Odds and Ends

Living in the Green Bay media market, I received pretty heavy coverage of the Marinette hostage situation.  My only expertise on Marinette is having driven through it a few times.  I don’t really feel like entering into the “we need to do something” or “people are overreacting” mode of analysis.  The pleading for a “rational explanation” and what signs were overlooked deserves more comment, but I’ll just say that we have overwhelming evidence that our confidence in discernment is unwarranted.  Being an odds and ends column, I’m going  to talk about a rather minor detail.  In some raw video shortly after the student-hostages were released from the courthouse – they were transported there to be reunited with family – I saw a number of students who appeared to be smoking.  They ducked away from cameras rather quickly.  I couldn’t think of a more normal reaction if I were in such a situation.  I’m quite frankly surprised that I noticed this detail.  All the badgering over smoking has raised my social consciousness apparently.

In a bit of an ironic twist, I have become more willing to defer to experts on various topics at the same time that my disillusionment with professionals has waxed significantly.  The latter is easy enough to explain.  As I’ve gained expertise in a number of topics and have had the benefit of hindsight, I’ve found a lot of academic work and professional analysis to simply be atrocious.   Rather than well-thought out and careful analysis, the norm seems to be off the cuff thoughts and tribal appeals.  The best, most rigorous, and brightest are not rewarded.  The connected and those most soothing to the ears are rewarded.  This isn’t going to end well as a professor I know put it in a similarly tempered conversation.  This however doesn’t explain the former sentiment.  Often going under the guise of common sense, I have lost faith in the ability of popular wisdom to solve our problems.  As deficient as the professionals have been, at least they are trying.  Popular wisdom seems to simply want to ignore issues or pretend there are “win-win” solutions to every problem, no matter how strained credulity must become in order to subscribe to such a belief.  Then there is the whole matter of what everyone knows to be true that simply ain’t.  With the economic crisis, far too many people I know have been found to simply be full of it when it comes to how people live.  While probably from a sense of shame, many folks took to be a personal trouble what was clearly a macro phenomenon: the loss of income in the upper-middle to lower classes, the increase in their expenses, and the use of credit to make up the differences.  I don’t think people are too perceptive of their fellow man, and I think there is a lot of play acting going on out there.  Too often the appeal to popular sentiment is just a lazy and discredited appeal to authority.

I have mixed thoughts about the Catholic blogsphere.  I’m coming around to thinking it is about as useful as gathering a bunch of recently divorced men in order to discern what women are like.  While perhaps I’m being a bit clericalist on this point, but in what age did lay catholics sit around obsessing over the writings of bishops and popes?  Certainly the theological education of Americans (I won’t speak for other peoples) is abysmal, be they catholic or secular.  Yes, even a bonafide secularist in past ages had decent biblical knowledge, although I’m not quite sure where the division between trivia and knowledge was there.  In short, one should at least have a base knowledge to consider oneself competent.  But the blogsphere isn’t about competency, it is beyond that.  The natural question is then to what end?  To increase my holiness and aid others in increasing theirs is an easy enough answer, but I imagine blogs have the success rate of a Jack Chick tract in that regard.  I’m afraid the answer is closer to the more banal: amusement.  In as much as this amusement is a diversion from a real social life, one seems prone to conclude that it is destructive.  It isn’t like the signs aren’t there.  When you read about people’s interaction with their parishes – a rare thing – they seem to have more the markings of a tourist than a vested member.  (Of course there are exceptions to this.)  Certainly there is value in the objective (tourist) frame, but distance can impede perception.  There are many things you can’t understand until you are in the thick of them.