice, available in its entirety on this blog, the main character spends weeks in an artificial sleep inside a magical lake, reliving his life. I put it in because I liked the idea of such a womb-like refuge. "The Chorus of the Lotos Eaters" by Alfred Tennyson expresses a similiar idyll, and I constantly recited it to myself in my perpetually-exhausted early teens:

We have had enough of action, and of motion we, Roll'd to starboard, roll'd to larboard, when the surge was seething free, Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea. Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind, In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

"To Helen" by Edgar Allen Poe is one of my all-time favourite poems because it manages to combine both these ideas-- of homecoming and of quest. ("On desperate seas long wont to roam" is a miracle of a line. I can hear and feel the motion of the tides in it.) The best line I have ever written myself, in my view, is the final line of the poem I read to my wife at our wedding reception: "When I see your face, what I am looking at is home." I believe that is what men find in feminine beauty; a homecoming.

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!

Special Snowflakes, the Good and the Bad

We're living at a time of massive backlash against political correctness, and I think it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. I think it's long overdue, I think it should be supported by us all, and I have no hesitation cheering it on.

One of the phrases that has become current, as a part of this backlash against political correctness, is "special snowflake". Special snowflakes (or just "snowflakes", for short) are people whose delicate sensibilities are injured by the expression of any opinion which they consider to be racist, homophobic, sexist, transphobic, etc. etc.

I'm all for the use of that expression, too. Political correctness needs to be not only opposed but derided, laughed out of existence.

At the same time...

I'd never really heard the term "snowflake" before, but I've learned that it comes from something mothers supposedly tell their children: "You're a special snowflake!". That is, you're unique, special, one of a kind.

Well, insofar as it means that, I agree with it. We are all special snowflakes. Didn't Jesus tell us every hair on our heads was counted?

This topic came into my mind because I've just been staring into the flame of a candle, and thinking how beautiful it is. How gentle, soft, comforting, dreamy.

What is it about candles? We seem to associate them with every ceremony which is a little bit sappy. Rock audiences famously hold up lighters when a rock band is playing a sentimental power ballad. There seems to be something about naked flames which brings out the warm fuzzies, or which is appropriate to the warm fuzzies.

Recently I've been reading a lot of back issues of An Sagart, the journal of Cumann na Sagairt, an association of Irish-speaking priests (and religious brothers and sisters). 

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was that I was only going to read the Bible and An Sagart, unless I was reading something for a very particular purpose. (That is, I wasn't going to get distracted by some book I happened to come across, or get sidetracked into literary infatuations such as studying the philosophy of Heidegger or immersing myself in film reviews. I would be disciplined and continuous.) I've kept it so far. 

I've been photocopying back issues of An Sagart so I can read it at home, as well. It's pure gold. I find it difficult to get my hands on suitable Irish language reading, because it's mostly novels that are available, and the novels try oh-so-hard to be 'edgy' and zeitgeisty and contemporary. I want something that reflects my own view of the world, where I feel at home.

The holdings of An Sagart that we have in the library are from the nineteen seventies until today. That is, they cover what I like to call the era of "the hippie priest". I grew up in the era of the hippie priest, and I think it persevered until the nineties.

I'm rather nostalgic for the era of the Irish hippie priest. The thing to be borne in mind is that Irish hippie priests weren't necessarily liberal. For the most part, I think, they were orthodox. Some were even notably conservative. But there was a tremendous emphasis on God's love, on prayer as an encounter with the divine, on spiritual and psychological well-being, on nature, on kindness and gentleness and compassion, on feelings, on art and poetry and creativity, on the person, and so forth. There was something very soft and warm about it, like the light of a candle.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that, as long as it's held within the bounds of orthodoxy. Which (in the case of Ireland) it was, more or less, until about twenty years ago.

I don't mind admitting that I'm a bit of a hippie myself, in this sense of the word.

But, once you step over the bounds of orthodoxy, compassion becomes indulgence, emotion becomes self-pity, poetry replaces theology, nature becomes an idol,  and pride and rebelliousness get the upper hand. (In the secular realm, it is tradition rather than orthodoxy which is rejected. but much the same effects ensue.)

That's what we have today. Gentleness, past a certain point, is replaced by rage. The v-sign becomes the clenched fist.

In both secular culture and in the Church, those who are reacting against political correctness have assumed an attitude of bullishness and abrasiveness which is, I think, inevitable, but which I rather regret. I regret its necessity.

I want to be able to assure everybody that they are special snowflakes, without encouraging victimology and resentment and radical egalitarianism.

Enemies of political correctness often say: "I don't care about your feelings". I think this, too, is unfortunate, but probably necessary. Emotional blackmail has become so widespread today-- "that offends me as an X, Y or Z!"-- that the line has to be drawn.

But I hope this is a passing phase. I would like to see political correctness completely and utterly wiped out, so that we can return to a social and religious discourse that allows a proper place to the softer emotions, and to gentleness.

Praying the Rosary on the Bus

I've been praying the rosary on my morning bus, every workday, for two years or longer. I don't pray with my beads in my pocket. I take them out, and I don't make any secret of the fact that I'm praying the rosary.

When I mentioned this to a priest friend, an Opus Dei priest who is very orthodox, he was rather dubious about it. He said: "I'm not going to say it's right and I'm not going to say it's wrong, but it depends on your motive." This deterred me for a little while. I can't remember if I stopped praying the rosary on the bus altogether, or if I was more discreet about it. But eventually I overcame these scruples.

Of course, I've reflected on our Lord's words about the Pharisees praying on street corners, and his recommedation that we go into our inner room to pray to our Father with nobody watching.

I don't think this really applies, though. Our Lord was talking about a culture where piety was admired and socially prestigious. We live in a culture where the very opposite is true, where people are embarrassed to admit to religious belief and practice. That's why I do it. (Aside from the fact that it's a convenient time, and a good way to start the day.)  It's also why I have a framed Divine Mercy picture standing on my desk at work.

Most of the time, before eating, I say a silent grace. But, when I'm eating my lunch in the staff room at work, I often make the sign of the cross over my food. Again, I think of it as an act of witness.

I'm pretty sure I don't do any of this in the hope that anyone will form a higher opinion of me. I don't imagine for a moment that they will. 

I do it because I want Catholicism to be more visible in everyday life. I inwardly cheer when I see a priest wearing his clerical clothes on the street, or when I see a nun (yes, I know they're not all "nuns", but let's not be pedantic) in her habit. I'm pleased when anybody invokes God or Jesus in ordinary conversation, or when a celebrity thanks God during a speech. I'm pleased when I see someone wearing a Catholic badge or pin of some kind. I'm pleased when I see a Christian street preacher.

Secularists want to push, push, push religion out of the sphere of public life, and little things like praying the rosary on the bus are my own way of pushing back. Is it wrong of me? I hope not.

Nobody has ever said anything to me about it, one way or the other. Nobody has given me a funny look, sniggered, or asked me to pray for them. I'm a bit self-conscious when I'm surrounded by teenagers taking the bus to school, but even they've never passed comment.

Even aside from religion, I cherish most departures from drab conformity in the public sphere. I took great pleasure in seeing a storm trooper walk down O'Connell Street when The Force Awakens was released. I like it when Scottish rugby fans wear kilts. (If we must have Scots, let them at least wear kilts.) I like seeing African women in their native dress. I like seeing a man with a serious beard, or side burns, or smoking a pipe. I like people singing in public.

What about your love of distinctions, and the distinction between the private and the public?, I hear you ask.

I don't think this applies, either. It seems to me that we have too much bad formality and not enough good formality in social life. Good formality is what you get in Mass or in parliament. Bad formality is what you get in the street or at a work meeting. It's conformity without solemnity. It has all the restraint of formality with none of its gravitas. It's tame, lame, and a shame. I say the hell with it!

The Door's Still Open

I''m still writing my weekly column on G.K. Chesterton for The Open Door magazine. It's a local magazine distributed for free over a small region in the east of Ireland. Every Wednesday (usually), I wrote four hundred and twenty words about some aspect of G.K. Chesterton's thought. Every Friday (usually) I get the previous week's edition in my pigeon-hole in work. I have a big stack of them now, with their distinctive red covers, heaped up in my bedroom. It's a bona fide Tradition, having run for about three years now.

Rather surprisingly, given its limited reach, quite a lot of people have seen the articles and mentioned them to me.

Writing this column gives me great pleasure for several reasons:

1) I'm spreading Chesterton's ideas.

2) I always get a thrill from having my words published in print, in whatever form. It doesn't get old.

3) I like the fact that it's local.

4) I like the fact that it's seasonal.

Let me say something about localism. (I've resisted the temptation to decorate this post with a picture of the shopkeeper in The League of Gentlemen TV series, famous for his "this is a local shop for local people" catchphrase.) 

I'm a localist, as well as a nationalist and a regionalist. I like everything to have an identity. I like small things. I think small is beautiful. I wish every neighbourhood had its own flag. (As with my nationalism, my localism is more cultural than political.)

G.K. Chesterton was also a localist, and his Napoleon of Notting Hill is possibly the only localist novel ever written. It's a fantasy in which the different boroughs of London are given autonomy, develop all the ceremony and regalia of Medieval city states, and even go to war with each other.

The global is not particularly exciting, now that every Facebook post and tweet can be visible to the whole world. But a magazine that's generally only available in a very small geographical territory...I find that exciting.

On the Irish Catholic Forum, where I often post, one gentleman is a partisan of a confederal Ireland, the idea that every region in Ireland should seek become semi-autonomous, develop its own identity, and that Ireland would become a federation. This is a point of view that has won quite a few adherents in Ireland over the years. I'm not opposed to the idea of local autonomy, but I do dislike it if localism or regionalism is seen as an alternative to nationalism, rather than a complement to nationalism. (The most famous proponent of this idea, Desmond Fennell, seems to see it in this way. He wrote a book called Beyond Nationalism.)

This is how I argued it on the forum. (I would no longer agree that Irish nationalism was a secular and Protestant creation and that I'm OK with that. I'm certainly OK with the Protestant input, but my Irish nationalism is innately Catholic and it's only the Catholic strain of Irish nationalism with which I identify.)
 
This is an interesting discussion because it is making me examine my own suppositions. Why does local identity seem subsidiary to national identity, to me? I think it's because the very virtues of local identity are also its shortcomings. It would be great if everybody was involved in their local community and knew the place and the people very well, but I feel cultural identity does have to be bigger than that-- the air you breathe, the backdrop of your existence. It has to be 'meta', to some extent, to include places you haven't been and people you have never met, to evoke the atmosphere of the sublime. Ulysses returning to Ithica is certainly coming home in a special sense, but the Greeks who went to Troy with him were his wider culture.

Desmond Fennell himself even hints of this when he uses the phrase 'a representative community' to describe a nation. Local communities are not going to have airports and world-class poets and universities and hospitals and all the things that are part of national life; they will always seem more partial and fragmentary, part of a whole, than a nation. (But, once again, I'm not at all opposed to the project of decentralisation of media and government.)

I also dislike the waste of abandoned projects which don't have to be abandoned. I agree that modern nationalism was a secular and Protestant invention, but I don't have a problem with that. Generations put a huge amount of effort into the project of 'traditional' Irish nationalism, and great gains were made. It seems to dishonour that, in my view, if we decide that old-fashioned nationalism was on the wrong path, especially if there is no compelling reason to do so. I am for reviving that project, which has demonstrated that it can galvanise tens of thousands of people (or more).

So, in brief; I am all in favour of strengthening and promoting local identities, but within the umbrella of cultural nationalism rather than as an alternative to it. If it is done as 'the next thing', yet another form of revisionism, I am even against it. You cannot preserve or create traditions by continually starting again. 

And finally, a word about seasonality.


The "unto everything there is a season" passage in Ecclesiastes is one of the most sublime pieces of poetry ever written, in my view. Seasonality is utterly fascinating. I love boundaries in both time and space. I love the idea that "this is here, not anywhere else". Or, "This is now, not any other time". Or "We are us, not them."

I've always loved collections of newspaper columns. I love reading articles that pertain to a particular moment in time, whether it's something regular and widespread like Christmas, or something much more specific like a general election, or a political scandal, or a papal visit. I like coming across cultural and topical references which are now obscure.

I love especially reading these articles long, long after they are written.

Such writing has a charm all its own. It's not like some timeless and deathless poem (Poe's 'Raven', for example) which transcends its era and original audience and speaks to the ages, to universal humanity. It's not so grandiose. Its very limits give it its charm. It feels more intimate.

So I enjoy putting references to the time of year, and to recent events, in my weekly column.

When I was a kid, I came across a yellowed page from a newspaper-- I think it might have been used as lining for the bottom of a drawer-- that showed a picture of a woman in a bikini, on the beach, and had the headline "Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer". I'd never heard the phrase before and found it madly evocative. (I still do.) But the thing I really found delicious was the contrast between the yellowed newspaper, used to line the bottom of a drawer, and the glamour of the picture. Somehow the distance in time and atmosphere made the summer seem more real, more summery.

I reminds me of the last two verses of Philip Larkin's 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album':

So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence;
To wonder if you'd spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,
No matter whose your future; calm and dry,
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there,
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

My Comment on Mark Shea's Blog

Mark Shea is a writer I used to respect and look up to so much. I also think he's a nice guy. I asked him to plug a few different things on his blog and he always did, and also to make a prayer request of his readers which he obligingly did. Fair dues to him.

His Mary, Mother of the Son trilogy is a book I've read at least three times, always with pleasure and profit. Indeed, it really unlocked the whole idea of sacred tradition for me. (The title is even mentioned in my famous-to-fifteen 'purple notebook', though I'm seriously thinking of excising that particular line.)

So I'm deeply saddened at his recent descent into militant leftism and (amongst other things) his demonizing of Donald Trump and Trump supporters.

Look; you can ardently dislike Trump if you want. I get that. You can think he's a sleazebag and a braggart. I get that. But to pretend he is some kind of civilizational threat, to make him out as a uniquely terrible President, seems ridiculous to me, especially when his policies are supported by so many millions of ordinary Americans, many of them Catholic. He's acting entirely within his democratic powers. There's no reason to suppose he's any more likely to start a Third World War than any previous President; it seems perfectly obvious that his apparent hot-headedness is actually very calculated. I think the world was probably saved from a Third World War by the defeat of Hillary Clinton.

Also, Shea has been very uncharitable towards those who are worried by the whole Amoris Laetitia controversy. He seems to think they are proponents of Fortress Catholicism who want to push as many people out of the Church as possible. In the post to which I was replying, he argued that Catholicism is about "here comes everybody", not doctrinal purity.

I wrote:

You say 'here comes everybody'. What about the millions of people who you seem to lump in with the Alt Right, who are extremely tired of the mud-slinging of "racism" and "sexism" at every opinion that doesn't dovetail with political correctness, who might be more or less sympathetic with Breitbart's angle? Are they "Alt Right filth" too? I say this as someone who doesn't even read Breitbart.

"Here comes everybody" is fine if it means the universality of the Church. But if it means yet more watering down of of doctrine and discipline, after decades of this has utterly failed to bring about a Catholic springtime and led to ever more of the kind of haemorrhaging you describe, then this just seems perverse to me. I doesn't work. It. Doesn't. Work. When will that lesson sink in?

You keep missing the point about Amoris Laetitia. It's not the text that has critics in 'hysterics', nor are they "Francis haters", it's the radical interpretations of it that fly in the face of St. John Paul the Great's teachings and the whole Catholic tradition, that are totally contrary to the views of the Chesterton you quote so often. (Read "The Surrender upon Sex" in the Well and the Shallows.) I've looked in vain on your blog for some condemnation of the bishops and bishops' conferences who have used Amoris as a pretext to cave in to the spirit of the age. Apologies if I've simply missed this. I can understand you refraining from such criticism out of a sense of docility, but to condemn other people for defending Catholic orthodoxy (nearly always in a way that is respectful towards the Holy Father), seems very cheap indeed. Even if you disagree with them, why can't you accept that they are motivated by sincere concern for the faith once delivered to the saints, rather than this rabid heretic-hunting you keep portraying?

And, by the way, I have attended a grand total of two Traditionalist masses in my life, I'm against the death penalty, I'm all for some social welfare, and I agree with a minimum wage. Stop the caricatures, Mr. Shea. Stop politicising the Faith, and go back to defending mere Catholicism like you used to do.

Mr. Shea replied, merely telling me to learn to live with disagreement. That's fine. He has a busy blog and mine was only one comment of many. But I'm glad I weighed in.