Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.
-Graham Greene, The Quiet American

HOUSTON IS SAFER TODAY:

...Think about what you’re putting on the air. There’s no law that requires you to accommodate the police every time they want to flex their muscles on the evening news. In one of the videos linked above, the news team shoves a camera into a woman’s face as she’s stepping into the wagon. The reporter then shouts questions at the woman—this just after the reporter points out the possibility that the woman she’s humiliating and zooming in on may be a sex slave.

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THREE MYTHS ABOUT THE CHURCH TO GIVE UP FOR LENT. From the unimportance of monsignors to the crucial witness of martyrs. I'd say 95% of public discussion of Catholicism in this country assumes the truth of all of these myths.

(Also, if PG Wodehouse shuffled back onto this mortal coil, I'd like to think his next book would be called The Unimportance of Monsignors.)

OKAY THEN!

The online producers at CBS posted a photo slideshow the other day that appeared under the following rather literal headline:

Activists Hold Annual March For Life On Roe v. Wade Anniversary

So, just thinking out loud, what percentage of the pictures in this gallery would you expect to be of, well, the thousands and thousands of activists who traveled to Washington, D.C., in order to take part in the annual March For Life on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade?

If you guessed anything other than zero, you would be wrong.

There are literally no pictures of any pro-lifers in this feature.

more--in the comments you can read that the slideshow was changed to be 50/50 marchers/protesters sometime today. This (Mollie's comment at 7.47 pm) is also worth noting.

DEVELOPING CONFLICTS: Some quick thoughts about Time Stands Still, at the Studio Theater through 2/12.

The play is about a war photographer and her reporter boyfriend; when she's almost killed on the job, they retreat to their Brooklyn apartment and try to figure out how to move forward with their lives. There are only two supporting characters, Richard the somewhat plastic editor and his new fiancee Mandy the cliched, saccharine Americaness. (After one scene with Mandy I found myself thinking, "Wait, but I thought this play was written by a woman?" It wasn't.)

There are a lot of problems with this play. It can be cheap and predictable (of course the photographer's much-divorced, horrible father is a conservative Christian! of course Mandy is much younger than Richard!) and the big-idea lines are often pat. The shifts in audience identification are what you might expect: Mandy gets her moments, etc. The actual war-zone descriptions are a bit tinny--I wasn't super surprised to find out after the show, from the playwright bio in the program, that David Margulies wrote it because he was troubled by his life in Connecticut rather than because he was troubled by his many trips to Iraq, you know?

That said, the play's heart is clearly in its portrayal of "emerging adulthood," anchorless people who are no longer as young as they act, people to whom life is starting to catch up.

I think one contrast between Sarah the photographer and Jamie the reporter/boyfriend is that he's trying to be a man, and she's trying to be an adult. Her task is more straightforward, and she's a more straightforward character in general. The way longing for connection and stability shapes a man is portrayed very keenly and subtly here. (I initially thought that Sarah had been captured, and that the suppressed aggression in Jamie's haunted eyes would come forward more directly. That didn't happen, and I think the play is better for it. Holly Twyford is pretty terrific as Sarah, but on the basis of those sunken eyes I'm giving the award here to Greg McFadden as Jamie.)

There are also some hints about the ways in which disaster-journalism requires the complicity of the suffering locals; the ethical dilemmas inherent in the practice are sharpened when the locals don't hand themselves over to the camera.

I'm glad I saw this and I'd generally recommend it, despite its flaws.

ALL MY SINS MISREMEMBERED: Review of David Carr's Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life--His Own. I've read a bunch of addiction memoirs this past year, and this is the one which spoke to me the most, by far. Carr is a reporter and editor (currently writing for the New York Times, but I promise not to hold that against him), and he decided to use his investigative techniques to figure out what really happened during his years of addiction to alcohol and cocaine. He did interviews and reviewed the documentary record--rehab admittance reports, police reports, all the old bad memories.

You can tell what he found from the Norman Mailer tagline he uses: "Who could tell anymore where was what? Liars controlled the locks." Some of his mismemories turned out to make him seem worse than he'd really been--but mostly he found that he'd been much more of a thug and a loser than he'd let himself remember. He'd hurt women, made violent threats, and even after a rock-bottom night on which he left his infant twin daughters alone in the car while he smoked crack, he took months to finally get clean. (He'd remembered that as the turning point. And it was... but big trucks make wide turns, and they take some time.)

Carr's prose style is roughed-up, not quite tabloid, with a fine streak of gallows humor. (The chapter on his relapse is titled, "Additional Research.") The book is also deeply forgiving, with compassion toward literally everyone who crossed the path of Carr's trainwreck: not just his first wife, the dealer, but also, for example, the people who ran his last rehab, a somewhat ramshackle affair with too much emphasis on humiliation and restriction for your own good ("There is no humility without humiliation," as Mother Theresa said, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to take it on yourself to humble others) but a lot of genuine love and companionship. Maybe the best example of this aspect of the book is Carr's description of Jayson Blair, whom he clearly views as a fellow addict, fellow newspaperman, and fellow human being--not a catchphrase.

Carr was raised Catholic, in a deeply loving family. I'm sure this is one reason the book spoke to me so much; I'm guessing books with more familial dysfunction will speak more to people who came from more cruel, tumultuous, or broken homes. His descriptions of his own faith, a matter of trust and need and accepting the lack of answers, struck me as powerful and poignant. I may have choked up a bit when he described lying on a couch during a period of brutal cancer treatment, listening to one of his little girls upstairs, guiding her sister through a childlike prayer to Mary. There are snapshots of the ways in which editing can be a leadership role. (I interned at the Washington City Paper while Carr was EIC there, and from my perspective he was a fantastic leader, although he gives ample evidence for an opposing point of view in the book!)

One thing which really struck me about The Night of the Gun is that although his catastrophe days make up the majority of the page count, the book feels like it's much more about recovery and sobriety. Maybe that's because the entire project of the book is a recovery project, so even the darkest parts are embedded in a project of rebuilding the personal integrity shattered by active addiction. It seems like a lot of memoirists fumble for words when trying to describe both the work and the joys of sobriety. There can be a sense that the mere absence of pain is such a relief, in itself, that there's nothing left to describe, just a blank space. Carr really conveys so vividly the working, loving life of gratitude and creation and service.

NEW YORK TIMES STORY BINGO 2011. Not always quite on-target (the aura-cleansing one) and it's not like Fashion Week clothes are supposed to be off-the-rack wearable, but enough of this works that I will allow it. Via IP, but I'm adding this lady to the blogroll because she is funny and interesting and so are her commenters.

NEVER FORGET WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO LIVE IN ROOMS LIKE THESE: GetReligion excerpts the discussion of faith from an NPR interview with David Carr, former Washington City Paper editor-in-chief and the author of one of the very best books I've read this year, The Night of the Gun. I'll write more about his book when I do my year-end roundup, but for now I'll just say that I found his comments on NPR characteristically relatable and down-to-earth and humbled.

CATS AND KITTENS: SOME MOVIE NOTES. Recently watched:

Sweet Smell of Success: This is still one of my very favorite movies. Ferocious and scathing and sad. Tony Curtis is unbelievably charismatic in his sordid, humiliated role; Burt Lancaster is terrifying. Glorious stuff. This time around, I especially noticed how often little sister Susie slipped in some candy-coated cruelty--she may lisp a bit, but she's clearly related to her brother, acidic and even calculating.

Friday Foster: Pam Grier thwarts a race-war plot. That's really all you need to know. There are fashion shows, there is music, there are afros, there is liquor, there are car chases, it is very glamorous and there's lots of shooting! Parts of this are set in DC but it doesn't have any real local color, unfortunately.

The Tomb of Ligeia: Look, this movie has some schlock elements and you've just got to roll with that if you want to have fun here. The screeching demon cat never really works at all, and there's some awesomely bad dialogue ("Let's go for a walk." "A walk?" "Or a stroll! What does it matter?"), and a tiny hint of evil-sapphistry teasing (which is a bonus, really). But you also get really gorgeous sets, one and a half compelling performances (Vincent Price is terrific, and the romantic lead is serviceable when she's playing his contemporary love interest but much better when she's playing the dead/undead Ligeia), and an ultimately painful story about the undertow of grief and the triumph of past over present.

REALLY FANTASTIC INTERVIEW WITH ROCCO PALMO. Via WAWIV. I initially skipped this but went back to it on his recommendation and it was completely worth it.

THE NEW YORK TIMES ON A PARADE OF RARE ARTWORKS. Snerk.

THEORIES OF THE BRITISH PRESS.

"SHAPING THE STORY." Via... DLB maybe?

"WE LIKE LISTENING": The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or, in its American titles, A Girl in Love or Never Read the Comments! SPOILERS, obviously.

Katharina Blum lives in West Germany, and it's Carnival so everyone is loosened-up and in costume. She is generally considered quite prudish, but goes to a party and ends up taking a young man home. He's a terrorist of some unspecified Red hue.

The next morning the cops invade her home. The moment in which the lady cop balances herself by putting her hand on Katharina's naked buttock is especially harsh, almost defining the word "objectification"; and I'll also call your gendered attention to the moment which provokes it, when a male cop is startled by accidental gunfire and he responds to his embarrassment by yelling at Katharina to put on clothes instead of her robe. She is interrogated. Over the course of the next however-many days, she is interrogated (they note that she pays for her own coffee) and newspaper reporters collude in the destruction of her reputation. Her divorce, her parentage, her aunt's life are all dragged through the mud. The press explicitly works hand-in-glove with the government. (“Front-page story” appears to be an Englishism, as Schadenfreude is a Germanicism.)

Katharina's life has its shaming elements, as whose life doesn't?, and those elements are deployed for political gain. This isn't subtle; the "reporters" blatantly lie, and Katharina is excoriated for preferring money to virtue by people who are quite obviously choosing cash over kindness. This is a morality tale about the cruelties inherent in our reality-TV morality tales.

I'm also struck, of course, by how opportunistic we are in our uses of culturally-sanctioned hatred. Katharina's accusers rely on misogyny for exactly the same reason that Sarah Palin's and Hillary Clinton's accusers so often rely on it (and Paris Hilton's or Snooki's, really, while we're here--this isn't about politics so much as it is about publicly-acceptable scapegoatesses): because they can. Play by my rules and I won't call in the referee.

There's so much else to talk about: There's the role of photography in shaping our notion of "truth"; there's the vomit in the toilet of the first cell to which Katharina is led and her pathetic feminine attempt to clean it up. (I think this is somewhat echoed in her insistence in cleaning and caring for her mother's body after death. There's the same association of femininity with vulnerability and shame, and yet also with care and cleaning.) There's Katharina's aunt's reliance on the guest/host relationship in the face of the overwhelming twentieth-century state-vs.-individual bulldozing. There's Katharina's driving, “mostly when it rains and when I'm alone”; the interrogator's viciously dry invocation of scarcity economics ("Perhaps we can learn how to own an apartment"). Surrealism: The stain on the door (echoes of Barton Fink) which Katharina opens to find spies putting on their costumes of sheiks and whores. Carnival gives all kinds of opportunities, to all kinds of maskers. An undeclared life: her unexplained miles on the meter. The ladies' room as the place where alliances might be formed. This is a really intensely-observed movie.

Power is so attentive to the cruelties of detail. Detail gives us our facial features, our humanity, and it's so often the small brutal detail by which we attempt to remove that humanity from others. Power creates its own narratives the same way everyone else does, through the thousand little choices of where to turn the light and where to throw a shadow by which a person is made into a persona. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is as much an indictment of art as anything in Shakespeare. And then there's the anonymous letter-writer, telling her, "Learn to pray again." Absolutely horrible, and absolutely what would happen.

The smash-cut from “We live in a free country!” to the tabloid Joan-Jett-reformatory photos of Katharina is pretty classic. Libertarians often argue that culture will take over from government in sanctioning wrong behavior. I wonder how many of them really want the punishments of internet culture, from which there is no escape. (I know the counterarguments, of which the strongest is that the culture which shapes the non-legal punishments inevitably shapes the legal—government is in no way an escape hatch from the problems of culture, and in many ways compounds those problems, especially due to civil servants' elite status relative to the people they regulate. But I wish more libertarians argued that the government is like a market with guns, whereas corporations are merely markets vying for guns. Or, in other words, Tim Carney for President in 2014!)

“You're divorced. You have no ties.” This is spoken by an interrogator, and is patently false, as it is always false. Divorce is not rewind. Most obviously when there are children; but even when there are not, divorce is never control-Z.

The absolute betrayal on her face, the iron control and the broken trust, is just shattering when she realizes that the priests only let her come to their sanctuary in order to make her conciliate her ex-husband. Again she's forced to recognize that everyone wants to use her new vulnerability to their own ends.

And then the final scene, a speech in favor of the freedom of the press, is over-the-top villainous. All my sympathies are engaged, and yet I can't help but think, Do you really WANT to cut off the branch you're perched on? I don't know, I suppose you could argue that the greatest virtue of unshakable freedom of the press (which has happened where, ever?) is that other artists can point out the destructive effects of the press without calling for censorship.

TWO MORE posts from me at Cato Unbound's traditionalism symposium: "Who Put the Tradition in 'Traditional Marriage'?" and "Tradition's Comedies of Error."

The whole discussion is available here.

HOLY CATS, THIS IS A CLASSIC HEADLINE: "GOP frets it's too surly with the fringe on top."

Via Mark Shea.

IN WHICH I STILL DON'T QUOTE OSCAR WILDE!: EDITED 9/28 to fix a ridiculously stupid mistake! ...I've gotten two terrific pushbacks on my big post about sincerism. You can find Camassia's here. And Miss Ogilvy emailed me thusly:

Just a quick question in reply to your recent "sincerism" posts: where and how does a gay self-identity (as opposed to a queer self-identity, which is a bit more flexible and maybe less self-serious) fit into your arguments against sincerism? I think one could use your definition of sincerism ("requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions," which entails wrongheaded "assumptions about our ability to know ourselves") to diagnose a gay identity as a symptom of sincerism or subservience to the sincerist ideal. Would love to hear your thoughts on this question.

And where and how does a Christian identity fit into your arguments against sincerism? What would a Christian apology for irony look like? Might be interesting to try on the following proposition for size: Protestantism serves the sincerist ideal; Catholicism does not.

Am feeling very sincerist myself as I sort through Gay Christian Whatnot. But I agree with you that the sincerist ideal is a mess.

I think it makes the most sense to reply to both at once. What follows will be so scattershot, it'll make a blunderbuss look like a laser. But I never promised you a precision garden!

From stupid through cute and maybe eventually ending up in worthwhile, let's proceed with our education, one and all....

1) I would never have cited journalism as a sincerist profession! But then my genealogy of the profession looks like "Journalism in Tennessee" --> SOMETHING ELSE AWESOME TK --> the New York Post. I suspect that there are other valid genealogies!

2) Maybe helpful: My problem is not with sincerity. I've seen women at the pregnancy center do amazing work through transparent personal sincerity. (It may be relevant to Camassia's comments that the woman I'm especially thinking of here is black? But I've also seen white women make amazing impacts, forging incredible connections with women who clearly wanted a sincere and heartfelt woman to talk to. In my own counseling, I try to shift between more heartfelt and self-revealing talk as vs. more complicit and nudge-wink talk based on what the client seems to be open to. More on cultures and subcultures, and leadership, in a bit.) My beef is with the attitude that sincerity is always better than other modes of self-presentation. And this I think is a desperately American form of crudeness and anti-aesthetic, democratic/majoritarian well-meaning callowness. More on this in what follows.

3) Camassia's point about anti-sincere strategies serving minority communities in their internal communiques against outside understanding or this-bridge-called-my-back-building is fantastic. I never would've thought of that, actually, and I really take to heart her defense of translation even though I think I still partly disagree.

Some things need to be universally translatable, like the Gospel. But does everything need to translate? Can we preserve some turf where the translator is still a traitor, and if you want to learn the language you'd better be ready to go native?

And what does it mean to be a Christian if your answer to those questions--like mine is, right now--is "no" and "yes"?

I'm not sure, and I think Camassia and Miss Ogilvy are both on to something supremely important. All I can really say in response is that I suspect that sincerism, like boboism ("bourgeois bohemianism"), attempts to assimilate the minority into the majority and translate in that direction--whereas Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija's language to Peter Sprigg's, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa.

I am open to accusations that this contrapposto stance simply reflects my own need to shore up my bohemian self-image. (She said, with a hipshot grin.)

4) I'm tempted to second Miss Ogilvy by saying that the Protestant denigration of "repetitive prayer" is a sincerist stance. I'm not sure if that's true really, because believe me, Protestantism is something I understand about as much as I understand the higher math. But here's something I wrote about repetitive prayer. Confession seems to work (for me, anyway?) somewhat similarly, in that the practice is so humiliating that it makes it unnecessary to dig the awl of self-scrutiny too far in: If I weren't really sorry I WOULDN'T BE HERE, ZOMG.

I think Miss O's suggestion that coming out is an inherently sincerist act is totally fascinating, since of course the gay subculture has traditionally (!) been one of the least sincerist, and yet I totally take her point about how coming out to oneself feels. Anyone have comments? I am at a loss!

5) I can think of two main categories of experience which prompted me to articulate why I think sincerism so often provokes bien-pensant stupidity on one hand, and cruelty-with-the-tweezers on the other. I have a hard time talking about sincerism because I find it much easier to point at than to define, and therefore it's easy to pat myself on the back for identifying examples. There's a way in which rationalism, for all its obvious falsehoods, is humbler than prudence, which requires so much trust in one's own perceptions. (Even if the examples are taken from my own life, there's still a showiness in the decision to display them in the light of my current better judgment.)

But here are the experiences. First, when I've been in a leadership position I've dealt with women (always women... I'm going to say this is cultural, and the guys would've framed their objections to my leadership this way if they'd thought it would win them masculinity points) who thought that the mask of command, as such, was inauthentic. Presenting a different persona when in leadership meant lying.

I think this is wrong on both rationalist grounds (I chose my leadership persona, so doesn't that choice incorporate the persona into my "self"?) and, obviously, aesthetic grounds. Leadership is an aesthetic act. It isn't rationalist, because there's always another syllogism, or an alternative premise, you can pose against the syllogism which would require of you something you don't want to do in the service of someone or Someone you don't love. It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent.

So um yeah. I will, if necessary, pay for your trust by sharing some deep dark painful secret--but I'll respect you a lot less in the morning. I should be able to lead you without groveling for your pitying endorsement of my perspective.

b) I've several times tried to "relate" on a deep dark authentic level with someone going through a kind of suffering I can't share. I've tried to ask How You're Doing. I've tried to Be Real.

In no case has this ever been the right thing to do.

I get that people with much more sophisticated senses of how to be in the world (like Camassia) understand that what you do, when you're dealing with another person's desperation, is listen and be there and try to roll with what they give you, and not push. I don't think any of that is sincerism, even though it's sincere. But I do think sincerism is what I believed when I thought it was right to press my fingers against other people's bruises. I didn't think I was really acting as their friend unless I poked. I could not have been more wrong.

So that's where I'm coming from, on this question.

6) I'm not sure I want to overphilosophize here, since really I'm not sure what exactly sincerism is--like I said, it's easier to point at than to anatomize. But I am tempted to argue that sincerism is a part or a result of two philosophical tendencies I abhor anyway. ("You want a second opinion? Okay, you're ugly!")

a) My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity--like ethics-talk!--is frequently appropriate.) If you say, "Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul's misogyny!", and I drawlingly reply, "Well hmmm, I'd rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit"... I've stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I'd clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

b) And on a deeper level, I really think sincerism is a subset of the Heideggerian fetish for authenticity and commitment. In this worldview, on the top level, Truth is found within--it's self-expression. I know that there is no philosophy without some level of self-trust. A radical skeptic can purchase bread, even though he knows it might be a hallucination, but he can never practice philosophy, because Sophia is nothing if she isn't real. (Even Derrida ETA 9/28 DESCARTES!!! "knew that he existed, and that he spoke French"!) But it is possible to distinguish between a philosophy of expressing the God within and a philosophy in which the self strives to recognize and love the God without--a philosophy in which recognition takes the place of expression, and submission is another word for love.

On the lower level, of course, "my real true deep self" becomes simply whatever my culture/subculture/biology/some complex interaction of all three tells me to value. That's one reason Heidegger's Rector's Address (which I used to be able to quote, as a party trick) is actually a valid conclusion from his premises. The naivete of sincerism is that it assumes that the self expressed will come pre-tamed.

Miss Manners knows better.

AFTER NEWSPAPERS:

...The New York Times reports on the ACLU's successful campaign to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the government to disclose documents about the government's detention and interrogation policies. The ACLU has received hundreds of pages of documents, which it has then released to the public on the Internet, becoming the basis of dozens of stories by journalists.

The torture story is one of the most important examples of American journalism in the last decade. But it was not revealed through traditional investigative reporting alone. Instead, a non-profit organization-- the ACLU--worked in coordination with journalistic efforts to mount a long-term litigation campaign to gain access to important government information. The ACLU then provided the information to the general public on the Internet, and journalists wrote stories based on the revelations, which led to further ACLU requests and more litigation, producing further revelations, and so on.

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IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS: I missed it, but yesterday was the feast of St. Bernardino of Siena, patron of preachers, publishers, and boxers.

AT THE END OF THIS TUNNEL OF GUILT AND SHAME THERE MUST BE A LIGHT OF SOME KIND: Helen's most recent post on shame rounds up all of her arguments to date, and is therefore invaluable. I still stand by the argument I made in her comments box--humiliation often brings spiritual fruit to the shamed, but humiliating others is a form of cruelty which will condemn those who practice it--but I wanted to talk here about one way in which I do believe in "shame culture."

(Ah, before we move on: I also agree with the class-based critique of shame culture, and it's part of the motivation for this post. I don't think there's ever been a shame culture in which poverty wasn't considered shameful--no, read that post first--so that's obviously anti-Christian. And yet there have definitely been vocational subcultures in which underclass background and even female sex weren't treated like crimes.)

Vocational training rests on shame culture. (Helen offers evidence here.) If you discern any kind of creative vocation, you are seeking to enter into a strict community of practice. This community uses harsh methods to teach you how to fulfill your vocation (think Kitchen Confidential) and promotes storylines, narratives of saints and villains, which show you how to live your vocation (newspapermen: All the President's Men) and how not to (Shattered Glass).

This vocation-based shame culture is far less cruel than a universal shame culture, in my opinion, because it is obvious that everyone judging you has submitted to roughly the same standards, and because you are being judged on performance you explicitly chose to make public. Anthony Bourdain can tell you your broccolini is so burnt it looks like something dredged up from Bob Marley's closet because you know he got yelled at and berated by chefs for years. Plus, you chose to present your broccolini to the outside world, your customer base, and not solely your friends, so you've submitted yourself to justice (for strangers!) rather than mercy.

(This btw is part of the intrinsic humility of entrepreneurship. If America can add anything to Catholic practice perhaps she can add this understanding of business as submission.)

The above claims are only partly true. Of course, if you have societal privilege then that privilege will affect how you're judged and which standards--spoken or unspoken--you must meet. To use the chef example again, Anthony Bourdain has written pretty harshly about the difference between the huge numbers of Latinos in the kitchen vs. the tiny numbers of Latino chefs who earn high honors. It's not because brown guys can't cook or run a kitchen, you know? Nonetheless, vocation-as-subculture is a real thing, and vocations build real solidarity, within which harsh chastisement and shaming can be done without self-aggrandizement on the part of the chastiser.

The intense emotion this vocational submission evokes was brought home to me in the Top Chef finale, when the amazing, lovely, super-cute and gentle (and hometown honey!) Carla Hall broke down in tears because she had failed to present good food to the judges. She was ashamed in front of her profession. And I understood: You should be. When you do inadequate work, you should be ashamed. If you aren't, you never understood your profession to begin with.

Vocation is performance--even a hermit's vocation, which is why everyone always bothers hermits!--and so vocation necessarily partakes in shame culture, not just guilt culture.

On the other hand... two caveats. First, I wonder whether Christianity can really support a strong shame/guilt distinction at all--at least if that distinction is cast in Helen's terms, rather than e.g. Ron Belgau's.

God has already "found you out." You are always watched. The only thing I remember from Lewis's Perelandra is the moment when the narrator wishes he could go outside--away from God's eyes!--and just have a quick smoke to re-establish his privacy. This small, human reticence of the cigarette is not available to Christians. For us, guilt is shame. Wrongdoing is always a violation of relationship, even if the only One we betrayed is our Lord.

And the second caveat: How do we understand a profession with a strong vocational ethos, which has nonetheless a deeply conflicted relationship with truth or virtue?

The obvious example for me is tabloid journalism. I far prefer the "black and white and red all over" style to the missish, Brahmin assumptions of the New York Times; but Five-Star Final is a terrific portrait of the cruelties of that profession, the shame involved in shaming others.

So, some questions: If Helen embraces Edward G. Robinson's character's shame in 5SF--he's the tabloid editor who obsessively washes his hands, and by the way, he's amazing in this role--is she necessarily embracing his actions in humiliating others? Can there be different standards of gossip, avoidance of scandal, and charity for different professions? Can a shame culture be a humility culture--rather than, what seems much more likely, a "good-people" culture of Pharisaical (sp??) self-satisfaction?

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